I’ve recently finished reading Olga Lossky’s biography of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, Toward the Endless Day
This interested me for two reasons. The first is that in some circles Mother Eudoxie is probably best known for not having got on with Saint Maria Skobtsova. While I don’t want to in any way detract from the holiness of Saint Maria, I remember that when I first read her biography a number of years ago, despite my admiration for her I felt a secret sympathy for Mother Eudoxie who seemed to appear in a less-than-entirely favourable light! The second reason is that I spent a couple of months in Bussy when I was in transition in recent years and it remains a very important place for me. No doubt some of Saint Maria’s criticisms of traditional monasticism were coming out of particular experiences or contexts, but what comes through in Mother Eudoxie’s description, and which I also experienced in Bussy, and elsewhere, is that the authentic Tradition does not exclude being open to the world and to those in need. In any case, this seemed worth making available online.
I just received your letter, which was forwarded to me here, in Switzerland, where I arrived more than four months ago. I remember you very well and our meeting at M[other] Maria’s place [the Lourmel shelter, prior to the war]. I’ve read your book on Russian holiness.
I’m sorry not to be able to attend the meetings of your ecumenical group [in Nancy] since meetings of this sort interest me very much. I can reply to the questions you ask but, give the time limits imposed by circumstances, I can’t meditate sufficiently on my answers or formulate them as well as I would like.
I left Russia in 1932, where I had made my monastic profession in a small convent – clandestinely, since this was already prohibited by law. I began to wear the habit only when I came to France. At the beginning, I lived with M[other] Maria [Skobtsova], who was dreaming of a new vocation for monasticism, and since there was nothing else, I began to collaborate with her. Her ideal was the active life and social advocacy. Unfortunately, she didn’t have any fondness for the liturgical offices or any knowledge of the Orthodox monastic tradition, and yet it is tradition that links us to the principle goal of monasticism: the transformation of the carnal being into a spiritual being, the purification of the heart by every means – self-denial, obedience, in brief, life according to the Gospel. Activity should be based on this fundamental premise. M[other] Maria practiced a lot of authentic denial herself, but she refused to believe that the traditional means for attaining it were efficacious. This gave our life with her an aspect of disorder, of arbitrariness. In the end, I wasn’t able to continue. I went to England where I had good relations with Anglican convents and, with their help, I got enough money to found a community in France. The beginnings were very difficult. Finally, a friend gave us her property in the Yonne: a big country house, a large garden, and two fields outside the village. We have been there for ten years. At this moment, we are fourteen sisters, a chaplain, and several persons whom we lodge and who help us with our work. During the summer we have boarder; in winter there are a few old women who stay with us on a permanent basis and whom we take care of. They pay us, and it is our only income, which enables us to receive all sorts of exceptional cases: a mother with two small children, abandoned by her husband; sick people without any means; old women who do not yet have their papers to be able to enter rest homes, … sometimes abnormal persons. People know we are there and that they can send someone to us only if we have enough room. As you can see, we do not have a defined activity.
Now, as for the convent itself. We are, of course, faithful to tradition. Orthodox monasticism is perhaps closer, in the way it is organized, to the Benedictines of old, in the times when they cleared the land, when they formed cultural centers in an uncivilized Europe, when you couldn’t be a specialist, when you had to take care of all the needs of the neighbors. The inner structure is also similar. A convent is an independent family, under the protection of the bishop. The abbess is the indisputable head until her death, and it is her personal inspiration that forms the spirit of the community. But only the spirit, because there are fixed rules. The origin of these rules goes back to the Stoudion monastery of Constantinople. There are fundamental rules that have been laid down by the ecumenical councils. But in all that, there are varieties in the details and they form the body of the traditions of a given monastery. We had to begin with everything up in the air and in very difficult conditions. I adopted the rule of a convent in western Russia along with another rule from a Carpathian convent, modifying both according to the circumstances. These circumstances were, above all, the psychology of the novices, who were no longer young and with whom you can’t be too rigorous about matter of fasting, vigils, etc. All that is very flexible, and I take advantage of the leeway offered by tradition. Our sisters do everything themselves. They tend the garden and the two fields, which give us our vegetables; we have two cows and some chickens. We have to take care of the old women, do the housework, sing the Daily Office. All that requires a lot of physical strength – and it also has a spiritual goal that is called “the obediences,” which should be carried out with prayer in one’s heart…
The inner life of the sisters develops under the inspiration give by the Daily Office and the spiritual direction they receive from their superiors and confessors. Since our chaplain is a member of the “white” clergy who is unfamiliar with the monastic tradition, I occasionally invite a priest-monk for spiritual direction, and it is he who professes the sisters.
According to the canons, the age for profession is forty, so the primitive and regular (rassophor) novitiates last a long time. There are exceptions, but these depend on the judgment of the abbess.
Sometimes, Western Christians do not understand that, in our concept of monasticism, which is that of a perfect Christianity, a single monastery embraces all sorts of different lifestyles within it walls: from those active in projects on the outside to contemplatives, and all the intermediary states. All that is individual, as are all human souls. Everything should be dominated by love, which is the true goal of the Christian life; monasticism is just one of the paths toward this goal.
Obviously, in our times there are many areas of activity where we could deploy our talents: the translation of the Daily Office into French (one of our sisters is Greek but culturally French), into English (we have a former Anglican who used to be a journalist and the literary editor of a publishing house on the Continent) – all that is very interesting but, unfortunately, there aren’t enough of us; we have all the manual work that need to be done just to subsist, and we don’t have young people willing to commit themselves to the religious life. We feel useful, people seek us out for different reasons, but what do you want us to do?
Let’s go back to the essential: Tradition is steadfast; the goal of monasticism is to give new birth from the old self in us, and that is why a new name is given u when we make our profession. The goal is to purify the heart by fighting against the passions; the means are the vows of chastity, obedience and poverty and the task of imitating the model given us in the life of the Lord; and the true shaping of the soul comes about through the life of the Community, where we all share the heaviest and most disagreeable tasks – all the novices go through that. Later a place, an obedience, is found for each according to her talents. I hope you understand my French, which is far from perfect, even though my father was French. If you need more particulars, please let me know; this letter is more like a rough draft. Pray for me…
P.S. The oral recitation of the Jesus Prayer enters into all of that, obviously. But we still don’t feel able to attain the summit.
From Olga Lossky, Toward the Endless Day, 110-113.
A vow of conversation 
August 18, 2012 at 3:39 pm
Thanks so much for finding and sharing this! Renovationism seems to have been part of the intellectual-religious climate in those days. For Roman Catholicism it led to the disasters of Vatican II; comparatively speaking, we Orthodox were spared much lasting damage, thanks to the firm understanding of tradition humbly maintained by Mother Eudoxie and many others like her.
I hope St Maria Skobtsova will be remembered and venerated for her self-denial and martyrdom, NOT for her writings.
August 19, 2012 at 7:26 pm
You’re welcome, abbamoses. I’m glad you liked it.
I might take issue with your comments on renovationism, though, depending what you mean by that. If you are referring to the liturgical. biblical and patristic renewals of the period between the two world wars, which did indeed prepare much of the ground for Vatican II, then I would see them in an entirely different light. Likewise, I do not see Vatican II as simply disastrous. Obviously it has its shortcomings from an Orthodox perspective, as do all post-schism western councils. And, even from a Catholic perspective, its results have been less-than-entirely positive. But that is a complex story with multiple causes and I would argue that the tragedy of contemporary Catholicism is that the great promise of the various renewal movements in the first part of the twentieth century have run aground and degenerated into either everything gone wild or else ultramontanist Tridentine nostalgia. And I must confess that I get a bit puzzled when I see some Orthodox seeming to favour the latter, which I’m not sure is any better than the former. But then I suppose that’s part of the reason I became Orthodox.
August 19, 2012 at 3:01 am
A very interesting letter, thanks for posting it.
I think Mother Maria can in some ways be seen as a proponent, or an example, of what is nowadays called the “new monasticism”. I don’t see it as a matter of “either/or” but rather “both/and”. I once wrote about it here A monastic vision | Khanya.
Having once tried to live in a “new monastic” community, which at the time we described as a Christian commune, I think that we might have done considerably better if we had had a spiritual father or mother from an “old monastic” community. I think we needed a Mother Eudoxie.
August 19, 2012 at 7:38 pm
I certainly agree that there should be a complementary between different vocations in the Church, and I wouldn’t want to rule out Saint Maria’s vocation, although I also think that she was a fairly exceptional person and that many of us simply need the regularity of a more traditional life if we are to do any good! However, I think that her ideas become controversial when she seeks to redefine monasticism. That is also part of my hesitation of the language of “new monasticism” – that it takes a traditional identity and seeks to redefine it. Traditional monasticism, certainly traditional Orthodox monasticism, as Mother Eudoxie shows here, has great flexibility but I suspect that that comes about more from simply being rooted in the tradition and living that in the circumstances one finds oneself in than consciously setting out to change the tradition.
August 21, 2012 at 2:16 pm
[…] On the monastic calling. […]
August 22, 2012 at 1:21 pm
The dichotomy Macrina presents – – everything gone wild or ultramontanist traditionalist nostalgia – is false. And it is unreal on the ground – most people in most parishes are simply unaware and, if they are aware, unsympathetic with either. There certainly is such a thing as ultramontanist traditionalism, but it’s by no means the only form of traditionalism within contemporary Roman Catholicism (I would also note that the Orthodox Church has its own forms of narrow traditionalism, even within the canonical churches). There are ‘traditionalists’ who draw precisely from the Patristic revival of the pre-conciliar years, who are familiar with and comfortable with the ‘return to the sources’, who read de Lubac, Congar et. al, and yet who feel that a certain ‘break’ in religious praxis necessitates a clinging to the older form of the Roman RIte, not because it is perfect, not because it is ‘ideal’ (what liturgy is?), but because it is more than the product of committees. Such breaks, contrary to much mythmaking, are not foreign to the Eastern Church either, nor is the liturgical state of the Orthodox Churches always and everywhere ideal. One needs only to familiarise onself with, say, the insights of Emphrem Lash, to realise that the idea of a supposedly immutable liturgy (‘was there a great entrance at the last supper?”) is simply a myth, as alien to Orthodoxy as it is to Catholicism. This is a hugely complex question, of course, but the truth is the more one immerses oneself within a tradition, the more variegated and complex it will seem. There is nothing nostalgic about young people attending the pre-conciliar forms of the Roman liturgy (how could it be nostalgic when they never knew it before?), nor are they all ultramontanist (many of them share with the current pope the feeling that the Roman pontiffs have overplayed their hand in the past – and especially in what pertains to the liturgy – and they are simply not naive enough to believe that even further Roman centralisation will solve all the problems of the Western Church. But nor are they willing to deny that Rome remains, by virtue of promises that exceed all her human limitations, the real, living and legitimate center of unity of the Church Catholic). I enjoy your blog. In Xto, Stephen.
August 25, 2012 at 9:53 pm
Thanks for your comment, Stephen. I think it would largely depend on where one is, and also on other variable factors, and I grant that I did over-simplify matters and spoke out of specific experiences. I would also grant that if one accepts the claims of Rome, then it is certainly possible to be a thoughtful “traditionalist” just as it is possible to be a thoughtful “progressive” (I find the labels really problematic!). I would also argue (well, no, I’m not arguing, simply stating my experience) that the “product of a committee” is not nearly as bad as it is made out to be, or at least that it doesn’t have to be so, although it obviously has weaknesses, as did the older form of the Roman rite. These things are rather complex as you say, and are no longer really my concern. My puzzlement, however, is when I see Orthodox Christians getting enthusiastic about “Tridentine” Catholicism.
August 28, 2012 at 5:26 am
I’m puzzled by your puzzlement. Worshipping regularly as I do in the so-called ‘Tridentine’ Mass – in fact, this label is incorrect, as the basis shape of the liturgy that commonly goes by that name is much, much older – and having also worshipped, with my Orthodox wife, in the Byzantine rite (in an Orthodox church), and having experienced numerous times the Missal of Paul VI, I completely understand why Orthodox Christians would recognise the older Roman Mass as being closer to the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom than the latter is to the new Roman Mass. I do not really believe that this makes these Orthodox enthusiastic about ‘Tridentine’ Catholicism as such. It strikes me that what they recognise is a Eucharistic devotion consonant, or roughly so, with their own; Marian devotion akin to their own; a liturgical demarkation between clergy and the laity akin to their own; and a sacral language (Latin) removed from the vernacular (much as Old Church slavonic or Ecclesiastical Greek etc. are removed from the vernacular); the Eastward position in the celebration, and a veneration of sacred images. Many of these things are not present to the same extent in the celebration of the new Missal, nor in the churches built or reordered to house it. So it should be no surprise why those Orthodox who even bother to look at the western Church find more family resemblances in the older Roman missal than they do in the new. This is not to say that there is not much in the modern liturgical movement to recommend it (to the Orthodox as well, I might add). Still, I have never met an Orthodox Christian, even one who is enthusiastic about the older Roman liturgy (those I know and know of comment on the beauty of the chant and the dignity of the ceremonial, and the sense of the sacred) who is equally enthusiastic about Tridentine ecclesiology!
September 14, 2012 at 7:22 pm
Stephen, my apologies that your comment got held up so long in moderation – I’ve really been neglecting this blog, and the notification had got lost in my inbox.
I am not the best person to comment on this as my experience of the Tridentine Mass has been minimal whereas my experience of the current Roman Rite has been less than entirely negative (although it has certainly had its negative moments!) Moreover, I am aware that there are various possible interpretations of these things that I don’t really want to get involved in now – certainly the accounts of friends of mine who regularly experienced the Tridentine rite before the Council were less than entirely positive.
But to respond to some of the points you made:
– Far from being a mark of Orthodoxy, I’m inclined to think that serving the Liturgy in a language that people do not understand is a major pastoral problem;
– I’m not sure that the Tridentine demarcation between clergy and laity is akin to the Orthodox one – indeed it is the very clericalisation of the Tridentine Liturgy that is foreign to Orthodoxy where it is inconceivable that a priest could serve the Liturgy on his own. (This does not mean that there are no distinctions of course, much less that there have not been abuses in this area in some contemporary Catholic circles).
On other points I’d be more inclined to agree with you. And you are quite right that Orthodox are not enthusiastic about Tridentine ecclesiology. But therein, perhaps, lies my puzzlement, for Liturgy and ecclesiology are closely intertwined (and it is no accident that the liturgical renewal went hand in hand with a renewal in ecclesiology). Thus a liturgy focussed almost exclusively on the actions of the priest (and indeed the practice of a priest serving the Liturgy alone) is as much an ecclesiological statement as it is a liturgical practice.
September 15, 2012 at 6:54 am
Thank you, Macrina, for your response. Since your argument seems to rest on the example of a priest celebrating on his own, let me focus on that. Not only is it conceivable to imagine the practice in Orthodoxy (except perhaps in an idealised version that one finds in books), there are in fact actual examples of Orthodox priests serving the liturgy on their own – what do priest hermits do? Moreover, Latin Canon Law always mandated the presence of at least person other than the priest – it was forbidden (minus a dispensation) to celebrate without a server, even before the liturgical reform. Kallistos Ware points out, too, that the angels and saints are always present at the celebration of the Eucharist, so the Church is present wherever the sacrifice is present (this is also an ecclesiological point), irrespective of the size of the congregation. I wonder whether Fr Gabriel Bugne only celebrates the liturgy if he is assured of a congregation? I doubt it. My point in all this is that it is somewhat easy to overstate the differences and to draw dramatic conclusions from what are, in the end, expressions of legitimate diversity. Do you know David Bentley Hart’s ‘The Myth of Schism’? It’s a wonderful piece. Hart does not deny a split but targets the mythologies that have risen around it. He writes, “In truth, the most unpleasant aspect of the current state of the division between East and West is the sheer inventiveness with which those ardently committed to that division have gone about fabricating ever profounder and more radical reasons for it.” I don’t mean that you are committed to the division, but I have noticed a tendency in converts from one communion to the other to exaggerate the significance of differences – such as the existence of ‘private’ Low Mass – which are minor.
October 6, 2012 at 11:26 am
I’m sorry, Stephen, I’ve done it again. I’m afraid I’ve been really neglecting this blog and pressured by lots of things.
I may be entirely wrong, and I am sure that one can find individual examples that contradict this, just as one can find individual examples that contradict everything, but I would be very surprised to learn that the practice of serving the Liturgy on one’s own is common among Orthodox priests, even hermits. As I understand it the practice on, say Mount Athos, is that hermits (priests or not) live some distance from the monastery but gather in its central Church for the Liturgy, a practice that originates in the Egyptian desert.
I have no knowledge of Fr Gabriel Bunge’s situation but I would even be surprised if he served the Liturgy on his own while he was a Catholic, given the sort of Catholics he was associated with (he was originally a monk of Chevetogne and had close connections to Bose). Again, I may be wrong and the sky will not fall in if I am, but I just find your suggestions unlikely.
I haven’t read Hart – I did think of reading his The Beauty of the Infinite but, given some reviews by people I respect and my sense that he is writing with a fairly specific agenda, plus the fact that there is so much that I would like to read, I have put him fairly low down my priorities list.