St Justin the New on the Mystery of Personhood

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This paper seeks to explore in a preliminary manner the range of Justin Popović’s early works with the special focus on the issue of person and personhood. The scrutiny of the mystery of person and personhood is without doubt an issue that may gather together different aspirations of entire Orthodox theology of the twentieth century. This issue is often associated with the contemporary Orthodox thinkers such as the Metropolitan of Pergamon John Ziziulas and Professor Christos Yannaras. However, the problem of personhood played a central role in the thought of Serbian theologian Justin Popović (1894–1979). Popović’s view of personhood, especially in his early works, is a creative synthesis of Russian religious thought of the nineteenth and early twentieth century and patristic, primarily, ascetic worldview. Abba Justin is linked to Russian religious thinkers of his time by the same questions, issues and aspirations, but not necessarily by the same responses to these questions. He merges sometimes abstract and romanticized Russian philosophical and theological thought with the ascetico-patristic tradition. Therefore, he offers the spiritual and ascetical insights of the Fathers of Syrio-Egyptian deserts as a solution to the problems of the Europeans at the beginning twentieth century. The mystery of personhood in his work is manifested through the mystery of human infinity, the mystery of human love and the mystery of sobornost or catholicity.

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