| Type: | priest |
| Honorific Prefix: | The Reverend |
| Georges Florovsky | |
| Church: | Eastern Orthodox Church |
| Birth Name: | Georgi Vasilievich Florovsky |
| Birth Date: | 9 September 1893 |
| Birth Place: | Yelisavetgrad, Russian Empire |
| Death Place: | Princeton, New Jersey, U.S. |
Georges Vasilievich Florovsky (Russian: Гео́ргий Васи́льевич Флоро́вский; – August 11, 1979) was a Russian Orthodox priest, theologian, and historian.
Born in the Russian Empire, he spent his working life in Paris (1920–1949) and New York (1949–1979). With Sergei Bulgakov, Vladimir Lossky, Justin Popović and Dumitru Stăniloae he was one of the more influential Eastern Orthodox Christian theologians of the mid-20th century. He was particularly concerned that modern Christian theology might receive inspiration from the lively intellectual debates of the patristic traditions of the undivided Church rather than from later Scholastic or Reformation categories of thought.
Georgiy Vasilievich Florovsky was born in Yelisavetgrad in the Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire (now Kropyvnytskyi, Ukraine) on 9 September 1893, the fourth child of an Orthodox priest. He grew up in Odesa. Raised in an erudite environment, he learned English, German, French, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew while a schoolboy, and at eighteen he started to study philosophy and history. He graduated from the University of Odesa in 1916.
After his first graduation, he taught for three years at high schools in Odesa, and then made his full graduation including the licentia docendi at all universities in the Russian Empire.
In 1919, Florovsky began to teach at the University of Odessa, but, in 1920, his family was forced to leave Russia. Florovsky realized at that time that there would be no return for him, because Marxism did not accept the history and philosophy he taught. He was part of the emigration of Russian intelligentsia, which also included Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Nicholas Lossky and his son Vladimir Lossky, Alexander Schmemann, and John Meyendorff, the last two of whom would follow him in the United States as Dean of Saint Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York.
In the 1920s, Florovsky had a personal and vocational friendship with the existentialist philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, but the two became distanced later, through Berdyaev's not understanding Florovsky's ordination to the presbyterate in 1932 and because of the critical attitude to Berdyaev's philosophy of religion expressed in Florovsky's Ways of Russian Theology (1937).
In 1924, Florovsky received his M.A. in Prague. In 1925, he became professor of patristics at the St. Serge Institute of Orthodox Theology in Paris. In this subject, he found his vocation. The lively debates of the thinkers of the early Church became for him a benchmark for Christian theology and exegesis, as well as a base for his critique of the ecumenical movement, and despite his not having earned an academic degree in theology (he was later awarded several honorary degrees), he would spend the rest of his life teaching at theological institutions. In 1932, Florovsky was ordained a priest of the Eastern Orthodox Church. During the 1930s, he undertook extensive research in European libraries and published valuable patristic studies in Russian, such as his book on Eastern Fathers of the Fourth Century (1931) and The Byzantine Fathers Fifth to Eighth Centuries (1933). These were followed by his magnum opus, Ways of Russian Theology (1937). In this work, he questioned the Western Christian influences of scholasticism, pietism, and idealism on Orthodox, and especially Russian, Christian theology and called for its reformulation in the light of patristic writings. The work was received with both enthusiasm and condemnation—there was no neutral attitude to it among Russian émigrés. One of his most prominent critics was Nikolai Berdyaev. Florovsky remained professor of patristics at the Institute until 1939, and from 1939 to 1948 taught there as professor of dogmatics.
In 1949, Florovsky moved to the United States to take a position as Dean of Saint Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York City. There, his development of the curriculum led to the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York granting the Seminary an Absolute Charter in 1953.
In 1955, Florovsky was asked by his synod overseers to "lay down the deanship."[1] He became a professor of divinity at Harvard University and ended his academic years as a professor at Princeton University.
He died on 11 August 1979 in Princeton.