Introduction

The most durable, indestructible and constantly self-renewing thing in the world is what has been worked out by the human spirit, human thought. On September 21, 1929, priest Pavel Florensky wrote to V.I. Vernadsky “about the existence in the biosphere, or perhaps on the biosphere, of what could be called the pneumatosphere, i.e. about the existence of a special part of matter involved in the cycle of culture or, more precisely, the cycle of spirit.” Let us note that in theology there is a special section of the teaching about the Holy Spirit - pneumatology, and what the natural scientist Florensky wrote about to the natural scientist Vernadsky, the latter explained as follows: “The irreducibility of this cycle to the general cycle of life can hardly be doubted. But there is a lot of data, although not yet sufficiently formalized, hinting at the special durability of material formations worked out by the spirit, for example, objects of art. This makes us suspect the existence of a corresponding special sphere of matter in space.” To this P.A. Florensky, a scientist who attached great importance to the experimental and concrete study of matter, added: “At the present time, it is still premature to talk about the pneumatosphere as a subject of scientific study; Perhaps such a question should not have been put in writing. However, the impossibility of a personal conversation prompted me to express this idea in a letter.” 1 So, the idea of ​​the pneumatosphere was preserved precisely in the letter. Any letters, like many other pieces of written paper, belong to the pneumatosphere, inseparable from man, whose spiritual efforts determine the “special durability” of its “material formations.”

Many of the works of priest Pavel Florensky are essentially personal conversations or letters filled with intimate inner light playing on the edges of the composition and addressed to a reader-friend. “The Pillar and Ground of Truth” 2 even has a clarification in the subtitle - “The Experience of Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters.” Sometimes letters, modified by P.A. Florensky, turned into chapters of his works. For example, the preface “On Makovets” to the work “At the Watersheds of Thought” 3 grew out of a letter to V.V. Rozanov. Florensky’s word is a symbol, i.e. it is always something else. This “something” should be revealed to those who, to one degree or another, are similar to the author in their worldview - hence the appeal to the individual, to a friend, and not to an abstract public. Florensky and his relatives lived in an “epistolary” time. Genre of correspondence: friend of Florensky V.V. Rozanov called it “the golden part of literature.” This genre is one of the most ancient: letters found during excavations give an idea of ​​bygone civilizations, of personal relationships between people, and letters of the apostles addressed to loved ones or Christian communities formed part of Holy Scripture. Letters are subjective by definition and preserve undistorted concrete and momentary dialogue, but they are also mythological, understanding myth as an eternally existing reality. The epistolary genre is a Socratic conversation that preserves the dialectic of communication. In this way, letters are fundamentally different from memoirs, which are essentially simulated conversations of the memoirist with himself in the past or with an interested interlocutor in the present, or justification of himself to his descendants in the future. This is why the epistolary genre is sometimes more accurate than time-honored memoirs, which often claim to be an objective reassessment of the past.

1. Biography of Florensky

Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky (1882–1937) - Russian religious philosopher and scientist, was born on January 9 (old style) in the town of Yevlakh in the west of present-day Azerbaijan. On his father's side, his ancestry goes back to Russian clergy, the mother came from an old and noble Armenian family. Florensky very early discovered exceptional mathematical abilities and, after graduating from high school in Tiflis, entered the mathematics department of Moscow University. After graduating from the University, he did not accept the offer to stay at the University to study mathematics, but entered the Moscow Theological Academy. During these years, he, together with Ern, Sventsitsky and Fr. Brikhnichev created the “Union of Christian Struggle”, which strived for a radical renewal of the social system in the spirit of the ideas of Vl. Solovyov about the “Christian community”. Later, Florensky completely abandoned radical Christianity.

Even as a student, his interests covered philosophy, religion, art, and folklore. He enters the circle of young participants in the symbolic movement, strikes up a friendship with Andrei Bely, and his first creative experiences are articles in the symbolist magazines “New Path” and “Scales”, where he strives to introduce mathematical concepts into philosophical issues.

During his years of study at the Theological Academy, he conceived the idea of ​​a major essay, his future book “The Pillar and Ground of Truth,” most of which he completed by the end of his studies. After graduating from the Academy in 1908, he became a teacher there. philosophical disciplines, and in 1911 he accepted the priesthood and in 1912 he was appointed editor of the academic journal “Theological Bulletin”. The full and final text of his book “The Pillar and Ground of Truth” appears in 1924.

In 1918, the Theological Academy moved its work to Moscow and then closed. In 1921, the Sergiev Pasadsky Church, where Florensky served as a priest, also closed. In the years from 1916 to 1925, Florensky wrote a number of religious and philosophical works, including “Essays on the Philosophy of Cult” (1918), “Iconostasis” (1922), and worked on his memoirs. Along with this, he returned to his studies in physics and mathematics, also working in the field of technology and materials science. Since 1921 he has been working in the Glavenergo system, taking part in GOELRO, and in 1924 he published a large monograph on dielectrics. Another direction of his activity during this period was art criticism and museum work. At the same time, Florensky works in the Commission for the Protection of Monuments of Art and Antiquity of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, being its scientific secretary, and writes a number of works on ancient Russian art.

In the second half of the twenties, Florensky’s range of activities was forced to be limited to technical issues. In the summer of 1928 he was exiled to Nizhny Novgorod, but in the same year, due to the efforts of E.P. Peshkova, will be returned from exile. In the early thirties, a campaign was launched against him in the Soviet press with articles of a pogrom and denunciation nature. On February 26, 1933, he was arrested and 5 months later, on July 26, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Since 1934, Florensky was kept in the Solovetsky camp. On November 25, 1937, he was sentenced to capital punishment by a special troika of the NKVD of the Leningrad Region and executed on December 8, 1937.

2. Stages of P. Florensky’s creativity

In the works of P.A. Florensky usually distinguishes two stages, which culminated in fundamental works on theodicy and anthropodicy.

Theodicy, which in a somewhat simplified translation means justification, explanation, justification for the existence of God, is the book “The Pillar and Ground of Truth,” the only major work on philosophy published during his lifetime, written when its author was less than thirty years old. The book played a big role in the churching of the intelligentsia of both the Silver and our “Iron” ages. It was read and known when reading religious literature it was unsafe. Florensky was a symbol of the scientist-priest who died in the camps. Now it is forgotten that it was dangerous to have patristic and church literature in general. Even in the late 80s, if a Bible was found by customs officers, a person would be at least “banned from traveling abroad.” Names church leaders in general, and the names of religious philosophers especially, were crossed out both literally and figuratively, just as the names of those objectionable to Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth” were crossed out.

Another work by P.A. Florensky - anthropodicy, the justification of man - was created by a mature forty-year-old thinker without hope of publication. It includes several volumes, the manuscripts of which were secretly preserved by his family. Now they have been published through the efforts of his grandchildren, and many of them, especially “Iconostasis” 4 and “Names,” 5 have entered our culture. Priest Pavel Florensky continued his posthumous way of the cross.

However, in the works of P.A. Florensky, as in his life, it is appropriate to highlight two more stages, which correspond to completed and perfect literary and philosophical works. This is his correspondence of the beginning and end of his life and creative journey.

Letters to family from the camps 1933–1937. – the work of the last stage of the creativity of prisoner P.A. Florensky. In them, he passes on the accumulated knowledge to his children, and through them to all people, therefore the main direction of their thought is the clan as the bearer of eternity in time and the family as the main unit of human society. The focus of experience becomes the unity of the clan, family and personality, a personality that is formed, unique, but at the same time connected by thousands of threads with its clan, and through it with Eternity, for “the past has not passed away.” The clan, in turn, finds in the family a balance of formed personalities, unmerged and indivisible; in the family, the experience of the clan is transferred from parents to children, so that they “do not fall out of the grooves of time.” By analogy with previous works, letters from prisons and camps can be called genodicy, the justification of the clan, the family.

There is another, no less perfect work - Florensky’s youthful correspondence with loved ones, letters from his time studying at the Tiflis gymnasium, as well as from the period of his studies at Moscow University and the Moscow Theological Academy. In correspondence of 1897–1906. reflected the formation of Florensky’s personality, the way he separates himself from his family, from his environment, and how he sets life’s goals. It is appropriate to call this stage justification of oneself, justification of the individual - egodice. With his philosophizing, the unity of his creative biography - theodicy, anthropodicy, genodicy, egodicy - priest Pavel Florensky embraced three usually non-overlapping worlds: the heavenly - supermundane, the pneumatospheric - human, and the personal-tribal - family. Each with its own objects, their special hierarchy, specific axiomatics.

Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky was a professor at the Moscow Theological Academy, the author of many books, articles, monographs, a poet, an astronomer who defended the geocentric concept of the world, a mathematician, physicist, art critic, engineer, inventor, author of a number of patents, professor of perspective painting, musician, music connoisseur, polyglot , who spoke Latin and Ancient Greek, modern European languages, as well as the languages ​​of the Caucasus, Iran and India, a folklorist, founder of the new sciences, cosmist philosopher and scientist of the new science, i.e. cosmist scientist. N.O. Lossky called him “the new Leonardo da Vinci,” and Alexander Men said that “...like Solovyov, Florensky appeared as a man who stood at the pinnacle of culture, and did not come into it from somewhere from the outside and only benefit from its fruits.” for your needs,<…>he himself was culture. Both Florensky and Soloviev are culture itself personified.”

P.A. Florensky was born on January 21, 1882 in the town of Yevlakh, Elizavetpol province, Russian Empire, died on December 8, 1937. His father, Alexander Ivanovich Florensky, an engineer, came from a family of Florensky clergy, and his mother, Olga Pavlovna Saparova, from the ancient Armenian family of the Saparovs (Saparian).

Since childhood, Pavel Aleksandrovich paid attention to those moments of life, “where the calm course of life is disrupted, where the fabric of ordinary causality is torn, there were seen ... the guarantees of the spirituality of being,” where “the boundary of the general and the particular, the abstract and the concrete” arose. Fascinated by physics and observations of nature while studying at the Tiflis gymnasium, he comes to the conclusion that “everything scientific worldview- trash and convention that has nothing to do with the truth.” He is looking for that inner feeling of the truth of the universe, which is formed by man himself in the entire totality of his states, bodies, images, knowledge. With all his subsequent work, P.A. Florensky, having absorbed the foundations of world culture, affirms the mental creativity of man, representing the unity of the micro and macrocosmos. He writes: “The truth has always been given to people, and It is not the fruit of the teaching of some book, not rational, but something much deeper structure that lives inside us, what we live, breathe, eat.”

P.A. Florensky is a poet. He was published in the magazines of symbolist poets “New Way” and “Scales”, his last poem “Oro”, written in prison, is a kind of summary of his life. Currently, collections of his previously unknown poetic works are being published and his poetic creativity is being studied.

Florensky attached great importance to clan and family. In 1904, he went to the “homeland of his paternal ancestors,” where he collected and studied folklore: ditties, spiritual poems, ballads and studied the ethnic composition and culture of the Kostroma province. P.A. Florensky appears before us as an ethnolinguist, folklorist and researcher of folk culture.

After graduating from high school, he entered the mathematics department of Moscow University, where he also attended lectures at the Faculty of History and Philology and independently studied the history of art. He was interested in the articles of L.N. Tolstoy and the teachings of Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov. He took part in the activities of the Christian Brotherhood of Struggle in 1904-5, condemned the imposition of the death sentence on Lieutenant P.P. Schmidt and the outbreak of mutual bloodshed, for which he was briefly arrested. Writes a candidate's essay: “On the features of plane curves as places of discontinuity,” pursuing the idea of ​​impulsive influence on evolutionary development peace in contrast to the dominant theory of consistent development. In 1904 he graduated from the university, refused the offered teaching position and entered the Moscow Theological Academy. Pavel Alexandrovich, in his words, wanted “to produce a synthesis of churchliness and secular culture, to fully unite with the Church, but without any compromises, honestly, to accept all the positive teachings of the Church and the scientific and philosophical worldview along with art.” In 1908, he wrote his candidate’s essay “On Religious Truth,” which became the basis of a book and dissertation for a master’s degree, “The Pillar and Ground of Truth.”

In 1911 he accepted the priesthood, from that moment his whole life was connected with the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. In 1912 he was editor of the academic journal “Theological Bulletin”. During the First World War, in 1915, Father Pavel, the regimental chaplain of a military ambulance train, went to the front.

After the revolution of 1917, Father Pavel, according to Alexander Men, did not emigrate: “He worked. He realized himself as a scientist who would work for his fatherland.” He was confident that the crisis of 1917 would cause spiritual search people. In one of the letters of this period, Father Pavel wrote: “... after the collapse of all this abomination, hearts and minds will no longer be as before, sluggishly and cautiously, but, hungry, will turn to the Russian idea, to the idea of ​​Russia, to Holy Rus'<…>I am confident that the worst is yet to come.” Preserving the foundations of spiritual culture, preserving museums, material images of culture - the goal of Father Paul’s actions during this period. In 1920, P.A. Florensky wrote, and he had the right to say so: “Never compromise anything from your convictions. Remember, a concession leads to a new concession, and so on ad infinitum.” P.A. Florensky works in many Soviet institutions without taking off his cassock, openly testifying that he is a priest. Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov will write in exile: “life seemed to offer him a choice between Solovki and Paris, but he chose... His homeland, although it was Solovki, he wanted to share his fate with his people to the end. Father Pavel organically could not and did not want to become an emigrant in the sense of a voluntary or involuntary separation from his homeland, and he himself and his destiny are the glory and greatness of Russia, although at the same time its greatest crime.”

Pavel Alexandrovich – scientist, engineer, inventor. He is interested in the problems of that edge of science with other existence, that other world from which the synthesis of the science of the future is born. In 1929, in a letter to V.I. Vernadsky, he suggests the presence of a pneumatosphere in the biosphere, “a special substance that is involved in the cycle of culture or the circulation of the spirit,” noting that the pneumatosphere is characterized by “special stability of material formations,” which, according to one of modern researchers of his work, Elena Mahler, “gives cultural conservation activities a planetary meaning.” P.A. Florensky is daring and brilliant in his thoughts and discoveries. He is extraordinarily talented in many areas. In science, as in all creativity, he is characterized by great hard work and curiosity. For him, science is joy, it’s wings, it’s fun. For him ancient science sacred and mysterious, the new one is strict, but the science of the future is joyful, it is characterized by “a slight inspiration of the future, “joyful science.”

Pavel Aleksandrovich is an art critic and innovator in museum affairs. In 1921, he became a professor at the Higher Art and Technical Workshops (VKHUTEMAS), where from 1921 to 1927 he lectured on the theory of perspective. At the same time, he wrote a number of articles on ancient Russian, medieval art, and icon painting. On October 22, 1918, P.A. Florensky joined the Commission for the Protection of Monuments of Art and Antiquities of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra and became its scientific secretary. In the article “The Trinity-Sergius Lavra and Russia,” noting that “The Lavra is an artistic portrait of Russia as a whole,” he will put forward the idea of ​​a living museum, insisting on preserving the Trinity-Sergius Lavra as “a living museum of Russian culture in general and Russian art in particular.” . The commission described the wealth of the Lavra and prepared the conditions for the decree “On applying to the museum of historical and artistic values ​​of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra,” signed by V.I. Lenin in 1920.

In his work “Temple Action as a Synthesis of Art,” P.A. Florensky proposed “to create a system of a number of scientific and educational institutions with the goal of “carrying out the supreme synthesis of arts, which modern aesthetics dreams so much about.” The idea of ​​a living museum, in his opinion, involves the preservation of each object in connection with the environment and relevant life circumstances inherent in this object. He insisted that “a work of art is a collection of a whole, a “bundle of conditions”, outside of which it simply does not exist as an artistic work.” The circle of “temple art” – P. A. Florensky’s term – includes vocal art and poetry. The idea of ​​a living museum echoes the ideas of N.K. Roerich about the synthesis of arts.

P.A. Florensky also speaks out in defense of the Optina Hermitage, calling this Abode “a powerful collective inciter of spiritual experience.” He addresses the Soviet administration with a letter about the need to “preserve Optina Pustyn (a monastery that existed since 1821, which was once visited by N.V. Gogol, F.M. Dostoevsky, L.N. Tolstoy).” In the same letter, Pavel Aleksandrovich will write that “Optina is precisely the beginning of a new culture,” moreover, a spiritual culture, from contact with which “the spirit is kindled.” He warns that the destruction of Optina Pustyn “threatens an unrewarded loss for all of us and the entire culture of the future.” Researcher of the work of P.A. Florensky I.L. Galinskaya reports that “as a result of the actions of O. Pavel and the trip of N.P. Kiselev (sent by the People's Commissariat for Education) to Optina Pustyn, a “living museum” was actually organized, which existed until 1928. "

In 1928, the persecution of P.A. Florensky began, with exile and subsequent sentencing to ten years in prison. In exile and imprisonment he manages to work. In conclusion, he will write the book “Permafrost and Construction on It,” which was published by his collaborators in 1940, the ideas of which were subsequently used in the construction of cities on permafrost. He studies the problem of extracting iodine from algae and discovers unusual medicinal properties Yoda.

On November 25, 1937, by a special troika of the NKVD of the Leningrad region, he was sentenced to capital punishment and executed on December 8, 1937. Subsequently, he was completely rehabilitated. The OGPU destroyed the unique library of Pavel Alexandrovich, in which “in the form of book summaries, the key to which is known to me alone,” his future finished works, his works, which “were already half finished.” “Destruction of the results of my life’s work is much worse for me than physical death,” wrote Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky.

When Pavel Alexandrovich was still twenty years old, before his exile and imprisonment, in the book “The Pillar and Ground of Truth” he wrote:
“And with anger I stamped my foot:
“Aren’t you ashamed, poor animal, to whine about your fate?
Can't you let go of subjectivity?
Can't you forget about yourself? Really, - oh, shame! - can’t you understand that you have to surrender to the objective?
The objective, standing outside of you, standing above you - won’t it really captivate you?
Unhappy, pathetic, stupid! You whine and complain as if someone is obligated to satisfy your needs. Yes? You can't live without this and without that? Well, so what?
If you cannot live, die, bleed to death, but still live objectively, do not descend into despicable subjectivity, do not seek conditions of life for yourself.
Live for God, not for yourself.
Be firm, be tempered, live objectively, in the clean mountain air, in the transparency of the peaks, and not in the stuffiness of the humid valleys, where chickens dig in the dust and pigs roll in the mud. Ashamed!"
Pavel Alexandrovich in life, “with human hands and feet,” accomplished his spiritual feat. Only in the work of improving the surrounding space and bringing good into life does an earthly personality approach its highest ideal. According to P.A. Florensky, a person must “through experience, through personal communication, through constant gazing into the Face of Christ, through finding in the Son of Man his true self, his true humanity” to find an example for himself, in order to become a saint, such how she appears in her ideal image. “A personality can and should correct itself, but not according to an external norm, even if it is the most perfect, but only according to itself, but in its ideal form.” Florensky argues that without creativity, a person’s self, or his earthly, carnal personality, will destroy him. Creative work associated with the Highest transforms the self - this is what the Teaching of Living Ethics says.

In the main work of his life, in the book “The Pillar and Ground of Truth,” P. A. Florensky creatively rethinks the heritage of world culture. The book is written in the form of letters to a friend, Sergei Semenovich Troitsky: “That’s why I write you “letters” instead of composing an “article,” which I am afraid to say, but prefer to ask.” An interview, a conversation with the reader is the principle of the book and the principle of exploring the world for P.A. Florensky, who, by talking with the outside world and readers, learns the internal relationships of man and the universe.

In the book “The Pillar and Ground of Truth,” Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky studies the history of Christianity. He recognizes the truth in many guises. Describing the origins of the future in the past achievements of mankind, P.A. Florensky recognizes the achievements of many prophets who were before Christ: “Just as before Christ there were Christ-bearers, so before the complete descent of the Spirit there are spirit-bearers.” Synthesizing the world cultural heritage in the field of philosophy, religion, science, he identifies the main directions of development of Christian thought and world culture, and formulates the main problem of the coming crisis: the departure from the spiritualization of human life and activity. Analyzing the problem of the “new consciousness” - among its representatives he includes such contemporaries as D.S. Merezhkovsky, Z.N. Gippius, N.A. Berdyaev - he emphasizes that the “new consciousness” will cease to be “new” and inevitably will lead its bearers to a dead end if there is no synthesis of knowledge with the spiritualization of the life and activity of the person himself - the exponent of this “new consciousness”. According to D.S. Likhachev, P.A. Florensky was one of the first to remind the Russian intelligentsia of the need for a spiritual life.

Studying this tragedy of our time, Florensky is looking for its origins, the point from which the development of human thought went in the wrong direction. In his opinion, it was the Middle Ages that became a turning point for humanity. In such works as “Imaginaries in Geometry”, “Iconostasis”, “Names”, in the book “The Pillar and Ground of Truth” he writes that the spiritual perception of the world, which was inherent in the Middle Ages, is subsequently lost by people, and secular science loses relationship with spiritual vision, plunging into materialism, putting earthly man first, denying his connection with the divine, with the cosmos. The Age of Enlightenment, according to Florensky, is not progress, but a regression of humanity, its departure from the spiritual worldview. Many researchers consider this point to be a delusion of Father Paul, who, in their opinion, idealizes the Middle Ages.

P.A. Florensky has always remained among those scientists and researchers of the philosophy of religion who in different times in different guises they preserved the innermost life of the Church - its spiritual part, realized in life. Florensky, from this point of view, is an exponent of the best spiritual quests of the Russian priesthood, manifested in such movements as hesychasm, name-glorification, and many other movements inner life Churches that may be unknown to us. Alexander Men recalled: “Florensky appeared as a man who stood at the pinnacle of culture, and did not come into it from somewhere from the outside and use its fruits only for his own needs... he himself was culture. Both Florensky and Solovyov are culture itself personified.”

Approaching his work from the standpoint of only religion leads to a misunderstanding of his ideas. As Lyudmila Vasilyevna Shaposhnikova rightly asserts, he cannot be called a “religious philosopher.” He is precisely the one whom we can now rightly classify as a cosmist philosopher. The philosophy of P.A. Florensky basically echoes Solovyov’s idea of ​​unity: “Everything is interconnected. The whole world is permeated by united forces. AND divine power enters the universe, nothing is separated, but everything is intertwined, it hurts in one place and is felt in another.”
“...If there is Truth,
then she is real intelligence
and reasonable reality;
she is the finite infinity
and endless finitude,
or, to put it mathematically,
actual infinity,
infinite, conceivable
as a whole
Unity…"

In 1923, at a time when churches and temples were being destroyed in the country, P.A. Florensky wrote an article “Christianity and Culture”, in which he explores the origins of disappointment in Christian faith, the origins of differences between different branches of Christianity, which previously became the causes of religious wars. In his opinion, the essence of this problem is not the differences in rituals, and even the dogmas of one or another branch of Christianity: “The Christian world is full of mutual suspicion, ill-willed feelings and enmity. He is rotten at his very core, does not have the activity of Christ, does not have the courage and sincerity to admit the rottenness of his faith. No church office, no bureaucracy, no diplomacy will breathe unity of faith and love where there is none. All external gluing not only will not unite the Christian world, but, on the contrary, may turn out to be only isolation between confessions. We must admit that it is not these or those differences in teaching, ritual and church structure that serve as the true cause of the fragmentation of the Christian world, but a deep mutual distrust, mainly of faith in Christ, the Son of God, who came in the flesh.” Pavel Aleksandrovich does not “fit” into the framework of the generally accepted scheme: he is not an ordinary priest and not an ordinary philosopher, he is a thinker of modern times, a cosmist thinker. From the study of philosophy, the foundations of religion, mathematics, physics, many natural sciences and the simultaneous spiritual comprehension of the foundations of the universe and the interrelations of being, a synthesis was born scientific knowledge, philosophical concepts with spiritual experience. This synthesis, the expression of which we see in the work of P.A. Florensky, was born on that line between the private and the general, the internal and the abstract, which his father told him about. L.V. Shaposhnikova called this state “two worlds.” P.A. Florensky noted that modern science has not yet begun to study spiritual experience, and that the denial by science of achievements in the field of knowledge that are obtained in the course of spiritual experience by true followers of the Teachings of Christ denies science itself as such.

Art can most fully convey the state of “two worlds” and make the results of this state an achievement for a person. In the book “The Thorny Path of Beauty,” L.V. Shaposhnikova notes that since 1910, a period began “when creative individuals, and above all artists, paid attention to the treasure of Russian culture - orthodox icons" It was in icons that Father Pavel saw (and revealed in his works “Iconostasis” and others) the role of art as a method in comprehending existence and otherness, as a method of conveying “two worlds.”

An icon, specifically a Russian icon, is a reflection of the act of creativity of icon painters, their bringing of spiritual experience into life. An icon is the line between worlds. But it becomes such only with the spiritual creativity of the person himself. P.A. Florensky argues that the method of reverse perspective, which was used by Russian icon painters, is not a mistake or inability to depict the world, but rather a mastery in depicting another space, other planes of existence. The strength and genius of a true artist is not in naturalism, which “does not reflect the multi-worldliness of space,” but imitates external truthfulness and creates “doubles of things”; The artist’s genius is in conveying a special view of space and the world, in conveying his vision of other existence. P.A. Florensky believes that children’s drawings often reflect precisely the phenomenon of reverse perspective and “only with the loss of a direct relationship to the world do children lose their reverse perspective<…>since children's thinking is not weak thinking, but a special type of thinking,” conveying a synthetic perception of the world. A person sees not just with vision, with his eyes; during the process of vision, a person perceives the image of a thing, a phenomenon, which consists of his mental perceptions. That is why “the artist must and can depict his own idea of ​​the house, and not at all transfer the house itself to the canvas.”

In the article “Organoprojection” P.A. Florensky examines the issues of the relationship between mechanisms and humans, technology and culture. He proposes to consider man in his entirety, as a microcosm, as a basis for the projection of possible mechanisms, emphasizing that only in this case can technology be considered as part of culture. P.A. Florensky points out many, not yet studied, hidden human capabilities. Man is the universe, a microcosm, fraught with many secrets not yet known by man himself. It is necessary to study the relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm, man and nature, and their subtle interactions. Denial of these relationships leads to denial of the person himself, warns Florensky. P.A. Florensky prophetically saw that the idea of ​​“conquering nature,” established in the materialism of the twentieth century, would lead to the primacy of a spiritless, mechanistic civilization, a process that is currently leading to the collapse of the mechanistic civilization itself.

P.A. Florensky points out the special relationships and interactions between sound and words, studying these issues using the example of the relationship between a person and his name. When Soviet power asserted itself by renaming streets, cities, people, P.A. Florensky writes an article “Names”, in which he shows how the interaction of the image of a thing, a phenomenon is formed in the representation of a person through sound into a word: “... The name is embodied in sound, then his spiritual essence is comprehended primarily by feeling into his sound flesh.” In the renaming of streets, people, cities, Florensky sees an action with a clearly expressed goal - the destruction of the foundations of culture. “Names behave in the life of society as certain focal points of social energy; Let these tricks be imaginary, but for the eye that sees them, even imaginary, they are quite equivalent to real tricks.” A name is a fact of culture; not understanding the meaning and significance of the role of a name means not understanding the meaning of culture. Humanity cannot "without self-destruction<…>deny the reality of culture that binds the human race.” P.A. Florensky emphasizes: “a name is a word, even a condensed word; and therefore, like any word, but to a greater extent, it is the tireless playing energy of the spirit.” P.A. Florensky was close to name-slavism; he studied the energetic relationships of numbers and letters with sound.

Limb physical world and the infinity of other being, types of spaces, spheres of being are considered by P.A. Florensky in the article “Imaginaries in Geometry”. Florensky's space is multifaceted, multiworldly. He distinguishes several types and subtypes of space, saying that “for each of the intended divisions of space, large and fractional, one can, abstractly speaking, think very differently.” P.A. Florensky criticizes the foundations of Euclidean geometry, relying on the metaphysical perception of the world by the author of the Divine Comedy, recognizes Dante's providence as scientific fact and on this fact he builds a mathematical theory. For him, poetic reality is reality “imaginable and conceivable, which means that it contains data for understanding ... geometric premises.” Explaining the meaning of his article “Imaginaries in Geometry” in a letter to the political department, P.A. Florensky wrote: “My idea is to take the original words of Dante and show that in a symbolic way he expressed an extremely important geometric thought about nature and space.” P.A. Florensky “was and is fundamentally hostile to spiritualism, abstract idealism and the same metaphysics.” He believes that “a worldview must have strong concrete roots in life and end in life embodiment in technology, art, etc.” Mathematical analysis and poetic image as “an expression of a certain psychological factor”, monism of the world order, “non-Euclidean geometry in the name of technical applications in electrical engineering” - on the verge of these combinations of sciences, at the intersections of science and poetry P. A. Florensky opens up new opportunities for research and applying the results of this research in life. P.A. Florensky is a cosmist scientist, for whom human thinking is not limited to the narrow framework of the dense world, but expands to the infinite dimensions of space, containing the universe and transforming the knowledge gained to improve life on earth.

Thought, according to P.A. Florensky – an independent entity: “The thought was conceived and embodied, born and grew; nothing will return her to her mother’s womb: thought is an independent center of action.” In the book “At the Watersheds of Thought” he studies the rhythm of thought, the processes of its origin and development. The rhythm of thought reminds him of Russian folk song, where “unity is achieved by the internal mutual understanding of the performers, and not by external frameworks.” P.A. Florensky knew music professionally. Music and art can convey the subtle states of the soul observing the birth of thoughts, ideas, those facets that are so indefinable in dense earthly matter. Watersheds of thought on the verge of being and other being, on the verge of Time, where the secrets of Evening and Morning meet - “these two secrets, two lights are the boundaries of life” - these states of “two worlds” are inherent in P.A. Florensky, a thinker and scientist of the new, spiritual science. Lyudmila Vasilievna Shaposhnikova in her book “Messengers of Cosmic Evolution” notes that 2000 years ago, the Apostle Paul was executed for asserting the need for constant remembrance of worlds of other dimensions, and Father Pavel Florensky was executed in the twentieth century for the same ideas.

The name of P.A. Florensky was forbidden to be mentioned for a long time. But the thoughts and ideas of P.A. Florensky were used in the practice and technology of life of the twentieth century and contributed to the transformation of people’s consciousness and their lives. Cosmist thinker P.A. Florensky, with his creativity, works and thoughts, gave impetus to the evolutionary transformation of the complex living space of the twentieth century.

Years near the town of Yevlakh (now this is the territory of present-day Azerbaijan). Father is Russian, a communications engineer. Mother is from an ancient Armenian family that settled in Georgia. The boy was baptized at the insistence of his father in Orthodox Church in Tiflis, the name was given in honor of the Apostle Paul. The family, which, besides the eldest Pavel, had six more children, lived in isolation. They didn’t talk about religion, they didn’t take the children to church. Pavel graduated from high school with a gold medal. “But everything that I acquired intellectually,” he admitted much later, “was not received from school, but rather in spite of it. Mainly I learned from nature."

At the age of 17, Pavel Florensky experienced a deep spiritual crisis, when he suddenly clearly realized the limitations of physical knowledge and realized that without faith in God, knowledge of the Truth is impossible. This year, Florensky brilliantly graduates from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow University.

Then he meets Bishop Anthony (Florensov), who lives in retirement in the Donskoy Monastery, and asks for his blessing to accept monasticism. But the experienced elder advises the young scientist not to rush, but to enter the Moscow Theological Academy to continue his spiritual education and test himself. Florensky moves to Sergiev Posad and for many years connects his life with the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. He graduates from the Academy and then teaches there. Writes books on the philosophy of cult and culture. Here he starts a family, children are born, here he becomes a priest ().

In the first years after the revolution, he worked in the commission for the protection of monuments of art and antiquity of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. Shortly before the closing of the Lavra and the removal of the relics of St. Sergius, with the blessing of Patriarch Tikhon, together with Count Yuri Alexandrovich Olsufiev, secretly hid the honest head of the saint.

After the closure of the Lavra, Florensky, as a prominent scientist, was invited to work at the Supreme Economic Council and Glavelektro. Here he makes a number of major scientific discoveries, develops the theory and practice of using semiconductors, and creates a special type of plastic - carbolite - which came to be called “Florensky plastic”. To serve in Soviet institutions, without fear of discontent from the authorities, Father Pavel wears a priestly cassock.

O. Pavel was sentenced to 10 years in the camps and exiled to the Far East.

One of his spiritual daughters, T. A. Schaufus, who became the secretary of the President of Czechoslovakia Tomas Masaryk and died in 1986 in America, appealed through the President of the Czech Republic with a request for Father Pavel to leave the USSR. Permission to leave was obtained, and it was allowed to emigrate with the whole family, but Father Pavel refused, and refused twice. He responded to the first proposal, referring to the words of the Apostle Paul that one must be content with what one has (Phil. 4:11). And the second time he simply asked to stop any hassle regarding leaving.

First, Florensky ends up in the research department of Bamlag, where he studies the problem of construction in permafrost conditions (Many years later, when he will no longer be alive, Norilsk and Surgut will be built using his method). In the year Father Pavel was transferred to Solovki. Here he makes more than a dozen scientific discoveries and extracts agar-agar and iodine from seaweed. “Smart iodine” by Pavel Florensky, which today can be bought at any pharmacy, comes from the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp.

Pavel Florensky was shot on December 8th. Six months earlier he wrote to his wife: “The task in life is not to live without worries, but to live with dignity and not be an empty place and the ballast of your country...”

This year he was rehabilitated for lack of evidence of a crime.

In his will to his children, Father Pavel wrote: “Try to write down everything you can about the past of the clan, family, home, furnishings of things, books, etc. Try to collect portraits, autographs, letters, printed and handwritten essays of all those who were related to the family. Let the whole history of the clan will be enshrined in your home and let everything around you be filled with memories". For many years now, the grandson of Father Pavel, Abbot Andronik (Trubachev), has been lovingly and carefully collecting documents, archival materials, eyewitness accounts about Pavel Florensky, and publishing his works. And ten years ago he created a museum in Moscow of his grandfather, priest Pavel Florensky.

When asked why Father Pavel Florensky was not canonized by the Church, Abbot Andronik (Trubachev) answered this way:

"Currently, the position of the Canonization Commission, which is supported Holy Synod, is that a person who pleads guilty to non-existent crimes is a perjurer. That is, the fact that he admitted himself to be the head of a non-existent political party is his perjury against himself. I do not agree with this position huge amount people. People who went through camps and torture say that this is wrong, that the acts of investigators and investigative files cannot be the decisive argument in the matter of canonization. In addition, Florensky’s refusal to leave the camp is an example of Christian deed.

The significance of the canonization of Father Paul would be very great: the priest, philosopher and scientist became a martyr. Of course, in Heaven, before God, saints are holy without canonization. But speaking from the point of view of pedagogy, we canonize those people who set an example for our life and creativity. How many saints do we have, when can we tell about their families? Among those canonized, the bulk are monks. The example of Father Paul is important because it convinces: science and religion, knowledge and faith are not mutually exclusive, but complement each other."

Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky. Born on January 22, 1882 in Yevlakh, Elisavetpol province - died on December 8, 1937 (buried near Leningrad). Russian Orthodox priest, theologian, religious philosopher, scientist, poet.

Pavel Florensky was born on January 9 in the town of Yevlakh, Elizavetpol province (now Azerbaijan).

Father Alexander Ivanovich Florensky (30.9.1850 - 22.1.1908) - Russian, came from the clergy; an educated, cultured person, but who has lost ties with the church, with religious life. He worked as an engineer on the construction of the Transcaucasian Railway.

Mother - Olga (Salome) Pavlovna Saparova (Saparyan) (25.3.1859 - 1951) belonged to a cultural family that came from ancient family Karabakh Armenians.

Florensky's grandmother was from the Paatov family (Paatashvili). The Florensky family, like their Armenian relatives, had estates in the Elisavetpol province, where during the unrest local Armenians took refuge, fleeing the onslaught of the Caucasian Tatars. Thus, the Karabakh Armenians retained their dialect and special customs. There were two more brothers in the family: Alexander (1888-1938) - geologist, archaeologist, ethnographer and Andrei (1899-1961) - weapons designer, Stalin Prize laureate; as well as sisters: Julia (1884-1947) - psychiatrist-speech therapist, Elizaveta (1886-1967) - married to Konieva (Koniashvili), Olga (1892-1914) - miniaturist and Raisa (1894-1932) - artist, member of the Makovets association.

In 1899 he graduated from the 2nd Tiflis Gymnasium and entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow University. At the university he meets Andrei Bely, and through him Bryusov, Balmont, Dm. Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Gippius, Al. Block. Published in the magazines “New Way” and “Scales”. During his student years, he became interested in the teachings of Vladimir Solovyov and Archimandrite Serapion (Mashkin).

After graduating from the university, with the blessing of Bishop Anthony (Florensov), he entered the Moscow Theological Academy, where he conceived the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe essay “The Pillar and Ground of Truth,” which he completed by the end of his studies (1908) (he was awarded the Makariev Prize for this work). In 1911 he accepted the priesthood. In 1912, he was appointed editor of the academic journal “Theological Bulletin” (1908).

Florensky was deeply interested in the notorious “Beilis case” - the falsified accusation of a Jew in the ritual murder of a Christian boy. He published anonymous articles, being convinced of the truth of the accusation and the reality of the use of the blood of Christian babies by Jews. At the same time, Florensky’s views evolved from Christian anti-Judaism to racial anti-Semitism. In his opinion, “even an insignificant drop of Jewish blood” is enough to cause “typically Jewish” physical and mental traits in entire subsequent generations.

He perceives the events of the revolution as a living apocalypse and in this sense metaphysically welcomes it, but philosophically and politically he is increasingly inclined towards theocratic monarchism. He becomes close to Vasily Rozanov and becomes his confessor, demanding renunciation of all heretical works. He is trying to convince the authorities that the Trinity-Sergius Lavra is the greatest spiritual value and cannot be preserved as a dead museum. Florensky receives denunciations in which he is accused of creating a monarchist circle.

From 1916 to 1925, P. A. Florensky wrote a number of religious and philosophical works, including “Essays on the Philosophy of Cult” (1918), “Iconostasis” (1922), and was working on memoirs. In 1919, P. A. Florensky wrote an article “Reverse Perspective”, dedicated to understanding the phenomenon of this technique of organizing space on a plane as a “creative impulse” when considering the iconographic canon in a retrospective historical comparison with examples of world art endowed with the properties of such; among other factors, first of all, it points to the pattern of the artist’s periodic return to the use of reverse perspective and abandonment of it in accordance with the spirit of the time, historical circumstances and his worldview and “feeling of life.”

Along with this, he returned to his studies in physics and mathematics, also working in the field of technology and materials science. Since 1921 he has been working in the Glavenergo system, taking part in GOELRO, and in 1924 he published a large monograph on dielectrics. His scientific activity supported by Leon Trotsky, who once came to the institute with a visit of audit and support, which, perhaps, in the future played a fatal role in the fate of Florensky.

Another direction of his activity during this period was art criticism and museum work. At the same time, Florensky works in the Commission for the Protection of Monuments of Art and Antiquity of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, being its scientific secretary, and writes a number of works on ancient Russian art.

In 1922, he published at his own expense the book “Imaginaries in Geometry”, in which, with the help of mathematical proofs, he tried to confirm the geocentric picture of the world, in which the Sun and planets revolve around the Earth, and to refute heliocentric ideas about the structure solar system, established in science since the time of Copernicus. In this book, Florensky also proved the existence of a “border between Earth and Heaven,” located between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune.

In the summer of 1928, he was exiled to Nizhny Novgorod, but in the same year, due to the efforts of E.P. Peshkova, he was returned from exile and given the opportunity to emigrate to Prague, but Florensky decided to stay in Russia. In the early 1930s, a campaign was launched against him in the Soviet press with articles of a devastating and denunciatory nature.

On February 26, 1933, he was arrested and 5 months later, on July 26, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was sent by convoy to the East Siberian camp “Svobodny”, where he arrived on December 1, 1933. Florensky was assigned to work in the research department of the BAMLAG management. While in prison, Florensky wrote the work “Proposed State Structure in the Future.” The best state structure Florensky believed in a totalitarian dictatorship with a perfect organization and control system, isolated from the outside world. Such a dictatorship must be headed by a brilliant and charismatic leader. Florensky considered Hitler and Mussolini to be a transitional, imperfect stage in the movement towards such a leader. He wrote this work at the suggestion of the investigation within the framework of a fabricated trial against the “national-fascist center” “Party of the Revival of Russia”, the head of which was allegedly Fr. Pavel Florensky, who gave a confession in the case.

On February 10, 1934, he was sent to Skovorodino (Rukhlovo) to an experimental permafrost station. Here Florensky conducted research that later formed the basis for the book of his colleagues N. I. Bykov and P. N. Kapterev “Permafrost and Construction on It” (1940).

On August 17, 1934, Florensky was placed in the isolation ward of the Svobodny camp, and on September 1, 1934, he was sent with a special convoy to the Solovetsky special purpose camp.

On November 15, 1934, he began working at the Solovetsky camp iodine industry plant, where he worked on the problem of extracting iodine and agar-agar from seaweed and patented more than ten scientific discoveries.

On November 25, 1937, by a special troika of the NKVD of the Leningrad region, he was sentenced to capital punishment and executed.

He was buried in a common grave of those executed by the NKVD near Leningrad (“Levashovskaya Pustosh”).

Rehabilitated on May 5, 1958 (under the 1933 verdict) and March 5, 1959 (under the 1937 verdict)

Family of Pavel Florensky:

In 1910 he married Anna Mikhailovna Giatsintova (1889-1973). They had five children: Vasily, Kirill, Mikhail, Olga, Maria.

The second son, Kirill, is a geochemist and planetary scientist.

Pavel Vasilievich Florensky (b. 1936), professor at the Russian University of Oil and Gas, academician of the International Slavic Academy of Sciences, Arts and Culture, academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, member of the Union of Writers of Russia, head of the Expert Group on Miracles at the Synodal Theological Commission of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Hegumen Andronik (Trubachev) is the director of the Center for the Study, Protection and Restoration of the Heritage of Priest Pavel Florensky, director of the Museum of Priest Pavel Florensky in the city of Sergiev Posad, founder and director of the Museum of Priest Pavel Florensky in Moscow.

We also discover a complex dialectic of philosophical and theological ideas when considering the “concrete metaphysics” of Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky (1882–1937). Florensky studied at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow University. Already during his studies, the talented mathematician put forward a number of innovative mathematical ideas, in particular in an essay on set theory - “On the Symbols of Infinity.” In 1904, Florensky entered the Moscow Theological Academy. After graduating from the academy and defending his master's thesis, he becomes its teacher. In 1911, Florensky was ordained to the priesthood. Since 1914 he has been a professor at the academy in the department of history of philosophy. From 1912 until the February Revolution, he was editor of the academic journal “Theological Bulletin”. In the 20s, Florensky’s activities were connected with various areas of cultural, scientific and economic life: participation in the Commission for the Protection of Monuments of Art and Antiquities of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, in the organization of the State Historical Museum, research work in state scientific institutions (he was a number of serious scientific discoveries were made), teaching at VKHUTEMAS (professor since 1921), editing the “Technical Encyclopedia” and much more. In 1933 he was arrested and convicted. Since 1934 he was in the Solovetsky camp. On December 8, 1937, P. A. Florensky was shot.

Florensky’s “concrete metaphysics” as a whole can be attributed to the direction of Russian philosophy of unity with a characteristic orientation for this direction towards the tradition of Platonism, towards the historical and philosophical experience of the Christianization of Platonism. Florensky was an excellent researcher and expert in Plato's philosophy. The philosopher A.F. Losev noted the exceptional “depth” and “subtlety” of his “concept” of platonism. V.V. Zenkovsky in “History of Russian Philosophy” emphasizes that “Florensky develops his philosophical views within religious consciousness". This characteristic fully corresponds to the position of Florensky himself, who declared: “We have philosophized enough about religion and about religion; we must philosophize in religion, plunging into its environment.” The desire to follow the path of metaphysics, based on living, integral religious experience - the experience of church and spiritual experience of the individual - was highly inherent in this thinker.

Florensky criticized philosophical and theological rationalism, insisting on the fundamental antinomianism of both reason and being. Our mind is “fragmented and split,” and the created world in its being is “cracked,” and all this is a consequence of the Fall. However, the thirst for “whole and eternal Truth” remains in the nature of even a “fallen” person and is in itself a sign, a symbol of possible rebirth and transformation. “I don’t know,” the thinker wrote in his main work “The Pillar and Ground of Truth,” “if there is Truth... But I feel with all my gut that I cannot live without it. And I know that if she exists, then she is everything for me: reason, goodness, strength, life, and happiness.”

Criticizing the subjectivist type of worldview, which, in his opinion, has been dominant in Europe since the Renaissance, for abstract logicism, individualism, illusionism, etc., Florensky in this criticism was least inclined to deny the importance of reason. On the contrary, he contrasted Renaissance subjectivism with the medieval type of worldview as an “objective” way of knowledge, characterized by organicity, conciliarity, realism, concreteness and other features that presuppose the active (volitional) role of reason. The mind is “participated in being” and is capable, based on the experience of “communion” with the Truth in the “feat of faith,” to go through the path of metaphysical-symbolic understanding of the hidden depths of being. The “damage” of the world and the imperfection of man are not equivalent to their abandonment by God. There is no ontological abyss separating the Creator and creation.

Florensky emphasized this connection with particular force in his sophiological concept, seeing in the image of Sophia the Wisdom of God, first of all, a symbolic revelation of the unity of heaven and earth: in the church, in the imperishable beauty of the created world, in the “ideal” in human nature, etc. The true beingness as “created nature perceived by the Divine Word” is revealed in the living human language, which is always symbolic, expresses the “energy” of being. Florensky's metaphysics was, to a significant extent, a creative experience in overcoming the instrumental-rationalistic attitude to language and turning to the word-name, the word-symbol, in which only the meaning of his own life and the life of the world can be revealed to the mind and heart of a person.

Dream Interpretation