What Non-Inclusion Does and Does Not Mean

A theological companion to the previous file. That Fr. Pavel Florensky is not among the glorified New Martyrs is a fact, and it should not be softened. But it is a fact of a particular and limited kind, and the limits matter. A glorification is the Church’s recognition and reception of a holiness believed to be manifest; its absence is therefore not a judgment that holiness was absent, and still less a condemnation of the person. This file states what non-inclusion does not claim, what it does mean, and how a Christian may rightly regard Florensky now.

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

What a Glorification Is

The repository’s statement of the theology stands and is followed here. Glorification (Slavonic proslavlenie) is not a juridical tribunal proving a life against a checklist. It is the Church’s formal recognition and reception of a holiness already believed to be manifest — the acknowledgment that this person is with God, may be venerated and invoked, and that God has been glorified in him. What the Church receives is a person in his fundamental orientation to God, not a bundle of endorsed positions (see What the Church Received, whose formulation this file adopts, and the theology of reception set out at St. Xenia — Methodology).

If that is what a glorification is, several consequences follow for what its absence is.

What Non-Inclusion Does Not Mean

It is not a condemnation. No Orthodox Church has condemned Pavel Florensky. No synod has censured his writings by name, no canonical penalty was ever imposed on him, and no ecclesiastical body has pronounced on his soul. The acts of 1935 that declared sophiology heretical named Archpriest Sergius Bulgakov and his teaching (see The Condemnations of 1935); Florensky is in none of them. To read non-glorification as a verdict is to read into the silence something the silence does not contain.

It is not a judgment that he did not die for Christ. The Commission’s criteria are evidential, applied to a documentary record produced by his persecutors, in conditions where the archives are partly closed and where confessions were routinely extracted by torture (see The Criteria and the Contested Cases). The refusal to glorify without adequate evidence is a statement about what can be established, not a finding about what happened. The repository’s own assessment of the Commission’s practice — that it “has declined, to its credit, to glorify without the evidence rather than lower the standard” — cuts both ways: a rigorous standard produces cases that cannot be resolved, and an unresolved case is not a negative one.

It is not permanent. The Commission’s own history includes reconsideration in the light of new archival material, in both directions. Igumen Andronik, who reports the current position, expressly notes that such positions change over time and that many respected churchmen already hold a different view — that the interrogation record should be weighed but not treated as decisive (Pravmir, 7 December 2012). The near-halt in new canonizations since 2011 is a consequence of closed archives, not of a completed judgment (Christensen, The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia, Routledge, 2018, chs. 4–5).

It does not settle the merits of his theology. The Church has not adjudicated Florensky’s sophiology or his antinomism (see Florensky, Bulgakov, and the Assessment of Sophiology). Non-glorification is not a doctrinal ruling, and it would be a category error to cite it as one — just as it would be a category error to cite a glorification as an endorsement of a saint’s every opinion.

It does not diminish the persecution. Florensky was arrested twice and shot in the Great Terror, in a persecution that killed clergy and faithful by the tens of thousands. Whatever the state of his individual case, he belongs to the history of that persecution and to its documentation (see The New Martyrs of Russia).

What Non-Inclusion Does Mean

The limits run in both directions, and the honesty of this collection depends on stating the second set as firmly as the first.

He may not be titled “St.” This collection does not do so, and readers should not. To style him a saint is to assert on the Church’s behalf something the Church has not said.

He may not be liturgically venerated. There is no feast, no service, no troparion, and no authorization. Private commemoration of the departed — praying for him, as the Church prays for all her dead — is a different act from invoking a saint, and the distinction is not a technicality (see Prayer for the Dead).

The obstacle is real and should not be waved away. The non-betrayal criterion exists because the Church took seriously what the persecution actually did to people, and because a Church that glorified everyone who died would be making a political gesture rather than discerning sanctity. Florensky’s 1933 confession to a fabricated organization is on the record. His family’s reading of why he made it is humane and may well be right; it is not, at present, established.

His theology remains contested and is not thereby sanctified. Nothing in a martyr’s death makes a theologian’s opinions correct — a point the tradition would insist on in either direction.

How Then to Regard Him

The tradition supplies the categories, and they are more flexible than the modern habit of sorting people into “saint” and “not a saint” allows.

He may be regarded as a priest of the Russian Church who did not deny Christ and was killed by an atheist state — which is a matter of record, not of judgment. He may be prayed for, as the Church prays for all her departed, and by name. He may be read as a theologian of great power whose work is his own and is contested — read with attention and with the discrimination that any theologian’s work requires. He may be remembered among the innumerable victims of a persecution whose whole multitude, “known and unknown, revealed and unrevealed, whose names are known to God,” the Church did glorify in 2000 — a general glorification whose whole point is that the Church does not claim to know the full roll (see The Two Glorifications).

That last point is worth dwelling on, because it is the deepest thing that can honestly be said here. The Church’s general glorification of the unknown New Martyrs is precisely an act of not knowing: an acknowledgment that the number of those who suffered for Christ under the Soviet state is beyond the reach of any commission’s files, and that God knows the names. What the Church has said about the ones she cannot name, she has said with confidence. What she says about a particular man whose file is ambiguous, she says — rightly — with reserve. Both are acts of the same honesty, and neither should be read as the other.

A Closing Note on Tone

Two failures of tone are available here and this collection tries to avoid both.

The first is hagiographic pressure: the assumption that because Florensky was brilliant, sympathetic, and shot, the Church must be wrong not to have glorified him, and that a guide’s job is to correct her. That is not this collection’s business. The Commission’s criteria are serious, arrived at by people who read the files, and the repository states elsewhere that their stringency is a mark of an honest process rather than an embarrassment.

The second is insinuation: reporting the non-glorification in a way that implies a verdict — that he was compromised, or unsound, or unworthy — which no ecclesiastical body has delivered and which the record does not support. That is also not this collection’s business.

What remains is the plain statement: a man of extraordinary gifts, a priest who stayed when he could have left, who was imprisoned and shot; a body of theology that is his own and is disputed; a confession under interrogation that is on the record and whose meaning is contested; and a Church that has not glorified him and has not condemned him. The question is open. It is permissible, and perhaps right, to find that painful; it is not permissible to resolve it by assertion.

See Also

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