The Fathers and the Mind of the Church

To follow the Fathers is not to quote them but to think with them — to acquire their phronema, the mind or disposition of the Church. This file expounds the concept of the patristic phronema and the program Georges Florovsky built upon it: the “neo-patristic synthesis,” a creative return to the Fathers (not archaeology) and the recovery of “Christian Hellenism,” together with the criticisms the program has drawn.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Phronema: A Mind Before a Doctrine

The Greek word phronema means mind, mindset, disposition, the habitual way of thinking and perceiving. St. Paul uses it in the great Christological exhortation, “Have this mind (touto phroneite) among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5), and speaks of “the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16) that belongs to the spiritual. Orthodox theology took up the term to name what one must acquire in order to think rightly within the Church: not merely a set of correct doctrines but the underlying disposition from which right doctrine flows — the “mind of the Fathers,” the “mind of the Church” (Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, Nordland, 1972; Ware, The Orthodox Way, SVS Press, 1995, on thinking with the mind of the Church).

The distinction matters because it changes what it means to be traditional. If Tradition were a body of formulas, fidelity would be repetition: to be orthodox would be to recite the received propositions. But if the deepest thing handed on is a phronema — a way of seeing God, the world, and salvation — then fidelity is something more demanding and more alive: it is to see as the Fathers saw, and therefore to be able to speak the same faith freshly in new circumstances and against new errors, as the Fathers themselves did (Florovsky, “The Ethos of the Orthodox Church,” in Aspects of Church History, Nordland, 1975). This is why the councils could confess new words — homoousios, Theotokos, the two energies — while claiming to add nothing: possessed of the patristic mind, they said the same thing in the terms the moment required.

Florovsky’s Neo-Patristic Synthesis

It was Fr. Georges Florovsky (1893–1979) who made the acquisition of the patristic mind into a theological program for the modern age, under the name that has defined a century of Orthodox theology: the “neo-patristic synthesis.” Florovsky issued the call most memorably in his address to the first Congress of Orthodox Theologians in Athens in 1936 and elaborated it across his career: modern Orthodox theology must return to the Fathers — but a creative return, not a repetition. “Let us… turn back to the Fathers,” he urged; theology must “acquire once more the mind of the Fathers,” advancing “beyond the Fathers” only by being “in the spirit of the Fathers” (Florovsky, “Patristics and Modern Theology,” 1936; and “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, 1972).

The program has a precise anti-antiquarian edge. To return to the Fathers is emphatically not to retreat into the past or to reproduce their conclusions mechanically; Florovsky scorned such “theology of repetition” as a betrayal of the very Fathers it claimed to honor, since the Fathers were themselves bold and creative thinkers who forged new language to guard the old faith (Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” 1972). The neo-patristic synthesis is therefore a double movement: back to the sources, in order to think forward — to engage the modern questions with the mind, not merely the letter, of the Fathers. “Follow the Fathers” means “possess their spirit,” and one who possesses their spirit is freed for genuine theological creativity within the Tradition rather than confined to its echo.

Florovsky set this program against what he diagnosed, in his vast Ways of Russian Theology (1937), as the long “Western captivity” (zapadnoe plenenie) of Russian theology — its capture first by Latin scholastic and then by German idealist categories, which had, in his judgment, alienated it from the patristic ethos (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Collected Works vols. 5–6; and see the topical article Holy Tradition, and Lossky, Florovsky, and the Neo-Patristic Synthesis). The remedy was the recovery of the Greek patristic mind as the authentic wellspring of Orthodox theology.

Christian Hellenism

A distinctive and contested element of Florovsky’s program is his notion of “Christian Hellenism.” He argued that the Fathers’ appropriation of Greek philosophical language and categories was not a corruption of the biblical gospel — as the Protestant “Hellenization thesis” of Adolf von Harnack had charged — but a legitimate and even providential inculturation: in taking up and transforming the tools of Greek thought, the Fathers created a permanent and irreducible form of Christian intelligence. “Hellenism,” Florovsky wrote provocatively, has become “a standing category of Christian existence”; Christian theology is “eternally Hellenistic” not in the sense of pagan philosophy baptized, but in the sense that the patristic transformation of Hellenic thought is a lasting achievement of the Christian mind that cannot be discarded without impoverishing the faith (Florovsky, “The Ethos of the Orthodox Church,” and “Christ and His Church,” in the Collected Works; and see the discussion in the topical article Holy Tradition). To acquire the patristic phronema, on this account, includes entering into this Christian-Hellenic mind, not treating it as a dispensable husk around a supposedly pure biblical kernel.

The Criticisms

Florovsky’s program has been the dominant paradigm of modern Orthodox theology, but it has not gone unchallenged, and a compendium governed by the both-sides discipline must record the criticisms fairly.

[Disputed: the adequacy of the neo-patristic synthesis and of "Christian Hellenism." (a) Critics of Florovsky's historical narrative argue that his account of the "Western captivity" of Russian theology is polemically overdrawn — that it underrates the genuine Orthodox substance of the Kiev school and of the Russian religious philosophers (Soloviev, Bulgakov, Florensky) whom Florovsky largely dismissed as captive to the West. Paul Gavrilyuk's *Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance* (Oxford, 2013) documents both Florovsky's debts to the very Russian religious renaissance he criticized and the tendentiousness of *Ways of Russian Theology* as history. (b) Others question "Christian Hellenism" as itself a *particular theological choice* dressed as a neutral return to origins — asking why the Greek patristic synthesis should be normative in a way that closes off other legitimate inculturations of the gospel, and whether Florovsky's program privileges one historical form of theology as though it were simply "the Fathers." (c) Defenders reply that Florovsky never meant a wooden Hellenism or a canonizing of one culture, but the recovery of a genuinely catholic theological mind, and that the neo-patristic synthesis remains the most fruitful path Orthodox theology has found in the modern era (so, broadly, Andrew Louth, *Modern Orthodox Thinkers*, SPCK, 2015). The compendium reports the debate; it does not adjudicate whether Florovsky's synthesis is the whole of the way forward or one powerful proposal among possible others.]

The Enduring Point

Whatever the verdict on the details of Florovsky’s program, its central intuition has been widely received across the Orthodox world and lies at the heart of what it means to appeal to the Fathers as the voice of Tradition. The Fathers are followed rightly not by citation but by communion — by entering their mind, praying their prayers, reading the Scriptures as they read them, and so becoming able to confess the one faith in one’s own age. This is the difference between a living Tradition and a dead traditionalism restated at the level of theology: the letter of the Fathers preserved without their mind is a museum; their mind acquired is the Tradition itself, still creative, still speaking (Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” 1972; and see Tradition as Life, Not Archaeology). To have the phronema of the Fathers is to have the mind of the Church; and to have the mind of the Church is to stand within Holy Tradition not as an heir guarding an inheritance but as a member sharing a life.

References

Florovsky, Georges. Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View. Collected Works vol. 1. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972. (“St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers”; the mind of the Fathers; against the theology of repetition.)
Florovsky, Georges. Aspects of Church History. Collected Works vol. 4. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1975. (“The Ethos of the Orthodox Church”; Christian Hellenism.)
Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology. Collected Works vols. 5–6. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979; Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987. (The “Western captivity”; the neo-patristic remedy.)
Gavrilyuk, Paul L. Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. (The critical assessment of Florovsky’s program and narrative.)
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Florovsky and the neo-patristic synthesis within twentieth-century Orthodox theology.)
Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Way. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995. (Thinking with the mind of the Church.)
Scripture: Philippians 2:5; 1 Corinthians 2:16.