Spiritual Renewal in Serbia

The Bogomoljci revival that Nikolai led fed a broader renewal of Serbian Orthodoxy between the wars: a revitalized monasticism, a devout laity, and a generation of clergy formed in its warmth. Its legacy is significant and genuinely mixed, and this file traces both its fruits and the questions later raised about it.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2003)

From a Lay Movement to a Church-Wide Renewal

The God-Worshippers were not an isolated phenomenon but the most visible expression of a wider stirring in Serbian Orthodoxy in the first decades of the twentieth century — a renewal in which Nikolai was a, perhaps the, central figure (Radmila Radić et al., “The God-Worshipper Movement in Serbian Society in the Twentieth Century,” Springer, 2017). Under his patronage the lay revival contributed to a broader revitalization along several axes.

Monastic renewal. The fervent piety of the Bogomoljci, oriented as it was toward the monasteries as centers of pilgrimage and prayer (see The God-Worshippers), fed vocations and helped repopulate and reinvigorate Serbian monastic life, which had suffered under centuries of Ottoman rule and the disruptions of war. The influx of Russian émigré monastics after the Revolution added to this, and the interwar Serbian Church saw a real monastic revival to which the God-Worshipper milieu contributed a stream of devout candidates.

A devout and catechized laity. The movement’s most direct fruit was a body of ordinary Serbs — peasants, artisans, townspeople — living an intensified sacramental and prayerful life: fasting, communing frequently, gathering for prayer, reading the devotional books (above all Nikolai’s) that the revival put into their hands. In a period when much of Europe was secularizing, the Bogomoljci represented a countercurrent of deliberate, popular re-Christianization from below.

Formation of clergy and future leaders. The devout world of the God-Worshippers and of Nikolai’s episcopate was the seedbed of a generation. His disciple St. Justin (Popović) — the great dogmatic theologian of the twentieth-century Serbian Church — was formed in close relation to Nikolai and to this milieu of intense Orthodox revival (see St. Justin (Popović)). The pattern of a learned, ardent, uncompromisingly Christocentric Orthodoxy that Nikolai embodied and Justin systematized passed to a whole current of Serbian churchmen and shaped the Serbian Church’s self-understanding well into the later twentieth century.

The Character of the Renewal

The renewal Nikolai led had a distinctive character that helps explain both its power and its later contestation. It was Christocentric and ascetical, centered on repentance, prayer, fasting, and the person of Christ rather than on social or political programs in the first instance. It was popular and anti-elitist, aimed at the ordinary believer and suspicious of a merely intellectual or bourgeois Christianity. And it was counter-modern, setting the Gospel and the ascetic tradition sharply against the secularism, materialism, and (in Nikolai’s diagnosis) the spiritual emptiness of modern European civilization (see Sin, Suffering, and Providence). This last feature is the hinge on which the assessment of the renewal turns.

A Mixed Legacy

The legacy of the Bogomoljci revival is significant and honestly mixed, and the collection reports it as such without adjudicating.

On the one hand, admirers — and much of the Serbian Church — see in it an authentic and fruitful awakening: a mass return to fervent Orthodox practice, a renewal of monasticism, the formation of saints and theologians, and a reservoir of popular faith that helped the Serbian Church survive the coming decades of war and communist persecution. On this reading, the renewal is among the glories of the modern Serbian Church, and Nikolai’s leadership of it is one of his surest titles to sanctity.

On the other hand, critical scholarship situates the movement within the wider world of interwar Serbian Orthodox conservatism and asks harder questions. The revival’s counter-modern intensity, its sharp opposition between a sacred national-Orthodox community and a corrupting secular modernity, and the entanglement of parts of this milieu with the interwar and wartime Serbian religious and political right, are read by critics such as Jovan Byford as part of the same complex of ideas that produced the contested cultural and political writing of Nikolai’s later years — including the antisemitism (Jovan Byford, Denial and Repression of Antisemitism, CEU Press, 2008). On this reading the renewal cannot be cleanly separated from the controversy: the same fusion of ardent Orthodoxy with a besieged national identity animated both.

[Disputed: whether the Bogomoljci revival should be read primarily as an authentic Orthodox spiritual awakening (the view of its admirers and of much of the Serbian Church) or as inseparable from the counter-modern, nationally-defensive religious politics of the interwar Serbian right that critical scholarship (Byford, *Denial and Repression*, 2008) connects to Nikolai's later contested writings. The two readings are not strictly exclusive — a genuine devotional renewal can coexist with a problematic politics — but they weight the movement's legacy very differently. This collection reports both and adjudicates neither.]

The Fate of the Movement

The organized Bogomoljci movement did not survive the mid-century intact. The Second World War, the German occupation, and above all the establishment of the communist Yugoslav state after 1945 — hostile to organized religion and especially to a mass popular Orthodox movement associated with a bishop it regarded as an enemy — brought the movement’s public life to an end. Its spirit, however, persisted: in the private piety of the faithful it had formed, in the monastic communities it had helped populate, and in the theological current carried by figures like St. Justin. When Serbian Orthodoxy revived in the late-communist and post-communist decades, and when Nikolai himself was rehabilitated and glorified in 2003 (see Glorification 2003), it drew in part on the memory and the human material of the revival he had led two generations before.

See Also

References

  • Radić, Radmila, et al. “The God-Worshipper Movement in Serbian Society in the Twentieth Century: Emergence, Development, and Structures.” In Orthodox Christianity and Modern Europe. Springer, 2017. (The movement’s development and its place in a wider Serbian Orthodox renewal.)
  • Byford, Jovan. Denial and Repression of Antisemitism: Post-Communist Remembrance of the Serbian Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović. Budapest–New York: Central European University Press, 2008. (The interwar Serbian Orthodox conservative milieu and its relation to Nikolai’s contested later writing.)