Disciple of Saint Nikolai

Justin Popović’s relationship to St. Nikolai Velimirović (1881–1956), the towering bishop, preacher, and poet of the interwar Serbian Church: the elder in whose orbit Justin was formed, his companion in the theanthropic critique of European humanism, and the man whose spiritual sonship Justin acknowledged. This file traces the bond between the two great Serbian saints of the twentieth century.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2010)

Two Saints of One Revival

The two most influential figures of twentieth-century Serbian Orthodoxy — St. Nikolai Velimirović and St. Justin Popović — were bound together as elder and disciple, and their two collections in this repository are best read side by side (see St. Nikolai Velimirović). Nikolai, the elder by thirteen years, was already a national figure — Bishop of Žiča and then Ohrid, the most celebrated Serbian churchman of his age, a preacher and poet whose Prayers by the Lake and homiletic works reached a mass audience, and the inspirer of the Bogomoljci (God-worshippers), the popular Orthodox devotional revival of interwar Serbia (Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, London: SPCK, 2015, treating Nikolai and Justin together; Klaus Buchenau, Auf russischen Spuren, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011, on Nikolai and the Bogomoljci). Justin, the younger, became the systematic theologian — the dogmatician who gave rigorous doctrinal form to much that Nikolai proclaimed poetically and pastorally.

The Bitola Years

The decisive institutional link was the seminary of Bitola (Bitolj) in Macedonia. In the interwar years Justin taught at the Bitola seminary in the diocese of Bishop Nikolai (then Bishop of Ohrid), and it was in this setting — the seminary, the diocese, the Bogomoljci movement associated with Nikolai — that the bond between the two men was forged and that Justin’s mature Serbian churchmanship took shape (the biographical apparatus in Popović’s Sabrana dela, ed. Bishop Atanasije Jevtić; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; and see Teacher and Monk). Nikolai was the diocesan hierarch and the elder; Justin the younger professor-monk who found in him a spiritual father and model. The relationship was that of disciple to elder in the Orthodox sense — not merely institutional but spiritual — and Justin acknowledged Nikolai as among his formative spiritual fathers (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; the biographical apparatus, Sabrana dela).

[Disputed: the precise texture and mutuality of the Nikolai–Justin relationship. Devotional accounts sometimes render it as a simple master-disciple hierarchy, and it is clear Justin revered Nikolai as an elder; but the two were also colleagues and, in maturity, peers in a shared theological project, and Nikolai’s own thought was in some respects influenced by the wider circle to which both belonged. This collection reports the firm outline — that Justin was formed in Nikolai’s orbit at Bitola and venerated him as a spiritual father — and does not press the devotional literature’s more schematic renderings, per METHODOLOGY §3.5.]

The Shared Theanthropic Vision

What most deeply united them was a common vision, of which each gave a characteristic form. Both Nikolai and Justin diagnosed the crisis of the modern world as the crisis of a European humanism that had abandoned Christ, and both set against it the theanthropic principle — the God-Man as the measure and salvation of humanity (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on the shared anti-humanist theanthropism of Nikolai and Justin; and see Against European Humanism). Nikolai’s works — his sermons, his Serbian Orthodox vision, his poetic and homiletic writings — proclaim this vision in a prophetic, lyrical, and popular register; Justin’s Dogmatics and essays give it systematic doctrinal form (see Christ the God-Man). Both drew on the Svetosavlje tradition of St. Sava as the Serbian embodiment of the theanthropic life (see St. Sava of Serbia), and both were shaped by the same Russian and Dostoevskian currents. The two men are, in effect, the poet-prophet and the theologian of a single movement of Serbian Orthodox renewal.

There were differences of temper and of judgment — Nikolai the public bishop and orator, Justin the confined dogmatician; and their political and historical circumstances diverged sharply after 1941 (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; Buchenau, Auf russischen Spuren, 2011). Nikolai’s own legacy carries its contested elements (his wartime detention at Dachau, and later controversies over some of his writings, are treated in his own collection — see St. Nikolai Velimirović). But on the central theological vision — the God-Man against the man-god, the theanthropic culture against the humanist — the two were of one mind, and Justin remained throughout his life a grateful disciple of the elder who had formed him.

Divergent Paths After the War

The Second World War and the communist takeover separated the two men’s outward fates. Nikolai, arrested by the Germans and held for a time at the Dachau concentration camp, did not return to Yugoslavia after the war but went into exile, dying in the United States in 1956 (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; and his own collection, St. Nikolai Velimirović). Justin remained in Yugoslavia, removed from his chair and confined to Ćelije (see Ćelije Monastery). The elder ended his life in the diaspora; the disciple in internal exile at home. Yet the theological line held: Justin carried the shared theanthropic vision forward through his writing and, above all, through his own disciples, the “Justinian bishops,” who became the leaders of the post-communist Serbian Church and who venerate both Nikolai and Justin as the twin fathers of modern Serbian Orthodoxy (see The Justinian Bishops). Both were in due course glorified by the Serbian Orthodox Church — Nikolai in 2003, Justin in 2010 — a joint recognition that set the seal on the movement they had led together (on Justin’s glorification, see Glorification 2010).

See Also

References

  • Popović, Justin. Sabrana dela. Ed. Bishop Atanasije (Jevtić) et al. Belgrade: Manastir Ćelije, various dates. (Biographical apparatus: the Bitola years and the relationship with Nikolai.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Nikolai and Justin treated together; the shared theanthropic vision; their divergent wartime fates.)
  • Buchenau, Klaus. Auf russischen Spuren: Orthodoxe Antiwestler in Serbien, 1850–1945. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011. (Nikolai, the Bogomoljci, and the interwar Serbian Orthodox revival.)