The State of the Question

Fr. Pavel Florensky has not been glorified. He was not among the more than a thousand named New Martyrs and Confessors glorified by the Moscow Patriarchate at the Jubilee Council of 2000, and no subsequent act has added him. This file sets out the record: what the Synodal Canonization Commission’s criteria are, what has actually been said about his case by those close to it, what is often asserted but not documented, the ROCOR question, and the fact of a real and continuing popular veneration that the Church has not ratified. It reports and does not adjudicate.

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

The Fact

The Moscow Patriarchate glorified the Synaxis of the Holy New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia at the Jubilee Bishops’ Council of 13–16 August 2000, comprising more than a thousand examined and named individuals together with a general glorification of the whole multitude “known and unknown”; the named list was designed to grow case by case and had reached 1,774 by 1 January 2011 (see The Two Glorifications and The Criteria and the Contested Cases, with which this file agrees).

Florensky is not among the named. Nor has he been added since. There is no service to him, no feast day, and no ecclesiastical authorization of his veneration by the Moscow Patriarchate.

The Criteria That Bear on His Case

The Synodal Commission for the Canonization of Saints, working from the NKVD investigation files, applied to candidates from the Soviet persecution a set of criteria of which one is decisive here: the negative test of non-betrayal. A candidate must not have, under interrogation, given incriminating testimony against others, denounced fellow believers, or otherwise cooperated with the investigation against the Church. A man who died faithful but who had signed testimony that fed the case could not, on this criterion, be glorified as a martyr, however sympathetic his own suffering (Christensen, The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia, Routledge, 2018, ch. 4, as set out in The Criteria and the Contested Cases).

The Commission is aware that the confessions in the files were often extracted under torture and “may not reflect what the prisoner truly did or said” — the repository states this uncertainty plainly, and it is not resolved by anything in Florensky’s case.

What Has Actually Been Said About Florensky

The most substantial statement in the accessible record comes from Igumen Andronik (Trubachev) — Florensky’s grandson, the editor of his collected works and of his prison letters, and the person who has done more than anyone to bring the archive to light. In an interview given on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the execution, he reported the position as follows (Andronik [Trubachev], interview with Leonid Vinogradov, Pravmir, 7 December 2012):

  • The Commission’s position as he reports it: that the question of canonizing a person who was accused of creating a non-existent counter-revolutionary organization and who pleaded guilty to it will not be raised, even if he was afterward shot.
  • What Florensky did: he was accused of creating a counter-revolutionary monarchist organization; he not only pleaded guilty but took the blame upon himself, saying that he was its ideologue.
  • Why, on his family’s understanding: he did this in an attempt to protect others.
  • Andronik’s own view: that this is the official position of those currently entrusted with canonizations, that such positions change over time, and that “many highly respected church people” hold a different view — that surviving accounts of investigations should be taken into consideration but should not be treated as decisive. He states his own conviction that Florensky has entered the host of martyrs, on the ground of the camp testimony to his faith and his fidelity to his priesthood.

This is reported here as what it is: the statement of a well-informed and deeply interested party, not an official communiqué. It is nevertheless the clearest thing on the record, and it identifies the operative obstacle.

What Is Asserted But Not Documented

Two things are frequently said about Florensky’s non-glorification that this collection declines to assert.

That his sophiology is the reason. It is commonly stated — in Anglophone discussion above all — that Florensky’s sophiology bars him from consideration, on the ground that a saint cannot hold heretical opinions and that developed sophiology is heretical. [Disputed: the sophiological consideration undoubtedly features in discussion of Florensky’s case, and the ROCOR Council of Bishops did declare sophiology heretical in 1935 — but that act named Archpriest Sergius Bulgakov and his teaching, not Florensky (see The Condemnations of 1935 and Florensky, Bulgakov, and the Assessment of Sophiology). No published decision of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Canonization Commission gives sophiology as the reason for not advancing Florensky’s case, and the reason reported by the person closest to the file is the 1933 depositions. This collection therefore reports the sophiology as part of the surrounding discussion and not as the documented ground.]

Any account of the Commission’s motives beyond its published criteria. [Disputed: there is no published formal decision of the Synodal Canonization Commission setting out reasons in Florensky’s case. What exists is the Commission’s general criteria and the account given by Igumen Andronik. Assertions about what the Commission “really” thinks — whether hostile or exculpatory — are inference. Per METHODOLOGY §4.2, this collection names what is documented and supplies no motive.]

The ROCOR Question

The Russian Church Abroad’s glorification of the New Martyrs at New York in 1981 was a collective act: it glorified the martyrs of the Russian persecution as a body, named and unnamed (see The Two Glorifications). This has led to the claim that Florensky was thereby glorified by implication.

[Disputed: whether the ROCOR act of 1981 covers Florensky. (a) On one reading, a collective glorification of all who suffered for Christ in the Russian persecution covers everyone who in fact did so, and a man shot as a priest in 1937 is included whether or not his name was pronounced. (b) On the other reading, a collective act does not constitute the veneration of any particular contested individual, and ROCOR sources have specifically resisted the inference in Florensky’s case: it is reported in ROCOR-connected discussion that where his name appeared on a version of the glorification icon of the New Martyrs it was subsequently disowned as not referring to the theologian, and that Metropolitan Vitaly (Ustinov), then First Hierarch, stated that no such glorification had been made. These reports circulate in ROCOR discussion and correspondence rather than in published synodal acts, and this collection reports the episode as unestablished and does not build on it. What is not in dispute is that ROCOR has never issued an act glorifying Florensky by name, and that the reservations about his writings within ROCOR are of long standing.]

Alongside all this there is a real and continuing devotion, which honest reporting must include.

Florensky is commemorated at memorials to the victims of the terror; the anniversary of his death is marked; his prison letters are read devotionally; and some Orthodox publishers — including the St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood at Platina, which issued his life of Elder Isidore — have printed his name with the title of saint. Written and spoken references to him as a martyr are common in Russian and in the diaspora. Several of the people who venerate him are aware of the canonization question and venerate him anyway.

That devotion is a fact about the Church’s life and is reported as such. It is not an ecclesiastical act, and this collection does not treat it as one. The Orthodox understanding of glorification is that the Church recognizes and receives a holiness already believed to be manifest; popular veneration is therefore not irrelevant to the process, but it does not by itself constitute glorification, and a veneration the Church has not ratified remains exactly that (see the theology of glorification and reception set out at What the Church Received).

The Honest Description of His Status

Neither “an uncanonized man whose case the Church has rejected” nor “a martyr of the Soviet persecution whom the Church merely has not got round to naming” is accurate. The exact description is this:

Fr. Pavel Florensky was shot by the state in a persecution of the Church, having neither renounced his priesthood nor denied Christ. The Moscow Patriarchate has not glorified him. The obstacle identified in the accessible record is his 1933 confession to a fabricated organization — a confession his family holds he made to shield others, and which the Commission’s criteria treat as disqualifying at the present state of the evidence. The Commission has published no formal reasoning in his case, the archives on which such reasoning would rest have been progressively re-restricted since the mid-2000s, and the question is therefore open rather than closed.

That is the whole of it, and the collection improves on it in neither direction.

See Also

References

  • Andronik (Trubachev), Igumen. Interview with Leonid Vinogradov, “The 75th Anniversary of Fr. Pavel Florensky’s Martyric Death.” Pravmir, 7 December 2012. (The reported position of the Synod and Canonization Commission; the confession and the “ideologue” claim; the family’s reading; Andronik’s own view and his note that other churchmen hold a different one.)
  • Christensen, Karin Hyldal. The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia: Soviet Repression in Orthodox Memory. London: Routledge, 2018, chs. 4–5. (The Synodal Canonization Commission, the non-betrayal criterion, the reading of interrogation files, the contested and withdrawn cases, and the re-restriction of the archives.)
  • Moscow Patriarchate, Jubilee Bishops’ Council, 13–16 August 2000. Acts glorifying the Synaxis of the Holy New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.
  • Florensky, Pavel. Salt of the Earth. Trans. Richard Betts. Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood Press. (Editions of which carry the author’s name with a saintly title — an instance of the private veneration described above.)
  • METHODOLOGY.md §4.2, this repository. (The discipline of reporting live disputes with the positions named and no adjudication.)