I'm in Boston this weekend at the annual conference of the Orthodox Theological Society of America. I was asked to come to give a response to Paul Gavrilyuk's excellent and important new book
Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance.
I've taken the liberty of posting below the comments that I shall be making this weekend as one of the respondents to the book:
A Response to Paul Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance (OUP, 2014)
Delivered 24 October 2014 at the Orthodox
Theological Society of America’s Annual Conference,
Holy Cross College, Brookline, MA
Introduction:
I’m delighted to be asked to take part in this symposium,
especially with such distinguished fellow panelists. I’m delighted, moreover,
because it gave me an opportunity to read a book I have wanted to read for most
of this year. Fr. Michael Plekon read and reviewed Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance for the
upcoming fall issue of Logos: A Journal
of Eastern Christian Studies, of which I am editor, and when he sent me his
review in the spring of this year, I was immediately jealous and annoyed with
myself that I did not first read the book before sending it to him for review!
It sounded utterly fascinating, and indeed it is. Reading Gavrilyuk’s study
took me back more than a decade to one of my doctoral courses at the Sheptytsky
Institute in Ottawa that was devoted entirely to the thought of Florovsky, to
whom I still turn in small ways on a regular basis as in, e.g., having my
graduate students read his essay, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the
Fathers.”
In what
follows, I shall proceed by way of three sections. First I begin with some
brief laudatory comments. Second, I note several areas where I would like to
hear further from the author. And in the third and longest section, I suggest
an alternate way of conceiving of Florovsky’s problematic and unsatisfactory notions
of the “pseudomorphosis” and “Western captivity” of Orthodoxy, which I draw
from the landmark work of the leading moral philosopher of our time, Alasdair
MacIntyre.
Laudations:
This is a crisply written book that brings together
wide-ranging discussions—history, philosophy, Russian culture and politics both
pre- and post-Bolshevik, and of course theology in the context of Florovsky’s
life. It cannot have been easy, it would seem to me, to maintain such an
even-handed tone throughout for it seems Florovsky was an infuriating person
both in some of his arguments and then, as the author painfully records,
particularly in his rather ruinous trail of thwarted personal and institutional
relations across Europe and North America. Put more simply, it would have been
both easy and understandable for the author to offer polemical and simplistic
rejoinders to the polemics and dubious theoretical generalizations of
Florovsky, but those were all avoided and the book is much the better for it. There were many moments in reading this
book when I was little short of staggered and sorely vexed by what Florovsky
had to say but in almost all those cases, the author had gotten in ahead of me
to at least mention, and often share, many of the concerns I had. This is
neither a “take-down” nor a pious hagiography, but intellectual history and
biography of the best sort, allowing us to see the man in full. If, as Cardinal
Newman famously said, the danger of hagiography is that it reduces complex
people and their messy lives to mere “clothes racks for virtues,” we can be
grateful to the author that he avoided that danger and allowed us to see everything Florovsky “wore,” winsomely
captured in the beret and cassock on
the front cover!
For
Further Elaboration:
There were, if I may so say, a
number of lapidary formulations in this book that were tantalizingly
under-developed. If time permits, I should like to hear even just a bit more
from the author when he says, but does not really develop, such things as:
- Florovsky
viewed American pragmatism as preferable to European rationalism (65)? Why?
- To
“reclaim its true identity, Russia had to recover its Byzantine cultural roots”
(66). Did Florovsky ever specify what such roots consisted of, and whether such
a process of recovery was even possible?
- All
of medieval Russia was “monolithic” and “united by the common religious ideal
of Eastern Orthodoxy” (73). Did Florovsky ever document this claim with serious
evidence? (I’m far from an expert in medieval Russian history, but what I have
read would suggest that this is too simplistic and neat a claim.)
- It’s
possible “to ‘enter’ the mind of the Fathers through ‘ecclesial experience’”
(91)? To channel Alasdair MacIntyre here (about whom much more below): Whose
ecclesia? Which experience?
And what about F’s famous aversion to mystical/spiritual experiences?
- It
has, it seems to me, become a deplorably common habit in Orthodox apologetics
(especially on-line) to constantly recycle fourth-hand stereotypes and
calumnies against Anselm, and I’ve long wondered where this got started.
Nobody, of course, ever bothers to cite sources, least of all primary texts,
but perhaps Florovsky is the originator of this, given the discussion that
starts on p.154 (and esp. the article cited there in footnote 81)?
- Florovsky
“was more receptive to the thought of Augustine, especially his ecclesiology”
(239). Why was he more receptive—especially when considered against the rather
tenuous (if not hostile) relationship most of 20th-century Orthodoxy
seems to have had towards Augustine, at least until recently?
- Vatican
Expansionist Policy (70-71): this discussion was, I thought, rather too brief
and overlooked some important recent scholarship. Through frightfully
ungenerous and shamefully triumphalistic in its “soteriological exclusivism,”
(Waclaw Hryniewicz), Catholic policy in this period was not nearly as
monolithic or almost “monstrous” as Florovsky seemed to think. There are
several studies that would have been welcome here, as they add important
distinction and nuance, and would be pivotal for later changes at the Second
Vatican Council.
- F
“assumed that nothing good whatsoever could come to Russia (more precisely, to
Ukraine) from adopting the Jesuit educational paradigms” (180). Why? What was
so problematic about the Jesuit paradigm that Florovsky could be so flippantly dismissive
of it?
Pseudomorphosis
and Western Captivity or Epistemological Crisis?
Let me come to what I regard as the
most central arguments for which Florovsky is best known, arguments which, more
than a decade after I first encountered them, seem to me far less clear or
convincing than they once did. In what Paul Gavrilyuk writes, I take the following
to be the central statement of the problem:
Crucial for understanding Florovsky’s analysis of the western
influences in Russian intellectual history was the concept of pseudomorphosis,
which he adopted from Oswald Spengler…..Florovsky was familiar with the concept
of pseudomorphosis both in the broad culturological sense proposed by Spengler
and in a related sense to denote the process of Orthodox theology’s succumbing
to the western influences and the consequent alienation of theological thought from
the life and worship of the Orthodox Church (pp.178-79).
From here, G
narrates “a history of Russian theology as a drama in three acts” (179ff):
- Prelude: from 988 until 16th
century: crisis of Russian Byzantinism as a departure from the Fathers
- First Act: 16th century Kiev: “acute
Latinization” under Mohyla.
- Second Act: Peter the Great’s Protestant
pseudomorphosis
- Interlude: heroic struggles of the 19th
century under Filaret to shake off the West and reintroduce patristics into
seminary curricula
- Final Act: Soloviev and Renaissance bring in
German Idealism, the “most damaging western influence” (182).
My questions here are not
dissimilar to those above and are two-fold: what is the evidence for all this?And: is such a theory of captivity and
pseudomorphosis not too neat by half? That is, does it not grossly oversimplify
what I suspect to be rather more complicated history? To be clear: I’m not saying Florovsky is entirely wrong. There
is clear evidence of Western
influence on Orthodoxy in each of the three periods noted above (as Ukrainian
Catholics know only too well!). My central rejoinder to Florovsky would be: you
bemoan Western influence as deleterious, and see the entire process in negative,
passive terms. I, however, would like to
suggest the process was, in part, a sign
of life and vitality as two traditions encountered one another. The process of pseudomorphosis was not all
bad. I am not being Pollyannaish here; nor am I defending (much less
trumpeting) the Jesuits or “the West”; nor am I denying that there were
problems in what they did, and in the Orthodox tradition that encountered “the
West.” What I am suggesting is that the Spenglerian categories are, as least as
Florovsky used them, unhelpful insofar as they seem far too unilateral and
negative, and allow Orthodoxy to portray itself in grossly unflattering light.
These categories obscure more than they reveal. I want to suggest an alternate
way of conceiving of the encounter between Orthodoxy and “the West.”
I was
glad to see that the author here argues, rightly in my view, that Florovsky is
to be faulted for “rarely taking the trouble to explain how precisely a given
‘western influence’ actually distorts the Orthodox teaching. Cultural
morphology is particularly ill-suited for making normative theological
truth-claims” (189).
If Florovsky’s theory and use of cultural morphology are not helpful, then
perhaps we may think instead in the terms of the history of philosophy. Here I
draw on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, widely recognized as the most important
and influential moral philosopher of the post-war period. I shall use MacIntyre
to illustrate my rejoinder above. Rather like Florovsky, MacIntyre’s work as a
philosopher is deeply embedded within a thick historicist narrative.
In what follows, I want to draw on an important essay of MacIntyre to see if
Florovsky’s dubious ideas of “captivity” and “pseudomorphosis” can be more
firmly situated on more intellectually defensible ground.
In a 1977 essay “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic
Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science”
MacIntyre begins to sketch out what happens to various narrative traditions
diversely conceived as they encounter one another in literature, science, and
philosophy. MacIntyre says that we all face epistemological crises on a regular
basis, in ways large and small as rival traditions of interpretation raise
troubling questions in what we assumed were settled narratives: “Every
tradition therefore is always in danger of lapsing into incoherence and when a
tradition does so lapse it sometimes can only be recovered by a revolutionary
reconstitution.” He
begins with homely examples: a happily married husband returns home one day to
find out his wife has left and is filing for divorce; or a seemingly respected
and appreciated employee arrives at work one day to find out she has been given
the sack. In cases such as these, what the man thought he knew about himself,
his wife, and his marriage is revealed to be faulty; and what the woman thought
about her employment and employer are similarly revealed to be mistaken in
crucial aspects. Both the man and the woman thus enter into an epistemological
crisis, one sign of which, MacIntyre says, is “that its accustomed ways for relating
seems and is begin to break down.”
When
faced with a breakdown, whether on a personal-domestic level or on a scientific
or philosophical level (MacIntyre references people like Galileo and Copernicus
here), the newly crumbling narrative tradition—whether of my marital life or of
cosmological history—is forced to choose one of three paths. In essence, the
crumbling tradition can collapse and disappear into total defeat; it can resist
the new knowledge as far as possible and thereby disappear into ever-increasing
irrelevancy and obscurantism; or it can begin the process of discerning where
it may well have been mistaken in the past, what it needs to survive in the
present, and what the rival narrative newly emerging will offer to the
tradition to allow it to survive into the future, albeit in a newly
reconstituted way. As MacIntyre puts it:
The criterion of a successful theory is that it enables us to
understand its predecessors in a newly intelligible way. It, at one and the
same time, enables us to understand precisely why its predecessors have to be rejected
or modified and also why, without and before its illumination, past theory
could have remained credible. It introduces new standards for evaluating the
past. It recasts the narrative which constitutes the continuous reconstruction
of the scientific tradition.
In a moment, I shall
attempt something of a recasting of the narrative told by Florovsky in an
effort to reconstruct it in light of what we now know about the history of
Eastern and Western Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In
order to do that—to construct a theory capable of withstanding the upheaval of
various epistemological crises—MacIntyre says that the crucial thing is to
offer a capacious and verifiable historical narrative subject to ongoing
correction and revision.
He argues that “the best account that can be given of why some scientific
theories are superior to others presupposes the possibility of constructing an
intelligible dramatic narrative which can claim historical truth and in which
such theories are the subject of successive episodes.”
Failing to do this will leave us in one of two dead-ends: “It is only when
theories are located in history, when we view the demands for justification in
highly particular contexts of a historical kind, that we are freed from either
dogmatism or capitulation to skepticism.”
Florovsky, I would submit, tended towards a pejorative
“dogmatism” in his narrative of the captivity and pseudomorphosis of the
Orthodox tradition, and one is tempted to respond with a perhaps all-pervasive
and corrosive skepticism of his entire work. But neither is helpful or just. If,
as MacIntyre says, one sign of a healthful theory is its capacity for on-going
revision and correction—its ability, that is, to stand upright between the
peaks of dogmatism and skepticism—how are we to analyze Florvsky’s theory of
captivity and pseudomorphosis? In F’s hands, the theory does not seem
especially open to correction or regular revision, and on that ground alone is
suspect. But there are other reasons for suspecting it as well.
Following
MacIntyre’s third way out of an epistemological crisis, can we not see the various
encounters between Orthodoxy and “the West” as having been “resolved,” in the
main, through changes that, far from being purely those of decline or
artificially imposed change on a helpless Orthodox victim, were in fact, to
some limited extent, far messier and more multilateral, and saw Orthodoxy
emerge afterwards in different form, but still very much alive and recognizably
distinct from the West? To hear Florovsky tell it, Orthodoxy was virtually a
corpse which her Western masters forcibly redressed with the latest fashionable
outfits from London or Paris or Milan without Russian resistance or response.
But surely this view of Orthodox passivity or, worse, “captivity” is (to put it
mildly) de trop. Not all Orthodox
were incapable of acting and re-acting to Western developments. Some, in fact,
took very robust and courageous steps towards resolving the crisis as in, e.g.,
the bold actions of the Orthodox bishops at the Union of Brest.
You may disagree—as doubtless Florovsky did—with that precise reaction, but at
least they were still acting! In its various encounters with “the West,”
Orthodoxy did not collapse and disappear—whether under Mohyla, Peter the Great,
or German Idealism. It emerged different, to be sure—on this nobody can gainsay
Florovsky—but the idea that it was somehow totally “captured” and forced to
endure an artificial or corrupting “pseudomorphosis” simply strains credulity and I would lay it aside as a failed theory
for at least three additional reasons.
First,
as Gavrilyuk recognizes (see p. 189), Florovsky has simply failed to provide
enough proof for a conviction. F’s sweeping generalizations—whether through
sloppiness, indolence, or malice—are sophomoric and insufficiently
substantiated with serious evidence. Nobody
looks good here. The Orthodox East is made out to be some sickly and helpless
victim beset upon by some rapacious and ravishing thug from the West.
Second, these
ideas of captivity and pseudomorphosis presuppose some pristine past untouched
by anyone who is not a pure laine Russian
working in some hermetically sealed “Russian culture” (or, worse, “Eastern
Christianity”) in which no “Western” ideas or influences may be found. I do not
believe that any such cultures exist, least of all in Europe; just as I do not
believe any church is ever totally isolated from influences from other
churches—nor should be! Here I would follow MacIntyre and suggest that
Florovsky is an acutely modern man insofar as he has failed to appreciate
precisely the extent to which he is himself a creature of the very traditions
and cultures whose existence he disputes! As Gavrilyuk very nicely puts it: “It
is ironic that the self-appointed guardian of the western corruption of
Orthodox theology would succumb to the most fundamental form of westernization
by choosing English over his mother tongue as his primary medium of scholarly
expression” (199)!
Third, I
would suggest to Florovsky—and here is where I think MacIntyre’s account of an
epistemological crisis far more helpful because it recognizes mutual agency and mutual responsibility for change over against Spengler’s idea of
captivity, implying as it does that the “captive” is always totally helpless,
always a victim: Orthodoxy did make
certain choices and did decide to act in certain ways when confronted with
rival traditions—whether the bolder actions at Brest or through the Kiev Mohyla
Academy, or in other ways. In responding in diverse ways, the Orthodox were not
being passive captives jerry-rigging a pseudomorphosis: they were resolving an
epistemological crisis as best as they could in their time and place, adopting
some new ideas, adapting others, rejecting still others. Whatever else you may
say of Mohyla, given his vast industry he cannot be accused of being merely
passive and helpless according to at least three recent scholarly studies.
Also important here is Metropolitan Filaret who, by Florovsky’s own admission, took
the initiative to restore patristic study to seminary curricula in Russia in
the 1840s (p.182)!
Here I
will go out on a limb and suggest speculatively that Filaret and the Russian
seminaries were, in fact, ahead of
the West, actively leading the West (rather than being led
by them) in recovering the study of the Fathers—a process that would take at
least two more generations in the West. Though I am not expert in the history
of Western seminary curricula and so cannot say for certain that the Fathers were
never studied, there was, from what I have seen, scant attention paid to them
(which is true even today in some places). In proof of this, consider the
reception of Cardinal Newman into the Catholic Church in October 1845: he had
been immersed in patristics as an Oxford Anglican for much of the first half of
his life, and it was precisely this immersion in the Fathers, rather than the
scholastics, that made him suspect from 1845 until at least 1878 when Pope Leo
XIII made him a cardinal. Newman deplored the West’s fortress mentality,
coining the phrase—long before Churchill used it in 1946—about an “iron
curtain” that descended over Catholicism after Trent, cutting off very nearly
the whole of the first millennium and imprisoning Catholicism in stultified
scholastic categories, cut off from her vital patristic heritage.
Consider,
moreover, the work of such towering figures as Yves Congar and others in the ressourcement movement who recovered the
study of the Fathers in the West only in the interwar period of the twentieth
century.
The idea that Orthodoxy is only ever led by the West or captured by it, rather
than at least some of the time showing the way, is thus, I would submit, a
thesis very much in need of revision in light of these two examples.
To be sure, the West has often had the upper-hand, but I do not think that one
can say that Orthodoxy is only ever acted upon, captured even, or forced to
endure a “pseudomorphosis.” History, including Christian history, is much
messier than that, and it is to Paul Gavrilyuk’s great credit that he has
helped us appreciate that with renewed depth in his splendid book.
