The Ecumenical Vocation and Vatican II

Evdokimov was one of the most thoroughly ecumenical Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century: active in the World Council of Churches from its foundation, a lecturer at the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey, a teacher of ecumenical studies at the Institut Catholique de Paris from 1967, and — with Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev — an Orthodox observer at the fourth session of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. This file documents that career, and situates it inside the intra-Orthodox argument over ecumenism which it inevitably raises.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

An Ecumenism Learned in Practice

Evdokimov’s ecumenism did not begin at a conference table. It began in the CIMADE houses, an ecumenical Protestant-founded relief network in which Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox worked together to keep people alive (see The War Years and CIMADE). This order — first the shared work, then the theological conversation — is the shape of his whole engagement, and it explains why his ecumenical writing is so uninterested in negotiated formulae and so preoccupied with what he called the spiritual and pneumatic conditions of unity.

He was active in the World Council of Churches in its formative period. The notices place his participation from about 1948, the year of the WCC’s founding assembly at Amsterdam, into the 1960s, with the notice in Omnes specifying a WCC involvement across 1948–1961 and Encyclopædia Universalis and the standard reference articles recording that he “continued to participate in ecumenical organisations throughout the 1960s” (Omnes, “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon”; Wikipedia, “Paul Evdokimov”). He taught at the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey, near Geneva — the WCC’s own graduate school — and at the Institut Catholique de Paris, where from 1967 to 1970 he lectured in ecumenical studies (OrthodoxWiki, “Paul Evdokimov”: “he was a teacher at both the Ecumenical Institute in Geneva and the L’Institut Catholique in Paris”; Omnes, dating the Institut Catholique teaching to 1967–1970).

The Institut Catholique appointment deserves a note. For an Orthodox layman to hold a teaching post in the principal Catholic faculty of Paris, in the years immediately after Vatican II, was a genuine novelty — an index both of the post-conciliar opening and of the standing Evdokimov personally had won among French Catholics. [Disputed: whether Evdokimov was the first Orthodox, or the first Orthodox layman, to teach at the Institut Catholique de Paris. The claim is made in some appreciations of him. This guide reports the appointment, which is well attested, and does not assert a "first" it cannot document.]

Vatican II: The Fourth Session

The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) invited non-Catholic observers, and the Orthodox response was tangled. Most autocephalous Churches initially declined to send observers, since they would have no vote; the Moscow Patriarchate, for reasons that were as much political as theological, broke ranks and sent observers to the very first session, which embarrassed Constantinople, and other Orthodox followed at later sessions (Bordeianu, “Orthodox Observers at the Second Vatican Council and Intra-Orthodox Dynamics,” Theological Studies 79, no. 1 [2018]: 86–106, at 93–95).

The St. Sergius contribution came through this gap. Bordeianu’s account is precise:

“Russian Orthodox émigrés teaching at St. Serge Institute in Paris had significant contact with Catholic colleagues associated with the Dominican Ecumenical Center Istina in Paris and with the Benedictine monks of Chevetogne, so their invitation to the Council was a natural development of these relationships that had already borne ecumenical fruit. However, St. Serge was led by Bishop Cassien (Bezobrazov), who was under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate — the latter being unable to send observers. Hence, Bishop Cassien attended the Council from the beginning as an SPCU guest, and not as an observer proper. Later, Paul Evdokimov and Nicholas Afanasiev replaced him at the fourth session.” (Bordeianu, Theological Studies 79/1 [2018]: 95, emphasis added; “SPCU” is the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity.)

So: Evdokimov was present at the fourth and final session (September–December 1965), in succession to Bishop Cassien, and alongside his St. Sergius colleague Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev, whose eucharistic ecclesiology left a documented mark on the Council’s texts on the local church and the priesthood of the laity (Bordeianu, Theological Studies 79/1 [2018]: 95 and n.39, citing Velati, Separati ma fratelli, and Olivier Rousseau’s preface to the French edition of Afanasiev’s L’Église du Saint-Esprit; see Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev). [Disputed: which sessions Evdokimov attended. Bordeianu's scholarly account places him at the fourth session. Some popular notices place him at earlier sessions — one describes him as an observer "at the second session in 1964," a formulation which is internally inconsistent, since the second session met in 1963. The fourth-session dating is the best attested and is used here; it remains possible that he was present in some capacity at the third session (1964) as well, and this guide does not exclude it.]

The fourth session is the one that produced Dignitatis humanae, Ad gentes, Gaudium et spes and Nostra aetate. Evdokimov’s own recorded impression of what it was like to be an observer is one of the passages historians of the Council quote:

“The impressions of the observers were unanimous: when they found themselves acting not as spectators but taken into the midst of the work itself and invited to take part in it, as well as expressing their views with complete freedom in private groups or in the commissions, they had the impression that they were witnesses to a real historical event.” (Evdokimov, quoted in Giuseppe Alberigo, “Transition to a New Age,” in Alberigo and Komonchak, eds., History of Vatican II, vol. 5, The Council and the Transition, 586; cited in Bordeianu, Theological Studies 79/1 [2018]: n.51.)

That is a carefully limited statement. It claims that the observers were listened to; it claims no more.

What He Thought Ecumenism Was

Evdokimov’s ecumenical theology is of a piece with the rest of his thought and is best summarized as pneumatological. Unity, on his account, is not primarily a juridical problem to be solved by agreed statements, but the work of the Holy Spirit, who is already at work outside the visible canonical boundaries of Orthodoxy, and whose activity Christians are to discern rather than to legislate. His late book L’Esprit-Saint dans la tradition orthodoxe (1969) is the systematic statement, and La Nouveauté de l’Esprit (Bellefontaine, 1977), published posthumously, gathers essays in the same key. This is why his contribution is characterized as a “pneumatic ecumenism” resting on eucharistic ecclesiology (Omnes, “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon,” summarizing his contribution as combining traditional Orthodox theology with original insights on marriage, priesthood, and a pneumatic ecumenism centred on eucharistic ecclesiology) — the eucharistic ecclesiology in question being that of Afanasiev, his colleague and fellow observer.

The Intra-Orthodox Argument

It must be stated plainly that ecumenical engagement of this kind is contested within Orthodoxy, and that Evdokimov’s reputation is entangled in that contest. [Disputed: the theological legitimacy of Orthodox participation in the ecumenical movement, and by extension the evaluation of Evdokimov's ecumenical career. (a) The affirming position — that Orthodox participation is a form of witness, that the Spirit is not confined by canonical boundaries, and that the Orthodox observers at Vatican II and in the WCC served the Church by making Orthodoxy audible in the West — is Evdokimov's own, and is held by the majority of the canonical Orthodox Churches, all of which have been WCC members or participants, and was reflected in the documents of the 2016 Council of Crete. (b) The critical position — that the ecumenical movement rests on an ecclesiology incompatible with the Orthodox confession that the Church is one and identifiable, that participation implicitly concedes the "branch theory," and that the enthusiasm of figures like Evdokimov blurred necessary boundaries — is held by traditionalist and Old Calendarist bodies, by significant monastic constituencies on Mount Athos, and by theologians in the line of St. Justin Popović, who wrote against Orthodox ecumenical participation in the strongest terms. The collection does not adjudicate. See [The Ecumenism Debate](../../orthodoxy/09-orthodox-distinctives/ecumenism-debate.md) for the wider argument and [St. Justin Popović](../../st-justin-popovic/README.md) for the classic critical statement.]

Two clarifications keep the record straight. First, no Orthodox Church has ever censured Evdokimov, and nothing in his published work departs from the Orthodox confession of faith in the manner alleged against, for instance, sophiology. Second, Evdokimov himself was not an indifferentist: his account of what Orthodoxy is, in L’Orthodoxie, is unembarrassed and unhedged. What he denied was that the boundary of the Church can be drawn by human beings in such a way as to tell God where He may not work.

See Also

References

  • Alberigo, Giuseppe. “Transition to a New Age.” In Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak, eds., History of Vatican II, vol. 5, The Council and the Transition. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 573–644, at 586. (The quotation from Evdokimov on the observers’ impressions.)
  • Bordeianu, Radu. “Orthodox Observers at the Second Vatican Council and Intra-Orthodox Dynamics.” Theological Studies 79, no. 1 (2018): 86–106. (The St. Sergius contacts with Istina and Chevetogne; Bishop Cassien as an SPCU guest; Evdokimov and Afanasiev replacing him at the fourth session; Afanasiev’s influence on the conciliar texts; the Evdokimov quotation at n.51.)
  • Evdokimov, Paul. L’Esprit-Saint dans la tradition orthodoxe. Paris: Cerf, 1969.
  • Evdokimov, Paul. La Nouveauté de l’Esprit. Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 1977. (Posthumous essays; the pneumatological key of his ecumenism.)
  • Encyclopædia Universalis. “Paul Evdokimov (1901–1970).” (Attendance at Vatican II as an invited participant.)
  • Omnes. “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon.” (WCC participation c. 1948–1961; Vatican II as observer; teaching ecumenical studies at the Institut Catholique de Paris 1967–1970; the characterization of his “pneumatic ecumenism” centred on eucharistic ecclesiology.)
  • OrthodoxWiki. “Paul Evdokimov.” (Teacher at the Ecumenical Institute in Geneva and the Institut Catholique in Paris; official Orthodox observer at Vatican II.)
  • Rousseau, Olivier. Preface to Nicolas Afanassieff, L’Église du Saint-Esprit, trans. Marianne Drobot. Paris: Cerf, 1975, 8–9. (Afanasiev’s influence at the Council.)
  • Wikipedia. “Paul Evdokimov.” (Continued participation in ecumenical organisations through the 1960s.)