Saint of the Month

  Father Georges Vasilievich Florovsky (August 23, 1893 – August 11, 1979) was a prominent 20th century Orthodox priest, theologian, and writer, active in the ecumenical movement. His writing is known for its clear, profound style, covering subjects on nearly every aspect of Church life.

Fr. Georges was born in Odessa, Russia as the fourth child of a priest. Inspired by the erudite environment in which he grew up, he learned English, German, French, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew while still a schoolboy. At eighteen, he started to study philosophy and history. After his graduation, he taught for three years at high schools in Odessa and then graduated with a licensia docendi recognized at all universities in the Russian empire.

In 1919, he began to teach at the University of Odessa, but his family was forced to leave Russia in 1920. The young Florovsky realized at that time that there would be no return for him, because Marxism did not accept the history and philosophy he taught. In 1925, Florovsky was appointed professor at the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris. There he found his real vocation. Early Christian history and the writings of the Church Fathers became for him the benchmark for Orthodox theology as well as a source for many of his contributions and critiques of the ecumenical movement.  Florovsky would spend the rest of his life teaching at theological institutions.  He also became involved in the emerging Ecumenical movement of the early 20^th century and was a prominent voice for the Orthodox Church in the World Council of Churches. 

In 1932, Florovsky was ordained to the priesthood. During the 1930s, he undertook extensive researches in European libraries and wrote his most important works in the area of early Christian literature as well as his monumental work, ‘Ways of Russian Theology’. In this massive work, he questioned the Western influences of scholasticism, pietism, and idealism on Russian theology and called for a re-evaluation of Orthodox theology in the light of the writings of the Church Fathers.

In 1949, Florovsky moved to New York City to take a position as Dean of the newly formed St. Vladimir's Orthodox Seminary. Florovsky's oversight of the development of the theological curriculum led to the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York granting the Seminary an Absolute Charter in 1953. He left St. Vladimir’s in 1955 to take a teaching position at Harvard Divinity School (1956-1964), teaching Early Christian Literature and Russian religious thought.  He left Harvard for Princeton University in 1964 teaching Slavic languages and literatures. He died in 1979.

Fr. Florovsky offers one of the most brilliant encapsulations of the divergent Eastern-Western Christian traditions one could come across:

The very problem of Christian reconciliation is not that of a correlation of parallel traditions, but precisely that of the reintegration of a distorted tradition.  The two traditions may seem quite irreconcilable, when they are compared and confronted, as they are at the present.  Yet their differences themselves are, to a great extent, simply the results of disintegration: they are, as it were, distinctions stiffened into contradictions.

[Fr. Georges Florovsky, “The Ethos of the Orthodox Church Churches” given in 1960]

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