The Philosophy of the God-Man

At the heart of Nikolai’s thought is a radically Christ-centered vision: Christ the God-Man (Bogochelovek) as the center, measure, and meaning of all reality, over against every humanism that puts man in God’s place. This vision, which he shared with and passed to his disciple St. Justin (Popović), is the positive core from which both his devotional depth and his sweeping cultural critique proceed.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2003)

Christ the God-Man as the Center of All

The organizing conviction of Nikolai’s theology is not a doctrine so much as a person: Jesus Christ, the God-Man, in whom God became man so that man might be united to God. Everything in Nikolai’s thought is referred to this center. The world is a book of signs pointing to Christ; history is the arena of the struggle between Christ and the powers that oppose him; the human person finds his truth only in Christ; and every philosophy, culture, and ideology is measured by its relation to the God-Man. This Christocentrism, rooted in the classical Orthodox dogma of the Incarnation and the two natures of Christ, is the thread that runs through the whole of Nikolai’s varied output — the poetry of Prayers by the Lake (see Prayers by the Lake), the daily devotion of the Prologue, the sermons, and the philosophical essays alike (Nikolaj Velimirović, Prayers by the Lake and the homiletic corpus; on the Christocentric core of his thought, see the studies of twentieth-century Serbian theology and the treatments of his relation to St. Justin).

It is worth recalling that Nikolai’s earned doctorate in theology was on precisely this foundation — Faith in the Resurrection of Christ as the Fundamental Dogma of the Apostolic Church (Bern, 1908; see Education of a Polymath). The Resurrection of the God-Man as the foundational fact of the Church is, in a sense, the seed of his whole later vision.

The Legacy Shared with St. Justin

Nikolai’s Christocentrism is the direct root of the most developed theological system in the twentieth-century Serbian Church, that of his disciple St. Justin (Popović). It was Justin who gave the vision its most rigorous and famous formulation as the “philosophy of the God-Man” (bogochovechanska filosofija) — the sustained opposition between Bogochovek (the God-Man, Christ) and chovekobog (the man-god, the deified man of humanism), and the argument that all of European culture faces a choice between these two principles (see St. Justin (Popović), where this is treated in full). The relationship between the two men was that of elder and disciple, and the continuity of vision is close: what Nikolai proclaimed as a preacher and poet, Justin systematized as a dogmatic theologian.

The collection notes the continuity in both its strength and its ambiguity. The strength is a profound, integrally Orthodox Christocentrism — arguably the most vital theological current in modern Serbian Orthodoxy, and one that connects both men to the wider patristic revival of twentieth-century Orthodox theology. The ambiguity is that the same sharp opposition between the God-Man and the deified man of secular humanism, when turned from theology to a reading of concrete history and cultures, is where Nikolai’s (and to a degree Justin’s) most contested claims arise — the sweeping condemnations of “godless Europe” and, in Nikolai’s case, of the supposed authors of its de-Christianization (see Sin, Suffering, and Providence and The Charge of Antisemitism). The positive vision and the contested application share a single root.

Against Humanism: The “Man-God”

Nikolai’s Christocentrism defines itself over against humanism — not human dignity as such (which for Nikolai is grounded precisely in Christ), but the modern project of a self-sufficient humanity that makes man the measure of all things and dispenses with God. In Nikolai’s diagnosis, the modern West had substituted the man-god for the God-Man: it had taken the humanistic promise of the Renaissance and Enlightenment to its conclusion in a civilization of enormous material power and spiritual emptiness, and the catastrophes of the twentieth century were the fruit of that substitution. This is a theological reading of modernity, and it is shared, in its broad lines, with a wide current of twentieth-century Orthodox (and indeed non-Orthodox Christian) thought critical of secular modernity.

The critique has real depth and has been received as a serious diagnosis of the spiritual crisis of the modern West. It also has, in Nikolai, a polemical sharpness that his critics regard as its weakness: the tendency to identify the abstract forces of de-Christianization (secularism, materialism, “modern ideas”) with concrete human agents, and — in the most contested passages — with the Jews (see The Charge of Antisemitism). Whether this identification is an alien excrescence on an otherwise sound theology, or an expression of something in the theology itself, is exactly the question the controversy raises, and the collection does not settle it here.

The “Faith of Educated People”

One characteristic strand of Nikolai’s apologetic deserves note: his insistence, against the assumption that religion is for the simple and unbelief for the sophisticated, that the deepest faith is the faith of the truly wise — that the greatest minds and the holiest lives have been believers, and that the educated unbeliever’s confidence is a shallow provincialism of the modern age. He gathered such witness in works presenting the faith of scientists, philosophers, and saints, arguing that Christ is confessed by the highest as well as the humblest. This apologetic register — learned, confident, addressed to a skeptical educated public — is the natural expression of the polymath of Section 01, and it connects his village piety to his European learning: the same Christ is the truth of the peasant’s prayer and of the philosopher’s inquiry.

The Shape of the Vision

Taken as a whole, Nikolai’s theology is best described not as a system but as a vision organized around the God-Man: Christ as the center of reality, the measure of every culture, the answer to the crisis of a humanity that has tried to live without God, and the object of a longing that his poetry expresses better than any argument. It is a vision of great power and, at its devotional heart, of great beauty. It is also a vision whose application to history and culture generated the sharpest edges of his legacy. The honest account holds the two together — the Christocentric depth and the contested application — and refers the reader to the controversy for the latter (see The Charge of Antisemitism) and to the companion file for the theology of suffering and providence in which the application is worked out (see Sin, Suffering, and Providence).

See Also

• Sin, Suffering, and Providence — the reading of history and suffering that follows from the Christocentric vision
• St. Justin (Popović) — the disciple who systematized the philosophy of the God-Man
• Education of a Polymath — the Resurrection thesis at the root of the Christocentrism
• Prayers by the Lake — the devotional expression of the vision
• Orthodoxy: Theosis — the deification of man in the God-Man, the vision’s positive goal
• The Charge of Antisemitism — where the vision’s application to history is contested

References

• Velimirović, Nikolaj. Prayers by the Lake (Molitve na jezeru); The Prologue from Ohrid; and the homiletic corpus. (The Christocentric vision in its devotional and homiletic form.)
• Velimirović, Nikolaj. The Faith of the Saints and related apologetic works. (The “faith of educated people” argument.)
• Studies of twentieth-century Serbian Orthodox theology and of the relation between Velimirović and Justin Popović, for the continuity of the “philosophy of the God-Man.” (See the companion collection St. Justin (Popović) for the systematic development.)
• Byford, Jovan. Denial and Repression of Antisemitism. Budapest–New York: Central European University Press, 2008. (The contested application of the critique of “godless” modernity; treated in Section 06.)