Emigration, Prague, and the Paris Chair

From 1920 Florovsky lived the rest of his life outside Russia: Sofia, Prague, then twenty-odd years in Paris at the St Sergius Institute, where he was appointed to teach patristics, was ordained deacon and priest, and wrote the two patristic lecture courses and the great book. The Second World War stranded him in Yugoslavia and then Prague from 1939 to 1945; in 1948 he left Europe for America. This file follows the career from the emigration to the crossing.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

Sofia and Prague, 1920–1926

Florovsky left Russia in 1920 with his family, going first to Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, where a substantial Russian intellectual emigration had gathered. It was in Sofia in 1921 that the collection Iskhod k Vostoku appeared, launching the Eurasianist movement with Florovsky as one of its four founding contributors — an episode treated in Section 02.

From roughly 1922 he was in Prague, then the most generously funded centre of Russian émigré scholarship, thanks to the Czechoslovak government’s “Russian Action.” He taught in the Russian academic institutions there, and took a master’s degree for work on Alexander Herzen’s philosophy of history (Wikipedia, “Georges Florovsky,” giving 1924; other accounts give 1923). His brother Antonii, an established historian, was also in Prague. [Disputed: the Prague degree is dated 1923 by some accounts and 1924 by others.]

In these years he married Xenia Ivanovna, who shared the whole of the subsequent life — Paris, the war, America — and who is commemorated with him in the émigré record (Canadian Orthodox History Project, “Protopresbyter Georges V and Matushka Xenia I Florovsky,” orthodoxcanada.ca). The marriage was childless.

Paris and St Sergius

The decisive move was to Paris, to the St Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute founded in 1925 under Metropolitan Evlogy (Georgievsky) — the institution that became the intellectual centre of the Russian emigration and, through its graduates, of twentieth-century Orthodox theology generally (see The Founding of St Sergius). Florovsky was appointed to teach patristics.

[Disputed: the date of the appointment. St Vladimir's Seminary's biography and several reference accounts give 1925 (St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, "Archpriest Georges Florovsky," svots.edu; Wikipedia, "Georges Florovsky"); the repository's hub essay and other accounts give 1926 as the start of his St Sergius tenure ([The Patristic Revival](../../orthodoxy/04-russian-orthodox-tradition/theologians/patristic-revival.md)). The discrepancy is probably between the invitation and the taking up of the post; nothing of substance turns on it.]

He was, on any reckoning, young — barely past thirty — and had no theological degree. The chair made him a patrologist; before it he had been a philosopher of history who read the Fathers.

Later, from 1939 or thereabouts, his teaching at St Sergius shifted from patristics to dogmatic theology, and it is in that period that his constructive dogmatic essays cluster (Wikipedia, “Georges Florovsky,” giving 1939–1948 for the dogmatics chair).

Ordination

Florovsky was ordained deacon in 1931 and priest in 1932 by Metropolitan Evlogy (Georgievsky), whose Russian archdiocese of Western Europe passed under the omophorion of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1931 (The Patristic Revival; St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, “Archpriest Georges Florovsky,” svots.edu, giving 1932 for the priesthood). He served as a priest for the remaining forty-seven years of his life, and was later raised to archpriest and eventually protopresbyter; the two titles are used of him interchangeably in the literature and both are correct for different periods.

The ordination is worth pausing on, because it is a hinge in the argument of this whole collection. Florovsky’s insistence that theology is an ecclesial act — that it arises from and returns to the Church’s worship and sacramental life, and that the Fathers were bishops and pastors before they were authors — is not a rhetorical position taken from a desk. From 1932 he was himself a serving priest, and he continued to serve and preach in parishes through the American decades, including in his last years in New Jersey (The Patristic Revival).

The Patristic Courses

The Paris chair produced two books that are, in form, lecture courses:

Vostochnye ottsy IV-go veka (The Eastern Fathers of the Fourth Century), Paris, 1931
Vizantiiskie ottsy V–VIII vekov (The Byzantine Fathers of the Fifth to Eighth Centuries), Paris, 1933

They were published in Russian, for Russian students, from courses given in Russian, and they later formed the basis of Collected Works vols. 7–9 in English (Florovsky, The Eastern Fathers of the Fourth Century, Collected Works vol. 7; The Byzantine Fathers of the Fifth Century and The Byzantine Fathers of the Sixth to Eighth Century, Collected Works vols. 8–9, Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987). They are surveys — clear, compressed, judicious — rather than monographs; their importance is that they gave the emigration, and eventually the Anglophone world, a patristic map drawn by an Orthodox hand.

The English versions of these particular volumes are the ones most affected by the editorial problems of the Collected Works, which print substantial additional material with no indicated source and no surviving Russian original; see The Florovsky Corpus and Its Editions (Alexis Klimoff, “The 14-Volume Collected Works of Father Georges Florovsky: Critical Comments,” as summarized in “Republishing Florovsky: An Overview,” rocorstudies.org, 2019).

Ecumenical Beginnings

Paris also began the ecumenical career. From 1928 Florovsky was active in the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, the Anglican–Orthodox body founded in 1928, and in the interconfessional colloquia around Nicolas Berdyaev; he attended the Faith and Order and Life and Work conferences of the later 1930s and was drawn into the process that produced the World Council of Churches (Père Stéphane Bigham, “Fr. George Florovsky: Ecumenist?”, stephanebigham.com, giving 1926–1979 for the ecumenical involvement and 1928 onward for the Fellowship).

It was inside the Fellowship that he took the position that most defined his ecumenism in advance: in 1933 he opposed Fr. Sergius Bulgakov’s proposal for partial Eucharistic intercommunion between Anglicans and Orthodox, on the ground that communion presupposes agreement in faith and cannot be used to produce it (Bigham, “Fr. George Florovsky: Ecumenist?”). Everything he later said at Amsterdam and in the WCC follows from that judgment (see The World Council of Churches and Its Orthodox Critics).

1936 and 1937

The two years that made his reputation:

29 November – 6 December 1936: the First Congress of Orthodox Theology in Athens, where his paper “Patristics and Modern Theology” issued the call that became the neo-patristic program (Florovsky, “Patristics and Modern Theology,” in Procès-verbaux du premier Congrès de théologie orthodoxe à Athènes, ed. Hamilcar S. Alivisatos, Athens: Pyrsos, 1939, 238–242; see Athens 1936 and the Call).
1937: Puti russkogo bogosloviya (Ways of Russian Theology), Paris — the book (see Section 03).

Between them, in July 1936, falls the minority report of Metropolitan Evlogy’s commission on Bulgakov’s sophiology, which Florovsky signed — the one formal act of opposition he ever made against his senior colleague (see The Minority Report of 1936 and the Silence).

The War

Florovsky was outside France when the war broke out in 1939 and could not get back. He spent the war in exile from his exile:

December 1939 – October 1944: Yugoslavia, in the Russian émigré colony at Bela Crkva near the Romanian border, serving as school chaplain and teacher of religion in the Russian boys’ and girls’ schools there.
November 1944 – December 1945: Prague, teaching English and doing pastoral work among the Russian émigrés.
December 1945: return to Paris, and the resumption of scholarly and ecumenical work.

(These dates and the Bela Crkva detail derive from Blane’s interview-based biography and are reproduced in the derivative literature; Blane, ed., Georges Florovsky: Russian Intellectual, Orthodox Churchman, Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993.)

Six years of a scholar’s most productive period were spent as a village chaplain and language teacher. It is a plain fact of the emigration’s history, and it is one reason the constructive dogmatic corpus is a body of essays rather than a system.

To America

In 1948 Florovsky crossed to America. The occasion was the founding assembly of the World Council of Churches at Amsterdam in August–September 1948, at which he was one of the principal Orthodox voices and was elected to the Council’s executive body; the destination was St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York, of which he became dean in 1949 (Bigham, “Fr. George Florovsky: Ecumenist?”; St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, “Archpriest Georges Florovsky,” svots.edu; see St Vladimir’s, Harvard, and Princeton).

He was fifty-five. The Paris half of the life was over; the American half — the deanship, the rupture of 1955, Harvard, Princeton, and the long ecumenical labour — is the subject of Section 07.

References

Blane, Andrew, ed. Georges Florovsky: Russian Intellectual, Orthodox Churchman. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993. (The war years, Bela Crkva, Prague; the source of the interview material.)
Florovsky, Georges. The Eastern Fathers of the Fourth Century. Collected Works vol. 7. Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987. (Russian orig. Paris, 1931.)
Florovsky, Georges. The Byzantine Fathers of the Fifth Century; The Byzantine Fathers of the Sixth to Eighth Century. Collected Works vols. 8–9. Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987. (Russian orig. Paris, 1933.)
Florovsky, Georges. “Patristics and Modern Theology.” In Procès-verbaux du premier Congrès de théologie orthodoxe à Athènes, 29 novembre – 6 décembre 1936, ed. Hamilcar S. Alivisatos, 238–242. Athens: Pyrsos, 1939.
Bigham, Stéphane. “Fr. George Florovsky: Ecumenist?” stephanebigham.com. (Chronology of the ecumenical involvement; the 1933 intercommunion dispute with Bulgakov.)
St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. “Archpriest Georges Florovsky.” svots.edu.
Canadian Orthodox History Project. “Protopresbyter Georges V and Matushka Xenia I Florovsky.” orthodoxcanada.ca.
Klimoff, Alexis. “The 14-Volume Collected Works of Father Georges Florovsky: Critical Comments.” Summarized in “Republishing Florovsky: An Overview,” rocorstudies.org, 31 August 2019.