08 — The Question of Canonization

Fr. Pavel Florensky was shot by the NKVD on 8 December 1937 and is widely revered as a martyr of the Soviet persecution. He has not been glorified by the Moscow Patriarchate, and he is not among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia canonized at the Jubilee Council of 2000. This section reports that fact soberly: what is documented about why, what is not documented and should therefore not be asserted, and what non-inclusion in a glorification does and does not mean.

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

This section is written under three constraints, stated here so that a reader can hold the collection to them.

  1. It does not present him as glorified. He is titled “Fr.” throughout this collection, never “St.” Devotional publishers who have printed his name with the title of saint are reporting a private veneration, not an act of the Church.
  2. It does not imply that he was unworthy. Non-inclusion in a glorification is not a verdict against a person, and the Church has issued no verdict against Florensky. The repository’s established formulation for this — developed for a comparable contested reception — is followed here (see What the Church Received).
  3. It reports only what is documented. Where the reasoning has not been officially published, this section says so and declines to supply a motive, per METHODOLOGY §4.2.

Files in This Section

File Description
The State of the Question The record: the 2000 glorification, the Commission’s criteria, the 1933 depositions, the sophiology, the ROCOR question, and the popular veneration
What Non-Inclusion Does and Does Not Mean The theology: what a glorification claims, what non-glorification does not claim, and how a Christian may rightly regard him now

See Also