The Commentaries and Letters

The remainder of Justin’s vast corpus: his verse-by-verse commentaries on the New Testament epistles, his Dostoevsky studies and programmatic essays, his ascetical and dogmatic writings, and his correspondence. These shorter and more occasional works are, in many ways, the best door into his mind.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2010)

The Scope of the Corpus

Beyond the two great monuments — the Dogmatics and the Lives of the Saints — Justin Popović produced a large body of commentaries, essays, and letters, gathered after his death into the multi-volume Sabrana dela (Collected Works) edited by his disciple Bishop Atanasije Jevtić and others (the Sabrana dela, ed. Bishop Atanasije (Jevtić) et al., Belgrade: Manastir Ćelije; 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 Sabrana dela runs to many volumes and represents one of the largest theological authorships in modern Orthodoxy — the more remarkable for having been produced, in its greater part, under the constraints of internal exile at Ćelije (see A Life of Hidden Prayer). This file surveys the principal categories.

The New Testament Commentaries

Justin wrote extended commentaries on books of the New Testament, above all the Pauline and Catholic Epistles, in the patristic and homiletic manner rather than the historical-critical one. His commentaries — on the Epistles to the Ephesians, the Philippians, the Colossians, the Thessalonians, and others, and on the Catholic Epistles including 1 John — read Scripture through the Fathers and the liturgy, expounding the text as the Church prays it and drawing out its theanthropic content verse by verse (the commentaries in the Sabrana dela, ed. Jevtić; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on Justin’s exegesis). The method is of a piece with his Dogmatics: the commentary is a tissue of patristic reading, doxology, and application, in which the single theme of the God-Man and the deification of the person recurs (see Christ the God-Man). These commentaries were among the works completed in his later years and, like much of the corpus, saw full publication mainly in the Sabrana dela after his death; portions have appeared in English in the anthologies (Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, trans. Asterios Gerostergios et al., Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994).

The Dostoevsky Books

The other great strand is Dostoevsky, the preoccupation of Justin’s whole intellectual life since the Oxford years (see Petrograd, Oxford, and Athens). The material of his unsubmitted Oxford thesis matured into two related works: The Philosophy and Religion of F. M. Dostoevsky (Filosofija i religija F. M. Dostojevskog) and Dostoevsky on Europe and Slavdom (Dostojevski o Evropi i Slovenstvu), both published from his work and collected in the Sabrana dela (the Sabrana dela, ed. Jevtić; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on Justin’s Dostoevsky writings). In these Justin reads Dostoevsky not as a novelist but as a prophet of the God-Man against the man-god — the source of the master-images (the Grand Inquisitor, the self-deifying man-gods) that structure his critique of European humanism (see Against European Humanism). The Dostoevsky books are thus not a literary sideline but a load-bearing part of Justin’s thought: the place where his diagnosis of the modern crisis is worked out through the Russian novelist he loved above all others.

The Programmatic and Ascetical Essays

A third strand is the essays — programmatic, cultural, dogmatic, and ascetical — through which Justin intervened in the debates of his time and stated his vision most accessibly. Chief among them is Svetosavlje as a Philosophy of Life (Svetosavlje kao filosofija života), his presentation of the tradition of St. Sava as the Serbian embodiment of the philosophy of the God-Man (see Against European Humanism; St. Sava of Serbia). Others expound the theanthropic virtues, the meaning of culture and education, the “supreme value and ultimate criterion” of the God-Man, and the ascetic path of deification; a representative selection is gathered in English in Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ (1994) (Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, 1994, containing “Humanistic and Theanthropic Culture,” “The Supreme Value and the Ultimate Criterion,” and related essays; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). His ecumenism writings — The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism (1974) and the Notes on Ecumenism — belong to this occasional-essay strand as well, though their reception has made them a subject in their own right (see The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism). For many readers these essays, brief and pointed and available in translation, are the best entry to Justin: they state in compact form the vision that the Dogmatics elaborates at length.

The Letters

Finally, the correspondence. Justin was a prolific letter-writer, and his letters — to disciples, to fellow clergy, to the Serbian Holy Synod, to spiritual children and inquirers — are gathered in the Sabrana dela and form an important source both for his spiritual direction and for his interventions in Church affairs (the letters in the Sabrana dela, ed. Jevtić; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019). The letters include his formal memoranda and appeals on ecumenism and the pan-Orthodox process (collected in English as Notes on Ecumenism, Alhambra, CA: Sebastian Press, 2013), which document that he pressed his case through canonical channels while remaining within the Church (see How His Stance Is Received Today); and they include a great deal of pastoral and ascetical counsel that shows the elder rather than the polemicist — the spiritual father of Ćelije guiding souls in the theanthropic life. As with all his work, the letters return again and again to the one center: the God-Man, the conquest of death, the deification of the person.

The Shape of the Whole

Taken together with the Dogmatics and the Lives of the Saints, these writings reveal a single, remarkably unified authorship. Whatever the genre — systematic theology, hagiography, biblical commentary, literary criticism, cultural essay, or personal letter — Justin writes always from and toward the same center, the God-Man, and always in the same patristic-doxological voice. The unity is the man: monk, dogmatician, and confessor, whose whole vast corpus is a single sustained meditation on Christ the God-Man and the salvation and deification of the human person in his body the Church (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019).

See Also

• The Lives of the Saints — the hagiographic monument alongside these writings
• The Dogmatics of the Orthodox Church — the systematic work the essays and commentaries serve
• Against European Humanism — the Dostoevsky books and Svetosavlje
• Petrograd, Oxford, and Athens — the Oxford origins of the Dostoevsky work
• How His Stance Is Received Today — the ecumenism letters and their contested use

References

• Popović, Justin. Sabrana dela [Collected Works], ed. Bishop Atanasije (Jevtić) et al. Belgrade: Manastir Ćelije, various dates. (The New Testament commentaries; the Dostoevsky books; the essays; the letters.)
• Popović, Justin. Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ. Trans. Asterios Gerostergios et al. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994. (English anthology of the essays and dogmatic-ascetical writings.)
• Popović, Justin. Notes on Ecumenism. Ed. and trans. Alhambra, CA: Sebastian Press, 2013. (The ecumenism memoranda and letters.)
• Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (The commentaries, the Dostoevsky writings, and the unity of the corpus.)
• Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T&T Clark (Bloomsbury), 2019. (The scope of the Sabrana dela and the letters.)