Orthodoxy and the Western European Reformation tradition: a memoir

Abstract

This memoir gives an account of how twentieth-century Orthodox émigrés from Russia encountered non-Orthodox Christians in the Christian West in which they settled and what they received from this encounter. Although the links in France between Russian theologians and their Catholic, Calvinist and Lutheran counterparts are not omitted, the author makes particular reference to the Fellowship of Saint Alban and Saint Sergius, an expression of the close and lasting contact which developed between Anglican and Orthodox theologians, and to Sergius Bulgakov and Nicolas Zernov, influential in its founding (1928), and Georges Florovsky and Vladimir Lossky, who exercised a patristic theological influence after the second world war.

Keywords:

• Ecumenical movement
• Orthodoxy
• Fellowship of SS Alban and Sergius
• patristic theology
• iconography
• liturgy
• church music
• sobornost

Notes

¹See Zernov, Russian Religious Renaissance; see also Khristoforov and Makarov, Vysylka vmesto rasstrela.

²See Ware (Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia), The Orthodox Church, 187–90.

³Bulgakov, Othodoxy.

⁴See Theokritoff, ‘Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius’. On Fr Lev and Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, see Lossky (-Laham), Vers le jour sans déclin.

⁵See Sept jours sur les routes de France by Vladimir Lossky under the pseudonym ‘Roger d'elan’, an exact translation of ‘Lossky’; see N. Lossky, ‘Preface’. An English translation by Michael Donley is about to be published by James Clarke.

⁶See Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology.

⁷See Van Der Bent, Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement.

⁸Evdokimov, L'Orthodoxie.

⁹See Stransky, Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement.

¹⁰See Van der Bent, Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement.

¹¹Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology.

¹²Ibid., 24.

¹³See, for example, Härdelin, Tractarian Understanding of the Eucharist.

¹⁴See, for example, Williams, Ponder these Things.

¹⁵See Talbot Rice, Byzantine Painting.

¹⁶See N. Lossky, Essai sur une théologie de la musique liturgique.

¹⁷See N. Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes the Preacher.

¹⁸See Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, The Philokalia, 63.