St Vladimir’s, Harvard, and Princeton

Florovsky was dean of St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary from 1949 to 1955, and under him the school obtained an Absolute Charter from the Regents of the University of the State of New York in 1953. In 1955 he was asked to lay down the deanship, after conflict with colleagues including Fr. Alexander Schmemann and a disagreement about what the seminary was for. He spent the remaining twenty-four years of his life in American universities — Harvard, then Princeton — as the first Orthodox theologian of his standing to hold such positions, and never again led an Orthodox institution.

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

The Crossing

Florovsky came to America in 1948, the year of the founding assembly of the World Council of Churches at Amsterdam, and in 1949 became dean of St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York — then a very small institution of the Russian Metropolia, the jurisdiction that in 1970 became the Orthodox Church in America (St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, “Archpriest Georges Florovsky,” svots.edu; The Patristic Revival).

He was fifty-five, had spent six of the previous nine years as a village chaplain and language teacher, and arrived in a country whose language he read perfectly and whose academic culture he did not know.

What He Built

His ambition for St Vladimir’s was explicit and large: an Orthodox academy operating at the highest scholarly level — a graduate theological faculty of the European type, capable of producing scholarship that Harvard and Oxford would have to take seriously.

The concrete achievement was substantial. He developed the curriculum, recruited faculty from the Paris emigration, and secured the seminary’s academic standing: under his deanship St Vladimir’s received an Absolute Charter in 1953 from the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York — the instrument that made it a degree-granting institution rather than a private training school (St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, “Archpriest Georges Florovsky,” svots.edu). He also brought over the men who would define the school for the next forty years: Alexander Schmemann arrived in 1951, John Meyendorff in 1959, after Florovsky’s own departure (see Fr. Alexander Schmemann and Fr. John Meyendorff).

That is not a small legacy. The institution that became the principal centre of English-language Orthodox theology got its charter, its first serious curriculum, and several of its defining figures under Florovsky.

1955

He was asked to lay down the deanship in 1955, after six years (the removal reported in the biographical literature; St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, “Archpriest Georges Florovsky,” svots.edu, states that he retired as dean in 1955; the fuller accounts describe a contested departure).

The published record establishes the following, and this collection reports it and no more.

There was conflict, and it involved Schmemann. The accounts describe deteriorating relations with colleagues and with the jurisdiction’s authorities, and name Schmemann among those with whom Florovsky was in conflict; Florovsky came to believe that Schmemann was undermining his authority.

They wanted different institutions. This is the substantive disagreement and the one worth understanding. Florovsky wanted an academy — a research faculty at the highest international scholarly level. Schmemann held that the seminary’s chief calling was to form priests for American parishes. Both are defensible conceptions of what a seminary is; they are not the same conception, and a small school with one building cannot pursue both at once.

And Florovsky was not an administrator. The biographical literature is candid that he was ill-equipped for academic administration and was not by temperament an educator of the American undergraduate kind.

(These points as reported in the biographical and scholarly literature on the period; the primary documentary source is now Paul L. Gavrilyuk, ed., On Christian Leadership: The Letters of Alexander Schmemann and Georges Florovsky (1947–1955), Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press — the correspondence in English translation, which covers the years from before Florovsky’s arrival to the rupture; a Russian edition appeared at Moscow in 2019.)

What this collection does not do. It does not reconstruct private conversations, assign blame, or narrate the motives of men who are not here to answer. Readers who want the detail should go to the correspondence, which is published, and to Blane’s biographical volume. [Disputed: the character of the 1955 departure. Accounts range from "retired as dean" (the seminary's own institutional biography) to "asked to leave amid much controversy" (the fuller biographical literature). Both descriptions appear in reputable sources; the underlying facts — that he ceased to be dean in 1955, that there had been serious conflict, and that he did not remain on the faculty — are not in dispute.]

It should be said plainly that this was a wound, and that the two men’s reputations have not been damaged by it in equal measure. Schmemann stayed and became the school’s defining figure; Florovsky left and became an American university professor. Both outcomes were, in their way, productive; only one of them was chosen.

Harvard

From the mid-1950s Florovsky taught at Harvard Divinity School, where he held a chair in Eastern Church history until 1964, and where he also taught in the Slavic field — becoming one of the first Orthodox theologians to occupy a significant chair at a major American university (Wikipedia, “Georges Florovsky,” giving 1956–1964; Père Stéphane Bigham, “Fr. George Florovsky: Ecumenist?”, stephanebigham.com, giving 1955–1964).

[Disputed: the start of the Harvard appointment — 1955 in some accounts, 1956 in others; the end date of 1964 is agreed. The discrepancy probably reflects the difference between appointment and the start of teaching.]

He also taught for a period at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Brookline, the Greek Archdiocese’s seminary, which is a reminder that his pan-Orthodox commitments were practical and not merely rhetorical — a Russian priest of the Metropolia teaching Greek seminarians in an era when the jurisdictions barely spoke.

The Harvard years were his most productive as a lecturer and essayist in English, and they are when the Anglophone theological world learned who he was. His students and hearers were not only Orthodox; a large part of his influence ran through Protestant and Catholic scholars who encountered patristic theology through him.

Princeton

From 1964 to 1972 he was at Princeton University, teaching in religion and Slavic studies; he had also been a visiting lecturer at Princeton Theological Seminary from the early 1960s, and continued to lecture and supervise long after formal retirement (Wikipedia, “Georges Florovsky,” giving 1964–1972 for Princeton University and 1962–1979 for the Princeton Theological Seminary visiting lectureship; Bigham, “Fr. George Florovsky: Ecumenist?”, giving 1964–1979 for Princeton).

[Disputed: the Princeton dates and titles. Sources give 1964–1972 for the Princeton University appointment and various end-dates from 1972 to 1979 for his continuing association with Princeton Theological Seminary. The ranges probably reflect the difference between a salaried professorship and continuing visiting lectureships after retirement.]

He remained, throughout, a serving priest: attached to Metropolia parishes, regularly celebrating and preaching (The Patristic Revival). His papers are held at Princeton University.

The Last Years and Death

Florovsky went on working, lecturing, and being consulted well into his eighties. He never returned to Russia; he never held another ecclesiastical post; the Collected Works began appearing in 1972 under Richard Haugh’s editorship and were still in progress when he died (see The Florovsky Corpus and Its Editions).

He died at Princeton, New Jersey, on 11 August 1979, aged eighty-five. He is buried at St Vladimir’s Orthodox Church in Trenton, New Jersey (The Patristic Revival; Wikipedia, “Georges Florovsky,” giving death at Princeton and burial in Trenton). He is not commemorated as a saint, and no Orthodox Church has taken any step toward his glorification; his memory is kept as that of a priest and a scholar.

The Shape of the American Half

A weighing, offered as such.

Florovsky’s American years gave him audience, position, and access that no Orthodox theologian had previously had in the West, and he used them: Harvard and Princeton chairs, the WCC platform, an enormous lecture circuit, and the formation of a generation of scholars in and outside Orthodoxy.

They also gave him no institution of his own after 1955, no students in the strict Orthodox sense after St Vladimir’s, and no completed book. The great constructive synthesis he had called for at Athens in 1936 was never written — not by him. That fact belongs in any honest account and is returned to in An Assessment.

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. The primary documentary source for the deanship and the rupture.)
Blane, Andrew, ed. Georges Florovsky: Russian Intellectual, Orthodox Churchman. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993.
St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. “Archpriest Georges Florovsky.” svots.edu. (The deanship, the 1953 Absolute Charter, the 1955 retirement from the deanship.)
Bigham, Stéphane. “Fr. George Florovsky: Ecumenist?” stephanebigham.com. (Chronology of the American posts.)
Fr. Georges Florovsky and the Patristic Revival. Repository hub essay, ../../orthodoxy/04-russian-orthodox-tradition/theologians/patristic-revival.md. (Jurisdictional path, parish service, burial.)
“Georges Florovsky.” Wikipedia. (Used per METHODOLOGY §2.3 to locate the chronological data; the disputed ranges are flagged in the text.)