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  • Mes missions en Sibérie, suivi de Confession d’un prêtre devant l’Église
  • Michael Plekon
Mes missions en Sibérie, suivi de Confession d’un prêtre devant l’Église. By Archimandrite Spiridon. Translated by Pierre Pascal and Michel Evdokimov with an introduction by Michel Evdokimov. [L’histoire à vif.] (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf. 2010. Pp. 255. €20,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-204-09373-6.)

The first of these two memoirs by Archimandrite Spiridon, a Russian monastic priest of the early-twentieth century, was first translated from the Russian by Pierre Pascal and published in 1950. Michel Evdokimov, an Orthodox priest of the Western European Archdiocese based in Paris and an emeritus professor of comparative literature at the University of Poitiers, has translated the second part—a confessional open letter about Spiridon’s service as a military chaplain and a statement he sent to the 1917–18 Moscow Council that was charged with reform of the Russian church.

This is a wonderful, first-person account of a life of dedication to pastoral ministry by a monastic priest who was born in 1875 and died in 1930. The first memoirs are colorful, recounting deprivations and adventures of the most inspiring sort as a missionary in Siberia. Spiridon comes across quite strongly as a pastor with a compassionate and discerning heart. He recognizes the hard life of people in this desolate, harsh region and the goodness of the Buddhists—even envisioning Christ and the Buddha as brothers, leading people to salvation/enlightenment. When he became a military chaplain, he was troubled by the act of communing soldiers who would then kill other human beings in battle.

Perhaps the most passionate expression of Spiridon’s soul comes toward the end in his open letter to the Moscow Council and the epilogue. Although St. Tikon (Bellavin), the newly restored patriarch of Moscow and head of the council, received the letter, Spiridon never received a reply. Spiridon, to be sure, speaks from the experience of the decadence of the church in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, a realization that finally took incarnation in the convocation of the Moscow Council in 1917. Spiridon pleads for the bishops, the teachers, and leaders of the church to repent and cast off their enslavement to canons and traditions, to distance themselves from the state and from power both spiritual and political and return to the simplicity and community spirit of the early Church. His is a call for the most basic Christian conversion and renewal, acutely relevant today not only within the internal Eastern Orthodox churches but also in the churches in communion with Rome and those of the Reformation. He notes that Christ himself might appear more like an anarchist to the institutional church in the radical nature of his words and actions in the gospels. St. Maria Skobtsova used a similar image in her provocative essays, imagining Christ leaving the incense, candles, icons, and chant of the church sanctuary to abide with the poor, the despised, and sick in the streets, past the church door and gate. Like her and other prophetic voices such as Alexander Schmemann, John Meyendorff, Paul Evdokimov and the martyred [End Page 140] Alexander Men, Spiridon expresses the same Spirit-driven passion and compassion. What he saw—hierarchs resolute in opposing reform, content with their power; churches preferring political and cultural power—is still evident today. In these stirring pages, however, we hear another voice, one reminiscent of those in the scriptures, saying otherwise.

Michael Plekon
Baruch College, City University of New York
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