The Intellectual Milieu

The wider world in which Mother Maria thought and worked: the Russian religious renaissance carried into exile, the St. Sergius Theological Institute and the movements of the emigration, and the paradox of a destitute refugee community that became one of the most creative moments in modern Orthodox theology — a legacy later received, and variously read, in the Orthodox West.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Paris émigré)

The Renaissance Carried Into Exile

The intellectual world Mother Maria inhabited in Paris was the continuation, in exile, of the extraordinary flowering of Russian religious thought in the two decades before the Revolution — the movement historians call the Russian religious and cultural renaissance (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 4–5; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3). Many of its leading figures — theologians, philosophers, poets — were expelled from Soviet Russia or fled, and a great number of them converged on Paris, which between the wars became the unofficial capital of the Russian emigration and of Orthodox thought (Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3; and, for the same milieu from the hesychast side, St. Sophrony of Essex, whose formation ran through this Paris).

The famous “philosophers’ ships” of 1922, which carried Berdyaev and other thinkers into forced exile, seeded the emigration with a whole intelligentsia (Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3). The result was a paradox that struck contemporaries and historians alike: a community stripped of everything material produced, in its poverty, some of the richest theology of the century.

The St. Sergius Institute and the Movements

The institutional center of this world was the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris, founded in 1925 under Metropolitan Evlogy’s exarchate, where Bulgakov was dean and where a constellation of scholars taught — among them, at various points, figures like Georges Florovsky, whose call for a “neo-patristic synthesis” would define much of later Orthodox theology (see Fr. Georges Florovsky and the Patristic Revival). Alongside the Institute ran the Russian Student Christian Movement (RSCM), in whose work Mother Maria was deeply engaged before and after her tonsure, travelling to the scattered Russian communities of France as a lay missionary of practical Christianity (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 4–5).

It was a milieu of intense and sometimes fractious debate: over the relation of the Church to culture and politics, over sophiology and its critics, over the jurisdictional divisions that split the emigration between Constantinople (Evlogy), Moscow, and the Russian Church Abroad (ROCOR). Mother Maria stood squarely in the Evlogian, Constantinopolitan wing — the wing most open to engagement with the modern world, and the wing most suspect to the traditionalists of ROCOR (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 5–7; see The Contested Saint — Methodology).

Poet Among Theologians

Mother Maria’s own place in this milieu was distinctive. She was not primarily an academic theologian like Bulgakov or Florovsky but a poet, essayist, and practitioner whose theology was worked out as much in the soup kitchen as at the desk (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 6–7; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3). She wrote poems, essays, and mystery plays; she painted and embroidered icons; and she brought to the theological debates of the emigration the pressure of a life spent among the destitute. Her contribution was to insist, against every temptation of an intelligentsia in exile to console itself with high thought, that Orthodoxy must become deed — the conviction embodied in the name of Orthodox Action (see Bulgakov, Berdyaev, and the Circle).

The Later Western Reception

The theology of the Paris emigration did not stay in Paris. Through the St. Vladimir’s Seminary in New York (where Florovsky, Schmemann, and others taught), through the wide diffusion of Bulgakov’s, Lossky’s, and Florovsky’s writings, and through the monastic and parochial life of the diaspora, the Russian emigration became one of the principal channels by which Orthodox theology entered the modern West (Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3). Mother Maria’s own reception belongs to this later diffusion: her writings were gathered and translated, her story told by biographers, and her figure taken up — in the Orthodox West and beyond — as a model of engaged, social Christianity (Forest, introduction to Essential Writings, 2003; see Legacy and Assessment).

That reception has itself been double. In one current — represented by the more traditionalist, ascetically-minded wing of Western Orthodoxy, of which Fr. Seraphim Rose is a leading representative — the whole “Paris school,” with its openness to modern thought, its sophiology, and its engagement with the world, has been received with real suspicion, as a potential dilution of the ascetic and dogmatic fullness of the tradition. In another current, the same school is celebrated as the great creative renewal of Orthodox theology in the modern age. Mother Maria stands at the intersection of these readings, and her contested reception is in part a local instance of this larger division over the legacy of the emigration (see The Contested Saint — Methodology).

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. 4–7 for the Paris emigration, the RSCM, the St. Sergius Institute, and Mother Maria’s place among the theologians.)
  • Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. (Ch. 3, and the surrounding chapters on the Paris emigration, the philosophers’ ships, and the theological renaissance in exile.)
  • Skobtsova, Mother Maria. Essential Writings. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; introduction by Jim Forest. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003. (Forest’s introduction for the milieu and the later reception of her writings.)
  • Fr. Georges Florovsky and the Patristic Revival — ../../orthodoxy/04-russian-orthodox-tradition/theologians/patristic-revival.md. (The neo-patristic synthesis and the intellectual world of the Paris emigration.)