Their Witness

What binds the four glorified together is a single witness: the refusal, under interrogation and unto death, to disown the persecuted neighbor — the theology of the sacrament of the brother carried to its last consequence. This file reflects on the common meaning of their martyrdom, and on what kind of martyrs they are.

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

One Witness in Four Lives

The word martyr means witness, and the four glorified together — Mother Maria, Yuri Skobtsov, Fr. Dimitri Klépinin, and Ilya Fondaminsky — bore, in four different lives, a single witness (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 9–11; see The Four Glorified Together). They were a nun, her son, a priest, and a layman of Jewish birth drawn late to Christ; they came from the poet’s studio, the emigration’s poverty, the parish, and the editorial desk. What made them one was not a shared temperament or even a shared task in every particular, but a shared refusal: they would not purchase their own safety by abandoning the hunted.

Martyrs of the Neighbor

These are martyrs of a particular kind, and the kind is theologically significant. The classic martyr dies rather than deny Christ — rather than sacrifice to the idols, rather than renounce the faith. Mother Maria and her companions died rather than deny Christ in the person of the persecuted neighbor — rather than cease to shelter the Jews in whom, on Mother Maria’s own theology, Christ was to be served (see The Sacrament of the Brother/Sister). Klépinin’s reported gesture under interrogation — holding up his cross and naming the crucified Christ as “this Jew” whom his interrogator did not know — is the emblem of the whole: the confession of Christ and the defense of the persecuted were, for them, one act (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 9; see Arrest 1943).

This is why their martyrdom is the exact vindication and completion of Mother Maria’s life’s teaching. She had preached for a decade that the love of God and the love of the neighbor are indivisible, that the destitute and the hunted are the presence of Christ, and that worship is fulfilled only in the laying-down of one’s life in service (see The Sacrament of the Brother/Sister). In the camps, that teaching stopped being an essay and became a death. The theology of the sacrament of the brother was carried to its last consequence: to serve Christ in the persecuted, when the persecutor came, meant to die with and for them.

The Range of the Company

The company itself preaches. That the four include Fondaminsky, a Jew by birth, deported to Auschwitz for the very identity Mother Maria’s household was risking everything to shelter, gives the group its terrible symmetry: the rescuers and one of the very people the age was bent on destroying are glorified side by side (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 9; see The Four Glorified Together). That the company includes a mother and her son binds the private grief of a family — Mother Maria had already lost one child, and now lost another to the camps — to the public witness. That it includes a priest places the sacramental life of the Church, in Klépinin, at the center of the rescue. The four together are a small icon of the Church’s calling in a murderous age: to shelter the hunted at the cost of itself.

Witnesses Against the Age

There is a further dimension to their witness that the twentieth century makes unavoidable. Mother Maria and her companions bore witness not only for the neighbor but against an ideology — against the racial persecution and mass murder of the Nazi state — at a time when much of Christian Europe was silent, compromised, or complicit (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 8–9; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3). Their sanctity is thus also a judgment: a demonstration, in flesh and blood, that the Gospel’s answer to the persecution of the innocent was neither silence nor accommodation but the laying-down of one’s life. This is part of why their witness has resonated so far beyond the Orthodox world — why Yad Vashem honored Mother Maria and Klépinin, and why their story is told wherever the question is asked what the Christian conscience owed, and gave, in the face of the Holocaust (see Sheltering Jews Under the Nazis; Legacy and Assessment).

The Witness and the Reservations

It is precisely this witness — the martyric love, common to the four and sealed in the camps — that constitutes the core of the case for their sanctity, and that the reservations about Mother Maria (her biography, her polemics, her associations) do not touch (see The Contested Saint — Methodology). Whatever one makes of Types of Religious Lives or of her debt to Bulgakov, the fact stands that she and her companions died sheltering the persecuted rather than betray them. The witness is the firm ground; and it is on that ground, the tradition holds, that a martyr is a martyr — not on the tidiness of the rest of the life (cf. What the Church Received). This does not dissolve the reservations, which stand on their own terrain; but it locates, precisely, the thing the Church received in glorifying the four.

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. 8–11 for the common witness of the four, Klépinin’s interrogation, and the meaning of their martyrdom.)
  • Skobtsova, Mother Maria. Essential Writings. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; introduction by Jim Forest. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003. (Her theology of the neighbor, which their martyrdom completed.)
  • Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. (Ch. 3, on the witness of the community against the persecution.)
  • Scripture: John 15:13; Matthew 25:31–46 (the martyric love of the neighbor at the heart of their witness).