Ways of Russian Theology
Georges Florovsky published Puti russkogo bogosloviia in Paris in 1937, writing as a patristics professor at the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute, the school founded by Russian émigrés scattered west by the Revolution. The circumstances matter to the book. An entire theological culture had been torn from its soil, and the exiles were asking what exactly they had carried out with them. Florovsky's answer was a thousand-page critical history of Russian religious thought from the baptism of Rus' to the religious renaissance of his own generation — not a celebration of a national tradition but an inquest into why that tradition had so often failed to think from its own sources.
His governing diagnosis is what he called pseudomorphosis, a term borrowed from geology by way of Spengler: a substance that has crystallized inside a mold not its own, taking a foreign shape while retaining its original matter. Russian theology, he argues, repeatedly did this. The Kyivan academies of the seventeenth century absorbed Latin scholastic method wholesale; the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries drew successively on German Protestant textbooks, pietism, and idealist philosophy; the Slavophiles and Vladimir Solovyov, for all their brilliance, built on romantic and Schellingian foundations rather than patristic ones. The result, in Florovsky's reading, was a persistent gap between the Church's liturgical and ascetic life and the concepts its theologians used to describe it — a theology fluent in borrowed grammar and mute in its own. Nor does he spare his contemporaries: the sophiological project of Sergius Bulgakov, his colleague at St. Sergius, falls under the same judgment. The closing chapter turns constructive and states the program that shaped a century of Orthodox thought after it: a neopatristic synthesis, a recovery of the Fathers not as museum pieces but as living teachers, and the conviction that theology must be done in the idiom of Christian Hellenism rather than in whatever philosophy is currently available. His slogan was to go forward with the Fathers, not merely back to them.
The book provoked immediate resistance — Nicolas Berdyaev's review, "Orthodoxy and Humanness," charged Florovsky with cold severity toward nearly everyone he examined — and the charge of one-sidedness has followed it ever since. It nonetheless reset the agenda. Much of twentieth-century Orthodox theology, and a good deal of Western ressourcement, runs downstream of its argument that renewal comes through return to sources rather than accommodation to the age.
Who should read this: students of Orthodox theology, historians of Russian religious thought, and anyone testing the assumption that inherited piety is the same thing as theological health. It is not devotional reading, not an introduction to Orthodoxy, and not neutral; read it with its critics at hand.