THIS 12 months marks the eightieth anniversary of the death of one in all the twentieth century’s most vibrant saints, Mother Maria Skobtsova. The life and writings of this eccentric, chain-smoking poet, monastic, and martyr remain relatively unknown, and yet her theological vision is one which is filled with challenge and wonder, and which stays prescient for our times. As her feast day approaches, her theology — rooted in the twin command to like each God and neighbour — deserves our renewed attention.
Mother Maria’s life was remarkable. She was a poet, an artist, and a politician (as Russia’s first female mayor, who fled to Paris after the Russian Revolution); a mother to a few children; and, somewhat surprisingly, a nun, who took the veil in 1932. This didn’t, nonetheless, stop her from chain-smoking or beer-drinking in Parisian cafés, wearing her monastic habit.
Her monasticism was characterised by service to the poor and vulnerable. She attended to the spiritual and material needs of her fellow Russian émigrés, for whom there was little social support in France, and provided spiritual nourishment, fed the hungry, and cared for the elderly. In the markets of Paris, she was often sighted trundling a wheelbarrow, which she used to gather discarded or low-cost food to make into soup for the hungry.
Later within the Thirties, Mother Maria’s attention turned to the work of resistance. In Nazi-occupied Paris, she began housing Jewish families in her convent and forging baptismal certificates along with her priest, Fr Dimitri Klepinin. Most famously, she orchestrated a rescue of Jewish children from the Vélodrome d’Hiver (a stadium in Paris where Jews were being held) by enlisting refuse-collectors to smuggle the kids out in empty bins. It was for this resistance work that Mother Maria was arrested, deported, and eventually killed at Ravensbrück concentration camp, in March 1945. She is honoured as a Righteous Among the Nations by the Jewish community.
MOTHER MARIA’s social motion and supreme martyrdom were inspired by her theology. She had a pointy intellect, was a friend of Aleksandr Blok and Anna Akhmatova, and arranged regular philosophical and theological discussions at her home, with contemporaries corresponding to Fr Sergei Bulgakov (her spiritual father) and Nikolai Berdyaev.
At the center of her theological vision is an insistence on maintaining a balance between loving each God and neighbour. While this twofold commandment is integral to Christian belief, Mother Maria believed that, in practice, parity between the 2 elements had not all the time been achieved. Her own theology is, due to this fact, characterised by a seek for synthesis between loving God and neighbour; between the Church and the world; and between the fullness of human creativity and the lifetime of prayer. In fact, she desired to tear down the partitions of the Church to let on the planet, with all its scabs and sores.
SHE wrote essays and articles that sought to provide theological weight to social engagement. She wrote with the eagerness of a poet, and her spirituality is deeply rooted within the asceticism of the Orthodox Church, and the Russian religious renaissance.
At the centre of her theological world-view is her notion of the “mysticism of human communion”. All people, she writes, are made within the image of God and are icons of Christ. This is why the congregation is censed within the liturgy. At the purpose of communion with one other person, one can encounter God. There is thus a mystical quality in our engagement with our neighbours, and within the means of showing love towards them. In these human, on a regular basis encounters, we see a glimmer of the divine reflected in those around us.
Yet that divinity needs some uncovering. An ascetic struggle is required to forged away the clouds that overshadow the image of God in us. For Mother Maria, this must be a shared practice: we must enter the inner lifetime of our neighbour, joining of their ascetic task, grappling with sin and failure like Jacob and the angel, as all of us seek to be transformed into the likeness of Christ.
In this task, Mother Maria was inspired by Mary, the Mother of God, who shows us a way of loving others which is rooted in a radical type of solidarity. At the crucifixion, Mary’s heart was pierced by a metaphorical two-edged sword. This was an unchosen type of solidarity: she was unable to alter the course of Jesus’s suffering, and yet she was certain up in his life in such a way that she suffered alongside him. In this relationship, Mother Maria recognises a radical, maternal type of human communion: one where every person is certain up within the fate of the opposite, sharing in a compassionate way of their sufferings, and journeying with them in solidarity towards transfiguration.
Mother Maria believed that, for authentic love of neighbour to flourish, we must let go of all self-interested desires, sacrificing our ego for true communion with our neighbours and with God. This is how she interpreted the monastic vow of non-possession: it was not nearly material possessions, but additionally about letting go of our selfishness.
THE human person is at the center of Mother Maria Skobtsova’s theology. Her insistence on our loving humanity with our whole heart, just as much as we love God, permeated her criticisms of the totalitarianism regimes taking root across Europe within the Thirties. These systems didn’t recognise the innate freedom and creativity of every human person, and the imago Dei in us all.
Mother Maria was not an armchair theologian. She lived her theology so comprehensively that she lost her life for her commitment to loving each God and neighbour. In our fractured world, her vision for the Church and for society stays as timely and difficult because it was in her own lifetime: value each remembering and celebrating.
Dr James Roberts is a theologian and interfaith practitioner based in Peterborough.
