The Lives of the Saints

Justin Popović’s great hagiographic labor: the twelve-volume Žitija Svetih (Lives of the Saints), arranged by the months of the church calendar and published in the 1970s. For Justin the Lives were not devotional supplement but theology in its most concrete form — the Dogmatics lived out — and the work absorbed years of his labor at Ćelije.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2010)

The Work

The Žitija Svetih (Lives of the Saints) is, alongside the Dogmatics, one of the two great monuments of Justin’s literary life: a complete cycle of the lives of the saints for the whole church year, filling twelve large volumes, one for each month of the ecclesiastical calendar (September through August), published across the 1970s (commonly given as 1972–1977) in the last years of his life at Ćelije (the publication data in Popović’s Sabrana dela, ed. Bishop Atanasije Jevtić; Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, London: SPCK, 2015). The scale is enormous — many thousands of pages, covering the saints commemorated on every day of the year — and it represents the sustained work of Justin’s confinement, undertaken when the state had removed him from the university and given him, unintentionally, the monastic solitude in which such a labor becomes possible (see Ćelije Monastery).

The Žitija stands in a long tradition of Orthodox menologia. Justin drew above all on the great work of St. Dimitri of Rostov, whose Chet’i-Minei (Reading-Menaion) had gathered and retold the lives of the saints for the Slavic Orthodox world in the seventeenth–eighteenth centuries, and behind Dimitri on the Byzantine hagiographic collections and the Synaxaria; to this inherited material Justin added, translated, arranged, and supplemented — including the lives of Serbian saints and of saints not in the older Slavic collections — to produce a comprehensive Serbian menologion (the Sabrana dela; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on the sources of the Žitija). The work is thus both a translation-and-compilation and an original synthesis, gathering the whole hagiographic inheritance of the Orthodox Church into Serbian.

Hagiography as Theology

What makes the Žitija more than a devotional anthology is the theological weight Justin placed on it. For Justin, the lives of the saints are theology — indeed the highest and most concrete form of theology, “dogmatics in action” (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on Justin’s understanding of the saints; 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 saints and the theanthropic life). The reasoning follows directly from his central idea. If the whole purpose of the Church is the deification of the human person through union with the God-Man (see Christ the God-Man; The Orthodox Ecclesiology), then the saints are the Church achieving its purpose — human beings in whom the theanthropic life has done its complete work, in whom the deified personhood that the Dogmatics describes in the abstract is shown concrete and living. The Lives are the Dogmatics incarnate: what dogma states, the saints display.

This is why Justin could regard the composition of the Žitija as continuous with, not a distraction from, his dogmatic vocation. The same theanthropic principle that governs the Dogmatics governs the Lives: each saint is a demonstration that the God-Man really does deify those who are grafted into his body, and the whole cycle of the year is a continuous proof, day by day, of the theanthropic economy at work in real human lives across every age, nation, and condition (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, 1994). The Lives are also, for Justin, the answer to European humanism (see Against European Humanism): where humanism produces the man-god who ends in nihilism, the theanthropic life produces the saint — the true, deified, fulfilled human being — and the Žitija is the vast documentary record of that alternative.

Method and the Question of Sources

The Žitija is a work of devotion and theology, not of modern critical hagiography, and Justin’s method must be understood on its own terms. He was not writing source-critical history in the manner of the Bollandists; he was handing on the Church’s memory of its saints as the Church has received and venerated them, in the tradition of Dimitri of Rostov and the menologia (the Sabrana dela; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). This is a legitimate and traditional genre, and the repository does not fault Justin for practicing it; but it means that the Žitija, like its models, transmits the developed hagiographic tradition — including late legendary elaborations and miracle accounts — as the Church’s devotional inheritance rather than as critically sifted fact.

This is precisely the distinction the repository methodology draws (METHODOLOGY §3.5; cf. the flagship treatment in St. Xenia: Methodology): a hagiographic collection like the Žitija is a monument of the veneration and theology of the Church, of the greatest value for what the Church confesses and celebrates, and it is not to be read as though it were a critical biography of each saint. Justin’s own theological defense of the Lives — that what the Church receives and transmits as an authentic expression of the theanthropic life carries an ecclesial authority of its own — is close to the position Fr. Seraphim Rose articulated on hagiography as theology, and it is reported here as Justin’s considered view of his work (Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, 1994; cf. METHODOLOGY §3.5). The honest description is thus twofold: the Žitija is a great and coherent theological achievement on its own terms, and it belongs to the genre of received hagiography rather than of source criticism — both things are true, and neither diminishes the other.

Place in the Corpus

The Lives of the Saints completes the shape of Justin’s authorship. The Dogmatics states the theanthropic faith systematically; the essays and commentaries expound and apply it; the Žitija shows it lived. Together they form a single vision from three sides — the doctrine, the argument, and the demonstration — all organized around the God-Man and all produced, in their final and largest form, from the enforced solitude of Ćelije. Among Serbian Orthodox the Žitija Svetih remains a standard and beloved work, the menologion of the Serbian Church, and it is not the least of the reasons Justin is venerated: he gave his Church, in its own language and in full, the memory of its saints (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; and see Legacy and Assessment).

See Also

References

  • Popović, Justin. Žitija Svetih [Lives of the Saints], 12 vols. Belgrade, 1972–1977; collected in the Sabrana dela, ed. Bishop Atanasije (Jevtić) et al. (The work, its arrangement, and its sources, including St. Dimitri of Rostov’s menologion.)
  • Popović, Justin. Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ. Trans. Asterios Gerostergios et al. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994. (The saints and the theanthropic life; hagiography as the living demonstration of dogma.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (The Žitija, its scale and sources, and Justin’s understanding of the saints as theology.)
  • METHODOLOGY.md §3.5, this repository (the standard for reading received hagiography).