"The Love of the Neighbor is a Sacrament" Paul Evdokimov’s Vision of Church and Society
by Archpriest MICHAEL PLEKON
Without specifying the forms of social structures, the Gospel is nevertheless precise about the basic attitude in relationships among human beings, something St. John Chrysostom later would qualify as sacramental: “The love of the neighbor is a sacrament,” he would say, a sacrament because beneath the visible form of the neighbor is given the grace of the invisible presence of Christ. It is this presence which makes me the neighbor of all. The last judgment is centered upon this “sacramental attitude” towards the sick, the hungry, the poor, and prisoners.
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ver fifty years ago, theologian Paul Evdokimov gave a course on the church’s social theology at the Ecumenical Center at Bossey. Evdokimov had migrated to Paris in the years after the Revolution and was in the first class at St. Sergius Theological Institute there. Fr. Sergius Bulgakov was one of his primary teachers, along with Nicolas Berdyaev and other luminaries of the émigré thinkers in Paris. Evdokimov raised his two children after his first wife’s death and spent years caring for the marginalized in ecumenical hostels in Sévres and Massey with his second wife. During the WWII occupation of France, these hostels helped protect people who were the targets of the
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Nazis. Evdokimov was a faculty member at St. Sergius and an ecumenical observer at Vatican II. Of all the great writers at St. Sergius, Evdokimov was the most pastoral, the most concerned with the mission of the church to the world and, in particular, to the suffering. In this, he was close to the ministry of St. Mother Maria (Skobtsova) of Paris and her companions. The Bossey course was aimed at sketching out how Orthodox theology viewed the relationship of church and society, in light of Vatican II and of Pope Paul VI’s constant speaking out against war and for social justice. It was the early 1960s, a time of great ferment about underdeveloped countries both in the churches and in international aid groups like the World Health Organization and the United Nations agency UNESCO. European nations such as England and France were withdrawing their colonial presence in other countries, and the enormous economic gaps between the “third world” and the rest of the nations were drawing international attention. It was not only a time of such rising social and economic consciousness. It was also a time of the rediscovery of the church as the people of God and as the witness to the Gospel in the world, as exemplified
