The epistemology of Georges V. Florovsky

This dissertation expounds and evaluates the epistemology of Georges Vasilievich Florovsky (1893--1979), one of the most important Eastern Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century. It does so because Florovsky makes exclusive statements of faith. For example, outside of the Orthodox Church there is no salvation.;How does Florovsky justify that his beliefs are true rather than false? He presupposes that no belief can be true without justification. Florovsky's preferred epistemology is presuppositional and christocentric. He presupposes that God Incarnate foreknows the actual future choices of free agents, is thus omniscient and self-sufficient in respect to knowledge, and can therefore serve as the self-attesting starting point for justifying knowledge. Sinful, self-attesting, autonomous man cannot serve in this capacity.;Florovsky also presupposes a limited univocal definition of divine and human freedom. This implies that divine and human freedom have a limited equivocal relation to necessity. History is not characterized by necessity but contingency.;How is this presupposition and its implications compatible with divine foreknowledge of the actual future choices of free agents? Florovsky believes that they are, but how does he justify his belief?;In the final analysis, Florovsky does not justify his belief that God Incarnate foreknows the actual future choices of free agents, that his connotation of God Incarnate is omniscient and self-sufficient in respect to knowledge, and can therefore serve as the self-attesting starting point for justifying knowledge. His presuppositional christocentric epistemology reduces to the relativism which he decries in anthropocentric Western post-Enlightenment epistemologies.;Why? It shares a presupposition of these anthropocentric epistemologies. It presupposes a limited univocal definition of divine and human freedom, which in turn presupposes sinful, self-attesting, autonomous man.;Florovsky and the Greek Fathers provide a corrective for relativism in the analogical relation between God and man which they presuppose in their defense of Chalcedonian Christology and the Trinity. However, they do not apply this corrective. They do not presuppose an analogical relation between divine and human freedom, so they do not justify their knowledge claims. At this point, Augustinian-Calvinism can help. It applies the Greek patristic corrective, so it justifies its knowledge claims.