St. Sergius and the Paris School

Schmemann studied at the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris from 1940 to 1945, under Fr. Cyprian (Kern), Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev, Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, A. V. Kartashev, and Basil Zenkovsky; he married Juliana Ossorguine in January 1943, was ordained deacon and priest in 1946, taught church history at the Institute until 1951, and defended his doctorate there in 1959 on the work that became Introduction to Liturgical Theology. This file traces that formation — the teachers who shaped him, the eucharistic ecclesiology he received from Afanasiev, and the neo-patristic program of Florovsky that set his direction.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Institute

The St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris, founded in 1925 under Metropolitan Evlogy (Georgievsky), was the most important center of Orthodox theology in the twentieth century — the place where the Russian theological tradition, uprooted by the Revolution, put down new roots in the West and produced a generation whose influence is still being worked out (see Orthodoxy: Russian Theologians; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, SPCK, 2015, on the Paris school). Schmemann entered it during the German occupation and studied there from 1940 to 1945, taking his degree with a thesis on Byzantine theocracy — the relation of Church and Empire in the Eastern Roman world, supervised by A. V. Kartashev. The subject was not incidental: it would surface again in his historical writing and in his lifelong suspicion of the Constantinian settlement (John Meyendorff, “A Life Worth Living,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 28, no. 1 [1984], text at schmemann.org/memoriam, on the thesis on Byzantine theocracy and on Schmemann as “a pupil of A. V. Kartashev”; on the years 1940–45, hub essay, Fr. Alexander Schmemann).

He returned to the Institute at the end of the decade for the higher degree. On 5 July 1959 he defended his doctorate at St. Sergius on The Church’s Ordo: Introduction to Liturgical Theology — the examiners were Afanasiev and Meyendorff — and the dissertation is the work published in Russian two years later and in English in 1966 (St. Vladimir’s Seminary, “Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann,” svots.edu, giving the date of the defense, the title, and the examiners). His most technical book is therefore a doctoral thesis, defended before the two men best placed to judge it (see The Ordo and the Byzantine Synthesis).

The Teachers

Five names matter, and they matter differently. Schmemann’s teachers at St. Sergius were Fr. Cyprian (Kern), Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev, Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, A. V. Kartashev, and Basil Zenkovsky (Meyendorff, “A Life Worth Living,” 1984; hub essay, Schmemann). In his diary he named those to whom he owed most and whom he commemorated at the proskomedia: Metropolitan Evlogy, General Rimsky-Korsakov of the cadet corps, Fr. Savva Shimkevich the corps chaplain, Fr. Cyprian Kern, and V. Weidlé (Schmemann, Дневники, azbyka.ru).

Archimandrite Cyprian (Kern) (1899–1960) — patrologist and liturgist, professor at St. Sergius from 1936 until his death — was Schmemann’s spiritual father, and the personal bond was the deepest of his formation (hub essay, Schmemann; on Kern’s teaching, Orthodoxy: Liturgy as Theology). Kern’s own major work, Evkharistiya (The Eucharist, Paris: YMCA-Press, 1947), combined historical scholarship on the eucharistic liturgy with theological reflection, and it stands directly behind Schmemann’s conviction that the study of the Liturgy is a theological and not merely an antiquarian discipline (Kern, Evkharistiya, Paris, 1947; Orthodoxy: Liturgy as Theology, on Kern as a direct influence on Schmemann).

Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev (1893–1966), professor of canon law, is the decisive theological debt — described in the standard account of Schmemann’s formation as the strongest single influence upon him — and Schmemann never concealed it. Afanasiev’s eucharistic ecclesiology — the thesis that the Church is fully realized in the local eucharistic assembly gathered around its bishop, so that ecclesiology must be built “from below,” from the Eucharist, rather than “from above,” from the universal institution — became the ground on which Schmemann’s whole account of the Church stands (Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit [Tserkov Dukha Sviatogo], Paris: YMCA-Press, 1971, posthumous; English trans. Vitaly Permiakov, University of Notre Dame Press, 2007; see Orthodoxy: Ecclesiology). Schmemann received this and modified it, and the modification is his own contribution; the detailed exposition of Afanasiev’s position belongs to the sibling collection on him, and this guide defers to it rather than duplicating it (see Nicholas Afanasiev, and, for Schmemann’s own development of the idea, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom).

Fr. Sergius Bulgakov (1871–1944), dean of the Institute and the most creative and controversial Russian theologian of the age, taught Schmemann in his last years; Bulgakov died in 1944, while Schmemann was still a student (hub essay, Schmemann; on Bulgakov, Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy). Schmemann did not become a sophiologist and did not take up the system whose central theses had been formally censured by both the Moscow Patriarchate and the ROCOR Council of Bishops in 1935; his own theological line runs elsewhere. But he had sat under Bulgakov, and the memory of that vast and unembarrassed theological ambition — theology attempted as a total vision rather than as a series of monographs — is part of what he carried away from the Institute (see Sergius Bulgakov).

A. V. Kartashev (1875–1960), the church historian — the last ober-procurator of the Holy Synod and the Provisional Government’s Minister of Confessions — taught him history, and taught it as a discipline with its own evidential rigor (hub essay, Schmemann; Orthodoxy: Russian Theologians). Schmemann’s first professional identity was as a church historian, not a liturgist: it was church history that he taught at St. Sergius and church history he first taught in America, and his Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy is the fruit of that training (Schmemann, The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy, trans. Lydia W. Kesich, 1963; see The Schmemann Corpus).

Florovsky and the Neo-patristic Program

A fifth name belongs here with a careful qualification. Fr. Georges Florovsky (1893–1979) — the architect of the “neo-patristic synthesis,” the call to recover the phronema of the Fathers and to break the “Western captivity” of modern Orthodox theology — was the presiding influence on Schmemann’s theological direction (see Fr. Georges Florovsky and the Patristic Revival; Georges Florovsky). But the relation is often stated too simply.

[Corrected: Schmemann is frequently described as having "studied under Florovsky" at St. Sergius. The correction adopted in this repository is that Florovsky's influence on Schmemann during the years 1940–45 came through the neo-patristic *program* — its diagnosis and its summons — rather than through classroom teaching in those particular years; Schmemann's classroom teachers were Kern, Kartashev, Bulgakov, and Afanasiev (see the repository's verification note at [orthodoxy/04-russian-orthodox-tradition/verification-log.md](../../orthodoxy/04-russian-orthodox-tradition/verification-log.md), entry of 11 June 2026 on schmemann.md). The two men were, in any case, closely associated afterward in America, where Florovsky had preceded Schmemann to St. Vladimir's and served as its dean from 1949 to 1955 (see [The Move to America and the Deanship](../02-america-and-st-vladimirs/the-move-to-america-and-the-deanship.md)).]

The substance of the debt is not in doubt. Schmemann’s entire program can be read as the application of Florovsky’s summons to a field Florovsky had not himself worked: if theology is to be liberated from its Western captivity and returned to the mind of the Fathers, then it must be returned above all to the Liturgy, which is where the Fathers did their theology and where the Church still does hers. Florovsky called for the recovery of the patristic mind; Schmemann answered that the patristic mind is a liturgical mind, and that a theology cut off from the leitourgia is captive whatever its footnotes say (see Liturgy as Theology; The “Western Captivity” and Liturgical Piety).

Marriage

In January 1943, at the Cathedral of St. Alexander Nevsky on the rue Daru, Schmemann married Juliana Sergeevna Ossorguine — Russian Ульяна Сергеевна Осоргина — born 6 October 1923 at Baden-Baden and died 29 January 2017, then a student of classics at the Sorbonne. They had met in the winter of 1940–41, playing opposing roles in a household musical staged at Clamart; he was nineteen and she seventeen, and they met again soon afterward at St. Sergius (Serge Schmemann, “Juliana Schmemann, My Mother,” Orthodoxy in Dialogue, 28 January 2018).

[Disputed: the day of the marriage. Their son Serge Schmemann gives 23 January 1943 ("Juliana Schmemann, My Mother," 2018); the Archdiocese centenary site (centenaire-archeveche.org) and Russian sources give 31 January 1943. All sources agree on January 1943 and on the venue, the Cathedral of St. Alexander Nevsky on the rue Daru.]

The Ossorguine (Osorgin) family belonged to the heart of the Russian liturgical emigration at Clamart, and the detail is worth stating precisely because of what it meant for Schmemann’s formation: Juliana’s grandfather, Archpriest Michael Osorgin, was ordained priest at the age of seventy-one to serve the exiles at Clamart; her father was the choir director; and the family itself constituted the church choir (Serge Schmemann, “Juliana Schmemann, My Mother,” 2018). Marrying into that household placed Schmemann inside a living tradition of Russian church singing and daily worship, and it is difficult to read his later work on the liturgical ordo without hearing that background in it. Juliana had been educated at the Catholic boarding school of Sainte-Marie de Neuilly and took her degree in classics at the Sorbonne; in America she taught French at Spence and Brearley and became headmistress of the Spence School in 1977. After her husband’s death she was the translator and editor who gave his Journals to the world (Schmemann, The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973–1983, trans. Juliana Schmemann, SVS Press, 2000; see The Journals).

The couple had three children: Anne (Anya, b. 1944), who married Fr. Thomas Hopko, later himself dean of St. Vladimir’s; Serge (b. 1945), the New York Times correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner; and Mary (b. 1948), who married Fr. John Tkachuk (survivors as listed in “Rev. Alexander Schmemann, Dean of Orthodox Seminary,” The New York Times, 14 December 1983, p. B5).

Ordination and Teaching

He was ordained deacon on 22 October 1946 and priest on 20 November 1946, both by Archbishop Vladimir (Tikhonitsky), head of the Russian Exarchate of Western Europe (ru.wikipedia, “Шмеман, Александр Дмитриевич,” giving the exact dates; orthodoxwiki, “Alexander Schmemann”; orthodoxcanada.ca; Meyendorff, “A Life Worth Living,” 1984, “following his ordination by the then Archbishop Vladimir (Tikhonitsky) in 1946”).

[Corrected: the Archdiocese centenary site (centenaire-archeveche.org) states that he was ordained priest on 30 November 1945 "at the age of 23." This is contradicted by every other source, and its internal arithmetic fails — he would have been twenty-four in November 1945. The same page carries the erroneous May birth date. The correct year is 1946.]

From 1946 to 1951 he taught church history at St. Sergius as a member of its faculty, and served as assistant priest at the church of Sts. Constantine and Helen at Clamart, editing the diocesan journal (orthodoxwiki, “Alexander Schmemann”; orthodoxcanada.ca; ru.wikipedia). [Disputed: drevo-info.ru gives 1945 as the start of his teaching at St. Sergius; orthodoxwiki, orthodoxcanada.ca, and the standard English references give 1946, which is the majority reading and is adopted here.]

What He Took from Paris

Five things went with him across the Atlantic, and together they are the whole of his later work in seed.

  1. The Liturgy as the native soil of theology, learned first as a boy on the rue Daru and then from Kern’s Evkharistiya.
  2. Eucharistic ecclesiology from Afanasiev — the Church realized in the eucharistic assembly — which he would receive, modify, and make his own (see Nicholas Afanasiev).
  3. The neo-patristic summons from Florovsky, redirected toward the leitourgia.
  4. The historian’s training from Kartashev, which gave him both his first academic identity and the historical apparatus of Introduction to Liturgical Theology — and which is precisely the ground on which later liturgiologists would contest him (see The Liturgiological and Traditionalist Critique).
  5. The conviction that the emigration was not an end but a beginning — that Orthodoxy in the West had a future, and not merely a past to be preserved.

The last of these is what made him leave. In 1951, at Florovsky’s invitation, he accepted the call to New York, and the Paris chapter closed — though not entirely, since he returned to St. Sergius in 1959 to defend the doctorate that made his name (see The Move to America and the Deanship).

See Also

References

  • Meyendorff, John. “A Life Worth Living.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 28, no. 1 (1984). Text at schmemann.org/memoriam. (The teachers; Kartashev as thesis supervisor; the thesis on Byzantine theocracy; the ordination of 1946 by Archbishop Vladimir Tikhonitsky; the invitation to St. Vladimir’s.)
  • “Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann.” St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, svots.edu. (The doctoral defense of 5 July 1959 at St. Sergius on The Church’s Ordo: Introduction to Liturgical Theology, with Afanasiev and Meyendorff as examiners.)
  • Schmemann, Serge. “Juliana Schmemann, My Mother.” Orthodoxy in Dialogue, 28 January 2018. (The meeting at Clamart in the winter of 1940–41; the marriage of 23 January 1943; the Osorgin family — Archpriest Michael Osorgin ordained at seventy-one, the father as choir director, the family as the choir; Juliana’s education and later career.)
  • “Rev. Alexander Schmemann, Dean of Orthodox Seminary.” The New York Times, 14 December 1983, p. B5. (The children and surviving family.)
  • “Протопресвитер Александр Шмеман.” Russian Wikipedia and drevo-info.ru; “Alexander Schmemann,” OrthodoxWiki; “Protopresbyter Alexander and Matushka Juliana Schmemann,” orthodoxcanada.ca. (The ordination dates of 22 October and 20 November 1946; the Clamart curacy; the teaching years. Used to locate the underlying sources, not as terminal citation.)
  • Afanasiev, Nicholas. The Church of the Holy Spirit [Tserkov Dukha Sviatogo]. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1971 (posthumous). English translation by Vitaly Permiakov. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. (Eucharistic ecclesiology.)
  • Kern, Kiprian (Archimandrite). Evkharistiya [The Eucharist]. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1947. (Schmemann’s spiritual father and the liturgical-theological study behind his own work.)
  • Schmemann, Alexander. The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy. Translated by Lydia W. Kesich. 1963. (The fruit of his training as a church historian.)
  • Schmemann, Alexander. The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973–1983. Translated by Juliana Schmemann. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000.
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (The Paris school and its generation.)
  • Repository verification note on Schmemann’s teachers: orthodoxy/04-russian-orthodox-tradition/verification-log.md, entry of 11 June 2026.