This monograph, published in the OUP series ‘Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology’, may be read in at least three ways: as an intellectual biography of the eminent Russian Orthodox historical theologian and thinker Georges Florovsky (1893-1979); as a study of conflicting trends in theological life among the post-Bolshevik Russian diaspora in the West (above all, in France, notably in the years before 1939); and as a programmatic statement offering a new direction for Orthodox theology in the future. It is rich in information and reflection, building upon not only archival discoveries pertinent to Florovsky's life and thought but also the astonishingly prolific output of Church-oriented writing in Russian since the end of the Soviet era. One should also add as an explanation for the success of the author's project his own admirably gifted – at once analytic and constructive - theological mind.
As the title indicates, Gavrilyuk situates Florosky against the background of the ‘Russian Religious Renaissance’, a phrase coined by Nicolas Zernov, sometime Spalding Lecturer in East Christian Studies at Oxford, for the upsurge of creativity in religious philosophy which characterized the ‘Silver Age’ of the turn-of-the-century Tsardom. Cruelly interrupted by the emergence of State-enforced atheism, those of the ‘fathers’ of the Renaissance still alive in 1917 (the majority) survived by transplantation to the West. As the author shows, Florovsky was at once a product of that Renaissance, not least through his early admiring interest in Soloviev, the founder of ‘sophiology’, and yet, once arrived in the West, its sternest critic. The Renaissance had boasted a twofold aim: to ‘ecclesialise’ Russian culture in all its dimensions, and to stimulate Orthodox theology to go beyond the limited horizon of the seminary manuals. Inevitably, in a diaspora situation where most exiles – as well as the Church structure – had to begin again from near zero, the scope for the transformation of culture shrank, but the theological impetus remained, exercised through the characteristically Russian medium of ‘religious – philosophical circles’ as well as via the theological academy-cum-seminary that was and is the Parisian Institut Saint-Serge. It was Florovsky's conviction that the Russian religious thought which he once admired for its originality had in reality lost its way. Through excessive ingestion of post-Cartesian Western philosophy, notably German Idealism, whose formulae it sought, improbably, to fill with Christian meaning, it had ceased to communicate the ‘mind of the Fathers’ – meaning, above all, the common mind of the Greek church of the patristic era to which the Byzantine divines of the mediaeval period were the natural successors.
Florovsky thus sought to put in place of the sophiology of St Serge, inseparable from the name of its Dean, Sergei Bulgakov, and the wider speculative culture of other Renaissance thinkers like Nikolai Berdyaev, a ‘neo-patristic synthesis’, consisting in the architectonic integration of the thinking of the great Fathers in a new whole – which, however, as Gavrilyuk points out, Florovsky's writing does little more than gesture towards as an achievement for the future to come.
Florovsky emerges from this study as far more than a chronicler of the Greek and middle Byzantine doctors, or an historian of ‘the ways of Russian theology’, to utilize the title of his magnum opus. Had he remained in his native Odessa, absent the October Revolution he would most likely have become, Gavrilyuk shows reason for believing, a professional philosopher: certainly a philosopher of culture, and perhaps a philosopher of science as well. There is a powerful philosophical undertow to his writing, not only in his insistence on the metaphysically innovatory character of the notion of creation, but also in his theory of history, which is strongly anti-deterministic and with a marked emphasis on personal agency as the true carrier of cultural creativity. Those two concepts have an obvious application in a critique of Bolshevism but they are also pertinent to disagreement with the sophiologists as well.
Gavrilyuk regards Florovsky's intellectual commitments here as owed almost as much to ‘Renaissance’ or other contemporary writers as to the Fathers themselves. Conversely, it was, he thinks, unfair of Florovsky to speak of Bulgakov as if he were a theologian working in ignorance of, or indifference to, the patristic witness. (It was Bulgakov who urged Florovsky to make patristics his life work, and secured his chair at Saint-Serge.) For Gavrilyuk, Florovsky's was a voice within the ‘polyphony’ of the Renaissance, not one that came from outside. In due time, however, his voice, unfortunately, drowned out that of others. His intervention in the world of Russian theology altered the balance of Orthodox theological life worldwide. He was victorious through his students and heirs. In describing the revisionism which is now seeking to revisit the issues and produce a new balance-sheet, Gavrilyuk makes it plain he would like to see the theologians of Orthodoxy move beyond both neo-patristics and a Bulgakov-like sophiology, so as to develop fresh forms of theological reflection taking their cue from such issues as politics, gender and the body. I think a Catholic commentator sympathetic to Orthodoxy would want to sound a warning note here. Learn negatively as well as positively from the experience of the West. Consider these themes theologically, by all means, but do not draw from them principles of order for theology at large. Do not erect them into alternative theologies in their own right, as some in the Catholic West have done in recent decades, to the confusion of hierarchs, intelligentsia and faithful. It is, surely, by entering with the help of a congruent metaphysics into the realm of revelation first fully registered by the Fathers that a theological life suited to the Great Church will make its way aright in the wider world.
