The Hostels and the Work of Welcome

From 1945 until 1968 Evdokimov directed CIMADE reception centres and student residences in the Paris region — houses for displaced persons, then for foreign students and workers. For most of his career as a theologian he was, by day, the warden of a hostel. This file describes that work and argues that it is the practical root of everything distinctive in his theology: the universal call to holiness, hospitality as sacrament, and the conviction that the Church’s real frontier runs through ordinary life.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

Twenty-Three Years of Houses

The postwar refugee crisis in France was enormous and long. The displaced persons of 1945 were succeeded by the political refugees of the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe, then by students and workers from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. CIMADE, which had been improvised in 1939 for the evacuees of Alsace, became a permanent institution of welcome, and Evdokimov worked inside it.

The notices agree on the outline. After the war he directed reception centres and student housing in the Paris region (Encyclopædia Universalis, “Paul Evdokimov”: after the war he “directed refugee centres and student housing in the Paris region before becoming a professor at Saint-Serge”). OFPRA’s account has him “managing reception facilities and a student residence while pursuing academic theology” (OFPRA, “Paul Evdokimov, theologian”). Omnes dates the end of this service precisely: he directed a student residence near Paris until 1968 (Omnes, “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon”). [Disputed: the exact names, locations and dates of the individual houses Evdokimov directed. The sources consulted agree that he ran CIMADE reception centres and a student residence in the Paris region from the immediate postwar years until 1968, but do not consistently name the establishments. This guide does not supply names it cannot verify.]

The chronology is worth holding in view, because it is easily missed. Evdokimov became a professor at St. Sergius in 1953 and remained one until his death in 1970 (Wikipedia, “Paul Evdokimov”). He published La Femme et le salut du monde in 1958, L’Orthodoxie in 1959, Le Sacrement de l’amour in 1962, Les Âges de la vie spirituelle in 1964. Every one of those books was written by a man who was simultaneously running a hostel. The theology and the housekeeping were not sequential phases of a life; they were the same fifteen years.

What the Work Was

Directing a CIMADE foyer meant beds, meals, paperwork, quarrels, illness, money that did not stretch, and a permanent traffic of people in the worst weeks of their lives — the ordinary substance of institutional charity, without glamour. It also meant a house that was religiously mixed by design. CIMADE was Protestant in foundation and ecumenical in practice; its residents in the 1950s and 1960s were Christians of every confession, Jews, Muslims and unbelievers. An Orthodox layman running such a house had to work out, daily, what it means to be a Christian presence among people who have not asked for one.

Evdokimov’s answer, worked out in these houses and then written down, is the doctrine of presence rather than proselytism. The Christian in the world is not primarily a persuader; he is a place where something of God can be met. It is in this register that he offered his best-known aphorism about modern apologetics — that in a world for which the classical proofs of God have lost their force, the remaining proof is a transfigured human face, a person in whom the light is visible (the formulation is summarized in Encyclopædia Universalis, “Paul Evdokimov,” which reports that he “presented the transfigured human face as the modern world’s primary ‘proof’ of God’s existence”; the theme runs through L’Amour fou de Dieu, 1973, and the essays gathered in In the World, of the Church, ed. Plekon and Vinogradov, 2001). That is not a sentiment. It is what a man concludes after fifteen years of living with people who will not be argued into faith but might be loved into noticing it.

Hospitality as a Sacramental Act

The theological significance Evdokimov drew from this work is best stated in the terms he himself used for the layman’s vocation. Through baptism and chrismation every Christian is anointed into the royal priesthood (1 Peter 2:9), and that priesthood is exercised not by liturgical action — which belongs to the ordained — but by the offering of the world: by making of one’s home, one’s table and one’s work an altar (Evdokimov, “Le monachisme intériorisé,” in Les Âges de la vie spirituelle, 1964, on the baptismal priesthood and the “église domestique”; see The Three Vows and the Royal Priesthood of the Laity). The hostel is a limit case of the domestic church: a house whose whole purpose is to receive the stranger.

Behind this stands the oldest Christian reading of hospitality — Abraham at Mamre receiving the three men (Genesis 18:1–15), the icon of which is Rublev’s Trinity; and the Judgement of Matthew 25:35, “I was a stranger, and ye took me in.” Evdokimov’s contemporaries in the Russian Paris had made this the explicit charter of their work: Mother Maria Skobtsova insisted that the person at the door is the sacrament, and that a Christianity which will not open the door has already apostatized (see St. Maria of Paris). Evdokimov, who was doing after the war what she had done during it, stands in the same line, and cites the same texts.

There is a further, sharper point in his version. Because the vows of the monk are for Evdokimov the concentrated form of the baptismal promises and not a superior state (see The Idea of Interiorized Monasticism), the man who keeps a hostel is not doing something lesser than the monk who keeps a cell. He is keeping the same rule under different conditions. Poverty, chastity and obedience are not suspended for him; they are transposed. The hostel warden is poor because the house is not his, chaste because the house is full of people who are not his to use, and obedient because a house of the destitute imposes its own unarguable discipline. Evdokimov did not write it as autobiography. But it is difficult to read Les Âges de la vie spirituelle without hearing a man describing what he knew.

1968 and After

He gave up the direction of the student residence in 1968 (Omnes, “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon”), the year of the Paris student revolt, which convulsed exactly the population he had spent two decades housing. He was by then sixty-seven, in his last years, and increasingly in demand as a lecturer: from 1967 to 1970 he was teaching ecumenical studies at the Institut Catholique de Paris (Omnes, “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon”), and he had participated as an observer at the Second Vatican Council (see The Ecumenical Vocation and Vatican II).

He died in his sleep on 16 September 1970, at Meudon, in his seventieth year (Wikipedia, “Paul Evdokimov,” on the date and the manner; Wikipédia (French), “Paul Evdokimov,” on Meudon as the place of death). The memorial issue of Contacts that appeared the following year gathered fourteen contributors — Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant — which is itself a comment on the kind of life he had led (Contacts: Revue française de l’Orthodoxie XXIII, nos. 73–74, 1971: Témoignages sur Paul Evdokimov).

References

Contacts: Revue française de l’Orthodoxie XXIII, nos. 73–74 (1971). Témoignages sur Paul Evdokimov. (Memorial issue with fourteen Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant contributors.)
Encyclopædia Universalis. “Paul Evdokimov (1901–1970).” (Direction of refugee centres and student housing in the Paris region after the war; the transfigured human face as the modern “proof” of God.)
Evdokimov, Paul. Les Âges de la vie spirituelle: Des Pères du désert à nos jours. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1964. English: Ages of the Spiritual Life, trans. and rev. Michael Plekon and Alexis Vinogradov. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998. (Interiorized monasticism; the baptismal priesthood; the domestic church.)
Evdokimov, Paul. In the World, of the Church: A Paul Evdokimov Reader. Ed. and trans. Michael Plekon and Alexis Vinogradov. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001. (Shorter writings on the lay vocation and presence in the world.)
Office français de protection des réfugiés et apatrides (OFPRA). “Paul Evdokimov, theologian,” Famous Refugees image gallery. (Management of reception facilities and a student residence.)
Omnes. “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon.” (Direction of a student residence near Paris until 1968; teaching at the Institut Catholique de Paris, 1967–1970.)
Wikipedia. “Paul Evdokimov.” (Professorship at St. Sergius from 1953; death in his sleep on 16 September 1970.)
Wikipédia (French). “Paul Evdokimov.” (Death at Meudon, 16 September 1970.)
Scripture: Genesis 18:1–15 (Abraham at Mamre); Matthew 25:35 (“I was a stranger, and ye took me in”); 1 Peter 2:9 (the royal priesthood).