Fr. Georges Florovsky’s Ecumenical Task

Abstract

"Fr. Georges Florovsky’s legacy is related to the term of neopatristic synthesis, although he never managed to fulfill the right content of his synthesis. The etymology of the term was not what exactly Florovsky himself had in mind to express, so it has been created a question in contemporary inquiry about the content of the term. Specifically, some views try to locate the background and the subject of the concept to be fully inspired by the trend of the Russian Religious Renaissance and its ambassadors. However, none of them anticipates that Florovsky’s motivation came from his favorite Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky and his willing to create a synthesis between man and society to solve the ecumenical problem of Europe in his age. So the ecumenical task which Florovsky had adopted from the beginning of his theological career was to systematize that unaccomplished synthesis of the Russian litterateur and create an epistemological theory. This theory was the neopatristic synthesis which was applied in the ecumenical dialogue of his days to propose the holy-patristic1 ecumenicity as a solution for the ecumenical problem."