Background
Florensky, Pavel Aleksandrovich was born on January 19, 1882 in Evlakh, Azerbaijan.
Florensky, Pavel Aleksandrovich was born on January 19, 1882 in Evlakh, Azerbaijan.
Graduated in Physics and Mathematics at University of Moscow in 1904 (also studying Philosophy under Lopatin), and in Philosophy and History of Religion, Moscow Theological Academy in 1908.
1908-1917, Professor of History of Philosophy at Moscow Theological Academy.
Apart from his philosophical and theological concerns, Florensky composed symbolist poetry, wrote on art and its history and did significant work in pure mathematics and physics. Although he was exiled in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution, from 1920 the Soviet regime found a use for his scientific skills, principally as a researcher for the state electrification plan. He edited the Technical Encyclopedia from 1927 to 1933. His refusal to renounce the priesthood resulted in spells of imprisonment, and finally Siberian exile. Florensky’s principal religio-philosophical work The Pillar and Ground of Truth (1914) developed Solov'ev’s metaphysics of total-unity, advancing the notion of the consubstantiality of all created beings. Florensky rejected human rationality as vitiated by original sin, and leading inevitably to antinomies; perception of truth was possible only through ‘rational intuition’, or reason in conjunction with faith. Special emphasis was placed on Solov’ev’s ambiguous concept ol Sophia as mediating between total-unity, identified with the Christian triune deity, and God’s freely created world, which is portrayed in the spirit of neo-Platonism as rooted in a world of concrete universals or ideal prototypes. Sophia in one sense is the unity of these underlying ideas, and is likened to a ‘fourth hypostasis’ entering into the Trinity, though having no independent existence. Florensky’s ‘antinomism’ and sophiological metaphysics of total-unity were developed by his one-time follower and fellow philosophertheologian Bulgakov, who added religio-philosophical interpretations of the Incarnation and the problem of evil. Florensky's intuitionism influenced Lossky.