What do you think?
Rate this book
Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius: The Tragic and Extraordinary Life of Russia's Unknown da Vinci
This is the first biography in English of an extraordinary polymath whose great genius was stifled and finally extinguished by the Soviet Union. Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius is the first biography in English of an extraordinary polymath whose genius was stifled and finally extinguished by the Soviet Union. Today Pavel Florensky is often referred to as the Russian da Vinci. Florensky was, at one and the same time, a supremely gifted philosopher, mathematician, physicist, inventor, engineer and theologian. He was also a poet and wrote studies of history, language and art. Although he taught philosophy for most of his working life, his interests were wide-ranging and profound and included the study of time and space, the theory of relativity, aspects of language, and the properties of materials and geology. His book The Pillar and the Ground of Truth is widely seen as a masterpiece of Russian Orthodox theology. Eminent Russian scholar Avril Pyman looks at Florensky's life, from his childhood as the son of a railroad engineer to his mysterious death, and provides a populist perspective on his achievements. Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius celebrates the life of this unjustly forgotten victim of the Soviet Union.
328 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
About the author
Avril Pyman
33 books6 followersBritish scholar and translator of Russian literature. In addition to translating poetry and children's literature, she has written a study of Russian symbolism, as well as biographies of Alexander Blok and Pavel Florensky.
She was married to the late Russian artist Kirill Sokolov. They have daughter Irina (Irene).
She was married to the late Russian artist Kirill Sokolov. They have daughter Irina (Irene).
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 17, 2020
I can't remember now where I first came across a reference to Pavel Florensky but after reading a little about him and grandiose claims to his being "Russia's unknown da Vinci" I thought he might be worth learning more about. There isn't much available in English on the man this book I believe being the first English language biography. So, da Vinci? Well based on this book I did not find him that quite although that could be the fault of the book rather than the man.
While Florensky for me is most interesting for his natural scientific endeavours this book for me was overly bogged down in his ecclesiastical studies. The fifth chapter of the book "The Quiet Mutiny" which deals with his formal academic submission to theological college is particularly heavy going for anyone not familiar with theological discussion. The most interesting part of his theological research, and controversial, seems to have concerned the concept of the female face of Christianity in the 'spirit' of Sophia. Quite why he abandoned a sensible secular scientific life for the anachronistic life of the then dying institution of Russian Orthodoxy was never entirely clear to me. There are some interesting musings on the nature of belief and faith but I remain unclear as to the real motivation for his entry into the priesthood, did the atheism of his youth really get wiped away by faith in the unseen or was it more closely connected to the idea of Mother Russia and belonging? "Pyman writes the "returning intelligentsia wanted, without renouncing science and culture, to re-establish communion with the faith of the Russian peasantry and it was precisely the ultra-refined avant-garde who though to approach the problem through what they termed 'historical Christianity' as represented by the Russian Orthodox Church, an institution of which the intelligentsia as a whole and the religiously inclined student of mathematics and philosophy Pavel Florensky in particular knew remarkably little".
The closing chapters of the book deal with Florensky in the turbulent post 1917 years when he returned to the natural sciences with the closure of the seminaries and suppression of religion by the new state. While his life and movements are tracked relatively little detail is offered regarding his research and work at this time. This may well be, as is occasionally stated, due to the lack or loss of information but it creates a bit of a gap in what I feel might be the more interesting side of his life.
Post Bolshevik Revolution, while the church was gradually suppressed Florensky threw himself back into science while never renouncing his commitment to the priesthood and paradoxically made a recognised valuable contribution "to the economic and technical self-sufficiency of the Bolsheviks". In darker moments Florensky mused on the idea of an 'End' which in the tumult of the early decades of the Twentieth Century probably felt as close as climate change makes it feel now, writing "It is right, however, without specifying times or seasons, to maintain an awareness that the world will have an End, though the symptoms of this are evident rather in the discord growing up between Man and Nature than in the activities of advocates of rationalised mysticism or painful social panaceas".
It was no doubt inevitable that Florensky would fall foul of Stalin's double distrust of the priesthood (seen as in league with the counter-revolutionary White forces abroad and subversives at home) and his regimes general dislike and distrust of former bourgeois and intellectuals in general. Despite this Florensky seems to have maintained an inner strength which kept him working on scientific challenges despite the hardships he faced in various prisons and labour camps from which he also maintained a fatherly relationship of encouragement with his family from which he remained separated for many years. His eventual random execution was just another injustice among many found, at his rehabilitation in 1958 to have had no legal grounding or justification in Soviet law.
Florensky was no doubt, like many who were consumed during the terror of the 1930s, a man with special qualities and foresight who, given the opportunity, could have contributed to the positive transformation of the Soviet Union. As it was, Florenky recognised the falleness of humanity and was perhaps little surprised by the turn of events. He wrote "I know enough of history and historical development of thought to foresee the time when people will begin to gather up the pieces of what they have destroyed. But that does not so much comfort me as exacerbate me: detestable human stupidity, spun out from the beginning of history and, no doubt, intent on continuing to the end".
The book has a useful chronology at the end which could be worth reading before tackling the main body, or at least reading in conjunction with in order to keep some idea of time and events which are not always clear. There is also useful glossary of names. The notes accompanying the work are less useful going into detail where I didn't require them and absent where I would have liked some detail.
While Florensky for me is most interesting for his natural scientific endeavours this book for me was overly bogged down in his ecclesiastical studies. The fifth chapter of the book "The Quiet Mutiny" which deals with his formal academic submission to theological college is particularly heavy going for anyone not familiar with theological discussion. The most interesting part of his theological research, and controversial, seems to have concerned the concept of the female face of Christianity in the 'spirit' of Sophia. Quite why he abandoned a sensible secular scientific life for the anachronistic life of the then dying institution of Russian Orthodoxy was never entirely clear to me. There are some interesting musings on the nature of belief and faith but I remain unclear as to the real motivation for his entry into the priesthood, did the atheism of his youth really get wiped away by faith in the unseen or was it more closely connected to the idea of Mother Russia and belonging? "Pyman writes the "returning intelligentsia wanted, without renouncing science and culture, to re-establish communion with the faith of the Russian peasantry and it was precisely the ultra-refined avant-garde who though to approach the problem through what they termed 'historical Christianity' as represented by the Russian Orthodox Church, an institution of which the intelligentsia as a whole and the religiously inclined student of mathematics and philosophy Pavel Florensky in particular knew remarkably little".
The closing chapters of the book deal with Florensky in the turbulent post 1917 years when he returned to the natural sciences with the closure of the seminaries and suppression of religion by the new state. While his life and movements are tracked relatively little detail is offered regarding his research and work at this time. This may well be, as is occasionally stated, due to the lack or loss of information but it creates a bit of a gap in what I feel might be the more interesting side of his life.
Post Bolshevik Revolution, while the church was gradually suppressed Florensky threw himself back into science while never renouncing his commitment to the priesthood and paradoxically made a recognised valuable contribution "to the economic and technical self-sufficiency of the Bolsheviks". In darker moments Florensky mused on the idea of an 'End' which in the tumult of the early decades of the Twentieth Century probably felt as close as climate change makes it feel now, writing "It is right, however, without specifying times or seasons, to maintain an awareness that the world will have an End, though the symptoms of this are evident rather in the discord growing up between Man and Nature than in the activities of advocates of rationalised mysticism or painful social panaceas".
It was no doubt inevitable that Florensky would fall foul of Stalin's double distrust of the priesthood (seen as in league with the counter-revolutionary White forces abroad and subversives at home) and his regimes general dislike and distrust of former bourgeois and intellectuals in general. Despite this Florensky seems to have maintained an inner strength which kept him working on scientific challenges despite the hardships he faced in various prisons and labour camps from which he also maintained a fatherly relationship of encouragement with his family from which he remained separated for many years. His eventual random execution was just another injustice among many found, at his rehabilitation in 1958 to have had no legal grounding or justification in Soviet law.
Florensky was no doubt, like many who were consumed during the terror of the 1930s, a man with special qualities and foresight who, given the opportunity, could have contributed to the positive transformation of the Soviet Union. As it was, Florenky recognised the falleness of humanity and was perhaps little surprised by the turn of events. He wrote "I know enough of history and historical development of thought to foresee the time when people will begin to gather up the pieces of what they have destroyed. But that does not so much comfort me as exacerbate me: detestable human stupidity, spun out from the beginning of history and, no doubt, intent on continuing to the end".
The book has a useful chronology at the end which could be worth reading before tackling the main body, or at least reading in conjunction with in order to keep some idea of time and events which are not always clear. There is also useful glossary of names. The notes accompanying the work are less useful going into detail where I didn't require them and absent where I would have liked some detail.
November 20, 2013
In Russian literature there is the tradition of the ‘superfluous man’ (лишний человек), which takes its name from Turgenev, but can be found in the works of Pushkin, Lermontov and Goncharov. (The superfluous men of Dostoevsky and Gogol resist the designation, indeed, fight the imposition with usually disastrous results ). But there exists in Russian life another man, the essential man, about whom not many wrote, because it was enough to be such men (and women). If there is a literary character that best represents the essential man it is Levin, that idealized stand-in for Tolstoy, who was himself a paragon of essential men. These men live to the depth of their being, with such bodily wear and tear and spiritual gusto, that at the end of their lives – whether at a ripe old age or prematurely snubbed out – an observer can only say, “Now that was a life…”
Pavel Florensky was such a man, and the subject of Avril Pyman’s biography, Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius (Continnuum, 2010). Florensky lived life as a search for truth and meaning beyond the positivist science and inflated rationalism of his day. Such pursuit eventually cost him his life, at the hands of Stalinist goons in the NKVD, in an artillery range outside St. Petersburg in 1937. Florensky, son of an Armenian mother and Russian father, renowned scientific engineer, mathematician, and Russian Orthodox priest, was buried in an unmarked mass grave alongside other prisoners, martyrs to the vulgar brutalism of Communist Russia. He left behind a grieving family, and a body of written work that is staggering in volume, and breathtaking in range: innumerable articles on applied physics, math, music, art, electricity and iodine production, as well as a body of theological and philosophic works. His best known work is The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters , an exercise in Christian epistemology published at the beginning of World War one and before the Bolsheviks consolidated power.
The Pillar and the Ground is the work of an emerging theologian and academic whose highest calling is the search for the truth found in and lived through Christian love, rooted firmly in the Russian Orthodox tradition. One should understand Florensky as a man of his time and place, a Russian Symbolist who applies systematic logic to a deeper, mystical and timeless meaning. For Florensky, all human pursuits are creative, and all creative acts are aesthetic manifestations of beauty. Russian Symbolism was born of modernism, but emanates from ancient tradition, and from a specific, geographic and wholly Russian encounter.
As with the symbolists, the essential man carries his past with him. In fact, his life often becomes an effort to reclaim essential truths that were known as children. Dostoevsky writes that, “some good, sacred memory preserved from childhood is perhaps the best education". In his memoirs, Florensky elaborates on this idea that “"the child has absolutely precise metaphysical formulas for everything other-worldly, and the sharper his sense of Edenic life, the more defined is his knowledge of these formulas" (For My Children, 74). All of his work, scientific, religious and otherwise, was a means to recreate the "direct contemplation of Nature's countenance" that he naturally and spontaneously enjoyed as a child in the Caucasus.
Florensky pursued every occupation – be it contemplation of the divine or electrification for the masses – with unbridled enthusiasm and intellectual discipline, not to refute a child-like state of wonder, but to return to it. Tolstoy immersed himself in land management, Nabokov chased butterflies, and Florensky worked, arduously and without ceasing for the benefit of his country, his children and to fulfill the promise he knew instinctively as a child, to apprehend life as the synthesis of an infinite number of individual moments in which the truth and beauty of this world is continuously revealed. Florensky never lost his sense of awe, never wanted for love of his fellow man, not even in the work camps in Russia’s bleakest period when he suffered extreme physical hardship, and presumably not even when he met his death by bullet in the back of his skull. In one of his last letters to his wife he encourages her to go for a stroll at dusk and think of him. As the sun inevitably set on his earthly life, his light remained profound, deep and true. Now that was a life…
Pavel Florensky was such a man, and the subject of Avril Pyman’s biography, Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius (Continnuum, 2010). Florensky lived life as a search for truth and meaning beyond the positivist science and inflated rationalism of his day. Such pursuit eventually cost him his life, at the hands of Stalinist goons in the NKVD, in an artillery range outside St. Petersburg in 1937. Florensky, son of an Armenian mother and Russian father, renowned scientific engineer, mathematician, and Russian Orthodox priest, was buried in an unmarked mass grave alongside other prisoners, martyrs to the vulgar brutalism of Communist Russia. He left behind a grieving family, and a body of written work that is staggering in volume, and breathtaking in range: innumerable articles on applied physics, math, music, art, electricity and iodine production, as well as a body of theological and philosophic works. His best known work is The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters , an exercise in Christian epistemology published at the beginning of World War one and before the Bolsheviks consolidated power.
The Pillar and the Ground is the work of an emerging theologian and academic whose highest calling is the search for the truth found in and lived through Christian love, rooted firmly in the Russian Orthodox tradition. One should understand Florensky as a man of his time and place, a Russian Symbolist who applies systematic logic to a deeper, mystical and timeless meaning. For Florensky, all human pursuits are creative, and all creative acts are aesthetic manifestations of beauty. Russian Symbolism was born of modernism, but emanates from ancient tradition, and from a specific, geographic and wholly Russian encounter.
As with the symbolists, the essential man carries his past with him. In fact, his life often becomes an effort to reclaim essential truths that were known as children. Dostoevsky writes that, “some good, sacred memory preserved from childhood is perhaps the best education". In his memoirs, Florensky elaborates on this idea that “"the child has absolutely precise metaphysical formulas for everything other-worldly, and the sharper his sense of Edenic life, the more defined is his knowledge of these formulas" (For My Children, 74). All of his work, scientific, religious and otherwise, was a means to recreate the "direct contemplation of Nature's countenance" that he naturally and spontaneously enjoyed as a child in the Caucasus.
Florensky pursued every occupation – be it contemplation of the divine or electrification for the masses – with unbridled enthusiasm and intellectual discipline, not to refute a child-like state of wonder, but to return to it. Tolstoy immersed himself in land management, Nabokov chased butterflies, and Florensky worked, arduously and without ceasing for the benefit of his country, his children and to fulfill the promise he knew instinctively as a child, to apprehend life as the synthesis of an infinite number of individual moments in which the truth and beauty of this world is continuously revealed. Florensky never lost his sense of awe, never wanted for love of his fellow man, not even in the work camps in Russia’s bleakest period when he suffered extreme physical hardship, and presumably not even when he met his death by bullet in the back of his skull. In one of his last letters to his wife he encourages her to go for a stroll at dusk and think of him. As the sun inevitably set on his earthly life, his light remained profound, deep and true. Now that was a life…
July 27, 2016
We seem to have a fascination with imaging the end of society. We like to talk as if we're at the end of an era, the twilight of Western civilization or something similar. This appears in our rhetoric, but it also appears in the glut of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic movies and books of late. I often find myself wondering if the Byzantines felt the same way in the late 1300s, or the early Britons in the face of the Norman invasions, or anyone at all during the long twilight of Rome.
The truth seems to be that society goes through transitions-- some quite painfully abrupt and others so gradual as to be unapparent until years or centuries later. For Christians, ideas about these collapses or transitions often take the form of fantasies of persecution or monastic retreat. We wonder what the Church might look like, how it would endure or be transformed, in such transitions. Ironically though, we forget that we have examples from the recent past of what the Church looks like when society collapses or transforms abruptly beyond recognition. Besides the more relevant example of Christianity in the Middle East today, we have the story of the Orthodox Church in Russia. It's a story that I still don't know all the details of, the collapse of an old order and the transition from one form of civilized society to another very different. What did the Bolshevik Revolution mean for the practicing faithful and for the institutional Church itself?
Pyman's book doesn't answer all these questions. In fact, it assumes the reader already has the context in which to situate the story she's telling: that of the life of Pavel Florensky, a Russian scientist and intellectual, a father, a priest, and ultimately a declared enemy of the Soviet state. This was one of my primary frustrations with the book: I was dropped into a narrative that I still don't have enough bearings to navigate. Pyman discusses Florensky's early work in a plethora of Russian names I don't know, and when the drama of the cataclysmic revolution that would have such an effect on the Church and Florensky's life within it take place, again the reader is assumed to already understand the contexts of the events being alluded to. It's difficult to understand the nature of Florensky's role and reactions to these transformations if, for instance, you don't already have a grasp on the role the Church played with respect to the government under the last Tsar and a basic knowledge of its hierarchical structure. All this knowledge is assumed. Indeed, not having much of the context of late Tsarist and early Soviet Russia made Florensky's eventual brushes with the Soviet authorities seem to me perhaps as arbitrary and obscure as they must have to the new Soviet citizens who found themselves in a wash of acronyms, bureaus, committees, and police services that seemingly sprang up overnight.
But Pyman is not writing a book about social transformation or the plight of the Church after the revolution, as it found itself in an increasingly and militaristically atheistic society. (If someone could recommend such a book, I would be interested.) Rather, Pyman's book is about a man, Pavel Florensky, who came to age in the flourishing of the pre-revolutionary intellectual and literary scene and shocked many of his avant-garde social circle by coming to faith and ultimately joining the Church, a body thought to embody many of the oppressive, traditionalist forces the young guard were rallying against. His first major work, The Ground and Pillar of Faith, which I have not read, is an intellectual apology for faith (something along the lines of a Russian Mere Christianity) lived in the life of the Orthodox Church and is still influential today.
Florensky was also recognized and highly regarded as a scientist, and when the theological schools at which he taught were closed after the Soviets came to power, he worked and published extensively as an electrical researcher on behalf of the state. He ultimately lost his parish and in many ways his priestly vocation, but he famously retained his beard and cassock working and lecturing on science in an increasingly hostile environment. His life is the story of intense learning and service, but also of rear-guard action, a long defeat, trying (for instance while serving on the board of antiquities for Russia's most revered monastery) to save the traditions and artifacts of the Church (even, according to this account, smuggling away the head of a saint whose tomb was to be desecrated) in an increasingly grim time.
It's the story of a long failure, as Florensky is finally arrested, does more scientific work for a time in a Siberian camp, writes his wife and children beautiful letters from a crumbling monastery converted in a labor camp and prison on the North Sea, and is ultimately shot on obscure charges and buried in a mass grave outside Moscow. It is in these final days that Pyman's account becomes most poignant, balancing a despairing narrative of the wearing away of individuality in the gulag archipelago with gorgeous passages of hope from Florensky's letters home.
I'm stuck by the deep Christian heritage there is to draw upon in the Russian tradition. Florensky the scientist and father was a contemporary of the Athonite monk St. Silouan, whose work I'm also reading now. Silouan represents a deeply contemplative, mystical approach to faith lived out in obedience and humility in a Russian monastery on Athos. Florensky was an intellectual (though also with a mystical bent), a family man, with a wife and five children, writing and teaching in the tumult of Moscow to support them. Florensky and Siouan lived very different embodiments of the common faith, and Florensky's life gives some hope in the possibility of living in grace in the context of home and science.
As far as Florensky's actual scientific contributions, Pyman does a good job documenting his career and giving summaries of his theological work, but her treatment of his mathematical and scientific works are less satisfactory. We're told he was a great mathematician, that he anticipated certain developments in quantum mechanics even, and that he drew on this to construct some kind of theology of number, but none of this is really expounded on, and as far as his context among Russian science in general, very little is said. This is likely due to the writer's background, but it leaves the true extent and lasting influence of Florensky to be taken on faith by those outside the Russian scientific sphere. (The question of Florensky's influence is one I would have liked to have heard more about. The narrative stops abruptly with his death, offering no discussion of the fate of his family or how his writings and influence began to make themselves felt during the long Soviet thaw.)
For those who are trying to practice a life of faith lived out in writing, in intellectual dialogue, teaching, and service-- and this in the spheres of both family and asceticism-- the account of Florensky's life, successes, and long fading will be inspiring and poignant. They will recognize a kindred spirit. And for those who bemoan the uncertainty of the times, the transitions or dissolutions of the culture, and the fate of the Church within all this, they will find an example of what a life of faith looked like played out in a "post-apocalyptic" society.
Take heart, little flock.
The truth seems to be that society goes through transitions-- some quite painfully abrupt and others so gradual as to be unapparent until years or centuries later. For Christians, ideas about these collapses or transitions often take the form of fantasies of persecution or monastic retreat. We wonder what the Church might look like, how it would endure or be transformed, in such transitions. Ironically though, we forget that we have examples from the recent past of what the Church looks like when society collapses or transforms abruptly beyond recognition. Besides the more relevant example of Christianity in the Middle East today, we have the story of the Orthodox Church in Russia. It's a story that I still don't know all the details of, the collapse of an old order and the transition from one form of civilized society to another very different. What did the Bolshevik Revolution mean for the practicing faithful and for the institutional Church itself?
Pyman's book doesn't answer all these questions. In fact, it assumes the reader already has the context in which to situate the story she's telling: that of the life of Pavel Florensky, a Russian scientist and intellectual, a father, a priest, and ultimately a declared enemy of the Soviet state. This was one of my primary frustrations with the book: I was dropped into a narrative that I still don't have enough bearings to navigate. Pyman discusses Florensky's early work in a plethora of Russian names I don't know, and when the drama of the cataclysmic revolution that would have such an effect on the Church and Florensky's life within it take place, again the reader is assumed to already understand the contexts of the events being alluded to. It's difficult to understand the nature of Florensky's role and reactions to these transformations if, for instance, you don't already have a grasp on the role the Church played with respect to the government under the last Tsar and a basic knowledge of its hierarchical structure. All this knowledge is assumed. Indeed, not having much of the context of late Tsarist and early Soviet Russia made Florensky's eventual brushes with the Soviet authorities seem to me perhaps as arbitrary and obscure as they must have to the new Soviet citizens who found themselves in a wash of acronyms, bureaus, committees, and police services that seemingly sprang up overnight.
But Pyman is not writing a book about social transformation or the plight of the Church after the revolution, as it found itself in an increasingly and militaristically atheistic society. (If someone could recommend such a book, I would be interested.) Rather, Pyman's book is about a man, Pavel Florensky, who came to age in the flourishing of the pre-revolutionary intellectual and literary scene and shocked many of his avant-garde social circle by coming to faith and ultimately joining the Church, a body thought to embody many of the oppressive, traditionalist forces the young guard were rallying against. His first major work, The Ground and Pillar of Faith, which I have not read, is an intellectual apology for faith (something along the lines of a Russian Mere Christianity) lived in the life of the Orthodox Church and is still influential today.
Florensky was also recognized and highly regarded as a scientist, and when the theological schools at which he taught were closed after the Soviets came to power, he worked and published extensively as an electrical researcher on behalf of the state. He ultimately lost his parish and in many ways his priestly vocation, but he famously retained his beard and cassock working and lecturing on science in an increasingly hostile environment. His life is the story of intense learning and service, but also of rear-guard action, a long defeat, trying (for instance while serving on the board of antiquities for Russia's most revered monastery) to save the traditions and artifacts of the Church (even, according to this account, smuggling away the head of a saint whose tomb was to be desecrated) in an increasingly grim time.
It's the story of a long failure, as Florensky is finally arrested, does more scientific work for a time in a Siberian camp, writes his wife and children beautiful letters from a crumbling monastery converted in a labor camp and prison on the North Sea, and is ultimately shot on obscure charges and buried in a mass grave outside Moscow. It is in these final days that Pyman's account becomes most poignant, balancing a despairing narrative of the wearing away of individuality in the gulag archipelago with gorgeous passages of hope from Florensky's letters home.
I'm stuck by the deep Christian heritage there is to draw upon in the Russian tradition. Florensky the scientist and father was a contemporary of the Athonite monk St. Silouan, whose work I'm also reading now. Silouan represents a deeply contemplative, mystical approach to faith lived out in obedience and humility in a Russian monastery on Athos. Florensky was an intellectual (though also with a mystical bent), a family man, with a wife and five children, writing and teaching in the tumult of Moscow to support them. Florensky and Siouan lived very different embodiments of the common faith, and Florensky's life gives some hope in the possibility of living in grace in the context of home and science.
As far as Florensky's actual scientific contributions, Pyman does a good job documenting his career and giving summaries of his theological work, but her treatment of his mathematical and scientific works are less satisfactory. We're told he was a great mathematician, that he anticipated certain developments in quantum mechanics even, and that he drew on this to construct some kind of theology of number, but none of this is really expounded on, and as far as his context among Russian science in general, very little is said. This is likely due to the writer's background, but it leaves the true extent and lasting influence of Florensky to be taken on faith by those outside the Russian scientific sphere. (The question of Florensky's influence is one I would have liked to have heard more about. The narrative stops abruptly with his death, offering no discussion of the fate of his family or how his writings and influence began to make themselves felt during the long Soviet thaw.)
For those who are trying to practice a life of faith lived out in writing, in intellectual dialogue, teaching, and service-- and this in the spheres of both family and asceticism-- the account of Florensky's life, successes, and long fading will be inspiring and poignant. They will recognize a kindred spirit. And for those who bemoan the uncertainty of the times, the transitions or dissolutions of the culture, and the fate of the Church within all this, they will find an example of what a life of faith looked like played out in a "post-apocalyptic" society.
Take heart, little flock.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews