02 — The Eurasianist Episode and the Turn

In 1921, in Sofia, the twenty-seven-year-old Florovsky was one of four contributors to Iskhod k Vostoku (Exodus to the East), the collection that launched Eurasianism — an ideological movement claiming that Russia is neither European nor Asian but a distinct civilizational world, and reading the Revolution as the judgment of that world upon a Westernized elite. Within a few years he had left the movement, and in 1928 he published a public repudiation, “The Eurasian Temptation.” This section reports the episode as documented history and traces what it explains about the later Florovsky.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

What This Section Covers

Why This Episode Gets a Section

Three reasons, all of them methodological rather than sensational.

Because it is documented and is sometimes passed over. Florovsky was a founder of a movement that later became notorious, and hagiographic treatments of him tend to mention it in a subordinate clause. The repository’s rule is to report what is documented, with sources, without sensationalism and without concealment (METHODOLOGY §4.2). He co-founded Eurasianism; he broke with it; he denounced it in print. All three are facts.

Because the break is the first appearance of his signature move. The charge Florovsky brought against Eurasianism in 1928 — that it subordinated the Church to a cultural-historical philosophy, that it made Orthodoxy an attribute of a civilization rather than the truth about God, that it was a “temptation” precisely because its premises were half-right — is structurally the same charge he would bring against sophiology in 1937 and against the whole of Russian religious philosophy in Ways of Russian Theology. The Eurasianist break is where the method is first visible.

Because his critics use it. Brandon Gallaher’s argument that Florovsky’s construction of “the East” against “the West” is itself a Romantic and identitarian construction — one he could not see because he was inside it — gains much of its force from the Eurasianist episode, which is exactly such a construction and which Florovsky himself abandoned (Gallaher, “‘Waiting for the Barbarians’: Identity and Polemicism in the Neo-Patristic Synthesis of Georges Florovsky,” Modern Theology 27, no. 4 [2011]: 659–691). The claim is contested and is set out with its answers in Section 08; this section supplies the facts it rests on.

A Caution About Anachronism

Eurasianism in 1921 is not Eurasianism in 2026. The word now names, in ordinary usage, a twenty-first-century geopolitical ideology associated with figures Florovsky never met and would not have recognized. The 1921 movement was an émigré intellectual current, its founders were young scholars in Sofia and Prague who had just lost their country, and its animating question was why the Revolution had happened and what Russia was. Reading the later thing back into the earlier is bad history. This section describes the 1921 movement, from the sources of the 1920s.

See Also

References

  • Florovsky, Georges. Contributions to Iskhod k Vostoku: Predchuvstviia i sversheniia [Exodus to the East: Forebodings and Events]. Sofia, 1921.
  • Florovsky, Georges. “Evraziiskii soblazn” [The Eurasian Temptation]. Sovremennye zapiski 34 (1928): 312–346.
  • 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.
  • Gavrilyuk, Paul L. Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.