The Name, the Cult, and the Philosophy of Language

The same theology of the symbol that governs Florensky’s account of the icon governs his account of the word and the rite. He supported the name-glorifiers (imiaslavtsy) in the controversy of 1912–13, anonymously prefacing Hieroschemamonk Antony (Bulatovich)’s Apologia, and developed a general “onomatology” — a philosophy of the name — in the essays gathered as At the Watersheds of Thought. His lectures on the philosophy of the cult make the parallel claim for liturgical action: the rite is not a representation of a sacred reality but the place where it happens. This file expounds all three, and follows the repository in reporting the imiaslavie question as one the Church has adjourned rather than settled.

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

The Name-Glorifier Controversy

The events belong to the repository’s Jesus Prayer collection and are not repeated here: the dispute among Russian monks on Athos over the formula “the Name of God is God Himself,” the Holy Synod’s condemnatory Epistle of 18 May 1913, the forcible removal of some six hundred monks from the Holy Mountain, the 1914 mitigation under Metropolitan Makarii, the referral of the doctrinal question to the Council of 1917–18, and that Council’s dissolution before it could conclude. The question has never been resolved by any council, Russian or pan-Orthodox (see The Athonite Dispute of 1912–1913 and The Unfinished Question, with which this file agrees).

What belongs here is Florensky’s part. He took the monks’ side. He wrote an anonymous preface to Bulatovich’s Apologia of Faith in the Name of God and in the Name of Jesus (Moscow, 1913), and thereafter defended the imiaslavtsy’s position in his own idiom (Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, T&T Clark, 2019; and see The Unfinished Question). Bulgakov and Alexei Losev took the same side, each with his own philosophy of the name, and the three together made imiaslavie a permanent theme of Russian religious thought.

Florensky was thirty-one, a priest of two years’ standing, and the editor of the Moscow Theological Academy’s journal when he did this — that is, he took a position against the ruling decision of his own Church’s Synod, at some professional cost. The pattern is characteristic and is worth naming: he was willing to conclude that the ecclesiastical authority of his day had misunderstood a question, and to say so.

Onomatology: What He Argued

Florensky’s contribution was to generalize. His claim was not simply that the monks’ devotional formula was defensible but that it is a special case of a universal structure of the name, and that this structure can be exhibited across languages, folklore, literature, and the history of religion.

The core thesis: a name is not an arbitrary label attached to a bearer by convention. A name is a symbol in his technical sense — a reality which is itself and at the same time carries the presence and energy of what it names. To utter a name is to enter a relation with the named; names shape the persons who bear them; the Church’s practice of giving a name at baptism, of commemorating by name, of praying “for the servant of God, N.,” presupposes that the name is not a label but a bond (Florensky’s onomatological essays in U vodorazdelov mysli [“At the Watersheds of Thought”], discussed in Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina Tserkvi, Aleteia, 2002, and in Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019).

Applied to the divine Name, the argument runs: if the name in general carries the energy of its bearer, then the Name of God carries the divine energy — and by the conciliar teaching of 1351, God’s energy is truly God (see St. Gregory Palamas). Florensky is thus claiming that the monks’ formula, rightly parsed, is Palamite, and that the Synod’s theology, formed in a scholastic idiom weak on the essence–energies distinction, was not equipped to hear it.

Two boundaries in his account matter and are frequently missed. He does not deify sounds and letters. The claim is about the name as a living symbol in the act of invocation, not about phonemes possessing power in themselves — Bulatovich had made the same denial (“God is not a name”). And he does not make invocation automatic: the name is met in faith and repentance, or not at all. The repository states the shared ground of both parties in the controversy in exactly these terms, and this collection does not depart from it (see Not a Mantra).

The Status of the Question

Per METHODOLOGY §4.2, this collection reports and does not adjudicate. The repository’s statement stands: the imiaslavie question was condemned synodally in 1913, mitigated administratively in 1914, referred conciliarly in 1917–18, and never concluded. Neither the position Florensky defended nor the position of the 1913 Epistle can be described as the settled teaching of the Orthodox Church, and this collection improves on that state of affairs in neither direction (see The Unfinished Question, which sets out both readings at full strength).

The double assessment of the philosophers’ role, which that file draws, applies to Florensky directly and should be repeated here: to the movement’s sympathizers, the philosophical elaboration shows that the praying monks had hold of a deep truth about symbol, energy, and presence; to its critics, it shows precisely the danger — that a confession of simple hermits was speculatively inflated into name-ontologies and sophiological alignments that wander well beyond the sober Palamite frame both parties claimed.

The Philosophy of the Cult

Florensky lectured in the early 1920s on what he called the philosophy of the cult — the theology of liturgical action — and the lectures survive as one of the most substantial parts of his projected “anthropodicy” (Slesinski, Pavel Florensky: A Metaphysics of Love, SVS Press, 1984, chs. 1–2 and 8; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, SPCK, 2015, ch. 3).

The argument is the symbol theory applied to action. A rite, on Florensky’s account, is not an expression of religious feeling, nor a memorial re-enactment, nor a piece of communal theatre. It is the place where the two worlds meet in act: the point at which the ordinary — water, oil, bread, wine, gesture, breath — is not replaced by something else but becomes the bearer of what it always secretly was. He develops from this a theory of the sacred as a distinct ontological register rather than a sociological category, and he argues that the whole of human culture derives from the cult: language, art, technology, and even the sciences are, in his reading, secularized derivatives of liturgical acts, and lose their coherence when severed from that root (Slesinski, 1984; Louth, 2015, ch. 3).

This is a large claim, and it is his own — an anthropology of culture, not a dogmatic thesis. Its attraction is that it explains why he could move between a laboratory and an altar without any sense of inconsistency (see The Refusal to Emigrate and the Cassock). Its risk, which his critics press, is the same one that attends the whole “concrete metaphysics”: that a general philosophy of the symbol has been erected first, with the Church’s sacraments then fitted into it as instances — theology governed by philosophy rather than governing it (see Assessment). Readers should note the danger and read him with it in mind; they should also note that the Church’s own sacramental theology, expressed in the mysteries themselves, is not dependent on his account and is set out on its own terms elsewhere (see The Holy Mysteries and The Divine Liturgy).

Language

The onomatology sits inside a broader philosophy of language sketched in At the Watersheds of Thought. Florensky rejects both of the accounts available to him: language as a system of arbitrary conventional signs (the nominalist and, later, structuralist view) and language as a merely subjective expression of inner states. His alternative is that the word is an organism with a body (the phonetic and morphological form), a soul (the general meaning), and a spirit (the particular, living act of meaning in this utterance) — and that in the word, thought and reality genuinely meet rather than merely corresponding.

Whatever one makes of the metaphysics, the historical consequence is not in doubt: this is one of the roots from which the Russian tradition of semiotics grew, and it is why Florensky was recovered in the Soviet Union in the 1960s by the Tartu–Moscow school rather than by theologians (Misler, introduction to Beyond Vision, Reaktion, 2002; see Concrete Metaphysics and the Unity of Knowledge).

References

Florensky, Pavel. U vodorazdelov mysli [At the Watersheds of Thought]. Composed 1910s–1920s; in the Russian collected works. (The onomatological and linguistic essays.)
Antony (Bulatovich), Hieroschemamonk. Apologiia very vo Imia Bozhie i vo Imia Iisus. Moscow: Religiozno-filosofskaia biblioteka, 1913. (The work Florensky anonymously prefaced.)
Alfeyev, Hilarion. Sviashchennaia taina Tserkvi: Vvedenie v istoriiu i problematiku imiaslavskikh sporov. 2 vols. St. Petersburg: Aleteia, 2002. (The documents of the controversy; Florensky, Bulgakov, and Losev as its philosophers.)
Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T&T Clark, 2019. (Florensky and imiaslavie.)
Slesinski, Robert. Pavel Florensky: A Metaphysics of Love. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984. (The philosophy of the cult; the theology of the symbol.)
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015, ch. 3.
Florensky, Pavel. Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art. Ed. Nicoletta Misler, trans. Wendy Salmond. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. (Misler’s introduction on the semiotic reception.)
Holy Synod of the Russian Church. Epistle of 18 May 1913. Tserkovnye vedomosti, 1913.