The relationship between Platonist and existential attitudes in the religious philosophy of Pavel Florensky

Contents Introductory remarks At the origins of realistic symbolism Early creativity Platonist object-centrism Cult as a healer of culture Synergistic symbolism Platonism and Christianity Caucasian symbol Platonism and existential thought The thematic focus of the work offered to the reader is determined by the relationship between the two key words included in its title - “Platonism” and “existentiality”. We are talking about the relationship between these fundamental philosophical and worldview principles in the work of P. A. Florensky. “If Plato’s idea is interpreted as a living personal concrete spirit, then existential thought converges with it [Platonism], if as a hypostatized abstract thought, then it diverges” 1 . In this work, we essentially clarify and concretize this statement of ours: Plato’s idea is interpreted by Pavel Florensky as a living face, a concrete spirit, but those created by it as an object of necessity stop the freedom of the human person. Even in this way, interpreted Platonism is unlikely to be seamlessly compatible with Christian-oriented anthropology, which is the basis of the existential thinking that we are talking about in our work. However, we will refrain from making judgments ahead of the research. This is all the more appropriate since its purpose is not to render verdicts, but to in-depth think through not a new problem that has given rise to an endless dispute waged on the “watersheds” of philosophical thought between “Athens” and “Jerusalem” 2 . Daring to write about the work of Fr. Pavel, it is impossible not to pay tribute to the works of S.S. Khoruzhy, who already in the early 70s studied and published the thinker’s manuscripts. Khoruzhim said, in our opinion, a lot of true and deep things about the work of Fr. Paul and his life's origins. Without aiming to analyze his interpretation of Florensky’s thought, we will only note certain points that are correlated with the topic of our research. The contrast between “biblical-Christian ontology”, as a dynamic and historical and, we would say, existential ontology, and a Hellenic-Platonist, ahistorical and static ontology, runs like a red thread through his interpretation of the work of Fr. Pavel. Analyzing the introductory letter-essay that opens the series of works “At the Watersheds of Thought,” Khoruzhy writes: “As a result, the history of existence is decisively transferred from the existential to the cosmic key, and instead of the drama of human freedom, we again see the rotation of the celestial spheres” 3 . We cannot ignore his other remark, which states “the extreme convergence of Christianity and Platonism, Russian Orthodoxy and the Hellenic mystery religion” in the creative personality of Fr. Paul, constituting “the foundation of his spiritual world” 4. The final judgment of the researcher - “Florensky’s philosophy is entirely within the framework of the static picture of existence” 5 - almost verbatim repeats the verdict of N. A. Berdyaev (“the ontologism of Father Florensky ... is the strengthening of any static givenness and the denial ... of all dynamics”) 6. The ending of Berdyaev’s work, which we used here, leads the reader to the idea of ​​the marginality of the figure of Florensky “in the entire context of Russian spirituality” 7 . This judgment makes us recall Berdyaev’s phrase about Florensky’s “renegadeness”, spoken in a polemic heat, although at the same time consistent with the conviction of its author. However, the thesis about “marginality” is immediately disavowed by the clarification: “a philosophy that fully corresponds ... to the central channel” of Russian spirituality “has not yet been created in Russia” 9 (it still does not exist). It's hard to disagree with this. But then the thesis about Florensky’s “marginality” loses its weight. Fundamentally new opportunities for studying the work of P. A. Florensky are opened by the recently published seven volumes of his works. The time has passed for hasty judgments, emotionally overloaded, but scientifically unsound, generalities in assessing the legacy of Fr. Pavel. The time has come for a balanced analysis based on a study of the entire corpus of his works in the context of Russian and world philosophy and culture. In the proposed work, we, without at all pretending to cover the topic completely, strived for precisely this kind of analysis, which in its design and nature of execution is not so much theological as philosophical. Another point of our research is that the creativity of Fr. We consider Paul in the context of the history of Russian and partly Western European philosophy of the 20th century, taking into account, first of all, the Christian existentialism of G. Marcel 10. At the origins of realistic symbolism Culture is driven by what a person puts his soul into. At the beginning of the 20th century. in Russia, the most creatively gifted people flocked to what was then called symbolism. It was a powerful and diverse cultural movement. Briefly speaking, it was an attempt to spiritualize and transform man and the world along the paths of a re-experienced revelation of the eternal truths of ancient religions and the Christian faith. At the head of the movement, as its theorists, were people highly gifted mystically and religiously, not to mention their outstanding scientific and intellectual potential. The first among them should be called Vyach. Ivanov, Andrei Bely and, standing somewhat apart, Fr. Pavel Florensky. Symbolist-minded souls contrasted the positivism and naturalism of their time with a “piercing sense of mystery and spiritual excitement” 11, which could not but bring their pathos closer to the existential orientation in philosophy. It is no coincidence that one of the leading ideological supports of symbolism was, along with F. Dostoevsky, Vl. Soloviev, as well as Fr. Nietzsche. The world war and revolution, like seaweed waves, “licked” this entire movement from the shore of culture. The great initiative of Russian symbolism with its sky-swift energy of universal transformation seems at first glance to have gone into business, and therefore a useful, but reduced result - into scientific cultural studies, predominantly structuralist. Having touched this icy contrast, we understand what Berdyaev, himself a philosopher of Russian symbolism and existentialism, called the tragedy of creativity: they strived for a pleromatic transformation of the world and man, but the result was an objectified cultural product, around which the scientific work of research, commentary, and interpretation grows. Hearts and souls burned, and the ashes were inherited by scientists writing dissertations on Russian symbolists. History and time seem to absorb the transhistorical and the eternal, which was undoubtedly present as a living fire burning inside what we call the already cooled name of symbolism. Russian symbolism itself realized this impossibility of a graceless transformation, the impossibility for a person solely through his own efforts to bring heaven to earth entirely before the sail and the final resolution of the fate of the universe as a whole. But this does not mean that the eschatological tension within a person does not correspond to any transreality. Such aspiration of the human heart and spirit, revealed by the Russian symbolists, was not only a psychological subjective phenomenon, a kind of individual “excitement.” It is also irreducible to the purely political and social plane of anticipation of revolutions and wars of the 20th century. The eternal core contained in it cannot be separated from its socio-historical and psychological shells. Therefore, we have no right to describe this metamorphosis of symbolism objectivistically. Vyach’s dialogue illuminated this entire situation in an existentially profound way. Ivanova and Mikh. Gershenzon, presented in “Correspondence from Two Corners”. This book became a message from Russian symbolism and, in its person, the entire culture of the Silver Age to the West, stunned by changes. She contributed to the existential awakening of Western European thought, resonating with the sentiments of such protagonists as, for example, G. Marcel. Renovationist movements in Catholicism and Protestant theology ran largely in parallel. Europe, represented by the best representatives of its cultural elite, understood the dangers of abandoning its own basic values. The Judeo-Christian heritage acquired then, in the 20s. XX century, second wind. This coincided with a surge in existential philosophizing, which only became popular after World War II. With the help of Platonism, Europe entered Modernity - into the New Age - with its science-centrism. But with the help of Platonism, although differently accentuated, she is trying to get out of Modernity. An example of this is Pavel Florensky. How must Platonism be reinterpreted for this to happen? If Galileo, Kepler and other creators of the scientific revolution and, accordingly, the project of Modernity used Plato’s geometricism, his ontologically significant mathematics (the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics), then the subverters of Modernity, in particular, Fr. Pavel, are inspired by Platonism as an animator of the world mechanized by the science of the New Age. According to the correct remark of A.F. Losev, Florensky understood Plato’s idea magically and personally-spiritually, connecting it with the concept of “face”. His platonism is not so much the science-morphic platonism of regular geometric solids, the polyhedra of Timaeus and Kepler, as the platonism of esoteric mysteries, the pagan religious soul with its demons, goblins, goblins, etc. In The Dialectic of Myth, Losev gave a memorable picture of such Platonism in the service of the anti-modernist turn of history. Therefore, for progressive modernists, Florensky and Losev will always be figures of radical “reaction.” But the modern “postmodern” consciousness has lost its progressivist pathos and therefore is more relaxed about this mysterious-demonic face of Platonism. It plays with all possible interpretations... for the sake of its completely modern, that is, modernist, “I”. W. Heisenberg wrote that in the Eleusinian mysteries one could actually meet Dionysus 12. The “postmodernists” apparently did not encounter any god other than their deified Self. They were not far from Stirner. Russian decadents, represented by V. Bryusov, boasted that they made sacrifices to all gods. But with this aesthetic “polytheism” they only demonstrated their Nietzscheanism and self-affirmation of a completely modernist type. But the fashion at the beginning of the century was really not so much for the “geometric” Plato of Kepler and Galileo, but for the animated Hermetic Neoplatonism of Bruno and Agrippa, about which the same Bryusov wrote 13 . Platonism and the existential attitude are related as a meeting and a rupture. It seems that Florensky did not think about such antinomianism of these attitudes; he did not bring it to the light of methodological and philosophical reflection. And this, first of all, I think, is because for him the existential direction of philosophical thought did not exist as a special movement. His basic categories were not existence and existentiality, but life, the organism, the mystical, the mysterious, the symbol as a “roll call” of everything with everything - living with living, spiritual with spiritual... He could not do without the basic concepts of Kant, whom he reviled so much - without dividing reality into noumenon and phenomenon. Berdyaev noticed the distance separating Florensky’s work from philosophy as a matter of life, as a profession and vocation. And he correctly noted, for Fr. Paul was a superphilosopher, a “godmaker,” or theurgist, a mystic and a priest by vocation and profession. And this means that the world of philosophy, considered from within it as a special way of thinking, did not interest him too much. For Florensky, priority was given to universally significant spiritual-sensual, spiritual-physical touches of the mystery of the world, in relation to which he always, from childhood, experienced excitement, fear and an irresistible attraction at the same time. His personality, which passes everything through its emotional life, is undoubtedly deeply existential. His creativity grew not from the external tasks of the profession and professorship, but from the depths of personal experience, the center of which was occupied by the mystery of being, the mystery of the above and below in their contact in a symbol that fills the whole world. When you think about Florensky, you remember these lines from Goethe: The path to the world of spirits is available to us, But your mind sleeps, exhausted: O student! rise up while bathing In the rays of dawn, the earth's breast! 14 In his absolute masterpiece, I mean his late autobiographical prose, there are words that make the reader perk up: “Adults in general do not touch the mysterious side of everything around them - either they do not notice it, or they hide it from us, probably so as not to frighten us; after all, they never tell us about such obviously existing things as devils, mermaids, goblins, they don’t even talk about cute elves” 15. It’s not surprising that Florensky, the father of a large family, considers himself to be a small child; what’s surprising are the words about “knowingly existing” devils, etc. What do they mean? What about. Paul is sure that contact with the spiritual world, including the world of the creatures he named, is an ontological contact, carried out in eternity (according to the belief of the Platonists and their predecessors about the soul’s presence in the heavenly world, its native one, from where it was cast out, and now yearns and seeks its way home)? Or do these somewhat provocative, shocking words of the modern intellectual contain the “stylization” noted by Berdyaev, not of Orthodoxy, but of primitive mythological and religious thinking? Or does he want to say that children a priori, of course, before any old wives’ tales, believe in brownies and goblins, that is, in living spirits, the path to the world of which, according to Goethe, is in principle open, but to enter it requires a cleansing initiation (bathing in the rays of dawn)? It is known from the history of culture that the spiritualizing role of initiations in the ancient world was emphasized not by philosophers, but by Hermetics and Gnostics. “If Greek theory,” says the English researcher of Neoplatonism E.R. Dodds, “seeks to create a bridge between soul and body... then the magicians, Hermetics and Gnostics are trying to build a bridge between God and man; for them, an immortal body is given in the process of initiation - having acquired it, a person becomes a god” 16. But what exactly do these stirring words of the reader mean? Pavel? Apparently, all three explanations we have proposed should be kept in mind, without thinking that we can limit ourselves to them. Let us take into account that for the children we are talking about here, purifying initiation is not required or almost not required due to the pristine purity of childhood, no matter what the blessed one thinks about it. Augustine 17. The dawn of which Goethe speaks is embodied in the child, so to speak, in a natural way. And therefore, for him, mermaids, goblins and even kikimoras obviously exist. The mythological and religious reality of the world of living spirits is the faith of “scientific believers” turned inside out (Florensky liked to write this word with a hyphen). If for science believers there are obviously electrons, atoms, molecules, etc., along with their movements and laws, then for myth believers, like Florensky, there are obviously elves and other spirits of the myths and religions of the world. But for the philosopher there is neither one nor the other. In any case, he denies their known existence. A philosopher questions everything, he must question everything, since he is a philosopher - both electrons and mermaids. Florensky was ready for the first, but apparently not for the second, since he talks about the “knowledge” of belief in spirits. Is there a deliberate stylized anti-positivist, anti-scientist bravado in this position? Maybe she is there a little bit. But I think that’s not the point, and it would be a mistake to measure Florensky with such a small yardstick. Another curious feature is striking, the thought of which arises when trying to interpret these seemingly strange words of Florensky. They are included in the chapter “Pier and Boulevard” about his childhood years in Batum. As a child, he walked with his little sister along the seashore and collected various wonders - pebbles, roots ground by the sea, etc. These finds were for him personal gifts from the Sea - a living creature in the form of a greenish-blue infinity, full of revelations and secrets. Looking at these gifts, Florensky says, “I looked and remembered, I smelled and I also remembered, I licked and I remembered again, I remembered something distant and eternally close, the most cherished, the most essential, which cannot be closer” 18 . The sea responded to him as if “calling his family,” as if he himself came from the family of Nereids, but forgot about it and now, in view of the Sea, endowing him with the riches of its secrets, he remembers his distant and eternally close homeland... Here again is the myth about the soul told by Plato. But in this myth, Orphic in its roots, the homeland of the soul appears as the upper world. Here, the family got a whiff of the Sea, the water element, which we are accustomed to consider not the “mountain”, but the “down”, not the spiritual, but the physical, not the ideal, but the material principle. Let us emphasize this important, in our opinion, point: the substance of the world, its depths, including water, act for Florensky as a substitute for the heavenly, the spiritual, the highest - the heavenly. In other words, the spirit and the body are indistinguishable for him, if they are alive, they are living beings that have a name and carry with it the secret of their existence. The sky is not only above our heads, but also under our feet, if we feel the earth and sea like spirits - spirit, like living things - living things. In this chapter we can easily find all the main intuitions and themes of the late Florensky. Indeed, symbolism, and emphatically realistic, in its classic Baudelairean representation contained in the poem “Correspondances” (1852), awakened in Florensky when he was a child. Here the children, playing on the shore, reached the sea water at the bottom of the dug hole: “Absolutely tears,” an adult naturalist says about that childhood experience. – And doesn’t this mean that I myself am from the same sea water? There are mutual correspondences everywhere, no matter what you take on, everything leads again and again to the sea” 19. So, “there are mutual correspondences everywhere”: Nature is a wondrous church, where a row of living columns Whispers to us about something in inaudible words 20 . This is how K. Balmont conveys the opening lines of Baudelaire’s “Correspondances”, conveys them close to the original (in Baudelaire, however, there is no “us” and no “row” of columns, just vivants piliers). The following two lines are especially consonant with Florensky (we will give them in the original, because Balmont said it worse): L'homme y passe a travers des forêts de symbols Qui l'observent avec des regards families 21 “In the Church of Nature, a man walks through virgin forests of symbols looking at him with familiar glances.” The symbols that look at a person in the church of Nature are living beings, whose glances remind of what is most dear to him, although half-forgotten. Such is the Sea, which Florensky writes with a capital letter, because it is the name of a living creature. By the way, modern science essentially says the same thing: the waters of the primeval ocean formed our blood, etc. 22 And therefore we do not look at the Universe only from the outside, but look as if from the inside. And it is precisely this coincidence of religion and myth with science, especially the new, non-mechanistic one, that characterizes the direction of Florensky’s aspirations in his creative activity - to bring science, and with it the entire culture, out of the snares and shadows of positivistic illusionism under the sun of ancient myth... Let us note two more main intuition-themes that are revealed with such expressiveness on the pages of this chapter. Right there, on the seashore, along with the symbolist credo, the primary experience of unity appears: “There is water in the earth, there is water in me, jellyfish are also water” 23 ... In other words, everything is one (one). The experience of Goethean metamorphoses will reinforce this maritime experience of the Thalesian type. And mathematics will give it the appropriate design. “Different in appearance... united in essence,” concludes Florensky. The sea is a living noumenon, which then, in blissful childhood, was really “seen, smelled, heard.” Here is an important point: a noumenon, an ideal essence, it would seem, something abstract, intellectual, smart - for Florensky it was initially sensual, bodily-living, visual, immediate. The concreteness of the future metaphysics of Fr. Paul - in this. The deep – noumenal – layer of being, the “life-creative” layer, is comprehended, according to Florensky, not by an abstract abstract mind, but by the whole being, whole and directly, because it is sensual first of all. Again, we cannot help but recall here Goethe with his “proto-phenomenon,” which is (proto) noumenal for him, like the Sea of ​​Florensky, like the Water of Thales, who, by the way, also has “everything full of gods.” Florensky's realistic symbolism has points of contact with the form of existential thought that we find in the philosophy of G. Marcel. Talking about the impressions of his early childhood, Fr. Pavel talks about the magical effect he experienced when he saw a monkey drawn by his father, intended to be the guardian of the grapes forbidden to the boy. The painted orangutan, he emphasizes, was “more powerful, more significant, more inexorable than the living one.” And he continues: “It was then that I grasped the basic idea of ​​my later worldview, that in a name there is what is named, in a symbol there is what is symbolized, in an image the reality of what is depicted is present and that therefore the symbol is what is symbolized” 24 . We find the connection between Florensky and Marcel that we mentioned in the word “presence”. Analyzing the situation with the image of a deceased person, whose photograph is lovingly kept by a person close to him, Marcel says that it does not remind him of the deceased, but allows him to enter into real contact with him: access to his real presence is partially opened by this photograph. But then the similarity gives way to divergence. Indeed, Florensky, as we see from the above quotation, identifies “is” and “is present,” saying that “a symbol is what is symbolized.” Marcel, on the contrary, distinguishes, although he also connects, these meanings (“is” and “is present”). So, in one place he says that there is no God, but He is present. We can say that “is” and “is present” have different ontological statuses, different modes of being. One might even suggest that presence has a higher status in this regard than simply being. One could clarify that in presence we are dealing with mystical being, inexpressible objectively. But we will not develop this idea now - it would take us away from our topic. Let's point out something else. “There is” is a sign of equating the subject of a judgment with its predicate. “Presence” expresses the existential mystery as such, the unspeakable mystery of “to be.” Of course, in language “is” also means “exists.” “We have oak trees in the forest” - this means that there are oak trees in the forest nearby our house. It is this meaning that sounds in the words “God exists.” But Marcel prefers to talk about the “presence” of God (in prayer His presence is more open than without it, although this does not mean that God has no presence outside of prayer, that He is present only in it, through it). For Marcel, the emphasis on presence and on the removal from the thematization of being as an essence, which is usual for scholasticism, is important because he thinks of God in an existential-personal way, and not objectively. God is not an object. It is impossible to objectify him. In order to separate the Christian God from Aristotelian and Platonic essences and ideas, Marcel emphasizes the expression “presence.” Florensky does not do this. In our language, we talk about ordinary objects, that they exist, that they exist, meaning, firstly, that they are fixed as objects (there are oaks in our forest, that is, known to us as a certain kind of tree), and, secondly, we always specify where, under what conditions they exist. “God exists”, “God exists”, but at the same time we cannot say about Him as an object known to us, and we cannot say where, in what, under what conditions He exists. To say “exists in the world” is hardly true; to say that He exists as the source of all goods, of all things, is in fact no definition, because we are not able to grasp the meaning of these phrases in all their certainty. Such phrases objectify God. It seems to us that He is objectified. But this is just appearance. Not a single judgment of rational theology contains such predicates of God that we actually embrace. They will say: God is the Creator of the world. But “to be the Creator of the world” does not express any specific object for us. The “Creator of the world” is not an object. We are not able to grasp, catch, record this quality of being a Creator. And existential thought openly and unequivocally recognizes this, criticizing rational theology, when they talk about God as they talk about oak trees in our grove. The idea of ​​a known God, to which young Florensky rushed like a light, is an impossible idea, unrealizable in its essence. But this does not mean that theology is impossible. However, as an objective science about the Existing (about the Existing God) it is truly impossible. That is why symbolism, developed so deeply, interestingly and diversely by Florensky, is valuable. One more note in connection with the above quote from the “Memoirs” of Fr. Pavel. Talking about the painted monkey, he says: “The symbol is what is symbolized,” “the reality of what is depicted is present” in the image. So, as we have already said, “to be present” does not mean “to be,” “present” and “is” are not the same thing. A symbol is what is symbolized, says Florensky, but the opposite is equally true: a symbol is not what is symbolized. Otherwise it would not be a symbol, but simply what it symbolizes. This, in our opinion, is an important point. Florensky “presses the pedal,” emphasizing the realism of the symbol. With the word “presence” he already sufficiently emphasized the realism of the symbol. And when he says that a symbol is what is symbolized, he takes a step towards eliminating the symbol itself. Indeed, even with the most realistic attitude towards a symbol, we still distinguish the symbol from the symbolized. In principle, we cannot help but distinguish between these two points. The antinomy in the composition of the symbol cannot be lost in the case of realistic symbolism. Let us consider this antinomy using the example of a symbol such as a name. The name is a symbol. And just as here Florensky says that “a symbol is what is symbolized,” so in his name-glorifying texts he states that “The Name is God, but God is not the Name” 25. This is tantamount to admitting that what is symbolized is not a symbol. Let us continue the comparison of Florensky and Marcel with the following statement. Both thinkers have a lot in common in the content of the basic attitudes that they developed in their childhood years. By the way, their circles of family communication were similar, as well as the norms of attitude towards children with a characteristically high level of their protection from the external, alien and little “decent” (Florensky’s expression) world. In both cases, the family atmosphere created a powerful protective screen that prevented the penetration of “germs” from the external environment. Close intra-family relationships and, accordingly, the practical impossibility of establishing communication connections “on the side” characterize the families of both thinkers in their childhood years. What exactly are their attitudes that seem similar to us? This is, first of all, focusing attention on the depth and mystery of existence, as well as a subconscious conviction in the undoubted value of the inner life of the spirit, thanks to which everything comes to life, even what at first glance seems completely inanimate to us. So, an orientation towards mystery and the intense inner life of the spirit - these are their general attitudes, formed already in childhood. “The whole world had an internal play of depth,” writes Florensky, restoring the spiritual world of his childhood. Marcel says the same thing. Both thinkers from childhood learned to look for signs of the deep in the world, visible signs of the invisible. And finally, one more thing - a taste for authenticity in everything. Hence Florensky’s dislike for factory products, machine-made things and, accordingly, his preference for hand-made things. Marcel also developed similar tastes from childhood. Pavel Florensky was often compared with Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe, Pascal... There are well-known grounds for such comparisons. However, in our opinion, it is more productive and interesting to compare him with A.S. Khomyakov. The universality of synthesis based on the truth of Orthodoxy - this is how one can determine the essential commonality that unites them. If Khomyakov is the recognized leader of the Moscow Slavophiles of the 40s of the 19th century, then Florensky is the no less recognized leader of the Moscow neo-Slavophiles of the first quarter of the 20th century. “After all,” Florensky says of Khomyakov, “he is a preeminent researcher of that sacred center from which the thoughts of the Slavophiles emanated and to which they returned - Orthodoxy, or, more precisely, the Church” 26. If we pay attention to these words, we will be able to identify both the common and the divergent in these figures. Indeed, if we keep in mind Orthodoxy, then both Khomyakov and Florensky start from it and return to it as the absolute center. Orthodoxy stands at the center of the universal worldviews of both thinkers. But if you pay attention to the fact that Fr. Paul, speaking about this center of Khomyakov’s thought, clarifies it specifically to the Church, which is certainly true, but strictly speaking, we cannot say this about him himself. Why? Because at the center of Fr.’s creative aspirations. Paul we find not so much the Church and, accordingly, ecclesiology, but a cult and, therefore, a philosophy of cult. Of course, there is no Church without a cult, but it still cannot be reduced to a cult. The difference in emphasis, in which particular side of Orthodoxy acts as the absolute center of thought, allows us to understand the difference between these two outstanding and largely similar thinker-theologians. If “Khomyakov is all about the Church” 27, then Florensky is all about the cult. Whatever work of his early period we take, everywhere we find, as it were, a program for his future research, which constituted a cycle of works on the philosophy of cult. Let us take for example his article “Empyrea and Empiria” (1904), to which he subsequently returned. In this work, Florensky provides a rationale for the religious worldview and reveals its main semantic nodes. The objects of his analysis that appear here, and the very course of their consideration, show that he is interested in the basic structure of the cult, which reveals the secret of the “joining” of the empirical (earthly, everyday phenomenon) with the empyrean (heavenly, miraculous). This is, first of all, the Eucharist, the central sacrament of Christianity. Unconsecrated bread and wine, located outside the “power lines” of the cult, are simply bread and wine with certain sets of physical and chemical characteristics inherent in them. But their inclusion in the mystical life of the cult leads to the fact that these ordinary earthly substances become the Body and Blood of Christ. Overcoming the level of our earthly world, they connect it with a higher reality. The difference between their earthly appearance and heavenly reality, the author of the article emphasizes, is not that in the sacrament of communion with these substances with their usual meanings we add a special meaning from ourselves, the meaning of the subjective symbolization of the Body and Blood of Christ. No, says Florensky, “wine and bread have actually and substantially transubstantiated” 28 . Scientific, philosophical and theological worldviews merge in Fr. Paul into one universal religious worldview, which he orients himself according to the sacrament of the Eucharist. It is the Eucharist, says Fr. Paul, “as the last point contemplated on Earth, as the strongest and most ontological foundation of the Earth - and the basis and criterion of every teaching” 29. He supports this idea with the authority of St. Irenaeus of Lyon, characterizing him as “one of the most deeply and consistently cult-centric witnesses of the Christian faith” 30. By the way, his own religious worldview should be denoted by the same word - consistent universalist cultocentrism. The cultocentric orientation is visible in Florensky’s work already in his early works, gaining scope and elaboration in his peak years, when lectures were given on the philosophy of cult and the Christian worldview and the works of the series “At the Watersheds of Thought” were created. Now let us turn our attention to another programmatic work of the early Florensky, namely his speech “Dogmatism and Dogmatics,” read on January 20, 1906 at a meeting of the philosophical circle of the Moscow Theological Academy. This work reveals the conceptual philosophical horizon of cultocentric thought about. Pavel. In addition, it shows the pathos of his searches, connecting them with the context of the era, in particular, both with the liberation impulse of that time experienced by Russia, and with the philosophical and literary movement of symbolism, which, by the way, were intertwined with each other. The essence of the program of radical transformation of theology as a system proposed by Florensky at that time was to recall the living, experimental basis of dogma, which had degraded in the 19th century. to dogmatism and ceased to attract the minds and hearts of those who took Christianity seriously. Florensky puts forward the thesis according to which a new construction of a dogmatic system must be approached from personal spiritual experience, from the “direct experiences” of God by man. Only in such experiences, he emphasizes, “God can be given as a reality,” “only by standing face to face before God with an enlightened consciousness does a person comprehend the truth of God” 31 . The essence of the program proposed by Florensky is to move from the subjectivity of experiences to their objective structure. “The experiences of prayer,” he says, “are too volatile, too fluttering... It is necessary to formalize the experiences, to attach to their living flesh a backbone of concepts and schemes that restrains it” 32. Concepts and schemes that objectify religious experience, Florensky believes, will make the unknown God of individual mystical experience known to the God of theological and philosophical science, a systematically developed cultocentric teaching. Why is this work, which lies at its origins, so important for a balanced assessment of the philosophy of cult? Yes, because in the developed form of the philosophy of cult, the subjective manifestations of religious life are relegated to the background. The analysis of prayer in the ninth lecture concludes the readings on the cult. In the objectivist-oriented presentation of the doctrine of the cult, it is no coincidence that direct experiences of God, personal experience of communication with God in prayer are relegated to the very end. But this was not the case with the relationship between the subjective and the objective in the works of the early period. As the aforementioned speech shows, here their order was exactly the opposite. Starting from subjective experiences, Florensky went to their objective structure, expressed in concepts and diagrams, in Platonic ideas. By the way, in this early text, which is uncharacteristic of the late Florensky, he relies on Dostoevsky, who in the history of thought was the initiator of its Christian-existential, rather than scientific-theological (Platonistically oriented) direction. The quoted text of the Russian writer is emphatically existential, as is Florensky’s commentary on it. “The fading face of the earth,” writes Dostoevsky, quoted by Fr. Paul, - and eternal truth came into contact here together” 33. And then the word of Florensky himself sounds with an existential-lyrical echo: “And when this “touching other worlds” has happened, then suddenly the stunned heart will tremble with joy and burst with unspeakable joy. And it will sing a burning hymn to its Lord, thanking and praising and weeping for everything and about everything” 34. What do we hear behind this enthusiastic syllable? If Plato, then the secret Plato, the Plato of the mysteries with his living mystical experience. But Dostoevsky is heard even more here with his characteristic lyricism of touching God. “A stunned heart,” “a burning, jubilant hymn to the Lord” is also the tone of the Old Testament prophets, biblical existentialism. The Bible and Dostoevsky lead the musical part of the voice here, and Plato sounds only muffled, mutely. We will not find “music” of such composition on the pages of the later works of Fr. Pavel. The tonality of this and similar places in the works of the early period of Fr. Paul correlates not so much with the “new religious consciousness”, behind which D.S. Merezhkovsky and his circle stand, but with the symbolist movement led by Vyach, which “intersected” with it. Ivanov and A. Bely. The desire to radically update the religious worldview, to give it a liberating pneumatological meaning, to pour into old wineskins the wine of new experiences, the personal experience of the younger generation, undoubtedly connects the origins of Florensky’s cultocentric theology with the innovative spirit of this era. By the way, a certain similarity in the focus of the report with the tendencies that appeared in Merezhkovsky was noted in the summary of MDA professor I.V. Popov, who participated in its discussion. In particular, it says: “The method of his work (that is, Florensky - V.V.) is closer to the method of modern writers (for example, Merezhkovsky): a certain foundation is taken and a large structure is built (for example, on some thoughts in the works of Dostoevsky ...)" 35. To this we can add that Vyach is also quoted here with sympathy. Ivanov, and F. Nietzsche. Thus, this text convincingly shows that Florensky’s thought is formed in line with the existentially colored symbolist literary and philosophical movement of the beginning of the century, the key figures for which were primarily F. Dostoevsky and Vl. Soloviev. The pathos of transforming blind faith into conscious and therefore seeing faith, the pathos of the struggle for the known God, directed against the church science of the 19th century, which was separated from living experience, inspired both the common teacher of the Symbolists and Florensky - Vl. Solovyova. We drew attention to the existential overtones characteristic of Florensky’s early work. However, later on it gradually recedes into the background, and the scientific and systematic beginning of the universal thought of God. Paul, on the contrary, is emphatically placed at its center. We find the balance of the subjective-existential and objective-Platonistic principles in “The Pillar” (1914), the main work of the mature, or middle, period of his creative path. However, after “The Pillar”, on the approach to “Philosophy of Cult”, the existential component is pushed aside by Platonist objectivism, without disappearing completely. The language of the report we are analyzing is sometimes symbolistically clumsy - “radiant losers of spiritual life” 36 and other similar expressions will become a thing of the past over the years. They are somewhat reminiscent of the young Andrei Bely with his poetic experiments and “Symphonies,” one of which Florensky 37 reviewed during these years. But not only symbolism and decadence, which were avant-garde at that time, left their mark on Florensky’s thought and word, but also the philosophical systems that were fashionable at that time. For example, in this report, in methodological terms, one can feel the influence of the teachings of R. Avenarius with his principle of “least waste of effort.” The young Pavel Florensky, who penetrates everything new with lightning speed, seems to him to have seen the treasured “key” to explaining “the entire history of science and philosophy” in this principle 38 . As always radical and courageous, he applies it to theology. And even if this looks like a strange modernization, he also attributes to the holy fathers of the Church the task of “combining the greatest completeness of schematized material with the least complexity of schemes united into a single building,” emphasizing that a similar task stood “before each of them” 39 . Is it really only the desire of the young mind to keep up with new trends that is the reason for this? I think no, that’s not the main thing. No matter how sensitive the seeking youth may be to the innovative or only seemingly such trends of their time, nevertheless, this was not the determining factor in Florensky’s appeal to empirio-criticism formulas. The point here is rather that thinking about. Paul was initially corrected on the touchstone of mathematics, exact knowledge of nature. Hence the inherent clarity of scientific formulaic language, in particular, the mentioned “economism” in the method. Widespread use of the concepts of mathematical series and limit, maximum and minimum, a penchant for combinatorics, geometric schemes and quantitative expression of the phenomenon being studied - these features of the thinking of a mathematician and natural scientist manifested themselves both in the early works and throughout the work of Fr. Pavel. Criticizing traditional dogma, Florensky notes that “the body and soul of the religious worldview have become separated” 40. And if at first he focuses on the “soul” as a symbol of the existentiality of the theological search, then he proceeds to emphasize, on the contrary, the objectivity of theology as a science (the position of the “body”). The existential moment is necessary, Florensky believes, to create an effective propaedeutics in a religious worldview. Only free creativity, based on personal experience, can create it. Starting from direct experiences of communion with God, one can ascend to the heights of dogma, but this is no longer possible outside of a scientific-objective, even mathematical form: “Truly,” says the speaker, “one can be surprised at the purely mathematical accuracy and expressiveness of Christological formulations, which do not allow one to change a single concept” 41. Here it is - that “fixed axis” that attracts him like a Platonist, on which the entire visible moving world rotates. Platonism and mathematics, as methodological guidelines, are practically indistinguishable here. Mathematical accuracy and immutability are more than simple analogues of the stability of dogmatic provisions as the conciliarly accepted results of church experience and the theological and philosophical search for its expression. True, the word “search” is not quite suitable here: in the case of Fr. Paul, it is better to talk about research, even “survey.” Search, searching - these words have too much of a flavor of personality and subjectivity. Another thing is the research that Florensky, as a scientist, was always ready to conduct, summing it up in diagrams and figures, be it a Kostroma ditty, a fan of philosophical worldviews, or a system of church sacraments. On the path from the unknown God to the known, it is impossible to pass by the heritage of the saints. fathers, and Florensky calls for “the true heat of knowledge of God to melt all the ice that has bound the great buildings of Sts. fathers" 42. The program of radical transformation of theological and philosophical thought put forward by him contains, thus, what then became, as it were, the intellectual property of Fr. Georgiy Florovsky's thesis about the “neopatristic synthesis” as the “royal path” of Orthodox thought. By the way, this report by Florensky, through the efforts of his MDA comrade G. Kh. Pop-Kharalampiev, was published in Bulgarian in 1907 in the Sofia Christian magazine. It is unlikely that Florovsky, who emigrated to Bulgaria and read in the language of this country, did not notice him. However, there is apparently no reason to talk about influence, because the idea of ​​connecting new experience with the heritage of St. fathers is obvious to all who seek the creative development of theology. One cannot help but pass by another feature of Florovsky’s concept of theology, developed in “Ways of Russian Theology” (1937). I mean his view of the history of culture as the history of the knowledge of God. A similar concept is contained in the analyzed work of Florensky. Material for the transformation of traditional theology of the 19th century. in the new, says Florensky, “our own experience and the experience of others should serve, since it was expressed in ascetic and mystical literature, in fine literature, in the visual arts and music.”43 Be that as it may, some important features of the theology of Father George were, as it were, predicted by this amazingly profound report of an MDA student. Let us return to the correlation between the existential-personalistic and platonist-objectivist attitudes that appeared in this document. The first of them, Florensky believes, should prevail at the initial stage of knowledge of God. Considering it meaningfully, he quotes N.M. Minsky, a writer from Merezhkovsky’s circle, who came up with a work on the religion of the future: “The basic law of religious creativity,” writes Minsky, “can be expressed as follows: all judgments leading to true knowledge of God have our human, conditional self as their unchangeable subject, and the absolute deity as their unchangeable addition” 44 . We can say that Minsky is talking about the phenomenology of religious faith. Here the path to knowledge of God passes through recognizing how “this knowledge arises in us.” But, Florensky believes, this is only the beginning of the knowledge of God, “the beginning of dogmatic work, going from man to the divine.” And the turn to its next stage can be designated as a transition from the phenomenology of faith (“psychology”, according to Florensky) to the metaphysics of Christianity. “We would repeat,” he says, “the unforgivable mistake of all subjectivists if we wanted to limit the work only to such a beginning. Indeed, for a philosopher, since he is a theorist, the object of religion is always only a predicate (in Minsky - an addition - V.V.) with the conditional self of the philosopher himself. Such a philosopher... can only talk about the divine - not about God. However, once only a living mystical experience brings him into the sphere of transsubjective reality, then man and God will change places, and God... will become the subject from the predicate. At the same time, dogma from subjective and conditional will become objective and unconditional. The epistemological dependence of the knowledge of God on man will be replaced by the mystical dependence of man on God” 45. This is how Florensky imagines the mechanism of a radical renewal of dogma and the knowledge of God in general. What seems doubtful here, from a philosophical point of view, is the belief in the possibility of completely separating the subjective and objective in the knowledge of God. Florensky believes that at the second, final, stage of this process, the subjective will be completely separated from the objective, and the epistemology of the subject will be supplanted by objective mysticism. But mystical, transsubjective, according to Florensky’s formulation, experience is also the experience of the subject. The “mystical dependence of man on God,” which he speaks of here, exists as an internal experience of man and therefore has a subjective side. But subjectivity for Florensky is only the “scaffolding” of the new dogmatics, which must be discarded during the construction of its building, since they cannot in any way enter it. The point of view of existential knowledge of God is different. It was, for example, expressed by Berdyaev, who defined Christianity as personalism 46. At the center of the personalistic worldview is the individual. Personality is freedom, spirit, creativity, communication between “I” and “You,” and love. And the objectivist realism of concepts, usually associated with Platonism, is, according to Berdyaev, “the source of human slavery” 47. The subject is, after all, no less real than the object. The mystical and realistic apotheosis of the subject is contained in the words of Angelus Silesius (“I know that without me God cannot live a single moment...”), chosen by Berdyaev as the epigraph to his “The Meaning of Creativity.” But the idea-objects of Platonism, like objectified deities of any kind, exist perfectly without man, just like the nature of scientific naturalism. Some under-revealed intentions of this thought-rich report were revealed in the speeches during its discussion. So, for example, the mentioned Pop-Kharalampiev expressed the following thought: “Divinity is something objective, but it lives in man. One will feel His presence in himself better, the other will feel worse” 48. These words lead to the final thoughts of the report, which began, as we remember, with a hymn to direct experiences that cannot be separated from their subject. It ends with a return to them, but with the selection among all subjects of one and only one - the God-man Jesus Christ. The universal human path, says Florensky, is unsuitable, because “the wider the area of ​​common experiences, the more meager, colorless and banal its spiritual content; the more current a coin is, the more worn it is” 49 . Therefore, one must choose the “all-human path,” which he defines as “the path of gathering the entirety of spiritual life,” the opposite of abstracting from everything original, non-banal, and dissimilar. But such collection is not mechanical summation. And here he turns to the mystery of the incarnate God: “On the path of all mankind,” says Florensky, “the Bearer of the maximum of spiritual life is subject to study. This is the Son of Man, ὁ υἱ o ς τ o ῦ ανθρ ώ π o υ, the Bearer of ideal humanity... The experiences of Jesus of Nazareth are a bridge along which dogmatics can pass from earth to heaven, from psychology to metaphysics” 50. In Jesus, self-consciousness absolutely coincides with God-consciousness. On this path, “judgments become metaphysical and related to transsubjective reality, and the moment of New Testament theology is replaced by a new one - the moment of mystical gnosis” 51. The milestones of this path of reforming theology are outlined in the triad: psychology of religion – New Testament theology – mystical gnosis. And only at the stage of mystical gnosis “the construction of dogmatics in the true and proper sense begins” 52. Here again we recall Dostoevsky, from whom Florensky takes the distinction between the universal and the all-human. This difference is based on the experience revealed by Revelation, the experience of life in Christ, the divine-human mystery. By the way, above we contrasted Florensky as an objectivist-platonist with Berdyaev as an existentialist and subjectivist. However, he is exactly the same as Fr. Paul, uses the distinction between the pan-human, as universal, and the pan-human, as general, accepting the first and decisively rejecting the second, as the source of slavery of the individual: “one must radically distinguish,” writes Berdyaev, “the general and the universal” 53. The general, presented as the objective reality of abstract concepts, enslaves the individual. Within the framework of reality interpreted in this way, personal freedom and, therefore, freedom itself is impossible. However, the realism of general concepts and ideas is actually quasi-realism, because the last and highest reality is existential and is not an objectified given. Thus, local convergence in the acceptance by both thinkers of the indicated distinction coming from Dostoevsky is not enough to avoid a significant divergence between them in philosophical orientations. We have dwelled in detail on this work of Florensky because of the richness of thought and the power of synthesis manifested in it. Human experience can be metaphysical in its meaning only to the extent that its subject is deified. Florensky calls the sphere of metaphysical “transsubjective,” which, in his understanding, apparently means “objective.” But isn’t it more accurate to speak at a similar level of penetration into reality about overcoming not only the “subject”, but also the “object”? In our opinion, this is exactly the case, and at these heights (they are also depths), the very opposition of subject and object becomes invalid: transsubjective reality is at the same time transobjective. But the idea of ​​overcoming the object along with the subject is absent from Florensky in this work. Existential philosophy in this respect differs from Florensky’s Platonism. Platonist object-centrism Despite what has been said above, Florensky cannot be imagined solely as an objectivist-impersonalist, alien to the existential attitude. As the analysis shows, his work reveals a moving relationship between these fundamental orientations of philosophical consciousness. It is impossible to unconditionally consider Florensky a Platonically oriented scientist who objectifies and naturalizes the world, including the Divine. He has an existential attitude at all stages of his creative path. And its origin cannot be associated with the fact that Dostoevsky or Nietzsche greatly influenced him, as, for example, was the case with L. Shestov or A. Camus. The existentiality of his thoughts is primarily due to his personal experience, which is always deeply and holistically experienced and comprehended by him, which, by the way, is connected with the artistic core of his personality. Scientific objectivism itself was a form of spiritual lyricism for him. Gifts given by Fr. Paul, were both abundant and varied. Due to an irresistible inner calling to the priesthood, he became interested in the experimental and theoretical comprehension of the Christian cult and came to the point of placing its existential-personal moments, as subjective-psychological ones, in a subordinate position in relation to the trans-subjective objectivity of worship. And here the model for him was the internally close mathematical natural science, which he understood as an artistically integral natural history in the spirit of Goethe. The philosophical example for his science of cult was Plato’s doctrine of ideas, which he understood as an understanding of the ancient pagan mysteries. As a result, the mystical gnosis declared in his early program speech began to be developed by him as an objective science, which he consistently sought to connect with mathematical natural science. Florensky strives in a scientifically objective way, in a universal scheme, often mathematical, to connect the worlds above and below. This desire can be called the positivism of the divine. For example, these worlds are connected by the idea of ​​a limiting transition, anticipated at the “end” of an infinite series of similar phenomena. Points of inversion and discontinuity also act as mathematical models for the “junction” of these polar worlds. Such mathematics in theology on its problematic border with scientific natural science is hardly capable of arousing enthusiasm in a philosopher, since the actual philosophical difficulties with such an approach are rather avoided than revealed and actually overcome. But scientists, especially representatives of the exact sciences, cannot but be attracted to such theological positivism, unless they are blinkered atheists. However, the focus on exact scientific knowledge, as a common denominator connecting these worlds, is questionable because science, in our opinion, despite the changes occurring in it, remains within the boundaries of our lower world. This is the first thing. And, secondly, God is not an object, and the divine, heavenly world cannot be objectified, that is, presented as an object of a special kind, thereby being able to “unite” with our world, the scientific objectification of which, within certain limits, is certainly legitimate. Therefore, the science of the “junction” between God and the created world is, to say the least, questionable. There is always an insurmountable transcendence, a gap between them. Imaginary numbers, non-Euclidean geometries, limits and inversions, any of the most intricate mathematical and physical objects are powerless to convey the transcendence of God in relation to the created world. Such a rapprochement between scientific natural science and theology is also risky because belief in the possibility of a scientific-like objectification of the heavenly world is typical of occultism, which naturalizes the spiritual transcendental principle. The claim of occultism that arises in this regard for the synthesis of science, religion and philosophy only gives rise to its imitation. Florensky in science - in set theory, in the doctrine of complex numbers, in the theory of relativity, etc. - is trying to find means for a scientifically significant demonstration of how God objectively enters our world, how the transcendental “joins” with the immanent. But isn’t such a synthesis of science and faith fruitless? It seems to us that it gives nothing either to science, since in science it is only looking for a ready-made construction to demonstrate the possibility of the indicated “docking,” or to theology, since it is deformed when worldly science penetrates into it in a similar way. The idea of ​​a known God, which Florensky insists on with such pathos, is ambiguous, one might say, risky. The word “know” when applied to God either means nothing at all, or, if it does, it means something completely different than in ordinary science, whatever its objects may be. There is a gap between the experience of natural history and the experience of divine knowledge, and no scientific theories can bridge it. Knowing God is the work of a saint who meets God himself, not a mathematician. But this does not mean that mathematics has nothing to say about the myths and religions of the world, including the Christian one. God is the source of all being, but He Himself is not being. God is super-existent. It is possible to “join” God and the world in an objective way only if both poles are allowed to “join” a single space of being. The discontinuity of existence, however, does not negate its continuity. Swallows, elephants, humans, angels, gods - all this is existence, although the differences between its named forms are obvious. If being is not problematized, if ontology is accepted unquestioningly only as the antithesis of psychology and “subjectivity”, that is, precisely as objectology, meaning coercion for the subject, superiority over it, then, provided that such a space is accepted, it is indeed possible to “join” one object with another, for example, God as an object with man as an object. Such an approach, however, is not philosophy. Philosophical ontology cannot be uncritical, unquestioning, purely objectivist. And when Florensky calls the golden ratio an “ontological law” 54, he precisely accepts this premise of a single space of being. In our opinion, the pinnacle of Florensky’s creativity, along with his famous masterpieces such as “The Pillar”, “At the Watersheds of Thought”, “Iconostasis”, is his autobiographical work “To My Children”, where the experience of communion with God is given not in the scientific-objectifying manner of an indifferent statement of “laws”, but as a personally experienced direct meeting with the heavenly world. Thus, Fr.’s creative work is enormous in volume and variety. Paul turns out to be permeated with an existential-artistic principle, including those of his works where he is filled with the pathos of the objective knowledge of God in His “docking” with our world. But, despite this, Florensky did not follow the path of consciously developed existential, dialogical and personalistic thought. Berdyaev, who recognized himself as the antipode of Fr. Pavel, once remarked: “P. Florensky, despite all his desire to be ultra-Orthodox, was completely in the cosmic seduction” 55. He apparently had in mind, first of all, the sophiology of Fr. Pavel. But not only that. With this formula, he wanted to express his concession to the Hellenic naturalistic principle in general: “The Hellenic spirit,” he says in this regard, meaning the entire religious and philosophical renaissance of the Silver Age, “was stronger than the biblical messianic spirit.” But Berdyaev does not realize that the expression “charm” is justified when used strictly within the church fence. Coming from the mouth of Berdyaev, whose well-known distancing from Orthodox church life was no secret even to Westerners, it sounds somewhat strange. Florensky, on the contrary, was clearly aware of the intra-church status of this word: “Since “delusion,” he says, “is defined only negatively, then, being very important in the sense of church discipline and for the purposes of practical asceticism, the accusation of “delusion” ceases to have any theoretical significance.” 56 Therefore, Berdyaev’s expression is unacceptable for us in its form and we will not use such language, since we strive precisely to consider the thought of Fr. Paul in philosophical and theoretical terms, outside the field of church disciplinarity. As for the content of this expression, in our opinion, it really captures a certain feature of Florensky’s thinking, which we would designate as Platonist object-centrism. This, however, does not mean, as we never tire of emphasizing, the absence of existentiality in his work. Indeed, analyzing the work “Dogmatism and Dogmatics”, we showed that the existential attitude was not alien to its author (orientation towards freedom of creativity in theology, understanding the fundamental importance for its renewal of “direct experiences” of personal experience). “In Father Paul,” said Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, “culture and churchliness, Athens and Jerusalem, met and united in their own way, and this organic connection in itself is already a fact of church-historical significance” 57. One can certainly agree with this, however, on the condition that “Jerusalem” is understood as a symbol of Christian churchliness. If we consider him, as L. Shestov does, for example, as a symbol of existential thought based on the biblical tradition as opposed to the Hellenic tradition (“Athens”), then it is no longer possible to agree with Bulgakov’s words. To clarify our disagreement, let's see how Fr. imagines philosophy. Paul. Philosophy in his eyes is essentially systemic, representing a dismembered conceptual organism, focused on solving its main task - the problem of the one and the many, their synthesis. So, if the first sign of philosophy, according to Florensky, is systematicity, then the second is the formulation and solution of the problem of the synthesis of the one and the many 58 . But if existential thought is not denied the title of philosophical, then it should be emphasized that it recognizes itself, on the contrary, as fundamentally non-systemic, this is - firstly, and secondly, it does not consider the opposition one/many to be the main one for philosophy and, accordingly, does not consider the problem of the synthesis of its poles to be its main problem. It is not difficult to show that such an image of philosophy means that Fr. Paul measures it by the Hellenic standard, by the scale of “Athens,” that is, first of all, by Plato and his school. Therefore, the existentiality that we noted in him is limited. Its basis is the recognition of the experiential nature of philosophical thought and the significance of “direct experiences.” To this should be added the concreteness of the metaphysics of Fr. Paul (“seven ways of sensually relating to the world are the seven metaphysical axes of the world itself”) 59. What was said above about systematism as a sign of philosophy (according to Florensky) requires clarification. The fact is that he emphasized systematism as a necessary feature mainly in his early works. In the works of the later period, the thought of Fr. Pavla, on the contrary, is sometimes consciously and pointedly anti-systemic. Such are, for example, the works of the series “At the Watersheds of Thought.” The cycle was conceived as a collection of exploratory studies of perspective, language, tools, etc., without pretending to be “philosophy,” although its subtitle is “Features of Concrete Metaphysics.” “This is not given here,” writes Fr. Pavel, - no system... But there are many questions about the very roots of thought. In the primary intuitions of philosophical thinking about the world, first boilings, rotations, vortices, whirlpools arise - they are not characterized by rational planning, and it would be false to disguise them as a system” 60. The events of the birth of a thought, its “initial fermentation” - this is what the experiences collected in this cycle are. But even in these works the very idea of ​​a system (that is, the idea of ​​an organism, the organic unfolding of many things into a concrete unity) remains for Fr. Paul all its significance. For example, in his work “Results” (December 1922), speaking about the future post-Renaissance culture, he emphasizes that if the system is destroyed, then the whole, built on its basis, is doomed 61 . The system here is obviously thought of as the constructive core of any cultural or natural integrity. This remark forces us to pay attention to the difficulty of a researcher writing about the work of Fr. Pavel. Abstract labels are completely inapplicable to it. It is difficult to place him among professional philosophers or even theologians, which, of course, does not mean that he did not master these disciplines. A creatively incredibly gifted nature, manifesting itself in a variety of fields of knowledge, Florensky, who spent his whole life thinking about the nature of the symbol, himself is a living symbol of the high cultural capabilities of Russia, when they were given such a fertile, but also such a short time for their manifestation. Hence such a concentration of heterogeneous intentions, an amazing density of thought and the speed of its development. Berdyaev, oddly enough (if we keep in mind the general context of his attitude towards Florensky), considered him, if not an existential philosopher, then an existential theologian. At the same time, he meant, first of all, the importance that Fr. Paul brought personal experience into the matter. “In him,” he says about Florensky, “one can find elements of existential philosophy, in any case, existential theology... He was the initiator of a new type of Orthodox theology, not scholastic theology, but experimental theology” 62. One cannot but agree with this judgment. But we can only talk about individual elements of the existential attitude, since according to the predominant type of his thought, Florensky was “a kind of Platonist” 63. What is this uniqueness? Of course, it is not that Florensky shared the typically Platonist idea of ​​unity. Here he was not original, joining a thousand-year tradition that stretched from the Greeks to Vl. Solovyova. Sharing the postulate of unity, Florensky believes that philosophy must “explain all being” 64. Material, sensory, ideal, spiritual being - everything - must be comprehended in its unity, in the systematic whole of thought. The young Florensky, whom we quoted, bursts out in this regard with admiration for Leibniz’s monadological metaphysics, since the German philosopher actually consistently reduces plurality to unity, moreover recognizing the equality of these fundamental categories. Therefore, Leibnizianism, says Florensky, “is an eternal and irreducible stage of philosophical development.” A philosopher, he believes, cannot help but be a taxonomist, for the true subject of philosophy is Everything as the unity of the entire multiplicity of existence. He is required to provide a complete, integral explanation of everything - as a whole and as a part. If the basis of such knowledge lies in the “direct experiences” of the individual, then its very peak is formed by “mystical gnosis.” All the diversity of the empiric world must be “economically” reduced and raised to the Empyrean - an ideal and at the same time the most real world, the meaning of which can only be revealed to the aforementioned mystical gnosis. There is little original here. This is the path of knowledge discovered by Plato and acquired special clarity and at the same time mystical power by Plotinus. It has been played out in different variations by many philosophers throughout the long history of philosophical thought as a general philosophical topos. The originality of Florensky’s interpretation of Platonism appears not in the theme of unity, but in his understanding of Plato’s eidos. Two related points come to the fore in it - the magic of the eidos as a living face. At the same time, the way opens for the philosophy of the name characteristic of Florensky. Here we should talk not so much about Platonism as about Neoplatonism, and even, apparently, about the late Neoplatonism of Iamblichus and Proclus rather than about Plotinus. If we still keep in mind Platonism, then in this case it is necessary to emphasize that we are talking about Plato of the mysteries, about the mystery roots of his theory of ideas. Plato's ideas are understood by Florensky as “the faces... of deities or demons who appeared to initiates in the mysteries” 65. Florensky calls the mystical aspect of Platonism “the sanctuary of Platonic philosophy.” In the work of Iamblichus, “On the Mysteries,” which has come down to us, this aspect is presented more fully than in Plato himself. The closeness to the late Neoplatonists is especially felt in the lecture “Universal human roots of idealism”, given by Florensky at the Moscow Academy of Sciences in 1908. It is here that thoughts about the magical worldview that underlies Platonism in the broad sense of the word are developed. Analyzing the question of the essence of Plato's idealism, Florensky comes to see it primarily in the magic of the name. “The name,” he says, “is the knot of all magico-theurgic spells and powers” ​​66. Easily and seamlessly throwing a bridge from the pagan magicism of late Neoplatonism (the content practically coinciding with the folk beliefs of the Hellenistic world) to Christian dogmatics, Florensky, in the spirit of the symbolist aesthetics of the beginning of the century, pronounces an exquisite praise to “direct thinking” immersed in the element of magic. The pathos of this speech is anti-intellectual, emphatically romantic neoplatonic mystical-occult aesthetics. The whole life, the whole way of life of the people - be it the pagan masses of the Hellenistic era, or the Orthodox peasantry of Russia - is “saturated and sealed with the otherworldly” 67. This is a world of spiritual energies, freely flowing in and out of one thing into another, spiritual connections that dominate the visible world. The key to these powers and connections is magic. “Magic” and “mighty,” says Florensky, are words with the same root 68. His name holds dear his mysterious, powerful – and, therefore, magical – power 69 . Cult as cultural healer The 1908 lecture, like a number of other early works, lays the foundation for future studies of the cult. Some images significant for Florensky’s cultology were formed in his mind long before he gave lectures on this topic in 1918. As an example, let us point out the colorful image of a pie 70 hastily swallowed by a passenger in a station buffet while looking at a newspaper while waiting for a train. Florensky needs it to demonstrate spiritual degradation, growing along with the growing unsanctification of such a function of life as nutrition, at the very pinnacle of sanctification of which stands the sacrament of the Eucharist. The beginnings of inner life have disintegrated, “life has become scattered,” and “there is no integral life” anywhere. There is only “psychic dust” everywhere. “Holiness, beauty, goodness, benefit,” says Florensky, “not only do not form a single whole, but even in thoughts are now not subject to merging” 71 . And the project he proposes is to collect the “scattered” life into a single organic whole with the help of a cult, which must therefore be comprehensively comprehended. After all, it is the religious cult that by its nature is a healer, a replenisher of fragmented life, restoring it to a holistic, meaningful, spiritualized, sanctified state. Florensky here comes to understand the need to sanctify the whole world, the entire life of man in our technicalized world. The this-worldly must again “attract” the otherworldly to itself - otherwise the world will perish in its fragmentation. Florensky's criticism of modern culture largely coincides with its criticism from Nietzsche and existential philosophers, in particular, such as Marcel. They all feel the pain of the fragmentation of the world and man unusually acutely. But the recipes for restoring integrity—spiritual health and human dignity—are given in different ways. Leaving aside Nietzsche, we compare Florensky and Marcel in this regard. Florensky sees a way out of the fragmentation of the world and man in the restoration of ancient animism (from animus - spirit), succinctly expressed by Thales: “Everything is full of gods.” Accordingly, Fr. Paul also strives to restore an organic understanding of the world: the world is a living organism, being is organic and in its fundamentals spiritual and magical. Above this world of ancient animism, he smoothly builds, organically completing it, the Christian cult with its dogmatics, which, according to Fr. Paul, the crown of the pagan worldview, which found its highest expression in Platonism. With all his constructions, Florensky leads the reader to one thought - Christianity has no other philosophy than Platonism, understood exactly as he understands it (magism plus face as the core of eidos). By absorbing Christian dogma and at the same time preserving its Hellenic character, the Platonism of Fr. Paul connects pagan and Christian religions. It would seem that Platonism is thereby Christianized. But does he actually become Christian? Doubt remains on this score. In particular, the personalistic interpretation of Platonism, “pulling it up” to the Christian worldview, is questionable. And this is precisely the interpretation of Platonism that Florensky gives, saying that the “concept of personality” is “in blood relationship with the teachings of Plato” 72 . There really is some kinship, but its connection with Christianity is much closer, more related to the concept of personality, than with Platonism. The dubiousness of the personalistic reading of Platonism is clear from the context in which it is included: “Aren’t “ideas,” “essences,” “concepts,” “monads,” “personalities,” asks Florensky, “consanguineously related to the teachings of Plato?” In fact, the individual just falls out of this series - she has no place in it. "Entities", "monads", etc. indeed related by blood to Plato's doctrine of ideas, but not of "personality." In personality, the very horizon of metaphysical substantialism has been overcome - no matter how the latter is understood. But this “overcoming” does not mean that the concept of personality is discarded into “perishable” psychology. The question of personality is connected with the question of the concreteness of metaphysics. Concreteness can be understood in different ways. If we understand it through personality, then we must say frankly that the element of sensuality and even life is not enough to ensure this kind of concreteness. And it is precisely this, vito-aesthetic, understanding of the concreteness of metaphysics that Florensky offers. Plato’s idea in his interpretation can be a living spirit, combining sensory-aesthetic meanings and the animation of a being (“face”), but at the same time not be what we, in many ways intuitively, call a personality, following, willingly or unwillingly, the Christian cultural tradition. It seems that rational personality is generally indefinable. The ineffable, the secret, the inexpressible in it surpasses what can be comprehended and defined. Therefore, in principle, it cannot be included in a homogeneous series with “essences” and “ideas”. Hellenic rationalism does not fit smoothly with the biblical belief in a personal God and, accordingly, with philosophical personalism. And its very mysterious subsoil, to which Florensky leads as a solution to Platonism, also does not fit in with Christianity: there is an obvious gap between them. But in order to realize it, what is required is not a Platonist-objectivist attitude of consciousness, but an existential one. Symbolism itself, in the light of such an attitude, is transformed from objective Platonic symbolism into existential symbolism. Florensky is inclined to identify Hellenic philosophy, and even only its Platonic branch, with philosophy in general. If the continuity between Hellenic thought and Christian thought is traced and demonstrated by him, then the gap between them, on the contrary, is camouflaged or even completely disappears from sight. A break also means dispute and conflict, struggle. Fascinated by the continuity of religious and intellectual development, the continuity and homogeneity of national consciousness in all eras of history, Fr. Paul sees in Christian theology, and even more so in philosophy, the organic completion of Hellenic thought with its central problem of the unity of the many: “In the proper sense,” he says, “only the Triune is ἕ ν κα ì πολλά, i.e., only in Her does the basic question of all philosophy receive a solution” 73 . The problem of the one and the many is immediately taken for granted as the main problem of all philosophy. Even as a hypothesis, Florensky does not admit that philosophy can be inspired not so much by Hellenic rationalism, but by a completely different cultural tradition, not “Athens”, but “Jerusalem”. He does not allow for the cultural bipolarity of Europe. For him, “Jerusalem” is nothing more than the organic “crowning” of “Athens”, that is, the same “Athens”, but having reached its peak and resolution of its problem, which we mentioned above. Both philosophy and culture are thereby unified under the pressure of the Neoplatonic paradigm of thought. He absolutely does not allow disputes, conflicts of cultural principles, their incompatibility without a unifying completion and “crown”. The personalistic philosophy of existential dialogue remains alien to him. Therefore, it is clear that we will not find any references, any themes or methods of thought even remotely reminiscent of Kierkegaard, Berdyaev or Shestov. U o. Paul's extensive bibliography lacks any mention of the Danish thinker. And the figure of Dostoevsky, so important in this regard, has always been for him, starting from childhood, a marginal figure, standing under the sign of hysteria and scandal - “indecent.” In this distance from Dostoevsky we see one of the significant differences between Florensky’s symbolism and Vyach’s symbolism. Ivanov, who, in addition, have a lot in common. Such distancing of Florensky from the tradition of existential thought indicates his inability to overcome, spiritually and intellectually, Hellenic Platonism. If we now briefly express the difference in the attitudes of Hellenic Neoplatonism and Christian existentialism, we can say: if for the first person is an “essence”, “monad”, “idea”, then for the second it is freedom and existence, existence. Existential symbolism is the symbolism of personal embodied existences, and not of intelligible essences, not of Platonic noumena, as Florensky says. In existence the very opposition of noumenon and phenomenon is overcome. Florensky does not look into this existential distance, although, I repeat, as an artistically gifted creative person, he is, of course, not alien to what we previously designated as the increased degree of existentiality inherent in the Russian philosophical tradition 74 . Marcel proceeds from the same statement: the world and man are split, man’s inner life is in dangerous decline. But, as a secular thinker, he does not theologize, but only philosophizes close to theology, without crossing the boundaries between them. The French philosopher does not consider Platonism the only possible form of Christian-oriented philosophy, although he does not deny its significance for it. Marcel takes the position of Christian existentialism, although he objected to such a “label” because it, like any abstraction, distorts the concrete, personal nature of his thought. Platonism is accepted by him because it affirms the primacy of the spiritual principle in relation to the material principle and thereby serves as a defense against the excessive claims of positivism and materialism. But Plato's theory of ideas is not accepted by Marcel insofar as they are interpreted as impersonal abstract idealities. Note that the “faces” as an interpretation of Plato’s ideas. Paul does not mean their personification is acceptable for Christian consciousness. The status of “faces” is therefore ambivalent at best: despite the terminological step towards “personality” and “concreteness”, their naturalistic content is too significant in them, stopping the freedom of the human personality. Therefore, Platonism as worded by Florensky would still hardly have suited the French philosopher if he had become acquainted with it. The essence of Marcel's existential thought is a Christian-oriented personalism of the conciliar type (the principle of intersubjectivity). Unlike Florensky, Marcel does not recognize the opposition one/many as fundamental in philosophy, which sets its main problem. Therefore, he does not share the philosophy of unity developed by the Russian thinker. For Florensky, the biblical mentality seems to recede into the background before the dialectic of Platonic idealism, which is irresistible to him. Marcel, on the contrary, rejects the very idea of ​​dialectics and idealism as existentially untenable. Therefore, Florensky’s dialectical schemes, for example, the alternative “realism or terminism”, understood as the opposition idealism/positivism 75, are not valid for Marcel. He is not a realist in the Platonic sense, but he is not a nominalist (“terminist”) either. In the classification of philosophical teachings coming from the famous passage of Porphyry 76, there is no place for existential thought. Therefore, she, in turn, does not care about this and similar classifications with their supposedly impeccably forced logic. She simply bypasses them, just as Kierkegaard in his time “bypassed” Hegel with his “absolute” logic. Unlike Marcel, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche did not hurt Florensky too deeply. We can say that Florensky simply did not notice the existential direction of thought as such. As a convinced Platonist, he could hardly recognize in Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard (about whom he apparently had heard nothing at all) something competing with Plato himself and capable of largely determining the future development of European philosophy in the 20th century. Florensky and Marcel read the books of E. Husserl at about the same time. The German phenomenologist was dear to Florensky as a Platonist, a “realist of our days” 77 . Even if this is some exaggeration, strictly speaking, Husserl was not a fully realist-Platonist, remaining a phenomenologist-transcendentalist without metaphysics. But it is important for us that Florensky’s sympathy for Husserl, noticeable in his early works, is connected with the latter’s Platonism. However, in the late period of his work, Florensky changes his attitude towards Husserl. The criticism of psychologism and positivism from phenomenology and platonism attracts his attention less. He now evaluates entire eras of thought and culture based on deep religious divisions. In “The Iconostasis,” adjacent to the cycles “Philosophy of Cult” and “At the Watersheds of Thought,” Husserl is assessed as an idealist philosopher who emerged from the Protestant tradition, with which Fr. Paul. “Don’t you really notice,” says the author’s alter ego, his character inside the dialogue embedded in the text of “Iconostasis,” “the swiftness of that flight of fantasy that created philosophical systems based on Protestantism? Whether Boehme or Husserl, apparently so far apart in spiritual make-up, and indeed Protestant philosophers in general, all build castles in the air out of nothing, in order to then temper them into steel and impose chains on all the living flesh of the world... Protestant thought is drunkenness for oneself, preaching forced sobriety” 78. So, Florensky, accepting or rejecting Husserl, is passionate and interested in him, which cannot be said about Marcel. For Marcel, Husserl is less interesting: too much of a professor for his existential-artistic taste. However, if he valued Husserl (and he did), it was not as a Platonist, but as a phenomenologist. Phenomenology entered the world of Marcel's philosophy and he himself practiced it, although independently of its specially scientific developments by a German professor. But Florensky has no experiments of such phenomenology. And the point, apparently, is that phenomenology, starting from consciousness as reality, looks for entities that lie on the other side of the subject/object opposition. Florensky, in his ontological intuition, remained an objectivist, one might even say, a pre-critical metaphysician. It was not for nothing that he dealt with Kant so harshly, especially in his later years. Marcel also did not favor the Koenigsberg philosopher. But his criticism of Kant was much more moderate and selective. And in this, I think, he was more right than Florensky, who found his philosophical “scapegoat” in Kant. He rejected Kant at first as the opposite pole of Plato as categorically and uncritically as he accepted Platonism in the same way: “Plato’s gaze, turned to the depths of the human spirit,” says Florensky, “is occupied with the objective, while Kant’s gaze, interested in external experience, devoted itself to pure subjectivity” 79 . Over the years, in connection with the direct development of the philosophy of cult, the rejection of Kant is only gaining momentum, since Florensky now views his philosophy as the embodiment of the Protestant spirit, which is deeply alien to him. Since the struggle with Kant by Fr. Pavel is so emotionally intense, it is not surprising that he sometimes falls into exaggeration. For example, he practically identifies the Kantian worldview with the Renaissance one, with which we cannot agree, although, of course, some basic aspects of the Reformation and Enlightenment, philosophically embodied by Kant, were already embedded in the culture of the Renaissance. This approach obscures the transitional nature of Renaissance culture. The essence of Kant’s experience, says Florensky, is “the impossibility of encountering the realm of the self-sufficient” 80. But the Renaissance still did not completely break with this possibility. This is evidenced by the development of Neoplatonic and Hermetic tendencies in his culture, partly combined with Christianity, and partly oriented towards the renewal of ancient pagan cults (for example, J. Bruno). In addition, the episteme of Renaissance thought, if we accept M. Foucault’s scheme, is close to ancient and medieval types of thought, which are characterized by the use of concepts of sympathy/antipathy, rather than scientifically verifiable equality. “Platonism, especially the church worldview,” says Fr. Paul means good and holy, Kant means evil and sinful” 81. This final definition of the reasons for his rejection of Kant is of a religious and ideological nature, going beyond the scope of philosophy itself. The church worldview is defined here as a type of platonism. Florensky not only brings together pagan Platonism and the Christian worldview. No, he directly considers the latter a form of platonism. It is difficult to agree with this point of view. But let's move on to Florensky's philosophical argument against Kant. Florensky considers his key principle to be the egocentric autonomy of the mind, isolated from living spiritual reality. So, the first point for philosophical divergence is the pathos of self-determination from pure reason, the autonomy of the subject. The second point, closely related to it, is the immanentism of Kantian philosophy, which places the whole world inside the experience of the subject. In addition, says Fr. Paul, Kant slyly confuses subject with object, and as a result, the mind, thirsting for truth, drowns in the Koenigsberg fog. The last point is especially important for Fr. Pavel. The fact is that his initial ontological intuition is contrasting, as if copying the clear contour of the mountains against the background of azure. The counterbalance to this clarity is the blurriness of the twilight valleys with their mists. Kant for Fr. Pavla is a genius of slyness: “This is slyness... psychologism, trying to confuse and cloud the real Truth, turning it into our dreams. Thus, the clarity of the snow ridges is erased with whitish steam” 82. Kant's philosophy thus contradicts Florensky's fundamental existential experience, which we will briefly call the Caucasian symbol. In his childhood years, he saw the mountain truth - existence is mountain-shaped. Its opposite - non-existence-delusion - acted as a denial of mountain purity, height and clarity. This is a deep world, a world of illusions, dreams, blurred contours. An ontological feeling (namely a feeling, and then the analytical mind with its reasoning), as a holistic and deep act of imprinting, arose in him while contemplating the snowy peaks of the Caucasus: “Ultimate clarity, nothing blurry - embodied ontology” 83. In the levitating field of such primordial intuition, Platonism and Christianity truly become almost indistinguishable from each other. Expanding his antithesis of the valley “steam” of the crafty dreams of the mountain clarity of “snowy ridges”, Fr. Paul says that “the embodied meaning can only require a decisive response from us, and by our response we are determined in the true sense of our understanding of life” 84 . And Kant’s “religion within the limits of reason alone” does not recognize precisely the Incarnation of the Word, for this would be a break with rationalistic immanentism. Hence such characteristics of Kant as the “genius of deceit”, the dialectical mastery of distinctions, which allows one to mix the unmixable. As a result, dislike about. Paul to Kant, growing over the years, reaches its climax in “Philosophy of Cult”. “Critique of Pure Reason,” says Fr. Pavel, written by its author in a cigar haze 85. And tobacco, as our ancestors believed, has a “non-attractive ability” 86. Tobacco, Florensky points out, clouds the spirit, and a person loses touch with reality, becoming a self-contained monad 87. So, Florensky’s pathos can be briefly expressed as follows: not Kant, but the Cult! Kant, being “a Protestant to the core,” says Fr. Pavel, “didn’t want to know the cult” 88. Could he, with his cultocentric worldview, have treated the German philosopher differently? But Kant, noisily driven out the door, nevertheless penetrates the window of the building of the philosophy of the cult. Florensky, unnoticed by himself, comes to, at least partially, accept the Kantian position, which, speaking in Hegelian language, can be briefly formulated as an assertion of the truth of the subject. On the pages of his later works, the theme of the “internal”, the theme of the subject, is rarely heard in full measure. In “Philosophy of the Cult” she bursts in only at the end of the curtain. “The basis of consciousness and self-awareness,” writes Florensky, “must immediately be located outside as conscious and inside as self-conscious... The condition of personality is the unity of the transcendental with the immanent” 89. This contains a deep thought that overcomes the simplified scheme of mutual repulsion of the transcendental and immanent, internal and external, subjective and objective. Much more often with Fr. Paul, on the contrary, proclaims the truth and ontology of the transcendental and objective and, accordingly, the falsity and illusionism of the immanent and subjective. However, in this passage, Florensky expresses the idea of ​​a single basis for these categories, fundamental to philosophy. This unity is the unity of consciousness and the realized, the true and the existential. “Yes,” says Fr. Paul, “we can only speak about the conscious” 90. The subject, in other words, is part of the “composition” of truth-being. But in this case, Kant, an inveterate immanentist and subjectivist, a crafty illusionist devoid of mystical experience, is also justified to some extent. But this Kantian note in his own thought went unnoticed by Fr. Pavel. And it is no coincidence: ideologically and ideologically, it is important for him to pursue the line of strict objectivism with maximum pressure. Antisubstantialism, according to Florensky, is subjectivism, leading from ontology to nihilism. In his review of A. Tuberovsky’s book on the Resurrection of Christ, remarkable for its theological subtlety, he says that “the highest spiritual experience” takes “consciousness from the subjective realm to the ontological realm” 91 . It is difficult to agree with such a combination of categories. It is based on a scheme that equates being with objectivity: to be, according to Florensky, means to be an object. But the subject is no less real (we do not distinguish between reality and being here). Florensky, in fact, does not assume the ontological status of the subject. It is not surprising that he did not notice Husserl’s phenomenology. In it, such a scheme of the relationship between object and subject is overcome. Perhaps such object-centrism of Florensky is due to the fact that in his searches he remains a natural scientist, for whom reality is exhausted by objective reality, expressed in mathematically formulated laws? This assumption does not seem to be without some basis. But it cannot be accepted because Florensky, for all his learning, was not a believer in science. Returning to our comparison of Florensky and Marcel, let us pay attention to Marcel’s expression “the influx of being”, or “the tide of being” (l’afflux d’être), and to his thesis that holiness is an introduction to ontology. This expression indicates both the mystical beginning of existence and its wave, energy nature. In general, it corresponds to Marcel’s thesis about the luminous nature of truth (and being, for for him, as for Florensky, they are inseparable) 92. Marcel’s “saint”, as a guide to the ontological sphere, is an ascetic, an ascetic of love and light, and finally, a martyr-witness of the Truth. Christian revelation and the Church are assumed here, but are not placed in the foreground. The cultic side of the Church is even further removed from what Marcel has in mind. For Florensky, on the contrary, it is the church cult that comes first, as the concentration of “ontology,” as he likes to say. Here the place of the Marseille saint is taken by a shrine as a source of sanctification of the world. It is not so much the saint-person, the saint-man, as the Shrine, that is, the impersonal Sacred, that stands at the center of Florensky’s cultology as the source of being, as the highest “ontology.” Accordingly, the role of regulator of the flow of higher being, directing it to the mortal world, is played by the priest, the priest-pontifex 93, who in cultic actions builds a bridge between Heaven and earth, along which the blessed flow of light-being rushes. For Florensky, the clergyman acts as a technically equipped acquaintance with the heavenly world, as with the world of Platonic ideas, which for him merges with the world of Christian Truth. Logically and philosophically, his communion with the Platonic world of ideas coincides with his participation in the grace of Christ in the sacraments of the cult. So, let us conclude: if Marcel emphasizes the mystical dimension of holiness as a source of being, then Florensky emphasizes the church-cult and mysterial dimension. Briefly, the difference between the two thinkers is that the French philosopher relies on mysticism distantly related to the Church, the Russian thinker - on the church cult, the logic of which he develops in the coordinates of Platonism. For Marcel, the “tides of being” are not included in the plan of church sacraments, in the system of cult, although he would hardly deny the connection between them. But with him, as with a secular philosopher, it is tacitly assumed and not made explicit. In Florensky, it is precisely the cult as an objective system of connection between what is above and what is below that is taken as the basis. Florensky approaches it as a natural scientist. He views the cult and, therefore, the problem of being as an objectivist-platonist, as a kind of cosmologist of the cult. With this aspect, it may seem that the grace of God itself is “regulated”, that it, being absolute freedom, turns out to be a kind of sacred necessity 94. Let us summarize the understanding of the connection between religion and ontology by both thinkers: if for Marcel the shrine is the Subject, then for Florensky it is the Object. For Florensky, the sacred object “works” according to a certain plan, which he establishes or discovers in the same way as the laws of nature are discovered in science. Marcel does not have a system for “encapsulating” the spirit, there is no system for sanctifying the world, but he speaks of grace that miraculously descends on people and the world in an unpredictable place and at an unspeakable hour. So, if we find in Marcel the spontaneity of mystical enlightenment, then in Florensky the mysticism itself is strictly canalized in a system of objectified cult sacraments. Perhaps such a comparison coarsens the situation, and this is so, but still it indicates the predominant tone of expression of the connection between religion and ontology, faith and philosophy among these thinkers. Therefore, it is clear that the main thing in the phenomenon of faith for Marcel is prayer, a direct personal appeal to God as the absolute “You”. Florensky begins his lectures on the philosophy of cult with the fear of God. Marcel's fear of God recedes into the shadows. The light of prayer, the miracle of the Divine presence, testimony and love comes to the fore... Nature and space for him are also only a distant background of the personality, its inner world, freedom and creativity. For Florensky, on the contrary, cosmicity, in the broad sense of the word, includes the mystical cosmos. His divine cosmos is organically continued in the natural. Cosmostudies and divine studies are united by cult studies, the universally significant example of which Fr. Paul. And therefore, his philosophy of cult would be more accurately called “cultology” - the science of cult. We would like to add the voice of S. L. Frank to the “dispute” between Marcel and Florensky regarding the relationship between subject, object and being. Why Frank? His voice in this dialogue is especially significant because Frank largely shared Florensky’s position as a Neoplatonist developing a philosophy of unity. The point, of course, is not a matter of their personal acquaintance, nor is it that Frank was interested in Florensky’s ideas and attended his lectures on the name-glorious problem. Both Florensky and Frank share the fundamentally Neoplatonic intuitionism of all-unity as an absolute philosophical starting point. If we compare Frank's main works - "The Subject of Knowledge" and "The Incomprehensible" - with such an important work of Florensky as "The Meaning of Idealism", then the similarities between them will not go unnoticed. “Every perception,” says Fr. Pavel, - not only ἕ ν, but also πολλά, and in a sense, παν "95. Frank could well subscribe to these words of Florensky. A single perception in its inscrutable depth contains everything in accordance with the formula “everything is in everything.” The implicit connection of each with each and with the all-one can be expressed in many ways. We can translate this thought about the unity that lies at the basis of each individuality of perception into the temporal plane, saying that in the moment the fullness of time, eternity itself, seems to shine through, in which we think of the Whole, integral being, as Florensky sometimes says. So, the point of convergence of the worldviews of Florensky and Frank is the philosophy of unity. But Frank's philosophical worldview evolved. His understanding of the significance of the existential dimension of being and thought gradually grew. The tragic years of World War II sharpened the sensitivity to the existential attitude. Perhaps the correspondence with L. Binswanger 96 also contributed to this, as well as the meeting in 1938 in Paris with G. Marcel. Without setting as our goal the study of Frank's turn from the philosophy of unity to existential thought, we will limit ourselves to pointing to it, emphasizing that he did not completely abandon the Neoplatonic heritage. Therefore, he can be considered as a mediator between these two divergent attitudes of philosophical thought, perfectly suited for the role of arbiter in the “dispute” between Marcel and Florensky. So, does the subject have ontological status? And if so, what is it, what is its structure? “In the face of mental life,” says Frank, “we have a certain independent “world” that lies in a different dimension of existence than the world of nature” 97 . Subjectivity appears as mental life, as that “psychology” that Florensky decisively rejects in the name of objectivity and ontology (for him, as we have seen, they practically coincide). The world of mental life is an independent existential world, equal in ontological status to the world of nature, external things as objects of our activity and knowledge. Let us record this result. But in the last years of his life, in his posthumously published work (“Spirit and Reality”), Frank deepened the same topic. “Existenz,” he says, “is deeper and more primary than mental life as an object of psychological knowledge, and is in general a reality that is not noticed at all, which is passed by by philosophers who strive to fully understand being in the form of its objective contemplation. This immediate, primary self-existence is reality, in the face of which a person goes beyond the limits of the “world” - in the broad sense of all objective reality - and opens up a completely new dimension of being - that dimension in which he encounters its final depths and directly has them in himself. Thus, it is revealed that reality in its living concreteness is something broader and deeper than any “objective reality”" 98. So, the reality of the subject, according to Frank, is two-layered. Firstly, it is parallel (conditionally) to the reality of external reality (nature, things of the world). At this level, it is not deeper than such a thing-like objective reality, but not more superficial. They are equal in ontological status. It’s just that mental life is a different reality than the one we encounter when dealing with the external world. Secondly, within the very reality of the subject, within his mental life, there is a deeper level called Existenz, existence, existence. This level of reality of the subject is rarely noticed by philosophers, for they are usually fascinated by the siren of Objectivity-Necessity. Frank emphasizes that this is the position of the contemplative attitude. Namely, it constitutes a characteristic feature of Platonism. The participation of the knowing subject in the object of knowledge, accompanied by risk and responsibility, is not taken into account by such philosophers. Their goal is the intelligent contemplation of the absolute as an object, or absolute object. Man has this reality of primary self-existence (in earlier works Frank defined it as Selbstheit 99) within himself as the last, deepest level of being as a whole. Here we are no longer talking about the equality of the ontological statuses of the subject and the object, but about the unconditional priority of the existential status of the subject as existence before the whole world of objectivity. We cited these arguments from Frank not to say that Florensky was wrong in his dispute (conditionally) with Marcel. Yes, we share what Frank says. Marcel, apparently, would also agree with him, like Berdyaev. But this does not mean that Florensky is clearly wrong. As the series of works (“At the Watersheds of Thought”) shows, Florensky tried to overcome the opposition of subject and object not along the paths of existential thought, as Marcel and partly the late Frank did, but along the path of synergistic symbolism. The doctrine of symbols in the work “At the Watersheds of Thought” develops into the doctrine of energies and essences, into philosophical synergetics. Synergy (synenergy, according to Father Paul) is “co-activity of beings” 100. It is noteworthy that the terms used here by Florensky are clearly of an organic nature, despite the fact that physical, in particular electromagnetic, analogies are widely used, which lead to the synergistic concept of a symbol. Synergy is defined by him as “the intergrowth of energies” 101, so that in a synergetic event there are no longer separate energies. It presents a qualitatively new existential formation. And the symbol itself in such a synergetic approach acts as “such an essence, the energy of which, fused, or, more precisely, dissolved with the energy of some other, more valuable in this respect, essence, thus carries within itself this latter” 102. The symbol, in other words, is other-urgic, and if we are talking about Divine energies, then those (o)-urgic. And therefore, symbols are born from reality itself (“from reality” 103), which is united as a synergistic reality. The opposition between subject and object is overcome in it and the possibility of concrete metaphysics opens up. Existential thought, for example, of Marcel, also strives for the concreteness of philosophy. And in this aspect, the searches of Florensky and existential thinkers, in principle, converge. Therefore, it is impossible to contrast the existential orientation and the synergistic-symbolist one in this regard. This is confirmed by the fact that in the program work Fr. Paul, in which the ideas of synergistic symbolism are developed (“Name-glorification as a philosophical premise”), we find significant overlap with the basic principles of existential philosophical thought of the 20th century, and not only with Marcel, but also with Heidegger. “The basic sense of well-being of humanity,” he says, “is “I live in the world and with the world”” 104. It is easy to see that there is a direct analogue of Heidegger’s concept of “being-in-the-world” (In-der-Welt-Sein). One more point related to what has already been said. “The connection of beings,” says Florensky, “is itself something real” 105. This aspect of the synergistic symbolism of Fr. Paul corresponds with what appears as the ontological status of the pronoun “we” in the personalistic philosophy of Marcel. And here we cannot fail to note the importance of the idea of ​​resonance put forward by Fr. Pavel. This idea, in our opinion, is one of the central ones for modern personalistic dialogical philosophy of culture. It corresponds to the concept of the meeting as a spiritually significant event. Of course, the accents and tonality of all the ideas we have listed, which bring Florensky’s synergistic symbolism closer to existential personalistic thought, are different for each philosopher to whom these ideas are close. U o. Paul, they fit into the natural scientific context, into the physical cosmos. For Marcel, it is not electrodynamics and cosmology, but music and the drama of interpersonal relationships that are the world in which they unfold and by the means of which they are formulated. The patristic heritage, and in particular Palamite theology, in fact turns out, although to an unequal extent, to be the historical resource that fed both the synergistic symbolism of Florensky and the existential philosophy of Marcel 106 . We can say that the synergistic symbolism of the late Florensky is an experience of the middle path between Platonism and the existential attitude. Indeed, Fr. Paul here there is a certain departure from the position of mental contemplation in the spirit of Platonism, since the centrality of the mind and its contemplation is replaced by a new center - the will, the original desire, the “impulse”, to use Bergson’s word here. Subject and object are united, or overcome, in their opposition by the intuition of the deep longing inherent in life both within and without man. For example, the desire of life for light is the common, unified reason for the formation of both the organs of vision and everything connected with it, as well as optical technology. “The primary aspiration to light,” says Florensky, “which contains further, already psychological, relationships to light - thinking, feeling and will, is a mystical connection with light reality, or, in other words, two-in-one, being as much ours, relating to the subject, as not ours, the reality of the object itself, although the terms “subject” and “object” should be used here very conditionally, for neither the object nor the subject, in in the exact sense of the word, at this depth there is no inner life yet” 107. One cannot help but think that the depths of inner life that Frank had in mind when speaking about existence somehow correlate with those that Florensky is talking about here. But the difference between them is still intuitively clearly felt. The depths mentioned by Florensky are related in type to the depths of Schopenhauer's will. It is not without reason that the starting points here are life and will, considered in the context of Goetheanism and romanticism of the early 19th century, that is, precisely the cultural environment from which Schopenhauer emerged (though not mentioned here). But the intuitions of life and will, taken in their connection, do not yet create the existential pathos of thought, although they presuppose some correspondence with it. All these passages of Florensky, like those quoted, reveal the synergistic nature of his symbolism. The merging of higher and lower energies, without their complete dissolution into each other, determines the realism of the symbol. Thus, the theme of realistic symbolism, common to Vyach. Ivanov and Florensky from an earlier time, is enriched by a synergistic approach so that modern science and technology are connected to the usual topos of Russian symbolism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the vast humanitarian spheres of language and culture (which is developed in a new way by Florensky). Synergistic mystical-realistic symbolism, like existential thought, refers to the level of reality on the other side of its dichotomy into objective and subjective 108. But this, the deepest, level of reality in both cases is addressed to us by different sides. The categories of subject and object are overcome here, but their shadows continue to hover. And indeed, we cannot help thinking that the shadow of a defeated object hovers over Florensky’s synergistic symbolism, and the existential attitude unfolds, as it were, in the shadow of an equally detached subject. The same depth of being has many “types” - this is how we could sum up this comparison of depths and the buildings erected on them by the thinkers in question. The depth tones are different. In the existential attitude there is more apophaticism, the experience of the unknown of God, towards which existence is directed. In the energy-symbolist attitude, on the contrary, confidence in the positive knowledge of the divine, in its recognition in the energy symbol, prevails. Those faces of gods and demons that the early Florensky spoke about, repeating the later Neoplatonists, here acquire their new synergistic life. In such a symbol as in the cult, the mystery of the divine is rather unraveled than hidden, as it is felt in existential thought addressed to the mystical depth of reality. The cultocentric synergistic-symbolic cataphatism of the knowledge of God, on the one hand, and the prayerful mood of God-impetuous existence on the threshold of an inexpressible mystery, on the other. This is how we would describe these two types of spiritual life, one of which comprehends itself more in philosophy (the position of the existential attitude), and the other in cult studies and cultural studies (the position of Florensky’s symbolism). Let us leave the question of the degree of departure of Florensky’s synergetic symbolism from Neoplatonism for future research. It seems to us that it is small. Indeed, in Plotinus (Ann. III, 2–6), like in Florensky, living eternity, or eternal life, is at the center of speculation. “On the seashore,” says Fr. Paul, “I felt face to face before my dear, lonely, mysterious and endless Eternity - from which everything flows and into which everything returns” 109. In this sense, Florensky’s symbolic worldview can be defined as a unique, Neoplatonic in spirit philosophy of life. Contrary to Nietzsche, who reproached Platonism for its anti-life pathos, Florensky proclaims, and precisely in the name of Platonic idealism, “yes” to life, “for life,” he argues, “is the continuous realization of ἕ ν κα ì πολλά " 110. Life is defined by him as “our point of departure.” The philosophy of life can to come into close contact and converge with existential thought, as was the case, for example, with L. Shestov. However, the difference between them is also significant. The philosophy of life tends toward organicism, and existential thought, as we have already said, is essentially personalistic and transnaturalistic. We can sum up what has been said about Florensky’s symbolism with these words: self-knowledge, knowledge of the cosmos and comprehension of the divine are one and the same knowledge, synergistic, real and symbolic. I don’t think that such integrity and height of speculation about Fr. Paul would have been left indifferent by G. Marcel if he had met him. I think that, on the contrary, he would find in him a lot in tune with himself. Let us recall in this regard that Marcel was deeply interested in the philosophy of Vyach’s culture. Ivanov, who is in many ways close to Fr. Pavel. Of course, not everything is from Vyach. Ivanov answered Marcel’s thoughts. But he highly valued the depth and authenticity of spiritual experience in his contemporary culture. And deny them to Fr. We can't do anything about Paul. According to the style of his thoughts, Fr. Paul was a radical. He loved the clarity of formulations taken to the extreme, which sometimes led him, in our opinion, to excessive trust in schemes, classifications, and dichotomies. “Any recognition of the heavenly world,” wrote Florensky, “inevitably leads thought to Platonism... and any attachment to the earthly world leads to the denial of Platonism” 111. In this phrase, obvious in meaning and even trivial, the word “inevitable” is confusing. Marcel, no less than Florensky, recognizes the “high world,” but at the same time we cannot say that he is “inevitably” drawn to Platonism, although the late period of the French philosopher’s work shows us the significance of Plato’s metaphysics for him. Philosophical reflection, according to Marcel, should not destroy spiritual life, but, on the contrary, highlight its presence. And where Socrates and Plato move along this path, they somehow accompany Marcel’s thought from within. He rejects the world of Plato's ideas as impersonal idealities. But this does not mean that he “cleaves” to the “downstream world.” Not at all. The fact is that one can recognize the heavenly world in different ways, not through platonism alone. Who will say that Holy Scripture is not a recognition of the heavenly world? But it is far from Plato, although it does not fit into the world below. So this dialectic, which is certainly apodictic in appearance, is only apodictic when the horizon of thought is narrowed by detachment from the existential-biblical mentality. Indeed, Florensky is in many ways the opposite of an existential thinker. The ultimate task of such a thinker is not knowledge, be it even the highest mystical gnosis that Florensky speaks of. The existential thinker aims to truly be, which is what he measures true knowledge of being, no matter how the latter is understood. Existential thought is person-centric and dramatic. An ontologically significant meeting of personalities, their pairing, and dialogue come to the fore here. Because of this, it is clear that it is not the unity that requires a philosophical system that sets the goal of the existential thinker. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Shestov, Marcel did not have a system. In addition, the problem of the one and the many, which is central to Platonism, is not the most important for the existential thinker. Moreover, his intuition of being is more dynamic than static. This is manifested, for example, in the fact that Marcel expresses the “ontological requirement” living in a person using the verb “to be” and not the noun “being” (l’exigence d’être, and not l’exigence de l’être). So, we can fix two main types in understanding the image of the philosopher and philosophy itself. The first type is the Platonist philosopher, who tries to think of unity with the help of the dialectic of one and many, an all-knower who, as a rule, does not imagine philosophy outside the system that embodies it. The other type is an existential thinker, a radical personalist, sensitive to the drama of human existence, to the interpersonal plane of existence. Behind these types are different, although closely interacting and entering into dispute and conflict, cultural traditions: Hellenism - on the one hand, and Judeo-Christianity with its prophetic and messianic pathos - on the other. These are ideal types. In the real history of ideas, we find different combinations of these ideal types among different thinkers. We have already talked in this work about the existential principle in Florensky’s creative personality. Now we are focused on revealing another type in its architectonics, the type of Platonist, who seeks to organically combine positive science and mystical gnosis with each other. For a clearer idea of ​​the specific relationship between these types, let's take a closer look at some of Florensky's early works. Perhaps, we find the peak of the themes of analysis that are existential in content in the essay on Hamlet (1905). Here Florensky touches on issues that make us recall the works of such an existentially oriented thinker as M. M. Bakhtin. Of course, the very image of Shakespeare’s Hamlet dictates Florensky’s similar nature of analysis. O. Pavel reveals the double consciousness of his hero. Hamlet, he emphasizes, acts as a bearer of incompatible types of consciousness, paradoxically united in the unity of his personality. “Hamlet,” he writes, “is a dialogue between two consciousnesses in the Danish prince, their struggle, tearing apart the unfortunate prince” 112. It also talks about the conflict between monologue and dialogue, which is a cross-cutting theme of Bakhtin. But, unlike the dialogue theorist, Florensky brings the struggle of consciousnesses within Hamlet’s personality to its religious level. For him it appears as “theomachy,” the struggle of the gods. It is indicative of the existential tone of this essay that the finale speaks of prayer as “the only gift that is in our power.” This motif also has its parallel in Bakhtin, who characterized one of the two limits of knowledge with the following words: “The second limit is the thought of God in the presence of God, dialogue, questioning, prayer” 113. In the early period of Florensky’s work, literary criticism occupied a significant place. But upon careful study of the works of this period, it becomes clear that already in these years the center of his interests lies not in essays with an existential theme, but in scientifically objective studies of myth, folklore, language, name, church dogma, etc. The center in which all these subjects converge is a religious cult. Although it was in the early period of Florensky’s work that we discovered increased attention to subjectivity, however, already in these years he attributed the subjective sphere of reality to the psychological level, denying “ontology” behind it. Over the years, this assessment of her will only intensify. The period of the “Pillar” is transitional in this regard. In this regard, we note the remark of Fr. Georgy Florovsky, who drew attention to the fact that if subjectivism, psychologism and the lyricism of an appeal to God that overcomes despair, that is, in a word, the existential tone, characterizes the first part of “The Pillar”, then in its second part the tone of “Platonism and ontologism” dominates. Indeed, The Pillar can be seen as a kind of existential-Platonist diptych. In later works, including “Philosophy of Cult” and “At the Watersheds of Thought,” object-centric motifs reach their full development. In his article about Archimandrite Serapion Mashkin (“To the honor of the highest title,” 1906), an inspired work, where with the ebullient energy of youth he expresses with quick and bold strokes the central intuition of a thinker close to him in spirit, Florensky also prophesies about his future creative path. Later, in the notes to “The Pillar,” he will note the similarity of the world of his ideas with the ideas of Fr. Serapion: “The thoughts of the late philosopher,” he says, “and mine turned out to be so similar and merging with each other that I no longer know where “Serapion’s” ends, where “mine” begins... the commonality of our starting points and knowledge inevitably caused homogeneity of further conclusions” 114. Thus, knowing the ideas of Fr. Serapion, we can imagine in general and most importantly, up to further conclusions, and the views of Fr. Pavel. What exactly does he say about the worldview of Fr. Serapion? First of all, he places him next to Vl. Solovyov and further writes: “The idea of ​​the Infinite captured them, captivated them, carried them with a swift takeoff into the heights of contemplation, showed in diversity the unifying Power and diverse fullness - in Unity it made them see the “immovable axis in the race of phenomena,” blinded them with its beauty and then lowered it into the world to infect it with true love for God, to point the world to the finger of God, to the imprint of the ideal. And each of them, having visited the heights, truly seems to be Origen - mountain-born; like their sublime predecessor Origen, each seems to be a mountain-born, a lark, living in the world and not of this world, flying up and disappearing from sight" 115. This passage could, it would seem, be called a characteristic example of romantic Platonist rhetoric and call it a day. However, the authenticity of the experience behind it does not allow this to be done. It is amazing how organically the experience of a truly Neoplatonist-oriented mystic-sage-philosopher merges with Christian experience, with the spiritual practice of both clergy - Fr. Serapion and Fr. Pavel. At the same time, neither one nor the other feels any awkwardness, any mutual repulsion between Platonism and Christianity. True, oh. Pavel, talking about Fr. who was so close to him in spirit. Serapione, qualifies his mentality as “somewhat “gnostic”,” noting his inherent “thirst for absolute knowledge” and emphasizing “natural philosophical (like Origen and Solovyov) aspirations in the field of philosophy and religion” 116. Bearing in mind that Fr. Serapion is recognized by Fr. Pavel is his alter ego, this characteristic also applies to him. The thirst for absolute knowledge, the natural-philosophical priority in its structure indicate “a certain Gnosticism” in the worldview of both of them, referring as its source to the Alexandrian school (explicitly to Origen, implicitly to Clement). The word “gnostic” is put by Fr. Paul in quotation marks and is given by him in a weakened semantic version (“several”). This, of course, is no coincidence: Fr. Paul is aware of its non-Christian meaning, which he seeks to mitigate as much as possible. However, such a softening or even neutralization turns out to be formal: the text quoted above confirms this conclusion. It is characteristic that in the mouth of Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–211/215) the expression “Gnostic” did not yet carry any negative connotation. “Clement considers James, Peter, Paul and other apostles to be examples of true Gnostics,” says V.N. Lossky. A Gnostic knows everything, understands everything, even what others seem incomprehensible" 117. And above, the Russian theologian emphasizes that in the perfect knowledge that the Gnostic enjoys already in earthly life, “there is no room left for mystery” 118. The divine principle is as fully revealed and comprehended by him as the natural one, and one knowledge passes into the other without any break. For such an Alexandrian cognizer there is no secret anywhere - neither on earth nor in heaven. V. Lossky also emphasizes the closeness of Clement’s gnosis to the Hermetic one, in which “knowledge is a kind of deifying form through which one rises to the sphere of the fixed stars” 119. This form, of course, is Platonic, not Aristotelian. She deifies because she herself is deified (remember Fr. Paul: “the finger of God” is equated to “the imprint of the ideal”). Of course, it is no coincidence that both thinkers – Fr. Serapion and Fr. Pavel – were both philosophers and mathematicians, and Fr. Serapion considered himself primarily a philosopher, and Fr. Pavel is a mathematician: “You have mathematics,” he writes to Florensky, “I have philosophy” 120. The combination of these disciplines is a conditio sine qua non of 121 belonging to the Platonic school, continued in the intellectualism of the Alexandrian teachers and never interrupted in the history of thought. At the end of the 19th century. she, among others, was represented in Russia by Vl. Soloviev and the much less famous Fr. Serapion. Of course, neither. Serapion, nor Fr. Paul cannot be completely reduced to the figure of a Neoplatonic contemplator. Indeed, Fr. Paul, for example, talks about Fr. Serapion, as an unparalleled prayer book, and prayer combines praxis and gnosis, spiritual activity and mental contemplation. And here again I would like to quote the outstanding Russian theologian: “But be that as it may... together with Clement and Origen (and we will add: and with Fr. Serapion and Paul. - V.V.) the Hellenic world penetrates into the Church, thereby introducing elements alien to Christian tradition” 122. The “mountain-born” spiritualistic-intellectualistic chosenness of the Platonists and the Good News of the Christian revelation - these are the principles that enter into dispute and conflict, which, within the limits of earthly time, is unlikely to ever become a once and for all closed page in world history. “Jerusalem” is not destined to “subtract” “Athens” in the Hegelian way. The tension of aporia between these principles of culture will always stimulate the search, disturbing the searching thought. V. N. Lossky believes that in the end the Christian Church absorbs, transforms and surpasses Platonism. Florensky considers it exclusively as an “anticipation of Christianity”, containing “a mass of church terminology” 123. In accordance with this, following the Greeks, believing that the main problem of philosophy is the problem of the relationship between the one and the many, he calls the Triune of Christians, or the Holy Trinity, the crown of its solution. At the same time, the main Christian dogma turns out to be an organic continuation of Platonic thought. However, it should be recalled that in theology, starting with the Cappadocian fathers, “The Trinity leaves no more room for God - a simple Monad, an intelligible or super-intelligible substance and the source of spiritual being” 124. In other words, in patristic theology, Platonism has been overcome, and a radical gap is recognized between the One (Monad) of the Neoplatonists and the God of Christians. But we do not find such awareness in Fr. Pavel. He does not see any gap between Neoplatonism and Christianity. Why? Without examining this in detail, let us draw attention to the fact that the terminology of Christian theology is indeed almost entirely Neoplatonic, and Fr. Paul was accustomed to looking at thought primarily as a system of interrelated terms. In terms, he sees the objective skeleton of thought, accessible to positive objective fixation. The desire for scientific objectification dominates his mentality. For all his mysticism, characteristic of him since childhood, in his real work as a thinker, Florensky appears more as a mathematician and encyclopedist than as a philosopher, especially of an existential kind. This was noted in unison, independently of each other, by such different people as Fr. Serapion and N.A. Berdyaev. So, the main aporia of thought striving for a Christian orientation can be formulated as follows: if in Platocentric thinking personal freedom is suppressed by intellectualistic naturalism, then in existential thinking, on the contrary, the individual risks breaking with the cosmos and nature. The pagan animation of the cosmos, so strong in Platonism, contrasts with the eschatologism and personalism of existential philosophizing. The right path lies between these poles. However, it is easier to outline it in general terms than to implement it de facto. Therefore, it is no coincidence that in history Christian thought is more likely to split into different currents in accordance with such a watershed, rather than to trace a harmonious synthetic path. Nevertheless, the focus on finding such a path, truly “royal”, one way or another appears among outstanding representatives of Christian thought, including Fr. Pavel. What degree of Platonism, what “percentage” of it is permissible as part of philosophical thought that wants to be Christian? “Every step towards a more subtle intellectual culture,” wrote S. S. Averintsev, “meant for Christianity an approach to the ontology of the Hellenic type, to Platonic or Aristotelian idealism” 125. Is this true? Is there not another path for Christian thought than Hellenic ontology? Isn't there a path of existential ontology of personality and dialogue? The path of Kierkegaard, Shestov, Buber, Bakhtin, Marcel? Is this path less intellectually subtle? And is it really a matter of subtlety as such when it comes to the fidelity of the fundamental intuitions of the philosopher to the Christianly experienced truth? Why do forces of mutual rejection exist between Platonism and Christianity? Is it because Christianity is a religion of personality and freedom, participation and achievement, and not an intellectual contemplation of the intelligible world? Contemplation closes on the object and the necessity that is inseparable from it. The horizon of Hellenic thought is closed by the image of fate, fate, fate. Speaking in strictly philosophical language, it is closed by an object, objectivity. Objectivity is such a reality, or, more precisely, such a “cut” of it, which contains at least two essential points: firstly, general validity, and secondly, the compulsory nature of the significant. So, the category of an object, to a first approximation, can be defined as a combination of the universally significant nature of the certification in the content of the object with the compulsory nature of such certification. To be objective means to be universally valid, impersonal, necessary and coercive. Let us emphasize once again that the identification of an object as an object is not only impersonal, but also forced (necessary). The essence of the object can therefore be briefly expressed as impersonal coercion, or impersonal coercion. The only chance of freedom in the world of objects is their cognition and thereby relative overcoming. It is not difficult to see that the principle of objectivity is most fully and clearly implemented in science, especially in the science of the New Age, the beginning of which, however, lies in Hellenic science. Existential thought, based on the Christian cultural tradition, strives to break through the boundaries of impersonal, objectified thinking. The metaphysical teachings of Plato and Aristotle are objectified constructions. Existential thought is looking for another metaphysics: “Impersonal thinking,” says G. Marcel, “does not allow one to enter that space that is worthy of being called metaphysical” 126. Impersonal thinking does not reach being, which in existential thought is assumed to be personal and free. “Where “the knife of death of a loved one,” says Rozanov, “I want not Kant, but Christ” 127. Let us assume that Averintsev is right and there is no intellectual improvement of Christian culture without its approach to Platonism or Aristotelism. However, Rozanov did not say: “I want Plato” - in a situation of the threat of the death of a loved one, Plato would hardly have suited him much more than Kant. Is it possible to express the impulse itself from Hellenic, or Hellenized, philosophy to the Christian faith philosophically? This is, in our opinion, an important question. And it was precisely this situation that G. Marcel wanted to comprehend, rushing to search for a specific philosophy. In his understanding, it is the philosophy of a specific person, clarifying his extremely deep problem, at the level of which he overcomes his psychological egocentrism. It is deprived of that form of universal validity, which is inseparable from objective knowledge, as well as the compulsion associated with it. And at the same time, it is not a subjective illusion. Returning to Rozanov’s statement, the question can be posed this way: does philosophical thought as such make sense in such a situation? What did Rozanov want to say when he pronounced Kant’s name? Was it in his mouth synonymous with philosophy in general, or did he mean specifically Kant with his special philosophy? But then why didn’t he name, as an alternative to Kant, the name of another philosopher, whose philosophy, in his opinion, would be appropriate to remember in this case? For example, the same Plato? So, the fact that Rozanov, mentioning the name of Christ, turns away from philosophy in general, doesn’t it tell us in favor of the already stated assumption that he wanted to point out the powerlessness and meaninglessness of any philosophy in this situation? But perhaps the human heart and mind still need in this case, as in life in general, Christ and philosophy at the same time, no matter how strange such a juxtaposition may seem? But it is precisely in its justification that I see the only possibility of Christian philosophy as such. Of course, anti-philosophical minds will deny such justification from the outset. For them, in this context, only religion and science are justified in thinking. At the same time, they see religion itself exclusively through the eyes of science, which means that in it they see a specific space of objectification, a special world of religiously significant objects, the science of which is both possible and necessary for man, just as he needs a science about the “worldly” objects of nature and society. And what is philosophy if not the intellectual spontaneity of a subject who knows that no objective knowledge about him as a person is in principle possible? And here the preposition “about” loses its meaning. Such a philosophy is no longer a philosophy “about” the subject, but a philosophy of the subject – a philosophy of personality and freedom. This is a free person himself, alive and concrete, who dares to philosophize at his own peril and risk. This is what existential philosophy is, in terms of status and meaning. Returning to Rozanov’s statement, we see that it means the inappropriateness of any abstract philosophical reasoning in the face of “a terrible separation, corrected only by the hope of resurrection” 128. But maybe this is only a problem with abstract thought, and if you manage to philosophize concretely, personally and participatively, then such philosophy will no longer be so inappropriate even in this case? An attempt to answer this question leads us to the following thoughts. A.F. Losev once said that religion will always defeat philosophy, because the pain of life in a person is stronger than the interest in life and, therefore, the curiosity of the mind 129. The separation we are talking about here is the “tangible torment” of a specific person. Could such pain be the source of a special type of philosophical thought that does not replace religion and does not pretend to be such a replacement in any case? If we answer that “yes, it can,” then existential philosophizing is possible. And the experience of Kierkegaard and Marcel, in particular, confirms this. The pain radiates, capturing the area and the mind. In the face of such pain, the whole person stands as a whole. Can he philosophize while in such pain? There is no doubt that he has a deep need for religion, for faith. But it is not at all necessary that religious faith completely supplants the work of philosophical reflection. In “The Pillar” by Pavel Florensky there is such a beginning: A friend has died, there is no longer a Friend nearby - what to do now, how to survive this? And we know that Florensky, like Marcel, also calls his metaphysics “concrete.” Florensky's concrete metaphysics is, first of all, his philosophy of cult, the focus of his theological thought. The philosophy of the cult is completed by the philosophy of name and word outlined within it; the philosophy of the icon and the church is organically added to it, and with it the aesthetics of Fr. Paul, as well as other components of his theoretical heritage. The emphasis on objectivity, scientific and superscientific or mystical, defines the style and spirit of his particular metaphysics. The concrete metaphysics of G. Marcel, on the contrary, is existential philosophizing, far from cultology, but carried out in the light of the Christian faith, nowhere passing into theological science and not pretending to be it. Therefore, the similarities between these thinkers are balanced by equally significant differences. The heavenly objectivity of the cult, according to Florensky, is “more objective than earthly objectivities, more complete and real than them” 130. Does this mean that God in the understanding of Fr. Paul is even more impersonal and coercive than the object of earthly science is impersonal and coercive? It's tempting to think that this is the case. There are reasons for this. But still such an assumption will be incorrect. Indeed, it seems that he does not mean a personal God, not an absolute “Thou,” to use the language of Marcel, but an absolute sacred Object, the mystical objectivity of the transcendental world, which he understands Platonistically. Yes, this is almost true, but only “almost”. And in the same “Philosophy of Cult,” the last chapter of which is devoted to prayer, we see that subjectivity, so categorically expelled from his philosophical theology, is restored by him as “subjectivity.” Accent, pathos - yes, that’s what it is. But Florensky would not be himself if he fell into the one-sidedness of the untrue. Here it is appropriate to recall the characteristics of Fr. Pavel Rozanov: “He is correct. Rich and at the same time correct. There are no “howling winds” in it... It has Caucasian firmness - from the mountains there..." 131. If “howling winds” in Rozanov’s vocabulary mean an existential spirit, something definitely “Dostoevsky,” then “Caucasian firmness” is read as “extreme correctness.” If we imagine truth as correctness, and correctness as a fixed sequence of its meaningful links, or elements necessary for its complete structure, then, following Rozanov’s perception of Fr. Pavel, we can say that Florensky, striving for the truth, hits the target. Correspondence to the truth is achieved surprisingly naturally. This means, in Rozanov’s words, that he is “extremely correct.” Rozanov, however, saw this as a “flaw in his nature.” But we will not discuss this feature of a creative personality. Paul can be regarded in a similar way. Let us accept it neutrally, as a fact: Fr. Pavel is like that. And let us now turn our attention to something else - to placing emphasis in the correct sequence of elements of truth. This accent in Florensky is special, it characterizes him. In our model of the relationship between truth and personality, it is “supertrue,” indicating the specificity of the person who knows the truth and strives for it. Rozanov is right: Florensky really does not fall into error against the truth (approximated by the model given above). Subjectivity, expelled, denied by all means and forces, at the end of the curtain of the philosophy of the cult, nevertheless enters into it. And how could it be otherwise? After all, Fr. Paul understands that without faith as an essential dimension of the subject, the very objective realities of its content are impossible. It is possible to pronounce the words of prayer mechanically and objectively. But will there be a touching of what is above and below? Therefore, Fr. Paul's philosophy of cult is the theory of the subject. It is based on, as we said, the fundamental distinction between subjectivity (all negative characteristics must be attributed to it) and subjectivity (positive assessment). True, it is characteristic that, while making this distinction, he still does it philosophically, undeveloped, casually: here again one feels that it is not philosophy that burns the mind and heart of Fr. Pavel. The technique of philosophical thought as such does not interest him too much. As a priest and theorist of the priesthood, Florensky recognizes himself as a super-philosopher. Yes, he knows philosophy, he has deeply penetrated its terminology. But his deepest hopes are not in her sphere. For philosophy as a profession and vocation, he is too mystic and too scientist at the same time. A natural scientist studies the structure of the natural cosmos. And o. Paul is busy understanding the sacred cosmos, understanding it as essentially permeating and embracing the natural cosmos, as its living spiritual core, the internal structure of which can be comprehended, starting primarily from one’s own experience of worship. Let us emphasize that it is no coincidence that the philosophy of prayer is presented in the last chapter of “Philosophy of Cult.” There is no point in turning to heavenly objectivity in prayer. Prayers cannot reach superobjective objectivity, which is greater than all earthly objectivities. And they are not really flying towards her. And oh. Paul knows this. He generally seems to know everything. But not everyone loves. And he does not love the subject, but loves the object - in all its forms. This is what we call a combination of correctness with a specific personal emphasis on it. Existential philosophical thought is primarily a philosophy of faith and prayer, and, moreover, to a minimal extent confessional and church-based. Such is Kierkegaard, such is Marcel. But Florensky is not like that at all. His religious object-centrism stems from the priority of the Church over the individual (“We trust the Church, not individuals” 132). So, he gives an example, we believe the word of Hermas not because Hermas said it, but because the thought of the Church was reflected in it. Church conciliar tradition is more ontological and objective than the opinion of a person. And we believe a person only to the extent that he expresses this ecclesiastical objectivity. Here's a thought about. Pavel. From this it is clear that the primacy of the Church over the individual necessarily leads him to what we have designated as the “object-centrism” of his thought. Let us note one more point. Churchliness itself, which is typical, is perceived here by Fr. Paul Platonistically: “The Church is our metaphysical homeland, and this is its charm. She, he says, “is remembered” (according to Plato). It resembles another world, imitates another world” 133. It seems surprising that, speaking about the Church, Fr. Paul does not mention the basic tenet of Christian ecclesiology. Of course, he knows it and its history and can interpret it objectively correctly, which he did in his extensive ecclesiological work. But in his preparatory, one might say, internal notes, he recalls in this case Plato, and not Christ. Churchliness in his eyes is organically interpreted in a platonistic way. And this understanding of her is close to him, moreover, deeply related. So, Platonized churchliness is one of the sources of his object-centrism. So, as we have seen, the Christian Church itself attracts and attracts Florensky because he perceives in it a similarity to the Platonic world of ideas, the heavenly world dear to his soul. Why is the latest source of inspiration for Fr. Was Paul specifically Platonism? What's the matter? In our opinion, the central intuition of Pavel Florensky, inspired by the Caucasus of his childhood years, or his ancestral symbol, was originally Platonist. Its essence is that he understood the mountain in the image and likeness of the mountain. Florensky was literally born in the mountain - he was born in Yevlakh, in Transcaucasia, between two chains of snow-peaked ridges. “The place of my birth,” he says, “has determined something forever in my soul” 134. Then and there he comprehended the primary phenomenon (Uhrphaenomen), comprehended in prime time, initially (Uhrzeit). Where was he born? In the sky - and only in it. For above, beyond the edge of the snow-white mountains with the clarity of unchanging forms, there was Azure, the upper sky, and below was the Transcaucasian steppe, perceived by him as “the sky below” 135 . It’s better to say – not perceived, but what was actually the lower sky. For how else can we call this sultry world, woven from the “metallic, ringing trills of cicadas and grasshoppers,” a world of heavenly abundance of “fish, game, livestock, animals, poisonous insects, snakes and incense” 136? So, he was born in the sky - upper and lower at once, in celestial space. What is a "snow peak"? This is a prototype of what exists, this is absolute reality in its primordial phenomenon. Everything is assessed about. Paul as he compares it to a “snowy peak.” She, he emphasizes, “was offered to me... but not by me” 137. This is an example of transcendental being, the being that nourishes all things. The experience of the mountains is the experience of transcendence, the experience of ecstasy. The sky is ontologically powerful, absolutely powerful. It was not created by me, and therefore was given to me as a reality that surpasses me. Florensky speaks of it as “the sky of objectivity” 138. The sky, the azure, are higher than me, the “at-home” one. “I want,” says Florensky, “not to master Azure, but to realize it in myself” 139. Azure is an absolute example: “What is given there, in the azure, is realized in my steppe by every movement of mine.” Azure, in other words, is the world of eternal, imperishable ideas, luminous samples. He is contrasted with the “spit-stained square” and the crowd with its “child of speeches and dust of “ideals”” 140. This is the opposition of the genuine and the fake, the most important in an existentially oriented worldview. Thus, the Platonist “heavenly music” 141 includes—and organically includes—an existential-sounding melody. It intensifies when Florensky plays out the theme of the free steppe, remembering not only his Karabakh ancestors on his mother’s side, but also his Zaporozhye roots on his father’s side. He paints his image in such a way that one involuntarily recalls Pushkin’s Aleko, the romantic ideal of unbridled freedom: “I am a robber with all my guts, and I would not sit in an office, but rush into a storm at night, without a goal, rush with a whirlwind on a Karabakh horse. There are no obstacles to this leap!.. And no barrier, erected by human hands, will confuse me: I will burn it, cut it down - and I will be free” 142. Father Paul unexpectedly turns to us with his poetic-romantic Byronic essence - the steppe freemen spoke in him, recognizing only Heaven, only the power of Azure over their unbridled freedom. In an early work that he wrote on the eve of entering the MDA (“Empyrea and Empiria”), he formulates the main opposition in the world of worldviews as the opposition between positivism and theism 143. Here, in a letter of 1917, when he came close to the philosophy of the cult, Fr. Paul appears as a romantic theist. He feels uneasy in Theosophy, stuffy and cramped in the square in the crowd proclaiming “human and civil rights.” ““The priestly whip,” he says, “gives me freedom of spirit,” and “self-extorted” democracy with its cult of rights and freedoms “takes it away” from him 144. Is this Platonism? Yes and no. This is super-Platonism, because such an apotheosis of freedom, such a desire for it, does not exist in Platonism. Yes, the mountain here is a prototype for the mountainous as spiritual. But in the world of mountains there is given a prototype not only of an objectively forced existence, absolutely given as something not made by hands, emanating not from me, but also a prototype of free existence. The mountains say an unyielding “yes!” not only absolutely unchangeable and indivisible (the ideas of Plato and what they symbolize), but also the absolute mobility of freedom, the freedom to depend only on them and depend completely freely. In the summer of 1917, when this letter was written, Fr. It seemed to Paul that the whole world, and especially Russia, was moving towards “riping down mountains”, throwing off Platonism and the religion of the transcendental God (“everyone is busy tearing down the peaks, clouding the firmaments of the earth, piercing into the Azure of heaven”) 145. Florensky, on the other hand, recognizes himself as a lonely rower against the tide - together, however, with Bulgakov, whose confessional response to the publication of his book (“Non-Evening Light”) is the letter we quote. “Now,” he writes to him, “the immanent is rushing everywhere. Church government, the sacraments, the meaning of dogmas, God himself - everything is mantled by him, deprived of an existence that does not exist in us, and becomes a mode of ourselves" 146 . In this lyrical and confessional letter, Fr. appears as a freedom-loving knight of transcendence. Paul. And if in his early works the model of a Christian Platonist for him was Vl. Soloviev, then here, with the pathos of this amazing confession, he approaches another thinker - Konstantin Leontyev. On the night of January 22, 1914, apparently after the service, he writes down: “My long-standing observation. As they sing “Like the Cherubim,” a mysterious whirlwind rises, blowing from bottom to top, and it takes me, the employee, out of the empirics. From this moment on, I cease to be like everyone else and with everyone else, and become different, and remain in a different place. This is complete isolation. The feeling is that throughout the service you are climbing and climbing uphill, the air becomes thinner, the wind is stronger. And when you reach the cherubim, you find yourself at the top, and then the wind of grace tears you from the top and carries you away, and you soar in another world” 147. This entry requires analytical reading. The fact is that the very analogy of the mountain and the mountain serves only as a means to a real transcendence into another world, an absolutely higher one. And this world, if you read the above record, is thought of as super-Platonic. Indeed, what is Platonic is the ascent to a peak that is still in this world. The entire service up to the Cherubim is still an earthly, in the sense of the immanent world, path upward. And only at the top of this world is the ascendant carried away to another world by the “wind of grace.” This is no longer a Platonic experience, it is a Christian experience, “higher empiricism,” in the words of Schelling, noted and adopted by Marcel. Only in such “higher empiricism” is there a complete break with the world of “empirics” - the empirical earthly world. Plato's experience of speculation only lifts, imparting a thrust upward, but this world is not completely overcome in it. Only the Christian experience is the experience of true transcendence. We began the topic of Caucasian intuition as an expression of a specific holistic experience, basic in its function and, it would seem, confirming the thesis about the platonism of Fr. Pavel. And we came to the conclusion that we saw this primal intuition as the path to truly Christian experience. You come to this comparison: isn’t Platonism similar to Fr. Paul's hallway in the Christian apartment of his soul? The hallway can be included in the apartment itself, or it can be excluded from it, emphasizing that it is not itself, but only the hallway leading into it. Let us dwell on this comparison for now and look at other places that reveal the Caucasian-Platonic intuition of Fr. Pavel. Rarely, perhaps, only in letters does he make it a conscious subject of his thought. Usually, Caucasian intuition only appears as a background in his works. For example, in the last chapter of “Philosophy of Cult,” he talks about the prayer call as overcoming self-isolation in subjectivity, describing it in the images of “cloudiness.” Moreover, this overcoming itself acts as a breakthrough in the clouds and access to the Sun, the Light. Here, of course, we see the implicitly working Caucasian paradigm - the image of a mountain ascent, an assault on the peak, when the cover of clouds is overcome and the dazzling, indescribable radiance of the azure sky is revealed to the climber. Here is another similar characteristic place. Speaking about the sacrament of consecration of oil, Fr. Pavel recalls the memorable event of the opening of the relics of St. Sergius in 1919. He compares the fragrance that reached him from the opened shrine of the saint “with the smell of a real mountain violet” and “a blooming vine” 148. In his perception in the earthly world, the smells and sights of the Caucasus, its heavenly nature, are as close as possible to the divine world. For Pavel Florensky, the earthly standards of the heavenly were, as it were, registered for life in the unforgettable Caucasus of his happy childhood and youth. The image of the higher world, persistently inherent in his memory, was formed in him under the direct influence of Caucasian nature. Dazzlingly sparkling mountain peaks are perceived as external objects. But they are experienced by an inner sense of the presence of the sacred, inseparable from them. This experience is essentially Platonic, not Christian. When we say “Platonic,” we mean first of all the mystical meaning of Platonism, its kinship with the world of ancient Hellenic cults, found in Plato’s theory of ideas. In the Caucasus Mountains, Pavel Florensky is a lonely contemplator, ecstatically experiencing the presence of the higher - heavenly - world. Platonism in Fr. Paul primarily serves as a provider of constructive schemes for understanding cult as a system of sacraments. “Every sacrament,” Fr. writes in his notes. Paul, “considered from the outside, there is some bodily action, but one that has unconditional value and holiness in the consciousness” 149. How is it possible for the bodily, earthly, that is, essentially relative and conditional, to have unconditional value (holiness)? This is the question that Fr. Paul. And he finds the answer to it in Plato’s theory of ideas, which he subjected to “smooth” Christianization. Each sacrament crowns a special series of life phenomena, which, he says, “rests on its symbolically embodied idea, on its absolute root, on the “τὸ” of the phenomenon - τὸ βρῶμα, τὸ βάπτισμα ... etc. " 150. This entry dated July 1, 1914 served as the basis for the sixth chapter of “Philosophy of Cult” (“Features of the phenomenology of cult”). Paul understands by referring to the Platonic idea as the absolute root of a homogeneous series of earthly phenomena. So, for example, nutrition has its absolute root, its “embodied idea”, in the Eucharist, the sacrament of communion. Let us note that the word “symbolically” (“symbolically embodied idea”) has been removed from the text of lectures on the philosophy of cult. In 1918, when this lecture was compiled, this word, which seemed necessary in 1914, was crossed out. Why? Apparently, because in these lectures Fr. Paul wanted to even more radically emphasize his main position in understanding the cult, which can be designated as Christian realism. But the word “symbolically,” no matter how much he insists on its ontological meaning, introduces unnecessary polysemy, in particular the illusionistic connotations associated with it. Let it be in the mouth of Fr. Pavel, as well as Vyach, who is quite close to him. Ivanov, the word “symbolism” is equivalent to “realism”, if you like, mystical, religious realism. But there were other interpretations of symbolism that were far from realism. And therefore this word could cause confusion. So, Platonism is the working language of Christian religious studies. Pavel. Without the feat of faith, it is impossible to “move to the very limit” of the series of earthly phenomena (nutrition, treatment, cleansing, etc.), and therefore the meanings of the sacraments are not revealed 151. Of course, the question arises of how Platonism is connected with the pre-Christian mysteries, with the ancient Greek cults, and what is the specificity of Christianity’s connection with it. Without researching how this issue is resolved. Paul, we only note that he emphasized the antinomian attitude of the Church to its pagan religious heritage. The Church, he says, denies its connection with this heritage, and de facto, liturgically, recognizes it 152. Cultocentric religious thought about. Paul, of course, not only recognizes this connection, but also specifically identifies it. But speaking of this antinomianism, he clearly speaks in favor of it as a principle. At the same time, the general significance for him of antinomianism as such is revealed. The fact is that, according to Florensky, without antinomies, reality becomes flattened: “The denial of one or the other half of it (antinomy - V.V.),” says Fr. Pavel, – leads to the plane” 153. In other words, antinomy means that the object endowed with it has depth, volume - vitality, true reality. The fact is that the core of Platonism itself is unthinkable without a fundamental antinomy in its composition. Indeed, what is Plato's idea? Briefly speaking, this is the visible (by the mind) invisible as the “absolute root” of the visible, this is the visibility of things purified to absoluteness, which has become invisible from such rectification. The concept of limit in mathematics, Goethe’s ur-phenomenon - all these are different models of Plato’s idea. And they all apply about. Pavel. He also applies the Aristotelian model of the Platonic idea, understanding it as an organizing form and “entelechy” (for example, when revealing the church teaching about the Holy Cross 154). All of them set ways of understanding the production of the sensuous by the supersensible, which itself, however, retains sensuality, but absolutely pure and conceived exclusively as mental visibility (this is the meaning of the word ίδεα and ε ἶ δ o ς - appearance, appearance). The Platonic-Aristotelian language has always been used by Christian thinkers to express Christian thought, and the use of words about. Paul continue this tradition. The line separating the Christian way of thinking from the Platonic way of thinking does not lie here. It takes place where, for example, the cognitive function is placed above salvation, knowledge above love, where the creation of the world by God is denied in favor of the eternity of the world, etc. But since we remain in the sphere of theory, we cannot avoid platonism. However, this is not so if we mean philosophy rather than theory. There is not and cannot be an existential theory (as well as a theory of existence), but there is an existential philosophy. And she, while accepting some important points of Platonism, nevertheless significantly diverges from it, using a different language. Fr. also resorts to certain elements of this language. Paul (“call”, “call”, “I” and “you”, “witness”, “prayer”, “faith”, etc.). But his Platonic discourse is represented to an incomparably greater extent than the existential one. Without the existential component there is no Christian philosophy. But different Christian thinkers present it to varying degrees. And Fr. Paul, the core of his thought is not she, but Platonism together with “cosmicity,” which we noted above as the object-centrism of his philosophy. A non-Platonic, even anti-Platonic Christian melody sounds in Fr. Paul not just quietly, but as an antinomian addition to the massive and pathetically charged discourse of Platonic objectivism. One passage in “Philosophy of Cult” is typical, in which Fr. Paul, in the spirit of Plato and his tradition, emphasizes without mincing words the deadness of history. And from his always sensitive and, in principle, infallible pen, the following antinomian clause flies out: “Among the dead waters of history - and yet alive...” 155 Here Fr. Paul speaks of the manifestation of holiness. History is still recognized as living, but the emphasis is not on living history. How does this contrast with the pathos of historicism in Fr. Georgy Florovsky! There is no need to raise the question of which of them is more Orthodox. These are empty questions. “In My Father’s house are many mansions...” (John 14:2). And not only is it permissible - who is the judge here, who can it be? – but it is also necessary for Christian thought to sound in different registers, in different keys. She is strong due to the richness of her palette It is not difficult to research the writings of Fr. Paul, for example, his “Philosophy of Cult,” using his usual method - counting the number of different characteristic terms used by the author. And if this is done, then the situation with the proportion of cosmic objectivism and personal subjectivism can be represented by the figure so beloved by them. We found only a few rare places where he speaks in terms of a dialogue between “I” and “you” about the realities of cult and faith. This is in the last chapter of this work: “The call,” he writes, “is a spiritual act that makes of him, or, more precisely, of it, you” 156. The Christian existentialist G. Marcel could also put his signature under such a statement. But if for him all these categories (the term “category” is not very successful here) are at the center of his thought, then for Florensky they are only included in the whole of his cultology, the pathos of which does not lie in them, but in the objectivistically interpreted reality of the mystical content of church sacraments. Father Paul is a clergyman, and not an extra-church philosophizing mystic. Hence his deep and comprehensive interest in the cult, which really cannot be understood without revealing the objectivism of the heavenly world hidden in it. His searching thought is not concentrated on the subject’s faith, or not so much on it, but on the objectively given realities of the cult. Platonism and existential thought Platonism as an existential experience - what does this mean in relation to history, including the history of thought? Here it is appropriate to turn to Florensky’s criticism, first of all, of his “Pillar”, by Florovsky. “Florensky does not feel history,” says Florovsky, “he does not live in history, he has no historical perspective” 157. Yes, it is not history with its temporality that is the focus of his thought, but the eternal. Correctly said about Fr. Pavle O. Sergius Bulgakov: his calls of eternity sounded stronger than the calls of time. The calls of time are the calls of history. But how could it be otherwise for a Platonist, and a Platonist not just by conviction, but deeper - and by virtue of personal existential experience? A Platonist and a mathematician is a doubly Platonist. But, nevertheless, Florovsky is not entirely right in his statement. Florensky had a supra-historical perspective of history. In the early period, during the years of his friendship with A. Bely, the metahistorical perspective appeared for him and his friend as an eschatological worldview (“apocalyptic,” as Florensky put it in a letter to Bely dated July 15, 1905). Later, this symbolist apocalypticism is reinterpreted as the prospect of the formation of a new integral culture, cemented from within by an organic religious worldview. As Florensky’s letter to Bely, written a year later, testifies, at the center of the desired new era stands the Church (“the harmonious music of the Church”), around which the entire world, graciously transformed in the cult, gathers. The idea of ​​a new Middle Ages, which N. Berdyaev came up with in post-war Europe (1924), was conceived much earlier in the symbolism of Florensky. Together with the circle of younger symbolists close to him, Florensky was filled with a feeling of the accelerating approach of a new era, in which one can see a continuation of the eschatological mood of the late Vl. Solovyova. He saw its signs, signs and omens everywhere, and above all in science, which was always close to him. But the radical Platonist is really sad about the history of people, although Florensky had his own historical method - genealogical - and he cannot be considered, as Florovsky does, generally insensitive to the historical dimension. He, a Platonist and naturalist, was attracted to genealogy, and as a linguist, he was attracted to roots, the origin of names and terms. Well, so, each thinker has his own special sensitivity to the historical. Not everyone has a taste for the human drama of passions and illusions, filled with rivalry, the struggle for power and self-affirmation. Let us note one more point. Forsakenness of God, doubt and despair and then overcoming them in the experience of conversion are not accepted by Florovsky as a necessary stage of the path to God: “One gets the impression,” he says, “that it is inevitable to come to God through doubt and despair” 158. Here he mentions Pascal, who went through a similar path. It is no coincidence that this type of experience underlies existential thought. Pascal, Kierkegaard, Marcel all experienced religious conversion. And it is these thinkers who represent religiously oriented existential thought. But Florovsky, with his refusal to abandon the faith of his fathers, with his seemingly innate Orthodoxy, appears for this reason as a thinker devoid of a deep existential dimension. Florensky, on the contrary, turns out to be a real religious existential thinker, but of a special type. Indeed, his fundamental experience is twofold: in it, the acquisition of Christian faith is balanced by the scale of the event with Platonism, as another form of existential personal experience. Behind Plato's ideas, as Florensky interprets them convincingly and artistically, there arises the image of fate, fate, the Greek Moira and Ananke. And the compulsion emanating from them is greater, the more they are considered as divine prototypes, first roots and primary causes of things, including man. Because the idea of ​​Ananke, or Fate, has a reflection of the deity, its fatal character becomes even more fatal, so to speak. That is why Platonism cannot be considered the only possible form of Christian thought, Christian philosophy par excellence. In his works specifically devoted to Platonism, Florensky shows how organically it is connected with astrology. But astral determinism is all the more inexorable because, being astral, it is divinely compulsory. After all, heavenly coercion is even more coercive than earthly, because on earth there is always room for chance, chaos interferes with what is happening on it, disruption of predestination is possible here, while heaven, as a synonym for the divine, is impeccable in the role of a “programming device”; it is a perfect mechanism, although it is thought of as living and animate. Animated causes, with which I cannot enter into dialogue, because they certainly surpass me, like immortals - a mortal, are even more inexorable than the laws of earthly nature. But why then is the divine-organic determinism of Plato’s ideas better, that is, closer, warmer, more merciful for humans than the secular-mechanistic determinism of new European science? So the main question is: can Christian philosophy be reduced to Platonism? Is it the only possible philosophy of Christian consciousness? In our opinion, it is productive to think about this issue by studying Florensky’s work. In his works he emphasizes that the ancient peoples thought according to Plato. But this raises the question: did all ancient peoples think according to Plato? Didn't the peoples who created the Bible go beyond Platonism? One more thing. In search of the form of his own worldview, Florensky strives from the mechanistic and therefore lifeless worldview of the 19th century intellectual, as a rule, the “scientific faith,” to the organic panvitalistic and panpneumatic platonically oriented worldview of the ancients. But the appeal to life that lies behind all the thoughts of Fr. Paul, does not necessarily have to be platonizing in nature. For example, L. Shestov, according to the fair remark of N. Berdyaev, is in the line of Lebensphilosophie, but his “philosophy of life” has a pronounced anti-Platonic, anti-metaphysical (but without positivism) character. This means that the conclusion follows that not a Platonist, but an existential “philosophy of life” is possible! In it, the basic intuition of life, if preserved, is pushed aside in favor of the intuition of personality and freedom. In the concept of life, no matter how it is understood, there will always be a depersonalizing residue, a shadow of the ancestral fate. The watershed here is in the way of understanding the spiritual principle. Spirit is not just a synonym for the heavenly, other in relation to the earthly. Spirit is also personality and freedom, without which it does not exist. And if it is identified with Plato’s idea, then doesn’t freedom disappear? And doesn’t the spirit then become a spirit of dependence on the absolute, which the Christian God, as an absolute Person, surpasses? What is not accepted by existential thought in a platonically oriented worldview? Downplaying the mystery of existence. Platonism, of course, cannot help but talk about the mystery in the depths of the world. But doesn’t he belittle it when he objectifies the mysterious, reifying the very thoughts of God about created being? It is easy to reduce Plato's ideas to such thoughts of the Creator about creation. Plato's rationalism tends to rationalize the Mystery. But such rationalization, especially the simplified one, following a stencil, cannot but raise doubts and skepticism. And then an anti-platonic reaction arises to self-satisfied, lazy, stereotyped platonism - sometimes in the form of crude materialism, although not only. A more subtle form of response to it is existential philosophical thought, including that of a Christian orientation. But let us repeat once again: the very opposition of Christian existential thought and Platonism should be considered, so to speak, a semi-opposition, as both G. Marcel and N. Berdyaev spoke about it in one voice. Plato's dualism of the sensible and the intelligible changes its meaning in the light of the Christian dogma of the Incarnation. Incarnation cannot fail to rehabilitate bodily and sensory existence. In Marcel, this moment is present in the elaboration of the idea of ​​incarnation (l’incarnation) in his phenomenology of the body and sensation (le sentir), tying the knot of existence as being-in-the-world. “The existential,” says Marcel, “inevitably points to an embodied being, that is, to the fact of being-in-the-world.” 159 A complex of existential concepts-symbols arises - situation, participation, involvement, etc., overcoming the contemplativeness of Platonism, in which cognitive orientation is the highest kind of universal human attitudes. Of course, one should not think that Christian dogmas erase Platonism from the arsenal of thought. This is, of course, not true. Platonism as symbolism (and a symbol is unthinkable without ontological mystery) retains, albeit in a transformed form, its rights, one might say, eternal rights. The Incarnation does not eliminate the mystery of God and man; although the Divine and the human merged hypostatically in the Incarnation, they remained unmerged - no matter how contradictory such a statement may be. And if so, then, along with symbolism, Platonism retains all its rights, since it, keeping the secret, remains faithful to symbolism. Thus, the basic ambivalence of Platonism in its relation to Christian thought should be defined as the juxtaposition of rationalism and symbolism in it: a Christian-oriented consciousness accepts the second and limits the absolutist claims of the first. Christian thought is in a dual, ambivalent relationship to Platonism - it is both inspired by it and strives to overcome its limitations inherent in it as Hellenic rationalism. Not only platonism is associated with symbolism, but also existential thought that opposes platonism. According to Fr. Paul, something acts as a symbol insofar as it is greater than itself 160. It is enough to compare this thesis about the self-transcendence of a thing as a symbol with the commonplace of existentialist philosophy about man as a being-project, a being fundamentally unequal to himself, a being-existence, and not a being-essence. Therefore, we can say that in existentialism a person is a symbol, a being symbolic in its ontology. The drama of salvation in the consciousness of Florensky is assessed not so much according to Dostoevsky as a battle between God and His enemy in the heart of man, but as a rebellion of the subject, or non-existence-subjectivity, against God the object, God the being. The objective is identified by him with true reality, even with Truth. Indeed, God speaks about. Paul, there is “objective, most objective” 161. He introduces degree into the concept of an object exactly as it is introduced into the concept of reality by Vyach. Ivanov (a realibus ad realiora). It seems that it is introduced because the object is identified with reality, acting as its philosophical name. Accordingly, the subject serves as a pseudonym for illusion, non-existence, delusion, that is, the unreal. Such usage as a philosophical position is questionable. But we do not find a value-neutral theory of subject/object in Florensky. For him, the object is always overloaded with values ​​to the detriment of the subject. Florensky’s phrase about God as “the most objective” should be supplemented with a counter-phrase: God is the most subjective, the innermost, the soul of the soul, the engine of engines, the active in the active. At the highest ontological “floor” of Christian philosophy, the very opposition of subject and object is overcome. However, Florensky’s object-centric pathos can be understood: it arises for him within the framework of the philosophy of cult, to which all his thought is drawn. Indeed, since we are talking about a religious cult, it is possible only if the sacred rites that form it are objective. The sacraments underlying the cult cannot be affected in their sacred depth by the subjective characteristics of the persons involved in it, as well as by other incidental circumstances of its earthly celebration. The cult functions, if you like, as a “machine” of sanctification and salvation, the work of which cannot be influenced by any subjective factors. Of course, everything must happen according to the rules, and Florensky considers various difficult situations possible here on the pages of his “Philosophy of Cult.” The main rule is this: the human imperfection of a particular clergyman when he performs a church sacrament cannot stop the flow of grace that is poured out in a mysterious way on the believers. And in this sense, we can say that the sanctification of earthly existence occurs objectively, that is, to a certain extent, similar to natural and necessary processes in nature, in the life of the cosmos. Therefore, it is understandable why the term “objectivity” is used by Fr. Paul is close, sometimes to the point of identification, to such terms of his philosophy of cult as “ontological” and “cosmic”. It is tempting to explain such object-centrism as the rudiments of scientific belief that has not been overcome, despite the “collapse” 162 experienced. This assumption is supported by the widespread use of scientific methods for describing various kinds of phenomena in the Philosophy of Cult. For example, examining the use of the word “martyr-witness” in sacred texts, Fr. Pavel resorts to a quantitative approach, calculates the percentage of its occurrence, etc. He uses scientific objectification as a method everywhere. While studying the mystical ontology of the cult, calling it, undoubtedly, philosophy, he remains a natural scientist and mathematician. All this is true. But the hypothesis that scientific belief cannot be overcome must still be decisively rejected. Science about. Pavel has overcome it in content and worldview. But as a universal method of cognition, it retains all its power. An object cannot be non-external, even if something internal is objectified. The object of attention, the object of activity, is always external as an object. God, in principle, is not an object, because He cannot become the subject of our activity in the sense in which the things of the world can become them. This non-objectivity of truth is expressed by Florensky at the end of his Memoirs: “Gradually, however, partly with the help of Tolstoy,” he says, “it began to become clear to me that truth, if it exists, cannot be external to me and that it is the source of life” 163. Here, overcoming the opposition subject/object occurs under the sign of life, conceived in its depth: life as the source and meaning of life, life that is larger than me and is not me, but comes into contact with me, nourishes me, gives meaning to my life. Thus, here, at the end of his Memoirs, Florensky leads to the following antinomy: life-meaning-truth is not external to me and life-meaning-truth is “not me and not in me.” The meaning of this antinomy is that the very oppositions external/internal, mine/not-mine, subject/object at this level of deepening into being are invalid. The word "life" is more appropriate than these words to convey this level of depth. And for good reason: after all, life really flows across the edges of all these distinctions. She is both subject and object – neither this nor that. Therefore, if you think about the idea of. Paul, then we should correct our judgment about his object-centrism: it would be more accurate to talk about his vitocentrism, that for him life as spirit is the focus of his thought. The word “object,” one might say, unduly Kantianizes the Neoplatonic mysticism of life, which is indeed so closely related to Fr. Pavel. Let us summarize the results of our research. In the Caucasian symbol, key for the creative personality of Fr. Paul, the platonic and existential principles organically merged together. In his personal concrete experience, both Platonic mysticism and Christian mysticism are experienced, and such an experience in itself carries within itself a moment of existentiality that characterizes all of his work. Depending on the specific situation, these constitutive moments of the philosophical worldview are in a certain moving dynamic relationship. This is exactly what we sought to show. Vizgin V.P. On the way to the Other: From the school of suspicion to the philosophy of trust. M., 2004. P. 730. The contrast between Jerusalem and Athens (“What do Athens and Jerusalem have in common?”) goes back to Tertullian (see: Shestov L. Soch. in 2 vols. T. 2. M.: Nauka, 1993. P. 465). Khoruzhy S. S. Philosophical symbolism of P. A. Florensky and his life sources // P. A. Florensky: Pro et contra. The personality and creativity of Pavel Florensky in the assessment of Russian thinkers and researchers. St. Petersburg, 1996. P. 549. Berdyaev N.A. Khomyakov and priest. Florensky // Berdyaev N. A. Muddy faces. Types of religious thought in Russia. M., 2004. P. 289. Khoruzhy S.S. Quote. op. P. 557. Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), French philosopher, playwright, literary and theater critic; converted to Catholicism (1929); one of the founders of Christian existentialism. Ivanov Vyach. Collection op. T. II. Brussels, 1974. P. 661. Heisenberg W. Philosophy Le manuscript de 1942 / Introduction et traductuon de Catherine Chevalley. Éd. du Seuil. Paris, 1998. P. 269. Agrippa of Nettesheim. Famous adventurer of the 16th century. Critical-biographical essay by Joseph Orsier “Trans. Bronislava Runt. Under. ed. Valeria Bryusova. With the appendix of three articles by the editor: “The slandered scientist,” “The Legend of Agrippa” and “The writings of Agrippa and the sources of his biography.” Tomsk, 1996. Goethe I.V. Faust. Tragedy / Transl. N. A. Kholodkovsky. M., 1962. P. 9. Florensky Pavel, priest. To my children. Memories of past days. Genealogical research. From Solovetsky letters. Will. M.: Moscow worker, 1992. P. 48 (hereinafter – To my children...) Dodds E.R. The astral body in Neoplatonism // Dodds E.R. Pagan and Christian in Time of Troubles. St. Petersburg, 2003. P. 291. Augustine of Hippo, Blessed. Confession. Book I. Ch. VII.11. Florensky Pavel, priest. To my children... P. 49. Baudelaire S. Correspondences / Trans. K. 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T. 3 (2), pp. 78–83). Florensky P. A. Iconostasis. M., 1995. P. 107. Florensky Pavel, priest. Philosophy of cult. P. 108. Florensky P. A. Op. in 2 vols. T. 2. At the watersheds of thought. M.: Pravda, 1990. P. 73. Florensky Pavel, priest. Op. in 4 volumes. T. 2. P. 436. It's him. Philosophy of cult. P. 102. Florensky Pavel, priest. Op. in 4 volumes. T. 2. P. 235. Marcel G. Le mystere de l’être. / Nouvelle Edition. P., 1997. Liv. I.P. 73. In ancient Rome, pontifexes (or pontiffs, literally bridge builders) constituted a college of clergy (sacerdotes) who initially supervised the construction of the bridge across the Tiber. Berdyaev caught this moment from Florensky. If o. For Paul, his “idea” is sacred Necessity, while for Berdyaev it is super-sacred, extra-divine Freedom, the choice of which is an ideological act, the choice of an abstract idea. Ideologism (ideology of revolution, change, reform, freedom) hovers over his criticism of Florensky. It is possible that this ideologism was provoked in part by the ideology of conservationism and church conservatism, seen by Berdyaev, not without some reason, in the work of Fr. Pavel about A.S. Khomyakov, which caused the maximum of his criticism. Florensky Pavel, priest. Op. in 4 volumes. T. 3 (2). P. 98. Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1966) – Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher, headed the clinic from 1911 to 1956; was a close friend of S. L. Frank. Binswanger's work had a significant influence on existential phenomenology and "existential psychoanalysis". Frank S. L. On the nature of mental life // Frank S. L. Beyond right and left. Paris, 1972. P. 225. Frank S. L. Reality and man: Metaphysics of human existence // Frank S. L. God is with us. M., 2003. P. 159 (author’s italics - V.V.). Florensky P. A. Op. in 2 vols. T. 2. At the watersheds of thought. M.: Pravda, 1990. P. 286. Vizgin V.P. Saint Gregory Palamas and the philosopher Gabriel Marcel // Vizgin V.P. 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T. 2. P. 433. Rozanov V.V. [Op. in 2 volumes] T. 2. Solitary. M., 1990. P. 650. Florensky Pavel, priest. Philosophy of cult. P. 489. Correspondence between priest Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky and priest Sergius Nikolaevich Bulgakov. Tomsk, 2001. P. 130. Florensky Pavel, priest. Op. in 4 volumes. T. 1. P. 155. Correspondence of the priest. P. A. Florensky with priest. S. N. Bulgakov. P. 132. Florensky Pavel, priest. Philosophy of cult. P. 451. Florovsky Georgy, prot. Paths of Russian theology. Vilnius, 1991. P. 494. Marcel G. Du refus a l’invocation. Paris, 1940. P. 33 (author’s italics – V.V.). Florensky Pavel, priest. Op. in 4 volumes. T. 4. Letters from the Far East and Solovki. M., 1998. P. 330. Florensky called the collapse of his science-centric worldview, which he experienced in the summer of 1899, a “collapse” (see: Pavel Florensky, priest to my children... pp. 216–245).