THIS year marks the 80th anniversary of the death of one of the 20th century’s most colourful 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 full of challenge and beauty, and which remains prescient for our times. As her feast day approaches, her theology — rooted in the dual command to love both 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 three children; and, somewhat surprisingly, a nun, who took the veil in 1932. This did not, however, 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 collect discarded or cheap food to make into soup for the hungry.
Later in the 1930s, 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 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 children 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 action and ultimate martyrdom were inspired by her theology. She had a sharp intellect, was a friend of Aleksandr Blok and Anna Akhmatova, and arranged regular philosophical and theological discussions at her home, with contemporaries such as Fr Sergei Bulgakov (her spiritual father) and Nikolai Berdyaev.
At the heart of her theological vision is an insistence on maintaining a balance between loving both God and neighbour. While this twofold commandment is integral to Christian belief, Mother Maria believed that, in practice, parity between the two elements had not always been achieved. Her own theology is, therefore, characterised by a search for synthesis between loving God and neighbour; between the Church and the world; and between the fullness of human creativity and the life of prayer. In fact, she wanted to tear down the walls of the Church to let in the world, with all its scabs and sores.
SHE wrote essays and articles that sought to give theological weight to social engagement. She wrote with the passion of a poet, and her spirituality is deeply rooted in 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 in the image of God and are icons of Christ. This is why the congregation is censed in the liturgy. At the point of communion with another person, one can encounter God. There is thus a mystical quality in our engagement with our neighbours, and in the process of showing love towards them. In these human, everyday 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 cast away the clouds that overshadow the image of God in us. For Mother Maria, this needs to be a shared practice: we must enter the inner life of our neighbour, joining in their ascetic task, grappling with sin and failure like Jacob and the angel, as we all 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 form of solidarity. At the crucifixion, Mary’s heart was pierced by a metaphorical two-edged sword. This was an unchosen form of solidarity: she was unable to change the course of Jesus’s suffering, and yet she was bound up in his life in such a way that she suffered alongside him. In this relationship, Mother Maria recognises a radical, maternal form of human communion: one where each person is bound up in the fate of the other, sharing in a compassionate way in 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 just about material possessions, but also about letting go of our selfishness.
THE human person is at the heart 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 in the 1930s. These systems failed to recognise the innate freedom and creativity of each 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 both God and neighbour. In our fractured world, her vision for the Church and for society remains as timely and challenging as it was in her own lifetime: worth both remembering and celebrating.
Dr James Roberts is a theologian and interfaith practitioner based in Peterborough.