On Father Georges Florovsky ... and his interpreters ... Father Georges was a genius. After all, he never formally studied theology (all of his degrees in that area were honorary), yet he was a theologians theologian. As a genius, he had a wide scope of interests, often put forth views as a heuristic exercise (such as his suggestion that St. Augustines ideas about the boundaries of the Church might serve the ecumenical movement), and never hesitated to exercise his considerable intelligence. But he was not in the same intellectual class as many of our ecumenist-minded ”scholars” today. These men, whether well-intentioned and misled or taken by self-interest, are not geniuses and are not in the class of Father Florovsky. That his thoughts have been misused and misrepresented is a terrible thing: a tragic thing. For, in fact, in all things, Father Florovsky NEVER allowed his intellectual vagaries (better, perhaps, speculations) to supplant his absolute fidelity to Holy Tradition. For example, though he often wore a beret, he was never to be seen without a rason (cassock) and did not cut his beard. Moreover, since he Liturgized for us at Princeton, we saw an expression of his Faith in the precision and care with which he conducted the Liturgy, often to the consternation of modernist Orthodox who would attend, accustomed as they were to that truncated Liturgy that has even entered the realm of what innovators call ”tradition” (by way of “liturgical books” that they have concocted themselves). Nor, despite his ecumenical activities, did he ever, whatever the rumors suggest, engage in the sharing of the Churchs Mysteries. Never. He told me that this was impossible. John Erickson* and F. J. Thomson**, in their comments about oikonomia, make some compelling arguments, misrepresenting in the process, however, the truth about this matter. Outside the Patristic consensus, that golden thread of spiritual agreement between Scripture, the Fathers, the Synods, and the Sacred Canons (none of which, even Scripture or the Synods, stands alone, but all of which are verified and sanctified by their eventual entry into the “general conscience” of the Church), there are many arguments that have validity, in and of themselves. Some are clever, others are not. But these arguments stand alone. Unless they are consistent with the consensus of the Church, with the “facts” of theology in Christian living, they mean nothing. Thomsons views are well-expressed but deceptively arranged, doing damage to the spiritual realities of the pastoral dimension of the Church. Erickson is simply not honest in making a distinction between the consensus of the Church and exceptions and trends away from it, a distinction which he certainly knows to be misleading. In fact, in Ericksons case, I think that there is a certain distaste for Orthodoxy that taints his study of the Canons. (In this sense, his treatment, and that of others of the first Canon of St. Basil, which seems complex, are usually based on a certain disdain for St. Basil himself. Why? Because they conveniently fail to point out that the Saint, himself, interprets this Canon, and this in a way that is wholly at odds with their aims and goals, none of which is sympathetic to the consensus of the Fathers and the thought of the Saint. Again, this is a form of intellectual dishonesty, since it is not the Truth, but their vision of it as an accommodating principle, that prompts them in their research.)
Posted on: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 21:12:26 +0000
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