I. Мемуары

Priest A. E. Elchaninov 30. From meetings with P. A. Florensky (1909–1910) 31 III/1. He has changed little since our last date (three months ago), only he seemed to become more nervous and a little more restless. He is always busy with something. Here is a list of his affairs for the two days that I have been here. 32 On Friday evening he sat down to write a lecture, and wrote it until half past four. I got up on Saturday at 8 o'clock and at 10 went to a lecture, and from there to the bathhouse, then lunch. Now after lunch, correction of the manuscript about ditties 33 for Kostroma antiquity,” etc. III/4. Gerasim-Grachevnik. Here are some of his conversations. – Do you notice that I am moving towards t, otherwise I fall into childhood. After all, even since the fall I have changed in this direction. I often feel like a child, I want to mess around and play pranks. Indeed, just before this he had been fussing with Daria for half an hour, pretending to be a bear, teasing her, singing ditties and begging her to advise him on what to do to please the girls. “At the Academy I restrain myself, but even then I constantly want to either trumpet the bundle of my lectures, or poke someone in the stomach, or slide down the railing. And this happens somehow by itself. I think this is because my Dionysian powers are looking for a way out and are showing up here.” I noticed this change in Pavlush especially clearly this fall, and over the winter it intensified and developed in him. He is very funny, witty, tireless in conversations with ladies and young ladies, and they usually remain delighted with their gentleman. Today we went skiing. Despite the fact that he has a lecture tomorrow, of which he only has three pages ready, he was so carried away that I barely persuaded him to go home. There are some very interesting conversations during this walk. When I told him it was time to go home, he replied: – Why should I write a lecture? Maybe I won’t live to see tomorrow, so I’d rather ride for fun. “But you must admit that you speak of women with irony, mockery, even contempt.” - This is wrong. I have deep respect for a woman who does her job. You know that I respect Marusya Lange 35 much more now than when she was a student. I laugh at those who mind their own business. I would laugh at a man who would take up a woman's business, I would laugh at a woman who would want to get a beard. Mind is a male sexual characteristic. And there is no need to envy us: I would really like to give birth to a child, but I can’t! And you know, I noticed that women who are inclined to scientific pursuits, even after marriage, usually all this disappears instantly, are always characterized by a lascivious character. “I don’t understand why D. was offended at me for the Gethsemane monastery and so on.” After all, ladies don’t walk naked on the streets, why does she want me to show myself naked to everyone from my apartment? - But you go to visit, right? - Well, what then? After all, I don’t go to everyone. I also appear naked to people, in the bathhouse, for example. Did I tell you about Kapterev 36’s experiments with suggestion? It turned out that sometimes a thin veil is enough to paralyze hypnosis. This is the deep meaning of the veil - it is impossible to seduce a woman wearing a veil. VII/7. I don’t remember when it was, it seems, at the end of May, in any case, on his last visit to Moscow on Novoselov’s call. I accompanied him to the station, where we waited for about an hour for the train. The conversation was long, and I remember only the main thing. We kept talking about Pavlusha’s same indifference to ladies, and about his frequent falling in love with young people. We were confused for a long time in explanations, and only at the end P. attacked the following hypothesis. A man is looking for an object that is passive enough to receive his energy. This is what women will be like for most people. There are ὑπо - courageous natures who seek complements in courageous men, but there are ὑπεр - men for whom the feminine is too weak, like, say, a pillow for a steel knife is weak. Such people look for and love just men, or ὑπо – men. Today over morning tea, Pavlusha told me the following about himself. Even this summer, P. often told me, half-jokingly, half-seriously, about his interest in tavern songs, in drunkards, and that he himself was trying to get drunk. “At least these people,” he said, “are simple, without any falsehood, but I want a simple life with simple people.” When I arrived here (September 8th), Pavlusha greeted me with a message about his drunkenness. I didn't believe it then. At tea today he began by announcing his intention to give the students a series of lectures on drunkenness. – I will begin with the fact that the central point of philosophy is now considered to be the question of cognition, that is, the question of cognition of the real, but all cognition is a coming out of oneself. I think that historically the epistemological question arose from the cult of intoxicating plants, since drunk people know best the phenomenon of losing oneself, the identity of subject and object. The interesting thing is that intoxication with different substances gives completely different experiences. For example, rum, vodka and wine. Their actions are completely different. I drink a lot now, I even think it's healthy. We still have too many wild impulses that need to be given vent. If we were at war, fighting with robbers, then it would be a different matter. When I drink a lot, I feel very good the next day. I even began to get better physically, everyone notices this and doesn’t know why. “But don’t you think that drunkenness dulls your faculties?” “I know that, but that’s what I want.” I am disgusted by any culture, sophistication, I want simplicity. – But if you lose the ability to distinguish the divine from the devil, aren’t you afraid of falling into some temptations and seductions and ending up on the road that leads to death? “I’m already dead,” this was said very seriously. – Actually, I’m going through some kind of turning point. The 27th year is already close, which means this is inevitable. – But why do you decide all this yourself, why don’t you consult your confessor? – Why do you think I didn’t consult? If I ask my confessor what should I choose, suicide or drunkenness, he will forbid both, and he cannot answer otherwise. Of course, I could resist this, but I know that then it will be even worse, and then, apparently, there’s no way to humble yourself otherwise... IX/14. Today, when I returned from Moscow, my servant, a very smart middle-aged woman, reported to me: “Then one student asked you, his head on one side... he’s so weak-minded... he looks like he’s slanted.” She apparently found it very difficult to accurately determine Pavlusha’s appearance. I didn’t even immediately guess that it was about him, and only by the signs - a long nose, long hair and civilian dress, I realized who it was about. IX/22. I don’t know yet whether he is always like this, but I see him every time very different compared to last year. There is no clarity in the eyes, liveliness and cheerfulness, instead there is some kind of dullness, heaviness, as if from a hangover (although P. assures that it is the next day after drinking that he feels especially good, “some kind of catharsis sets in, first acute repentance, and then humility, clarity and joy”). Yesterday, as usual, he sighed that there was too much to do, that he didn’t have time to do everything, that he didn’t have time, and then sighed that he didn’t have a secretary. I volunteered to help him with one of his works (a review of Naumov’s essay on Dionysus), he agreed. We worked all evening yesterday and until lunch today and talked a lot. IX/24. I will write down only one part of the conversation, especially important for me, although I heard these thoughts from him a year and a half ago, last spring. “It’s not difficult for me to kill a lot of things in myself, but what will come of it?” I could kill everything in myself that is connected with gender, but then all scientific creativity would die in me, first of all. You say that this is how it should be, that all ascetics went through such a death, I know this, but they don’t let me into the monastery, they tell me to give lectures. Why do many essays, textbooks, etc., especially seminar ones, smell like carrion. It’s as if everything is in place, there is great learning, decent language, even thoughts, but it’s impossible to read? Because they were written by eunuchs. And I could write it down like this, but who needs such work? Now you and I are writing about Dionysus. After all, I must experience all this, feel it, today I did not sleep all night from some kind of general excitement, as if I myself had participated in orgies. And so that's it. Same with lectures. I know that in subsequent lectures I will give a Christian synthesis, but while I am expounding, I cannot help but feel sympathetic to my subject. X/10. He has a lot of tenderness, affection, and love. I have never seen him become cold towards people first, that he was burdened by a loved one, that he was looking for change, freedom. If he falls in love with someone, he will give everything for this friendship, he wants to involve his friend in every detail of his life, and enters into his life and interests with all his soul. He will leave his affairs, his acquaintances, urgent activities, if his time is needed (or he thinks that he is needed) by a friend. With Vassenka 37 he eats from the same cup, and would never sit down to dinner without him, even if he didn’t come until the evening, goes to talk to his doctor, helps him write an essay, and generally does not give him “neither rest nor time.” (This is what real friendship should be, but only with complete reciprocity, otherwise it is an unbearable burden, I know this from myself.) He often talks about his intention to leave the Academy. He decided to leave her in the summer, but talked you out of it. Mich. The mood is still heavy. X/18. On the 13th-16th I was in Moscow. Before leaving, Pavel told me: – If you see Lord 38, tell him about me. You can say that I often want to see him, but I won’t come to him, because I still won’t listen to what he tells me. I visited Vladyka on the 15th. First I told him about my affairs, and then about Fm. I reported only the facts: disappointment in science, causeless melancholy, drunkenness. Vladyka listened, sitting sideways and grinning into his beard, but when I spoke about drunkenness, he became serious. “Started early,” he muttered. “Tell him,” he said quickly, “that I really ask him to hold out until he’s 30 years old.” Let him gather all his strength. Then it's no longer dangerous. Blood ferments until the age of 30, and these last years are especially dangerous. Excited (but not very) he became and went into his room for a minute, then returned and continued: – Let him apply my Socratic method of analyzing concepts. Then he began to say that he wanted to go to the Solovetsky Hermitage again in the summer, and was thinking of taking Pavel there and living the summer with him. “Tell him this, it will encourage him.” By the way, at the end of the conversation he suggested whether Pavel had contracted drunkenness from Glagolev. To all the arguments, he says one thing: “I want true love; I understand life only together; without “together” I don’t want salvation; I don’t rebel, I don’t protest, I simply have no taste for life or for saving my soul - while I’m alone. If they save me, I won’t protest, but I don’t want to. You are talking about an old man. I consulted many times, and each time they told me: wait, be patient, this will pass; I’m waiting, maybe this really is the best.” Today it seems to have cleared up. I came to him - he was alone, writing. The view is bright and quiet. - Look, I’m writing a letter to Anthony. Almost already written. – And not only Anthony, here’s another one – completely ready. And to whom?! To the girl!! Only I may not send Anthony yet. You judge for yourself what it can help, but what I wrote is still a benefit – objectification. The conversation ended there and began again about the bishop. Gabriel. Yesterday he served our liturgy, and I was amazed at the solemnity and significance with which he conducted it. I asked Pavel about this. “You know my opinion about him,” he began with displeasure. – All this sounds false and theatrical. He pronounces a word, and one feels that the tone and diction are invented, and that he is watching to see what impression it makes. It is quite possible that objectively all this is perceived differently, but I know it and cannot free myself from this feeling. He knows the divine service well, loves it, but this decorum and sophistication is not an Orthodox thing. You are a Westerner, but to us, on the contrary, it’s nice when the service goes the way it goes everywhere in Russia, stumbling, ugly, etc. We love the slave’s look, but you want even the rags to be not real, but hemmed with a lining. This is evangelical, and not just Orthodox. Why did Christ love the company of harlots and tax collectors so much? One must imagine that these were real harlots who quarreled, had “indecent” conversations, and scolded, but Christ still preferred them to the company of the Pharisees. Think about why it is said: “The power of God is made perfect in weakness.” After all, infirmity is not only weakness, some kind of poetic disease, like consumption, but sinfulness, badness. Christ was with sinners not only because they were in greater need, but because he was more pleased with them, he loved them for their simplicity and humility. I/31. Came in the evening, at 10 o'clock. On Saturday morning, Bulgakov, Glinka 39 and Novoselov 40 (Berdyaev was with them) carried him away to the Zosima Hermitage, from where he fled in the evening. – I’m visiting you for a short time. Brought Lavater. 41 Do you have anything about repentance? V.M. is needed for the semester. – I wanted to ask you about your trip, but if you’re in a hurry, I’ll ask later. P. became a little stubborn, but then he talked about Bulgakov and all the others. It turns out that he himself was going to Zosimova, but now he didn’t want to, since there were a lot of strangers. – Are you still writing your memoirs? So write it down then, it’s interesting from a general theological point of view. I am now noticing a strange phenomenon. Never before has my prayer been as effective as it is now, when it would seem that I am the least worthy. It feels as if God is deliberately coming to meet me halfway to see what I will finally get to. I sometimes have a strange feeling, absurd from a theological point of view, perhaps because I cannot express it properly: I sometimes feel sorry for God because he made you so bad. - Yes. I have this comparison: if someone gets very angry, he begins to agree with everything and do everything as you want. So God is with me. True, it's more in the details. Yesterday, for example, you. M. was not at home for a long time. I was very worried. All the usual times have passed when he arrives, 11 o'clock and three o'clock. I became terribly alarmed and began to pray, and before I could finish my prayers, he was already knocking on the door. - Well, I would be afraid of such phenomena, I would think that the devil was stalking me. - What benefit does he have? If it would increase my pride... “It increases your despair.” He somehow didn't pay attention to it. “You all look at my sins too simply, and most importantly, you apply aesthetic, everyday assessments to them. For example, my drinking. There are unconditional sins - pride, anger, but drunkenness, etc., there is still a big question about this. When I sit in a company and decide to give up vodka, the whole mood of the company immediately changes. Anger and irritability appear from somewhere, and not at me, and not even because of my refusal, but from somewhere. - But this is terrible! Well, if you find yourself in a company where they chew galoshes, should you really chew with them in order to maintain their complacency? Well, they are pigs and they drink pork, but why should you go to them? “You see, I’m so stupid now that I can’t get angry or offended, but if there was anyone else here, even someone who had your views, his anger would immediately flare up at your words.” This was said in a truly meek, good-natured tone. “I agree with you that it’s not good to speak in such a tone.” But I wanted to say that with your behavior you offend sober people, while consoling drunk people, you have left your former friends, Fr.’s heart hurts for you. Evgeniy and many others. “I myself am afraid of this and even more afraid of the temptation from my behavior.” But you don’t want to understand what is important in my sins and what is not. For example, I often spoke about. Herman 42 that doing science develops vanity in me, but somehow he is not at all affected by this. He thinks that I am saying this out of excessive modesty. And then, if I hadn’t been drunk, I would have been dead a long time ago. My melancholy must have an organic origin, an excess of strength, but drunkenness dissipates these forces, and then I am pacified. Why not, they say, take up science, even though it’s a waste of time, but you can still somehow live. “I’m very glad that you think so about the reasons for your condition.” – And the fact that your melancholy, as you said, is of organic origin. - That's not entirely true. Its main reason, of course, is different: the desire for real, complete communication as a guarantee of church life. I don’t find this communication anywhere, all just pieces of paper, and never gold. I'm not saying there isn't pure gold in the church, but I haven't come across any. If I didn’t believe, it would be easier, but that’s the hard part: I believe that there is gold. If there is no communication, there is no church, and there is no Christianity. They tell me to believe, and I believe, but this is not life. Life just begins from the time you see and feel this main fact. II/5. Yesterday I visited him in the evening and spent the night, since V.M. went to Moscow for the Day. Some aphorisms and thoughts. Pavel loved plants since childhood with a kind of enhanced tenderness, pity and understanding. He says that he loves them for their gentleness, for their close proximity to the earth. II/13. For about a week he has been quite calm, working out and not drinking. Today I was re-reading his letters from 1903-1904 and was amazed at how little he had changed in his main ideas. It seems that he did not renounce anything that he expressed then, and many of the ideas that he himself, it seems, is now inclined to consider as new, he again had seven years ago. For example, “you don’t notice this drop when you realize the fundamental worthlessness of yourself in essence” (1903. X. 16), and much more. Yesterday. I told him about Ephraim the Syrian and his advice against lustful thoughts. - Well, they're not very good! – he said with a smile. For example, advice to imagine the woman you love as a decaying corpse. After all, in this way not only prodigal thoughts, but all human relationships become impossible. I don’t think that such an attitude towards one’s neighbors would be moral... Andrey Bely 43 . Beginning of the century (fragment) 44 Chapter III. Ajax discord (1930–1933) I met with three students: with Vladimir Ern, who had been left at the university under Professor Trubetskoy, 45 with Valentin Sventsitsky, 46 still a philology student, and with Pavel Florensky, graduating from the Faculty of Mathematics, a student of Lakhtin, 47 and listening to his father’s lectures, who had already demonstrated bright abilities, even talent, in mathematics. And the white, oak-haired and long-tailed Vladimir Frantsevich Ern, 48, immediately glanced at me incredulously, his light eyes blinking innocently. For a number of times, he believed Vyacheslav Ivanov, but not me. In 1904, he only agreed with Florensky’s thoughts. – Mean... So mean” (not “mean”). And he crumpled his hand. He was beardless, braless, with a face like a pickled apple, puffy, with a hint of a sick blush; seemed to fold like a yard; an expert on the first centuries of Christianity, touched them, cut them as if they were alive, with abstract truths, chopping them in the air with his paw: - “That means bodies are resurrected!” Having said this, he blinked, embarrassed, and something dovelike appeared in his face. Sventsitsky, snub-nosed, stubborn, with a red face, was fiddling with a red-colored, very thick beard, snoring from under his brows. I didn’t like this red melt of brown eyes. He pushed me away like a bull, with his jacket on askew, butting me with his cowlicks. I thought that glanders and cowlicks were just a pose, and the smell of unwashed feet was just an impression, a purely moral one. With a brownish-greenish, very ugly and old-looking face, an angular nose, he sat down in a chair, as if his keen gaze was riveted to his socks, and in a barely falling nasal babble, he spoke with fascinating sharpness about his father’s ideas, which were close to him. It was he, in all likelihood, who initiated the visit of three friends to me. Only he was then interested in new art and understood it. During these years, Ern was slow to understand beauty, Sventsitsky had vulgar tastes, and besides, Florensky could also be interested in me as his father’s son. He appreciated his father's ideas. As I listened to him, he defeated me with his dying voice. He babbled about the models for “en” dimensions that Karl Weierstrass fashioned, 49 and about the fact that there is a bad infinity, according to Hegel, and a finite infinity, according to the mathematics of Georg Cantor. 50 I remembered something familiar, from children’s books: a falling voice, a smile, sad and frightened, a thin, brittle, sick intellect, not flying, but quietly crawling, with a tail running beyond the horizons of history. I should sketch Florensky with an Egyptian outline. Draw a crocodile near his feet! And so he stood up. Saying goodbye, he stood with his indiscernible eyes tied to his socks, as if falling, with a hieratic broken arm, in his old, crumpled student's frock coat, hanging askew, with his pennies ribbon hanging down. The shadow of a nose, the size of an arshin, lay under the feet of a crocodile's tail. I only talked with Florensky. Sventsitsky and Ern did not seem to trust me. Ern clearly coughed with suspicion, since then they appeared. One day the three of them appeared again and gave me a magnificent photograph of the Novodevichy Convent as a gift as a sign that my father’s grave was here, 51 and this touched me. Since then, only Florensky came, he interested me in the ideas of the mathematician and philosopher Vronsky. 52 The arena for meetings with the “troika” is the open section “History of Religions” (under Trubetskoy). The meetings took place at the university. The then core - three Ajaxes, 53 bearded Galanin, 54 two Syroechkovskys, 55 A. Khrennikov, 56 several wild Socialist-Revolutionaries, with the problem of the painful “to hit or not to hit”, fat-loving anarchists who became praisers of God, or praisers of God who stood with a bomb in a mental pose, posad academicians from the self-divided, a bunch of female students Guerrier. 57 The chairman was S. A. Kotlyarevsky, 58 who was still writing his work “Lamene”. The Koiranskys, 59 “griffs”, 60 and “Argonauts” appeared and went to fight the theologians. These meetings connected with me in the fall. Frozen, first October days. Everything turned gray and fell, fell, fell. Drops - into the window panes, into the soul, and something seemed to cry out, and floundering helplessly in the falling time, fell into the heart. I went to Mokhovaya, to sit with Sventsitsky in a depressing room, tightly stuffed with jackets, whipped up with gloomy curls of hairy students with a problem (“to hit or not to hit”), where Sventsitsky learned to perform a pyrotechnic trick with fire brought down from the sky, in response to the problem - to go with a bomb at the Governor-General or not to go? - “This bomb is heavenly fire, brought down by the prophets who united the faith of the early Christian fathers with the protesting radicalism of Herzen!” He will strike out heavenly fire! He moved his laboratory with explosive “gunpowder” to the section meetings. He roughly carried out experiments with self-hypnosis, with the hypnosis of those closest to him who believed him, sitting, sometimes, in front of Erna, snoring, with a face brutalized from tension, like Daniel’s cave. 61 The eyes glowed, becoming wildly and bloody. It happened that he would transfer them to Boris Syroechkovsky, to Kotlyarevsky or to me in order to bring us into a cataleptic state (which he tried to hypnotize became a fact for me), sometimes it would rattle through the nerves with burry barks. He expects influx, and - the smell of feet. The female students are in holy delight! The speaker would finish, and Sventsitsky would take off. And butting with his frocks, like a neglected bull or a whip, screaming, chopping the air with his hand, giggling and choking, a mouth hole appears from his mustache, flaming with bloody lips, like a vampire’s, and he assures us: the appearance of Damascus light and the lightning with which Peter destroyed Ananias. Kotlyarevsky, who looks like a satyr, simply doesn’t know what to do with him. Half-smiling, he looks around at us, sometimes with a confused, questioning look. I'm sick of it. Sventsitsky's bark has a purely physical effect on me, like the blow of a gong with which Charcot 62 operated, causing tetanus in patients. Part of the audience used to go stupidly crazy: with delight. The part is spitting: - “Dubious charlatan!” He collapses, red and sweaty. Grasping his crumpled chest with his hairy hand (red wool), he torments his jacket. You don’t know whether to collapse, whether to carry him a glass of water or... beat him. After his speech, the sickly Ern stands up - long, bald, and whitish; with his hand he chopped, beating out, as if with a stick, in the foreheads, in a dull voice, insipid clarity about miracles and sign-phenomena in the first centuries of Christianity, trying to connect, according to Trubetskoy, with evangelical criticism. He is a translator of Sventsitsky’s “holy cries” into “clear” language. That one is a prophet, this one only “didaskalol from Valentin, 63 at these moments he seemed to me a typical “Enes”, 64 a folk teacher somewhere in a distant bearish corner. Next to Ern with a brown-greenish face, ugly and old-looking, disgustedly depressed by the thunder of Sventsitsky, P. A. Florensky is mummified in a chair, chained with invisible eyes to his boot, like Gogol, nodding his nose over the ashes of his “Dead Souls.” Dead souls - Ern and Sventsitsky. Ern, who died gracefully before his death, Sventsitsky, in stinking convulsions, alive, as if eaten by worms. In response, Florensky spoke to them in a dying voice, stooping strangely and looking like a tombstone figure, hanging somewhere in the sands like a silent bas-relief of an age, and suddenly acquiring the gift of speech. His words, unclear from the burden of arrhythmology, 65 are like a stream drying up in the sand of the desert. He used to talk him out of it and sit down - green and skinny. His figure was half the size of his actual size, because he stooped and collapsed, as if at his feet, as if in a tomb, in which he lived comfortably, during his lifetime changing the signs “minus” to “plus”, “plus” to “minus”. It sometimes seemed to me that he would put a samovar in the coffins, and go from there to “Scales” to sing in front of the covers depicting naked ladies, “Rest the slaves with the saints!” I later found him with Bryusov in “Libra”. He talked, strangely stooping, looking sideways, explaining in a nasal voice, echoing himself, but fading, some detail: a detail of an engraving of the fourteenth century, something like a drawing by Kunrath, 66 with a modest inscription: “Ora et labora.” 67 And Bryusov respectfully listened rather to the arrhythmologist, transformed into a decadent, than to the mystic or religious philosopher. Again it seemed that he was a Memphis half-bas-relief, with traces of the brownish-yellow and greenish coloring peeling off. Coming out of the gray-yellow stone, he walked slowly, in millennia, thousands of miles to appear from Memphis in the Metropol house, where “Libra” had so cheerfully taken refuge. He came from Memphis, or perhaps from Atlantis, to talk about the growth of Egyptian meanings in the 20th century. From then on, he came to me, avoiding my resurrections, as if stealthily, in secret fear, without looking into my eyes, babbling amazingly. His original thoughts lived within me. He loved to talk about the theory of knowledge, and strengthened in me the idea of ​​​​the critical importance of symbolism. What seemed distant to his closest comrades - Blok, Ivanov, Bryusov and Merezhkovsky, he saw as ABC. His thought about the growing, swelling, like a grain, swelling multi-grained arrhythmological meaning, nourished me, reconciling the thought of symbolism with my father’s thoughts. Student Florensky about the mathematician Euler, 68 and the long-nosed shadow stretched from his boot, about something else, his own, very ancient. And it began to seem that day would come, a shadow would sit in a chair, Florensky would lie down at her feet. And we rarely saw each other with Valentin Sventsitsky. Valentin Sventsitsky, I admit, I ran. The sweat, the glanders, the “fire in the eyes” pose, the jerk, the untidiness, the hairy paw, the burry basso, everything evoked almost physical disgust in me. Somewhere one sensed a pathetic, sick charlatan and eroticist, poisoning himself with the exhalation of bloody sweat and flagellantism. 69 He had already won applause, made frantic girls faint, and even organized a debate. On it, like an experienced sharper with marks on his hands, he beat “father” after “father”. Krap - the tone of the prophet, they dragged the parish “father” into the meeting. He, frightened, opened his mouth. Never before in his life had he seen Samuel, 70 incriminating him that “father” was serving in the police. Caught in the most primitive liberalism, “father,” dumbfounded, left the level in fear. “Listen, listen,” yesterday’s blasphemers gloomily whispered: Hamlets with “to beat or not to beat”... the governor. And then, with a bull’s roar, Sventsitsky took off and stuck his bloody eyes into the “sacred sacrifice.” And with the mechanics of three or two, for the “father”, malicious questions, studied in front of the mirror, he cursed the “father”. Checkmate consisted of being pressed against the wall, and in a thunderous roar: to the audience: - “You see, Father Vladimir Vostokov renounced God!” – No, I’m not for “father”, I’m against cheating. At these moments, the smell of Valentin Sventsitsky was so obvious! Once he tried to be frank with me, unexpectedly praising my poem “Not the One,” whose theme is loss of self-confidence, and in connection with the poem, he started talking about himself, snoring and tugging at his reddish mustache: “Sometimes you worry so much that...” he grinned, and grinned wickedly! He waved his hand, making it clear that he had some “his own” experiences, hidden from everyone. - “This “prophet” will show himself yet!” He really showed himself. In the meantime, faith in the “prophet” Sventsitsky began to grow. He was a “trump card” for women’s courses, students, aging ladies, veterinarians, and even teachers. Taking the shuytsu, as if a dynamite bomb, taking the cross in his right hand, he crossed them, just as 71 golden-headed bishops cross a dikiri with a trikiri. The merging of a bomb with a cross is his personal experience. He stood with a bomb, supposedly watching for someone. He couldn’t give up; it was revealed to him, like Saul, that it was time to kill the governors with a bomb from heaven. So he preached the vision of a bomb falling from the sky through our prayers. In addition, he supposedly went to Macedonia, together with the rebels, to overthrow the padishah. 72 and what a farewell! He left... somewhere in the Russian province. He hid gloomily there and returned to Moscow. He was greeted with reverence. Liberated the Macedonians! Yes, evil fate laughed at the brutal-looking sick man, who made wild girls faint, who extracted superstitious whispers from bearded, respectable, gray-haired, already experienced public figures. Even then Florensky did not sympathize with his friends, Sventsitsky and Ern. But he was hiding. In general, in those years he did not expand too much on various topics. Sventsitsky's fame grew. Florensky seemed to sit in the shadow. His long nose stretched out from his shadowy corner, and the most sophisticated discussions about mathematics and symbolism were heard. Soon he stopped visiting me, being offended by something. In “New Path” he published a sympathetic review of my “Northern Symphony”. 73 Then I met him only from afar. He soon let go of his long curls, and when he sat silently later at religious and philosophical meetings, his nose, frightened by something, peeked out from the curls. We called him in those days: “The nose in the curls.” The nickname was invented, of course, by Ellis. 74 Soon he completely disappeared into Sergiev Posad. S. I. Fudel 75. About Fr. Pavle Florensky (1882–1943) 76 As the End of History approaches, new, hitherto almost unprecedented, pink rays of the coming Day of the Unfading appear on the domes of the Holy Church. Priest Pavel Florensky “The Pillar and Ground of Truth.” Opening for us the door to the shrine of early Christian worship, the Apostle Paul in the 14th chapter. 1 of his Epistle to the Corinthian Church teaches that those who have the grace-filled gift of prayerful conversation in unknown tongues, or “speaking mysteries in the spirit” (2), should “pray for the gift of interpretation” (13), for “if I come to you and speak in unknown tongues, what benefit will I bring you if I do not express myself to you either by revelation, or knowledge, or prophecy, or teaching” (6). “If there is no interpreter, then remain silent in church, and speak to yourself and to God” (28). One person reminded me of these words about “interpretation” when we were talking with him about the spiritual heritage of Fr. Pavel Florensky. The beginning of understanding Florensky - for many this can become the beginning of knowledge of the Church. But the general understanding of theological and philosophical education, coupled with the barbed wire of scientific terminology around his works, make them almost inaccessible to the modern reader. His appearance disappears in the flow of time, from the memory of those who knew and loved him. The impoverishment of school theology and the darkening of the concept of the Church continues, and to an even greater extent than during his Lifetime, something against which his not always clear thought was primarily directed. All this forced me to try to convey both the personal appearance and the teaching of Fr. Paul, in relation to the themes or letters of his main book. I can only begin this work; there is little strength, knowledge and opportunity for such work, there is little material, especially biographical. But I’m afraid to put it off, “redeeming time.” I will convey what I can, and then I will no longer write, but wait for a personal meeting with him and with everyone from whom my heart received warmth, light and joy. “The dead will be resurrected, and those who are in the tombs will rise, and all earthly beings will rejoice” (canon of Great Saturday). But I’m afraid to put it off, “redeeming time.” I will convey what I can, and then I will no longer write, but wait for a personal meeting with him and with everyone from whom my heart received warmth, light and joy. “The dead will be resurrected, and those who are in the tombs will rise, and all earthly beings will rejoice” (canon of Great Saturday). Having started reading the main work of Fr. Pavel Florensky - “The Pillar and Foundation of Truth”, sees that much of what was written in it was written with the expectation of people who had already overcome Kant and the “Critique of Abstract Principles” by Vl. Solovyov that she introduces him into the field of metaphysics and abstract knowledge. In addition, the author, being primarily a mathematician by education, often uses data from this science in this work. His mathematical works generally go in parallel with theological ones. In 1916, at the height of his theological activity, he published in the Theological Bulletin “Bringing Numbers” - a mathematical justification of numerical symbolism. Recently I was told that one young man wanted to enter the Faculty of Mathematics only in order to “understand Florensky.” He himself is aware of his philosophical difficulties and his tendency towards schematism. “In my schematic presentation,” he writes in “The Pillar,” “I omit the discussion of the path of asceticism” (p. 638). And in another place: “Forgive me these crude and hateful tweezers and scalpels... Just don’t think that my cold words are metaphysical speculation, “gnostics”... I am forced to use metaphysical terminology” (p. 324). This “compulsion” is, of course, to some extent conditional. We sometimes perceive it simply as a consequence of a certain, already experienced culture of the 19th century, a certain intellectual habit or a rut of thinking of European education. We, the people who captured the end of that era, as high school students, seriously and selflessly, despite the already existing sports and cinema, read Kant, Solovyov and Nietzsche, Marx and Stirner. Florensky’s book was written before the First World War - before the start of the “flood” that separated our world from the “antediluvian” one. From this lost world, only the Ark of the Church remained intact and saving for us, and everything else seems to be fragments of buildings floating on the ocean. We are now looking for simplicity in the word, clarity, extreme conciseness and depth of it, so that this written word is rooted in another, undying world. And here some of us have a question: is Florensky necessary for a modern Christian? This is not the time to call out the shadows... And this hour is so terrible, - At this hour of church history, along with the continuation of the basic ritual appearance, religious allegorism and amazing spiritual insensitivity, we see something else: the aspiration of some people for spiritual authenticity and for the joy of true, and not allegorical, communication with God. Communion with God is a constant goal towards which the modern sincere Christian will increasingly strive, who “counts all things but loss for the sake of the superiority of the knowledge of Christ Jesus his Lord.” He achieves this goal in the Church, which he perceives quite simply as the convening and communion of Christ’s disciples. So much has been piled up over these two thousand years around the invisible walls of the Church that only the simplicity of immediate, personal love for Jesus Christ, and thus only the power of uncunning faith, has the power to touch these walls and meet our Teacher within them. Christ again, more and more, in conditions of spiritual desolation, in our time becomes the direct Teacher of His Disciples, according to what was said: “Do not be called teachers, for you have only one Teacher - Christ, yet you are brothers.” It seems that Christianity is once again entering the deep waters of its first love. In this pre-dawn time, the grace of God - His luminous power, itself leads people to the service of eternal life and immortality, itself opens for them the path to acquiring faith. “Grace is God felt in the heart,” says Pascal. Who among us does not know these absolutely amazing and incomprehensible ways in which God brings people to Himself in our time from the very thick of unbelief, these adults, unbaptized, not bookish. And Florensky the scribe. And this makes him difficult to read, alienates him, and I know that for many he is now a stranger. I was told the story of one former student, Fr. Paul at the Theological Academy. His philosophical course was difficult for students. One day Fr. Pavel, having finished reading, raised his head and asked: “We didn’t understand anything, Pavel Alexandrovich,” answered one of those sitting. But obviously, students are different. In the memoirs of another of his students at the Moscow Theological Academy (S.A. Volkova) there are the following lines: “The audiences at his reading (were) crowded... His speech flowed from somewhere from within... not striving for a beautiful style, but being beautiful in its organic unity, where content and form merged into something holistic. There was a magical charm in his speech. You could listen to it for hours without getting tired. And only then, when he finished and disappeared, when the student crowd began to hum like a swarm of bees, getting up and moving towards the exit, only then will you feel how your whole body has turned to stone after sitting and paying attention to the cycle for two hours... I remember, as now, the feeling of this exceptional bliss - to surrender to the flow (of his thoughts).” In addition, Tyutchev comes to mind again: How will our word respond... 78 There is a known case when one unbelieving intellectual was shocked to the depths by a phrase he accidentally heard from Isaac the Syrian. 79 It is also known that the Gospel mentions various scribes, including “scribes taught in the Kingdom of Heaven.” You cannot “learn the Kingdom of Heaven” without going through personal suffering and without heroic deeds. This means that there are suffering scribes, and it seems to me that Fr. Paul. Everyone was drawn to him, as if to the new Leonardo da Vinci, surrounded him with a ring, caught his every word, “his name,” as one contemporary wrote, “became legendary,” and there were few people who loved and pitied him. But deep loneliness, longing for friendship and the great suffering of the human desert, both externally and internally, permeate his entire great book. “My meek one, my clear one! Our vaulted room breathed on me with coldness, sadness and loneliness... I entered it alone, without you... One by one, one by one, like yellowed leaves, dear people are falling away... What have you done for them?.. There is no longer an opportunity to hug the legs of each of them. It is no longer possible to shed tears and beg for forgiveness - to beg for forgiveness in front of the whole world." Thus begins his main work, this super-learned, difficult book, equipped with 1956 notes and excursions, seems to be in all types of human knowledge. And through this suffering, through this search for love, its author suddenly becomes dear and necessary to us. The impenetrable thickets of his philosophical theorems and metaphysical constructions are suddenly penetrated by rays of such simplicity and clarity. There is also something else in it. Usually, learned theological works speak of God as if He were some unknown mathematical quantity that requires proof, and this proof is immediately brilliantly and solemnly carried out to the complete satisfaction of the learned author. He makes a point and puts down his pen. This is how, by the way, many of Vl’s works were written. Solovyova. The mathematician and physicist Florensky speaks of God with awe of love, and at the same time is still clearly unsure of his right to speak about Him. In “The Pillar” he points out the influence of the philosopher-monk Archimandrite on him. Serapion (Mashkin). Here is one of the favorite sayings of this little-known thinker: “Love God is the basic maxim of behavior. Falling in love with God, being drunk with God, this is the true forging of personality.” If these words seem too “intellectual,” they can be supported by the words of the saints. “The world cannot stand those in love with Jesus Christ,” says Georgy the Recluse of Zadonsky. 80 “Divine love is the aspiration of thoughts intoxicating with the Spirit,” wrote St. Gregory of Sinanite. 81 When Florensky overcomes the “theological mathematics” sometimes inherent in him, he ceases to be a professor of theology and becomes a teacher of life. I remember that in our youth, when we read his book, we did not understand anything about its scholarship, we felt that we had emerged from the forest of quotations obligatory for all theological books, although his book was also full of quotations, that, despite the obvious modernity of the author, we had already emerged with him not only from the motley hall of religious and philosophical meetings, so widespread in those days, but even from Dostoevsky’s attic, where his young men were arguing about God. There were no more disputes here. Understood in its suffering and love, this book read as a record of life already realized in God, proven by the great silence of a forever joyful mind. The mind has finally found its lost homeland - the Father's house (!), that warmest place where it should stand before God. The thought turned out to be living in the cage of the heart, where in the corner, in front of the icon of the Savior, the lamp of the Comforter burns. In this cage there was nothing “of the world,” but at the same time, thought, ascending to the cross of churching, embraced here everything good that was in the world, in history, as its own, as belonging to God the Creator, both creatures and thoughts. Through this book, it became clear to us that the struggle for the cross in history is a struggle not only for the personal salvation of one’s entire self, i.e., thereby one’s mind, but also a struggle for the beloved land of humanity. In memories of Fr. Pavle S.N. Bulgakov, there is such a place: “He (Fr. Paul) loved her, this native land, like the all-human mother, the ancient Demeter, but at the same time he knew and honored her as the holy land of God, the Most Pure and Most Blessed.” Of course, everything valuable that Florensky had came from the ancient insights of the saints. But the enormity and incomparability of his attempt to express it in a modern dialect is quite obvious. The way he sometimes wrote did not produce words over which the mind, as usual, would roll, as if on something slippery, and forget, but some illuminated objects. This learned scribe found the way to the forgotten treasures of religious and philosophical word-making. To make this feel, I will give an excerpt from one of his articles in 1907 (“The Lamentation of the Mother of God”), just about the power and powerlessness of words: “There are only words. They are composed by reason and the press is filled with them. From these gray creations of the head, the spiritual eye became clogged and the soul became dusty. But there are also other words... Like golden fruits, they grow and are filled with the juices of the soul when the time comes for them... There are invocation words in which the mysterious singing of infinity sounds, words that attract grace-filled support to those who pronounce them... Words are sometimes permeated by the Spirit. The mystery of the transubstantiation of the word occurs.” After Florensky, it was easy to read Paterikov’s stories about the transformation of creation by the light of God, but not dissertations on the topic: “On the question of the development of Trinitarian disputes.” He proved the possibility of ending seminary in thought. Florensky was born in 1882 in the Caucasus. His father is Russian, his mother is Armenian. It seems that he also had Georgian blood in him. In 1900, he dedicated his “Universal Roots of Idealism” to “my dear mother and the memory of my beloved father,” perhaps because he wanted to gratefully note the roots of his idealism. He was brought up in Tiflis in a cultural environment, in an atmosphere, as Bulgakov writes, of Beethoven and Goethe, but it seems in an environment of little religion, which suggests the fact of a later religious revolution. While still a high school student, he, together with his friend A. Elchaninov, set up a “scientific office” with geological and botanical collections. There is information that already at the end of the 90s, one of his scientific articles (together with Elchaninov) appeared in the German press, which requires verification, as does almost all the biographical data provided. In 1904, he graduated from Moscow University, where he studied mathematics and physics, while simultaneously listening to lectures on the philosophy of R. N. Trubetskoy and L. M. Lopatin. 82 Of the other teachers of his youth, N. Bugaev and A. I. Vvedensky should be noted. 83 (After graduation, he was offered to stay at the University (this proposal was, it seems, from several departments), but in the same year, 1904, he entered the Moscow Theological Academy, which he graduated from in 1908 (April 23‒24) and served as a priest in the home hospital church of Sergiev and Posad. On May 19, 1914, he defended his master’s thesis on the book “On Spiritual Truth,” published in Moscow in 1912, which included the first seven chapters (letters) of “The Pillar” published in 1914. He was a professor at the Moscow Theological Academy, and from 1911 to 1917 he was also the editor of its magazine “Theological Bulletin”. Since 1919, he worked in the field of technology, first at the Karbolit plant, and then at Glavelektro, where he worked on issues of electric fields and dielectrics, which may have been important for the first power plants being created at that time. He had at least 12 certified inventions in chemistry, electrical and other fields!). In the early 1920s, he prepared a course of lectures on the “encyclopedia of mathematics” for publication. At the same time he published “Imaginaries in Geometry” and “Number as Form”). During these same years, I taught a course on ferroalloys at Moscow University. He worked in the first edition of the Great Soviet Technical Encyclopedia, published in 1927–1936, where he participated in a number of departments. According to Modestov, in his articles of 1930, his attention to issues of atomic physics is visible. The first volume of the Encyclopedia contains his articles on asphalt varnishes, asbestos masses and slate, in the 10th volume - on copals, in the 12th - on linoleum. He began publishing in Russian magazines no later than 1903, i.e., while still a Moscow student. In addition to his main works of theological and philosophical content, he had works on electricity, industrial technology, commodity science, astronomy, optics, mathematics, art history, theory of knowledge, perspective painting, folklore, philology and literature. He could speak or write with full knowledge of the matter on issues of medicine, psychopathology, occult sciences, archeology, psychology of vision, the history of ladies' fashion, and the genealogy of noble families. Knew several European and Eastern languages. He read and wrote in Hebrew, Greek and Latin without a dictionary. He translated Kant and the church historian Zom. He published poems in magazines at the beginning of the century (there was also a separate publication: “In Eternal Azure”). The most convincing thing about him was that he carried all this immensity, like religious obedience, in perfect silence and integrity and modesty. The portrait of Nesterov (“two philosophers”) 84 conveys something of his profound quietness, of his immersion in the “vision of the era” (as S. N. Bulgakov called this portrait). In all his appearance he was some kind of historically fickle person. It was in his personal appearance, much more than in the books, that his strength was felt. When speaking, he often did not read, but spoke, possessing the extraordinary power of the living word. “You are a noumenon,” V. Rozanov once told him, and at the same time added: “but you have one drawback - you are too charming, and a Russian priest cannot be charming.” His cassock seemed to be not a cassock, but some kind of ancient Eastern clothing. Everything in it was perceived as a return from intellectual abstraction to the reality of a long-forgotten and joyful existence. Bulgakov also notes that all his strength was primarily in himself. "ABOUT. “Paul was for me,” he writes, “not only a manifestation of genius, but also a work of art, his image was so harmonious and beautiful... The most basic impression of Fr. Paul (he also writes) had an impression of strength. And this force was a certain primordial character of a brilliant personality... with complete simplicity and every possible absence of internal and external posture... The spiritual center of his personality, the sun with which all his gifts were illuminated, was his priesthood... The real creativity of Fr. Paul - not books, but he himself, his whole life, which has gone irrevocably from this century to the next.” In his work “The First Steps of Philosophy” he speaks “about the taste for the concrete, about the science of reverent acceptance of the concrete and contemplation of it ... be it a stone, a plant, a religious symbol and a literary monument.” He had a special ability to enter into “consistency” with a cognizable object, and, of course, only this explained the depth and confidence of his knowledge. In the same work, he wrote that the rationalistic shell of all natural sciences is only “a thin crust of the identified above the abyss of fiery lava of irrationality.” This is what attracted him to scientific work, “whether it be a stone or a plant,” - a feeling of the mystical immensity of this work, its mystical promise. In its subject matter, of course, there is no trace of the topic of ensuring equal rights for religion with science. On the contrary, science in relation to religion must ensure this equality by reaching its eternal horizons, realizing this “fiery lava of irrationality.” It is not religion, but science that must prove itself. Listening to him, to his quiet words more than to his scientific load, sometimes it seemed that just a little more, just a little, biology, mathematics, and physics would speak to a person with some new, creative, “angelic” words, words characteristic of these exact sciences, but sprouted into Eternity, and washed there from the Imperishable Source. New science. We are almost sure that she will not exist in this life, but it was not in vain that Florensky carried within himself the dream of her. He showed that human thought must and can find the Stone of Faith, since only from it is the azure of Eternity visible to it, and only on it does reason - every reason, scientific reason - find peace. He carried out the churching of this child of God. “Churchfulness is the name of that haven where great peace descends into the mind,” he wrote in the preface to the book. In the first years of the century he communicated a lot with the Symbolists. Andrei Bely, recalling 1903, writes: “The appearance of a trio of “apocalyptics” to me - Ern, Florensky and V. Sventsitsky... The whole point is in Florensky... as I listened to him, he conquered me... spoke in a dying voice, strangely stooping and looking like a tombstone figure, hanging somewhere in the sands like a silent bas-relief of a century, and suddenly finding the gift of speech... I “Vesakh” later found him with Bryusov, he was talking... explaining some detail: a detail from an engraving of the 14th century, something like a drawing by Uprat with a modest signature. And Bryusov listened respectfully... His original thoughts lived in me, he loved to talk about the theory of knowledge, and strengthened in me the idea of ​​​​the critical importance of symbolism. What seemed distant to his closest comrades - Blok, V. Ivanov, Bryusov and Merezhkovsky, he saw as ABC.” 85 To this extract from Bely we can add that Florensky was then a little over 20 years old. For him, the symbolists were people who were mystically much more sensitive than the positivists of science; they gave something to his mystical realism. In 1904, he published in their magazine “Scales” an article “On one premise of a worldview,” which talks about biology, thermodynamics, molecular physics, and in which there is a phrase: “We, who have seen the dawn of the “new art,” stand on the threshold of the “new science.” But the most precious thing in this article is its epigraph, revealing all the melancholy of the age, all the thirst for its true words of the Lord, the true Knowledge and the Bread of Life In the epigraph, he quoted the words from the eighth chapter of the book of the prophet Amos: “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord God, when I will send a famine on the earth, not a famine of bread, not a thirst for water, but a thirst for hearing the words of the Lord. In 1933, Fr. Pavel Florensky was exiled to Siberia, to a camp in the village of Skovorodiko beyond Lake Baikal. They demanded that he publicly renounce his faith. He was soon transferred to the Solovetsky Islands, from where he wrote to his family until 1937. Then the letters stopped. Fr. died Pavel, according to official data, December 15, 1943 on Solovki. How can we convey to a non-believer our feeling of the Church as a shrine? Believing in God is quite acceptable for many, but believing in the Church is completely different, this is the beginning of doubt, confusion and darkness, and this is very out of date. I am talking now about those who actually do not believe in the Church, no matter how Orthodox they are called. The essence of the matter is clear. God can be accepted abstractly, in terms of abstract, and generally non-binding deism, but the Church cannot be accepted abstractly, and at the same time sincerely. It must be actually found on earth, it must be felt, as one feels a living body. It must be seen in people. This is the great difficulty of believing in the Church. We need to find people who would be a “small Church.” The Church is a continuation in the history of the incarnation of Jesus Christ. His deeds on earth were to transform man, to illuminate him with heavenly light. Therefore, only people who, even to a small extent, but in a completely real way, were touched by this transformation, this repetition of Christ’s holiness, prove the existence of the Church. And the Church exists in them, in their living breath, in their verbal inheritance. The Church is the shrine of God in people, and this is the only way to write about it. Florensky’s book, contrary to the tradition of school theology, spoke of the Church not as a museum of dogmas and traditions, rules and disputes, miracles and doubts, but as an organism of holiness and love that is still alive today, as a miracle of Christ’s Incarnation that continues on earth. I remember once again the impact the book’s publication had on us 50 years ago. Many of us were then filled with Blok and his nightly premonitions of history. Spring, spring! Tell me, why do I feel sorry? What dream is your head burning with?... 86 And so we then perceived his scientific and theological book with the same young ears. “Spring is beginning,” we told ourselves. “The Church is this eternal Spring. Now everything is clear for the rest of my life.” Ignatius the God-Bearer 87 writes that “The Lord has scented the Church with incorruption.” Through the seven seals of learned work we inhaled the fragrance of the Church. The heavenly azure of God-consciousness was revealed to us under the dark, and so familiar, vaults of the old church. Of course, we received the Church from childhood, from the time when my mother and father walked with candles on the night of Holy Saturday, burying the body of Christ. Since then, we have learned that the “Song of Songs” lives on earth. But then there were years of dispersion and oblivion, and Florensky managed to somehow recall this Saturday night. I remember my father and I were visiting M.A. Novoselov, in his apartment on the corner of Obydenny Lane. He was once a very prominent and fiery Tolstoyan, but now he devoted himself entirely to the Church and “the work of the Lord.” He had a hall there with large portraits of Khomyakov, 88 Dostoevsky and Vl. Solovyov, with a long table for the study of his religious and philosophical circle, his office with the image of St. John Climacus 89 and the third small room-dining room, where we sat having tea, and M.A. from time to time ran with a scoop for coals into the samovar so that his song would not stop. And here he is, a very warm-hearted man and at the same time loving. Paul, working with him to defend the name-glorification from the attacks of the Synod, suddenly began to express doubts about the Church value of his works. I was 17 years old, I was silent, but suddenly excitement literally pushed me into conversation: “How can you say that! Father Paul opened the Church to us.” I remember my father’s encouraging eyes, and first surprise, then an embarrassed smile, and finally obvious approval on Novoselov’s face, as if he was just waiting for this young protest of mine. When, summing up his book, Florensky asked, “What is Truth?”, he answered: “This is the Church, this is authenticity, this is the spiritual law of identity, this is feat, this is Trinitarian Unity, this is the Light of Tabor, this is the Holy Spirit, this is Sophia, this is the Most Pure Virgin, this is friendship, this is again the Church.” The Church was named twice, and knowing that he wrote about the light of Tabor, about Sophia, about friendship, about feat, about the Holy Spirit, about creation, we understood that the answer about the Church as the Truth must be much strengthened. The whole book is a book about the Church as the Truth. The very title of the book is the definition of the Church given by the Apostle Paul. Formally speaking, this is, of course, how all the apologists of churchism of the 19th and 20th centuries defined the Church, but they were so disbelieved that they seemed unheard. It was impossible not to hear Florensky. He, at least for a moment, for some, made it possible to see and even touch the walls of the true Church. It was not at all that easy to do. In society, the identification of the Church with its double has already gone too far. Let us remember that the book was published in the “era of Rasputin,” 90 who was not only not excommunicated from the Church, but, on the contrary, parasitic around the church administration. This misunderstanding has gone too far that the double is not the Church, that next to it, in the same common fence, among the darkness, ignorance, cold, wickedness and vices of everyday churchliness, the Light of the true Church incomprehensibly exists - the body of God in history, living in living people. “And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.” The provocation of the church double, this false interweaving in the consciousness of two concepts, was unconditionally and silently, that is, non-polemically, dissected in Florensky’s book. He speaks only of Truth, and this Truth is “once again the Church.” And that which is not from the Truth is extra-church, even if it considers itself churchly. This is incomprehensible to reason, but it is so. In the preface (“To the Reader”) he writes: “Churchfulness is life, a new life, like any life inaccessible to reason... The Church is the body of Christ, “the fullness of Him who fills everything in everything.” How can this fullness of Divine life be placed in the narrow coffin of logical definition?.. Church life is comprehended only vitally, not rationally. Churchliness is a new life in the spirit. The criterion for the correctness of this life is beauty. There is a special spiritual beauty, and it, elusive to logical formulas, is the only true path to determining what is Orthodox and what is not. The connoisseurs of this Beauty are spiritual elders, masters of “the art of art,” as the holy fathers called asceticism” (p. 7-8). You can talk a lot about the Church and say nothing. With all its historical reality, or precisely because of it, this is an ineffable subject of theology. It can be established, for example, that Florensky’s ideas could have been influenced by R. Zom, whose book “Church System in the First Centuries of Christianity” he translated in 1906. This book, in particular, says: “The essence of the Church is spiritual... (it) is the Body of Christ on earth... The Church is a spiritual magnitude, alien to the norms of the earthly... At the basis (of the concept of the Church) are the words of the Lord: “Where there are two or three in My name, there I am in the midst of them.” But how much more expensive is it when the Church simply shows itself. “Orthodoxy is shown, but not proven,” writes Florensky in the preface; or rather, it is proven either by personal example or by a story about living life. It was in this, in the story about the living carriers of the Church, that there was a methodological plan for creating the history of the Church, which belonged to one of the people close to Florensky, who died untimely in 1929, Fr. Sergius Mansurov. 91 In 1909, Florensky published “for acquaintances only,” as it says on the back cover, “The Tale of the Life of Abba Isidore,” 92 hieromonks of the Gethsemane monastery and his elder. “In him,” Florensky wrote, “as rarely in anyone, the living, building, creative Body of the Church was felt with a bare hand - the Church has power...” “The Confession of the Elder, simple in appearance, was completely special due to some elusive spirit of eternity.” And then Florensky cites the story of one professor who came to confession to this “sorrowful man for the world.” “There was nothing between me and him,” says this acquaintance of Florensky, “between me and Christ. How much rationalism and anger I carried, it all melted away in Fr. Isidora... I came with a feeling of formal humility... it seemed to me that everything would be as it had always been - that a dear, decent monk would receive me nicely, decently, that I would confess decently, and everything would be as it should be. But here’s what was wrong: in this cell, in its simplicity, endless power... I experienced what I call the impression of the Church... The elder stood up and, as he was dressed in a shirt for graduation, ports and pistons on his legs, calmly stood up and said: Well, okay (to the request for confession). He took out the stole, put it on himself, fastened an old brocade bandage onto his shirt with his power and blessed God... When he read the prayer of absolution, I could only say one thing: It’s in my soul now - “Christ is risen from the dead.” Then he finished singing: By death he has trampled down death, and given life to those in the tombs. Then I cried again, and he again told me that I would be comforted, and when I left, he kissed my hand... I only know one thing, that I saw a Stone, and on it the Church. And I can’t say anything more than greatness. This has remained with me forever, like a great blow. The church opened for a moment and then disappeared. The church is in ports and gold bands, and the epitrachelion is on the Stone.” Florensky writes (in the preface) that “the meaning (of his book) is preparatory, the meaning of catechetical words in the church yard.” But this is “preparatory work” for the vision of the “Church on the Rock.” Each church era has its own characteristics in the knowledge and definition of the one Truth. One of the common, or identical for all eras, features of Christianity is its transcendence of ordinary rational concepts. The incarnation of God, the Creator of the world in man with full foundation of both Divinity and humanity, the true death of the man Jesus and then his true resurrection, only this fundamental fact of Christianity takes it beyond the border of three dimensions. “Christianity is a mystery for the world,” said Macarius the Great, 93 and this is where its difficulty lies for this world, its “madness” or unreasonableness, super-rationality or, simply put, backwardness from the point of view of the world. But our contemporary, who sincerely enters into Christianity, may at first be embarrassed by this fullness of Christianity with sacraments, by this need to make an unshakable foundation for himself in Christianity, not in the convincing words of human wisdom, but in the “manifestation of spirit and power,” according to the Apostle, this, as the same Apostle says, “the economy of the mystery revealed from eternity in God.” The knowledge of this divine economy of the Church is the knowledge of a mystery, no less for us than the mystery of the God-manhood of Jesus Christ. Someone said that “the Church is as much an object of mystical experience as Christ.” And the consciousness of every sincere Christian, as his life in the Church grows, will enter into this mysticism of Christianity, which permeates everything in him, starting from the hidden inner life of the soul, according to what is said in the Gospel: “The Kingdom of God is within you.” “There is esotericism in it (the Church), writes Florensky. “This is the mystery of her life for anyone not initiated into this life, the existence in it of a special structure of the soul, without which nothing in the Church can be correctly perceived... In this sense, if you like, we can talk about some analogy of church life to the ancient mysteries” (p. 782). Vl. Solovyov defined the Church as a mystical society, 94 and to understand Florensky it is necessary to establish continuity of thinking on this most important issue, despite his disagreement with Solovyov on many other things. There is no doubt that Fr. During his short life among us, Pavel managed to take some step in the development of the doctrine of the Church, although it was precisely this side of his activity that all his critics did not notice, saying that he “passes off his philosophical speculations as church thought” (Zenkovsky 95) or that he “does not come from Orthodox depths” (Florovsky), Berdyaev - the era of the book’s publication (1914), believed that Florensky’s Church was “archaic” and “stylized”, i.e. both outdated and unnecessary. “This book,” he wrote, “is deeply hostile to the new religious life... he wants to remain in the childhood period of Christianity... he is all turned back.” As if in the “infancy of Christianity” these eternal words were not spoken: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.” Only Bishop Theodore, a strict and good monk and learned rector of the Academy, said that “the author’s book is Orthodox from beginning to end,” and that “having read the book of Fr. Paul, and having taken a completely unusual path for theological thought, we can say: the author established and clarified in our minds the absolute value of spiritual truth (namely the trinity as the main Christian dogma), and established the Church in our minds.” 96 This says a lot. Only after Florensky it became possible to assert V. Lossky 97: “The main dogmatic theme of our time is the doctrine of the Church” (“The Dispute about Sophia,” 1937). It is known that there is no dogma about the impossibility of a new dogma. The dogma of the Church, understood as the mystery of God about the creation of holy humanity experienced in living experience, may be the last feat of Christian life and thought. “Living religious experience,” writes Florensky in the preface, “(this) is the only legitimate way of learning dogmas.” The Church as Truth clearly shaped his thinking from a young age. In his biographies it is usually noted without any explanation that at the beginning of the century he participated, or even “created” together with Ern, V. Sventsitsky and Fr. Jonah Brikhnichev 98 “Union of Christian Struggle”, “meaning active actions in the name of renewal of the social system” (Zenkovsky). The social ideas of this society were somehow connected with the ideas of the first revolution, and Archbishop. Antony Khrapovitsky 99 called its participants a “revolutionary gang.” But in order to somewhat clarify this fact of his biography, I will write down those points of the program of the “Christian Brotherhood of Struggle” (and not the “Union”) in which his attitude towards the Church is visible. Points 6–7: “According to the deepest Christian faith, there will never be universal well-being on this earth. Within history, the final goal of Christians is the appearance of the “woman clothed with the Sun.” The Church will open to believers, preparing for marriage with her Master.” In a speech by Sventsitsky, obviously the most active figure of the Brotherhood, in 1907 in the St. Petersburg Court of Justice, in connection with his accusation of calling on the troops to disobey the authorities, he explained that he was addressing not the troops, but the Church, and at the same time clarified what he meant by the Church: “The Church,” he said, “the body of Christ... Outside Christ, outside the Church there can be neither Truth nor Good, no Beauty. This limitlessly expands the boundaries of the Church, but also limitlessly narrows them. The Chief Prosecutor (of the Synod) may not enter them and Beethoven will find his place. The world in its struggle strives for this creative source of life - the Church.” 100 It can be noted, by the way, that this is the same Valentin Sventsitsky, who 15 years after this speech became a priest in Moscow, the spiritual leader of many people, a teacher of unceasing prayer and “a monastery in the world.” Of Florensky’s printed works, the only one where any of his complicity in the “Brotherhood of Struggle” is visible is the brochure “The Cry of Blood,” which is his “word on the week of the cross, spoken in 1906 in the church of the Theological Academy. But it also contains the following words: “The Church is the most precious thing on earth for us, a bridge to heaven.” The first letter - “Two Worlds”, adjoins the preface in leading the reader to the primary feeling of the Church. “Everything is spinning, everything is sliding into a deathly abyss,” writes Florensky. - Only One abides, only in Him is immutability, life and peace... In life, everything is turbulent, everything is unsteady in outline. And from the depths of the soul rises an unbearable need to support oneself on the Pillar and affirmation of Truth, not just one of the truths, not the private and fragmented human truth, restless and scattered like dust driven in the mountains by the breath of the wind, but the complete and eternal Truth, the one and Divine Truth, the bright and luminous Truth, that “Truth”, which, in the words of the ancient poet, is “the sun of the world...” How to approach this Pillar? For Florensky, the Church is the Element of the “Unified Center” - God, to whom “all radii of the circle of times converge.” Outside this Center everything is unreal. This is “Two Worlds”. And, finishing the book, he writes: “There are two worlds, and this world all crumbles into contradictions, unless it lives by the forces of that world... But how to approach that Stone of Faith?” (p. 483). When the words about the Stone were first heard in the Gospel, they gave the opposition of two worlds, the main opposition of Christianity: “On this Rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” In revealing this opposition within oneself, in opening within oneself the gates of the Church and the gates of hell, lies, probably, the surest path to the Stone of Faith. There are the gates of the Church and the gates of hell, there is the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world, the Church and not the Church. This opposition is conceivable only if the concept of the Church includes the actual, and not legal or verbal, filling of the people who make it up with the grace-filled divine-human element. “Churchfulness,” Florensky writes in the preface, “is that divine-human element from which the rites of the sacraments, the formulation of dogmas, canonical rules, and partly even the fluid and temporary way of church life are condensed and crystallized in the historical course of church humanity.” Approving the visible forms of churchliness, he simultaneously defines their primary life-giving force, from which they are nourished and are effective, and outside of which they are “only ringing brass and a clanging cymbal.” The awareness of “Two Worlds,” of course, was not for Florensky an escape “from a world that lies in evil,” or even less contempt for this world. In the notes of “The Pillar” one can more than once see the author’s very favorable statements about V. Rozanov, a person close to him. Rozanov has the following words: “Dostoevsky, by contrasting Zosima and Ferapont, expressed an eternal truth: about the thousand-year struggle of two ideals - the blessing and the curse, the peace-kissing and the peace-spitting” (“Near the Church Walls”). In 1917, Florensky published letters to Archimandrites. Fedora Bukharev, 101 and did a lot for his memory. In one letter, Bukharev writes: “All my best hopes for the future of the Church and the whole world rest on the fact that in everything earthly and visible for its salvation from sinful corruption, open all kinds of environments (areas) to the manifestation and assimilation of Christ’s grace”... We must “follow the direction of Christ’s descent from heaven into our visible world and Christ’s ascension from earth to heaven already with earthly nature” (Letters, pp. 86‒90). The most difficult thing in realizing the “two worlds” is that the Church does not live inside the church fence, that evil and good “geographically” coexist. Florensky says that true churchliness is “new life in the Spirit,” that is, this or that degree of spirituality, this or that degree of acquisition of grace. But the boundaries between the grace-filled and ungraceful or even counter-graceful states, both within a person and in the totality of the Church, are not clear for ordinary consciousness. To understand them, first of all, you need to realize that there really is an analogy in the existence of the Great Church and the “little church,” the Universal Church and the church of the individual soul. In the life of the martyr Seraphima (July 29), 102, we read the following dialogue between her and her tormentor: “The hegemon said: Are you, as you say, the church of your God? Seraphim answered: since I keep myself blameless with His help, He (His) truly is the church. For our Scripture says: You are the living church of God, and the Spirit of God lives in you.” “The word Church,” teaches St. Macarius the Great, “is spoken of both many and one soul, for the soul before God is the church.” And about this soul the same great saint says: “The sun, illuminating stinking places, is not defiled. Sometimes a pure and holy spirit, dwelling in a soul that is still under the influence of the evil one, does not borrow anything from it,” for “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it,” and again: “In one heart two kinds of life are active: the life of light and the life of darkness.” 103 Just as the light of God does not cease to be light, and only the purest light in the heart, despite the still surrounding darkness of this heart from the “action of the evil one,” so the light of the Universal Church “borrows nothing” from the geographical presence of evil in the church fence. It is as if the double existence of the Church is known through the double life of the soul. We cry over our darkness, we sigh over our imperfection, we yearn for the dream of a divine world. And only in the fire of these feelings, rushing towards God, does the soul become a church. Oh, a heart full of anxiety. Oh, how you beat on the threshold The first letter is unusual not because of its philosophically understandable content, but because of its simplicity and warmth. We, unfortunately, are accustomed to the fact that questions of faith and unbelief, life and death are always spoken from the pulpit and with a certain theological chill. It was only St. Seraphim 105, through his conversation with Motovilov 106 in the winter of 1831, who revealed to us that we can also gain knowledge of divine life and participation in it in the forest, sitting on a tree stump under falling flakes of snow. In his first letter, Florensky introduces us to his small room, and we enter into a conversation with him, listening to the wind rustling in the trees, how the locomotives shout, how “at about four o’clock in the morning they announce the morning service.” We see that from the lamp a sheaf of light comes upward onto the miraculous face of the Savior, and this sheaf convinces us of Christ more than many “Christological” pages of many books. We hear that the eternal “immeasurable and timeless has settled under the arches between the narrow walls of this room.” We are brought by the author into an atmosphere of premonition of Truth, ineffable and loving. I am not writing this based on the impressions of the book alone. I remember the streets and houses of old Sergiev Posad half a century ago. The figure of the then Fr. Paul and the special silence that was around him, the silence of listening to eternity, betrothed to it. The second letter is “Doubt”, the most difficult to understand. But when taking into account Florensky’s difficulties, one must keep in mind that if the very path of his philosophical theorems is not clear, then the conclusions for each chapter are always clear. In addition, in the text the reader will always find reference points for understanding: either in the mention of some phenomenon of life, for example, the play of the sun at the dawn of the first day of Easter, or in the incidentally given explanation of a prayer, ritual or gospel parable, or in the vignette of the epigraph. The entire significance of asceticism for the transformation of the flesh is conveyed in the epigraph to the letter “Creature” - “Clears to the light.” In this book, and especially in this letter, the author set himself the task of giving a philosophical introduction to the knowledge of the dogmatics of the Church. In this regard, one more biographical fact should be noted. In 1906, the Religious and Philosophical Society named after Vl. Solovyov, associated with the names of Andrei Bely, V. Ivanov, Trubetskoy, N. Berdyaev, V. Ern, Florensky, V. Sventsitsky, S. N. Durylin, 107 S. N. Bulgakov. On March 15, 1907, the Society began giving lectures at the Free Theological University organized under it, and the title of the course of lectures that Florensky (then still a student at the Moscow Spirit Academy) was to give there was “Philosophical Introduction to Christian Dogmatics.” 108 When explaining the book in “Introductory remarks before the defense for the master’s degree” (St. Petersburg, 1914), Florensky says that when studying religion, the main question arises: “What trains of thought should my mind go through in order to recognize the salvific nature of this religion?”, or: “In what ways does a person become convinced that God is God, that is, truly possessing salvation and giving it to people?”... that He is “the Real Truth, the Savior.” And the author is trying to open these “trains of thought” of the mind seeking the Truth. After all, “he who wants Truth cannot rest in nihilism,” he writes (in the 4th letter). “He leads consciousness to the recognition of the necessity of faith through a purely logical process.” To do this, he, first of all, establishes and examines the norms of the activity of reason, and then proves that these norms cannot guarantee a person the truth and cannot prevent the terrible process of doubt from arising in him. “We are forced,” he writes, describing this process, “to passively surrender to the contradictions that tear apart our consciousness. By asserting one thing, at the same moment we are forced to assert the opposite. Having affirmed the latter, we immediately turn to the first. Like a shadow, each statement is accompanied by a painful desire for the opposite statement... Now doubt in the sense of uncertainty is far away: absolute doubt has begun, as the complete impossibility of affirming anything, even one’s own non-affirmation... Skepticism reaches its own denial, but cannot jump over the latter, so it turns into an endlessly painful languor, into the agony of the spirit... I don’t have the truth, but the idea of ​​it seeks me...” He goes on to show that this process of skepticism is flawed because it is based on nothing, and the statement is nowhere proven - do not accept anything without evidence. After all, if we are to be consistent, then this unproven demand for rational evidence is in itself a forced dogmatic premise. Florensky argues that if thought develops in some kind of honesty and in a real thirst for Truth, then it itself must be convinced of the need to break away from skepticism. The logic of thought itself should lead to a rebellion against him. “We don’t know,” he writes, as if in line with this stage of thinking, “whether there is Truth, but with all this we say to ourselves: If it were, then we could look for it, going some way at random... I will try to make an unjustified, but also not condemned attempt to find the Truth... I am groping... I am trying, at my own risk, to grow something, guided not by philosophical skepticism, but by my feeling... I have hope for a miracle: perhaps the flow of lava (doubt) will recede before my sprout, and the plant will turn out to be a burning bush...” This passage of writing is about the logical inevitability for conscientious thinking to break away from rational skepticism, very convincingly. Florensky does not propose the obligatory path of doubt, as one of his critics suspects, but leads us to the only reliable path to knowledge of the truth - living heartfelt experience. But this personal experience usually includes one or another stage of doubt. Cloudless thinking is almost always suspicious. Us. 691 he quotes the words of St. Gregory of Nyssa 109: “Whoever, having seen God, understood what he saw, this means that he did not see Him.” Doubts are temptations of the mind, and St. Isaac the Syrian said that “if there were no temptations, there would be no saints.” We often do not overcome doubts from within, but simply close our ears to them with a dogmatic spell. In this regard, one must be aware of the deep decline of school theology, which became quite obvious by the time Florensky began his theological activity. And it cannot be understood without taking this fact into account. Here is what can be read in one article from the beginning of the 20th century, written by a person close to Florensky: “Our school theology, alien to religious experience, not only does not spiritualize anyone and does not raise anyone to God, but also kills those living beginnings of religious life that are perceived in the family and the church... By attacking rationalism, we ourselves, in essence, stand on the basis of the same rationalism. With a zeal worthy of a better fate, we guard the dogmatic shell, having frozen it so completely with the coldness of rationality that those seeking the nourishing grain of Christ are blocked from accessing it... The gradual loss of living knowledge of God (sensation of God) has led man to complete oblivion of God.” 110 This is what people who gave themselves entirely to the Church wrote at the beginning of our century. Therefore, Florensky instills in us the idea that we, in our search for faith or in our affirmation of faith already received, must oppose faith to the five-sensory experience of people of unbelief, not as trust in a purely external authority, but as a living, new experience of the mind and heart, as the possibility of experienced knowledge of the most real being: “Only relying on direct experience can one appreciate the spiritual treasures of the Church,” he writes in the preface, and only through the experience of the heart does a person approach faith. This is the meaning of the second letter. The new presumptive construction of the mind, which wished to escape from the torment and hopelessness of skepticism into the realm of living experience, leads thought to the affirmation of Truth as “The Infinite Act of Three in Unity” (p. 48). In difficult terms and in a roundabout philosophical way, the author approaches a simple and understandable truth for the human heart, that Truth cannot in any way be an abstract, abstract principle, that it, in contrast to this, is necessarily a living and real person, but at the same time such a person, such a being, whose entire being, both inside and outside of it, is perfect love. Only love is “self-proving,” and not only for the heart, but also for the mind; only it convinces, creates life and creates truth. Love within the Being is presented to us as a relationship of three within this One. The author philosophically leads us to an understanding of the Christian dogma of Trinity in Unity as a dogma of love, and thereby as the only certainty. “In our search for certainty,” he writes, “we came across a combination of terms that cannot make sense to reason. “Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity” does not mean anything to the mind. And yet, the very existing norm of reason leads us to such a combination, demands that it have its own meaning, that it be the starting point of all knowledge. Condemning itself, reason demands the Trinity in Unity, but cannot contain it. Reason on its own would not have come to the possibility of such a combination. Only the authority of the “Powerful One” can be the reference point for the efforts of... the mind... to become a new mind” (pp. 59–60). “In order to approach the Truth,” he writes in the afterword, “one must renounce one’s self, one must come out of oneself, and this is absolutely impossible for us, for we are flesh. But how, then, can one grasp the Pillar of Truth? – We don’t know, and we can’t know. We only know that through the gaping cracks of human reason the azure of Eternity is visible (italics Fl. - S.F.). It's incomprehensible, but it's true. And we know that “the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and not the God of philosophers and scientists” comes to us, comes to our beds at night, takes us by the hand and leads us in a way that we could not even imagine. For humans this is “impossible, but with God all things are possible” (p. 489). “The inner Teacher teaches us,” writes Bl. Augustine, teaches Christ, Divine inspiration. Where there is no such inspiration and inner enlightenment, the action of words from without is in vain.” “Seek God within yourself,” St. taught. Leo the Great. 111 The words about the “God of philosophers and scientists” belong to Pascal, 112 French mathematician and philosopher of the 17th century, from his so-called “Amulet”, given by Florensky in the “Appendix”, to confirm how through the fire of doubt and the torment of searching the living certainty of Truth is revealed to man. “After the death of one of the most sincere people,” writes Florensky (p. 577), “a small note, carefully preserved by him, was found in the lining of his jacket. This note dates back to the time or even the moment of Pascal’s “conversion”, and represents a confession of his faith, or, more precisely, a prayerful contemplation of individual moments of spiritual ascent.” Here is the beginning of this wonderful document of the life of the soul: « Year of Grace 1654. Monday, November 23rd, St. Clement 113 pope and martyr, and others in the month. St. Eve Chrysogonus the Martyr 114 and others. From approximately ten and a half o'clock in the evening to approximately midnight and a half" (“This precision of the date,” Florensky writes in the notes to the “Amulet,” indicates that the fullness of knowledge that was revealed to Pascal was not dreams or vague premonitions, but was a precisely delineated phenomenon and, therefore, qualitatively new, standing outside the usual processes of consciousness”). “Fire” (“Of course,” writes Florensky, “the fire of doubt. For two hours Pascal languished in the fire of Gehenna, and then, after this test of non-existence, Jehovah was revealed to him”). “The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, not philosophers and scientists” (“Truth is a Person,” writes Florensky, “historically revealing itself, and not an abstract principle”). “Credibility, Credibility. Feeling. Joy. Peace" (“In a meeting with God, Truth is certainty and therefore the resolution of the Epoch (the extreme point of doubt); it is this certainty that gives satisfaction to the feeling - joy and peace, i.e. God satisfies the criterion of truth.") “The God of Jesus Christ” (“The God of Jesus Christ is the Truth. The Trinity, for only Christ proclaimed the Trinity”). The reality of communion with God, the joy of feeling grace, this freedom and peace and joy, after the torments of unbelief, after - as Florensky writes - “the test by the fire of non-existence”, fill the entire document, and it is simpler, clearer and stronger than all this second letter from Fr. Paul speaks of the happiness of finding faith. The metaphysical labyrinth of doubts described by Florensky, also, like Pascal’s, ends simply with the help of God. And then the question arises: why were all these torments of the mind and all the “moves” of its logic, seeking the truth? But this is the point, that God’s help goes to where people are looking for it, although without understanding it, that God needs to see the search of a person’s mind, his thirst for truth. That logical process of thinking, which is given in the second letter of the book as leading to the recognition of the need for faith, is a process of mental birth, is the free feat of a person calling on the Unknown God. And this call of human freedom is answered by the love of God and gives help. “Freedom and love are mutually similar,” says the bishop. Theophan the Recluse. 115 Florensky gives us an image of conscientious unbelief and shows that such conscientious-seeking unbelief, through the logical path of its searches, inevitably reaches the very threshold of Faith, without crossing it. The miracle of crossing the threshold is beyond our comprehension. We can only guess that the ray of Trinitarian Love, according to laws unknown to us, finds in the darkness of the world the searching ray of the human heart, and then Faith is born, a new life begins. The dogma of the Trinity was comprehended and theologically “spoken out” by the Holy Fathers, and it is picturesquely comprehended in Rublev’s icon. Florensky wrote about this icon: “We are touched, amazed and almost burned in Rublev’s work by the suddenly pulled back veil of the noumenal world before us... He truly conveyed to us the revelation he had seen. Amid the turbulent circumstances of the time, amid strife, internecine strife, general savagery and Tatar raids, amid this peacelessness that corrupted Rus', the endless, imperturbable, indestructible world of the heavenly world was revealed to the spiritual world. The enmity and hatred reigning in the earthly world was contrasted with love flowing in eternal harmony, in eternal silent conversation, in the eternal unity of the heavenly spheres. It is this inexplicable peace, flowing in a wide stream from Rublev’s Trinity directly into the soul of the contemplator, this azure that is not equal to anything in the world, more heavenly than the earthly sky itself, this inexpressible grace of mutual inclinations, this premium silence of wordlessness, this endless submission to each other, we consider the creative content of the icon of the Trinity. Human culture, represented by chambers, the world of life - by a tree and the earth - by a rock, everything is small and insignificant before this communication of inexhaustible, endless love, everything is only about it and for it, for it, with its blueness, the music of its beauty, its presence above gender, above age, above all earthly definitions, is heaven itself, is the unconditional Reality itself" ("Trinity-Sergius Lavra and Russia"). Rublev’s icon, Florensky tells us, gave a vision of the authenticity of the world of divine love. We believe in Love - this is what lies as an imperishable grain in the shell of the Trinity dogma,” about which one should have studied in seminaries not according to “Filaret,” but “according to Rublev” and Florensky. Believing in Love means that a person has a reflection of this love, like a nugget of gold in the very depths, and this reflection gives birth to faith. Florensky spoke about the idea of ​​the Trinitarian Truth in his second letter in philosophical terms, as “the only possible idea of ​​truth for reason.” And in the afterword: “Reason is possible because there is a Tri-radiant Light - the root of reason.” Now, in the third letter, he speaks about the same thing in theological language. The Nicene Church Fathers of the 4th century established the dogma of the consubstantiality of the Holy Trinity. “Consubstantial” means concrete unity, but not nominal unity. This one term combined both the individual and the general. Each hypostasis or face, while not merging with the other in the least, is at the same time inseparable from it. In the word “consubstantial,” there is an indication of both real unity and real difference... “Here it was a matter,” writes Florensky, “of the radical self-determination of the Church of Christ. And in a single word not only the Christological dogma was expressed, but also the spiritual assessment of the rational laws of thinking. Here reason was struck to death. Here, for the first time, a new beginning of the activity of the mind is announced.” The term “consubstantial” is the antinomic grain of the Christian understanding of life, it is the single name of the Three Hypostases... We say “in the name” and not “in the names” of the Father, Son and Spirit. This is a purely mystical, superlogical teaching... To accept it, one must go beyond the limits of reason... Rational faith does not want to renounce the self... To know the truth, you must have it, and for this you need to stop being only yourself and partake of the truth itself... This is a renunciation of your uniqueness, of your selfhood and the beginning of participation in the life of Trinity love, which is all expressed in this one word “consubstantial.” When defending his book for his master’s degree, Florensky said: “Truth makes itself truth. This self-truth of Truth is expressed by the word - consubstantial. Thus the dogma of the Trinity becomes the common root of religion and philosophy.” Lossky considers this development of the idea of ​​consubstantiality, which reveals the essence of love, to be Florensky’s main merit for the Christian worldview. Florensky divides all philosophical and religious systems into two types, depending on whether they recognize consubstantiality or only similarity, “likeness.” According to the Arian and any other rationalistic “philosophy of similarity,” the world consists of beings whose existence in relation to each other is completely external; they are connected only by external and temporary relations. They are only similar - essential, and not consubstantial with each other. On the contrary, the philosophy of consubstantiality asserts that ontologically all beings are closely related internally. This gives an understanding of the nature of the world as an organic whole, this is the knowledge of the unity of humanity. Lossky’s thoughts must be continued, since the edge of this term separates the truth from the untruth of life and thought. A departure from the experience and philosophy of consubstantiality is a departure into the formalism, appearance and illusionism of religious and philosophical thought. Literature has replaced communication with the Word in many minds and hearts,” writes Florensky (p. 682). In religious and philosophical “literature” there is no consubstantiality with the spiritual world, which is its theme. The experience of the essence of the object of faith is replaced here by one or another dogmatic scheme. This can be observed in a wide variety of people. In the memoirs of Andrei Bely there is the following passage about Berdyaev at the beginning of the century: “Niagara flowed in short, crackling, sharpened phrases; each as an ultimatum: predicate, subject, period... The other side of his dogmatism always seemed to me to be chimerism; he began to fear concrete knowledge of the subject.” 116 Florensky is remembered precisely because he switched the method of religious thinking and his statements from the plane of purely external dogma, from the plane of religious “chimerism” to the plane of spiritual concreteness. We perceive the ontologism of his thought as a sign by which we distinguish “Florenian theology” from “pre-Florenian” or from religious journalism. Ontology does not allow any allegory in life and thought. “A symbol,” writes Florensky, “is not a conventional icon, not an allegory, but a genuine image of reality (p. 673). For the philosophy of consubstantiality, there cannot be a gap between word and concept, name and what is named, prayer and what is called, faith and life, faith and love. Life must be, and can be, consubstantial with faith, and man – with love. “Salvation,” Florensky writes, “is in consubstantiality with the Church... the ontological essentiality and objective significance of humility, chastity and simplicity are established as forces that, in the Holy Spirit, make all creation consubstantial with the Church” (p. 343). Where there is no “consubstantiality” - internal spiritual unity with the divine world, appearance immediately begins there. People, according to the words of the apostle, can “preserve the image of piety (an external sign), but reject its power.” The concept of “consistency” reveals the historical substitution or counterfeit of Christianity: the falsehood and pretense of crafty and vicious people, the indifference of even sincere, but indifferent people. Consubstantiality as a moral category is holiness, a forgotten concept and almost incomprehensible to us. Holiness is the striving in love and repentance for real communion with God, for real, and not allegorical, touching the shrine of God, the striving for consubstantiality with it. “As You, Father, are in Me, and I in You, that they may be one in us” (John 17:21). Chimerism of thinking is often expressed in a special unctuousness of behavior and verbal expression. Not living in spiritual reality, thought is forced to revolve in religious pretense. In the “Biography” of the Optina elder Leonid, 117 who died in 1842, there is the following description of him: “His disciples could not be crafty people, they could not stand his gaze. Squeezing their hearts, they soon ran away from this disciple of Christ, seeing that feigned politeness and false respect were unsuitable for the elder’s cell, where spiritual simplicity and Christian infancy reigned. The elder did not tolerate all types of feigned humility and false reverence, “delights” of kissing shoulders and hands and called them “chimeras.” There is another type of creation of religious chimeras: the perception of Christianity as only the world of external miracles. St. John Chrysostom 118 writes: “We are surprised at the apostles not for their miracles, but because they showed angelic life... A righteous life will receive crowns without miracles.” 119 “An evil and adulterous generation seeks a sign,” we read in the Gospel. The spiritual consciousness of many generations was distorted due to the accumulation of sheer miraculousness in the lives of the martyrs, making, in essence, these torments no longer seem real, and therefore not terrible. Reality was turning into a religious fairy tale. It is enough to read the few surviving acts of torment or the contemporary records of saints, for example St. Dionysius of Alexandria (III century), 120 to see the true reality of the feat of Faith, and to understand the importance for the practice of Christianity, for the cultivation of Christian courage - to reject religious daydreaming. This is how St. describes one persecution. Dionysius: “Everyone was struck with fear then... Those who came (to the judgment seat) were called by name, and proceeded to unclean and nasty sacrifices (i.e., they renounced Christianity) - some pale and trembling, not with the intention of making a sacrifice, but as if they themselves were about to become victims of idols, so that they aroused ridicule in the surrounding crowd. Others approached the altars more readily, trying to prove by their very boldness that they had not previously been Christians. Of the rest... some escaped, and some were captured, and of the latter, some survived to the bonds and prison, and others, although they had been in custody for many days, but then, without waiting for the trial, they renounced. There were also those who, having endured enough torture, did not dare to endure further torture. Only the solid and blessed pillars, having been strengthened by the Lord and having received worthy strength and constancy of irresistible faith, became wondrous witnesses of the kingdom of God.” 121 Further, the saint conveys the torment of these “blessed pillars” without mentioning a single external miracle. The miracle was performed in the mystery of “the constancy of irresistible faith.” The Acts of the Torment of Perepetua, 122 who suffered in Carthage in 202, an exquisitely brought up young woman of 22 years old, have been preserved. The Acts, in addition to descriptions of her martyrdom, included her autobiographical story. She writes about how “a few days later we were placed in prison and I was horrified, since I had never endured such darkness. Moreover, I had to endure the rudeness of the soldiers, and finally, one thought about my child deprived me of all peace...” When you read these Acts, you want to kiss the black lines of the letters that capture the true miracle of the Faith. “In one word (consubstantial), Florensky wrote, the Christological dogma was expressed” (consubstantiality of the Son with the Father). And in another place: “The building of dogmatics was based on the great word, immediately true for consciousness, for life by faith in Christ Jesus - “consubstantial” (p. 116). In this regard, we recall G. Florovsky’s reproach that in Florensky’s book “everything is built around Christ”, that it “has no Christological chapters.” Back in 1905, Florensky wrote: “There is an absolutely Holy and Pure Being, there is One Sinless One, who took upon Himself the sin of the world and does not reject people, despite all their uncleanness” (“Antony of the novel and Anthony of the legend”). In the first letter of the Pillar we read: “The fullness of all things is in Jesus Christ, and therefore knowledge can only be obtained through Him and from Him.” He writes about “he who has power” and about the meaning for us of His consubstantiality with the Father in this third letter. In the 4th letter he says that “only by believing in the Son of God and receiving in him the promise of the Holy Spirit, the believer knows who the Father is, only in the Son of God does he recognize the Father as Father, and therefore he himself becomes the Son. Through the Son he receives the Holy Spirit, and then, in the Comforter, he contemplates the indescribable beauty of the essence of God, rejoices with inexplicable awe, seeing within his heart the intelligent light, or the light of Tabor... This is the light of reason, this is the light of Christ, which enlightens everyone” (p. 95‒96). These statements could be greatly increased. “In Florensky’s book,” writes Bishop Theodore, “the whole premium depth of Christianity, its necessity for man, is revealed.” 123 There are no “chapters about Christ” in this book, but there is also no chapter “about love”, there are no chapters “about the Church,” while all of it is based, starting from the first epigraph, on revealing the essence of love, and is all aimed at clarifying the idea and mind of the Church. According to the author’s plan, the book lacks not “chapters about Christ,” but a second book, or a new “Pillar,” about Christ, and he himself makes a special reservation about this. “The question arises,” he writes, “how exactly does the idea of ​​the authority of Christ arise, how does the mysterious rebirth of the soul occur? Without going beyond the boundaries of my work, which has theodicy as its subject and not anthropodicy, I could not deal with this issue. But I consider it my duty to emphasize that there is a gap here, which I propose to fill in the long-planned work “On the Increase of Types” (p. 638). He spoke about this same methodologically necessary division of a single topic at the defense of his book for an academic degree. 124 He ended his opening speech at this defense with significant words: “Philosophy is lofty and valuable not in itself, but as a pointing finger to Christ, and for life in Christ.” And in “The Pillar” this “pointing finger” tirelessly guides our thought, despite the division of the topic. Here, on p. 97 o. Paul gives an explanation of the “Quiet Light” prayer: “The Lord Jesus is a gentle, quiet light from the holy glory of the immortal, holy, blessed Father in Heaven. But He, this quiet Sun of the world, rose on earth and then set, again becoming, as it were, with us. We saw the light of this setting Sun, and in it, in the light of this Light, we saw the light of the Ever-Bearing Trinity. Therefore, we now sing praises to Her, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit - God. The Son of God, who by that trisolar illumination of creation gives life to the world, is glorified by the world in grateful songs.” The fourth letter of the “Pillar” is about the “three-solar enlightenment of the creature.” “Christ, Light of truth, enlighten and sanctify every person coming into the world”... Everything in a person who has not yet been born, but is already moving from Eternity to earth, is illuminated by Divine light: the body, the will, the heart, and the mind. Church people often have the same misunderstanding about the meaning of reason as they do about the transformation of the body or about the nature of the Church. “The trouble is,” said St. Seraphim, “that we are not looking for the Divine mind, which is not arrogant, for it is not of this world, but being filled with love for God and neighbor, creates every person for salvation.” 125 “A mind filled with love” - a loving mind - this is the main theme of Florensky, which must be seen, like a clear clearing, in the forest of his learning. “Reason yearns for salvation, it perishes in its essential form, in the form of reason,” he said in the “Introductory Remarks” to the defense of the book. “My unfruitful mind is fruitful, God, show me,” he recalls in this book the irmos of the canon on the week of the “Prodigal Son.” It is possible to make a “fruitful mind” that has exhausted itself in the deserts of the world only by leading it along the narrow road of Christ, leading to the riches of knowledge, to a feast not only of faith, but also of the mind, to consubstantiality with the knowable truth, to love. The mind yearns for love just like the heart, and only by achieving it does it blossom. This is the secret of the fact that “love gives birth to knowledge” or “knowledge is made by love” - those words of St. Gregory of Nyssa, which stand as the Greek epigraph of the book and which, above all, amazes in it and is most remembered in it. “In love,” writes Florensky in the 4th letter, “man found the initial stage of a long-desired intuition... Cognition is the real emergence of the cognized into the knower, real unity... moral communication of individuals... Cognition of truth is a real entry into the depths of the Divine Trinity. Therefore, true knowledge is possible only through the transubstantiation of man, through the acquisition of love as the Divine essence... Both are only sides of the same mysterious fact: the entry of God into me as a subject (of knowledge) and me into God as into objective Truth... Revealed truth is love... If I have not known God, have not joined His Being, then I do not love... For my own human efforts, love for a brother is absolutely impossible. This is a matter of the power of God... Only he who knows the Triune God can love with true love... In the lover is the seed of truth itself and true knowledge... A metaphysical chain fetters these two acts - knowledge and love.” Florensky is difficult to convey until a person realizes what his main pain is. I remember one evening in a prison cell in 1946. It was already after the evening gruel, when all the passions and excitement of the day had subsided. Dominos were knocking on the long table, and the chess players were humming something to themselves. Next to me on the bunk was a very young man who had not received any transmissions, a professor at a foreign university. I’m trying to tell him about Florensky, and I don’t know how to overcome both the difficulty of the topic and the lack of knowledge of the language. And I remember that there is another one - the “first epigraph” of the book, but not Greek, but Latin: Finis amoris, ut duo unum fiant. My listener understands this well, and I suddenly saw tears on his gray face. I managed to convey Florensky. Florensky illustrates his idea about the merging of love and knowledge in the 4th letter by explaining the liturgical text: “Let us love one another, so that with one mind we confess the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” Love is the condition for the unanimity of faith, the knowledge of faith, and therefore only it is the condition for the possibility of the following “Creed” - the contemplation of divine truths. This was the constant, persistent teaching of the Fathers. “Knowledge (cognition), being in its essence entirely love,” writes Bl. Diadochos, 126 – does not allow our thoughts to expand in the generation of divine contemplations, unless we first accept into love those who are unjustly angry with us.” “Oh, the Precious Unit and the Most Honest Trinity! You scorch with the ulcer of love the mind that resides in you, enlightening it more and more and truly introducing it to inaccessible, secret, heavenly spectacles” (Callistus Catafigist 127). 128 “No love means no truth,” writes Florensky, and this formula of his is very close to the thoughts of his contemporary, Abba Silouan of Athos, 129 who taught that the only infallible criterion for the correctness of a particular teaching is its solution to the question of love for enemies. “True love,” writes Florensky, “is a way out of the empirical and a transition into a new reality... Love for another is a reflection of true knowledge (knowledge) on him, and knowledge is a revelation to the heart of the Trinitarian Truth, that is, the abiding in the soul of the love of God... In love for another, the I passes into the not-I and through him, through this depletion of myself, returns to myself, affirming myself in love. Love is a “yes” that I say to myself, while hatred is a “no” to myself... In love, people grow together into a consubstantial whole, into the Church, or the Body of Christ... The distinctive advantage of love, according to St. Neil of Sinai 130 (writes Florensky), is that it unites everyone to the very inner disposition of the soul. As a result of unity alone, each person transmits his suffering to everyone else, and he himself receives their suffering from others. Everyone is responsible for everyone and everyone suffers for everyone” (p. 435). This is Dostoevsky’s favorite, and probably central, idea, and as for the quoted words of Fr. Paul that the Church is the consubstantiality of people in love, then after them it is especially clear that any sectarian denial of the Church is essentially a denial of love, and thereby of God. Florensky shows that love is not moral didactics, but being, air, the very essence of the Church as the Divine-human body. “Christian love,” he writes, “must be removed from the field of psychology and transferred to the sphere of ontology” (p. 83). “The word Love, of course, is not in the subjective-psychological sense, but in the objective-metaphysical sense... The metaphysical nature of love is in going out of oneself, and this happens when the power of God influences another, breaking the bonds of human selfhood. By virtue of this emergence, the I becomes a friend of the non-I, becomes consubstantial with my brother - consubstantial, and not only similar in essence, which similar-existence constitutes moralism, i.e., a vain, internally insane attempt at human, extra-divine love... (In love) instead of separate self-governing selves, a duality is obtained - a dual being, having the beginning of its unity in God. Florensky does not cite the words of the saints, who explain the ontology of love even more clearly than he. “You must see your God in your brother” (St. Simeon the New Theologian 131). “Have you seen your brother? “You have seen the Lord your God” (Abba Apollos). 132 “Could there be a better vision than to see the invisible God dwelling in man as in his church” (Pachomius the Great 133). This last saying is given by Florensky in the article “On Types of Increase” in 1906. Cognition, the “seeing” of God in a person, and not psychological or socio-ethical considerations or coercion, determines and gives birth to Christian love. When a person sees the dawn, he should not be forced to joy or amazement. In January 1907, Florensky spoke in the church about the “Cherubic Song.” “We, who mysteriously depict cherubim and sing the thrice-holy Song to the life-creating Trinity, will now leave all worldly thoughts in order to raise the King of all, invisibly carried by the spears of the ranks of Angels. – What mysterious words are sung during the liturgy! Who can listen to them without trembling? Think about it: we mysteriously depict cherubs! Is not like represented like? This means that in each of us there is something similar to a cherub... There is a cherubic core of our soul, great in its significance... God has invested in man his best gift - the image of God. But in the innermost storehouses of the soul this precious pearl lurks: in a muddy, ugly shell among the mud, at the bottom of the spiritual world. We are all in sin. But we are like clay vessels full of sparkling gold. On top, blackened and smeared, and inside - dazzlingly radiant... This is the holy inside of the human soul, the true Self of man... The Kingdom of Heaven is the divine part of the human soul. To find it in yourself and in others, to be convinced with your eyes in the holiness of God’s creation, in the kindness and love of people - here is eternal bliss and eternal life” (“Joy Forever”, 1907). If we had nothing left from Florensky except that student sermon in the church of the Kostroma diocese, then even then his inheritance would be large. The fusion of love and knowledge in the soul of Fr. Paul gave him the basis, in the words of Theodore Bukharev, for “unifying and leading in Christ the whole work of his thought and his study of modern sciences.” About the archimandrite To Theodore Bukharev, who has an undoubted influence on Florensky, he wrote that his thoughts are “one of the most important fermenting principles of this (19th) century in Russian culture... that the future has yet to discover Archimandrite Theodore Bukharev” (“Letters”, p. 41). Here are some of these thoughts: “You can plow the land and chop wood, acquiring Christ the Lord for yourself through this work... Double-mindedness is not suitable for any work. My business of thought and knowledge is bad when I conduct this business (studies) in this way: this is what I say or think, based on the principles of ordinary criticism, logic, experience, probability theory, etc., etc. I, an Orthodox man... need to unite and lead in one Christ the whole work of my thought, all the methods and images of knowledge, all acquaintance with modern knowledge, the study of all modern sciences... Even in baptism we died to every other principle, in order to live only to Christ and by Christ, and this is as much in thought as in other aspects of our being... Understand the same regarding any kind of research... Christ is our truth... Consider it not only a sweet duty, but also a glory to perceive Him... by constant ascent in any scientific field... This is the way of the cross” (“Letters”, pp. 115‒120). “But why didn’t the early Christians create science themselves?” - asks Florensky and answers: “Because they had no time for it, just as in general, probably, a Christian who was completely devoted to the feat had no time for science, although only he has the inclinations necessary for true science” (p. 284). I don't know if this answer is sufficient? Did the struggle in which a minority of Christians always lived hinder the founding of Christian Science? Is it insufficient for the general mass of believers to fill this feat with grace? Florensky often writes in this book about the illumination of the divine light of the ascetics of Christianity, about the reality of this light, which illuminated their minds for “examining creatures”, for the knowledge of everything that exists. “The thorny path of smart doing,” he writes, “is crowned with the bliss of absolute knowledge” (p. 108). But this path did not become the general practice of the Church; the majority of Christians did not want the thorns of achievement, and was this not the reason for the non-creation of Christian science? The feat is illuminated by the grace of the Holy Spirit, and in the history of Christianity, perhaps, the question and answer about which “Acts” is told is repeated: “Paul found some disciples and said to them: Have you received the Holy Spirit when you believed? They said to him, “We have not even heard whether there is a Holy Spirit” (19:1-2). “Do you remember, quiet one, our long walks through the forest of dying August... Do you remember, my unanimous brother, the reeds over the black pools? We stood silently by the steep shore and listened to the mysterious evening rustles. An unspeakably jubilant secret grew in our souls, but we remained silent about it, speaking to each other in silence... Now it’s winter outside. I study by the lamp, and the evening light in the window seems blue, majestic, like death. And I, as before death, again run through the whole past, again I am excited by unworldly joy.” This is how the fifth letter begins - about the Holy Spirit. In the house of Fr. Paul in those years when I visited him there was a children's room, and in it in the corner for icons hung a white flying dove, like an icon of the Holy Spirit given to us from heaven. The epigraph-vignette to this letter reads: “The pledge is love” - Pignus amoris. Florensky's shortcomings and mistakes only become apparent later. Its first impact is the first spiritual nourishment among that “hunger of the words of the Lord” about which the prophet wrote. The shortcomings and errors lie in the field of theological and philosophical theorizing, and all his strength lies in the charm of his spiritual personality, which helps us to feel the “jubilant mystery” of Eternity. I think there is truth in the words spoken to me in 1936 by Fr. Mikhail Shik, 134 that “the significance of Florensky is for those still standing only at the church walls.” And Florensky himself writes in the preface about the significance of his work, only for those still approaching the Church. But all these concepts need to be deeply deepened and heard in a completely new way. Are we not approaching the immaculate walls of the Church all our lives? And isn’t it still a great mercy of God that they don’t drive us away from these walls? I think that many people have a wrong idea of ​​their presence within the Church, based on their knowledge of the Creed and the Ten Commandments, a position that seems to them to be something like hereditary and honorable nobility. To be in the Holy Church means to be in the grace of the Holy Spirit; grace is found in Christian work or deed. Which of us is in asceticism, and which is in grace? But all of Christianity is in these two words. “And having tasted Christianity,” said St. Macarius the Great, “think of yourself as if you had never touched it. And let this not be a superficial thought in your mind, but something always implanted and established in your mind.” 135 Florensky writes the fifth letter with extreme caution. “That’s why I write you ‘letters’” instead of composing an “article,” which I am afraid to assert, but prefer to ask” (p. 120). By the way, the form of the letters shocked many. I remember one pre-revolutionary general who was always indignant that these were “all some kind of letters.” It seems to G. Florovsky that this is only a “literary device.” But, firstly, this “reception” is sanctified by apostolic practice, and secondly, every content seeks its own “reception” or form. It is known that both Gregory the Theologian, 136 and Simeon N.B. sometimes expressed their religious content and thoughts in a poetic “device”. Florensky is right when he speaks in this letter about the insufficiency of dogmatic knowledge about the Holy Spirit. Obviously, a more complete knowledge of Him is a sacrament of the future age. But along with this fact, we have the wealth of experienced knowledge of the Holy Spirit by ascetics. I am afraid to touch this shrine of the Church, and in my superficial presentation to cite the testimonies of saints. But I am also afraid of something else: “to hide my master’s money,” not to tell those who do not know what I know. “I heard,” writes St. Simeon N.B., “from one monk-priest who trusted me as his friend: I have never (he said) liturgized without seeing the Holy Spirit, as I saw Him descending on me at the time when I was ordained, and the Metropolitan read the prayer of priestly consecration over me, and the Missal lay on my poor head. Simeon asked him: how did he see Him then and in what kind of form? He said: simple and formless, but also like light. And when I, seeing something I had never seen, was surprised at first and wondered within myself what it could be, then He said to me mysteriously, but in a clear voice: Thus do I descend upon all the prophets and apostles, and the present chosen ones of God and saints: for I am the Holy Spirit of God - to Him be glory and dominion, forever and ever. Amen". 137 “I tried to lead you,” says St. Barsanuphius the Great 138 to his disciple, “and into other ineffable, most honorable, pure treasures of the Spirit, and the Spirit of God said to me: now is not the time, but when he strives to make the old man new to receive the Holy and Worshipful Spirit, then he will receive the Spirit, who will teach him everything.” 139 These are the unspoken conversations of the ascetics with the Comforter. Fr. points out correctly. Paul also points out the liturgical insufficiency of prayers to the Holy Spirit, but again, he doesn’t seem to say enough. Along with this, in the divine service there are exceptionally powerful prayers to the Holy Spirit, but they are not known to anyone. Here is just one troparion from the canon for Compline on the Spiritual Day: “Come to us, O Holy Soul, Thy partakers of holiness, and the Everlasting light, and divine life, and the most fragrant dispensation. You are the river of the Divinity, coming from the Father through the Son” (paragraph 6). Florensky laments that the Church has few prayers to the Spirit, but it turns out that the Church has, you never know, a lot, but we don’t pray, and that decides everything. The main fact is not that in the Church there is not enough experienced knowledge of the Holy Spirit, but that the general mass of believers does not use the existing knowledge acquired by the saints and does not seek His grace. Who knows that the goal of Christian life is not to achieve virtues or to create morality, but to acquire through it the grace of the Holy Spirit? Already in 1907, Florensky drew attention in print to the conversation between St. Seraphim and Motovilov, hitherto unknown to many, about the acquisition of the Holy Spirit as the goal of life. In the article “Questions of Religious Self-Knowledge” in 1907, he wrote: “This complete inattention to the very idea of ​​acquiring the Spirit is terrible. They don’t have it, and they don’t want to have it, they don’t consider it necessary to have it, they don’t think that without real power, Christianity is like salt and an extinguished lamp.” But in the fifth letter, Florensky, albeit with great reservations, wants to say that the point is not that people “do not consider it necessary to have,” but as if they cannot have, are unable to have knowledge and prayers to the Holy Spirit, that “the one-sided knowledge of the Second Hypostasis (i.e., Jesus Christ) gave birth to the religion of modern times” (p. 127), i.e., Christianity, that in it “the fullness of acquisitions (St. Spirit) is inaccessible to believers as a whole, and is also inaccessible to an individual believer in the integrity of his life” (p. 112). The teaching and perception of the Logos, as it were, obscured the teaching and perception of the Holy Spirit - this is, in fact, what Florensky wants to say in his fifth letter about the entire history of the Church. He understands that by doing so he is approaching the position of the people of the so-called “new religious consciousness” who were then grouped around Merezhkovsky, 140 and this, naturally, scares him. “It is highly alien to me,” he writes, “the desire to, as it were, forcibly acquire the Holy Spirit” (p. 123). “The new consciousness,” he says, “always turns out to be not high-church, as it pretended to be, but anti-church and anti-Christ. He who has the Spirit as much as His saints had, clearly sees the madness of claiming more... Parallel to the entire church history runs the thread of this false religious consciousness, which has always presented itself as “new”” (p. 133). The essence of the “new religious consciousness” is the absence of the Holy Spirit in the history of the Church. This is still the same Protestantism, which does not believe in the Church. The promise of Christ about her invincibility through the gates of hell turned out to be unfulfilled for him. Pentecost did not happen, and therefore it will still happen. “New consciousness” is the desire to create “next to the religion of Christianity, a new religion of the Holy Spirit, next to the New Testament of Christ, which no longer satisfies, the Third Testament... We are not talking about the simple evolution of Christianity, but about the emergence of a new religion on its soil. 141 “In order to enter the third moment (the Third Testament), the world,” writes Florensky, “must finally emerge from the second moment; in order to enter the religion of the Spirit, the world must finally come out of the religion of the Son - from Christianity" (weekly "Century", 1907, No. 19). Against the background of these aspirations, the fifth letter is perceived with bewilderment. “Throughout our entire era,” writes Florensky, “they pray most importantly to the Father. Even if they pray to the Spirit, they wait more for Him, yearning for the Comforter more than rejoicing in Him” (p. 129). But this has been known to Christianity since its very foundation. Already the Apostle Paul established the knowledge that what was achieved after Pentecost is not yet the “fullness of the Spirit,” but only “the firstfruits of It,” or, as the ascetics said, “a pledge” and a “betrothal,” that the creation therefore still “groans and suffers,” and we groan within ourselves, awaiting “adoption.” And the church apostles accepted the Light of Tabor only as best they could - “as if they were a host.” But this “firstfruits” is so great that it is incomprehensible and incomprehensible to us, and knowing about it through the revelations of the saints, it is unacceptable even with reservations to talk about some kind of “inadequacy” or “one-sidedness” of the New Testament. In the entire letter about the Holy Spirit, there is no mention at all of Pentecost - this fiery baptism of the Church with the Holy Spirit. About the teaching of pr. Seraphim about the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, the author speaks only in the Fourth Letter, in connection with the particular question of the reality of the Tabor Light, and not in this letter, to which it directly refers. He also does not note the amazing fact that in January 1831, entry into this ineffable light of Tabor grace was given not to a hermit or even a monk, but to a worldly man, a married landowner, but at the same time, of course, a servant of God and a disciple of the saint. It is in this combination that the immeasurable value of this document lies. Florensky writes: “In the deserts of Thebaid and Palestine, to individual saints, to these pinnacle and almost superhuman points of the Church, the Spirit revealed Himself and through them to those around them” (p. 120). But can Motovilov be called “the superhuman point of the Church”? “The Conversation with Motovilov” showed that the path to acquiring the Spirit is possible for everyone, that “all things are possible to him who believes.” It is interesting to note the heated objection to Father Paul back in 1907, which he received from one priest D.G.T. “Florensky writes,” we read in this objection, “those who have acquired the Spirit are not visible among Christians, no active force is felt in them. Come and see,” I answer him. Rake up the ashes and you will see fire, it always tries to hide; such is the property of the fire of Christ" ("Christian", 1907, vol. I, p. 650). Florensky’s mistake is that he still turns a little towards the “new religious consciousness.” “And yet,” he writes, “the basis of the “new religious consciousness” is a true idea” - this is on p. 129, the very one where he says about the representatives of this “new consciousness” that they are “people of false knowledge.” His hesitation is biographically understandable. He, like Sventsitsky and Ern, in his youth was close to the people surrounding Merezhkovsky. And he himself warns the reader: “If there are any “my” views in my work, it is only due to thoughtlessness, ignorance or misunderstanding” (p. 360). His misunderstanding is that he attributes the obvious lack of acquisition of the Spirit and knowledge about Him to some “regularity” of the Testaments, something “provided for”, and not to the reluctance or inertia of church people, i.e. exactly what he correctly spoke about in 1907. Pentecost opened the “royal doors” of spirituality to all people, and only people themselves do not want it. “Many are called, but few are chosen” is the constant sorrow of the Gospel, and this is precisely the answer to the “new consciousness.” O. Sergius Mansurov, who at one time stood close to Fr. Paul, taught with particular force about the Church, precisely as the already open gates of the Kingdom of the Holy Spirit, i.e., thereby about the real inseparability for the Christian life of the Son and the Spirit. I remember what happened between him and Fr. Pavel had disputes and some kind of disagreement. However, I heard that when Fr. Sergius died, this was heartily received by Fr. Pavel. I remember how, with some fear, I asked one spiritual elder monk: “How do you feel about Florensky?” The fear was from the expectation of a negative assessment from an Orthodox strict person. And the elder replied: “How do I feel? - Of course, good. Only he was still young.” I think these words contain the norm of attitude towards Fr. Pavel. The letters of the “Pillar” were obviously written in the process of spiritual growth. Letter 5, “The Comforter,” the weakest of all, was published already in 1908. The letter “Sophia” was published only in 1911 (“Theological Bulletin”). In 1912, when he defended his book for his master’s degree, there were only 7 letters in it, including this fifth, and the rest (“Two Worlds”, “Gehenna”, “Sophia”, “Friendship” and “Jealousy”) appeared together in the “complete” “Pillar” in 1914. And in the letter “Sophia” we read words that contradict the entire meaning of what was said in the 5th letter: “For school theology, it’s easy to say that the concepts of the Church, the Holy Spirit and the Son of God are different, in his consciousness these are only concepts. But for a believer who perceives them in their living reality, for which with full tangibility the Church is the Body of Christ - the fullness of the Spirit sent by Christ, for such a believer it is painful to make sharp divisions, because they cut on a living body.” The mystery of the inseparability of the perception of the Spirit, the Church and Christ for the saints is that they walked to Them in the only and common way - through feat, through participation in Calvary of the Son. Ave. Simeon N.B. calls the Holy Spirit “our great God and Lord in scarlet” - clothing before the crucifixion. In the Eucharistic prayer of the ancient liturgy of Clement, the Holy Spirit is called “Witness of the sufferings of the Lord Jesus.” 142 Only through the suffering of Christ, only through feat can one enter into communion with the Spirit. This is where the mystical knot of the inseparability of their perception is, and this is where the abyss between Christian mysticism and any other mysticism is. And oh. Pavel knows this. “Outside of achievement,” he writes, “the Spirit was and is known only negatively” (p. 121). But if the path to the Holy Spirit is through the Son, through the Cross, then the Son is recognized only in the grace of the Spirit, since “no one can call Jesus Lord except by the Holy Spirit” 1 Cop. 12), and since the Holy Spirit “comes from the Father and rests in the Son” (Trinity service). This unity in consciousness is not a dogmatic confusion, but a living undividedness of love, which amazes you when you read liturgical texts or the words of saints. Here is the Synaxarion, 143 unknown to anyone) on the Day of the Spirits: “The Comforter, the Holy Spirit, is said to be able to comfort and give us peace. Instead of this Christ we received, and Onago (i.e. Christ) with that (i.e. the Holy Spirit) who intercedes for us with unspoken voices to God, like our lover of mankind, stands before us like Christ.” To enter into the mystery of the consubstantiality of the Son and the Spirit, to enter with your mind, heart and will, with all your joy and consolation, labor and love, to enter for some kind of embodiment or reflection in yourself of Their consubstantiality, this is the constant goal of every Christian. Those who in Christianity separate themselves from Golgotha ​​of the Son, believing that even without it they already possess the Resurrection in the Holy Spirit, fall into daydreaming, false spirituality and exaltation. These people reject the narrow path and somehow merge with the “world that lies in evil.” Those who, accepting the narrow path and feat of Calvary, forget about the already past Resurrection, about the Kingdom of the Holy Spirit already revealed on earth, make their Christianity dead or, repeating the words of Fr. Paul, “overwhelmed with salt and an extinguished lamp.” For saints, it is all about the unity of this perception and the unity of life in it. “The grace of the All-Holy Spirit,” writes St. Simeon N.B., “is given to souls ignorant of Christ.” All Christians, great and small, are called to receive this grace, and “everyone,” writes the same saint, “should recognize whether he has received the betrothal of the Spirit from the Bridegroom and Master Christ.” "Betrothal" of the Spirit. Betrothal is not yet the “Marriage of the Lamb,” but its pledge. “Having the firstfruits of the Spirit,” both man and the Church await His fullness, wait, groaning and yearning together with the Apostle, for the fulfillment of the time when God will be “all in all.” And about this expectation from Fr. Paul has true words in this letter. “I sketch,” he writes, “thoughts that I feel more than I can express. Like some kind of fabric, like some kind of body from the finest star rays is woven into the world’s foundations: something is waiting. There is something missing, something the soul is yearning for, wanting to be resolved and be with Christ. And something will happen: “if it doesn’t appear, what will happen.” But the more acutely one feels what is being prepared, the closer and more intimate the connection with the Mother Church becomes. What will be will be with Her, and through Her, not otherwise. With quiet joy I look forward to what will happen, and “Now you let go” is sung and rings in a humble heart. When will it come, when the Great World Easter will open... I don’t know... but my heart is calm, because hope brings it close to it.” Or, adding the words of the Apostle, “hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” Coming to the 6th letter, again may be frightened by philosophical theorems, and the use of a “logistic algorithm”, mysterious to him, to prove that “truth is a contradiction”, or antinomy. I was scared until I accidentally read the epigraph to M. Voloshin’s poem “St. Seraphim of Sarov,” which reads: “When I talk about God, my words are like blinded lions, looking for a source in the desert.” The main point of this letter is to reject a special kind of religious positivism, for which “everything is clear”, which can understand and explain everything - edifyingly or theologically scientific. When thought, abandoning simplification, begins to truly enter into the feat of religious life, in its quest for reason, unity and peace in God, a period of some kind of religious contradictions is inevitable, like blindness “for lions seeking a source in the desert.” Antinomy is affirmed by Florensky, of course, not as an eternal and insoluble norm, as one critic suspected him of, 144 but as a sign of a consciousness that has not yet been transformed. Antinomies do not lie in the nature of divine things, but in a temporary transitional state of our mind. But honesty and seriousness of thinking do not allow escape from them. It's like twilight before dawn, aurora time. This is especially evident in the consciousness of Ancient Greece. “The pursuit of contradiction,” writes Florensky, “and the love of contradiction, along with ancient skepticism, seems to be the highest that antiquity has given... Contradiction brings together,” he quotes Heraclitus 145, “perfect harmony is formed from opposites.” I remember the love of Fr. Paul to ancient times. It stood out, in particular, in that on the walls of his room in Posad there were many photographs of Greek statues, which was unusual for a priest’s room. Antique art, shining with the sun, was, of course, “day” for the ancient Greek in his opposition to chaos, the night of the world, about which the poet said: She came, and from the world of fate Fabric of the blessed cover, Having torn it off, it throws it away. Here is the first, and such a gaping, antinomy of the world! - night and day. Perhaps under her influence, Florensky applied the antinomian alternation of days and nights to the theory of world cultures in the article “The Ancestors of Philosophy,” where he writes: “Our life runs in parallel sequences of days and nights, although interspersed, but seemingly not noticing each other, joining into two parallel threads of life - black and white. This is what Psalmist 146 expresses with the words: Day vomits forth the days, and night proclaims the night the understanding. This is exactly what happens in history. The bands of daytime consciousness “belch out the verb,” that is, they have the continuity of tradition, the single mind of culture, not to the bands of night consciousness adjacent to it, but to other bands (daytime), delimited from it by the night culture. And the nocturnal culture “proclaims its reason” directly to the nocturnal culture, not the daytime one, that is, not the one that is adjacent to it... The Middle Ages are culturally different, their own culturally... The philosophy of the Renaissance is not adjacent to medieval thought, but to the thought of antiquity. In Alexandrian philosophy, in Neoplatonism, one must look for its origins. On the contrary, the approaching evening of thought, already clearly blowing cool air over our heads, and the evening shadow of a new culture quickly approaching us, apparently breaks with the traditions of the ancient culture of the New Time that immediately preceded them, and the invisible arteries and nerves of society receive nourishment from the thought of the Middle Ages, which was considered, not so long ago, irrevocably buried.” “The new Middle Ages are near,” he wrote in “Ancestors of Philosophy.” In another article, he defines his understanding of culture in general. “All dogmatic disputes,” he writes, “from the first century to the present day, lead to two questions: the problem of the Trinity and the problem of the Incarnation. These two lines of questions were a defense of the absoluteness of the Divine, on the one hand, and the absoluteness of the spiritual value of the world, on the other. Christianity demands both with equal force... If there is no absolute value (God), then there is nothing to embody, and, therefore, the very concept of culture is impossible. If life, as an environment, is completely alien to divinity, then it is unable to embody a creative form, and, therefore, it will again remain on its own, outside of culture, the concept of culture is again destroyed... The defense of culture, in its very foundations, has always been a struggle for both mutually necessary principles of culture" ("Trinity-Sergius Lavra and Russia", 1919). Culture is the embodiment of the divine principle in the earthly environment. If there is nothing to embody, or if there is nowhere to embody, that is, if there is no God or an environment for Him, then the culture dies. It is not enough to recognize God, we must also create a soil that yearns for His incarnation; we must have a Zion upper room, where Christ can come again. In this statement of the “holy land,” or spiritual ground for incarnation, Florensky continues the thoughts of Dostoevsky, whom he often fondly remembers in “The Pillar.” “Knowledge of the truth,” he writes in this letter about antinomy, “requires spiritual life and, therefore, is a feat. And the feat of reason is faith, that is, renunciation. The act of self-denial of reason is precisely the statement of antinomy... If truth were (for reason) not antinomy, then reason would not have the impulse to begin the feat of faith... We should not gloss over contradictions... It’s time to reflect the powerless effort of the mind to reconcile contradictions with a cheerful recognition of inconsistency... The secrets of religion are... untold, indescribable experiences that cannot be put into words except in the form of contradictions, which are both “yes” and “no”. This is “more than meaning - sacraments.” Contradictions are the secret of the soul, the secret of prayer and love... There, in the Mountainous Jerusalem, they are not there. There are contradictions in everything, and they are not eliminated by arguments... The mind itself is split, and only the purified, God-bearing mind of the saints is somewhat more complete. In it, the fusion of faults and cracks has begun, in it the disease of being is healed, the wounds of the world are healed... Only at the moment of grace-filled illumination, contradictions in the mind (obviously, of every person) are eliminated, but not rationally, but super-rationally.” In the appendix (“Lewis Carroll’s Problem”) he speaks even more clearly about the same thing: “What for ratio is a contradiction, and an undoubted contradiction, then at the highest level of spiritual knowledge ceases to be a contradiction, is not perceived as an antidote, is synthesized, and then in a state of spiritual enlightenment, there is no contradiction. Therefore, there is no point in training a rationalist to realize that there are no contradictions. They exist, yes, they are undeniable. But these contradictions turn out to be the highest unity in the light of the “Unsetting Sun” (p. 505). “The Holy Book,” he writes in the sixth letter, “is full of antinomies.” He gives some of them here and on page 418. “Dogma as an object of faith certainly includes rational antinomy. If there is no antinomy, then the rational position is complete. And then this is not a dogma, but a scientific position. There is nothing to believe here, there is nothing to purify oneself and perform a feat for. But it seems to me,” writes Florensky, “that it is great blasphemy to think that religious truth is a sacred thing, understandable in any internal state, without achievement. It may gracefully shine upon the unclean mind in order to attract it, but it cannot be accessible to everyone... Dogmas are comprehended by the Spirit, in Him is the fullness of understanding... Only genuine religious experience discerns antinomies and sees how their actual reconciliation is possible... Where there is no antinomy, there is no faith, and this will only happen when faith and hope are abolished and only love abides... Completeness and unity, holistic completeness, for of reason is only postulated. But the condition for the intuitive givenness of the postulate is the taming of one’s rational activity, and the exit into the grace-filled thinking of the restored, purified and recreated human nature.” What does “taming rational activity” mean? This phrase by Florensky, the meaning of which he repeatedly repeats, causes some people both bewilderment and grief. And one might even think that it is in contradiction with the enormous material immediately cited by the author on the purely rational defense of Christianity with the weapons of philosophy, philology, history and the exact sciences. Interpreting the text of the ap. Paul (1 Cor. 4), St. John Chrysostom says exactly the same thing about “taming” the mind. What is “madness about Christ”? - he asks and answers: “That is when we tame our own thoughts, when we clear our mind of external teaching, so that it is cleared to accept divine broadcasts. When God declares something that should not be examined, it must be accepted by faith.” 147 This means that taming “rational activity” is just taming the conceit of the mind, although, of course, this is also very difficult and difficult to accomplish. In the third letter, Florensky writes: “Faith, by which we are saved, is the beginning and the end of the cross, and co-crucifixion with Christ... There are many types of atheism, but the worst of them is the so-called rational, or more precisely, rational faith... Spiritual goods lie outside the realm of carnal knowledge, they are “what the eye has not seen and the ear has not heard, and what has not entered the heart of man.” Florensky affirms two types of activity of the Christian mind: one, in the sphere of universal human rational knowledge, the other, in the depths of grace-filled life. The connection between them is that the first is entirely nourished by the second, and only in the presence of the second can it have meaning and strength. Faith cannot be rational, but it can sometimes be defended rationally. The first region is not denied by Florensky, but is affirmed as auxiliary, auxiliary, for refuting untruths, for strengthening some approaches to the Church, its “suburbs” or “suburbs”. The very same “City, whose maker and builder is God” (Heb. 11), lives in a different life not only of the heart, but also of the mind, and his “weapons of warfare” are already different - “throwing down all exaltation, rising up against the knowledge of God and taking every thought captive into the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10). “Firearms,” writes Florensky (on p. 809), “the power of the Spirit that strikes from afar, is the direct property of the Church.” Inside the City is the life of the Spirit, and only as long as this “life lives”, and thought is nourished by it and returns to it, after “excursions” into rational knowledge, does the Church or an individual live in spiritual health. If nutrition stops, then religious rationalism begins, separating knowledge from spiritual life, replacing life in grace-filled humility of the mind with a life of complete faith in the infinity of human knowledge. And “knowledge puffs up,” says the Apostle, “but love creates.” Anyone who thinks that he knows anything does not yet know anything as he should know” (1 Cor. 8). A Christian who defends himself against unbelief only by rational knowledge, only by his own reason, is like that warrior from a fairy tale who chopped off a many-headed monster: he chops off one head, and in its place two grow. Christianity conquered the world not “by convincing words of human wisdom, but by the manifestation of the spirit and power” (1 Cor. 2), by the blood of martyrs and the madness of preaching. “This madness is more intelligent than all wisdom, it dispersed the darkness of the universe, it brought the light of knowledge” (St. John Chrysostom), 148 it is the stronghold of Christianity, and in it “mind” becomes “mind”, becomes a God-bearing mind. This learning is painful. It is difficult to accustom yourself to the words of the Apostle: “I decided to be among you, knowing nothing except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” Faith is a feat of reason, its cross and dying in God. “With complacency,” writes Florensky, “in an amicable way, you cannot overcome reason” (p. 650). According to his terminology, this process of painful degeneration of the mind is the introduction of it, and not just the body and heart, into asceticism, that is, onto the narrow path of the gospel feat. Back in 1906, in an article about Archimandrite. Serapion Mashkin, he wrote: “The ancient ideal of the sage received its highest revelation in the patristic concept of the monk as a Christian philosopher... Philosophizing becomes possible after the preparation of the mind by asceticism.” In other words, the fight against sin is a fight for the transformation of the whole person, including his mind. This is how the saints write about it: “When sin is mortified in us, heaviness, blindness, and everything that oppresses the soul falls away. Feelings that hitherto bore fruit of death rise in health and invincibility. The mind, as it were, is entwined with illumination and calms down in incorruption, freed from all disturbances, it observes the Sabbath, lives in another, new age, deep in the consideration of new and incorruptible objects” (Abba Isaiah). 149 In one of Florensky’s poems from 1907 (the “Star Friendship” cycle), there are the following lines: My dissatisfaction with myself is the beginning of the struggle to find myself in God, myself cleansed of everything that is not the true “I.” “What does religion save us from?” - Florensky asks in the “Opening Remarks” when defending the book in 1912, and answers: “It saves us from us, saves our inner world from the chaos lurking in it. She overcomes the Gehenna that is within us. It strikes the reptiles of the “great and vast sea” of subconscious life. She settles the soul. And by establishing peace in the soul, it pacifies both the whole society and all of nature.” In other words, the meaning of Christianity Fr. Paul states exactly in the Gospel: “...she will give birth to a son, and you will call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21), in saving a person from sin, in reconciling the soul,” and through it - social conflicts, and not vice versa, as is often assumed in our time by religious people. The human soul is the focus of both social and natural existence. By his sin, man corrupts the air of the world, the existence of nature and creation. St. Tikhon of Zadonsk 150 wrote: “Sin is the reason that even the most innocent nature (of the creature) suffers. Man sins, and other creatures suffer, the earth does not bear fruit, the air and water are corrupted” (“On the History of Christ,” 1908, p. 151). The struggle for the cosmos takes place within people, in their hearts, and in their sanctifying spiritual activity, expressed, in particular, in sacraments and rituals. I remember that this was the main idea of ​​the course of lectures by Fr. Paul, which he read, it seems, in the summer of 1918 in Moscow, under the general title “Philosophy of Cult.” He spoke at these readings, which took place in a crowded auditorium of the “Gymnasium of the Society of Teachers” somewhere on Ostozhenka, about the reality of the penetration of the divine element of the sacraments into all pores of the earth’s fabric, about the sacraments as “foci from which divine warmth spreads throughout the world,” about how at Epiphany the consecrated Epiphany water washes away and heals the underground roots of life, about the danger that lurks in the separation of personal and public life from cult, about the mystical degradation of the process of eating, starting from eating the Bread of God at the sacramental meal, and ending with hastily swallowing a sandwich at the railway buffet, that the goal of Christianity is to sanctify the world, “to preserve its residence with the cross,” to overcome its corruption, its “flight to Death,” to transform its life, to permeate its “existence,” its temporal all-pervasiveness, rays of Eternity coming from the cult. At the same time, I remember, he repeatedly spoke in Moscow churches with extra-liturgical conversations, mainly about the name of God. “You cannot even put a razor blade between the invoked name and the Named One,” he said. This is his external idea. In 1909, in “The Universal Human Roots of Idealism,” he wrote: “The name of a thing is the substance of a thing,” “names express the nature of things.” The same is in the “Pillar”: “The Name of God is the mystical Church.” I remember his liturgy in the home hospital church of Posad. He served very simply, quietly, collectedly and concentratedly; one could feel his immersion in what he was doing. They saw him standing in the same way in the church after he stopped serving. Someone once saw two priests performing the liturgy in an almost empty church: Fr. Pavel and Fr. Mikhail Shik. Perhaps there are still living people today for whom this liturgical combination will say a lot. It is known that he celebrated the liturgy together with Fr. Sergius Bulgakov in Moscow. I don’t know how he prayed outside the church, whether prayer always lived in him, but I felt in him, inside his spiritual composure and warm seriousness, like a house for prayer. I loved going up to him for his blessing. He blessed with such faith in the grace of blessing. “Prayer is breathing into oneself the grace of God,” he writes in connection with the life of his elder Isidore. I don't know about him as a confessor. They said that when V. Rozanov was dying in Posad (in a house on Polevaya Street), he did not call Fr. Paul, but a parish priest. Did heartfelt humility live firmly in him? I only know that there was not a shadow of this terrifying external humility in him. In addition, there is no doubt that, as one of his students (Volkov) wrote about him, “he placed humility at the basis of the methods of thinking and the way of a person’s entire life.” He was very simple, and everything external was organically alien to him, everything external that was inadequate to the internal. And I remember well with what humility, patience and goodwill, he, breaking his busy working day, received me, a young man of 18-19 years old, for a conversation. “Well, Seryozha, let’s talk,” he said quietly and as if doomedly, sitting down and sitting me next to him and listening, for example, to my thoughtful project to write - neither more nor less, about Tyutchev’s “night”. “Don’t you think, Seryozha, that it’s better to narrow the topic and work on the issue of Tyutchev’s epithets, for example, black and gold?.. Every topic is interesting,” he added, “if you approach it closely.” Dislike for appearance was also manifested in one official fact. When the Synod awarded him a “pectoral”, that is, a gold cross, he continued to wear his previous silver one, and they say he received a reprimand from the rector of the Academy. "ABOUT. Paul neglects the blessing of the Holy Synod,” the bishop said sternly. Fedor. It seems he never wore a master's badge. In him there was an obvious spirituality of mind, and thereby of teaching, and this is what determined his significance in the Church. This same strict bishop. Fedor wrote about his book: “Reading the author’s book, you feel that you are growing spiritually with it.” 151 People experienced the same thing when communicating with him personally. The apostles and ascetics talk about holistic spirituality, about immersing the entire Rule of man in the element of spirituality, in the element of the Holy Spirit. Ave. Simeon N.B. says about the ascetic that “he is completely in the depths of the Spirit, as if in the depths of immeasurable bright waters.” But to write about the Church and about the feat, as Fr. Paul, it is possible only after the root of sin has already been overcome, and the stage of spirituality has been reached from which influence on others begins. They also said that after the closure of the Lavra, he gave a sermon in the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary about the “high peace” of the Mother of God, “surpassing all understanding.” So they told me about this more than 50 years later as if it were yesterday. If I were asked how to generally determine the meaning of Florensky for people, I would say that it can be reduced to the powerful direction of our consciousness into the reality of spiritual life, into the reality of communication with the divine world. “By plunging into sin,” he wrote in his eighth letter, “we lose the sense of objectively real existence. Plunging into sin, the spirit forgets itself, loses itself, disappears for itself. “The final abyss of sins has passed over me, and my spirit disappears,” we hear the testimony of the Holy Church. “The self stings itself with sin...” And in the seventh letter he writes: “Sin is a moment of discord, the disintegration of spiritual life. The soul (then) is lost in the chaotic whirlwind of its states... The “I” is choked in the “mental stream” of passions... The neurasthenic semi-loss of reality of the creative I is also a type of spiritual intoxication, and it is difficult to get rid of the conviction that the reason for it is the disorder of the personality... Sins surround the heart, stand in a thick formation around it and block access to the refreshing breeze of grace, and “outside grace is the world seems like a ghost...” (p. 736). Sin lies in the unwillingness to leave self-identity. Affirming oneself as oneself, without one’s relationship to another, that is, to God and to all creation, is self-emphasis, without losing oneself, and is a fundamental sin, the root of all sins. All private sins are only manifestations of self-obstinacy, which makes itself the only point of reality. Sin is something that closes all reality from the Self, for to see reality means precisely to come out of oneself, and to transfer one’s Self into the non-Self, into something else, into the visible, that is, to fall in love.” These thoughts of Florensky about the nature of sin, about the fact that it is an obstacle to love, are very helpful in understanding the Church. “The mystery of the Church is the mystery of the grace-filled consubstantiality of people,” their unity in love, or the mystery of conciliarity, as opposed to the mystery of sin, which is always the internal isolation of a person, his withdrawal into himself, in his “self,” into “self-extortion.” By separating yourself, you cannot be in the conciliar Church, you cannot be one of Christ’s disciples. That is why, for saints, the concept of the Church and unrepentant, i.e., not washed away sin, are incompatible. That is why any communication of the Church, the introduction into it of the vices and indifference of the world, is a heresy of life that separates a person from the Church and threatens the entire existence of the Church. And vice versa, this is why repentance for sin is so extolled in the Church, starting with the parable of the publican’s prayer. Repentance is an aspiration to God from sin, an escape to the Light, to its freedom from sinful slavery, it is the beginning of unity with people, the beginning of the Church. At St. The Epiphany of Cyprus is such, at first glance, an amazing relationship between the repentant sinner and the Church: “You who accepted the prayer of the believing thief, accept the prayer of your believing people. Thou who hast received the cry of the sinner-harlot, accept now into Thy Church.” 152 “Love serves as the path leading to God,” St. taught. Ignatius the God-Bearer. “Whoever cannot love God cannot believe in Him” (St. Simeon N.B.). Love is oblivion of oneself, of one’s selfhood, i.e., thereby humility. Those who deny or do not understand the need for the constant acquisition of love, the ways of love, who try to replace love with fear or obedience, and we still have many of them following K. Leontiev 153 and Dostoevsky’s Ferapont, simply distort Christianity. “Only those know what it means to believe in God who love Him” (St. Augustine). “The beginning and end of all virtue is love” (St. John Chrysostom). The beginning, not just the end. The beginning of “all virtue,” including the fear of God. This is the ABC of Christianity. “Faith is the beginning of love. The end of love is the knowledge of God” (Abba Evagrius). “You are the salt of the earth. If the salt loses its strength, then what will you use to make it salty?” And again: “Have salt in yourself.” St. Theodore the Studite writes about these gospel words: “Salt means love. For just as neither bread nor anything else is consumed without salt, so without love no godly deed can be done.” 154 By achieving humble love, we only begin to struggle with sinful selfhood - the breeding ground for all sinfulness, according to the constant teaching of the Church. Florensky contrasts the idea of ​​sin with the idea of ​​chastity. The word itself, he writes, indicates integrity, soundness, unity, non-fragmentation and strength of personality... Chastity in the consciousness of a person himself, that is, as an experience... is “bliss”... rest from a tirelessly greedy and never satisfied desire, self-collection of the soul for eternal life in God. In the 1st century, when the distant seemed so close, when the fiery tongue was still burning above the head of the believer, the Good News for the first time gave people the taste of the sweetness of peace and rest, from whirling corruptible thoughts. Christ brought us out of a restless and anxious world... Chastity is the bliss of a peaceful heart, from the infinity of desire, brought to the measure, curbed by the measure, and beautified by the measure.” Further about. Paul speaks of how through chastity a person enters into the element of the memory of God. “Truth is Unforgetfulness, not licked away by the streams of Time, it is a Stronghold, not corroded by Death, it is the most essential Being, and, finally, in which there is no Nothingness at all. In Him, the imperishable, the corruptible existence of this world finds its protection, from Him, the Strong, and it receives strength and chastity. God grants victory over Time, and this victory is “remembrance” of God - Unforgetfulness... (Hence) - “to be remembered by the Lord” (“remember me, Lord, in Thy Kingdom”, “remember, Lord, name”, etc.)... Without the remembrance of God we die, but our very remembrance of God is possible through the remembrance of God about us. My “eternal memory” means the “eternal memory” of God about me, and me about God. In short, the eternal memory of the Church, in which God and man converge... The Lord Jesus Christ, the Premier Mind, is called “Eternal Memory” (akathist) (p. 327). “God has creative thought - “he thinks in things”, which is why His eternal memory is a powerful and real position in Eternity of that which has already passed away in Time.” And in a letter about Sophia, he repeats: “To exist means to be thinkable, to be remembered by God” (p. 327). Florensky does not indicate, but leads to the fact that in the teachings of the ascetics, a person’s memory of God is defined as a synonym for unceasing prayer and love for God. “He who wishes to purify his heart, let him constantly kindle it with the memory of the Lord Jesus” (Blessed Callistus and Ignatius). “Whoever loves the Lord always remembers Him, and the memory of God gives birth to prayer” (Abba Silouan). “The memory of You warms my soul, and it finds peace in nothing on earth except You, and therefore I search for You tearfully and again I lose it, and again my mind desires to enjoy You” (he). When Fr. Pavel read his course “Philosophy of Cult” in Moscow in 1918; the left edge of the front bench of the audience was filled with Moscow occultists. I knew them by sight, and saw with what greedy attention they wrote down his words in their notebooks. Occultists, or people close to them, have always been drawn to him. He undoubtedly had a highly developed mystical talent, a heightened mystical sense. One historian of Russian philosophy writes: “Among spiritual writers a teaching appears that wants to revive it (church life) through a return to the source of all religious life - to mysticism (P. Florensky, S. Mashkin, Anna Schmidt 155, etc.).” 156 Christianity cannot live outside of mysticism, and when it tries to live, it dries up in rationalistic deserts and merges with a multitude of social teachings. Each of us dries up as soon as we leave the living water of the other world into the scorching haze of affairs, worries and passions. The elders said that “faith is communication with the invisible world” or, according to the Apostle, “confidence in the invisible.” Florensky cannot even be remotely understood outside of mysticism. He directly connected even minor moral issues with it. In 1921, the Moscow Theological Academy began to function again for a short time. Classes were held in the buildings of the Moscow Petrovsky Monastery. I remember at one lecture Florensky said: “Smoking discourages the mystical sense.” In his work “The Meaning of Idealism,” he cites the words of Ignatius Brianchaninov 157 “about the mystical insensitivity of the sinner.” “Entering into communication with beings of the invisible world,” writes Bishop. Ignatius, “happens through the “opening of the senses,” or as through some gates.” It is wise and merciful that for people who are not internally ready for this communication, these gates are closed by God, and “it is not permissible for a person to eliminate the gaze of God and by his own means, and not by the will of God, to open his feelings and enter into communication with spirits.” These words quoted by Florensky already contain the basis of the Christian attitude towards mysticism. In the same article (“The Meaning of Idealism”), Florensky cites the words of the Apostle Paul: “So that you, rooted and established in love, may comprehend with all the saints what (is) breadth, and length, and depth, and height,” as an indication of the possibility of “four-dimensional knowledge,” of the mystical vision available to man. But this “availability,” subject to mystical security, is possible precisely after “rooting and affirmation in love,” which, according to Christian understanding, is participation in Christ’s feat. Christianity has a safe bed or reservoir into which it introduces the deep waters of mysticism - sacrificial love. Christian mysticism is inseparable from Golgotha, which anchors its shores and directs it towards the general Resurrection. Maybe in about. Pavle sometimes felt, like a breath of chill, not the mysticism of the Cross, but mysticism in general, the mysticism of another, night world. In 1901, Andrei Bely dedicated the poem “Sacred Days” to him, which contains the following stanza: More than once the curtain fluttered in the night. I am again engulfed in a harsh melody, The song of the centuries about the Coming of the New... And Eternity knocked like a thunderstorm on the window. 158 I remember the anthroposophist and poet A. Bely with his unbearable mystical-electric sparkle in his eyes. In the 20s, Florensky was close to the professor of mathematics N. N. Buchholz. He was a very learned man, very traditionally Orthodox, and very inclined in the sense of curiosity, to occult teachings and depths. He and Florensky were then going to work together on the “Dictionary of Symbols.” I once asked Buchholz: “What unites you with Florensky, what is your closeness based on?” “We both don’t like people,” he replied. I don’t know if this is so, and I don’t draw any conclusions from this towards a holistic perception of Fr. Paul, but I note it as some symptom of some aspect of his spiritual appearance. And in one article about Florensky it is noted that not only his theme was antinomy, but also “the perception of his personality was antinomian. She at the same time... could inspire a feeling of remoteness and (was) surrounded by an atmosphere of love” (Modestov). I know that Fr. Pavel could sometimes, as it were, tease people, finding weak points in them. He could speak polemically and contradict himself. My early memories of him are also connected with the field of mysticism “in general.” When I was still 11-12 years old, I remember him telling my father and M.A. Novoselov that Berdyaev lights a lamp in front of his icon every evening, and how it goes out every time at 12 o’clock at night. According to the stories of V. Sventsitsky, Florensky in his youth was heavily involved in both spiritualism and hypnosis. “Eternity knocking on the window” is most strongly felt in his “Universal Human Roots of Idealism” of 1909. “Plato’s ideas,” he says, “are the essence and tools of knowledge of all things, but they are also knowable reality... metaphysical essences... Everything that the eye does not see has a different, trans-empirical essence... everything is involved in another world... all life is saturated and held together otherworldly. The ocean of the unknown beats its waves into everyday life (of life).” In the literature about Florensky, it was noted that his teaching about Plato’s ideas, as living concrete personalities, and not abstract concepts, is valuable, but we must not forget that it was discredited by the teachings of anthroposophists and occultists. Looking for the roots of Plato's idealism in the mystical and magical worldview of the people, it seems that he himself sometimes, in the process of searching, too trustingly plunged into the night element of the people's soul. If mysticism is not introduced into the channel of achievement, unexpectedly, from some hidden depths, sometimes the most ordinary rationalism emerges, but only with a heavy mystical coloring. This is the “mysticism of the head”, not the heart, which Fr. himself spoke so well about in “The Pillar”. Paul (see appendix “The Heart and Its Importance in Spiritual Life,” p. 535). And he, in his work “Near Khomyakov” (1916), pays tribute to the mysticism of the head. Khomyakov, in his teaching about the Eucharist, was afraid of two dangers: the Protestant “evaporation of the sacrament,” its disappearance in the process of only “remembering,” and the Catholic conversion of it into a purely material “miracle of atomic chemistry,” independent of the faith and love of the participants in the Last Supper. Therefore, without denying the legitimacy of the Eucharistic term “transubstantiation,” he was careful with it, trying most of all to emphasize the danger “from the right” - from Rome. This Roman “magicism” of the sacrament (it can be both in Rome and here, practically) disgusts his evangelical instinct, and it is this magicism that appeals to Florensky in this work of his. In Khomyakov he suspects a liberal-Protestant altruist, and therefore is afraid that under his influence the misunderstanding of authority, canons, the beginning of fear and power will increase in the Church. Khomyakov does not deny authority, but his Roman understanding, outside of love. “Authority, miracle and mystery,” as if from the darkness of Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor,” somehow suddenly appeared seductively before Florensky, and appeared offended by Khomyakov. “Is it really permissible,” says Florensky, “while remaining members of the Church, to deny “authority, miracle and mystery,” or at least one of the three?” The Apostle Paul, as you know, denied outside of love not “one of three,” but all three: the miracle of angelic conversation, and the authority of prophecy, and the knowledge of all the secrets of the world. He even denied giving his body to be burned for Christ, if there was no love in all this. The Eucharist is celebrated not by virtue of, or not under the compulsion of, the priest pronouncing the Eucharistic formula of transubstantiation, as some kind of magical act, but by the power of faith and love of the disciples of Christ who came again to the Last Supper, even if there were only two of these disciples in the great crowd. The Eucharistic formula is only one link in the metaphysical chain of the sacrament. St. Dmitry of Rostov 159 asks: “What must be observed when celebrating the Eucharist? ", and answers: "Three things: 1) the priest must be properly ordained 2) the throne or antimension must be consecrated by the bishop 3) the priest must have an unshakable faith that the essence of bread and wine is transformed into the essence of the Holy Spirit” (“Creations”, p. 85). To the two external conditions for the performance of the sacrament, a third, their final internal condition was directly added: the faith of the priest, obviously victorious, or covering up his sinfulness. I don't know if this indication is sufficient? How should one treat the Eucharist if it is performed by a virtuous but unbelieving priest? Perhaps the sacrament will be performed even if only the people standing in the church have this unshakable faith? But in this case, it is important for me to note the thought of the holy teacher of the Church about the internal condition for the effectiveness of the sacrament. St. Ephraim the Syrian approaches the celebration of the sacrament of repentance with the same internal requirement. He writes: “If custom alone draws you to the Doctor, then you will not receive health... The Most Merciful One requires love from the one who wants to come to Him. And if the one who comes brings love and tears, Tuna accepts the gift” (“Creations”, 3rd ed., part 3, pp. 208‒209). Outside of the real and original mystery of faith and love, we should not dare to think about the mystery of transubstantiation. The Eucharist is not magic, but Golgotha. Outside the “miracle, power and authority” of Love, we open in our awareness of the sacrament the door to the realm of dark mystical thingness. “Do this in remembrance of Me”—a remembrance of His love. I remember that the book's release was about. Pavel about Khomyakov caused great grief among people close to him. M.A. Novoselov immediately went to see him in Posad, and then told my father that he argued with him almost all night and proved to him his “Roman-magical” bias. “And so,” said M.A., “in the end, Fr. Paul bowed his head and agreed, and at the same time said: “I will no longer practice theology.” These words turned out to be prophetic, although he did not put into them the meaning that came out. It was the eve of 1917, when the Academy soon closed, and his work increasingly began to go first into art history, and then into mathematics and technology. His attack against Khomyakov can be considered in some sense accidental. Indeed, in “The Pillar” he writes: “The reader will probably not fail to notice the significant similarity of the theoretical ideas of Slavophilism with the ideas of the proposed book” (p. 608). And for a positive characterization of Pascal, he cites the opinion of Khomyakov, as completely authoritative for him. In the “Obituary” of F.D. Samarin, he speaks of the Slavophiles as “dead people dear to us.” In a letter to Fr. Paul to F.D. Samarin 160 dated August 1, 1912, there are the following words: “Slavophilism, in its early stages, is evidence of something dear, dear, long familiar, but forgotten, like childhood memories... As a symbol, Slavophilism is eternal, for it is a symbolic expression of Russian self-consciousness.” In “The Pillar” there are several negative characteristics of Vl. Solovyov, which again brings the author closer to Khomyakov. “Our work stands in antinomy in spirit against the conciliatory philosophy of Vl. Solovyov" (p. 612). “Soloviev’s philosophy is subtly rationalistic” (p. 775). But, obviously, rationalism is a contagious disease. The influence of head mysticism, and in the position of Fr. Paul in the dispute between the “name-slavers” and the “name-fighters” of 1912‒1913, which he defined, in particular, in the preface (“From the Editor”) to the book of the hieroschemaist Anthony (Bulatovich) 161 “Apology of Faith in the Name of God.” In this dispute, both sides were wrong, that is, both stood on the positions of rationalism - secret among the “name-slavers” and open, crude - among the representatives of the “name-fighting” synodal power. It seems that at the beginning of 1922 Berdyaev, then still living in Moscow, organized the Free Academy of Spiritual Culture, in which Fr. Pavel gave a lecture on the topic “The Magic of Words.” In the same year, his work “Imaginaries in Geometry” was published in a private publishing house that still existed, and it contained an announcement from the publisher about the start of printing Florensky’s great work “At the Watersheds of Thought,” the first part of which was to be completed with two topics: “The Magic of the Word” and “Name-Glorification as a Philosophical Premise.” Speaking of Berdyaev. During these years (21st, first half of 22nd) he taught a philosophy course at Moscow University, and in his apartment on Bolshoy Vlasyevsky Lane he had either “Tuesdays” or “Thursdays”, from one of which I have two memories. Firstly, the young and beautiful Marina Tsvetaeva, 162 who sat all evening with her eyes downcast, as if immersed in a conversation that only she could hear. And then someone’s argument on the topic: why are the Orthodox so smilingly condescending towards Rozanov, and so militantly strict towards Solovyov? It seems that someone said that Rozanov never had a “will to heresy,” that he was simply a “sinner,” but in Solovyov theological rationalism is clearly palpable. His chill is present not only in Florensky’s work on Khomyakov, but also in this eighth letter about Gehenna. Within the limits of reason, it is impossible to resolve the terrible antinomy: about the forgiveness of sinners and at the same time about the impossibility for the freedom of God and man to forcibly draw these sinners through forgiveness into Love - the antinomy of the Last Judgment. “Love cannot help but forgive,” but “if human freedom,” writes Fr. Paul, - there is genuine freedom of self-determination, then forgiveness of an evil will is possible, because it is a creative product of this freedom... Here it is no longer God who does not reconcile with the creature, and does not forgive the evil soul, but the soul itself does not reconcile with God. To force her to reconcile, to force her to love, God would have to take away her freedom. But, being Love, He does not destroy anyone’s freedom, and therefore He subjects those who voluntarily deviate from Him to excommunication from Himself, which they themselves chose.” Quoting the words of St. Irenaeus of Lyon, 163 o. Paul speaks them as if from himself. But, looking for a way out of the antinomy of Justice and Mercy and not finding it, he immediately simply and literally cuts the antinomic knot. In 1877, at some social Moscow evening, Lord Redstock spoke about the words of one Syrian slave that “God, in His justice, will punish and destroy sin, and in His mercy will have mercy on the sinner.” 164 This story essentially formed the basis of Florensky’s construction. A person will be metaphysically dissected, and part of him – “for himself”, i.e., his self will be cast “into outer darkness”, and the other part of him – “about himself”, will be saved. A person’s “Holy of Holies” will be saved, but his “work” may perish. The entire content of his consciousness perishes, since it is not from faith, hope and love... “Every unclean thought,” he writes, “every evil deed will be torn out of the empirical personality... Only illusory “dreams of shadows” and “shadows of dreams” will swarm in Gehenna. Man’s “deed” (which did not withstand the judgment of God), his self-consciousness (evil), having separated from “himself” (man), will become purely imaginary, a nightmare without the one seeing this dream. And after this surgical dissection (Florensky here calls the Last Judgment - “The Day of the World Operation”) the eternal bliss of “himself” (man) will begin, and the eternal torment of his “self”, i.e. imaginaries, or “shadows of dreams.” The Last Judgment thus turns into a judgment on imaginary things, that is, it becomes completely fearless and also imaginary. But we do not dare to judge Fr. Paul, and not because our love for him prevents this, but because we know that some great fathers of the Church could not resolve this antinomy, or resolved it even more simply than he. The antinomy of the Last Judgment is insoluble, and it is not at all necessary to resolve it in any way. Abba Silouan of Athos (our contemporary), it seems, also could not accommodate the idea of ​​​​eternal torment, but he did not build any metaphysical hypotheses around it. We must believe in the love of God, and plunge into it not only all our understanding, but also all our misunderstanding. And if you need to think something here “on your own,” then it seems to me that you need to follow Anthony the Great and say (and say quite seriously): “Everyone will be saved if I perish,” “everyone will be forgiven except me.” This formula contains recognition of the victory of mercy, antinomianism, and humility. I remember, it seems in 1916, Vyach. Ivanov, to whom Florensky dedicated “Not the Admiration of Nepshchev,” read a report “On the Boundaries of Art” at the Moscow Religious and Philosophical Society. The report was somehow particularly important, “epoch-making,” and Andrei Bely, speaking in the debate, jumped up and flew into the air, and waved his hand, in rhythm with the words of his extreme indignation. So, I think that we should have another report - “On the limits of knowledge”, and what exactly is it about. Paul could have written it. It is a great blessing that a person does not have to understand everything. He writes in “The Roots of Idealism”: “Curbing greed in knowledge is the same virtue as putting a limit to the lusts of the flesh.” The Fathers also taught: “The mind must observe the measure of knowledge so as not to perish” (Callistus Catafigist). Sometimes when I think about Fr. Pavle, I have one paradoxical image that I’m somehow embarrassed to even utter. It seems to me that his spiritual appearance somehow lacked Sonya Marmeladova. Sonya is Sonya, she is naive, undeveloped, and maybe a little stupid. How clever is the handsome Raskolnikov next to her! But, obviously, love, and not just poetry, according to Pushkin, should be somewhat stupid, or at least simple-minded. And in the Apostle we read: “The foolish things of God are wiser than men, and the weak things of God are stronger than men.” It is not the mind that is belittled in Christianity, but its claim to become wiser than the “unwise God.” Among the few sensible remarks that critics who deny Florensky have is that he has “overwhelming scholarship” (Zenkovsky). But I know that Fr. After the release of The Pillar, Pavel was dissatisfied with it. Perhaps he also realized the unnecessaryness of burdening the reader’s mind with his immense scientific burden, all his excursions even into the homotypic of the human body, all these disputes - even with Schopenhauer 165 on the issue of shaving the beard, or with Belinsky and Madame de Staël, 166 on jealousy, unnecessary for his most sacred themes. Perhaps he also sensed the possibility, under the smokescreen of this erudition, of unexpected forays of mystical rationalism, which was obviously his nature. But it must be said that he lived not by a dry and imprinted scheme, but by the living growth of his soul, and when we are ready to condemn him and the individual unenlightened “Aegean strata” of this soul, then it suddenly turns out that he has already left them, that he is already free from his “ancestors of wisdom.” If, for example, in “The Inhuman Roots of Idealism” (1909), he too trustingly immersed himself in the mystical-magical worldview of folk antiquity, then this is what we can read in “The Pillar,” (1914) “According to popular expression, the demon is called a “nauseating force,” that is, one that causes nausea. Popular saying captures the very essence of the impression of evil spirits. It is not so much fear or horror as it is a deep, indescribable and unimaginable feeling of nausea. Any contact with the phenomena of magic, even with theories and books on the occult and other currents of thought, inevitably leaves in the soul some kind of unclean feeling, disgust, satiety and nausea. There is a deep, albeit incomprehensible, connection between the organic sensation of nausea and what the forbidden region of dark knowledge leaves behind... The demon, and everything connected with it, is a walking perversion of the natural order of creation - unnaturalness itself. To accept into oneself, even without the consent of the will, something unnatural, this means precisely to cause a natural reaction of the entire being to the eruption of what has been accepted - ontological vomiting” (p. 705). The Origenism of the 8th letter, of course, also gave critics a reason to attack the author’s Orthodoxy. I remember in a pre-revolutionary missionary magazine an article by one archimandrite, which said that Florensky’s book was “a bouquet of heresies.” Berdyaev hints at the same thing. Florovsky writes: “There is a very clear touch of theological charm in him. Anthony Khrapovnitsky, without hesitation, called “Pillar” “Khlystov nonsense.” Everyone is trying to put a discrediting stamp on him, but no one says that, despite the condemnation of Origenism, that is, one part of Origen’s enormous legacy, 167 he himself, as a whole, continues to be a teacher of the Church. Fr. himself Paul, referring, of course, to the errors of Origen, speaks of him this way: Origen emanates a scopal spirit, as does all souls with a rationalistic system in general” (p. 749). And this is how the Church Fathers looked at Origen, this “founder of Christian Science”. “Holy. Gregory the Wonderworker 168 says that as a result of the teachings of Origen, love for the Holy Logos, the holiest of all objects (of knowledge), which attracts everything to Himself with His unnamed beauty, was kindled in him and turned into a flame.” "St. Gregory of Nyssa managed to be a philosopher and admirer of Origen, remaining on the basis of church teaching. In his eschatology, he repeats Origen’s teaching about universal restoration (forgiveness) and cleansing of all sinners.” “In the theological system of St. Gregory the Theologian, there are many echoes of Origenism... this includes some uncertainty about the eternity of torment.” “In the writings of St. Dionysius of Alexandria on the Holy Trinity, he is a faithful disciple of Origen." 169 The influence of Origen on St. John Chrysostom. So one must be very careful with the “bouquet of heresies.” We don't know church history at all. Florensky’s book was greeted with joy mainly by the youth of that time, and the hostility with which some learned people greeted it, it seems to me, is mainly explained by the fact that the author violated all the traditions and canons of professorial theology, the entire usual theological standard. From the clouds of such a pleasant, non-binding afternoon abstraction, he, one might say, rudely pulls you into living religious life. In this letter, he talks about how one day he was on the verge of the “second death”: “I wanted to scream and could not... I knew that one more moment and I would be cast out into outer darkness... In final despair, I screamed in a voice that was not my own: From the depths I cried to You, Lord, Lord, hear my voice!” But reading this, the shrewd reader will be able to reject reality (he will think, Kant’s learned opponent will really “scream”!), and will be able to imagine some quite decent allegory here. But at the end of the same letter, the author writes just like a medieval monk: “The evil July passion, like a dog, barked persistently after me, my thoughts began to swirl like a whirlwind, the heat of Gehenna kindled in my soul... It became increasingly difficult to pray to the Lord for mercy... In vain I tried to follow the advice of St. Isaac the Syrian: If you do not have the strength to control yourself, and fall on your face in prayer, then cover your head with a robe and sleep until this hour of darkness passes for you.” It was difficult for those of us for whom Christianity had not yet become a matter of life, a matter of daily struggle with the darkness of the world, which is realized primarily as a real darkness inside our own soul, to endure such primitiveness. Florensky, and with all his “oppressive learning,” calls for “the work of the Lord,” which is, first of all, work on oneself. “There is nothing more beautiful than a person who, in the mysterious darkness of inner activity, has defended the dregs of sinful anxieties, and, clarified, allows one to see in himself the image of God shimmering, like a precious margarite,” Florensky wrote in his eighth letter. Almost the same words can be found in his articles of 1906. The integrity of his worldview is obvious. The first appearance of “The Pillar” in the collection “Questions of Religion” dates back to 1908, when he was not even 26 years old. This means that he began to write this work during the lifetime of his elder, the “sorrower for the world,” Hieromonk Isidore, who died in 1908. He knew people of “inner work”—ascetics of the Church—not only from books. “On these lonely evenings,” he writes in the tenth letter, “I vividly remembered the late elder Isidore. All grace-filled and beautiful in grace, he gave me in my life the firmest, most undoubted, purest perception of a spiritual personality.” “The highest points of holy humanity,” he writes in the 9th letter, “are already illuminated by the rays of the coming Luminary - the apocalyptic Christ. Through heroism they acquired the Spirit, and in the grace-filled gifts of the Comforter they find strength for the highest love for creation.” Florensky speaks throughout the book about true churchliness, which realizes itself in asceticism and in the acquisition of the grace of the Holy Spirit, and, characterizing it, often uses the term “beauty.” “Revealed truth is love. Realized love is beauty” (p. 75). “Spiritual life - life in the Holy Spirit, the likeness of God that takes place in me, is beauty” (p. 84). “Beauty is understood (by me) as Life, Creativity and Reality” (p. 586). “Spirituality is the limit of created beauty. Beauty approaches this limit as it penetrates from the phenomenal periphery of a being to its noumenal root, and, therefore, as it penetrates into the divine world” (pp. 751‒752). In the appendices of the “Pillar” there is a special excursion to establish that the author’s use of this term has nothing to do with the concept of aestheticism, for example, K. Leontyev. And despite this, Florensky, of course, was accused of “decadence” and “weaving aesthetic lace.” Obviously, his critics simply do not know the sources from which he drew. Here are a few random extracts from the Fathers. “Follow alms. When it dwells in you, then holy beauty is formed in you, by which a person becomes like God” (St. Isaac the Syrian). “Since You, the most good and beautiful, contain in Yourself the entirely united Good and Beauty and the creative principle of all good and beauty, then the mind cannot dwell in anything other than You and enjoy in various ways” (Callistus the Catafigist). Macarius the Great said about the saints that “they were stung by divine beauty, and the life of heavenly immortality sank into their souls.” These saints attributed the concept of Beauty to the human body, deified in feat. “There is a purity of mind in which, during prayer, the light of the Holy Trinity shines. But the mind, honored with its light, imparts many signs of divine beauty to the body united with it” (St. Isaac the Syrian). This word is the “key” to ascetic theology, which revealed the howl of treasure to Florensky long before the release of “The Pillar”. Already in 1906 he wrote as if he were conveying the phrase of St. Isaac. He wrote: “Goodness becomes a real force, penetrates physicality, flares up throughout the entire body with radiant beauty. (“About types of increase”). Beginning in 1907, in various works he drew attention to the teaching of St. Seraphim about the acquisition of the Holy Spirit as a constant goal of Christian life. In 1915, on a private, seemingly exegetical issue (“Not the admiration of Nepshchev”), he recalled the forgotten spiritual foundations of monasticism. Monasticism is not ritual or appearance only, but above all spirituality and grace. The entire practice of Eastern monasticism is a striving for the acquisition of the Spirit, and Florensky courageously rehabilitates before us even such a difficult for us, “suspicious” concept as “frenzy” or “admiration”, i.e. the highest accessible degree of human consciousness emerging from his “three-dimensional” existence into the divine element of spirituality, a concept that firmly lived among the Apostles and saints. I will make only one extract to characterize this concept. “There are two types of frenzy in the spirit,” Florensky quotes St. Gregory of Sinaita, “one is heartfelt (deepening in the heart with oblivion of everything), and the other is delight beyond the limits of everything that exists. The first is characteristic only of those who are enlightened, and the second is characteristic of those who are perfect in love.” In addition to this saint, Florensky also cites extracts from the following Fathers who taught or testified about the frenzy: Anthony the Great, 170 Abba Silouan, St. Isaac the Syrian, Ave. Simeon N.B., Nikolai Kavasil. 171 Of course, this list can be much longer. Macarius the Great, Nikita Stifat Ave., 172 Seraphim of Sarov Ave., Pimen the Great, 173 Callistus Catafigist, I’m calling names that just came to mind by chance. These are no longer “theologumen,” that is, private theological opinions, for the use of which Fr. Paul is his ill-wishers, but a forgotten practice of the Church. The path of spiritual enlightenment and improvement in love, the path of movement towards its perfection, is, according to the teachings of the saints, a Christian feat. The word “feat” has the same root as the words “move”, “shift”, movement.” This is literally the movement towards God, the path to Him. That is why Florensky includes the word “feat” in one of his definitions of the Church: “The Church is authenticity, and achievement, and light” (afterword). “The ascetic path to the eternal Truth,” he wrote, “is the only path, for only a purified heart can accept the ineffable light of the Divine and become beautiful” (p. 90). He knew not only Elder Isidore as a living bearer of spiritual beauty, he also knew others, in particular Father Alexei Mechev. 174 In the article “On the funeral homily of Fr. Alexey Mechev”, marked 18. VIII. 1923, he writes: “Passion grows from the deep rhizome of the self. To see God, you need to break out of your selfhood... However, this should not be understood in an abstract and relaxed way. These are not... mental acts that are not obligatory to anything and do not require sacrifice... To die for the world means a great mystery that we, who are not dead, cannot understand, but which we must firmly remember that it exists. You can remain among people and do the things of life with them, but be dead to the world... The soul of such a person has already been born into a new life, and while still in the body, breathes the air of a different existence.” In these thoughts, it seems to me that the most significant thing is not that they are close to the thoughts of St. Gregory Palamas 175 or Macarius the Great, but the fact that they indicate a feat in the world, a “monastery in the world,” the preaching of which sounds in the Russian Church, starting with Tikhon of Zadonsk. It can also be noted that the article about Fr. Aleksey Mechev was written after the publication of “Imaginaries in Geometry” (1922), “Calculation of the Electric Gradient” (1921), “Shift Ultramicroscope” (1922) and other mathematical and technical works. For him, his departure from participation in the public sphere of church life was not a departure from participation in its essence. On the contrary, the articles of the 20s, when he could touch upon church topics, are more mature spiritually. In “Imaginaries in Geometry,” Florensky raises the question of the rehabilitation of the Ptolemy-Dante system of the world, in connection with the 600th anniversary (in 1921) of Dante’s death. It seems that he read this work in some scientific meeting of mathematicians. And here we can recall the almost shock when many, in these twenties, saw at the department of VKHUTEMAS, or the technical council, or the learned society, the stooped figure of a priest in a cassock and skufia. "Who is this? Who is this?" – those still ignorant asked almost with fear. It seems that until the end of the 20s he carried this challenge to irreligious science, this is his own and external affirmation of the unity of knowledge of the world. But, of course, its scientific nature was incomprehensible to many. Once, speaking about his constant linguistic excursions, Paul remarked: “The true subject of our discussions is inner life, not linguistics” (p. 785). The same could probably be said about all of his scientific works, although this made them even more scientifically serious. His whole appearance, and in his scientific character, with all its authenticity, was different from the usual appearance of people of science. “He who has grace,” writes Macarius the Great, “has a different mind, a different meaning and a different wisdom of this world.” “Departing from worldly life,” writes Florensky in the 9th letter, “the monk indulges in worldly life. He is different in everything, he is a monk. Monasticism is nothing other than spirituality, and spirituality cannot but be monasticism... Asceticism is a direct continuation of charismaticism (i.e., the possession of the gifts of the Holy Spirit by the early Christians)... Innocence, crowning the ascetic feat, is the winging and spiritualization of the sex, and not espionage... Like a phoenix building its own mortal fire, it comes to life in the fire reborn, so the flesh is resurrected in fiery renunciation of itself. There is no other way... Self-affirmation in self-denial... Loving all creation, the ascetic does not love anything created, that is, characteristic of a fallen creature.” “With all my writing,” says Bishop Florensky. Theodore, he preaches asceticism, understands it deeply and reveals it.” 176 This sermon is based on the perception of the unity of the Christian life. In his thinking there is no bifurcation of the concept of Christian life into a spiritual life for monks, and a non-spiritual life for the laity. This is the most difficult legacy of long church prosperity, which turned Christianity from a feat of life into an everyday habit (V. Sventsitsky). Spiritual life, first of all, is the life of the heart in the grace of Christ's love. “Church mysticism,” he writes in the 9th letter, “is the mysticism of the breast. All the attention of church mysticism is to the heart... From here it is clear that the task of ascetic Life is defined as purity of the heart. The heart is the center of Spiritual life, and “to be spiritualized” means nothing more than to “arrange, arrange, make chaste” your heart. Purification of the heart gives communication with God, straightens and arranges the entire personality. Spreading throughout the entire personality and penetrating it, the light of Divine love sanctifies the border of the personality - the body, and from here it radiates into the nature external to the personality... Endless sharp pity and awe of reverent love for all of the first-born Adam stings the heart of the ascetic, as soon as he has cleansed it of the bark of sin. When the dirt is washed away by a long struggle, then the creation of God appears before the renewed and spiritual consciousness as an original and suffering, beautiful and polluted creature, as the prodigal child of God. Only Christianity gave birth to an unprecedented love for creation, and inflicted a wound on the heart of loving pity for all things.” Further about. Paul cites the words of Isaac the Syrian about “a heart that has mercy on every creature”, Parthenius of Kyiv - about schema monasticism, as devoting oneself to prayer for the whole world, gives both in this letter and in other places many extracts from the Ascetic Fathers, rewrites entire pages from them, revealing to us asceticism as a hitherto unknown, fertile continent. Of the approximately 40 names of the Fathers and saints of the Church mentioned in the “Pillar,” 20 names belong to ascetics. Asceticism as a norm of life was also felt in the personal life of Fr. Pavel. He did not eat meat, or perhaps only once a year - at Easter. Bulgakov writes: “I witnessed his ascetic self-discipline, as well as his scientific feat. He usually spent his nights at work, going to bed only at 3-4 o’clock in the morning... the same can be said about his diet... He, as far as I remember, never got sick, leading a life full of ascetic deprivation.” I cannot resist citing one of the ascetic extracts from The Pillar. This is a piece from the life of Abba Yafkeran of Abyssinia 177 - “the star of the Gospel”, “meek in heart, whose tears were close to his eyes for the love of God and a sorrower for everyone, for people and livestock and even for worms”... It further tells how one day he and his friend Abba Zechariah, 178 who lived far away, met on Lake Azaf, “to comfort each other for the sake of majesty of God”... “And they walked like dry land on the lake by the power of the Lord their God, and met in the middle of the lake, and kissed each other spiritually. Abba Zechariah took off his sandals and shook off the dust from them, and Abba Yafkeran also took off his sandals and found some moisture in his sandals. Abba Yafkeran showed Abba Zechariah: My beloved brother, why are my sandals wet? Tell me, I beg you, oh my beloved. Abba Zechariah answered and said to him: Father, arise, let us pray to the Lord our God, that he may reveal to us why there was moisture in your sandals. They stood up and prayed. After the prayer, Abba Zechariah said to Abba Yafkeran: Father, this was not revealed to me for my goodness, but for the sake of the greatness of your prayer. Your sandals are wet because you hid the fruits of the barley so that the birds would not eat them, while God is merciful and considers all creatures and gives them food. That is why there is moisture on your sandals.” After this extract, the thought, with greater attention than before, returns to the epigraph of this letter: “Clears to the light.” By the way, the vignette epigraphs are taken from the book: Ambodik “Symbola et Emblemata Selecta”. The colors of the book cover are selected according to the main colors of the ancient Sofia icons (p. 807). “One of the newest researchers,” writes Florensky, “characterizes asceticism as the “art of holiness.” But this characteristic is not new at all... (And) not a metaphor, for if all art is the transformation of one or another substance, the investment in it of a new image of a higher order, then what else does the spiritual work (of Christian achievement) consist of, if not in the transformation of the entire human being” (p. 665). It is to this “transformation” that the exclamation of Fr. Paul in the preface: “Uncountable, innumerable, indescribable are the riches of the Church.” Even Levin in Anna Karenina, as it says there, “was amazed by Khomyakov’s teaching about the Church. He was struck by the idea that comprehension of divine truths is not given to man, but is given to a collection of people united by love - the church. He was delighted by the thought that it was easier to believe in the now living church... holy and infallible, and from it already accept beliefs in God... than to start with God, distant, mysterious” (Part 8, Chapter 9). The Church, if it is understood as “holy and infallible”, as “a set of people united by love”, brings the concept of God closer and denser to a person, makes it really tangible, and transfers it from the category of abstraction into the living life of the heart. That is why the Apostle defined the Church so “tangibly”: she is the “Body of God”, she is the “House of God”, she is the “Pillar of Truth”. And Khomyakov’s merit, which so amazed Levin-Tolstoy, is that, among the dead schemes and rational formulas of the idea of ​​the Church, he simply and firmly pointed out its ontological place, reminded that the Church is not a legal or social concept, but a living and mysterious for us Organism of love, in which appearance only has a sacred meaning insofar as it is filled with sacred content. This was Khomyakov’s “brilliant simplicity,” as Berdyaev put it. Florensky’s thought also leads us to the divine ontologism of the Church. You can only believe in the Shrine, and he shows us that this Shrine eternally, that is, even before the existence of the world, exists as a Church. He cites the words of the teachers of the Church about the pre-existence of man before the creation of the world in the “thought of God,” in the “mental concept of the Divine” (St. Gregory the Theologian and Clement of Alexandria). From the so-called 2nd Epistle of Clement of Rome, he quotes the words about “the first Church, spiritual, created before the sun and moon... The living Church is the body of Christ... The Church is not now, but from above. For she was spiritual, like our Jesus, but she was revealed in the last days to save us. The Church, being spiritual before the sun and moon, was revealed (now) in the flesh of Christ, becoming visible to us.” 179 Florensky confirms this same idea about the pre-temporal existence of the Church with extracts from the “Shepherd” of St. Erma. In 180 this book, which was included in the New Testament canon in early Christianity and was read during divine services, about which he was told that “it is the Church of God,” and in response to Hermas’ question: Why is it old? (a natural question for the end of the first century of Christianity), the answer is: “Since she was created first of all, she is old; and for her the world was created." These clear words of the first Christian prophet and teacher were reflected in theological literature: “The idea of ​​the Church,” writes Archpriest. P. Smirnov, 181 developing the thoughts of Met. Philaret of Moscow, 182 – takes precedence over the idea of ​​the universe... The idea of ​​the Church, inextricably linked in the Eternal Council with the idea of ​​redemption, is dominant in the universe. The latter submits to it, conforms to it as to the main sovereign idea. The world is built according to the idea of ​​the Church... The idea of ​​the Church, as it were, reigns in the thought of the Creator, and the creative thought that is fulfilled over the course of six days is constantly in conformity with it.” 183 Interpreting the words of the ap. Paul about “choosing us in Him (in Christ) before the foundation of the world, so that we would be holy and blameless before Him in love, having predestined us to be sons to Himself through Jesus three hundred” (Eph. 1:4-5), Athanasius the Great, also quoted here by Florensky, writes: “So, how did He choose before we came into being, if we were not, as He Himself said, prefigured in Him." “The idea of ​​the Sophia-Wisdom pre-existing to the world,” writes Florensky in the 10th letter, “of the Mountainous Jerusalem, of the Church in its heavenly aspect, or of the Kingdom of God, as the Ideal Personality of the Creation... this idea is scattered in abundance throughout Scripture and in the works of the fathers... Some of them were analyzed (by me) in a special work on the Church. This work is unknown in print." On Easter 1905, he preached the sermon in the Academic Church that he writes about in The Pillar. An attempt to give an artistic and religious synthesis of ideas about the Kingdom of God, as a pre-religious synthesis of ideas about the Kingdom of God, as a transcendental reality pre-existing to the world, is represented by the Easter word: “The Chief of Life” (p. 756). “There is a glow of the Hypostasis of the Father’s Radiance in every person coming into the world,” writes Arch. Fyodor Bukharev (“Letters”, p. 93). Likewise, probably, the Church, which was just “coming into the world” from Eternity, was enlightened and sanctified by the Lord. Here is the beginning of one letter from St. Ignatius the God-Bearer: “The blessed church of Ephesus in Asia, blessed in its entirety by the greatness of God the Father, destined before the ages to eternal and unchangeable glory”... The pre-eternity of the Church, its existence in the bosom of God is understood both from the Apostolic words about “the economy of the mystery hidden from eternity in God” (Eph. 3), and about “wisdom secret, hidden, destined before the ages for our glory” (I Cor. 2). The birth of the Church in our history was on Golgotha, its Baptism - in the Descent of the Holy Spirit. Its links are some in Eternity, others in time, but there is not and cannot be a difference in its perception. “Its two aspects – in Eternity and in time,” writes Florensky, “are not at all what modern church warriors now commonly call the “mystical Church” and the “historical Church,” and the first is extolled for the sake of blaspheming the second. This is one and the same Being, but only visible from two different angles of view, namely, from the side of the heavenly and previous, unifying mystical form and from the side of the united empirical earthly and temporal content, receiving deification and eternity in the first... The latter earthly grows into it (into the heavenly) and is transubstantiated in it, therefore the separation of symbolic images only indicates the difference between the two points of view. Once, so to speak, from top to bottom, from heaven to earth, and the other time – from bottom to top, from earth to heaven” (pp. 337‒338). To this place, the author provides in a note a link to the confirmatory work of his like-minded person V. Ern: “On the concept of “mystical church” and “historical church”, and on the unfoundedness of the division of one and the other among Protestants and people of “new religious consciousness”, see: Ern “Historical Church” (p. 757). In the article “The Historical Church,” Ern writes: “There is one Church. The Church that was in the Eternal Council with God is precisely the same Church that Christ acquired with His Blood, with which He will remain until the end of the age. The Church is one, like Christ is one, and the Christian consciousness cannot even abstractly imagine it in detail.” 184 The truly holy Church visible in history is the same as the Invisible Church, but at a different moment of its existence - at the moment of its journey, in the terminology of the bl. Augustine, not in a moment of glory. In the intimate unity of these two moments lies the mystery of the holy existence of the Church, and at the same time the difficulty of comprehending it for the mind. What, then, is everything unclean, everything that is clearly not holy, that we so often see in the earthly church fence? This is not the Church. Florensky writes: “The Church in its earthly aspect (is) the totality of all individuals who have already begun the feat of restoration, who have already entered with their empirical side into the Body of Christ” (p. 360). The empiricism of the “feat of restoration”, the reality of entering into the element of grace, and not the external ecclesiastical position or position, determine ecclesiasticality. Florensky's formula says the same thing that we know from many saints. You can be a member of the Church, but “without inner feeling and movement, you can be a dead stone in the streams of a living stream.” These stones are "geographically" within the holy stream of the Church, but they are dead. “There are many pagans under the Christian name, and even more so in these fierce times...” writes St. Tikhon of Zadonsk, - all of them remain in death... What is the use of being numbered in the Church before people, but in the eyes of God to be outside the Church?.. It is impossible for someone who is faulty and has not been cleansed by repentance to be inside the Church of God" (Spiritual Treasure. St. Petersburg, 1893. Part 2. P. 41, 163; Part 3. P. 99). What keeps us in the Church is not our knowledge or “metrics,” but our actual aspiration towards God, not the form of our stay, but our active will. “And after a Christian has already joined the Church,” writes Bishop. Theophan the Recluse, “he stays in it not against his will (and not) as if out of some necessity, but not otherwise than holding himself” (Letters on Christian Life. St. Petersburg, 1880. P. 406). The Church is the body of Christ, the body of freedom and holiness, and as Macarius the Great writes, “the soul, while it lives in sinful darkness and is nourished by this, does not belong to the body of Christ” (Conversations and Words. St. Petersburg, 1904). The Holy Visible Church consists only of saints, and everything that is not holy is not the Church. But, saying “saint” (person), Florensky explains: “This does not mean sinless.” “How can someone born of a woman be pure? Even the moon is not bright, and the stars are not pure in His sight” (Job 25:4-5). “Holiness” is not “dispassion,” but the fallibility of holiness is such that it cannot push away the grace of God from a person, it cannot keep a person from his aspiration to God. “The attribute of holiness,” writes Vl. Soloviev, is not the same thing as infallibility. Both individual holy people and the church, consisting of people, can sin, of course, sins “not leading to death,” without losing their holiness from this” (vol. 8, p. 437). But every sin, even a small one, will lead to death if there is no repentance for it. Only repentance washes away sins and only love covers them. Therefore, holiness is aspiration towards God through repentance and love. A repentant publican is a saint, since he is in the holy Church, but an unrepentant Pharisee, no matter how little he has sinned, and no matter how “Orthodox” he is, will be outside it. This is how it is captured in the service of Matins of the Week about the publican and the Pharisee: “Whoever lives like a Pharisee, the Church is far away” (Synaxarion). But if holiness is an uncontrollable desire for God, for His grace, then holiness should be our constant desire. John of Kronstadt 185 says: “The Lord Himself demands: Be holy, as I am holy, the Lord your God (1 Sam. 1:16; Lev. 19:20). This should be our first desire and the goal of our life” (“My Life in Christ,” vol. 2, p. 415). Obviously, we are not given the opportunity to comprehensively define the concept of churchliness. In the introductory speech to the defense of the book, Florensky says: “In the Church there is no one criterion that would guarantee the churchliness of a given person, but life itself, through a series of trials, weeds out the faithful from the unfaithful” (p. 12). And at the beginning of “The Pillar” he writes: “The uncertainty of Orthodox churchliness is the best proof of its vitality” (pp. 5-7). We only know that the entire Church possesses holiness, and if we want to be in the Church, we must strive for it, or, as Khomyakov said, “each of us is constantly looking for what the Church constantly possesses.” And yesterday's dead stones can come to life today in life-giving streams. Interpreting the definition of the Church given by St. Augustine (“Invisible”), prof. Bolotov 186 writes: “The visible Church always contains within itself not only its true members, but also persons who belong to it only apparently. Only God Himself knows His own.” 187 Or, one might add, “the Son commands him to open.” This is how Macarius the Great speaks about the internal, rather than external, criterion of churchliness: “Many, apparently righteous, are considered Christians. But the job of skilled and experienced people is to explore. Do such people really have the seal and image of the Tsar on themselves... If there are no skilled people, then it will be impossible to identify deceiving workers, because they also bear the image of monks or Christians.” 188 Ave. Macarius speaks here about the most difficult question - about knowledge of the Church. Khomyakov wrote about it this way: “Knowledge of the existence of the Church is also a gift of grace, given from above and accessible only to faith, and not to reason. The visible Church is not a visible society of Christians, but the Spirit of God and the grace of the sacrament of those living in society. Therefore, the visible Church is visible only to the believer, (who) does not confuse it with the society bearing the name of Christians, for not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” really belongs to the chosen race and the seed of Abraham.” “There are tares in the Church,” writes Bl. Augustine, “they do not constitute the Kingdom of Christ in the Church and do not reign with Him.” 189 In “The Pillar,” Florensky does not touch upon the issue of evil in the church fence; he writes only about the holy sophia of the Church, and not about the fact that there can be a “militant church,” or that, as Hilary of Pictavia said, 190 “the ears of the people are holier than the hearts of bishops.” His grief over the invasion of evil into the practice of churchliness was reflected in his article “On the funeral homily of Fr. Alexei Mechev”, where he writes with bitterness that “the repentant tears of Mary of Egypt can be made into a style of spiritual fashion, and, moreover, flattering pride,” that is, its essence, sincerity and aspiration towards God, can be replaced by its form. The form may be different, and the Franciscans' walking barefoot will also be only a phrase, since this is a purely external rite for them. “Every time,” he writes, “allows us to see with our own eyes the struggle for spirituality proclaimed by Christ... The law of grace arose not only in those ancient times, but is eternally in revolt. Moreover, in all social environments, whether they are called the Western or Eastern Church.” One of the forms of legalism, i.e. Florensky saw formalism in the dogmatization, so to speak, of the liturgical Rule, in giving it the meaning of some kind of religious inviolability. Speaking about Fr. To Alexey Mechev, with love and knowledge of him, he wrote: “... about. Alexey always instilled that love is higher than the liturgical Rule... He (Fr. Alexey) told endless cases when it was impossible not to leave the Rule... Real freedom is conceivable only on the solid ground of the law... but even this unshakable Rule, which must be revered as truly sacred, can be overcome by a special creative force invading it: the spirituality of Christians and freedom... Stone-frozen, it (the Charter) is softened by its heat, made pliable and elastic. But every time it is a miracle... Insisting fully on the monumental reality (of the Charter), Fr. Alexey,” writes Florensky, “preached a miracle, and he himself lived a fiery melting in love, which stood before him as an eternal stronghold of church improvement... The creative principle was life for him, and everything else was an indirect consequence.” We all know how often this “indirect consequence” is put at the forefront “to ensure churchliness.” About the canonical and hierarchical formalism of the Roman Church, Florensky wrote this at the beginning of “The Pillar”: “Where there is no spiritual life, something external is necessary, like ensuring churchliness... Hierarchy is the criterion of churchliness for a Catholic... the decisive (for him) is the ecclesiastical-legal concept... But, becoming the highest criterion, (this) concept thereby makes the manifestation of life unnecessary” (pp. 6-7). Life dies, its form remains. 191 But without accepting religious formalism in any way, Fr. Paul at the same time was, of course, outside of any “social modernism” in Orthodoxy. “The renewal movement among the Russian clergy,” writes Bulgakov, “which later degenerated into living churchism, “never found an echo in him, no matter how much he suffered from all the inertia of our church life.” For the biographer Fr. Paul, this fact of his revealed spiritual closeness to Fr. Alexei, and in the guise of Fr. Alexey, we clearly see the very traits that attracted Fr. Paul in his long-dead elder Isidore: spirituality, some foolishness and Christian simplicity. About Fr. Isidora Florensky in 1909 wrote almost the same thing as in 1923 about Fr. Alexei: “He (Isidore) lived according to the rules, but he knew what was the spirit of the church rules and what was the letter, and if necessary, he freely and authoritatively violated the letter for the sake of preserving the spirit.” Two stories about Fr. Isidore, cited by Florensky. During the famine in India, Fr. Isidore told Metropolitan Sergius of Moscow about the need for help from the rich Lavra: “Here, father, what I’ll tell you: they write in the newspapers that Indians are starving, but we have a lot of everything...” His other speech was before Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, when Fr. Isidore was still a young cell attendant at the Lavra Archimandrite Anthony, with whom Philaret talked over tea about the possibility of uniting with Catholics. Their conversation stopped at the dead end of the question - who will preside at that Ecumenical Council that will end the division of Churches? And Isidore, who entered at that moment, firmly said: “And the Mother of God, that’s who will be the First. So leave the chairman’s seat unoccupied; it will be for the Mother of God.” About the same thing. Isidore said before his death, perhaps the elder foresaw that in our time this dispute could continue. Florensky wrote about him: “The elder did not study theology, because he had a spiritual life in God and spiritual knowledge of God.” This characteristic can also be attributed to o. Alexey. About some foolishness about. Everyone who remembers him knows Alexey. It is known that the third person known to me who had on Fr. For Paul, it was precisely the spiritual influence of old age that also seemed to act somewhat like a fool. This is Bishop Anthony, who lived retired in Moscow in the Donskoy Monastery, and was little known and possessed spiritual gifts. I saw one of the books about. Paul with the author's inscription: “To the deeply revered Bishop. Anthony asking for prayer." It seems that he came to bury Elder Isidore when, as Fr. Paul, “in the tomb lay flat-faced spiritual beauty, the beauty of Sabbathkeeping.” Fr. Paul and the elders of Optina and Zosima Hermitage. Of the people with whom he had friendly connections, besides S. N. Bulgakov, V. Ivanov, M. Novoselov, who are personally known to me, it is necessary to note V. A. Favorsky, 192 who created several woodcuts for him: covers for the books “Imaginaries in Geometry” (1922), “Number as Form” (1923) and a book sign. He also made pencil portraits of his children Kirill and Olga (1927), and, it seems, an ivory cameo - the head of Florensky in a 3/4 turn, in the same 20s. I don’t know anything completely reliable about the Friend to whom the “Pillar” letters are addressed. It is possible that it was Troitsky. In No. 1 of the magazine “Christian” for 1907, Florensky’s poems were published, with the following note from the author: “With love I dedicate these pages of the diary to Sergei Troitsky - the Friend with whom we experienced them.” And in No. 2 for the same year of the same magazine, the verses “The Great Entrance” (“Now the heavenly forces serve with us invisibly”) by Sergei Troitsky were published with the following note: “To my sincerely beloved Friend, Pavel Florensky, the author asks you to accept these lines as a souvenir of our joint Communion.” To understand Fr. Paul's knowledge of his friends is a particularly important question. Much, for example, comes from his unexpected, for some, friendly connection with such a seemingly unlike person as Fyodor Dmitrievich Samarin, this “early Slavophile” who has come down to us. Florensky's poems seem to me to have no poetic power. They are too smart, difficult, ponderous. There is something in them close to the poems of A. Bely, even in the names of the collections: in A. Bely - “Gold in the Azure”, in Florensky - “In the Eternal Azure”. Florensky spoke very highly of Bely’s literary work, calling it “perhaps the most original phenomenon of modern Russian literature” (“Antony of the Romana,” p. 22). Any distortion of the beauty of the Church - its spirituality, by the evil and indifference of people, their secularization, was perceived very painfully by Florensky. In the early 30s, after a long break, I saw him in the laboratory of the Fruit and Vegetable Institute, where he came in connection with his work on the electric sealing of cans. Soon after this, I came to see him in Zagorsk, and we talked about how in the Church more and more there remains, as it were, one “Symbol of Faith”, without its embodiment in life, that its deeds are increasingly merging with the world, unbelief is penetrating into it more and more, in the words of St. Simeon N.B.: “Those who are unfaithful are those who are established on faith alone without works.” I said: “But despite this, the sacraments are performed in the Church.” He replied: “That’s what’s scary, that they are happening.” We were sitting in his room, it was not long before his arrest. There were brochures in English on the table, and I read the title of one: “On methods of packing onions in America.” The room was still the same, with only one change. Previously, in the corner there was one large icon of Sophia of the Wisdom of God (Novgorod type), and it always seemed to me that there was definitely some kind of contemplative chill around its loneliness. And now, leaning against it, stood an icon of St. Nicholas the Pleasant, immediately reminiscent of someone’s misfortune, of someone’s warm prayer. Soon after this, “his life ended and his life began.” His name, after many years of oblivion, is now engraved, as rehabilitated, on a monument in the garden of the Theological Academy in Zagorsk. The date of death on this monument is not specified. Obviously, it happened in the first half of the 40s. At the beginning of 1947, people in Siberia who left the camp told me about it as an event that would not happen in the next few years. And its circumstances have not yet been clarified and, if I may say so, are sophiological. The most reliable story seems to be that he died in the camp (in Solovki?) in the camp hospital from dystrophy. They say that before this he acquired great spiritual power over criminals, which was facilitated by the fact that he, collecting pieces of bread from those who had more property, distributed them to the hungry, and that when the body of his priest Paul was carried out of the hospital doors, it was greeted by a crowd of these wards who knelt down. The greatest aspect of Sophia, next to the Celestial Church, is the Mother of God. “If Sophia is the Church of the Saints,” Florensky writes in this letter, “then the soul and conscience of the Church of the Saints - the Mother of God, is Sophia par excellence...” “And she is,” he writes, “the True Church of God, the True Body of Christ - the Blessed Virgin, Graced by the Holy Spirit, from Her came the body of Christ... She is the Church.” Beginning the book, he dedicates it to the “All-fragrant and Most Pure Name of the Virgin and Mother,” ending it, he once again affirms that the Church is the Most Pure Virgin. The patristic and liturgical texts he cites in support could be multiplied. Here is a passage I accidentally came across from the Theotokos canon of the service on July 11, hymn 9: “Behold the Church, behold the door, behold the Holy Mountain of God... Behold the Most Pure Mother of God, the Intercessor of all of us who sing.” It was not without reason that he pointed out the need to create “liturgical theology” in order to draw knowledge of God from the liturgical everyday life of the Church. By this, by the way, he accurately foresaw his future accusation that “he does not see the Spirit in the everyday life of the Church” (Florovsky). Clement of Alexandria liked to call the Church “Virgin Mother” (“Educator”, I, 1, p. 6). “Virgin Mother” – the Gallic confessors of the 2nd century called the Church (Evs. 4 books, p. 261). Eusebius himself calls the Church “the holy and divine Bride of the Word” (Evs. 10 books, p. 551). It is known that the composition of the icon of the Ascension is an image of the Church awaiting the second coming of Christ. Florensky, in a note, makes an extract from one description of this icon: “In the scenes of the Ascension, the central figure contains the meaning of both the Church on earth and the Mother of God, or, better, the Image of the Church, specifically given in the image of Mary.” The inscription to another image of the Mother of God “likens Her to the Heavenly City from which Christ came to save the world... This inscription establishes the constant presence of God in Her midst as the earthly Church” (p. 771). Our Lady is the Church, and as a Church she is Sophia. “I dare to sing the praises of a virgin, but you have named her virgin soul your divine Church, and as the incarnation for the sake of your word, you have called Sophia the Wisdom of God,” we read in the service to Sophia. And it contains the following explanation: “The poem and other poems were written for the feast of the Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos, since She is the Church animated by the Wisdom and Word of God, called Sophia.” The idea of ​​the Mother of God-Church-Sophia fully satisfies the all-human desire to feel the Sophia unity of the world, and in this part of the letter the great merit of Fr. Pavel. All other aspects of Sophia that he gives: the Ideal Personality of the Creation, the Guardian Angel of the creature, the Great Root of the entire creation (“Primary Material” in the article “Symbolism of Flowers”) and others, either repeat the idea of ​​​​the pre-existing Church, or are, as Bishop Theophan the Recluse said in such cases, “too subtle.” About the doctrine of Sophia Vl. Solovyova O. Paul's response is generally unfavorable, but the influence of this teaching on him is undeniable. “What Soloviev taught,” writes Florensky, “adjoins Sabellianism, Spinozism, and Schellingism” (p. 775). Some kind of familiarity of Solovyov in relation to the “World Soul”, reflected both in his poems and in his letter, given on p. 331 “The Pillar”, of course, makes a difficult impression, and Florensky wants to get away from this bias and base his theory of Sophia on the teachings of Athanasius the Great. “The dogma of the consubstantiality of the Trinity,” he writes, “the idea of ​​the deification of the flesh, the demands of asceticism, the aspiration of the spirit of the Comforter and the recognition of the creature’s premium, incorruptible significance, these are the leitmotifs of Athanasius’ dogmatic system. The entire present book is built on these same basic motives” (p. 349). From the words of St. Athanasius, it is clear that he really affirmed the pre-peaceful and incorruptible existence of creation, some kind of pre-existence in the bosom of God. Contemplation of the Holy Father can be understood as “the Human Nature of Christ, as His Body, as the Church, as the Side of the created world, facing eternity” (p. 344). But, firstly, from these names and aspects of contemplation of the pre-worldly existence of the creature it is clear that they all come down to one thing - to the Church, and, secondly, St. Athanasius ends his contemplation here, without making an attempt to penetrate into the essence of what he contemplates, without trying to affirm the separateness of the pre-worldly existence of the Church. Its peaceful existence is the mystery of the Body of Christ and the Bosom of God, inaccessible to our measure of knowledge. Thus, then, the possibility of deviations into the “fourth hypostasis” does not arise, although Florensky firmly emphasizes its creatureliness. We can think about Sophia, it seems to me, only “like a mirror in fortune-telling,” and any attempt at violent metaphysical clarity in her image, the audacity of putting her face to face,” leads only to mystical fantasy and leads, and this is the most important thing, from the practice of Christianity. “Do not philosophize,” says the apostle, “more than is fitting to philosophize” (Rom. 12). And St. John Chrysostom warns against inappropriate inquisitiveness in reasoning.” Churches were erected to Sophia, icons were painted, services were compiled, with celebrations at the same time as the Mother of God. Through this we have it as a Symbol of the heavenly, as the Heavenly Church. But Divine symbols are not metaphysical puzzles that need to be solved, especially with the help of “Sophia specialists,” as Vl did. Soloviev, by his own admission (p. 331 of “The Pillar”). One must remain silent around them and purify the heart, just like Fr. Paul writes: “As our hearts are purified, the schematic character of the symbols becomes more and more condensed into a realistic one” (p. 678). Precisely feeling the danger of schematism and the unconvincingness of the general theosophical aspects of the contemplation of Sophia, he occupies most of this letter with materials about the icons and churches of Sophia and materials about the veneration and life of the Mother of God, about “Her incomprehensible superiority over all of God’s creation” (he quotes these words of Khomyakov in the text of this letter). Elder Fr. Florensky Isidore said that the earthly birth of the Church was on Calvary in the outflow of blood and water from a perforated rib. He associates this same moment with receiving a wound in the heart of the Mother of God. The images of the Mother of God and the Church merge in the immaculate body of God, in the accomplished Incarnation of the Divine. “The Mother of God united the Church in herself,” Florensky wrote in the article “The Earthly Path of the Mother of God.” Through the image of the Mother of God we ascend to the Image of Sophia, from the earthly, holy and immaculate Church of God we ascend to the heavenly Church, for both of them are one. We must touch and talk about the Shrine with great caution. We may not understand a lot, it is not for this that we will be exacted, but for negligence, which can be twofold. In this case, I mean criticism and condemnation of Bulgakov’s Sophianism by Metropolitan. Sergius, and mainly V. Lossky, Although this does not directly apply to Florensky. This criticism is largely fair, but at the same time, the fact of arrogant and careless passing by the very idea of ​​​​Sofia, even if incorrectly interpreted by Bulgakov, is scary. And the positive part of this criticism ceases to be reliable after the phrase about. Sergius: “From the point of view of God’s intentions and desires, the fall of man, and the resulting incarnation of the Son of God, can be called an accident.” No matter how the first part of the phrase softens the meaning of the second, and no matter how “subtly” Lossky explains the concept of chance, the “chance of Golgotha” still sounds blasphemous, especially after the words about “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Apoc. 13:8), or about “the spotless and pure Lamb, predestined even before the foundation of the world” (1 Pet. 1:19). Such a sober-minded and deeply Orthodox person, full of Khomyakov’s theological heritage, F. D. Samarin, wrote to Florensky: “The teaching (about Sophia) is not the creation of philosophical speculation, but the fruit of a living church consciousness” (“Letters” - “Theological Bulletin”, 1917, No. 4). This church consciousness, despite the churches and icons of Sophia, is just beginning to dawn; it may remain more of a premonition. But we must cherish this presentiment of knowledge within ourselves, like a treasure, being wary, on the one hand, of premature metaphysical conjectures, and on the other hand, of denying its possibility from the standpoint of some kind of heavy and hopeless seminary of thinking, into which Bulgakov and V. Lossky fall in criticism. The Jesus Prayer—the prayerful contemplation of the Fathers—goes back to the “predestination” or pre-eternity of the sacrifice of the Lamb. “This saving Name is Jesus,” writes St. Dmitry of Rostov, - first of all, the century was prepared in the Trinity Council" (Cheti-Minea, January 1). Prayerful contemplation of the Fathers is the mystical theology of the Church. In his sermon to the Sophia Church, Fr. Pavel was not alone even in the environment of the Theological Academy. Among its outstanding scientists of this time, one can point to prof. I. V. Popov, 193 wrote in “Lectures on Patrolology” that “The Church as God’s plan, of course, pre-existed in the thought of God.” In one letter from Fr. Paul to F.D. Samarin (1912) there is such a place: “A.P. Golubtsov, 194 professor of our Academy, used to tell me that in ancient times all the current Assumption and Annunciation churches were Sophia churches,” that is, in other words, the dedication of the church to the Mother of God Church was at the same time its dedication to Sophia. Prof. was also close to Florensky. S. S. Glagolev, who wrote in his review of his work: “You can dispute and even deny a lot in the work of Fr. Paul, but this does not detract from the exceptional significance of this exceptional book.” From a later time it can be noted that Fr., who was critical of Florensky. V. Zenkovsky, believes that his merit lies precisely in posing the problem of the sophistic nature of the world, the living unity of the cosmos, the “Root of the whole creature.” Florensky writes about the apocalyptic moment of the idea and icon of Sophia (pp. 382 and 769). In this regard, I recall the definition given back in 1903 by Andrei Bely to the “three apocalyptics”; I recall the book by Fr. Paul in 1909 about Elder Isidore, full of apocalyptic mood. And in the 10th point of the program of the “Christian Brotherhood of Struggle”, at the center of which stood the same “apocalyptics” - Sventsitsky, Ern and Florensky, we read: “The time has come to consciously serve this approach (the transcendental goal of humanity). For “the time is near,” we are entering the final apocalyptic period of world history. Dostoevsky already spoke about this. Vl. recently said this publicly. Soloviev." 195 Obviously, the knowledge of Sophia as the Church and the Mother of God as the Church is providentially open to our era. The closer the end of the story is, the clearer it becomes, in the words of Fr. Paul, “like a snowy peak from the gray morning mist “The Pillar and Ground of Truth is the Church of God.” In the article “Trinity-Sergius Lavra in Russia,” Florensky wrote: “Rev. Sergius builds the Church of the Most Holy Trinity, so that by constantly looking at it, in the words of the life writer of the Venerable, he can overcome the fear of the hated division of the world.” This was written in 1919, but it seemed especially for us living in the 60s. There are fewer and fewer people “looking” at the Church of the Holy Trinity, and the division of humanity is becoming more and more terrible. But this makes every truth about the Church even more necessary. After all, as Fr. wrote. Paul in another article, “only the Trinity is in the proper and final sense, unity and plurality” (“The Meaning of Idealism”). Only in the Church of the Body of Christ does the unity of many people become a reality - the unity of grace-filled friendship. Having brought in the tenth letter to the walls of the Eternal Church-Sophia, Fr. Paul asks the question: under what spiritual conditions is it possible to establish oneself on this “Pillar and Ground of Truth” - and answers: “Friendship is like a mysterious birth. You are the environment in which the revelation of Truth begins.” His book about the Church, Fr. Paul, one might say, ends with a letter about Friendship, revealing in it the essence of the catholicity of the Church - the consubstantiality of its people in love, overcoming in it the “hateful division of the world.” We enter the Church, or achieve it, only by overcoming our isolation, “separateness,” hostility and loneliness. The Church is the unity of Christ’s disciples, the unity of plurality, a multitude of people, a council of people. The Church is the “Conciliar Being,” as Fr. wonderfully calls it. Paul in his article “The Meaning of Idealism”, and in it he also cites the words of Archbishop Nicholas Kavasila of Thessalonica (14th century) about the “vision” of the Church as a single divine-human organism. “If anyone could see the Church of Christ,” writes Nicholas Kavasila, this “authoritative interpreter of church sacraments,” “in the very form in which it is united with Christ and participates in His flesh, then he would see it as nothing other than the body of the Lord.” It is to this vision or knowledge of the Church that the whole meaning of the twelfth letter leads. “That spiritual activity,” writes Fr. Paul in this letter, - by which, and through which, knowledge of the Pillar of Truth is given, is love. This is gracious love... We still need to achieve it through a long struggle. To strive for it, you need to receive an initial push... Such a push happens... (also) Love... This love is not like that, and at the same time an anticipation of the expected one. Love gives a shake-up to the whole makeup of a person, and after this shake-up, this “earthquake of the soul,” he can search. Love opens the doors of the higher worlds for him” (p. 395). Florensky calls this “original” love with the Greek word “philia” - “love-friendship”. First of all, it is important that he, in full accordance with the teachings of the Fathers, affirms love as the “initial impulse” of spiritual life, as the “source of faith” (John Climacus), as the basis of growth and perfect love (he calls it “grace-filled”). Moreover, it is clarified to them that this is not “general” love, but specifically personal love, the kind that becomes more understandable to us through the idea of ​​friendship. This personal concreteness of love becomes, as he writes, “a bridge to heaven.” In addition to “philia love” in Christianity, he says, there is also “agape love,” universal love, the love of the brotherhood of all people. “Both sides of church life,” he says further, “the agapic side and the philic side - brotherhood and friendship, in many ways proceed in parallel. At points of highest significance, brotherhood and friendship even tend to merge completely. This is understandable, for communion with Christ through the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist is the source of all spirituality. But nevertheless, they are not reducible to each other. For a Christian, every person is a neighbor, but not everyone is a friend.” Florensky rightly calls “communion with Christ in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist”, “the point of highest significance”, in which “brotherhood and friendship (agape and philia) strive to completely merge.” But this communion and aspiration towards it is the essence of Christianity, the center towards which all its radii are drawn. And the closer they are to him, the closer they are to each other. This is the spiritual norm of church existence, and since we are talking about the norm, and not about the reality that has departed from it, we can affirm that inside the Body of Christ or, in other words, during true stay in the Church, people’s love for each other will always be “at the point of external significance.” That is, brotherly, or “agapic” love will always be love-friendship, since here love is inside the One who said, “you are My friends. I no longer call you slaves. But I have called you friends. “Friends” to Him – can there not be “friends” among themselves? “From repentance to Thee, who came all in Thy presence, Thou didst do other things, the One and Blessed One, always, now and unto endless ages. Amen" (prayer before Communion). Here is the evidence of love-friendship within the Body of Christ. “Love for one’s neighbor” is love for every person, including those completely outside this Body, outside the Church. When this love meets within the Church the reciprocal love of a “fellow believer,” a brother of one mind, one in spirit in Christ, one friend in Christ, it becomes love-friendship, since through Christ it acquires a consubstantial unity—its full disclosure. The catholicity of the Church is the consubstantiality of people in God. “The Christian community,” writes Florensky, “(has) a friendly, philic structure... The limit of fragmentation (of the community) is not a human atom, but a communal molecule - a pair of friends... This is a new antinomy: a personality-two. On the one hand, an individual person in Christianity is everything: but on the other hand, he is something only where there are two or three.” “Two or three” is something qualitatively higher than one. A person can be absolutely valuable only in absolutely valuable communication. “Two are not one and one, but something essentially greater and more powerful.” – “Two is a new combination of the chemistry of the spirit, when one and one are transformed qualitatively and form a third...” – “Again, truly I tell you that if two of you agreed on earth about anything that they asked, it would be done for them by My Heavenly Father. Where two or three are gathered in My Name, there I am in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:19-20). Why is this so? And therefore (Florensky writes) that “the gathering of two or three in the name of Christ, the descent of people into the mysterious spiritual atmosphere around Christ, the communion of His grace-filled power - transforms them into a new spiritual essence, makes of the two a particle of the Body of Christ, the living embodiment of the Church, churchizes them” (p. 421). In the prayer practice of our time, there is “prayer by agreement” - the prayer of “two”, about a common cause for them. Here's the text for those who don't know: “Lord my God, Jesus Christ. You said with Your most pure lips: When two on earth agree to ask for any deed, it will be given to them by My Heavenly Father, for where two or three are gathered in My name, there I am in the midst of them. Your words are immutable, O Lord, Your mercy is unconditional and Your love for mankind has no end. We pray to Thee, our God, grant us (the names of those asking), who have agreed to ask Thee for (the subject of prayer). But not as we want, but as You, Lord. Let Your will be done in everything. Amen". “The property of love,” says St. John Chrysostom, - such is that the lover and the beloved are no longer, as it were, two separate persons, but one person” (p. 436). “John Chrysostom,” writes Florensky, “interprets all Christian love (that is, both agapic and philic, in the terminology of Father Paul) as friendship. Friends,” says Chrysostom, “are dearer than fathers and sons, friends in Christ” (p. 443). And Florensky almost agrees with this. “Just as agape towards a person gives rise to philia (friendship) towards him,” he writes, “so sovereign agape is embodied in friendship.” But at the same time, he wants to believe in some kind of separate existence in Christianity of love and friendship, which, of course, as Berdyaev correctly noted, is simply going beyond the limits of Christian reality. For those extracts from the Fathers that Florensky cites to confirm his thought (the strongest are from Isaac the Syrian, which he does not cite), one can cite the same number, where the Fathers do not advise entering into a special, deliberate, “separate” friendship with anyone. They did this out of fear of temptations and grief associated with closeness to one person, and out of special zeal for the Lord, friendship with Whom can be forgotten through addiction to a person. “I was empty and naked from Your friendship,” we read in prayer 10 – Kathisma. “Do not look for friends on earth, so that there are no sorrows, but make a friend of the Lord,” writes one contemporary monk and ascetic, “if you happen to have a friend, thank the Lord who gave him, but be comforted not by him, but by the Lord” (Archbishop Varlaam of Ryazan). The Lord gives a friend, through His Friendship, and not only “one”, “for life”, “exceptional” and “special”, but also everyone, seemingly random, encountered on some roads to Christ and through Christ, who became unforgettable, non-random and unique. The priests performing the liturgy, “at the point of its highest significance,” to use the expression of Fr. Paul about the fusion of agape and philia, they kiss each other and say: “Christ is and will be among us.” This happens with ordinary people, either near the Chalice, or even as if completely far from it, somewhere, perhaps in the subway, when the breath of Christ’s breath (again using the words of Father Paul) suddenly “transforms them into a new spiritual essence, making from two a particle of His Body, from two such that, perhaps, will never meet again.” The lines between philia and agape are elusive. And Fr. himself Paul writes that in the Gospel the Lord’s personal love for “friend Lazarus” is spoken in Greek either “philia” or “agape.” The same is true in addressing his beloved disciple John. And even Fr. Paul gives as an example of philia the relationship of the elder to the disciples, that is, the relationship of plurality, and not of separateness. And the words “you are My friends” were addressed to all eleven who listened to Him, giving an image of the proper relationship of all Christians within the same faith and love. What about. Paul calls “philia” - friendship, the core of Christian love, revealed in the communication of people within the Holy Church. Love is one, just as the ray coming from the great Sun is one and continuous, but our approach to the source of Light is not the same. The closer you are to Him, the more consubstantial Friendship is, the more it is realized - “that two may be one.” There is love-patience, and there is love-joy, they are at different stages of the path of approaching the United Center. The closer people meet to Him, the closer they become from being simply “neighbors” - to the hidden places of grace, the more they enter into the Church, which is the overcoming of the separateness of people - the Unity of the great multitude. In the eleventh letter, what is important for us is not the terminological part, that is, not an attempt to somehow highlight philia, but the revelation to us of this heart-shaped being of Christian love, in confirmation of the words of St. John Chrysostom. Columbus, looking for a sea route to India, discovered, as we know, a new continent unexpectedly. Florensky, and erring in the theoretical superstructure, reveals to us the essence of the conciliarity of the Church. He lowers the barrier before our possible aspiration “in general” into love, into altruistic uncertainty, and leads into the “closeness” of the “small church”, “two” with any “other” with whom Christ unites me. By the way, the root of the word “other” is also “friend”. By this he defines the spiritual cell of the great church Body. “Friendship,” he writes, “is the last word of the truly human element of churchliness” (p. 443). The letter contains a wonderful paragraph 196 - the words of Christ, preserved in the so-called “Second Epistle of Clement of Rome”: “The Lord Himself, once asked: when will His kingdom come? - answered: When the two will be one, and the outer as the inner, and the masculine together with the feminine, neither masculine nor feminine.” “What is important to me,” writes Florensky, “is the first member of the agraph, that is, an indication of friendship brought to completion.” V. Ern, a friend of Florensky, says: “We hardly see God in people. We don’t feel them as an immortal being. We live with a person for many years, but not once does his face shine for us for eternity.” 197 “The radiance of eternity” - this living halo of grace, people feel over each other when they really, and not in words, enter the shrine of Christ. More perfect people probably see it - this halo, over every person, both faithful and unfaithful, and without a “meeting” with this person, as soon as the image of God is seen in him, and then everyone becomes different from him, and without knowing it, or even without wanting it, maybe even opposing it. The Lord said to Judas already in Gethsemane: “Friend, why have you come?”, and we cannot in any way perceive this address as polite language. In this word the Lord appealed for the last time to the holy face of His Apostle, fading in the darkness of hatred. The agraph cited by Florensky speaks of the time of the end of history. At all times, the union of “two or three” in the name of Christ will be the Church, unless, of course, this union is not a consequence of sectarian opposition to the universal Church, but a meeting in the desert of the world. But, obviously, in recent times this knowledge of the “two” will be especially important, and the union of these “two” by the name of Christ will then be most effective. But is this then where the final knowledge and maturation of the Church will be revealed? From early Christianity these words come to us: “Where Jesus Christ is, there is the universal Church” (St. Ignatius the God-Bearer), and He is there “where two or three are gathered in His name.” My father's meetings with Fr. Pavel were quite rare, but I well remember my father’s special smile when he spoke about him. I was told that a person close to my father and an admirer of Khomyakov like him, Fyodor Dmitrievich Samarin, was excited by the appearance of Florensky both as a new thinker and as a person and said that “we have never had anything like this before,” perceiving him as a kind of new focus in the “golden chain of Russian thought.” That’s what was in my father’s smile – approval, surprise and joy. I remember walking with my father along Nikolsky Lane and telling him that, as I heard, Florensky explains the words of the funeral service this way: “a funeral sob creates a song: we transform a funeral sob into a song of triumphant victory.” And I remember how my father’s face brightened up with joy: “Yes, yes, he said it correctly.” Florensky knew how to discover gold in coins that had been completely erased by centuries and were considered copper. For me personally, this conversation had a special meaning; it took place in the fall of 1918, three months before my father’s death. Florensky, one of the first priests, came to our house after the death of his father and served a memorial service. I remember his stooping figure in a robe at the coffin, his quiet voice saying: “God of spirits and all flesh”... The first time in my life I saw him even before the publication of his great book, but after accepting the priesthood, probably in 1911 or 1912. My father, who took me to Optina to see the monks, also took me to Posad to see Florensky. He then lived on Shtatnaya, behind the Lavra. I vaguely remember their conversation about some kind of eugenics, then about Berdyaev. I perked up, it seems, only at dinner, at which I remember there was red grape wine in glasses, and in the way it was served, there was a sense of some kind of strict daily routine, and something not from our history. A kerosene lamp illuminated the table. After dinner Fr. Pavel went to accompany his father to the Lavra Hotel. It was winter, but the night was not frosty. We walked along an empty street, downhill, past small townspeople's houses towards the huge and clear contours of the Lavra. All around were snow and the silence of that now so distant Russia, the Russia of childhood. At the bridge, I remember, fragments of the conversation reached me. First, about the dark forces that would break into Russia (this was the beginning of the Rasputin period), and then about the symbolism of flowers on the icons of the Mother of God. Six or seven years later, already in 1918–1919, when Godunov’s golden robe was removed at the Lavra to reveal Rublev’s Trinity, and the quiet colors of divine creation shone to the world with the lights of the Non-Evening Light, the light of the divine Trinity, I remembered this second excerpt of the conversation about the colors of the Annunciation, as a night pre-betrothal, as a parting word of joy for life. “Calm in bad weather” was the signature under one of the vignettes-epigraphs of the book. This is how he remains in my memory. Florensky opened some window, and the air of the heavenly world blew into our religious thinking. The living faith of a living soul pushed us onto the path of experimental knowledge of God. In “The Symbolism of Flowers” ​​he wrote: “God is light, and this is not in a moralizing sense, but as a judgment of perception, spiritual, but concrete, direct perception of the glory of God.” From the realm of spiritual allegory, he leads thought into the reality of the sensation of the divine world, into consubstantiality with truth, into the consubstantiality of faith and life. Having mastered all the weapons of scientific and philosophical thought, he suddenly somehow turned this entire great machine so that it seemed to stand obediently and joyfully in front of the open door of true knowledge of the “nature of things.” This “turn” is the churching of our thought, the return of the intimidated, confused and impoverished thought to the treasuries of grace-filled knowledge. Rejecting the rationalism of school theology, which is characterized, first of all, by the separation of thought from life, or talk about the spiritual without life in the spiritual, he calls for the feat of struggle against doubt and sin, in order to achieve through this feat the Light of Truth, to acquire the grace of the Comforter and the love of the Trinity. In an article back in 1909, he wrote: “Religion is not reasoning about divine things, but the acceptance of the divine into one’s being” (collection “On Religion”). The saints of the Church experimentally taught about this acceptance of the divine world into oneself. Therefore, he opened the teachings of the spirit-bearing ascetics to many, and after him, we also felt the imperishable beauty of the enlightened creation, this “eternal miracle of God”; we rejoiced, perhaps for the first time in our lives, when we learned that in the darkness of history there is, and will always be, the Immaculate Church of God - Sophia. Those persons who truly live the hidden life of this Church have no need for the teaching of Florensky. Grace itself enlightens their mind and heart. But how many such people do we know, especially among the intelligentsia? For her, the works of Father Paul can still be “an introduction to the Church.” “Who am I to write about the spiritual?.. And if I, nevertheless, attach some significance to my Letters, then it will be exclusively preparatory, until there is direct nourishment from the hands of the Mother,” he writes in the preface. Florensky's mistakes or shortcomings are obvious, but they may not be noticed. His certain deviation into mystical rationality, the remnants of Merezhkovsky’s “new religious consciousness” in him, is a scientific oversaturation. Every person should be assessed not by mistakes and sins, but by some kind of spiritual outcome. A ship going to sea is judged by the correctness of its general course, which it follows to the pier. If this course is correct, then we approve of the ship, we admire it, completely disregarding the fact that there may have been moments when it deviated from the path. The last time I saw Fr. Pavel is already in a dream. It was in Siberia, probably in 1947, in those days when the “second death” came to me, as it once did to him. It was a time of loneliness and horror for me. And everything was resolved after this dream. I saw my father and Fr. Paul, sitting in the altar of the Mother of God chapel of our Plotnikovskaya Church on Arbat, at a small church table. They didn’t tell me anything, only my father showed me his throat, as if it had just hurt and healed, and handed me a medicinal bottle from the table, on the label of which I read one word written: “patience.” The two people closest to me spiritually came and said that there is no past, that they are not in the past, but in the present and future, that we must live more and more in the world in which we live Ave. Theodore the Studite 198 writes: “Children! May the light of a true mind shine upon you, and may God’s love separate you from the world... None of you will be deprived of that good part that the previously deceased brothers received, because we will all go there, we will know each other by a different kind of recognition and we will see each other.” 199 In 1905, on the second day of Easter, Florensky, then still a student, I think a second year, at the Moscow Theological Academy, said the word in the Academic Church - “Chief of Life.” It ended with the words about the general Resurrection: “The spiritualized will meet close and loving people, hug after many years of separation, and will not be able to look into each other’s eyes enough, shaking hands with a childish smile, silently. They will be in communion with Christ the Lord, Whom they love without seeing Him, whose bright joy we rejoice in anticipation. And there will no longer be anything unclean on that great holiday of the Rebellion of the Dear Ones, on Great Easter. Yes, Lord, come! Amen!". S. A. Volkov 200. P. A. Florensky 201 Having paid tribute to everyday life and the somewhat anecdotal side of the life of the Academy, I turn to the memories of a man with whom I was not close, but who, with his life and his works, left an indelible imprint on my entire subsequent life. There are people whose name has been surrounded by legends since early times. Gradually they themselves become legends and thus pass into history. Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky, whose name has appeared more than once on the pages of these memoirs, belongs to their number. He was born and raised in Tiflis, graduated from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow University, then from the Moscow Theological Academy, became its professor, priest, rector of the house church of the Red Cross Community in Sergiev Posad, worked after the closure of the Academy in Moscow research institutes, was exiled to Siberia, where he worked on the problems of permafrost, was transferred to the terrible Solovki, where he studied Bely's algae sea, and ended his life unknown when and where. I first heard about Florensky in the gymnasium from my friend Alexei, the son of Professor A. A. Spassky, 202 who read the history of the ancient Church. By the time I entered the Academy, the professor was no longer alive, but before that I had visited their house, and then read his works, which I liked and fascinated. “The History of Dogmatic Movements”, “Hellenism and Christianity” were written not only vividly, but, I would say, also elegantly. Spassky was a scientist of the French type, who knew how to generalize well and present his own and other people's thoughts in a fascinating way. The last years of his life he was interested in the history of Gnostic teachings and was preparing a book on this topic. 203 Florensky was a student of Spassky, and after the latter’s retirement, he often visited him at home and talked with him a lot. Alexey, as Spassky’s eldest son, was sometimes present at these conversations, and his father told him about the rest. This is how it became known to me too. As a sixteen-year-old high school student, I had very vague ideas about philosophy. I was fascinated by the history of the ancient world, excited by the poetry of Tyutchev and the Symbolists, whose poems I began to look for in magazines, and borrow books from a private city library. Strange as it may seem, in the gymnasium library Russian literature ended with A.P. Chekhov and V.G. Korolenko. My comrades had no idea about the Symbolists, and the teachers, if I asked them, spoke about them with condescension, or even with gross disdain. – We don’t keep such rubbish in our house! – our unfortunate speaker of literature once said when I asked him for poems by K. D. Balmont and V. Ya. Bryusov in the gymnasium library. And I felt genuine poetry in the Symbolists, I saw in them truly the successors of Tyutchev, Lermontov, Pushkin and Fet, while all sorts of Corinthians, Ratgauses and Frugi, 204 seemed to me to be genuine decadents, that is, poetic degenerates... I had no one to talk to or consult with. The only outlet in my unconscious spiritual and literary searches turned out to be Alexey, but if you look deeper, it’s not even him, but Florensky reflected by him. Now, recalling the story of my spiritual growth, I understand how often neither at school, nor among friends, nor at home do they suspect what feelings, what ideas a teenager lives and breathes, where he gets food for his mind and soul. It was a huge support for me to learn from Alexey that Florensky not only appreciates the Symbolists, but is friendly and close to many of them, and his own views are close to Vyacheslav Ivanov, Andrei Bely and Valery Bryusov. I owe similar stories to the emergence of interest in philosophy and mysticism, in the works of Vladimir Solovyov, which, in turn, served as a prolegomena for me to that wondrous region where Logos and Sophia reign. So, without knowing it, Florensky already in his gymnasium years became my spiritual teacher, although I saw him only at lectures at the Academy. But that was still a long way off. Alexey told me that Florensky is preparing for publication a large religious and philosophical dissertation - “The Pillar and Ground of Truth”, in which he examines questions of existence, and is going to dedicate his book to the Mother of God herself. We thought this was great courage, and even audacity. Suffice it to recall that this was said in 1914, when the concepts of “blasphemy” and “sacrilege” were very effective in Russian criminal legislation. But indeed, upon the publication of the book, one could read the dedication printed there to “The All-Fragrant and Most Pure Name of the Virgin and Mother.” 205 The book was published in a patterned and intricate manner, with headpieces from a rare publication of Peter’s time, “Symbols and Emblemata,” 206 in ornate “Elizabethan” font, which, according to Florensky’s original plan, was supposed to be so small that it had to be read with a magnifying glass. According to Florensky, conveyed by Alexey, this was required so that the reader would approach the book with attention, read it with difficulty, delving into the content, and not absentmindedly skimming the lines... Then I liked this idea. Then I realized its absurdity; the book was already difficult enough to understand. As for external factors, such as font, vignettes, screensavers, etc., all this is tinsel that does not facilitate understanding, but only interferes with the reader, blocking the meaning of words and phrases from him. A book should be written and printed in such a way that there are as few obstacles as possible between the reader and the author’s thoughts. There is no need to complicate the truth with intricacies; this is “Byzantism,” as V.V. Rozanov sensitively and rightly noted, 207 and not creative, but decadent. Later, having become acquainted with the books of medieval philosophers and mystics published in the 16th century, I understood where Florensky borrowed the idea of ​​the design of his book - microscopic font, headpieces, initials, endings... This is how Picodella Mirandola or Agrippa of Nettesheim would have published their work 208 Such a book, published for the purpose of obtaining an academic degree at the Moscow Theological Academy, was, of course, unacceptable. Therefore, presenting his work as a master's thesis, Florensky published it in an abbreviated form, without dedication, allegorical drawings and under a more modest title: “On spiritual Truth. Experience of Orthodox theodicy". And all the same, as Archimandrite Hilarion later told me, the then famous learned Archbishop Anthony (Khrapovitsky) spoke quite harshly about Florensky’s work, saying: - Either I no longer understand anything about philosophy, or this is just Khlyst nonsense! Talking about this in 1919, Hilarion added that although he greatly honors and respects Bishop Anthony, seeing in him “the pillar of Orthodoxy,” he is ready to agree only with the first half of his judgment, since, busy with the affairs of church administration and the public, Anthony “has fallen far behind philosophy and underestimates its newest trends.” But all this will happen much later. And then I asked Alexei about Florensky at every meeting, and in these stories I was struck by one more incident. One day while walking we started talking about Buddhism. In my naivety, I was ready to consider Buddhism a kind of paganism, something like shamanism. Alexey explained that this is a deep philosophical teaching that contains enormous power, especially in the ideas of karma, reincarnation and nirvana. He said that Buddhism is enjoying great success in Europe, including in Russia, and even a Buddhist temple has been erected near St. Petersburg, in Novaya Derevnya. Apparently, Alexei himself then became interested in the ideas of Buddhism, which is why he spoke of it as a serious rival to Christianity. Then he said that Florensky once had to visit a secret Russian Buddhist, not only from the rich, but, it seems, even from high-ranking officials in St. Petersburg. The kind host showed the guest his secret Buddhist chapel, where there was a statue of Buddha, lotuses bloomed and other cult paraphernalia, and immediately performed a prayer, lighting some fragrant sticks, and fumigating himself and the guest with them. According to Florensky, these actions horrified him. He told Father Alexei that at that moment he clearly felt the presence of some unknown forces in the chapel, which for Florensky were, of course, the forces of evil. And this reminded me of another incident and another story heard that same summer, when I was visiting Mavrin, about twenty-five miles from Sergiev Posad, with an old auntie who was a teacher. When I was there, the local village priest came to visit her. Not long before, he had to visit a local sorcerer on some matter and talk with him. The priest admitted that he was scared: His eyes are very piercing, as if some kind of power jumps out of them... I was surprised by this fear, as it turned out, equally inherent in both the seedy rural priest, who, behind the demands and household worries, forgot all his modest seminary wisdom, and the learned mystical theologian, also a priest. “Are they really,” I thought, “people of clergy, servants of God, possessing the power and authority to “bind and let go,” do not they feel in themselves the grace that manifests this strength and power through them? They tremble not even before dark forces, but simply before the incomprehensible and unknown...” And I involuntarily remembered the legend of how St. Sergius, with just one fiery prayer, drove out the demons that threatened him. Or has grace now left the church? All this prompted me to think long and hard, to search for answers to the questions of faith that arose before me, and fueled curiosity about Florensky... As a high school student, I often wandered around the walls of the Lavra. I loved to look through the narrow loopholes at the picturesquely scattered houses of Sergiev Posad, immersed in dense gardens, of which there were so many then, at the expanse of fields spread around, coming close to the town, at very close forests stretching to the horizon... Walking along the eastern wall, I looked at the windows of the academic library. In the summer they were often open, and in the depths of the halls one could see huge cabinets and shelves filled with books, where, apparently, Florensky also worked. But I met him only at the first lecture, in the fall of 1917, and this meeting, naturally, was etched in my memory for the rest of my life. The Academy's largest auditorium is overcrowded. About ten minutes before the bell rings, they are already standing in the aisles, along the walls, sitting on window sills, crowding near the door. The bell rings and Florensky appears - of average height, slightly hunched over, with black, slightly curly hair falling to his shoulders, with a small curly beard and a very large, straight Gogol nose. He sidles his way, almost squeezes through the crowd and comes out to a table in front of the student benches. At the back is a large board. Florensky never ascended to the pulpit. And immediately there is silence. He didn't seem handsome. There was something oriental in the whole type of his face, especially in his “long” gaze from under lowered eyelids, which fell somehow sideways, slid over the interlocutor and seemed to go inside him. He never put on his master's cross: a simple black cassock and a silver pectoral cross, like that of an ordinary village priest. Looking ahead, I will say that Florensky never aspired to fame; no honors or distinctions attracted him. This was also evident in everyday life. I remember how amazed I was when, at our first meeting, he responded to my simple, albeit polite bow with a purely monastic, low, almost waist-length bow! You could say I was “stunned.” Then my monk friends explained that this was his usual way of bowing. And yet, even years later, I could not shake my first puzzled impression. I confess, it seemed to me that such humility is “humility more than pride,” and in Florensky’s bow from the waist there is something offensive for the person to whom they bow so much. I think that people like Tareev, whose behavior, perhaps, even emphasized their “greatness,” perceived his humility in the same way, and Florensky was disliked for this contrast... But let me return to the first lecture. Florensky's movements are constrained, his figure is somewhat tilted, his voice sounds muffled, and his words fall abruptly. Contrary to expectation, there was neither majesty of posture or gestures, nor florid fluency of phrases. The speech flowed as if from within, not monotonously, but also without rhetorical tricks and declamatory pathos, not striving for the beauty of style, but being beautiful in its organic unity. There was a certain magical charm in his speech. One could listen to it for hours without any fatigue. Despite the dull tone of his voice, he painted with words, evoking corresponding musical echoes in the soul of the listener, captivating him entirely. For two academic hours, both I and the others sat literally without moving, surrendering to the flow of thoughts, emerging associations and moods. And only then, when Florensky finished speaking and somehow suddenly, from the table, when the audience roared, stood up, warmed up, and flowed towards the exit, I felt my body go numb and stiff from immobility. Until this moment I didn’t feel it. During Florensky’s lectures, it was as if I had no body, only my spirit remained, and it jealously followed the flow of the lecturer’s thoughts. During the two years that I studied at the Academy, I did not miss a single lecture by Florensky. He read them as if he were “writing out loud,” so they demanded maximum attention from the listeners. It was necessary not to lose the sequence of development of thought, but at the same time to catch this or that feature in the pronunciation of individual words, since Florensky knew how to highlight unexpected semantic shades with intonation, to emphasize subtle nuances that allowed him to make striking comparisons, sometimes bordering on genuine revelation for listeners. Similarly, when writing, he used individual spelling techniques to spell individual words, especially words with prefixes. Therefore, many students found his lectures difficult. “He speaks very darkly, and gives a lot of names and factual material” - this is the typical attitude towards his lectures of an ordinary student who would like science to be simpler and easier, and to get a diploma into his hands as quickly as possible. Indeed, Florensky’s style of speech and thoughts stood out from the lectures of other professors, but for me they were understandable. I found in them something that was partly already familiar to me from the symbolists and philosophers I had read. I especially remember the lectures on the history of ancient philosophy. The wondrous Hellenic world, familiar since high school, now appeared in its new aspect of the origin of culture and art from ancient wisdom. Florensky saw its ancestral home in archaic Egypt, in the mysteries of the Cretan-Mycenaean era and in more distant ancient civilizations, only still guessed at the beginning of the 20th century. Florensky deeply and thoroughly explained to us that for us, and for the future, this ancient wisdom is not just an archaeological relic, valuable only for its curiosity, but the root of all our knowledge, the key to the mysteries of the world and the human soul, and finally, nutrition that strengthens our known and unknown forces. Turning away from this source, human thought withers and creativity dries up, while coming from this origin and constantly returning to it, the tree of knowledge rises, grows stronger and covers the earth with its shoots, “bearing much fruit.” But I was especially struck by the lecture on Plato. 209 Florensky was a Platonist, so when speaking about the cherished, he achieved the utmost perfection. For the same reason, A.F. Losev considered his interpretation of Plato’s idealism the best, and unsurpassed by anyone in all philosophical literature. 210 One could not only think, but also feel everything when he spoke about ideas, revealing the secret essence of the “myth of the cave,” 211 or clarified and developed the provisions of the “Symposium” and “Phaedrus.” After them I came out positively intoxicated, feeling myself to some extent involved in this divine life. I wanted to live, think, create. Eyes opened to the smallest details of the surrounding world, beauty began to shine and caress with its enlightenment. Evil ceased to threaten, it was perceived as a shadow, as just the absence of beauty. Remaining in the world, it did not make a person helpless and weak, on the contrary, it called for struggle, for feat, for renunciation of evil in oneself, for victory over world evil... The power of Florensky's lectures, as I have already said, was amazing. He not only painted. He enchanted, like Orpheus, magically took possession of the soul of the listener, turning it into wax or clay, from which he then sculpted his creations. The peculiarity of my nature was that which was once defined by the word “visionary”. A phenomenon that struck me with something in reality returned translated into a dream vision, where it was transformed, refined and deepened to the point of inexpressibility, but at the same time it became clearer and more accessible in its images. I had one of these dreams after a series of lectures on Plato. Some bright creatures (Plato's daimons!) carried me away into a fairy-tale land that appears only in the paintings of the Italian Pre-Raphaelites - transparent streams among hills and valleys covered with flowers and trees dotted with fruits, transparent blue expanses, castles and small medieval towns... And at the moment of farewell, music began to sound that shocked me to tears. Imagine my surprise when, after some time, I heard the same divine music performed by one of my friends, a gifted violinist! It was the melody of Gluck's Orpheus. 212 And then, when it began to sound in a concert or on the radio, I remembered my dream, clearly realizing that I had never heard it before... I have preserved plans for two of Florensky’s lectures, notes made at home from memory, a dry skeleton of what I heard. Many took notes during the lectures, but I did not do this consciously. Only shorthand recording is justified, otherwise the style is distorted, and with it the meaning. In addition, when writing down, you inevitably miss something, and hence there is a violation of coherence and understanding, especially when you listen to such a master as Florensky, whose many thoughts and conclusions are based on subtle accents of speech. At home, I wrote down the main points and points, allowing me to remember everything else later. I had a lot of such sheets, but, unfortunately, they perished in the vicissitudes of life. However, I didn’t particularly try to write everything down, since Florensky himself told us that he was already preparing a course of lectures for publication, and their first edition had already been published. 213 Alas, the events of subsequent years prevented the release of further issues... So, here is the outline of these two lectures - on knowledge: "1. Knowledge. Our attitude towards him. V. A. Kozhevnikov’s view on this issue. Two types of knowledge: natural and artificial. Anthropocentrism of the first (but not in the Protagorean sense - man is the measure of things), anthropism of the second. “Scientific worldview” as the second type of knowledge. His desire for unconditional objectivity. The impossibility of this objectivity. The inevitability of the “human” in all scientific abstractions as their fundamental basis. 2. Continuation and development of the same topic. The difference between the “scientific worldview” and science. The first is like a later and vague echo of the last. Dogmatization by the “scientific worldview” of hypotheses and methods that are “because-to the extent” for science. The presence of a certain element of this dogmatization in science itself. Scientific trick. Not answering the question directly is the main point of consistent and painstaking analysis. “Lubricating” problems by introducing the infinitely great to indicate the extent of this process. Transference to infinitely distant times or to an indefinable future as a way of proving a problem without evidence. Historical overview of the growth of ideas of the "scientific worldview". The Renaissance is like an era against God. Philosophical meaning of great discoveries. Copernicus - Ptolemy. The role of great discoveries in the matter of reducing the meaning of the Earth to zero, and hence, in the matter of eliminating differences, individual colors.” Of course, here you will not find either arguments or the author’s brilliant dialectics, paradoxes that at first stunned and then amazed with the depth of penetration into the essence of the issue, the sharpness and sensitivity of its resolution. There is also none here of that colorfulness, I would even say, the aroma of the word, its melodic sound and semantic richness, everything that made Florensky’s lectures a masterpiece, and listening to them a feast of thought and spirit... In such a small town as Sergiev Posad, every little thing turns out to be public property and becomes the subject of gossip, including a person’s personal life. Naturally, the students were interested in their professors. They were talked about a lot and in different ways, but I never heard any comments or stories about home life, or Florensky’s “weaknesses”. All conversations about him were limited exclusively to philosophical and mystical topics. Some were ready to declare him a theosophist, others - a spiritualist and warlock, others - a magician... I will give one story, very typical in relation to Florensky. When he was still a student at the Academy, his sick comrade was placed in the academic infirmary. Florensky came to visit him. The third person in the room was another student, who was dozing at the time. When he woke up, according to him, Florensky was sitting on the floor on a pillow, his legs crossed cross-legged (a habit of Georgian childhood?!), on his lap lay a huge book, from which he was reading in an incomprehensible language, rocking left and right, and his comrade was lying on the bed, stretched out like a dead man. The picture made such a terrible impression on the narrator that he... fell asleep from horror! Did the narrator dream this, or was the penultimate scene of Turgenev’s “Song of Triumphant Love” used to characterize Florensky? God knows. And yet, this case shows that at the Academy Florensky was not completely considered “one of their own.” Apparently, this is the fate of any extraordinary personality. At first, it arouses curiosity among others, then suspicion, finally fear and even condemnation... I did not often have the opportunity to talk with Florensky at home or in the academic library. He was not very sociable, and in this respect he was not like Archpriest Vorontsov or Professor Glagolev, who were ready to endlessly talk to students at home, or, more precisely, to continue lecturing in their office, because it is difficult to call their monologues anything other than lectures. As far as I know, some students overpowered Florensky with their visits, but if he did not want to fully reveal his thoughts, he began to speak in a dark and complicated manner, so that the listener was at a loss. It happened that at such a moment Florensky suddenly fell silent. And he was silent for quite a long time and then, as if waking up, he began to talk about something else. V.V. Rozanov, who knew him for a long time and closely, very accurately noted this moment in his notes: “Florensky will look at him for a long time and will not say anything...”. 214 This property is equally figuratively noted in a rare brochure published for the 100th anniversary of the Academy, entitled “Academiae Historia Arcana”: “Paul the priest, due to his many learning, speaks dark and inconveniently intelligible: he speaks even in the Russian language, both of his words are foreign to Pavlov...” 215 I first came to Florensky in the fall of 1917. I remember that I was worried when I went to see him. I needed some advice regarding a semester essay I had planned on Gogol. At the same time, I wanted to see the person whom I secretly worshiped in his home environment, since it always helps to reveal the character, tastes and habits, and, perhaps, even the style of thinking of the owner. I was led along a short staircase, then through a small corridor, and I found myself in an office, the walls of which were completely lined with bookcases. Their solid wooden doors reliably hid the contents from prying eyes. I managed to look into them much later, without Florensky... On the doors there are small glass photographs: views of the Acropolis, Paestum, photographs from ancient statues and bas-reliefs. In the corner is a icon case with icons, in front of it, a lit lamp. On the contrary, there is a small, very simple table, on which there are no “writing instruments”, but only an inkwell and a student’s pen and feather. I asked questions, and Florensky answered in a dull, seemingly slightly cracked voice, with long pauses, during which he seemed to forget about me, and, looking past me, was immersed in the contemplation of his own visions. At such moments there was a painful silence. But then the owner of the office seemed to wake up, looked at me in bewilderment, as if remembering something, and again continued the interrupted conversation. At the same time, he did not look straight, but somewhere sideways, and only occasionally glanced at me with a piercing and long gaze, as if trying to look into the very depths of my soul. There was something in this look that came from antiquity, from the hierophants 216 of Eleusis and Egypt. Probably, the three futurists, including Velimir Khlebnikov, felt the same thing when they visited Florensky 217 to invite him to become one of the “Chairmen of the Globe,” but they never dared to say so after listening to his lecture on the law of the “golden ratio.” That time I received from Florensky not only advice on my essay. On the streets and in educational institutions, in institutions and in homes, when acquaintances gathered, there were debates about what “freedom” was and what it should be. So Florensky, in a conversation with me, casually remarked: “Now everyone talks and even shouts about freedom, but few people know what it is. A stupid person, overwhelmed by vanity, in the most democratic country will not feel freedom, will not be able to take advantage of it, but a true sage can feel free even in an atmosphere of violence and slavery... I remember these words well, which helped me to identify the essence of an idea that I had vaguely felt before. And in subsequent years, they have repeatedly been my support and consolation in various difficult circumstances of life. As far as I know, Florensky never belonged to any party, and apparently was not interested in politics and did not like it. Simply put, he was a man of a conservative mindset, seeing in the opposite direction the elements of Chaos, which he considered himself obliged to resist in the name of Logos. In 1923, the famous “renovationist” Archpriest A.I. Vvedensky wrote that “just before the revolution, Fr. Florensky published an article on the pages of one of the right-wing Moscow newspapers, where he demanded dogmatic recognition of the organic connection between Orthodoxy and autocracy... A complete merging of the divine and the human, the bringing down of the heavenly king to earth, and the elevation of the earthly king to the heavenly throne. Byzantium did not know such an apotheosis, did not dare to know. Requirement o. Florensky sounded already when even an insensitive ear definitely heard the underground rumbles of the approaching revolution.” 218 I did not find the article to which Vvedensky refers, 219 and have never heard of it. True, in Florensky’s critical article about the book by V.V. Zavitnevich, dedicated to Alexei Stepanovich Khomyakov, there is a rather similar statement: “In the minds of the Russian people, autocracy is not a legal right, but is a fact revealed by God himself, the mercy of God, and not a human convention, so the autocracy of the tsar is not a legal, but a doctrinal concept, it is included in the realm of faith, and is not derived from non-religious premises with a view to public or state benefit.” 220 There is no dogmatization of autocracy in these words, but they clearly show that Florensky, speaking this way, was thinking of an ideal image of royal power, which hardly coexisted in his mind with its last real exponent... In connection with this issue, it is worth recalling that while still a student at the Academy, in 1906 Florensky published a separate brochure entitled “The Cry of Blood”, denouncing the inhuman terror of reaction. It contains the text of the sermon he delivered in the academic church on March 12, 1906. This is what he wrote: “Waves of blood are flooding the homeland. Her sons are dying in the thousands - they are hanged, shot, and prisons are filled with thousands. The times of the godless King John have returned. Under the guise of “pacification”, peaceful peasants and workers are beaten. People who do not have a piece of bread are shot by those who live off their labors. Women and children are not even spared - they are raped and insulted at every step. They mock in insane brutality... And we remain silent, we keep silent, we all wash our hands... not with water, like Pilate, but with blood, for now there is no water that is not mixed with blood, there is no water that would wash away the blood from Rus'... Look, holy Rus', you would not turn out to be the disgrace of history! 221 Florensky’s passionate cry against fratricidal bloodshed was not heard, and even if it was heard, it was very soon forgotten... The essay I had planned about Gogol, about which I went to consult Florensky - “Dark People. Elements of Melancholy and Horror in Gogol (1812–1813)” was completed by the spring of 1918. In my research, I wanted to show that these elements were present in the work of our classic from the very beginning, and did not appear only at the end of his life. I worked a lot, looked through a lot of works on Gogol, and prefaced the essay with a short methodological introduction. The result was a voluminous notebook of more than one and a half hundred pages. Florensky praised the introduction and my efforts, but noted that this was more a literary work than a philosophical work. And to console me, he advised me to consider the rest of the writer’s creative period, thus creating a “purely professorial volume,” as he put it, not without some irony. And then, as if for edification, Florensky started talking about the essay of my fellow student, priest Mikhail Spassky, small in size, but very rich and deep, also dedicated to Gogol. Spassky was able to show in his work the role of moonlight in Gogol’s descriptions, connecting it with some features of the writer’s worldview and worldview, and at the same time he drew on some points from Rozanov’s book “People of Moonlight”. And then, correctly sensing my condition, Florensky suggested reading this work. Of course, he was absolutely right in his assessments! Spassky’s compact, precise and clear work was precisely a philosophical study, while my “work” turned out to be overloaded with biographical materials that were not at all affected by philosophical understanding... Florensky himself knew how to speak and write in such a way that a listener or reader could, rereading or turning his thoughts to what he heard, for a long time to discover for himself the most diverse layers of ideas and feelings, outlined in a few phrases. His idealism flowed from two sources - the philosophy of Plato and Christian teaching. Of course, Christianity dominated, Plato's wisdom was considered only as a prototype of the Christian revelation. Here Florensky seemed to be following in the footsteps of Clement of Alexandria, who tried to combine philosophical Hellenism with Christian dogmas. That is why Florensky's "Pillar" is as patterned and encyclopedic as the "Stromata" of his Egyptian predecessor. Here you can find the Bible, the works of the fathers and teachers of the Church, medieval scholasticism and mysticism, the latest theology, right up to Catholic neo-Thomists and Russian “God-seekers.” And along with them, the wisdom of pagan thinkers from the Eleatics to Plotinus and Iamblichus, which through renounced Gnosticism blossomed in the philosophy of medieval realists, and passed into the romantic-idealistic movements of modern and contemporary times. Here you will find the exoticism of Kabbalah, multiplied by the intricacies of the Talmud, the solipsistic visionaryism of the Brahminical and Lamaistic East, its transformation in modern occultism, and theosophy and anthroposophy trying to be esoteric and at the same time scientific. And right there next to you are the ponderous, not always acceptable, fruits of science. Florensky did not ignore its rich fields and vegetable gardens... And although Florensky repeatedly and emphatically speaks about his Orthodoxy, although in the preface to “The Pillar” he almost renounces the vain wisdom of this world, examines and reveals the relativity of human knowledge and the helplessness of the knowing “I”, its insignificance before the treasures of patristic spiritual experience, comparing the creations of teachers and apologists of the Church with a “waterfall of semi-precious stones” (a purely Byzantine image!), he does not will fail to resort to the harsh truths of mathematics, to the stores of facts and observations piled up in the storerooms of natural science, to the “Athenaean” intricacies of free-thinking philosophers and to the even more dangerous secular poets... At the same time, Florensky was deeply sincere and spoke from the bottom of his heart when he preached humility and exalted the world of Christian ascetics and desert lovers. Skepticism is overcome by him only by Christian love, the relativity of everything and everyone in the human world, only by reliance on the Church, which he postulates as “the pillar and affirmation of the Truth,” and the doomed winglessness of rationalistic knowledge, only by the ecstatic experience of prayer and deed. The Pillar and Ground of Truth has generated some heated debate in academic circles. The ecclesiastical professors, for the most part, were extremely flattering and highly appreciative of this work. S.S. Glagolev directly called it a “brilliant book.” The then rector of the Academy, Bishop Theodore, noted that “the book of Fr. Paul is an exceptional phenomenon,” at the end of his review he considered it necessary to note: “Perhaps I will not appreciate this book if I recognize it as worthy of a master’s degree, and not a higher academic degree.” Florensky deserved a completely different assessment from his opponent, Professor M. M. Tareev, 222 who wrote that Florensky “the principle of the fatherland, carried out from above, is the principle of provincial Catholicism, carried out from below, is the principle of disguised Protestantism, it is always the principle of arbitrariness... Both in the title of the book and in its text, the author advertises church and paternal sources, but his book in its content does not have a single Christian feature philosophy, this is nothing more than spiritualist philosophy." And here is what P. A. Florensky himself apparently writes about Florensky in the 44th volume of the “Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Garnet Partnership”: “Florensky understands his life task as a continuation of the path to a future integral worldview. Florensky considers the fundamental law of the world to be the principle of thermodynamics - the law of entropy, the universal equation (Chaos). The world is opposed by the law of ectropy (Logos). Culture is a struggle with the world equation - death. Culture (from “cult”) is an organically connected system of means for the implementation and disclosure of a certain value, which is accepted as unconditional, and therefore serves as an object of faith. Faith determines a cult, and a cult determines a worldview, from which culture then follows. The universal world pattern is a functional dependence, understood as discontinuity in relation to connections, and discreteness in relation to reality itself. This discontinuity and fragmentation in the world leads to the Pythagorean affirmation of number as a form and to the policy of interpreting Plato’s “ideas” as prototypes.” 223 After the October Revolution, which Florensky perceived in the spirit that he expressed in his significant words about “freedom,” he gradually began to cooperate with the new government, taking an active part in the work of the Commission for the Protection of Scientific and Artistic Values ​​of the Trinity Lavra. Interested in art issues, he reads numerous reports in Moscow art historical societies and publishes articles in the Makovets magazine. Later, he began to work in Moscow research institutes, and for some time he was very close to L. D. Trotsky, 224 who respected and appreciated him. From a reliable source I heard a story about how their first meeting took place. Trotsky arrived at the All-Union Electromechanical Institute. Florensky, who always wore a cassock and a cross, decided not to create awkwardness for his superiors and remained in the laboratory. As soon as Trotsky got out of the car and greeted the director, he immediately asked about Florensky. They ran after that. The employees formed two lines. Between them at one end stood Trotsky with the director of the institute, Florensky appeared at the other. They met halfway, the director introduced them to each other, and Trotsky, taking Florensky by the arm, and not paying attention to the others, went to his laboratory... Another episode, from a later time, told by one of my former students in 1925. A Komsomol detachment is marching along a crowded Moscow street. The movement of crews stopped. In an open car, also stopped, sit Trotsky and Florensky - as usual, in a cassock, skufya and with a pectoral cross. They talk without paying attention to those around them. The Komsomol members, looking at them, grumble gloomily: “Apparently, priests will soon command us...” It is difficult to say what attracted Trotsky to Florensky, what they talked about, and what questions they discussed, perhaps the most unexpected for us. The permanent keeper of the academic library, even when it became a branch of the Rumyantsev Museum, K. M. Popov, told me that L. D. Trotsky once requested from it some rare work by a mystical author in German... about angels! The book was not bound. Trotsky returned it already bound, and Popov wrote the appropriate inscription on it. Who, if not Florensky, could recommend this book to him and point out its existence in the academic library? I think that it was precisely the friendship with L. D. Trotsky and N. I. Bukharin that had such a tragic impact on the future fate of Florensky, who flaunted his priestly rank for too long. In 1930 or 1931 he was exiled to Nizhny Novgorod, but was soon returned to his interrupted work. Then he was exiled to Siberia, to the region of permafrost, which he studied there together with his friend, university professor P. N. Kapterev, the son of Academy professor N. F. Kapterev. Kapterev returned to Moscow, and Florensky was sent to Solovki. And although letters came from there for some time and his relatives once even obtained the opportunity to meet with him, the circumstances, time and place of his death remain unclear... There is a lot of mystery in Florensky’s fate and life in general. My thoughts return to the mystery of his friendship with Trotsky, and I cannot understand what connected a politician, an orator, a man of action, with a philosopher and mystic who was constantly trying to escape the questions of real life, not to participate in its events? Here is a typical case. Shortly before the opening of the relics of St. Sergius, when it became known that despite the protests of believers, the relics would still be opened, one of the prominent parishioners of our academic church, being shocked by such a prospect and did not know what to do in order to “protect the Rev. from desecration,” decided to turn to Florensky for help. Since she did not know Florensky, she asked me to accompany her. We didn’t find Florensky at home; he was at the Olsufievs’ on Valovaya Street, where we headed. Florensky was called. The conversation took place in the large, bright entryway of Olsufiev’s house. My companion, crying, begged, almost conjured Father Pavel to prevent the opening of Sergius’ shrine, asked to seek the protection of Trotsky, to instill in him that he should not offend the feelings of the believing people. Florensky felt awkward. He told us about the historical and mystical significance of the Reverend, that the autopsy is not an insult, but a kind of new feat for Sergius, who thus becomes a martyr after his death... He could not advise anything real. He refused to contact Trotsky and tried to say goodbye to us as quickly as possible. It was felt that all this tormented and worried him, but that he himself was helpless and confused. We came to him as messengers from another world, which he did not want to know because... he did not understand? Or, on the contrary, did he understand too well? I don't know... Finishing his portrait, I cannot keep silent about a chance meeting with him, which is especially etched in my memory. This was in the winter of the same 1919. I was walking along Vifanskaya (now Komsomolskaya) street, heading towards the railway line. It was already deep night. Frost enveloped the branches of the trees in frost, the snow crunched sharply underfoot, and in the sky, in endless spaces, the lilac winter moon shone. Suddenly, from around the corner of Valovaya Street, the figure of Florensky appeared, in his usual black cassock. Obviously, he was returning home from the Olsufievs, whom he often visited then. There was something mysterious in his whole appearance. Black hair escaping from under the skuf, glass glasses sparkling under the moonlight, behind which the eyes were not visible, a large “Gogolian” nose directed forward, a head slightly tilted to one side, and most importantly, a long black cassock, with flowing skirts and wide sleeves, all this clearly stood out against the sparkling bluish snow. Florensky’s steps were almost inaudible in the icy silence, and it seemed that he was not walking, but slowly flying, among the numbly sleeping world At that moment I saw not the familiar professor whose lectures I had listened to with such delight, but a mysterious magician from the ancient country of Mizraim, flying into a distance unknown to us... L. F. Zhegin 225. Memories of P. A. Florensky 226 In people, at the same time, extremes come into contact with depravity, even crime, and he referred to the example of St. Clement of Alexandria, who, it turns out, was even a murderer. P. A., as one of the “Makovites” 227 - N. M. Rudin or the late M. S. Rodionov told me, was interested in artists, attended their meetings. V. E. Pestel also told me that back in 1912–1914, Florensky visited the house of the cubist artist L. S. Popova. Artists and theorists of the left artistic sense gathered there - A. A. Vesnin, V. E. Tatlin, A. V. Grishchenko, Toporkov, Stepun. Philosophical conversations were held and reports were read. I also heard that P. A. conducted something like a seminar with a small group of art critics and art lovers in one of the premises of the Museum of Fine Arts. In this regard, I remember. At the beginning of the revolution, the kind V. E. Giatsintov became the director of the Museum. 228 P. A.’s wife was nee Giatsintova. This coincidence interested P.A., and he went to Giatsintov to find out if there was a family connection. In general, the name P. A. Florensky attached great importance. Florensky was invited to participate in the magazine “Makovets” by N. M. Chernyshev. The name of the magazine alone was enough for Florensky. “Makovets” is the name of the town where Sergius of Radonezh was born. Florensky gave his consent. At that time, due to his extraordinary versatility, Florensky was loaded to the limit, he was literally torn to pieces. He was a member of the Supreme Economic Council, he was invited to all sorts of scientific conferences and meetings, but his main activities were connected with Glavelektro and with the Institute, which was located, it seems, on Grokhovskaya Street. I went there one day to see him on some business. I waited in the lobby for a long time, but he was still not there. Finally, I learned from the doorman that Florensky “is about to arrive, you go to meet him, you’ll recognize him right away - he’s a prominent figure,” he added. The word “prominent,” of course, is not the right word, but there was something unusual, out-of-date, of course, in Florensky’s entire appearance. He walked in his cassock and kamilavka, hunched over, lowering his searing black eyes, as if immersed in some unknown depths; it seemed that not the 20th century, but some XII or XIII century was looking at you. Despite his striking appearance, I never met him on the street, and when I returned to the Institute, I learned that he had already gone to his office. It was a small room, separated by a glass partition in a wide corridor. They kept turning to him and asking him something. He gave everyone hasty, but, as I understood from his tone, completely accurate and categorical answers. A young man, a student or an employee, came and began to talk about his solution to the question proposed by Florensky. “That’s not true,” said Florensky. He insisted on his own, not very politely interrupting and fuming. Again the same even and unhurried tone: “Do it your way, but it’s not like that.” The young man, apparently discouraged, left. Others came - again questions, messages, complaints, etc. “You see,” Florensky turned to me, “what a madhouse this is!” At this time, the courier brought from the printing house a pile of books, quite thick, tied with twine. “Is this “At the Watersheds of Thought”? _ I asked. - What a “watershed of thought” this is! 229 – And something, calm as always, but this time hopeless, seemed in his gaze. “You understand,” he said the next time, “you will be allowed to express your main idea, but they will not give you an argument, and in this form everything loses all meaning.” The books brought to Florensky were called “Dielectrics” - an area that Florensky was specially interested in. The name of the author caught my eye - Professor P. A. Florensky. I don't remember the exact names of the books. We left Glavelektro together, and I saw P.A. “Let’s go on foot,” he suggested, “it’s more convenient to talk, and then,” he added, “I don’t have money.” In 1919, L. Trotsky was at the head of Glavelektro. Walking around the entire institution, Trotsky, in the basement laboratory, noticed Florensky. He was in his usual white robe. I approached him and invited him to participate in a congress of engineers. - Only, if possible, not in this suit. Florensky replied that he had not resigned from the priesthood and could not put on civilian clothes. - Yes, you can’t, then in this suit! Florensky made a report at the congress. When I ascended the pulpit, bewildered exclamations were heard - a priest on the pulpit!.. Florensky's report was, as always, informative and brilliant in form. Finished to applause. Sometimes Florensky attended our meetings, that is, the meetings of the Makovets artists. One of these meetings took place at my place. I then lived in a house known in Moscow as “Pertsov’s house” - on the corner of b. Prechistenskaya Square. I occupied a room on the ground floor. The meeting dragged on for some reason. Exactly at 11 o'clock, some incomprehensible and difficult to identify sounds began to be heard from the basement, something extremely unpleasant and alarming, some screams, howls, interspersed with blows on iron, or the clanging of chains, something positively infernal! P.A. became wary. His eyes, covered with strong glasses, moved anxiously. I began to say that I had just moved into this room, and had already heard something similar once, but had not yet managed to find out the reason for this phenomenon. It all seemed very strange. In general, this evening was full of failures. Some kind of dispute arose between Chekrygin and Florensky. Yak did not listen to him, but, one must think, on the topic of resurrection, the topic that Chekrygin was so captivated by. But Chekrygin apparently found such an opponent difficult as Florensky, and he stepped aside offendedly. Then S.P. Bobrov, who came to our meeting, began to address Florensky with endless questions. 230 He quickly, quickly scribbled words, like Pyotr Verkhovensky, and jumped on Florensky from all sides, fussing and fussing, like a demon before matins. Finally, even such a meek and patient person as Florensky exploded. “Why, exactly, should I answer all this!” - he exclaimed. Somehow Bobrov calmed down. In general, one should not think that Florensky belonged to the category of pliable, and so-called “soft-bodied” people. In matters of principle, he was completely categorical, and sometimes even cruel. So, after Chekrygin’s death, I had to hear from him everything about Chekrygin’s same dream - about resurrection. “Well, it’s good to talk about this for a year or two, but 10 years, it will be just phrases.” And he had a negative attitude towards Fedorov’s ideas, regarding them, along with the Old Believers, as “the delights of Orthodoxy.” But let's return to the mysterious sounds coming from under the floor. The answer was only revealed the next day. It turned out that due to renovations at the theater, Meyerhold rented the lower floor of the Pertsovsky house for his rehearsals. And indeed, one evening, in the chaos of the same sounds, I suddenly clearly heard the words spoken in a strong and sharp voice: “How? You don’t know how to break a head with an empty bottle - I’ll show you now how it’s done.” It was Meyerhold's voice. 231 Everything was explained, therefore, completely prosaically. But the rumor that Zhegin had evil spirits began to spread, and this version lasted for quite a long time. Florensky valued Chekrygin’s art very highly, and had no doubt that if this brilliant young man had remained alive, he, of course, would have realized the dream of his whole life - a grandiose fresco expressing in living images a certain horoscope of existence. I really wanted Florensky to write something about Chekrygin, and he promised to do it. In order to better acquaint Florensky with Chekrygin’s drawings, I agreed on a certain day and hour, and had to bring the drawings to the house of the Korean, or rather, his friend, an engineer, with whom Florensky stayed when visiting Moscow. Spring howled. It was either snowing or raining. Afraid that the drawings might get wet, I put them in a folder and wrapped it in a blanket that had somehow survived from the old days. In such packaging, nothing could threaten the drawings... An acquaintance of Florensky lived on Bolshaya Spasskaya. Having reached the Red Gate, I went on foot to warm up a little. At the corner of Spasskaya a strange scene caught my eye. About 5-6 passersby stood around some sickly-looking man sitting on the sidewalk. This man, resting his hands on the pavement, swayed furiously, with the obvious intention of breaking the back of his head. It was an epileptic. It seemed that one more swing, one more tension of the wild, all-destructive force that was found in this creature, and everything would be over. What was to be done? Either the inevitable death of the epileptic, or the death of the drawings, they were quite fragile. It was impossible to hesitate... I quickly bent down and placed my precious burden under the unfortunate man’s head. He hit his head softly on the blanket and froze for a moment. Someone thought of covering his eyes with a handkerchief, and he gradually began to calm down. I don’t know how to judge my action, maybe it was weakness on my part. But, fortunately, the drawings were not damaged at all. After Chekrygin’s death, all of his drawings - about 1500, which were in the possession of his widow Vera Viktorovna, were recorded by me, and now the fine pollen of pressed coal has quite firmly connected with the paper. The rest of the way to the house where Florensky lived passed without any incidents. Florensky suggested laying out the drawings on the table, while he climbed onto a stool and illuminated the drawings with an electric lamp hanging from the ceiling. He was in his usual white cassock, with a large silver cross on his chest. Everything together presented a rather unusual spectacle. It’s hard to tear yourself away from Chekrygin’s drawings. They suck you in, and at the same time you want to break out of this captivity. Even I experienced this feeling, although I have seen them many times already. Finally, Florensky, apparently tired, climbed down from his perch. We began to talk about various subjects related to art. I asked him, and now I repent of the tactlessness of my question, whether he knew Pompeian erotic images. I didn’t know them, and I was wondering what their picturesque qualities were. “I know them,” said Florensky. – They are very weak in form, as one would expect. You can't hide from him anywhere! He knows everything. And there was, it seemed, no subject left unattended by him. Florensky was universal. It was probably one of the most encyclopedic European goals. This can be judged by reading from board to board, at least his work “The Pillar and Ground of Truth.” In some issues related to electricity, he was the only specialist. When he was arrested, articles on electricity for TSB were sent to him in prison for editing. No other editor could be found for these issues. This was probably in 1925-1926. 232 Having learned that Florensky had been taken, I went to the Political Red Cross committee to see Peshkova, Gorky’s wife. Having waited in line, he asked her to tell Alexei Maksimovich that Florensky had been arrested. “That’s all I ask,” I said. “Gorky knows this,” was the answer. That's where the conversation ended. After some time, Florensky was exiled to Gorky for 3 months, apparently to work at the Automobile Plant. Returning to Moscow, Florensky said: “I was in exile - I returned to hard labor.” Once I managed to bring Florensky to Chekrygin’s widow to introduce him to Chekrygin’s work in all its scope. There was no one there except Vera Viktorovna and me. We reviewed the drawings for a long time. Whole myriads of images passed before our eyes. Suddenly Florensky turned to both of us: “Did you hear?” – we pretended not to notice this question, and then asked each other in bewilderment, what was Florensky listening to? I did not know that F. apparently was subject to auditory hallucinations. In general, everything secret and hidden was so clear and so close to him. In this regard, I remember his story of how once in church he celebrated the sacrament of the Eucharist. He had a bowl in his hands. What will he say next? – flashed through my head. “A cup of blood,” he continued firmly, “and a bee was hovering over my hand, and I was afraid that it would sting me and I would spill the cup. But the bee, having drunk blood, spun around a little and disappeared somewhere. Then I remembered. It was the day of memory of my friend Serapion Mashkin. The winged creature, the bee, which replaced the angel-symbol of the soul here, was a reminder of this to me.” Perfect idealism, and at the same time, such extensive knowledge in the field of exact sciences! Florensky knew how to synthetically combine both. In those years, I was fascinated by the theory of relativity and asked Florensky what his attitude towards Einstein was now. 234 “The attitude is ambivalent,” he answered. “That Einstein is a Jew is good, but his theory is not entirely materialistic, this is bad.” – And again he began to look somewhere with his deep, dark brown eyes. I remember several of his statements about painting. He visited our small exhibition “The Way of Painting”, organized in a private apartment in Serebryany Lane. This was in 1927. Florensky did not like the works of my friend P. Babichev. They seemed too impressionistic to him; he strived for greater constructiveness. “Everything floats here,” he remarked. I did not agree with this assessment. Babichev, in my opinion, of course, was a painter, and therefore knew how to organize form. Then he turned to V. Koroteev’s pastels - a full-length female figure, very beautiful in color. He pointed out the originality and motivation of the color scheme: the entire figure was given in a very light ocher-pink tone, and the head in light greenish shades. Florensky explained that the body, as an expression of gender, and the head are two different spheres, and here this is expressed in color. Green color dematerializes, it is associated with the intellect, with the sphere of the head. About my portrait of my mother, he told me that there is “a balance of matter and space, and this echoes the old masters.” I feel that I am not worthy of such an assessment, but how dear they were to me, these words! He never answered a question right away. Somehow it closes in, withdraws into itself, and two or three spoken words, like heavy drops of water, swell, gather and fall heavily, leaving an indelible mark on the soul. Afterwards, you will return to them all your life, and build everything else on them. I remember another conversation about something I had conceived back in 1917, the “Series of Tens,” with the central figure of Christ. On the right and on the left, there are, as it were, stripes of this row - the creator and “Nothing”. To the left of the creator is the personification of Chekrygin, and three female images - Passion, Elegy and Flesh. Next is a philosopher (Plato) in purple robes. To the left of Christ, a figure in green (Berdyaev) is a cerebral relationship to Christ. Then two figures in motion, in red - the wife, and in blue - the husband. Thematically, these were rehashes of the Deesis rite. The compressed charcoal sketch hung in my room. - What colors will the figure of Christ be in? - asked Florensky. - In yellow and blue, the figure itself is against the background of tall doors or gates, but they have only a formal or decorative meaning. “I don’t think so,” he answered. – A door or gate, a very ancient and complex symbol – a symbol of the feminine, eternity and mystery. Try,” he continued, “to stand at the slightly open door for a while, and you will feel somehow uneasy, and you will want to look at what is behind the door, In 1928, my work on the crooked space of a painting was completed in rough form. The inspirer of the work was P. A. Florensky, and of course, it should have been shown to him first. The central point of this work was the moment of the so-called transformation, that is, the transformation of a curved, dynamic system into a straight, static one. I am not a mathematician, and I solved this question based on the features of the pictorial form, and therefore I was most worried about this part. One mutual friend who lived in Zagorsk gave F. my note, where I briefly outlined what was going on and asked to make an appointment with me. He also answered her with a note, which I later had in my hands. He wrote that “I’m always glad to see Zhegin, but now I’m very busy, and viewing the work can be lengthy and it’s better to postpone the meeting until the beginning of June.” I waited impatiently for the appointed time. And finally, having collected all his material, he went to Zagorsk to see Florensky. Getting out of the carriage, I made an agreement with the cab driver. The folder turned out to be heavy and it would be difficult to drag it. He gave the address - Piarskaya, formerly Dvoryanskaya. - Fathers? I know how not to know! Florensky's house is one-story, clean and unusually friendly. Painted floors. There are rugs in the rooms and plants on the windows. I found F. in the glassed-in terrace. He was sorting out the mushrooms he had just picked and arranging them by variety. I began to apologize that I did not warn by letter about the day of my arrival, and if today is inconvenient, then I can postpone it until another arrival. He listened to all this and closed the window on the terrace. We sat down in the garden at a small table. I opened my folder. I have just begun my introduction concerning the presented topic - the relationship of mass: space, like a sudden wind, scattered my drawings and photos along the paths of the garden. “A bad sign,” I thought. A thunderstorm was brewing. The horizon has already darkened. We went back to the terrace. I began to continue. Everything seemed to be going well. Finally, the most crucial moment has arrived - the process of transformation, i.e. the main node of the entire visual-spatial system. This process was expressed in the exchange of sides: left - right, top and bottom. I solved this question without outside help, without mathematics, and was completely unaware of the correctness of my solution. The moment was tense. How will F. react to my decision? One word from him should have decided everything. If true, the work is justified; if not, all the work is in vain. I was a terrible coward. Even out of cowardice, I wanted to somehow quickly rush through this difficult and cardinal question. “Excuse me, excuse me,” said F. My heart sank painfully. He looked at the drawings again. “Oh, you do that,” he apparently already had some other solutions. - Well, you can do it that way. Florensky accepted! – flashed through my head. This time the bad omen seemed not to be justified... Then it was already simple, there were conclusions, and the results of the general construction were the form of “iconic slides” and a system of linear compositions. The compositions consisted of the lines of the S frame - the result of the transition from a concavity system to a convex system. – But Hogarth spoke about the shape of the frame S! 235 - F said to me - Why are you looking at me so surprised, don’t you know Hogarth? Hogarth was one of my favorite old masters,” but what does the S frame have to do with it? “Why,” continued F., “Hogarth discovered this line back in the middle of the 18th century.” This was unknown to me. I got to this line myself, so to speak, “with my own hump.” Arriving in Moscow, I looked into the encyclopedia and actually found there that Hogarth wrote a book in 1753 in which he argued that every organized form is based on this line, which he called beautiful - “beautiful line”. Florensky inspected the latest drawings and reproductions. I fell silent and looked at him questioningly. “All this can be calculated,” he told me, “but it seems to me that this is not necessary.” You have no new mathematical thoughts. To this I replied that I was also pleased that I had not mixed up with the old ones. – Most of all I liked your slides. As always, he was right, of course. Explaining the "slides" is the central and most compelling part of my work. He liked the system of linear compositions less. Somehow he didn't see them. To distinguish them, special eye training was needed, which he probably did not have. He advised me to limit the number of illustrations as much as possible. - Otherwise, no one will undertake to publish your work. Alas! He was right about that too. 30 years have passed since then, and the work remains a dead weight. Nobody is going to print it. His wife, a good-natured blue-eyed woman of about forty, invited him to the table. In the dining room, on a special easel, stood a large, beautiful icon of the 15th century, to which F. drew my attention. - And this? - I turned in bewilderment to the portrait hanging right there - a combination of wavy lines in the form of an S shape - either stylization or a claim to a super-real form. “This is my portrait, painted by Komarovsky, the object of hatred of some,” and he looked towards his wife. Such a pictorial form has always seemed to me an attempt with unsuitable means. This is where I differed with Florensky. After lunch we went to Florensky's office. It was a small room, partitioned off by a bookcase. On the cabinet there was a large photo from a Greek bas-relief. It was an image of a naked girl playing a pipe, from the so-called “altar of Ludovisi.” A thing of rare beauty. But somehow this didn’t fit well with the room of an Orthodox priest. Florensky did not limit himself to ready-made formulas. He was too multifaceted, and, it seems to me, he felt himself as an apostle of beauty. It is not for nothing that he wrote his wonderful article for “Makovets” - “Church performance as a synthesis of art.” For Florensky, everything came down to “art.” He went to the bookcase and took out his small book - “Ambrose, Trinity Carver of the 15th Century”, and handed it to me. “Don’t just say that I gave it to you.” I thanked him, began to say goodbye, and asked permission in a year, when my work was finally completed, to visit him again. “If only I’m alive,” he said. This was our last date. In 1933 he was expelled. Nowadays it can almost be said that he is no longer alive. But he will live for a long time in the hearts of those who knew him. A. F. Losev 237. P. A. Florensky according to the memoirs of Alexei Losev 238 Alexey Fedorovich Losev was a younger contemporary of P. A. Florensky. Moreover, he not only personally knew Father Pavel, as he always called him, but also considered himself his student. We have heard about this more than once. And once, when one of us asked Losev what he saw as the fundamental difference and commonality between Vyacheslav Ivanov and Pavel Florensky, he exclaimed: “This is a really interesting historical question!” He paused, and then added: “Establishing the commonality between them is the subject of a special study. Although this is common in myself. I consider myself a student of both.” Below are published fragments from conversations with A.F. Losev, which give the reader an idea of ​​his views on the creative heritage, and assessments of the personality of Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky. It should be said that in conversations A.F. Losev often recalled his predecessors and contemporaries. And first of all, Vl. S. Solovyova, Vyach. Ivanov, P. A. Florensky, S. N. Bulgakov, V. V. Rozanov, F. F. Zelinsky, N. A. Berdyaev. There have been especially frequent conversations about Pavel Alexandrovich in the last year. The internal reason for this was the participation in conversations of P.V. Florensky, the grandson of the philosopher. Externally, the news is that in January 1988 in Bergamo, at the local university, a seminar was held dedicated to P. A. Florensky. The inspirer of the midnight conversations at the “Arbat Academy,” as A.F. Losev called his house on Arbat in Moscow, was Aza Alibekovna Taho-Godi, the wife and colleague of Alexei Fedorovich, to whom the publishers of the article express sincere gratitude. For ease of reading, Losev's interlocutors are not named. I. – In connection with the upcoming conference in Bergamo dedicated to Florensky, I would like to hear from you, Alexey Fedorovich, at least a few words... Is it possible, for example, to say that Florensky’s views have undergone some kind of evolution? - No, you can’t say that. – That is, he was always the same person and philosopher with whom you began your acquaintance, and remained so until the last years of his life? - Why is he being driven into the Solovyov cell? For classification, or is there still a basis... – After all, he is, of course, Solovyov’s student. “This is the common source for all Russian philosophy at the beginning of the century,” clarifies A. Taho-Godi. – At the same time, I will say this: the doctrine of Sophia was first formulated by Solovyov. Moreover, he even pointed to that very ancient icon (from the first centuries of Russian Orthodoxy), which depicts Sophia herself, and which Father Paul later cites and analyzes in his famous book. 239 Before Florensky, no one, except Vladimir, seriously spoke about this Sofia concept. But only those who study the Orthodox concept of Sophia for the first time should refer first to Solovyov, and then to Florensky. – Alexey Fedorovich, a mathematician came to see me today. Based on quantum mechanics and any game with formulas, incomprehensible to me, he tried to explain that the structure of this world and that world can be represented. Moreover, he does not even know about similar reasoning from P. A. Florensky’s “Iconostasis” about the oncoming movement of the worlds - this and that. But he admits that there is movement, and thus the future is predictable, and the present is determined by the future. All this, he claims, is proven on the basis of modern physics and mathematics. - I would say that Father Pavel has a really huge discovery here, which is alien to the mathematicians of the beginning of the century. After all, mathematicians are, in a certain sense, formalists. They usually studied number as a number, and did not try to apply it to characterize the structure of space itself. But when they began to use it, it turned out that there are a lot of types of space. Here the principle of relativity appeared, and the revolution began. True, many mathematicians at one time did not digest the principle of relativity for a long time, although now it has been included in textbooks. Father Pavel considers the Lorenz coefficient. 240 It shows the dependence of the volume of a body on its movement. This coefficient is calculated by the formula: 1 -v²/c² , where v is the speed of a given body, c is the speed of light. So, if we assume a speed equal to light, then at this moment the volume of the body disappears. One minus one, that is? nothing, and all this is under the sign of the radical. This means that a quantity multiplied by zero equals zero. Thus, the dimension of a body has been mathematically proven to be zero if it moves at the speed of light. Further, Father Pavel says: what if a body moves at a speed greater than the speed of light? Then what happens?! According to this formula, the result is not one, not zero instead of a radical quantity, but an imaginary quantity. Thus, when a body moves at a speed greater than light, it acquires an imaginary magnitude. That is, it becomes an idea without volume. Re-read carefully 241 the work of Father Pavel “Imaginaries in Geometry”, he has a whole argument there. – Yes, yes, it was recently republished in Germany, and I have it. – - And yet I knew good mathematicians who trembled with hatred when reading these pages. Although Florensky says there that he consulted with his university friend Nikolai Nikolaevich Luzin, they graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics together in 1904, fellow students. So he, writes Florensky, read and approved. But I knew the teacher, Academician Luzin, closely. This is Dmitry Fedorovich Egorov, a major world-famous mathematician. So, he was nervously negative about these conclusions. When I talked to him, and he was always a correct person, a gentleman, at the mention of this reasoning, he tensed up and lost his composure. “This is all student guesswork!” - he exclaimed. I objected: “But even if these are just student guesses, then don’t they matter?” “They have,” he answered sharply, “but they cannot be printed.” But even today, if we talk about the fact that under certain acceptable conditions, a number, in its material embodiment, turns into zero, or, on the other hand, turns into an idea... This, you know, few people are able to understand and think in this way. Then the cool times began. Florensky disappeared. Thus, the brilliant discovery of Father Pavel remained in the shadows... – Alexey Fedorovich, but still, how do you view the creative heritage of Pavel Alexandrovich? – I consider the philosophy of Father Pavel as a transition period between the old and the new. For here is present the most essential of the old, and the most essential of the new. And all this is summarized in one person. – And by old do you mean ordinary classical idealism? Like Plato's?.. – Whichever one you want, and not just Plato’s. When an idea is one thing, and a thing is another. And they represent different things, and there are different relationships between them. Including their mutual transition. - So these are two areas... – But the new thinking is completely different. It lies in the fact that, first of all, an idea without matter cannot be thought of, but matter without an idea cannot be thought of either. That's the crux of the matter. Why does Father Pavel have such brilliant guesses about the Lorentz coefficient?! Because he realized that space is compressible and expandable, that it has different structures. What did Einstein become famous for? There, in the West, he also did not immediately receive recognition. The fact is that in science, the anomaly in the movement of Mercury around the Sun remained unexplained if we adhere to traditional Newtonian mechanics. Einstein proceeded from the fact that around the Sun there is a completely different space, that is, not the same as ours... Einstein, using his theory, explained the anomaly in the movement of Mercury. This was around 1915. 242 Einstein's victory began here! Although, of course, there are many enemies to this day. But now it is clear that only retrogrades and narrow-minded people object. There are too many orthodoxies of the past, but a modern, normal mathematician recognizes this as a fact. You can now find different types of space design in textbooks in a brief and popular form. But only Father Pavel was able to draw all the conclusions for matter and for ideas, and then all his closest students. In this regard, I am an absolute student of Florensky. Although I disagree with him on some points. But here it’s impossible. – By the way, when did you meet him? – I’m not a Muscovite. Came to study at Moscow University in 1911. I first met P. A. Florensky at the Religious and Philosophical Society named after Vl. S. Solovyova. All the symbolists of that time were there: Evgeny Trubetskoy, Vyacheslav Ivanov, N.A. Berdyaev, S.N. Bulgakov, S.N. Durylin, Vladimir Ern. Florensky was also there, although quite rarely. He still had to travel to meetings from afar, from Sergiev Posad. I remember one of his later reports. It was called purely in Florentine: “On the magical nature of space.” He was also present at my report on the relationship between Plato’s Parmenides and Plato’s Timaeus, 243. And I remember that I gave a number of significant clarifications. Since I rented a dacha in Sergiev Posad for several years, I saw Father Pavel quite often on Saturdays and Sundays. This is where our rapprochement took place. But it must be said that he was a secretive person and spoke reluctantly. For example, I remember when the so-called “living Church” opened, I met him in Posad and asked: how do you feel about this phenomenon? And, in particular, to Alexander Vvedensky? 244 He snapped irritably: “But it’s just not enough for you and me to establish all sorts of points of view here.” I realized that this was a painful question for him, and changed the conversation. - And in what years did you live in Sergiev Posad? – In the first post-revolutionary years. The place is exceptional. Near Khotkovo to the monastery. There is a picturesque village nearby, Mitino... This village, I think, is connected with the name of Dmitry Donskoy. By the way, St. Sergius, despite the fact that many years had passed, had such ardent, zealous admirers in Posad, almost to the point of nervous excitement. This Sergievsky mood was, of course, transmitted to me. Even Klyuchevsky, an undoubted positivist who can only be considered conditionally Orthodox, writes that since the time of Sergius, the Trinity Lavra became the center of Orthodoxy, to which the people were drawn, and they will be drawn to this Lavra as long as the country and the people exist. This is written by V. Klyuchevsky. But he was a tongue-in-cheek and an orator, he loved to show off his words, but here he did not dare to say anything negative. – Alexey Fedorovich, your afterword to Hübscher’s book, in fact, contains the first mention of Florensky in the post-war period. There you draw his verbal portrait. – Yes, I remember how they did not want to publish this episode with Florensky, because he was a priest, a professor and an engineer. – I want to recall that episode from the book: “At the very beginning of the revolution, numerous voices about the fall of the entire European culture were heard with equal force from both the right and the left. The then famous theologian and mystic Florensky, who was also an engineer who was then intensely carrying out laboratory research on the technical application of dielectrics, gave public lectures and reports at the beginning of the revolution, the idea of ​​which boiled down to some kind of inevitable and already approaching catastrophe. In a dull and barely audible voice, with his eyes always downcast, this engineer spoke that nothing should remain in the same place, that everything should lose its design and its patterns, that everything that exists should be brought to final disintegration, atomization, melting, that until everything old turns into pure chaos and is ground into powder, until then it is impossible to talk about the emergence of new and stable values. I myself listened to these terrible reports, and now I am perfectly aware of their true historical validity.” 246 If you read it inattentively, you get the impression that you are condemning Pavel Alexandrovich... You are not writing very positively about him. And when you think about it and read it again, this opinion changes to the opposite. - This is a characteristic of transition. Therefore, it is quite natural that some like what has passed, while others like what is to come. And depending on this, perceptions and assessments can be built. I always tried to be historically objective; transitivity in this case can be proven. No one understood ancient Russia as deeply as he did, no one renewed the Orthodox sense of well-being as Florensky did. Could you express more clearly the essential features of this transition? You see, Florensky’s ancient religious rite turns out to be precisely provable. And mathematicians prove it without knowing what they are proving. There is a whole doctrine about sets. Such things are told there, with such frankness that you will not find in theology textbooks. And these were the latest achievements, which went far from the mathematics of Newton and Leibniz. They give a formula that applies to movement in space. Moreover, it is believed that space itself is motionless, homogeneous, does not round out or deepen anywhere, is an absolute void, and mechanical formulas are applied to this void. This is what mechanical consciousness, formulated already in the 18th century, consists of. Well? And now, now there is no absolute space. It is different everywhere. Moreover, the same thing in one space has one volume, and in another - another. And once it gets into the third space, it completely loses its volume. And it becomes zero. – After all, this is a mathematical proof of the possibility of a miracle! – So, when I say that in Florensky we find a combination of pure mathematics and pure space, this is not a catchphrase. It’s just a pity that I don’t have suitable publishers and readers. Otherwise I would have piled up a lot of stuff here, based on Korean, of course, that would go even further than Florensky. But talking to our publishers about Florensky is a hopeless matter... - You talk to us... - But you’re nobody. If only you were some kind of leading line. You are only individual manifestations of some line that could exist, but there is no such line. There is no line. – Alexey Fedorovich, you have now characterized the transition of such a complex figure of modern philosophy as Pavel Florensky. Have you finished this description?.. Otherwise we will distract you a little... – I didn’t start it. (General burst of laughter.) I outlined only two trifles, two strokes. - In that case, we are waiting for the continuation. – Who, Alexey Fedorovich, can tell Pavel Vasilyevich about his grandfather, if not you? “I don’t know if you’ll wait, Pavel.” I started to get really into something. I'm afraid of something like this... “Then, you know, these ideas of Florensky, in the sense I say, continue to be rejected in a very malicious manner. That's why everyone who rejects them is an active opponent for me. For them, mathematics is mathematics, but for me, mathematics is being. Therefore, all the miracles that happen in mathematical formulas, they happen to an even greater extent in space and time. These are the views that I learned from Solovyov, and then from Florensky. Solovyov also has these ideas, but Pavel Aleksandrovich has developed them. He is a specialist in mathematics, he cannot use words in vain. So in this regard, of course, Florensky is a big man. He has no open students. Or maybe there is, but everyone is afraid. But all this, my dear friends and interlocutors, hardly interests you deeply. There is nothing offensive here, because philosophy is not a broad, but a very narrow specialty that requires special training, many years of thinking, reading, writing... So geologist Pavel Florensky does not have to be a philosopher. But, since he is still the closest relative of Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky, his grandson, he has the right to know significant ideas about his grandfather. – How can we briefly formulate the main discoveries of Father Paul in the field of spirit? – Pavel Vasilyevich wedges himself into the monologue of A.F. Losev. – Philosophy is the indistinguishable identity of ideas and matters (pause), perceived sensually, by sensory forms... – You gave the definition of philosophy... - Yes, but I expressed this on the run... “But Pavel,” A. Taho-Godi comes to the rescue, “asks you what discoveries in philosophy Florensky made... - So I said which ones. This is clear. The identity of philosophy and mathematics. But usually, philosophy speaks about infinity, but also words about mathematics. Mathematics is all peppered with teachings about infinity, but not a word beyond the boundaries of its field, not a word about philosophy. Florensky has a holistic approach. For him, infinity is neither an ideal nor a material concept, but a living one, which is at the same time sensually perceived. This is a discovery, a huge discovery, to which in many ways our science has not yet matured. Thus, Father Paul comes to the same universalism and synthesis that was in antiquity (by the same Plato), but only on new grounds, on the latest mathematical achievements... - Well, yes! But under Plato there was no such subtle mathematics, such subtle art. – There, mathematics and philosophy were one and the same. This is wonderful. A thousand years later, on a new basis, based on the latest achievements... These two disciplines are philosophy and mathematics, since they concern the most general subjects and the Universe as a whole, they never die. They are changing. But they never die. Therefore, I will find you various kinds of philosophical and mathematical teachings in the Middle Ages, and in the Renaissance, in the 17th and 18th centuries, and so on. This is an eternal problem... – But only matter expressed in numbers... – ...Hence Florensky’s connection with art history, his passion for icon painting. There, precisely in the icon, something general is given that is essentially mathematical, but in fact, in what is depicted, it is given in the form of a living being. Infinity as a living being, perceived sensually, that’s Florensky’s news. But many people don’t understand what icons, Florence, and the reverse perspective have to do with it... II. In the archive of P. A. Florensky, kept by the descendants of the philosopher. There are three letters from A.F. Losev. And so, during one of our usual Saturday meetings in December 1987, Pavel Vasilyevich Florensky, over evening tea, reminded A.F. Losev of the contents of those old letters. And it was like that. – Alexey Fedorovich, while sorting through Pavel Alexandrovich’s materials, we discovered your letters. - Come on! – Losev perked up. “I made copies for you, assuming that it might be of interest.” – Listen to what you wrote then: Your High Blessing Fr. Paul! S. N. Bulgakov and V. I. Ivanov told you about the upcoming series of religious and philosophical books on topics about Russian nationality. At present, I, as the editor of this series, can inform you of the final conditions, which the publisher is inclined to consider as ultimatum: 1). The manuscript must be from 2 to 4 printed sheets. 2). The manuscript must be delivered to me (Vozdvizhenka, 13, apt. 12) no later than April 12th. Art. Art. Printing manuscripts submitted later is problematic. 3). The editor offers 300 rubles for every 40,000 letters for 3,000 copies. This issue can be resolved upon receipt of the manuscript. 300 rub. – minimum. 4). Upon receipt of the manuscript, ½ of the fee is given, upon printing, which is expected immediately, the remaining half. 5). The text of the manuscript should not contain any party points of view, and no topicality. If all these conditions are suitable for you, then I humbly ask you to immediately inform me of the topic, size of the article and the time frame within which I can receive it. Sincerely devoted to you A. Losev Address: Moscow. Vozdvizhenka, 13, apt. 12. Alexey Fedorovich Losev. And then immediately another letter with similar content: Dear and dear Fr. Paul! I dare to disturb you on two issues. “Among people who are close to you in their worldview and partly your students, the idea arose about publishing a number of collections,” which would be beyond any doubt regarding censorship, namely, on mathematical, astronomical and mechanical topics, a philosophical bias necessary for us. The following articles are planned for the first collection: 1) mine - the mathematical teachings of Plotinus and Iamblichus, and reasoning about name and number; 2) V.N. Muravyova - On the concept of big and small, and on the hypostatic construction of the doctrine of sets; V. P. Zubova - about medieval physics and optics (Rodg. Bacon and others); Valentina Mikhailovna 247 – about the astronomical system of Ptolemy and Proclus. We also address you with the most humble request to participate with us in this publication with articles of similar content, without being embarrassed by either the topic or the size of the articles. It would be desirable to have something like "Imaginaries in Geometry". The fee is expected after printing, about which there must be a special agreement in case of your agreement in principle. It was decided to begin printing (taking into account censorship) in July-August. I hope that you will not refuse my request to inform me about your attitude to this personally, or through you. Iv., or by phone (in my apartment) 1–37–43. – The second question is less complicated. May 23, Art. Art. (June 5th according to the New Style), on the day of the Ascension of the Lord, the anniversary of our wedding with Valentina Mikhailovna. Do not refuse to visit us at any hour of the day or evening, and share with us our memories that are good for us. We'll wait all day. We ask for your blessing and St. prayers. “You, Alexey Fedorovich, were a very young man then, and apparently very energetic, since you were entrusted with such a serious matter. One can guess from the context of the first letter that you were supposed to be the editor of a series of collections. What is the future fate of this curious accrual? Have these books and collections been published or not? - No hint! It's just a dream. Partly mine, partly theirs, my older comrades. But the idea was wonderful, and they organized quickly. I was placed as a business person at the head of this, as it turned out, hopeless enterprise. And although, as I remember, I received support from many people interested in such books, the matter did not go further than the publishing corridors. - Then all we have to do is remind you of another letter, along with your theses attached to it. O. Pavel Florensky. B. Spasskaya, 11, apt. 1. 248 Moscow, January 30. 1923 Dear and dear Fr. Paul! I dare to disturb you with my most humble request to review during your stay in Moscow the theses of the Imiaslav teachings that I have attached, noting in the margins all your doubts, amendments and additions. I talked for a long time with Fr. Irenaeus, 249 who made comments that I fully accepted and noted in the text. Since I often have to argue, and in the coming days I will have to argue with notorious name fighters, I would like to have for myself firm and systematic, but also brief theses, in which philosophical terminology would be avoided as much as possible, although the most general and abstract formulas would be given. Since I am interested in the exact edition (and I have not found it in the existing Imenaslav literature), I would ask you to directly cross out what seems incorrect to you and correct it in your own way. I am also interested in whether these theses are sufficient or whether they are incomplete. I myself would be inclined to add a thesis specifically about the name Jesus. Thesis III c (about the symbolist nature of the name) deserves special attention. The fact is that Fr. He seemed very suspicious to Irenaeus, although he himself could not formulate it in his own way, and promised to think about it. His main objection is this: a name is not a symbol, because a symbol is visible, but the names of God are invisible. He also referred to numerous disputes on Athos about the word “symbol”, since name fighters understand by symbol icons, relics, crosses, etc. How can I express myself more precisely? I also have purely philosophical theses of name-glorification, which I do not dare bother you with at the same time as these. If you have your permission, then allow me to make it difficult for you on one of your next visits. Please leave the abstracts with your notes at your apartment. Iv. in my name. I'll come see you on Thursday or Friday. Iv. and I will take them. My wife, Valens. Mikhailovna, sends you greetings. Deeply devoted to you A. Losev. I. (The Name of God is the energy of the essence of God.) a). The Name of God is the unapproachable and infinite Light of the being of God, revealed in the finite being of the world and man (correction in pencil from the word “revealed”: revealing itself from creation - finite) b). The Name of God is the omnipotent Power of the being of God, acting in the finite being of the world and man c). The Name of God is the fullness of the perfection of God’s being, revealed in the finite being of the world and man, as an endless goal for the creation’s striving towards God. d). So, the name of God is the Light, Power and Perfection of God acting in the finite nature, or the energy of the essence of God. II. (The Name of God as the energy of the essence of God is inseparable from the essence itself and therefore is God himself). a). In God there is no difference between part and whole (another note in P. A. Florensky’s pencil: “divisions” is written above the word “differences”), property and essence, action and acted, and therefore - b). The Light of God is inseparable from the essence of God, the Power of God is inseparable from the essence of God, the Perfection of God is inseparable from the essence of God, c). therefore, the energy of the essence of God is inseparable from God himself and is God himself, and the name of God is inseparable from the essence of God and is God himself. III. (On the symbolic nature of the names of God). a) the name of God is God himself, but God himself is not a name; God (correction by Father Irenaeus: the “essence” of God) is above every name, and above the knowledge of human and angelic, b) consequently, the name of God is such a manifestation (Fr. Irenaeus: “revelation”) to the world and man of the essence of God, in which it, while remaining nameless and incomprehensible, nevertheless takes on the forms of the visible world accessible to the human mind c) this means that the names of God are fraught with a symbolic nature: in their final form they speak of the infinite essence of God; the names of God are living symbols of the appearing God, that is, they are God himself in his appearance as a creature e) from here it follows that in their being and essence, the names of God are inseparable from the essence of God and are God himself, but for human knowledge they are separable, since God is inaccessible to us in his essence, being accessible, however, in his names; One must not just forget that names at the same time still carry the energy of essence, which is why they are not other names, but names of God. The same thesis as corrected by Fr. Irenaeus: from here it follows that in their being and essence the names of God are inseparable from the incomprehensible essence of God and are God himself, but for human knowledge they are understood by faith, since God, being inaccessible to us in his essence, is revealed, however, in his names. (Fr. Irenaeus skips the words starting with “just don’t forget,” etc.). IV. (The Name of God is not a sound and requires divine worship.) a) the name of God is therefore not “only a name,” i.e., a sound or the experience of a sound. Sound and the experience of sound become bearers of the name of God not because they are precisely sound and the experience of sound (in this they are similar to all other sounds of humans and animals), but because God himself is present in them in his appearance b) therefore, the very sounds, as carriers of God’s energy, are worshiped along with icons, relics, and St. The cross and other objects of “relative worship” that have a connection with the created existence of man: the essence of the name, that by virtue of which the sound is the bearer of the name of God, is God himself and requires not relative, but unconditional (correction of Father Irenaeus: “God-beautiful”) worship and service. V. (In the name of God - the meeting of man and God). a) in the name of God we are cleansed from sins and saved, in the name of God the sacraments are performed, in the name of God the whole Church is effective as the place of our salvation b) naming is not a force in itself, since what is meant is the sound of a name or the inscription of a name (Fr. Irenaeus’s insertion after the word “since”: “the mind of a person is not turned to God and is meant,” etc.); but since it is not a real and true naming c) but insofar as naming is effective, to that extent it is done through active faith towards sincere devotion to God (instead - the edition of Father Irenaeus: “But since the mind of a person is turned to God, naming is effective, and to that extent it is done through active faith towards sincere devotion to God”); therefore, sacraments and miracles are performed by the Name, but the subjective and active faith of the namer is always associated with the effectiveness of the name e) hence, although in itself the name of God is God himself and therefore is of one nature, pronounced by man, and in connection with this the effective name of God is two-nature, since human energy also participates here; the pronounced name is the meeting place of Divine and human energies e) however, human energy is reduced only to the reception of Divine energies within oneself, but God himself truly acts in mystery and miracle in His names, and only He, and man becomes only a vessel of the name of God. - Can you, Alexey Fedorovich, now say anything in connection with what you just heard? – It seems to me that now there is no point in commenting on my own judgments, albeit sixty years ago. It is a pity that Pavel Alexandrovich’s response letter has not been preserved. My archive was lost three times. The first time was during the Civil War, then after my arrest in the 30s, and finally in 1941, when the house in which I lived was destroyed by a high-explosive bomb. - But then we ask you to give us an answer in the most general form. - Why are you interested in name-glorification? “I think this is an important line of thought.” Important equally for you and for Pavel Alexandrovich’s worldview... – Yes, this is a wonderful phenomenon. He was not given a chance... these... those of that time... it was on Athos, on Old Athos, that the movement began that the Name of God is God himself. There was a lot of arguing there, the matter came to the Holy Synod. The Synod also argued a lot, sent preachers there and... everything... and in the end they decided that “The Name of God is God Himself” is a heresy, and these name-glorifying heretics should be removed from Athos. And they were removed from there and banned from serving. But then the ban was no longer an issue. They still served, because here in Russia, in the territory of Russia where they were resettled, they were still given parishes, they were given chapels, they were given churches where they could serve, so the ban on serving after all disappeared. And, apparently, the Synod itself hesitated in this matter. But Florensky sharply took the point of view of the Imiaslavtsy. And I, unfortunate one, also looked for more precise formulations of this Orthodoxy and Christianity, I also grabbed hold of name-glorification, and in those days I wrote a lot, but did not publish, because there was evolution then. I wrote a lot, thought a lot, and, in fact, two people thought it through very deeply - Florensky and me. This needs to be said completely openly, without boasting. Father Pavel really thought this through very deeply. And he calculated the formula that the Name of God is God, but God himself is neither the name of God nor a name at all. 250 I think that this formula is absolutely correct. Only by name we must understand not the letters or sounds that we pronounce. Letters and sounds are icons. The icon, of course, is not God, but the icon depicts the Divine. This is what you need to understand. Therefore, in the Name of God there is no God, its substance, but in its energy, in its semantic flow there is God himself; In God's Name, pronounced with sounds and letters, God himself exists. But not in substance, but in its accident, in its energy. It was in this sense that I then wrote those theses of Orthodox imyaslaviya, which we recalled above. I consulted with Florensky in this regard, and received a lot from him. It seems to me that there were two people from all of Orthodoxy who took this seriously and thought it through to the end. These are Pavel Florensky and Alexey Losev. So... Well, and then the revolution came. All this was forgotten. But the essence of the question is that the main bishops were against this. The majority were against this. Only a few took the point of view of name-glorification. And the majority considered this heresy. So - a revolution, on the one hand, and on the other hand, this primordial resistance and such, too everyday theology, it prevented this teaching from being formulated. And it even prevented it from being accepted in the church. Well, for acceptance into the church there must, of course, be a council, a church council, because such truths were accepted only at councils, and not by virtue of the evidence of individual theologians. All this has been forgotten, discarded, destroyed, and no one knows anything about it, and only now you have dug it up. But you are archaeologists here. You here are archivists, archaeologists. You never know what happened in history. So you unearthed Florensky, and you unearthed Losev, that once upon a time, at the beginning of the revolution, there was an Imenislav movement, yes. Here. We tried to formulate it. And they even found my theses, in which an attempt was made to accurately formulate the foundations of the Imiaslav teachings. Denying the divine side of the Name of God is the same as reducing everything to the subjective. A subjectively given feeling, including prayer, including the whole ritual, these are all subjective things that belong to a person, but have nothing objective. But if they have anything objective, it is not only the Name of God. And the simple icon, why was it introduced? Because the deity is present, it is depicted in the icon, it is present in the icon. Why do you bow to the icon and pray to it? Otherwise, it’s a piece of wood. You see, now we are talking about this in vain. Although, of course, it’s always good to study history. Well, you have now unearthed historical eras that have long passed and which require enormous mental work. III. Viktor Kosakovsky, director of the Leningrad Documentary Film Studio, took part in the conversation] – Alexey Fedorovich, in one of your previous conversations with us, you said that Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky was a transitional figure between the philosophy of the past and the new philosophy. Perhaps we will return to this topic today to develop this thesis. And then, we are all very interested in your relationship with Pavel Alexandrovich. After all, you yourself say that you took up other areas than those philosophers who were often mentioned. What is the difference between your circle of interests and the circle of interests of Pavel Alexandrovich? Not confrontation, of course, but the flow of thoughts in which you and he developed, the channel of thoughts that led you... – You see, I had real... such... close communication with Florensky only at the very beginning of the revolution. These were 1920-1921... This communication was deep, but rather short-lived and very... so... dangerous. And the feeling of danger was immediately realized, because in 1922 many philosophers were exiled abroad. We survived only because we left the main topic... I went into the history of ancient aesthetics, and Father Pavel, since he was an engineer, since he had a mathematical education, he went into engineering. And before his arrest, and until his death in the 30s, he was an engineer, and even wrote research papers of an engineering nature. So, his large volume was published - “Dielectrics and their technical applications.” A large volume in which there was no longer any hint of philosophy... So we both survived until the early 30s. In the early 30s, due to the intensification of the general reaction, he was also arrested and died. - Alexey Fedorovich, forgive me, but you have not yet answered our very first question. We ask you to return to the description of the philosophical image of Pavel Alexandrovich, which you began in the last conversation... “And this is a different topic, of course. This topic is purely historical. Yes, yes, I believe that Florensky’s main and central position is that he was a transitional figure between the old worldview and the new. I understand the old worldview as... such... a very high development of bourgeois science and bourgeois philosophy. That is, reliance on exact science, reliance on... positive knowledge. This is the old worldview. And as for the new time, into which Florensky began to move, and thanks to which I now consider him a transitional figure, this is a completely different view. This is, so to speak, the worldview of expanded... broadly understood positivism. This is no longer just Newtonian mechanics, the laws of nature, the calculation of the motion of stars and nothing more. Here the understanding of mathematics is deeper and more vibrant. Even the number began to be understood more, I would say, poetically, or perhaps artistically. Cantor's doctrine of sets played a major role in establishing this approach. It gave such interesting constructions that could not have been imagined before, based on Newtonian mechanics and mathematics. In addition, it must be said that this was immediately reflected in the subject that was being studied in mathematics of a new type. Namely, the doctrine of the heterogeneity of space appeared at the beginning of the 20th century. The so-called Einstein's principle of relativity. However, we already mentioned this last time, didn’t we? – You are right, Alexey Fedorovich, and yet we ask you not to be afraid of repetition. Please continue. - So, how was it before? Empty space, absolutely the same and homogeneous, wherever you go, without beginning, without end. You apply mathematical equations to it, and the result is a law of nature, the law of gravity. It's completely different here. According to Einstein, space began to be understood as an inhomogeneous mass that is compressible and expandable, which is one thing in this place, and another in another place. And this is exactly what Pavel Florensky took advantage of. He took the most modern, the most fashionable and the most subtle mathematics, on the one hand, and on the other hand, from this mathematics he drew conclusions... of a philosophical and even religious nature. And it seems to me that this news could be reduced to the most... so... simple... axiom, this is that he, Pavel Florensky, used... I’ll say now... used these mathematical formulas that assume the heterogeneity of space. Therefore, I used such equations and coefficients that were introduced into the usual formulas of motion and space. Usually no one talked about this, because it was believed that the space was the same everywhere. And then it was he who began to talk about different spaces in connection with movement, in connection with movement. And Florensky just applied... applied this coefficient of change in space depending on movement. It turns out that a body has an ordinary volume if it moves at a speed less than light. If it moves at the speed of light, then the volume of the body is already zero. The result was that crazy news that the body changes as it moves, changes in its volume and in its spatial dimension. This, strictly speaking, is proof of a miracle. It turns out that a lamp is not just a lamp. She's a lamp here. Whether it will be a lamp on the Moon is unknown. Maybe something else. Moreover, Florensky went further. Others admitted this. But he said: what will happen to the volume of a body if it moves at a speed greater than light? At a speed faster than light. According to this formula, it turned out that this space took on imaginary quantities. But, he says, imaginary quantities, imaginary in geometry. These are not just negative quantities, and not just a lack of magnitude, but they are a very real thing. But what kind of thing is this? This is the idea of ​​a thing. The perfect thing. Therefore, it turned out, from Florensky’s point of view, that both the mobility of a thing and its convertibility into zero, convertibility into the ideal are provable... This, it seems to me, is where all of Florensky comes into play. On the one hand, he stands at the height of modern mathematical thought. On the one side. On the other hand, he also studies physics, astronomy, and also solves the same problems that were solved before. This is where, in my opinion, there is news. It was here that Florensky found himself in the middle, between the old worldview and the new. - Alexey Fedorovich, we understood you, and you proved it all very clearly. But you said that Pavel Alexandrovich renewed Orthodoxy. What's the news? What is the renewal of Orthodoxy according to Florensky? - It lies in the fact that Florensky considered traditional Orthodoxy too boring, too prosaic, too far from living faith, too traditional. Therefore, he enlivened it in different ways. Firstly, the mathematical method, which I just mentioned. It turned out that a person goes to church and gets baptized and prays not because dad or mom ordered it, but because science really requires it, because without this you will just be a fool, you will be a fool if you do not go to church and do not profess the latest truths of science. That's one thing. Then, Florensky’s completely new approach is attention to art history. No one had previously raised the question of the importance of art history for theology and for church life. Well, they said something there. There were some small discussions about the beauty of the icon. But what Florensky did was an unprecedented thing, because his study of the icon was combined with a reverent religious state. Therefore, just as mathematics became something living, in the same way the ritual, the icon, and in general everything external that was in the church, in Florensky shone with an intense inner feeling and was imbued with great intimacy. This is the new thing that he brought into church life. I remember now one of the conversations with him. “I,” he says, “did not accept the priesthood in order to serve in the parish. I accepted this for my personal fellowship with God. And you know, our parishes are entirely everyday Orthodoxy, which is completely uninteresting to me. I have never been to any parish and will not be, because it is all too boring, uninteresting, it has become too everyday and ordinary. Religion is something unusual. But here everything is normal, everything is everyday.” And he got it right, because his teaching, just as original, just as living, is a combination of old and new, like his mathematics, which I mentioned above. – Alexey Fedorovich, can I read one fragment to you? – From Berdyaev, which, it seems to me, is very appropriate: “All my life, since childhood, I have been tormented by the damned questions that Dostoevsky considered so characteristic of “Russian boys.” I remain such a “Russian boy” in my declining years. During my Marxist youth, one fairly cultural Marxist, of the German formation, told me reproachfully that, in essence, I was a religious person, that I had a need to justify the meaning of life and eternity. My thoughts are free, completely free, but these thoughts are connected with primary faith. I am characterized by the inviolability of a certain primary faith. I have religious experiences that are very difficult to express in words. I plunge into the depths and stand before the mystery of the world, the mystery of everything that exists, and every time, with acuteness piercing me, I feel that the existence of the world cannot be self-sufficient, cannot but carry behind it, in an even greater depth, a mystery, a secret meaning. This mystery is God. People couldn't think of a higher word. Denial of God is possible only on the surface, it is impossible in depth.” 251 Isn’t this in tune with everything that you are saying now about Pavel Alexandrovich, and about his search not for the everyday God that was imposed by the parish and the usual religious service, but for the sacrament to which he dedicated himself? - Yes, yes, absolutely right. But, you see, what needs to be said. What you read corresponds to Florensky. But the fact is that Berdyaev still did not understand all the subtleties of Florensky’s theology. Therefore, he believed that Florensky was too close to decadence, too close to subtle aesthetic experiences, and that this contradicted the strict Orthodoxy that Florensky himself wanted to achieve. And Berdyaev has an article called “The Refined Thebaid.” 252 Thebaid is an ancient and very strict monastery in Africa, a model of severity. So, Berdyaev emphasizes with the title what Florensky is striving for. Father Paul took the most strict thing that exists in Orthodoxy, and at the same time, gave it an unprecedentedly subtle image, which, in a certain sense, even makes it difficult to understand the full depth and severity of Orthodoxy, so there was a difference between them. And ideologically, Florensky and Berdyaev are opponents. Although in the sense of religion, in the sense of subtle experiences, both have gone far from ordinary, everyday theology. – Alexey Fedorovich, could you describe in more detail how Florensky understood the term “magic”? – Once at a meeting of the Religious and Philosophical Society named after Vladimir Solovyov in 1919‒1920, Father Pavel gave a report “The Magic of the Word,” where he developed the ideas he expressed in his work “The Meaning of Idealism.” He said that idealism is also interesting because it goes back to a living perception of reality. By that time, all the nature surrounding man was a real living tissue. After all, the world for the ancient Greek was a living reality. And man is life, living. Unity, the connection of a living person with living nature is magic. Magic. The magic of words. The word is magical. Magic is the meeting of a living person with a living substance, in contrast to science. There is a meeting of concept with concept. Magic in life is living communication with living reality. Name with name. This is an alliance. It doesn't matter which one. A union of love or a union of hatred - but a union. Therefore, magic is a living, vital (spiritualized) communication between a living person and living nature. This is a reality that is an object of faith. There is no religion without magic, understood so broadly, and there cannot be. And the word religion itself means connection. And Christianity is also a connection, a connection between a person and the true God. These thoughts later went into the work “Philosophy of Cult”. After the report, Father Pavel was asked why he uses the word magic? After all, from a generally accepted Christian point of view, magic is condemned, although it is not denied as a fact. Surely Christianity should shun magic? He responded something like this: “Yes, I used the word magic. I did not use it by accident, but consciously and intentionally. I used it in a sense much broader than the understanding contained in your question. In it I included and combined not only the Christian, but also the pagan worldview and understanding of magic. This is my opinion, not a reservation. Before Christianity there was religion. And there were also sacraments. For example, the Greeks took communion with the blood of a goat. Isn't this magic? Vyacheslav Ivanov would say that this is one and the same with Christianity. And indeed, this is the same thing, but formally, not in essence. This is the only revelation in paganism, that is, people naturally formed a formal perception of what was later radically transformed into Christianity as a result of divine revelation, and not as a result of universal human life instincts. Isn't this magic too? Only different spiritual heights separate them, but theology recognizes natural revelation along with divine revelation. At the same time, there is also the so-called black magic - communication with the lower, graceless forces of nature. Such magic fills paganism, although not always paganism, it is “black magic”. Magic is only communication between a person and someone, be it light or dark forces. And only part of what can be called “white magic” in this sense corresponds to Christianity with its sacraments. Therefore, I consciously used and continue to use the word “magic”, putting both positive and negative meanings into it. In Christianity, in Orthodoxy, we have sacraments that, in fact, replaced and once and for all abolished the old pagan magic. The sacrament is determined by the fact that we confess an absolute infinite personality, an absolute ideal - Christ, his incarnation here on Earth. The communication of man and humanity with the absolute personality - God, is a sacrament. But this is magic, so to speak, “white”, light, grace-filled, Christian magic. In Orthodoxy, God is baptism, confession, communion, prayer - all these are sacraments. Our God is available for communication. After all, prayers are not an abstraction, they are living communication. We can have communication with God through touch (to icons), taste (at communion), smell (incense), hearing, sight - all the senses. Protestantism is also a religion, also communication, but communication in concepts. Hegel and Kant were deeply religious, but in concepts. Therefore, Protestants do not have magic, and cannot have it. Kant thought: God is the unity of the universe, true, but abstractly. The meaning of idealism is not in abstraction, not in a system of categories, like Kant and Hegel, but in the fact that a person really communicates with the real, living life of the world. Science is also communication. Communication with nature, but in concepts, because in science there are no names, but only concepts. Communication is not lively, not vital. Therefore, science is a meeting of man with concept, reality with concept, concept with concept. Even art (art) will not provide the fullness of life communication, although it is better than conceptual, scientific communication, but it is not as deep as religious, mystical communication. So, magic is not only a sacrament, it is much broader, and to emphasize this expanded understanding, I take this word. Of course, if there was another, more general word, I would say it, but there is none. Magic is worse, and magic, although debatable, is at least decent...” Apparently, Father Pavel deliberately used the word “magic,” indicating its breadth, in order to consider the positive and negative together. Of course, I would like to have a common, unifying, single term, more neutral, less annoying. But he's not there! And if Father Pavel did not know him and did not offer him, then there is nothing left to do. And if there were a more general, broader term, then “magic” would be synonymous with black magic. This is exactly how this word is usually understood, contrasting it with the positive Christian sacrament. Father Pavel loved to be original. And so he was. In his speeches, he often evoked a lively reaction from the audience. Here too, using the word “magic” quite correctly, in a broad sense, irritated the listeners. This happened often. For example, he accused Khomyakov of Protestantism. But at one time there was a thought about his canonization. Khomyakov proposed the concept of the Church: “It is an organism of life and love, or more precisely, life and love as an organism.” Father Paul found direct Protestantism here: the organism is a scientific concept, love is abstract, true love, even more so. Father Pavel was asked: “Will you also offer a definition?” “I’m not offering anything new,” Florensky replied. – The Apostle Paul has it, you should know it: the Church is the body of Christ! The body is more concrete than the organism, and believers are parts of the body, the organism.” So, the word “magic” in the understanding of Father Pavel Florensky does not contradict the canonical views of Christianity, if we correctly understand what he put into it. I. D. Levin 253. “I saw P. Florensky once...” 254 I saw P. Florensky once (at the State Academy of Agricultural Sciences). What remains in my memory is an inspired face, as if descended from an ancient icon. But when I thought about “Imaginaries in Geometry” (and I “swallowed” this book 255 immediately after its publication), an almost blasphemous question involuntarily arose and confused me, which can be formulated using the opposition put forward by Florensky himself: face or mask? This amazing person expresses the most extravagant (“paradoxical” is not the right word), “out of the blue” thoughts in such an ordinary tone that you involuntarily remember, may this be forgiven me, a magician of the highest class who produces the most amazing, incredible things with such an artificially imperturbable look that this alone should convince us of the absence of any “fraud,” any mystification. This is the strength of Florensky, his “charm” both in the original and in the derivative meaning of this word that has come into use. I understand Zenkovsky, a zealot of orthodox Orthodoxy, who in his “History of Russian Philosophy” condemned Florensky’s teaching as a modernist heresy (the last words are mine; I am summing up the impression that remained after reading Zenkovsky’s book a long time ago; I, of course, am not going to go into the question of the validity of this judgment). I really like Florensky’s ontologism. According to Florensky, reality is given not in knowledge, but in life and is expressed through symbols. In 1923, in one of the apparently existing philosophical societies, I expressed the idea that reality is given in experience and is expressed in art. The proximity here, however, is more in the terminology used than in the meaning put into it. This relates, first of all, to the meaning of the concept of the real as the ideal, understood in a strictly philosophical sense, revived (albeit not quite adequately) by Husserl, and in our country by G. Shpet. The victory of Christianity in the Greco-Roman world was a great revolution of the spirit, which established in the minds of people the superiority of the spiritual principle both in man and in existence in general. This consciousness was based on the direct experience of the reality of the spiritual principle by the prophets of the Old Testament (“not by army, not by strength, but by my spirit” - Zechariah), and by Jesus, and the apostles. But Christian, or more broadly, Judeo-Christian (including Pharisaic-Talmudic) thinking was and remained pre-philosophical thinking, aggravated by naive materialism and mythology. His concept of spirit also remained. Philo of Alexandria could introduce philosophical elements (Logos) into this concept. The Gnostics, Augustine and some of the Church Fathers, could try to combine the concept they received with the philosophy of Neoplatonism, but the pre-philosophical character of the conceptual system of Christianity was preserved. Florensky's ontology remains on the whole, on the plane of pre-philosophical thinking. Not because, of course, he has not “grown” to a philosophical level. Of course, he grew up, but “outgrew, overcame”, rejecting him, like the entire “revival” culture” for the sake of Christian truth. How did she open up to him? In religious experience (a term first introduced, if I'm not mistaken, by James, and very popular in the early twenties)? In mystical intuition? It would be immodest to wait or seek an answer to this question, especially since none of the possible answers will eliminate the danger of this subjectivism, which Florensky so decisively condemns, and not without reason, in Renaissance culture. Although it is risky in the face of such a strong (δεινóτατος 256 - Socrates would say) accuser, I would still like to put in a word in defense of Renaissance culture. I will not refer to the flourishing of science and philosophy, to the beauty in the works of Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt; for Florensky these are rather anti-values. But can it be considered accidental that the two types of Christianity, with all their opposition, went through the revived reformation and counter-reformation - Catholicism and Protestantism, turned out to be the most stable? They not only turned out to be effective as a preventive weapon against the atheistic revolution, but also where the latter was brought from a recently Orthodox country, they were able to defend their existence and influence much more successfully. My answer is: it was the Renaissance that created the cultural environment in which Christianity could grow stronger. There is no need that it was from the Renaissance that materialism, pantheism, and atheism came. In the atmosphere of the Renaissance, this revolution of reason, these trends appeared not as dogmas, as they resulted in non-Renaissance conditions, but as products of free thought, competing with religion, but not suppressing it. There were religious (more precisely, interreligious) wars, but there were no anti-religious wars. Even Robespierre recognized Etre supreme. 257 Under these conditions, Christianity adapted to changes in the intellectual and general cultural climate. Protestantism absorbed and assimilated the rational elements of contemporary culture. More conservative Catholicism itself contained a rich culture, and represented an independent force, independent of the state. When it had to, it was able to withstand the “Kulturkampf”, not only Bismarck’s, but also Hitler’s (and Gomulk’s). Russia did not “do” the Renaissance, and only subsequently adopted and assimilated its finished fruits. The comprehensive and Orphic development of culture did not work out. And historical experience has shown that this did not benefit either the church or religion. The church and the state mutually relied on each other (as later, ideology and the state), and naked state conviction only weakened the moral authority of the church and its internal growth. This was fully revealed when the hour of testing arrived. Holy Rus' has turned into a country of mass atheism like no other country in the world. Countries that have “overcome” the Renaissance have nothing to repent of. And can it really be considered an accident that major religious thinkers of Russia, like Khomyakov, Solovyov, Berdyaev (not to mention Shestov), ​​turn out to have relatively little connection with the Russian cultural heritage, and draw much more for themselves from the West. Without hesitation, one can say even about Dostoevsky (cf. the image of Ferapont in “The Brothers Karamazov”), from the rosy Orthodoxy, which it is not without reason that Konstantin Leontiev dissociates himself. Was Florensky an exception? I don’t presume to judge, but I am sure that his rejection of the “revival” culture is an illusion, because he is already too “spoiled” by it. And he sees Rublev’s Trinity differently from the way Rublev’s Moscow contemporary, a “pre-perspective” person, saw it. The return of Russian man to pre-Petrine thinking, or of European man to pre-Renaissance thinking, is as illusory as the return of civilized man to nature. But the most insightful people of the 19th century saw in Russia a bulwark against revolution, socialism and atheism. Apparently, Tyutchev understood the language of nature (“there is a language in it”) better than the language of history, and Dostoevsky understood the human soul better than the soul of the people (although he claimed a monopoly in this area). Woe to the people who imagine themselves to be a bulwark of something or against something. His destiny would be stagnation ending in revolution, and revolution ending in stagnation. A huge space, with its inexhaustible material and human, physical and spiritual resources, is a potential field for the free play of forces, in which the positive that is in revolution, socialism and free thinking would be revealed, and that which is viable in traditional foundations would be tested. It would seem that thinking Russian people should have thought through everything that happened and learned the necessary lessons from it, or at least drawn obvious conclusions. Unfortunately, when you compare the current state of mind with the mood of the early twenties, when we, with the ardor, zeal and greed for yet new impressions of life characteristic of youth, attended Ilyin’s seminars, listened to Frank’s lectures, reports by Berdyaev, Stepun, Vysheslavtsev, inspired broadcasts by Vyacheslav Ivanov, Andrei Bely, you experience a double feeling. Memories dear to the heart emerge about the best time of life, its impulses and hopes, and at the same time they are disappointed by the familiarity of all the motives and the lack of a new understanding of what they have experienced. All this was talked about and argued about half a century ago. And I would like to say: although we forgot a lot (and not only the bad, but also the good), we learned almost nothing. What have you sinned or continue to sin? 1. The misuse of anti-individualistic concepts, to which the impersonal consciousness of Buddhism is now added. Haven’t we since then had a lot of “conciliarity”, unity, integrity, impersonality (though in a completely different way than expected). Isn’t it time to think more about the individual, about her soul, her rights, uniqueness, independence, spontaneity, freedom (here you can learn a lot from Dostoevsky). 2. Ideological extremism, unbridled, both in the direction of irrationalism and in the direction of materialism (this kind of dilemma is characteristic of Russian thought). Rationalism is rejected because of its “abstractness” by both sides. I remember how, in the aforementioned philosophical society, the young philosopher S. (who, unlike us, “bears,” and despite his chiliastic moods danced well and a lot at the party) argued that the theory of relativity and the Japanese earthquake (under the impression of which everyone was - it was 1923) are symptoms of the same cosmic cataclysm, manifestations of the same apocalyptic element, and this ontological balancing act does not affect anyone I was shocked and not even amused. The prevailing belief was that the fullness of truth (and they did not agree to anything less) could be achieved only by religious or mystical insight or experience. And thus, the one who was not granted such insight, despite all his efforts, was pushed towards materialism. And this happened often. And the same path for many is predetermined by the current mindset. Meanwhile, there is a third path, the path of in-depth philosophical reflection, the path of metaphysical reflection. But more on that later. 3. An addiction to jumping, a desire to certainly “bypass” certain stages towards socialism, bypassing capitalism in general (populism) or developed capitalism. The non-European path to Buddhism. Didn’t Pushkin say, however, in a different context: “A European, and in the rapture of oriental luxury must preserve the taste and look of a European”? The non-revival path to some other, higher culture and national state, bypassing Western democracy. But the inorganic path of development has already cost Russia dearly in the past, and the same trend threatens (in particular in the field of culture) in the future. The combination of national characteristics and originality with belonging to the pan-European cultural sphere has always been given here with difficulty and not without effort. And now difficulties arise along this path, unfortunately not only of an external (police-ideological) nature, but also of an internal nature. The easiest way out was and remains to be the denial of Europe (“Renaissance”) in the name of national identity. This seemed to be the line of least resistance (“do without”). In fact, such a somersault is available to few. Florensky is not afraid of the denial of the Renaissance, because he will have a lot of other things left (and, in essence, a lot of “Renaissance”). Tolstoy, in his nihilism, went further (throwing out Orthodoxy), but he also had something left (although, perhaps, less), but why lead these little ones into temptation? In this regard, one cannot help but pay tribute to Vladimir Solovyov, his strength of mind (despite being constrained by dogma, on the one hand, and excessive trust in the data of mystical “experience,” on the other), and the breadth of his horizons. Breadth of outlook and breadth of education are two different things. Florensky is more educated than Solovyov. But his horizons are incomparably narrower. Contrary to Dostoevsky, Leontiev, the Slavophiles, and despite all his criticism of “abstract principles,” Solovyov was able to look at the West (in particular, the Catholic West) without bias. His Russia is not just the “East of Christ”, but is closely connected with the West of Christ. However, Dostoevsky, despite his soiledness, kissed the sacred stones of Europe, and wept tenderly in front of the revivalist Sistine Madonna. And his Christ is not only the Christ of the East, just as the Grand Inquisitor turned out to be not only the Inquisitor of the West... Florensky believes that Renaissance culture and civilization do not even deserve criticism on the merits. Someday, humanity will simply brush them aside as something unnecessary and annoying, telling them “don’t.” Everything that was said by Rousseau, Tolstoy, Ruskin and others pales before this devastating verdict. And here the power of Florensky the magician, which was mentioned at the very beginning, is manifested. In order to figure it out, you must first come to your senses, come to your senses, as if after a deafening blow. And almost immediately you start asking questions, timidly at first, and then more and more boldly. Where to begin with Renaissance culture and its destruction, with gunpowder or printing, Boccaccio or Calvin? Can we still preserve a telephone for calling emergency services, a radio for those in distress at sea or in the mountains, airplanes and helicopters for providing assistance to victims of natural disasters? Is it possible to cope with the food problem of the growing world population or the environmental problem without science? Enslavement by technology is bad, technicalism is evil, but was enslavement by manual labor better, always perceived as a curse, a consequence of the Fall (“in the sweat of your face you will eat bread”)? In one case there is alienation, in the other there is identification of a person with the products of labor. Both are bad, but the latter is more detrimental to the spiritual essence of man. And this, perhaps, is the essence of the curse? Moreover, there is something humiliating in this identification. If the Renaissance slogan - “power over nature” turned into its negative side and led humanity into a dead end, does this mean that the state of helplessness in the face of natural elements was in fact a “golden age”? It is absolutely clear that what has happened over the last half-millennium, no matter how you look at it, is irreversible. The path to retreat is cut off. You can only go forward, and the only question is choosing the path. For the “revival” culture leaves enough room for free choice. After all, a characteristic feature of the “revival culture” and the renaissance person is precisely its openness in all directions - to the past and the future, to the East and to the South. This culture is dialogical, polyphonic and, so to speak, “symposionic”. This is the only culture that has become a culture for itself, rising to a metaculture, capable of determining its path with the greatest degree of freedom. Freedom of choice is facilitated by the controversial nature of the Renaissance culture to accommodate a variety of elements pulling in different directions: technicalism and spiritual values, natural sciences and religion (as well as economic inequality, private property, on the one hand, and political freedom and democracy, on the other), which turned out to be beyond the power of those who remained outside the Renaissance. The most valuable product of Renaissance culture, I am ready to consider disappointment in it, dissatisfaction with it, is the appearance of people like... Florensky. For the very reflection on this culture, the very awareness of the dead end and the need to search for a way out of it, is a necessary element of this culture, as a metaculture, as an “open” culture. The topic of the moral ills of the “consumer society” (and this, in essence, is the last transformation of Renaissance society) has already become hackneyed. These illnesses exist and it's sad. However, it does not seem to me that the moral character of a person in a “society of underconsumption”, and even more so in a society of need, is purer. In the latter, one is struck by the indifference of the well-fed to the hungry, and the rampant violence on all sides. In a civilized society, no matter what you say to Rousseau or Tolstoy, there is at least more elementary decency. 258 And no less spirituality. If here it is drowning in “mass culture,” then there it is drowning in mass lack of culture. The spiritual wealth of primitive man is “infused” into him by the dissatisfaction of civilized man. There is no less spirituality (as well as crime) “per capita” in modern revival society than in Moscow society of the era of the great, unrivaled Rublev. This, of course, does not affect the essence of Florensky’s statements (which have now become commonplace) about the spiritual illnesses of modern civilized humanity. Of course, science also bears its share of responsibility, although not everything that Florensky says about this is convincing enough. If modern scientism has abandoned claims to absolute truth, this does not at all devalue science; it rather opens, rather than closes, the prospect of the transcendent. Is Florensky really able to give us this absolute truth? Florensky's answer is clear: faith. Many people are now talking about renewal through faith, about religious renewal. But faith is not given by order, and when religion turns from an end in itself into a tool, into a means (even of the most sacred goal), then some kind of substitution occurs, a falsehood is felt (unintentional, of course). Faith instilled in oneself not because one has believed, but in order to find peace of mind, or for moral renewal, or, what is now even more common, for national revival, or out of respect for national traditions, cannot be either sincere enough or strong enough. Wishful believing 259 is no better than wishful thinking. 260 And it can also be pointed out that in countries where the old faith is still very strong and deeply rooted, in Latin America, in Muslim countries, in southern Italy, and perhaps in India, we do not observe either a higher level of morality or national uplift (in the positive sense). And in civilized countries, the skepticism that gave birth to science and is generated by it has gone so far that it is unlikely that a sufficiently powerful hosanna can still pass through this crucible (isolated cases do not count). But besides science and religion, there is a third way - philosophy, and in particular, “first philosophy” - metaphysics. Like religion, and unlike science, metaphysics recognizes the transcendent, but like science, and unlike religion, it does not want to accept it on faith. A. Pyatigorsky speaks of metaphysics, mysticism and religion as if they were something identical. This can be understood, since their conclusions (if one can speak of conclusions regarding the last two) may turn out to be close. The comprehension of basic metaphysical concepts or symbols requires such intellectual depth, such power of speculation, which may have something of “mystical intuition” or “experience”. In metaphysical reflection, the infrarational, the rational, and the superrational in Existence are revealed. One cannot, however, ignore the fundamental difference between the intersubjective character of metaphysics and the purely subjective (contrary to Florensky) character of religion and mysticism. Of course, the metaphysician (if he does not want to fall into the same subjectivity) is forced to deal with assumptions, hypotheses, more or less plausible. The philosopher does not have his own credo, 261 he has to be content with his cogito. 262 But what to do if everything that is offered to him in return, even under the guise of a pillar and affirmation of the truth, seems to him even more problematic, if it does not convince him, if he is not capable of elevating, saving self-deception. Limiting reason only to the sphere of exact and empirical sciences will not expand the sphere of faith, but will only lead to agnosticism and will close the (for many) exit from the sphere of sensory data. Pascal says that faith is given to us from above, and reason is a human matter. Why not the other way around? Perhaps the mind that distinguishes a person from an animal is a gift or an emanation from above, and faith is inspired by people, or by oneself? The Renaissance opened up all three paths to European man. It laid the foundations of modern science. It, through the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, carried out a religious renewal, and it, in a powerful impulse coming from Nicholas of Cusa through Descartes, Malebranche and Spinoza to Leibniz, erected the majestic edifice of metaphysics. This creative impulse did not dry out in subsequent centuries. Until recently (in Russia to varying degrees - Frank, Lossky, Lopatin, and partly Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Askoldov). But what are the real chances of success of just such a turn? Let's face it, they're not too big. Oddly enough, in modern Western culture science and religions (including occultism, theosophy, etc.) easily coexist, but both do not coexist well with metaphysics. For science, this is something irrational that pretends to be rational; for religion - the rational, wanting to replace the irrational - faith. Science operates in categories that are more easily accessible to reason,” and religion has its own proven paths to the mind, heart and imagination of the mass person. Metaphysics and philosophy in general are devoid of all this. Still, there are some encouraging signs. Logical positivism is in a state of disintegration. Its extreme wing, analytical “philosophy,” got lost in the jungle of grammatical exercises, while its most prominent representative, Karl Popper, with his concept of the “third world” took a serious step towards platonism. In psychoanalysis, a path parallel to this is from Freud to Jung and Fromm. There are also purely philosophical elements in neo-Thomism. Existentialism will either develop into metaphysics (Jaspers was heading towards this), or degenerate into mysticism without mystery (the works of Heidegger of the second period), or “biased” insanity (Sartre). Finally, the very development of exact and natural sciences (quantum mechanics, theory of relativity, molecular biology, cybernetics, if you like, bionics) more and more urgently requires philosophical understanding not in a positivist, but in a metaphysical sense. Metaphysics (as genuine philosophy in general) belongs to the field of esoteric culture. It does not appeal directly to either the “masses” or the “general public,” but to the “initiated.” But the same applies to “religious experience” and “mystical intuition”. Their distribution outside this circle comes at the expense of depth and authenticity. But esotericism does not mean hermeticity. Ideas studied by metaphysical thinking make their way through various paths into both esoteric and “mass culture.” Its presence itself determines the character, the coloring of the culture as a whole (as it was in the ancient world or in the era from Kant to Hegel in Germany), sharply distinguishing it from ametaphysical or amusic culture,” which is a joyless spectacle of abandonment, the “game of glass beads,” oblivion of the most important and essential, or the refusal of a free, non-dogmatic interpretation of this important and essential, not bound by the shackles of tradition. One cannot count on more than this indirect influence or “coloring,” but this is not a little. Ten righteous men could not have converted Sodom, but their presence would have been enough to save it from God's wrath. Elchaninov Alexander Viktorovich (1881–1934) – Russian religious publicist, priest (since 1926). Graduated from the Faculty of History of St. Petersburg University and the Moscow Theological Academy (MDA). Secretary of the Moscow Religious and Philosophical Society named after. Vl. From Losev (1905). Since 1911 taught at the Levandovsky gymnasium in Tiflis.” Emigrant since 1921. Leader of the Russian Student Christian Movement. Works: History of religion. M., 1909; Records. Paris, 1935 (6th ed. 1990). See about him: In memory of Fr. Alexandra Elchaninova. Paris, 1935 (3rd ed. - 1991). To understand the nature of the relationship between two Tiflis friends - Elchaninov and Florensky, the initiates of Fr. Alexander pages of the memoir “To my children...” (esp. pp. 201–206). For the first time, Elchaninov’s memoirs about Florensky were printed and annotated by N.A. Struve (we use some of them below). Published according to the first publication: Bulletin of the Russian Christian Democracy. Paris; New York; M., 1984. No. 142 (III). pp. 68–77. Here... - in Sergiev Posad. Manuscripts about ditties... - Collection of ditties of the Kostroma province of Nerekhta district. With a foreword by P. A. Florensky. Kostroma 1909. Evgenia... – oh. Evgeny Vorontsov, Hebraic scholar, professor of Old Russian language at the Academy (died in 1927) (note by N.L. Struve). Marusya Lange is the future wife of A. Elchaninov’s brother Nikolai (note by N.A. Struve). Kapterev Petr Fedorovich (1849–1922) - Russian teacher and psychologist. Vasenka - Giatsintov Vasily Mikhailovich, MDA student, brother of Florensky’s wife E.M. Giatsintova. See about him: To my children... P. 379. If you see the Lord... -ep. Antony Florensov (1847–1920), confessor of Florensky (since 1904). See about him: Elchaninov A. Elder Bishop (Put. 1926. No. 4. P. 121–129); Igum. Andronik (A. S. Trubachev). Bishop Anthony Florensov is the confessor of priest Pavel Florensky (Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate. 1981. No. 9. pp. 17–77; no. 10. pp. 65–73). Glinka-Volzhsky Alexander Sergeevich (real name Glinka, 1878–1940) - Russian critic, literary historian. Works: On solitude. New way. 1904. No. 11; From the world of literary exploration. St. Petersburg, 1906; F. M. Dostoevsky. Life and Sermon. M., 1906; Garshin as a religious type. M., 1906; Holy Rus' and the Russian vocation. M., 1915; Socialism and Christianity. Nizhny Novgorod, 1919. Novoselov Mikhail Alexandrovich (1860–1940) - Russian religious publicist, publisher of the Religious and Philosophical Library. Lavater Johann Caspar (1741–1801) – Swiss philosopher. O. Herman is probably the elder of the Zosimov Hermitage (note by N.A. Struve). Andrei Bely (pseud.; present, first and last name. Bugaev Boris Nikolaevich; 1880–1934) - Russian writer, poet, critic, symbolist theorist, philosopher,” cultural historian. For a detailed bibliography of Bely’s works and literature about him, see the book: Andrei Bely. Problems of creativity. Articles. Memories. Publications. Comp. M.A. Benin. M., 1988. pp. 806–827. An extensive section of the collection is devoted to the relationship between Bely and Florensky: Context-91. Literary and theoretical research. Rep. ed. A.V. Mikhailov. M., 1991. P. 3–99. See also: Szilard Lena. A. Bely. P. Florensky. Slavik's studio. Budapest, 1987. No. 33 (1‒4). pp. 227–238. The name of V. Sventsitsky mentioned at the beginning of the memoir fragment is important for his inclusion as the author of the sensational novel “The Antichrist (Records of a Strange Man)” (M., 1908; two editions) in the general experience of understanding the theme of the Antichrist in the 20th century, including by A. Bely (see the first of the early “Symphonies” in the book: Bely A. Symphonies. L., 1991; cf. Italian edition: Bely Andrej. Edizione e commento di Daniela Rizzi, 1990) and P. Florensky (“Eschatological mosaic”). For the history of the image of the Antichrist in Russian literature, see the article: Isupov K. G. Russian Antichrist: a dystopia coming true. Antichrist: An Anthology. Comp., comment. A. S. Grishina, K. G. Isupova. M., 1995. P. 5–34. (From the history of domestic spirituality). Florensky’s collection of poems “In Eternal Azure” (Sergiev Posad, 1907) is named not without reference to Bely’s collection “Gold in Azure” (1904). Florensky’s short poem cycle “White Stone” is dedicated to Bely. Here is a poem by the philosopher, written in April 1904: You captivated me with the sacred fire! The chants of the waves rushed... A current of chrysolite streams was seen everywhere, The golden snakes sparkled. The ocean suddenly sparkled with liquid gold Fiery lace of lines. Stretched out a column of blue incense And the dark blue solidified into the air... (Russian poetry of the “Silver Age”, 1890–1917: Anthology. M., 1993. P. 284). Published according to the publication: Bely Andrey. Beginning of the century. Prep. text and comment. A. V. Lavrova. M., 1990. pp. 298–304. (Series of literary memoirs). Sventitsky (Sventitsky) Valentin Pavlovich (1879/1882–1931) - writer, publicist, church leader. He studied at the historical, philological and law faculties of Moscow University. In January 1905 he organized (together with V. Ern, A. Elchaninov and Father Jonah Brikhnichev) the “Christian Brotherhood of Struggle” (see: “Christian Brotherhood of Struggle” and its program. Religious and Public Library. M., 1906. Ser. 1, No. 2), to which Florensky was indirectly related. For the publication of the brochures “Letters to Everyone” (M., 1907) and “The Second Crucifixion of Christ” (M., 1908) he was subjected to judicial repression. He wrote dramatic sketches (“Pastor Relling”, 1909; “Death”, 1909; “Intelligentsia”, 1912). In 1917 he accepted the priesthood at St. John's Monastery in Petrograd. Works: Seeking the City. Sat. 1. M., 1906 (together with V. Ern); What does a peasant need? M., 1906; L. Tolstoy and Vl. Soloviev. M., 1907; The truth about the Earth. M., 1907; Religious meaning of Ibsen's "Brand". St. Petersburg, 1907; Life of F. M. Dostoevsky. M., 1912; Poet of Calvary Christianity (Nikolai Klyuev). M., 1912 (department of the edition of the introductory article to the collection of N. Klyuev “Brotherly Songs. M., 1912); Citizens of Heaven. St. Petersburg, 1915; Holy fool. Notes from the Smovable Public Theatre. 1917. No. 7–8; Dialogues. Preface L. Kalinina. Kyiv, 1994. See about him: Rusov N. N. From the life of church Moscow. V. Sventsitsky. The day before. 1922. 3 Sep.; Crepe R. Preface to the publication: Sventsitsky V. P. Suicide letters. The past. Historical almanac. (Paris, 1986). M., 1990. T. 1. P. 294‒298; Kozlov M. Finding churchliness. Word. 1991. No. 10; About the author of "Dialogues". Sunday school. 1992. No. 1; Sventsitsky A. “He found peace in the Church.” Moscow church newsletter. 1992. No. 7(73). Lakhtin Leonid Kuzmich (1863–1927) – mathematician, professor at Moscow University. In 1904, student Florensky presented Lakhtin with his work “The Idea of ​​Discontinuity as an Element of World Outlook.” The “Introduction” to it was published in the collection: Historical and Mathematical Research. M., 1986. Issue. 30. Ern Vladimir Frantsevich (1881–1917) - Russian philosopher, school friend of Florensky, in recent years he lived in Vyach’s apartment. Ivanova, where he died. Vyach. Ivanov wrote to V. Bryusov on January 3/16, 1905: “Our beloved Vl. was admitted into our solitude. Ern. Have you heard about dear Ern, for example from Bely and Florensky? (Literary heritage. T. 5: Valery Bryusov. M., 1976. P. 470). Florensky published his “Letters on Christian Rome” in “Theological Works” (1912. No. 11; 1913. No. 1:9). Weierstrass Karl Theodor Wilhelm (1815–1897) – German mathematician, Bely’s father listened to his lectures. Georg Cantor (1845–1918) – German mathematician, initiator of set theory. Both Bely and Florensky were captivated by his ideas in their youth. The latter wrote a work about him, read first as a report at a seminar [On the symbols of infinity (Essay on the ideas of G. Cantor). New way. 1904. No. 9. P. 485]. my father’s grave... - Nikolai Vasilyevich Bugaev (born 1837) was buried in the Novodevichy Convent on May 31, 1903. Jozef Wronski (1778–1852) – Polish philosopher, mystic, mathematician, author of the works “Messianicism as the ultimate unification of philosophy and religion...” (1831–1847); "The Metaphysics of Messianism" (1840). See about him: Lossky V.N. Goene-Vronsky, Polish Plato. Abroad. 1927. No. 37/38; Hegumen Gennady Eikalovich. “The non-pothetical principle” of Plato and “The Absolute” of Gohen-Vronsky. Abroad. 1974. Sep.-Dec. pp. 2–13. The Three Ajaxes are a trace of Bely’s fascination with Homeric plots and “Argonautic” myth-making. See: Lavrov A.V. Myth-making of the “Argonauts”. Myth-folklore-literature. L., 1978. P.137–170. Ajaxes (Ayants) – applicants for the hand of Helen, then participants in the Trojan War. See: Myths of the peoples of the world: In 2 vols. M., 1980. T. 1. pp. 146–147. Galanin Dmitry Dmitrievich (1857–?) – teacher-mathematician. Syroechkovsky (brothers: Boris, Vladimir and Evgeniy Evgenievich). The first of them (1881–1961) was a student at Moscow University, a member of the Christian Brotherhood of Struggle. Gerye Vladimir Ivanovich (1837–1919) - Russian scientist-historian, professor of general history at Moscow University (1868–1904), organizer of the Higher Women's Courses (1877). See about him: Moscow University in the memoirs of contemporaries. Comp. Yu. N. Emelyanov. M., 1989 (according to decree). Kotlyarevsky Sergei Andreevich (1873–1939) – historian, private associate professor at Moscow University. Member of the Central Committee of the Cadet Party. His book “Lamenais and modern Catholicism” (M., 1904) is mentioned. Koiransky (brothers): Alexander Arnoldovich (1884–1968) – poet, artist, critic; Boris Arnoldovich (1882–1920) – poet, journalist, lawyer; Genrikh Arnoldovich (1883–?) – writer, doctor. Griffik - Koiransky were associated with the activities of the private St. Petersburg publishing house "Grif" (1903–1913), founded by S. A. Sokolov (Krechetov, 1878–1896). The literary and artistic almanac “Vulture” was published (1903–1914. No. 1–4), where mainly symbolist-oriented authors were published. Daniel's Cave... – Acts 9:3–6; 5:1–5. Charcot Jean Martin (1825‒1893) – French psychiatrist. Didaskalol - teacher. The phrase “didaskalol from Valentin” here has at least a double meaning: in addition to the name of Sventsitsky, it also points to the name of the famous Gnostic Valentin (d. ca. 160), about whom Vl. Soloviev, in an article written in the Brockhaus and Efron dictionary, said: “One of the most brilliant thinkers of all times” (Christianity: Encyclopedic Dictionary. In 2 vols. M., 1993. T. 1. P. 320). The concept of Valentine (his teaching about Sophia-Achamoth) is set out in the work of St. Irenaeus of Lyons (140/160–c. 220) “Against heresies” (see: Works of St. Irenaeus of Lyons St. Petersburg: Published by P. Preobrazhensky, 1900; Meyendorff John, Archpriest Introduction to Patristic Theology. 2nd ed. Vilnius; M., 1992. pp. 29–31). Valentin finds himself in the center of attention of Russian sophiologists and critics of sophiology (from A. M. Bukharev and V. L. Solovyov to V. N. Laossky and D. L. Andreev). The popularity of Valentin’s legacy for the 20th century was reflected by L. Karsavin, who wrote an article about him “The Depths of Satan” (Torches. M., 1922. Book 1) and included his image in the poem “Earthly and Mountain Sophia” (Sagittarius. Sat. third and last. Edited by A. Belenson. St. Petersburg, 1922. For reprint see: Question philosophy. 1991. No. 9. pp. 175–189. Preface, prep. text and notes V. N. Nazarova). At the end of the commented text by A. Bely there is a recollection of the criticism of sophiological enthusiasm on the part of “Trubetsky, pointing to the very vague religiously and weak theoretically theme of “Sophia”, as the church-bride, the soul of the world (Humanity too). What about anthroposophy? Should we look at this “idea” according to Boehme, Schelling, Valentin, or Comte?” (pp. 377–378). Enes - members of the People's Socialist Party (autumn 1906); from June 1907 - Labor People's Socialist (note by A.V. Lavrov). From being overloaded with arrhythmology... - In the second chapter of the memoirs to my children...” [“Pier and Boulevard (Batum)”] Florensky conveys his sense of rhythm: “And one more thing: in mathematics, the Fourier series and other expansions speak to me internally, almost physically, representing every complex rhythm as a set, as an infinite set of simple ones. They tell me native continuous functions without derivatives and rotten functions everywhere, where everything falls apart, where all the elements are placed upright. Listening to myself, I discover in the rhythm of my inner life, the sounds that fill my consciousness, these forever remembered rhythms of waves, and I know that they are looking for their conscious expression in me through the patterns of those mathematical concepts. Subsequently, when I heard the famous Rostov ringing, where increasingly frequent rhythms are intertwined and overlapping each other, I again remembered the rhythmic structure of the sea surf and Bach’s fugue, the primordial rhythms of my soul” (pp. 51–52). From the commentary to this fragment by the publishers of Florensky’s memoirs: The concept of arrhythmology was introduced by N.V. Bugaev and was understood by him as the doctrine of discontinuous functions. N.V. Bugaev believed that the entire worldview (philosophy and science) and human action should be rebuilt on the basis of arrhythmology. The problem of continuity in natural science worried Florensky even in high school. He synthesized the ideas of N.V. Bugaev’s arrhythmology and Georg Cantor’s set theory” (To my children... P. 485). The following works of Florensky are devoted to the development of ideas in arrhythmology: “The idea of ​​discontinuity as an element of worldview” (1903) (the introduction to this work was published by S. S. Demidov and A. N. Parshin in the book: Historical and Mathematical Research. M., 1986. Issue 30); 0b one premise of the worldview" (Libra. 1904. No. 9); “On the symbols of infinity (Essay on the ideas of G. Cantor)” (New Way. 1904. No. 9. P. 485). After reading Bely’s book “Symbolism” (M., 1910), Florensky writes to the author on November 14/28, 1910 from Sergiev Posad: “I now want to share with you the bright and kind mood taken from your book. I mean specifically your research on rhythm (“rhythmology”) and related issues” (Context-91, p. 44). It is also obvious that communication with Florensky could not but influence Bely’s ideas about “eurythmy” and, in general, affected his poetry studies (“Dialectics of rhythm” (1917); “The principle of rhythm in the dialectical method” (1927); “On the rhythmic gesture”, “Rhythm as dialectics and “The Bronze Horseman” (1929). See: Grechishkin S.S., Lavrov A. V. About Bely’s poetic heritage. Works on sign systems. Tartu, 1981. Issue 12. pp. 97–146; Gasparov M. L. Bely the poet and Andrey Bely. Problems of creativity. Kunrath Heinrich (XVI - early XVII centuries) - German mystical writer, alchemist. See about him: Florensky P. A. Analysis of spatiality and time in artistic and visual works. M., 1993. S. 289, 321. Ora et labora - pray and work (lat.). Euler Leonhard (1807‒1783) – Swiss mathematician, mechanical physicist, astronomer. The flagellants are a flagellant sect that arose in Italy in 1210 and was condemned as heretical (1349). Dikiriy with trikyriy - a two-candlestick with a three-candlestick. We are talking about the Macedonian uprising against the Turkish yoke (Aug.-Sept. 1903). Review of my “Northern Symphony”... – Florensky P. A. Spiritualism as anti-Christianity. New way. 1904. No. 3. P. 158–167. Ellis (pseud.; present, name and family name. Kobylinsky Lev Lvovich; 1879–1947) - Russian poet and critic, translator, theorist of symbolism. Since 1913 - in Switzerland. Works: Russian Symbolists. M., 1910. See about him: Tsvetaeva A. Memoirs. M., 1971; Grechishkin S., Lavrov A. Ellis - symbolist poet, theorist and critic. Herzen readings. T. 25: Literary criticism. L. 1972. Ellis translated the X letter of the “Pillar”: Sophia. Ahren atis der Garbe kleines Jahrbuch des Matthias-Grttnewald-Verlags fttr das Jahr. 1926. Christi Reichim Osten. Mainz, 1926. Fudel Sergey Iosifovich (1900–1977) – memoirist, theologian, historian of spiritual culture. Son of I. I. Fudel, a famous priest, correspondent of K. N. Leontyev and author of articles about him. Since the beginning of the 20s. was subjected to repression. Since 1956, he has created a number of works, a list of which according to the author’s list is given by the compiler of the biographical information, Archpriest. Vladimir Vorobyov (New World. 1991. No. 3. P. 189): “K. Leontyev in his letters to Fr. Joseph Fudel”, “The Legacy of Dostoevsky”, “The Beginning of Knowledge of the Church (About Father Paul Florensky)”, “Notes on Liturgy and the Church”, “Slavophilism and the Church”, “The Path of the Fathers”, “Letters from Exile”. The book by S. I. Fudel, which is the first monograph by a Russian author about Florensky, is published according to the first edition (Paris, 1972). Published under the pseudonym F.I. Udelov. This is not the time to call out the shadows... - the beginning of the penultimate stanza of F. I. Tyutchev’s poem “From edge to edge, from city to city...”. It is not given to us to predict... - the first line of the famous fragment by F.I. Tyutchev (1869). Isaac the Syrian (died at the beginning of the 8th century) - saint, father of the Church. Works: Words of asceticism. M., 1993. Georgy the Recluse (in the world - Georgy Mashurin; 1789–1863) - ascetic, novice of the Zadonsk Mother of God Monastery. He was tonsured under the name Stratonika. Gregory of Sinaite (second half of the 13th century - 40s of the 14th century) - Byzantine spiritual writer, preacher of hesychasm, Christian ascetic. After staying in a monastery in Sinai and then on Mount Athos, he founded a monastery in the Paroria desert near the city of Sazopol, where he died. Lopatin Lev Mikhailovich (1855–1920) – Russian philosopher-personalist, professor at Moscow University, editor of the journal “Questions of Philosophy and Psychology”, chairman of the Moscow Psychological Society (in 1899). Works: History of ancient philosophy, M., 1901; Psychology. M., 1902; Philosophical characteristics and speeches. M., 1911; Positive tasks of philosophy. 2nd ed. M., 1911. Parts 1–2; Lectures on the history of new philosophy. M., 1915. Part 1. Vvedensky Alexey Ivanovich (1861‒1913) Russian theologian, critic and publicist. Works: Western reality and Russian ideals. Sergiev Posad, 1894; Letters on contemporary art. M., 1898; Pessimism of theory and pessimism of life. M., 1907; The world tragedy of knowledge. M., 1908. After the death of A.I. Vvedensky, the rector of the Moscow Theological Academy, Bishop, became the head of Florensky’s work. Theodore (Pozdeevsky). “Two Philosophers” (“Philosophers”) by M. V. Nesterov (1862–1942) created in 1918. Bely A. Beginning of the century. M.; L., 1933. pp. 131–132 and further about Florensky: p. 263, 270–274. Spring, spring. Tell me, why do I feel sorry? - the last stanza of the poem by A. A. Blok (1881–1921) “Life went on slowly, like an old fortune teller...” (March 16, 1902), which was included in the sixth section of the early cycle “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” (1901–1902), is quoted. Ignatius the God-Bearer is the third bishop of Antioch. During the reign of Emperor Trajan (53–117, reigned from 98) he was tortured and executed in Rome. Works: Messages. Monuments of ancient Christian writing (ed. P. Preobrazhensky). T. 2 (see also “Orthodox interlocutor”, published by the Kazan Theological Academy, 1855). Khomyakov Alexey Stepanovich (1804–1860) - Russian religious philosopher, poet, leader of the Slavophile movement, encyclopedist. Works: Works. T. 1‒2. Kyiv, 1902–1913; About old and new. M., 1988; Works: In 2 vols. M., 1994. See in this volume the materials of the controversy around Khomyakov (articles by V. Rozanov, N. Berdyaev, G. Florovsky and commentary on them). John Climacus (John the Sinaite, John Scholastic; c. 535–600?) – saint, venerable. Abbot of the Sinai Monastery, author of “The Ladder of Paradise” (first Russian translation – M., 1647) and “Words to the Shepherd.” Modern ed.: Our Venerable Father John, Abbot of Mount Sinai Ladder, in abbreviation for beginners the path of spiritual life. M., 1991. See about him: Jerome. Hermann. Venerable John Climacus. St. Petersburg, 1854. Rasputin (Novykh) Grigory Efimovich (1872–1916) - peasant of the Tobolsk province, favorite of the last Romanovs, pseudo-fool. Mansurov Sergei Pavlovich (d. 1929) – priest, Church historian. Abba Isidore (Gruzinsky, died in 1908) – hieromonk of the Gethsemane monastery. In 1909, Florensky published a book about him (Salt of the Earth... Sergiev Posad, 1909). Macarius the Great (301–391) – saint, Egyptian hermit-ascetic, Christian preacher. Works: Spiritual conversations of St. Macarius the Great. M., 1904. Issue. 4. See: Troitsky I. Review of sources on the history of Egyptian monasticism. Sergiev Posad, 1907. Criticism of abstract principles, ch. 21. Zenkovsky Vasily Vasilievich (1981–1962) - Russian religious philosopher, historian of philosophy and culture, priest since 1942. Ep. Theodore. About spiritual Truth. St. Petersburg, 1914. Lossky Vladimir Nikolaevich (1903–1958) – Russian theologian and Church historian. Works: Essay on the mystical theology of the Eastern Church. Dogmatic theology. M., 1991. Brikhnichev Jonah – Tiflis priest, member of the “Christian Brotherhood of Struggle”. For the extent of Florensky’s participation in this community, see Ivanova E.V. Pavel Florensky and “Christian Brotherhood of Struggle.” Questions of philosophy. 1993. No. 6. pp. 159–166. Anthony (in the world – Alexey Pavlovich Khrapovitsky; 1864–1936) – Russian spiritual writer. Archimandrite, rector of the Moscow Theological Academy (1890), Kazan Theological Academy (1895). Bishop (1897), Archbishop of Volyn (1902). Works: Complete. collection Op.: In 3 volumes. Kazan, 1900; Son of Man. Theological Bulletin. 1903. No. 11; The moral meaning of basic Christian dogmas. Vyshny Volochek, 1906. Weekly "Vek", 1907, No. 12, in the article by St. K. Aggeeva. Speech by V. Sventsitsky: “Vek”, 1907, No. 2. On bringing to court. responsibility: “Vek”, 1906, No. 7. In the same 1906, Florensky published “The Cry of Blood”. Bukharev Alexander Matveevich (Archimandrite Theodore; 1824–1871) – Russian theologian and critic. Florensky regularly published Bukharev's manuscripts when he was editor of the Theological Bulletin (1912–1917). Works: On Orthodoxy in relation to modernity. St. Petersburg, 1906; Letters to A. A. Lebedev. Theological Bulletin. 1915. No. 10–12. pp. 413–544; Apocalypse Research. Sergiev Posad, 1916 (previously in the “Theological Bulletin” in 1913–1916); About the Epistle to the Romans. Theological Bulletin. 1917. No. 4/5. pp. 464–477; Letters from Archimandrite Theodore (A.M. Bukharev) to Kazan friends. Sergiev Posad, 1917; About the spiritual needs of life. M., 1991. See about him: Dmitriev A. The Spirit of Christ in worldly work. Religious self-determination of culture in the activities of archimandrites. Theodora (A. M. Bukhareva). Sphinx. 1995. No. 1(3). pp. 50–61. Florensky's sermon, published as a brochure (Cry of Blood. M., 1906), was delivered in the church of the Moscow Theological Academy during the liturgy on March 12, 1906 [with the subtitle “A Word for the Week of Lenten” the text is reproduced in the brochure: S. L. Kravets. On spiritual beauty (P.A. Florensky: Religious and moral views). M., 1990. pp. 48–54). The commentary contains excerpts from a letter from V.F. Ern to his future wife E.D. Vekilova (Ern-Kalashnikova) dated March 26, 1906: “Florensky, who was once a very close person to me (and is now very dear to me), has been arrested. On March 12, in the academic church, he delivered a sermon (this is their custom for students to give sermons), in which with great religious feeling he spoke about the shootings, executions and murders now taking place. A protocol was drawn up. Academicians, that is, students, greeted his sermon with enthusiasm (this was precisely the day when the news of Schmidt’s execution arrived) and decided to publish it uncensored at their own expense, which they did. And on the 22nd, the authorities summoned Pavlusha and, having arrested him, sent him to Moscow, to the Taganskaya prison... All this happened terribly unexpectedly, because Pavlusha Florensky was very hostile to any kind of social activity and always said that you can only influence individual individuals, and on this point he is very different from us...” (p. 63). S. L. Kravets quotes the source: Correspondence of N. Luzina with P. A. Florensky. Historical and mathematical research. M., 1989. Issue. XXXI. P. 134). Seraphim the Martyr - born in Antioch, was beheaded during the reign of Emperor Hadrian (76–138, reigned from 117). Memorial Day July 29th. "Conversations and Words", 4th ed., 1904. pp. 100, 101, 126, 141, 150, 265, 418, 419. Oh, my prophetic soul! - the first line of Tyutchev’s poem (1855). Seraphim of Sarov (in the world - Prokhor Moshnin; 1760–1833) - Russian saint, Orthodox ascetic, preacher. Canonized in 1903. See: Chronicle of the Seraphim-Diveevo Convent. Works: Archim. Seraphim (Chichagov). 2nd ed. St. Petersburg, 1903. Motovilov Nikolai Aleksandrovich (1809–1887) - Siberian landowner, judicial official, interlocutor of Seraphim of Sarov (his dialogue with the saint in the winter of 1831 is quoted and analyzed by Florensky in the chapter “The Light of Truth” of the book “The Pillar and Statement of Truth.” The texts of the conversations are given in the book: Nilus S. The Great in the Small. M., 1911 (more than once reprinted in our time). Durylin Sergei Nikolaevich (1877–1954) - writer, critic, literary critic, religious thinker. In 1920 he accepted the priesthood, but soon resigned. Op.: In your corner. M., 1991. Gregory of Nyssa (335–after 394) - saint, Eastern Father of the Church, brother of Basil the Great, bishop of Nyssa, one of the three great Cappadocians along with Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian. Works: Poly, collected. cit.: In 8 vols. M., 1861–1872. Novoselov M.A. The forgotten path of experimental knowledge of God. 3rd ed. M., 1912. S. 72–74, 83, 91. Leo the Great (440‒461) – St., Pope of Rome. Memorial Day – February 8th. Pascal Blaise (1623‒1662) – French religious philosopher, mathematician, physicist. Initiator of the ideas of probability theory, differential calculus, hydrostatics. Works: Thoughts. SPb., 1843 (SPb., 1882; M., 1899; 1905; 1931:1994); Letters to the provincial. St. Petersburg, 1899. Clement of Rome is an apostolic holy man, father and teacher of the Church. According to legend, ap. Peter converted him to Christianity. He died in the third year of Trajan's reign (101). In the story of the unnamed “Acts of Martyrdom of St. Clement” (not earlier than the 4th century), Clement of Rome may be identified with Flavius ​​Clement, the Roman consul who suffered under Domitian. Part of the relics of Clement of Rome was transferred to Russia by Prince Vladimir. The day of remembrance of Clement of Rome in the Orthodox Church is November 25, and in the Catholic Church it is November 23. The corpus of texts associated with his name is called “Clementine”. See: Priselkov A. A. Review of St. Clement of Rome ... St. Petersburg, 1883. Chrysogonus - saint, martyr, suffered under the emperor Diocletian (c. 304). Memorial Day – December 22. Feofan the Recluse (in the world - Georgy Vasilyevich Govorov; 1815‒1894) - Bishop of Vladimir, recluse of the Vyshinsk Hermitage. Bely A. Beginning of the century. M., Leningrad, 1933. pp. 131‒132 and further about Florensky: p. 263, 270‒274. Elder Leonid (in the schema - Leo, in the world - Lev Danilovich Nagolkin; 1769‒1842) is a monk, the initial times of glory of the Optina eldership are associated with his name. John Chrysostom (c. 347‒407) – saint, father of the Church. His works (Creations. T. 1‒12. St. Petersburg, 1898‒1906) have been republished since 1993. Creations. SPb.: Spirit. academy. 1898. T. 1. P. 146, 147, 504, 510‒512, 514, 539, 541. Dionysius of Alexandria (the Great) (late 2nd century - 265) - saint, bishop of Alexandria, church writer. Works: Creations. Kazan, 1900 Eusebius. Church history. St. Petersburg, 1848. Book. V. pp. 380, 381. Perepetuya - saint, martyr. A noble Carthaginian woman was executed in 202 along with four servants for refusing to sacrifice to idols. While defending his book for his master’s degree, he said: “When studying religion, two questions arise: first, how salutary is this system of experiences and actions? And, secondly, how this system of experiences and actions is done is saving for me, since I am convinced of its saving in general.” He attributes the answer to the first question to “theodicy,” to which “The Pillar” is dedicated, and the second to “anthropodicy,” and although he stipulates that they can only be considered separately methodologically, he considers it necessary to make this conditional division. In the second part of his work, as he writes, “everything should be framed by the central question of anthropodicy - the Christological one.” “On the Purpose of the Christian Life,” p. 12. Diadochos (5th century) - blessed, bishop of Photiki in Illyrian Epirus, student, church writer. Author of the popular “Ascetic Word”. Callistus I (d. 1363) – saint, Patriarch of Constantinople in 1350‒1354 and 1355‒1363, theologian and translator of psalms. Memorial Day - July 20. Philokalia, vol. 3. “Ascetic, second. St. Fathers" – Callistus Kataf. About divine unity. Kazan, 1898. P. 100. Abba Silouan (d. 1938) – Athonite elder. See the essay about him in the book: Archbishop John of San Francisco (Shakhovskoy). Favorites. Petrozavodsk, 1992. P. 490‒491. Neil of Sinai (d. about 450) – reverend, prefect of Constantinople, church writer. Simeon the New Theologian (949‒1022) – reverend, church writer. Op. Words: In 2 vols. M., 1890‒1898; Monuments of Byzantine literature. M., 1969. P.128‒132. Abba Apollos was a Jew from Alexandria who converted to Christianity, a disciple of John the Baptist (Acts 18:24). The Epistle to the Hebrews is attributed to him. Pachomius the Great (d. 347) – venerable, hermit of the Theban desert, Christian ascetic. Maxim Yakovlevich Shik (1884‒1968) – poet, critic, German correspondent of “Libra”, one of the translators of W. James’s book “The Variety of Religious Experience” (Moscow, 1910; reprint, edition: St. Petersburg, 1993). "Conversations and Words". 4th ed., 1904. P. 100, 101, 126, 141, 150, 265, 418, 419. Gregory the Theologian (Nazianzen, 339‒389) - saint, member of the Cappadocian circle, one of the three ecumenical teachers of the Eastern Church, who determined the general trend in solving the Trinitarian problem in the Christian East. Works: Creations: In 6 volumes. M., 1843‒1846. Philokalia, 1889, vol. 5, p. 64. Barsanuphius the Great (late VB - late 6th century) - reverend, Eastern Christian hermit, church writer, opponent of the Origenist monks. Works: The Rev. Fathers Barsanuphius the Great and John, a guide to spiritual life, in answers to questions from students. M., 1855. "Guide to Spiritual Life", 1883, answer 136. Dmitry Sergeevich Merezhkovsky (1865‒1941) – Russian religious writer, publicist, poet, critic, translator. Modern ed.: Collection. cit.: In 4 vols. M., 1990. Reformers: Luther. Calvin. Pascal. Brussels, 1990; Sick Russia. Favorites. L., 1991; Acropolis: Selected literary-critical articles. M., 1991; Atlantis-Europe. The Mystery of the West. M., 1992. See memoirs about him 3. Gippius in the book: Merezhkovsky D.S. December 14. Gippius-Merezhkovskaya Z. N. Dmitry Merezhkovsky. M., 1991. Volzhsky A. The Life of Dostoevsky. Questions of religion. 1908. Issue. 1. P.178‒205. This entire prayer, according to a Syriac manuscript from the end of the 4th century, is as follows: “We ask You, Lord, that You would send Your Holy Spirit, the Witness of the suffering of the Lord Jesus, upon this sacrifice, so that this bread may be transformed into the body of Your Christ and this Cup into the blood of Your Christ.” The synaxarion is a collection of information about the faces of saints and holidays. Trubetskoy E. N. Light of Favorsky and the transformation of the mind. Rus. thought. 1914. May. Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 540, year of death unknown) - ancient Greek philosopher, author of a dialectical picture of the world. Works: Fragments of early Greek philosophers. Part I: From epic theocosmogonies to the emergence of atomism. M., 1989. P. 176‒257. The psalmist is David, the second king of Israel (c. end of the 11th - first quarter of the 10th century BC). See: Nikolsky N. King David and his psalms, St. Petersburg, 1908. Creations. SPb.: Spirit. Academy, 1898. T. 1. P. 146, 147, 504, 510‒512, 514, 539, 541. Abba Isaiah (d. 1090) - saint, native of the Kyiv land, since 1077 Bishop of Rostov. Op. see as part of the publication: Orthodox Interlocutor. Kazan, 1858. Publ. Kazan Theological Academy. Part 1. pp. 432‒450. Tikhon of Zadonsk (real name Timofey Savelyevich Kirillov; 1724‒1783) – saint, hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, spiritual writer. According to Fr. Andronicus (A.S. Trubachev), Elder Isidore (d. 1908) and S. Troitsky (d. 1910) are dedicated to the “Letters” of the “Pillar...”. Novoselov M.A. The forgotten path of experimental knowledge of God. 3rd ed. M., 1912. S. 72‒74, 83, 91. "Word on Christ's Resurrection." Add. to the Church Gazette". 1900. No. 15‒16. Leontyev Konstantin Nikolaevich (1831‒1891) - Russian religious thinker, publicist, writer. Works: Collection. cit.: T. 1‒9. M., 1912‒1913; Egyptian pigeon. Novel, stories, memoirs. M., 1991; Notes of a Hermit. M., 1992; Selected letters. St. Petersburg, 1993. See about him: Korolkov A. A. Prophecies of Konstantin Leontyev. St. Petersburg, 1991; Sivak A. F. Konstantin Leontyev. St. Petersburg, 1991; Theses of the All-Union Seminar dedicated to the work of K. N. Leontiev (1831‒1891). Kaluga, 1991. K. Leontiev, our contemporary. Comp. B. Andrianov, N. Malchevsky. St. Petersburg, 1993; K. N. Leontiev: pro et contra. Ed. preparation A. P. Kozyrev, A. A. Korolkov. Book 1‒2. St. Petersburg, 1995 (Series “Russian Way”). See about the aestheticism of K. N. Leontyev in “The Pillar...”: Excursion XXVII - “Aestheticism and Religion.” pp. 585‒586. Ave. Theodore the Studite. Praise to the great apostle and evangelist John. Add. to the Church Gazette". 1899. No. 38; Avva Evagrius. Philokalia, vol. 1, ed. 1908, p. 608; St. John Chrysostom. Creations. St. Petersburg, 1898. T. 1. P. 597; St. Ignatius the God-Bearer. Translation ed. Preobrazhensky. St. Petersburg, 1895. “To the Ephesians,” ch. 9. Anna Nikolaevna Schmidt (1851‒1905) – journalist, author of religious and mystical works. Modern ed.: Third Testament. M., 1993. Issue. 1. Radlov E. Essay on the history of Russian philosophy. Pg., 1920. Ignatius Brianchaninov (in the world - Dmitry Aleksandrovich Brianchaninov; 1807‒1867) - saint, bishop of Kazan and Chernigov, archimandrite of the Sergius Hermitage, in 1857‒1861. Bishop of the Caucasus, researcher of ascetic experience. In the 80s XIX century A six-volume volume of his works was published, republished in 1993‒1994. See about him: Sokolov N. L. Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov. His life, personality and literary activity. Kyiv, 1915. T. 1‒2. Canonized in 1988 Gold in azure. M., 1904. P. 251. Dmitry of Rostov (Daniil Tuptalo, 1651‒1709) – saint, metropolitan of Rostov. Using, among other things, Latin and Greek sources, he compiled the “Cheti-Minea.” Spiritual writer (“Irrigated Fleece,” 1680; “Search for the schismatic Bryn faith,” 1709). Samarin Fedor Dmitrievich (d. 1916) - one of the participants in the “Society of Seekers of Christian Enlightenment” (M. A. Novoselov, P. B. Mansurov, V. A. Kozhevnikov, S. N. Bulgakov, V. F. Ern, P. A. Florensky). See about him: Bulgakov S.N. Note on the occasion of the death of F.D. Samarin. Theological Bulletin. 1916. No. 10/12. pp. 578‒581. Also known is another F.D. Samarin, who lived in 1858-1920, a landowner of the Kazan, Samara, Astrakhan and Tula provinces, a zemstvo figure; member of the city council. Mentioned in “Yasnaya Polyana Notes” by Makovetsky (In 2 vols. M., 1981. T. 2. By decree). Bulatovich Alexander Ksaverevich - hieroschemamonk Anthony (1870‒1919), head of the Athos imyaslaviya, author of the book “Apology of Faith in the Name of God and in the Name of Jesus” (M., 1913). Tsvetaeva Marina Ivanovna (1892‒1941) – Russian poetess, critic. Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130‒202) – saint, father of the Church. Works: Works of St. Irenea. St. Petersburg, 1900. The preaching activities of Lord G.V. Redstock left a noticeable mark on the life of St. Petersburg in the 70s. XIX century: his Russian followers (V.A. Pashkov, Baron M.I. Korf, Count A.A. Bobrinsky, Prince M.M. Dondukov-Korsakov, F.N. Turner, partly, N.S. Leskov) organized in 1876. “Society for the Encouragement of Spiritual and Moral Reading”; The Pashkovite sect that arose on this basis published the magazine “Russian Worker” (1875‒1886). They propagated the idea that faith was sufficient for salvation, denied the possibility of salvation through good works, and rejected the veneration of icons and saints, sacraments and church hierarchy (a clear influence of Protestant doctrine). Arthur Schopenhauer (1788‒1860) – German philosopher, representative of voluntarism, art theorist. Works: Selected works. M., 1992; Free will and morality. M., 1992; Collection cit.: In 5 volumes. M., 1992. T. 1: The world as will and representation. Steel (marital name - Steel-Golyntein, maiden name - Necker) Anne Louise Germaine de (1766‒1817) - French writer, literary theorist, publicist, playwright. Works: Corinna, or Italy. M., 1969. Origen (c. 185‒253/254) is one of the founders of Christian theology, the first to formulate the main provisions of Christian doctrine using the categories of ancient Greek philosophy. The personal fate of Origen, as well as his theoretical legacy, was not easy and to this day has not received unambiguous interpretations in historical-theological and historical-philosophical science. A number of provisions of his doctrine were rejected by the Church, others, most often latently, predetermined the evolution of theology. Origen is not canonized, not recognized as the “Father of the Church”; in historical and ecclesiastical science he is usually interpreted as a “church writer.” Works: About the beginnings. Kazan, 1912 (M., 1993); Against Celsus. Kazan, 1912. Gregory the Wonderworker (c. 213‒c. 270) – saint, bishop of Neocaesarea (c. 200) Theological Encyclopedia. Ed. prof. Lopukhina- T. 4. S. 623, 625, 631, 640 and 1084. Anthony the Great (c. 260‒c. 355) – venerable, founder of monasticism. See the work about him: P. Florensky. Anthony of the novel and Anthony of the legend. Theological Bulletin. 1907. Nicholas Kavasila (1332 -beginning 1371) - late Byzantine mystical theologian, representative of hesychasm. See: Alexy (Dorodnitsyn). Byzantine church mystics of the 14th century. Orthodox interlocutor. Kazan, 1906. Main. cit.: Life in Christ. M., 1874. Nikita Stiphatus (Pectorate, 11th century) – monk of the Studite monastery in Constantinople, author of an anti-Roman treatise (1053). Pimen the Great - saint, Egyptian abbot, preacher, associate of the Egyptian ascetic Paisius the Great (d. 400). Alexey Mechev (1860‒1922) – archpriest, Moscow pastor and preacher. Works: Memoirs. Letters, sermons. Paris, 1970. See about him: Father Alexey Mechev. Ed. N. A. Struve. Paris, 1970. Florensky dedicated to Fr. Alexey Mechev wrote a number of essays: “Reasoning in the event of the death of Alexei Mechev’s father” (1923), a biographical essay “On the funeral eulogy of O. Alexey Mechev.” The publication of materials covering the connections between Florensky and Mechev and some memoirs about the latter was carried out by Abbot Andronik (Trubachev) (Moscow. 1990. No. 12. P. 160‒184). Gregory Palamas (1296‒1359) – saint, late Byzantine theologian, theorist of hesychasm (“In Defense of Sacred Silence”). For the Russian translation of his “Homilies”, see ed. archim. Ambrose (Pogodin) (Montrell, 1975; Conversations: In 3 vols. M., 1994). Fragments of op. see: Monuments of Byzantine literature. M., 1969. P. 366‒374. The reader will find a productive attempt to develop Palamas’s ideas in the works of a modern author: Khoruzhy S.S. Diptych of Silence. Ascetic teaching about man in theological and philosophical light. M., 1991; After the break. Paths of Russian philosophy. St. Petersburg, 1994. The life of the Abyssinian saint Yakferan Ekzie is quoted by Florensky (“Pillar...”, 301‒305) according to the source: Turaev B. (A.) Some lives of the Abyssinian saints. Byzantine timepiece. M., 1906. T. 13, issue. 2 (“Pillar...”, 749. Note 543). Zechariah - Abba, Rev. Apparently, an Egyptian desert-dweller-ascetic of the 4th century. Memorial Day – December 5th. “Sunday Reading,” June 19, 1849, No. 12, p. 126 (publication Kyiv. Theological Academy). About the second letter to Corinth, St. Clement of Rome, it says here: “This epistle, in its internal character and content, is worthy of the name under which it is eternal, and belongs, without a doubt, to the Apostolic age.” Hermas (Herma, Herma, 1st century) - saint, Roman Christian, mentioned by the ap. Paul (Rom. 16:14). The book “The Shepherd”, created in the apocalyptic genre, is attributed to him; published by P. Preobrazhensky in “Monuments of Christian Writing” (M., 1866). Smirnov (apparently Pyotr Semenovich Smirnov; 1861‒?) – professor at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, Moscow Theological Academy. Works: History of the Russian schism of the Old Believers. 2nd ed. St. Petersburg, 1895; Literature of history and denunciation of the Old Believer schism in the 19th century. Christian reading. 1901; Reverend Feofan. Tambov, 1906. Filaret (in the world – Vasily Mikhailovich Drozdov; 1783‒1867) – Metropolitan of Moscow. Church leader, initiator of the preparation of the publication of the Russian translation of the Bible (1858), famous preacher and spiritual writer. Prot. P. Smirnov. From the doctrine of the Church. Add. to the Church Gazette”, ed. at St. Orthodox Synod. 1901, no. 46. Church renewal. 1907. No. 11. John of Kronstadt (in the world - John Ilyich Sergeev; 1829‒1909) - saint, archpriest, prayer book, spiritual writer. Pupil of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy. Founded the “House of Industriousness” in Kronstadt (1882). Canonized in 1990. In addition to his complete works in 6 volumes, his works were published: Words and Teachings. St. Petersburg, 1887‒1889; My life in Christ. M., 1894 (several reprints in 1990‒1993); Conversations about God the Creator and Provider of the world. St. Petersburg, 1895; The truth about God... M., 1900; Knowledge of God and self-knowledge acquired from experience. St. Petersburg, 1900; Christian philosophy. St. Petersburg, 1902; Contemplation and feelings of the Christian soul. St. Petersburg, 1905; Thoughts of a Christian. St. Petersburg, 1905. Bolotov Vasily Vasilyevich (1853‒1900) – church historian. Master's thesis - “Origen's Doctrine of the Holy Trinity” (St. Petersburg, 1879) Works: Lectures on the history of the ancient Church. St. Petersburg, 1907, 1910. Issue. 1st See about him: Church Bulletin. 1900. No. 16; Christian reading. 1910. No. 2. Quote by: Bolotov V.V., prof. Lectures on the history of the ancient Church. St. Petersburg, 1910. T. 3. P. 18 ff. "Conversations and Words". 4th ed., 1904. P. 100, 101, 126, 141, 150, 265, 418, 419. “On the City of God”, 20, ch. 9. Hilary of Pictavia (Hilary of Poitiers, 315‒368) – saint, great teacher of the Western Church. See about him: Orlov A.P. Trinitarian views of Hilary of Pictavius. M., 1908. Recently an old carpenter told me the story of his loss of faith. He should have, like Florensky, met his Isidore, seen the Stone and the Church on it, but he did not meet anything except form. This is so typical, so scary, and in his eyes there was such a gentle sorrow of loneliness and misunderstanding that I cannot help but convey his story, literally. “I’m not against faith,” he told me. - Believe whoever you want. My father was a drunkard, but fair. Last year, at Easter, I bought a quarter,” went to the cemetery and poured it all on the grave: drink, old man, don’t mind... I even served the priest when I was a boy, blowing up the censer, ringing the bell tower. In the winter it was cold and dark, but in the summer it was crazy... I was honest: I would sweep the church, find a spot and put it in a box. And the headman took handfuls from the box. He was a hard worker, but he loved me because I obeyed in everything and respected the entire form. In confession you’re supposed to say: I’m a sinner, father, that’s what I’ve always said. He will ask me: Did you drag girls around? - Sinful, father. But I didn’t carry it. So you understand why this is? But you can’t say anything: the form... He fed me apples, but he kept doubting: was I stealing something?.. As for my faith, my doubts went into hunger strike. There was nothing to heat it with, it was cold. He says: Bring, Vaska, the icons. And they stood in the attic for centuries, huge. I demolished it, but it was like I hit it with an ax, and it seemed like something was cut off.” Favorsky Vladimir Andreevich (1886‒1964) – Russian artist, founder of the school of woodcuts, illustrator (author of the cover for Florensky’s book “Imaginaries in Geometry” (Pomorye, 1922). Popov Ivan Vasilievich (1867‒1937/38) – professor at the Moscow Theological Academy in the department of patrolology and history of religious thought; Master of Divinity since 1897; author of the books: “The Moral Law”; "The Idea of Deification in the Ancient Eastern Church." Golubtsov Alexander Petrovich (1860‒1911) – professor of church archeology and liturgics at the Moscow Theological Academy. Works: Origins of the history of ancient Russian icon painting. M., 1897; From Christian iconography. Sergiev Posad, 1903; Collection of articles on liturgics and church archeology. Sergiev Posad, 1911. See about him: Theological Bulletin. 1911. No. 7‒8. Weekly "Vek", 1907, No. 12, in the article by priest. K. Aggeeva. Speech by V. Sventsitsky: “Vek”, 1907, No. 2. On bringing to court. responsibility: “Vek”, 1906, No. 7. In the same 1906, Florensky published “The Cry of Blood”. Agraphs are sayings attributed to Jesus Christ, but not recorded in the Four Gospels. What to do? Questions of religion. 1908. Issue. 2. P. 80. Theodore the Studite (759–826) – reverend, Byzantine theologian, church leader, opponent of iconoclasm. Works: Works of our venerable father and confessor Theodore the Studite. St. Petersburg, 1907–1908. T. 1–2. See about him: Dobrosklonsky A. P. Rev. Theodore, confessor and abbot of Studio. Odessa, 1913–1914. Parts 1–2. Ave. Theodore the Studite. Catechetical teachings and testament. Kaluga, 1896. P. 42. Volkov Sergey Aleksandrovich (1899–1965) – student of P. Florensky at the Moscow Theological Academy (1917–1919), teacher of Russian language, literature, Russian history in secondary schools, vocational schools and at various courses in Zagorsk. In 1954–1960 – Head of the MDA office, taught Russian to graduate and foreign students there. See about him: Nikitin A.L. Keeper of Tradition (S.A. Volkov and his memories of the Moscow Theological Academy). Path: International Journal of Philosophy. M., 1994. No. 5. P. 160‒164. Published by: Path: International Journal of Philosophy. M., 1994. No. 5. P. 164–182 (published by A. L. Nikitin). S. A. Volkov’s memoir is a fragment of his book “Memories of the Moscow Theological Academy” (Finis Academiae). See preliminary publications: The Past. Historical almanac. Paris, 1988. T. 6. P. 321–324; Symbol. Paris, 1994. T. 29. Spassky Anatoly Alekseevich (1866–1916) – theologian, church historian. Editor of the Theological Bulletin in 1898–1903. Works: History of dogmatic movements in the era of the Ecumenical Councils. St. Petersburg, 1906. T.1. Under the pseudonym "A. Sotersky" A. A. Spassky published "Publicly accessible lectures on the history of the Western European Middle Ages" (Theological Bulletin. 1910. No. 2-12). There was also a separate publication. Corinthian Apollon Apollonovich (1868–1937; received his surname from his grandfather, M.P. Barentsev, an Arzamas peasant who, having graduated from the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, received a gold medal, the title of academician and surname for his graduation project in the “Corinthian style”), religious-romantic poet, prose writer, translator. Based on folklore, he compiled the book “People's Rus'. All year round legends, beliefs, customs and proverbs of the Russian people" (M., 1901). Author of more than twenty poetry collections. Works: Songs of the heart. M., 1896; Happened. Stories, pictures and thoughts. St. Petersburg, 1896; Hymn to beauty. St. Petersburg, 1899; Late lights. St. Petersburg, 1912; In the rays of a dream. 2nd ed. St. Petersburg, 1912; In the thousand-year struggle for the Motherland. There were events from the 10th to the 20th centuries. Pg., 1917. See about him: Russian writers 1800–1917. Biographical Dictionary. T. 3: K-M. M, 1994. P. 70–71 (note by L.N. Ivanova). Ratgauz Daniil Maksimovich (1868–1937) – poet, emigrant since 1922. Author of popular romances. Works: Complete. collection poems: T. 1–3. M., 1906; My songs. M., 1917. See about him: Sumtsov N.F. About the poetry of Ratgauz. Kharkov, 1899. Frug Semyon Grigorievich (1860–1916) - poet. Works: Complete. collection cit.: T. 1‒6. St. Petersburg, 1904; Full collection cit.: T. 1–3. 6th ed. Odessa, 1913. See: Florensky P. The Pillar and Ground of Truth. Experience of Orthodox theodicy. M., 1914. The symbols and Emblem, by decree... of the Emperor of Moscow, Great Sovereign Peter Alekseevich, were printed. Amsterdam, 1705. “To complicate inspiration with cunning - that’s Byzantium. This is how it is from the confusion of palace life to the canons, and to the headpieces on manuscripts” (Rozanov V. Fallen Leaves. St. Petersburg, 1913. P. 335). Picodella Mirandola (1463–1494) - one of the prominent figures of the Italian Renaissance; studied the works of the Neoplatonists and Kabbalah. Agrippa of Nettesheim (1487–1535) was a German scientist and thinker who tried to combine the ideas of Neoplatonism with magic and Christianity. Contemporaries considered him a warlock. See Agrippa of Nettesheim. Famous adventurer of the 16th century. Critical-biographical essay by D. Orsier. Ed., with introduction and notes. Valeria Bryusova. M., 1913. Obviously, Volkov was present at one of Florensky’s two test lectures, given at the MDA on September 17, 1908 and published under the title “Universal Human Roots of Idealism” (Theological Bulletin. 1909. No. 2. pp. 284–297; No. 3. pp. 409–423). Losev A. F. Essays on ancient symbolism and mythology. M., 1939. T. 1.S. 680. Author's edition. “Plato’s Cave” is a Platonic symbol from the beginning of Book VII of the Republic (514a‒517d). In Russian religious philosophy, the image of “Plato’s cave” formed an independent plot, apparently starting with P. Chaadaev (see: Chaadaev P. Ya. Articles and letters. M., 1987. P. 142). L. Shestov connected the image of Dostoevsky’s “underground” with Plato’s symbol: “After all, Plato also knew the underground, only he called it a cave and created a magnificent parable about people as cave dwellers that thundered throughout the world. The same thing happened to Dostoevsky in the underground as to Plato in the cave: new eyes appeared and where everyone saw reality, man sees only shadows and ghosts” (Shestov L. Overcoming self-evidence. Modern notes. Paris, 1921. Vol. 8. P. 144). In a remark regarding the culture-fighting sentiments of the century (one of the motives of Plato’s utopia “expulsion of the Muses”) Vyach. Ivanov noted: “... Expelling the Muses would only be a palliative: the writings will appear again and their scrolls will again reflect the same unchangeable mental image of the prisoners of Plato’s Cave chained to the rock” (Vyach. Ivanov, M. Gershenzon. Correspondence from two corners. Pg., 1921. P. 21). Florensky, who more than once pointed to “Plato’s cave” as the possibility of symbolic epistemology (see: “Reverse Perspective”, 1919), knows another cave - the pre-temporal womb, where the first things of the world are born: “Below, leave fear, go down into the cave. Drops of time fall from the arches and fall into the depths of darkness. As in a watchmaker's workshop, innumerable rhythms catch up and overtake each other. The spindles of fate are humming elastically. The hearts of all beings pulsate in these depths. Here, from darkness and rays, all the things of the world are born. Here weaves, from rhythmic vibrations, fast and slow, dull and sonorous, from hums and cave echoes, a living cover that is called the Universe” (Florensky P.A. On Poppy. Works. M., 1990o T. 2. P. 20; cf.: Nepshchev’s Not Admiration. Theological Bulletin. 1915. T. 2. P. 528). Russian philosophy saw a special merit of the symbol of “Plato’s cave” in terms of the history of self-consciousness: “Plato carved out his “Cave” in the self-consciousness of humanity” (Ern V.F. The Supreme Comprehension of Plato, 1917. Works. M., 1991. P. 465). S. Bulgakov contrasted the darkness of “cave” knowledge with intuitive insight: “Science, with its instrumentality and pragmatism, is connected both with the location of the prisoners in the cave and with their relationship to the light source. Science, born in the kingdom of shadows and penumbra, becomes unnecessary, since the cave would be illuminated directly by light” (Bulgakov S.I. Philosophy of Economics. M., 1990. P. 137). “Plato’s Cave” received special attention in avant-garde literature: V. Bryusov - “I returned to the bright land” (1896), “Contempt” (1900), “To the Bronze Horseman” (1906), “Faithful to the Lyre” (1916); A. Roslavlev - “In the Cave” (1905); E. Zamyatin - “Cave” (1922); M. Aldanov - “Cave” (1930s). We are talking about the opera Orpheus and Eurydice (1762) by Gluck Christoph Wallibald (1714–1787). See: Florensky P. A. First steps of philosophy. From lectures on the history of philosophy. Vol. 1. Sergiev Posad, 1917 (published in the “Theological Bulletin” in different years). Rozanov V. Fallen leaves. St. Petersburg, 1913. P. 414. It was a small brochure, approximately 1/8 of a sheet in size, about 50 pages. On the cover on the right, at the top - “As a manuscript.” In the middle is the name "Academiae Historia Arcana". Below – “Sergiev Posad. Printing house of I. Ivanov. 1914". It contained a number of poems and songs from academic folklore. Thus, one of the poems, imitating Pushkin’s “Song of the Prophetic Oleg,” tells how the inspector of the Academy, Hieromonk Kirill, tries to seduce students, and asks the rector, Archimandrite Lavrenty, about the success of his enterprise. Another work, according to S. S. Glagolev, written by Archpriest D. Rozhdestvensky, is entitled: “From the collection for the 200th anniversary of the MDA. In memory of the deceased heads and mentors of the Academy, not only from the white clergy and secular rank, but even from the monastic rank. Sergiev Posad, 2014.” What follows is a pamphlet on Archimandrite Hilarion and some of the monastic leaders of the Lavra - Archimandrite Tovnya, Archimandrite Dosifei, etc.: “Reflections on the Aquarium. After the monastic meal and afternoon rest.” Unfortunately, I did not save the text. It tells how Hilarion, looking at the aquarium standing in his reception room, thinks about fish and caviar and comes to the idea that it would be useful for the monks of the Lavra to write about caviar for their candidate essays: they do not know foreign and ancient languages, but here they could write on the basis of personal experience. It would be flattering for them to receive a candidate's badge, especially since some of them sometimes achieve high degrees. True, Hilarion immediately notes with irony that this badge is not suitable for them: it would be “like putting gold in the nostrils of a pig.” Then Hilarion, supposedly with sadness, reflects on what high titles the eastern patriarchs bear - “Pope”, “Judge of the Universe”, “Thirteenth Apostle” - being, moreover, only “slaves of the Sultan”, but, catching himself and exclaiming - “Do not lead me into temptation!” - shouts: “Vasily, some tea!” The language of the pamphlet is sharp and apt, completely in the spirit of Rozhdestvensky’s statements when, in the words of N.S. Leskov, when describing Avvakum of China (“Mysterious Portents”), was “having read the labels”... The quoted words of P. A. Florensky are found in another, most interesting and significant work of the collection - “Petition against the Black Deacon Tryphon,” which I speak about in more detail in connection with Hierodeacon Vassian (Pyatnitsky). “The Secret History of the Academy” was published, apparently, in an extremely limited edition, and if it was in the academic library, it was not given to students, and I knew nothing about it until approximately 1925, when I received it from S.S. Glagolev, no longer as a student, but as a colleague at school. No less curious is that the name “Academiae Historia Arcana” appears in “Memoirs of Professor M.D. Muretov” (Theological Bulletin. 191b. No. 10–12. P. 602) not as an indication of a specific brochure, but as a kind of folklore esoteric term applied to a similar collection of folklore order, only handwritten, which existed in 1873–1877 and was then quickly burned. Senior priests, all-knowing. About the trip of the futurists to Florensky in 1916. see: Petrovsky D. M. Memories of Velimir Khlebnikov. LEF. 1923. 1 (March). pp. 145–147. Vvedensky A I. Church and State. M., 1923. P. 13. There is an undiscovered article by Florensky “Absolutism and Monarchy”, the abstract of which, as commentators believe, is the theses “On the goal and meaning of progress” (1905) (Florensky P. A. Works: In 4 vols. M., 1994. pp. 719–720). See in the note “Orthodoxy” (1923): “...Orthodoxy is firmly and internally connected even with political history - through autocracy. Faith in the tsarist autocracy, a mystical attitude towards it, is one of the indispensable elements of Orthodoxy” (Ibid. p. 662). Theological Bulletin. 1916. No. 6–7. pp. 538–539. It was published as a separate brochure: Around Khomyakov. Sergiev Posad, 1917. Florensky P. Scream of Blood. Word for the Week of the Worship of the Cross. Said in the MDA church during the liturgy on March 12, 1873 after the death of Jesus Christ. M., 1906. Publication of M-na and Kh-va. It is worth paying attention not only to the content of the sermon, in which Florensky, then still a priest, denounces the government terror after the suppression of the revolution of 1905 and the brutal executions associated with it, but also to the date of the sermon, which diverted the censor’s attention from momentary events to something “past” (1873!), although its recalculation to the actual date from Christmas, and not from the death of Christ, certainly points to 1906. Let me give you a few more excerpts that give an idea of this wonderful Christian – and civil – document! Florensky's consciousness. “The godless deed of killing the Son of God as a rebel corrupting the people has been accomplished. And this lesson, it would seem, should fill the soul of every king, every ruler, every priest, every patriot, every indulger in murder with horror of violent death. Now let's move through the 19th centuries to the most Christian center of what is considered the most Christian of states. Don’t you understand that again and again Christ is shot, and hanged, and beaten, and desecrated? Don’t you understand that every shot is aimed at the body of Christ?.. All this is happening before our eyes, before the eyes of Christians! The groans of the tortured and killed, those killed without repentance, the cries of the prisoners and the insulted rush to the altar of the Almighty and drown out our prayers. The tears and sobs of thousands of mothers and sisters interfere with our chants. God cannot be with us: the blood shed has risen up to our necks; Soon we will drown in the ocean of our own crimes. Be careful that the words of the Lord Jesus do not come true over us: “May all the righteous blood shed on earth come to you, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachi, whom you killed between the church and the altar.” Let this pass from us, Lord Jesus! Do not let the new Pharisees mock your death again when they remember your suffering!..” Tareev Mikhail Mikhailovich (1866–1934) – Russian theologian, professor of the department of moral theology of the Moscow Theological Academy. In May 1917 he replaced Florensky as editor of the Theological Bulletin. Author of the essay “The Destruction of Our Lord Jesus Christ” (Moscow, 1901), as well as “Fundamentals of Christianity” in 5 volumes (1908–1910). Works: Criticism of the economic teachings of K. Marx. Theological Bulletin. 1912. No. 7/8. pp. 596–651; No. 9. P. 1–37; No. 10. P. 328–361; No. 11. P. 569–605; No. 12. P. 739–759; New theology. Right there. 1917. No. 6/7. pp. 3–53; No. 8/9. pp. 168–224; Church and theology. Right there. 1917. No. 10/12.; The ideology of socialism. Right there. 1918. No. 1/2, 3/5, 6/9. See about him: Rozanov V.V. Sweet and bitter in Rus'. To the history of Prof. M. M. Tareeva. Russian word. 1910. June 23, July 27 and 28; Philosophy of life. Sergiev Posad, 1916. I will give the first (biographical) part of the quoted article: “Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky, mathematician, physicist, theologian. Genus. in 1882. He graduated from Moscow University in 1904, where he worked mainly in the mathematical department under the leadership of N.V. Bugaev and studied philosophy in the historical and philological department under the leadership of S.N. Trubetskoy and L.M. Lopatin. In 1904 entered the Moscow Theological Academy and focused mainly on philosophy and the history of religions. In 1908 he was elected to the department of history of philosophy. In 1914 he defended his master's thesis “On Spiritual Truth” and in the same year he was ordained a priest without holding a parish position. In 1919 he began working in the field of technology; From that time on, he served in the Supreme Economic Council, first at the Karbolit plant, and then at Glavelektro, where he was busy with the issue of electric fields and dielectrics...” (Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Granat T.V., Vol. 44, 1926). Trotsky (Bronstein) Lev (Leiba) Davidovich (1879–1940) - political figure, one of the leaders of the communist movement in Russia, organizers of the October Revolution, leaders of the Red Army, later an opponent of Stalinism, publicist, literary critic. Works: Stalin: In 2 vols. Ed. Yu. Feltshtinsky. M., 1990; Literature and Revolution (1923). M., 1991; My life: Experience of autobiography. M., 1991; See about him: Deutscher Isaac. Trotsky in exile. M., 1991. In the biographical information in the book: Zhegin L.F. The Language of a Painting (Conventions of Ancient Art) (M., 1970) about the author it is said: “Lev Fedorovich Zhegin (Shekhtel) was born in 1892 in Moscow, in the family of the famous architect F. O. Shekhtel. He studied painting, first in the studio of K. F. Yuon, and then at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Among his close friends were the artists M. F. Larionov, V. N. Chekrygin, the poet V. Mayakovsky, the philosopher P. A. Florensky, and the mathematician N. N. Luzin. Together with Chekrygin, he designed, among other things, Mayakovsky’s first book of poems “I”, participated in various art exhibitions (“World of Art”, 1917–1921; “Makovets”, 1922–1924; International Exhibition in Venice 1928–1930, etc.); a number of his works are kept in the Tretyakov Gallery and other museums. At the same time he conducted teaching and artistic design work. Back in the 20s. L. F. Zhegin became interested in studying the perspective and composition of ancient painting, in particular Russian. Only in recent years did he begin to publish the results of his research in the form of articles, which aroused interest not only from art historians, but also from representatives of semiotics and cybernetics. Thus, this book is the fruit of almost 40 years of work by the author. Lev Fedorovich was not destined to live to see the publication of his book. He died on October 1, 1969; buried at Preobrazhenskoye Cemetery in Moscow." The cited edition is supplied with a large introductory article by B. A. Uspensky “Towards the Study of the Language of Ancient Painting” (pp. 4‒34). The publications of L. F. Zhegin are indicated: Spatio-temporal unity of a painting. Symposium on the Structural Study of Sign Systems. M., 1962; Some spatial forms in ancient Russian painting. Old Russian art of the 17th century. M., 1962; "Iconic slides." Spatio-temporal unity of a painting. Works on sign systems. Tartu, 1955. Vol. P. Published according to the publication: Bulletin of the RHD. Paris; New York; M., 1981. No. 135. (III - IV). pp. 61–70. “Makovchane” - members of the association of artists “Makovets”, which was founded in 1921–1922, was part of the Union of Artists and Poets “Art - Life”. Until 1925, exhibitions of Makovets residents were organized under a double title: in 1922 - “The first exhibition of paintings by the Union of Artists and Poets “Art is Life” (“Makovets”)”; in 1924 – “The second exhibition of paintings “Makovets” (“Art is Life”)”; On December 26, 1925, the “Third Exhibition of Paintings “Makovets” (the last one) was opened. A. Ya. Tugenhold wrote about this group: “If the Knave of Diamonds are, first of all, materialists, then the Makovites are people of a different mental attitude. “Makovets” is the last link of Russian symbolism. Both P. Florensky and V. Khlebnikov collaborated in the ideological organ “Makovets” (“Art-Life”). But the most characteristic figure is the young artist N. Chekrygin, who died untimely in 1928 (under a train) [here, apparently, there is a typo: this means Vasily Nikolaevich Chekrygin (born 1897); see Catalog of his works (Moscow, 1969). – K.I.], a talent of wide scope and internal combustion, endowed with great imagination and a peculiar tragic feeling of life. The imprint of some spiritual anguish was reflected in the work of his friends and followers, giving some of them an attraction to such old masters as Goya and El Greco. At the same time, both in Chekrygin’s work and in the painting of “Makovets” there is very little Russian (this is how they differ from the “Jack of Diamonds”, who combine French with purely Moscow); “Makovites” are entirely Westerners. This group is one of the most cultural in our art (features of this subtle culture are marked, in particular, by the works of Fonvizin and Zefirov, and then by Mashkevich, Ryndin). But here is also her undoubted weakness, eclecticism, and tendency towards stylization. The face of the Makovites is complex, but in the end, isn’t this complexity due to makeup and isn’t it time for him to wash off the paint in order to become himself?..” (Tugenhold A. Ya. From the history of Western European and Russian and Soviet art. M., 1987. P.219–220). In the first issue of the group’s magazine “Makovets” (published in 1922), Florensky published a well-known article “Church performance as a synthesis of arts” (pp. 28–32); in the same issue, see his name under the manifesto of the Prologue group. Florensky was familiar with the artists listed here as a teacher at VKHUTEMAS (since 1921); in the second issue Florensky’s work “Heavenly Signs” was published (pp. 14–16). Among the names listed by Zhegin are: Alexander Alexandrovich Vesnin (1883–1959), who, together with the brothers Leonid Alexandrovich (1880–1933) and Viktor Alexandrovich (1882–1950), led the constructivist movement in architecture in 1925; Vladimir Evgrafovich Tatlin (1855–1953) – painter, artist, designer; Fyodor Avgustovich Stepun (1884–1965) – Russian religious thinker. Also mentioned are Mikhail Semenovich Rodionov (1885–1956) – graphic artist; Pestel Vera Efimovna (1896–1952) – painter; Chernyshev Nikolai Mikhailovich (1885–1973) – painter; Babichev Alexey Vasilievich (1887–1963) – sculptor, painter, graphic artist, art theorist, professor at VKHUTEMAS. See about the “Makovites”: Lapshin V.P. From the history of artistic life in Moscow in the 1920s. "Makovets" Soviet art history-79. M., 1980. Issue. 2. The working name of the group goes back to the name of the hill on which in the middle of the 14th century. Rev. Sergius of Radonezh founded a monastery in honor of the Holy Trinity. Later, Sergiev Posad arose around the Lavra. Florensky lived in these places in 1904–1933. See article: Florensky P. A. Dostokhvalny “Makovets”. Essays. Paris, 1985. Vol. 1, pp. 380–385. Giatsintov Vladimir Evgenievich (1855–1933) – art critic, playwright, professor at Moscow University. Under this title, a series of books by Florensky, united by a common plan and a common ideological orientation, was to be published by the Pomorye publishing house. Bobrov Sergei Pavlovich (1889–1971) – poet, critic, poetic critic. Meyerhold Vsevolod Emilievich (1874–1940) - Russian Soviet director. Member of the CPSU (b) since 1918. Headed in 1920–1938. theater in Moscow (since 1923 - Meyerhold Theater). Repressed. Rehabilitated posthumously. We are talking about the first arrest in 1928, and the deportation of Florensky to Nizhny Novgorod. Peshkova Ekaterina Pavlovna (1876–1965) - the first wife of M. Gorky. Einstein Albert (1879–1955) – German-American physicist, mathematician, creator of the theory of relativity. Florensky showed keen attention to Einstein’s concepts, which affected the book “Imaginaries in Geometry” (1922), where an attempt was made that intrigued readers to substantiate the presence of a relativistic principle in Dante’s picture of the world. The principle of relativity, Florensky said, “was accepted by me not at all after a long discussion or even without study, but simply because it was a weak attempt to put into a concept a different understanding of the world. The general principle of relativity is, to some extent, a rounded and simplified fairy tale of mine about the world” (To my children... pp. 193–194). William Hogarth (1697–1764) – English painter, graphic artist, and art theorist. In ch. VII of his treatise “Analysis of Beauty” (1753) gives the following definition: “A wavy line, as a line of beauty, is even more diverse (than straight and curved lines - K.I.) and consists of two curved opposite lines, and therefore becomes even more beautiful and pleasant; even the hand, drawing such a line on paper, makes a living movement with a pen or pencil. And, finally, the serpentine line, bending and twisting simultaneously in different directions, gives pleasure to the eye, forcing it to follow the infinity of its diversity...” (L., 1987. P. 139). See also the extensive introductory article by Academician M.P. Alekseev, which covers the history of the perception of Hogarth’s ideas in Russia (pp. 3–104). Florensky analyzes the spatial organization of a painting in the works “Iconostasis” (1922), “Reverse Perspective” (1919), “Analysis of Spatiality in Artistic and Visual Works” (M., 1993), its first fragments were published in the magazine “Decorative Art in the USSR” (1982. No. 1. pp. 25–29). Komarovsky Vasily Alekseevich (1881–1914) – count, son of the horsemaster of the imperial court. Artist and Tsarskoye Selo poet. He died in a psychiatric hospital. Author of the only book of poems, “The First Pier” (1913). See: Russian poetry of the “Silver Age”, 1890–1917: Anthology. M., 1993. pp. 687–689. Alexey Fedorovich Losev (1893–1988) – philosopher, philologist, art critic, historian of aesthetics and culture, linguist. In 1915 he graduated from the department of classical philology and the history department of Moscow University. Since 1911 - visitor and speaker at religious and philosophical meetings in the Society named after. Vl. Solovyova; Member of the Free Academy of Spiritual Culture. He made his debut in print with the article “Eros in Plato” (1916). In the 20s the main range of scientific interests was determined: eight books were published in three years: “Ancient Cosmos and Modern Science” (1927), “Music as a Subject of Logic” (1927), “Philosophy of the Name” (1927), “Dialectics of Artistic Form” (1927), “Dialectics of Number in Plotinus” (1928), “Criticism of Platonism in Aristotle” (1929), “Essays” ancient symbolism and mythology" (1930), "Dialectics of myth" (1930). In 1923, he discussed imyaslavsky problems with Florensky. On April 18, 1930 he was arrested, in 1931 he was sentenced to 10 years in correctional camps. After L. M. Kaganovich’s report at the 16th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, and M. Gorky’s speeches in Pravda and Izvestia (1931), Losev spent more than 2 years in the camps. Today, the bibliography of the thinker’s works includes more than a thousand titles; in its center is a multi-volume work on the history of ancient culture, unprecedented in the breadth of its coverage of material, “The History of Ancient Aesthetics” (1963–1994). Works: From early works. M., 1990; Philosophy of the name. M., 1990; Vl. Soloviev and his time. M., 1990; Philosophy, mythology, culture. M., 1991; Life. St. Petersburg, 1993; Being. Name. Space. M., 1993; Essays on ancient symbolism and mythology. M., 1993. See about him: A.F. Losev and the culture of the 20th century: Losev readings. M., 1991; Khoruzhy S.S. Rearguard battle. Khoruzhy S.S. After the break. Paths of Russian philosophy. St. Petersburg, 1994, pp. 209–253. Excerpts from Losev’s memoirs about Florensky have been published more than once: Vestnik RKhD. 1988. No. 153; Russian Abroad in the year of the millennium of the baptism of Rus'. M., 1991. S. 455–460; Florensky P. Works. M., 1990. T. 2. P. 278–288; Bibikhin V.V. From the stories of A.F. Losev. Started. 1993. No. 2. P. 124–144. Among the works connecting the work of A. Losev with the legacy of Florensky, see: Stepanov Yu. S. “Law” and “antinomy” in the humanities from Descartes Florensky and Losev. A. F. Losev and the culture of the 20th century. M., 1991. pp. 38–51. Published according to the publication: Context-90. M., 1990. P. 6–24 (Publication by Yu. A. Rostovtsev and P. V. Florensky). Florensky P. The Pillar and the Statement of Truth. M., 1914. Lorenz (Lorentz) Hendrik (1853–1928) - Dutch physicist and engineer. Nobel laureate (1902). Losev recalls one of the Lorentz transformations, which substantiates the fundamental principle of the theory of relativity. A.F. Losev addressed all his interlocutors as “you”. The special, or particular, theory of relativity was created by A. Einstein already in 1905. The archive of P. A. Florensky preserved a summary of this report, written by the hand of an unknown person. Vvedensky Alexander Ivanovich (1888‒1946) – leader of the renovationist “living church”, head of the “Union of Communities of the Ancient Apostolic Church”. Klyuchevsky Vasily Osipovich (1841‒1911) – Russian historian-sociologist, teacher. As the author of the article “The Significance of St. Sergius for the Russian People and State” (Essays and Speeches: Second collection of articles. M. B/g. P. 199‒215) and the work “The Gracious Educator of the Russian National Spirit” (Sergiev Posad, 1908), Klyuchevsky shares with Florensky their common Moscow-soil perception of the Guardian Angel of Russia. See: G. P. Fedotov: “Three Capitals” (1926); "Klyuchevsky's Russia" (1932). Works by P. Florensky about the teacher. Sergius: “Prayer icons of St. Sergius” (Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate. 1969. No. 9. P. 80‒90); “Trinity-Sergius Lavra and Russia” (Florensky P.A. Justification of Cosmos. St. Petersburg, 1994. P. 159‒183). See also: Hegumen Andronik (Trubachev). Russian spirituality in the life of St. Sergius and his disciples. Theological works. M., 1989. T. 29. P.225‒253. Losev A.F. The death of bourgeois culture and its philosophy. Huebscher A. Thinkers of our time. M., 1962. P. 317. Muravyov Valerian Nikolaevich (1885‒1932?) 1932?) - Russian philosopher. Works: Mastering time. M., 1924. Florensky and Muravyov are brought closer to Losev by attention to the problem of the name. See: Aksenov G.P. Time-power (About Valerian Muravyov and his philosophy). Questions of philosophy. 1992. No. 1. P. 93. Zubov V.P. – translator, historian of science and culture. Loseva Valentina Mikhailovna (nee Sokolova; 1898‒1954) - mathematician, wife of A.F. Losev, married to him by P.A. Florensky in Sergiev Posad on June 5, 1922, on Spiritual Day. See about her: Taho-Godi A. A. About V. M. Loseva. Started. 1993. No. 2. P. 107‒112 (there is also her preface to the unpublished book by A.F. Losev “Dialectical Foundations of Mathematics”: P. 113‒123; letter to her by A.F. Losev: P. 145‒157). Address on the surviving envelope. Father Irenaeus is an Athonite elder, a leader of the Imenaslav movement. See about him: Bulatovich A. My struggle with the name fighters on the Holy Mountain. Pg., 1917. For material reflecting Florensky’s participation in the Imenaslav plot, see: Works. T. 2. See also the commentary on the first publications of articles: Slavik’s Studio. Budapest, 1988. No. 34/1. pp. 9‒25. Berdyaev N. A. Self-knowledge (Experience of philosophical autobiography). M., 1991. P. 185 (collective quotation). N. Berdyaev’s article “The Refined Thebaid (Religious Drama of Durtal Huysmans)” was first published in “Russian Thought” (1910. July) and then reprinted as an appendix to the book “Philosophy of Freedom” (1911). This article has nothing to do with Florensky. Levin Joseph Davidovich (1901‒1984) – Soviet philosopher, jurist. As stated in his biographical information, “he graduated from the philosophical department of Moscow University. He actively participated in Moscow philosophical circles in the 1920s. He did not join any of the philosophical trends widespread in those years - neither religious philosophers, nor phenomenologists, nor Marxists. At that time he was mainly concerned with the problems of philosophy of knowledge, philosophy of culture and logic. Not a single one of his philosophical works was published (the book “Philosophy of Knowledge,” highly appreciated by G. G. Shpet and recommended by him for publication, after traveling through censorship authorities for two years, was ultimately banned in 1924). He worked almost his entire life at the Institute of State and Law, was a Doctor of Law (since 1939) and a professor, but all his life he considered philosophy to be his calling. In 1950‒1960 a large philosophical work was written, including as sections metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics and philosophy of culture, which was based on the metaphysical system he developed” (Historical and Philosophical Yearbook '91. M., 1991. P. 270‒271). Works: Sixth plan. Historical and Philosophical Yearbook 91. M., 1991. P. 271‒306. In 1994‒1995 A two-volume volume of philosophical works by I. D. Levin was published in Moscow. Published from the first publication: Questions of Philosophy. 1991. No. 5. P. 60‒65. Publisher – Yu. I. Levin. And I got sick. An excerpt from the diary of a 21-year-old student will help to better understand what follows: “November 22, 1922. I am very impressed by Florensky’s new book. I am faced with the question: to be or not to be, to remain a free thinker or to give up... The strangest thoughts come to mind: how to live further, whether it is necessary to rebuild my whole life... What if this is just tendentious apologetics? But she’s very talented...” Supreme Being (French). Decency - English. Thinking on order - English.