Pavel Florensky

What is the Absolute? Does God exist?

The truth that proves itself is the Trinity, and the icon bears witness to it

A personal GodStated explicitly

Florensky starts, in The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, from living religious experience as the only legitimate way of knowing dogmas. In the letter on doubt he follows scepticism to its end and concludes that only a truth that is at once subject and relation, an I that gives itself to a Thou and recognises itself in a He, can stand: the Trinity. His God is personal and tri-personal, and his inner life is self-giving love. To this speculative path he adds an aesthetic one: in Iconostasis he asserts that, since Rublev's Trinity exists, God exists, and presents this as the most convincing proof, one the textbooks never mention. For him the icon does not illustrate an idea: it is a window through which the invisible lets itself be seen.

Who am I? Is there a true self?

The self finds itself only in love and in friendship

A self cultivated in relationshipStated explicitly

Florensky criticises the identity of the self conceived as the logical law A is A. In The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, such closed self-affirmation is the very form of sin and death: a self that only repeats itself becomes empty. True personal identity is reached by going out of oneself, when the self gives itself to another and receives itself from him; its model is Trinitarian life, in which each person is what it is through its relation to the others. That is why he devotes an entire letter to friendship, which he understands from the tradition of spiritual brotherhood in the early Church, as the experience in which two persons become consubstantial without being confused. The self is real and immortal, but it is found only in communion.

Why do we suffer?

Sin is self-assertion that disintegrates; the true gift is paid for in pain

Separation from GodStated explicitly

In The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, Florensky defines sin as the self-assertion of an I that shuts itself into its empty identity and breaks communion; its consequence is inner disintegration, the loss of the person's integrity, and its end is gehenna, the loneliness of one who can no longer go out of himself. Suffering is the fruit of that separation, but love also includes it: in the letter on Sophia he writes that love eternally takes away in order eternally to give, and puts to death in order to bring to life. His own life confirmed it: from Solovki, shortly before he was shot, he wrote to his wife that the more selfless the gift, the harsher the persecution and the more severe the suffering, and called this the law of life.

What happens after death?

Before gehenna, an antinomy: salvation of all and eternal damnation at once

Eternal life and resurrectionStated explicitly

Florensky addresses what happens after death in the letter on gehenna in The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, and he does so with his method of antinomy. On one hand, God's love demands that all be saved; on the other, the creature's freedom makes eternal damnation possible. Neither thesis can be eliminated without betraying faith, and reason must accept holding them together. His solution points to a distinction within the person: what in it is the image of God is saved, while what sin has built, its caricature, burns and is separated. Beyond speculation, his faith in the resurrection is that of the Orthodox Church, which he lived until his execution in 1937, as his letters from Solovki show.

How is liberation or salvation attained?

Salvation is lived in the Church: ascesis, sacrament and transfiguring love

Through grace and loveStated explicitly

Florensky presents salvation as incorporation into the life of truth, reached not by reasoning but by experience: the living religious experience he defines at the start of The Pillar and Ground of the Truth as the only legitimate path to the dogmas. That experience is given in the Church, through ascesis, which restores the integrity of the person broken up by sin, through the sacraments and through brotherly love. Its fruit is transfiguration: in the letter on the light of truth he reproduces the passage where Motovilov sees Seraphim illumined, as an example of what grace does in the flesh. In The Philosophy of Cult he adds that liturgical worship is the place where the human and the divine meet and where the whole of reality is sanctified.

Is a teacher necessary?

Truth is received in the Church and in the spiritual fatherhood of an elder

Community and traditionStated explicitly

Florensky came to faith as an adult, from science, and his path was marked by concrete figures: Bishop Antony Florensov, whom he regarded as his spiritual father, and the elder Isidore of Gethsemane, to whom he devoted The Salt of the Earth, a portrait of an elder's simple holiness. His theology holds that truth is not passed on as information, but by incorporation into the living experience of the Church, its sacraments, its worship and its saints. In The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, written as letters to a friend, the genre itself expresses this conviction: truth is sought in dialogue and friendship, not in self-sufficient solitude. The teacher is necessary, but within a community of faith that precedes and sustains him.

Is the world real?

The creature is rooted in God through Sophia; the visible borders the invisible

A good and real creationStated explicitly

Florensky, theologian and scientist at once, does not doubt the reality of the created world, but thinks of it as open from above. In The Pillar and Ground of the Truth he devotes one letter to the creature and another to Sophia, which he defines as the great root of all creation, through which the creature enters Trinitarian life and receives eternal life. The world is good because it is rooted in God. In Iconostasis he describes the boundary between the visible and the invisible world, which dreams, art and liturgy allow one to cross, and the icon as its witness. In Imaginaries in Geometry he went so far as to propose, on the basis of relativity, a model of the cosmos in which the visible world borders a space of another nature.

What is love?

Love is consubstantiality: it takes in order to give and makes two one unconfused

Love of God and neighbourStated explicitly

In The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, love is the key to Trinitarian life and therefore to truth itself: God is love because each divine person gives itself to the others. Florensky describes it with paradoxical formulas: love eternally takes away in order eternally to give, eternally puts to death in order eternally to give life. In the letter on friendship and the letter on jealousy he studies it in its most concrete human form, friendship between two persons, which the early Church blessed with a rite of brother-making of its own, and which makes two one without confusing them, in the image of the Trinity's consubstantiality. Jealousy, in this sense, can be the face of love defending its unique object. Love of neighbour in general is first learned in love for one concrete friend.

Are we free, or is everything determined?

Freedom and grace form an antinomy that reason does not solve but accepts

Real free willInferred from their doctrine

Florensky does not treat freedom as an isolated problem, but as one of the cases of antinomy he considers proper to all religious truth. In the letter on contradiction in The Pillar and Ground of the Truth he holds that truth, seen from finite reason, appears as a pair of opposed affirmations that must be held together: providence that disposes all things and freedom that responds, grace that saves and human effort. In the letter on gehenna he applies the same scheme: God's love wills the salvation of all, but the creature's freedom can refuse it, and both theses are true. Human freedom is therefore real, and the human being answers for his acts, though his relation to providence cannot be reduced to a formula.

Why meditate or pray?

Worship is the root of culture and the place where reality is sanctified

Ritual and self-cultivationStated explicitly

Florensky, a priest as well as a scientist, thought of prayer above all from liturgical worship. In the lectures gathered as The Philosophy of Cult he maintains that worship is the centre from which all culture springs, as the word itself indicates, and that in it material reality, water, bread, oil, word and gesture, is sanctified and opened to the divine. In Church Ritual as a Synthesis of the Arts and in Iconostasis he describes the liturgy as a total work of art involving architecture, candlelight, incense smoke, chant and the icon, and the icon as a window onto the invisible world. His interest in the divine name, in the context of the name-glorifying controversy, shows that personal prayer is not separated from rite.

Can reason know the ultimate?

Religious truth is antinomic: reason touches it only as contradiction

The ultimate lies beyond the mindStated explicitly

Florensky was a mathematician by training and never despised reason: he studied Cantor's set theory, wrote on the infinite and worked as an engineer. Precisely for that reason he knew its limits. In The Pillar and Ground of the Truth he holds that reason, governed by the law of identity, cannot by itself find a truth that proves itself: it leads to scepticism. And when it approaches the mysteries of faith, it meets them as antinomies, pairs of contradictory affirmations equally true, such as God's unity and trinity or freedom and grace. The letter on contradiction makes antinomy the seal of religious truth. Knowledge of the ultimate is possible only through living religious experience, in which reason is transfigured without being abolished.

Withdraw from the world or transform it?

A priest in a cassock at the technical office: serving through science without leaving faith

Contemplation in actionInferred from their doctrine

Florensky embodied a singular way of living in the world. After the revolution, when the Theological Academy closed, he neither emigrated nor withdrew: he worked on the commission for the protection of the monuments of the Lavra of Saint Sergius and later on the country's electrification plan, where he attended meetings in cassock and pectoral cross. He published studies on dielectrics and wrote articles for the technical encyclopaedia. Deported to Solovki, he researched the extraction of iodine and agar from seaweed. In his letters to his children from the camp he teaches them to observe nature attentively and to work well, as a form of service. Science, art and liturgy were for him expressions of one and the same vision of the world, and none required renouncing the others.