The Break and “The Eurasian Temptation”

Florovsky withdrew from the Eurasianist movement he had helped found, and in 1928 published “Evraziiskii soblazn” — “The Eurasian Temptation” — in the leading émigré review Sovremennye zapiski. The essay’s charge is that Eurasianism had made the Church a function of a culture, mistaking a historical-geographical destiny for a theological truth; and that the error was a temptation precisely because its diagnosis of Russia’s Westernization was half-right. The structure of that argument — a true diagnosis serving a false remedy — is the structure of everything Florovsky would later write against sophiology and against Russian religious philosophy.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Withdrawal

Florovsky’s association with organized Eurasianism was short. He contributed to the founding collection at Sofia in 1921 and to the movement’s early publications, and then drew away as the movement acquired a program, a politics, and an organization — a process that occupied the middle years of the decade. He was not expelled and did not stage a rupture; he stopped participating, and then, in 1928, explained in print why.

The essay is “Evraziiskii soblazn” (“The Eurasian Temptation”), published in Sovremennye zapiski vol. 34 (1928), pp. 312–346 — the most important journal of the Russian emigration, edited by the Socialist Revolutionary intelligentsia in Paris and read by everyone. Publishing there rather than in a church periodical was itself a statement: the critique was addressed to the émigré intellectual public that Eurasianism was trying to win.

The Word “Temptation”

Everything is in the title. Soblazn is not “error” and not “heresy”: it is temptation, seduction, a skandalon — the thing that attracts because it is partly right and destroys because of what it adds. Florovsky did not write that Eurasianism was stupid or that its diagnosis of Russia was false. He wrote that it was a temptation, and the compliment inside the accusation is deliberate.

This is his permanent rhetorical shape, and recognizing it here makes the later Florovsky legible. He almost never argues that an opponent has said something silly. He argues that an opponent has seen something real, has responded to it with a construction imported from elsewhere, and has thereby lost the very thing he was trying to save. Sophiology is the great instance: Bulgakov saw a genuine question — how creation is grounded in God — and answered it with Schelling and Böhme rather than with the Fathers (see The Colleague and the Critic). The Ways of Russian Theology verdicts on Khomiakov, Solovyov, and Florensky have the same form.

The Substance of the Charge

Reconstructing the argument of the 1928 essay from its own statement and from the scholarly accounts of it (Florovsky, “Evraziiskii soblazn,” 1928; Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, ch. 2), the lines of attack are these.

Eurasianism subordinates the Church to a philosophy of culture. In the Eurasianist scheme Orthodoxy is the spiritual dimension of a civilization — what Eurasia believes, the inner form of a place-development. Florovsky’s objection is not that this undervalues Orthodoxy but that it misdescribes it: the Church is not the soul of a culture but the Body of Christ, and her truth is not the self-expression of a people’s historical experience. A theology that begins from the geography of the steppe has begun in the wrong place, however warmly it ends by praising the faith.

It replaces the personal and the ecclesial with the organic and the collective. The Eurasianist categories — mestorazvitie, the symphonic personality of a people, the organic whole of land and folk — belong to a Romantic naturalism. They cannot carry the weight of Christian anthropology, where the acting subject is a person made in the image of God and freely responsible, nor of ecclesiology, where the Church is a gathered communion and not an ethnographic fact.

It is a determinism, and therefore a denial of history as freedom. If a civilization has a destiny written into its geography, then nothing that happens in it is genuinely an act. Florovsky’s lifelong insistence that history is the arena of free personal decision under God — the theme of his later essays on Christian history — is already the ground of the 1928 objection (cf. Florovsky, “The Predicament of the Christian Historian” and “Antinomies of Christian History: Empire and Desert,” in Christianity and Culture, Collected Works vol. 2, Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1974).

It sanctifies the Revolution. Read the Bolshevik seizure of power as the authentic revolt of the Eurasian earth against a Westernized elite, and you have supplied it with a theodicy. Florovsky saw where that ended; and the movement’s later Sovietophile faction, and its penetration by Soviet intelligence, made the point for him.

And its diagnosis was half-right, which is why it was dangerous. Florovsky did not withdraw the claim that Petrine Westernization had estranged educated Russia from its own religious inheritance. He would spend the 1930s proving it in enormous documentary detail. What he withdrew was the remedy: a return not to the Fathers but to the soil.

What Survived the Break

It is a false simplification to say that Florovsky simply left Eurasianism behind. Three things carried over into the theology, and the honest account says so.

The critique of the Petrine rupture. Ways of Russian Theology is the Eurasianist thesis about the eighteenth century, executed as intellectual history and relocated from politics to theology (Florovsky, Puti russkogo bogosloviya, Paris, 1937).
The refusal of Western universality. The claim that European categories are provincial rather than universal survives, transposed into the claim that Latin scholastic and German idealist frameworks are not neutral instruments for Orthodox theology.
The civilizational grammar itself — “East” and “West” as coherent, opposed wholes with characteristic principles. Whether this is a legitimate theological distinction or a Romantic construct in patristic dress is exactly what the modern critique contests.

The Contested Reading

Two scholarly readings of the episode, both serious, must be reported without adjudication (METHODOLOGY §4.2).

Gavrilyuk’s reading: the break is genuine and formative. Florovsky worked out a culturalist account of Orthodoxy in his twenties, saw its consequences, and rejected it — and the rejection is what made the neo-patristic program possible, because it freed the criterion of Orthodox theology from any cultural or national index. On this reading the 1928 essay is the birth certificate of the mature theologian (Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, 2013, ch. 2).

Gallaher’s reading: the break is partial. What Florovsky rejected was the geographical form of the civilizational thesis, not the thesis itself; the East/West opposition simply migrated into theology, where it acquired the authority of the Fathers without ceasing to be a construction of nineteenth-century Romantic historiography — and Florovsky’s polemical energy prevented him from seeing this about himself (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).

[Disputed: as above — whether the Eurasianist break was an abandonment of the civilizational frame or its theologization. Gavrilyuk argues the former; Gallaher the latter. The dispute is a scholarly one about intellectual genealogy, not a doctrinal one, and this repository records it without deciding it.]

A third position deserves naming, if only because it is the one most Orthodox readers will take instinctively: that the genealogy of a thesis is not its refutation. Even if Florovsky learned the East/West opposition from Romantic historiography, the question whether Latin scholasticism and German idealism actually did deform Russian theology is a question about the sources, answerable from the sources, and it is not settled by showing where he got the frame. That is a fair point, and Section 08 gives it.

A Note on Proportion

The Eurasianist episode occupies perhaps seven years of a life of eighty-six, ended with a public repudiation in a leading journal, and produced no lasting institutional or political entanglement. It is treated here at length because it is genuinely explanatory of the method, and because a reference work that omitted it would be doing the reader’s thinking for him. It is not treated here as a stain, because the documented record does not support that reading: a young man in exile joined a movement asking why his country had been destroyed, and left it when he concluded that its answer subordinated the Church to a myth.

References

Florovsky, Georges. “Evraziiskii soblazn” [The Eurasian Temptation]. Sovremennye zapiski 34 (1928): 312–346. (The public repudiation.)
Florovsky, Georges. Puti russkogo bogosloviya. Paris, 1937.
Florovsky, Georges. Christianity and Culture. Collected Works vol. 2. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1974. (Includes “The Predicament of the Christian Historian” and “Antinomies of Christian History: Empire and Desert.”)
Gavrilyuk, Paul L. Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. (Ch. 2.)
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.
Iskhod k Vostoku: Predchuvstviia i sversheniia. Sofia, 1921.