Georges Florovsky

Georges Florovsky (1893-1979) was one of the most influential Eastern Orthodox theologians of the mid-twentieth century, alongside Sergei Bulgakov, Vladimir Lossky, Justin Popović and Dumitru Stăniloae. A priest, theologian and historian, he devoted his work to a clear aim: that modern Christian theology should draw its inspiration from the living debates of the Fathers of the undivided Church, rather than from Scholastic or Reformation categories of thought.

Born in Yelisavetgrad in the Russian Empire, the son of an Orthodox priest, he grew up in Odesa, where he studied philosophy and history and graduated from the university in 1916. After the revolution his family was forced to leave Russia in 1920. Florovsky realised that he could not return, since Marxism had no place for the history and philosophy he taught. He settled in Paris, where in 1925 he became professor of patristics at the St Serge Institute of Orthodox Theology. There he found his vocation, and he was ordained a priest in 1932.

His major work, Ways of Russian Theology (1937), questioned the influence of scholasticism, pietism and idealism on Orthodox theology, especially the Russian kind, and called for its reformulation in the light of the Fathers. The book provoked both enthusiasm and condemnation among Russian émigrés, and one of its most prominent critics was Nikolai Berdyaev. His patristic studies on the Eastern Fathers of the fourth century and the Byzantine Fathers of the fifth to eighth centuries were equally important.

In 1949 he moved to the United States to become dean of St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York, a post he left in 1955 under pressure from his church superiors. He then taught at Harvard and Princeton and lectured at several other universities and seminaries. He died in Princeton in 1979.

His theology is Christocentric. For him the Church is the work of Christ on earth and the body of the incarnate Lord, not an incarnation of the Holy Spirit, and within it human salvation and deification (theiosis) reach their fullness. Sobornost, the unanimity of believers in faith and love, is for him the meaning of catholicity, and the infallibility of the confession of faith belongs to it. The hierarchy is an organ of unity, a role his theology did not always spell out in detail.

His influence endures in Orthodox ecclesiology and in the ecumenical debate. Critics have argued that his notion of sobornost leaned towards an idealised, almost democratic picture of the Church. Even so, his recovery of the mysterious dimension of catholicity and of the patristic heritage remains a contribution that later ecclesiological syntheses have not been able to ignore.