Teacher and Monk

Justin’s return to Serbia and the two decades of teaching that made him a theologian: ordination to the priesthood, professorships at the seminaries of Prizren, Bitola, and Sremski Karlovci, the editing of the journal Hrišćanski život (Christian Life), and the appointment to the chair of dogmatics at the University of Belgrade. This is the period in which the monk became the dogmatician.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2010)

Ordination and the First Chairs

Returning to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (from 1929, Yugoslavia) in the 1920s, the monk Justin was ordained to the priesthood and set to the work that would occupy him until 1945: the teaching of theology in the seminaries and, in time, the university of the Serbian Church (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; Paul Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New, London: T&T Clark, 2019). Over the interwar years he taught at several of the Serbian Church’s theological schools — among them the seminaries at Prizren (in Kosovo), Bitola (Bitolj, in Macedonia), and Sremski Karlovci (the historic seat of the Serbian Church in the Habsburg lands) — moving between them as appointments and circumstances required (the biographical accounts, Sabrana dela; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015).

The Bitola years matter especially for the relationship that shaped him. At the seminary of Bitola, the diocesan bishop in whose orbit Justin taught was St. Nikolai Velimirović (then Bishop of Ohrid), the towering figure of interwar Serbian Church life — preacher, poet, and evangelist of a renewed Serbian Orthodoxy — with whom Justin formed the bond of disciple and elder that would last both their lives (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, treating Nikolai and Justin together; and see Disciple of Saint Nikolai). It was in this milieu — the Bitola seminary, the Bogomoljci (God-worshippers) devotional movement associated with Nikolai, the revival of a self-consciously Svetosavlje Orthodoxy — that Justin’s churchmanship took its mature form (Klaus Buchenau, Auf russischen Spuren, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011, on Nikolai, the Bogomoljci, and the interwar Serbian revival).

Editing Hrišćanski život

Alongside the teaching, Justin was an editor and a controversialist for the faith. He was closely associated with the journal Hrišćanski život (Christian Life), which he edited in the 1920s and which became a vehicle for a theologically serious, patristically grounded, and pointedly anti-secular Orthodox voice in Serbian public life (the biographical apparatus, Sabrana dela; Buchenau, Auf russischen Spuren, 2011, on the Serbian Orthodox press and Justin’s role). Through the journal and his other essays he entered the interwar debates over the direction of Serbian and European culture already armed with the thesis that would define him: that the crisis of Europe was at root a religious crisis, the crisis of a humanism that had cut man off from the God-Man, and that the only medicine was the return to the theanthropic life of the Orthodox Church (see Against European Humanism). The programmatic essays of this period — including Svetosavlje kao filosofija života (Svetosavlje as a Philosophy of Life) — belong to the same effort (the Sabrana dela; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015).

The Chair of Dogmatics at Belgrade

The culmination of the teaching years was the University of Belgrade. Justin was appointed to the Faculty of Orthodox Theology of the University of Belgrade, where he held the chair of Dogmatic Theology, the most important theological professorship in the Serbian Church, from the 1930s until his removal in 1945 (the biographical apparatus, Sabrana dela, ed. Jevtić; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019). It was as professor of dogmatics at Belgrade that he wrote and published the first two volumes of his Dogmatics of the Orthodox Church (vol. 1, 1932; vol. 2, 1935), the systematic theology that is his central monument and that grew directly out of his lectures (see The Dogmatics of the Orthodox Church). The Belgrade chair was the platform from which Justin exercised his greatest influence as a teacher, forming the generation of students — several of whom would become the “Justinian bishops” — through whom his theology entered the leadership of the Serbian Church (see The Justinian Bishops).

The Making of a Theologian

Three features of the mature theologian were fixed in these teaching years, and they are worth naming because they govern everything in the Dogmatics and after.

First, theology as the exposition of the Church’s own life, not a system imposed on it. Justin taught and wrote dogmatics as a monk and a priest who understood the discipline as the articulation of what the Church prays, confesses, and lives — the Fathers, the councils, the liturgy, the saints — rather than as a philosophical construction. His dogmatics is saturated with patristic citation and reads more like a mosaic of the Fathers than a modern textbook (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on the character of the Dogmatics; and see The Dogmatics of the Orthodox Church).

Second, the organizing centrality of the God-Man. From the interwar essays onward, Justin’s whole thought is built around the person of Christ the God-Man (Bogočovek) as the single center from which everything — anthropology, ecclesiology, ethics, the critique of culture — is to be understood (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; and see Christ the God-Man).

Third, the union of the scholar and the monk. Justin never ceased to be the monk tonsured at Scutari. He taught, edited, and wrote as an ascetic and a man of prayer, and he held that theology divorced from asceticism and the liturgical life is not merely incomplete but false — a conviction that would be tested and confirmed when the communist state stripped him of the professor’s chair in 1945 and confined him, for the rest of his life, to a convent (see The Confessor Under Communism). The teacher and the monk were, for Justin, one vocation; the years in the seminaries and at Belgrade are simply the phase in which the Church let him exercise it in the open, before the state drove it into the hiddenness of Ćelije.

See Also

References

  • Popović, Justin. Sabrana dela. Ed. Bishop Atanasije (Jevtić) et al. Belgrade: Manastir Ćelije, various dates. (Biographical apparatus: the seminary professorships, Hrišćanski život, the Belgrade chair.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (The teaching years, the relationship with Nikolai, the character of the Dogmatics.)
  • Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T&T Clark (Bloomsbury), 2019. (The Belgrade professorship and the removal of 1945.)
  • Buchenau, Klaus. Auf russischen Spuren: Orthodoxe Antiwestler in Serbien, 1850–1945. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011. (The interwar Serbian Orthodox revival, the Bogomoljci, the Orthodox press, Nikolai and Justin.)