Ways of Russian Theology forms an integral part of the attempt to purify Russian Orthodoxy by clarifying its proper relationship to the West. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, the Russian Church found itself intellectually unprepared to deal with the religious and cultural storms bursting in upon it. First came the era of open hostilities between Protestants and Catholics; later came the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Consequently, Orthodoxy absorbed, sometimes unconsciously, western scholasticism, deism, pietism, and idealism, and produced what Fr. Florovsky describes as the "pseudomorphosis" of Russia's authentic religious life derived from Byzantium. Only in the nineteenth century did Russian Orthodoxy seriously undertake to recover its Byzantine heritage and find its way "back to the Fathers," thereby laying the foundation for Florovsky's later program of "neo-atristic synthesis".
