The Nun Who Would Not Stay in the Cloister

In 1932, after the canonical dissolution of her second marriage, Elizaveta Skobtsova was tonsured a nun under Metropolitan Evlogy (Georgievsky), taking the name Maria — but on the explicit understanding that she would not enter an enclosed convent. Her vision was of a “monasticism in the world”: the monastic vocation reconceived as total availability to human need, the city itself as the cell, and active love as the asceticism. This file follows the tonsure and the argument behind it.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Paris émigré)

The Path to Tonsure

By the end of the 1920s Elizaveta Skobtsova’s marriage to Daniel Skobtsov had effectively ended, and her energies had turned wholly toward the religious and charitable service of the destitute Russian emigration (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 4–5; see From Russia to Paris). Under the influence of her spiritual father, Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, and encouraged by the leading churchman of the Paris Russians, Metropolitan Evlogy (Georgievsky) — exarch of the Russian parishes in Western Europe under the Ecumenical Patriarchate — she came to see monastic tonsure as the proper seal of the life she was already living (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 5; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3).

Two obstacles had to be met. The first was canonical: a woman married could not be tonsured, and so the dissolution of her marriage to Skobtsov was arranged with ecclesiastical sanction before the tonsure could proceed (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 5). The second was the objection, felt by many and not least by Elizaveta herself, that a woman of her temperament and history — twice married, a former revolutionary, a poet, a mother — was ill-suited to the cloister. Her answer, and Metropolitan Evlogy’s, was not to force her into the cloister but to redefine the vocation.

The Tonsure of 1932

In 1932 Elizaveta Skobtsova was tonsured a nun by Metropolitan Evlogy, taking the monastic name Maria — after St. Mary of Egypt, the great penitent and desert saint (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 5; Forest, introduction to Essential Writings, 2003). [Disputed: the choice of the name Maria is generally associated with St. Mary of Egypt, the penitent whose road to sanctity ran through a disordered past into the desert — an association her biographers find apt to her own history; the sources report the name and its resonance without a documented statement of intent from the metropolitan or from Maria herself.] The choice of patron is worth pausing on: St. Mary of Egypt is the saint of the ruined life redeemed, of holiness reached through and not around a past — an apt patron for a nun whose sanctity would never disown her bohemian and revolutionary years (cf. the sibling collection St. Mary of Egypt; DISAMBIGUATION: Mother Maria of Paris is a distinct twentieth-century figure, not St. Mary of Egypt herself nor St. Mary Magdalene).

Crucially, the tonsure was granted on the shared understanding — Evlogy’s as much as Maria’s — that she would not enter an enclosed convent but would live her monasticism in the world, among the poor of Paris (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 5; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3). Metropolitan Evlogy’s willingness to sanction so unusual an arrangement is itself significant: the vision of a monasticism in the world was not a private eccentricity smuggled past the Church but a course blessed by the ruling bishop of the Paris Russians.

The Argument for a Monasticism in the World

Mother Maria did not merely happen into an unenclosed life; she argued for it, at length and with force, as the authentic form of the monastic vocation for her time. Her contention, developed across her essays, ran roughly as follows (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 5–7; Skobtsova, Essential Writings, 2003).

First, the emigration had dissolved the ordinary structures of church life — parish, monastery, the settled forms of piety — and scattered the faithful across a foreign land in destitution. In such conditions, she held, to seek the safety of a walled convent while one’s brothers and sisters starved in the streets was not fidelity to the monastic ideal but a betrayal of it (Skobtsova, “Types of Religious Lives” and related essays, in Essential Writings, 2003; Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 6).

Second, and more deeply, she read the monastic vows themselves as pointing outward. Poverty, chastity, and obedience she interpreted not as the furniture of an enclosed institution but as the shape of a total self-offering to God through the neighbor: poverty as real solidarity with the destitute, obedience as availability to whatever human need presented itself, the whole monastic self-emptying redirected from the cell to the street (Skobtsova, Essential Writings, 2003; Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 6–7). “The way to God,” she famously held, “lies through love of people,” and at the Last Judgment she would be asked not whether she had kept the fasts or completed her prayer rule but whether she had fed the hungry and clothed the naked (Skobtsova, paraphrasing and citing Matthew 25:31–46, in Essential Writings, 2003; see The Sacrament of the Brother/Sister).

Third, she was sharply aware that this vision cut against a powerful strand of the tradition — the strand that prizes stability, enclosure, the guarded interior life, and the primacy of liturgical and contemplative discipline. She did not deny that strand’s authenticity so much as insist that it was not the only authentic form, and that for her time and place another form was demanded (Skobtsova, Essential Writings, 2003; Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 6). This is precisely the point at which her critics, then and since, have entered their reservations (see Against a Self-Enclosed Piety and The Contested Saint — Methodology).

A Contested Novelty

Mother Maria’s monasticism in the world was, and remains, contested. Some among the Russian émigré clergy and laity — and more sharply, later traditionalist observers — regarded a nun who kept no cloister, wore a shabby habit, smoked, sat up all night in Montparnasse cafés arguing theology, and ran a soup kitchen as a figure at best irregular and at worst a scandal to the monastic ideal (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 6–7, on the criticism she drew; see The Contested Saint — Methodology). Her defenders answered then, as now, that she had recovered something essential and ancient — the diaconal heart of the Gospel and of the earliest monasticism’s care for the poor — and had done so under the blessing of her bishop and at the eventual cost of her life (Forest, introduction to Essential Writings, 2003; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3). This collection does not adjudicate between these readings; it records that the novelty was real, was argued, was blessed, and was disputed (cf. METHODOLOGY §4).

See Also

References

  • Hackel, Sergei. Pearl of Great Price: The Life of Mother Maria Skobtsova, 1891–1945. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1965; rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981. (Ch. 5–7 for the dissolution of the marriage, the 1932 tonsure under Metropolitan Evlogy, the name Maria, the vision of a monasticism in the world, and the criticism it drew.)
  • Skobtsova, Mother Maria. Essential Writings. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; introduction by Jim Forest. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003. (Her essays on monasticism, the vows, and the second commandment; Forest’s introduction for the tonsure and its meaning.)
  • Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. (Ch. 3, on the tonsure and the theology of active love; Metropolitan Evlogy and the Paris exarchate.)
  • Scripture: Matthew 25:31–46 (the criterion of the Last Judgment, central to her reading of the monastic vocation).