Lev Gillet

Lev Gillet (born Louis Gillett; 8 August 1893 - 29 March 1980) was an archimandrite of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Brought up in the Roman Catholic tradition, he joined the Orthodox Church in 1928 and worked for the union of the churches.

Louis Gillet was born on 8 August 1892 or 1893 in Saint-Marcellin, Isère, France. He studied in Grenoble and philosophy in Paris.

During World War I he was mobilised and posted to the front, where he made liaison with British troops. He was taken prisoner in 1914 and spent three years in captivity with British and Russian prisoners, when he was attracted by the spirit and the spirituality of the Orthodox Russian prisoners.

After the war he studied mathematics and psychology in Geneva, but he decided to join the Benedictines of Clairvaux in 1919. At this period he spent some time in the Benedictine house at Farnborough in Britain, and studying theology in Rome. Attracted by Eastern Christianity, he became acquainted with Dom Lambert Baudouin (who later founded the bi-ritual communities at Amay and Chevetogne) and Metropolitan bishop Andriy Sheptytsky of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Galicia and pronounced his final vows as Lev in 1925 at the Studite monastery of Univ Lavra in Galicia.

Disappointed by the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church towards Orthodoxy, Gillet was received into the Orthodox Church in Paris in May 1928 by Metropolitan Evlogii - with the approval, Fr Lev always maintained, of Metropolitan Andriy. In November 1928, he became rector of the parish of Sainte-Geneviève-de-Paris, the first French-speaking Orthodox parish.

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