Justin Popovich (1894-1979)

A Family of Seven Generations of Priests

Blagoje Popović was born on 25 March 1894 — the feast of the Annunciation of the Mother of God in the Julian calendar still in use in Serbia — at Vranje, a small town in southern Serbia recently liberated from Ottoman rule^[10]. His parents, Spiridon, a parish sacristan, and Anastasija, belonged to a lineage counting, before him, seven consecutive generations of priests^[11]. At baptism he was given the name Blagoje — literally "proclaimer of the good news" — in direct honour of the feast of the day and of the Mother of God^[12]. This birth name, chosen in exact echo of his date of birth, would become retrospectively, in the eyes of his Orthodox biographers, a sign announcing the day of his death: eighty-five years later, to the very day in the Julian calendar, he would pass away at Ćelije on a 25 March, feast of the Annunciation^[13].

His Teacher Nikolai Velimirovich and the Saint Sava Seminary (1905–1914)

From 1905 to 1914, young Blagoje studied at the Saint Sava Seminary in Belgrade^[14]. There he met the man who would permanently shape his spiritual life: the hieromonk Nikolai Velimirovich (future Bishop of Ohrid and then of Žiča, who died in exile in 1956 and was himself later canonized), then a young professor at the seminary, whom Orthodox tradition would nickname the "new Chrysostom"^[15]. It was Velimirovich who initiated Popovich into the depths of Christian life and inspired in him that love of eternity which would never leave him: from that period until the end of his life, Popovich adopted the daily and unbroken habit of reading three chapters of the New Testament^[16]. His final dissertation dealt with theocracy and the Eastern Roman Empire^[17] — an early sign of an interest that would never leave him in the relations between the Church and temporal power, a theme that would return with redoubled force in his later critique of the papacy.

Monastic Tonsure at Shkodër and the Name of Saint Justin the Philosopher

In the midst of the First World War, in which he first served as a military nurse^[18], Blagoje Popović was tonsured a monk on 1 January 1916 at the Orthodox cathedral of Shkodër, in Albania, where the Serbian army and part of the Serbian clergy had retreated^[19]. On this occasion he received the name of Justin, in honour of Saint Justin the Philosopher and Martyr (2nd century), one of the very first Christian apologists to argue that Christianity was the "true philosophy" — a programmatic reference for one who would devote his entire work to demonstrating that Orthodox Christianity alone is the full truth about man^[20].

"The Oxford Debacle": A Thesis on Dostoevsky Never Defended (1916–1919)

After a first period of study at the Orthodox seminary of Petrograd in 1916, interrupted by Bolshevik unrest, the young monk Justin was transferred to England, where he joined — with some fifty other refugee Serbian seminarians, professors and clerics — a hospitality programme set up by the Faculty of Theology at Oxford: a diplomatic and humanitarian gesture by the British authorities which would subsequently help to shape the theological formation of the Serbian clergy for decades^[21]. There he prepared, from 1916 to 1919, a Bachelor of Letters devoted to Dostoevsky, entitled The Religion of Dostoevsky^[22].

The result was what recent academic historiography bluntly calls the "Oxford debacle"^[23]: the examiners, Walter Frere and Nevill Forbes, acknowledged in the work "a detailed and eloquent interpretation of Dostoevsky's religious beliefs", but faulted it for the absence of any critical perspective and for failing to relate it to contemporary events in Russia and Russian Orthodoxy^[24]. In the view of his examiners at the time, Popovich had merely shared Dostoevsky's premises without ever interrogating them — a judgment Justin himself refused to act upon: he never formally defended the thesis and therefore obtained no Oxford degree^[25]. Published nonetheless in 1923 in the Orthodox review Christian Life, which he then edited, the essay — now The Philosophy and Religion of F. M. Dostoevsky — is retrospectively regarded as one of the very first "neo-patristic" readings of the Russian novelist's work, and as the laboratory in which the central conviction of all his later theology was already forged: that Western rationalist humanism structurally carries within itself the negation of the God-man^[26].

The Athens Doctorate on Saint Macarius of Egypt (1926)

Lacking a British degree, Popovich completed his formation at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Athens, where in 1926 he defended a doctoral thesis devoted to a 4th-century Egyptian Desert Father: The Problem of Personality and Knowledge According to Saint Macarius of Egypt^[27][28]. The choice of subject — the human person illumined by patristic mysticism rather than by modern philosophy — already announced, by contrast, the entire theological programme to come: an anthropology never constructed from man folded back upon himself, but always from his lived, ascetic and prayerful relationship with God.

A Relationship with England More Nuanced Than Usually Said

The older historiography of Popovich — first constructed by his most fervent disciples, then mirrored by his detractors — long reduced his time at Oxford to a simple failure followed by a definitive rejection of Anglo-Saxon thought. A recent monograph by Bogdan Lubardić, Justin of Ćelije and England (Institute for Theological Studies, Belgrade, 2019), seriously qualifies this narrative^[29]. Systematically exploring Popovich's personal library, still preserved at Ćelije Monastery, Lubardić found in it numerous positive references to Anglican thinkers and British scholars: the writer John Middleton Murry, the convert Cardinal John Henry Newman, but also the astrophysicists Arthur Eddington and James Jeans, whose scientific discoveries of the first third of the twentieth century Popovich integrated into his theology of the Logos — drawing on Saint Maximus the Confessor's doctrine of the logoi spermatikoi (the "seminal reasons"), according to which every visible being bears the invisible trace of the divine Logos's intention^[30]. Popovich went so far as to admire Shakespeare and the Catholic poet Francis Thompson explicitly, and converged, on one precise point, with the Anglican critique of the First Vatican Council^[31]. In Lubardić's own phrase, Popovich's stance toward the West is "paradoxical only in appearance": it remains fundamentally coherent, for what Popovich targets under the name of "the West" is not this or that nation, but a certain rationalist and humanist spirit which, in his eyes, runs through secularized Eastern Europe just as much as Western Europe^[32].

Karlovci, Prizren, and the Czechoslovak Mission Against Uniatism

Back in Serbia, Hieromonk Justin taught patrology, dogmatics, liturgy and hagiology at the theological seminaries of Sremski Karlovci and then Prizren^[33][34]. In 1930–1931, he was sent by the Serbian Holy Synod to Bishop Iosif of Bitola to help organize the young Orthodox Church of Czechoslovakia, then directly threatened by attempts at union with Rome carried by Greek-Catholic Uniatism in the region^[35]. In recognition of this work, the Serbian Holy Synod offered him, at the end of the mission, episcopal consecration for the new diocese of Subcarpathian Russia; Justin firmly refused, pleading his unworthiness, inexperience and lack of charismatic wisdom^[36] — an early sign of a humility that would remain, in the eyes of his Orthodox biographers, one of the most striking constants of his spiritual life, despite the polemical virulence of his later writings.

Two Spiritual Friendships: Metropolitan Anthony and the Future Saint John of Shanghai

In those same years, Popovich formed a lasting spiritual friendship with Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) — first primate of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, then provisionally settled in Serbia — and with Hieromonk John (Maximovitch), future Archbishop of Shanghai and then of San Francisco, canonized in 1994 by that same Russian Church Abroad^[37]. These ties illustrate the place Popovich very early occupied in the networks of the White Russian monastic emigration sheltered in the Balkans — the very community from which the Saint Sergius Institute in Paris would emerge, where, a generation later, Alexander Schmemann would be formed.

The Dogmatics of the Orthodox Church and the Belgrade Professorship (1932–1945)

Already recognized as a writer of great talent, Popovich published in 1932 the first of three volumes of his Dogmatics of the Orthodox Church, followed by the second in 1935^[38][39]. In 1934, he was appointed professor of dogmatics at the Saint Sava Faculty of Theology of the University of Belgrade, a post he would hold until 1945^[40][41]. His teaching method deliberately broke with classical academicism: in the testimony of his colleagues, his theology was "never purely academic, but always living, charismatic, liturgical, compunctious and prayerful", for Popovich theologized not in a merely reflective manner, but literally "suffered" the divine realities he taught, in prayer and the tears of repentance^[42]. A preacher of ardent speech, he led multitudes of the faithful to awareness and repentance, and became — alongside his professorial office — a spiritual director and confessor of recognized authority far beyond the walls of the university^[43].

Dismissal and Interior Exile (1945–1948)

In the aftermath of the Second World War and the establishment of Tito's communist regime, Popovich was dismissed from his university chair as an "enemy of the regime"^[44]. After three years of instability and forced moves, he became in 1948 parish priest and confessor at the convent of the Holy Archangels at Ćelije, near Valjevo, where he exercised his ministry "in confinement and under strict surveillance by the authorities"^[45] — continuous police surveillance by the Yugoslav secret police which lasted, according to available records, the whole of the thirty-one following years^[46].

Daily Life at the Monastery: Liturgy, Asceticism, Spiritual Direction

For thirty years, Archimandrite Justin celebrated the liturgy daily — he himself confided that it was from the holy mysteries that he drew all his strength^[47]. He lived in strict asceticism, between prayer and fasting, while working tirelessly at study, writing and translation, and spiritually directing and confessing the community of nuns and a countless multitude of the faithful come from all over Serbia and abroad^[48]. As a direct consequence of this exemplary life, the convent of Ćelije still serves today, in Serbia, as a model of monastic life for all the country's other monasteries^[49].

The School of Ćelije: Jevtić, Radović, Bulović, Radosavljević

It was in this guarded seclusion that Popovich formed, around himself, a whole generation of disciples who would become among the most influential bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church at the end of the twentieth century: Atanasije Jevtić (future Bishop of Zahumlje-Herzegovina), Amfilohije Radović (future Metropolitan of Montenegro and the Littoral), Irinej Bulović (future Bishop of Bačka) and Artemije Radosavljević (future Bishop of Raška-Prizren) — collectively known as the "Justinovci", the "disciples of Justin"^[50]. It was notably Jevtić and Radović who, from 1979 onwards, took charge of preserving and disseminating his written legacy, opening the first phase of his theological reception in Serbia^[51].

A Monumental Work Written in the Shadows

Far from being reduced to the silence imposed upon him by police surveillance, Popovich produced at Ćelije the bulk of his written work: exegetical commentaries on the Gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint John, on the epistles of Saint Paul and the catholic epistles of Saint John, and above all the twelve volumes of his Lives of the Saints (1972–1977), which would become a classic of contemporary Serbian spirituality^[52]. It was also during this period that he completed the third volume of his Dogmatics, published posthumously^[53].

"No Other Manhood Exists Under Heaven"

Popovich's entire theology comes down to a single central affirmation, hammered home in countless forms throughout his writings: Christ the God-man (Bogočovek, literally "God-man") is the sole key to all truth, and Orthodoxy itself is nothing other, in his view, than "God-manhood" lived and prolonged in history by the Church:

"Orthodoxy is Orthodoxy by reason of the God-man, and not by reason of anything else or anyone else. [...] man learns the complete truth about man, about the purpose and meaning of his existence only through the God-man. Outside of Him a man turns into an apparition, into a scarecrow, into nonsense [...]. Therefore, true manhood lies only in God-manhood; and no other manhood exists under heaven." — Justin Popovich, The God-Man: The Foundation of the Truth of Orthodoxy, essay reprinted in Man and the God-Man, Sebastian Press, 2008–2009^[54]

This same conviction structures his very definition of Tradition, which he never reduces to a mere deposit of transmitted customs or texts:

"The principal Tradition of the Orthodox Church is the living God-man Christ, entire in the theanthropic Body of the Church." — Justin Popovich, "The Attributes of the Church", Orthodox Life, vol. 31, no. 1, January–February 1981^[55]

Popovich develops this intuition to its most radical conclusion: for him, everything in Christianity that claims to accomplish the Gospel "through the methods of this world and through the methods of the kingdoms of this world" is not Orthodox, but entails "enslavement to the third temptation of the devil"^[56] — a direct reference to the Gospel episode of Christ's temptation in the desert (Mt 4:8–10), where the devil offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the world in exchange for his worship. This formula, which he applies in other writings explicitly to the exercise of temporal-type ecclesial power, directly illuminates the theological root of his later critique of the papacy: in his eyes, whoever seeks to establish the unity of the Church by means of power rather than by the sole lived truth of the God-man structurally reproduces that same temptation.

Man Without the God-Man: The Critique of European Humanism

Symmetrically, Popovich defines every form of "heterodoxy" — a term he uses broadly, without reserving it for Protestantism alone — as the fragmentation of integral man into "atoms" and "particles": reason, will, the senses, soul, body, expertise, each erected into an absolute in place of the whole Christ^[57]. It is this same grid of interpretation that he applies, from his youthful thesis on Dostoevsky onwards, to the whole of modern European civilization: the "vain idol of the infallibility of man, which synthesizes in itself the spirit of Europe"^[58]. For a Catholic reader, this critique of secularism and of the self-idolatry of human reason meets, in substance, intuitions that are perfectly acceptable and already present in twentieth-century Catholic thinkers such as Romano Guardini or Henri de Lubac on the "tragedy of humanism without God" — but Popovich, unlike them, extends this same critique to encompass the very institution of the papacy, which he identifies, as such, as the most accomplished ecclesial expression of that "infallibility of man".

Genesis of a Struggle: From "The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism" to the Two Memoranda

It was in the very last years of his life that Popovich became, in the eyes of the Orthodox world and beyond, the most radical voice of opposition to modern ecumenism. In 1974, he published his most discussed work, The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism (English translation: The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism, Lazarica Press, Birmingham, 2000), in which he expounded the doctrine of the Orthodox Church by systematically confronting it with what he called the Western humanism "devoid of the Spirit", from which he claimed was born the "pan-heresy of ecumenism"^[59]. That same year, while the Serbian Orthodox Church — a member of the World Council of Churches (WCC) since 1965 — deepened its ecumenical commitment, Popovich denounced this direction in memoranda addressed in 1970 and then in 1977 to the Serbian Holy Synod, in which he rose up both against the organization of the future "Holy and Great Council" of the Orthodox Church, driven in his view by hierarchs too wedded to the ecumenist ideology of the Phanar, and against Serbian participation itself in the WCC^[60].

"Protestantism, the Loyal Child of Papism"

The heart of Popovich's thesis lies in a deliberately provocative theological genealogy: in his view, all Western Christian confessions, Catholicism and Protestantism alike, proceed from one and the same logic — that of putting man, the infallible pope on one side and the individual believer erected into a pope unto himself on the other, in the place that only Christ the God-man should occupy:

"Protestantism? It is the loyal child of Papism. [...] There is no way out of this impasse for the Papist-Protestant Ecumenism with its pseudo-Church and its pseudo-Christianity without wholehearted repentance." — Justin Popovich, "Humanistic Ecumenism", in Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, trans. Asterios Gerostergios, Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Belmont (Massachusetts), 1997^[61]

For Popovich, ecclesiology and Christology are one and the same question: criticizing ecumenism is thus always, in the last analysis, a way of defending who Christ truly is, not a mere institutional debate between confessions^[62]. This explains the harshness of his overall judgment: "Ecumenism is the common name for the pseudo-Christianity of the pseudo-Churches of Western Europe"^[63].

Dialogue and Ideology: The Nuance Retained by His Own Disciples

His closest disciple, Bishop Atanasije Jevtić, himself warned against too literal and too sweeping a reading of this struggle, calling "imprudent zealots" those who claim Popovich rejected all ecumenism without distinction^[64]. According to Jevtić, Popovich "criticized the ideology of ecumenism, which he regarded as a variant of the 'new Christianity', as an ecclesiological heresy" — but never criticized as such participation in ecumenical meetings or dialogues, going so far as to regard as a saint his own teacher Nikolai Velimirovich, who had actively taken part in them^[65]. A true ecumenism, according to Popovich, presupposes on the contrary Christ the God-man as its absolute centre, repentance before the truth rather than diplomatic compromise, and the explicit rejection of the "branch theory" which would treat the separated Churches as equivalent^[66].

"The Greatest Heresy Against the Church"

On the papacy proper, Popovich's judgment admits of no nuance:

"The dogma of papal infallibility is not only a heresy but the greatest heresy against the True Church of Christ. [...] The pope — a man — has usurped the place of the God-man." — Justin Popovich, "Reflections on the Infallibility of European Man", in Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, op. cit.^[67]

As early as the interwar period, at the time of the concordat crisis between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the Holy See (1935–1937), Popovich went so far as to draw a historical parallel bound to shock a Western reader: in his view, "the papacy was the father of fascism and communism, because it employed violence in the name of God"^[68] — a judgment to be set back into the very concrete polemical context of a Serbian Orthodox opinion then vigorously mobilized against the ratification of the concordat, perceived as Catholic interference in the kingdom's affairs. Thirty years later, commenting on the Second Vatican Council's reaffirmation of the doctrine defined by Vatican I, Popovich would describe it, in an equally cutting formula, as a "renaissance of European humanism, and therefore a renaissance of corpses"^[69].

What Vatican I Actually Defined — and What Popovich Says About It

Popovich's rhetoric systematically presents papal infallibility as the "infallibility of man" in general — a pure and simple divinization of an individual^[70][71]. Yet that is precisely not what the First Vatican Council defined on 18 July 1870 in the dogmatic constitution Pastor Aeternus. An honest Catholic look at this critique must therefore, without softening its severity, specify its real object exactly:

Reading the table: Popovich's critique targets, word for word, a caricature of infallibility — a sort of permanent right to be incapable of error, exercised by a divinized man — which Catholic teaching itself explicitly excludes. This does not dissolve the true underlying disagreement between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, which concerns the very nature of Petrine primacy as the visible and perpetual principle of unity of the whole Church (Lumen Gentium §23^[75]) — a disagreement a Catholic has no reason to minimize, but which is not the cruder one Popovich's rhetoric sometimes displays.

For the full development of Catholic answers to the classic Orthodox objections on the Filioque, primacy and infallibility, see Answers to Orthodox Objections and What Does the Church Say About the Orthodox?; on the historical rupture itself, see The Great Eastern Schism.

A Critique to Be Situated in Its Time

It would be equally dishonest to read Popovich's virulence apart from its real historical context. This critique of the papacy is not the constant preoccupation of an entire lifetime, but became dominant in the reception of his work according to precise political cycles: Serbian academic research thus distinguishes several phases in the reception of his thought, in which the emphasis placed on his critique of Rome or, conversely, on his critique of Western secularism and rationalism in general, varies greatly with the geopolitical context:

Source: Zdenko Š. Širka, "Mission and reception of St Justin Popović", Nicholai Studies I, no. 1 (2021), pp. 192–193, synthesizing the introduction by Vladimir Cvetković and Bogdan Lubardić to the proceedings of the Belgrade international colloquium (10–11 May 2019)^[76].

The Belgrade International Colloquium (2019) and the Catholic Contribution of Thomas Bremer

The international colloquium Mission and Thought of Saint Justin Popović, organized at Belgrade on 10 and 11 May 2019 by the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory, the Orthodox Faculty of Theology of the University of Belgrade and the Centre for Byzantine-Slavic Studies of the University of Niš, brought together twenty-four scholarly contributions, several of them by non-Orthodox theologians^[77]. The first thematic section of the published proceedings, entitled "Justin Popović Between Ecumenism and Anti-Ecumenism", includes notably a contribution by the Catholic theologian Thomas Bremer, professor at the University of Münster, alongside a Czech Lutheran perspective: according to reviewer Zdenko Širka's synthesis, these four studies together show that "Justin's relations with the Anglican, Roman Catholic and Lutheran Churches, as well as his relations with the institution of the papacy, are more nuanced and subtler than previously understood"^[78].

"Justinology": A Now Established Academic Discipline

Since the mid-2000s, carried notably by the Serbian ministerial project Serbian Theology in the Twentieth Century (2006–2015), the study of Popovich's work has grown into an autonomous academic discipline which Serbian researchers themselves call "Justinology"^[79]. This academic development, according to Širka, makes it possible to "demythologize and de-instrumentalize" Popovich's work, steering between two equally sterile extremes: on one side, a pious and defensive reading which regards any criticism of Justin as a direct attack on his sainthood; on the other, a reading which instrumentalizes his work to justify a wholesale rejection of the Serbian Church and of Orthodoxy as a whole in the name of their alleged anti-modernism and retrograde intransigence^[80]. Between these two symmetrical caricatures, recent research endeavours to understand the concrete reasons and circumstances — historical, political, ecclesial — in which Popovich's thought took shape, without judging a priori whether his positions are right or wrong^[81].

Justin Popovich passed away at Ćelije Monastery on 25 March 1979 (Julian calendar) — the very feast of the Annunciation, the day of his birth, eighty-five years earlier to the day^[82]. Since then, his grave has become a place of pilgrimage, not only for the Serbian people so long tried by communist repression, but for the entire Orthodox world^[83]. His disciples and many witnesses of his time credit him with having lived and confronted the contemporary problems of the Church "in the patristic manner and spirit", actualizing — with the terminology and problematics of his own time — the ever-new message of the Church Fathers on Christ the God-man and on salvation through repentance as the only true way out of every human impasse^[84].

2 May 2010

Thirty-one years after his death, the Assembly of Bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church adopted, on 29 April 2010, unanimously, the recommendations of the competent diocesan bishops and enrolled in the diptych of the saints of the Orthodox Church the name of Archimandrite Justin Popovich, spiritual father of Ćelije Monastery^[85]. The official glorification was proclaimed on 2 May 2010 by the Holy Synod^[86]. He has since been celebrated each year on 1 June of the Julian calendar (14 June of the Gregorian calendar), under the name of Saint Justin the New of Ćelije (Justin Ćelijski)^[87].

A Theological School Still Alive in Serbia

Popovich's legacy continues to irrigate, to this day, the Serbian Orthodox Church through the lasting influence of his disciples who became bishops — Jevtić, Radović, Bulović, Radosavljević — and through the academic discipline of "Justinology" developed since the mid-2000s^[88]. His Dogmatics of the Orthodox Church, often presented by his admirers as the most systematic Orthodox dogmatic synthesis since Saint John Damascene, remains a required reference for every Serbian Orthodox theology student. For a Catholic reader, the ambivalence of this legacy remains whole: a spiritual master of incontestable ascetic and Christocentric exigency, whose critique of secularism meets in many respects the surest Catholic intuitions on the primacy of Christ — but whose anti-Roman polemic, while it must be reported faithfully and without softening, equally calls for an honest answer on what the Catholic Church actually teaches, not on the caricature sometimes given of it — in the very particular context of communist Yugoslavia and the twentieth century's Balkan tensions — by one of the greatest theologians of contemporary Orthodoxy.

The figure of Justin Popovich is illuminated by the history of the separation between East and West and by the other great voices of twentieth-century Orthodox theology confronted, each in their own way, with dialogue or non-dialogue with Rome.

• On another great twentieth-century Orthodox theologian, himself engaged in dialogue with Rome as an observer at Vatican II: Alexander Schmemann (1921–1983).
• On the theology of uncreated light and hesychasm, another great debate of Orthodox theology received by Popovich through his patristic masters: Gregory Palamas.
• On a medieval adversary of union with Rome whose doctrinal legend anticipates, on many points, the intransigence of Popovich: Mark of Ephesus (1392–1444).
• On another Russian Orthodox pastor known for his spiritual ministry and life of prayer rather than his academic work: John of Kronstadt (1829–1908).
• On the founding rupture between Rome and Constantinople inherited by all later Orthodox polemical theology: The Great Eastern Schism.
• On the complete Catholic answer to Orthodox objections, notably on Roman primacy and papal infallibility: Answers to Orthodox Objections and What Does the Church Say About the Orthodox?.
• On a great Russian hegumen and spiritual guide contemporary with the formation of modern Orthodox monasticism: Sergius of Radonezh (1314–1392).