Athens 1936 and the Call

The First Congress of Orthodox Theology met at Athens from 29 November to 6 December 1936, drawing theologians from the Orthodox faculties of several countries. Two questions dominated its agenda: the external influences on Orthodox theology since the fall of Constantinople, and the authority of the Fathers. Into that setting Florovsky read a paper called “Patristics and Modern Theology,” calling for a creative return to the patristic mind. It became the founding text of the neo-patristic synthesis.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Congress

The First Congress of Orthodox Theology was held in Athens, 29 November – 6 December 1936, convened by the Athens theological faculty under Hamilcar S. Alivisatos, and bringing together representatives of Orthodox theological faculties from several countries — the first pan-Orthodox academic gathering of its kind (the proceedings published as Procès-verbaux du premier Congrès de théologie orthodoxe à Athènes, 29 novembre – 6 décembre 1936, ed. Hamilcar S. Alivisatos, Athens: Pyrsos, 1939; the congress and its dates as given in the repository’s account at The Neopatristic Synthesis and Its Critics).

The agenda is the point. Two of the congress’s central questions were:

the external influences on Orthodox theology since the fall of Constantinople — that is, precisely the problem Ways of Russian Theology was then being written to document; and
the authority of the Fathers.

Florovsky was not introducing an eccentric preoccupation. The congress had convened to ask whether Orthodox theology had been shaped by alien forces and what the Fathers’ authority amounted to. He supplied the sharpest available answer to both questions at once.

The Paper

His contribution, “Patristics and Modern Theology,” occupies pages 238–242 of the published Procès-verbaux (Athens: Pyrsos, 1939) — four pages. It is reprinted, with the other essential texts, in Brandon Gallaher and Paul Ladouceur, eds., The Patristic Witness of Georges Florovsky: Essential Theological Writings (London: T&T Clark, 2019), which is where an English reader should now go.

Four pages, at a congress, in 1936. The disproportion between the physical text and its historical effect is one of the odder facts in modern theology, and it should temper the way the paper is described. It is not a treatise. It is a manifesto delivered into a room already asking the question it answered.

What It Said

The paper’s argument, as reconstructed from its own text and the standard accounts:

Orthodox theology has been shaped by forces alien to it — rationalism, abstract scholasticism, idealism, syncretism, religious individualism — and this shaping is the reason for its present condition (the summary of Florovsky’s Athens argument as given in the survey literature; cf. Paul Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New, London: T&T Clark, 2019, part 1).

The remedy is a return to the Fathers, and the return must be creative. Not a return to dead texts, but — in the formulation preserved in the accounts of the paper — to the creative fire of the Fathers, a restoration of the patristic spirit, an establishment of continuity of life and mind with them. Florovsky was explicit that the return implies self-criticism: it is a demand made first of the theologian who issues it.

And the name for this is a synthesis. The congress’s own resolutions re-emphasized the authority of the Fathers and endorsed a “return to the Fathers”; Florovsky’s contribution was to insist that the return be a creative one, and it is this that the subsequent tradition has meant by neo-patristic synthesis — patristic in substance, synthetic in that it must be built rather than merely inherited, and neo- in that it is undertaken now, for questions the Fathers did not face.

“Forward to the Fathers”

The phrase most associated with Florovsky requires care, because it is often quoted without a source.

What is securely his and securely documented is the formulation in Ways of Russian Theology (1937) — published the year after Athens — 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, Puti russkogo bogosloviya, Paris, 1937, concluding chapter; the passages quoted and cited in “Georges Florovsky and the Mind of the Fathers,” publicorthodoxy.org, 25 June 2025).

[Disputed: the precise wording and venue of the "forward to the Fathers" slogan. It circulates in Orthodox writing in several forms — "Forward to the Fathers," "not back to the Fathers but forward with the Fathers" — and is attributed variously to the Athens paper of 1936 and to *Ways of Russian Theology* of 1937. The documented formulation, and the one this collection uses, is the 1937 book's: the road to the Fathers leads forward, not back. Readers should treat freestanding quotations of a slogan without a page reference with caution.]

This collection does not print a quotation it cannot source. The substance — that the return is forward-moving, creative, and not archaeological — is beyond dispute and is stated in Florovsky’s own words in several places, above all in “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” where following the Fathers is defined as acquiring their mind rather than quoting their sentences (Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” in Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, Collected Works vol. 1, Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972).

When Was the Phrase Coined?

“Neo-patristic synthesis” (neopatristicheskii sintez) is Florovsky’s own coinage, but it does not appear in the four-page Athens text as a formula; it emerges in his writing over the following years and is used retrospectively of the Athens call. Gavrilyuk’s study traces the term’s development and argues that the program acquired its definition gradually, in polemical engagement — above all with sophiology — rather than arriving fully formed in 1936 (Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, chs. 5–7).

This is worth saying because the usual narrative — Athens 1936, the manifesto, the paradigm — flattens a decade of development into a single afternoon. The Athens paper is the hinge; it is not the whole door.

Why It Worked

The program conquered the field within twenty years, and it is worth asking why a four-page paper did that.

It named what everyone was already feeling. The congress had convened around the question of external influence. Orthodox theologians across several countries were dissatisfied with a school theology that felt borrowed. Florovsky said so with authority.

It offered a criterion, not just a complaint. “Acquire the mind of the Fathers” is a workable standard for judging theological proposals — much more workable than “be Orthodox,” which had ceased to discriminate.

It was executable. The twentieth century was the great age of patristic scholarship: critical editions, Sources Chrétiennes from 1942, the Migne corpus finally being superseded, manuscripts catalogued. A program of return to the Fathers was, for the first time in centuries, technically possible.

And its authors were formidable. Florovsky’s own patristic courses; Vladimir Lossky’s Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient (Paris, 1944), which gave the movement its most-read book; then John Meyendorff on Palamas, Alexander Schmemann on liturgy, Dumitru Stăniloae in Romania, John Romanides in Greece, Kallistos Ware in English. Virtually all post-war Orthodox theology of stature worked inside the paradigm (Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019, parts 2–3; and see Vladimir Lossky, Fr. John Meyendorff, Fr. Alexander Schmemann, Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae).

The parallel with the Catholic ressourcement — Daniélou, de Lubac, the founding of Sources Chrétiennes — is exact enough to be more than coincidence, and was noticed at the time. Two confessions, in the same decades, decided that the way forward ran through the Fathers.

What It Was Not

Florovsky spent the rest of his life saying what the program was not, which suggests he was regularly misunderstood.

It was not a theology of repetition. He condemned that explicitly and repeatedly: repeating patristic sentences is the opposite of acquiring the patristic mind, since the Fathers themselves did not repeat, they thought (Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” 1972).

It was not antiquarianism. The Fathers are to be read as living voices in the Church, not as an archive.

It was not a rejection of scholarship. It demanded more and better historical work, not less.

It was not anti-Western in the sense of refusing to read the West. Florovsky’s own reading was omnivorous, and his ecumenical career was built on serious engagement with Protestant and Catholic theology (see The World Council of Churches and Its Orthodox Critics).

Whether the program became some of these things in the hands of others is exactly what the post-patristic controversy is about, and it is treated in Section 08 and in the repository’s Neopatristic Synthesis and Its Critics.

References

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.
Gallaher, Brandon, and Paul Ladouceur, eds. The Patristic Witness of Georges Florovsky: Essential Theological Writings. London: T&T Clark, 2019. (Preface by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware; reprints the Athens paper and eighteen other essential texts.)
Florovsky, Georges. “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers.” In Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, Collected Works vol. 1. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972.
Florovsky, Georges. Puti russkogo bogosloviya. Paris, 1937.
Gavrilyuk, Paul L. Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. (Chs. 5–7 on the program’s formation and the term’s career.)
Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T&T Clark, 2019.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957. (French orig. Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient, Paris: Aubier, 1944.)
“Georges Florovsky and the Mind of the Fathers.” publicorthodoxy.org, 25 June 2025.