Catholicity, Sobornost, and the Body of the Living Christ

Florovsky’s ecclesiology is set out in two principal texts: the 1934 essay on the catholicity of the Church, written for an Anglican volume, and the French study “Le corps du Christ vivant” of 1948, written for the ecumenical confrontation at Amsterdam. Together they argue that catholicity is not a matter of extent or numbers but a mode of being: the Church is catholic because she is Christ’s Body, and each member is catholic in the measure that he lives the whole Church’s life. The essays take the Slavophile word sobornost and give it a christological rather than a sociological content.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Two Texts

“Sobornost’: The Catholicity of the Church” appeared in The Church of God: An Anglo-Russian Symposium, edited by E. L. Mascall (London: SPCK, 1934) — a volume produced by the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, the Anglican–Orthodox body in which Florovsky had been active since 1928. It is available in English at the standard online repositories of his work (Florovsky, “The Catholicity of the Church,” fatheralexander.org; also in Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, Collected Works vol. 1, Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972).

“Le corps du Christ vivant: une interprétation orthodoxe de l’Église” appeared in La Sainte Église Universelle: Confrontation œcuménique (Neuchâtel and Paris: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1948), the volume of the ecumenical confrontation associated with the founding of the World Council of Churches. It is Florovsky’s fullest ecclesiological statement, was written in French, and remained untranslated for seventy years; the first English version appears in John Chryssavgis and Brandon Gallaher, eds., The Living Christ: The Theological Legacy of Georges Florovsky (London: T&T Clark, 2021), which takes its title from it.

That the fullest statement of the ecclesiology of the twentieth century’s most influential Orthodox theologian was inaccessible in English until 2021 is a fact about the reception of Florovsky worth registering, and it is of a piece with the state of the Collected Works (see The Florovsky Corpus and Its Editions).

Catholicity Is Not Extent

The essay of 1934 opens by refusing the ordinary meaning of the word. Catholicity is not geographical scope, and it is not numerical majority. A Church is not catholic because it is spread widely or because it counts many members; the primitive Church of the Upper Room was catholic when it numbered a hundred and twenty.

The Greek katholikē, Florovsky argues, is qualitative before it is quantitative: it means according to the whole, wholeness, integrity. The Slavonic translators rendered it sobornaya — a word cognate with sobor, both “council” and “assembly” — and that translation, whatever its philological accidents, preserved the qualitative sense.

Catholicity is a mode of being. It is the way the Church exists: as one whole in which the many are genuinely many and genuinely one. And it is predicable of persons, not only of institutions. A member of the Church is catholic in the measure that he has ceased to live from himself alone and lives the life of the whole Body.

The Christological Ground

Here Florovsky makes his decisive move against the Slavophile inheritance.

Khomiakov had made sobornost the centre of Russian ecclesiology, and had described the Church as a communion of love in which freedom and authority cease to be opposed — an organic unity of persons over against the Roman unity of authority and the Protestant unity of individual conviction. Florovsky honoured the insight and judged the framework: in Ways of Russian Theology he holds that Khomiakov’s sobornost is formed by German Romantic philosophy of the organic community before it is formed by the Fathers (Florovsky, Puti russkogo bogosloviya, Paris, 1937; see The Book and Its Argument).

His own version relocates the ground. The Church’s catholicity is not a sociological property of a loving community; it is christological. The Church is catholic because she is the Body of Christ — Christ’s own life extended, the totus Christus, so that her unity is not the unity of a society of like-minded persons but the unity of a single organism whose principle of life is the risen Lord. The unity is given in Christ and realized in the Spirit; it is not achieved by the members’ agreement.

From that follows the formula that Florovsky’s readers have found most illuminating: the idea of the Church as organism must be supplemented by the idea of a symphony of persons, in which the mystery of the Holy Trinity is reflected — a unity in which multiplicity is not dissolved, because the model is the Trinity, where the Three are one without being confused (as summarized in the accounts of his ecclesiology; cf. “Georges Florovsky’s Model of Orthodox Ecclesiology,” blogs.ancientfaith.com, 2014). Catholicity is thus a trinitarian pattern realized christologically and pneumatologically.

The practical corollary, and it is a hard one: in the Church, the opposition between freedom and authority disappears — not by one defeating the other but by both being taken up into the concrete union of love. Florovsky is aware that this is a description of the Church’s reality and not of most parish meetings.

The Church as the Body of the Living Christ

The 1948 French essay develops the same christological centre in an explicitly ecumenical setting, since it was written for a confrontation of confessional ecclesiologies.

Its principal claims:

The Church is a reality before she is a doctrine. She is not primarily a societas or an institution or an aggregate of believers but the continuing presence of the incarnate Lord in history. “The Body of the living Christ” is meant literally in the sense that a body is the presence of a person.

Ecclesiology is a chapter of Christology. One cannot describe the Church truly while bracketing Christ; the Church has no nature of her own to be studied independently.

Sacramental and hierarchical structure follows from this, rather than being added to it. The Eucharist is not one activity of the Church among others; it is where the Body is manifest as the Body. Florovsky’s ecclesiology is eucharistic in substance, though he did not develop it into a full eucharistic ecclesiology as Nicholas Afanasiev did, and he had reservations about the direction Afanasiev took it (see Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev).

And the boundaries of the Church are a real problem, not a slogan. Florovsky’s ecumenical work forced him to think about the status of the divided Christian bodies, and his position — worked out through St Augustine and St Cyprian, whose disagreement about baptism outside the Church he treated at length — is that the Church’s canonical boundaries and the reach of her sacramental grace may not simply coincide, and that this is a mystery the Church has never resolved into a formula. He was accordingly unwilling either to say that everything outside Orthodoxy is void of grace or to say that the divisions do not matter (Florovsky’s ecclesiological essays in Bible, Church, Tradition, Collected Works vol. 1, 1972; and see The World Council of Churches and Its Orthodox Critics).

This is one of the places where Orthodox readers divide sharply, and the division is reported rather than resolved here. [Disputed: Florovsky's treatment of the limits of the Church. (a) His defenders hold that he faithfully reproduces a genuine patristic tension — Cyprian's rigour and Augustine's account of valid-but-irregular sacraments were never synthesized by the Church — and that refusing a formula is the honest position. (b) His critics, in ROCOR and traditionalist circles particularly, hold that the Church's canonical boundary is her real boundary, that the tension he leaves open is the door through which ecumenical ambiguity enters, and that his position functions in practice as a concession. See [The Ecumenism Debate](../../orthodoxy/09-orthodox-distinctives/ecumenism-debate.md). This repository records both positions per METHODOLOGY §4.2.]

Tradition and Scripture

The ecclesiology carries a doctrine of Tradition, worked out in the essays collected as Bible, Church, Tradition (Collected Works vol. 1, 1972) — above all “The Lost Scriptural Mind” and “Revelation and Interpretation.”

Tradition is not a second source alongside Scripture. It is the Church’s own life, the abiding presence of the Spirit, within which Scripture is read and understood. Florovsky rejected the post-Tridentine two-source model as firmly as he rejected the Protestant opposition of Scripture to tradition; both, on his account, are pseudomorphic borrowings that Orthodox theology took over without noticing.

Scripture is the Church’s book. It was written in the Church, canonized by the Church, and is intelligible only in the Church’s mind — which is why “the lost scriptural mind” is a diagnosis of modern Christianity’s condition rather than a complaint about biblical illiteracy.

(See Holy Tradition and Holy Scripture, and the companion treatment in the Holy Tradition compendium.)

What Is Dogma and What Is Florovsky

The Church confesses that she is one, holy, catholic and apostolic; that she is the Body of Christ; that Tradition is the life of the Spirit in her (METHODOLOGY §4.1). Florovsky’s specific formulations — catholicity as a mode of personal being, the “symphony of persons,” the deliberate re-grounding of sobornost away from Khomiakov, the open treatment of the Church’s limits — are his theological work. They have been extraordinarily influential and are widely regarded as faithful; they are not conciliar definitions, and the last of them is contested by other Orthodox.

See Also

References

  • Florovsky, Georges. “Sobornost’: The Catholicity of the Church.” In The Church of God: An Anglo-Russian Symposium, ed. E. L. Mascall. London: SPCK, 1934. (Also as “The Catholicity of the Church,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, Collected Works vol. 1, Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972; text at fatheralexander.org.)
  • Florovsky, Georges. “Le corps du Christ vivant: une interprétation orthodoxe de l’Église.” In La Sainte Église Universelle: Confrontation œcuménique. Neuchâtel and Paris: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1948. (English translation in Chryssavgis and Gallaher, eds., The Living Christ, 2021.)
  • Florovsky, Georges. Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View. Collected Works vol. 1. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972. (Includes “The Lost Scriptural Mind,” “Revelation and Interpretation,” and the ecclesiological essays.)
  • Chryssavgis, John, and Brandon Gallaher, eds. The Living Christ: The Theological Legacy of Georges Florovsky. London: T&T Clark, 2021.
  • Florovsky, Georges. Puti russkogo bogosloviya. Paris, 1937. (On Khomiakov and Slavophile sobornost.)
  • “Georges Florovsky’s Model of Orthodox Ecclesiology.” blogs.ancientfaith.com, 13 November 2014. (Summary of the organism / symphony-of-persons formulation.)