Concrete Metaphysics and the Unity of Knowledge

Behind Florensky’s bewildering range — theology, higher mathematics, electrical engineering, philology, art history, museum curatorship — lies a single programme that Russian scholarship, following Sergei Khoruzhii, calls his “concrete metaphysics”: the conviction that the spiritual is not behind or above the material but in it, and that consequently every discipline is an approach to the same reality. This file sets out the programme, the theory of the symbol on which it rests, and its two most striking products: the projected “anthropodicy” gathered as At the Watersheds of Thought, and the geometrical-cosmological essay Imaginary Points in Geometry (1922).

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

The Programme

Florensky planned his life’s work as a diptych. The Pillar was the theodicy — the way from the doubting human mind up to God. Its companion was to be the anthropodicy — the way from God down into human life, culture, language, art, and the body. He never finished the second, but its materials survive in the lecture courses and essays of the 1910s and 1920s, gathered posthumously in Russian as U vodorazdelov mysli (“At the Watersheds of Thought”) and in the lectures on the philosophy of the cult (Slesinski, Pavel Florensky: A Metaphysics of Love, SVS Press, 1984, chs. 1–2; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, SPCK, 2015, ch. 3).

The name for what unites them — “concrete metaphysics” (konkretnaia metafizika) — is the term used by Sergei Khoruzhii, the philosopher and editor who did more than anyone to reconstruct Florensky’s thought as a whole for post-Soviet readers (Khoruzhii, Mirosozertsanie Florenskogo, Tomsk: Vodolei, 1999; the term and Khoruzhii’s reading are standard in the secondary literature). Its content is a refusal: Florensky will not allow metaphysics to become a study of abstractions. Ideas, for him, are not general concepts hovering above particulars; the real is always this thing — this icon, this word, this rite, this face — and the spiritual is encountered in the particular or not at all.

Three consequences follow, and they organize everything he wrote.

The Symbol

If the spiritual is met in the particular, then the crucial category is the symbol — and Florensky’s account of it is the most influential single idea he produced.

A symbol, on his account, is not a sign that points to an absent referent. A symbol is a reality which is itself and, at the same time, more than itself — a being through which another being is genuinely present. The word carries the thing; the icon carries the prototype; the rite carries the mystery; the name carries the bearer (Florensky, Iconostasis, trans. Sheehan and Andrejev, SVS Press, 1996; Slesinski, 1984, ch. 8; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, T&T Clark, 2019).

This is an antinomic definition, and deliberately so: the symbol is two things at once and cannot be reduced to either. Deny that it is fully itself and you have allegory; deny that it is more than itself and you have a mere label. Florensky’s whole theology of the image and of the Name is an unfolding of this definition (see Iconostasis and Reverse Perspective and The Name, the Cult, and the Philosophy of Language).

It is also the point at which his admirers and his critics part company most cleanly. Admirers see a genuinely Orthodox sacramental ontology, congruent with the Seventh Council’s theology of the image and with Palamite energies (see Icons and Iconoclasm). Critics see a general theory of symbol imported from Russian Symbolism and from Platonic and occultist sources, into which the Church’s sacraments and icons are then fitted as particular cases — theology as an instance of a philosophy rather than the other way round (Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, OUP, 2013; and see Assessment).

Discontinuity

The second consequence is Florensky’s insistence on discontinuity (preryvnost’). Inherited from Bugaev’s arithmology and from his own dissertation on the singularities of plane curves, it is the claim that reality is not a smooth continuum but is articulated by real breaks, thresholds, and leaps — and that the smooth, continuous, infinitely divisible world of post-Newtonian science is an abstraction that has been mistaken for the world (Papadopoulos, “Pavel Florensky and his world,” arXiv:2310.12159, 2023, §2; Slesinski, 1984, ch. 1).

Theologically this matters because the whole of his thought turns on boundaries: between this world and the other (Letter One of the Pillar), between the sanctuary and the nave (the iconostasis), between the profane and the consecrated (the cult), between the name and the world. A metaphysics of pure continuity has no place for such boundaries; a metaphysics of discontinuity makes them the most interesting things there are.

Imaginary Points in Geometry

The most notorious product of the programme is Mnimosti v geometrii — “Imaginaries in Geometry,” sometimes Englished as Imaginary Points in Geometry — published in Moscow in 1922 with a cover designed by Vladimir Favorsky, and subtitled as an extension of the domain of two-dimensional geometric images (Papadopoulos, arXiv:2310.12159, §3).

The essay gives a geometrical interpretation of imaginary numbers on the plane, and then, in a final section, applies special relativity to argue that at velocities beyond the speed of light the observed magnitudes become imaginary — which Florensky takes as a mathematical warrant for a bounded cosmos, and thence for the plausibility of the Ptolemaic-Dantean universe of the Divine Comedy, with the boundary of the physical world coinciding with the boundary of the spiritual one (Papadopoulos, arXiv:2310.12159, §3).

The book was attacked in the Soviet press as obscurantism, and it has embarrassed some of Florensky’s admirers ever since. Two things should be said about it plainly. First, whatever its physics, it is a serious piece of geometry by a trained mathematician, and it is read as such by mathematicians today (Papadopoulos, arXiv:2310.12159, §3). Second, its cosmological conclusion is not a claim the Orthodox Church makes or needs; it is Florensky’s own speculative extension, and it is the clearest illustration of both what his method could produce and why prudent readers hold it at arm’s length. [Disputed: assessments of Mnimosti v geometrii range from a reading of the last section as a deliberately provocative thought-experiment about the limits of physical models, to the judgment that it is a straightforward and mistaken attempt to derive a cosmology from relativity; the essay’s tone leaves the question genuinely open.]

The Museum, the Dictionary, and the Encyclopaedia of Everything

The same programme accounts for the parts of his career that look, from outside, like distraction. As scientific secretary of the commission for the preservation of the art and antiquities of the Trinity–St Sergius Lavra from 1919, he argued that the Lavra should be conserved as a living whole — a “living museum” in which liturgy, architecture, icons, chant, and even the fragrance of the place belong together — rather than dismembered into a collection of objects behind glass (Pyman, Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius, Continuum, 2010, ch. 8; Florensky’s museum essays are translated in Beyond Vision, ed. Misler, trans. Salmond, Reaktion, 2002). He lectured on the theory of spatiality in art at the Moscow VKhUTEMAS. He worked on a Symbolarium, a projected dictionary of symbols. He edited a technical encyclopaedia of electrical materials. To Florensky none of this was miscellaneous: it was one enquiry conducted in whatever medium was available in a given year.

That is also, it must be said, why his output is so fragmentary. Almost none of the great projects was completed. The anthropodicy was never finished; the Symbolarium was never finished; the philosophy of the cult exists as lectures. Some of this is temperament, and most of it is the twentieth century: the man was arrested in 1928, arrested again in 1933, and shot in 1937 (see Section 07).

What Survives of the Programme

The concrete metaphysics has had an afterlife well beyond theology. Florensky’s semiotics of the symbol and his essay on reverse perspective were taken up by the Tartu–Moscow school of semiotics — the Tartu Trudy po znakovym sistemam published “Reverse Perspective” in the 1960s, the first significant republication of Florensky in the Soviet Union [Disputed: the article is most often cited as Trudy po znakovym sistemam 3 (Tartu, 1967), pp. 381–416; some catalogue entries assign it to the 1965 volume] — and by art historians, cultural theorists, and philosophers of science who have no interest in his theology (on the 1967 republication and the semiotic reception, Misler, introduction to Beyond Vision, 2002; Pyman, 2010, epilogue).

Within Orthodox theology the reception is more divided, and Section 09 reports it. What is not in dispute is the ambition. Florensky attempted, almost alone in the twentieth century, to think the whole of human knowing from within the faith without either surrendering the sciences or sentimentalizing them — and he did it while working full time as a Soviet electrical engineer.

See Also

• Antinomy as Method — the logic the programme presupposes
• Iconostasis and Reverse Perspective — the symbol theory applied to the icon
• The Name, the Cult, and the Philosophy of Language — the symbol theory applied to word and rite
• GOELRO, Dielectrics, and the Soviet Scientist — the same programme in a Soviet laboratory
• Assessment — the objection that this is philosophy governing theology
• Icons and Iconoclasm — the conciliar theology of the image his symbol theory invokes

References

• Florensky, Pavel. Mnimosti v geometrii [Imaginaries in Geometry]. Moscow: Pomor’e, 1922.
• Florensky, Pavel. U vodorazdelov mysli [At the Watersheds of Thought]. Composed 1910s–1920s; published in the Russian collected works. (The materials of the projected anthropodicy.)
• Florensky, Pavel. Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art. Ed. Nicoletta Misler, trans. Wendy Salmond. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. (The museum essays, the lectures on spatiality in art, and “Reverse Perspective”; Misler’s introduction on the Soviet-era reception.)
• Florensky, Pavel. Iconostasis. Trans. Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996.
• Khoruzhii, Sergei S. Mirosozertsanie Florenskogo [Florensky’s Worldview]. Tomsk: Vodolei, 1999. (The reading of Florensky’s system as a “concrete metaphysics.”)
• Slesinski, Robert. Pavel Florensky: A Metaphysics of Love. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984.
• Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015, ch. 3.
• Papadopoulos, Athanase. “Pavel Florensky and his world.” arXiv:2310.12159, 2023. (Bugaev and arithmology; Mnimosti v geometrii and its cosmological section; the Lavra commission and the technical work.)
• Pyman, Avril. Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius. New York: Continuum, 2010, ch. 8 and epilogue. (The Lavra commission and the “living museum”; the later reception.)
• Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T&T Clark, 2019.
• Gavrilyuk, Paul L. Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.