Visual Thought in Russian Religious Philosophy

Pavel Florensky's Theory of the Icon

Clemena Antonova

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429557958
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'art médiéval

This book considers a movement within Russian religious philosophy known as "full unity" ( vseedinstvo ), with a focus on one of its main representatives, Pavel Florensky (1882–1937). Often referred to as "the Russian Leonardo, " Florensky was an important figure of the Russian religious renaissance around the beginning of the twentieth century. This book shows that his philosophy, conceptualized in his theory of the icon, brings together the problem of the "religious turn" and the "pictorial turn" in modern culture, as well as contributing to contemporary debates on religion and secularism.

Organized around the themes of full unity and visuality, the book examines Florensky's definition of the icon as "energetic symbol, " drawing on St. Gregory Palamas, before offering a theological reading of Florensky's theory of the pictorial space of the icon. It then turns to Florensky's idea of space in the icon as Non-Euclidean. Finally, the icon is placed within wider debates provoked by Bolshevik cultural policy, which extend to current discussions concerning religion, modernity, and art.

Offering an important contribution from Russian religious philosophy to issues of contemporary modernity, this book will be of interest to scholars of religious philosophy, Russian studies, theology and the arts, and the medieval icon.

1
The unity of man and God before the icon

The icon as “energetic symbol”

In a highly intimate text addressed to his children, Florensky wrote: “All my life I have been thinking about one thing – about the relation between phenomenon and noumenon.” ¹ That relation, according to Florensky, is to be understood through the symbol. We are surrounded by symbols: i.e. phenomena that reveal and even “contain” the noumena, for “the mystery of the world is not hidden, but is precisely revealed through symbols in its true essence – that is, as a mystery.” ² Clearly, “symbol” is interpreted here as possessing a unifying function; i.e. it brings about the unity of the phenomenon and the noumenon, of the immanent and the transcendent. This connotation of the term goes back to the ancient Greek symbolon, from the verb symballein, which means “to throw together, to unite, to fit together,” ³ in this case to unite what belongs to our immanent world to what belongs to the higher, transcendent world. Integral knowledge becomes very much the ability of recognizing the symbols in the phenomena.

The view of the symbol as the unity of the immanent and the transcendent has had a long history in human thought. In this chapter, I will address only one moment of this history, namely the understanding of the visual image as symbol, which was vigorously promoted by Florensky throughout the corpus of his writings. The Russian thinker drew from several major sources, including the Byzantine theology of the icon and the German romantic opposition between symbol and allegory. I have paid more detailed attention to both the Byzantine and the German background elsewhere. ⁴ The common element in these diverse intellectual influences is the idea that the visual image is a symbol in the sense that it “contains” the presence of the depicted being or figure. The symbol is the symbolized. Thus, the icon of Christ (immanent) is Christ (transcendent) in a manner defined by the Byzantine iconophile theologians of the eighth and ninth centuries.

In the following text I would like to draw attention to a little-known aspect of Florensky’s preoccupation with the symbol. I will suggest that the Russian writer’s works on the visual image, mostly from the 1920s, present a further stage in earlier work, mostly from the 1910s, on the philosophy of the language and specifically the philosophy of the Name. More concretely, Florensky became arguably the most intellectually influential figure in the imiaslavie (Name-Worshipping) controversy, which unfolded particularly in and after 1913. By defending the imiaslavtsy (the followers of Name-Worshipping) in his writings, he went back to the terminology and positions expressed by the fourteenth-century Byzantine theologian St. Gregory Palamas and particularly Palamas’s theology of divine essence and energies. This work, I believe, lies at the heart of Florensky’s later definition of the icon as “energetic symbol.” There is a smooth and logical transition between the idea that “the Name of God is God” in terms of divine energies (but not essence) and the notion that the icon of Christ discloses the energies (and, again, not the essence) of Christ and is, therefore, Christ Himself.

My purpose in this instance is not simply to point out yet another intellectual source of Florensky’s theory of the image. Rather, I would like to demonstrate through a particular example what I believe to be an approach to knowledge which is highly typical of Florensky’s thinking. The pretext is frequently a concrete contemporary issue – in this case, the Name-Worshipping controversy in Russia. Florensky analyzes this issue by placing it within the long history of Eastern Orthodox Christian thought. The familiar theological dogmas and ideas, such as the Palamite distinction between divine essence and energies, are, however, thoroughly modernized exactly by drawing the visual implications which lay dormant in medieval theology. This is how Palamite terminology, meant to describe the relationship between God and man, is used to describe this relationship in the specific case when it takes place before the icon.

The imiaslavtsy incident in 1913 and its intellectual afterlife

In June 1913, the monks of Mount Athos, the greatest conglomerate of Orthodox monasteries in the world, were subjected to an unusual sight. Right before their eyes they could see military ships approaching their tranquil surroundings. To their great astonishment, they realized that the Russian Navy meant to storm the Russian monastery of St. Panteleimon on the Mount, on the grounds that some of the monks belonged to the movement of imiaslavie (“Name-Worshipping” or “Name-glorifying” in English), which the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church had declared heretical. The monks, who refused to recant, were arrested and sent back to Russia, where they were excommunicated.

The incident could be dismissed as yet another row between monks and church officials if it were not for its hugely important and surprisingly wide-ranging impact in a number of intellectual contexts. Indeed, Name-Worshipping left a deep imprint on religious philosophy, but also – and probably more surprisingly – on developments in mathematics. A recent study has suggested that Name-Worshipping was “instrumental in helping the birth of a new field of modern mathematics,” ⁵ i.e. what is known as Descriptive Set Theory, developed by the world-famous Moscow School of Mathematics in the 1920s and 1930s. One of the founders of the school, the great mathematician Dmitrii Egorov, was a practising Name-Worshipper. ⁶ It was Florensky, however, a member of the school, who systematically applied mathematical ideas to theological and religious problems, which emerged in the imiaslavie debates (See Chapter 3, section “Florensky and the development of a mathematical worldview”). In this sense, his use of the same theological ideas in his theory of the icon should be seen as a consistent approach of using creatively – and sometimes controversially, as we will see – theological notions in completely new and frequently unexpected contexts.

The drama on the Holy Mountain had been provoked by a revival of the Hesychast practice of the Jesus prayer and the accompanying belief that the Name of God, recited during the prayer, was God Himself. Hesychasm was a mystical movement in medieval Byzantium, whose theological importance was mainly due to the writings of St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), a monk from Mount Athos who became the Archbishop of Thessaloniki. In the process of defending Hesychast spirituality, St. Gregory developed a sophisticated theology which is a cornerstone of Eastern Orthodox thought. It is well-known that Hesychasm had a strong following in medieval Russia; there has been an interesting debate among scholars on the possible impact of Hesychasm particularly on fourteenth and fifteenth century Russian religious painting. ⁷ The Hesychast revival in nineteenth century Russia has also attracted significant attention. ⁸ In this sense, the incident with the Russian monks on Mount Athos bears witness to yet another revival of Hesychasm in Russian history.

Interestingly, rather than extinguishing the movement the events on Mount Athos in 1913 gave it intellectual credibility. The issuing controversy touched on, sometimes gave focus to, many of the themes that lay at the heart of the full unity movement. Some of the foremost thinkers at the time got involved (Sergei Bulgakov, Vladimir Ern, later Alexei Losev), while arguably no one’s intellectual impact was as important as Florensky’s. Florensky’s role was crucial in defining the dominant framework within which the controversy was interpreted at the time and since. Indeed, it was Florensky who established the implicit opposition between the mysticism and genuine spiritual experience of the imiaslatsy and the rationalism and positivism of their opponents. ⁹ In his notes, written at the time and not meant for publication, ¹⁰ he describes the conflict as a philosophical struggle between the Platonic idealism of the Name-Worshippers and “the Kantian positivistic point of view” of their opponents. ¹¹ For Florensky, the whole debate was of the utmost importance, because it came down to the possibility or impossibility of a union between man and God. To deny the possibility that the Name of God was God was to deny the possibility of a communion between God and man. It is through the divine energies in the Name that man finds himself, quite literally, in the presence of God.

It should be kept in mind that while Hesychasm as a movement had an almost uninterrupted history in Russia, the theology of St. Gregory Palamas – whose teaching provided the main theological support of Hesychast spirituality – was largely forgotten in nineteenth-century Russia. Tellingly, both versions of the Philokalia (the standard collection of texts on Eastern Orthodox Hesychast theology, first compiled in the eighteenth century) – by Paisii Velichkovski at the end of the eighteenth century and by Feofan Zatvornik (or Theophan the Recluse) in the nineteenth century – omit Palamas’s theological writings. ¹² This is remarkable, considering that Palamas’s teaching had been part of the official doctrine of the Orthodox Church as a result of the decisions of two important councils in the fourteenth century. During the imiaslavie debates in the 1910s it became clear that, as Scott Kenworthy remarks, “no one in the debate had actually read Palamas, nor were they familiar with the fourteenth-century councils.” ¹³ We encounter, therefore, the interesting situation whereby theologians and philosophers who did not know Palamas’s works in the original were consistently using terminology which is clearly Palamite. Florensky was no exception, while the same applies to Sergei Bulgakov and Vladimir Ern. While Florensky refers in passing to the Byzantine theologian in his Pillar and Ground of Truth, his citations are almost invariably from secondary sources. At the same time, as we will see, both in his works on the Name-worshippers and in his writings on the icon, Florensky relies heavily on terms that are clearly Palamite.

Already in the nineteenth century, when Kireevsky maintained that integral knowledge was possible only “because the energies communicate a full image of being,” ¹⁴ I believe that he used the term “energy” exactly in the sense of Palamas. In this way, while there was little familiarity with St. Gregory’s works in the original, Palamite energetism became an important influence on the Russian philosophy of full unity from the very beginning. It was the controversies around the Russian Name-worshippers, however, that pushed Palamas into the spotlight. In many ways, this was the immediate background of the works of Vladimir Lossky and John Meyendorff that put Palamite teaching firmly on the map of modern Eastern Orthodox theology. In the following section, I will focus on Florensky’s highly original application of Palamite theological terminology to the theory of the icon.

From word to image: drawing the visual implications of Palamism

One of the purposes of this chapter is to show that, for Florensky, one of the sites of the encounter between God and man, an idea of immense importance in Orthodox theology, takes place before the icon. The experience of the believer before the holy image is conceptualized by Florensky through his application of Palamite terminology. Ultimately, the Russian author defines the Orthodox icon as an “energetic symbol” (energiinii simvol).

The distinction between esse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Florensky’s project of religious modernity
• 1 The unity of man and God before the icon: the icon as “energetic symbol”
• 2 The unity of the icon in space: on a stage in man’s road to deification
• 3 The unity of faith and reason: on an unusual application of Non-Euclidean geometry
• 4 The organic unity of the icon and the Church ritual as a synthesis of the arts
• Conclusion and implications
• Bibliography
• Index