The Sacrament of the Brother/Sister

The core of Mother Maria’s theology: that the love of God and the love of the neighbor are one movement, that Christ is really present in the destitute human being, and that to serve the neighbor is to venerate a living icon of God — so that the “second commandment” is not a lesser appendix to the Gospel but its very heart. This file expounds that teaching from her essays, pinning it to her own words and to the Scriptures she read as programmatic.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Paris émigré)

The Two Commandments as One

Mother Maria’s theology begins from the Lord’s own summary of the Law: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart… this is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Matthew 22:37–39). Her whole originality lies in how she read the word “like.” The second commandment, she insisted, is not a moral consequence tacked onto the first, nor a lower rung; it is like the first — of the same nature, the same dignity, indivisible from it (Skobtsova, “The Second Gospel Commandment” and related essays, in Essential Writings, 2003; Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 7). To love God while passing by the suffering neighbor is, on her account, not an incomplete love of God but a false one: “the way to God lies through love of people, and there is no other way” (Skobtsova, Essential Writings, 2003; Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 7, on this as the axis of her thought).

She grounded this above all in the great judgment scene of Matthew 25. There the criterion of salvation is neither doctrine nor observance but the deed of mercy done or withheld: “I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat… Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matthew 25:35, 40). Mother Maria took this with radical literalness. The hungry man is not merely an occasion for virtue; he is, in a real and not merely metaphorical sense, Christ present and to be served (Skobtsova, Essential Writings, 2003; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3).

The Neighbor as Icon

Mother Maria expressed this presence in the language of the icon and the sacrament — the deepest categories available to her Orthodox tradition. Every human being, she held, bears the image of God, and the image is not effaced by degradation but shines, however obscured, precisely in the degraded. To meet a human being is therefore to stand before an icon of God, and the reverence owed to the icon — bowing, kissing, tending — is owed, in its own register, to the person (Skobtsova, Essential Writings, 2003; Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 7). She could speak of encountering the neighbor as a kind of veneration, and of the service of the destitute as the tending of a shrine.

She pressed the sacramental analogy further still. As the Church reverences the consecrated Gifts, so, she taught, the Christian is called to reverence the human being in whom Christ has hidden himself; there is, she suggested, a real correspondence between the Eucharistic Body received at the altar and the “body of Christ” that is the suffering neighbor (Skobtsova, Essential Writings, 2003; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3). This is bold language, and she knew it; but she insisted it was only the drawing-out of what the Gospel and the tradition of the image already contained.

The Liturgy After the Liturgy

From this followed one of her most influential formulations: that the Liturgy celebrated at the altar is fulfilled only in a second liturgy carried out in the world — the offering of one’s life in service, “the liturgy after the Liturgy” or “the liturgy outside the church walls” (Skobtsova, Essential Writings, 2003; Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 7). The Eucharist, on this reading, is not a self-contained transaction between the individual soul and God but the source and pattern of a life poured out for others; the worshipper who has received Christ at the altar goes out to serve Christ in the streets, and the two acts are one act (Skobtsova, Essential Writings, 2003). This is the theological root of the rue de Lourmel: the canteen and the chapel under one roof were, for her, two moments of a single liturgy (see The House on the Rue de Lourmel).

Kenosis: Love That Empties Itself

Mother Maria’s active love was not sentimental; it was cruciform. She understood the love of the neighbor as a genuine self-emptying (kenosis) after the pattern of Christ, who “made himself of no reputation” (Philippians 2:7). To love the destitute really — not from a safe distance but by sharing their condition — is to give oneself away, to accept exposure, loss, and eventually, she came to see, the cross (Skobtsova, Essential Writings, 2003; Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 7). She wrote of a love that takes the neighbor’s suffering into itself and bears it, a maternity extended to all the abandoned — the vision born at the deathbed of her own daughter (see From Russia to Paris). This kenotic strain links her closely to the theology of self-emptying love that runs through the Russian tradition and through her own émigré milieu (cf. St. Silouan the Athonite and St. Sophrony of Essex, whose prayer “for the whole Adam” moves in a neighboring key).

Not a License for Indifference to Worship

It is important, in fairness to her thought and to the tradition, to see what Mother Maria’s theology of active love did not claim. She did not teach that the sacraments and the liturgical life were dispensable, still less that social work could replace worship. Her whole point was that the Liturgy overflows into the service of the neighbor and is betrayed only when it is walled off from it (Skobtsova, Essential Writings, 2003; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3). Her chapel stood at the center of her house; she was a nun who kept the Church’s cycle of prayer. What she attacked was not worship but a worship curved in on itself — and that attack is the subject of the companion file (see Against a Self-Enclosed Piety). Whether her sacramental language about the neighbor stayed within the bounds of Orthodox tradition or strained them is one of the questions taken up in the contested-saint section (see The Contested Saint — Methodology).

See Also

References

  • Skobtsova, Mother Maria. Essential Writings. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; introduction by Jim Forest. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003. (Her essays, esp. “The Second Gospel Commandment,” on the two commandments as one, the neighbor as icon, the sacramental correspondence, the “liturgy after the Liturgy,” and kenotic love.)
  • 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 exposition of her theology of active love and its place in her life.)
  • Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. (Ch. 3, on the sacramental theology of the neighbor and the liturgy after the Liturgy.)
  • Scripture: Matthew 22:37–39; Matthew 25:31–46; Philippians 2:5–8 (the Scriptures she read as programmatic).