Formation and the Great War

Blagoje Popović’s years at the St. Sava Seminary in Belgrade, the interruption of the Balkan Wars and the First World War, his service as a medical orderly, the typhus that nearly killed him, the retreat of the Serbian army and people across Albania in the winter of 1915–1916, and the tonsure at Scutari in 1916 that made him the monk Justin.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2010)

The St. Sava Seminary

Blagoje entered the St. Sava Seminary (Bogoslovija Svetog Save) in Belgrade around 1905 and passed through it in the years when Serbian ecclesiastical education was at once traditional in content and increasingly exposed to the currents of modern European thought (the biographical apparatus in Popović’s Sabrana dela, ed. Atanasije Jevtić; Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, London: SPCK, 2015). The seminary gave him the standard theological formation of the Serbian Church — Scripture, liturgics, patristics, church history, dogmatics — and it was here, the sources indicate, that the young man’s characteristic combination came into view: an intense personal piety joined to a first-rate intellect and an early, voracious reading that reached well beyond the curriculum, above all into Dostoevsky, who would remain a lifelong preoccupation (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on the young Justin’s Dostoevskian formation; see Petrograd, Oxford, and Athens).

The Serbia of these years was a small kingdom in a dangerous position, and the seminary’s calm was not to last. In 1912–1913 came the Balkan Wars, in which Serbia and its allies drove the Ottoman Empire from most of its remaining European territory; in 1914 came the assassination at Sarajevo and the Austro-Hungarian invasion that opened the First World War (standard general history; on the Serbian experience, see also Klaus Buchenau, Auf russischen Spuren, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011). Blagoje’s formation as a theologian was thus interrupted, and shaped, by war.

The Balkan Wars and the Orderly

During the Balkan Wars, the young seminarian did not remain in the lecture hall. The biographical tradition, consistent with the general mobilization of Serbian society, records that Blagoje served the army as a medical orderly, tending the wounded and the sick — an experience of mass suffering and death that his biographers connect to the deep note of compassion and the preoccupation with death and immortality that runs through his mature theology (the biographical accounts in the Sabrana dela; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). Whatever the precise dates and postings — which the popular Lives give with more confidence than the documentation warrants — the substance is firm: the future dogmatician of the God-Man came to theology through the field hospitals of the Balkan Wars, not around them.

The Great War, Typhus, and the Retreat

The First World War brought the catastrophe that decided his vocation. After early Serbian successes, the combined offensive of the Central Powers in the autumn of 1915 overran Serbia, and in the winter of 1915–1916 the Serbian army, government, and a mass of civilians undertook the terrible retreat across the mountains of Montenegro and Albania to the Adriatic, where the survivors were evacuated by the Allies — a march through cold, hunger, and disease in which tens of thousands died (standard history of the Serbian “Golgotha” and “Albanian retreat” of 1915–1916). Blagoje Popović was among those who made this retreat.

The biographical tradition records that he had already suffered a grave illness — typhus, the epidemic disease that ravaged wartime Serbia — and that he was near death (the biographical apparatus, Sabrana dela; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015).

[Disputed: the exact sequence and dating of Blagoje’s wartime illness, near-death, and his vow to become a monk are given with circumstantial detail in the devotional Lives (the vow made in extremis, the recovery understood as a deliverance) but are not documented with the precision those accounts imply. This collection reports the firm outline — that he served as an orderly, that he suffered typhus, that he made the retreat, and that he was tonsured in early 1916 — and treats the interior drama of vow-and-deliverance as the tradition’s account of his vocation, pinned to the devotional Lives, per METHODOLOGY §3.5.]

The Tonsure as Justin, 1916

It was in the course of, or immediately after, the retreat — at Scutari (Skadar) in northern Albania, at the beginning of 1916, in the common report on 1 January 1916 — that Blagoje Popović was tonsured a monk and received the name Justin, after the second-century apologist and martyr St. Justin the Philosopher (Justin Martyr) (the biographical accounts in the Sabrana dela, ed. Jevtić; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; Paul Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New, London: T&T Clark, 2019, on Justin Popović’s life and formation). The name was well chosen and, by his later life, well earned: like the second-century Justin, the twentieth-century Justin would be a philosopher who found in Christ the fulfilment of all that philosophy sought, and an unbending confessor of the faith against the wisdom of the age.

The tonsure in the midst of the national catastrophe is the true beginning of the theologian. Blagoje the seminarian became Justin the monk not in the peace of a monastery but in the collapse of his country and the wreck of the retreat, among the dying — and this, his interpreters observe, is why the themes of death, suffering, and the victory of the God-Man over both are not academic questions in his theology but the burden of a lived experience (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019). The war that scattered the Serbian Church across Europe also sent the young monk Justin abroad to study — first, briefly, to revolutionary Russia, then to Oxford, then to Athens — the years treated in the next section.

The Shape of the Formation

Two things from these years stamp everything that follows. First, Justin’s Orthodoxy was tempered in suffering: a childhood in the liturgical world of southern Serbia, then the field hospitals and the Albanian retreat, gave him a theology that is never merely speculative but is always, in his own idiom, a matter of life and death, of “conquering death” through the God-Man (see Christ the God-Man). Second, he became a monk before he became a scholar: the tonsure precedes the doctorate, and the ascetic-liturgical commitment is prior to and governs the academic one. He would insist that theology can be done rightly only from within the ascetic and liturgical life of the Church — a conviction whose biographical root is precisely that Justin the theologian was first Justin the monk, tonsured at Scutari in the winter of the Serbian Golgotha (the biographical apparatus, Sabrana dela; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015).

See Also

References

  • Popović, Justin. Sabrana dela. Ed. Bishop Atanasije (Jevtić) et al. Belgrade: Manastir Ćelije, various dates. (Biographical apparatus: the seminary, the war service, the typhus, the retreat, the tonsure and the name Justin.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (The formation, the Dostoevskian reading, the tonsure as Justin.)
  • Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T&T Clark (Bloomsbury), 2019. (Justin Popović’s life, formation, and place in modern Orthodox theology.)
  • Buchenau, Klaus. Auf russischen Spuren: Orthodoxe Antiwestler in Serbien, 1850–1945. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011. (The Serbian ecclesiastical and political context.)
  • Devotional Lives of St. Justin of Ćelije, used for the wartime vow and near-death and reported as tradition per METHODOLOGY §3.5.