01 — Life and Formation

Georges Vasilievich Florovsky was born in 1893 into a priest’s family in the Russian Empire’s south, formed at the University of Odessa in history and philosophy rather than in a theological academy, and driven out by the Civil War in 1920. The two files in this section cover the Russian formation and the émigré career: Odessa and the university; then Sofia, Prague, Paris, the chair at St Sergius, ordination, the war years in the Balkans and Prague, and the move to America.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

What This Section Covers

  • Odessa, the Priest’s Son, and the University — the family, the seminary rector father, the secular university training in history and philosophy, the early scientific and philosophical interests, and what it meant that Russia’s most famous twentieth-century patrologist held no degree in theology.
  • Emigration, Prague, and the Paris Chair — 1920 to 1948: Sofia, the Prague master’s degree, the St Sergius appointment, ordination as deacon and priest, the patristic lecture courses of 1931 and 1933, the war spent in Yugoslavia and Prague, and the departure for America.

The Skeleton of the Life

Date Event
28 Aug / 9 Sept 1893 Born, Yelisavetgrad (now Kropyvnytskyi, Ukraine); the family moves to Odessa in 1894
1916 Graduates from the University of Odessa (history and philology)
1919–1920 Teaching at the University of Odessa; emigration in 1920
1920–1921 Sofia; the Eurasianist collection Iskhod k Vostoku appears there in 1921
c. 1922–1926 Prague; master’s degree (1923 or 1924)
1925 or 1926 Appointed to the St Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute, Paris
1931 / 1932 Ordained deacon; ordained priest by Metropolitan Evlogy (Georgievsky)
1931, 1933 The Eastern Fathers of the Fourth Century; The Byzantine Fathers of the Fifth to Eighth Centuries
29 Nov – 6 Dec 1936 First Congress of Orthodox Theology, Athens
1937 Puti russkogo bogosloviya (Ways of Russian Theology)
Dec 1939 – Oct 1944 The war in Yugoslavia (Bela Crkva), as school chaplain
Nov 1944 – Dec 1945 Prague; returns to Paris in December 1945
1948 To America; the WCC founding assembly at Amsterdam
1949–1955 Dean of St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary
1955/56–1964 Harvard Divinity School
1964–1972 Princeton University
11 Aug 1979 Dies at Princeton, New Jersey

Individual entries are sourced in the two content files; several carry [Disputed: ...] notes there, because the standard sources do not agree on the Paris appointment, the Prague degree, or the Harvard start.

What the Formation Explains

Two things about Florovsky’s later work are set by his formation and are worth naming at the outset.

He was trained as a historian and a philosopher, not as a churchman-theologian. His university was secular, his early publications were in the philosophy of history and the history of ideas, and his doctorate-equivalent work concerned Alexander Herzen. This is why Ways of Russian Theology reads as intellectual history rather than dogmatics, why he was so unusually alert to the philosophical genealogy of theological positions, and why his critics have found it worth asking whether the categories he used to demolish Russian religious philosophy were themselves borrowed from German philosophy (see Section 08).

He came to patristics late and largely by assignment. He was given the patristics chair at St Sergius as a young man without formal theological credentials, and the two great lecture courses of 1931 and 1933 were written in the doing. The patristic vocation that defines him was, in the ordinary sense, a job he grew into — and this is a point his admirers and his critics both make, in opposite directions.

See Also

References

  • Blane, Andrew, ed. Georges Florovsky: Russian Intellectual, Orthodox Churchman. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993.
  • Gavrilyuk, Paul L. Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
  • St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. “Archpriest Georges Florovsky.” svots.edu.