Odessa, the Priest’s Son, and the University

Georges Vasilievich Florovsky was born on 28 August / 9 September 1893, the youngest child of an Orthodox priest who became rector of the Odessa theological seminary. He grew up inside the clerical estate and in a house of books, but took his degree at the secular University of Odessa in history and philology — a formation that gave Russia’s most influential twentieth-century patrologist no formal theological credential at all, and that stamped his later work with the habits of an intellectual historian.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

Birth and Family

Florovsky was born on 28 August 1893 (Old Style) / 9 September (New Style) in Yelisavetgrad, in the Kherson province of the Russian Empire — the city is now Kropyvnytskyi in Ukraine. In 1894 the family moved to Odessa, and Odessa is where he was raised and educated; some reference works, compressing the point, simply give Odessa as his birthplace (Wikipedia, “Georges Florovsky,” giving Yelisavetgrad with the 1894 move to Odessa; St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, “Archpriest Georges Florovsky,” svots.edu, giving Odessa). The repository’s hub essay follows the Yelisavetgrad reading (The Patristic Revival).

[Disputed: birthplace. Sources built on Andrew Blane's biographical interviews give Yelisavetgrad (Kropyvnytskyi) with the family's move to Odessa in 1894; several institutional biographies, including St Vladimir's Seminary's own, give Odessa directly. The two are reconcilable — born in one city, raised in the other — and this collection reports both.]

His father was Vasily Antonovich Florovsky (1852–1928), a priest who taught in Odessa and rose to be rector of the Odessa Orthodox theological seminary and senior priest of the Transfiguration Cathedral; his mother was Klavdia Georgievna, née Popruzhenko (1863–1933), from a family of Greek descent with academic connections (Wikipedia, “Georges Florovsky,” summarizing the family data given in Blane, ed., Georges Florovsky: Russian Intellectual, Orthodox Churchman, Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993). His elder brother Antonii Florovsky became a distinguished historian, and later a fellow émigré in Prague.

This matters more than a genealogical note usually does. Florovsky grew up inside the Russian clerical estate at its most educated: a seminary rector’s household, a cathedral, a father who was both priest and schoolman. When he later wrote the harshest modern indictment of Russian school theology — the seminaries teaching from Latin textbooks, the Confessions written in borrowed categories, the “Western captivity” of the whole enterprise (see Pseudomorphosis and the “Western Captivity”) — he was writing about the world of his own childhood, from inside it. The book’s tone of grieved intimacy is not an accident of style.

The Languages and the Reading

The biographical tradition records an extraordinary early linguistic range: besides Russian, he acquired English, German, French, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew while still at school (St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, “Archpriest Georges Florovsky,” svots.edu). Whatever allowance one makes for the gratitude of institutional biography, the working evidence is in the corpus: he read and cited the Greek Fathers in Greek, followed German philosophy and German Protestant historical scholarship in the original, published in French and English, and lectured in several languages across a fifty-year career.

He was also, in youth, seriously interested in the natural sciences and the philosophy of science — physiology and psychology in particular — and his first publications were not theological. Gavrilyuk stresses this scientific-philosophical starting point as one of the keys to the later Florovsky: a mind formed on the problem of how knowledge is historically conditioned, which is the problem Ways of Russian Theology solves for the history of Russian thought (Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, ch. 1).

The University of Odessa

He entered the University of Odessa — the secular imperial university, not the seminary his father directed — and graduated in 1916 from the historical-philological faculty. He then taught in Odessa schools, and from 1919 held a teaching position at the university itself, before the collapse of the White south forced the family out in 1920 (Wikipedia, “Georges Florovsky”; St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, “Archpriest Georges Florovsky,” svots.edu).

Two consequences of this choice run through everything he wrote.

First, he had no theological degree. The man who would occupy the patristics chair at the principal Russian theological school in the emigration, be ordained priest, become dean of an American seminary, and be treated for half a century as the arbiter of what Orthodox theology is, was formally trained as a historian and philosopher. His higher qualification, taken in emigration, was a master’s degree at Prague for work on Alexander Herzen’s philosophy of history — a nineteenth-century Russian radical, not a Father of the Church (Wikipedia, “Georges Florovsky,” giving 1924; other accounts give 1923). [Disputed: the year of the Prague degree — 1923 in some accounts, 1924 in others; the subject, Herzen's historical thought, is not in dispute.]

Second, his instincts were those of the intellectual historian. Florovsky’s characteristic move is genealogical: he asks of a theological position not first whether it is true but where it came from — which philosophical school, which century, which borrowed vocabulary. That move is the engine of Ways of Russian Theology, and it is also the point at which his critics turn the instrument on him, asking where his categories came from (Brandon Gallaher, “‘Waiting for the Barbarians’: Identity and Polemicism in the Neo-Patristic Synthesis of Georges Florovsky,” Modern Theology 27, no. 4 [2011]: 659–691; and see Gavrilyuk, Gallaher, and the Hidden Debts).

What He Absorbed and What He Later Repudiated

The Russia of Florovsky’s youth was the Russia of the religious-philosophical renaissance — Vladimir Solovyov’s afterlife, the Symbolists, Pavel Florensky’s Pillar and Ground of the Truth (1914), the young Bulgakov and Berdyaev moving from Marxism toward the Church, the religious-philosophical societies. A student of history and philosophy in a great southern city could not not have read them, and Florovsky read them closely.

His mature verdict on that whole movement — that it was brilliant, spiritually serious, and captive to German idealism — is the concluding argument of Ways of Russian Theology (see The Book and Its Argument). Gavrilyuk’s central historical claim is that the repudiation was never as clean as Florovsky presented it: that the problems Florovsky spent his life on — the antinomies of faith and reason, the meaning of history, the nature of personhood, the relation of Church and culture — are the Renaissance’s own problems, taken over and answered differently (Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, 2013, chs. 1–3 and conclusion). That is a scholarly thesis, contested in its strong form, and it is set out with its opponents in Section 08.

Emigration

In 1920, as the Bolsheviks took the Black Sea coast, the Florovsky family left Russia. He never returned. The southern Russian world of his formation — the cathedral, the seminary, the university, the library — was destroyed in the sense that mattered: the institutions were seized, the clergy scattered or killed, the theological academies closed. What Florovsky carried out was a training, a language stock, and a set of questions.

That the greatest programmatic statement about the future of Orthodox theology in the twentieth century was written by a man with no theological faculty behind him, no library of his own, no country, and no salary secure for more than a few years at a time, is a fact about the emigration that ought to be stated plainly rather than romanticized. The Paris school produced what it produced under those conditions (The Founding of St Sergius).

References

Blane, Andrew, ed. Georges Florovsky: Russian Intellectual, Orthodox Churchman. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993. (The biographical volume, based on Blane’s 1969 interviews with Florovsky; the source behind most subsequent biographical accounts.)
Gavrilyuk, Paul L. Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. (Chs. 1–3 on the Russian formation and the Renaissance context.)
Gallaher, Brandon. “‘Waiting for the Barbarians’: Identity and Polemicism in the Neo-Patristic Synthesis of Georges Florovsky.” Modern Theology 27, no. 4 (2011): 659–691.
St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. “Archpriest Georges Florovsky.” svots.edu. (Institutional biography: birth, languages, Odessa, career dates.)
“Georges Florovsky.” Wikipedia. (Used per METHODOLOGY §2.3 to locate the family and chronological data traceable to Blane, not as a terminal citation.)