02 — The Pillar and Ground of the Truth

Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny (“The Pillar and Ground of the Truth”), published at Moscow by the Put’ press in 1914 and subtitled “an essay in Orthodox theodicy in twelve letters,” is the book on which Florensky’s theological reputation rests and one of the strangest major works of Russian religious thought. It is not a treatise: it is a sequence of twelve letters addressed to an unnamed friend, moving from doubt through the Trinity, the Comforter, contradiction, sin, Gehenna, creation, Sophia, friendship, and jealousy, weighted with hundreds of pages of endnotes drawing on patristics, philology, folklore, mathematics, and the history of art.

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

This section treats the book itself: what it is and how it is built (The Book and Its Form), and what it actually argues, letter by letter (The Argument of the Twelve Letters). Its central method — the doctrine that truth is antinomic — is given a section of its own (Section 03), and its most contested content, the sophiology of Letter Ten, is treated in Section 04.

Two cautions govern the section. First, the Pillar is Florensky’s own theological work, not a statement of the Church’s dogma; where he expounds the received doctrine (the Trinity, the Church, the sacraments) he does so as a believing priest, but where he innovates — on antinomy, on Sophia, on the ontology of Gehenna — the innovation is his, and this collection attributes it to him. Second, the book has been assessed very differently by serious Orthodox readers, and Section 09 reports that dispute without settling it.

Files in This Section

File Description
The Book and Its Form Genesis from the 1908 dissertation, the epistolary form, the apparatus, the 1914 publication, the English translation, and why the form is part of the argument
The Argument of the Twelve Letters A walk through the twelve letters: doubt, the Trinity as the resolution of doubt, the Comforter, contradiction, sin, Gehenna, creation, Sophia, friendship, jealousy

See Also