Pavel Florensky

Lore and Story

After the October Revolution, Florensky formulated his position: 'I have developed my own philosophical and scientific worldview, which, though it contradicts the vulgar interpretation of communism... does not prevent me from honestly working in the service of the state.' After the Bolsheviks closed the Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra (1918) and the Sergievo-Posad Church (1921), where he was priest, he moved to Moscow to work on the State Plan for Electrification of Russia (ГОЭЛРО) under recommendation of Leon Trotsky, who strongly believed in Florensky's ability to help electrify rural Russia.

According to contemporaries, Florensky in his priest's cassock, working alongside other leaders of a Government department, was a remarkable sight. In 1924, he published a large monograph on dielectrics. He worked as Scientific Secretary of the Historical Commission on Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra and published works on ancient Russian art. He was rumored to be the main organizer of a secret endeavor to save the relics of St. Sergii Radonezhsky whose destruction had been ordered by the government.

In the second half of the 1920s, he worked on physics and electrodynamics, publishing his paper 'Imaginary numbers in Geometry' devoted to the geometrical interpretation of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. Among other things, he proclaimed that the geometry of imaginary numbers predicted by the theory of relativity for a body moving faster than light is the geometry of the Kingdom of God. For mentioning the Kingdom of God, he was accused of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda by Soviet authorities.

1928–1937: exile, imprisonment, death

In 1928, Florensky was exiled to Nizhny Novgorod. After intercession of Ekaterina Peshkova (wife of Maxim Gorky), he was allowed to return to Moscow. On 26 February 1933 he was arrested again, suspected of conspiracy with Pavel Gidiulianov, a professor of canon law who was a complete stranger to Florensky, to overthrow the state and install a fascist monarchy with Nazi assistance. He defended himself vigorously until he realized that by admitting the false charges, he would enable several acquaintances to resecure their liberty.

He was sentenced to ten years in labor camps by Article 58 (clauses ten and eleven: 'agitation against the Soviet system' and 'publishing agitation materials against the Soviet system'). The published agitation materials were the monograph about the theory of relativity. His manner of continuing to wear priestly garb annoyed his employers. The state offered him numerous opportunities to go into exile in Paris, but he declined them.

He served at the Baikal Amur Mainline camp until 1934, when he was moved to Solovki, where he conducted research into producing iodine and agar from local seaweed. In 1937 he was transferred to Leningrad, where on 25 November he was sentenced by an extrajudicial NKVD troika to death. According to a legend, he was sentenced for refusing to disclose the location of the head of St. Sergii Radonezhsky that the communists wanted to destroy. The saint's head was indeed saved and in 1946...

Biography

Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky was born on 21 January [O.S. 9 January] 1882 in Yevlakh, Elisabethpol Governorate (present-day Azerbaijan), into the family of railroad engineer Aleksandr Florensky. His father came from a family of Russian Orthodox priests; his mother Olga (Salomia) Saparova (Saparyan, Sapharashvili) was of the Tbilisi Armenian nobility in Georgia. His maternal grandmother Sofia Paatova (Paatashvili) was from an Armenian family from Karabakh, living in Bolnisi, Georgia.

Florensky 'always searched for the roots of his Armenian family' and noted they came from Karabakh. He completed high school at the Tbilisi classical lyceum (1893-1899), where companions included the founder of Russian Cubo-Futurism, David Burliuk. In 1899, after a visit to Leo Tolstoy, Florensky underwent a religious crisis caused by awareness of the limits of scientific positivism and rationality. He decided to develop theories reconciling spiritual and scientific visions on the basis of mathematics.

He entered the mathematics department of Imperial Moscow University, studied under Nikolai Bugaev, and became friends with Bugaev's son, the poet and theorist of Russian symbolism Andrei Bely. He was particularly drawn to Georg Cantor's set theory and also took courses on ancient philosophy. Graduating in 1904, he declined a teaching position and instead studied theology at the Ecclesiastical Academy in Sergiyev Posad. There he met Elder Isidore at Gethsemane Hermitage, who became his spiritual guide and father.

With fellow students Ern, Svenitsky, and Brikhnichev, he founded the Christian Struggle Union, aiming to rebuild Russian society according to Vladimir Solovyov's principles. He was arrested in 1906 for membership in this society but later lost interest in the Radical Christianity movement. He married Anna Giatsintova in August 1910, a move that shocked friends familiar with his aversion to marriage. He was ordained into the priesthood in 1911.

Between 1911 and 1917, he was chief editor of the Orthodox theological publication Bogoslovskiy Vestnik. He was also a spiritual teacher of writer Vasily Rozanov, urging him to reconcile with the Orthodox Church. Florensky was influenced by Rudolf Steiner.

Influence

Florensky's main philosophical work, 'The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: an Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters,' was published in 1914. According to the foreword of a book of his letters published by Princeton University Press, the book is a series of twelve letters to a 'brother' or 'friend,' who may be understood symbolically as Christ. Central to the work is an exploration of the various meanings of Christian love, viewed as a combination of philia (friendship) and agape (universal love).

He describes the ancient Christian rites of adelphopoiesis (brother-making), which joins male friends in chaste bonds of love. Florensky was one of the first thinkers in the twentieth century to develop the idea of the Divine Sophia, who has become one of the central concerns of feminist theologians. Florensky's biographer Avril Pyman evaluates Florensky's position regarding Jews as, contextually for the period, a middle way between liberal critics who excoriated Russia's backwardness and the behavior of instigators of pogroms like the Black Hundreds.

Florensky was a prominent member of the Russian Symbolism movement with his friend Andrei Bely, publishing in magazines New Way and Libra. He published works on philosophy, theology, art theory, mathematics, and electrodynamics.