“I had no idea who C.S. Lewis was, but I received the answers to all my questions regarding the existence of God”

Dr. Denise (Daniela) Vasiliu teaches English at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in the city of Iași, the regional center of mountainous northeastern Romania. Originally from the town of Piatra Neamț some 100 miles to the west, she is an active member of Iași’s Adora Christi Baptist Church, where her husband, Florin, is pastor.

Over the past decade, Denise has become familiar internationally to scholars and enthusiasts of the popular British Christian writer C.S. Lewis (1898-1963). Together with two female colleagues—Professor Emerita Rodica Albu and Dr. Teodora Ghivirigă—she has organized a series of conferences devoted to the life and legacy of C.S. Lewis, as well as kindred Christian writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien and George MacDonald. Held in Iași from 9-11 November 2023, the sixth and most recent of these events—“C.S. Lewis—The Re-enchanted Academic”—drew 45 specialists from 12 countries. The initiative is unique in Central and Eastern Europe, and all the more remarkable given that C.S. Lewis’s works were practically unknown in Romania before the downfall of the Communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu in late 1989—even until the early 2000s.

In early December 2023 the editor of the East-West Church Report met Dr. Vasiliu in Iași to learn more about her passion for Lewis’s work and her efforts to share his legacy in and beyond Romania. The interview took place in English.

How did you encounter Christianity and the works of C.S. Lewis?

My brother and I used to celebrate Easter and Christmas with my mother, but she never attended church—maybe for the Easter service, but Christmas was a very small celebration under Communism, almost forbidden. In early 1989, when I was in my twenties, a young person in Piatra Neamț who had converted to Evangelical Christianity from a non-practicing Orthodox family told me about the Lord Jesus and gave me some tracts to read. I asked my mother if she believed in Jesus, and she replied, “Yes, of course.” I then asked who He was, and she said, “I don’t know.” That was how illiterate we were. We had no idea—I had never seen a Bible in my life. I accepted an invitation to attend a wonderful Baptist church that had just started meeting at a small house in Piatra Neamț. There I started to receive answers to my questions through the sermons, but I found it very hard to reason that God exists. In my heart, I was somehow very afraid that my life would change completely.

Then someone gave me Lewis’s Mere Christianity. It was a miracle that there was a copy in Piatra Neamț—it was an edition that had been translated and printed in Wheaton, Illinois, by the Romanian Missionary Society and smuggled into Romania along with Bibles. I had no idea who C.S. Lewis was, but I received the answers to all my questions regarding the existence of God. Suddenly, everything made sense.

In early autumn 1989, not long before the [December] Revolution, I had been very depressed, because my teenage dreams of love, truth, and beauty were in ruins—those years to all my questions regarding the existence of God”: under Communism were terrible and ugly. In winter we lived in severe cold and darkness, and we had very little food. Because of the secret police, people said, “Truth? There is no such thing”—everybody was scared of saying what they were really thinking. It also seemed as if there was no love, because everybody was cheating on each other. Then, as I read Mere Christianity and the Gospels, I reached the point where Jesus says, “I am the Truth.” I remembered that I had written in my diary that I believed that truth did exist, and that it would be like a key unlocking the mystery of life and the universe. I then realized that what I was looking for was His person, not a concept of truth. So I knelt and prayed: “If You exist—I don’t believe, but if You do—I definitely want You to be in my heart.” Why would anyone reject God if He is love, truth, and beauty? Nothing happened immediately, but after about a week I realized that all the unbearable emptiness inside my heart had somehow disappeared. 

What was it about Mere Christianity that particularly resonated with you?

It was the first time that all the pieces came together and made sense—it was so coherent and clear. Somehow I was able to trust and hope that God exists before I had received the Lord in my heart. I accepted it with my head, and that had been the most difficult thing. Lewis experienced something similar in his conversion. Following the Revolution my husband—who had converted in 1988 through the same young person in Piatra Neamț—left to study theology at the Baptist Seminary in Bucharest. Women were not admitted to study theology, and for a whole year I cried that this was not fair. I begged God to do something. The following year, the Faculty of Baptist Theology opened within the University of Bucharest. Previously there had just been a small seminary for training pastors, but the introduction of religious education as a compulsory subject in state schools following the Revolution meant that new theology faculties were required to train teaching staff.

A specifically Baptist theological faculty must be a rarity in Eastern Europe.

Absolutely, it’s unique. In addition to Orthodox theology, the university also has a Faculty of Roman Catholic Theology. There is a small Pentecostal Institute, but it is not part of the university.

When my husband was in the second year, I enrolled at Bucharest University to study Baptist theology along with English in the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures. I chose English purely because it would help us in our theological training and to be in contact with the outside world. I had not learned English because it seemed like a dead language when I was in school: In the years before the Revolution, they cut off almost all contact with English-language music and movies. I was one of only three girls in the university English class.

You must also have been among the very first women studying Baptist theology in Romania.

Yes, which was an amazing thing. It was God’s provision—theology and English gave me the whole foundation for what I’m doing now. In my English classes I realized that the lecturers would often misinterpret things—they were not able to recognize any Christian elements because they had no biblical knowledge. You cannot study literature or philosophy without that understanding. I thought, “This is a mission field, actually.”

After his graduation, my husband was invited to serve as a pastor at the First Baptist Church here in Iași. I stayed for one more year in Bucharest and then started teaching English and religious education at Richard Wurmbrand College, a private Christian school here in Iași.

After 1989 did you encounter other works by C.S. Lewis besides Mere Christianity?

No. I didn’t hear about him at all until the movies appeared. In 2006 the first movie, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, was launched at a big cinema in Iași. That was when I first encountered The Chronicles of Narnia.

A group of Romanian intellectuals who had managed to study in exile abroad returned to Romania after the Revolution—one of them, Andrei Pleșu, was even Minister of Culture from 1989-91. Their goal was to establish a publishing house that would translate 10 “forbidden” authors into Romanian, and one of those was C.S. Lewis. But I was not aware of that back then. We used to be pretty isolated—life was hard, ministry very difficult, we had three children, and I was teaching.

I also completed a Master’s degree program, travelling to Bucharest for classes twice a month for two years. When I came to write my thesis, I said that I wished to write at the border between literature and theology. The sad answer from one of my professors was that I would not be able to find a good enough theologian in the sphere of literature! In the end, I wrote on the doctrine of God’s sovereignty in Puritan thinking, still in my English language subject area.

While at home during those years, I watched the movies and read the books in The Chronicles of Narnia series. I began to think about applying to do a PhD in literature—something interdisciplinary. I thought about proposing a Christian writer: “What about C.S. Lewis?” Someone gave me the number of Rodica Albu, who was at that time professor of linguistics in the Department of English at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași. She was interested in C.S. Lewis and encouraged me to apply immediately. I passed the entrance examination and enrolled in the PhD program. The title of my doctoral thesis is C. S. Lewis at the Border Between Christian Spirituality and Fiction.

Everything was possible thanks to Professor Albu. Like me, she discovered C.S. Lewis in 1989 just prior to the Revolution, through one of her students who is now my colleague, Dr. Teodora Ghivirigă. While visiting Bucharest on a very cold day, Teodora went to the British Council library—she tells how it was warm and smelled of oranges at a time when we couldn’t find anything like oranges or chocolate in Romania— and asked for book recommendations. She was given a copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to take home. She gave it to Professor Albu, who fell in love with the book, translated it, and managed to publish it in 1993. We believe Professor Albu’s to be the very first edition in Romanian.

How did the C.S. Lewis conferences that you organize in Iași develop from your studies?

The same year that I enrolled in the PhD program, my family visited Pastor Stuart and Jill Briscoe in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. When Jill heard about my PhD, she said I must go to the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College [Editor’s note: a research center devoted to “seven British Christian authors who provide a distinctive blend of intellect, imagination, and faith”: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams.] There I met the then director, Christopher W. Mitchell, who exclaimed, “No way! A PhD on C.S. Lewis in a post-Communist country! At a state university!” I did not realize at the time how surprising that was. The following year, 2013, there were several commemorative events to mark 50 years since Lewis’s death—a summer school in Oxford and a conference hosted by the Inklings Society in Germany. [Editor’s note: The Inklings were an Oxford-based informal literary discussion group that included Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.] When I returned from them to Romania, I asked, “What about allowing me to organize an event here?” My professor agreed, but said that the university could not help financially, and added, “If you have 10 people, consider it a success.” “Ten speakers, or 10 attendees?” I wondered—but I didn’t have the courage to ask.

By a miracle, a family in the States offered to support the conference financially. Michael Ward, a key Lewis scholar, accepted an invitation, as did a German professor, a local translator, and a few others. By another miracle, the then British ambassador also agreed to come. [Editor’s note: Martin Harris, as of 2023 British ambassador in Ukraine.] When people heard that the British ambassador was coming, everybody came, including the rector of the university! The British ambassador spoke movingly about his first-edition copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which his grandmother had read to his mother, his mother to him, and he was now reading to his own children.

Quite unexpectedly, the event proved a great success: In total, around 150 people attended. The following year the university asked me to organize a second conference. The fact that we keep it strictly academic means that we have had no hindrances whatsoever. We never talk about beliefs from confessional points of view, only from Lewis’s point of view, and we always include atheist perspectives because it is an academic conversation. We are also able to make the conferences interdisciplinary—this year we covered literature, history, philosophy, theology, psychology, and law. Romanian edition of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, published in 1993

Have the conferences focused upon particular themes?

The first one, in 2013, was called “The Romantic Rationalist: Life, Joy, and Imagination in the Work of C.S. Lewis.” It focused on the idea that, in Christianity, Lewis discovered a way to reconcile his reason with his heart. The following year was “C. S. Lewis—Life and Legacy,” which was more introductory, as Lewis was still not well known here. After that, we decided to hold a conference every two years, as it was too much to organize annually. The conferences in 2016 and 2018 were both called “C.S. Lewis and Kindred Spirits,” which gave us the possibility to consider other Christian writers. Here in Romania, for example, there was a famous Orthodox priest, Fr. Nicolae Steinhardt [1912-89], who wrote a book called Jurnalul Fericirii, or The Diary of Happiness. We had a professor talk about the fact that Steinhardt was influenced by Lewis’s Surprised by Joy. [Editor’s note: See Laura Carmen Cuţitaru, “From C.S. Lewis’ Joy to Nicolae Steinhardt’s Happiness, Linguaculture vol. 5, no. 2 (December 2014), 99-103, https:// www.shakespeare.linguaculture.ro/images/stories/22014/ cutitaru.pdf.] The other Inklings are mostly not well known, nor are kindred writers Dorothy L. Sayers and George MacDonald.

The recent pandemic must have affected your activities.

Yes. In 2020 we organized the first of many online events, “C.S. Lewis and Kindred Spirits Connected.” In 2021 we hosted a hybrid conference, “C.S. Lewis and Kindred Spirits: Of This and Other Worlds.” Some people attended in person, some via Zoom. In recent years, online events have allowed us to feature speakers unable to attend in person, including Oxford-based Orthodox Metropolitan Kallistos Ware [d. 2022] and California-based Orthodox priest Fr. Andrew Cuneo, as well as Oxford-based scholar Alister McGrath and Cambridgebased scholar Malcolm Guite, who are both Anglicans.

With this year’s conference, “C.S. Lewis—The ReEnchanted Academic,” we celebrated our tenth anniversary. The event has grown—over 200 people attended from 12 countries, and this was the first year in which we hosted not only speakers, but people who traveled simply in order to attend the conference.

Is C.S. Lewis now a popular author within Romanian churches?

He was always on the radar of those who are keen readers, but he has become especially popular among young people. In our Baptist church we work a lot with young people who are very interested in Lewis—they all came to the recent conference. We are now planning to start a reading group to study Mere Christianity. Such reading groups could be for people from any background, similar to the [Oxford University] Socratic Club which Lewis chaired. His purpose was simply to present Christianity. You cannot force people into belief, but at least we can give them the opportunity to discover that Christianity is not something related to a certain church, or to tradition, or to old thinking. They should have the right to have the resources to support them in their search for meaning, even if they never choose Christianity.

I now assist two students doing PhDs on C.S. Lewis. Today it has become easier to get hold of resources—I have many specialized books on Lewis which were displayed at our conference, and I was able to send some to a student in Bucharest who is doing a Master’s degree on Lewis. Our dream would be to open a dedicated center for all these resources. That would be unique in Central and Eastern Europe.

Editor’s note: Dr. Paul E. Michelson of Huntington University, Indiana, has written a detailed paper on the emergence of Romanian interest in the works of C.S. Lewis. See Paul E. Michelson, “C.S. Lewis Comes to Romania, 1977-2022,” in Ion Bolovan and MelaniaGabriela Ciot, eds., Românii și România în context European. Istorie și diplomație. Omagiu profesorului Vasile Pușcaș la împlinirea vârstei de 70 ani, Cluj-Napoca: Editura Academia Română/Centrul de Studii Transilvane, 2022, 985-1004, https:// pmichelson.com/michelson_csl comes to romania 2022.pdf. Also freely accessible online, an earlier article by Emanuel Conţac of the Pentecostal Theological Institute in Bucharest similarly considers the reception of C.S. Lewis in post-Communist Romania. See Emanuel Conţac, “The Reception of C.S. Lewis in Post-Communist Romania,” Linguaculture vol. 5, no. 2 (December 2014), 123-41, https:// journal.linguaculture.ro/index.php/home/article/view/55/45. ♦