Against a Self-Enclosed Piety

The polemical edge of Mother Maria’s theology: a sharp critique of forms of religion she judged to have turned inward — the aestheticized, the ritualist, the ascetic-for-its-own-sake, the merely traditional — at the expense of the suffering neighbor. Its classic statement is her essay Types of Religious Lives. This file expounds the critique, and honestly registers why it is one of the things that make her a contested figure.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Paris émigré)

The Essay Types of Religious Lives

Mother Maria’s most systematic polemic is the essay usually titled Types of Religious Lives (Tipy religioznoi zhizni), written in the later 1930s and among the sharpest things she wrote (Skobtsova, Essential Writings, 2003; Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 7). [Disputed: the precise date and publication history of Types of Religious Lives are given somewhat variously in the literature; the essay is generally dated to the late 1930s and was not widely published in her lifetime, circulating and appearing more fully only later — Hackel and the Essential Writings editors treat the text as authentically hers while noting the complications of its transmission.] In it she anatomizes several distorted “types” of the religious life — several ways of being pious that, in her judgment, evade rather than fulfill the Gospel’s demand of love.

Her types include, in substance (the exact naming varies with translation): the synodal or established type, which fuses religion with social respectability and the state; the ritualist type, which locates the whole of piety in the exact performance of rites and the beauty of worship; the aesthetic type, which savors religion as beauty and culture; and the ascetic type turned inward, which pursues personal perfection and the salvation of one’s own soul as a private project (Skobtsova, “Types of Religious Lives,” in Essential Writings, 2003; Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 7). Against all of these she sets what she calls the evangelical or Gospel type — the life measured by Matthew 25, given away in love of the concrete neighbor (Skobtsova, Essential Writings, 2003).

The Charge Against Ritualism and Aestheticism

The strand of the essay that has drawn the most notice, and the most controversy, is her attack on ritualism and aestheticism. She had a poet’s love of beauty and a nun’s reverence for the Liturgy; her critique is therefore not of ritual or beauty as such but of their idolatry — of a religion that has made the correct performance of the rite, or the exquisite savoring of it, into the whole substance of faith while the hungry go unfed at the church door (Skobtsova, Essential Writings, 2003; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3). She could be scathing about a piety that trembles over the letter of the rubric and the aesthetics of the chant but is untroubled by the destitution outside — a piety that has, in her terms, substituted the vessel for the wine (Skobtsova, “Types of Religious Lives,” in Essential Writings, 2003).

She was equally hard on the inward-turned asceticism that makes one’s own salvation the goal, treating the neighbor as, at most, an instrument of one’s own spiritual advancement. To seek to save one’s soul while indifferent to the perishing, she argued, is to have misunderstood salvation itself, which is love or it is nothing (Skobtsova, Essential Writings, 2003; Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 7). Here her thought touches, at its edge, the perennial Gospel paradox that whoever would save his life shall lose it (Matthew 16:25).

Why This Makes Her Contested

It must be said plainly that this polemic is one of the reasons Mother Maria is a contested saint, and the reservation is not frivolous. Orthodoxy holds the liturgical, sacramental, and ascetic life at its very center; the beauty of worship, the exactness of the tradition’s forms, and the ascetic labor for one’s own purification are not corruptions to be transcended but treasures to be guarded. A polemic that can be read — and by some was and is read — as denigrating ritual, disparaging the ascetic tradition, and setting social service above worship touches something the tradition will not surrender (see The Contested Saint — Methodology, which sets out this reservation at full strength; cf. the tradition’s high valuation of the liturgical and ascetic life throughout St. Ignatius Brianchaninov and the hesychast collections).

Her defenders answer that she attacked not the tradition but its counterfeits; that the prophets and the Fathers say as much (Isaiah 1:11–17; the homilies of St. John Chrysostom on the “sacrament of the brother” alongside the sacrament of the altar); and that a nun who embroidered her own chapel’s vestments and kept the Church’s prayer was no despiser of worship but its most demanding friend (Skobtsova, Essential Writings, 2003; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3; Forest, introduction to Essential Writings, 2003). Chrysostom’s insistence that the Christ who is honored in the church must not be neglected in the person of the poor at the door is indeed a close patristic parallel to her central claim (a commonplace of Chrysostom’s preaching on almsgiving; cited by her interpreters as her deepest antecedent).

The collection does not decide between these readings. It registers that the polemic is real, that it is sharp, that it can be read in more than one way, and that it is genuinely one of the grounds of the reservations about her (cf. METHODOLOGY §4). What is not in dispute is that she meant it: her critique of a self-enclosed piety was not an intellectual pose but the theological justification of a life she then laid down for the persecuted neighbor.

The Positive Core

For all its sharpness, the polemic exists to clear the ground for a positive claim, and it should not be read apart from it. Mother Maria attacked the self-enclosed types of religion in order to recover what she took to be the one thing needful: a Christianity in which the love of God and the love of the suffering human being are indivisible, and in which worship overflows necessarily into mercy (Skobtsova, Essential Writings, 2003; see The Sacrament of the Brother/Sister). The critique is the negative image of the sacramental theology of the neighbor; the two belong together, and together they define the whole shape of her sanctity.

See Also

References

  • Skobtsova, Mother Maria. Essential Writings. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; introduction by Jim Forest. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003. (The essay “Types of Religious Lives” and related pieces; Forest’s introduction for their context and reception.)
  • 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. 7 for the “types” and the polemic against ritualist and aestheticized piety.)
  • Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. (Ch. 3, on the critique and its patristic antecedents.)
  • Scripture: Matthew 16:25; Isaiah 1:11–17; and the tradition of St. John Chrysostom on the “sacrament of the brother” (cited by her interpreters as her patristic antecedent).