ANTON KARTASHEV AND THE POST-WAR REVIVAL OF THE ST. SERGIUS ORTHODOX THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE IN PARIS

Abstract

The paper reveals the role of the famous church historian Anton Kartashev in the revival of the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris after the Second World War, as evidenced by the restoration of the number of students and professors. The sources for the article are published and archival materials stored in the Bahmetev Archive of Russian and East European Culture at Columbia University, USA. The research methodology is based on the principles of communication analysis of intellectual biography, considering its polycontextuality. The socio-political and professional contexts were chosen as significant ones. As a result of the study, the change in the national composition of students led to a metamorphosis of the mission of the institute, as the historian characterized it. From an educational institution where priests were trained for Russian emigrants who were forced to leave their homeland after the 1917 revolution, it turned into a pan-Orthodox educational center in Russian. The professor’s special contribution to the revival of the institute was in the search and implementation of opportunities for material and financial support of colleagues and students in the difficult post-war years and in the training of a young generation of the teachers. The article clarifies the motives for Anton Kartashev’s rejection of the actions of Metropolitan Evlogy (Georgievsky) to return Russian Orthodox parishes in Western Europe to the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate. Considering such a step reasonable, he defined it in the specific conditions of international relations (the spread of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe) and the political situation in the USSR (the enslavement of the Russian Orthodox Church by the godless state) as an act of generating new schisms among Russian emigrants.