03 — Antinomy and the Structure of Truth

“Truth is an antinomy.” Florensky’s central methodological claim, set out in Letter Six of The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, is that religious truth is irreducibly two-sided: dogma consists in paired assertions, each necessary, which discursive reason cannot reconcile, and the act of faith is the holding of both. Around that claim he built what Russian scholarship calls his “concrete metaphysics” — a programme for the unity of knowledge in which theology, mathematics, philology, art history, and the natural sciences are approaches to one reality rather than separate territories.

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

This section treats Florensky’s method rather than his conclusions. The two are hard to separate in his case, because he held that the form of a true statement about God is itself theologically significant: a doctrine flattened into a single non-contradictory proposition has, on his account, already been falsified.

Both files present Florensky’s own positions, expounded sympathetically and attributed to him. Antinomism is not the teaching of the Orthodox Church; it is one thinker’s proposal about how the Church’s teaching is structured. Where the proposal has been criticized — for licensing genuine contradiction, for owing more to Kant than to the fathers — the criticism is named.

Files in This Section

File Description
Antinomy as Method Letter Six: the sources of the idea, what Florensky claims and does not claim, the worked examples, and the objections
Concrete Metaphysics and the Unity of Knowledge The programme behind the polymathy: symbol, discontinuity, U vodorazdelov mysli, and Imaginary Points in Geometry

See Also