07 — America and the Ecumenical Movement

In 1948 Florovsky crossed to America for the founding assembly of the World Council of Churches and stayed for the rest of his life: dean of St Vladimir’s Seminary 1949–1955, Harvard from the mid-1950s to 1964, then Princeton. Alongside the academic career ran three decades of ecumenical labour — the WCC’s founding assembly, its Faith and Order work, the Toronto Statement of 1950 — which made him the most visible Orthodox theologian in the Western Christian world and which a substantial part of Orthodoxy regarded, and regards, with suspicion.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration) / Orthodox Church in America

What This Section Covers

• St Vladimir’s, Harvard, and Princeton — the American academic career, the transformation of St Vladimir’s, the rupture of 1955 and the documented circumstances of his departure from the deanship, and the two decades after.
• The World Council of Churches and Its Orthodox Critics — Amsterdam 1948, the Faith and Order work, the Toronto Statement, Florovsky’s own account of what Orthodox ecumenical participation was for, and the intra-Orthodox dispute about whether he was right.

The Two Halves of the American Career

The institutional half was consequential and, in its personal dimension, painful. Florovsky arrived at a seminary that was little more than a few rooms and a handful of students, and left it a chartered degree-granting institution; and he left it because he was asked to. What followed — Harvard, Princeton, a long series of visiting positions — was in academic terms a considerable ascent and in ecclesial terms a diminution: he never again led an Orthodox institution.

The ecumenical half was continuous from 1926 to the end of his life and made him, for a generation of Western Christians, the voice of Orthodoxy. It is also the part of his record most contested inside Orthodoxy, and this section reports the contest rather than resolving it (METHODOLOGY §4.2; see The Ecumenism Debate).

A Note on Discretion

The 1955 departure from the deanship involved living people, their students, and institutions that still exist. The repository’s rule is to report what is documented, with sources, without sensationalism and without concealment. The content file accordingly states what the published record establishes — that he was asked to lay down the deanship, that there had been conflict with colleagues including Fr. Alexander Schmemann, and that the two men held different conceptions of what the seminary was for — and declines to reconstruct motives, private conversations, or blame. Paul Gavrilyuk’s edition of the Schmemann–Florovsky correspondence (SVS Press) is the primary documentary source now available, and readers wanting more should go to it.

See Also

• Life and Formation — the European career that preceded this
• Catholicity, Sobornost, and the Body of the Living Christ — the ecclesiology behind the ecumenical work
• Fr. Alexander Schmemann and Fr. John Meyendorff — the successors at St Vladimir’s
• Orthodoxy in America — the wider setting
• The Ecumenism Debate — the intra-Orthodox dispute

References

• Gavrilyuk, Paul L., ed. On Christian Leadership: The Letters of Alexander Schmemann and Georges Florovsky (1947–1955). Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. (Russian edition Moscow, 2019.)
• Blane, Andrew, ed. Georges Florovsky: Russian Intellectual, Orthodox Churchman. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993.
• Florovsky, Georges. Ecumenism I: A Doctrinal Approach and Ecumenism II: A Historical Approach. Collected Works vols. 13–14. Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1989.
• World Council of Churches. “The Church, the Churches and the World Council of Churches” (the Toronto Statement). Central Committee, Toronto, 1950. oikoumene.org.