Petrograd, Oxford, and Athens

The young monk Justin’s studies abroad: a brief period at the Theological Academy of Petrograd on the eve of the Russian Revolution, the Oxford years (1916–1919) and the doctoral thesis on Dostoevsky that he never submitted, and the doctorate taken at the University of Athens in 1926 with a dissertation on St. Macarius of Egypt. The Oxford episode is a genuinely disputed point, and this file handles it carefully.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2010)

Petrograd on the Eve of Revolution

After his tonsure at Scutari in early 1916, the monk Justin was sent by the Serbian Church — like a number of promising young Serbian clergy in the war years — to study in Orthodox Russia, at the Theological Academy of Petrograd (St. Petersburg) (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 stay was short. He arrived on the eve of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the collapse of the old order made continued study in Russia impossible; the encounter with Russia was nonetheless formative, deepening the affinity with Russian religious thought — above all with Dostoevsky and with the Slavophile and patristic currents — that already marked him (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; Paul Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New, London: T&T Clark, 2019). Russia, which he would never see restored, remained for Justin the great Orthodox nation martyred by the same anti-theanthropic humanism he diagnosed in the West — a theme of his mature critique (see Against European Humanism).

Oxford, 1916–1919

From Russia — or, on some accounts, sent directly by the Church as the Russian option closed — Justin came to England, to Oxford, where he studied for some three years (commonly given as 1916–1919) at a time when a number of Serbian and other Orthodox students were placed in British universities under wartime and ecclesiastical arrangements (the biographical apparatus, Sabrana dela; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; and the detailed archival study by Bogdan Lubardić, “Justin Popović in Oxford,” treating the Oxford years). At Oxford he undertook doctoral work on a subject that was already his lifelong love: the religion and philosophy of Fyodor Dostoevsky. The thesis is usually titled, in its later published forms, something like The Philosophy and Religion of F. M. Dostoevsky (the Serbian Filosofija i religija F. M. Dostojevskog, later published from his papers; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015).

The famous story is that Justin’s Oxford degree was refused because he would not soften the thesis’s sweeping attack on Western European humanism and on the Latin and Protestant Christianity he read as its root — that the young Serbian monk, invited to moderate his critique of the very civilization whose university was to certify him, declined, and so left without the degree. The story is attractive and has become part of the Justin legend, and it is not baseless; but the archival research complicates it.

[Disputed: why Justin left Oxford without a doctorate. (a) The traditional account — repeated in devotional Lives and many popular biographies — is that the thesis was rejected, or that Justin refused to submit or defend it, because he would not remove its harsh criticism of Western humanism and Western Christianity, and that the examiners or the milieu found this unacceptable; on this reading the non-degree is a badge of confessional integrity. (b) The revisionist account, argued from the Oxford records by Bogdan Lubardić (“Justin Popović in Oxford”), is that the situation was more mundane and more complex — bound up with the requirements of the degree, the state of the manuscript, the disruption of the war years and Justin’s departure, and institutional factors — so that “rejected for attacking the West” is at best a compression and at worst a legend. This collection reports both: the thesis on Dostoevsky was real and profoundly critical of European humanism, and Justin left Oxford without the degree; the dramatic causal story of a principled refusal is a contested reconstruction, and Lubardić’s archival work counsels caution. The collection does not adjudicate, per METHODOLOGY §4.]

What is not in dispute is the intellectual substance. The Oxford work fixed the pattern of Justin’s mind: Dostoevsky read not as a novelist but as a prophet of the God-Man against the man-god, of Christ against the Grand Inquisitor and against the whole project of a humanity that would organize its happiness without God (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on Justin’s Dostoevsky; and see Against European Humanism). The Dostoevsky material would later appear in his Dostoevsky on Europe and Slavdom (Dostojevski o Evropi i Slovenstvu) and The Philosophy and Religion of F. M. Dostoevsky (the Serbian editions from his papers; see The Commentaries and Letters).

Athens and the Doctorate of 1926

The degree Justin did not take at Oxford he took at Athens. In the early 1920s he studied in Greece, and in 1926 he was awarded the doctorate in theology by the University of Athens for a dissertation on the anthropology and epistemology of St. Macarius of Egypt — commonly titled The Problem of Personality and Knowledge according to St. Macarius of Egypt (Serbian Problem ličnosti i poznanja po svetom Makariju Egipatskom) (the biographical apparatus, Sabrana dela, ed. Jevtić; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019). The choice of subject is revealing. The Macarian Homilies are a monument of early monastic mysticism, centered on the experience of grace in the heart, the person’s transformation, and the knowledge of God given in that transformation rather than in speculation. In taking St. Macarius as the matter of his doctorate, Justin bound his academic formation to exactly the patristic and ascetic sources from which his later theology would draw: a theology of the person (ličnost) and of knowledge (poznanje) grounded in the experiential, grace-given life of the Church rather than in the autonomous reason of European philosophy (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on the Macarius dissertation and the theme of personhood and knowledge).

The Athens doctorate thus completes the pattern the whole formation reveals. From Petrograd he took the encounter with Russian religious thought and the shadow of the Revolution; from Oxford, the Dostoevskian and anti-humanist polemic and, whatever its cause, the refusal to be certified by the West on the West’s terms; from Athens, the grounding of a theology of personhood and knowledge in the Greek patristic and ascetic tradition. Petrograd, Oxford, and Athens — Russia, the West, and Greece — were the three poles of a formation that produced a theologian at once deeply learned in European thought and radically critical of it, a monk who had read Kant and Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and had chosen St. Macarius (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019).

The Meaning of the Itinerary

It is worth marking how unusual this formation was. Justin Popović was not a provincial cleric who denounced a West he had never seen; he was a doctor of Athens who had studied at Oxford and knew Western philosophy and theology at first hand, and whose critique of European humanism was the critique of a man who had been inside the thing he judged (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; and see the both-sides treatment of how this cuts in the reception debate, How His Stance Is Received Today). His defenders make much of this — that his anti-Westernism was informed, not ignorant — and his critics grant the learning while questioning the sweep of the conclusions. Either way, the student years are the key to the man: a monk formed by war, tempered by Russia and Greece, sharpened at Oxford, who returned to Serbia in the later 1920s to teach, to edit, and to write the Dogmatics.

References

Popović, Justin. Sabrana dela. Ed. Bishop Atanasije (Jevtić) et al. Belgrade: Manastir Ćelije, various dates. (Biographical apparatus: Petrograd, Oxford, the Athens doctorate on St. Macarius.)
Lubardić, Bogdan. “Justin Popović in Oxford” (archival study of Justin Popović’s Oxford years and the fate of the Dostoevsky thesis). (The revisionist account of why Justin left Oxford without the degree; cited for the disputed reconstruction.)
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (The Oxford years, the Dostoevsky thesis, the Athens doctorate, and the theme of personhood and knowledge.)
Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T&T Clark (Bloomsbury), 2019. (Justin’s formation and the Macarius dissertation.)
Devotional Lives of St. Justin of Ćelije, used for the traditional Oxford narrative and reported as contested per METHODOLOGY §4.