05 — Creation, History, and the Church
Florovsky wrote no dogmatic system. What he wrote was essays — perhaps forty or fifty that matter — and they cluster around three themes: the doctrine of creation, the theology of history, and the nature of the Church. This section covers the two densest clusters: “Creation and Creaturehood,” his most important constructive piece and the one in which the whole quarrel with sophiology is settled without sophiology being named; and the ecclesiological essays on catholicity, sobornost, and the Body of the living Christ.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox
What This Section Covers
- Creation and Creaturehood — creation ex nihilo out of the free will of God, the absolute Creator–creature distinction, the logoi of St Maximus, the contingency of the world, and the theology of history that follows from it.
- Catholicity, Sobornost, and the Body of the Living Christ — the 1934 essay on catholicity, the transformation of sobornost from a Slavophile concept into an ecclesiological one, the Church as the Body of the living Christ, and the ecclesiology that underwrote his ecumenical work.
The Shape of the Corpus
A reader coming to Florovsky from the reputation is usually surprised by the corpus. There is no Dogmatics, no Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, no single book in which the theology is set out. There are:
- two patristic survey courses (1931, 1933), which are handbooks rather than arguments;
- one great critical history (Ways of Russian Theology, 1937), which is about other people’s theology;
- a four-page manifesto (Athens, 1936);
- and essays — in Russian, French, English and German, scattered across journals, Festschriften and conference volumes over half a century, some of them very great.
The best of the essays are gathered in Collected Works vols. 1–4 (Bible, Church, Tradition; Christianity and Culture; Creation and Redemption; Aspects of Church History) and, in a modern critical selection, in Gallaher and Ladouceur, eds., The Patristic Witness of Georges Florovsky (London: T&T Clark, 2019). The recent anthology The Living Christ: The Theological Legacy of Georges Florovsky, ed. John Chryssavgis and Brandon Gallaher (London: T&T Clark, 2021), includes the first English translation of his major French ecclesiological study, “Le corps du Christ vivant” (“The Body of the Living Christ: An Orthodox Interpretation of the Church”).
The absence of a system is not an accident of circumstance only — six years of the war spent as a village chaplain, a career of institutional insecurity — but is also a consequence of the program. A man who has just argued that Orthodox theology went wrong by adopting systematic forms built for other content is under some obligation not to produce another system.
Key Essays
| Essay | First appearance | Theme |
|---|---|---|
| “Tvar’ i tvarnost’” / “Creation and Creaturehood” | Pravoslavnaia mysl’ 1 (Paris, 1928); English in Creation and Redemption, CW vol. 3 | Creation ex nihilo; the Creator–creature distinction |
| “Sobornost’: The Catholicity of the Church” | In The Church of God, ed. E. L. Mascall (London: SPCK, 1934) | Catholicity as the Church’s mode of being |
| “Le corps du Christ vivant” | In La Sainte Église Universelle: Confrontation œcuménique (Neuchâtel/Paris: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1948) | The Church as the Body of the living Christ |
| “The Lost Scriptural Mind”; “Revelation and Interpretation” | Collected in Bible, Church, Tradition, CW vol. 1 (1972) | Scripture, Tradition, and theological method |
| “Antinomies of Christian History: Empire and Desert”; “The Predicament of the Christian Historian” | Collected in Christianity and Culture, CW vol. 2 (1974) | The theology of history |
| “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers” | Collected in Bible, Church, Tradition, CW vol. 1 (1972) | The phronema; the open age of the Fathers |
| “Cur Deus Homo? The Motive of the Incarnation” | Collected in Creation and Redemption, CW vol. 3 (1976) | Christology and soteriology |
[Disputed: dates and venues of first publication for several essays. The 14-volume Collected Works altered titles, split single texts, and in some cases printed material with no source indicated (see [The Florovsky Corpus and Its Editions](../09-legacy-and-assessment/the-florovsky-corpus-and-its-editions.md)), so first-appearance data taken from that edition is not reliable without independent confirmation. Where this collection gives a first appearance, it gives what the scholarly literature supports; where it cannot, it cites the Collected Works volume only.]
The Standing of This Material (METHODOLOGY §4.1)
Florovsky’s dogmatic essays are, in the main, expositions of the Church’s teaching rather than novel proposals — creation from nothing by the free will of God, the absolute distinction of Creator and creature, the Church as Christ’s Body, catholicity as a mode of being rather than a statistic. Where he expounds the Church’s dogma, this collection presents it as the Church’s dogma. Where he makes a distinctive move of his own — the specific antinomic structure he gives to the theology of history, the specific use he makes of the Maximian logoi against sophiology — that is his theological work, and it is attributed to him.
See Also
- The Neo-patristic Synthesis — the method these essays execute
- Florovsky and Bulgakov — the unnamed interlocutor of “Creation and Creaturehood”
- St. Maximus the Confessor — the Father behind the doctrine of the logoi
- Ecclesiology — the doctrine of the Church in its systematic setting
- Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev — the eucharistic ecclesiology developed alongside his
References
- Florovsky, Georges. Creation and Redemption. Collected Works vol. 3. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1976.
- Florovsky, Georges. Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View. Collected Works vol. 1. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972.
- Florovsky, Georges. Christianity and Culture. Collected Works vol. 2. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1974.
- Gallaher, Brandon, and Paul Ladouceur, eds. The Patristic Witness of Georges Florovsky: Essential Theological Writings. London: T&T Clark, 2019.
- Chryssavgis, John, and Brandon Gallaher, eds. The Living Christ: The Theological Legacy of Georges Florovsky. London: T&T Clark, 2021.