A Life of Hidden Prayer

The inward reality of Justin’s decades at Ćelije: the ascetic-scholar’s daily round of liturgy, prayer, and prodigious writing, carried on under a hostile state; the eldership he exercised over the nuns and the stream of visitors and students; and the union of scholarship and sanctity that made him, in his disciples’ testimony, a living example of the theology he wrote.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2010)

The Monk Behind the Dogmatician

The public facts of Justin’s later life — the removal from the university, the confinement at Ćelije, the great books — are the outer shell of a life whose center was hidden: a life of prayer and the liturgy. Justin had been a monk since 1916, tonsured in the wreck of the Great War (see Formation and the Great War), and he held throughout his life that theology is impossible apart from the ascetic and liturgical life of the Church — that dogma is prayed before it is thought, and that the theologian must be, first, a man of prayer (Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, London: SPCK, 2015, on the union of asceticism and theology in Justin; Justin Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, trans. Asterios Gerostergios et al., Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994, on the theanthropic virtues). At Ćelije, cut off from the lecture hall, this conviction became simply the shape of his days.

The testimony of those who knew him — above all his disciples, the future bishops who came to him as young men (see The Justinian Bishops) — is consistent: Justin was a man consumed by the liturgy and by prayer, who served the Divine Liturgy with an intensity that struck all who saw it, who wept easily and prayed constantly, and in whom the scholar and the ascetic were not two men but one (the biographical and personal accounts gathered in the Sabrana dela, ed. Bishop Atanasije Jevtić, and in the memoirs of his disciples; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). This is testimony from within the circle of his devotees, and this collection reports it as such — as the witness of those who loved him — rather than as detached observation; but its consistency, and its coherence with everything in his writing, gives it weight.

The Liturgy at the Center

Accounts of Justin at Ćelije place the Divine Liturgy at the center of everything. He is remembered as a priest for whom the liturgy was not a duty but the burning heart of life — served with tears, with long preparation and thanksgiving, as the point at which the whole theanthropic reality he wrote about became present and tangible (the personal accounts in the Sabrana dela and the disciples’ memoirs; and see the eucharistic ecclesiology in The Orthodox Ecclesiology). For Justin the liturgy was the place where the God-Man gives himself to his body, where the deification of the person actually occurs, and where the “philosophy of the God-Man” ceases to be a philosophy and becomes communion (Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, 1994; and see Christ the God-Man). His enormous scholarly output flowed from and back into this liturgical center: the Lives of the Saints, the Dogmatics, and the commentaries are, on his own understanding, all extensions of the Church’s worship, not a separate academic enterprise (see The Writings).

The Eldership

Though confined, Justin was not isolated in spirit. As spiritual father of the Ćelije convent he guided the community of nuns; and as his reputation grew, a stream of visitors made its way to the remote monastery — clergy, laity, and above all the theologically serious young men who would become his disciples and, in several cases, the leading bishops of the next Serbian generation (see The Justinian Bishops). Amfilohije Radović, Atanasije Jevtić, Irinej Bulović, Artemije Radosavljević, and others came to Ćelije to sit at his feet; through them the confined elder shaped the future of the Serbian Church far beyond the convent walls (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on the disciples; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New, London: T&T Clark, 2019). His eldership was thus of a piece with his theology: he formed persons, in the theanthropic sense, by drawing them into the life of prayer and the Fathers that he himself lived.

The Scholar Under Surveillance

The labor of these years was immense, and it was performed under the constraints described in the companion file (see Ćelije Monastery): a watched man, whose publication within Yugoslavia was difficult, writing for a future he might not see. In the enforced solitude of the convent, Justin completed the third volume of the Dogmatics (published 1978), produced the twelve-volume Lives of the Saints (1972–1977), wrote his New Testament commentaries and a great body of essays and letters, and composed The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism (1974) — a body of work that would have been remarkable for a scholar with every resource, and that was produced by a man in internal exile in a rural monastery under a hostile regime (the publication data in the Sabrana dela; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019; and see The Writings). The paradox is exact: the state’s attempt to remove Justin from public influence gave him the monastic solitude in which he wrote the works that secured his influence.

The Confessor’s Witness

The word the Church has attached to Justin for these years is confessor — in the technical sense of one who suffers for Christ without being martyred, who bears loss, constraint, and the enmity of the powers for the faith and does not yield (see Glorification 2010). His confession was not dramatic. He was not executed, as the New Martyrs of the communist yoke were; he was not even, in the main, imprisoned. He was simply set aside — stripped of his chair, confined to a convent, watched, and left to grow old in obscurity. What made this a confession rather than a mere misfortune was the manner of it: that he bore it without bitterness or compromise, that he kept the faith and the liturgy and the work through more than thirty years of it, and that he made of the enforced hiddenness a genuine monastic hiddenness — a life of prayer offered to God rather than a career frustrated by the state (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; the disciples’ testimony in the Sabrana dela). The hidden life of prayer at Ćelije is, in the Church’s judgment, the substance of his sanctity: not the polemics for which he is best known, but the decades of liturgy, tears, labor, and love in a small convent under a regime that wished him gone.

See Also

• Ćelije Monastery — the outward frame of the confinement
• Christ the God-Man — the theology lived at the liturgy
• The Orthodox Ecclesiology — the eucharistic center of his ecclesiology
• The Justinian Bishops — the disciples formed by his eldership
• Glorification 2010 — the confessor recognized

References

• Popović, Justin. Sabrana dela. Ed. Bishop Atanasije (Jevtić) et al. Belgrade: Manastir Ćelije, various dates. (The personal and biographical accounts of his life at Ćelije; the disciples’ memoirs.)
• Popović, Justin. Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ. Trans. Asterios Gerostergios et al. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994. (The theanthropic virtues; theology as inseparable from asceticism and the liturgy.)
• Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (The ascetic-liturgical character of Justin’s life; the eldership and the disciples.)
• Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T&T Clark (Bloomsbury), 2019. (Justin’s later life and the disciples.)