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Florovsky’s essential ecumenical position was forged in the mid-1930s in reaction to Bulgakov’s ecumenical work. Bulgakov believed both that the churches might be led to unity by limited episcopally blessed intercommunion and that although the Orthodox Church most fully embodied the Church Universal or Una Sancta, the Church Universal was not bound by its limits and included to a lesser degree other ecclesial bodies as true churches.1
Throughout his work, in contrast, Florovsky is clear that he believed that the Orthodox Church is the true and only Church which does not witness to a ‘local tradition of her own’ but witnesses to ‘Patristic tradition’ or ‘the common heritage of the Church universal.’2 Nevertheless, he argued that not everything that had been held or was even then held by the Orthodox Church was the ‘truth of
God’. All other churches, he argued, had defected from Orthodoxy as the common tradition of the Undivided Church or were ‘schismatic’ and were consequently called to return and be healed (i.e. ‘conversion’) within the unity of the Orthodox Church.3
Intercommunion, between the Orthodox and the heterodox, whose faith and life were so radically different, was naturally inconceivable and as a means to unity it was “a blind alley from which there is no escape”.4 Future progress on the road to unity would only come from supplementing an ‘ecumenism in space’ (the discovery and registry of the various agreements and disagreements amongst the churches) with an ‘ecumenism in time’, which was the reintegration of the East and the West in their return to their common tradition in Orthodoxy;5 although he tended to see this common tradition as essentially ‘Eastern’, ‘Christian Hellenist’ and ‘Greek’ in character. Florovsky, not surprisingly, saw the involvement of the Orthodox Church in the ecumenical movement as a kind of
‘missionary activity’6 or as the witness of the truth of Orthodoxy to the whole Christian world: “Christian reunion is just universal conversion to Orthodoxy … What is beyond [the Church’s norm of the rule of faith and order] is just abnormal. But the abnormal should be cured and not simply condemned....
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