Non-Fundamentalist Monastic Spirituality of Mother Maria Skobtsova
by Kateřina Kočandrle Bauer for Public Orthodoxy
Since the beginning of modern times, monastic spirituality has had to face both extreme fundamentalism and extreme liberalism, or in postmodern times, relativism. One reason is an incomplete or incorrect understanding of the human person and human identity. Mother Maria Skobtsova (1891-1945), an Orthodox nun who left Russia after the 1917 revolution and settled in Paris, represents a monastic spiritual journey that moderates both fundamentalism and extreme relativism. She was creative and innovative in her spiritual journey, but at the same time she held onto the spiritual values of the Christian tradition of the past that, in a new context of exile, did not lose meaning. We can find inspiration for a non-fundamentalist but rooted monastic spirituality not only in Mother Maria’s life and actions but also in her theoretical presuppositions for the monastic journey, especially her understanding of the human person as made according to God’s image and likeness and her notion of human identity.
The fundamentalist notion of the human self-affirms a strong identity. Postmodern liberal identity, on the other hand, is fluid and often unstable. Fundamentalist religious identity plays strongly on collective identity and thus denies to a certain extent individuality and authenticity. Postmodern liberal consumerist identity, however, seeks only individualism and authentic experience but often without a profound understanding of the past. Here, Mother Maria offers a position that moderates the two extremes: first, she speaks of collective identity as sobornost, but only together with the authenticity of individual identity; and second, she affirms rootedness in the past, but combined with dynamicity and the possibility of adapting Christian identity to the contemporary context—bringing it into the present.
For the exiled Mother Maria, identity was a crucial theological question. Russian émigrés lost not only their homeland but also their culture. In exile, she no longer felt any connection between her identity and the “big names” of Russian Orthodoxy such as Khomiakov and Solovyov. Everything was in doubt. Here she echoes the difference between the Latin meaning of persona and the Greek prosopon: in exile she needed to wash all the “make-up” from her face, like a stage actor. An émigré’s identity consisted of their conscious self, knowledge of God, and the love of God. However, losing all external stability, the “make-up” of the motherland and the Russian Orthodox Church, did not mean losing her roots. On the contrary, a “clean face” brought the freedom to rely on her own cooperation with God and on the Church, not as a structure but the Church that is always within us. Holiness is not therefore the primary aim of the Church, it is not just more “make-up” on the face of the Church; rather, it blooms and blossoms, especially in times of great difficulty. For this reason, she criticizes an identity that is based on stylization, which simply perpetuates dead customs; rather, only authentic spiritual fire carries any weight in the religious life. New souls require correspondingly new expressions, without “make-up,” to become real persons and attain the likeness of God.
To relativize identity based on stylization, based on the right make-up, Mother Maria calls for the revival of the tradition of the yurodivy, the fool for Christ. The life of the fool for Christ unmasks all false holiness that hides true identity behind the make-up that covers not just the face but sometimes the whole body, as do, say, the garments of a monk or priest. To use iconographic terminology, the fool for Christ calls for an inverted perspective on reality that uncovers every hypocrisy and reveals Christ’s truth. A fool shows us how not to possess even the identity based on our own holiness, how to invert the wisdom of the world, to turn our own wisdom into the wisdom of Jesus Christ. To be a fool for Christ is to give up all possessions, including the inner possession of ourselves. To be rooted in Christ means to lose the self, but not for one’s own sake: the fool for Christ serves as a model of service to the world...continue reading Public Orthodoxy
