The exile of members of the Russian intelligentsia not acceptable to the Bolsheviks can be seen as one of the unintentionally creative events of the last century for Orthodox theology. In exile, the Russians had to make sense of their experience of Orthodoxy, no longer at home in the place where they found themselves—for most of them, Paris. The political structures of Tsarist Russia, which had provided a scaffolding for the Russian Orthodox Church, had been removed, and with that an institutional sense of the Church as existing in symphonia with the State: an ecclesiology that went back, ultimately, to the emperor Constantine’s conversion and the close relationship between Church and State, envisaged by Justinian’s Codex and Novels. Some, especially Fr Afanasiev, looked back behind the Constantinian settlement and evolved an ecclesiology that drew on the Slavophil sense of sobornost′, interpreted in terms of the eucharist as the event of the Church, the influential ‘eucharistic ecclesiology’. Exile encountered hospitality offered by Western Christians interested in, and sometimes attracted to, Orthodoxy, two examples of which being the short-lived colloque convened by Nicholas Berdyaev and the Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain, and the still existing Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius. Exile was, however, for many a traumatic experiences, causing great suffering, and however much diaspora was seen as an opportunity, there remained for many a deep nostalgia for the loss of Holy Russia.