Justin Popović

Saint Justin Popović, venerable, also called Justin of Ćelije, was a Serbian Orthodox theologian, archimandrite and spiritual father of the Ćelije monastery near Valjevo, professor of dogmatics at Belgrade and an interpreter of the work of Dostoevsky. He was born at Vranje in 1894 and fell asleep in 1979, on the feast of the Annunciation, at Ćelije. The Holy Synod of the Serbian Orthodox Church canonised him on 29 April 2010.

Childhood and calling He was born on the day of the Annunciation, by the old calendar, to Spiridon, a sexton, and Anastasia Popović, in a family in which seven generations of forebears had been priests, hence the name Popović. At baptism he was given the name Blagoje, after the feast of the Annunciation. He was the youngest of his brothers and sisters, and his grandmother Stana lived to be a hundred and five. His mother and grandmother took him as a child to the monastery of Saint Prohor of Pčinja, where he witnessed the miraculous healing of his mother. He was an excellent pupil at the school in Vranje and in 1905 he entered the Seminary of Saint Sava in Belgrade, where Nikolaj Velimirović was his teacher, who became his spiritual father and had a decisive influence on him.

From youth he desired the monastic life, but his parents opposed it and asked Metropolitan Dimitrije not to tonsure him. A painful event had been the death of his brother Stojadin, a law student, who fell from a train. After he finished the seminary, in 1914, the First World War began. As a graduate he worked as an orderly at the military hospital in Niš, where he caught typhus that winter and spent over a month in hospital. On 8 January 1915 he returned to duty and crossed Kosovo and Albania with the Serbian army, in the retreat in which very many perished. The great sufferings of the soldiers decided him: on the night between 31 December 1915 and 1 January 1916, at Shkodër, Archimandrite Benjamin Taušanović tonsured him a monk with the name Justin, after Saint Justin Martyr and Philosopher.

Studies At the beginning of 1916 the Serbian government sent a group of young theologians, among them the monk Justin, to study at the Theological Academy of Petrograd, where he learned of the great Russian ascetics, among them Saints Anthony and Theodosius of the Caves, Seraphim of Sarov, Sergius of Radonezh and John of Kronstadt. In June 1916 he went to England, to Oxford, where he studied until 1919. His doctoral thesis on the philosophy and religion of Dostoevsky was not accepted, because of its sharp criticism of Western humanism and rationalism, of Catholicism and of anthropocentrism. It was printed in 1923. In 1926 he received the doctorate in theology at Athens, with a work on the problem of personality and knowledge in Saint Macarius of Egypt.

During all this time he translated into Serbian lives of saints from Greek, Syriac and Slavonic sources, as well as homilies of Saints John Chrysostom, Macarius and Isaac the Syrian. From 1921 he taught the New Testament, dogmatics and patrology at the seminary of Sremski Karlovci, and he was ordained hieromonk in 1922. In 1930 he worked with Bishop Joseph of Bitola on the reorganisation of the Church of the Carpatho-⁠Russians in Czechoslovakia and declined to be elected bishop of Mukachevo. From 1932 he was a professor at the seminary of Bitola, and in 1934 professor of dogmatics at the Faculty of Theology in Belgrade. In 1938 he was one of the founders of the Serbian Philosophical Society.

Ćelije and his writings After the communist regime came to power he was removed from university teaching. In May 1948 he became spiritual father of the convent of Ćelije, near Valjevo, where he lived to the end of his life. He left writings exceeding twenty thousand pages, among them the Dogmatics of the Orthodox Church in three volumes and the Lives of the Saints in twelve volumes, and he became known as a critic of pragmatic church life and an opponent of communism. He fell asleep in 1979 and was buried at Ćelije.

Veneration The Synod of the Serbian Church canonised him on 29 April 2010 as Venerable Justin of Ćelije. On 12 June 2014 his relics were found at the Ćelije monastery and placed provisionally in the old church of the Archangel Michael. Their intended resting place is the monastery church dedicated to Saint Sava of Serbia, built with money left by his will. His feast has been set on 1 June, by the old calendar.