01 — Life and Formation

Florensky’s first thirty years: birth in the Caucasus in January 1882 to a Russian railway engineer and a mother of Armenian family; a childhood deliberately insulated from religion; the classical gymnasium at Tiflis; the crisis of 1899 that broke the positivist world he had been raised in; mathematics at Moscow University under N. V. Bugaev; the refusal of a university career for the Moscow Theological Academy at Sergiev Posad in 1904; marriage in 1910; ordination to the priesthood in 1911; and the editorship of Bogoslovskii vestnik.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Theological Academy; the Russian religious renaissance)

The two files of this section carry the biography to the eve of the First World War, at which point The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (Section 02) had appeared and Florensky’s public life as priest, professor, and editor was fully formed. The Soviet decades are treated separately in Section 06 and Section 07.

Two things about the formation deserve flagging at the outset, because they govern everything that follows. First, Florensky came to faith out of the exact sciences rather than around them: he was a professional mathematician before he was a theologian, and he never treated the two as separable spheres. Second, his turn to the Church was a turn to a place — the Trinity–St Sergius Lavra and the town of Sergiev Posad, where he lived for most of his adult life and to whose art and antiquities he later devoted himself under Soviet power.

Files in This Section

File Description
From Yevlakh to Moscow Birth, family, the Caucasus, the Tiflis gymnasium, the crisis of 1899, mathematics under Bugaev, and the decision that turned him toward the Academy
The Academy, Marriage, and Priesthood Sergiev Posad from 1904: the Academy, Elder Isidore, the dissertation, marriage in 1910, ordination in 1911, teaching, and Bogoslovskii vestnik

See Also