The Book and Its Argument

Puti russkogo bogosloviya (Paris, 1937) tells the history of Russian theological thought from the baptism of Rus’ to the twentieth century as a single continuous argument: an authentic but unsystematic Byzantine inheritance, a seventeenth-century capture by Latin scholastic form, an eighteenth-century capture by Protestant and then German idealist form, a nineteenth century of brilliant and unsatisfying attempts to escape, and a present in which the only way out is a creative return to the Fathers. It is a work of criticism as much as of history, and it judges almost everyone.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

What Kind of Book It Is

It is not a history of the Russian Church, and not a history of Russian piety. It is a history of Russian theological thought — of what was taught in the academies, printed in the confessions and catechisms, argued in the journals, and thought by the religious philosophers — and it is written by a man who believes that most of it went wrong. The genre is closest to a critical history of ideas with an explicit normative standard: the standard is the patristic mind, and every figure is measured against it.

The book is enormous, extraordinarily learned, and written in a compressed, allusive Russian that Robert L. Nichols’ English translation cannot fully carry (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, trans. Robert L. Nichols, Collected Works vols. 5–6, Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979; Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987). Its bibliographical apparatus is a research resource in its own right. It is also, unmistakably, a polemic.

The Shape of the Argument

Following the book’s own sequence, and the summary in the repository’s hub essay (The Patristic Revival), the argument runs:

The Kievan inheritance. The reception of Byzantine Christianity in Rus’ was genuine and promising but largely unsystematic: Rus’ received the liturgy, the icon, the ascetic literature, and the lives of the saints, but not the theological culture — not the habit of disputation, the schools, the mastery of the Greek philosophical vocabulary in which the dogmas had been fought out. What was received was the fruit without the tree. This is the book’s first and most original historical claim, and it is doing a great deal of work: it explains why, when the confrontation with the Latin West came, Russia had no indigenous theological apparatus with which to meet it.

The Kiev Academy and the Latin capture. The seventeenth century, under Polish-Lithuanian pressure and the Uniate challenge, produced the Kiev Mohyla Academy — and with it a theological education conducted in Latin, on Jesuit models, using Counter-Reformation textbooks. Peter Mogila’s confession and catechetical works are, on Florovsky’s reading, essentially Latin in content and structure, dressed in Orthodox vocabulary. The Orthodox response to Rome was formulated in Rome’s own categories.

The Petrine reforms and the Protestant capture. Peter the Great’s ecclesiastical settlement, and above all the theology of Feofan Prokopovich, replaced the Latin scholastic frame with a Protestant one — and the Spiritual Regulation subordinated the Church’s administration to the state. Russian seminaries went on teaching from Western textbooks; Russian dogmatic treatises followed Western systematic formats; the theological language of the Russian Church was, for two centuries, a translation of somebody else’s.

The nineteenth century: the attempts to escape. Here the book’s judgments become finely graded.

The Slavophiles — Khomiakov and Kireevsky — represent a genuine effort to think in Orthodox categories and are treated with real respect; but their thought is too deeply formed by German Romantic philosophy, and sobornost as they conceived it is a philosophical construct before it is an ecclesiological one.
Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow and the great academic patrologists and translators of the century receive substantial credit: the recovery of patristic texts in Russian, the Optina translations, the theological academies’ scholarly achievement.
Vladimir Solovyov is treated harshly — a mind of the first order whose Sophiology and whose ecumenical scheme Florovsky judged to have departed from the patristic tradition altogether.

The religious-philosophical renaissance. The book’s last movement, and the one that made enemies. Berdyaev, Frank, Florensky, Bulgakov — the brilliant generation of Florovsky’s own teachers and colleagues — are judged to remain, for all their spiritual seriousness and creative power, captive to Western philosophical categories, above all German idealism. Sophiology is the culminating instance: the Orthodox answer to a genuine question, framed in Schelling’s and Böhme’s terms rather than the Fathers’.

The conclusion. The book ends not with despair but with a program: the way out of the captivity is a creative return to the Fathers — not conservatism, not repetition, not anti-intellectualism, but a recovery of the patristic mind as the working method of theology, engaged with modern questions. The formula that became famous is the insistence that the road to the Fathers leads only forward, never back, and that fidelity is owed to the patristic spirit rather than to the letter alone (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, 1937, concluding chapter; the formulation quoted and discussed in “Georges Florovsky and the Mind of the Fathers,” publicorthodoxy.org, 2025).

What Florovsky Was Actually Attacking

It is easy to read the book as anti-Western, and easy to read it as anti-intellectual. Neither is right, and both misreadings are common enough to be worth blocking.

He was not attacking the West as such. Florovsky read Latin and German theology all his life, respected Augustine, engaged Barth, worked for decades inside an ecumenical body full of Protestants, and repeatedly said that Orthodoxy must know Western theology thoroughly. His target is not Western thought but unacknowledged dependence — theology done in borrowed categories by people who believe they are simply thinking.

He was not attacking learning. The book is itself an act of enormous erudition, and its constructive proposal is an academic program: read the Fathers in Greek, historically, critically, and then think with them. The “return to the Fathers” is not a retreat from scholarship into piety; it is a demand for better scholarship.

And he was not proposing that Russian theology had produced nothing. The book is full of appreciations — of Filaret, of the patristic translators, of the ascetic and Philokalic revival associated with Paisius Velichkovsky and Optina, of individual works and individual insights. What it denies is that these amount to a synthesis.

The Reception in the Emigration

The book was, in the emigration, a scandal. It appeared in 1937 from a professor of the St Sergius Institute and passed severe judgment on the senior colleagues in whose institution he taught — Bulgakov above all, though Bulgakov’s sophiology is handled as the terminus of a tradition rather than as a personal target. It appeared a year after Florovsky had signed the minority report of Metropolitan Evlogy’s commission on Bulgakov’s teaching, and the year of the bishops’ conference that closed the affair (see The Minority Report of 1936 and the Silence). Relations at St Sergius did not recover, and the book is one of the reasons Florovsky’s Paris career had, by the late 1940s, no future.

Nikolai Berdyaev’s response — a hostile review objecting to the book’s judging spirit and its treatment of Russian religious philosophy — is the best known of the contemporary reactions, and set the terms of the “Florovsky as prosecutor” reading that has never gone away (the polemical reception discussed in Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, chs. 4–6).

Against that, the book gave the emigration something nothing else had: a single, coherent, documented account of how Russian theology had got where it was, and a way forward. Within twenty years its program had captured the field (Paul Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New, London: T&T Clark, 2019, part 1).

How to Read It Now

Three practical judgments, offered as such.

As a reference work it remains valuable and is still consulted for its bibliography and for its coverage of minor figures no one else has read.
As an interpretation it is contested, and increasingly so — the “pseudomorphosis” frame in particular (see Pseudomorphosis and the “Western Captivity”).
As a piece of theological criticism it is still the most formidable thing of its kind in Orthodox literature, and readers who disagree with every one of its verdicts will learn more from arguing with it than from most books they agree with.

Its title is Ways — plural, and in Russian puti, roads or paths. The book is about roads taken and roads missed. Its author believed the right road was still open.

References

Florovsky, Georges. Puti russkogo bogosloviya. Paris, 1937. English: Ways of Russian Theology, trans. Robert L. Nichols, Collected Works vols. 5–6. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979; Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987.
Gavrilyuk, Paul L. Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. (Chs. 4–6: the book, its polemical setting, and its reception.)
Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T&T Clark, 2019. (Part 1: the Paris school and the book’s place in it.)
“Georges Florovsky and the Mind of the Fathers.” publicorthodoxy.org, 25 June 2025. (Quotes the concluding formulations on spirit versus letter and on Christian Hellenism, with citations to the 1937 text.)
Fr. Georges Florovsky and the Patristic Revival. Repository hub essay, ../../orthodoxy/04-russian-orthodox-tradition/theologians/patristic-revival.md. (The summary of the book’s key claims that this file expands.)