St. Sergius and the Sorbonne

Meyendorff was formed twice over and at once: at the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris, where he took his theological degree in 1949 and studied under Fr. Georges Florovsky, and at the Sorbonne and the École pratique des Hautes Études, where he acquired the philological and historical apparatus of a professional medievalist. This file describes that double training, the teachers, and the intellectual world that supplied the categories — for good and ill — of his later Palamas scholarship.

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

Two Institutions at Once

Meyendorff enrolled simultaneously at the Orthodox Theological Institute of St. Sergius, on the rue de Crimée in the nineteenth arrondissement, and at the Sorbonne (Aretakis, “Meyendorff, John,” The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, on the simultaneous enrollment). The degrees came in close succession: a licence ès lettres from the Sorbonne in 1948; the theological degree from St. Sergius and a diplôme d’études supérieures in 1949; a diplôme de l’École pratique des Hautes Études in 1954; and the doctorate in 1958 (St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, “Protopresbyter John Meyendorff,” svots.edu, giving the full sequence of degrees and their years).

The list looks bureaucratic; it is in fact the key to the man. It means that by his early thirties Meyendorff had been trained as a theologian by the Russian church in exile and as a philologist and historian by the French university — the École pratique des Hautes Études in particular being the institution where Byzantine and Christian-Oriental philology in France was actually taught. The result was a scholar who could read the manuscripts and also knew what was doctrinally at stake in them. Almost nothing else in the twentieth-century Orthodox theological world had quite that combination; it is why his Palamas edition was a genuine critical edition and not an apologetic anthology.

After graduating he stayed on to teach: assistant professor of church history at St. Sergius, and concurrently a fellow of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, the French national research body (St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, svots.edu). He held both posts until the move to America in 1959.

The Teachers

At St. Sergius, Meyendorff studied under the luminaries of the Russian religious emigration. The biographical record names Fr. Georges Florovsky and “the young Fr. Alexander Schmemann” among them (Canadian Orthodox History Project, “Protopresbyter John and Matushka Marie Meyendorff,” orthodoxcanada.ca; the repository’s hub file likewise records that “Fr. Alexander Schmemann and Fr. John Meyendorff, both students of Florovsky at St. Sergius, carried his neo-patristic program into the next generation” — Fr. Georges Florovsky and the Patristic Revival).

The chronology is tight and worth stating precisely, because it is often blurred. Meyendorff studied at St. Sergius from the mid-1940s to 1949. Florovsky taught there until 1948, when he left for St. Vladimir’s Seminary in New York, becoming its dean from 1949 to 1955 (Fr. Georges Florovsky and the Patristic Revival, on Florovsky’s departure and American deanship). The overlap is therefore real but short — a matter of two or three years at the end of Florovsky’s Paris period. [Disputed: the depth of the direct teacher–pupil relation. That Meyendorff studied under Florovsky at St. Sergius is stated by the Canadian Orthodox History Project and by the repository's own hub file; the overlap in Paris was nonetheless brief (Florovsky left in 1948). Meyendorff's own intellectual debt to Florovsky is not in doubt and is acknowledged in his work — he explicitly develops Florovsky's suggestion about Palamas and the Areopagite (see [The "Christological Corrective" Debate](../08-the-scholarly-reassessment/the-christological-corrective-debate.md)) — but readers should not picture a long apprenticeship. Note also that the two would be colleagues in America from 1959, Florovsky then at Harvard.]

Schmemann was five years older, a graduate of St. Sergius who taught there from 1946 until his own departure for New York in 1951. The relation between the two was thus less that of master and disciple than of near-contemporaries formed in the same house, who would spend the next three decades working in the same institution on two sides of one project (see Fr. Alexander Schmemann).

The wider St. Sergius faculty of those years included the generation of the Paris school — Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, its dean until his death in 1944, and Archimandrite Cyprian (Kern), the patrologist whose 1950 monograph on Palamas’s anthropology was one of the immediate precursors of Meyendorff’s own work. Meyendorff’s formation is thus not simply “neo-patristic”: he was educated in a faculty where sophiology and the return to the Fathers were both living options, and where the argument between them had been conducted in public (see Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, and the hub treatment at Bulgakov and Sophiology). He chose the Florovskian side decisively, and the choice shaped everything after.

The Neo-Patristic Program He Inherited

Florovsky’s program, announced at the First Congress of Orthodox Theologians in Athens in 1936 and carried through Ways of Russian Theology (1937), had three components that Meyendorff took over whole.

First, the “return to the Fathers” understood not as citation but as the acquisition of the patristic mind. Florovsky’s formulation is the classic one: “‘To follow’ the Fathers does not mean just ‘to quote’ them. ‘To follow’ the Fathers means to acquire their ‘mind,’ their phronema” (Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers” [1959], in Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, Collected Works vol. 1, 105–120; quoted at Fr. Georges Florovsky and the Patristic Revival).

Second, the diagnosis of a “Western captivity” or pseudomorphosis of Orthodox theology — the charge that post-Byzantine Orthodox thought had adopted Latin and Protestant categories alien to it, and needed to be repatriated (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, 1937; see the hub file). This diagnosis, inherited, is the deep structure of Meyendorff’s historical narrative: his Byzantium is a theological culture with its own integrity, misread when translated into scholastic terms.

Third, the conviction that the return to the Fathers was to be creative, not repetitive — a “synthesis,” not an archive.

Meyendorff was the neo-patristic program’s best-equipped executor. Where Florovsky wrote programmatically and Lossky dogmatically, Meyendorff went to the manuscripts. That is the division of labor the repository’s own account of the lineage records: “Lossky was dogmatic and measured; Meyendorff was a careful historian” (The Neo-Palamite Lineage).

Paris in the 1940s and 1950s

The intellectual weather matters, because later scholarship has argued that it left more of a mark on Meyendorff’s Palamas than he realized. He wrote his thesis in the Paris of existentialism and personalism — of Gabriel Marcel and Emmanuel Mounier, of the nouvelle théologie and the great French patristic recovery represented by Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou and the founding of Sources Chrétiennes in 1942. The vocabulary in which he cast Palamas — “personalism,” “existential,” “essentialism,” the opposition of a living encounter with God to a philosophy of essences — belongs recognizably to that moment.

Meyendorff regarded these terms as the natural modern rendering of a genuinely biblical and patristic mode of thought. His critics have argued the opposite: that the categories are French mid-century imports read back into fourteenth-century Byzantium. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, defending Palamas against the charge of Neoplatonism, nonetheless acknowledged that Meyendorff’s emphasis on existentialism reflected the concerns of post-war French intellectual life (as summarized in Pino, “Beyond Neo-Palamism,” Analogia 3.1 [2017]); and Bernhard Schultze had argued as early as 1951 that the nominalism–essentialism opposition Meyendorff would deploy was itself an inheritance from Russian Slavophile intellectual traditions rather than a description of Byzantine debate (Schultze, 1951, as reported in Pino, “Beyond Neo-Palamism,” Analogia 3.1 [2017]). That argument is taken up in full in Section 08; it is flagged here because the formation is where it starts.

What is not in dispute is the technical competence the Paris training produced. Whatever one concludes about Meyendorff’s interpretive frame, the Défense des saints hésychastes of 1959 is a critical edition made from the manuscripts by a man who had been taught how to make one, and it remains in use (see The Critical Edition of the Triads).

The Emerging Program

By 1958 the shape of the life’s work was set. Meyendorff had chosen the fourteenth century — the hesychast controversy, the Palamite councils, the late Byzantine world and its Slavic periphery — as his field, and he had chosen a thesis about it: that Byzantine theology, at its best, is Christological through and through, and that its distinctive achievement is a doctrine of the human person made capable of God without ceasing to be human. Every later book is a variation on that theme. Christ in Eastern Christian Thought argues it from the Christological councils; Byzantine Theology argues it as a synthesis; Byzantium and the Rise of Russia traces its political and cultural consequences into the Slavic world. The Paris years produced not only a thesis but a program.

References

St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. “Protopresbyter John Meyendorff.” svots.edu. (Degrees: Sorbonne licence ès lettres 1948; diplôme d’études supérieures 1949; St. Sergius theological degree 1949; École pratique des Hautes Études diploma 1954; doctorate 1958. Assistant professorship at St. Sergius and CNRS fellowship.)
Canadian Orthodox History Project. “Protopresbyter John and Matushka Marie Meyendorff.” orthodoxcanada.ca. (Study “under luminaries including Father Georges Florovsky and the young Father Alexander Schmemann.”)
Aretakis, Jonathan G. “Meyendorff, John.” The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, via encyclopedia.com. (The simultaneous enrollment at St. Serge and the Sorbonne; teaching at St. Serge until 1959.)
Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology (1937); “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers” (1959), in Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, Collected Works vol. 1, 105–120. (The neo-patristic program, the phronema formula, and the pseudomorphosis diagnosis.)
Pino, Tikhon Alexander. “Beyond Neo-Palamism: Interpreting the Legacy of St Gregory Palamas.” Analogia 3.1 (2017): 53–73. (Bernhard Schultze’s 1951 argument on the Slavophile provenance of the nominalism–essentialism divide; Kallistos Ware on Meyendorff’s existentialism as a post-war French concern.)
Meyendorff, John, ed. Grégoire Palamas: Défense des saints hésychastes. Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense 30–31. Louvain, 1959; 2nd ed. 1973. (The critical edition produced from the Paris training.)