The Academy, Marriage, and Priesthood

From 1904 Florensky’s life was fixed at Sergiev Posad, in the shadow of the Trinity–St Sergius Lavra: four years as a student of the Moscow Theological Academy, a decade of teaching there, spiritual direction under Elder Isidore of the Gethsemane Skete, marriage to Anna Mikhailovna Giatsintova in 1910, ordination to the priesthood in 1911, and the editorship of the Academy’s journal Bogoslovskii vestnik from 1912. This file covers the years in which he became what he remained: a married parish priest who was also a professor and an editor.

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

The Academy at Sergiev Posad

Florensky entered the Moscow Theological Academy in 1904 and completed the course in 1908, submitting a dissertation entitled O dukhovnoi Istine (“On Spiritual Truth”), the seed from which The Pillar and Ground of the Truth would grow (Papadopoulos, “Pavel Florensky and his world,” arXiv:2310.12159, 2023, §2; Pyman, Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius, Continuum, 2010, ch. 3). He was retained as a lecturer and from 1908 until the Academy’s closure after the revolution he taught the history of philosophy there — a course running from the pre-Socratics through Plato and the Neoplatonists to Kant, which survives in his lecture notes and is the immediate context of much of his mature vocabulary (Papadopoulos, arXiv:2310.12159, §2; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, SPCK, 2015, ch. 3).

The Academy in these years was in an interesting condition. The great scholarly generation of Russian church history and patristics was at work; at the same time the “academic theology” of the Synodal period, largely built on Latin scholastic models, was under criticism from several directions. Florensky’s criticism was the sharpest and the least conventional: he thought the seminary theology of his day had accepted a rationalist standard of proof that was foreign to the faith and could only ever produce a defensive imitation of Western systematics. His answer was not to argue better within that framework but to change the framework — hence the antinomic method of the Pillar (see Antinomy as Method; Slesinski, Pavel Florensky: A Metaphysics of Love, SVS Press, 1984, ch. 2; Louth, 2015, ch. 3).

Elder Isidore and the Gethsemane Skete

The other side of his formation at Sergiev Posad was not academic at all. Florensky attached himself as a spiritual son to Hieromonk Isidore (Gruzinsky) of the Gethsemane Skete near the Lavra, an old and unlearned monk of great simplicity who died in 1908 (Florensky, Salt of the Earth, trans. Richard Betts, Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood Press; Pyman, 2010, ch. 3). Immediately after the elder’s death Florensky wrote his life — Sol’ zemli, “The Salt of the Earth” — a small book of anecdote and portraiture which is the least academic and in some ways the most attractive thing he wrote, and which is his one straightforwardly hagiographical work.

Two things should be noticed about it. First, it shows Florensky’s own instinct about where holiness is found: not in theological brilliance, which he had in abundance, but in an uneducated monk whose distinction was love. Second, it establishes his personal continuity with the Russian tradition of eldership and with the world of the Lavra and its sketes — the tradition of St Sergius of Radonezh, to whose monastery and relics Florensky remained bound for the whole of his adult life (see St. Sergius of Radonezh; on his later work for the Lavra’s art and antiquities, The Refusal to Emigrate and the Cassock).

Marriage and Ordination

The years 1910–1911 settled the shape of his life. In August 1910 he married Anna Mikhailovna Giatsintova, a young woman from a modest, non-intellectual family; the marriage was long, close, and — on the evidence of the prison letters of the 1930s — the emotional centre of his existence (Papadopoulos, arXiv:2310.12159, §2; Pyman, 2010, ch. 4). They had five children: Vasily, Kirill, Olga, Mikhail, and Maria-Tinatin.

In 1911 he was ordained to the priesthood, serving thereafter at the church of the shelter of the Sisters of Mercy at Sergiev Posad, where he remained as priest until the church was closed in 1921 (Papadopoulos, arXiv:2310.12159, §2; Pyman, 2010, ch. 4). The point deserves emphasis because of how his later life is often told: Florensky was not a lay religious philosopher who happened to be pious. He was an ordained priest with a cure of souls, serving the liturgy for a decade before the Soviet closures, and it is as a priest — cassock, cross, and all — that he entered the Soviet institutions of the 1920s (see The Refusal to Emigrate and the Cassock).

The choice of marriage and secular priesthood, over the monastic path to which he had at one time been strongly drawn, is itself a piece of his theology. The Pillar’s eleventh letter, on friendship, and its treatment of specific, embodied, particular love as the medium in which truth is known, is not a detached philosophical thesis but the working out of a conviction he had staked his life on: that the concrete personal bond, not the abstract idea, is where reality is met (Slesinski, 1984, ch. 6, whose subtitle “a metaphysics of love” names precisely this).

Bogoslovskii vestnik

From 1912 to 1917 Florensky was editor of Bogoslovskii vestnik (“Theological Herald”), the journal of the Moscow Theological Academy (Papadopoulos, arXiv:2310.12159, §2; Pyman, 2010, ch. 5). [Disputed: the editorship is dated 1912–1917 in most accounts and 1911–1917 in some reference summaries; the discrepancy concerns the point at which he formally took over the journal rather than the substance of his tenure.] Under his editorship the journal published patristic translations, philosophical essays, and material from the religious-philosophical world outside the academy — an editorial policy that made it more interesting and more controversial than a seminary journal was expected to be, and that drew criticism from conservative quarters.

The editorship also placed him at the centre of the pre-revolutionary Russian religious renaissance. His friendships and collaborations in these years included Sergei Bulgakov, whom he helped draw back toward the Church and who later credited him with a decisive role in his return (see Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and the hub essay Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy); Vasily Rozanov, with whom his relations were close and, on one matter, later became the subject of serious criticism (see Assessment); and the circle around the publishing house Put’, which brought out the Pillar in 1914.

1913 and the Name-Glorifiers

One episode from these years bears directly on his theology and belongs here as biography. When the name-glorifier (imiaslavie) controversy broke over Mount Athos in 1912–13 and the Russian Holy Synod condemned the movement in its Epistle of 18 May 1913, Florensky took the monks’ side. He anonymously prefaced the Apologia of Hieroschemamonk Antony (Bulatovich), published in Moscow in 1913, and thereafter developed a general philosophy of the name of which the imiaslavtsy’s confession was, in his reading, a particular case (Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, T&T Clark, 2019; the episode as reported in this repository at The Unfinished Question, with which this file agrees).

This was not a safe position for a young academic priest, and it had consequences for his standing. It is also the first clear instance of a pattern: Florensky’s willingness to attach his considerable intelligence to a position that the ecclesiastical authority of his day had condemned, on the ground that the authority had misunderstood the question. Whether he was right is a matter the Church has never settled — the imiaslavie question was mitigated in 1914, referred to the Council of 1917–18, and never concluded — and this collection follows the repository’s practice of reporting it as open (see The Name, the Cult, and the Philosophy of Language).

The Eve of the Revolution

By 1917 Florensky was thirty-five: a priest of six years’ standing with a growing family, a professor of the history of philosophy, the editor of the Academy’s journal, and the author of a book that had made him famous and controversial in equal measure. The Academy would be closed, the journal suppressed, the Lavra shut and its brotherhood dispersed, and his parish church taken from him within five years. Everything in this file was destroyed by 1921 — and Florensky, who could have left, did not (see The Refusal to Emigrate and the Cassock).

References

Papadopoulos, Athanase. “Pavel Florensky and his world.” arXiv:2310.12159, 2023. (The Academy years, the 1908 dissertation, the teaching of the history of philosophy, marriage and ordination, the editorship.)
Pyman, Avril. Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius. New York: Continuum, 2010, chs. 3–5. (Sergiev Posad, Elder Isidore, the marriage, the journal, the circle around Put’.)
Florensky, Pavel. Salt of the Earth. Trans. Richard Betts. Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood Press. (His life of Hieromonk Isidore of the Gethsemane Skete.)
Slesinski, Robert. Pavel Florensky: A Metaphysics of Love. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984, chs. 2 and 6. (The critique of Synodal academic theology; friendship and the metaphysics of love.)
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015, ch. 3.
Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T&T Clark, 2019. (Florensky and the imiaslavie controversy.)
Antony (Bulatovich), Hieroschemamonk. Apologiia very vo Imia Bozhie i vo Imia Iisus. Moscow: Religiozno-filosofskaia biblioteka, 1913. (The work Florensky anonymously prefaced.)