Creation and Creaturehood

“Creation and Creaturehood” is Florovsky’s most important constructive essay and the place where his theology is actually done rather than announced. Its subject is the absolute distinction between the uncreated God and the created world: that the world might not have been, and is, only because God freely willed it; that creation is ex nihilo and not an emanation, a necessity, or a moment in the divine life; and that this contingency is the ground of the world’s reality and of history’s seriousness. It is also, without naming its target once, the decisive answer to sophiology.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Text

The essay first appeared in Russian as “Tvar’ i tvarnost’” in Pravoslavnaia mysl’, the St Sergius Institute’s journal, in Paris in 1928, and is available in English as “Creation and Creaturehood” in Creation and Redemption, Collected Works vol. 3 (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1976). It is also among the texts selected for the modern critical anthology (Brandon Gallaher and Paul Ladouceur, eds., The Patristic Witness of Georges Florovsky: Essential Theological Writings, London: T&T Clark, 2019).

Its opening is the whole essay in miniature: the mystery that the world might not have existed at all, and that what might not have existed does exist (Florovsky, “Creation and Creaturehood,” in Creation and Redemption, Collected Works vol. 3, 1976). Everything else unfolds from that sentence.

The Argument

Contingency Is Not a Defect

The starting point is the sheer gratuity of creaturely existence. The world is not necessary. Nothing in the nature of God requires it, nothing in the nature of anything else produces it; it exists because God willed it, and the willing was free.

Florovsky’s move is to make this contingency positive. In much philosophical theology, contingency is a deficiency: the creature is a diminished being, less real than the necessary, a shadow of the truly existent. Florovsky reverses the valuation. The creature is real precisely as creature, with a reality that is genuinely its own because it was genuinely given. To be created is not to be a lesser mode of God; it is to be a new thing, other than God, willed into being alongside Him.

Creation ex nihilo, and What It Excludes

The doctrine of creation from nothing is not a cosmological curiosity but a boundary marker, and Florovsky uses it to exclude three things:

Emanation. The world is not an outflow or a lower degree of the divine. There is no continuous scale from God down to matter.

Necessity. God did not have to create; creation adds nothing to Him and answers no lack. This is why the world can be a gift — a necessary effusion is not a gift.

Any tertium quid. There is no third thing between Creator and creature: no divine-and-creaturely intermediary, no realm that is neither God nor world. Every being is on one side of the line or the other. [This is where the essay does its polemical work. Bulgakov's Sophia was presented, on his own account, as neither a fourth hypostasis nor a creature but as the divine nature disclosed — and to Florovsky, and to Lossky, that meant it occupied a position the Fathers' ontology has no place for (see [The Colleague and the Critic](../06-florovsky-and-bulgakov/the-colleague-and-the-critic.md) and [The Critics: Lossky, Florovsky, and After](../../sergius-bulgakov/08-the-modern-reappraisal/the-critics-lossky-florovsky-and-after.md)). Bulgakov is not named in the essay.]

The Two Distinctions

The structural heart of the essay is a double distinction that Florovsky takes from the Fathers and applies with precision.

Within God, the distinction is between essence and will — or, in the developed Palamite form, between the imparticipable essence and the uncreated energies. God’s being is necessary; God’s willing of the world is free. Confusing these two is the root error: if the world proceeds from the divine essence, it is divine and necessary; if it proceeds from the divine will, it is other and free.

Between God and the world, the distinction is absolute: uncreated and created, with no intermediate ontological status.

The Fathers on whom this rests are St Athanasius — whose distinction between the Son’s generation from the Father’s essence and the world’s making by the Father’s will is the ancestor of the whole argument — and St Maximus the Confessor, whose doctrine of the logoi supplies what sophiology was trying to supply: the eternal divine intentions or “words” of each created thing, which are in God, are uncreated, and yet are not the creature, so that the world has an eternal ground in God without any part of the world being divine (Florovsky, “Creation and Creaturehood,” 1976; see St. Athanasius and St. Maximus the Confessor).

This is Florovsky’s constructive answer, and it is worth stating as a claim rather than as a polemic: Orthodoxy already possesses the resources sophiology was invented to provide. The essence–energies distinction and the Maximian logoi, taken together, allow one to say that God is genuinely related to the world, that the world has an eternal ground in God’s counsel, and that God really gives Himself to creation — while preserving the absolute distinction of natures. Vladimir Lossky pressed the same point from the essence–energies side (Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, London: James Clarke, 1957, chs. 2–4; see Vladimir Lossky).

The Consequences for Anthropology and History

If the creature is genuinely other, then creaturely freedom is genuine. Florovsky’s insistence on this is what makes his theology of history what it is.

History is not the unfolding of a divine idea. It is the arena of free personal acts, which might have gone otherwise, and whose consequences are real. Against every determinism — Hegelian, Marxist, Eurasianist, sophiological — Florovsky held that history is contingent all the way through, and that God works in it not by necessity but by providence, condescension, and the free response of persons.

And history is therefore antinomic. Florovsky’s essays on the theology of history — above all “Antinomies of Christian History: Empire and Desert” and “The Predicament of the Christian Historian,” collected in Christianity and Culture, Collected Works vol. 2 (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1974) — argue that Christian history contains irreducible tensions that cannot be resolved into a single principle. The Christian Empire and the desert monasticism that fled it are both authentic responses to the Gospel, and neither cancels the other; the Church is in the world and not of it, and both halves are true at once. The historian who resolves the antinomy has falsified the history.

This is one of Florovsky’s genuinely original contributions and one of the least noticed. It is also a rebuke to a certain kind of Orthodox historiography which knows in advance that the Empire was providential, or that it was a fall.

The Church and the New Creation

The essay’s theological arc closes on redemption. If the world is contingent and free, then the Fall is a real catastrophe and not a necessary moment in a dialectic; and redemption is a real act of God in history and not the working-out of a metaphysical scheme. The Incarnation is the entry of the Uncreated into the created, which is possible only because the two are genuinely distinct — a confused ontology makes the Incarnation either unnecessary or unintelligible. Florovsky’s later essay “Cur Deus Homo? The Motive of the Incarnation” (in Creation and Redemption, Collected Works vol. 3, 1976) works out the soteriological side.

Why This Essay Matters

Three reasons, in ascending order.

It is the program executed. Everything Florovsky said about method at Athens — acquire the phronema, think with the Fathers on a live question, do not repeat and do not import — is here done rather than described. Athanasius and Maximus are not quoted as authorities; they are thought with.

It settles the sophiological question constructively. The negative case against sophiology was made by Seraphim (Sobolev) and by Lossky. Florovsky’s contribution was to show what the Fathers say instead — and a refutation that leaves the original question unanswered is not much of a refutation (Alexis Klimoff, “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, nos. 1–2 [2005]: 67–100).

And it is the ground of everything else he wrote. The theology of history, the ecclesiology, the anthropology, the resistance to every scheme in which the Church is the expression of a culture or the Revolution is the judgment of the earth — all of it follows from the single claim that the world is contingent, free, and other than God.

A Note on What Is Dogma Here

Creation ex nihilo by the free will of God, and the absolute distinction between the uncreated and the created, are the Church’s teaching, confessed in the Creed and defended by the Fathers and the councils; the essence–energies distinction was vindicated by the councils of the fourteenth century (see Theosis and St. Gregory Palamas). Florovsky’s use of the Maximian logoi against a particular modern proposal, and his antinomic theology of history, are his own theological work — well-founded, widely accepted, and not conciliar definitions.

See Also

References

  • Florovsky, Georges. “Creation and Creaturehood.” In Creation and Redemption, Collected Works vol. 3. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1976. (Russian orig. “Tvar’ i tvarnost’,” Pravoslavnaia mysl’ 1, Paris, 1928.)
  • Florovsky, Georges. “Cur Deus Homo? The Motive of the Incarnation.” In Creation and Redemption, Collected Works vol. 3. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1976.
  • Florovsky, Georges. Christianity and Culture. Collected Works vol. 2. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1974. (Includes “Antinomies of Christian History: Empire and Desert” and “The Predicament of the Christian Historian.”)
  • Gallaher, Brandon, and Paul Ladouceur, eds. The Patristic Witness of Georges Florovsky: Essential Theological Writings. London: T&T Clark, 2019.
  • Klimoff, Alexis. “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, nos. 1–2 (2005): 67–100.
  • Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957.