“A fundamentalist Protestant publication recently published an attack against Orthodoxy in which the accusation was made that Father Georges Florovsky and his “followers” reject St. Vincent—specifically his definition of Catholicity. I have not read much of Florovsky, but I have a hard time believing that this claim is correct. (Fr. J.W., TX)
Neither did Father Florovsky reject nor have his “followers” ever rejected St. Vincent and his definition of catholicity. Rather, Father Florovsky and those who have expanded on his notions point out that the Vincentian formula, “…quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est,” is not adequate, per se, to describe the catholicity of the Church. Catholicity is not a matter of geography and majority (what is believed everywhere and by everyone), since it is often the case that truth resides in the minority (the “little flock”) and among even the very few (e.g., the Cappadocians or the anti-unionists at the time of St. Mark Evgenikos). What Father Florovsky, in particular, argues is that we must understand St. Vincent in terms of a larger consensus, a kind of existential universality that encompasses the whole spiritual voice of the Church. “Universal consent,” a Protestant idea, can easily be derived from a misunderstanding of St. Vincent’s famous words; therefore, Father Florovsky rightly points out that we Orthodox (and St. Vincent) accept the teachings of the Fathers, for example, not by subjection to the external authority of some “democratic” consensus, but because of their inner catholicity, the inner evidence of their catholic truth. This profound distinction is not immediately obvious in St. Vincent’s formula. Clearly, then, the formula is inadequate only in the sense that it cannot stand alone, without a deeper understanding of what catholicity is and how it relates to the Church’s true authority, which rises from the common authority of the Fathers, who are the criterion of catholicity (even, in some matters, beyond and above the synods and councils) when they speak (each one of them in every place, their oneness and location understood, here, spiritually and not empirically) for the whole people of God, for the entire experience of the revealed truth of the Christian Church.
It is obvious, from what we have written, that the Protestant fundamentalists to whom you refer not only misunderstand us Orthodox when we speak about the Fathers, but imagine that we are somehow limited in our thinking, such that a phrase or formula from one of the Fathers cannot be approached in critical terms. Father Florovsky is, once again, simply pointing out, in his statements about St. Vincent, that this Saint’s famous formula for catholicity is inadequate only if its terms are accepted in an empirical, simple-minded way, as they are by Protestants in deriving a theory of “universal consent” (democratic truth) therefrom, and Roman Catholics, who find therein a geographical and external definition of authority. Moreover, he also argues, in one place, that St. Vincent’s catholic formula is as much a statement about the permanence of Christian teaching as about catholicity itself. Needless to say, Father Florovsky and his “followers” do not, thereby, reject St. Vincent. “-Fr. John Whiteford
Read the whole article at orthodoxinfo.
