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SPIRITUALITY IN EXILE: EXPATRIATE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX THEOLOGY *

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By Mikhail Epstein

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The Montréal Review, October 2022

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Religious Philosophy in Russia

It would be difficult to extract or isolate religious thought from Russian philosophy, as the two have been integral from the outset. According to the Rus' Primary Chronicle, or The Tale of Bygone Years (compiled in Kiev around 1113), Rus' adopted its faith from a “philosopher” (filosof), a missionary sent by Byzantium in A.D. 986 and credited with unfolding before Prince Vladimir the mysteries of the Old and New Testaments. Most of those who founded Russian philosophy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—Grigorii Skovoroda, Petr Chaadaev, Aleksei Khomiakov, Ivan Kireevsky, and Vladimir Solovyov—were deeply religious thinkers. The central purpose of Vladimir Solovyov’s philosophy, according to his own definition, was “to justify the faith of our fathers and elevate it to a higher level of rational consciousness.”1 This did not imply a return to the medieval European principle that philosophy is the servant of theology. This synthesis of religion and philosophy, as Russian thinkers at least since Solovyov understood it, was to be achieved on an individual, creative foundation, in the process of free thinking, not as an official dogmatic system of the Orthodox Church, which in Russia was traditionally quite far from philosophy and any secular forms of knowledge. For the thinkers just mentioned, the very purpose of philosophy and religion was identical: philosophy was to attain the absolute by way of thinking, religion, by way of being. The ultimate goal is one, which makes possible the synthesis of philosophy and theology.

Even in the early twentieth century, in the Silver Age, when Russian philosophy attained its broadest scope and impact, and was no longer accountable to religious censorship, it remained profoundly religious, though it accentuated existentialist aspects of faith as a personal truth rather than a dogmatic tradition. This integrative character of “religious philosophy” was further intensified in the postrevolutionary period, when the majority of preeminent Russian thinkers were forced to emigrate. The writings of émigré thinkers of this period, such as Nikolai Berdiaev, Lev Shestov, Sergei Bulgakov, Semyon Frank, Dmitrii Merezhkovsky, Georgii Fedotov, and Ivan Ilyin, are imbued with a spirit of resistance to the militant materialism and atheism that prevailed in the USSR. However, the philosophical and social perspectives of Russian religious thinkers, even those with deep Orthodox affiliations, are marked by a great diversity. For example, Berdiaev’s apocalyptic Christianity, with its appeal to free religious creativity and denial of Church dogmatism, finds a strong contrast and counterpart in the writings of Ivan Ilyin, the foremost apologist of the political right and Russian nationalism.

Major Expatriate Theologians

The latter half of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of several important expatriate spiritual writers. Although some of their works were written in English, they may definitely be inscribed in the tradition of Russian philosophy that was their cultural inheritance. Orthodox thought of this period concentrates on three major sets of problems: 1) theology and dogmatics; 2) the life of the Church, the liturgy and other sacraments; and 3) the personal experience of faith and prayer. Respectively, the three major Orthodox thinkers of the emigration—Georges Florovsky, Alexander Schmemann, and Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh—devoted themselves to these three domains.

The Revival of Theology. Georges Florovsky

Georges Florovsky (1893–1979), who emigrated from Russia in 1920, had a long and illustrious scholarly career, teaching at such universities as St. Sergius Theological Institute in Paris (which he cofounded), Harvard Divinity School, and Princeton University. His first intellectual association, beginning in 1921, was with the group of Eurasianists, which he cofounded with three other thinkers; in particular, he authored three of the ten articles comprising the group’s manifesto Exodus to the East (1921). Florovsky, however, soon broke with the Eurasian movement because of its pro-Soviet orientation and proto–totaliatarian ideology, and his intellectual perspective shifted to what he called a “new patristic synthesis.” Simply put, he believed that the teachings of the Eastern Church fathers should provide the foundation for a future Orthodox revival. This position informed his major works, The Eastern Fathers of the Fourth Century (1931), The Ways of Russian Theology (1937), and others, comprising sixteen volumes of his Collected Works published in English translation. His main treatises were composed in the 1930s–40s and belong among the classics of Russian theology, but some of his principal articles were written later, in the 1950s–70s, and collected in the volume Christianity and Culture, where he explores the relationship between the two phenomena, an issue that was focal for Russian religious philosophy in general.

Georges Florovsky (1893–1979)

Florovsky characterizes Christianity as an “essentially historical” religion, since historical events and names, like Pontius Pilate, are included even within the Christian creed. He agrees with the English philosopher R. G. Collingwood that “what is miscalled an event is really an action, and expresses some thought (intention, purpose) of its agent.”2 Florovsky interprets this to mean that history as such began only with Christ, since before him it was merely a succession of events, and only after Christ endowed the world with purpose did history become a chronicle of “actions” in the proper (i.e., purposive) sense of this word. As Florovsky puts it, “the true history of man is not a political history ... but a history of the spirit, the story of man’s growth to the full stature of perfection, under the Lordship of the historical God-man.”3 Thus the events of history ought not merely to be recorded, but also interpreted in light of their religious implications.

Above all, the Christian historian will regard history at once as a mystery and as a tragedy—a mystery of salvation and a tragedy of sin. He pursues his professional task of interpreting human life in the light of his Christian vision of that life, sorely distorted by sin, yet redeemed by Divine mercy, and healed by Divine grace, and called to the inheritance of an everlasting kingdom.4

Florovsky’s thought strives—typically for the conservative mode of reasoning—to mediate between extremes. In his discussion of the relationship between Christianity and the secular world, Florovsky argues the inadequacy of the two polar tendencies of “flight into the desert” and, on the other hand, the “construction of the Christian Empire.”5 He concludes that the very dilemma is a false one, since Christians are called to work within the world but not to immerse themselves in worldliness. The model of the creative interaction between Christianity and the world might be the medieval monasteries, which “were, for a long time, precisely the most powerful centers of cultural activity, both in the West and in the East,”6 though they eschewed taking a political role. Christianity, then, does not deny worldly culture, but judges it by the measure of Christ. Thus, for Florovsky, both history and culture should be admitted into the realm of Christianity, as long as the limitations of their sovereignty are recognized and they are considered in light of their relationship to revelation.

This same equivocating tendency is evident in Florovsky’s critique of the two main tendencies in contemporary theology. One of these, liberalism, attempts to demythologize Christianity by interpreting the miracles of Christ solely as edifying and psychological metaphors. At the other extreme, the neo-Orthodox tendency seeks to limit the role of individual action in the Church, leaving its members with only the possibility to listen and to hope. Florovsky identifies these tendencies with the ancient heresies of Nestorianism and monophysitism, which respectively emphasized the human versus the divine nature of Christ.7 The only solution Florovsky offers is to “preach the whole Christ,” by which he means a theological synthesis of Christ’s humanity and divinity. In effect, this entails a general return to the practice of theology as it was understood by the Church fathers. Such is Florovsky’s overall message: theology is more crucial now than ever. Since the modern world is dominated by a mood of existential despair and intellectual fragmentation, theology is the one discipline that can integrate such diverse human capacities as were bestowed in the act of creation.

Theology, in Florovsky’s estimation, is more important for the Church than any political or social commitment, since history must be understood through its spiritual dimension. Florovsky’s main reproach to Russian Orthodoxy is that it suppressed its theological mission in favor of liturgical practice; such religious thinkers as Vladimir Solovyov and Nikolai Fedorov, on the other hand, digressed too far from theology in the direction of philosophical mysticism and utopian social projects. Thus, theology, as the realm of dogmatic thinking advanced by the Church fathers, has been neglected both by the “non-thinking” Orthodox priesthood and “non-dogmatic” religious thinkers. In fact, most Orthodox priests consider theology to be a luxury, or even a betrayal of ritualistic duties, while philosophers tend to view Church dogmatics as too restrictive for the free flight of their thought. The silence of priests, and the hasty and vague eloquence of philosophers—these were the two deviations from the theological mission of Orthodoxy. Florovsky believes that this “[n]eglect of theology in the instruction given to laity in modern times is responsible both for the decay of personal religion and for that sense of frustration which dominates the modern mood.”8 He goes even so far as to blame this anti-theological bias of Orthodoxy for the spiritual catastrophe of the Russian Revolution. When it comes to theological questions, in his view, silence is at least as dangerous as false solutions;9 thus it is the task of Orthodoxy to revive the art of dogmatic thinking and the theological zeal of the early Eastern fathers. 

The Liturgical Philosophy of Alexander Schmemann

Alexander Schmemann (1921–83) was one of the most influential writers on questions of the Orthodox liturgy. Having emigrated from Estonia in childhood, he lived in Paris until 1951, when he moved to the United States. In 1962, he became dean of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary in New York City, where he served until his death. He was the author of approximately three thousand sermons that were broadcast to Russia twice a week and had considerable impact on the Orthodox revival there. Schmemann was a rare combination of rigorous theologian and popular preacher. Along with Florovsky and Vladimir Lossky (1903–58), he is considered to be a leading Orthodox scholar in the field of Church dogmatics. At the same time, like Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, he is regarded as one of the most eloquent Orthodox preachers, addressing the existential and cultural challenges to faith in the postwar world.

Alexander Schmemann (1921–1983)

Schmemann is an “objective” theologian, in the sense that he considers the primary reality of religious life to be revelation. The objective reality of God is given through the scriptural revelation of the Bible and the corporeal revelation of Christ. “Faith is the human response to God, and this response presupposes that the initiative of the human attitude toward God that we call faith, belongs not to man but to God. God reveals Himself to man, man receives this revelation and responds to God.”10 This is why the atheistic demand for proof of God’s existence must be answered not merely with the assertion that God is invisible, but also with the evidence of revelation, through which God becomes visible.

The majority of Schmemann’s works deal with the meaning of revelation as it is presented in the Orthodox liturgy, which he considers to be the most transparent and accessible manifestation of God’s reality. Three of his most important books are dedicated to the liturgy: An Introduction to Liturgical Theology; The Eucharist; and Of Water and the Spirit, devoted to the sacrament of baptism. He interprets the formal components of the liturgy as symbols of human communication with God grounded in the materiality of the rituals themselves.

The central concept of Schmemann’s theology is that of symbol. The sacraments are symbolic, but no more than the material world itself is symbolic in its relationship to the kingdom of God. Hence the function of symbol is not to represent the reality that it signifies, but actually to become it. The symbol is a portal from the lesser reality to the greater one. Sacraments were established in response to the fall from grace, as medicines to heal the ills of sin. Thus the purpose of the sacraments is transformative rather than representative; they act to restore the fullness of reality from which man alienated himself through sin. Etymologically, “symbol” comes from a Greek word meaning “to unite, keep together,” originally referring to an object that has been divided into two pieces such that the possessor of either piece could recognize the other. In the same way, the sacrament is granted to humanity as a symbol enabling it to recognize this world, fallen and alienated, as a part of God’s kingdom. In symbol,

the empirical (or “visible”) and the spiritual (or “invisible”) are united not logically (this “stands for” that), nor analogically (this “illustrates” that), nor yet by cause and effect (this is the “means” or “generator” of that), but epiphanically. One reality manifests and communicates the other, but—and this is immensely important—only to the degree to which the symbol itself is a participant in the spiritual reality and is able or called upon to embody it.11

For Schmemann, symbolism is connected with the very essence of religious faith, since faith is directed to the manifestation of invisible things. “Therefore, if the symbol presupposes faith, faith of necessity requires the symbol.”12

In Schmemann’s view, the reality that is manifested in the sacrament is the kingdom of God. The liturgy is the manifestation of this kingdom, not merely hoped for or believed in, but already present in human life. “For the first Christians the all-encompassing joy, the truly startling novelty of their faith lay in the fact that the kingdom was at hand. It had appeared, and although it remained hidden and unseen for ‘this world,’ it was already present, its light had already shone, it was already at work in the world.”13 Schmemann criticizes the tendency of later Christianity to relate this world and God’s kingdom in chronological or topographical terms. According to this misrepresentation, the kingdom is “there” or “then,” beyond this world or after it. The sacrament is a way of integrating here and there, now and then, in such a way that the kingdom is experienced as fully immanent and material.

 The overall aim of Schmemann’s theological project, despite its thematic diversity, may be summarized as an elaboration of the material substance of faith. He is critical of all kinds of religious idealism or psychologism, which identify Christianity with pure spirituality, with a transcendent realm or the internal domain of personal inspiration. “Man, as he was created by God, is both an animated body and embodied spirit, and therefore any separation of these—not just the final separation, in death, but also before death—any violation of their unity is evil, a spiritual catastrophe.”14 It is the mission of the Church to restore this unity. Against the emblematic conventionalism that developed in the Catholic and especially Protestant churches, Schmemann counterposes the realism, even materialism, of the Orthodox liturgy. For Schmemann, the core of the Orthodox tradition is its reliance on the liturgy, not in the sense that it isolates the Church from the world, but in the sense that the entire world, including the Church, is only part of God’s kingdom. The liturgy is the sensible and corporeal manifestation of God’s kingdom on earth, just as Christ was the corporeal manifestation of God himself. Therefore one cannot divorce the liturgy from Christianity or downplay its significance by calling it a “ritualistic form.” Thus, for Schmemann, the objects and actions that comprise the liturgy are spiritualized inasmuch as spirit is materialized through their sacramental manifestations.

Paradoxically, Schmemann sees the ritualistic accent in Russian Orthodoxy as indicative of a certain deficiency, a lack of creative impulses. “In adopting Byzantine Christianity, Russia took no interest in either Plato, Aristotle, or the entire Hellenistic tradition, which for Christian Byzantium remained a living and vital reality.... Incredibly, Russian Christianity began without a school or scholastic tradition, and Russian culture immediately concentrated in the church and worship ... and [this church- and worship-oriented Christianity] proved alien to the idea of ​​development and creativity. It became sacred and static, excluding doubt and seeking.... Any creativity, any seeking, any change was perceived as rebellion, almost blasphemy and anarchy, and thus the essence of culture, as a creative continuity, did not emerge.” 15

This juxtaposition of traditional–liturgical and creative–spiritual aspects in Schmemann's theology becomes more clear if we understand it as the theology of life that resists all kinds of mortification. This means, first, to perceive life not as a given, but as a gift, because no one can make himself alive. The gift arouses wonder and gratitude, because it is constantly renewable, with every minute. Alexander Schmemann's journals published recently provide clear evidence of such an approach:

My main and constant sensation is the sensation of life. Perhaps the closest thing to this feeling is the word "wonder," the perception of each moment and each condition as some kind of gift (as opposed to "self-evident," "self-obvious"). Everything is always new, everything is always not just life, but an encounter with life and therefore a kind of revelation... <...> The mass of people, maybe even the overwhelming majority, live without noticing life. For them, it is a neutral, impersonal "frame" of themselves, a "substrate," but not an encounter, not a gift."16

Schmemann clearly suggests that life itself, not just scriptures or rituals, is revelation, and to be worthy of it we have not just to "live," but to perform living as a sacrament, as an encounter with God and as a gift from Him.

The Existential Christianity of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh (1914–2003; secular name: Andrei Blum), commonly known as Anthony Bloom, was the son of a Russian diplomat who remained abroad after the October Revolution. An atheist in his early youth, Anthony pursued a medical career that was not halted by his sudden conversion to Christianity. Ordained as a priest in 1948, he served for decades as the head of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchal Church in Great Britain. In 1957 he was consecrated as bishop, and then as archbishop and metropolitan bishop in charge of the Russian Orthodox Church in Great Britain and Ireland. A magnificent preacher, and one of the spiritual leaders of the Russian Orthodox intelligentsia, he was for many years one of the very few bridges between the Moscow Patriarchate and Orthodoxy abroad.17

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh (1914–2003)

Of all major Orthodox thinkers, Anthony of Sourozh puts the least emphasis on Church tradition, focusing instead on the complexities of the personal encounter between man and God. His theology is anthropologically oriented toward the existential circumstances of modernity: the psychological anxieties of contemporary humanity, its feelings of alienation, loneliness, and obsession with materialistic pursuits. Anthony does not seek to refute materialism from some “super-spiritual” or purely idealistic point of view, but argues, rather, that Christianity serves the glorification of the material world better than does atheistic materialism. “Christianity is the only perfect materialism in the sense that a materialist regards matter as a constructing material, whereas for us matter acquires an absolute significance; it is sacred because of the embodiment of Christ, in Whom the fullness of Divinity dwelled corporeally.”18 Though materialists claim to glorify man as the creator of all values, the image of man is actually denigrated, devoid as it is of those potentials for sanctification that man enjoys in Christianity. Thus communication between believers and nonbelievers might proceed, not through polemics, but on the assumption that nonbelievers’ ideals and hopes are justified, but are best served by Christianity.

Metropolitan Anthony takes a similarly tolerant and conciliatory attitude toward the issue of pluralism, a phenomenon typically decried by Orthodox and conservative thinkers (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn among them) as incompatible with Christian convictions. In his view, pluralism is entirely understandable: it calls into question not Christianity but Christians themselves, whose example is not compelling enough to keep others from adopting alternative value systems. Thus if one is aware of Christian beliefs but does not accept them, this is not one’s own failing, but that of the Christians one knows, who do not adequately embody the truth of Christianity in such a way as to make it undeniable. Tolerance is also characteristic of Anthony’s attitude toward other religions; he treats them as stages in the search for God, referring to Pascal’s revelation from the Pensées: “Comfort yourself, you would not seek Me if you had not already found Me.” This means that Christians must be attentive to how people of other religions experience God, even if their piety is expressed in the most exotic or seemingly distorted forms.

The basic concept of the metropolitan’s theology is the personal and immediate encounter between an individual and God, which is attained through prayer. Anthony of Sourozh authored several books on the subject of prayer whose influence spread beyond the bounds of Orthodoxy. In these he argues that mere ritual cannot provide a true sense of God unless one knows to whom such worship is addressed. “Encounter is central to prayer. It is the basic category of revelation, because revelation itself is an encounter with God who gives us a new vision of the world.”19 One must feel God with the same certitude with which one knows a neighbor, so that prayer becomes a kind of dialogue.

The difficulty, according to Anthony, is that not only may our image of God be false, but also our image of ourselves may be falsified by our social existence. Each individual presents himself as a succession of social masks, thereby becoming unrecognizable to others and even to himself. So he must also discover his true self before he can have a real relationship with God. Without self-knowledge, true dialogue with God is impossible, and many prayers go unanswered that are founded upon an incomplete understanding of the self. Anthony emphasizes the importance of silence as a mode of communication with God: “Inner silence is absence of any sort of inward stirring of thought or emotion, but it is complete alertness, openness to God.”20 True communication is both speaking and listening, and it is often easy to forget that prayer also involves listening, not just the cataloguing of requests and adorations. One should attain such a repose of soul and body that one may become aware of even the faintest whispering of God’s replies. For Anthony, prayer is not just a habitual element of worship, but a continual mode of existence, of remaining both open to the divine word and answerable to it.

For Anthony of Sourozh, the main aspect of the relationship between man and God is mutuality. Traditionally, faith and hope are viewed as transient modes of the human attitude toward God that will fall away when God reveals himself fully. However, Anthony is convinced that faith and hope are also modes of God’s own existence inasmuch as He is personally involved in the creation and life of each individual. “[E]very time that a man enters the world, it is an act of Divine faith in him.... God believes in us, God hopes for everything from us.”21 Further:

We must bring to the world a faith not only in God, but in man ... and must trust that God did not create people in vain, that He believes in every person, that He trusts in everyone, that He loves each person until His very death on the cross; and therefore there is no man, no matter how far he is from God in his own eyes, who would not be infinitely close to God.22

This creed of Christian humanism is addressed not only to each individual but also to the entire world as it was created by God and is studied by the natural sciences. “I graduated from the science faculty; I was a doctor, and I experienced the study of physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine as part of theology, that is, as part of the knowledge of what God created, of what He reveals, of what He loves—because God created nothing by power, but created by love.”23 We have to love the world in its materiality because it was created not only with love, but “by love.” Thus theology should not isolate itself from the natural sciences, but incorporate them as an inquiry into God’s creation.

Furthermore, non-Orthodox denominations and even non-Christian religions, according to Metropolitan Anthony, contain a certain truth about God. “As for non-Christian religions, I think that no one can invent God, and therefore any religion that speaks of God speaks from within some direct experience of the Divine. This experience may be very incomplete, but it is real.”24 Metropolitan Anthony acknowledges that he learned a great deal about Christianity and the Orthodox faith from reading and communicating with non-Christians, with secularized people, nonbelievers who were capable of love, sacrifice, compassion, and mercy. Believers have only themselves to blame for the fact that nonbelievers, meeting them, do not meet Christ in their person and therefore become alienated from faith.

Metropolitan Anthony, being a high-ranking member in the Church hierarchy, represented one of the most inclusive, existentially profound views on faith as a complete openness to the world. “Orthodoxy is as spacious as God Himself. If it is not the size of God, then it is just another religion, it is not an experience of God.”25

Expatriate theology made an important contribution to Russian intellectual history of the 1950s–80s in that it demonstrated that Orthodoxy is not an outdated and purely formal system of dogma. Indeed, Orthodoxy had been subject to criticisms of its strict conformity to the letter of tradition, its ostensible incapacity for spiritual renovation, its isolation from the social and cultural world. The Orthodox thinkers of the twentieth century, though immersed in dogmatic and liturgical studies, provide a framework of linkages between the formal elements of ritual and its spiritual meanings, thus giving impetus to the religious renaissance that slowly took place in Russia in the 1970s and 1980s with the waning of the ideology of atheism.

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Mikhail N. Epstein is a Russian–American cultural and literary scholar. He is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University (USA). From 2012 to 2015, he served as Professor and Founding Director of the Centre for Humanities Innovation at Durham University (UK). Epstein has authored 39 books and more than 800 articles and essays. His work has been translated into 24 languages. His latest books include: The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012); The Irony of the Ideal: Paradoxes of Russian Literature (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017); Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (with A. Genis and S. Vladiv-Glover; Berghahn Books, 2016). A Philosophy of the Possible: Modalities in Thought and Culture (Brill, 2019); The Phoenix of Philosophy: Russian Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953-1991) (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019); Ideas Against Ideocracy: Non-Marxist Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953–1991) (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).

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* This article was originally published in the book: Mikhail Epstein. Ideas Against Ideocracy: Non-Marxist Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953–1991). New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, 280 pp. 63–72. For this publication, the chapter was slightly revised and expanded.

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Notes:

1 Vladimir Solov’ev, Sochineniia v 10 tt. (St. Petersburg: Prosveshchenie, 1914), 4: 243.  

2 R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (New York: Mentor Books, 1949), 127–28.

3 Georges Florovsky, Collected Works (Belmont, MA: Nordland Publishing Company, 1972–74), 2: 64.

4 Ibid., 65.

5 Ibid., 2: 28.

6 Ibid., 30.

7 Ibid., 1: 14–15.

8 Ibid., 15.

9 Georgii Florovskii, Puti russkogo bogosloviia (Paris: YMCA Press, 1988), 517.

10 Protoierei Aleksandr Shmeman, Voskresnye besedy (Paris: YMCA Press, 1989), 25.

11 Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist. Sacrament of the Kingdom, trans. Paul Kachur (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988), 39.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., 42.

14 Shmeman, Voskresnye besedy, 73.

15 A. Shmeman, “Istoki maksimalizma v russkoi kul’ture” (a discussion on Radio Liberty). Available electronically: https://www.pravmir.ru/protopresviter-aleksandr-shmeman-istoki-maksimalizma-v-russkoy-kulture/

16  Protoirei Alexander Schmeman. Dnevniki. 1973-1983. 6th ed. Moscow: Russkii put', 2021. 
Entry March 11, 1980. https://booksdaily.club/nauchnye-i-nauchno-populjarnye-knigi/istorija/page-160-185414-aleksandr-shmeman-dnevniki.html

17 One of the most trustworthy and authentic biographical accounts of Metropolitan Anthony was written by his longtime friend, the distinguished scholar of Russian culture Avril Pyman: Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh. A Life (Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2016). 

18 Mitropolit Antonii Surozhskii, “Otvety na voprosy zhurnala ‘Zvezda,’” Zvezda (Leningrad), no. 1 (1991): 122.

19 Anthony ofSourozh, Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh. A Selection of His Writing, ed. and with an introduction by Hugh Wybrew (Springfield, IL: Templegate Publishers, 1988), 26. Other books of Metropolitan Anthony include Courage to Pray, God and Man, Living Prayer, Meditations on a Theme, and Beginning to Pray.

20 Ibid., 76.

21 Mitropolit AntoniiSurozhskii, “Otvety na voprosy zhurnala ‘Zvezda.’” Zvezda, no. 1 (1991): 125.

22 Mitropolit Antonii Surozhskii, “My dolzhny prinesti v mir veru—ne tol’ko v Boga, no v cheloveka.” An interview with Anthony of Sourozh by Mikhail Epstein (London, April 1989), in Mitropolit Antonii Surozhskii, O vstreche (St. Petersburg: Satis, 1994), 79–93. Available electronically: https://predanie.ru/book/70592-o-vstreche/#/toc6

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

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