The Play of the Semiotic and the Symbolic: The Authenticity of the Life of Mother Maria Skobtsova.

This article deals with the issue of innovation in church tradition, more specifically in Orthodoxy. Using as an example the admittedly untypical life of Mother Maria Skobtsova (1891–1945), an Orthodox nun living in France after the 1917 revolution in Russia, the article shows how the creative moments of her life, which shaped the church tradition in exile, can be also viewed from a psychoanalytical perspective. With the help of French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, the creative changes Mother Maria brought to church tradition can be seen as the play of the semiotic and the symbolic within the Symbolic order: the maternal, imaginatively associative, less conscious and the paternal, regulated, structured and regulated. The subversive forces of the semiotic – madness, holiness and poetry – observed in Mother Maria’s life, brought new and living possibilities into the theology of Orthodox diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]