The Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge

Pavel Florensky is undoubtedly the most enigmatic figure of Russia’s Silver Age. Despite his propensity to paradox and contradictions, the profundity and intensity of his intellect captivated the minds of many of his contemporaries. As his university classmate Leonid Sabaneeff put it: ‘He was a man quite unlike any other’.  Less known in the West than his fellow sophiologists Vladimir Soloviev and Sergei Bulgakov, Florensky’s scholarly contributions to the Russian Religious Renaissance are discussed in various Histories of Russian Thought but, on many occasions, understated.  Florensky’s thought often poses a challenge to researchers’ ability to achieve a holistic fusion of his various philosophemes due to their profound depth and unusual aperture.

In the last year of the second millennium, the Jubilee Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church adopted several important documents, one of which—The Basic Principles of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Attitude towards Heterodoxy,  hereinafter The Basic Principles—will be analysed in this essay. In this document, which appeared only a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the reviving Russian Church expressed her conciliar view on a rather burning and painful issue – the attitude to heterodoxy.
The essay unfolds in three steps. The first section briefly identifies the history and presuppositions for the development of The Basic Principles, followed by a general overview of the document itself. Complementing this, sections two and three give full articulation to the twin key discussions – The Boundaries of the Church and The Barriers to Russian Ecumenism. Obviously, these themes are related, as the ecumenical behaviour of a church, to a great extent, depends on how much latitude is allowed in the identity of the Church.

The opening chapter of Genesis had an arguably greater influence on the development of Christian theology than any other part of the Old Testament. Ancient thinkers have gleaned profound levels of meaning from Genesis 1, thus making it one of the most read and adored chapters of the Bible by Christians throughout time. One of the most popular genres of scriptural commentary among the Fathers was commentary on the six days of creation, the Hexaemeron. Writers who reflected on the Hexaemeron tended not to analyse it verse by verse in order to defend a particular scientific narrative; rather, they largely directed their exegesis toward deriving Scripture’s broader spiritual lessons. 
There are debates even amongst members of the same tradition about what these creation narratives actually mean. In our day, it is getting increasingly difficult to take biblical cosmological accounts literally, considering the developments of modern science that continue to challenge them. Despite this, Christian fundamentalists perseveringly accuse the adherents of nonliteral interpretation of rescuing the sacred text from the rationalist assault of contemporary critics.
This essay will unfold in two steps: firstly, I will identify some of the allegory’s main species and review its primary functions; secondly, I will explore several allegorical readings, both ancient and modern, of the Gen 1:6-8 passage. These allegories will be juxtaposed against multiple literal interpretations rather than one—‘plain’—sense. By doing so, I seek to legitimize allegorical reading as a trustworthy approach to scriptural exegesis.

In this paper, I argue that ‘collectivistic’ Christian traditions, e.g. most Orthodox churches and, to a large extent, the Roman Catholic Church, are more resilient in the face of secularisation.  The key word here is ‘resilience’ as it highlights a church’s ability, in the long term, to maintain its public 'relevance in all spheres of life' at the personal and the institutional levels, rather than her ability to occasionally demonstrate measurable growth.

A very important and long-awaited recent event in the Russian Orthodox Church caused me to want to research the subject of this essay. In early December 2016, the First International Congress of Choirmasters and Singers of the Russian Orthodox Church took place at the Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow. This was the first gathering dedicated to the issues of liturgical singing ministries since 1917. Traditionally fulfilling its role as an inseparable aspect of church worship, Russian liturgical singing never fully developed the same degree of ideological and artistic independence from the Church as was achieved by Western sacred music.  So, the persecution that befell the Russian Orthodox Church in 1917 truly reduced many of the areas of church life to the level of catacomb existence. Obviously, in such circumstances prospects of engaging in any form of liturgical music ministry were dim. An observation from my fifteen-year liturgical singing praxis further illustrates this point: I have never performed a church hymn composed by a living author.

The main task of this essay is to review the two subject texts and critically evaluate the research methods employed by Horujy and Slesinski to unpack Florensky’s complex and original theology for their respective audiences. After discussing structure and key ideas in the following two sections, I will offer several comparative points to identify commonalities and distinctive differences in the two approaches used. I argue that these differences are predicated not only by the subjective reception of Florensky’s ideas by these two authors but by their own motivational thoughts and distinct audiences, the dissident Soviet intelligentsia and the ecumenically-minded Western scholars looking East for an inspiration.

The goal of this essay is to critically investigate a particular facet of Pavel Florensky’s original theology. Given that Florensky’s contribution was formulated in the general context of the Russian idea of 'integral knowledge', it would be misleading to even use the word ‘interaction’ to describe Florensky’s spiritual and scientific endeavours, as he was driven by a goal that was very different from motivations found in most contemporary Western books on the dialogue between science and theology. Florensky does not focus on presenting more scientific evidence that backs faith; rather, he strives for using all means possible to construct a unified world, where science and theology, phenomena and noumena, exist in concord.
This essay will unfold in two steps. First, I will review biographical underpinnings and early influences on Florensky’s worldview. Second, I will discuss several mathematical-theological ideas, which Florensky presented in his magnum opus, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth.
Please note, this exposition will be limited to Florensky’s early contribution, thus leaving his post-1917 work (Iconostasis, The Imaginaries in Geometry, At the Watersheds of Thought, etc.) for my further treatment.