Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance
COMMON KNOWLEDGE Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 297 pp. 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 (18931979), 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 nonteleological philosophy of history, personalism, singularism, and a human ego kept in check by a Christian "intimation of creaturehood." Russian Orthodox Published by Duke University Press Common Knowledge theology, Florovsky believed, had long been in captivity to the West, distorted by Protestant and Roman...
