Pavel Florensky

Works

• 1914The Pillar and Ground of the Truth

  Twelve letters on Orthodox theodicy: truth is antinomic, reached through love and the community of the Church; with a sophiology of creation.

• 1922Iconostasis

  Interprets the icon as a boundary between the visible and invisible worlds and defends its “reverse perspective” against Renaissance perspective; written in 1922, published only in 1972.

Position

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.

Life & context

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.

Further main works

• Reverse Perspective (Obratnaia perspektiva, 1919)
• Imaginaries in Geometry (Mnimosti v geometrii, 1922)