St. Vladimir’s and the OCA

From 1959 Meyendorff taught church history and patristics at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary; from 1984 to 1992 he was its dean, succeeding Fr. Alexander Schmemann. For twenty years he edited The Orthodox Church, the newspaper of the Metropolia and then of the Orthodox Church in America, and he was one of the negotiators of the 1970 Tomos of Autocephaly. This file covers the institutional life: the seminary, the church, and the argument for an indigenous American Orthodoxy.

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

The Seminary

Meyendorff arrived at St. Vladimir’s in the autumn of 1959 at the invitation of Fr. Alexander Schmemann, then acting dean (St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, “In Memoriam: Marie Meyendorff,” svots.edu). The school was still small and had only recently begun its transformation from an émigré pastoral academy into a serious institution — a transformation begun by Fr. Georges Florovsky, who had joined the faculty in 1948 and served as dean from 1949 to 1955 (Fr. Georges Florovsky and the Patristic Revival).

He held the chair of church history and patristics, and at various points served as seminary librarian and as director of studies (St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, “Protopresbyter John Meyendorff,” svots.edu). The teaching is remembered as unusually vivid for a man whose subject was the fourteenth century. At the centenary tribute of February 2026 Bishop Irinej of Eastern America recalled that Fr. John lectured “with such piercing perception as though he had come to know the historic person of whom he spoke” (Bishop Irinej, reflections at the centenary tribute, 6 February 2026, reported at orthochristian.com, 2026).

The repository’s own account of St. Vladimir’s names the succession that made it what it became: “Fr. Georges Florovsky set its patristic and ‘neo-patristic synthesis’ direction; Fr. Alexander Schmemann (dean 1962–1983) reframed Orthodox theology around the Eucharist and the liturgy as the church’s primary theology; Fr. John Meyendorff (dean 1984–1992), the Byzantinist and Palamas scholar, succeeded him; and Fr. Thomas Hopko (dean 1992–2002) became the school’s leading catechist and popularizer” (The OCA). Meyendorff’s deanship ran from March 1984 to his retirement on 30 June 1992 — three weeks before his death (St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, svots.edu).

What the pairing with Schmemann produced. The repository records the model plainly: “At St. Vladimir’s Seminary, Schmemann and Fr. John Meyendorff established a model of Orthodox theological education that combines academic rigor with liturgical life” (Fr. Alexander Schmemann). The division of labor is worth naming: Schmemann supplied the liturgical theology and the rhetorical force; Meyendorff supplied the historical and patristic ballast. A seminary that had one without the other would have produced either scholars without a Liturgy or a Liturgy without scholarship. Between 1962 and 1983 the two men held those halves together, and after 1984 Meyendorff held both.

The Editorships

Two editorial chairs made Meyendorff the ordinary theological voice of his church.

St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly. He was its long-serving editor (St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, svots.edu), and under him the Quarterly became the principal English-language journal of Orthodox theology — the venue in which the Paris school’s inheritance was translated into an American idiom, and in which the debates of the period were conducted. The SVTQ symposium on autocephaly published in 1971 (vol. 15, nos. 1–2), cited in the repository’s account of the Tomos (The Tomos of Autocephaly 1970), is an example of the journal doing exactly the work he intended it to do.

The Orthodox Church. From January 1965 to December 1984 he edited the Metropolia’s — then the OCA’s — monthly newspaper, writing signed editorials on the growth and development of Orthodoxy in America (SVS Press, catalogue note to Vision of Unity, svspress.com, describing the collection as editorials written for The Orthodox Church between 1965 and 1984). Two volumes gather them: Vision of Unity (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1987), divided into “Steps Towards Unity” and “Debates on Church Order,” and Witness to the World (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1987).

These editorials are the least-read part of the corpus and the most revealing. They are where a Byzantinist addressed, month after month for twenty years, the practical questions of a church in a new country: jurisdiction, language, parish life, marriage, education, ecumenical relations. Whatever one thinks of the positions, the sustained attempt to think theologically about ordinary church life in public is unusual.

Autocephaly, 1970

The Orthodox Church in America received its Tomos of Autocephaly from the Patriarchate of Moscow on 10 April 1970, and Meyendorff was one of the principals.

The theological argument. The repository’s account states it: “By the 1960s a generation of theologians at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary — above all Fr. Alexander Schmemann and Fr. John Meyendorff — had reframed the American situation theologically. They argued that Orthodoxy in America was no longer an émigré outpost but a maturing local Church whose canonical destiny was a single, territorially-defined, self-governing body. This conviction made autocephaly, not merely autonomy, the goal” (The Tomos of Autocephaly 1970, citing Schmemann’s first-person account in Tarasar, ed., Orthodox America 1794–1976, 1975).

The argument rests on a piece of ecclesiology that Meyendorff had learned from the Fathers and taught all his life: that the Church is constituted locally and eucharistically, that the canonical order knows territorial churches and not ethnic ones, and that the multiplication of overlapping jurisdictions in one territory on the basis of national origin is an anomaly, not a system (see Overlapping Jurisdictions and Ecclesiology). This is the ecclesiology of Nicholas Afanasiev’s “eucharistic ecclesiology” as received and modified in the Paris–New York line (see Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev).

The negotiation. Meyendorff sat on the Metropolia’s negotiating committee, which was chaired by Archbishop Kiprian (Borisevich) of Philadelphia and included Schmemann, Meyendorff, and Fr. John Skvir; the agreement was signed at Syosset on 31 March 1970 (The Tomos of Autocephaly 1970, citing the OCA’s “Road to Autocephaly”).

The consequence, and the dispute. The Ecumenical Patriarchate condemned the act as exceeding Moscow’s authority; several churches have never recognized the OCA’s autocephaly, and the question remains open (see The Tomos of Autocephaly 1970, on Constantinople’s rejection and the recognition dispute; the repository treats this as a live jurisdictional dispute per METHODOLOGY §4.2, with both-jurisdiction sourcing). Meyendorff’s own position on the matter is stated at length in the editorials of Vision of Unity.

[Disputed: the canonical validity of the 1970 autocephaly. This is a live inter-Orthodox dispute and the repository treats it at length elsewhere ([The Tomos of Autocephaly 1970](../../orthodoxy/10-orthodoxy-in-america/history/tomos-of-autocephaly-1970.md)). In brief: (a) Moscow and the OCA hold that a mother church may grant autocephaly to a mature daughter church in its own territory, and that the American church met the conditions; (b) Constantinople holds that the granting of autocephaly requires the consent of the whole Church expressed through the Ecumenical Throne, and has not recognized the act. Meyendorff was a principal advocate of position (a) and his theological writing on primacy — see his edited volume *The Primacy of Peter* — belongs to that argument. This collection reports his role and his position without adjudicating the canonical question.]

The Vision of an American Church

The program Meyendorff and Schmemann pursued was for an Orthodox Church in North America that was local, territorial, English-speaking, and not bound to a single ethnicity. The repository records the outcome: the OCA “is the most thoroughly English-language of the major American jurisdictions, the direct heir of the Schmemann–Meyendorff aspiration to an American Orthodox Church not bound to a single ethnicity” (The OCA).

This program was not uncontroversial and is not universally accepted. It has been criticized from two directions: by those who saw in it the dissolution of the particular ethnic traditions that had carried Orthodoxy to America and preserved it there, and by those who thought the autocephaly a jurisdictional maneuver dressed in ecclesiology. Meyendorff’s answer — argued in the editorials and in his patristic work — was that the canonical tradition is unambiguous about territoriality, that the ethnic jurisdictions were an emergency arrangement of the twentieth century, and that treating the emergency as normal was the innovation (see Twentieth-Century Fragmentation and Ligonier 1994, the later attempt at the same goal).

It is worth noting the historical irony: an argument for a non-ethnic American Orthodoxy was made most forcefully by two Russians born in France who had arrived in the country as adults. Neither man was a native; both insisted the church must become one.

The Later Years

Meyendorff’s last decade combined the deanship with a heavy scholarly output — The Byzantine Legacy in the Orthodox Church (1982), Catholicity and the Church (1983), the Classics of Western Spirituality Triads (1983), the three-volume Christian Spirituality series co-edited with Bernard McGinn and others (1985, 1987, 1989), Vision of Unity and Witness to the World (1987), Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions (1989), The Legacy of St Vladimir (1990), and the revised Primacy of Peter (1992) (St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary bibliography, svots.edu).

He also became, in the perestroika years, a bridge to the Russian Church emerging from persecution. He was made an honorary member of the Leningrad Theological Academy in 1990 and received the Order of St. Vladimir, 2nd Class, from Patriarch Aleksy II in 1991 (St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, svots.edu); his books began to be published in Russian (Vizantiia i Moskovskaia Rus’, 1990). He did not live to see much of what followed. He retired on 30 June 1992 and died on 22 July (see Neuilly, Paris, and the Emigration).

See Also

References

  • St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. “Protopresbyter John Meyendorff.” svots.edu. (Appointments; the deanship March 1984 – June 1992; the editorships; the OCA offices; the honors of 1990 and 1991; the bibliography of the later years.)
  • St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. “In Memoriam: Marie Meyendorff.” svots.edu. (Schmemann’s invitation and the 1959 arrival.)
  • Meyendorff, John. Vision of Unity. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987. (Editorials from The Orthodox Church, 1965–1984; “Steps Towards Unity” and “Debates on Church Order.”)
  • Meyendorff, John. Witness to the World. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987.
  • Meyendorff, John, ed. The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992.
  • Tarasar, Constance J., ed. Orthodox America 1794–1976: Development of the Orthodox Church in America. Syosset, NY: OCA Department of History and Archives, 1975. (Schmemann’s first-person account of the autocephaly negotiations.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. “The Road to Autocephaly, 1963–1970.” oca.org. (The negotiating committee and the Syosset signing of 31 March 1970.)
  • “Centennial of Fr. John Meyendorff marked by St. Vladimir’s Seminary and Fordham.” orthochristian.com, 2026. (Bishop Irinej’s recollection of his teaching.)
  • SVS Press. Catalogue entry for Vision of Unity. svspress.com. (The dates of his editorship of The Orthodox Church.)