The Student Years and the Dostoevsky Thesis

Between 1923 and 1942 Evdokimov became a theologian while remaining a labourer, a husband and a father: degrees at the Sorbonne and at the newly founded St. Sergius Institute, formation under Bulgakov, Berdyaev and Kartashev, marriage to Natasha Brunel in 1927, two children, a move south to Menton, and finally a doctorate defended in 1942 on Dostoevsky and the problem of evil — written in the middle of a war, while his wife was dying.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

Two Faculties at Once

From his arrival in Paris, Evdokimov studied on two tracks. He read philosophy at the Sorbonne, and theology at the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute on the rue de Crimée, taking his theological degree in 1928 (Omnes, “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon,” on the Sorbonne and the Saint-Serge degree of 1928; OrthodoxWiki, “Paul Evdokimov,” on his continuing “his studies at the Sorbonne and the St. Sergius Institute”). Since the Institute opened its doors in 1925, this places him among the first cohort of students ever to pass through it — the generation that received the emigration’s theology at first hand, in the years when it was being invented.

This double formation is the structural fact of Evdokimov’s mind. He is at once a French-trained philosopher — at ease with Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud and later Jung, Simone Weil, Bonhoeffer and Simone de Beauvoir — and a Russian theological student reading the Greek Fathers in a converted German Lutheran church on a Paris hillside (on the range of his interlocutors, see the list of influences compiled in Plekon, “Paul Evdokimov,” in Witte and Hauk, eds., Christianity and Family Law, Cambridge, 2017, 363–380). He never learned to think as though these were two worlds.

Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Kartashev

The teachers matter. At St. Sergius his principal master was Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, the Institute’s dean and the most creative and most contested Orthodox theologian of the century; he also worked closely with the historian Anton Kartashev, and outside the Institute with the religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, in whose Clamart circle much of the emigration’s intellectual life happened (OrthodoxWiki, “Paul Evdokimov,” on study “with Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and Nikolai Berdyaev”; Wikipedia, “Paul Evdokimov,” listing Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Afanasiev, Lev Gillet, Kartashev and Georgy Fedotov among his influences, following Plekon).

Evdokimov’s relation to Bulgakov is the single most delicate question in his intellectual biography, and this collection treats it at length in How Much Sophiology, and the Counter-Reading. It is enough here to state the shape of it. Evdokimov revered Bulgakov and absorbed a great deal from him — above all the conviction that creation is not alien to God, that Wisdom is a real theological category, and that the feminine has a properly theological weight. He did not, however, construct a sophiological system of his own, and he wrote after the censures of 1935 with evident care. The scholarly characterization that recurs is that Evdokimov was a disciple of Bulgakov who absorbed a good deal of the neo-patristic critique of sophiology, and thereby occupies a position between the two camps (this is the reading in the Oxford volume on the patristic roots of modern Russian sophiology, which describes Evdokimov as “a disciple of Bulgakov who incorporates key aspects of the neo-patristic critique”; on the condemnations themselves and their exact scope, see Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, which is this repository’s authority on that question and should be preferred wherever the two accounts might seem to differ).

That intermediate position is not an evasion. It became his programme. His theological thought, as the standard summary has it, “is marked by the attempt to synthesise two important currents in twentieth-century Orthodox thought, namely the ‘neo-patristic’ renewal and the insights of the Russian religious philosophers” (Wikipedia, “Paul Evdokimov,” citing Michel Stavrou in La Croix, 18 September 2010; the same judgement in Encyclopædia Universalis, “Paul Evdokimov,” which names Berdyaev and Bulgakov as the philosophical sources alongside the patristic tradition). Where Fr. Georges Florovsky and Vladimir Lossky defined themselves partly against the Russian religious philosophy, Evdokimov tried to keep both.

Natasha Brunel, Menton, and the Children

In 1927 Evdokimov married Natasha Brunel, a French teacher of Russian origin, and the couple moved south to Menton, on the Riviera near the Italian border (Wikipedia, “Paul Evdokimov,” on the 1927 marriage, Brunel’s background, and the move to Menton). They had two children: Nina, born in 1928, and Michel, born in 1930 — the latter becoming, in his turn, an Orthodox priest and theologian and a writer on the Russian spiritual tradition (Wikipedia, “Paul Evdokimov” and “Michel Evdokimov”; Michel Evdokimov died in 2025).

The southern years are the quietest stretch of the life and the least documented. Evdokimov was not yet teaching; he was reading, writing and earning a living. [Disputed: how Evdokimov supported his family at Menton in the 1930s. The sources consulted for this guide record the marriage, the move and the children, but do not establish his employment in these years. The guide does not guess.]

The War Comes South

With the outbreak of the Second World War and the Italian occupation of Menton in June 1940, the family had to move again, this time inland to Valence in the Drôme (Wikipedia, “Paul Evdokimov”). Menton was among the very few pieces of French territory actually annexed into the Italian occupation zone, and a stateless Russian family there was in an exposed position.

It was in these years, displaced for the second time in twenty years, that Evdokimov wrote his doctorate.

Dostoïevski et le problème du mal

In 1942 Evdokimov defended his doctoral thesis, at Aix(-en-Provence), on Dostoevsky and the problem of evil; it was published the same year as Dostoïevski et le problème du mal (Wikipedia, “Paul Evdokimov”: “In 1942, Evdokimov defended his PhD thesis on Dostoyevsky and the problem of evil,” citing Plekon, Living Icons; Encyclopædia Universalis: “He earned his philosophy doctorate from the University of Aix in 1942 with a dissertation on Dostoevsky”). [Disputed: the year and description of the degree. The dominant account is a doctorate in philosophy/letters at Aix in 1942. The French Wikipedia article gives "Docteur ès lettres (1938)," citing a Sudoc catalogue record for the thesis. The 1942 date is better attested and is the one used throughout this guide; the 1938 datum is noted so that readers who meet it are not misled. It is possible the discrepancy reflects the difference between a first registration or earlier degree and the defence itself.]

The choice of subject was not a detour from theology. For Evdokimov, Dostoevsky is the writer in whom the modern question — whether a good God can be believed in a world containing the suffering of children — is posed with full force and answered without evasion, and the thesis is the seedbed of a lifelong preoccupation that produced a second book two decades later, Gogol et Dostoïevski, ou la descente aux enfers (1961), and a third, Le Christ dans la pensée russe (1970). The theme is followed in this collection in Dostoevsky, Atheism, and the Modern World.

The circumstances of the writing should be stated plainly, because they bear on how the book reads. Evdokimov worked on the thesis during the war, while caring for a wife who was dying of cancer; Natasha Brunel died at or about the end of the war, and the family returned to Paris (Wikipedia, “Paul Evdokimov”: “The end of the war coincided with Brunel’s death from cancer, and the family relocated to Paris”; Omnes, “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon,” dating her death to 1945 and noting that he pursued the doctoral research on evil while caring for her). A study of the problem of evil, composed under occupation, in a house where a young mother was dying, by a man who was at the same time hiding refugees, is not an academic exercise. Whatever one concludes about Evdokimov’s answers, the question was not theoretical for him.

He would remarry in 1954, to Tomoko Sakai, an English–Japanese interpreter (Wikipedia, “Paul Evdokimov”). But between the two marriages lie the years of the war and the hostels, which are the subject of the next section.

References

Encyclopædia Universalis. “Paul Evdokimov (1901–1970).” (Doctorate in philosophy at Aix, 1942; lay status; the synthesis of patristic tradition with Berdyaev and Bulgakov.)
OrthodoxWiki. “Paul Evdokimov.” (Study at the Sorbonne and St. Sergius; Bulgakov and Berdyaev as teachers; the 1942 doctorate published as Dostoevsky and the Problem of Evil.)
Omnes. “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon.” (The Saint-Serge theological degree of 1928; marriage in 1927; wife’s death from cancer in 1945; doctoral research on evil in Dostoevsky pursued during the war.)
Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. (The standard English biography of Evdokimov; source for the 1942 thesis defence.)
Plekon, Michael. “Paul Evdokimov.” In John Witte, Jr. and Gary S. Hauk, eds., Christianity and Family Law: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, 363–380. (The catalogue of Evdokimov’s intellectual influences: Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Afanasiev, Lev Gillet, Kartashev, Fedotov, Jung, Dostoevsky, Weil, Bonhoeffer, de Beauvoir, Freud.)
Stavrou, Michel. “Paul Evdokimov, un témoin du Ressuscité.” La Croix, 18 September 2010. (Evdokimov’s project as a synthesis of the neo-patristic renewal and Russian religious philosophy.)
Wikipedia. “Paul Evdokimov”; “Michel Evdokimov.” (Marriage to Natasha Brunel in 1927; move to Menton; children Nina (1928) and Michel (1930–2025); relocation to Valence under the Italian occupation; 1942 thesis; Brunel’s death; remarriage in 1954 to Tomoko Sakai.)
Wikipédia (French). “Paul Evdokimov.” (The divergent “Docteur ès lettres (1938)” datum, with its Sudoc catalogue reference; death at Meudon.)
Wisdom in Christian Tradition: The Patristic Roots of Modern Russian Sophiology, chapter “Modern Russian Sophiology and Its Discontents.” Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Evdokimov as a disciple of Bulgakov who incorporates key aspects of the neo-patristic critique.)