Ćelije Monastery

The turning point of Justin’s outward life: removed from the University of Belgrade by the new communist authorities in 1945, he was placed — and effectively confined — at the Convent of the Holy Archangels at Ćelije, near Valjevo in western Serbia, where he lived from the late 1940s until his death in 1979 as spiritual father to the nuns and as a scholar in internal exile under the Tito regime.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2010)

Removal from the University, 1945

The victory of Josip Broz Tito’s communist partisans and the establishment of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia at the end of the Second World War brought a militantly atheist state to power over a Serbian Church it regarded as an ideological enemy and a wartime rival. Among the early casualties in the theological world was Justin Popović. In 1945 he was removed from his chair of dogmatic theology at the University of Belgrade, as the new regime purged the university and moved to suppress the influence of the Church in education and public life (the biographical apparatus in Popović’s Sabrana dela, ed. Bishop 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). The Faculty of Orthodox Theology was itself soon expelled from the University of Belgrade, and the leading Serbian dogmatician of his generation was, at fifty-one, deprived of the platform from which he had taught and written the first two volumes of his Dogmatics (see Teacher and Monk; The Dogmatics of the Orthodox Church).

The removal was part of a broader repression. Justin, like his elder St. Nikolai Velimirović, had been an outspoken critic of communism and of the whole “humanist” project of which, in his diagnosis, communism was the most consistent and murderous form (see Against European Humanism); the regime had every reason to silence him. Where Nikolai left Yugoslavia and died in exile in America, Justin remained (see Disciple of Saint Nikolai). The biographical tradition records a period of danger and even of imprisonment or detention in the immediate post-war years before his situation was regularized into the long confinement at Ćelije; the details are given with varying precision in the accounts, and this collection reports the firm outcome rather than the contested particulars (biographical apparatus, Sabrana dela; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015).

[Disputed: the precise circumstances of Justin’s treatment in the immediate post-war period (arrest, detention, threat of execution) are narrated with dramatic detail in devotional accounts but given more cautiously in the scholarly literature. What is firm: he was removed from the University in 1945, the regime treated him as a hostile figure, and by the later 1940s he had been placed at the Ćelije convent, where he remained under effective internal exile for the rest of his life (biographical apparatus, Sabrana dela, ed. Jevtić; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). The dramatic particulars are reported as tradition, per METHODOLOGY §3.5.]

The Convent of the Holy Archangels at Ćelije

By the late 1940s — the date is usually given as 1948 — Justin was settled at the Convent of the Holy Archangels (Manastir Ćelije), a women’s monastery near the town of Valjevo in western Serbia, where he would live for the remaining three decades of his life (biographical apparatus, Sabrana dela, ed. Jevtić; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019). The arrangement was ambiguous by design and by circumstance. On the one hand, Ćelije was a genuine monastery and Justin its spiritual father; on the other, his residence there was not a free choice but an imposed confinement — a form of internal exile in which the state kept a dangerous churchman out of the capital, away from students and pulpits, under the watch of the local authorities and the security services (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on Justin’s confinement at Ćelije; Klaus Buchenau, Auf russischen Spuren, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011, on the Serbian Church under Yugoslav communism). He was, in the phrase his biographers use, an exile in his own country.

Ćelije became, over those decades, the whole compass of his outward life. He served the liturgy, guided the small community of nuns, received the visitors and students who came — increasingly, as the years passed and his reputation grew, from across Serbia and beyond — and, above all, wrote (see A Life of Hidden Prayer). The convent that had been meant to bury him instead became a spiritual center: the place from which the third volume of the Dogmatics, the twelve volumes of the Lives of the Saints, the commentaries, and The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism all issued, and to which the future “Justinian bishops” came as young men to sit at his feet (see The Justinian Bishops; The Writings).

Under Surveillance

Life at Ćelije was lived under the conditions of a police state hostile to religion. Justin was watched; his correspondence and his contacts were subject to the interest of the authorities; the community’s freedom was constrained; and the publication of his works within Yugoslavia was difficult, so that much of his output circulated in manuscript, appeared abroad (in the Serbian diaspora and in Greek), or was published only in the relative thaw of his last years and after his death (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019; Buchenau, Auf russischen Spuren, 2011, on the constraints on Serbian Church publishing). The long delay in the appearance of the third volume of the Dogmatics — not published until 1978 — and the fact that The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism (1974) and the Lives of the Saints (1972–1977) belong to the very end of his life are direct consequences of these conditions (see The Dogmatics of the Orthodox Church).

That Justin produced, under these conditions, the largest and most important body of theological work in twentieth-century Serbian Orthodoxy is the central paradox of his later life. The state that removed him from the university and confined him to a rural convent did not silence him; it gave him, unintentionally, the enforced solitude of a monk, and he used it to write. His confinement at Ćelije is therefore not merely the story of a persecution but the story of a confession: a theologian who bore the loss of his public standing and lived out his witness in obscurity, prayer, and prodigious labor, and who is venerated today precisely as a confessor — one who suffered for the faith without dying for it — of the communist period (see Glorification 2010).

Death at Ćelije

Justin died at Ćelije on 25 March 1979 by the Julian calendar — 7 April 1979 by the Gregorian — on the Feast of the Annunciation, the same feast on which he had been born eighty-five years earlier (biographical apparatus, Sabrana dela, ed. Jevtić; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; and see Glorification 2010). He was buried at the convent, and his grave at Ćelije became at once a place of pilgrimage — the beginning of the veneration that would culminate in his glorification by the Serbian Orthodox Church in 2010. The convent to which the state had exiled him became his shrine.

References

Popović, Justin. Sabrana dela. Ed. Bishop Atanasije (Jevtić) et al. Belgrade: Manastir Ćelije, various dates. (Biographical apparatus: the 1945 removal, the placement at Ćelije, the death in 1979.)
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (The removal from the University, the confinement at Ćelije, the conditions of the later life.)
Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T&T Clark (Bloomsbury), 2019. (Justin under communism; the later works.)
Buchenau, Klaus. Auf russischen Spuren: Orthodoxe Antiwestler in Serbien, 1850–1945. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011. (The Serbian Church under Yugoslav communism; publishing constraints.)
Devotional Lives of St. Justin of Ćelije, used for the post-war detention narrative and reported as tradition per METHODOLOGY §3.5.