Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance by Paul L. Gavrilyuk (review)

Rare is the book that scrupulously succeeds in using a single person as lens to explain a complex era. Rarer still is the book that illuminates both the individual and the era with equal compassion and brilliant detail, when the intellect serving as the lens grew ever more critical of the era and disdainful of its survivors. Georges Florovsky (1893–1979), priest, historian, professor of theology, and father of twentieth-century Orthodox neopatristics, was among the more fortunate of his wandering exiled generation. Born in Odessa, educated in Ukraine, Sofia, and Prague among sympathetic Eurasianists, he taught at the St. Sergius Theological Institute in Paris from 1926 until the Nazi invasion. In 1948 he immigrated to the United States and found work at eminent Orthodox seminaries and university communities (Harvard, Princeton). Florovsky was learned, opinionated, inconsistent, and irascible. At every stop, he managed to alienate most of his colleagues. In his Ways of Russian Theology (1937), he argued that every way other than the patristic (as creatively synthesized by him) was a spiritual dead end. Gavrilyuk covers nothing up, sensationalizes nothing, and calmly examines each claim.

Unlike his fellow exiles Nicolas Berdyaev and Sergius Bulgakov with their youthful Marxist enthusiasms, Florovsky had always been nonpolitical. His life’s mission was to revive Christian Hellenism, the synthesis of secular and religious knowledge characteristic of Byzantine culture. It embraced intuitivism, a non-teleological philosophy of history, personalism, singularism, and a human ego kept in check by a Christian “intimation of creaturehood.” Russian Orthodox theology, Florovsky believed, had long been in captivity to the West, distorted by Protestant and Roman Catholic borrowings. Vladimir Solovyov had made a brave start at a native synthesis but was led astray by German Idealist metaphysics and sophiological mysticism. Florovsky disapproved also of the “new religious consciousness” of the Russian Symbolist poets—too self-servingly experimental, too Decadent. Religious wisdom, he insisted, should stay within the church. Each individual should strive toward a disciplined “enchurching” (votserkovlenie) of his or her own mind.

Gavrilyuk notes that Florovsky “sought to make patristic theology modern and modernity outdated.” Parallels will be noted here with the Roman Catholic half of Christianity, those neo-Thomist philosophers in France during the interwar period who also looked back (in their case, to Aquinas rather than the Greek fathers) for truths that could save modernity from its self-inflicted epistemological and ontological abyss. Florovsky’s trademark attire during his American years was telling: a beret—marking a member of the Russian intelligentsia—and a black cassock. To the properly “enchurched” personality, there was no conflict between individual dignity and institutional authority, or between reason and faith.