01 — Life and Formation

The making of a Byzantinist: a Baltic-German baronial family scattered by the Bolshevik Revolution and reassembled in the Paris of the Russian emigration; a boyhood between Paris and Biarritz; and a double formation — the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute and the Sorbonne, taken simultaneously — that gave John Meyendorff both a churchman’s theology and a medievalist’s philological training.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration) / Orthodox Church in America

What This Section Covers

Meyendorff was born on 17 February 1926 at Neuilly-sur-Seine, in the western suburbs of Paris, and died on 22 July 1992 in Montreal (St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, “Protopresbyter John Meyendorff,” svots.edu). Between those dates lie two lives that were never quite separable: the life of a priest of the Russian emigration and its American continuation, and the life of a working Byzantinist who published critical editions, held a Guggenheim Fellowship, and served as acting director of studies at Dumbarton Oaks.

The two files in this section cover the years before America.

• Neuilly, Paris, and the Emigration — the family (Theophile Baron von Meyendorff and Catherine Schidlovsky), the Baltic-German baronial line, the world of the Russian exile church in France, marriage to Marie Mojaïsky in 1950, ordination in 1959, and the departure for New York.
• St. Sergius and the Sorbonne — the theological institute on the rue de Crimée and the university on the Left Bank, taken together; his teachers, above all Fr. Georges Florovsky; the École pratique des Hautes Études; and the intellectual world — Paris in the 1940s and 1950s — in which the categories of his later work were formed.

What This Section Does Not Cover

The doctoral thesis itself, though completed in this period, belongs to Section 02. The American career belongs to Section 07.

A Note on Titles

Meyendorff is called “Fr.” or “Protopresbyter” here, never “St.” He is not canonized (see the master README). “Protopresbyter” is the highest honorific rank the Slavic churches confer on a married priest; it was his by the end of his life and is the title St. Vladimir’s Seminary uses for him.

See Also

• The Palamas Scholarship — what the Paris formation produced
• Fr. Georges Florovsky and the Patristic Revival — the neo-patristic program he inherited
• The Paris School — the older generation of the emigration, at St. Sergius alongside him

References

• St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. “Protopresbyter John Meyendorff.” Institutional biography and bibliography, svots.edu.
• Canadian Orthodox History Project. “Protopresbyter John and Matushka Marie Meyendorff.” orthodoxcanada.ca.
• Aretakis, Jonathan G. “Meyendorff, John.” The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, via encyclopedia.com.