Florovsky Georges, Creation and Redemption, Pournaras, Thessaloniki, 1983.
The sum of the advanced, deep theological problematic on issues of creation, evil and the possibility of its transcendence through the salvation in Christ, constitutes the content of this volume, which Fr. Georges Florovsky authored under the title: Creation and Redemption.
Clarifying once again his theological scholarship, this great Russian theologian, reflects, through a dialectic of revelation and experience and based on the patristic testimony, on the mysteries of creation, evil and redemption.
The revelation of God in the Scripture and the personal existence of the faithful becomes a holy collateral in the body of the Church. This collateral reveals to all of us the world as creation. A change (according to the intelligent observation of Gregorios of Nyssa), of non-existence into existence. However, according to the patristic thought, the reality of creation quickly turned from object of admiration to object of theological research. The connection to the supreme rhetoric of Origenis seems unbreakable.
The question about the initial and final limits of creation begs an answer. Can we think of the almightiness and sovereignty of God in the ex nihilo situation before creation? From the “mental occasion” introduced by Gregory of Nyssa, the world as a thought of the divine Intellect, according to Gregory the Theologian, to the theory of “the word of beings” of Maximus, the problem of creation remains a mystery, which eucharistically engrafts everything in God.
A similar mystery to that of creation is the one of evil. An “unsown grass without root”, according to Gregory of Nyssa, (phenomenon omnino non fundatum), an irrationalism and a malevolent existence, evil seeks its “foundation” in the lack of judgment of human will and the easily overturned human nature. Thus, evil reveals itself as narcissistic self-reference and self-love of man. It is a reality, which is created through persons and exists within the framework of human actions.
Its revelation as pain and sadness, as attrition and death does not define an environment that must be devitalized from the Greek understanding of apathy, but one that should be infused with a hypostatic intervention “beyond good and evil”.
At this point, Florovsky introduces, after a rather traditional analysis of good and evil, the need of salvation in Christ. A salvation intricately linked to incarnation as the response of God to the problem of evil and the drama of history.
In this volume, readers meet a deep and detailed narrative, which includes almost the whole of Christology and soteriology. Fr. Georges Florovsky will attempt to carry in our times a multitude of theological and philosophical problematic about time, nature and its restoration, attrition and death, the immortality of the soul and resurrection, the renewal of everything and eschatology. Issues always topical, in a fertile and creative discourse.