Barth and Florovsky met on 29 June 1931 at the University of Bonn. Barth was then teaching a seminar on Schleiermacher. Florovsky, then professor of patrology in Paris and still a layman, addressed Barth's seminar with a paper titled ‘Offenbarung, Philosophie, und Theologie’. In 1937, the two were honoured by the University of St Andrews with honorary doctorates. Beginning in 1947, they would collaborate for a decade in the ecumenical movement. Photographs exist of them together at Faith and Order meetings with cheerful expressions. Supposedly, Barth once called Florovsky the only other real theologian in the WCC. There is no indication, however, that they were close, and there is no surviving correspondence. Moreover, the impression left on both after their first meeting was that of manifest disagreement. In what follows, I aim to expose that disagreement, while also suggesting certain crucial convergences.
Florovsky–Lieb correspondence and the ‘The Crisis of German Idealism’
Florovsky's invitation to Bonn came through a mutual friend, Fritz Lieb. Son of a Swiss pastor, Lieb trained in oriental languages before turning to theology. In 1920, he joined Barth as his assistant at Safenwil while Barth worked on the second edition of his Römerbrief. A Russophile, Lieb amassed an enormous library of religious and philosophical books. In 1924, he met the émigré philosopher, Nikolai Berdyaev, with whom he would become close. From 1926 to 1932, Florovsky also met almost weekly with Berdyaev in Paris. It was through Berdyaev that Lieb and Florovsky became acquainted.
The Florovsky–Lieb correspondence, in German and Russian, spans from 1928 to 1954, the greater part from 1929 to 1934.Footnote 1 These letters provide fascinating insights into Florovsky's mind in the period when he met Barth. It is clear that the motive of interest in many of the books Florovsky asked from Lieb – on patristics, Origenism, Luther, even medieval mystics like Henry Suso – was his concern to trace the sources of Russian sophiology and to distinguish these from patristic teachings on Christology and the doctrine of creation.Footnote 2 Here we find a crisscrossing of interests which led both to Florovsky's engagement with Barth, and to his involvement in the controversy over the sophiology of Fr Sergei Bulgakov in 1935.
In his fourth letter to Lieb, dated 11 June 1929, Florovsky writes:
Yesterday I was with Nikolai Alexandrovich [Berdyaev] and we discussed the article on Barth. Besides the characteristics of Barth himself, it would be interesting to us to determine also his historical position. The book by Kattenbusch, which I received from you, is very useful for this. In addition, I would like also to say something about Kierkegaard . . . I want to speak about the crisis of German Idealism and the religious turn of contemporary philosophy in connection with the Barthian theology.Footnote 3
The book by Kattenbusch, Die deutsche evangelische Theologie seit Schleiermacher: Ihre Leistungen und ihre Schäden (1926), detailing the achievements and defects of German Protestant theology from Schleiermacher to the 1920s, was one which Barth also commended.Footnote 4 Ferdinand Kattenbusch (1851–1935) was a discriminating follower of Ritschl. His most important historical studies concerned the development of ancient creeds. Florovsky would later appeal to Kattenbusch's scholarship in favour of his own ideas of the ‘pseudomorphosis’Footnote 5 of post-Byzantine theology and the Christocentric character of patristic thought: in order to grasp the genuine spirit of Orthodox theology, one had to return to the Gründungsepoche, the period of the Christological controversies, reading the whole tradition out of that centre. ‘Kattenbusch rightly stressed the centrality of the Christological vision in the total structure of the Greek theological system: der Inbegriff aller Themata’ – and it is to this patristic vision of Christ crucified, God and Redeemer, that modern theology must return, as the starting point and centre of theological synthesis.Footnote 6 This Christocentrism, of course, has obvious parallels to Barth.
The essay Florovsky promised for Berdyaev's journal, Put', does not mention Barth.Footnote 7 To learn that this essay, ‘The Crisis of German Idealism’, was originally conceived with Barth in mind puts it in a new light.Footnote 8 Here Florovsky formulates his idea of Christian Hellenism in relation to precisely the nexus detected in his letters to Lieb: German Idealism and its crisis, the Reformation and contemporary return to the Reformation. It was probably Kattenbusch's Ritschlian opposition to Hellenism that Florovsky saw as shedding light on Barth.
Florovsky views the Reformation as a rejection of the project of Christian philosophy. To ‘philosophize about God’ (Gregory Nazianzen) is no opus supererogatorium, but an essential moment of the Christian calling. The Great Church never accepted any divorce between Athens and Jerusalem. No wonder the project of Idealist metaphysics arose primarily in a Protestant milieu: in the vacuum created by the Reformation. With their failure to grasp the significance of creation ex nihilo and the fundamental difference between Creator and creation, Florovsky regards the great Idealist systems as a relapse into pagan Hellenism, a theory of Godmanhood (bogochelovechestvo) without the historic God-man. Responding to this, dialectical theology returns to the Reformation. Yet the biblicist renunciation of Christian philosophy is insufficient to counter the crisis of Idealism. Return to an Aristotelian Thomism also would not answer the Reformational challenge. In Florovsky's view, the way forward lies in return to the Christian Hellenism of the Fathers.Footnote 9
In 1930, with Barth's support, Lieb was appointed professor of Eastern Christianity at Bonn. Lieb soon proposed to invite Florovsky to lecture at one of Barth's seminars. On 3 June 1931, Florovsky thanks Lieb, and notes he already has a lecture to present, ‘La révélation, philosophie et la théologie’.Footnote 10 The lecture had been delivered at Berdyaev's colloquium that spring; Florovsky asks Lieb to translate.Footnote 11
Three weeks later, Florovsky notes that he is sending a revised version of his paper, as the original was for a Roman Catholic audience.Footnote 12 He also mentions another Russian article, ‘On the Death on the Cross’, likewise originally a paper for Berdyaev's circle.Footnote 13 It is unfortunate, Florovsky remarks, he did not think to offer it for Barth's seminar, as he would be ‘very interested to know Barth's opinion – especially in connection with the Christology of Brunner’.Footnote 14
Florovsky makes no reference to Brunner in this Russian article. However, already in 1927, he had, in reviewing Brunner's book Der Mittler, attacked Brunner's Christology for its ‘docetism’ – a result, he held, of Brunner's rejection of the communicatio idiomatum and the patristic doctrine of the hypostatic union. Reacting against Ritschl and Harnack and invoking Fathers such as Irenaeus and Athanasius, Brunner continues the Ritschlian fight against Christian metaphysics. Stuck in a halfway house between the ‘Jesus-ism’ of Liberal theology and the Christology of the Ecumenical Councils, he repeats the tragedy of the Reformation: fearing the ghost of Pelagius, he reduces man to historical passivity; consumed by the Lutheran distrust towards reason, he does not fully allow that faith is ‘the light of the mind’ – he fails to see in dogma a positive kerygmatic light. While Brunner emphasises the objectivity of faith, it is an objectivity which attempts to bypass the mind, leading back into precisely the psychologism Brunner aims to oppose, in which ‘the objectivity of faith is confined to experience’.Footnote 15 Florovsky does not mention Barth in this polemical review. Given, however, that Florovsky, like many at this time, closely associated the names of Barth and Brunner,Footnote 16 the review sheds light on the questions accompanying Florovsky in his first meeting with Barth.
Florovsky's Bonn Lecture: ‘Offenbarung, Philosophie und Theologie’
Florovsky arrived in Bonn on 29 June 1931 and addressed Barth's seminar with his lecture, ‘Offenbarung, Philosophie und Theologie’.Footnote 17 Florovsky's starting point was revelation – ‘the voice of God speaking to man’. The written record of this revelation is scripture – ‘the voice of God in the language of man’. Like Barth, Florovsky understands revelation as a system of both words and acts, though his emphasis falls more on acts: the Bible as sacred history. Like Barth in CD I/2 and II/2, he defends the ‘anthropomorphism’ of the scriptural medium; following the Fathers, he understands this anthropomorphism on analogy with the incarnation itself. Florovsky and Barth agree that ‘human language in no way reduces the absolute character of Revelation nor limits the power of God's Word’.Footnote 18
From here we anticipate Barth's objections. Florovsky describes the impact of revelation upon human language, thought and history in terms of ‘transfiguration’. Through revelation, history becomes ‘sacred’ – transfigured from within. Florovsky like Barth is concerned with the ‘objectivity’ of revelation – its Sachlichkeit or Gegenständlichkeit. Yet it is doubtless not only Luther but also Barth's second Römerbrief that Florovsky has in mind here in underscoring that this objectivity is not to be apprehended by man's shrinking himself to a ‘mathematical point’, or abstracting himself from time.Footnote 19 In fact, Barth had already abandoned this idea, and would soon insist that revelation can never be apprehended as a timeless core by abstracting oneself from time.Footnote 20 Yet Barth would not have agreed that the ‘highest objectivity in the hearing and understanding of Revelation is achieved through the greatest exertion of the creative personality’.Footnote 21
According to Florovsky, the capacity for hearing revelation, the imago Dei, was never fully destroyed by sin, and is renewed by revelation itself, so that apprehension of revelation entails a rehabilitation of human powers – indeed, ‘theosis’.Footnote 22 This rehabilitation ought to issue into human reason. ‘Reason is summoned to the knowledge of God.’Footnote 23 Knowledge of God remains ‘heteronomous’; faith ever remains its foundation. But Christian faith is more than just Old Testament expectation – it is ‘theophany’, ‘vision’, open to growth towards gnosis and theoria. Revelation must issue into an ‘entire system of believing confession’, ‘a philosophy of Revelation’.Footnote 24 The Church's condemnation of Apollinarianism means that Christ's renewal of human nature entails also a renewal of reason. While not a truth of reason, the truth of faith is nevertheless a truth for reason. Through the incarnation, and in the Church's dogmatic theology, thought is sanctified – ‘words themselves are transformed’.Footnote 25 The Church does not create closed systems; Christian knowledge is in via, incomplete. But this does not weaken the apodictic character of knowledge given in faith as a light for reason. There is, then, a philosophia perennis, outlined in Church dogmas, explicated in the Christian Hellenism of the Fathers. This philosophy is properly apprehended only within the experience of the Church and her Tradition, wherein Scripture comes alive. Tradition is more than historical erudition: it is the ‘inner memory’ of the Church. Theology requires a certain askesis, an attaining of the catholic mind of the Church. Those who have so attained and are enabled to speak on behalf of all we call Fathers.
We have no record of the conversations which followed this paper. In an interview four decades later, Florovsky recalled that his paper sparked a discussion between the two theologians which ‘took two evenings, or rather one evening and a second night, because we parted at six in the morning, walking the streets, singing “Gaudeamus”’.Footnote 26
Barth's criticisms of Florovsky
This happy conclusion should not deceive us. Days after Florovsky's visit, Barth wrote to Eduard Thurneysen:
The day before yesterday evening we had a seminar session with a Russian Orthodox, Florovsky, brought by Fritz Lieb from Paris. I did not have an overwhelming impression that we really needed this Oriental theology. I'll send what he has submitted to Georg Merz for Zwischen den Zeiten, so that the black on white will be immediately visible with us, what is actually going on there. It was very instructive how, in this confrontation, one immediately felt solidarity with Roman Catholicism, in which, it should be noted, the contours and the boundaries are everywhere respected – quite different than this formless Russian heap of thoughts, in which everything is allowed to blur into everything else. The question has preoccupied me very much whether, in good faith, we might have misunderstood Dostoyevsky ten years ago, at least in important parts, because we did not have in mind this background of self-understanding. The way in which precisely eschatology is really de-eschatologized completely is positively frightening.Footnote 27
Here we have two criticisms: Florovsky is guilty of a ‘blurring of boundaries’ and a ‘de-eschatologizing’ of eschatology.
What were the boundaries Florovsky blurred, which Rome did not? Florovsky's visit coincided with the lectures which make up the first half-volume of the Church Dogmatics. Discussing the filioque near the close of CD 1/1, Barth speaks in a manner reminiscent of his letter to Thurneysen: Russian theologians are guilty of ‘obliterating the frontiers of philosophy and theology, of reason and revelation, of Scripture, tradition and direct illumination’.Footnote 28 Barth refers to an anthology of Russian religious thought which included Bulgakov; Barth, however, seems to have viewed Florovsky in a similar way.Footnote 29
That a Reformed theologian would feel an Orthodox had blurred the boundaries between scripture and tradition is unsurprising: given that Florovsky stresses scripture-in-tradition, it is no surprise that Barth would feel more affinity with a Roman Catholic theology which, prior to Vatican II's Dei Verbum, preferred to distinguish scripture and tradition as separate ‘sources’ – though Barth would not accord tradition the status Roman theologians did.Footnote 30 More interesting is the question of the boundary between philosophy and theology. Florovsky closely identifies dogmatics with a Christian philosophy grounded in revelation, a philosophy taking its starting point in faith, on the foundation of historical events and witnesses. Florovsky was aware of the debate going on in Paris during this time concerning Christian philosophy, involving Gilson, Marcel, Blondel and others.Footnote 31 In other respects, Florovsky's concept of theology as philosophy grounded in the biblical record of revelation hearkens back to pre-Nicene apologists, especially Clement of Alexandria.Footnote 32
Barth voiced doubts regarding the idea of Christian philosophy. In his 1929 ‘Schicksal und Idee in der Theologie’, he expressed a dialectical view: theology relies on philosophy for terms and concepts, in permanent dialectical relation to both realism and idealism, but permits no theological-philosophical synthesis. Philosophy remains outside – there can be no ecclesial philosophy, no philosophia perennis, as had been proposed by Florovsky and by Erich Przywara, whom Barth here has in mind.Footnote 33
In CD I/1, Barth admits that theology, ‘insofar as it uses human speech, is in fact a philosophy or a conglomerate of all kinds of philosophies’.Footnote 34 But this is precisely to underscore the ‘secularity’ of the medium: there is no historical ‘transfiguration’ of thought and words, as we find in Florovsky.Footnote 35 This difference here has less to do with respective conceptions of philosophy and theology as with other matters. As Kenneth Oakes has shown, Barth himself finally had difficulty distinguishing between philosophy and theology.Footnote 36 Conversely, Florovsky was not adverse to distinguishing.Footnote 37
Regarding Barth's second charge, that of ‘de-eschatologizing’ eschatology, Barth mentions also Dostoevsky. The importance of Barth and Thurneysen's mutual discovery of Dostoevsky for Barth's Romans commentary is well-established. Already by 1922, however, the two had grown less enthusiastic, critical of Dostoevsky's political chiliasm and believing him to have confused time and eternity.Footnote 38 Yet there is no mention of Dostoevsky, and little directly touching on eschatology, in Florovsky's Bonn paper. And Florovsky elsewhere squarely rejected the political messianism of the great novelist.
It has been suggested that Barth's objection might have been to Florovsky's appeal to theosis. Footnote 1 However, in CD I/1, Barth quotes John of Damascus on deification positively, with no critical comment.Footnote 40 Barth's criticism regarding eschatology probably has to do with a different, though closely related notion: Florovsky's idea of the ‘transfiguration’ of history, language and thought in the historical church. This idea seems to conflict with Barth's dialectic between the revealed Word and the mediating sign, in which the sign remains profane, secular – untransfigured. For Barth, such transfiguration as Florovsky envisions would be a species of over-realised eschatology.
Barth's comments suggest differences which cut deeply into the two theologians' respective understandings of revelation, church, history and tradition, revealing at bottom a Christological difference. Both Barth and Florovsky seek to uphold a Chalcedonian Christology which announces the union of God with man in Christ and upholds the infinite qualitative distinction between Creator and creature. Bruce McCormack has shown how Barth used the enhypostasia/anhypostasia distinction (ostensibly derived from Leontius of Byzantium, via Reformed sources) at this time to move beyond his earlier time-eternity dialectic and restriction of revelation to the ‘mathematical point’ of the cross.Footnote 41 Florovsky also made use of this same distinction in his own asymmetric Chalcedonian Christology.Footnote 42 Yet their disagreement regarding the ‘transfiguration’ – or alternatively, eschatological reservation – of history in Christ and his Church points to a difference in the understanding of enhypostasia and the application of this Christological analogy to the Church as well as to theological concepts.
Florovsky on Barth
On 24 July 1931, Florovsky sent his greetings to Barth via Lieb and wrote, ‘The days of my stay in Bonn will remain in my most pleasant memories.’ He was glad of the opportunity to make contact, through Barth, with the Bonn Catholic Theological Faculty, where he talked extensively with Franz Josef Doelger (1879–1940) and Wilhelm Neuss (1880–1965), professors of church history and Christian archaeology, regarding artistic representations of Sophia and their relation to Germanic mysticism.Footnote 43 Florovsky's argument with Russian sophiology apparently set the tone even for his visit to Barth.
Nonetheless, Florovsky too came away with a sense that he and Barth disagreed. He made this disagreement publicly known at the 1937 Edinburgh Assembly. Commenting on the assembly report in which it was stated that conflicting attempts had been ‘made on philosophical lines to reconcile the apparent antithesis of God's sovereignty and man's responsibility’, but that ‘such speculations’ were ‘no part of the Christian faith’, Florovsky remarked:
It is true that many doctrinal statements are not part of the Christian faith. For example, in the Reformed Church the doctrine of predestination is not an article of faith. But from the point of view of the urgent needs of our time, is it possible to jump over all the difficulties with it? The common life of millions today is influenced by the dialectical theology of Karl Barth. What lies beyond the unanimity is not merely the speculation of philosophers, but an actual influence upon devotional and spiritual life. Six years ago in discussion with Barth I found our disagreement much greater than our agreement.Footnote 44
Florovsky does not spell out the disagreement, but it is no coincidence that this comment was made in the context of discussing the role of philosophy in doctrine, as well as human freedom and responsibility in history.
Florovsky's problem with Barth at bottom concerned the same matter Barth had against Florovsky. Christoph Künkel puts his finger on the disagreement: ‘The differences of opinion revolved essentially around the question of whether what Florovsky understood as the eschatological gifts of the experience of faith mediated through the Church were not, as Barth claimed, only eschatological gifts of the future.’Footnote 45 The church, in Florovsky's view, is no mere eschatological token, but rather a ‘proleptic eschatology’ – eph' hapax, decisive, permanent.Footnote 46 His objection to Barth is an instance of his wider charge against Protestant theology – that of ‘hyper-eschatologism’, the devaluation of historical activity.
This is not to say that Florovsky believed that the eschatological gifts present in the Church are evident to all, outside faith. Like Barth, he stressed the krypsis, the veiledness of divine glory which characterises the Church in via. In an article written in the late 1920s, titled ‘Zhil li Christos?’, Florovsky borrowed heavily (including the title) from Barth's 1910 essay, ‘Ob Jesus gelebt hat?’, both responding to the atheist Arthur Drews, who in his 1909 work Die Christusmythe (republished in several editions by the Soviets in the 1920s) had denied the historical existence of Jesus.Footnote 47 Barth and Florovsky agreed on the importance of a datable historical time for the life of Christ and his death sub Pontio Pilato. Conversely, both argued that no historical proof is sufficient for faith, nor should faith seek to rely on such external proofs: the knowledge of faith differs from mere historical certainty.
Where Barth and Florovsky disagreed concerned what is now available to faith, the categories of promise and fulfilment as these apply to the Church in history. Thus Florovsky wrote in 1937:
Every explanation of Christian revelation only in terms of the ‘Semitic’ categories of ‘law’ and ‘prophecy’ turns out to be insufficient. Such categories have quite recently attracted many, and find their best expression in the ‘dialectical theology’ of the school of Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and others. This is precisely an interpretation of the New Testament within the categories of the Old, in the element of prophecy without genuine consummation, as if prophecy had not been realized. History is devalued, with the accent shifting to the last judgment. The fullness of the revealed truth is constricted. Biblical prophecy, meanwhile, finds its actual consummation precisely in Christian Hellenism.Footnote 48
Barth's later reduction of sacraments to mere signs of response, witness and thanksgiving, lends some credence to this criticism. Given that the Orthodox conceive of the Church in sacramental terms, this point extends also to Barth's ecclesiology.
Barth and Florovsky concur in regarding the Church as entailed in the prolegomenon to dogmatics, the existential presupposition of theology. Yet their differing senses of eschatology and history show manifestly in their respective ecclesiologies. At a 1947 Faith and Order meeting in Clarens, Switzerland, where Barth had sent a paper to be read, ‘The Church: The Living Community of the Living Lord Jesus Christ’,Footnote 49 Florovsky commented:
In Barth's conception there really was no Church at all: the Church was de-substantialized, it happened from time to time, its existence was reduced to some moments of definite action. This was completely unwarranted by Holy Scripture, because the whole New Testament speaks of the enduring unity of the Church in Christ its Head, not of a Christ who now and then sends his Spirit. Reconciliation is something ontological, man brought back into reconciled unity with God. Orthodox and Catholics believe that sacraments and order are of the ‘esse’ of the Church because they put their trust, not in a human institution, but in divinely constituted realities. The Church, as the Body of Christ, is an organism with an organic structure constituted, not by man, but by God.Footnote 50
It seems Florovsky's own Corpus Christi ecclesiology was in part worked out against Barth's congregationalism. In his longest ecclesiological essay, ‘Le corps du Christ vivant’, written around this time, Florovsky argues that the calling of the Twelve marked the eschatological reconstitution of Israel; through apostolic succession, each local church is included in this eschatological Jerusalem church.Footnote 51
Reading Florovsky's stray comments on Barth from the 1930s, one has the same feeling as with many Roman Catholic theologians on Barth: they are stuck on an impression of Barth based on his second Romans commentary, of a dialectical theologian caught in a kind of fideistic, neo-Tertullianic reaction, averse to all metaphysics and to ‘Hellenism’.Footnote 52 Florovsky seems to have revised this perspective somewhat in the 1950s.Footnote 53 In a surprising turn, in a 1952 piece on ‘The Message of Chalcedon’, Florovsky appealed to Barth in defence of his own idea of Christian Hellenism:
I believe Karl Barth is perfectly right when he reminds the modern man that all this alleged ‘Greek intellectualism’ was in fact but an aspect of that sincere seriousness with which the Early Church used to approach and to contemplate the Mystery of the Incarnation, the mystery of the Holy Night. The whole intellectual armoury used by the Fathers was intended to serve but one purpose – to stress that unique and novel mystery, ‘And was made man’.Footnote 54
Florovsky has in mind here CD I/2, §15, with its reflection on the miracle of Christmas and lengthy defence of Greek patristic Christology against modern neo-Protestant critics. For Barth, the Christology of the Greek fathers is simply the way of taking with full seriousness the affirmation of John 1:14, whereas its modern critics in fact reject the biblical ‘realism’ of revelation.Footnote 55 Here Florovsky could only agree.
Barth further defended the perennial relevance of the Greek inheritance and rejected the anti-Hellenism of recent Protestant theologians in CD III/2. Interestingly, here ‘Hellenism’ stands, not for metaphysics, but for eros and the understanding of man as ‘a free, openhearted, willing, spontaneous, cheerful, bright, and social being’. The Greeks more than any other nation of antiquity had ‘the privilege of displaying so fully what humanity as an unbroken continuum means’. ‘The agape of the Christian’, claims Barth, ‘would not be what it claims to be if it remains hidden to the transparency of Greek eros. When someone schooled in Hellenic culture encounters the Christian, he should feel a sense of solidarity to the very roots of his erotic being.’Footnote 56
Although Florovsky critiqued Anders Nygren on his opposition between agape and eros,Footnote 57 and in general stressed the encounter of the Fathers with humane culture, he showed little interest in aesthetics; for him, Hellenism primarily ‘means philosophy . . . the right of the human mind to ask questions’. His stress, however, fell not on continuity between Greek philosophy and Christianity, but precisely the Christianising of philosophy – Hellenism ‘dissected with the sword of Christian revelation’, ‘sharply polarized’, ‘converted’, ‘fertilized for a new and Christian development’.Footnote 58 Florovsky also agrees with Barth in identifying certain excesses of Hellenism insufficiently baptised, e.g. Origen and Pseudo-Dionysius.Footnote 59Both Florovsky and Barth stress salvation ‘come from the Jews’, and maintain a critical, dialectical attitude towards Hellenism, as the subject of both a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’. Yet where Florovsky spoke of the patristic ‘transformation’ of Hellenism, Barth treated ancient Hellenism as an external ‘witness’, one which confirms the truth about humanity derived independently from the Gospel, but nevertheless is not ‘transfigured’ therein.
Florovsky also treated the Fathers under the rubric of ‘witnesses’. For Florovsky, however, the Church is not only a witness, but a continuation of the realities witnessed. Likewise, the Church is not only an event, but an event or a series of events being made permanent – a body growing and built up through history. Into this body, the genius and the categories of Hellenism have been baptised and grafted – in the form of patristic philosophy and in the mysteriological character of the Orthodox liturgy. The mediating witnesses, then, do not stand ‘outside’, but are integrated permanently into the catholic body of truth, where they retain their human character, but are transfigured.
Thus, the disagreement remained – as both intuited in 1931 – eschatology and history. In one of his most profound treatments of this question, his 1959 essay ‘The Predicament of the Christian Historian’, Florovsky refers the reader to Barth's treatment of time and history in CD III/2.Footnote 60 Florovsky, like Barth at this time, was much concerned to counter the thought of Bultmann,Footnote 61 and criticised the reduction of eschatology to a realm of interiority, of individual believers and their existential decisions. He also rejected the shift of eschatology wholly to a realm of sacramental experience. Indeed, he did not favour a realised eschatology, but a ‘proleptic’ or ‘inaugurated’ eschatology. But it seems he had Barth critically in mind too, in the following passage:
It is sometimes assumed that there was, indeed, a sacred history in the past, just up to the coming of Christ Jesus, in which it was ‘consummated’, but that after him there is in history only an empty flux of happenings, in which . . . nothing truly ‘eventful’ can take place, since there is nothing else to be accomplished in history. . . . history appears to be just a great Interim between the great events in the past and in the future, between the ‘first’ and the ‘second’ comings of the Lord, devoid of any constructive value, just a period of hope and expectation.Footnote 62
Florovsky's critique of Barth is similar to one offered by Balthasar: Barth has emphasised the work of Christ in such a way that the place for any human activity has been crowded out. At times, Florovsky will refer to this tendency as an ‘anthropological minimalism’, and a new ‘monophysite’ tendency in theology.Footnote 63
Florovsky's concern is to underscore the truth that, in the incarnation, a radical ontological novelty occurs in history. Time and human historical activity are vindicated and renewed; new and permanent things are being accomplished zwischen den Zeiten. His worry regarding Barth is similar to his concern regarding the sophiology of Soloviev and Bulgakov: namely, that the significance of historical activity has been undermined. This was a connection which Florovsky himself made in surprising ways in two unpublished texts in the 1960s and 1970s.
In ‘The Renewal of Orthodox Theology’, an unpublished lecture from a conference on ‘Idealist Philosophy in Russia’ held in Aix-en-Provence in March 1968, Florovsky describes the dominant trope in the metaphysics of Soloviev and Bulgakov as that of a ‘continuum’ between God and the world – a supertemporal continuum, in which real time plays very little role. For Soloviev, following Schelling, history is ‘a story of a theogonical process . . . a story of God, who by necessity of his nature, becomes a creator and therefore the image of the world some-how belongs in an absolute way, inevitably, to the existence of God . . . the story of the world is an intimate story of God’. Similarly, for Bulgakov, ‘by very nature, the Son of God . . . is already the Lamb of God sent from eternity. There is one story, there is one God, and man is one, God and cosmos are one, and there is not a story of man, but a story of God through man, in man, and in the cosmos.’ Florovsky continues:
At this point, in parenthesis, I would say something quite unexpected. There is an unexpected and incomprehensible paradoxical similarity between this conception developed by Bulgakov and the conception of Karl Barth in the fourth volume of his Dogmatics, in which you find that Jesus of history actually has been eternally with the Holy Trinity and the Holy Trinity never existed without Jesus. Why this, well, you don't expect. I play tricks sometimes with texts in English translations from Bulgakov and from Barth and ask people to identify them. Usually they were wrong. It is unexpected, but it shows that there is a serious problem. They started from different angles, different points; their inspiration was not identical, but there was one thing to which we now come. Not only continuum, but supertemporal continuum, in which actually the real time plays very little role.Footnote 64
Florovsky made this same connection in a 1973 letter to T. F. Torrance reflecting on the ‘problem’ of creation as a Christological question: ‘The focal point is precisely this “coordination” of two dimensions: time and eternity. St Augustine was fully aware of this mystery-antinomy. Father Boulgakov [sic] – and Karl Barth in his own way – attempted to rationalize the antinomic mystery, and then the Timeless is ontologically involved in the Time-process.’Footnote 65
In his reference to ‘the fourth volume’ of Barth's Dogmatics, Florovsky has in mind CD II/2, with its treatment of election. Florovsky's charge seems to be that Barth, like Bulgakov, has utterly collapsed the distinction between immanent and the economic planes in trinitarian doctrine. Here Florovsky strangely anticipates the new reading of Barth put forward by Bruce McCormack and challenged by George Hunsinger and Paul Molnar, but opposes Barth precisely on this ground.Footnote 66 Following Athanasius and later Fathers, Florovsky underscored the distinction between the divine essence, within which the Son is generated, and divine will, according to which the world is created.Footnote 67 At the same time, Florovsky was critical of the one-sided apophaticism typical of many recent Orthodox theologians, as in Vladimir Lossky, and he was clear that economic missions echo the pattern of ontological processions.
Barth and Florovsky on the nature of theology
In spite of crucial disagreements, given the developments in theology and culture since their time, certain fundamental convergences between Barth and Florovsky regarding the nature of theology now look more manifestly obvious.
In spring 1969, Florovsky tempered his earlier criticisms: ‘The whole religious picture since I wrote Puti russkago bogosloviia is now changed. At that time Karl Barth dominated; now it is his opponents, and I am more in sympathy with Barth than I am with his opponents. To begin with the world instead of the Word is the wrong method.’Footnote 68 Commenting on Bultmann at a 1967 conference in Switzerland, Florovsky struck certain Barthian tones:
One cannot forever fit the Gospel to the so-called modern man. . . . It is simply impossible . . . One isn't dealing with a linear development of thought. It goes in zigzags . . . Modern man changes so quickly that it is impossible to keep up with the ins and outs. . . . As soon as one from the church thinks he has adjusted himself to modern man, the so-called modern man is another. . . . Of course we must speak so that it is understandable . . . But the old message will always remain the same. It is not the message which should adjust to man but man which should adjust to the message. . . . The modern world has arisen from Christianity and will turn back to it. The modern frame is open for criticism and for reforms. Certain conditions complicate the message for modern man. Why can we not criticize the modern mentality? Human thought has always found it easier to acquire general ideas before the unique: God in history. The Jews waited for a sign. The sign was the cross and they considered it to be an insult. The Greeks laughed at Paul's speech about the resurrection. The Gnostics tried to soften the shock by spiritualizing the message. Thus man has always wanted to represent the church in a universal way, as a universal truth. Universal truth does exist, but it is also dressed in history. . . . There will always be a certain tension between word and content in the message of the Gospel, but one doesn't solve the problem by shoving the Gospel out of history and into another sphere. In each endeavor after having used a language which communicates with modern man one must never forget the identity of the message.Footnote 69
In the same period, addressing ‘the contemporary confusion in theology’, Florovsky similarly remarked:
Theologians today, Orthodox, Catholic and others, want to get out of the confusion, but they do so by the wrong method. They start with the wrong problems, which are posed by contemporary thought, and they adjust the Christian message to these wrong questions, and nothing good can come out of these. But the true theological methodology starts with the message and tries to understand the queries of today in light of the message. My impression is that many theologians ask ‘how can we adjust the method to the hippies' mentality’, and my question is ‘how can the hippy be impressed by the message, how do you present the message to the hippy to impress him with it’. This is a methodological problem. It is true that the physician must start with the illness, but he regards the illness as illness, and if he does not, but just as brute fact, he will never heal the illness. People are so impressed by the confusion of today, that they try to adjust the Gospel to it. Well, it is impossible.Footnote 70
Florovsky and Barth agree that Christian theology must take as its starting point, not culture, the human spirit or a phenomenology of human existence, but the revealed Word of God. For both, this means assuredly the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ. For Florovsky, the Christology of the Church is the only sound foundation for theology, and a protective against all species of vague mysticism. Barth's own critique of Schleiermacher finds some parallel in Florovsky's critique of the Slavophile approach to the Church as a Spirit-filled community, with its possible reduction of ecclesiology to a kind of ‘charismatic sociology’.Footnote 71
Rowan Williams remarks that Florovsky's ‘project shows some parallels with Karl Barth's rejection of the heritage of religious philosophy . . . Some of what he wrote in the 1930s about revelation is strongly Barthian in tone.’Footnote 72 Williams suggests that Florovsky's disagreements with Bulgakov ‘may have been further sharpened by contact with Barth in 1931’.Footnote 73 In fact, a stress on revelation and a rejection of an independent natural theology dates from his earliest essays of the 1920s, and was strengthened by patristic studies.Footnote 74 It is interesting to find, however, that people were saying similar things about Florovsky in the 1930s. On 4 April 1932 – the spring after his visit to Barth – writing to Lieb from a conference of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius in London, Florovsky notes that he ‘read the same report as in Bonn with some additions. Barth was much talked about in the discussion [afterwards] and some took me to be a Barthian’.Footnote 75
What was it that made Florovsky's hearers take him to be a ‘Barthian’? In all likelihood, it was his stricture on natural theology. As he wrote then:
Strictly speaking theology grows possible only through Revelation. It is the answering speech of man to God, as man's witness of God who had spoken to him; whose voice he had heard and remembered, and whose words he had kept and was repeating. So-called ‘natural theology’ is no theology in the true sense of the word. . . . it is only through Revelation that true theology becomes possible.Footnote 76
Other notes in the paper may also have earned Florovsky the moniker of ‘Barthian’: revelation as ‘the history of the covenant’; its disruptive character; its heterogeneity over against ‘religion’; inability of scientific criticism to prove or disprove the inspired character of scripture. Yet a closer look might show that what Florovsky's hearers dubbed ‘Barthian’ had greater affinities with Brunner than with Barth. Though he does so only to set the option aside, as strictly speaking not revelation, Florovsky does speak briefly of a certain general revelation in nature. In the archive of Andrew Blane, I discovered a letter to an unnamed correspondent, where Florovsky writes as follows:
it is questionable whether we should be so exclusively ‘Biblical’ as to eliminate any concepts of ‘common sense’, resp. of ‘Natural Theology’, in the sense in which it is admitted and understood, among others, by Emil Brunner. I should suggest his book, The Eternal Hope, as one of the best and soundest treatments of all related topics.Footnote 77
Similarly, in ‘Revelation and Interpretation’, a paper prepared for the 1948 Amsterdam Assembly, Florovsky appears to echo Brunner's association of the imago Dei with language – Wortmächtigeit Footnote 78 – as indicating a capacity for revelation: ‘The Word of God does not grow dim when it sounds in the tongue of man. For man is created in the image and likeness of God – this “analogical” link makes communication possible’.Footnote 79 Elsewhere, he will also underscore the other prong of Brunner's doctrine of the ‘formal’ sense of the image preserved after sin: responsibility, sensitivity to the realm of Wert.Footnote 80
All this raises the question of what Florovsky made of the issue of analogy which so exercised Barth. Florovsky was generally less than positive on Thomism, but showed a considerable sympathy for Duns Scotus, appealing to the Subtle Doctor on contingent causality in creation, as well as the absolute decree of the incarnation. He also displayed affinities with Scotus on formal distinctions between divine attributes and the radical freedom of divine will. This makes one wonder what exactly he made of the Scotist notion of univocal predication at work in conceptual analogies.Footnote 81
Florovsky does leave us one reference to the analogy of being, in a 1954 letter to the Ukrainian historian of philosophy Dmytro Chizhevsky, discussing Bulgakov's Philosophy of the Name.Footnote 82 His comments, while tentative, are suggestive:
It is no secret that I do not approve of the ‘philosophy of the Name’ – I do not believe in the ontological nature of ‘names’, though I admit the reality of the problem and the insufficiency of ‘nominalism’ – to which, however, I feel a strange attraction. The problem goes back to the Cratylus, if not before, and if I am not satisfied with the thought that all the names are only θέσει, I seriously doubt their existence as φύσει. Here is the problem of apophaticism, or, in another dimension, analogia entis, which is, rather, homologia. I think that in the perspective of contingent creatureliness (or creaturely contingency), non-absolute being does not escape from ‘logical relativism’. And the opposite (‘realism’) would inevitably lead to the idea of ‘projectivity’ – temporal existence as a reductive projection of ‘the eternal’, which is, after all, the source of predestination and the depreciation of concrete time.Footnote 83
Florovsky's equation of analogia entis with homologia could suggest the Scotist notion of analogy as involving conceptual univocity. One wonders, however, whether Florovsky like Barth essentially accepted Kant's critique of the ontological argument, according to which being is not a real predicate that enlarges the subject.Footnote 84 If so, then at least on Scotist terms, this would seem to eliminate an analogia entis. In any case, there is no appeal to analogy of being in Florovsky, nor is this idea characteristic of Orthodox theology in general.
Florovsky rejected the ultra-realism of Bulgakov's conception of naming, as a depreciation of concrete created time in its otherness from God. Bulgakov's philosophy of the name was in no sense Thomistic, his sophiology no true analogy; in spite of his best caveats, his system teeters on monism.Footnote 85 Conversely, Florovsky is no nominalist, as is sometimes suggested, but rather (like Barth) a kind of critical realist,Footnote 86 whose differences with the thinkers of the Russian religious renaissance may be understood as a conflict of realisms.Footnote 87 Following Athanasius, Florovsky understands creation ex nihilo as implying a complete heterogeneity of Creator and creature, a dissimilarity of substance, barring the way against any ‘logical realism’.Footnote 88 It was with this concern – and with Bulgakov in mind – that Florovsky, in his seminal 1928 essay ‘Creation and Creaturehood’, rejected ‘the endowment of [created] substances with absolute and eternal (beginningless) properties and predicates’, insisting that ‘the created nucleus of things must be rigorously distinguished from the Divine idea’, and commenting that ‘only in this way is even the most sequacious logical realism freed from a pantheistic flavor’.Footnote 89 In this light, the theological motive and significance of Florovsky's philosophical defence of logical relativism becomes clear.Footnote 90 Human logic is relative, and theology inherently analogical, owing to the contingent character of everything created, and the properly ‘anthropomorphic’ character of revelation.Footnote 91
A glance at Florovsky's patrologies suggests that, in his talk of nominalism, physei and thesei, Florovsky probably had in mind Gregory of Nyssa's arguments against the Eunomian theory of language. Gregory was no nominalist or sceptic, insists Florovsky; rather, following Plato, he simply underscored the human and conventional character of all names – thesei, not physei. Names are not things, and do not create things; they are rather an invention of the God-given faculty of epinoia. Yet names do stand in relation to things, and presuppose real objects.Footnote 92 Gregory, and Florovsky with him, defends the use of concepts.Footnote 93 There is, however, an apophatic and equivocal element here that Barth rejects. It is hard to find in either Gregory or Florovsky any consistent use of Barth's idea that terms are predicated properly of God, improperly of creatures. Florovsky defends the propriety of terms on the basis of the divinely elected anthropomorphism of revelation. However, like Gregory, he works with a clearer distinction between Deus in se and Deus revelatus than does Barth. In Florovsky's view, both analogy and negation are necessary in order to move from this economic order of revelation to predicate terms of God in himself. Even with this apophatic element, however, theological knowing is for Florovsky never a non-cognitive or anti-intellectual exercise.Footnote 94
Notwithstanding significant differences between these three theologians on this question, Florovsky essentially propounds a critical realism of a kind standing on a general spectrum of affinity with that of Barth and T. F. Torrance.Footnote 95 Unsatisfied with the thought that names are only thesei but likewise doubting their existence as physei, Florovsky, like Barth and Torrance, attempts to walk a middle line between nominalism and ultra-realism. Torrance puts it nicely: a ‘(properly) realist (physei) relation of language to being (aletheia ton onton) requires to have at least a dash of conventionalism (a relation thesei), or perhaps even nominalism, about it, in order to be truly related to the truth’.Footnote 96 For Florovsky, as for Torrance's ‘disclosure model’ of doctrine, doctrinal statements, while having a certain ‘adequacy’ to the truths they communicate, are still only ‘maps’: necessary and positive, but not to be mistaken for the real terrain.Footnote 97
Unlike Barth and Torrance, however, it might be suggested that Florovsky's treatment of divine predication somewhat ambiguously hovers between Scotist univocity, Cappadocian equivocity and genuine analogy.Footnote 98 In a long discussion of analogy in CD II/1, Barth rejected both equivocal predication and the Scotist conception of univocity in favour of genuine ‘analogy of attribution’.Footnote 99 Florovsky criticised Vladimir Lossky for dismissing too easily the Thomistic conceptions of analogy, and recommended the Swiss Charles Journet's work, The Darkness of God, for its presentation of Thomas' negative theology.Footnote 100 On the whole, it seems Florovsky never clarified his own thinking on analogy.
In Florovsky's description, theology is a work of fides quaerens intellectum and credo ut intelligam. Footnote 101 As for Barth, the fides here is no subjective leap or non-cognitive affair, but the faith of the Church – involving definite cognitive propositions entailed in her Credo. Footnote 102 ‘Intelligere comes about by reflection on the Credo that has already been spoken and affirmed. . . . Intelligere will not go beyond the limit of the inner necessity of the articles of the Credo.’Footnote 103 Much more than for Barth, however, for Florovsky, there was no separating the kerygma of the apostles from the dogmata of the Fathers.
Like Barth, Florovsky characterised theology as a rational affair. In his understanding, the programme entailed in the motto of his hero, St Philaret of Moscow, ‘theology reasons’ (bogosloviya razsuzhdaetʹ),Footnote 104 involved an a posteriori reasoning after the ‘facts’ of salvation history – grounded on actualities, not hypotheticals.Footnote 105 Theology reasons by tracing, via the order of biblical narrative, the pattern of creation and redemption: only on this basis, controlled by this pattern, does it proceed to a ‘speculative’ confession.Footnote 106 Like Barth, Florovsky stresses the self-evidencing character of truth, possessing no certain ‘external’ guarantees. For Florovsky, however, this self-evidencing witness includes the catholicity of the Church – by no means ‘external’. Theological reasoning finds its home in the continuous stream of knowledge that is church tradition, in which the realities known are not only past events, but continually made present in anamnesis, through the unceasing witness of the Spirit in word and sacrament.
Conclusion
As both Barth and Florovsky understood it, the major disagreement between them concerned the relation of eschatology to history. Barth thought Florovsky guilty of over-realised eschatology; Florovsky thought Barth guilty of a hyper-eschatologism which collapsed New Testament proclamation and historical Church into Old Testament categories of prophecy, hope and expectation. Both viewed the debate in terms of a conflict between the Reformation and Eastern Orthodoxy. In spite of this, the two were able to agree precisely on the topic of eschatology at the 1954 Evanston Assembly when, against Reinhold Niebuhr and other American theologians who interpreted Christian hope with a tint of optimistic social progressivism, Barth and Florovsky led the opposition in underscoring the eschatological character of Christian hope.Footnote 107
A second major disagreement regarded philosophy and its relation to theology and dogma. Here not all Orthodox theologians would agree with Florovsky. But surely most would concur in requiring a deeper commitment to patristic categories as a perennial framework and foundation for exegeting the main dogmas of the faith than one finds in Barth: the dogmas of the ecumenical councils must be interpreted with the help of the Fathers who produced them and first received them. Florovsky's view of patristic theology as the only idiom which can unite Christians across East and West in a common universe of discourse remains salient today – all the more so now that the Roman Catholic patristic ressourcement shows its fruits, and Protestant theologians are drawn to the theology of the Fathers. There is probably more promise in a dialogue of Orthodoxy with the type of theology opened up by T. F. Torrance than with any recent species of ‘neo-Barthianism’.
Finally, there is a considerable agreement between Florovsky and Barth on the rational character of theological enterprise and its Christological starting point. On the first, Barth presents a challenge to the Orthodox to clarify their position on analogy, particularly as a certain ill-considered one-sided apophaticism continues to have a wide currency. On the second, the Orthodox may also offer a challenge. While we may agree on the absolute priority of Christology, the conflicts concerning the Church, eschatology and the transfiguration of history suggest a real disagreement regarding the very person of our Lord Jesus himself. Here we find, as Barth and Florovsky also did, that precisely the agreement that brings us together also compels us to take our disagreements seriously. Thus, we end, as Florovsky recalled he and Barth also parted that early morning in summer 1931 with the Latin carol ‘Gaudeamus’, with a common joy in one evangelium – but equally, with hard questions:
