What the Church Received

A theological companion to the methodology file: what an Orthodox glorification does and does not claim, and how that bears on a contested saint like Mother Maria. A glorification is not a certification that a saint’s every opinion was sound or her every habit exemplary; it is the Church’s recognition that, through this person, the holiness of God was manifest — supremely, in her case, in a martyric love unto death. This file works through that distinction without resolving the reservations the previous file set out.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Paris émigré; glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, 2004)

What a Glorification Is

The reservations about Mother Maria (see Methodology) gain much of their force from a tacit assumption about what glorification means: that in numbering someone among the saints the Church certifies the whole of her — her opinions, her habits, her associations — as models to be imitated. It is worth examining that assumption, because the Orthodox understanding of glorification is more precise, and the precision matters for how her case is weighed.

Glorification (Greek anagnorisis, Slavonic proslavlenie) is not a canonization in the developed juridical sense of a tribunal proving a life against a checklist of virtues. It is the Church’s formal recognition and reception of a holiness already believed to be manifest — the acknowledgment that this person is with God and may be venerated and invoked, and that God has been glorified in her (this is the theology of glorification set out in the Xenia methodology, following Fr. Seraphim Rose on the ecclesial reception of the saints; see Fr. Seraphim Rose). What the Church receives is a person in her fundamental orientation to God, crowned in Mother Maria’s case by martyrdom — not a bundle of endorsed positions.

This distinction is not special pleading invented for a hard case. It is the ordinary structure of the Church’s sanctoral tradition. The Church venerates saints who held, on this or that point, opinions later judged mistaken or at least disputed; it venerates saints of every temperament, station, and prior life, including great sinners turned penitents. To be glorified is not to be declared to have been right about everything or admirable in every habit; it is to be recognized as having, in the end and in the main, belonged wholly to God.

What Is Therefore Not Claimed

Applied to Mother Maria, this yields a set of clarifications that neither dissolve the reservations nor let them prove more than they can.

The glorification does not certify her polemics. That the Church numbers her among the saints does not mean it has endorsed every sentence of Types of Religious Lives, still less that it has devalued the liturgical and ascetic life her essays criticized (see Against a Self-Enclosed Piety). A saint’s writings are not conciliar definitions; the Church reveres saints whose theological opinions it does not thereby dogmatize. The reservation about her anti-ritualism is a reservation about her thought, and it may be pressed on its own terms; but it is not automatically answered — nor automatically defeated — by the fact of her glorification.

The glorification does not certify her habits or her past. That she smoked, that she was twice married, that she came from the revolutionary intelligentsia — none of this is held up for imitation by her glorification. The Church glorifies penitents and the redeemed; the pattern of St. Mary of Egypt, whose name she took, is precisely that of holiness reached through a disordered past (see The Nun Who Would Not Stay in the Cloister; St. Mary of Egypt). What is received is the person as she was in Christ at the last, not the biography as a template.

The glorification does not certify Bulgakov’s sophiology. That her confessor’s theology was censured in 1935 is a fact about his system, on which the Church has spoken; her glorification says nothing to reverse that censure and nothing to endorse the disputed doctrines (see Bulgakov, Berdyaev, and the Circle; Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy). A pastoral and spiritual bond to a censured theologian is not itself a dogmatic adherence, and the glorification of the disciple is not a rehabilitation of the master’s system.

What Then Is Claimed

If the glorification does not claim these things, what does it claim? On the received theology, it claims that Mother Maria is a saint — that God was glorified in her, that she is with Him, and that she may be venerated and invoked. And the specific ground of that claim, in her case, is not obscure: it is the martyric love in which her whole life culminated — the sheltering of the persecuted unto her own death in a concentration camp (see The Death of 31 March 1945; Their Witness). The martyr’s crown is the tradition’s clearest title to sanctity, and it is on that title, above all, that the Ecumenical Patriarchate received her and the four together in 2004 (see Glorification 2004).

This does not settle the dispute, and it is not meant to. One may grant everything said here about what a glorification claims and still hold — as the traditionalist reservation holds — that a figure whose visible life and thought so cut against the tradition’s instincts is an imprudent choice for the Church to raise up as a saint, precisely because the faithful will read a glorification as an endorsement of the whole, whatever the theologians say about its proper limits. That is a serious argument, and it is not refuted by the distinction drawn here; it is, if anything, sharpened by it, for it concerns the pastoral effect of glorifying a contested figure rather than the bare logic of what glorification claims (see Methodology).

The Present State of the Reception

Where this leaves Mother Maria is exactly where the previous file left her: a saint glorified by one Church, venerated widely, and not yet received by all — a reception in motion. The theology of glorification set out here explains why her case is possible — why a Church can glorify a contested figure without thereby endorsing her every position — but it does not by itself make her veneration universal, and the tradition supplies no mechanism that would force it to. Reception across the Orthodox world is a slow, organic, and sometimes contested process, and Mother Maria’s is unfinished (cf. the theology of reception in the Xenia methodology). The honest description of her status is therefore not “a universally acknowledged saint” nor “a merely local enthusiasm,” but a saint truly glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, whose reception by the wider Church is real, growing, and incomplete — and whose martyrdom is the ground on which that reception, wherever it takes hold, is built.

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. (For the life and martyrdom that ground the reception.)
Skobtsova, Mother Maria. Essential Writings. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; introduction by Jim Forest. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003. (Her writings, distinguished here from the dogmatic teaching of the Church.)
St. Xenia of Petersburg — Methodology — ../../st-xenia-of-petersburg/06-hagiography-vs-history/methodology.md. (The repository’s statement of the theology of glorification and ecclesial reception, on which this file draws.)
Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy — ../../orthodoxy/04-russian-orthodox-tradition/theologians/bulgakov-sophiology.md. (The censure that the glorification does not reverse.)
METHODOLOGY.md §4, this repository (the discipline of non-adjudication on live disputes).