The colloquium "Russian Emigration and Spiritual Culture in the West"

This article presents the colloquium entitled "Russian Emigration and Spiritual Culture in the West," of which Michel Philippenko was one of the organizers. It is an introductory text to the Proceedings of this event, which adopts both a historical and analytical approach. The author sets out the intellectual and spiritual issues related to the Russian diaspora in the West, examining the way in which this emigration contributed to the transmission and renewal of Orthodox spiritual culture outside its lands of origin. The central idea is that exile did not constitute a rupture, but rather a vector for the dissemination and deepening of Russian theological and spiritual thought. The contribution of the article lies in its contextualization of the cultural and religious dynamics specific to the Russian Orthodox diaspora within the Western world in the twentieth century.