पावेल फ़्लोरेंस्की

कृतियाँ

• 1914सत्य का स्तंभ और आधार

  ऑर्थोडॉक्स ईश्वर-न्याय (थियोडिसी) पर बारह पत्र: सत्य विरोधाभासी है, प्रेम और चर्च के समुदाय के माध्यम से प्राप्त होता है; सृष्टि की सोफ़ियोलॉजी सहित।

• 1922इकोनोस्तास

  आइकन की व्याख्या दृश्य और अदृश्य संसारों के बीच की सीमा के रूप में करता है और उसके “उलटे परिप्रेक्ष्य” का पुनर्जागरण-परिप्रेक्ष्य के विरुद्ध बचाव करता है; 1922 में लिखा, केवल 1972 में प्रकाशित।

मत

Florensky is on the map as a central figure of Russian religious philosophy after Solovyov. In “The Pillar and Ground of the Truth” he argued that truth cannot be reached by the law of identity; religious truth is antinomic and is entered through love, friendship and the life of the Church. He linked this with ideas from mathematics, notably Cantor’s set theory and discontinuity, and with a sophiology of creation. His writings on the icon and on “reverse perspective” influenced art theory and the study of medieval art. His Orthodoxy was contested from the start: Berdyaev called the book “stylised Orthodoxy” (1914), an aestheticised return to tradition. Part of the research also attributes to Florensky unsigned contributions to Vasily Rozanov’s antisemitic book on the alleged relation of Jews to blood (1914), written in the wake of the ritual murder trial of Mendel Beilis in Kyiv, who was acquitted in 1913. Their extent and meaning are disputed: Leonid Katsis sees Florensky as Rozanov’s secret helper, while Avril Pyman reads the texts as a scholarly polemic and rejects the picture of a “grey eminence” behind Rozanov. The question belongs to the critical assessment of his thought. Under Soviet rule he remained a priest while working as a scientist; his execution in 1937 made him a symbol of the persecution of the Church and the intelligentsia, and his letters from the camps have been widely read in Russia since their publication.

जीवन और संदर्भ

Pavel Florensky was born on 21 January 1882 in Yevlakh in the South Caucasus (now Azerbaijan), the son of a Russian railway engineer and an Armenian mother, and grew up in Tiflis. He studied mathematics at Moscow University from 1900 to 1904 under Nikolai Bugaev and then theology at the Moscow Theological Academy in Sergiev Posad, where he taught the history of philosophy from 1908. In 1911 he was ordained a priest, and from 1912 to 1917 he edited the academy’s journal. “The Pillar and Ground of the Truth” (1914) grew out of his master’s thesis. After the revolution he served on the commission for the protection of the art and antiquities of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, lectured on perspective at the Vkhutemas art school in 1921–24 and worked in Soviet electrification research on dielectrics and materials, often appearing in his cassock. Arrested in 1928 and briefly exiled, he was arrested again in 1933 and sentenced to ten years in the camps; from 1934 he was held on the Solovetsky Islands, where he worked on extracting iodine from seaweed. On 25 November 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and he was shot near Leningrad on 8 December 1937. He was rehabilitated in the late 1950s.

अन्य प्रमुख कृतियाँ

• The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny, 1914)
• Reverse Perspective (Obratnaia perspektiva, 1919)
• Imaginaries in Geometry (Mnimosti v geometrii, 1922)
• Iconostasis (Ikonostas, 1922)