In this essay, Reader John (Richard) McLaughlin traces the impact of the Russian Revolution on the church, a history in which our own Orthodox Church in America shares a unique part.
The Bolshevik coup of October 1917 and victory in the ensuing civil war triggered a massive exodus of Russians from their native land. According to data compiled by the League of Nations, over a million fled the war, pestilence and famine then engulfing the country between 1917 and 1920.
Scattered across the globe from Harbin and Shanghai to Constantinople and westwards to Sofia, Prague, Berlin and Paris, the exiles saw themselves as akin to the righteous remnant that refused to bend its knee to Baal who, in his latest manifestation, had taken the form of atheistic Marxist-Leninism. They viewed themselves as emigres, rather than refugees, because, according to Nikita Struve, a French writer of Russian descent, they felt that they had not left Russia but had actually carried Russia with them. In creating a Russia abroad, the emigres aimed at preserving all that was good in traditional Russian culture from Bolshevik contamination, distortion and destruction. Orthodox Christianity, the perennial core of Russian culture and identity, was at that time the target of a bloody and brutal persecution. Indeed, many thoughtful contemporaries believed that the Russian Orthodox Church was then in danger of extinction. As Paul Valliere notes, the Revolution was a catastrophe which ruined the largest, richest and best-educated Orthodox church in the world. Fortuitously, a group of extremely gifted and devout Russian Orthodox emigres were drawn to Paris where they created a dynamic cultural environment that not only preserved the Church but also continued the renaissance in Russian Orthodox theology inaugurated by the Moscow Council of 1917-1918.
The émigré success in preserving the Church is evident when placed alongside the magnitude of the Soviet anti-religious program. As militantly atheistic champions of a materialist world view, the Bolsheviks viewed the Russian Orthodoxy as a bastion of obscurantism, ignorance, and reaction. To them, the Church was a class enemy and a major prop of the Tsarist regime, an opiate that narcotized the masses, helping to keep them oppressed. Almost immediately after the Bolshevik seizure of power, church property was nationalized while monasteries, convents, seminaries, and religious academies were closed. Religious education was banned and priests were restricted to serving Liturgy and banned from preaching or teaching church doctrines. Churches were shuttered in three waves: 1917, 1928-32 and 1937-40. According to a report, issued by the Holy Synod in 1914, there were 54, 174 churches in the Russian Empire with 38, 230 of them in Russia itself; by 1939, the number had been reduced to between 200 and 300 in the entire Soviet Union. Between 1917 and 1938, 300,000 Orthodox clergy were liquidated. In 1914, the Church in Russia had 65 dioceses with 130 bishops; by July 1939, only four bishops remained.
Paris, a world capital, was, by rights, the natural center of gravitation for the emigres. A renowned cultural hub, it was also the seat of a major European power that had initially refused to recognize Bolshevik Russia. In fact, during the recent civil war, French material aid had sustained the White counterrevolutionary armies and France felt a moral debt towards the defeated Whites. The city also served as the backdrop for major postwar conferences dealing with the Russian Question. Most importantly, France, because of the horrendous manpower losses suffered during the recent Great War, was the most hospitable European nation to immigrants. At its height, the Parisian émigré community probably numbered around 80,000 and was dwarfed by the larger Italian, Polish, and Spanish communities. However, it included a significant number of educated individuals and had a political-anti-Bolshevik orientation while the other emigrant groups were largely composed of the unskilled who had come to France primarily for work. Because of these factors, the Russians were highly visible in French society and thus were able to bring Orthodoxy to the attention of the wider world.
Orthodoxy was the glue binding the Russian émigré community together. The rich Liturgy, with its glorious music, magnificently vested clergy, the forests of candles illumining the darkness, and aroma of incense wafting heavenwards, was the sole link with a vanished Motherland that few of them would ever see again. Many, who had been hostile or indifferent to the Church in prerevolutionary times, were now drawn to its comforting embrace. But, ironically, the Church also became the arena of discord and schism. Because of a breakdown of communications between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox in Western Europe, questions now arose about the nature and extent of its jurisdiction and authority over the Russian diaspora. In some quarters, especially among ultra- monarchists, it appeared that the patriarch had buckled under coercion and pressure from a militantly atheistic regime. This conspiracy theory gained traction from several incidents, two of which are recounted here. Early in 1918, Prince Georgii Trubetskoi, before departing to the Don to join the Whites, had asked for Tikhon’s blessing but the Patriarch refused since he was determined to keep the Church above politics. Subsequently, after months of house arrest, Tikhon penned a letter that was published in the soviet press, instructing the clergy to refrain from political activity. The letter further cautioned Christians to give their unqualified obedience to the soviet authorities. The missive put a dent in the morale of the White army then advancing on Moscow. It was only after the collapse of the USSR with the opening of the soviet archives that it became obvious that the Tikhon’s original letter had been heavily reworked to give it a pro Bolshevik slant. The ultras among the monarchists who had fought in the White armies against the Bolsheviks in the recent civil war were in the forefront of this group. They refused to recognize the Patriarch, viewing him as a Bolshevik puppet and were prepared to use the Church as a springboard for launching anti-Soviet political initiatives. They were indifferent to whether their actions rent the Church in schism or harmed those who living under Bolshevik rule.
Patriarch Tikhon had already reacted to the disruption in communications by granting autonomy to Russian Orthodox dioceses outside Russia in a decree of November 20, 1920. He also enabled Russian bishops in the event of chaos to join with their episcopal confreres in neighboring dioceses to create church institutions to weather the storm of irreligion. A further decree, dated April 8, 1921, named bishop Evlogy Georgeivitch of Volhynia the provisional head of all Russian Orthodox parishes in Western Europe with the rights and prerogatives of a diocesan bishop. Metropolitan Benjamin of Petrograd whose see had been responsible, up to this time, for all foreign Russian Orthodox parishes outside North America, also confirmed Evlogy’s jurisdiction over the Russian Orthodox communities in Western Europe. These two patriarchal decrees gave Evlogy a firm canonical basis for his tasks as metropolitan. Ultimately, however, the new metropolitan would face challenges to his authority from émigré Russian monarchists of the Karlovci synod.
The first rumbling toward a fissure appeared in December 1921 when the Higher Ecclesiastical Administration of the Russian Orthodox Churches Abroad, recently established in Constantinople by some exiled Russian bishops with Metropolitan Anthony Khrapovitsky of Kiev as president, convened an émigré conference. The site for this gathering was the Serbian town of Sremski Karlovci which coincidentally also served as the headquarters for the White Russian Army in Exile under the command of General Piotr Wrangel. There were one hundred-fifty clergy, including twelve bishops, and laity in attendance. The gathering opened under a cloud of gloom and foreboding for fate of the beleaguered Russian Church. Nicholas Zernov, a participant, observed in his diary of the conference, “The Patriarch is under arrest, fifteen bishops have been imprisoned, Metropolitan Kiril has lost his sight, Gurii is suffering from tuberculosis, Bishop Fedor has gone mad. Everywhere there is disorder: the Ukrainians have seized the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Kiev and are demanding autocephaly, supported by the Bolsheviks and the Jesuits in Poland, 300 parishes have been closed and the priests imprisoned.”
Although initially billed as a conference, a cabal of monarchist delegates successfully maneuvered during the initial session to elevate the proceedings from a conference to a Sobor or Council of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. They claimed to be acting in the name of and with his blessing of Patriarch Tikhon. Tikhon had named Anthony head of the Higher Church Administration in Southern Russia during the recent Russian civil war when all communication between the Patriarchate and outlying dioceses had been cut off. Whether Anthony’s canonical authority continued after Russian soil is open to question. The Russian Orthodox Church now found itself in an unprecedented position with the Bolshevik victory. For the first time since Russia’s conversion to Christianity, the Church was confronted by a militantly anti-religious government with extensive coercive powers and no moral scruples. By contrast, even during the two centuries of the Mongol yoke, no one molested the Church. A major part of the Bolshevik strategy involved reducing the patriarch to a cipher and isolating him from outside contacts in an effort to destroy his credibility and prestige and to bring the Church into disarray. Russians hierarchs abroad now had to construe the canon liberally. Consequently, issues concerning the scope of jurisdictional authority of both the Moscow Patriarchate and of the émigré bishops heading the Russian Orthodox Church abroad would continue to haunt the émigré church until well after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Metropolitan Anthony, who already had pronounced monarchist views, under pressure from count Alexander Grabbe, a former general and aide to Tsar Nicholas II, introduced a resolution advocating that “God might return to the All Russian Throne the Anointed and lawful Orthodox Tsar of the House of Romanov.” Another resolution called for the Allied powers that were due to meet in Genoa during the following month to resume military operations against the Bolsheviks in Russia. Both resolutions passed by a majority who viewed the late Tsar as the” anointed of God” and a martyr whose cause transcended the border between the secular and the religious realms. Metropolitan Evlogy and five other bishops dissented on the grounds that these resolutions were political and therefore had no legitimate place in a church assembly. Evlogy had a particularly strong aversion to the secular intrusion into the life of the Church. In his memoirs, he referred to the cosseting and privileges that were bestowed on the Church in the prerevolutionary period but protested that they had been bestowed at great cost in the form of bureaucracy, the strangling of all vitality and the decline in its popularity. Evlogy and the other dissenters also feared that the Karlovci resolutions would give the Bolsheviks a pretext for harsh retaliation against an already beleagured Church in Russia.
Patriarch Tikhon responded to the resolutions of the Karlovci council on May 5, 1922, ruling that the Higher Ecclesiastical Administration of the Russian Churches Abroad had no legal status. Since the Administration’s decrees were purely political, they were void ab initio, having no weight or significance in the Church. Tikhon then dissolved the council and ordered the patriarchal synod to begin collecting evidence in order to determine whether the conduct of its individual members warranted bringing them before a church court when conditions allowed. In order to avoid any ambiguities, the Patriarch declared that bishop Evlogy, who had already been raised to the status of metropolitan on January 30, 1922, alone had full jurisdiction over the Russian Orthodox churches abroad. Evolgy will loom large in this article because for nearly twenty-five years, he would be the first Russian Orthodox bishop to sit in Paris. He deserves credit for fostering the Church’s theological traditions when a wave of darkness had overwhelmed Russia and all but drowned church life.
Metropolitan Evlogy, concerned that patriarch Tikhon may have been acting under duress from soviet pressure, and also out of friendship and respect for Metropolitan Anthony, who had been his teacher at the Moscow Theological Academy, refrained from dissolving the Higher Ecclesiastical Administration. However, the Higher Church Administration did dissolve itself, assuming a new existence as the Temporary Episcopal Synod Abroad. Evolgy’s failure to dissolve the Karlovcian synod, pursuant to patriarch Tikhon’s orders, was a major mistake that would haunt him until the end of his days. The synod would remain a major adversary contesting Evlogy’s jurisdictional authority. Eventually this body which was generally referred to as the Synod” would evolve into ROCOR. After World War II, it would move to the United States and establish its headquarters in Jordanville New York
Soviet retribution quickly followed the council’s pronouncements. A violently anti-religious campaign was already underway in Russia but the Karlovci proceedings furnished the soviets with a pretext for racheting up the level of violence against the Church. Earlier, between April and May 1922, Metropolitan Benjamin Kazanik of Petrograd and more than eighty other churchmen and lay advisors had been arrested and charged with counterrevolutionary activities in the form of opposition to the Bolshevik seizure of church valuable and secret communication with the Karlovci synod. The soviets now prosecuted the group for their alleged offenses, and after a trial of two weeks duration, Metropolitan Benjamin and four others were found guilty and on July 31, 1922 executed. Contemporaneously, another sixty-four bishops and 8,000 clergy were arrested and sent to the Gulag. The wrath of the Soviet government had not been softened by Tikhon’s denunciation of the Karlovci council since the patriarchal reprimand fell short of its demand for the excommunication of all participants. Because of the persecution, metropolitans Anthony and Evlogy created a temporary synod on September 2, 1922. The temporary synod, in turn, held a council in May 1923, confirming metropolitan Evlogy as head of the diocese of Western Europe.
Tensions between Metropolitan Evlogi and the Karlovcians resurfaced following an October 1924 conference of the Russian Bishops Abroad held at Sremski Karlovci where the participants decided to abolish the autonomy of Evlogi’s diocese of Western Europe. They postponed implementing a decision until receipt of approval from Patriarch Tikhon. However, Tikhon’s death in 1925 and the simultaneous near collapse of the Moscow Patriarchal administration left the issue unresolved. The discord finally erupted into open conflict in 1926 when metropolitan Anthony openly questioned whether Tikhon had actually granted Evlogy jurisdictional rights over the churches in Germany. In June of the same year, a majority of Russian Orthodox bishops attending another council in Sremski Karlovci voted for the creation of a centralized church administration under Metropolitan Anthony Khrapovsky of Kiev. This council also created an eparchy in Germany, infringing on Metropolitan Evlogy’s episcopal rights there conferred on him by Patriarch Tikhon.
Both sides appealed to Metropolitan Sergius Stragorodsky of Nizhny Novogorod who had recently assumed the status of locum tenens of the Moscow Patriarchate following the death of Patriarch Tikhon in April 1925. As locum tenens, Sergius was the administrator of the Patriarchate of Moscow until such time as a canonical synod of bishops could elect a new patriarch. The Soviets did not allow such a synod to assemble until 1943 when Sergius was canonically elected patriarch. Sergius, however, refused to adjudicate the dispute since he was ignorant of the situation of the church abroad and unable to maintain regular contact. He also advised the litigants to stop asking the Patriarchate for instructions because of probable soviet manipulation.
Unfortunately, the conflict continued unabated, finally coming to a head in October 1927 when the Karlovci synod brought charges against metropolitan Evlogy for allegedly violating church canons and banned him from performing any liturgical or sacramental activity. The Karlovcians, in their own flagrant violation of the canons, declared Evolgy deposed and appointed its own administrator, archbishop Serafim for the Western European Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Abroad. The overwhelming majority of parishes in the region remained loyal to Evlogy so that the synodal maneuvering came to naught. But the fissure between metropolitan Evlogy and the Karlovcians had hardened. Now, that there were now two rival jurisdictions of Russian Orthodoxy in Western Europe, each with a diametrically opposed vision of the Church.
The bishops of the synod had an attitude eerily similar to that of the Bourbons, the French royal family who were restored to the throne ruled again after the French Revolution but were said to “have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” The Bourbons failed to grasp that the Revolution had been a watershed, bringing vast permanent changes in its wake; the Ancien Regime was dead and a new France had taken its place. This willful ignorance and lack of perception led to their political demise. Likewise, the Karlovcians saw time as standing still with the Old Regime of Tsarism just waiting to be reappear without ever having undergone even a jod or tittle of change.
Mother Maria Skobtsova, an Evlogy loyalist, had some profound insights regarding the members of the Karlovci synod. On the one hand, she praised their deep and authentic piety while finding it very conservative and formalized. On the other hand, she saw them as imprisoned in the past by a nostalgia for an idyllic imperial Russia and an unswerving adherence to national traditions. She saw them as regretting the end of caesaropapism in Russia and as finding the stirrings of freedom in the Church introduced by the Moscow council of 1917-1918 distasteful. Nicolai Zernov, who would later become a renowned spokesman for Orthodoxy in the West, had similar observations, noting that the members of the synod viewed the Church as confined solely to the performance of cult activities. They looked to the restoration of the autocracy as the only viable means of protecting church life. They had no interest in the ideas of religious converts from the intelligentsia.
The Karlovicians were part of a tradition, adhering to the view, exemplified in a letter written in 1395 by patriarch Anthony of Constantinople to Vasily I grand prince of Moscow, to the effect that, “…for it is impossible for Christians to have a Church and no empire.” The partisans of the synod tended to be reclusive and xenophobic, avoiding any contact with broader cultural currents. They broke off all relations with the Moscow Patriarchate on the ground that it was a soviet puppet and reproached Evlogy for not following suit.
Metropolitan Evlogy’s continuing good relations with Metropolitan Sergius Stragorodsky, the locum tenens of the Moscow Patriarchate, by contrast, were predicated on a desire to avoid a further splintering of Russian Orthodoxy. It was a very perilous time for the Russian Church, coinciding with the consolidation of political power in the hands of Joseph Stalin who unleashed a new wave of terror. The scale of this persecution was symbolized by the public demolition with dynamite on December 5, 1931 of the cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. An architectural gem and major Orthodox religious focal point was reduced to rubble ostensibly so that a public swimming pool could be built on the site. The act of state-supported vandalism was part of a wider, well thought out plan to expunge, efface, and erase any memory of the Church from Russian society.
In dealing with Metropolitan Sergius, the Soviets were cleverly diabolical in their application of pressure. Rather than directly threatening or physically harming him, they brutalized him through the persecution of third parties. Both his sister, a nun and his cell monk had been executed as a warning. Whenever Sergius did not immediately comply with a demand of the soviet government, the secret police would stage a sweep of mass arrests of clergy followed by their executions or consignment to the Gulag. This vast system of concentration camps was scattered like islands of desolation, according to Alexander Solzhnitsyn, in an “archipelago” across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union. There, the harsh climate, meager rations, arduous labor, and savage physical abuse quickly took their toll on the inmates. While Sergius may have been willing personally to suffer personal martyrdom, he was reticent about placing anyone else at risk. He was caught in a terrible personal dilemma. He was aware that by his apparently supine and craven submission to soviet demands, he had destroyed his own reputation but he was just as aware that his open opposition would have completely destroyed the physical remnants of the Church in Russia. Sergius had also naively hoped that his collaboration with soviet authorities would result in their acceptance of the Church. Subsequent events were to prove his optimism as misplaced.
One sentence in Sergius’s declaration of loyalty to the soviet state in 1927 outraged many in the world wide Russian émigré community. “We wish to be Orthodox, he declared, and at the same time to claim the Soviet Union as our civil motherland, the joys and successes of which are our joys and successes, the misfortunes of which are our misfortunes.” The anger in émigré circles was misdirected since the sentence is actually an example of Sergius’s taking advantage of what little wiggle room he had to outwit the soviet authorities. He used the term rodina which means motherland rather than otechestvo, meaning fatherland, a word with obvious political connotations. In his declaration, Sergius was actually saluting the Russian people and not the soviet state. According to Alexis II Rediger, a later Patriarch of Moscow in an interview during the 1980s, it appears that Metropolitan Sergius had made an initial draft of the first half of this declaration in May 1927 but that its final version was the product of soviet compulsion.
Evlogy avoided public criticism of Sergius’s actions because he realized that the locum tenens was under very heavy soviet pressure with very little room to maneuver. Father Sergius Bulgakov, the dean of St-Sergius Theological Institute and a close personal advisor, encouraged Evlogy to remain steadfast in this position. In a pastoral message of 1930, Evlogy stated that, “we will never be able to understand how heavy is the cross that weighs on the shoulders of our hierarchy in soviet Russia.”In a second pastoral message , he repeated that, “we would not dare to judge Metropolitan Sergius.” Earlier in July 1927, Sergius had issued a declaration reproaching members of the émigré Russian Orthodox clergy for publicly taking counterrevolutionary positions and threatening church sanctions against those who refused publicly to recant and demanding that all promise loyalty to the soviet government. Evlogy personally complied, assuring Sergius that he was completely apolitical. He also promised that he would see to it that his clergy remained aloof from politics but he refused to guarantee the loyalty of any émigré to a Soviet regime that had declared them to be stateless. Metropolitan Sergius accepted this disclaimer.
As the Soviet persecution of religion continued unabated, Christians of many denominations began to protest. In 1929, Catholics and Anglicans sponsored days of prayer for the persecuted Christians in Russia. Evlogy, initially refrained from participating in these activities on the ground that the gatherings were not of a strictly religious nature. He also distanced himself from protests because his fellow bishops in Russia would bear the brunt of soviet retribution. Under pressure from his angry flock, Evlogy eventually spoke out, even participating in services at St Paul’s Cathedral in London and at L’Oratoire in Paris for the persecuted Church in the Soviet Union. Izvestia, the daily broadsheet newspaper that was the official mouth piece of the Soviet government responded by attacking these protests and prayer vigils as anti-soviet provocations, spearheaded by the Vatican and White Guardists. Evlogy, himself, also became the subject of sharp criticism from other soviet press outlets, while the journal of the Moscow patriarchate disputed Evolgy’s loyalty, calling the Anglican participants at the prayer services “ an international company allied against our government and headed by the Roman pope. “ The soviet authorities now forced Metropolitan Sergius to hold a public news conference on February 15, 1930 attended by international journalists in order to deny that there was any religious persecution in the Soviet Union. He also claimed that any clergy who were imprisoned had earned this fate through their involvement in illegal political activity. This event marked the nadir of Sergius’s moral reputation. The Karlovcians reacted, seeing him as a soviet flunky and as such, the proponent of a new heresy which they labeled “Sergianism.” Evlogy still continued to exercise restraint, commenting that, “The Church cannot be saved by lying in any case. But what would have happened if the Russian Church had been left without bishops, priests and sacraments-That’s unimaginable. At any rate, it is not for us, sitting in safety beyond anyone’s reach, to judge Metropolitan Sergius.”
Under relentless soviet pressure, the office of the synod of the Moscow patriarchate now accused Evlogy of breaching the terms of his declaration of loyalty to the Soviet Union by having attended prayer vigils. Sergius now demanded another signed oath of loyalty from Evlogy. His refusal led Sergius to castigate him severely. On June 10, 1930, Metropolitan Sergius followed up by issuing a decree removing Evlogy from the administration of the Russian churches in Western Europe and appointing Archbishop Vladimir Tikhonicky of Nice as his temporary replacement. Vladimir, however, refused to accept the appointment. Sergius also summoned Evlogy to appear before a synodal court in Moscow. On October 28, 1930, Sergius warned the disobedient clergy in Paris that metropolitan Evolgy and his followers had been given sufficient time to consider the harm caused to the Church by their actions and to repent. Because in their continuing defiance of the locum tenens, they had violated church canons and fostered a new schism. In a letter of December 24, 1930, that was only received in Paris in June 1930, metropolitan Sergius and his synod decreed that the dismissal of Evlogy was valid from the moment of its reception in Paris. Under its terms, all bishops, priests and laity who had been under Evlogy’s jurisdiction were now dispensed from any canonical obedience to him since his organization was considered schismatic. Metropolitan Sergius followed up by dispatching metropolitan Elevthery of Vilnius and Lithuania to Paris to assume authority and jurisdiction over the parishes of metropolitan Evlogy.
Shortly after his arrival in Paris on February 3, 1931, Evleuthery had a short discussion with Evlogy who was now compelled by circumstances to cross an ecclesiastical Rubicon. He realized that it was impossible for him to conduct a viable defense with Sergius since the metropolitan was now under the control of sinister forces outside the Church and was no longer acting in its best interests. Evlogy believed that his only recourse was to sever relations with Moscow. He now traveled to Istamboul, seeking the aid and counsel of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. Accordingly, on February 17, 1931, the patriarch issued a tome granting Evlogy the status of “Exarch for the Russian Parishes in Western Europe. An exarchate is an ecclesiastical that is not necessarily coterminous with a diocese; in Evlogy’s case, his see covered all of Western Europe, including the British Isles.
Evolgy’s diocesan council ratified his decision on February 25, 1931, noting that the Ecumenical Patriarch had assumed “provisional jurisdiction over the Russian Orthodox parishes in Western Europe.”By exercising this option, Evlogy was able to blunt the sanctions emanating from Moscow and to avoid directly responding to its decrees which henceforth would be referred to the patriarch of Constantinople. Most Western European parishes remained loyal to metropolitan Evlogy who had based his decision to come under the jurisdiction of another patriarch on canons that allowed a bishop to do so when in a dispute with his own. Some
individuals, however, including the theologian Vladimir Lossky and Anthony Bloom who would later become the Russian Orthodox bishop of Great Britain and Ireland, after a distinguished medical career, remained loyal to Moscow. They believed that the only licit reason for breaking the bonds of fealty to the Moscow Patriarchate would have been Sergius’s falling into open heresy. In their eyes, Sergius’s falling under soviet domination did not hit the mark. The Karlovcians also joined the fray and castigated Evlogy as a “Greek bishop.” Consequently, there were now three competing Russian Orthodox jurisdictions: the Exarchate for the Russian Parishes in Western Europe under metropolitan Evlogy, the Higher Church Administration Abroad, formerly known as the Karlovci synod under metropolitan Anthony, and the Patriarchate of Moscow under the locum tenens Sergius. A fourth group, the Renovationists who were fully coopted by the Soviets, had no impact in Western Europe.
Already, in December 1922, Evlogy had selected Paris as the seat or headquarters for the administration of his new diocese. During this time of great turmoil, the Parisian emigre community was fortunate in having him as its shepherd. The French Orthodox historian, Antoine Niviere considers Evlogy as one of the greatest Russian Orthodox churchmen of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Father Alexander Schmemann, who had served under him in the Parisian cathedral of St. Alexander Nevsky from the age of twelve, first as an acolyte before eventually progressing to the rank of subdeacon, recalls him as a simple humble man “whose authority clearly and self- evidently flowed from love”. Other contemporaries remembered him as kind-hearted man with a sparkling sense of humor. Although not renowned as a theologian or ascetic, Evlogy was a zealous pastor whose unstinting efforts helped to establish and foster a firm foundation for Russian Orthodoxy in the West.
His earlier career in the Church helped to prepare Evlogy for the challenges attached to his new office as Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox parishes in Western Europe. He had been a teacher and seminary administrator before serving as a bishop first in the Ukrainian diocese of Chelm, and then in the Galician diocese of Volhynia. Both sees had large Catholic and Uniate populations, and the latter was also of great strategic importance since it abutted the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A Russian Orthodox bishop in such areas had to be a model of tact and discretion. From 1905 onwards, he was a renowned champion of church reform and a delegate in the Second and Third Dumas. At the Moscow Council of 1917-1918, he was the chair of an important committee dealing with liturgics and subsequently a member of the patriarchal synod established by the council. The Patriarch Tikhon dispatched him to attend the church council of Kiev where he and Metropolitan Anthony were taken prisoner first by Ukrainian forces of Symon Petliura and then by the Poles. During his captivity, much of which was spent in solitary confinement, Evlogy underwent a deepening of his faith. In his memoirs, he recounts that his captivity had been a beneficial form of God’s mercy. It was only through the intervention of Georges Clemenceau that the two hierarchs were released after almost a year of captivity.
Providentially, the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad after the Bolshevik coup d’etat was in a historically unique position. For the first time since Tsar Peter the Great in 1721 had curtailed the autonomy of the Church by abolishing the office of patriarch and putting a synod of powerless bishops under a lay chief procurator in its place, a segment of the Church, although in exile, could work in an environment of freedom denied to both its predecessors and contemporaries in Russia. This segment was also at liberty to implement the reforms adopted by the All Russian Council of Moscow of 1917-1918. Unfortunately, the Bolshevik triumph of 1918 in Russia ended all probability of these reforms ever seeing the light of day in the Russian Mother church. The Bolsheviks, in a mirror image of Peter the Great also kept the patriarchal chair vacant after the death of patriarch Tikhon in 1924 until 1943. Likewise, in Petrine fashion, they confined the Church to worship, while banning preaching, instruction and charitable activities.
Conditions in the Church under the Chief procurator’s regime had been surreal right up to the eve of the Revolution. Under the Petrine system, which was influenced by German Protestant concepts of the subordination of the church to the prince, the Chief procurator was all powerful, serving as the eyes and ears of the Tsar while the bishops were merely pawns on the board. He controlled the agenda of the Holy Synod and kept a tight rein on the bishops who could not even travel within their own dioceses without his permission. There had been no assembly of Orthodox bishops in Russia between 1721 and 1917. If a bishop had a petition for the Tsar, it first had to pass through the Chief procurator who had the power to shelve it. The rare bishop who resisted was liable to being relegated to a monastery. A prime example of the unhealthy situation in which the Church found itself dates from 1905 when the Holy Synod asked the bishops of Russia for input over what areas of church life needed alteration or reform. The bishops’ response was enthusiastic, insightful, oriented toward real reform and revealed an amazing consensus among the episcopate regarding the specific areas in need of reform. Only three of the 130 Orthodox bishops in the Russian Empire opted for retention of the status quo. The responses, by churchmen, regarding affairs of the Church and filling three volumes, were read by the Tsar, a layman who on the advice of the Chief procurator, another layman, shelved them without taking any further action.
Evolgy, as a bishop in Russia before the Revolution, saw how the dead hand of Tsardom had oppressed the Church. In his memoirs, he relates that toward the end of the Old Regime, many pious and thoughtful Orthodox were alarmed by the contrast between grandeur, power and exterior beauty of the Church and its sad interior spiritual squalor. He saw a major source of the problem stemming from a state bureaucracy that had penetrated the administration and life of the Church and in the process, suffocating and paralyzing its spiritual forces while destroying its liberty and independence and squelching its dynamism. Most damaging to the Church was its loss of prestige among the people as it came under the domination of the state. While the state had conferred powerful material support, “the Church had to pay very very dearly because the state takes more from the Church than it supplies.” “..and that which it gives are perishable material goods and it obliges it (the Church) to renounce that which it is not possible to compromise.”
Evolgy also spoke from personal experience. He had been a deputy to the second and third imperial Dumas but the Holy Synod would not authorize his candidacy in the 1912 elections to the fourth imperial Duma because he had defied the wishes of the High procurator to become a member of a clerical clique of delegates in the upcoming session of the Duma who would give unswerving support to the government. A golden thread running through his career as a bishop is his persistent struggle against all those, both right and left who sought to diminish the liberty of the Church. His attitude had a pragmatic basis, “Let me say more about the Church’s freedom. In the framework of Church dogma and canons the Church’s freedom is the basic element, God’s voice that is heard in her. Can it be bound or muffled? External ties and suppression of this voice lead to spiritual slavery. Fear of freedom, thought, and spiritual creativity appear in Church life, and a drift toward pharisaic legalism, to the cult of the form and the letter become apparent. These are all signs of a faded freedom in the Church, of slavery, while Christ’s Church is a fully vital being that is eternally young, blossoming, and bearing fruit. I bow my head before the great spirit-bearing apostle of Christian freedom, the Holy Apostle Paul, and I rejoice that our holy Orthodoxy has kept this gift unscathed.” It was this love of freedom in an academic context that compelled him to a spirited defense of Father Sergius Bulgakov against what he considered to be baseless, and malicious charges of heresy.
Meanwhile the new Metropolitan’s energy in creating a Russian Orthodox church structure in France and the rest of Western Europe matched his zeal for defending the freedom of the Church. Eugraph Kovalevsky, a former member of the Duma as well as a close associate of Evlogy describes the metropolitan’s usual daily activities. In the course of an average day, he might begin by saying a moleban, a service of supplication or thanksgiving that could be served anywhere, then preside over a meeting, followed by delivering a sermon, and ending the day by being present at examinations of students at St Serge. A dynamo of energy, he also traveled across Western Europe through Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Germany, Italy and the British Isles, giving comfort, consolation and encouragement to the members of the Russian Orthodox parishes in these areas to remain steadfast in their faith. He also oversaw the creation of new parishes together with a network of schools and philanthropic organizations. In addition, he was a frequent guest at the conferences of Russian Orthodox youth organizations as well as a participant at meetings held by the nascent ecumenical movement.
He was instrumental in the creation of about thirty-five new parishes in Paris and its suburbs during the interwar period. The first of these, St-Sergius of Radonezsh, was formed because the cathedral of St Alexander Nevsky was too small to accommodate the throngs of Russian emigres desiring to attend Divine Liturgy. A spacious plot of realty, that included a former German Lutheran church that had been seized by the French government as war reparations, was purchased on July 18, 1924. The purchase date coincided with the feast day of St Sergius of Radonezsh who now became the patron saint of the new parish. Another parish, St sergius of Sarov and the Protection of the Mother of God was consecrated in 1933 by Evolgy. It was built on the miniscule donations of the financially hard-pressed Russian emigres of the 15th arrondissement. The actual building, a standing barrack ha the distinction of having been built around two live trees with openings left in the roof for tree limbs. In order to reach the actual building, which is invisible from the street, parishioners had to walk through an alley lined with garbage cans into a courtyard that actually is attached to another edifice. Today, the liturgical services at this small church are conducted in both French and Church Slavonic. A third parish, Our Lady the Joy of All Who Sorrow and Ste. Genevieve, was specially created for the spiritual needs of French speakers with a former Benedictine monk, Lev Gillet as its rector. The Liturgy and sacraments were celebrated in French. Evlogy had encouraged the foundation of this parish because he foresaw a time when a younger generation had assimilated into French society and no longer spoke Russian. He realized that language sensitivity was the key to retaining their loyalty to Orthodoxy.
The selection of these two saints as parish patrons signified a coalescence of east and west. The dual patrons emphasized that Orthodoxy was not irrevocably tied to any one culture and could flourish in a western milieu. The cult of Our Lady Joy of All who Sorrow was one of the most popular Russian Orthodox Marian devotions. St Genevieve, the patron saint of the city and Catholic diocese of Paris, lived in the fifth century Gaul; her prayers were credited with saving Paris in 451 from the wrath of Attila the Hun. This parish also acted as a magnate for converts. The noted French Orthodox theologian, Elisabeth Behr-Sigal, although an academically-trained Protestant theologian, was attracted here, eventually converting to Orthodoxy. Other parishes were established in working class neighborhoods -in garages, abandoned factories, and even in private homes. These parishes then crafted a network of schools, libraries, and homes for the aged and destitute, merging philanthropy, social work and outreach.
Evlogy was gifted with discernment, integrity and moral courage, leading him to protect Father Sergius Bulgakov, a most controversial and perhaps the greatest Russian Orthodox theologian of the twentieth century, from his detractors. He had personal esteem for Father Bulgakov and tenaciously defended him against charges of heresy leveled against him by both the Moscow Patriarchate and by the Karlovci synod. His strong sense of the need for intellectual freedom in theological studies coupled with his recognition and respect for Bulgakov’s deep spirituality compelled him to act. The galvanizing factor was undoubtedly the overwhelming awe emanating from Father Bulgakov when he served Liturgy. Evlogy also sensed the spiritual gifts of Elisabeth Skobtsova which were not as readily apparent of those of Bulgakov. On the surface, she was a twice-divorced, chain smoking bohemian with an abrasive personality. Evlogy discerned that beneath an unconventional exterior, there glowed the embers of a spiritual ardor waiting to be ignited. As he describes her in his memoir, “…and formerly a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Her personality featured unusual energy, a freedom loving breadth of viewpoints, a gift of exercising initiative, and imperiousness. Monasticism had not caused her to overcome her leftist political sympathies nor her demagogic tendency to influence people.” There is a story, no doubt apocryphal, but with more than a kernel of truth about the personalities of both, that when Metropolitan Evlogy had suggested that she should enter the religious life. Skobtsova protested that, “ I could never be a good nun.” He is said to have responded, “ I know that but I want you to be a revolutionary nun.” In receiving her into the monastic life on the First Sunday of Lent in 1932, Evlogy gave her the name of St. Mary of Egypt, telling her that just as the first Mary had retreated to the desert after a life of passion, so too, she should go into and speak, and act in the desert of the suffering human heart. Mother Mary then spent the next decade caring for the poor, the outcast, and the discarded in Paris and the rest of France. During the German occupation of France, she provided false documents for Jews, an act leading to her arrest and eventual death in the Ravensbruck concentration camp. Today, she is revered as Saint Mary of Paris both by the Orthodox and by French Catholics.
Undoubtedly Metropolitan Evolgy’s most far reaching accomplishment was his role in the foundation of l’institut de Theologie Orthodoxe Saint-Serge in Paris. The Institute was on the same grounds as the like-named parish. Its priority was the education of candidates for the priesthood. At its opening in 1925, St Serge was the only institution in the world devoted to Russian Orthodox theological studies. The Metropolitan intended the new entity to continue the high scholastic traditions of the theological academies of St Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev and Kazan. All of them, together with all other Russian seminaries had been shuttered by the soviet state. In a heart- felt sermon, Evlogy expressed his hopes for the new school: “…How I hope that this place should become a warmly-lighted centre of orthodoxy…I hope that our foreign friends, representatives of Western Christianity , may also find a way to this shrine…We must show them the beauty of orthodoxy.” The initial funding for this institution came from a variety of sources including Dr. John Mott, President of the American YMCA’s World Committee, the Anglican Society of St Alban, and Moses Ginzburg, an old friend of Evlogy who extended a loan of 100,000 francs without interest or a time limit for repayment. These donations evoked a negative response from the conspiracy prone among the more reactionary elements of the Russian emigration who saw Saint-Serge as a front for Jewish and Masonic machinations.
Evlogy recruited a stellar faculty of academically distinguished, priests and laymen, many of whom had taught at secular universities, to staff the new facility. Father Sergius Bulgakov, the dean of the new Institute taught Dogmatic Theology, while Father Georges Florovsky was sssigned to fashion a program of Patristics, the study of the thought and works of the Church Fathers. Some of the other faculty members and their specialties were: George P Fedotov in western church history and hagiography, the study of saints’ lives. Father Cassian Bezobrazov in New Testament studies and Greek, Nicolai Afanasiev in canon law and early church history, Vasily Zenkovsky in philosophy, apologetics and the history of religion. These were only part of a faculty that produced a prodigious quantity of books and articles, many of which are still relevant today. Florovsky’s Ways of Russian Theology still generates both controversy and respect for its depth and erudition. Six of Bulgakov’s most significant theological works appeared as two trilogies and have recently been republished for an appreciative academic audience. The first three books dealing with the theme of divine wisdom (Sophia) in the world are: The Burning Bush, the Friend of the Bridegroom, and Jacob’s Ladder. The second three focusing on the relationship between God and humanity are: The Lamb of God, the Comforter, and the Bride of the Lamb. Fedotov, who was initially trained as a medievalist, did pioneering work in the study of saints’ lives and is best known for his two volume study, The Russian Religious Mind, while Afanasiev’s Church of the Holy Spirit is viewed as one of the most significant works in twentieth century Russian Orthodox theology as well as a source book for reformers at the Second Vatican Council. Zenkovsky, who came to the Institute as a layman, before eventually becoming a priest, authored a two volume History of Russian Philosophy that remains a long time classic in the field. In addition to the output of books, many of the faculty contributed articles to the Russian language journal, The Way (Put), edited by Nickolai Berdjaev.
The faculty came to be known collectively as the “Paris school”. The term is misleading since it was not limited to faculty members or to Paris; it embraced thinkers like Vladimir Lossky and Nikolai Berdyaev who were never on the faculty of St Serge, while faculty members like Father Cyprian Kern vehemently denied the existence of such a school. Furthermore, the relationship among faculty members was not all that harmonious. During the late 1930s, for instance, George Fedotov came under heavy personal criticism from faculty colleagues because of his vocal defense of the Republican side in the Spanish civil war. Members of the Karlovci synod used the term “Paris school”as a shorthand for the sinister stirrings of modernism, Masonry and heresy that it imagined were emanating from St Serge to the detriment of Russian Orthodoxy. ” Their unease stemmed from the fact that the American Protestant YMCA, and Anglican groups had made substantial financial contributions to St Serge and that some of its faculty, including Fathers Bulgakov and Florovsky were now participating in the nascent ecumenical movement.
While there was not a single unified school of religious and theological thought coming out of St. Serge, Father Alexander Schmemann demonstrated, there was a unanimous criticism of the Western captivity of Russian theology and the need to reset Russian theology once again along traditional patristic lines. However, the consensus broke down as two major, often diametrically opposed strands of thought, emerged on how to implement this project. Fathers Georges Florovsky and Sergius Bulgakov, described by Father John Jillions as “ colleagues and sparring partners, “ were the major protagonists of each strand. In one sense, the ensuing controversy was grammatical, revolving around the use of to implement this project. John Jillions as “protagonists of each strand. In one sense, the ensuing controversy was grammatical, revolving around the use of prepositions: was there a need to return to the Fathers or to go beyond them?
Father Bulgakov, as Father Schmemann points out, was the more philosophically oriented of the two. He advocated focusing on the traditional sources of Russian Orthodoxy found in the Fathers, the Liturgy, and the living spiritual experience of the Church, but, at the same time, he was willing to critique the Fathers and received Tradition on the ground that centuries of philosophical development had created a new situation, calling for a creative synthesis. Father Bulgakov saw the fuel for a synthesis emanating from the Western philosophical tradition, especially from German idealism. He was convinced that the Hellenic tradition, by itself, no longer provided the intellectual scaffolding need by the Church to come to terms with modernity. More concretely. Father Bulgakov hoped to flesh out and elaborate on the dogmatic declarations of the Fathers at the Council of Chalcedon.
Father Florovsky, needless to say, took an opposite tack, advocating a return to the Greek Fathers. In his eyes, their work was the bedrock and glue giving shape and doctrinal coherence and consistency to the Church. He advocated a “return to the Fathers”, a task to be accomplished through a neo-patristic synthesis. Such a synthesis was necessary because Unfortunately, Russia had readily assimilated Byzantine ascetic and liturgical practices while lagging on the absorption of its theological tradition. Based on his reading of the German historian of civilization, Oswald Spengler, Florovsky adopted the concept of “pseudomorphosis”. A term originally used in geology, it was transformed by Spengler to indicate a social process in which a young immature culture is overwhelmed and smothered by a more sophiscated one. In the case of Russia, a weak Orthodox theological tradition had been swamped by western scholasticism. At Kiev, where a number of Orthodox bishops submitted to Rome and adopted scholasticism as the intellectual foundation for all theological endeavors to the detriment of a traditional Orthodox world view. Under both the Catholic and Protestant varieties of scholasticism, a premise followed by logical syllogisms replaced the traditional apophatic approach. Other salient examples of Western infiltration involved such issues as the problem of justification in the form of Pelagianism that had enmeshed Catholics and Protestants from the Reformation up to recent times, the existence of Purgatory, and papal primacy versus the authority of councils. Both forms of scholasticism continued to be in vogue in Russian theological schools until the Great War. (The theological disagreements between Bulgakov and Florovsky will be amplified in a later installment.).
Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev sees five streams of thought emanating from St. Serge. The first two stemmed from the work of Fathers Florovsky and Bulgakov. Florovsky’s allies and disciples also included Cyprian Kernm, Vladimir Lossky and John Meyendorff who helped to rediscover the writings of St. Gregory Palamas. A third stream, consisting of Fathers Nicholas Afanasiev and Alexander Schmemann focused on liturgical theology. Father Schmemann also had a foot in both of the first two streams. A fourth stream, characterized by an interest in Russian history and culture was dominated by Georges Fedotov who did pioneering work in editing Russian saints’ lives and by Nicholas Zernov who coined the term Russian religious renaissance in the course of writing about the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church. Zernov was also an active participant in the ecumenical movement and one of the founding members of the Brotherhood of St. Alban and St. Sergius which aimed at the reunion of the churches. A fifth stream focused on traditional Russian philosophy which focused on religious questions; its most prominent members were Nicholas Berdyaev, Nicholas Lossky, Basil Zenkovsky, Lev Shestov and S. Frank. The members of all five streams were united in their desire to preserve traditional Russian culture and to reinvigorate the Russian Orthodox Church as envisaged by the All Russian council of Moscow of 1917-1918. Ironically, their major theological task – the liberation of the Church from the western captivity – was accomplished while in exile in a western milieu.