01 — Life and Formation
Schmemann’s origins in the Russian emigration: birth at Reval (Tallinn) in 1921, boyhood in the Russian Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, the cadet corps and the French lycée, and the theological formation at the St. Sergius Institute under Kern, Afanasiev, Bulgakov, Kartashev, and Zenkovsky that set the direction of everything he later wrote.
Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)
Nothing in Schmemann’s thought is intelligible apart from the world that produced it. He was a child of the first Russian emigration — a generation that had lost a country and, in Paris, rebuilt a Church and a theological school out of nothing. The St. Sergius Institute where he studied from 1940 to 1945 was the most creative Orthodox faculty of the twentieth century, and he took from it three things that never left him: Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev’s eucharistic ecclesiology, Fr. Georges Florovsky’s neo-patristic program, and Fr. Cyprian (Kern)’s conviction that the Church’s worship is a subject for scholarship. He also took a temperament: the émigré’s double consciousness, at home in French literature and in the Russian Church, and at ease in neither exclusively.
Reval, Paris, and the Cadet Corps covers the origins and the boyhood, and corrects several widely circulated biographical details against Schmemann’s own diary. St. Sergius and the Paris School treats the teachers, the ordination of 1946, the years of teaching church history, and the 1959 doctorate that became Introduction to Liturgical Theology.
Contents
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Reval, Paris, and the Cadet Corps | Birth 1921, the émigré childhood, the cadet corps, the lycée — with corrections |
| St. Sergius and the Paris School | The Institute, the teachers, marriage and ordination, the 1959 doctorate |
See Also
- The Move to America and the Deanship — where the formation was put to work
- The Ordo and the Byzantine Synthesis — the dissertation that grew out of the Paris years
- Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev — the teacher whose eucharistic ecclesiology he received and modified
- Orthodoxy: The Patristic Revival — Florovsky and the neo-patristic program
- The Schmemann Corpus — the works that came out of this formation