Neopatristic Synthesis as a Meeting of Tradition and Modernity (About the book of Gavrilyuk Paul L. Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance. Oxford University Press, 2014. 297 p.)

Abstract

The review discusses the importance of Paul Gavrilyuk’s monograph for understanding the history
of Russian religious thought of the 20th century in the dynamic relation of tradition and modernism
as its key landmarks. The work reviewed is a successful combination of theoretical and empirical
genres of the history of ideas: it introduces a number of new documents, and based on their analysis,
the author proposes a new concept of the history of Russian religious-philosophical renaissance. It is
shown that the book of Gavrilyuk also sheds new light on the many individual stories of the history
of Russian religious thought and helps to overcome the considerable number of stereotypes related
to it. The author’s socio-psychological analysis of the relationships between different generations
of Russian religious thinkers abroad should be marked as having great historical-philosophical
productivity. In particular, it gave the author of the reviewed monograph additional reason to interpret
the legacy of Vladimir Solovyov and the whole Russian religious-philosophical renaissance as a
«polemical subtext» of the concept of neo-patristic synthesis, developed by Florovsky. It is justified
to interpret the critique of ideology of Eurasianism by Florovsky as based on building identity along not national, but religious lines. In this regard, the author has also taken a successful attempt
to uncover the conceptual relationship of historical and philosophical works of Florovsky devoted
to criticism of Western «pseudomorphs» of Russian theology and that part of his legacy, which
contained the neo-patristic synthesis program. In addition to a detailed explication of the genesis
and evolution of the neo-patristic synthesis, the author takes a critical analysis of Florovsky’s
conception, the basic contradictions of which are seen in the field of the history of philosophy. The
incompleteness of neopatristic synthesis is a fundamental feature of this open project.