Influence and Reception

Evdokimov’s afterlife has taken an unusual shape. Among Orthodox theologians his most famous book is now the least defended, while the phrase he borrowed from a nineteenth-century Russian — “interiorized monasticism” — has entered the common vocabulary of Western Christian writing on the lay vocation. He is honoured in France as one of the two founders of Francophone Orthodox theology, read in English chiefly through Michael Plekon’s editions, and remembered in the Orthodox world as the man who asked the question about women before anyone else did.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

In France

Evdokimov’s first and deepest reception was French. He wrote in French for a French readership, and his books were published by the major Catholic houses — Casterman, Desclée de Brouwer, Cerf, Seuil — which placed him inside the French theological conversation rather than beside it. He taught at the Institut Catholique de Paris, contributed to and was memorialized by the review Contacts, and was one of the small group of Russian émigrés who made Orthodoxy an available intellectual option for French readers.

The definitive French statement of his standing is Olivier Clément’s pairing of him with Vladimir Lossky as the two passeurs — the two ferrymen who carried the tradition across (Clément, Orient–Occident: Deux passeurs, Vladimir Lossky et Paul Evdokimov, Labor et Fides, 1985; see Olivier Clément). There is a full-length French study, Jean-François Roussel’s Paul Evdokimov: Une foi en exil (Montréal/Paris: Médiaspaul, 1999). The memorial issue of Contacts in 1971 gathered fourteen Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant contributors under the title Témoignages sur Paul Evdokimov (Contacts XXIII, nos. 73–74, 1971).

His son Michel Evdokimov (1930–2025), an Orthodox priest, professor and writer on Russian spirituality, carried the name and much of the sensibility into a second generation (Wikipedia, “Michel Evdokimov”).

In English

The English reception came late and in two waves.

The first wave was the 1960s: The Struggle with God, the Paulist Press translation of Les Âges de la vie spirituelle, appeared in 1966, in the ecumenical enthusiasm following Vatican II.

The second wave, which is the one that matters, was the work of Michael Plekon and his collaborators from the late 1980s onward: The Sacrament of Love (SVS Press, 1985, trans. Gythiel and Steadman), The Art of the Icon (Oakwood, 1990, trans. Bigham), Woman and the Salvation of the World (SVS Press, 1994, trans. Gythiel), the revised Ages of the Spiritual Life (SVS Press, 1998, trans. Plekon and Vinogradov), In the World, of the Church: A Paul Evdokimov Reader (SVS Press, 2001, ed. and trans. Plekon and Vinogradov), and finally Orthodoxy itself (New City Press, 2011, trans. Hummerstone, with Clément’s foreword). Plekon added the scholarly apparatus: the American Benedictine Review study of interiorized monasticism (1997), the chapter in Living Icons (Notre Dame, 2002), the essay on marriage in the Sophia Studies volume (2013), and the Cambridge chapter in Christianity and Family Law (2017). It is not an exaggeration to say that the English-language Evdokimov is Plekon’s construction, and this is worth naming, because it means that the emphases of the English reception — the lay vocation, marriage, the spiritual life — are partly editorial choices.

Andrew Louth included Evdokimov among the subjects of Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present (SPCK/IVP Academic, 2015), which is the standard survey and which fixes his place in the canon of twentieth-century Orthodox theology.

The Uneven Shape of the Reputation

Three observations about how the reception has actually settled.

1. “Interiorized monasticism” outran its author. The phrase, which Evdokimov took from Bukharev, is now current in Western Christian writing on lay spirituality, on new monastic movements, and on the recovery of contemplative practice outside monasteries, often at some distance from Evdokimov’s own theology. Plekon’s article was written for a Benedictine journal, and the idea has had a notably Roman Catholic career (Plekon, American Benedictine Review 48:3 [1997]: 227–253; Catholic World Report, “Interior Monasticism,” 2022). Within Orthodoxy the substance of the idea — that laypeople should keep a rule and take the ascetic tradition as addressed to them — is now close to a pastoral commonplace, though the phrase itself is used less.

2. The Sacrament of Love has aged best. It is the least contested of his books and has had a continuous influence on Orthodox pastoral practice and on ecumenical theology of marriage; it stands beside Meyendorff’s Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective (1970) as one of the two twentieth-century Orthodox treatments that shaped a generation, and it has been read appreciatively well outside Orthodoxy (see Fr. John Meyendorff).

3. La Femme et le salut du monde is the book he is known for and the book fewest people now defend as it stands. The English translation arrived in 1994, into a conversation whose leading Orthodox voice — Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, who had begun from Evdokimov — had already abandoned his categories, and it was reviewed accordingly (see Behr-Sigel and the Critique of the Eternal Feminine). What survives from it is the question: the Orthodox conversation about women that runs from Agapia (1976) through the Rhodes consultation (1988) to the present renewed discussion of the female diaconate begins substantially from Evdokimov’s insistence that the Church owed the subject a theology (see Women in Orthodoxy and Deaconess History).

Among His Contemporaries

Evdokimov’s place in the Paris generation is best fixed by contrast.

  • Against Fr. Georges Florovsky and Vladimir Lossky, who defined Orthodox theology by a return to the Fathers against the Russian religious philosophy, Evdokimov tried to keep both, and was therefore never fully claimed by either party.
  • Against Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, his teacher, he is the disciple who declined to build a system and absorbed the criticism.
  • Against Fr. Alexander Schmemann, with whom he shares the diagnosis of secularism and the exaltation of the laity, he is the one who kept the ascetic rather than the liturgical vocabulary for the lay vocation.
  • Against Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev, his colleague and fellow observer at Vatican II, he supplies the spirituality to Afanasiev’s ecclesiology.
  • Against Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, he is the one who opened the question she then took away from him.
  • And with Mother Maria Skobtsova he shares the conviction, tested in occupied Paris, that the stranger at the door is where theology is decided (see St. Maria of Paris).

Andrew Louth’s placement of him — as a theologian who held together the neo-patristic renewal and the insights of the Russian religious philosophers — is the settled scholarly judgement (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; Stavrou, La Croix, 18 September 2010).

An Assessment

Offered as this guide’s judgement, not the Church’s, and open to revision.

Evdokimov’s permanent contribution is a relocation of the centre of Christian seriousness. Before him, and in much Orthodox writing since, the spiritual life is described from the monastery outward, and the layman receives an abridged version. Evdokimov denied the abridgement. He argued that the full Gospel is addressed to the man on the night shift, that marriage is not a lesser state but another form of the same asceticism, that beauty is a name of God accessible in a factory town, and that in an unbelieving age the only argument left is a human being who has become transparent. He made these claims while living exactly that life, for forty-seven years, as a stateless refugee who never took a passport and never took orders.

His weaknesses are real and should not be minimized. His anthropology of the sexes rests on a metaphysical construction he inherited rather than argued for, and it does not survive the scrutiny it has received. His method — a warm, allusive, associative synthesis drawing on the Fathers, the liturgy, the icon, Russian philosophy and depth psychology in the same paragraph — makes it hard to see which claims are load-bearing and which are decoration. He is a theologian of vision rather than of argument, and vision is harder to check.

But the strongest thing to be said for him is the thing his critics concede. Behr-Sigel, who dismantled his framework, still recorded that he was for a long time the only Orthodox theologian to look at the question of women with interest and sympathy. That is the pattern of his whole career: he was, repeatedly, the first Orthodox to take a modern question seriously enough to get it wrong in public. A tradition needs people willing to do that.

See Also

References

  • Catholic World Report. “Interior Monasticism.” 17 February 2022.
  • Clément, Olivier. Orient–Occident: Deux passeurs, Vladimir Lossky et Paul Evdokimov. Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1985.
  • Contacts: Revue française de l’Orthodoxie XXIII, nos. 73–74 (1971). Témoignages sur Paul Evdokimov.
  • Hinlicky Wilson, Sarah. Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. London: T&T Clark, 2013.
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK / Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015.
  • Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002.
  • Plekon, Michael. “‘Interiorized Monasticism’: A Reconsideration of Paul Evdokimov on the Spiritual Life.” American Benedictine Review 48, no. 3 (1997): 227–253.
  • Roussel, Jean-François. Paul Evdokimov: Une foi en exil. Montréal/Paris: Médiaspaul, 1999.
  • Stavrou, Michel. “Paul Evdokimov, un témoin du Ressuscité.” La Croix, 18 September 2010.
  • Wikipedia. “Michel Evdokimov.” (1930–2025; Orthodox priest and theologian, son of Paul Evdokimov.)