The Global Church Era · 1920s-1970s · Paris, then global
There's no built conversation for this tradition here yet.
The Russian revolution scattered a whole church's worth of thinkers, monks and parishioners across Europe, and a remarkable number of them landed in Paris. The St Sergius Institute was founded there in 1925 and became the centre of it. Sergei Bulgakov's theology drew a controversy of its own between 1935 and 1937, argued in print on both sides; Georges Florovsky's Ways of Russian Theology (1937) called the emigration back to the Greek fathers; Vladimir Lossky's Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, written in French and published in 1944, put Orthodox theology in front of Western readers who had never had it. YMCA Press printed what they wrote. Mother Maria Skobtsova ran a hostel in Paris, sheltered Jews under the occupation, and died at Ravensbrück on 31 March 1945. The next generation — Alexander Schmemann, John Meyendorff — carried the work to America, and Schmemann's journals from 1973 to 1983 record what that cost and what it was for.