04 — The Paris School

Mother Maria did not act or think alone. This section places her within the remarkable circle of the Russian religious renaissance in exile — her confessor Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, the scholar Konstantin Mochulsky, and the organization Orthodox Action they founded together — and sketches the wider intellectual milieu and its later Western reception.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Paris émigré)

The Paris of the Russian emigration between the wars was, for all its poverty, one of the most creative moments in modern Orthodox thought. Around the St. Sergius Theological Institute and the journals and movements of the diaspora gathered a generation of theologians and philosophers who reshaped Orthodox theology for the twentieth century. Mother Maria belonged to this world: it was her intellectual home, the source of her collaborators, and — through her confessor Bulgakov — the source of one of the associations that make her a contested figure.

Section Contents

• Bulgakov, Berdyaev, and the Circle — her confessor Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, the scholar Konstantin Mochulsky, and Orthodox Action (Pravoslavnoe Delo)
• The Intellectual Milieu — the Russian religious renaissance in exile, the St. Sergius Institute, and the later Western Orthodox reception of the emigration’s legacy

See Also

• The Sacrament of the Brother/Sister — the theology she developed in this milieu
• The Contested Saint — Methodology — how the Bulgakov association figures in the reservations
• Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy — the censure of her confessor’s theology