Justin Popović

Archimandrite Justin Popović

Ava Justin (Popović) ; Serbian Ава Јустин (Поповић) (born April 6, 1894 in Vranje , † April 7, 1979 in the Čelije monastery near Valjevo ) was an important theologian of the Orthodox Church in the 20th century. In evaluating his rank, he is not infrequently put on an equal footing with the church fathers of earlier times; his thinking is shaped by the preservation of the authentic tradition of Orthodoxy with a view to the modern world.

The future Archimandrite was born as Blagoje Popovic in the southern Serbian city of Vranje. After completing elementary school he attended from 1905 to 1914 the spiritual seminar (in Serbian "Bogoslovija") in Belgrade and began at the local university to study at the Faculty of Theology, the first by the outbreak of the First World War came to an end. In 1914 and 1915 he completed his military service as a medic, fell seriously ill with typhus and was finally released from further obligations. Dressed as a monk in January 1916 , he was soon sent to the Spiritual Academy in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) for further training ; the October Revolution and the civil war that followed in Russia, however, accelerated his return to Serbia.

Another study visit took the young monk to Oxford University between 1919 and 1921 , where he was to write a dissertation on " Dostoevsky and Europe". But because of various ideological differences, conflicts arose, which ultimately led to the rejection of the doctoral thesis - one of the main reasons for this may well be found in the uncompromisingly orthodox attitude of the theologian.

From 1934 to 1941 he was Professor of Dogmatics at the Theological Faculty of the University of Belgrade . In 1979 he died in the Čelije monastery near Valjevo (position of the grave: ⊙ ). In 2010 he was formally canonized by the Serbian Orthodox Church .

Footnotes

1. ↑ Homepage of the Serbian Orthodox Church

Web links

• Alexander Mrakic. The Holy Monk Justin Popović and his criticism of humanistic anthropology