Wartime Diplomat

During the First World War the Serbian government sent the young hieromonk Nikolai on missions to Britain and the United States to plead his nation’s cause. His eloquence made him a celebrated Orthodox voice in the West — the first Eastern Orthodox to preach in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and an honorary Doctor of Divinity of Cambridge — and the experience shaped the internationalist churchman he became.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2003)

Serbia’s Catastrophe and a Priest Sent West

When the First World War engulfed Serbia, the small kingdom that had triggered the July crisis of 1914 was subjected to invasion, epidemic, and eventually — in the winter of 1915–1916 — the catastrophic retreat of army and government across the mountains of Albania. In the midst of this the Serbian government looked for men who could carry its case to the Allied and neutral publics whose sympathy it needed. The hieromonk Nikolaj Velimirović, already known as a preacher and fluent in English, German, and French from his years of study abroad (see Education of a Polymath), was among those chosen. He was dispatched on missions to the United States (from 1915) and to Britain, where he spent much of the war as an unofficial but highly effective advocate for Serbia and for the South Slav cause (“Nikolaj Velimirović,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org, on the April 1915 appointment to the U.S. mission and the lecture tours; Slobodan G. Markovich, “Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović … and his studies in Bern,” on his wartime activity in the West).

The Orator of the West

It was as an orator that Nikolai made his name in these years. He lectured widely in American cities and, above all, in England, where his combination of theological depth, evident sincerity, and command of English drew large audiences and the attention of the Anglican establishment. The most celebrated moment came when he became, by the usual accounts, the first Eastern Orthodox clergyman to preach from the pulpit of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London (“Nikolaj Velimirović,” Wikipedia, on the St. Paul’s sermon). His wartime lectures and sermons were gathered and published in English in this period, and his standing in Britain was formally recognized by the award of an honorary Doctorate of Divinity from the University of Cambridge — a mark of the esteem in which the Anglican and academic worlds held him, and one distinct from his earned Continental doctorates (Wikipedia, “Nikolaj Velimirović”; cf. Markovich on the honorary recognition). His contacts in these years reached to leading figures of English religious life, and he became, for a season, one of the best-known representatives of Eastern Orthodoxy in the English-speaking world.

The substance of what he said in the West was a fusion of the political and the spiritual: he presented Serbia’s suffering as the suffering of a Christian people, set the war in a frame of sacrifice and providence, and pressed the case for the liberation and union of the South Slavs. This preaching-as-advocacy — the wartime cause read through a theology of sacrifice and national vocation — is an early form of a pattern that recurs throughout his life, and that becomes contested in his interwar and wartime writing, where the fusion of nation and faith takes on sharper and, to his critics, darker tones (see The Charge of Antisemitism). In the wartime setting, however, it was received simply as the moving witness of a churchman for a martyred nation.

Fruits of the Mission

The wartime years abroad left several lasting marks. First, they gave Nikolai an international stature that no other Serbian churchman of his generation possessed; when he was consecrated bishop in 1919 (see Bishop of Žiča and Ohrid), it was as a man already known across the Atlantic world. Second, they deepened his engagement with Western Christianity — the Anglicans above all — and made him a natural participant in the early ecumenical contacts of the interwar decades. Third, they confirmed in him a conviction that would run through all his later work: that the crisis of the modern West was fundamentally a spiritual crisis, a loss of God at the heart of a civilization of enormous power, and that the Orthodox East had something the West had lost and needed. This diagnosis — sympathetic and admiring toward the Christian West, severe toward its secular modernity — is one of the constants of his thought, and it is worth naming here because its later, harsher expressions are exactly what the controversy turns on (see Sin, Suffering, and Providence).

The precise itineraries, dates, and audiences of the wartime missions are not always given consistently in the sources, and the popular accounts sometimes inflate them; the secure core is that Velimirović was an officially supported Serbian religious envoy to Britain and the United States during the war, that he preached and lectured to great effect (including at St. Paul’s), and that he emerged from the war with an honorary Cambridge D.D. and a reputation as the foremost Orthodox voice in the English-speaking world (Wikipedia, “Nikolaj Velimirović”; Markovich, “Studies in Bern”). On that basis he returned to a Serbia now enlarged into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and to the episcopate.

See Also

References

  • “Nikolaj Velimirović.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org. (The April 1915 appointment to the U.S. mission and the lecture tours; the return to Britain; the St. Paul’s Cathedral sermon as the first by an Eastern Orthodox clergyman; the honorary Cambridge Doctorate of Divinity. Used to locate these facts; not a terminal citation.)
  • Markovich, Slobodan G. “Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović (1880–1956) and his studies in Bern within the context of the Old Catholic–Serbian Orthodox relationship.” University of Belgrade. (Velimirović’s wartime activity in the West and his standing among Western Christians.)