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One of the films about him is called “Russian Leonardo”. Mathematician, philosopher, priest, theologian, art historian, geologist, botanist and physicist, participant in the GOELRO plan and apologist for Christianity. A unique person who chose a common fate.
In the spring of 1989, I went on a business trip on the train from Mary to Kushka. Echelons with troops from Afghanistan were moving towards them. The guy-guide gave me to read “Questions of Philosophy”, I answered him with a fresh “Literary Study”. Florensky’s texts were published in both journals. They were still not very clear to me, but he himself immediately became close. Close in voice, thoughts about the salvation of the house, his fate of a man who lived in the epicenter of social upheaval with love, science, children, the Gospel.
The future priest gained faith in God at an age when teenagers usually lose it. Former seminarians left for science and revolution, and after graduating from university, he entered the Theological Academy. In the 1920s, Florensky was one of the few priests who dared to walk around Moscow in a cassock and lecture in Soviet universities in it. During these years, he makes discoveries that are far ahead of contemporary science: he predicts the existence of black and white holes and antiparticles, explains the reverse perspective in icon painting, constructs a computer prototype and comes to the conclusion that the Universe is finite…
After his arrest, articles on electricity for the TSB were forwarded to him in prison – no other editor could be found. Academician Vernadsky, Gorky’s widow Yekaterina Peshkova, and Czech President Tomas Masaryk petition for him. In 1935, an order came to the camp to inform Florensky, who had not been “defrocked”, that he could leave the country. Pavel Alexandrovich refuses to be released in order to share the fate of his comrades.
“Everything passes, but everything remains,” wrote Florensky. “Nothing leaves at all, nothing disappears … And feats, even if everyone forgot about them, somehow remain and bear fruit …”
His dates
- January 9 (22), 1882: born in Yevlakh (now Azerbaijan) in the family of a railway engineer.
- 1900: graduated with honors from the Tiflis Gymnasium, and then from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow University.
- 1904: entered the Moscow Theological Academy.
- 1906: Arrested for preaching against the death penalty and calling for an end to fratricide.
- 1910: married Anna Giacintova.
- 1911: ordained a deacon, the next day a priest.
- 1914: camp church priest on an ambulance train; in May he became a professor at the Moscow Theological Academy.
- 1922: publishes the book Imaginations in Geometry.
- 1928: arrested and exiled to Nizhny Novgorod.
- 1933: in the conclusion he writes a treatise “The proposed state structure in the future.”
- 1934: after refusing to emigrate, he was transferred to the Solovetsky camp.
- December 8, 1937: shot in Leningrad.
Keys to Understanding
Remember the past and live in time
It is no coincidence that our memory highlights, first of all, the good – in this way it sharpens our vision of the good in the present. Forgetfulness is the same as sadness. About this danger, Florensky wrote to his mother: “If life has meaning and value at all, then forgetting the past is ingratitude and unreason, because everything becomes the past and then all life in total should turn out to be pure zero.” Florensky often recalled the Shakespearean expression “groove of time” (“Time came out of the grooves,” says Hamlet), considering it to be mathematically accurate and meaning by it life next to the previous and next generation. Feeling himself embedded in the grooves of time, he considered a great success and happiness. When he found out about the birth of his grandson in Solovki, he wrote home: “… [He has] two grandfathers, two grandmothers and three great-grandmothers, so there will be someone to pamper him and he will be put into the groove of time …”
“ALL SCIENTIFIC IDEAS… CREATED IN ME FROM A FEELING OF MYSTERY. WHAT DOES NOT INSPIRE THIS FEELING DOES NOT ENTER THE FIELD OF MEDITATION.
Think Clearly, Do Meaningfully
A Latin proverb says: Non multa, sed multum, “Not much, but great.” It is important to solve a problem when it appears before us not in a book, but in life. Do everything you do, not for others, but for yourself, for your soul, trying to benefit from everything, so that not a single minute of your life flows past you without meaning and content, urged Florensky. Whoever does something somehow, he speaks somehow, and a blurred, unmarked word draws thought into this indistinctness. Do not allow yourself to think casually. To be distinct in one’s thought is a pledge of spiritual freedom and joy of thought.
Take care of your home and appreciate your loved ones
The best cure for disappointment is to appreciate what you have. First of all, your home and your loved ones. You can get carried away and admire strangers, but you can’t give them what your relatives need and what only you can give them. It is dangerous to be seduced by the smart instead of the essential. And strangers are inevitably smarter than their own.
Florensky was arrested when his older children were teenagers. While in prison, he was afraid that the children, orphaned without him, would exchange the house for childish companies. In almost every letter to his eldest daughter, he tactfully tries to explain to her that it is easy among friends, but this lightness is the lightness of emptiness, and the real requires effort, work and responsibility. What a home can give, no one and nothing will give later, but you need to earn it – to be attentive to the house, and not to live in it, like in a hotel.
About it
- Pavel Florensky Works in 4 volumes Thought, 2000.
- Pavel Florensky “All thoughts are about you. Letters to family from camps and prisons, Satis, 2004.
- Nikolai Lossky “History of Russian Philosophy” Academic project, 2007.