…that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You;
that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me
.
~John 17.21
In January of
2015 the noted author James K. A. Smith visited Wichita as the keynote speaker
for our fifth annual Eighth Day Symposium. Around a year after that visit he
reached out to me for an interview to be published in Comment Magazine, an excellent like-minded journal he edited at that time.
Here’s what the introduction to that interview had to say:
When
Comment editor Jamie Smith visited Eighth Day Institute last year, he
was astonished by a hidden gem tucked away in Wichita. Like a metaphysical
wardrobe in the heart of “flyover” country, the Eighth Day Institute is a
portal to another world—a place where remembrance is at the heart of cultural
renewal. His experience at EDI gave him hope for the future of faith.
“A place where
remembrance is at the heart of cultural renewal.”
“Hope for the
future of faith.”
I want to use
those two phrases as bookends to this inaugural Eighth Day Florovsky Lecture.
(I preface Florovsky Lecture with Eighth Day intentionally because we’re not
the first to present a Florovsky Lecture; the Orthodox Theological Society of
America also organizes one at its annual meeting.) But I also want to weave the
theme of cultural renewal through the lecture, since that is the mission of
Eighth Day Institute.
We’re going to
do five things this evening. (1) We’ll begin with remembrance and then (2)
we’ll remember Fr. Matthew Baker, to whom this lecture and this Florovsky Week
is dedicated. Next (3), I’ll briefly introduce you to Florovsky, then (4) we’ll
hear from Florovsky himself, by means of an imaginative exercise that we do at
every Hall of Men and Sisters of Sophia by answering one simple question: what
would Florovsky have to say to us today, in the 21st century, right here in
Wichita, KS, if he were to descend from the cloud of witnesses and give us a
word about cultural renewal? Finally (5), we’ll end with hope.
So first, remembrance.
I believe Jamie is right. Remembrance is at the heart of cultural renewal.
That’s why it is at the heart of everything we do at Eighth Day Institute where
our mission is to renew culture. That’s why we are gathering here this evening,
to remember the life of Fr. Georges Florovsky. That’s why the Eighth Day Symposium
banquet celebrates an early Christian saint each January: St Gregory the
Theologian (2013), St Anthony the Great (2014), St Athanasius the Great (2015),
St Cyril of Alexandria (2016), St Gregory of Nyssa (2017), and St Basil the
Great (2018). At the next Symposium in 2019 we’ll be remembering the life of
St. Mary of Egypt…she has a fascinating story…you really should come and learn
about her! It’s also why the Hall of Men celebrates two heroes a month and the
Sisters of Sophia remember a heroine each month. It’s why you have a pint glass
with Florovsky on it, and it’s why we have lots of other pint glasses in the
back with various other saints and heroes on them. It’s why we have
an annual Inklings Oktoberfest, to remember a small group of friends—especially
C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien—who spurred one another on to
write stories and essays that have had unimaginable influence on so many people
around the world, including Warren Farha who created this whole Eighth Day
enterprise when he opened Eighth Day Books. [How about a toast to Warren! To
the proprietor of Eighth Day Books, a peddler of books and culture!] Remembrance
is why we’ve started this new event with such a strange name: Florovsky Week.
While the focus this evening is on Florovsky himself, the emphasis for the week
is to remember the common heritage we all share in the first millennium of
Christian history. We want to remember that common tradition as a way to
overcome our divisions, in this instance as a way to deal with one of the key
theological issues that divided Christians during the Reformation period: justification
by faith alone.
Remembrance is
central to the work of Eighth Day Institute because it is central to the life
of the Church. As Christians we remember the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus
Christ every December. We remember His death, burial, and resurrection, every
Easter—or Pascha, as the Orthodox Tradition calls it. Every
year we remember the Ascension forty days after the Resurrection and then Pentecost
ten days later to remember the descent of the Holy Spirit. And we remember the
saints, just as St. Paul does in the Epistle to the Hebrews in his famous
chapter on faith; just as the early Christians did when they celebrated the
death day of the martyrs as their true birthday, for it was on the day of their
martyrdom, the day they bore witness to their Savior, that they were born into
the kingdom of God and became fully alive. Today the Church’s calendar is
filled with saints to remember, usually multiple saints on each day. Today, for
example, we remember the 45 Holy Martyrs of Nikopolis—they were
burnt alive in the year 315 under the Roman Emperor Licinius. Had you heard of
them before tonight? They are a part of the great cloud of witnesses and we
should know them.
Now, what does
all this talk about remembrance have to do with cultural renewal? Why do I
think Jamie is right to say that remembrance is at the heart of cultural
renewal? In order to answer that question, I'd like to introduce you to a couple other heroes of mine. First the
Catholic historian Christopher Dawson, who I met simultaneously with Florovsky
while reading
THIS
book on
historiography for my Master’s degree at Wichita State University (C. T.
McIntire, ed., God,
History and
Historians: Modern Christian Views of History
, 1977). I’d like you to
listen to what Dawson has to say about culture:
Culture is like a
city that has been built up laboriously by the work of successive generations,
not a jungle which has grown up spontaneously by the blind pressure of natural
forces. It is the essence of culture that it is communicated and acquired, and
although it is inherited by one generation from another, it is a social not a
biological inheritance, a tradition of learning, an accumulated capital of
knowledge and a community of ‘folkways’ into which the individual has to be
initiated.
Hence it is clear
that culture is inseparable from education, since education in the widest sense
of the word is what the anthropologists term ‘enculturation’, i.e., the process
by which culture is
handed on
[traditioned,
we could say, since the Greek word for tradition, paradosis, simply means to hand down] by the society and acquired
by the individual. […] A common educational tradition creates a common world of
thought with common moral and intellectual values and a common inheritance of
knowledge, and these are the conditions which make a culture conscious of its
identity and give it a common memory and a common past. Consequently any break
in the continuity of the educational tradition involves a corresponding break
in the continuity of the culture. If the break were a complete one, it would be
far more revolutionary than any political or economic change, since it would
mean the death of the civilization. (Dawson, Crisis of Western Education
, 3-5)
There are five
key ideas to be gleaned from this passage; or we can frame them as five
questions that can be answered:
1) What is
culture? Culture is something that is built; it is created. And it takes a great deal of work. It is a laborious enterprise. It is a podvig
– that’s a Russian word Florovsky uses frequently: an
ascetic exploit. Building or creating culture is a prominent theme in the work
of Florovsky.
2) But what is
actually built? A social inheritance, a tradition of learning into which the
members of a society must be initiated.
3) Where are the
members of society initiated? In the church and in the family. It’s the
church’s responsibility to pass the faith on to the family. And it is the
responsibility of the parents to pass that faith on to their children. That means
the church and families—YOU! —have an
educational responsibility, a catechetical duty (to slip in a word that is in my
original dream for EDI: the catechetical academy – you can read about that
dream in the first issue of Synaxis).
4) Now, what does
that tradition of learning—of catechesis—actually
do? According to Dawson, it “creates a common world of thought with common
moral and intellectual values and a common inheritance of knowledge.” It gives
the culture a common vocabulary, a common MEMORY. Do we still have this? Look
around and I think the answer is pretty obvious. We’ve lost it. And it’s why
our culture is in chaos.
5) What
happens when the labor of passing on that tradition of learning is broken? I
don’t think Dawson is overstating his case to suggest that a complete break
“would be far more revolutionary than any political or economic change…” Why?
because “it would mean the death of the civilization.”
Has our
civilization died? Is that what I’m insinuating? No. At least not yet. But we
have broken the tradition of learning. We have forgotten. We have failed to do
the laborious work of preserving what was handed down through so many
generations. And so I do believe that we—western
civilization, that is—are on the path toward death.
It’s why I’m so passionate about my work at Eighth Day Institute. It’s also why
I’m encouraged by the rise of classical schools, schools like Christ the Savior
Academy and Wichita Classical School, to just mention two in Wichita.
Now for one
more sidetrack. In this same book with Dawson and Florovksy, I also met T. S.
Eliot. And then later I read THIS
important book: Christianity and Culture.
It consists of two pieces, one based on lectures he delivered in 1939 at Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge: “The Idea of a Christian Society”; and the other
based on three pieces he published in 1945-46: “Notes towards the Definition of
Culture.” In “The Idea of a Christian Society,” Eliot distinguishes three
historical periods for Christians:
- When “Christians are a new minority in a society
of pagan traditions.” Done!
- When “the whole society can be called
Christian.” Been there!
- When “practicing Christians are a minority in a
society which has ceased to be Christian” (p. 9). Is this where we are?
Eliot asked
this in 1939 and he ultimately answered no, based on the second of two criteria.
Here are his critieria:
- “A society has ceased to be Christian when
religious practices have been abandoned, when behavior ceases to be regulated
by reference to Christian principle, and when in effect prosperity in this
world for the individual or for the group has become the sole conscious aim.”
Sounds like us today.
- “A society has not ceased to be Christian until
it has become positively something else.”
Now here is
where I think Eliot’s question of whether or not Christians are a minority can
be answered in the affirmative today. Our culture has positively become
something else. And I would argue in at least two ways. First, following the
argument of Charles Taylor’s magisterial book A Secular Age, we have constructed a secular age, by which Taylor
means an age in which there are many options, more so than ever before, an age
in which Christianity is the most difficult option because belief in God is no
longer axiomatic, no longer built into the structures of existence the way it
was in the middle ages. Now that’s a far too simplified version of that 800-page
book, but it will have to do for now, given our time restraints. The second way
our society has become something other than Christian has been described in
Mario Vargas Llosa’s book Notes on the
Death of Culture—a direct play on Eliot’s essay “Notes
towards the Definition of Culture”—in which he describes our
society as a civilization of the spectacle. Listen to Llosa’s description:
What do we mean by
civilization of the spectacle? The civilization of a world in which pride of
place, in terms of a scale of values, is given to entertainment, and where
having a good time, escaping boredom, is the universal passion. To have this
goal in life is perfectly legitimate, of course. Only a Puritan fanatic could
reproach members of a society wanting to find relaxation, fun and amusement in
lives that are often circumscribed by depressing and sometimes soul-destroying
routine. But converting this natural propensity for enjoying oneself into a
supreme value has unexpected consequences: it leads to culture becoming banal,
frivolity becoming widespread and, in the field of news coverage, it leads to
the spread of irresponsible journalism based on gossip and scandal. […] The
culture in which we live does not favor, but rather discourages, the
indefatigable efforts that produce works that require of the readers an
intellectual concentration almost as great as that of their writers. Today’s
readers require easy books that entertain them and this demand creates a
pressure that becomes a powerful incentive to writers. [the same can be said
about lectures…keep it under 20 min…sorry, not this one!] […] A notable feature
of contemporary society is the waning in importance of intellectuals who, for
centuries, up until recently, had played a significant role in the life of
nations. . . .Today, intellectuals have disappeared from public debates, at
least the debates that matter. . . . . Because in the civilization of the
spectacle, intellectuals are of interest only if they play the fashion game and
become clowns. [Our] culture favors minimal intellectual effort, at the expense
of commitment, concern and, in the final instance, even of thought itself. This
culture has given itself over, in a passive manner, to what a critic now
relegated to obscurity [not at Eighth Day Books!]—Marshall
McLuhan—who was a wise prophet of the cultural signs of our
times—called the ‘image bath’, a form of docile submission
to emotions and sensations triggered by an unusual and at times very brilliant
bombardment of images that capture our attention, though they dull our
sensibilities and intelligence due to their primary and transitory nature.
Does this sound
familiar to you? It does to me. Our culture has been taken captive by the
spectacle; or I should say we have willingly submitted to the rule of the
spectacle. We might even put it in the words of the title to a wonderful book
by the social critic Neil Postman: We are Amusing
Ourselves to Death. Franklin Sanders, a farmer-economist friend in Dogwood
Mudhole, TN once called it Americanity, which he suggested consists of the twin
pillars of individualism and greed. I need not say more, except that I would argue
that many Americans who call themselves Christians are just as captive to this
new global culture that is smitten by the gods of entertainment, comfort, and
convenience. Taking up the cross and dying to self is not on their agenda. All that
to say that I think Eliot would agree that today we do indeed fit into his
third historical era of the post-Christian.
Eliot goes on
to conclude his reflection on the state of his culture with these words: “I
believe that the choice before us is between the formation of a new Christian
culture, and the acceptance of a pagan one” (9-10). That choice is all the more
pressing to us: will we form a new Christian culture? Do we have the strength,
the stamina, the will to build or create a new Christian culture? Are we willing
to put in the time and labor necessary for rebuilding a tradition of learning
that will give us “common moral and intellectual values,” a “common inheritance
of knowledge,” a common vocabulary, a common MEMORY?
There. That’s
my long rant on remembrance and cultural renewal. I had to do it. It’s what
I’ve dedicated my life to. But we are here to learn about Florovsky. Before turning to Florovsky, however, I do want to formally dedicate this lecture and this
week, and for that matter, the work of Eighth Day Institute, to the memory of
Fr. Matthew Baker. I’ve already told the story of Fr. Matthew’s tragic death in
my note in your program [Click here for program and see pp. 2-3]. Please do read it. All I will say right now is that,
even though I never met him in person, I still consider Fr. Matthew a dear
friend. This is how the communion of saints works.
Fr Matthew was
the driving force behind the Florovsky Symposium, which began the same year we
launched the Eighth Day Symposium in 2011. I coordinated a live feed broadcast
of all four of those symposia from Princeton University to Wichita, KS. Without
ever meeting him in person, I felt like I knew a man who had drunk deeply from
the well of the Fathers...and of Florovsky; a man who, under the influence of
Florovsky, understood my passion for pursuing the unity of Christians, a
passion that was born in me when I worked in Mexico and experienced a Baptist
church divide three times over the course of two months. Many predicted Fr.
Matthew would be the most important theologian of the 21st century, just as many
have called Florovsky the most important theologian of the 20th century. His
loss is truly tragic. It really does break my heart. So, to organize this
evening, this inaugural Florovsky Week, is truly an honor for me because I see
it as a continuation of his work. As I note in the program, this week we humbly
stand on the shoulders of two giants: Fr. Georges Florovsky and Fr. Matthew
Baker. May their memory be eternal!
Now I have to
present you Florovsky now, and I only have about ten minutes left for the rest
of this lecture! How in the world can I do Florovsky justice? I vividly remember
Fr. Matthew’s lecture at the first Florovsky Symposium. It was way longer than
he had time to present. He had so much to say, too much to say. It was an
impossible situation for him. I felt his pain then. And I feel exactly the same
way today. There is so much to say about Florovsky. But alas, I’ve promised 30 minutes and I intend to honor that. So let me simply share a few memories and explain how
Florovsky has a mission, or maybe better put, a message for our secular age.
I’ve already
mentioned my first encounter with Florovsky while studying history at WSU. My
next memory is my reception into the Orthodox Church. My friend, and an original Eighth
Day Institute board member, Carol Adamson, gave me THIS
book, volume 3 in the 14-volume collected works of Florovsky. She also included a passage by Fr. Thomas Hopko—this passage!
Little did I know back then in 2004 how significant this gift would be, how much
the author of this book would shape my life. Thank you, Carol, for this amazing
gift! And then I remember receiving a draft of Fr. Matthew Baker’s Master’s
thesis on Florovsky— THIS
draft. I had already read quite a bit of Florovsky, but this
thesis rocked my world. For the first time I realized how important ecumenical
dialogue was to Fr. Georges, how central it was to his key proposal that I’ll touch
on in a moment. And I was moved to dig far deeper into his work, reading every
book review he ever wrote, searching for every rare and obscure writing I could
find. And I’ve been hooked ever since.
Metropolitan
Kallistos Ware has described Florovsky as “the greatest Russian, and indeed
Orthodox, theologian during the twentieth century.” Rowan Williams says “his
name deserves to stand with those of the major theologians of the [20th] century.”
Andrew Louth says “he was the most famous Orthodox theologian in the world”
when he died on August 11, 1979, mostly due to his huge involvement with the
World Council of Churches—he was one of its fourteen
founding members. The recently canonized Serbian theologian St. Justin Popovich
describes Florovsky as “an icon on the deisis
of Orthodox theology.” The accolades go on and on. The problem is that,
as famous as he may have been at one time, he is little known and hardly read at
all today, outside of a very small group of scholars.
There are a few
factors for this ignorance. For one thing, he only wrote three books: The Ways of Russian Theology
and two
volumes of Patristics lectures. But if you take into consideration his
occasional articles, his sermons, his letters, his book reviews, his editorials—he
launched St Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly—then
you begin to assemble a massive body of work. Not counting the archives at
Princeton University, St Vladimir's Seminary, and those in the possession of
Katherine Baker, a compilation of his writings includes 376 published pieces. Another significant factor is that, although many of these writings were published in the
14-volume collected works, they have been out of print for many years now. And
most people who own them do not ever let them go. There is a new volume coming
out from Oxford with a sampling of his essays, but I'm sure it will be expensive and inaccessible to most people. But I am slowly posting his
writings in a Florovsky Archive on the Eighth Day Institute website, trying to make them more available
to the wider public, or at least to Eighth Day Members. Plus, you have one of them in your program, which is a
personal description of his experience with ecumenical dialogues. I hope you’ll read it here (see pp. 4-7).
So what was
his message? It was a message of remembrance and hope. It is most famously
known as a proposal called the "neopatristic synthesis." And it is usually
simply and inadequately defined as a call for a return to the Fathers. It is
that, indeed. But it is so much more. In my dissertation, I clarify it with ten
different characteristics. I won’t bore you with those this evening. But I will
say that, for our purposes this evening and this week, it can be boiled down to
a call for a return to the common heritage of all Christians in the first
millennium as a way to overcome division. Florovsky believed all Christians could find
a common vocabulary for a common idiom in the Bible and in the Fathers of those
first thousand years of the Church’s history. He believed the early Christians
baptized Hellenism and thereby built a Christian culture. Does that sound
familiar? Building culture. Common vocabulary. The neopatristic synthesis was at
heart an ecumenical proposal, a call for Christians to create a new Christian
culture, and in doing so, to overcome the divisions of the second millennium of
the Church’s history. This is his message for us today.
Now let me
begin winding down by answering the key question proposed at every Hall of Men
and Sisters of Sophia meeting. What would Florovsky say to us about cultural
renewal? I’ve boiled his answer down to twelve words:
1. Remember!
We’ve covered that one!
2. Repent!
More than anything he’d beg us to feel the pain of our division and ask us to
repent, to repent of our apathy toward our disunity, to repent of our sin of
disunity.
3. Study!
He’d tell us we all have a duty to learn. He frequently cited an early
Christian heresy called Apollinarianism which denied Christ a human mind. For
Florovsky, as for the Church, Christ became fully human, which means that he
assumed a fully human mind. God has thus redeemed the human mind. Moreover, we
are all disciples of Christ, Florovsky was fond of reminding people, which
means we are His students, we are His apprentices, His learners. He has given
us amazing minds for an eternal quest of learning under His tutorship. It’s our
responsibility to use them. This is why I believe an “academic” conference fits
within Eighth Day Institute’s mission of renewing culture.
4. Confront!
This comes up repeatedly throughout Florovsky’s writings. It’s in the essay in
your program. He insisted that we must not minimize our differences. We must
courageously confront them so that we can actually overcome them, instead of
pretending they don’t exist. How does ignoring problems in your family work for
you? It doesn’t. You have to actually deal with them. This is why the Florovsky
Week intends to tackle a dividing issue head on every year. Next year it will
be “The Patristic View of Church Authority: Bible, Pope, or Conciliarity?" But
it’s not just a confrontation.
5. Encounter!
Look into each other’s eyes. Listen to one another. Listening is a lost art. We
must relearn it. It’s necessary for this sort of ecumenical enterprise. Listen
to one another so that you can understand one another, not so that you can come
up with a winning argument to defeat an opponent. We are brothers and sisters
in Christ, not enemies!
6. Be humble!
Please do not think you understand it all, that you have all of the answers.
Listening requires humility, a willingness to believe you can actually learn
something from the other person. We can ALL learn from one another. So be
humble, listen, and learn!
7. Be
patient! Flovovsky repeatedly talks about a patient ecumenism, about the
sin of ecumenical hastiness. This is a long-term project. This reminds me of
another passage from T. S. Eliot: “The fact that a problem will certainly take
a long time to solve, and that it will demand the attention of many minds for
several generations, is no justification for postponing the study.” We can’t
avoid our divisions and we can’t rush solutions. We must be patient and prepared
for the long-haul.
8. Work!
Work hard! Division exists because of human decisions, Florovsky tells us.
Reunion is only possible with more human decisions. We must decide that union
is important. We must decide to take action. We must decide to work toward
overcoming the division. We must decide to engage in a dialogue of love and
truth.
9. Trust in
the Lord! We have our role to play. But ultimately, it is in God’s hands.
As Florovsky puts it, “the advance is in the hands of the Lord.”
10. Have Hope!
I am convinced that there has never been a moment in history like today. There
has never been another civilization that did not have religion at the center of
its culture. There has never been a global entertainment culture, transmitted
around the entire world, first through radio waves, then the TV, and now
through movies and the internet. This can be a frightening thought. But
Florovsky would echo Christ: “Take heart. Be not afraid. Have hope.” Florovsky
believed history is shaped by human decisions. Our decisions today do indeed
have the power to change the course of history. A new Christian culture can be
built. A tradition of learning can be revived. A common vocabulary can be
acquired. But it’s going to take a lot of work. And it’s going to take Christ’s
blessing, which leads to the eleventh word.
11. Christ!
First and foremost, look to Christ! Much of Florovsky’s work focused on
Christology. He always kept Christ at the center of his work. It’s why we have
this Gospel book displayed here in the front. This is a new thing for us at
Eighth Day Institute. And it’s because of Florovsky. Listen to this passage
from him on the ecumenical councils:
The Ecumenical
Councils functioned in an age of absolute despotism more like a forerunner of
representative government than like an elite, aristocratic group, cowed by and
servile to the imperial and secular State. The procedures used in the meetings
of the Ecumenical Councils in fact sanctioned the principle of discussion, the
principle of common and open deliberation as the best means of arriving at an
expression of the truth of the faith and settling controversies.
With so much
controversy over who presided at the Ecumenical Councils [i.e., Emperors], with
so much written on the subject, one
reality is often lost, neglected, or forgotten. In the middle of the
assembled clergy something special lay upon a desk or table. That something
special held a special place and had a special significance at all councils. On that desk or table lay an open copy of
the Gospels. It was there not only as a symbol but also as a reminder of
the real presence of Christ in accordance with his promise that where two or
three are gathered together in his name, he will be present. In a very real
sense it was the presence of the open Gospel which presided. Christ is the
Truth. The source and the criterion of the truth of Christianity is the Divine
Revelation, in both the apostolic deposit and in the Holy Scriptures. (Florovsky, “Nicaea and the Ecumenical Council”
in Collected Works VIII, 137).
We are heeding this first piece of advice, beginning
tonight, and at every other Eighth Day event. Christ is with us because we are
gathered in His name. And it is His presence in THIS
Gospel which has been and shall continue to preside over this
evening, over the following days as we engage in a dialogue of love and truth,
and over all future EDI events.
12.Finally, Pray! Our hope is based on the
contingent nature of history, on the freedom of the human person to make
decisions, on the person and presence of Christ, and on the power of prayer.
And that’s how
I want to end. I’d like to invite you to join me in praying Christ’s prayer for
unity on a regular basis. We do this at every Hall of Men and Sisters of Sophia
meeting. And we’re going to close this evening by doing it here. Please stand
with me as we pray Christ’s prayer for unity in John 17.
PRAY JOHN 17
The final word:
- If you believe the laborious
work of building a tradition of learning is important,
- If you are committed to
creating a new Christian culture,
- If you believe the divisions
among Christians are a disgrace to the world around us,
- And if you believe endeavors
like this one have an important role in overcoming those divisions and in
facilitating the laborious work of building a common tradition,
- Then, please consider making a sacrificial offering to Eighth Day Institute [and I'll automatically register you for the 2020 Florovsky Newman Week on June 3-6].
