Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky
Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky was a multifaceted Russian thinker born on January 9, 1882, in Evlakh, Azerbaijan, within the Russian Empire. He emerged from a family with deep religious roots, as his father was a railroad engineer from a Russian priestly lineage, while his mother was of Armenian descent. This diverse background influenced Florensky's lifelong struggle to reconnect with the Orthodox faith and cultural traditions that he felt were denied to him by his parents. A prodigious intellect, he studied mathematics and philosophy at Moscow University, engaging with prominent contemporaries and participating in the vibrant literary salons of his time.
Florensky's spiritual journey was complex, marked by a search for meaning that included flirtations with various philosophies before returning to Orthodox Christianity. After his formal theological training, he became a teacher at the Moscow Theological Academy. His life took a dramatic turn following the Russian Revolution, as he faced persecution under the Bolshevik regime, leading to multiple arrests and eventual exile. Despite his hardships, he continued to write and explore his faith until his execution on December 8, 1937. Florensky's legacy as a philosopher, artist, and scientist reflects the tensions between faith, modernity, and the sociopolitical upheavals of early 20th-century Russia.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky
Theologian
- Born: January 9, 1882
- Birthplace: Evlakh, Russia (now Azerbaijan)
- Died: December 8, 1937
- Place of death: Near Leningrad, Russia (now St. Petersburg)
Biography
Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky was born on January 9, 1882, in Evlakh, a town in the part of the Russian Empire which that later became Azerbaijan. His father was a railroad engineer, but had come from a Russian family with a strong religious background, producing many priests. By contrast, his mother’s family were Armenians, and would have belonged to the Armenian Apostolic Church rather than the Russian Orthodox Church. As a result of this difference of faith, the couple effectively shut organized religion out of their lives. Throughout his life, Florensky struggled to rediscover and reclaim what he considered to have been the heritage denied him by his parents’ decision, particularly his Russian Orthodox faith and the warm traditions of kinship common in the Caucasus.
Florensky was a precocious child and quickly soaked up a wide range of knowledge about the physical sciences. In 1898, he took his one and only trip abroad, visiting Berlin with some of his mother’s family. However, he was already entering a period of spiritual awakening in which he saw the natural world less as something to be studied and analyzed and more as a transcendent unity to be experienced. During this period of questioning, he briefly flirted with Tolstoyanism and various occult mysticisms before returning firmly to the Orthodox faith of his forebears.
In 1900, he entered Moscow University to study mathematics and philosophy, a decision which put him in close contact with a number of the leading thinkers and artists of his time. In particular, he became close friends with Andrei Bely, who gained him entrance to many of the leading literary salons of the time. However, he felt uncomfortable with the modernist literary crowd, and upon his graduation from the university in 1904 he went to the Moscow Theological Academy in Sergiev Posad for a four-year course, after which he accepted a teaching post there. He remained there until 1917, except for a brief period of imprisonment after his 1906 arrest for a sermon condemning the execution of Lieutenant Petr Schmidt after the 1905 Revolution.
Although he had originally intended to enter the black, or monastic priesthood, a second spiritual crisis led his spiritual director to advise him to marry. He wed Anna Mikhailovna Giatsintova, and was subsequently ordained in the white (parochial) clergy on April 23, 1911. Although he wanted to become a full-time parish priest, he was kept in his academic role until the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks purged the academy staff, although he continued to give lectures until 1919. He apparently passed up several opportunities to emigrate, and instead tried to find an accommodation with the Soviet leadership, working in various technical agencies. However, in 1928, he was arrested and exiled to Nizhny Novgorod. In 1933, he was arrested again and this time sent to the Far East. He began to write verse once again, but his last work was to remain forever unfinished, for on December 8, 1937, he was executed near Leningrad in one of the frantic “population reductions” in which prisons were cleared for fresh influxes of arrestees.