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The Pillar and Ground of the Truth

Princeton University Press

Introduction

RUSSIAN religious thought is a unique modern expression of the Eastern Christian worldview. It came of age early in the twentieth century, in a period now referred to as the "Russian religious renaissance" and is known to the West mainly in the works of Nikolai Berdiaev and Leon Shestov. The roots of modern Russian religious philosophy can be traced to the nationalist debates about Russia and its world-historical cultural mission in the mid-nineteenth century. The Westernizers, following the lead of Peter the Great, argued that Russia's future lay in an alliance with the West. They were challenged by the Slavophiles, who claimed that Russia's unique social and religious experience not only shaped its past but destined its future. One of the early prominent Slavophile thinkers, Ivan Kireevsky (1806-1856), called for the creation of a modern Russian philosophy which would use as a "convenient point of departure" the then fashionable German idealist philosophy of Schelling and Hegel, but corrected by the "basic principles of ancient Russian culture."

Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900) took up Kireevsky's directive; his philosophy of "total unity"and his theology of Godmanhood are the culmination of this nineteenth-century Russian philosophical endeavor and the intellectual foundation on which the religious renaissance rested. As with Solovyov, this return to religious roots was a decided reaction against the prevailing positivism of the times and for some a movement "from Marxism to idealism." But this idealism tended to lose sight of Kireevsky's basic principles of ancient Russian culture. Father Pavel Florensky (1882-1937) regrounded the philosophical endeavor on these basic principles, and his unique book The Pillar and Ground of the Truth(1914) became a seminal work for the new Russian Orthodox philosophy.

Florensky, a polymath and renaissance man, was born in Azerbaijan and lived most of his early years in Tbilisi, Georgia. He claimed that the mountainous Trans-Caucasian environment shaped his way of thinking. His mother was Armenian and his father Russian. From his mother's line he believed he inherited his artistic tendencies, while from his father, a railroad engineer descended from the clergy, both his scientific and religious interests. In later years he imagined his childhood days as an Edenic paradise now lost and asserted that "the child has absolutely precise metaphysical formulas for everything other-worldly, and the sharper his sense of Edenic life, the more defined is his knowledge of these formulas" (DM, 74). His memoirs record many moments of his "direct contemplation of Nature's countenance" (DM, 75) when he felt himself "face to face with the native, solitary, mysterious and infinite Eternity, from which everything flows and to which everything returns" (DM, 50). These childhood moments of "ecstasy" with their sense of "magic" gave him "an objective, noncentripetal perception of the world, a kind of inverse perspective" which allowed for a "penetration into the depth of things" (DM, 438-39). In school, however, Pavel turned from this childhood mysticism toward the sciences and their laws, a scholarly interest that he maintained throughout his life. "The mystery I kept within myself, the laws were proclaimed for myself and others" (DM, 190). The decisive moment came in the summer of 1899, when Florensky, reared in a home without religion, had a metaphysical dream of existential darkness and meaninglessness through which he heard or saw the name of God. When later he heard a voice call out his name, he became convinced of the "on-tologicalness of the spiritual world" (DM, 215-16).

Florensky's adult life was shaped by this dichotomous lure of mystical intuition and the laws of science. In the fall of 1899 he entered Moscow University, where he studied mathematics with the noted mathematician N. V. Bugaev (1837-1903) and philosophy with S. N. Trubetskoi (1862-1905) and L. M. Lopatin (1855-1920). In 1904 he rejected a research fellowship for advanced work in mathematics to enroll in the Moscow Theological Academy, and in 1911 he was ordained to the priesthood. The Pillar and Ground of the Truth grew out of his candidate's thesis, "On Religious Truth" (1908) and his Master's dissertation, "On Spiritual Truth" (1912). Upon graduation Florensky joined the faculty, where he taught until the closing of the Academy after the revolution. In these years he also served as editor of the important Bogoslovskii vestnik (Theological Herald) and wrote numerous articles on mathematics and the philosophy of language, as well as theology, some of which remained unpublished.

After the revolution Florensky redirected his scholarly activity. He developed his interest in art history, wrote a book on the analysis of space in art and a seminal study on icons, and taught the theory of perspective at the State Higher Technical-Artistic Studios (VKHUTEMAS). He also pursued research in physics and electrical engineering, worked for the Commission for the Electrification of Soviet Russia, and served as an editor of the Soviet Technical Encyclopedia, to which he contributed many articles. In 1927 he invented a noncoagulating machine oil, which the Soviets called "dekanite" in commemoration of the Bolshevik Revolution. His book on dielectrics became a standard textbook. Throughout this period he remained a priest and appeared at government offices in his cassock. Arrested briefly in 1928, Florensky managed to pursue his scholarly activities until 1933, when the Soviet government sentenced him to ten years of corrective labor in Siberia. At various camps he continued his scientific work and ministered to his fellow prisoners. On August 8, 1937, he was executed. Florensky was rehabilitated in 1956 and then was slowly rediscovered, first mainly as a philosopher of language and culture of interest to Soviet semiotics. In post-Communist Russia he has re-emerged as a seminal philosopher and theologian and become a major symbolic figure in the back-to-roots movement.

Florensky must be seen first of all, however, as a man of his era. He arrived in Moscow in 1899 at age seventeen, in time to experience the growth and flowering of Russian Symbolism. He befriended Andrei Bely (1880-1934), the son of his mathematics professor N. V. Bugaev, and Viacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949), a distinguished classics scholar, both of whom were important Symbolist poets and theoreticians. Florensky's first published review was of Bely's "Northern Symphonies," and Florensky himself published poems in the Symbolist Journal Vesy (The Scales). In his memoirs he claimed retrospectively, "I have always been a symbolist" (DM, 154).

Russian Symbolism, with its renewed concern with the significance of language and classical and medieval culture, its focus on intuitive knowledge, and its mystical apprehension of the divine root of reality couched in the language of Vladimir Solovyov, was seemingly made for Florensky, and his philosophical and theological work must be seen in the light of this important movement. With the Symbolists Florensky shares a "conception of the world and culture as a composition of symbols, turned both upward toward its original homeland and meaning and downward toward the fate of man in history." Florensky's fundamental conception of truth is constructed according to the Symbolist model of reality where all phenomena are reflections, emanations, or manifestations of the noumena and we are to move, in Viacheslav Ivanov's programmatic phrase, de realibus ad realiora. Florensky's ornate, metaphorical, and lyrical writing style, which Berdiaev dismissed as "stylized archaism" and decadent Alexandrianism, is characteristic of much Symbolist procedure. The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, which was conceived and written at the height of the movement, represents in style, structure, and worldview the most elaborated work of Russian Symbolist theology.

The Pillar and Ground of the Truth is constructed not as a philosophical treatise, but as a series of twelve letters addressed to an unidentified "brother," "friend," "elder," and "Guardian," who may be understood symbolically as Christ. Poetic moments describing the narrator's present sense of separation from this "far, yet eternally near friend" are sprinkled throughout the text, thus identifying the narrator's spiritual mood, which is his constant awareness of "two worlds" and his desire to reach out from this world to experience or touch the other world. Argument often yields to emotion, and logic to lyricism. The basic assumption is that "the philosophical creation of truth is closest to artistic creation." The narrator's "I" is not an "abstract, colorless, impersonal 'consciousness in general,'" Florensky insisted at the defense of his Master's dissertation, but "concretely general, symbolically personal," a "methodological 'I'" in dialogue with its addressee. The method is "dialectical," understood as an "ever growing ball of threads of contemplation, a clot of penetrations, ever congealing, ever intruding into the essence of the subject studied ..., an aggregate of the processes of thought which 'mutually reinforce and justify each other.'" Furthermore, the dialectical development of this concrete, living narrator's thought cannot be linear or "presented as a single-voiced melody of discoveries," but resembles more a "fabric or lace, whose threads are woven into varied and complex patterns." Such a book, like any typical modernist text, cannot be read, but only reread.

In characteristic Symbolist fashion, Florensky stressed the aesthetic character of his own book. He carefully chose the illustrations, created a special typeface for it, and oversaw its production. "A book, as a whole, must itself be an artistic work and consequently have its own composition and its own construction," argued the professor of art history. "Its structure and external appearance must be determined first of all by its inner idea. Its dimensions, the character of its paper and cover, its typeface, its sectioning, the consistency in the use of various typefaces for the delineation of the parts, chapters, and paragraphs, the manner of opening and closing the various sections, the placing of charts, diagrams, tables, formulas, etc. all this has an expressive dimension" which when successful, "corresponds to the idea of the book itself." With its many illustrations, charts, tables, diagrams, formulas and sections in varying size script, not to mention its one thousand fifty-six footnotes and thirty addenda, what, we may ask, is the idea of The Pillar and Ground of the Truth and how is it one aesthetic whole?

Florensky subtitles his book "An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy." His theodicy, however, is not a justification of the goodness of God in the face of evil, but of the divine Truth to be ascertained even in this sinful world. This Truth is attained through our experience of "ecclesiality," which is understood as the new life in the Spirit, experienced within Orthodoxy and represented ideally in the lives of the ascetics and elders in the monastic tradition. In modern Russia this tradition was renewed in the late eighteenth century through the revival of hesychast mysticism, a yoga-like form of meditative practice based on the silent recitation of the Jesus Prayer. The nineteenth century, which experienced an incredible growth in the monastic population, witnessed a creative encounter between the monasteries and the artists and intellectuals, reflected, for example, in the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. This encounter fostered a renewed interest in the culture of liturgy, icons, and patristics.

Florensky, who had himself wanted to become a monk, consciously grounds his whole book in this monastic sense of ecclesiality. The complex system of layers of text and additions to the text serves to create the sense of the depth of this tradition even as it recovers it and places it on a par with secular culture. One reason for the importance of The Pillar and Ground of the Truth lies in its extensive reference to the patristic tradition and its creative reading of the liturgy, for these verbal creations best represent the basic principles of ancient Russian culture. Florensky, who preferred medieval culture to renaissance or modern, gives these verbal systems of symbols (as well as the iconographic ones) the same high regard Viacheslav Ivanov gave to classical Greek culture. While many editions of the Eastern Christian Fathers were newly translated and published in the nineteenth century, as Florensky's notes testify, it was Florensky who was responsible for legitimizing their relevance to modern philosophical and theological discourse in Russia. Likewise, Florensky was the first to see the incredible resources that lay hidden in the rich and poetic Greek and Slavonic liturgical texts which he approached with Symbolist reverence. Liturgy, for Florensky, was the "heart of human activity," for it expressed the two worlds, human and divine, of what he called homo liturgus. With the secularization of life, "cult," Florensky believed, branched off into "culture," whose activities are "secondary and express human nature one-sidedly." With his firm belief that liturgy was humanity's "primal activity" and his focus on the symbolic meaning of liturgical texts Florensky enabled the development of modern Orthodox liturgical theology.

The more massively and metaphysically crudely and archaically we conceive religious concepts, the more profound will the symbolism of their expression be and therefore the closer we will come to a genuine understanding of strictly religious experience. This compressed, densified character of religious concepts characterizes our entire liturgy ... (PGT, 63) The liturgy is the flower of Church life and also its root and seed. What richness of ideas and new concepts in the domain of dogmatics, what abundance of profound psychological observations and moral guidance could be gathered here even by a not very diligent investigator! Yes, liturgical theology awaits its creator.

Ecclesiality also means for Florensky the mystical life of the church. The Truth is attained in the ascetic's mystical experience of encounter with the "other world." Florensky had a special admiration for the humble purity and spiritual strength he saw in his own beloved elder, Abba Isidore, who "gave me the most solid, the most undeniable, the purest perception of a spiritual person I have had in my entire life." (PGT, 233). In 1908 he wrote a whole book about him. In characteristic Eastern Christian fashion, Florensky saw the ascetic virtues, especially chastity, aesthetically, and he related life in the Holy Spirit to the experience of beauty: "Ecclesiality is the beauty of new life in Absolute Beauty, in the Holy Spirit" (PGT, 234). This Divine Beauty, understood as order and wholeness, is at one with Truth and Goodness. This Divine Truth, Beauty, and Goodness are revealed and manifested in Creation.

Ecclesiality also entails the dogmatic tradition of the church. The fundamental dogmatic premise of Florensky's theodicy (as of Solovyov's theology of Godmanhood) is that the Creator and Creation are one, as God and Man are one in Christ. The whole book can be considered an exploration of the epistemological, ontological, and moral implications of the two central Christian doctrines Florensky believed both symbolized the religious experience of medieval Kiev and Moscow and prophesied the "two fundamental ideas of the Russian spirit." Florensky's theodicy rests on the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, understood as basic principles of ancient Russian culture.

The first controlling idea of The Pillar and Ground of the Truth is epistemological and is treated mainly in letters two, three, and six. In a fashion characteristic of the whole Slavophile tradition from Kireevsky on, Florensky grounds his theory of knowledge in an attack on "rationality." In this tradition, Reason, understood as the processes of thought and the laws of logic, is considered the foundation of Western philosophy, with its roots in both Aristotle and Aquinas, its modern champion in Descartes, and its apotheosis in Hegel. Florensky, trained in logic and mathematics, attacks the logical laws of this rationality with impressive manipulations of symbolic logic. At bottom, however, his approach is Symbolist. The law of identity, A = A, is read as a sign of reality in a state of isolating sin: "This formula affirms in advance the separateness and egotistical isolation of the ultimate elements of being, thus rupturing all rational connection between them" (PGT, 22). Truth, he argues, is antinomial, to be represented as A + (- A), and every singular truth is to be understood symbolically as a truth about the Truth, which can be experienced only "discontinuously." Christian doctrine is seen as a web of antinomial statements about this Truth. Florensky's characterization of this antinomial Truth seems to have captured something of the epistemological spirit of Orthodoxy, which is so grounded in apophatic theology. It may reflect Dostoevsky's pro and contra and was certainly useful to later Russian religious thinkers, not the least significant of whom was Mikhail Bakhtin.

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Excerpted from The Pillar and Ground of the Truth by Pavel Florensky Copyright © 1997 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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