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MelIta Theologica Journal of the Faculty of

Measuring Divinity: Pavel Florenskij’s Integral Vision of the Finite and the Infinite

Proceedings of an Inter-Faculty Colloquium Organized by the Department of Moral Theology Faculty of Theology, University of 6-7 December 2017

Editors Martin Micallef and Glen Attard ISSN: 1012-9588 Copyright Melita Theologica Press: Best Print, Qrendi, Malta

Melita Theologicais a peer-reviewed journal of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Malta. The journal has been published biannually since 1947, initially by the then Royal University Students Theological Association (RUSTA) and, since 1980, as a joint venture between the Theology Students Assocation and the Faculty of Theology. As from 2012 Melita Theologica is being published jointly by the Faculty of Theology at the University of Malta, the Theology Students Association, and the Foundation for Theological Studies. MELITA THEOLOGICA

Volume 69 – Number 1 2019

Editor-in-Chief: Contents Martin Micallef 1 Inter-Faculty Colloquium Editorial Board: Preface Martin Micallef, chairperson; John Berry; 5 Glen Attard Carl M. Sultana; Jonathan Farrugia; Measuring Divinity: Pavel Florenskij’s Integral Jean-Paul De Lucca; Raymond Zammit; Vision of the Finite and the Infinite Paul Sciberras; Nikki Felice. 11 Josef Lauri Administrative Board: Florenskij and : Naming Infinity Alda Anastasi; Martin Micallef; 17 Vincent Riolo Jonathan Farrugia; Jean-Paul De Lucca; Pavel Florensky, The Symbols of the Infinite Jesmond Schembri; Brenda Prato. 23 Sandro Lanfranco Advisory Board: Pavel Florensky, and the Uniqueness of Man Francesco Asti (Pontificia Facoltà Teologica Ray Zammit dell’Italia Meridionale, Naples); Maurizio Barba 35 Physics, Technology, and Theology (Pontificio Ateneo S. Anselmo, Rome); Johannes in Pavel Florensky Beutler (Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome); Michael T. Buchanan (Australian Catholic 47 Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci University); Lisa Sowle Cahill (Boston College); Inverse, Reverse Perspective as Subversive Peter De Mey (KU Leuven); Gerard Hughes Perspective in Florensky’s Silent Mutiny: (University of Oxford); Mathijs Lamberigts (KU A Debate Leuven); Augustin Mendonça (St Paul University, Michael Zammit Ottowa); Elzbieta Osewska (Cardinal Stefan 69 Volentem ducunt: Wyszynski, University, Warsaw); Josef Stala Guiding the Willing Out of a Tunnel (Pontifical University of John Paul II, Cracow); Anthony Francis-Vincent (Pontificia Università 81 Ranier Fsadni Salesiana, Rome); Robert Wicks (Loyola Florensky and the Personalisation of the Word University, Maryland). 91 Charlò Camilleri Published jointly by: Pavel Aleksandrovič Florenskij The Faculty of Theology, Lectures on the Christian Worldview University of Malta; 99 Hector Scerri Theology Students Association; Pavel Florenskij’s The Concept of the Church in Foundation for Theological Studies Sacred Scripture: The Reaction and Response of a Systematic Theologian Editorial Office & Subscriptions: 107 Paul Sciberras Melita Theologica The Church as Body of Christ: Pavel Florenskij’s, Faculty of Theology The Concept of Church in Sacred Scripture University of Malta 117 Vladimir Fedorov Msida MSD 2080 Beauty, Goodness, and Truth in Pavel Malta Florensky’s The Pillar and Ground of the Truth [email protected] 127 Guidelines For Contributors

Yearly subcription for two issues: Malta: €12.00 Europe: €25.00 Other Countries: €30.00 MELITA THEOLOGICA Journal of the Faculty of Theology University of Malta 69/1 (2019): 1-4

Inter-Faculty Colloquium Preface

etween the 6th and the 7th December 2017, the Faculty of Theology Bcommemorated the eightieth anniversary of the untimely death of one of ’s great polymath thinkers of the twentieth century, Pavel A. Florensky (1882-1937). While introducing this thinker to the academic and student community at the University of Malta, the Inter-Faculty Colloquium sought to celebrate Florensky’s interest in bringing together different streams of thought and research in view of a wider, more integrated form of knowledge. True knowledge, he would say, must serve the purpose to open us to new horizons, to overcome one-sided worldviews, to engage us in dialogue with the intrinsic and organic diversity of the world, and to let this same diversity shape the very fabric of our life and thought. As society becomes, even in academic circles, more fragmented and specialist, Florensky’s polyvalent heritage resounds today ever more conspicuously. He worked tirelessly to reform the Church spiritually, internally, at a time when most clerics sought institutional remedies to solve the problems that the Orthodox Church was facing. At the time of the Soviet anti-ecclesiastical rule, he also cooperated with the Government in areas of engineering, chemistry, and applied physics, teaching and researching in many governmental institutions and bringing forward many important projects as well as ground-breaking discoveries. He was also a man of the , an admirer of marionette theatres, a critic of iconographic , an avid reader of world literature – like Shakespeare and Goethe –, and, being a pianist himself, was great friends with musicians like Aleksandr Skrjabin and Marija Judina. He was also a Symbolist; he believed that in the visible world is incarnated or manifested another spiritual world that is distinct but not separate from the physical world we see around us. If one looked closely at the visible world, tears, as it were, could be perceived unto the invisible

1 2 MELITA THEOLOGICA world. Florensky was also a man of many friendships. His letters reveal a character of extreme intensity and approachability, gentleness, respect and love for others, be they work colleagues, childhood friends, devotees seeking direction, or close family members asking how he and his wife and children are doing. The Inter-Faculty Colloquium, in fact, sought to celebrate one of the core elements of Florensky’s life project, namely, integrity and interdisciplinarity. With this dialogical in view, the Colloquium brought together lecturers and students from eight Departments of the University of Malta: the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Biology (from the Faculty of Science), the Department of , the Department of Art and Art History and the Department of Anthropological Studies (from the Faculty of Arts), and the Department of Moral Theology, the Department of Sacred Scripture, Hebrew, and Greek, and the Department of Fundamental and Dogmatic Theology (from the Faculty of Theology). The programme itself also sought to enhance this dialogical spirit between the three Faculties. Five of Florensky’s papers were chosen, and five pairs of speakers were then given the task of reacting to these papers, each speaker from their own perspective. These five papers were chosen to reflect the vast array of Florensky’s academic interests. The present volume contains all the proceedings that were presented at this Colloquium, following this same programme. The five themes and Florensky’s papers that were discussed were the following: 1. Philosophical Mathematics Examined papers: On the Symbols of Infinity (1904); On Types of Growth (1905) Speaker 1: Prof. Josef Lauri (Department of Mathematics) Speaker 2: Mr Vincent Riolo (Department of Philosophy) 2. Physics, Technology, and Theology Examined paper: Incarnation of the Form: Action and Tools (1922-24) Speaker 1: Dr Sandro Lanfranco (Department of Biology) Speaker 2: Rev. Dr Ray Zammit (Department of Moral Theology) 3. Perspective in Art Examined paper: Reverse Perspective (1920) Speaker 1: Prof. Giuseppe Schembri-Bonaci (Department of Art and Art History) Speaker 2: Prof. Michael Zammit (Department of Philosophy) Preface - Glen Attard 3

4. Culture and Christianity Examined paper: The Cultural-Historical Place and Perspective of the Christian World Understanding (1921) Speaker 1: Mr Ranier Fsadni (Department of Anthropological Studies) Speaker 2: Rev. Dr Charlò Camilleri (Department of Moral Theology) 5. The Idea of Church Examined paper: The Concept of Church in the Sacred Scriptures (1906) Speaker 1: Rev. Prof. Hector Scerri (Department of Fundamental and Dogmatic Theology) Speaker 2: Rev. Dr Paul Sciberras (Department of Sacred Scripture, Hebrew, and Greek) Delivering the Keynote Address at the end of the two-day Inter-Faculty Colloquium was our distinguished guest, Russian Orthodox Archpriest Professor Vladimir Fedorov of the Department of Theology and Religious Pedagogy from the Russian Christian Humanitarian Academy, St Petersburg, Russia. His speech was entitled: Beauty, Goodness, and Truth in Pavel Florensky’s ‘The Pillar and Ground of the Truth’ (1914). Born on the 8th March 1945, Rev. Prof. Fedorov graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics of Leningrad State University, after which he worked at the Faculty of Psychology of the same University. In 1977, he graduated from the Orthodox Theological Academy with a degree in Theology. In 1978, he was then ordained deacon and in the . Between 1977 and 2001, he taught at the St Petersburg Theological Academy. Between 1998 and 2001, he was a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Munich, Munster, and Hamburg. He was also a member of the Synodal Theological Commission. From 2002 to 2007, he was a consultant for the World Council of Church Commission for Theological Education in Central and Eastern Europe. Currently, he is Head of Department of Theology and Religious Pedagogy at the Russian Christian Humanitarian Academy. He also taught at the Department of Psychology, Department of Extreme Crisis Psychology, as well as the Department of Conflict of the Faculty of Philosophy and Political Sciences at the St Petersburg State University. Since 1994, he has been also: Director of the Orthodox Institute of Missiology, Ecumenism, and New Religious Movements; President of the Inter-Church Partnership “Apostolic City–Nevsky Prospekt”; President of the Association of Teachers of and Theology of Eastern and Central Europe; and Vice-President of the East-European Association of Missiological Studies. In 2010, he was awarded the title of Honorary Worker of Higher Professional Education by the Russian Federation. 4 MELITA THEOLOGICA

Two years on, an interest in Florensky’s interdisciplinary work is still felt among lecturers and students alike at the Faculty. I hope the present volume could inspire more readers as well as scholars to delve into Florensky’s intriguing thought.

Glen Attard Department of Moral Theology Faculty of Theology University of Malta Msida MSD 2080 Malta [email protected] MELITA THEOLOGICA Glen Attard* Journal of the Faculty of Theology University of Malta 69/1 (2019): 5-9

Measuring Divinity: Pavel Florenskij’s Integral Vision of the Finite and the Infinite

The building of culture is defined by the spiritual law: ‘where your treasure is, “there your heart will be also’ (Lk 12:34). This treasure is spiritual value, that which we recognise as the objective meaning and justification of our existence.” Pavel Florenskij wrote these words in 1924 to an American audience. His firm was that a culture is born of any given group of people who hold some “treasure” or other to be “objective” and which would “justify” their existence. Cultures, therefore, are inherently diverse, entropic, and dependent on the space that any given people occupy at any particular point in time. The more diverse the cultures, the more diverse are the values of meaning. What brings all these cultures together is their common recognition of the need for “meaning” and a “justification of our existence.” In other words, “our personality and, therefore, all its manifestations are determined by our treasure,” continues Florenskij.1 Through this Colloquium, the Faculty of Theology continues to stretch out its hand of friendship in collaborating with other Faculties in search for this “treasure” and “justification.” The crux of this Colloquium and, so to say, the “culture” that it intends to continue promoting at our University is Integral Vision. Even though for the naked eye, the encumbered mind, Science and the Humanities might seem worlds apart; a Colloquium, a Dialogue, will bring us closer to realising that even though our languages differ, our ‘treasure’ is the same, namely, our common search for meaning and justification.

* Glen Attard O.Carm. is a Lecturer in Spiritual Theology, Faculty of Theology, University of Malta, Executive Director of the Carmelite Institute Malta, , and Provincial Secretary and Archivist of the Maltese Carmelite Province. 1 Pavel Florensky, “Christianity and Culture,” The Pilgrim 4, no. 4 (1924): sec. 4.

5 6 MELITA THEOLOGICA

This was also Florenskij’s project. He also wanted to contemplate the world as a whole. In a letter of the 21st February 1937. which he writes to his son Kirill from the Solovki prison, he says: I wanted to write to you about my work or, more precisely, about its meaning to me, its inner substance, so that you could continue what life has prohibited me from elaborating and fulfilling. […] What have I done in my entire life? I have contemplated the world as a whole [целое], as a wholesome picture of reality. At each phase I approached my work from different perspectives. […] Points of view change, one enriches the other; this is the reason for the constant dialectic of my thought and its orientation for seeing the world as one whole.2 Thus, Florenskij faced the very same question of meaning, firstly of his personal life, then of his teaching at the Theological Academy, where he taught between 1908 and 1917, and lastly also of the future of Russia during the Soviet regime. Firstborn of Aleksandr Florenskij, Engineering Director of the Trans- Caucasian Railway, and artist Olga Saparova on 9 January 1882, Pavel Florenskij was brought up in a household that was equally scientific and artistic, and which looked upon religion as a taboo or, at best, as a social duty. Young Pavel was imbued by the beauty of Nature and the mysteries that it held. The Caucasian Steppe of and , his home for the first 18 years of his life, was for him not only the scene of frequent expeditions with his father but also the beginning of his search for objectivity. His pure scientific rigour compelled him to leave not one stone unturned. Then, as he was going through his first interior crisis, a particularly hot summer day in July 1899 shook the foundations of the scientific worldview he had held so dear. Florenskij’s newfound intuition – arrived at painstakingly – was the “complementarity” and “interpenetration” [взаимопроникновение] of the two different planes of reality, the natural and the interior one. Having lived up to that point by the criteria of pure science, he had dissected and prioritised the phenomena and processes of nature above all other planes. He had isolated his fascination with the Mystery of Nature from his scientific work. But at this point, Florenskij came to realise that the interior, mystical world need not exclude the visible, natural one; they just had “different coefficients of value.”3 He continues:

2 Павел Флоренский, СЧТ, вып. 4, 672. 3 Павел Флоренский, Детям моим. Воспоминанья прошлых дней. Генеалогические Исследования. Из Соловецких писем. Завещание (= серия Голоса Времён), сост. игум. Андроник (Трубачёв) et alii, предисл. игум. Андроника, коммент. подгот. игум. Андроника et alii (Москва: Московский рабочий, 1992), 214. Measuring Divinity - Glen Attard 7

In the depths of my , the other world was always and without any doubt authentic and real. This perception [of another reality] did not just regard the depth lying beneath the natural elements of nature, the spiritual side of plants, rocks and animals, but also of human persons and, particularly, the saints. The sensation of the constant presence of my departed aunt was within me in quite a special way. Her delicate closeness was more real to me than when she had been alive.4 Having enrolled at the Department of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Moscow, where he was to continue living for the rest of his life, he came in contact with Nikolaj Bugaev who introduced him to the ideas of Georg Cantor and the latest developments in philosophical mathematics. He ended his studies with a dissertation entitled On singularities of plane curves as places disturbing its continuity wherein he discussed his proposal of discontinuity as a vital component of his integral worldview. Like his mentor Bugaev and the Moscow (Pythagorean) School of Mathematics, Florenskij was especially attracted to the theological connections of discontinuous functions, “the very thing which provoked such strong negative reactions from the Petersburg Mathematicians, with their strong positivist orientation.” He also published the first article ever in the about Cantor’s . He did this not in a scientific journal, but in the short-lived journal of the Religious-Philosophical Society. The Society strongly advocated finding new paths for the revival of religious life in Russia, including freeing the Church from the control of the State to which it had been subordinated since Peter the Great in the 18th century. The Society, however, was suppressed in 1903 for its liberal proposals. During this time, Florenskij attended additional classes by the well-known Lev Lopatin and Sergej Trubeckoj in philosophy, philology, history of art, and poetry. Having graduated first in class in 1904, Florenskij turned down the Chair of Mathematics offered him and took up another course, this time in theology, at the Moscow Theological Academy of the -St Sergius Lavra, where he eventually started to teach History of Philosophy in 1908. Serving between 1911 and 1917 as the Editor of Bogoslovskij Vestnik, the journal of the Academy, he took the opportunity to continue developing his integral vision by means of the academic programmes and articles he used to publish. During his time at the Academy, he produced what was to become one of his most popular works, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, which took shape gradually over a period of 10 years, between 1904 and 1914, through the publication of four different versions, and which to date has been translated in 10 languages. Florenskij’s thought is evidently characterised here by his inter-

4 Павел Флоренский, Детям моим, 217. 8 MELITA THEOLOGICA disciplinary approach, bringing together pure science, philosophy of language, literature, art criticism, culturology, and theology. At his doctoral defence, he says the Pillar is a “part of my soul, as any book must be.” The “justification” – to which we referred at the start of our introduction – that Florenskij was searching here was . More precisely, “in what way can we know that God is God? By means of reason, we must put God to the test to discover who he truly is as Truth and Saviour.” There are, according to Florenskij, two ways for objectivity: and anthropodicy. Theodicy is the objectivity that comes from the Truth itself. There can be coherent meaning in the world because the Truth reveals itself, justifies itself, and is something so total that is not even afraid to contradict itself. This, in other words, is the ontological, metaphysical plane; the justification of God. Anthropodicy is the objectivity that comes from self-abasement, detachment from oneself, to be saved from oneself, “to save our interior world from the chaos that hides in it.” This, in other words, is the phenomenological, concrete, experiential, sacramental plane; the justification of Man. Any work on our part is always on the border between these two worlds, the metaphysical and the phenomenological, the abstract and the natural, the artistic and the scientific, the noumenal and the phenomenal, the spiritual and the worldly.5 ThePillar and Ground of the Truth, as a matter of fact, constitutes Florenskij’s work on the Theodicy, whereasOn the Watersheds of Thought and Philosophy of Cult, his Anthropodicy, was for the most part written but never finished for publication. Florenskij was also an ordained priest of the Russian Orthodox Church. He married Anna Michailovna on the 25th August 1910 and went on to have five children. He was then ordained on the 24th April 1911. His name remains synonymous with his white cassock which he used to wear publicly, even at the time of the Soviet regime after the 1917 Revolution. When the Academy was closed down, Florenskij was instrumental to convince the State authorities to transform the Lavra in a museum rather than destroy hundreds of years’ worth of history and culture. A Joint Commission was formed, with Florenskij as its Secretary, which had the colossal task of creating an inventory of the entire monastery. Florenskij’s eye for detail is seen not just in his explanations of the hundreds of artefacts that decorated the monastery but also the smells and the general atmosphere that was felt there. Most importantly, the 1920s saw Florenskij’s most productive years. His writings range from Iconostasis,

5 Павел Флоренский, Разум и диалектика, in СЧТ, вып. 2, 131-135. See also: Догматизм и догматика, in СЧТ, вып. 1, 550-553; Столп и Утверждение Истины, 1914, 638; Философия Культа, 4/3. Measuring Divinity - Glen Attard 9

Philosophy of Cult, Reverse Perspective, and The Cultural-Historical Place of the Christian Worldview (as opposed to the Soviet advances of an atheistic cult, also called proletkul’t, the cult of the proletariat) to Imaginary Numbers in , and the writing of 127 articles for the 23-volume Techničeskaja Enciklopedja, on which he also worked as Co-Editor even after he was imprisoned. Although Florenskij had been offered a chance for a safe exile with his family to Czechoslovakia, he chose to remain in Russia with those who were less fortunate. He cooperated with the State in several Government projects of a scientific and also industrial nature, but then at the height of Stalin’s Great Purge between 1936 and 1938, he was tried for treason and participation in monarchist propaganda. Florenskij humbly accepted the false accusations brought before him to save other men and their families. In 1933, he was sent to the Svobodnyj lager, in the Far Eastern region of Russia, and in 1934 he was transferred to the Solovki lager in the Finnish archipelago. In prison, Florenskij was made to carry out experiments on the properties and possible industrial use of iodine, marine algae, and permafrost. In 1937, the Solovki lager was closed down and all 1,150 prisoners were transported to the Toksovo forest in the Leningrad region, shot, and left dead without informing any family members. It was the 8th December 1937. His name was later cleared by the Moscow Town Judiciary in 1959, which found his trial to be without basis and fundamentally flawed in the way it was conducted. A death certificate with the correct date of Florenskij’s death was issued to the family on the 24th November 1989. His writings remained largely hidden from public view until 1990 when the re-publication of his most famous work, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, started a long chain of events that would see Florenskij’s other major works published, some of them for the first time, and even translated.

Glen Attard Department of Moral Theology Faculty of Theology University of Malta Msida MSD 2080 Malta [email protected] MELITA THEOLOGICA Josef Lauri* Journal of the Faculty of Theology University of Malta 69/1 (2019): 11-15

Florenskij and Georg Cantor: Naming Infinity

t might seem surprising to talk about the relationship between a theologian Iand a mathematician. One deals with matters of while the other deals with hard, logical arguments — or not? The relationship might not seem so surprising if I could, in as non-technical terms as possible, explain Cantor’s theory of infinite sets, the objections raised against it, and what an eminent defender of his theory said. I’ll try to do this in these few minutes, without risking going out of point, because this is basically what Florenskij does in his 1904 paper The symbols of the infinite (An essay on the ideas of G. Cantor) (Italian translation),1 and on which I was asked to comment for this session.

Cantor’s cardinals Cantor developed the theory of infinite cardinals and ordinals simultaneously, but I shall here deal briefly with cardinals since it is easier to give a nontechnical presentation. So, consider the totality of the positive integers, 1.2.3.. .. and that of the even positive integers, 2.4.6.. .. It should be clear (without going into a strict definition of what “infinite” means), that these are both infinite sets. It should also be clear that the second set is contained completely in the first set but there are many (in fact an infinity

* Joseph Lauri teaches Mathematics at the University of Malta, and for five years, until June 2001, had been Pro-Rector of the University. 1 Pavel A. Florenskij, “Simboli dell’infinito (Saggio sulle idee di G. Cantor),” inIl Simbolo e la Forma: Scritti di Filosofia della Scienza, ed. Natalino Valentini and Anatolij Gorelov (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2007), 25-80.

11 12 MELITA THEOLOGICA of ) integers in the first set not in the second. The first set should be larger than the second. In fact, it should be twice as large, should it not? But Cantor says that the two sets have the same size, or cardinality, because we can set up a one- one correspondence between the elements of the two sets: 1 in the first set corresponds to 2 in the second, 2 corresponds to 4, 3 corresponds to 6, and so on. Every number in the first set has one and only one mate in the second set under this correspondence, and every number in the second set has one and only one mate in the first set. Now this is strange: a set is in one-one correspondence with a proper subset (we shall see how this seeming contradiction can be turned on its head to give a definition). But this is only the beginning. In a slightly more complicated way one can show that there is a one-one correspondence between the positive integers and all the rational numbers (that is, integers and also fractions). The latter set seems to be so much larger than the first. The integers are discretely set apart whereas the rationals are dense, because between any two fractional numbers there is an infinity of other fractional numbers. But, rather surprisingly, Cantor tells us that their cardinalilities are equal, therefore one infinity is as large as the other. Even a little more technical to show, but equally true is that the set of all numbers (integers, rationals and irrationals — that is, those numbers that cannot be written as fractions or recurring decimals, such as the well-known 7r) between zero and one has the same cardinality as the set of all the numbers between zero and one hundred, or all the numbers without upper or lower limits! A moment’s thought might lead one to say that, of course, we are talking about infinity, and there is only one infinity, and it should make sense that all infinities are equally large. But here Cantor’s theory took the first seemingly bizarre twist in 1874: he showed that there is no one-one correspondence between the set of integers, or the set of integers and rationals, and the set of all numbers. The cardinality of the latter set is a larger infinity than the cardinality of the former.

Several “infinities” I think that this is where trouble might have started with Cantor’s contemporaries. Yes, Cantor had the audacity to assign a symbol to infinity — to give it a name — but now this name has turned round to bite its inventor, because it has led to a multiplicity of infinities. Some theologians saw this as an argument in favour of . An eminent mathematician described his theories as “a grave disease” and another accused Cantor to be a “corrupter of youth.” Years after Cantor’s death in 1918, Wittgenstein was still raising difficult philosophical Florenskij and Georg Cantor: Naming Infinity -Josef Lauri 13 issues with the transfinite set theory.2 But David Hilbert,3 probably the foremost mathematician of his time, in 1926 used a religious metaphor to defend Cantor: Out of the Paradise that Cantor has created for us, no one must be able to expel us. So it is not that surprising that Floresnkij should be interested in Cantor’s work both as a mathematician and a theologian; perhaps more surprising and to Florenskij’s credit is that this happened in the early 1900s when there was still some dispute surrounding Cantor’s work. But Cantor’s work is particularly relevant to Florenskij’s philosophy that naming a concept is akin to giving it life, as I shall try to explain.

Naming infinity Let us, as Florenskij did in his paper, start with the Greek mathematicians’ way of dealing with infinity. In their work we can distinguish between potential infinity and actual infinity. The Greeks always steered cautiously away from the latter. So, they said that given any straight line of finite length, it can always be extended to a longer (but still finite) length. Similarly, when Euclid shows that the number of primes is infinite what he does is to show that if you hypothesize a largest prime then he can always find a larger one. This is potential infinity. The Greeks never considered an infinite line, but only one that can be made as finitely long as required. And they never considered the totality of elements of an infinite set, but they used the fact that any finite subset of such a set can be made as large as required, but always remaining finite. I sometimes think that Zeno wanted to illustrate, through his famous paradoxes, the dangers of playing with actual infinity. For the Achilles and the Tortoise Paradox, I would be surprised if Zeno and his contemporaries did not possess the technical skill to sum what we call today a geometric progression and thereby “resolve” the paradox. But why should a sum of an infinite number of terms be finite? Maybe because the terms are becoming smaller? These would be reasonable questions which Zeno might have pondered. Again, I believe that from here it would have been an obvious next step to consider checking out this assertion by experimenting with the most obvious infinite sum whose terms become smaller, the harmonic series, 1 1 1 1 + /2 + /3 + /4 + … And again, I am sure that the Greek mathematicians had the technical abilities to discover that assuming that this series has a sum leads one into trouble.

2 Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (London: Oxford University Press, 1982). 3 David Hilbert, “Uber das unendliche,” Mathematische Annalen 95 (1926): 161-190. 14 MELITA THEOLOGICA

So, giving a name to something in mathematics is not an idle matter, especially where infinity is involved. If the listener wants a more prosaic example, then she could try this: find the area of a right-angled triangle whose sides are, respectively, 3cm, 4cm and 6cm long. If you let A be this area, then trying to manipulate A will give you absurd results, simply because a right-angled triangle with sides 3, 4 and 6 does not exist — in mathematics, giving names to unicorns does not bring them to life. But giving a name to something which works according to the rules of mathematics can turn magic into mathematical reality, even if counter- intuitive reality. (Here I am glossing over the issue of axiomatics raised by the relationship between naming and existence.) And this is what Cantor did. He gave a name to actual infinity — and he was handed back with a hierarchy of infinities. And it seemed that he was sailing towards the rocks of mathematical contradiction. But it turned out that he was discovering a new continent, or a paradise, as Hilbert put it. That an infinite set is in one-one correspondence with a proper subset can be turned from a seemingly contradictory statement to a definition of what an infinite set is—in fact, after Cantor, it was realized that mathematics did not have an axiom to define an infinite set and one had to be devised. That there is a hierarchy of infinities gave mathematics the Continuum Hypothesis: that there is no set whose cardinality is between that of the integers and the real numbers. It turned out that either the truth or the falsity of this hypothesis can be assumed as a new axiom without disturbing the other accepted axioms of mathematics!

Cantor’s “Paradise” in Florenskij’s Words The work of Cantor, especially carried out in the face of adversity for daring to give a name to actual infinity and opening what was then a Pandora’s box, must have struck a strong chord with Florenskij, who was so close to philosophy.4 Hilbert might have used the word “Paradise” as a metaphor, intending no spiritual or metaphysical significance. But surely Florenskij was doing precisely that when he wrote, in his 1904 paper, “At what is he [Cantor] aiming? He is striving to create a “temple,” to create the symbols for the Infinite. He wants to see the realization of the Divine forces, he wants to convince himself that this is possible, and he wants to do it as soon as possible. He must prove that the idea of the Transfinite is not intrinsically contradictory but it is legitimate and necessary.”

4 Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor, Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious and Mathematical Creativity (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009). Measuring Divinity - Glen Attard 15

Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Alexandre Borovik,5 and Jean-Michel Kantor, for several communications which helped me understand better Florenskij’s philosophy,6 and how it influenced the way he viewed Cantor’s work on infinite cardinals.

Josef Lauri Department of Mathematics Faculty of Science University of Malta Msida MSD 2080 Malta [email protected]

5 Alexandre Borovik, “Being in Control,” in Understanding Emotions in Mathematical Thinking and Learning, ed. Ulises Xolocotzin Eligio (New York: Academic Press, 2017), 77-96. 6 S.S. Demidov and C.E. Ford, “On the Road to a Unified World View: Priest Pavel Florenskij — Theologian, and Scientist,” inMathematics and The Divine: A Historical Study, ed. T. Koestner and L. Bergmans (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005), 595-612. MELITA THEOLOGICA Vincent Riolo* Journal of the Faculty of Theology University of Malta 69/1 (2019): 17-21

Pavel Florensky, The Symbols of the Infinite

avel Florenskij has been introduced to us as the Russian Leonardo da Vinci, Pa Renaissance Universal Man pursuing an integral world view. In this first session we are focussing on Florenskij the theologian and mathematician, and in my twenty minutes I shall be sharing with you some reflections on whether, and if so in what way, one can integrate the two disciplines within one and the same person. I shall then give an account in some, but not much, detail of Florenskij’s position on this issue. The title of Florenskij’s 1904 paper that provides the basis of my considerations, namely, “The symbols of the infinite. An essay on the ideas of G. Cantor,”1 points simultaneously to a specific piece of mathematics and to its theological connection. The piece of mathematics in question is the Theory of Transfinite Numbers, put forward by the German mathematician Georg Cantor in 1895, the same Cantor of set theory fame. Cantor was not only a pure mathematician; he was also extremely concerned with the philosophical and theological implications, as he and some of his contemporaries saw them, of his mathematical work on the infinite. This mathematician-theologian is the Cantor whom Florenskij embraced, and whom he introduced to a Russian public. Let me now discuss the personal integration of theology and mathematics in the context of four positions on the relationship between theology and mathematics.

* Vincent Riolo lectures at various Faculties of the University of Malta, and in the Department of Philosophy also lectures the Philosophy of Science 1 My English translation of the Italian translation of the paper, Pavel Florenskij, “I simboli dell’infinito. (Saggio sulle idee di G. Cantor),” inIl simbolo e la forma. Scritti di filosofia della scienza, Nuova Cultura 168, ed. Natalino Valentini and Alexandre Gorelov, trans. Claudia Zonghetti (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2007), 25-80.

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Position 1: Mathematics has no bearing either on theology or on religious beliefs Thus, they can coexist within the person, though only living in separate and disjoint spaces. I would think that in practice, many mathematicians and theologians today behave in this way.

Position 2: Mathematics is incompatible with theology and thus also with religious belief In this case a person of integrity would discard at least one of the two. Incidentally, such a moral obligation seems to have been ignored by some Roman Catholic intellectuals at around the beginning of the twentieth century (the time span in which Florenskij lived), prompting a rebuke in the anti-Modernism encyclical Pascendi2 and an inclusion in the newly-introduced oath to be taken by all clergy and seminary professors. I quote a sentence from the oath: I also condemn and reject the opinion of those who say that a well-educated Christian assumes a dual personality—that of a believer and at the same time of a historian, as if it were permissible for a historian to hold things that contradict the faith of the believer, or to establish premises which, provided there be no direct denial of dogmas, would lead to the conclusion that dogmas are either false or doubtful.3 For “historian,” of course, read “practitioner of any science, including mathematics.” It is a fact that some theologians considered Cantor’s transfinite numbers incompatible with Christian theology. This is because it was thought to imply Pantheism, i.e. that there is no distinct but rather the divinity is identical with all reality. Thus, Florenskij reports that the eminent Austrian Jesuit theologian Cardinal Johann Baptist Franzelin had expressed this concern in a letter to Cantor, who then provided him with clarifications and explanations. The Cardinal was convinced: he withdrew his objections and attested that there was no danger to religious truth in Cantor’s work.4 The devout Lutheran Cantor

2 See “18. The Methods of Modernists.” http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-x/en/encyclicals/ documents/hf_p-x_enc_19070908_pascendi-dominici-gregis.html. Accessed 1 June 2018. 3 See Pope Pius X, Oath against Modernism (1 September 1910). https://www.ewtn.com/ library/papaldoc/p10moath.htm. Accessed 1 June 2018. 4 I simboli dell’infinito, 74. Pavel Florensky, The Symbols of the Infinite Vincent- Riolo 19 even sent a letter on the correct theological interpretation of his work to Pope Leo XIII himself, and addressed several pamphlets to him.5

Position 3: Mathematics has a positive bearing on theology and thus too on religious belief This is the position of Florenskij (and of Cantor). The piece of mathematics we are focussing on is Cantor’s Theory of Transfinite Numbers. I shall say something about these actual infinites and then go into the question of their significance to theology. Let us recall Prof. Lauri’s explanation of the basis for Cantor’s Theory of Transfinite Cardinals with the help of a couple of sentences: 1) The size of the set of evangelists is four. What about the size of the infinite set of prime numbers? 2) 2 sets shall be said to have the same cardinality (= size) if and only if there is a 1-1 correspondence between them. 3) A proper subset of an infinite set can have the same cardinality as the original set. 4) The “bizarre twist”! An infinite set can have a “bigger” cardinality than another infinite set. And now Cantor took the, by hindsight obvious, step of creating a system of new numbers for the size of these differently-sized infinite sets – the system of transfinite cardinals! How, now, do these mathematical entities bear on theology? Let us look at an argument which Florenskij, following Cantor, highlights from the work De Principiis of one of the greatest Christian theologians, Origen of Alexandria (185-254 C.E.). I quote the Patristic specialist J.W. Trigg: God, Origen held, must have created a limited number of rational creatures, as an infinite number of them would be incomprehensible even to God, and to allow that the All-knowing could fail to comprehend anything would be to postulate what is not possible, a self-contradiction in the nature of God.6 Here is my tongue-in-cheek version of it. Had God created an infinite number of rational creatures, He would not have been able to comprehend them, which goes counter to His being omniscient. So, to avoid that contradiction

5 Joseph W. Dauben, “Georg Cantor and Pope Leo XIII: Mathematics, Theology, and the Infinite,”Journal of the History of Ideas 38, no. 1 (1977): 85-108. 6 As quoted in “Rational Creatures.” http://www.copticchurch.net/topics/patrology/ schoolofalex2/chapter11.html. Accessed 1 June 2018. 20 MELITA THEOLOGICA

He was forced to create only a finite number of them, which goes counter to His omnipotence. Looks as if God’s in real trouble! Jesting aside, the sentence which is important to us is “An infinite number of rational creatures would be incomprehensible even to God.” Florenskij says that for Origen “an infinite set cannot exist, since if it ever existed, it would be captured – like every set – by means of a number, but there exists no infinite number.” Cantor had the highest opinion of Origen, whose works he had extensively studied. He reacted to Origen’s position with understanding: Origen was right in the sense that the numbers at his disposal were inadequate, but now he, Cantor, has created the transfinite numbers. The latter had removed the stumbling block troubling the theist – and here lies the reason why I have put Cantor and Florenskij in Position 3: for them, this piece of mathematics has a positive bearing on theology and faith. So Florenskij has demolished that argument against , but does he also make the strong claim that the transfinite numbers prove the ? Let us examine the two statements relevant to this question which he makes in the paper under consideration. The first: “No, not only does the Transfinite not contradict theism, but on the contrary it is necessary for it,” i.e. If you believe in God, then you must accept the transfinite numbers. Let us be careful not to swap the antecedent and the consequent of the subjunction he affirms! So, no, he is not making the strong claim here. The second: “… it has been discovered that the idea of the transfinite presupposes the idea of the Absolute and that if we accept the first we have no right to reject the second.” The two parts of the conjunction are logically equivalent, so we only have one statement being repeated. Yes, that statement is the strong claim. And, as far as I can see, it comes out of the blues, as Florenskij presents no argument whatsoever in its favour. Finally, let me for a moment turn my and your attention away from the methodologically prejudiced activity of producing arguments which mechanically prove theses in favour of a tableau-like Weltbild, Florenskij’s world picture. Florenskij depicts two actual infinites, one such that no other infinite can be bigger than it, and one which can have other infinite quanta bigger than it, which are realized in three contexts. “In the first place in as much as such an actual infinite realizes itself in the supreme perfection in an independent and supernatural reality, in short in Deo ….” This infinite is the Absolute. ‘”n the second place, the actual infinite can be supposedin concreto, in the dependent world, in creation.” It can be called the Transfinite. Pavel Florensky, The Symbols of the Infinite Vincent- Riolo 21

In the third place, finally, the actual infinite can bein abstracto, in the spirit, in as much as it has the possibility of comprehending the Transfinite in nature, and, up to a certain point, the Absolute in God. In the latter case the infinite takes the name of Symbols of the Infinite. Specifically, when it is a case of knowledge of the Transfinite, these symbols take the name of transfinite numbers and transfinite types.7 This brings us in the most natural way to the last position,

Position 4: Mathematics has no bearing on theology but a positive bearing on religious belief This is the position I personally would take. I’ll only make a couple of remarks as it is outside the scope of our meeting today. The believer holds faith to be a gift and realizes that he cannot capture God – no, not even using transfinite numbers! But this is not to declare redundant our esteemed colleagues from the Department of Fundamental Theology! A mature faith, as I see it, needs to cultivate both theological argumentation and a religious Weltbild which draws in it the positive achievements in all spheres of human activity – including mathematics.

Vincent Riolo Department of Philosophy Faculty of Arts University of Malta Msida MSD 2080 Malta [email protected]

7 All the quotations in this paragraph are from I simboli dell’infinito, 33. MELITA THEOLOGICA Sandro Lanfranco* Journal of the Faculty of Theology University of Malta 69/1 (2019): 23-34

Pavel Florensky, and the Uniqueness of Man

avel Florensky’s On the Watersheds of Thought1 represents a major work Pwritten at a time of very rapid change in Russia. It signalled a change of direction in Florensky’s writing, moving away from his justification of God and leaning towards the role played by Man in building the “Kingdom of God” on Earth. In Part II of this work, “The Embodiment of Form – Action and Tool,” Florensky advances the notion that the principal trait separating humans from other animals is not reason, but the use of tools, referring to Man as Homo faber. The real question is, however, deeper. Why was Florensky—the philosopher, priest, and scientist—inclined to search for differences between Man and other animals, and why did he indicate “tool-use” rather than “reason” as the principal distinction? The answer is probably not simplistic, but his search for the uniqueness of Man may be a reaction to the scientific climate of the time.

The Perceived Uniqueness of Man The uniqueness of Man, and the special place held by Mankind as the climactic pinnacle in Creation myths have always been a staple of philosophical and theological thought. The notion that Man is privileged by a special origin and destiny underpins most and, as such, much theological and philosophical literature has been preoccupied with the construction of narratives reinforcing the privileged status of Mankind.

* Sandro Lanfranco is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Biology at the Faculty of Science, University of Malta, 1 This is the English translation of Avril Pyman,Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius: The Tragic and Extraordinary Life of Russia’s Unknown Da Vinci (London: A&C Black, 2010). The original title is U vodorazdelov mysli. Čerty konkretnoj metafiziki (Moscow: Pravda, 1990).

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Western philosophy attempts to locate Man in relation to organisms that are most similar, usually other primates,2 and from which Man is perceived to differ in certain important respects. This derives from the Biblical worldview which holds that whilst all animals were created by a deity in an act of Special Creation, only Man was formed in the image and likeness of the deity. The privileges of Man extend to an “” from which other animals are presumably excluded and that Man can accede to by meeting various criteria. This worldview informed much of Western thought for many centuries such that it was unnecessary to focus on the properties that distinguished Man from other animals because these were perceived as intuitive and obvious products of Special Creation. This also implies that there was no requirement for an evolutionary perspective that would explain the origin of uniquely human qualities. The Biblical story of the Tower of Babel in Gen 11:1-9 sufficed to explain languages, whilst the tool-making skills of Tubal-Cain in Gen 4:22 and the shipbuilding skills of Noah in Gen 6:22 were not questioned as they would have been assumed to be part of the original, privileged skill-set assigned to Man at the Creation. The Biblical worldview therefore implies a sharp cognitive and morphological discontinuity between Man and animals that was later evident in Cartesian philosophy. Descartes lists properties that ostensibly distinguish man from other animals, and that are the root of the special status of humans. These include the presence of an undefined “soul,” the power of “reason,” high intelligence, the use of language, and the ability to create and use tools.3 The Biblical view of Man’s position relative to other life on Earth was also informed by Aristotelean philosophy which was popularly summarised as a Scala Naturae. This ladder of nature placed all Creation, both real and imagined, on the rungs of a symbolic ladder, with the “lower” forms of life towards the bottom of the ladder, Man situated above all other animals and plants, and the Creator on the topmost rung. This emphasised the fixity of species, where each animal or plant would occupy its own rung on the ladder, and from which it could neither progress nor regress. In this hierarchical scheme, any extinction of existing species or the creation of new ones was inadmissible, since it would sever this Great Chain of Being. This worldview was essentially unchallenged for many centuries, as it was simple, convenient, and had no credible alternatives.

2 A taxonomic order in biology, comprising the lemurs, monkeys and apes. The “apes” (superfamily Hominoidea) also includes humans and all their ancestors. 3 Peter Harrison, “Descartes on Animals,” The Philosophical Quarterly(1950-) 42, no. 167, (1992): 219-227. Pavel Florensky, and the Uniqueness of Man - Sandro Lanfranco 25

It was only during the Enlightenment that this philosophy was disputed and that the first, tentative ideas of biological evolution were expressed. The fixity that underlay the natural order and that perpetuated the social order was now being questioned. In a less-constrained intellectual climate, and based on evidence from geology, Buffon in the 18th century, and Lamarck in the 19th century, in France, both proposed that species might not be immutable, with Lamarck providing a testable mechanism for this process.4 Questioning of the immutability of the natural order and of the reliability of Genesis was quickly followed by attention being focused on the place of Man in both space and time. In 1844, the publication of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation engendered controversy with its inclusion of Man in the evolutionary series.5 The book was initially published anonymously, presumably out of fear of retribution, and it was only decades later that the author was revealed to be Robert Chambers.6 Although Chambers’ book contained little of lasting scientific value, it did, however, reflect the changing intellectual climate of the time and a willingness to question the “revealed wisdom” that had been transmitted across generations for centuries. The work of Darwin and Wallace (1858)7 provided an empirical basis for the mutability of species, and firmly placed the emergent study of evolution within the realm of quantitative science. This preceded the publication of Darwin’sOn the Origin of Species the following year, 1859.8 Although the work of Darwin did not immediately displace the prevailing natural theology from the scientific mainstream, it did provide the foundations for the modern evolutionary synthesis that explains natural selection in terms of inheritable genetic changes. For the first time, the biblical creation narrative now had a more plausible competitor, a Copernican worldview in which neither Earth nor Man were at the centre of anything, and in which observed phenomena were governed by mechanistic and predictive natural laws. The biological worldview, therefore, reserves neither any special place, nor any privileged status for Man. The human species is one recent product of a long

4 Evolution through the inheritance of acquired characteristics. 5 Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and Other Evolutionary Writings, ed. James E. Secord (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1844/1994). 6 Chambers also printed Bibles, so this may have been an astute move on his part. 7 Charles R. Darwin and Alfred R. Wallace, “On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection,” Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, Zoology 3, no. 9 (1858): 45-62. 8 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life (London: Murray, 1859). 26 MELITA THEOLOGICA evolutionary process that connects all known forms of life on Earth in a non- linear phylogenetic tree. The human species does not represent a culmination of this process, nor does it endow humans with traits that are necessarily unique, or superior to those of other animals. It is in reaction to this, that new theological concerns about the place of Man in the Universe now arose. Appeals to the infallibility of revealed wisdom and threats of divine retribution were no longer satisfactory counter-arguments to the new and decentralised location of Man in space and time, and the quelling of dissent now required arguments based on reason. This was the scientific climate that Pavel Florensky was writing in, one in which the privilege of being human was undermined, in which the lineage of Man was now disconnected from the divine, and in which it now became necessary to emphasise differences between Man and animals in order to retain a special status for our species, at least in our own minds.

What is Man? When referring to “Man,” the biologist and theologian might be speaking about different entities altogether. There was nothing ambiguous about the Homo that Florensky wrote about in the early 20th century, since the “Man” of scripture and of science were largely coincident at the time. They were, of course, viewed differently by the theologian and the scientist, but the object of interest was the same. That started changing when multiple discoveries of the remains of ancestral humans were made in Africa and Asia. These discoveries shed light on a hitherto hidden history of the human species and indicated that modern humans are simply one surviving species of hominin amongst many others.9 These new branches on the phylogenetic tree of the human species rewrote the biological history of humans and blurred the boundaries between “Man” and “Non-Man” for both biologist and theologian. Biologists, of course, took it in their stride. The same blurred boundaries in ancestor-descendant lineages are found throughout the whole tree of life and the human line is certainly no exception. The concept of “species” is a purely human construct, and the sharp distinctions between the “kinds” that pervade Genesis are merely oversimplifications that do not reflect nature.

9 “Hominins” are members of the taxonomic Tribe Homini (ancestral humans). “Hominids” are members of the Family Hominidae which includes Orangutans, Gorillas, Monkeys and the human line. Pavel Florensky, and the Uniqueness of Man - Sandro Lanfranco 27

It has been more difficult for theology to reconcile the continuum of hominin forms with scripture and dogma. Scripture speaks of “Man” and was written at a time when no knowledge of human evolution was available. The first suggestions of an ancestor-descendant relationship between Man and other primates were implied in Darwin’s work and were met with visceral opposition as theology and philosophy were disinclined to yield Man’s privileged position. Since then, the evidence for microevolutionary and macroevolutionary change in nature has accrued beyond the point of reasonable refute. Long after Florensky was writing, the role of evolutionary change in nature was only acknowledged, somewhat hesitantly, by the Catholic Church through Pius XII’s Humani Generis,10 and accepted a further half-century after that by John Paul II.11 The underlying caveat is that theology reserves ensoulment for Man, although “Man” is not defined anywhere, except, perhaps as an implied descendant of Adam. Given that Adam is a metaphor, it becomes very difficult for theology to separate modern man – the “Man” of scripture – from other hominins, for even if Man is ensouled and has exclusive access to an afterlife, there is still no sound definition for “Man.” The “uniqueness of Man,” therefore, has different meanings for the theologian and for the biologist. The philosophico-theological uniqueness is centred on the spiritual dimension of Man, on the accessibility of a state of post-existence that, in Christian theology at least, is assumed to be denied to other animals. Conversely, the biological uniqueness of Man rests on the presence of synapomorphic12 traits that are not present in ancestral lineages. As such, biological uniqueness is based on the objective and observable, whilst philosophico-theological uniqueness is constructed on the basis of the subjective and unmeasurable.

Florensky’s “Man” – Homo faber It is against this backdrop that Florensky’s treatise Homo faber, in Part II of The Watersheds of Thought, “The Embodiment of form – Action and Tool,” can

10 Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis (12 August 1950). http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/ en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_12081950_humani-generis.html. Accessed 1 June 2018. 11 Message du Saint-Père Jean-Paul II aux membres de l’Assemblée Plénière de l’Académie Pontificale des Sciences (22 October 1996). https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/ fr/messages/pont_messages/1996/documents/hf_jp-ii_mes_19961022_evoluzione.html. Accessed 1 June 2018. 12 Shared derived characteristics. 28 MELITA THEOLOGICA be interpreted.13 Florensky searches for the uniqueness of “Man,” presumably in relation to other “animals” and appraises traits that can support this. Florensky starts with a critique of the Linnaean Homo sapiens, the binomial label that is applied to our species by biologists. The name was coined by Carolus Linnaeus in 1758, according to the principles of the taxonomical system that he had developed himself, and using himself as the lectotype for the human species. Linnaeus also recognised several subspecies, corresponding to the main racial groups. The specific epithetsapiens highlighted the cognitive discontinuity between Man and “Animals,” which for a biologist like Linnaeus, must have represented the most obvious point of difference. Florensky countered that it is not within the remit of Biology to define or to measure this trait. It is an abstract concept and one which, at least at that time, could not be measured empirically. As such, Florensky suggested that it would be more accurate to define Man according to the manifestation of reason, rather than “reason” itself.

The Incidence of Tool-Use The manifestation of reason that Florensky identified as being an indicator of the uniqueness of Man is the ability to make tools. In this, he was echoing Benjamin Franklin’s “Man is a tool-making animal” and Thomas Carlyle’s “Without tools, he is nothing.”14 Florensky’s label for tool-making man, Homo faber, recycled a concept originally introduced in antiquity of Man being the master, or Artifex, of his own destiny through the ability to manipulate and modify the environment. He used the term Homo faber in the sense of Bergson (1907), who equated “intelligence” with the ability to create a variety of tools.15 With the benefit of a century of hindsight, Florensky’s refute ofHomo sapiens is admirable as it stresses the empirical over the unmeasured. It should also be seen in the context of early fossil finds of which Florensky was aware. The discovery of flints in the Somme Valley, and of flints and a human jawbone in the Moulin Quignon quarry by Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes, were used as an example of this. For Florensky, these presumed ancient tools were evidence of tool-making ability – the manifestation of reason – and, therefore, a concrete indicator of the behaviour that set Man apart from “Animals.” Nonetheless,

13 See Pyman, Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius, 118f. 14 Kenneth Oakley, “Tools Makyth Man,” Antiquity 31, no. 124 (1957): 199-209. 15 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1907/1911). Pavel Florensky, and the Uniqueness of Man - Sandro Lanfranco 29 for many authors, the definition of “tool” was often taken through implication and was certainly informed (but also biased) by the knowledge of the subset of human behaviours that involve tool-making and tool use. It is more instructive to define “tool-use” rather than “tool” in this context. A twig that has been used creatively by an animal remains a twig, and only becomes a “tool” by virtue of its intentional utilisation. A widely used definition of tool- use in animals was articulated by Beck (1980) as follows: … tool use is the external employment of an unattached environmental object to alter more efficiently the form, position, or condition of another object, another organism, or the user itself when the user holds or carries the tool during or just prior to use and is responsible for the proper and effective orientation of the tool.16 This definition has been refined by various authors,17 but still remains highly influential because of its generality and robustness. In line with this definition, there are many instances of tool-use by non-primates throughout the animal kingdom, further invalidating the hypothesis that tool use is a uniquely human trait. Amongst many other examples, elephants are known to use branches and leaves to swat insects,18 octopi can build a shelter from empty coconut shells,19 whilst New Caledonian Crows can manufacture hooks from plant material and use these to catch their prey.20 Although tool behaviour in non-primate animals has mostly been described as stereotyped,21 some of these observations demonstrate that this is not necessarily the case for all tool-use behaviours. The

16 Benjamin B. Beck, Animal Tool Behaviour: The Use and Manufacture of Tools by Animals (New York: Garland, 1980), 10. 17 See Robert St. Amant and Thomas E Horton, “Revisiting the Definition of Animal Tool Use,” Animal Behaviour 75, no. 4 (2008): 1199-1208; Robert W. Shumaker, Kristina R. Walkup, and Benjamin B. Beck, Animal Tool Behavior: The Use and Manufacture of Tools by Animals (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 18 Suzanne Chevalier-Skolnikoff and J. O. Liska, “Tool Use by Wild and Captive Elephants,” Animal Behaviour 46, no. 2 (1993): 209-219. 19 Julian K. Finn, Tom Tregenza, and Mark D Norman, “Defensive Tool Use in a Coconut- Carrying Octopus,” Current Biology 19, no. 23 (2009): R1069-R1070; V. Sreeja and A. Bijukumar, “Ethological Studies of the Veined Octopus Amphioctopus Marinates (Taki) (Cephalopoda: Octopodidae) in Captivity, Kerala, India,” Journal of Threatened Taxa 5, no. 10 (2013): 4492-4497. 20 Gavin R. Hunt, “Manufacture and Use of Hook-Tools by New Caledonian Crows,” Nature 379, no. 6562 (1996): 249. 21 Suzanne Chevalier-Skolnikoff, “Spontaneous Tool Use and Sensorimotor Intelligence in Cebus Compared with Other Monkeys and Apes,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12, no. 3 (1989): 561-588. 30 MELITA THEOLOGICA non-stereotyped behaviours would certainly qualify as ‘tool-making’ in the definitions of Herbert Spencer, Florensky, and Thomas Carlyle, but would not have been known to these authors as their writing predated these discoveries. The overall effect of these new frontiers in ethology was that the perception of tool- making ability as the principal difference between Man and Animals dimmed considerably during the 20th century.

Relatives of Homo sapiens Having defined “tools” faber( ), it is now necessary to revisit “Man” (Homo). As discussed previously, the “Man” of Philosophy/Theology and of Biology are two very different entities, with very little in common. The former is a symbolic representation of our hopes, possibilities and fears, whilst the latter is a concrete entity with a discoverable history (phylogeny) that has been created by a measurable process (evolution). Since Florensky, the direct lineage of modern man has expanded to include several species tracing back a discontinuous but nonetheless discernible evolutionary path stretching back several million years. The cradle of humanity was now Africa,22 not the mythical Eden, and one of the earliest ancestors was “Lucy,”23 not the metaphorical Eve. Even in these early origins, long before the flints that Florensky was aware of had been manufactured, there is evidence of rudimentary use of stone tools, as these australopithecine ancestors of Homo were “extending their sensory organs.”24 This range of tool use is within the known behavioural capability of Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and the Bonobo (P. paniscus). The behaviours are not stereotyped and appear to arise from the chimpanzees’ understanding of the relationship between the tools and their function.25 Although chimpanzees are our closest extant relatives and share up to 99% of our DNA,26 they are not part of the direct evolutionary lineage of the human species and represent a sister group, the Tribe Panini, that separated from a common ancestor approximately six million years before present (BP). As such,

22 Chris Stringer, “Human Evolution: Out of Ethiopia,” Nature 423, no. 6941 (2003): 692. 23 This is an endearing name given to collection AL 288-1, a group of bones comprising just under half of the skeleton of a female Australopithecus afarensis. 24 This is the terminology used by Herbert Spencer to describe tool-use in Man and was implicitly adopted by Florensky. 25 Osamu Sakura and Tetsuro Matsuzawa, “Flexibility of Wild Chimpanzee Nut‐Cracking Behavior Using Stone Hammers and Anvils: An Experimental Analysis,” Ethology 87, no. 3‐4 (1991): 237-248. 26 This figure may vary depending on whether shared genes or the whole genome are compared. Pavel Florensky, and the Uniqueness of Man - Sandro Lanfranco 31 these would certainly be classified as “Animals” rather than “Humans” by non- biologists, but nonetheless exhibit the “extension of sensory organs” suggested by Ernst Kapp,27 and that Florensky considered a unique attribute of humans. It should once again be emphasised that Florensky was writing in the early 20th century, when ethological studies on other primates were not widespread and when Homo faber was therefore a reasonable model to apply. The issue of separating modern “Man” (anatomically modern humans) from their closest relatives is largely a philosophical one. The earliest species in the genus Homo is H. habilis,28 which diverged from the genus Australopithecus between 2.8 to 2 million years BP. This was a tool-using species, although not necessarily the earliest tool user in the human line. Tools made by H. habilis were more sophisticated than those characteristic of chimpanzees and may account, at least in part, for the preferential survival of this species line relative to other, more robust, hominids that it coexisted with. TheHomo erectus/Homo ergaster species group, dating from approximately 1.8 million years BP, showed progressively more diverse and complex tool use, relative to their ancestors, as well as the use of fire.29 The laterHomo heidelbergensis, dating from approximately 700,000 years BP, used a broad variety of stone and wooden tools, including hand axes and stone-tipped spears.30 They may also have been the first hominins to use burial rituals (Bermúdez de Castro et al. 2004),31 suggesting a growing cognitive capability in these indirect ancestors of modern man. Neanderthal Man (Homo neanderthalensis), a Eurasian species, evolved approximately 450,000 years BP and disappeared comparatively very recently, about 40,000 years BP.32

27 Ernst Kapp, Elements of the Philosophy of Technology: On the Evolutionary History of Culture (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1877/2018). 28 Fred Spoor, Philipp Gunz, Simon Neubauer, Stefanie Stelzer et al., “Reconstructed Homo Habilis Type OH 7 Suggests Deep-Rooted Species Diversity in Early Homo,” Nature 519, no. 7541 (2015): 83. 29 David Lordkipanidze, Marcia S. Ponce de León, Ann Margvelashvili et al., “A Complete Skull from Dmanisi, Georgia, and the Evolutionary Biology of Early Homo,” Science 342, no. 6156 (2013): 326-331. 30 Jayne Wilkins, Benjamin J. Schoville, Kyle S. Brown et al., “Evidence for Early Hafted Hunting Technology,” Science 338, no. 6109 (2012): 942-946; Yonatan Sahle, W. Karl Hutchings, David R. Braun et al., “Earliest Stone-Tipped Projectiles from the Ethiopian Rift Date to 279,000 Years Ago,” PLoS One 8, no. 11 (2013): e78092. 31 J. M. Bermúdez de Castro, M. Martinón‐Torres, E. Carbonell et al., “The Atapuerca Sites and Their Contribution to the Knowledge of Human Evolution in Europe,”Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 13, no. 1 (2004): 25-41. 32 Tom Higham, Katerina Douka, Rachel Wood et al., “The Timing and Spatiotemporal Patterning of Neanderthal Disappearance,” Nature 512, no. 7514 (2014): 306. 32 MELITA THEOLOGICA

Apart from using complex tools and weapons, Neanderthals used cooperative hunting techniques and may also have buried their dead.33 Neanderthals should not be considered as direct ancestors of anatomically-modern humans, but rather as a sister species/subspecies. They coexisted with modern humans and certainly interbred with them.34 Between 1% to 3% of the genomes of non-African humans are derived from Neanderthal ancestors,35 with approximately 20% of the Neanderthal genome still present in modern humans.36 An extinct sister group of the Neanderthals, the Denisovans,37 also interbred with humans,38 as well as with Neanderthals themselves.39 Approximately 4% to 6% of the Denisovan genome is still present in that of modern-day Melanesians.40 Furthermore, genetic and statistical analyses of Human, Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA have uncovered traces of at least three “ghost” species of humans (“Basal Eurasians,” “African Neanderthals,” and “Ghost Denisovans”) whose remains have not yet been discovered but whose interspecies mating episodes left a distinct signature in these ancient genomes.41

33 William Rendu, Cédric Beauval, Isabelle Crevecoeur et al., “Evidence Supporting an Intentional Neandertal burial at La Chapelle-aux-Saints,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 1 (2014): 81-86. 34 Sriram Sankararaman, Nick Patterson, Heng Li et al., “The Date of Interbreeding Between Neandertals and Modern Humans,” PLoS Genetics 8, no. 10 (2012): e1002947; Richard E. Green, Johannes Krause, Adrian W. Briggs et al., “A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal genome,” Science 328, no. 5979 (2010): 710-722. 35 Vania Yotova, Jean-Francois Lefebvre, Claudio Moreau et al., “An X-Linked Haplotype of Neandertal Origin is Present Among All Non-African Populations,” Molecular Biology and Evolution 28, no. 7 (2011): 1957-1962. 36 Benjamin Vernot and Joshua M. Akey, “Resurrecting Surviving Neandertal Lineages From Modern Human Genomes,” Science 343, no. 6174 (2014): 1245938. 37 Named after Denisova Cave in Siberia from where a single finger bone was discovered, and from which ancient DNA was extracted and sequenced. 38 Matthias Meyer, Martin Kircher, Marie-Theres Gansauge et al., “A High-Coverage Genome Sequence from an Archaic Denisovan Individual,” Science 338, no. 6104 (2012): 222-226. 39 Elizabeth Pennisi, “More Genomes from Denisova Cave Show Mixing of Early Human Groups,” Science 340, no. 6134 (2013): 799. 40 David Reich, Richard E. Green, Martin Kircher, et al., “Genetic History of an Archaic Hominin Group from Denisova Cave in Siberia,” Nature 468, no. 7327 (2010): 1053. 41 See Kelley Harris and Rasmus Nielsen, “The Genetic Cost of Neanderthal Introgression,” Genetics 203, no. 2 (2016): 881-891; Rasmus Nielsen, Joshua M Akey, Mattias Jakobsson et al., “Tracing the Peopling of the World Through Genomics,”Nature 541, no. 7637 (2017): 302; Iosif Lazaridis, Dani Nadel, Gary Rollefson et al., “Genomic Insights into the Origin of Farming in the Ancient Near East,” Nature 536, no. 7617 (2016): 419; Vincent Plagnol and Jeffrey D. Wall, “Possible Ancestral Structure in Human Populations,”PLoS Genetics 2, no. 7 (2006): e105; Joseph Lachance, Benjamin Vernot, Clara C. Elbers et al., “Evolutionary History Pavel Florensky, and the Uniqueness of Man - Sandro Lanfranco 33

These recent discoveries further blur the philosopher’s boundary between modern, rational man and other hominins. They also raise questions about the uniqueness of Man that are relevant to the theologian. The “modern Man,” or “anatomically-modern humans” of philosophy and scripture might seem indisputable, but that is only because we are reading along the tips of the phylogenetic tree and overlooking the history that led to it. Going back in time by a few tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of years, the distinction between species becomes far more equivocal and there is no single ‘evolutionary instant’ when archaic Man transformed into modern Man.

Cognitive Differences as a Criterion for Uniqueness Florensky’s original refute of “reason” as the defining difference between Man and Animals therefore needs to be revisited in the light of all these recent discoveries. If a single, overriding characteristic that differentiates modern man from other species is still required by the philosopher and the theologian, then that difference is not the use of tools, sinceHomo faber is now known not to be unique. In practice, the differences that are usually emphasised are those in the cognitive domain. Even in this case, “uniqueness” should be questioned. Several decades of recent research on comparative cognition42 have tended to support Darwin’s claim that the differences between Man and “higher animals” are differences in degree rather than kind.43 This claim is not universally accepted and various authors have identified cognitive discontinuities between Man and other animals.44 Nonetheless, the differences in “degree” are sufficiently large to enable modern humans to perceive this cognitive gap and its derivatives (complex language, symbolism, culture, art, farming, religion) as the principal trait that distinguishes Homo sapiens from other species. and Adaptation from High-Coverage Whole-Genome Sequences of Diverse African Hunter- Gatherers,” Cell 150, no. 3 (2012): 457-469; Ping Hsun Hsieh, August E Woerner, Jeffrey D Wall et al., “Model-Based Analyses of Whole-Genome Data Reveal a Complex Evolutionary History Involving Archaic Introgression in Central African Pygmies,” Genome Research 26 (2016): 291- 300; Sharon R. Browning, Brian L. Browning, Ying Zhou et al., “Analysis of Human Sequence Data Reveals Two Pulses of Archaic Denisovan Admixture,” Cell 173, no. 1 (2018): 53-61. 42 Irene M. Pepperberg, “Intelligence and Rationality in Parrots,” in Rational Animals?, ed. Susan Hurley and Matthew Hudds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 469-488 43 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, vol. 1 (London: Murray, 1888). 44 Derek C. Penn, Keith J. Holyoak, and Daniel J. Povinelli, “Darwin’s Mistake: Explaining the Discontinuity Between Human and Nonhuman Minds,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31, no. 2 (2008):109-178. 34 MELITA THEOLOGICA

Conclusion Florensky’s On the Watersheds of Thought is ultimately a search for God through the two books that, according to Florensky, reveal God’s work: the Book of Nature and the Book of History,45 with the latter being headed by the Bible. Both, according to Florensky, are deserving of study and it cannot be argued that one is in any way reducible to the other. From the point of view of the scientist, however, this distinction cannot exist. The Book of History is merely one strand in the Book of Nature and is only overemphasised by our own anthropocentric tendency to see everything in relation to ourselves and by our own need to reinforce our belief that we are, in some way, “chosen.” The Book of History is further evidence that the cognitive capabilities of modern humans and, perhaps, of their most recent congenerics, are complex enough to enable contemplation of situations beyond the immediate, concrete needs of the organism. These capabilities created, amongst others, an external locus of control that needed to be appeased for it to grant improbable outcomes to the humans appealing to it. This is a very powerful impulse that is transmitted trans-generationally through language and through behaviour-imitation, and it is still an impulse that is extremely relevant for a very large segment of the human species. Our brain and its mind have not only created tool use, they have also created our . And it is this particular product of our cognition that might actually be invoked for our uniqueness.

Sandro Lanfranco Department of Biology Faculty of Science University of Malta Msida MSD 2080 Malta [email protected]

45 Referred to by Avril Pyman (Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius, 2010), as the Book of Being and the Book of Culture, respectively. MELITA THEOLOGICA Ray Zammit* Journal of the Faculty of Theology University of Malta 69/1 (2019): 35-46

Physics, Technology, and Theology in Pavel Florensky

If the ignorance of nature gave birth to the gods, the rise of knowledge of “nature is calculated to destroy them … Man, when instructed, ceases to be superstitious.”1 This bleak diagnosis can have no positive prognosis unless Alfred North Whitehead’s comment, made in the 1920’s, goes unheeded: “When we consider what religion is for mankind and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to the relations between them.”2 For, as John Paul II wrote to George V Coyne, the Director of the Vatican Observatory, on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the publication of Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, unless intense dialogue takes place between science and religion, these two fields of thought will not contribute to the future integration of human culture but to its fragmentation. Interestingly, among the few authors mentioned in Fides et ratio for their “courageous research” in a “fruitful relationship” between faith and reason is

* Raymond Zammit is Head of the Department of Moral Theology at the Faculty of Theology, University of Malta 1 Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach [1820-21],The System of Nature: or Laws of the Moral and Physical World, 3 vols. with notes by Denis Diderot (New York: Lenox Hill Publishing, 1970), 1:174. Cited in Edward L. Schoen, “Between Addition and Difference: A Place for Religious Understanding in a World of Science,” in Zygon 33, no. 4 (1998): 600. 2 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Glasgow: Fontana Books, 1975), 215. Cited in Michael Heller, The New Physics and a New Theology, trans. George V. Coyne, Simonetta Giovannini, and Tadeusz M. Sierotowicz (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 23.

35 36 MELITA THEOLOGICA

Pavel A Florensky who,3 in his own words, sought to open “new ways for a future global vision of the world.”4 Florensky’s religious and philosophical convictions did not arise from philosophical books but from his childhood observations.5 His journey started in the Caucasus mountains, which he described as an Edenic paradise in which he developed a deep and mystical love for the natural environment which remained with him throughout his life.6 Educated in a scientific vision of the world without any concern for religion, he enrolled as a student at Moscow University where he turned to the sciences and their law: “The mystery I kept within myself, the laws were proclaimed for myself and others.”7 Following “a metaphysical dream of existential darkness and meaninglessness,”8 however, Florensky turned to the study of theology and was ordained a priest. The dichotomous appeal of mystical intuition and the laws of science remained with him throughout his life, even when the Moscow Theological Academy was closed and he dedicated himself to scientific research, teaching mathematics and supervising electrification projects. Though his insistence on wearing the priestly cassock irked the Soviets, his downfall was to be his work on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity which the Soviet communists did their best to suppress, seeing it antithetical to their materialism.9 Timiryazev denounced relativity as Machism; Maksimov, a party ideologue, pleaded for a recasting of Einstein’s physics by proletarian scientists;10 in a speech in 1947, Zhdanov called for a fight against “smuggling God into science” while Kuznetsov argued that the development of science could only be secured by the “total renunciation of Einstein’s conception, without compromise

3 Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Fides et ratio (1998), no. 74. 4 Pavel Florenskij, “Avtoreferat [Nota autobiografica]” (1927), inPavel A. Florenskij. Il simbolo e la forma. Scritti di filosofia della scienza, ed. N. Valentini and A. Gorelov (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2007), 5. 5 Avril Pyman, Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius: The Tragic and Extraordinary Life of Russia’s Unknown Da Vinci (New York: Continuum, 2010), 7. 6 Florensky devotes a chapter in The Pillar and Ground of Truth to nature as creation (“Letter Nine: Creation”). See Pavel Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters, trans. Boris Jakim (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 190- 230. 7 Pavel Florensky, Detiam moim, Vospominaniia proshlykh dnei [To my children, Memories of past days] (Moscow, 1992), 190. Cited in Richard F. Gustafson, “Introduction to the Translation,” in The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, x. 8 Ibid. 9 Stanley L. Jaki, “The Fate of Physics in Scientism,” in The Relevance of Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), chap. 11. 10 Ibid., 486. Physics, Technology, and Theology in Pavel Florensky- Ray Zammit 37 or half measure.”11 Florensky’s Imaginary Numbers in Geometry, published in the 1920’s, was devoted to the geometrical interpretation of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. In it Florensky proclaimed that the geometry of imaginary numbers predicted by the Theory of Relativity for a body moving faster than light is the geometry of the Kingdom of God. This was deemed to be a crime of “agitation against the State,”12 for which he was sentenced to ten years in the labour camps where he continued to conduct research until his execution in 1937. In a letter to his son Kirill from the Solovki islands on 21 February 1937, Florensky wrote: I wanted to write to you about my works or more precisely of their meaning, of their interior essence, so that you would be able to continue to advance that thought which luck no longer allows me to elaborate and to conduct it to its end, which will be reached only when it has become intelligible to others. What did I do all my life? I contemplated the world as a whole, as a picture and a compact reality, but in every instance, or more precisely, in every phase of my life, from a determined point of view … Its angles change, one enriching the other; and (in the change of visual angle) there lies the reason of the continuous dialectic of thought, together with the constant orientation of looking at the world as one whole.13 Such a vision, known to past civilisations and people living in close contact with nature, was unfortunately abandoned by modernity as if it were a useless superstition, such that people today are no longer capable of “Science but of sciences, or more accurately of disciplines.”14 Thus, replying to his mother from the , he wrote:

11 Ibid., 488. 12 “Despite his active support of government policies, and despite his recognized standing as a mathematician and scientist, a status which saved Cosmist thinkers like Tsiolkovsky, Chizhevsky, and Vernadsky, Florensky was arrested; the stated reason being a paper he had written about the theory of relativity, arguing that the geometry of imaginary numbers predicted by the theory of relativity for a body moving faster than light is the geometry of the Kingdom of the Divine. For that, he was sent to a labor camp in the farthest north, where despite nearly intolerable conditions he continued his scientific work …” See George M. Young, “Esoteric Elements in Russian Cosmism,” The Rose + Croix Journal 8 (2011): 124-139. www.rosecroixjournal.org/ archive. Accessed 1 June 2018. 13 Pavel Florenskij, Sočinenija v četyrech tomach. Opere in quattro volumi (Moskva: Mysl’, 1998) ed. Natalino Valentini and Lubomir Žak, trans. Leonid Charitonov and Giovanni Guaita, in Pavel A. Florenskij, ‘Non dimenticatemi.’ Le lettere dal gulag del grande matematico, filosofo e sacerdote russo (Milano: Mondadori, 2006), 379-380. Cited in Armando D’Ippolito, Arte e metafisica delle forme: Creazione, Crisi, Destino (Roma: Inschibboleth edizioni, 2016), 241. 14 Paraphrase of Florensky’s words in Pavel Florenski, “Le radici univerali dell’idealismo. Filosofia dei popoli,” inRealta e mistero (Milano: SE, 2013), 22. Cited in Lubomir Žak, “La 38 MELITA THEOLOGICA

No, not even if I were in Moscow would I participate in works, in modern studies of physics; I would rather occupy myself with cosmophysics, with the general principles of the structure of matter, but as this is given in real experience, and not how they construe it in an abstract way starting from formal premises. Closer to reality; closer to the life of the worlds: this is my tendency.15

Restoring What Ockham Took Away16 The origin of the present cultural and intellectual crisis of the West can be found in Ockham’s nominalism which dethroned realist , leading to a distrust of metaphysics and a manifold of consequent cultural and spiritual fragmentations. Much of Russian philosophy, however, being geographically shielded from Scholasticism and many post-Scholastic developments, as well as being aided by the Eastern Orthodox ascetical-mystical tradition, did not give up “that more ancient sense of metaphysics, nor the foundational premise that knowledge of the truth includes both communion with the truth and communion with other knowers of the truth.”17 Thus, reacting to German Idealism, in nineteenth century Russia there arose the philosophical movement of Slavophilism in which Florensky’s thought is to be situated. Florensky believed that the separation of science and religious dogmas by Scholasticism amounted to “Christianity’s wake.”18 He called Modern philosophy is a ‘narrow coffin of logical definition’ and an ‘endless marching and stamping in place, going nowhere’ (PGT 7-9).19 From Descartes on, we have “morticians of ideas” (20). Empiricism, idealism, pragmatism, and Kantianism, all fail because they turn knowing into “thinking,” a picture or description enclosed on itself (60f ). Identity and sufficient reason are hallow, A=A formulas – dead facticity. Without a proper metaphysical ground, all

complessita del reale e la sua conoscenza. Spunti di rflessione sull’ ‘allargamento della ragione’ proposto da P.A. Florenskij,” in Divus Thomas 119, no. 3 (2016): 140. 15 Florenskij, «Non dimenticatemi». Le lettere dal gulag del grande matematico, filosofo e sacerdote russo, 284. Cited in Lubomir Žak, “La complessita del reale e la sua conoscenza,” 143. 16 See Patrick Henry Reardon, “Truth Is Not Known Unless It Is Loved: How Pavel Florensky Restored What Ockham Stole.” http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/1998/ sepoct/8b5044.html. Accessed 1 June 2018. 17 Ibid. 18 C. V. Vodenko, “Antinomic-Symbolic Epistemological Concept in Russian Philosophy,” International Journal of Applied and Fundamental Research 1 (2011): 55. http://www.science- sd.com/387-23470. Accessed 1 June 2018. 19 PGT refers to Florensky’s The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, and within the quote the page references to PGT are provided within their parentheses. Physics, Technology, and Theology in Pavel Florensky- Ray Zammit 39

thought is in a ruptured state, and hurls the knower into delirium, dementia, and what Florensky calls ‘bad’ infinity (30).20 Florensky rejected the Kantian separation of noumena and phenomena with all his being, instead drawing strongly from the Platonic tradition.21 “For me,” he writes: The phenomenon was always the manifestation of the spiritual world, and the spiritual world beyond its own manifestation was understood by me in so far as not-manifested, existing in itself and for itself – not for me. The phenomenon is the substance itself (implied: in its manifestation), the name is the denominated itself (in the measure in which it passes into consciousness and becomes the object of knowledge). But the phenomenon (two-in-one spiritual-material), the symbol has always been dear to me in its immediateness, in its concreteness, with its flesh and its soul. In every fibre of its body I saw, I wanted to see, I sought to see, I believed to be able to see the spirit, the only spiritual substance.22 Florensky was heavily influenced by Goethe, whose natural philosophical method based on the conception of “primordial phenomenon” he appropriated. The German author, it must be noted,23 was particularly provoked by Newtonian science,24 believing that the capacity for wonder and the sense of the whole was radically threatened by science and disputing the claim that science could give us real knowledge of nature with its analytical methods.25 His friend Scheler

20 David Pratt, “Spatial Metaphors in Pavel Florensky’s Absolute Knowledge: Guideposts in a ‘Lonely’ Critique of Reason,” in Lieven Boeve, Joeri Schrijvers, Wessel Stoker et al., Faith in the Enlightenment? The Critique of the Enlightenment Revisited (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 209. 21 Florensky was “enchanted” with . “Throughout his entire philosophical-theological corpus, he makes frequent references to Plato, and, most certainly, it was Plato who inspired Florensky to explore the other reality by pointing at the existence of ‘other planes [and] other layers,’ which exist ‘behind the fore of the empirical’” (Florensky, Khristianstvo i kultura, 399). Also, Plato likely played a role in Florensky’s interest in mathematics as an essential tool in a philosopher’s toolbox. See Sergei Baranov, “An Examination of The Attitude of Pavel Florensky Towards The Interaction of Science And Theology” (Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge, UK), p. 4. https://oxford.academia.edu/SergeiBaranov. Accessed 1 June 2018. 22 Pavel A. Florenskij, Ai miei figli. Memorie di giorni passati,ed. Natalino Valentini and Ludomir Žák, trans. C. Zonghetti (Milano: Mondadori, 2003), 201-2. Cited in Pavel A. Florenskij, Il simbolo e la forma. Scritti di filosofia della scienza, 166, n. 12. 23 Johann Von Goethe, best known as a poet, was also a leading figure in the Romantic reaction against Newtonian science. His theory of colour and work on plant morphology has long been ridiculed by the scientific establishment but is now being reassessed. See Stratford Caldecott, “A Science of the Real: The Renewal of Christian Cosmology,” Communio 25 (1998): 471. 24 George S. Hendry, Theology of Nature (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980), 43. 25 He believed that the capacity for wonder and the sense of the whole was radically threatened by science; disputing the claim that with its analytical methods science could give us real 40 MELITA THEOLOGICA had also lamented how science had robbed nature of its enchantment and joy: “unconscious of the joys she dispenses … she lavishly obeys the law of gravity, a nature shorn of the divine.”26 Florensky would agree. And, on the basis of Goethe’s morphology of nature, the Russian scientist and mystic delineates a new science capable of unifying different specialities through the notion of symbol: All my life I have thought basically about one thing: about the relationship of the phenomena to the noumenon, of its manifestation, its incarnation. I am speaking of the symbol. All my life I have reflected on only one problem, the problem of the symbol.27

Symbols and the Antinomy Between Science and Religion Florensky thus dwells at length on an epistemology of the symbol, which he defines in many ways, to arrive at a “concrete metaphysics.” It is “a part which is equal to the whole, while the whole is not equal to the part;”28 it is “a being which is more than itself: this is the foundational definition of symbol. The symbol is something that manifests in itself that which is not itself, that which is greater than itself, and yet is essentially manifested through itself. “The symbol is a substance the energy of which, being conjoined … with the energy of another substance … carries in itself this latter substance.”29 All our knowledge, he maintains, is but symbols, even though there can be a series of symbols for any given reality which would mean that a hierarchy of symbols is needed. Florensky also gave systematic considerations to antinomies, both in scientific thinking and religion, such that it grew into a methodology. Perhaps impressed

knowledge of nature. He was particularly provoked by the science of Newton against which he waged a determinate and desperate war for many years. He would have nothing, for example, of Newton’s analysis of light by means of a prism, rejecting the belief that one could study light by breaking it up in this way. “Friends, avoid the darkened prisons // Where they pinch and tweak the light // And in pitiful decisions // Bow to rays distorted quite, // Worshippers most superstitious // Thronged in plenty down the year. // Leave in hands of teachers vicious // Spectres, madness, cheats and leers.” (As quoted in ibid., 43.) 26 Ibid., 43-44. 27 Florenskij, Ai miei figli. Memorie di giorni passati, 201. 28 Pavel A. Florenskij, Sočinenija v čertyrech tomach (Opere in quattro volumi), ed. A Trubačëv, MS Trubačëva, PV Florenskij (Moskva: Mysl’, vol 3/1, 1999), 138. Cited in Florenskij, Il simbolo e la forma. Scritti di filosofia della scienza, 187, n. 6. 29 Pavel A. Florenskij, Sočinenija v čertyrech tomach, vol 3/1, 257. Cited in Florenskij, Il simbolo e la forma. Scritti di filosofia della scienza, 187, n 6. Physics, Technology, and Theology in Pavel Florensky- Ray Zammit 41 by the fact that the majority of Platonic dialogues are a great antinomy artistically dramatized,30 Florensky argues: Knowledge of contradiction and love of contradiction, along with ancient scepticism appears to be the highest achievement of antiquity. We must not, we dare not cover contradictions. Let contradiction remain as profound as it is.31 For him, thought is dialectic, and reality is discontinuous and full of antinomies which, for the dialectic mind, are not destructive, but motivating. Florensky is thus unperturbed by Lalande’s quip that he could not find any trace of God in the heavens,32 or by Karl Büchner’s caustic jest that the creative force had not written his name in the heavens with the stars.33 Neither could he, replies Florensky, find the law of gravity emblazoned in the sky.34 Nowhere is there written that a star is a star. Thus, focusing on the antinomies between nature and history, nature and culture, nature and religion, nature and meaning, Florensky argues that: “All sciences are a description of reality. Reality is described by symbols or images. Every image and every symbol … we name, and therefore it is a word… all [sciences] are language and only language.”35 The natural sciences are characterised not by explanations but by descriptions of phenomena, expressed in symbols and mechanical forms. Against classical deterministic mechanics Florensky held the symbolic structure of language as paradigmatic of scientific thought, even before the disagreements on the interpretation on quantum mechanics seemed to settle in favour of the Copenhagen Interpretation, according to which there is no consistent metaphysical interpretation of the entities represented by quantum mechanics. Bohr, who later formulated the Complementarity Principle, remarked: “there is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out

30 Vodenko, Antinomic-Symbolic Epistemological Concept in Russian Philosophy, 56. 31 Ibid. 32 Joseph-Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande. Cited in Florenskij, Il simbolo e la forma. Scritti di filosofia della scienza, 123. 33 Karl Büchner, Kraft und Stoff, 8-te Auflage (Leipzig: Theodor Thomas, 1864). Cited in Florenskij, Il simbolo e la forma. Scritti di filosofia della scienza, 123-124. 34 Ibid., 127. 35 Originally Pavel A. Florensky, “Simvolicheskoe opisanie,” Feniks (Moscow, 1922) 1: 90, 92, 94, quoted in Pavel A. Florenskij, Mnimosti v geometrii, ed. Michael Hagemeister (Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner, 1985), 13. Cited in Kirill Sokolov and Avril Pyman, “Father Pavel Florensky and Vladimir Favorsky: Mutual Insights into the Perception of Space,” Leonardo 22, no. 2 (1989): 238. 42 MELITA THEOLOGICA how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.”36 Words, names and terms are, according to Florensky, eyes of the mind without which there can be no perception, no understanding, no science for these are the preconditions for observation without which phenomena have no meaning. Words and terms are tools by which humans understand the world and come to knowledge of it, with knowledge being understood as the biological activity of humans as they adapt to their environment.

What Bioethics Could Have Been Though bioethics today, at least for many, is a new form of medical ethics necessitated by the rapid development of technology in the biomedical sciences, the term was coined by van Potter in 1970 to refer to the bridge between nature and culture, science and values.37 Even before him, the German pastor Jahre had spoken of bio-ethics, in the hyphenated form, to extend Kant’s moral imperative to non-human life.38 Florensky, of course, did not use the term himself, but his thoughts on science, technology, and the world seem to offer a robust argumentation for a religiously based philosophy of the environment. Knowledge, argues Florensky, is the biological activity of man by which he adapts to the environment. Nature, as he puts it, is beholden to man and transformed to culture. Biologically, rationality is man’s purposeful activity revealed externally as a set of instruments or technology, and internally as cognition, or the totality of the aims of these instruments. The content of reason is thus incarnated and materialised in the form of instruments which Florensky, following Kapp’s idea of organ projection, considers to be an extrapolation of the

36 This famous remark was made by Niels Bohr in 1927 when the quantum debate erupted at conferences in Como and Brussels. Though the Copenhagen Interpretation met bitter resistance immediately after its first articulation at these meetings, during the 1930’s it evidently was regarded as the orthodox interpretation of quantum theory and came to be accepted by both the majority of the textbooks on the subject. It stands as the most influential interpretation of quantum theory even today. The most significant dissident to Bohr’s interpretation was Einstein who regarded its idealistic aspects as implausible. See Niels Bohr, “Discussions with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics,” in Paul A. Schilpp, ed. : Philosopher – Scientist (La Salle: Open Court Publications, 1970), 209. Bohr’s position is also criticized by Stanley L. Jaki in his account of this controversy, in The Road to Science and the Wa y s to God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 200-203. 37 Van Rensselaer Potter, Bioethics: Bridge to the Future (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1971). 38 H. M. Sass, “Fritz Jahr’s 1927 Concept of Bioethics,” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 17, no. 4 (2007): 279-295. Physics, Technology, and Theology in Pavel Florensky- Ray Zammit 43 body by which man, who is better known as homo faber rather than homo sapiens, expands and amplifies the senses. Florensky provokes material atheists by calling such technical activity “magic” which he defines as “the act of moving the boundaries of the body beyond its’ usual space,” not however in the sense of mysteriosity or complexity but as manifestation of will, due to a morphological identity between organ and instrument. The human body is thus less of a machine, an idea typical of eighteenth-century , with its mechanistic conception of the universe created by an excellent clockmaker who could thus retreat from the automaticity of the world. In line with the nineteenth century discovery of the organism, Florensky compares the human body more to a dwelling place where the potential for all technology is to be found already. Now, the projection of the body and its organs in tools and instruments, including words, occurs in a subconscious and superconscious way such that there is a close connection between the projections of one’s organs and that of the psyche. He thus argues that there is not much difference between the creation of art, science, fantasy and dreams, and the process of symbol creation which they entail. If these are to be graded, this is to be done according to their diffusion, more than the peculiarity of the visions themselves, with religious, philosophical, scientific and artistic symbols and dreams graded in terms of their diffusion from the most diffused and public to the least diffused and private, respectively. These symbols are incarnated or materialised in culture, as well as the economy, which can be seen as the achievements of the technologies we have created to satisfy our needs. The body is thus likened to a membrane which separates phenomena and noumena; it is “the concretised equilibrium between exterior and interior, subjective and objective, mystic and material; it is the root of our person, our support, Jacob’s ladder which leads us down into consciousness and up into super consciousness.”39 The empirical mastery of the world and its assimilation and technical organisation is made possible by “the world’s presence in me.” Indeed, “all terms, numbers, representations, categories, all that we can think or say about the world is ‘decisively and absolutely anthropomorphous,’ reflecting man and his external structure and internal processes.”40 It is perhaps for this reason that Florensky ended his Imaginary Numbers in Geometry (1922), published 600 years after Dante’s death, with a detailed reading of the Tuscan poet’s spatially enigmatic

39 Florenskij, Il simbolo e la forma. Scritti di filosofia della scienza, 206. 40 Ibid., 207. 44 MELITA THEOLOGICA ascent in The Divine Comedy. Florensky praises Dante’s Ptolemaic worldview, transposing the poet’s movement onto a scientific backdrop with a discussion on the movement of a body moving at the speed of light in the elliptical non- Euclidean space in which Dante travels. Through the body and its technological extensions, man has the power to control the world through the lower magic of technical mastery and science, the higher magic of philosophy and art, and through the theurgy of religion and ascetic effort. To do this, however, man needs to establish control over himself (his body) for the interior purposes of man (for good or bad) are projected externally through the technological extensions of the body. One must recognise in this regards the reciprocal self-determination between man and the world, and the compenetration of one in the other, recently brought to our attention once again through Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato si (2015). Though man is sovereign with respect to the world, he is not to be a tyrant, usurping his mastery, but rather man is to be to the world as a bridegroom is to his bride, loving her, caring for her and being one with her. Unfortunately, however, Western civilisation has not been preaching to all creatures (see Mk 16: 15);41 neither has it been the good news of Resurrection and Transfiguration; nor has it been the news of a new earth and a new heaven.42 It has rather been a rapacious civilisation with no love or mercy for creatures, aimed not at aiding nature manifest the hidden culture inside of it, but rather a forceful imposition of external aims onto it. Any violence to nature, however, is equally a violence to man who, when sacrificing nature for profit, sacrifices himself.43 Florensky was also interested in Vladimir Vernadsky’s idea of the biosphere becoming a noosphere, or planet of thought,44 which Vernadsky defined as the “sphere of manifested scientific thought and technics,” recognising it as “new

41 Ibid., 209. 42 Ibid., 209-210. 43 Ibid., 210. 44 Known mostly for his book The Biosphere (1926), Vernadsky (1863–1945) is considered to be one of the founders of geochemistry, biogeochemistry, and radiogeology. This Soviet scientist, who was also a founder of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, used the term ‘biosphere’, coined by Eduard Suess in 1885, to hypothesize that the earth develops from a geosphere (inanimate), to a biosphere where biological life becomes the geological force that shapes the earth. This then develops into a noosphere (a term coined by Theilard de Chardin in 1925 when he met Vernadsky at the Sorbonne in Paris where the latter was lecturing) where human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere. See Barbara Sundberg Baudot, ed. Candles in the Dark: A New Spirit for a Plural World (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 183. Physics, Technology, and Theology in Pavel Florensky- Ray Zammit 45 geological factor unprecedented in its power.” 45 In a letter sent to the Soviet scientist in 1929, Florensky suggests “that interpenetrating the biosphere, or perhaps lying over it, is what he would call the ‘pneumatosphere,’ a sphere of spirit and culture intimately related to, affecting and effected by, the rest of the biosphere,”46 which he defined as “a special part of a substance that has been drawn into the cycle of culture, or more exactly, the cycle of spirit.” Florensky continues: Undoubtedly, this cycle is not the same as the general life cycle. But there is a large amount of data, admittedly not yet sufficiently worked out, which points to a special kind of stability shown by material formations created by spirit, for example, objects of art.47 Florensky himself admits, however, that it might be still “premature to speak of the pneumatosphere as a subject for scientific investigation.”48 One might of course debate whether this notion is still relevant today, or whether it is still premature to speak of it. In any case, however, Florensky has allowed religion back into the public discussion with science. In a letter to his mother in 1900 in which he described how mathematics is the key to his worldview, Florensky writes: With a mathematical worldview, there is no need to deliberately or unconsciously ignore phenomena, or to augment or supplement the reality. Natural philosophy becomes one whole with ethics and . Religion acquires a very special meaning by finding its place in this whole, the place, which it was deprived of earlier so that it had to build itself a […] detached room.49

45 V. I. Vernadsky, Biosphere and Noosphere [Биосфера и ноосфера, Айрис-пресс, Москва.], 2004, 16. Cited in Sanja Veršić, “An Integral Approach to the Thought Space or Noosphere – Evolving of Human Consciousness and its Energy,” Integral Leadership Review (2016). http://integralleadershipreview.com/14485-an-integral-approach-to-the-thought-space-or- noosphere-evolving-of-human-consciousness-and-its-energy/. Accessed 1 June 2018. 46 George M. Young, The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 132. 47 See Baudot, ed. Candles in the Dark: A New Spirit for a Plural World, 188. “Florensky stresses how the symbolic function of an object transforms the object materially. This refers to the process of transformation of the material aspect of a symbol or a sign in the semiotic sense, as it is influenced by the symbolized aspect. Florensky was particularly interested, for example, in the material differences between Orthodox icons and other objects of a similar kind.” Ibid. 48 Young, The Russian Cosmists, 132. 49 Letter to his mother dated 4 October 1900. Cited in Sergei Baranov, “An Examination of the Attitude of Pavel Florensky Towards the Interaction of Science and Theology.” 46 MELITA THEOLOGICA

Conclusion I would like to conclude with a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer who reminds us that: The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of an apparently trivial detail quite often makes it possible to see into the depths of things. And so the wise man will seek to acquire the best possible knowledge about events, but always without becoming dependent upon this knowledge. To recognise the significant in the factual is wisdom.50 Another prisoner, under a different regime and in a different context, would have agreed. Florensky’s original approach to the phenomena of nature lies in recognising not so much their conformity with established laws, but rather in the interior perception of the presence of mystery in every natural reality. Never loosing sight of the vision of the whole in his focus on a particular phenomenon, Florensky sought not so much the how but the why, or the ultimate meaning of that phenomena, embracing an authentic mysticism that sought to purify the heart to see clearly the invisible within the visible. In this way, this great Russian polymath leads the way to enable us once again to be able to arrive at “The Love that moves the sun and the stars.”51

Ray Zammit Department of Moral Theology Faculty of Theology University of Malta Msida MSD 2080 Malta [email protected]

50 Dietrich Bonhoeffer,Ethics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), 70-71. My italics. 51 Dante, The Divine Comedy: Paradise, trans. Dorothy Sayers and Barbara Reynolds (Penguin, 1962), canto 33, line 145. Cited in Elizabeth A. Johnson, “Does God Play Dice? Divine Providence and Chance,” Theological Studies 56 (1996): 18. MELITA THEOLOGICA Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci* Journal of the Faculty of Theology University of Malta 69/1 (2019): 47-67

Inverse, Reverse Perspective as Subversive Perspective in Florensky’s Silent Mutiny: A Debate

Visualising the verbum dei caro factum est anofsky (1892-1968) opens his Perspective as Symbolic form with Item PPerspectiva ist ein lateinisch Wort, bedeutt ein Durchsehung. Perspectiva is a Latin word which means “seeing through,” a -Dürer concept of perspective as a window. This was the main Quattrocento-Cinquecento idea of perception via perspectiva:1 a Quattro-Cinquecento state whose re-birth one witnesses in the rationality of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: “positivism, linearity, and ‘singularity’ across a wide number of fields.”2 Florensky (1882-1937) challenges this with his own version proposing transcendental reality as one in which and through which mankind finds itself to be seen through, instead of the Kantian passive immobile subject “acting” on the world through a window. The depiction by the subject of the subject’s reality being seen through is integrally linked with what Florensky terms as Polycentredness, an intriguing parallel concept to Bakhtin’s contemporary idea of polyphonic heteroglossia.3 Essentially, and narrowly, this means that “the

* Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci studied Philosophy, Law and the Arts, graduating from the University of Malta, State University of Kiev, and State University of Moscow. He directs the Modern and Contemporary Art Research Programme with the Department of Art and Art History, Faculty of Arts, at the University of Malta, and is coordinator of the Fine Arts Programme within the same department. 1 , Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 27. 2 Caryl Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 150. 3 Deborah J. Haynes, Bakhtin Reframed (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 51-60; 143-144.

47 48 MELITA THEOLOGICA composition is constructed [stroitsa] as if the eye were looking at different parts of it while changing its position.”4 In reverse-inverse perspective, which Florensky finds to have been already exploited in antiquity, there are two double actions, again reflecting and appropriating Bakhtin’s philosophical concept of “the dialogic”:5 the action of “being seen through” and simultaneously the action of the subject perceiving the multi-view points in spatial, or rather in chronotopic movement, whilst being “seen through” and thus grasping or attempting to grasp what is essentially a non- visual situation, i.e. that of a transcendental reality, which for Florensky is the only reality. Reverse-inverse perspective is a dialectical relationship between the viewer being seen and the viewer seeing: but not only, since this dialectical relationship is not only enmeshed within a multiplicity of perceptions but also in what Bakhtin terms as a “double-voiced discourse.”6 We find Panofsky attempting to deal with this relationship, although as a Western scholar retaining a surgical positivist methodology, he gives weight only to one side of this double-dialectical link, albeit a very important one which reflects Florensky’s concept here discussed. Heinrich Wölfflin’s (1864- 1945) contribution to the debate on the comparison between Renaissance and Baroque perspective evinced periodical differences in vision that, although not being discussed in this essay, add weight to this dynamic discussion.7 According to Panofsky, as Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk have noted, perspective in antiquity: was constructed in relation to subjective optical impressions. We do not see with a single, fixed eye, but with two constantly moving eyes. The result is an aggregate space rather than a modern systematic space ... and this is what antique art attempts to render ... form and plenitude coexist next to each other without being resolved into a unified view of space and time ... space in antiquity becomes an intervening medium with an independent vibrancy... [as opposed to] the Renaissance’s understanding of space as homogenous and infinite constructed according to the vanishing axis principle.8

4 Pavel Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, ed. Nicoletta Misler, trans. Wendy Salmond (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 197-272. 5 Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London: Routledge, 2010), 14-25. 6 Alastair Renfrew, Mikhail Bakhtin (London: Routledge, 2015), 85-86. 7 Heinrich Wölfflin,Principles of Art History: The Problems of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M.D. Hottinger (New York: Dover Publications, 1986). 8 Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk, Art History: A Critical Introduction to its Methods (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 104. Inverse, Reverse Perspective - Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci 49

In fact, Panofsky calls this antique philosophy of space as fundamentally an “unmodern view of space.”9 This reverse, inverse, distorted, so erroneously called false perspective enhanced through compositional polycentredness is the main issue proposed by Florensky not as a methodological technique but as an ontology which he redefines as “concrete metaphysics.” Paradoxically, Florensky is here proposing, as Cubism does, the concept of “interpenetration” of multileveled realities, reflected also in Bakhtin’s “intercorporeality and intertextuality.”10 Florensky was much indebted to Oskar Wullf ’s work Die umgekehrte Perspektive und die Niedersicht. He was also close to Moritz Cantor’s (1829- 1920) mathematical philosophy and history which underlines the religious and spiritual justifications that ground a non or an anti-Quattro/Cinquecento perspectival philosophy in Ancient Babylonian and Egyptian civilisation. Such ancient manifested lack of perspective is in fact regarded by the German scientist and mathematician as a higher form of artistic maturity, if not the highest teleological evolution. Florensky, being a mathematician himself, influenced by the Russian mathematician Nikolai Bugaev (1837-1903), appropriated Cantor’s radical idea of mathematics and made mathematical philosophy central to his ontological studies as much as Bakhtian aesthetics appropriated mathematical and theological concepts.11 Analysing reverse-inverse perspective on its own as if it is a methodological process, as implied by Panofsky, to paint or to depict some outward reality, would be a very mistaken approach. Reverse-inverse perspective is Heidegger’s (1889-1976) unearthing aletheia and Bakhtin’s “authoring” which the Russian philosopher found to be realised in the icon. Reverse-inverse perspective is only one of the multilayer compositional philosophies and theological thoughts cobwebbing the whole idea of icon reading and painting, not as a mechanical method but as a transcendental metaphysical action in mankind’s relationship with reality, defined by Florensky as the internalising of the external against the falsehood stemming from the mimetic illusion of traditional realism. In fact, it is precisely here that Florensky is many a time misinterpreted as though he is absolutising the idea of reverse-inverse perspective and narrowing down the philosophy of the icon to some sort of a technical idea of perspective. On the contrary, the relationship between the viewer and the icon is one of “answerability” defined by Bakhtin as the “process of mutual response, concrete

9 Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 43. 10 Holquist, Dialogism, 90-96; Renfrew, Mikhail Bakhtin, 162-164. 11 Haynes, Bakhtin Reframed, 13-14. 50 MELITA THEOLOGICA response” which for Florensky can only be found in his idea of “concrete metaphysics” when the symbol finds its tangible realisation. In other words, for Florensky “concrete” is the act of a holistic eye perceiving the whole. Here Bakhtin and Florensky intersect yet again. For Bakhtin “the ability to see time, to read time, in the spatial whole of the world ... is the ability to read signs in everything.”12 Florensky applied Goethe’s (1749-1832) Urphänomene, primordial phenomena,13 probably unaware of Bakhtin’s own appropriation of ’s (1874-1945) Urphänomene philosophy. This interesting discussion on Florensky and Bakhtin, although as one can see is quite unavoidable, would unfortunately take us off track from this present debate. The important and vital element for the purpose of this essay is to understand the strong parallelisms at work between Florensky and Bakhtin. What for decades Western scholars of positivist-enlightenment termed as “defective” Florensky terms as the only authentic path through “perspectival angular construction” (razrabotka perspektivnihk rakursov). Such perspectival foreshortenings trigger the Bakhtian viewed-viewer separation that would maintain one’s unique position outside the space viewed. The unBakhtian empathic force emanating from and to the icon must “be followed by a return to the self.”14 This return to the self is the authentic path towards meaning. This is quite close to Bertolt Brecht’s (1898-1956)Verfremdungseffect : alienation-distantiation effect. Brecht’s breaking the fourth wall and exposing the hidden structure of theatre is playing the same role in creating a conscious distance and a return to the self as Florensky’s perspectival foreshortenings and Bakhtin’s critique of empathy. Florensky gives a comparative example of such defective distortions between Christ Pantocrator at the State Museum of the Lavra of Sergiev Posad,15 and a similar work lacking all these distortions that is contrarily formed of perfect composition.16 Florensky comes to the fascinating conclusion that “the transgressions against positivist perspectival rules are not a permissible

12 Haynes, Bakhtin Reframed, 72. 13 Sergei Baranov, “An Examination of the Attitude of Pavel Florensky Towards the Interaction of Science and Theology.” https://www.academia.edu/33813863/An_Examination_of_the_ Attitude_of_Pavel_Florensky_Towards_the_Interaction_of_Science_and_Theology. Accessed July 4, 2018. 14 Haynes, Bakhtin Reframed, 44. 15 Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” 205. 16 Pavel Florensky, “Obratnaya Perspektiva,” in Filosofiya Russkovo Religiosnovo Iskusstva, ed. N.K. Gavriushin (Moscow: Progress Publications, 1993), 247–264. Inverse, Reverse Perspective - Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci 51 or tolerated weakness”17 on the icon painter’s part but rather are his positive strength. The icon harbouring such so-called deformations is much more powerful aesthetically, philosophically, and ontologically than anything created with the utmost Quattro and Cinquecento disciplined “correct” manner. “Aesthetic seeing with participative thinking by a return to one-self constitutes aesthetic contemplation” which is realised under the “gaze of another and to look at oneself through the eyes of another.”18 In the case of the icon’s gaze, Bakhtin’s “surplus seeing” would need a further transcendental qualification since the viewer here is in no position to see “further behind the image’s space.” This would be the core philosophical meaning of inverse perspective which creates the necessary ambiance for participation in the “emerging event.” Bakhtin’s “double-voiced word”19 through Florensky’s concrete metaphysics transfigures itself into a polyphonic multi-voiced word as an orchestration in which every word struggles for meaning, defined as ‘the inner principle or “word”20 leading towards Florensky’s meditative silence echoed in Dostoevsky’s (1821-1881) Christ’s silence whilst kissing the Grand Inquisitor. Within such Florensky-Bakhtin dialogue one can understand why an icon is not a painting painted and viewed but a word written to be read. The icon is the word made flesh:verbum dei caro factum est. Florensky’s icon is Bakhtin’s novel. Contemplating “reading” the icon would be the sozertsatel’s (contemplator) Bakhtian response making him, the contemplator, whole. Contesting Florensky, Bakhtin underlines that “it is precisely our own selves that we cannot know, since the human psyche is set up to work ‘from the outside in,’ that is, to encounter and come to know truths from others,”21 drugost and inakovost (otherness and otherwise-ness). Although Bakhtin does go into the superaddressee-avtor-sozertstael aesthetic creative relationship,22 he however seems to avoid the situation when this drugost is the “word” manifested by the icon. His “I-for-myself ” and “I-for-the-other: The-other-for-me” circumvents Florensky’s transcendental reality imbued in the relationship with the icon as the “word.”

17 Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” 204. 18 Renfrew, Mikhail Bakhtin, 32-33. 19 Emerson, The First Hundred Years, 130. 20 Ibid., 173. 21 Ibid., 212. 22 Ibid., 217; 231. 52 MELITA THEOLOGICA

And here we come to another biblical dicta, the interpretation of which can be clarified through this Florensky-Bakhtian dialogue. Through Bakhtin’s avtor-sozertsatel, “the contemplator’s response as a leap of trust undertaken only under conditions of love which sees only wholes” can one come to a closer understanding of “[T]hou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” with the help of Florensky’s philosophy grounding inverse perspective.

A True Essence of Being, or a Verisimilitude to Appearance Art evolution demands freedom from perspective for the sake of “religious objectivity and suprapersonal metaphysics”23 against the dictatorship of the abstracted single person with the abstracted Cartesian single point of view, at this abstracted single specific moment, an abstractedsingleness which demands thus a perspective of a “fragmented consciousness.” This brings Florensky quite close to Bakhtin’s belief that “a single consciousness is little more than a fiction.”24 Florensky defines rational abstraction as an alienated mode of singling out, abstracting out only a particular from a holistic universal whereas he defines the concrete as a holistic eye-action perceiving the whole. This definition establishes his idea of concrete metaphysics which universalises the partial. These dialectics were fundamental to the work of Maltese artist Josef Kalleya (1898-1998) who exploited materiality’s visual heaviness to explore his preoccupations with the immaterial and metaphysical. What Panofsky termed as the “great evolution from aggregate space to systematic space,”25 and the subsequent Bakhtian “return-back” to aggregate space as envisioned by Florensky’s “concrete metaphysics” which according to the Russian thinker is the only direction and alternative to the modern alienation and abstracted fragmentation of reality. Fragmentation, and the critique thereof, is not new in the history of art. Harsh critics of the Baroque termed this as “butchery piles,” “cut-up members,” spezzata (Stigliani) (1573- 1651), mescolanza, accozzamento (Baldinucci) (1624-1697), sconcerto (Boschini) (1602-1681), “rampant epanalepsis of figure, figurette, figuraccie e figuroni” (Gilio da Fabriano) (d.1584), macchia (Maffei) (1605-1660).26

23 Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” 208. 24 Renfrew, Mikhail Bakhtin, 80. 25 Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 65. 26 Philip Sohm, “Baroque Piles and Other Decompositions,” Pictorial Composition from Medieval to Modern Art, ed. Paul Taylor and François Quiviger (London: Warburg Institute, 2001), 58-90. Inverse, Reverse Perspective - Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci 53

Panofsky’s trail from “aggregate space” to “systematic space” shows how this has lead to fragmentation oxymoronically through the authoritarian abstract rule of the “single point.” Whereas Panofsky finds that this single point would evolve onto and in fact parallels the vanishing point in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s (c.1290-1348) Annunciation (1344), such singleness Florensky finds only in applied art, decorative, and theatrical art, whose task is not “the true essence of being, but verisimilitude to appearance.”27 Such theatrical-cinematic “verisimilitude to appearance” goes diametrically against Bakhtin’s idea of “polyphonic dialogism” and Florensky’s “polycentredness’s interpenetration.” What we see is governed by how we see, and how we see has already been determined by where we see from.28 Where we see from is not only narrowed down to an Einsteinian spatial-time displacement. It also encompasses the spiritual-ideological meaning of wherefrom, that is from which intellectual-spiritual baggage we determine our action of seeing. Jean-Louis Baudry’s (1930-2015) “apparatus theory” is quite relevant here. In his Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus, Baudry practically equates Quattro and Cinquecento perspective to the development of cinematic apparatus construction which positions the subject as the centre.29 Panofsky himself implied how perspective is the dominant feature for “a highly formalised kind of performance aimed at the spectator.”30 That is why, according to Florensky, perspective was in fact begotten by theatrics, the scientific scenographic explanation of an illusion,screening away the “light of existence” which was based on Vitruvius’s definition ofScenografia, as omnium linearum ad circini centrum reponsus,31 Panofsky’s “centre of projection’ of the eye. This is debatably defined as ‘the correspondence of all lines to the vanishing point, which is the centre of a circle.”32 This idea of theatrical screen or veil-window defined linear perspective’s role in radically changing the course of

27 Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” 209. These questions were also debated by Hans Belting in his book Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 28 Holquist, Dialogism, 164. 29 Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus,”Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Reader, ed. Philip Rose (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 286-287; Iversen, “The Discourse of Perspective,” 195. 30 Iversen, “The Discourse of Perspective,” 196. 31 Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 38. 32 John Hendrix, Platonic Architectonics: Platonic Philosophies and the Visual Arts (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 28. For a detailed debate on this definition see Panofsky,Perspective as Symbolic Form, 97-100. 54 MELITA THEOLOGICA painting from a status of metaphysical contemplation into one of an Aristotelian narrative story-telling. Florensky believed that the Renaissance veil approach is precisely that border which prohibits the “seeing” of truth. It creates the “limit”33 as against the icon’s “dialogic uncompleted openness.” Here Florensky challenges Leon Battista Alberti’s (1404-1472) definition of composition inDe Pictura as a relationship between “bodies,” “members,” and “surfaces” together combined to depict historia. Historia demands the use of linear single point perspective due to its narrative. Florensky’s contemplation and Bakhtin’s dialogism do not. The arrangement within the compositional pictorial space or on the picture plane became concerned with the idea of the narrative, and here the of perspective played the dominant role.34 In a rather strange manner Henri Matisse’s (1869-1954) definition of composition (which has been here gleaned from various parts of the French artist’s seminal essay) comes, if one delves deeper and re-qualifies Matisse’s terms “decorative” and “condensation,” weirdly close to Florensky’s, albeit with a different approach, confronting the positivist philosophy prevalent in contemporary Europe: …the art of arranging, in a decorative manner, the diverse elements at the painter’s command to express his feelings, by condensing the meaning to its essential lines for a truer more essential character which the artist will seize so that he may give to reality a more lasting interpretation by realising a work that carries within itself its complete significance and impose that upon the beholder even before he recognises the subject matter for a soothing calming influence.35

Florensky’s and Matisse’s ideas of composition are here in dialogue. It is fascinating to sense how, as we shall see later, Florensky’s multi-perspectival philosophy borders on that of Cubism whilst his idea of ontological composition is Matissean. In his pivotal essay, Florensky unfortunately did not deal with the construction of perspective through colour, except when he dealt with colour as “celestial sign.”36

33 Holquist, Dialogism, 26. 34 Charles Hope, “Composition, from Cennini and Alberti to Vasari,” Pictorial Composition from Medieval to Modern Times, ed. Paul Taylor and François Quiviger (London: Warburg Institute, 2001), 27-44. 35 Henri Matisse, “Notes of a Painter,” Art in Theory: 1900-2000. An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 69-75. 36 Pavel Florensky, “Celestial Signs: Reflections on the Symbolics of Colours,”Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, ed. Nicoletta Misler, trans. Wendy Salmond (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 119-122. Inverse, Reverse Perspective - Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci 55

Sacrificing God: A Piece of Steel and a Magnet as Seen Through a camera obscura The separation between aggregate space and Euclidian-Kantian systematic space, the oxymoronic separation from the window-veil illusion and transcendental concrete metaphysical truth, which provokes the severance of perspective from its spiritual dimension and finally displaced by the narrative triggered a further separation between figural composition and the narrative itself resulting in the dominance of the former, figural composition. François Quiviger was quite correct when he stated that “the Battle of Cascina was perceived as a figural composition rather than as the expression of a Florentine military victory over the Pisans.”37 This total disjointing between concrete metaphysics, truth, and perspective, opened the way for the Western approach of art that established the idea of the decoration of the narrative in the broadest sense of the term. Thus, whereas paintingought to be truth of being, the Heideggerean alatheia proposing a “profound penetration of its architectonics, of its material, of its meaning,”38 painting-as-decoration, is a lie, albeit maybe a beautiful one replacing reality, a façade of reality which displaces the truth of being, a façade which is based on empirical scientific positivist abstracted truth ushered in by the Enlightenment but which however loses the universal concrete interconnectedness with Man’s being and the holistic spiritual reality. The scholastichuperouranios topos (place beyond the heavens) is transposed into the rationalist Renaissance natura naturata (nature/reality already created). A place beyond the heavens has been transformed into empirical nature, “detheologised.”39 Florensky parallels Panofsky’s natura naturata with his critical analysis of linear perspective as: …a method ... which results from a Weltanschauung in which the real basis for half-real, things-notions is admitted to be a certain kind of subjectivity which is itself devoid of reality ... an expression of meonism (the non-existent/ nothing) and impersonalism, usually called ‘’ and ‘’- the trend that emerged with the end of Medieval realism and co-centrism.40

37 François Quiviger, “Imagining and Composing Stories in the Renaissance,” Pictorial Composition from Medieval to Modern Art,ed. Paul Taylor and François Quiviger (London: Warburg Institute, 2001), 55. 38 Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” 209. 39 Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 66. 40 Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” 264. 56 MELITA THEOLOGICA

Whereas mankind’s pathos in Medieval-Theophilosophy was the rooting of reality within Mankind’s essence as one’s objectivity, the pathos of the new modern Mankind is precisely Mankind’s fugue and escape from reality. This fugue called for a particular method of depiction relating to this very escape of man’s subjectivity, that is Quattro and Cinquecento perspective, a fugue towards the illusion of the vanishing point, an escape through the window. One underlines “life’s creative foundations” whereas the other “the imitation of life’s surface.”41 The living active man is replaced by a Beckettian “dead” spectator awaiting nothing. The Bakhtianevent of existence, which in Russian sobyitye means “co- being,” the “sharingness of being,”42 is de-robed from its heteroglossic uniqueness. The world is understood as a single, indissoluble and impenetrable net of Kantian and Euclidean relationships, having their focus in the I of the observer of the world, but in such a way that this I is itself inactive and mirror-like, a certain imaginary focus on the world.43 A subjectivity devoid of reality: an “I” without the outsideness “it needs to perceive itself.”44 This transforms perspective from its character as aDasein modality, in other words from its ontological spatial form of “being-here,” the modality of “being-here” into a narrow technical of a formal depiction. Whilst agreeing with Hubert Damisch in his critique of scholars who treat perspective as: …if it were nothing more than a nifty technical device for systematically creating an illusion of space, so that foreshortenings and the diminution of size of objects in depth all obey a common rule and conform to a single viewpoint, one cannot narrow down perspective solely to how it organises the way we think about art and its history.45 Perspective is not only a mode of, but also a modality of existence. It dialogistically organises the way we are. Florensky goes further and also studies the chiaroscuro effect. He here juxtaposes or rather challenges the Baroque chiaroscuro “naturalism” and “butchery-pile”46 with the icon philosophy of its “distinctive distribution of shadows.”47

41 Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” 210. 42 Holquist, Dialogism, 25. 43 Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” 264. 44 Holquist, Dialogism, 35. 45 Margaret Iversen, “The Discourse of Perspective in the Twentieth Century: Panofsky, Damisch, Lacan,” Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 2 (2005): 191-202. 46 Sohm, “Baroque Piles,” 58-82. 47 Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” 206. Inverse, Reverse Perspective - Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci 57

The iconist’s deliberate artistic calculations include the overall distribution of light underlining quite distinctly an absence of a definite focus of light. Light emanates without creating the naturalist-earthly shadows. Icon light distribution does not comply with human optical laws. The iconist “writes” a whole atlas of contradictory illuminations throughout the icon space, projecting forward masses that should be in shadow. Spirituality, metaphysics, ontology cannot create shadows. For radically different reasons, and on distinctly diverse grounds, one can also find quite a strong critique of ‘shadow butchering’ in painting in various Baroque writings: “...baroque tenebrist truncation in which the essential is obscured in favour of the incidental ... visual amputation...;”48 “... dawn as the executioner who chops the neck of shadows with the axe of rays.”49 Whereas Florensky’s critical analysis is entirely based on the question of Being and Truth, Baroque writings utilise parallel arguments for the enhancement of the same “illusionary window” Florensky is challenging. Razdelka is the next vital category undertaken by the Russian philosopher. This plays a central role within the icon’s “polycentredness.” Razdelka, in plural razdelki (linear divisions), are specific lines painted (often metallic paints) in a different colour from the one used for the object and corresponding place, lines which do not reflect nor represent anything “physically seen:” “a powerful condenser of intangible forces,” to appropriate Valentin Voloshinov’s (1895- 1936) terminology.50 Fascinatingly Florensky compares these lines to electric field or magnetic lines of force, but which, in the icon-world express a “metaphysical schema of the given object, its dynamic, with greater force than its visible lines are capable of.”51 Such lines compose the architectonic structure of the dialogic seeing-as-action, Bakhtin’s “dynamic of the architectonic event.”52 These lines, sort of lines of force, stemming from Posidonius’s “universal vital force” which found its echo in Henri Bergson’s (1859-1941) élan vital and “the flow of inner timedurée ,” laterally direct the movement of the eyes as one contemplates the icon. Florensky underlines that:

48 J. J. de Lalande in Sohm, “Baroque Piles,” 75. 49 Flaminio Strada in ibid., 76. 50 Renfrew, Mikhail Bakhtin, 152. 51 Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” 206. 52 Renfrew, Mikhail Bakhtin, 51. 58 MELITA THEOLOGICA

…if an artist in depicting a magnet were to be satisfied with showing merely the visible aspect then he would be depicting not a magnet but merely a piece of steel: the real essence of the magnet - that is, its force-field - would go not only unrepresented but also unindicated. Clearly in depicting a magnet, both the field and the steel must be shown: but their depictions must also be incommensurate, showing that the magnet’s two dimensions belong to two different planes. The steel could be shown in colour while the field must be depicted abstractly ... I dare not try to instruct the artist in how actually to represent this unmingled mingle of two planes of existence ...53 Florensky’s defining light forces depicted in silver/gold are enriched by comparing them to the Arab-Islamic philosophy enveloping the mushrabijja line screen, which is also a radical negation of, and an alternative to, the Renaissance “painting as window screen.” In the Islamic world a screen is built at [this] threshold that becomes a focus of artistic energy. The screen is porous, but not for the gaze ... rather it is porous for light, a shift that also reverses the direction between inside and outside.54

The mushrabijja is a reverse perception that is specifically created to provide an orchestration of light forces, a “polyphonic interpenetration” of light waves. It succeeds in generating a dialogic “here-there” relationship via transgredience, a passing beyond.55 Departing from Hans Belting’s (b.1935) idea that this structure “is not for the gaze,” I would requalify this statement by asserting that this is for a particular type of gaze. The screen philosophy is beautifully reflected in Matisse’s colour belief as a source of light itself. As in icon art, light emanates onto the viewer by means of these forces described by Florensky, just as light passing through the Arab screen, which is porous for light “but not for the gaze.” Here we have an “orchestration of light” just as in the icon’s polyphonic composition of colour. The window in this case is that which screens out light, “rather than a window as an opening,”56 a “screening- out” by which light becomes form itself. When such ontological essence is solely appropriated as a façade methodological means to embellish a surface, the result is an abuse of appropriation. Such a deep metaphysical rendition of forces can be transfigured

53 Andrew Spira, The Avant-Garde Icon: Russian Avant-Garde Art and the Icon Painting Tradition (London: Lund Humphries, 2008), 65. 54 Belting, Florence and Baghdad, 253-254. 55 Holquist, Dialogism, 33. 56 Belting, Florence and Baghdad, 255. Inverse, Reverse Perspective - Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci 59 into a decorative-ornamental stance, as can be seen in Emvin Cremona’s (1919- 1987) work at St Cajetan’s Church (Ħamrun, Malta). This does not mean that appropriation always leads to this decorative embellishment. The “interconnectedness” of acts of creation which compose an architectonic relationship of what Bakhtin terms as “authorshipness”57 serves to pollinate a whole mosaic of different forms rendering such Florensky forces. It is within such parameters that Florensky deals with “contour,” “assist,” ozhivki, dvizhki, otmetiny, probeli paralleling Bakhtin’s multileveled “microdialogue within”58 and which “accentuate all the irregularities that should not have been visible.”59 This brings Florensky’s ideas close to the philosophy of Rayism, founded by Mikhail Larionov (1881-1964) and Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962). Whereas the “contour” provides the architectonics which structures the relationship between the icon, the contemplative “viewer” and Yuri Kariakin’s (1930-2011) “finger pointing toward the truth”60 as Florensky’s idea of reality, the “assist” which as Spira underlines is not only “a special gilding technique for areas of particular sacredness ... such as the robes of Christ, thereby investing the technique - resplendent fans of golden rays, called assist - with a special spiritual significance.”61 This surely influenced Larionov’s Rayist paintings,62 who wrote how art should depict rays stemming from reality: “We perceive a sum of rays proceeding from a source of light; these are reflected from the object and enter our field of vision.” This in fact replicates Florensky’s idea of how the invincible realm’s energies become comprehensible through sensory images. Larionov continues underlying that “the style of Rayonnist painting that we advance signifies spatial forms which are obtained arising from the intersection of the reflected rays of various objects and forms chosen by the artist’s will.” Florensky’s counterpoint here is that the energies’ interaction depicted through such rays and contours compose an ontology of being and not just Larionov’s “forms chosen by the artist’s will.”63 In Florensky’s words:

57 Holquist, Dialogism, 149-182. 58 Emerson, The First Hundred Years, 152. 59 Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” 207. 60 Emerson, The First Hundred Years, 130; 153. 61 Spira, The Avant-Garde Icon, 64. 62 Ibid. 63 Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863-1922 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 136-141. 60 MELITA THEOLOGICA

…the invincible realm somehow becomes comprehensible to us and, further, its primary energies become actualised into sensory images, energies whose interactions constitute the ontological skeleton of a thing. For yes, then we can say that the assist-lines are the lines of energy constituting the force-field that is the thing itself...64 Within such a multilevel perspective and interrelated polycentredness one feels the rich “storage” and the non-fortuitous character of such creation as against Larionov’s artist-centred will. How such perspective reflects the nature or essence of objects and reality however defined is the central debate in Florensky. These questions are integrally linked, obviously enough, with the meaning itself of perspective. This of course quite interestingly relates with the much discussed and debated idea that “perspective depicts the world as only the imagination can see it. It constructs the world for a symbolic gaze” unlike the Cassirer-Panofsky Kantian approach of defining it as a construction for and onspace rather than gaze.65 One may thus debate whether perspective is only an artificial technical method, a tool, a representational scheme, a system of rules by which one may represent not one’s world/reality applied solely for a particular historical “reception- perception.” Is it just one of the other many methodological possibilities throughout the passage of human history, by which one may interpret reality: an interpretation amongst others? Or, on the contrary, may one approach the question by qualifying perspective as a “multiplicity in human perception”66 reflecting the realisation of a world-view which transcends empirical actuality? Perspective is, in fact, the architectonics of the I-Thou-Other relationship, if one can again introduce Bakhtin to the dialogue on Florensky.67 Florensky defines perspective as the “true word of the world” against the idea that it is just a particular orthography relative to what Michael Baxandall (1933- 2008) calls the particular “period eye,” to the particular culture, to the particular socio-economic structure, and to the particular society-in-history. How can it be related to a historic particular style-genre defined as a particular way of perceiving reality?68

64 Spira, The Avant-Garde Icon, 64. 65 Hans Belting, Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 16. 66 Holquist, Dialogism, 22. 67 Emerson, The First Hundred Years, 214. 68 Holquist, Dialogism, 163. Inverse, Reverse Perspective - Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci 61

As the “true word of the world,” perspective finds itself in a quite enigmatic and paradoxical situation since, debatably, “the reality of another’s time/space is different from my own.”69 If this is correct, then how are we to integrate perspective with style-genre, particularly when one is aware that “perception can only be achieved from a unique point in the spectrum of possible perspectives?”70 Style-Genre is, in fact, a socio-economic-historic decision of how a certain particular period “chooses” a mode of correspondence between points on the surfaces of reality and the points on the canvas. Such a choice depends on the attitude to the world, depth of philosophy, and perception of life, which altogether define what reality is for a particular period and for a particular historical world-view. Panofsky rewords this by underlining that it is “essential to ask for artistic periods and regions, not only whether they have perspective, but also which perspective they have.”71 In Florensky’s words, “depending on the inner need of the soul, however, a certain principle of correspondence is selected by an epoch,” with all the principle’s corresponding peculiarities. These particularities formstyle-genre and manner. The creator, who for many reasons absorbs this correspondence, is in a position to state the period’s Zeitgeist through a corresponding Weltanschauung. Florensky understood that Renaissance Humanist philosophy and psychology, amongst other things, were based on the belief that no knowledge is possible without sensation. This Renaissance combination, provided by the relationship between five external senses and “common sense,” the combination of perception and cognition which, whilst provoking mental images as compounds of sensations, demanded the depiction of reality within a disciplined structure of sensory, even if illusionary, perspective.72 This is what Florensky challenges. Florensky counterpoints this by his six sub-textual categories, vital for the understanding of perspective and without which such perspective is only an illusion, as Renaissance perspective is. Florensky attempts to prove his main contention recalling Seneca and King Lear that “nothing is more deceiving than our eyesight.” The Renaissance philosophy of perspective, according to the Russian philosopher, is not only an illusion, a lie, but it also is “extremely narrow, extremely limited, hampered by a host of vital supplementary” and derivative

69 Ibid., 166. 70 Ibid., 164. 71 Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 41. 72 Quiviger, “Imagining and Composing Stories,” 46-48. 62 MELITA THEOLOGICA conditions without which it cannot function.73 He starts by challenging the belief that space of the real world is a Euclidean space defining space as an objective and absolute space. Such Euclidean space is isotropic: it contains the same value when measured from different directions and not varying in magnitude. It is homogeneous, infinite, and boundless, encapsulated within the parameters of a three-dimensionality of a zero curvature.74 Florensky counter proposes a space which is not Euclidean, and not unitary but, on the contrary, multivalent, composed of differing “degrees” of rhythmic “extensity” to be grasped only if one defines perspective as “creative intuition.”75 Space perception is based on what is known as Nikolai Lobachevsky’s (1792- 1856) space hyperbole categories. Furthermore, Florensky subverts the idea that there is only one exceptional and exclusive point of reference, “occupied by the artist himself,” a monarchical point, and thus going against Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1857-1913) “Mount Jura single vantage point”76 and paralleling Bakhtin’s multiple “chronotopic difference” and “simultaneity.” The so-called royal view-point is precisely the centre of the world. It is from here that one encloses Kantian absolute space. It is also believed to be Being’s executive and perceived from, and by one cyclopic eye. “It is the centre that legislates the universe,”77 forgetting however that “we see not with a single fixed eye but with two constantly moving eyes, resulting in a spheroidal field of vision” and that the “retinal image is a projection not on a flat but on a concave surface.”78 Reality thus is believed to be perceived through the absolutist throne of a mechanical camera obscura. A minimal change in position would cause the whole unity of the perspectival construction to shatter and fall apart. Reverse-inverse perspective on the contrary is allowing, as discussed above, a multi-changing view-point that encompasses a hierarchical informative structure.79 The narrowness and limitations of perspectival representation, according to Florensky, is enhanced by the belief that all reality and being are thought of as immovable and unchanging, static and immutable: a dead world,

73 Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” 261. 74 Ibid. 75 Boris Viktorovich Raushenbakh, Prostrnastvenniye Postroyeniya v Zhivopisi (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), 102-103. 76 Holquist, Dialogism, 44. 77 Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” 262. 78 Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 31. 79 Boris Viktorovich Raushenbakh, Prostranstvenniye Postroyeniya v Zhivopisi (Moscow: Izdatelstvo ‘Nauka’, 1980), 130-132. Inverse, Reverse Perspective - Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci 63 and, in his own words, “a picture frozen in its ice-bound immobility.”80 This element induced Damisch to claim, quite similarly to Florensky, that Quattro- Cinquencento perspective is anti-Humanist [which] reduces man to an eye and the eye to a point, and to the Cartesian subject - itself a sort of geometrical point ... the subject is reduced to a point, the Cogito, and separated by an abyss from extended substance.81 This brings such perspective close to the idea of a photographic image of the world (the Zeno arrow paradox) which demands an act, or rather a non-act, of mental cognitive passivity by and of the viewer. Florensky is here harking us back to the Zeno/Parmenides and debate and paradoxes, and at the same time to the Bergson/Einstein debate so contemporary to him:82 a debate one can also find in the Cubist’s writings of the time, and particularly in Albert Gleizes (1881-1953) and Jean Metzinger’s (1883-1956) Du Cubism. As does Florensky, both artists underline that space is curved, malleable, irregular, and changing, Bakhtian “open-ended” and “unfinalised.” Space is infinite and is itself an infinite number of dimensions, with figures and realities changing according to their relative position. Florensky also challenges and confronts the idea that all psycho-physiological processes so vital to antique art83 are to be excluded from the act of seeing, from the act of perceiving and from the corresponding representation. Thus, the very act of seeing together with the act of perceiving is barred from all other interacting and interpenetrating heteroglossic actions; that of memory, from all spiritual acts and forces, and from the act of consciousness and awareness. The magnet is debarred from its own magnetic forces. Panofsky underlined this debarring in his Perspective as Symbolic Form when he stated that “perspective transforms psychophysiological space into mathematical space”84 making one forget that the very act of seeing is an act hegemonically conditioned. Kepler himself termed this fact when he emphasised that one has to be schooled into linear perspectival construction.85 Here one cannot by-pass Henri Poincaré’s (1854-1912) revolutionary geometry. Poincaré believed that space relations are relativist and these have a psycho-physical origin and are hence

80 Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” 263. 81 Iversen, “The Discourse of Perspective,” 199. 82 Jimena Canales, The Physicist & The Philosopher (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015). 83 Iversen, “The Discourse of Perspective,” 196. 84 Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 31. 85 Ibid., 34. 64 MELITA THEOLOGICA not an absolute reflection of external reality. There is no Kantian a priori category of a three-dimensional space. Geometry is only an accorded construction of the mind, an argument that does recall Saussure’s parallelisms and radical ideas on linguistics and semiology. According to Florensky: …if the six aforesaid conditions are observed, then, and only then, does the correspondence which a perspectival picture wants to convey between the points on the skin of the world and the points of a representation become possible. But even if one of the aforementioned six conditions is not observed in its entirety, then this aspect of the correspondence becomes impossible and then the perspective will then inevitably be destroyed.86 Juxtaposing these six categories with the birth of Cubism and other twentieth- century art movements introduces a quite intriguing aspect on Florensky’s philosophy of perspective. His philosophy provides quite a sharp complementary parallel to Cubism and Rayism as discussed above. Cubism’s “multi-view,” “multi- experience,” “perpetual successive moments,” “accumulation” and “repetition” is clear for all. Although in his The Meaning of Idealism, Florensky criticised Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) “cubism as geometric experiments from the poisoned soul of a great artist.”87 Both Cubism’s and Florensky’s ideas harbour an intriguing overlapping philosophy of Time and Space.88 Such parallelism does not stop at Poincaré or at Bergson whose ideas were so deeply embraced by the major Cubist artists. This relationship was already dealt with by Alexei Grishchenko (1883-1977) in 1913.89 It also harked for a novel return to archaic truth epitomised by some authentic archetypal form. The two paths believed that ‘in searching for a new model of artistic culture that was both objective and absolute, some avant- garde artists may have become sensitive to universal or archetypal forms and configurations that lay dormant in the national sub-consciousness: ... Florensky describes how the use of reverse perspective in icons corresponds to a metaphysical perception of reality as it is, in contrast to the naturalistic perspective of western art which attempts to rationalise the world, reducing it

86 Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” 263. 87 Nicoletta Misler, “Pavel Florensky as Art Historian,” Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, ed. Nicoletta Misler, trans. Wendy Salmond (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 59. 88 Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten,Cubism and Culture (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001), 64-110. 89 Alexei Grishchenko, Misli Zhivopistsa o Sviaziakh Ruskoi Shivopisi s Vizantiei i Zapadom XIII-XXv, (Moscow, Gorodskaia tip., 1913). Inverse, Reverse Perspective - Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci 65

to the level of a human being’s ability to perceive it ... men here become mere observers...90 Bakhtin similarly believed that in the “undying elements of the archaic ... these archaic elements are preserved ... only thanks to their constant renewal, which is to say, their contemporization.”91 Such archetypal forms can be unearthed solely on the rubble of the present becoming past. Let’s remember Panofsky’s positivistic words paralleling Florensky’s metaphysical ones, when: …work on certain artistic problems has advanced so far that further work in the same direction ... appears unlikely to bear fruit, the result is often a great recoil ... a reversal of direction. Such recoils ... create the possibility of erecting a new edifice out of the rubble of the old; they do this precisely by abandoning what has already been achieved, that is, by turning back to apparently more ‘primitive’ modes.92 With such an insightful sharp awareness, it is surprising that Panofsky does not seem to accept the role of pre-Renaissance perspective. Whilst defining antique perspective as primitive, he stops short from his own conclusion quoted above, that one must turn back and abandon what has already been achieved “to turn back to more primitive modes.” Unfortunately enough, he seems to be unaware of Florensky’s diametrically opposed approach, in particular of the Russian philosopher’s challenge against the Kantian constructive rationalisation of space.93 Florensky proposed that solely via inverse perspective can one attain the depiction of an ontological truth of our being sustained through the complete architectonics of a geometrical structure which webs the entire Dasein of our existence. This was the whole idea behind a complex and rigid mathematical structure composing the whole iconic depiction with svitki and podlinniki and zastavitsa which were, and still are, considered as sacred writings and geometric bozzetti, copiati e ricopiati da generazioni by the enlightened icon-creator (znamenitili).94 One finds such sacred ontological geometry and proportions not only in icon art but also in Islamic art, in which the Divine Principle is enveloped within infinite layers of hidden interflows, encompassing everything through symmetry

90 Spira, The Avant-Garde Icon, 70. 91 Holquist, Dialogism, 126. 92 Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 47. 93 Iversen, “The Discourse of Perspective,” 196. 94 Egon Sendler, L’Icona: Immagine dell’Invisibile (Pisa: Edizioni Paoline, 1985), 86-87; Guillem Ramos-Poquí, The Technique of Icon Painting (Kent: Search Press, 1997), 60-63. 66 MELITA THEOLOGICA and harmony that can only be grasped by a particular kind of perspective.95 Perspective here is established by the linkage between sensible geometry which leads to technical structures, and intelligible geometry which would lead to intellectual arts, ‘the root to all knowledge.’96 Geometry and perspective, far from being technicalities, are regarded as spiritual functions. This is beautifully explained by Laleh Bakhtiar in her study of the tomb of Imamzada ‘Abdullah (Farsajin), in which: …in the same way that planar surface patterns exhibit cosmic norms and archetypal , the tombs enshrine these same geometries and symbols in three-dimensional form - the cycles of time and space frozen in matter indicating a timelessness and unbounded space which transcends the wear and tear of worldly existence.97 Florensky’s icon philosophy echoes the Islamic concept of the Door-Way da ira ‘ala, that is the door threshold, not a Quattro-Cinquecento window through which an eye looks passively, but a perspectival path, Bakhtin’s “event, created by sensible geometry to affect man’s perceptual awareness of the experience on entering another state of consciousness.”98 This “entering another state of consciousness” by the means of intelligible and spiritual geometry is, I believe, achieved by Mark Rothko (1903-1970) with his simple linear asymmetrical-symmetrical minimalist axial-radial octagonal chapel (1971)99 for which perspectival path Barnett Newman (1905-1970), probably unaware of any Florensky-Panofsky-Bakhtian link, proposed his own inverse- reflectiveBroken Obelisk (1963-1967).100 Axial symmetry dialogue with specular reflection and refraction immerses the “I” into a space of inverse perspective. It is vital to remember here that whereas even for Damisch perspective can be defined as a structural “sentence” which “systematically organises material and positions” an “I” over against a correlative “you,” for Florensky perspective is a

95 Mikhail Aleksandrovich Marutaev, “O Garmonii Kak Zakonomernosti,” Printsip Simmetrii: Istoriko-Metodologicheskie Problemi (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Nauka, 1978), 363-395. 96 Keith Critchlow, Islamic Patterns: An Analytic and Cosmological Approach (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), 70-102. 97 Laleh Bakhtiar, Sufi: Expressions of the Mystic Quest (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), 100. 98 Ibid., 102. 99 Sheldon Nodelman, The Rothko Chapel Paintings: Origins, Structure, Meaning (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 250. 100 Jacob Baal-Teshuva, Rothko (Cologne: Taschen, 2003), 73-75. Inverse, Reverse Perspective - Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci 67 modality for meditative metaphysics which he found encapsulated in the icon, and which I also find in Rothko. In another peculiar way, and at first glance seemingly paradoxical, Florensky’s philosophy is deeply close to Malevich’s (1879-1935). In direct parallel with Florensky, Malevich was seeking to realise that state of consciousness in which the truth about reality is expressive of itself, not requiring the prisms of art and the mind to mediate on its behalf. In the context of the Orthodox tradition, St Gregory Palamas (c.1296-1357/59) also acknowledged that knowledge of the Divine is not attained through manipulation of self or circumstance but that it arises gracefully beyond the mind, as a function of reality: “If all intellectual activity has stopped, how could angels and angelic men see God except by the power of the Spirit?”101 This stripping away of intellectual thought, the cessation of all intellectual activity, thoughtlessness would lead us finally to what Malevich termed as the surrendering the motive and concept of art and Florensky’s sacrificing God as an object of mind or thought,102 and thus ultimately to the divine contemplation of silence.

Giuseppe Schembri-Bonaci Department of Art and Art History Faculty of Arts University of Malta Msida MSD 2080 Malta [email protected]

101 Spira, The Avant-Garde Icon, 61-62; 147. 102 Ibid., 147. MELITA THEOLOGICA Michael Zammit* Journal of the Faculty of Theology University of Malta 69/1 (2019): 69-80

Volentem ducunt: Guiding the Willing Out of a Tunnel

n his Obratnaia perspekiva (Reverse perspective), a lecture written in October I1919, Pavel Florensky (1882-1937) notes: “The liveliness of the discussion that ensued brought home to me that the question of space was one of the fundamental ones in art and, I would go even further, in the understanding of the world in general.”1 Then again in a letter to his daughter Ol’ga, sent from Solovki on the 13th May 1937, the year of his assassination, he retorts: The secret of creativity lies in the preservation of youth. The secret of genius lies in the preservation of something infantile, an infantile intuition that endures throughout life. It is a question of a certain constitution that provides genius with an objective perception of the world, one that does not gravitate towards a centre: a kind of reverse perspective, one that is, therefore, integral and real.2 As the perception becomes drawn to gravitate towards some centre, the creativity that springs from the preservation of youthfulness becomes challenged. Innocence is lost. Genius is forfeited and perspective acquires the potential for the violation of the real. After Baudelaire, Florensky declares genius to be no more than childhood recaptured at will; “childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.”3

* Michael Zammit is Associate Professor of Philosophy, in the Faculty of Arts, at the University of Malta. His research interests include Ancient Greek, Renaissance studies, Sanskrit, Philosophy of Architecture, Philosophy of Language, Oriental Philosophy, and Classics. 1 Pavel Florensky, Beyond Vision, trans. Wendy Salmond (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 300. 2 Ibid., 50. 3 Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (London: Penguin Books, 2010), 11.

69 70 MELITA THEOLOGICA

The child that does not allow its perceptions to be pulled here and there like some lost moon desperately seeking to gravitate towards some centre is a child savant. The expression of its genius is a kind of refusal to acknowledge the subject/object dualism as expressed by: The observer who brings nothing of his own to the world, who cannot even synthesize his own fragmentary impressions; who, since he does not enter into a living interaction with the world and does not live in it, is not aware of his own reality either…[Who] yet on the basis of his own furtive experience constructs all of reality, all of it, on the pretext of objectivity, squeezing it into what he had observed of reality’s own differential.4 Florensky boldly condemns Leonardo, Descartes and Kant whose world views grow from the soil of the renaissance and whose visual art equivalent, perspective, is as he claims an expression of meonism and the impersonal. The termmeonism derives from the Greek μὴ ῶν, (un-being) a concept axiomatic to the philosophical theory of the poet and philosopher Nikolai Minsky (1885-1937) for whom all human striving towards the absolute necessarily fails. Since God is dispersed within eternity, Minsky declares any knowledge of It is paradoxically unattainable. Minsky was also one of the conveners of the religious- philosophical gatherings that Florensky frequented. In keeping with these ideas and as heir to the linguistic school of W. von Humboldt Florensky therefore studiously reflects on the dynamic aspect of language asa pining (μὴ) of the spirit (ῶν) to express itself and, accordingly he shows sympathy with the avant-garde poetic theories of his time. With perspectival artistry such as this, meonism embodies thought doomed to all kinds of passivity that: For an instant, as if by stealth, furtively spies on the world through a chink between subjective facets. Thought, that is lifeless and motionless, incapable of grasping movement and laying claim to a divine certainty, specifically about its own place and its own instant of peeking out.5 This rejection of perspectives actually creates a challenge to our vision of the world today. Indeed the practitioner of perspectival science observes six conditions that Pavel Florensky in this lecture vehemently criticizes, ending his talk by claiming that:

4 Florensky, Beyond Vision, 264. 5 Ibid., 264. Volentem ducunt: Guiding the Willing Out of a Tunnel - Michael Zammit 71

In the present analysis the limited nature of naturalism had to be overcome from within, showing how ‘fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt’, the fates guide those who are willing but compel those who are unwilling, to liberation and spirituality.6 The whole thrust of Florensky’s epistemological quest strives to shed light on the experience of truth as gained in a lived contact with reality. For him all being is nothing but symbolic of , the all-embracing reality linking both Creator and creature together. This metaphysics he transcribes into a sophiological key variously designated as the great root of the total creature, the guardian angel of creation and the eternal spouse of the Word of God. “Linear perspective,” he claims, is a machine for annihilating reality, an infernal yawn that swallows everything wherein the vanishing point functions. Conversely reverse perspective, like a fountain of reality spurting into the world, serves to generate reality, extract it from non-being and advance it into reality. Point of darkness and point of light, such is the correlation of the centres of ‘inverse’ and ‘linear’ perspective.7 He makes this exceptional statement and in its light please allow me to invite you, dear reader, for instance to take a moment from reading, to lift up your sight and look at anything, wherever you happen to be, calmly; some flowers, perhaps, that may be in the room, or a book, a plate, the ring on your finger or a tile on the floor, anything really. Just look very simply, and serenely note what might start to happen rather quickly. Besides the physical form, besides the vision, the mind, the name therefore starts to push its way into your awareness. Theflowers speak to your mind and your feelings with your very own voice; your attitudes come in sight and your ideas, your relationship to them...and suddenly those flowers start to transform into something more abstract, colour, feeling, but ironically more real. A wider, perhaps more open consciousness challenges “the individual judgement of the single person with his single point of view.”8 Where previously there was a perspective characteristic of a fragmented awareness, where previously there was a deception, now perception arises, thoroughly (Latin: per) seizing (Latin: capere) the event in an ever widening vision with, so to speak, the abstraction of the flowers, the book, plate or whatever at its centre, everywhere. In view of this as Florensky notes, perspective arises not so much in pure artistic expressions as in the applied art of scenography, the seductive deception of stage design:

6 Ibid., 272. 7 Ibid., 93. 8 Ibid., 208. 72 MELITA THEOLOGICA

[P]ure painting is, or at least wants to be, above all True to life; not a substitute for life but merely the symbolic signifier of its deepest reality. Stage design is ascreen that thickens the light of existence while pure painting is a window opened wide on reality...that provides for penetration.9 Florensky attempts to catch that reality that perspective shuts down. In the final analysis, and in terms of using sight, he suggests that there are only two ways to experience the world; the window, the human being looks out through and the screen, the scientific (i.e. Kantian) experience of looking at (something). One (the former) is defined by a subtle (call itinternal ) attitude, the other the screen, by a gross and physically assisted demeanour (call it external). The contemplative, creative culture as one opens and looks out through the windows of perception, is radically distinct from that predatory, viz. mechanical culture geared to merely amassing information to be displayed on the various and varied screens that separate the human soul from the real, the intangible. The facile experience of the world therefore consists in the theatricality of perspectival depictions devoid of both the feeling for reality and the sense of responsibility that sees life merely as a spectacle, a performance. Florensky without any equivocation, claims that perspective means to deceive. The Artist David Hockney’s show, up at thePace Gallery in New York, from April 5th to May 12th of 2018: Something New in Painting (and Photography) [and even Printing] explosively depicted his energetic inquest into the contributions of reverse perspective even as expounded in Florensky’s lecture essay. Lawrence Weschler declares in his introduction to the exhibition: “Hockney deploys hexagonal canvases, the lower ends notched out, so as to allow the eye to bend the picture far beyond the frame. As Hockney quips, ‘Far from cutting corners, I was adding them.”10 Then he goes on to suggest what Hockney means by reverse perspective: [B]y way of an allusion to an experience he once had coursing through the arrow- straight eighteen kilometer St Gotthard Pass road tunnel, the tiny pinpoint of light ahead epitomizing ‘the hell of one-point perspective, I suddenly realized (Hockney tells Weschler) how that is the basis of all conventional photographic perspective, that endless regress to an infinitely distant point in the middle of the image, how everything is hurtling away from you and you yourself are not even in the picture at all. But then, as we got to the end of the tunnel everything suddenly

9 Ibid., 209. 10 David Hockney and Lawrence Weschler, Something New in Painting (and Photography) [and even Printing] (New York: Pace Gallery, 2018), Introduction. Volentem ducunt: Guiding the Willing Out of a Tunnel - Michael Zammit 73

reversed with the world opening out in every direction...and I realized how that, and not its opposite, was the effect I wanted to capture.11 Now in the Sanskrit philosophy of language, which Florensky seems so obviously to have been aware of, the effect of this sudden reversal of perspectival vision would readily be termed sphota. The wordsphota is derived from the seminal sphut (to burst). The term also captures a robust sense of clarity.Sphota is a commonly used word for the Sanskrit deconstructionists. Sometimes it is used to signify the permanent aspect of a phoneme, sometimes in the sense of meaning bearer or expressive word, and different from the articulated sound calleddhvani. Mādhavāchārya derives the word in two ways. Firstly sphota is ‘that which expresses a meaning’…Secondly it is ‘that which is manifested by letters’…These definitions are offered keeping in view the process of communication through language. Hence the first definition is with reference to the speaker and the second with reference to the listener.12 The concept came about in the analysis of the need to explain how particular vocal characters, the letters assemble, how the sounds they represent mingle and interact to form meaningful words. Thussphota is taken to be the eternal essence of words both because it manifests their meaning (actually called artha, value) and also because it is made manifest in the phonetic rendering of the letters. But finally, the Sanskritvyakaranin (lit. the deconstructionists, that we insist in calling grammarians) identify sphota as: The hidden or underlying power behind individual letters of a word which present the meaning of the word to the reader or hearer of it…It is the single meaningful symbol. The articulated sounds used in linguistic discourse are merely the means by which the symbol is revealed according to the Sanskrit [scholars] who propounded the theory.13 Florensky’s lecture examines the shift from the flat surface experience of the screen rendering of reality, axiomatic of perspectival vision, to the burst of lucidity, the sphota of the panoramic view sub specie æternitatis. He speaks of the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca and how, in 1336, he, Petrarch, climbed a mountain with the specific intent to merely observe and somehowcapture the view; something that no one seems to have even thought of doing before. The

11 Ibid. 12 M. S. Murti, Bhartrihari the Grammarian (New Delhi: Sahita Akademi, 1997), 34. 13 John Grimes, A Concise Dictionary of Indian Philosophy (Varanasi: Indica Books, 2009), 352. 74 MELITA THEOLOGICA exhilarating experience he receives there, he expresses as being an apotheosis of the soul gripped by the profound sense of synchronicity. Petrarch feels as though he had stepped through an enchanted portal into some other dimension. In trepidation of this thrilling experience he seeks support and reaches out for his copy of Augustine’s Confessions that he happened to have at hand. His eye falls on the passage, as quoted in Jean Gebser’s The Ever-Present Origin, that reads: And men went forth to behold high mountains and the mighty surge of the sea, and the broad stretches of the rivers and the inexhaustible ocean, and the paths of the stars, and so doing, loose themselves in wonderment.14 This losing oneself in wonderment becomes for Florensky the constitution that provides genius, i.e. the human soul, with the recognition of a world that is not merely arising from some I, some vanishing point lost in some remote dark corner of life as flattened by those sedentary and lustful cravings spinning from its pathologically incessant passions for appropriation and attachment. “The pathos of modern man is to shake off all realities, so that ‘I want’ establishes the law of a newly constructed reality, phantasmagorical even though it is enclosed within ruled-out squares.”15 Perspective therefore becomes for Pavel, an expression of meonism (un-being) where the subject, the observer of the perspectival, is denuded and deflated of reality. On the other hand the reverse is what he terms the pathos of ancient man: The pathos of ancient man, and of mediaeval man too, is the acceptance, the grateful acknowledgment, and the affirmation of all kinds of reality as a blessing, for being is blessing, and blessing is being. The pathos of mediaeval man is an affirmation of reality both in himself and outside himself.16 There is, therefore, a constitution that provides the human genius with that particular perception of the world from what is not merely some I, some personality trait as is often intimated. Rather it manifests as astate of emergenc(e) y that can suddenly open up and out from one’s being to embrace reality in the lived knowledge of the pristine bliss that attends the childlike recognition of one’s true and unadulterated nature. Florensky’s words thus bear repeating: “It

14 Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, trans. Noel Barstad and Algis Mickunas (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 12-15. 15 Florensky, Beyond Vision, 217. 16 Ibid., 217. Volentem ducunt: Guiding the Willing Out of a Tunnel - Michael Zammit 75 is a question of a certain constitution that provides genius with an objective perception of the world – one that does not gravitate towards a centre.”17 In one sense this is a deeply enigmatic statement and in another it is explosive, mind-boggling, even world-changing. Sometime later Paul Klee, in his notebooks, will claim that the geometric point that Euclid terms as semeion (lit. a seed) stands at the orgasmic source of the cosmos, so also Florensky here intimates the same … although surprisingly in reverse mode … a perception therefore that does not gravitate towards a centre and yet allows genius an objective perception of the world. The renaissance world-view, steeped in the Aristotelian logical principles, forcibly re-educates the entire human psycho-physiology and makes abstract demands, essentially anti-artistic, essentially outlawing art, especially the visual arts. The sacred increasingly becomes just an excuse for depicting the profane, the body and the landscape. Hamlet’s renowned dictum, to be or not to be, then lends its full thrust towards the fragmenting of the soul of the man steeped in the dualities of thinking that were to become the tools for, and causes of, so much misery and suffering for 20th century humanity. Florensky’s contemporary, Jean Gebser, in his ground breaking The Ever- Present Origin explores the various layers of the constitution of consciousness culminating in the negative aspects of the mental structures that begin to emerge with the dawn of the Renaissance when the certainty of the theocentric world view becomes suspect, and where, along with the music of the spheres, there now sounds a cacophonous dirge arising from the obstinate affirmation of the human being having a separate and possibly separable identity. This ego centred individuation process then steadily and surely leads even towards the emergence of nationhood that forms the attitudinal basis for the terrible conflicts that erupt thereafter in their wake. Then begins the attempt to replace realities that are growing muddied and obscured with simulacra and phantoms, to replace theurgy (divine agency) with illusionistic art, to replace divine actions with theatre…A secular vision that progressively abandoned the mystical, or more exactly the mysterial reality of the tragedies of Aeschylus, then Sophocles and finally Euripides.18 A perspectival vision therefore, that fixes the observer and the observed in space and in time; man on the one hand, and the world on the other. In turn compellingly isolationist, man’s attitude in the face of the world tends towards

17 Ibid., 50. 18 Ibid., 221ff. 76 MELITA THEOLOGICA hostility and becomes confrontational. The world that responds manifests its extraordinary expanse and power that the dilation of the ego attempts to command, using technologies ultimately rooted in the very same potencies that they attempt to harness. The condottiere, the Renaissance man seeped in this overwhelming sense of self-importance becomes the standard for the coming humanity, the humanity that we in the last four centuries have been born into. For as long as there was any form of moderation present and effective, the mental processes of abstraction and quantification were incapable of producing dire negative effects; but when moderation came to be displaced by ratio, i.e. division, as is most clearly evident in Descartes, the processes of abstraction morphed into an overwhelming sense of isolationism, while that of quantification led to the practice of amassment and agglomerating greed. Gebser, writing in the terrible forties and fifties decades of the 20th century tells us: These consequences are partially characteristic of our time. Isolation is visible everywhere: isolation of individuals, of entire nations and continents; isolation in the physical realm in the form of tuberculosis; in the political in the form of ideological or monopolistic dictatorship; in everyday life in the form of immoderate, ‘busy’ activity devoid of any sense-direction or relationship to the world as a whole; isolation in thinking in the form of the deceptive dazzle of premature judgements or hypertrophied abstraction devoid of any connection with the world. And it is the same with mass-phenomena: overproduction, inflation, and the proliferation of political parties, rampant technology, and atomization in all forms.

What sustained or reinforced the so called ‘development’ over the past 400 years, which led to these results, can be found in the notion of technology that brought about the age of the machine with the aid of perspectival, technical drafting; in the notion of progress that spawned the ‘age of progress’; and in the radical rationalism that, as we are surely justified in saying, summoned the ‘age of the world wars.’19 In his archaeology of consciousness Gebser examines the constitution of the levels of awareness as they form the strata of the human psyche. He speaks of an archaic level of the structure of consciousness, which has a zero-dimensional identity, a time of complete non-differentiation of man and the universe. A time marked with a defining sense of wholeness, when the soul/psyche is still dormant. In turn the magic structure becomes an expression of one-dimensional unity and man’s merging with nature as distinct from what he terms the mythical

19 Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, 94. Volentem ducunt: Guiding the Willing Out of a Tunnel - Michael Zammit 77 structure of consciousness, wherein are located the terms of expression of a two-dimensional polarity. The characteristic attribute of themagic stratum therefore appears as the emotional realm of the waking human psyche, whereas that of the mythical, the imagination. Abstraction then becomes the identifying characteristic of the subsequent mental structures of consciousness. Gebser’s emphasis stays with his assertion that this archaeology of consciousness, designated as the archaic, the magical, the mythical, the mental and the integral, is not merely constituted of past events, but “are in fact still present in a more or less latent and acute form in each one of us.”20 Perspective (associated with the mental structures of awareness) therefore becomes the pre-eminent expression of the emergent consciousness of 15th century European man, the palpable expression of his objectivation of spatial awareness. Besides illuminating space, perspective brings it to man’s awareness and lends man his own visibility of himself. This evident perception comes to light for the first time in the paintings of Giotto and Masaccio. Yet this very same perspective, whose study and acquisition were a major preoccupation for Renaissance man, not only extends his image of the world by achieving spatialization, but also narrows his vision – a consequence that still afflicts us today.21 David Hockney’s tunnel vision then settles in and quickly proceeds to define for humanity at large, the sedentary lifestyle that has now, at the commencement of the 21st century, become the norm for the larger portion of the masses. The mental structure of consciousness that produces perspective also unleashes a rather superficial appreciation of the world. It is this that we ought to excavate to seek the deeper, and the subtler, that we may refresh, reassess and re-access all the other creative aspects of awareness. Our faculties of sight and hearing, but not exclusively of course, can do this and as example I would ask you, yet again dear reader, to start hearing right now as you read. Hear the sounds in the room, the sounds in the building and beyond; and you might, if your investigation is sharpened, even perhaps catch the sounds of these very written words, speaking in the silent expanse of the mind, possibly flowing as in a stream with other thoughts, feelings and attitudes.22 Learn to listen to the sound of the voice as others speak or even as you yourself speak, and discover that hearing voices never excludes what is uttered but holds

20 Ibid., 42. 21 Ibid., 18. 22 In the Semitic Maltese language these latter forms of thought/feelings are identified by the term ħoss (with the sound ħ for home) that literally means sound in a family of languages where the contents of the mind are identified assonant . 78 MELITA THEOLOGICA much more besides. There are emotive strands there. There are colourings of attitudes and directions of feelings there also. Then, quite suddenly, who knows, you might rush out of themetaphorical tunnel vision and experience directly what is being uttered, differently. Even as your appreciation of speech starts to touch on some subtler awareness as to what one really is, as to how the seemingly fixed relational characteristics of discourse may start to evaporate, even then one may seek the deeper, greater realms of the vast ocean that is the non-dual, aperspectival foundation of the phenomenal experience. As the perspective with its vanishing point at what-is-said turns around on itself to give rise to a spontaneous immersion in the heightened awareness of the realm of becoming, suddenly catching some glimpse not of, to repeat, merely what is said but also who is saying it, why s/he is saying it, where s/he is saying it from, and what s/he may be saying about it…, then suddenly the sense of the limitless may start to become apparent. The sense of a reversal breaking the narrow confines of the merely perspectival tunnel world-view may start to become shown, sometimes even rather dramatically. Then simply, in the silence that supports all that is spoken, all that is witnessed, there is no lack, no dearth of possibilities. But let me come to the end of this now. Pavel Florensky proceeds to say in his essay: “In particular, the vanishing point tends to be presented as a negative point, and at this point, the schemes fundamental to perspectival representation converge – which becomes the compositional center of the picture.”23 Therefore, a hard blackness seeps into the human heart as we move through life. As we have come to know it, life’s composition extends and grows complex, and with the advent of perspectival vision and its consequences, its techniques, the world recedes from the viewer, the flaneur.“It is only when they lose their spontaneous relationship to the world that children lose reverse perspective (their obratnaja perspektiva).” 24 On the other hand, the appreciation of iconography gently embraces the being to allow time for the heart to melt, dispelling darkness by transcending it. This prepares for the cultivation of a human stand that from being furtive and recessive morphs into becoming a firm and strongly sustained position, wherein “the viewer thinks that the composition [of the real] is extending and growing.”25 Growing away therefore, even as the hardness melts. “However, for its spatial or

23 Florensky, Beyond Vision, 92. 24 Ibid., 219. 25 Ibid., 92. Volentem ducunt: Guiding the Willing Out of a Tunnel - Michael Zammit 79 depictive function, the vanishing point is not the source of representation, but its conduit”26 … and as such not the beginning. How can a vanishing point even be a beginning? Childhood never happens in a world of vanishing beginnings. The surface perpendicular to the visual ray is seen as sucked into the endless depth of the Euclidean extension, always constant in its monotone movement, without hold, arrest, or obstacle. In receding, the surface rakes over everything that it encounters in its path, cleansing the space of any possible reality. The latter seems to rush headlong along the tracks of non-being, along the lines of escape until it reaches the point, that is, until the fullness and diversity that fill the space concentrate in a zero – a homogeneous and isotropic space, beyond quality, and indifferent to its own content, remains empty, and in turn, transforms into a pure zero.27 Florensky finds no hesitation to call linear perspective, the technology for the annihilation of reality, an infernal yawn. Reverse perspective, on the other hand, he associates it with a spring, a cascading reality into the world, spurting from non-being. Point of darkness and point of light, such is the correlation of the centres of linear and inverse perspectives, a robust echo of the ancient Upanishadic dictum:

Lead me from illusion to reality. Lead me from darkness to light. Lead me from death to immortality. In a reversed perspectival mentality every identity is transient, changeable and in flux. It is thought that there are clear-cut identities, distinct identities especially as designated nominally with words. But words themselves are illusory creatures. Like light to a mirage, language is vaporous and in the final analysis ineffable. What we hold to be beautiful depends on what we silently believe to be ugly. Words and things, signifiers and signifieds, cannot but be from divergent, indeed conflicting sources. In turn signifieds are born from that metaphor, that nameless chaos, amorphic, indeterminate and dark…the signified of signifieds. Metaphysics calls it nothingness, the absolute, and the shaman, and the mystic asymptotically breeze through its reality in their ecstatic flights of trance. Indeed Zen typically admonishes and advocates diffidence in view of the attempts at expressing such reversals.

26 Ibid., 93. 27 Ibid. 80 MELITA THEOLOGICA

Regrettably, laments Pavel Florensky, open minds have seemingly become rare in this our age of perspectivistic tunnel vision.

Michael Zammit Department of Philosophy Faculty of Arts University of Malta Msida MSD 2080 Malta [email protected] MELITA THEOLOGICA Ranier Fsadni* Journal of the Faculty of Theology University of Malta 69/1 (2019): 81-89

Florensky and the Personalisation of the Word

Florensky and the Questions of His Age

hat came first, the word or the deed? What are the origins of religion? WWhat is its relationship to mass psychology? Is religion a form of magical thinking? These quintessential nineteenth-century questions1 waned around the middle of the twentieth but have returned with force today. They were initially raised in the light of the then new theories of socio-cultural and biological evolution; they faded because the intial speculative answers, based on little ethnographic data, were found to be naive once religions around the world were studied using fieldwork methods; but today, the richer ethnographic record together with advances in the neurological and information sciences, enable the questions to be approached with greater sophistication.2 For a social anthropologsist to read Pavel Florensky with this background can be a disconcerting experience. One reason, no doubt, has to do with this particular social anthropologist’s very limited knowledge of Florensky’s intellectual milieu. But the main reason is another. Florensky is clearly concerned with those same nineteenth-century questions, as well as others relating, say, to telepathy, kinetic energy and . They are the same questions tackled, in a different milieu

* Ranier Fsadni is a member of the Department of Anthropological Sciences, University of Malta, where he teaches with special reference to the anthropology of politics and the contemporary Arab world. 1 See George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1991). 2 See Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Tanya M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back (New York: Vintage, 2012).

81 82 MELITA THEOLOGICA and in a completely different style by G.K. Chesterton3 in his polemics against public intellectuals that he considered either excessively materialist or excessively spiritualist. Unlike Chesterton, Florensky shows some familiarity with certain ethnographic theories, some of which he explicitly mentions, while the implied presence of others is impossible to miss. Throughout, what is arresting is the way that Florensky manages to be both a figure of his age and an uncanny precursor of several later intellectual developments. In the process he flies against the characteristic assumptions of both contemporaries and successors. Florensky does not seem to have had much access to ethnographic studies (the modern type of fieldwork was only instituted in the 1920s), as can be seen by the anecdotal and literary examples he cites in his early work on superstition and . However, the questions he tackles in that work show a familiarity with the work of cultural evolutionists like Edward Tylor and James Frazer,4 who took an intellectualist approach to religion, seeing it essentially as primitive science, and therefore full of misunderstanding of how the world works. Religion was considered to be an improvement on “magic,” associated with more “primitive” societies, and deemed to consist of an individualist attempts at the manipulation of cosmic forces for private ends, unlike religion which was public and propitiary. Florensky must have such work in mind when he discusses miracles in terms of science, religion and magic.5 He broadly accepts the terms and their distinctions (which are queried today) but departs from the analysis in a strikingly modern fashion. Whereas Frazer was famous (and enormously influential) for deducing the logic of rituals from his reading of literary sources, missionary reports and early ethnographic expeditions – believing that the meaning could simply be read off the described behaviour – Florensky argues that behaviour cannot yield meaning in this way. It is only context, and knowledge of motive, that can distinguish “superstition” from perceptive apprehension of the world. He does not discount the claims of science, but says the legitimately secular aims of science are valid in their realm but do not exclude the claims of religion. In his work on the “magical value of the word, ” Florensky would go further and associate “the word” (by which, here, he understands “language”) with a self-organising cultural world

3 See Gilbert Keith, Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Louisville, Kentucky: GLH Publishing, 2016). 4 James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 5 Pavel Florenskij, Sulla superstizione e il miracolo, ed. Natalino Valentini, trans. Claudia Zonghetti (SE: Milano, 2014). Florensky and the Personalisation of the Word - Ranier Fsadni 83

(“a small closed world.”)6 This implicit critique of Frazer echoes (and in places anticipates) the insistence by Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert that social meaning was contextual and that any single belief needed to be examined as part of an entire cosmology. Nor, I believe, is it reading too much into what Florensky says about the scope of science to see in it the schematic lineament of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s7 later caustic critique of Frazer: in their different ways, both Wittgenstein and Florensky attribute a creative power to language that Frazer overlooks. Much of Florensky’s knowledge of the social sciences comes out implicitly in what questions he tackles. However, the three times he does mention prominent names, in the lecture notes published under the title of At the Crossroads of Science and Mysticism8 all have a point of interest. Florensky passes an approving remark about Marxist critques of bourgeois ideology as exploitative9 – but the “ideology” in question is “scientific world- understanding.” In this instance Florensky appreciates the role that class relations might play in a field of endeavour that, in principle, should transcend class. However, he mentions it as a contrast with “ecclesial world-understanding.” It is a pity that he never factored in that religion, in practice, might also experience the structural contradiction of universalistic religion whose churches, however, sometimes identified with exclusivist nation-states (and nationalist ideology). There is only a cursory reference10to the work of Hubert and Mauss, who as joint authors proposed seminal theories on religious sacrifice and on magic.11 But it is interesting that Florensky describes their work as illuminating “mass psychology” and not, as is usual, “culture.” One reason might be that Florensky’s conceptual understanding of “culture” – at least to go by the compressed lecture notes – is not articulated in a particularly interesting way. But the main reason is that Florensky was thinking of religion as not reducible to culture, understood as a “small closed world,” since it also enabled a collective rationality as well as a “transcendent psychology”12 of the miraculous and mysticism. Here he

6 Pavel Florenskij, Il valore magico della parola, trans and ed. Graziano Lingua (Milano: Medusa, 2003), 53. My translation from the Italian. 7 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough (London: Humanities Press, 1987). 8 Pavel Florensky, At the Crossroads of Science and Mysticism, trans and ed. Boris Jakim (Brooklyn, New York: Semantron Press, 2014). 9 Ibid., 101. 10 Ibid., 69. 11 See H. Hubert and M. Mauss, A General Theory of Magic (London: Routledge, 2001). 12 Florensky, At the Crossroads of Science and Mysticism, 70. 84 MELITA THEOLOGICA anticipates the work of E.E. Evans-Pritchard13 who criticised his predecessors and contemporaries for reducing religion to either psychology or sociology (or both) without paying attention to religion’s cognitive element, in particular the way it enables the philosophical exploration of life’s mysteries. Florensky’s discussion of Auguste Comte14 is longer and concerns a critical feature of the thought of both men. Florensky refers to Comte’s ambition to discover laws of human affairs that were as universal and necessary as the laws discovered by the natural sciences. Interestingly, Florensky accepts that such laws may be discovered for economics and sociology (a minority view nowadays) but not for history. For history is the study of particular, individual, singular cases – that is, of what made them singular and unrepeatable – and therefore there are no laws that can be generalised. We can pass over this distinction between history and sociology (for it is possible to have a sociology of individuals and individuality) to focus on a point of greater interest. For Florensky, the paradigmatic case of the irreducibly singular is the person. There is no such thing as saintliness qua general concept, he says; there are only saints, people who achieved sainthood precisely by not giving up their uniqueness but living up to it, being “eternally new.”15 These three cursory references to other thinkers are interesting in themselves but in combination show true originality. The singular personality is said to go with the ecclesial world-understanding, a dramatic upending of the usual assumption that to subscribe to a religion is to agree to some notional conformity. At the same time, perceptiveness (as well as its potential frustration by ideology) is linked to collective rationality. It is out of these elements that Florensky presents a philosophical anthropology of the person, and which I will attempt to sketch and evaluate. For reasons of space, I will focus mainly on his essay, “The magical value of the word.”16

Florensky and Language One way to get to the heart of Florensky’s argument is to contrast his essay title with that of a classic modern essay by the anthropologist S.J. Tambiah, “The

13 E. E., Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). 14 Florensky, At the Crossroads of Science and Mysticism, 96. 15 Ibid., 97, 98. 16 Florenskij, Il valore magico della parola. Florensky and the Personalisation of the Word - Ranier Fsadni 85 magical power of words.”17 The titles seem almost identical but each key word contains an essential difference. First, Tambiah writes of “words,” in the plural, because what he has in mind is a special category of words – those used in various rituals, under special conditions. Florensky, however, writes of “word” in the singular, since what he has in mind is language – the ability to speak, to enunciate meaning. The reason he never uses the term “language” is that he wishes to focus on the concrete, on the singular instanciation of language by unique persons. He does not simply refer to the sense of words but their very voicing in material sound. Second, Tambiah uses the word “magical” in the standard anthropological sense to refer to an area of activity removed from everyday causality and having to do with a notional sphere of the sacred. The sacred vs profane distinction is salient here. Florensky departs from this meaning (although he is obviously familiar with it since he had drawn on it himself in his essay on superstition and miracles). Here, he is using “magical” to mean, roughly, a marvelous transmutation. He intends no gush or hyperbole when he writes that the word is the most manifest vital act all persons perform18 for it transmutes matter and energy (the material features of voice production) into spirit, and spirit into matter and energy. It transforms collective cultural patrimony into a unique individual’s personality, action and thought, as well as a unique person’s cultural productions into something collective. Language is also deed, for it brings about what it utters, not only in the sense of performing speech acts but also because it constitutes self and relationships. Any single word is constituted by the whole of language, and thus represents a complex cultural universe, while each word is itself condensed with layers of meaning. Finally, Tambiah refers to magical “power” as he is interested in the use of words notionally to control and constrain events and other people. Florensky speaks of “value,” by which he means a different kind of power, creative, generative and enabling, rather than the zero-sum power games of strategic control. Its most creative feature is that it is involved in the continual historical and personal process of birth. For Florensky, the most quintessential word is the name. It is the name that calls us out of ourselves, that makes us live up to it. It is in this sense, therefore, both a summary description of us as well as an imperative

17 S.J. Tambiah, “The Magical Power of Words,” inCulture, Thought, and Social Action (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1985). 18 Florenskij, Il valore magico della parola, 69-70. 86 MELITA THEOLOGICA drawing us out. It is our being as well as our becoming. The idea of creative action is salient: History is a collection of names. ... The relation of names is a ‘begat’-relation, a birth-relation. This formula is the quintessence of history. Birth-relations are, first of all, concrete, independent, individual relations: physical, spiritual, scientific, etc. Birth also signifies artistic succession ... “Abraham begat Isaac” – that is the classic formula of history; everything else is only its unfolding.19 Florensky is obviously not reducing history either to kinship or to a “great man” theory of history. He is clearly talking about a person-centred conception of history that involves all persons. It is through the power of language that they make the world their own. They appropriate a cultural patrimony but at the same time, to be intelligible even to themselves, must open themselves up to the organic demands of language, and in speaking to others are recreating and transforming a living language. Let us pause to see what idea of religion is being proposed here. Religiosity is not what many nineteenth-century thinkers and today’s “new atheists” say it is: a mental attitude based on awe or fear (though in certain instances it may be true). It is in the first place physical, as Florensky continually underlines. His discussion of how posture or chemistry could affect our spiritual state would find a ready popular-magazine audience today. Nor is religion based on an intellectual mistake, if only because it cannot be reduced to intellectual activity or assent. The word is performative; the self is outpoured creatively towards others. Finally, there is no distinction drawn here between the sacred and the profane. The magical value of the word sacralises everything. When Florensky writes20 that religion inheres in all culture, he does not mean that it is because humanity has a tendency to feel “religious.” He means that there is no culture without the magical creative value of language. Given our physical, organic constitution as linguistic animals we cannot opt out of this creative sacralising engagement with the world. To my philosophically untrained ear, it sounds like an argument from design, and given Florensky’s interest (in other essays not discussed here) in the name of God, it may be linked to an argument for the existence of God. But in any case, this is an argument for the permanent sacrality of the world based on a continual cosmic process of radical newness.

19 Florensky, At the Crossroads of Science and Mysticism, 7. 20 Ibid., 89. Florensky and the Personalisation of the Word - Ranier Fsadni 87

It contradicts Max Weber’s characterisation of the modern world as “disenchanted” – driven by the granular outlook of science and dominance of instrumental reason to inhabit a cold “iron cage.” Nor is Florensky’s emphasis on birth to be conflated with the religious experience of being “born again. ” The latter is based on the experience of an existential break with one’s past and radical choice. Florensky is talking about a continual process that is based on an ethos of exploration not choice.

Critique of Florensky’s Anthropology Given Florensky’s polymathic interests, it is almost too easy to find links between his thought and thinkers that came later. I do not think it trivial to point out the overlap between his project and that of, for example, the Roman Catholic thinker, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, or the secular scientist, Ilya Prigogine. But I will restrict myself to pointing out where Florensky seems both to prefigure later seminal developments in social theory as well as to fall short of them. In building his model of human communication, Florensky devotes considerable time in offering a theory of . He may possibly be the first semiotic theologian, preceding the Dominican friar Herbert McCabe21who combined Wittgenstein with Aquinas to produce a semiotic understanding of the sacraments, by several decades. Florensky’s emphasis on personhood and human agency enables him to avoid the arguable shortcomings of semiological structuralism, namely, that human agency is not given sufficient importance. However, his achievement is limited by his lack of distinction between speech and language (parole and langue); while, in discussing signs, he does not differentiate between signifier, signified and referent. Anyone wishing to develop Florensky’s thought further down the semiotic route will probably need to rearticulate his arguments in a more promising framework, whether of French structuralism, pragmatist semiotics, or the analytical philosophy of language. A more significant criticism lies in his decision to ignore the operations of worldly power. In his discussion of miracles,22 Florensky allows for a discussion of evil and its masks. But his discussion of the magical value of the word does not. The potential of humanity to deploy destructive ideologies and myths, or for creativity to exist in tension with control, or for different “world-understandings” to clash is missing. An anthropologist today would find it difficult to discuss the perception of divine power without exploring what experience of secular power

21 Herbert McCabe, God Matters (Oxford: Mowbray, 2000). 22 Florenskij, Sulla superstizione e il miracolo. 88 MELITA THEOLOGICA informs it.23 The entangled relationship between religion and the nation-state is also not simple. Perhaps Florensky ignored worldly power not because he considered it unimportant but rather because, in terms of his model, he considered it an aberration – like all evil, something missing from what is good. So it could be that what he presented was a picture of a transfigured world – a state of original blessing, rather than of the world after the Fall. In this case, the criticism is of course unwarranted but it also means that any adoption of Florensky’s thought for pastoral or social purposes will not be simple.

Florensky Among the Personalists From a Roman Catholic viewpoint, there are at least three trajectories worth exploring with the aim of combining Florensky’s philosophical anthropology with contemporary socio-political thought. One is the thought of the French personalist philosopher, Emmanuel Mounier,24 who was a younger contemporary of Florensky and an important influence on the Catholic centre-left in Europe, especially after 1945. Like Florensky, Mounier emphasised that personalism was not a system of thought but rather a method of raising and pursuing questions. His particular critiques of the social structures of his day (say, the bourgeois family) are obviously outdated but his understanding of culture (as the way in which globalised relations are literally personalised in individuals) can be fruitfully read in the light of Florensky, and vice-versa. A second is Saint John Paul II, whose admiration for Florensky is well known, given the mention of the Russian thinker in the encyclical Ratio et Fides as an exemplar of how to combine faith and reason. But I have in mind the late Pope’s book, Memory and Identity25 (2005), which he described as a quasi “theology of nations” (while obviously recognising that nations are not collectively saved or damned). In that work, he offers an interesting personalist understanding of patriotism, which presents “native land” as a deep bond between the material and the spiritual, between culture and territory, and where to be a patriot is to struggle to keep one’s native land at a cultural highpoint.

23 M. Gilsenan, Recognizing Islam (London: Croom Helm, 1982). 24 E. Mounier, Personalism (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989). 25 John Paul II, Memory and Identity: Personal Reflections (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005). Florensky and the Personalisation of the Word - Ranier Fsadni 89

There are important differences of emphasis. If for Florensky history is the story of continuing artistic birth, then for John Paul it is the story of artistic struggle. Florensky identifies with the Transfiguration, John Paul with the Crucifixion, ’s twentieth-century fate at the hands of both fascism and very much on his mind.27 The resources of these two Catholic writers make it possible to bring a critical edge to Florensky’s anthropology: Mounier in thinking about globalisation (even if he died long before its current incarnation), and John Paul in thinking about a Christian patriotism in a world increasingly shaped by extreme populism. However, Florensky would also enrich our understanding of those two and other social thinkers. In his incisive work on varieties of religion today, Charles Taylor28 relies on a (deliberately) simple three-stage scheme. There is “paleo-Durkheimian” religion – in which religion is coterminous with cultural cosmology and social roles; you cannot lose your religion without dropping out of society. There is “neo-Durkheimian” religion, where religion is identified with the nation-state, and thereby permeated with nationalist sentiment as much as religion might sacralise the state. And there is “post-Durkheimian” religion – what is sometimes called, by its critics, “religion à la carte;” people picking and choosing among doctrines and ritual practices, a privatised religion for an individualist culture. It is a mark of Florensky’s originality that he articulates a religious ethos that transcends the polarisation between collective public religion and individualist privatisation. He emphasises religion’s role in fulfilling the uniqueness and creativity of each person, of each becoming a saint in his or her own way – an early powerful case that individuality and collective identity go together. Whatever is made of it as theology, it is a compelling social vision of how no one can reach their full personal communicative potential unless everyone else does too.

Ranier Fsadni Department of Anthropological Sciences Faculty of Arts University of Malta Msida MSD 2080 Malta [email protected] MELITA THEOLOGICA Charlò Camilleri* Journal of the Faculty of Theology University of Malta 69/1 (2019): 91-98

Pavel Aleksandrovič Florenskij Lectures on the Christian Worldview

he Florenskian text, here being subjected to our reactions and reflections, Ttakes us back to Pavel Aleksandrovic Florenskij’s lectures in the Summer and Autumn of 1921 at the Moscovite Theological Academy. There are two versions of these lectures, Florenskij’s own brief notes, and a more complete transcription by his students. The text I was asked to react to is the latter. Florenskij’s personal notes are only published in Russian, in volume three of the Complete Works.1 The student’s transcriptions have also been published in Italian and in English.2 The context is that of the great famine which lasted till 1922 and which left no less than five million victims. This famine, as others in Russian history, was the result of the economic disruption sparked during World War I and amplified through four instabilities brought by, namely: the Russian Revolution; the Russian Civil War; the War Communism policy which started in 1918 and included the confiscation of religious property; the Bolshevik food apportionment policy which was made worse by inefficient rail systems that were unable to distribute food resourcefully. The 1921-1922 drought, then, aggravated the state of affairs to a national famine calamity.

* Charlò Camilleri, O.Carm. is Lecturer at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Malta, member of the Board of Directors and Academic Board of the Carmelite Institute Malta and Research Fellow of the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. 1 Pavel. A. Florenskij, Sočinenija v četyrech tomach [Collected Works in Four Volumes], ed. A. Trubačëv, M.S. Trubačëva and P.V. Forenskij (Moskva: Mysl’, 1994-1999). 2 Pavel Florenskij, La concezione cristiana del mondo, ed. Antonio Maccioni (Bologna: Pendragon, 2011); Pavel Florensky, At the Crossroads of Science & Mysticism: On the Cultural- Historical Place and Premises of the Christian World-Understanding, trans. and ed. Boris Jakim (Kettering: Semantron, 2014).

91 92 MELITA THEOLOGICA

It is in this context that Florenskij delivered his History of Philosophy Lectures, striving to integrate the complexity of his arguments stemming from years of mathematical, philosophical and religious research. In fact, his lifetime project was to come up with a system which promoted a unified worldview. In this apocalyptic socio-religious and political context, Florenskij comes forward as a teacher, a master, with all intent to secretly pass on wisdom to his interlocutors. Yes, secretly. These lectures were delivered in absolute secrecy and illegality as, in 1918, Lenin practically started decreeing the illegality of the Orthodox Church as an institution. Consequently the Academy had closed its doors and the lectures were delivered at the Donskoy Monastery. At first glance, the text itself, made up of notes and scattered papers, appears to be composed of a cluster of disconnected ideas. However, upon taking the ascetical challenge of reading it more than once and to patiently ponder on its context, one arrives at grasping something of Florenskij’s logic regarding his theory of a Christian worldview. What follows in this contribution, then, are the deciphered elements which characterize this worldview:

Reasonably Counter-Current Considering the context, we are inclined to value these lectures, which came down to us through Florenskij’s notes, firstly as an act of defiance, intolerance and resistance towards the atheist worldview which was imposing itself by communism upon a “people who is deeply theocratic at the core of its soul.”3 He himself declares, “I have developed my own philosophical and scientific worldview, which … contradicts the vulgar interpretation of communism.” Secondly we are inclined to think that Florenskij attempts at showing the reasonableness of religious faith and it’s worldview in the face of irrational hostility towards the religious phenomenon. Florenskij’s understanding of hostility is that of “an erroneous methodological propensity.” He seems to hint at this in Lectures I and III (respectively entitled The Day and the Night of History and The Signs of the Epoch). Then, inA Note on Orthodoxy, he argues that: The existent hostility is that of a methodological type. It is not determined by the content of religion, or by that of the religious confession under scrutiny, but it is determined by the method of knowledge. The knowledge proper to the culture of Modernity is that which emerges through negation: omnis determinatio est negatio. Modernity does not acquire knowledge through the sympathetic con- penetration in reality, but through the affirmation of the I which is hostile to

3 Vladimir Solov’ëv, Il destino della teocracia (Milano: Udine, 2014), 41. Pavel A. Florenskij Lectures on the Christian Worldview - Charlò Camilleri 93

reality. This affirmation is at loggerheads with an obstacle, namely the reality which the I fails to penetrate (grasp).4 So, what Florensky is proposing in his Christian Worldview is not so much the formal aspect of religion, in particular Christianity, but a re-evaluation of the dialectical relationship between the subject and object of spiritual knowledge.5

In the Midst of the Scientific and the Intuitive To explore what Florenskij has to say on the Christian Worldview it is imperative to get a glimpse of Florenskij’s own worldview. As a Platonist and Physicist he holds on to the existence of “two worlds,” or spheres of existence: terrestrial and spiritual, the visible and the invisible. The former falls within the grasp of rational faculties and the senses, while the latter aspires to infinity transcending the senses and the rational faculties. Nonetheless, the invisible/ spiritual world leaves tangible signs of its presence. As rational, sensible and spiritual creatures we have to dwell in the intermediary state between two worlds, in a sort of frontier, which sometimes he refers to it as dream. No wonder Iconostasis,6 Florenskij’s last theological work written in 1922, opens with a chapter on The Spiritual Structure of Dreams, insisting that these are our first access into the realm of the invisible. Paradoxically a dream’s finale denouement)( wakes us to the realm of the visible. It is here, in this frontier or passage way, where Truth is encountered. This passage way is a meeting point between our search for Truth and Truth’s self-revelation. In the impact fragments of Truth are grasped as we patiently search for meaning by integrating fragments and contradictions. In itself this is an ascetical exercise into which Florenskij employs the key of mathematics to open ajar the meaning of existence.7 In Lecture XI of his The Christian Worldview, he states that “we are oriented towards reality and towards its meaning’ as ‘meaning sustains reality.”

4 Pavel Florenskij, “Nota sull’ortodossia,” in Bellezza e liturgia. Scritti su cristianesimo e cultura, trad. Claudia Zonghetti (Milano: Mondadori, 2010), 41. 5 See: Marina Guerrisi, “Pavel Florenskij e la tolleranza infelice,” in Metabasis.it, Filosofia e Comunicazione: Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia online X/20 (Novembre 2015): 57-76. 6 Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, trans. Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996). 7 Vladislav Shaposhnikov, “Mathematics as the Key to a Holistic World View: The Case of Pavel Florensky?” Lateranum 83, no. 3 (2017): Pavel A. Florenskij – “Ho contemplato il mondo come un insieme.” Teologia, filosofia e scienza di fronte alla complessità del reale, 535-562. The author has other studies which explore the hypothesis of the ritual genesis of arithmetic and geometry, the religious background of the emergence of zero, the role of Name-worshipping. 94 MELITA THEOLOGICA

This is Florenskij’s initial viewpoint from which he contemplates and explores reality in all of its complexity. In the same lecture, on Instruments, notions and things sacred, his method is presented: “The scope of the study of the particular areas is primarily to observe the results of various disciplines, to fix distinct theses and deduce distinct conclusions; secondly to show the mutation of the world’s spiritual life,” and in his view (experientially passing from a scientific worldview to a Christian one) shows that the mutation does not reject the former, neither endorses it, but (we must say) is a natural development of it as much as it is a leap into it! One might conclude here that Florenskij’s worldview is religious and particularly Christian, inasmuch as firstly it is mathematical. For Florenskij, Mathematics is complex, Religion is complex, Christ himself is complex. But then again, it is precisely because of complexity that all lead to simplicity.8 Florenskij did not pursue mathematics as a discipline for its own sake, but for the light it could bring to the philosophical and theological aspects of the concept of Infinity. His mathematical worldview enabled him to integrate the principles of continuity (i.e. “nature never makes leaps,”) and discontinuity (i.e. leaps are necessary). Already as a student he dwelt on concepts of continuity and discontinuity in writing his dissertation The Idea of Discontinuity as an Element of the Worldview for which he was awarded his baccalaureate in 1904. Florenskij’s interest in mathematics was largely theological. He sought to establish an analogy between mathematics and theology. It is not the place here to discuss this analogy; what is of interest for us is that the elements for a Christian worldview, presented in his lectures, represent his leap from science to theology.

A Liberating Leap from Imposed Constraints The Christian worldview is in itself linear starting from creation (beginning), moving towards eschatological fulfilment (end) through a process of redemption (battling against chaos and fragmentation). With this at the backdrop, Florenskij can spell out in his lectures an understanding of the Resurrection (and consequently, of eschatological fulfillment) as a leap, a movement of transcendence. In Lecture I of The Christian Worldview, he specifies that “Christianity is not about eternity and eternal life, but about the resurrection from the dead,” ultimately it is about a leap enabled by the hiddenness within the present of past and future. Creation itself is a leap, as it originates from God, and is in God, Maker of heaven and earth of all that is seen and unseen. Continuity

8 Florenskij, La concezione cristiana del mondo, XII, 135-137. Pavel A. Florenskij Lectures on the Christian Worldview - Charlò Camilleri 95 is therefore the result of discontinuity. In The Pythagorean Numbers he writes: “Where there is discontinuity, we search for wholeness; but where there is wholeness, form is acting and, consequently, there is an individual limitation of reality from the environment.”9 Employing this paradoxical principle in a theological context saves us from determinism and any pharisaic self-referential way of living and acting. For example, in Lecture XVI Oriented towards Christ, he delves into the diatribes between Christ and the Pharisees but not with sinners. Pharisees are the epitome of a self-referential existence, observing laws by appropriating them and in doing so detaching them from their source: God. In this context one understands Florenskij’s criticism, especially in Lecture X, of the Renaissance worldview to which we owe a religion based on moral behaviour (hence individualistic - Protestant) as opposed to the Medieval worldview (to which we owe a religion based on the symbolic, therefore ecclesial - Orthodox). Florenskij argues that a sinner can still be part of the Church, as the Church — or rather ecclesiality — is the space where contradictions are integrated in unity. In Lecture I he writes: ‘inner contradiction is not a sign of falsehood but of inner integrity.’ For Florenskij, Truth resides in contradiction and all Christian tenets of the faith point to this, starting from belief in the Tri-Unity of God and the Divine-human oneness in Christ. A Christian worldview is consequently, by force, ecclesial and therefore organic but not necessarily systematic; it embraces contradiction. This seems to be the underlying line of thought in Lectures IV, V and VI.

Organically One Organic unity is therefore another characteristic of a Christian Worldview. It has been acknowledged that Florensky’s contribution “was formulated in the general context of the Russian idea of ‘integral knowledge’.”10 He is not interested at all in finding “scientific evidence thatbacks faith; rather, he strives for using all means possible to construct a unified world, where science and theology, phenomena and noumena, exist in concord.” 11 It is this organic unity

9 Pavel Florenskij, “Pifagorovy čisla,” Sočinenija, 2: 634; See also, Vladimir Sergeyvich Soloviev, The Justification of the Good: An Essay on Moral Philosophy, trans. Nathalie A. Duddington (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2010), 259-260. 10 Sergei Barano, An Examination of the Attitude of Pavel Florensky Towards the Interaction of Science and Theology (Cambridge: The Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, (on-line) http://cam-uk.academia.edu/SergeiBaranov, 2017, 1. Accessed July 4, 2018. 11 Ibid. 96 MELITA THEOLOGICA which enables us to contemplate Truth. Florensky defines Truth “as a living wholeness” emerging through “direct rational attention on the actual objects of the external world.”12 As with the neo-Idealists, Florensky “strove to overcome Kant’s phenomenalism by attempting to link the knowing subject and the world in organic unity.” Critical of Western positivism and rationalism, Florensky also followed Solovyov’s intuitivist theory of knowledge.13 In Florensky’s thought, organic unity is possible in and through ecclesiality based on love or friendship. “Because love means that an entity passes from the isolated separateness of A into the other, non-A, establishes its consubstantiality with it and consequently finds itself, i.e., A, in it.” In Lectures VIII and IX Occultism and Sensibility, and The Human Body and the World, Florensky discusses the possibility of finding oneself in the organism of another, both in human relationships and in the relational encounter with that which is hidden (occult) and also with creation.14 Positively this unity is characterized by harmony as there are various strata or levels of reality and “every phenomenon reflects in itself all other phenomena.”15 Therefore this unity is both living and vital. It is realized firstly in the Tri-Unity of God, wherein the Three Divine Persons pour themselves and receive each other in loving unity. In history this is actualized in and through the Church recognized by Florensky, and before him by Solovyov and Bulgakov, to be a manifestation of (Sophia), created but eternally destined to deepest union with God. In The Pillar and Ground of Truth, quoted and referred to also in the Lectures on The Christian Worldview, Florensky tries to present a complete Christian worldview (system of the world) around and ecclesiology dominated by the wisdom theme.16 Divine Wisdom permeates and penetrates everything and it is the principle of unity. For this reason Florensky can state that “there is no phenomenon which does not have a clear ecclesial aspect. All phenomena, positively or negatively, are oriented

12 Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Any Rand: The Russian Radical (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 44. 13 Ibid. 14 He delves critically into mystical and esoteric phenomena but the underlying point is that of becoming one with the other. 15 Lecture IX, At the Crossroads of Science & Mysticism, 73; La Concezione cristiana del mondo, 114. He gives the example of a photograph which symbolically (not positivistically) is a manifestation of a body and the body is manifestation of the soul, 115. 16 Pavel Florensky “Sophia,” in The Pillar and Ground of Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997/2004), 231-283; Louis Bouyer, The Church of God: Body of Christ and Temple of the Spirit (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), 140-141. Pavel A. Florenskij Lectures on the Christian Worldview - Charlò Camilleri 97 towards ecclesiality.”17 This constitutes “the sacral principle” (myth) which gives rise to cult and culture. Culture emerges from a cult, and cult rises from a myth. In the Christian context we express this in Liturgy, which binds the Church and opens up a window on the spiritual world, and permeates the life cycles of the believers and the cultural ramifications which express it and celebrate it. The same applies to icons, which are, strictly speaking, liturgical windows to heavenly realities, and of saints (especially the incorrupt bodies) which are a sign of the permeation of the divine life in death.18 In fact in Lectures XIX and XX, he discusses The Question of the Symbol and of the Icon, as well as The Reverse Perspective and Illusionism.

Conclusion In this respect Florensky’s statements are understandable and prophetic, considering the rise of the communist regime from 1918, which tried to systematically eradicate Christian culture from , not only by confiscating Church property, desecrating the sanctuaries, and prohibiting liturgical and cultic expressions, but also by going as far as to unearth the incorrupt bodies of the saints, displaying them in museums together with the mummified bodies of rodents. This “calculated blow by anti-religious propaganda,” intent at replacing the Christian worldview with another, was then reinforced with the state mimicking the Christian cult and culture through “mass blasphemous processions,” the publication of new state icons, and later the preservation of cadavers of the new “saints” of the state enshrined in state mausolea (like Lenin’s corpse in the Red Square). This new worldview, however, was systematically imposed on a people and it is the total opposite of the Christian system. Like the art form which represents it, the “spectre of the world revolution” replaces “the love of Christ” by “hatred and, instead of peace, ignited class enmity” and “divided the people into hostile camps and driven them to fratricide of unprecedented cruelty.”19 It

17 Florenskij, La Concezione cristiana del mondo, XI, 129. 18 See also Pavel Florensky, Philosophy of Cult, in Italian as La Filosofia del Culto: Saggio di Antropodicea Ortodossa, ed. Natalino Valentini (Cinisello Balsamo: San Paolo, 2016); Florensky, Pillar and Ground of Truth. 19 Патриарха Тихона, ‘Послание Совету народных комиссаров’ (25 октября /7 ноября 1918 года): Покров 1.11.2017 (on-line) http://pokrov.pro/author/red/. Accessed June 30, 2018. 98 MELITA THEOLOGICA

pretends to create only the appearance of reality and not a window on it, becoming also a deceptive instrument to the immobile spectator … the man of the XIXth century made of himself the absolute measuring tape of truth and beauty. He forces the entire universe to rotate around himself.20 Faced by the illusionism of such a culture, still persisting in our age, Florensky proposes the experience of a living and vital Christian system as ‘a new way of perceiving the world’21 in ourselves “destroying hardness of heart”22 to come together in community, in an “authentic school”23 of life. This is “the immense responsibility”24 Florensky shoulders us with in his Lectures on the Christian Worldview, his testament before being himself used, tried, persecuted, and eliminated for embodying this same worldview in himself.

Charlò Camilleri Department of Moral Theology Faculty of Theology University of Malta Msida MSD 2080 Malta [email protected]

20 Florenskij, La Concezione cristiana del mondo, 208. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 209. MELITA THEOLOGICA Hector Scerri* Journal of the Faculty of Theology University of Malta 69/1 (2019): 99-106

Pavel Florenskij’s The Concept of the Church in Sacred Scripture: The Reaction and Response of a Systematic Theologian

n a chapter on Eastern Orthodox theology in the book The Modern Theologians, Iand before being propelled to Cantuarian fame, Rowan Williams describes Pavel Florenskij as “a brilliant and eccentric polymath who finally disappeared in the Gulag.”1 Several learned colleagues from this Faculty and from a wide spectrum of other Faculties in this alma mater have already demonstrated the eclectic interests and expertise of this great Russian. It is therefore unnecessary to contextualize the author and his multifaceted talents. One is therefore called to delve immediately into the reaction and the response to Florenskij’s The Concept of the Church in Sacred Scripture from the point of view of systematic theology. Florenskij insists that the only legitimate way to know the dogmas is the lived religious experience. Logical-abstract knowledge, on its own, perceives a phenomenic reality full of antinomies which, when facing reason, lead the latter to doubt and scepticism. The only way forward consists in passing from concepts to spiritual experience whose organ is the ‘heart,’ according to the biblical sense of the concept, namely, the heart as the seat of human decisions. Truth is found in the Trinity. Spiritual knowledge on the part of the believer consists in the interior union between the know-er and the known. This knowledge is possible only by living “ecclesiality,” which Florenskij defines as the safe harbour where the anxiety of the heart finds rest. Ecclesiality is not derived

* Hector Scerri is Deputy Dean, Faculty of Theology, University of Malta. 1 Rowan Williams, “Eastern Orthodox Theology,” inThe Modern Theologians, ed. David F. Ford (Oxford and Cambridge/Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1994), 2:157.

99 100 MELITA THEOLOGICA from abstraction or ratiocination, but from life itself, because ecclesiality is a new life, life in the Spirit. Where spiritual life is absent, it is necessary to have something exterior to guarantee ecclesiality: the hierarchy in Catholicism, and the confessional and scriptural formulas in Protestantism. Florenskij affirms that in Orthodoxy the concept of ecclesiality does not exist, but it is ecclesiality itself that exists.2 This succinct presentation seeks to merge together an overview, or a bird’s eye-view, of the long text by Florenskij and my personal reaction to it, as I see – or rather hear – aspects of it echo in contemporary Catholic theology. Herein lies the contribution offered by this short paper. The text by Florenskij,The Concept of Church in Sacred Scripture, is extremely rich, abounding in a return to the biblical founts and other sources of the Tradition of the Church, in particular the Church Fathers and a varied selection of authors from the Russian Orthodox spiritual corpus. The convergence and confluence of these three streams provides us with the extremely fertile soils of Florenskij’s text. In the “Methodological Observations” of Chapter 1, he explains how the Church is not solely a human reality.3 What is finite and provisional is to be incorporated with what is infinite and eternal.4 Florenskij highlights the mysteric and eschatological light which enables us to delve deeply into the Church. In order to pass on to others eternal life, she has to possess eternal life. Florenskij states that “the Church is the road to the ascent into heaven. The Church is Jacob’s ladder and from the visible she raises to the invisible.”5 He insists on the insufficiency of words to describe the mystery of the Church.6 When he discusses “The Double Nature of the Church” in Chapter 2, he talks of the encounter of the divine will and the human will, the Church’s double nature, a bipolar unity, where – as I interpret him – eternity meets time, a concept which reminds me of the theological schema of the contemporary Italian eclectic theologian, Bruno Forte.7 The Church is more than a sum-total of the faithful. It is an expression of Christian life, as well as the ambit where Christian life is

2 See Franco Ardusso et al., La teologia contemporanea (Torino: Marietti, 1980), 652; Battista Mondin, Dizionario dei teologi (Bologna: Studio Domenicano, 1992), 241. 3 See Pavel A. Florenskij, Il concetto di Chiesa nella Sacra Scrittura (Cinisello Balsamo: San Paolo, 2008), 101. 4 See ibid., 103. 5 See ibid. 6 See ibid., 105-106. 7 See Bruno Forte, L’eternità nel tempo. Saggio di antropologia ed etica sacramentale, Simbolica Ecclesiale 6 (Cinisello Balsamo: Edizioni Paoline, 1993). The Reaction and Response of a Systematic Theologian Hector- Scerri 101 accomplished. So, besides divine and human, we also have the eternal Church and the historic Church, stasis (divine) and kinesis (human), the “new” and the “old,” authority and liberty, the dogmatic and the mystical. In his “A Dogmatic-Metaphysical Definition of the Church” (Chapter 3), he focuses in an astonishing depth on the first chapter of St Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. Florenskij does this both exegetically as well as patristically.8 Regarding Ephesians 1:23b (“… the Church, which is his body [soma], the fullness [pleroma] of him who is filled, all in all”), he underlines the fact that this is not a metaphor, nor a simile, but an ontological formulation.9 The Churchis the Body of Christ. This offers a reminder of a text of the Magisterium, published after Florenskij’s death, namely, the encyclical letter by Pope Pius XII,Mystici Corporis Christi (1943). The theme also enables scholars in recalling several contributions published in 1997, in the festschrift in honour of the renowned Jesuit ecclesiologist Angel Antón.10 The Churchis the true Body of Christ, metaphysically, substantially, not metaphorically.11 When Florenskij talks of the Church as “instrument of salvation,” one immediately recalls the similar and iconic words of the Dogmatic Constitution of the Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium: “Since the Church is in Christ as a sacrament or instrumental sign of intimate union with God and of the unity of all humanity…”12 Abstract definitions are not enough, but recourse is to be made to experience, indeed the mystical experience.13 Florenskij’s in-depth analysis on verses from the Letter to the Ephesians, and consequently on soma, pleroma and etymological of related words, offers the reader more food for thought than the mouth can gobble. The footnotes (by Natalino Valentini and Lubomír Žák, the editors of the Italian edition used in this study), and the endnotes (by Florenskij himself ), I have to say, are a treasure trove in themselves. These continue to shed light on the glimmering gold of the Florenskij corpus … or should I say the Florenskij forma mentis? … or the Florenskij sapientia cordis?

8 See Florenskij, Il concetto di Chiesa, 129. 9 See ibid., 134. 10 See Ecclesia Tertii Millennii Advenientis. Omaggio al P. Angel Antón, ed. Fernando Chica, Sandro Panizzolo and Harald Wagner (Casale Monferrato: Piemme, 1997). 11 See Florenskij, Il concetto di Chiesa, 137. 12 Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium, 1, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner (London and Washington, DC: Sheed & Ward and Georgetown University Press, 1990), 2:849. 13 See Florenskij, Il concetto di Chiesa, 143. 102 MELITA THEOLOGICA

Chapter 4 traces the “Fundamental Characteristics of the Church.” Florenskij refers to Chomyakov’s rich and fertile intuitions on the Church. Insights such as ecclesial growth, integrity and internal unity, the members of the Church, the Church as a building and the bonds of unity are presented. I was particularly struck by aspects such as the welcoming of members who are transformed, ennobled, enlivened and elevated.14 The mention of the choir ready to sing at a feast15 is, in my opinion, an echo of Ignatius of Antioch’s Letter to the Romans. The first-century Apostolic Father affirms: “Grant me no more than that you let my blood be spilled in sacrifice to God, while yet there is an altar ready. You should form a choir of love and sing a song to the Father through Jesus Christ.”16 The concept ofcommunication is underlined – the communication of gifts (as in John Chrysostom) and the gifts of the Spirit (as in Theodoret) – while then proceeding to see an analogy in the nervous system17 and the diffusion of love.18 Florenskij focuses on Christ as the Head, and on the significance of the Head to the Body.19 What I deem to be an excursus on the Gehenna20 is indeed thought- provoking. Another aspect in Chapter 4 which is treated in great detail is the absolute integrity of the Church.21 He focuses on unity in Christ (recapitulation as in Ephesians 1:10), the unity between Christ the Head and his Body, the unity of the Church in all its manifestations and the unity in faith and knowledge.22 The Church isone . The Church isunique .23 An important affirmation explained by Florenskij is that the ontological union of the believers asks for a unifying Principle which is not the work or result of human beings, but which is given to them by God.24 I thoroughly enjoyed when Florenskij states that the unity of the Body of Christ and his sacramental life makes of them one substance (homoousios), not like substance.

14 See ibid., 174. 15 See ibid. 16 Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Romans, 2,2, in Epistles of St Clement of Rome and St Ignatius of Antioch, Ancient Christian Writers, ed. J. Quaesten and J.C. Plumpe (Westminster/ Maryland and London, 1946), 1:81. 17 See Florenskij, Il concetto di Chiesa, 176. 18 See ibid., 179. 19 See ibid., 180. 20 See ibid., 182-187. 21 See ibid., 187. 22 See ibid., 189. 23 See ibid., 190. 24 See ibid., 192. The Reaction and Response of a Systematic Theologian Hector- Scerri 103

When Florenskij talks of the Church as sacrament,25 I could glimpse within him a forerunner of what Catholic theologians like Edward Schillebeeckx and Karl Rahner would explore and write about later, as well as what we have already seen from the incipit of the Constitution Lumen Gentium. When Florenskij uses the important phrases, “unity of the Church and Baptism” and “one Spirit,”26 I could not help but recalling the renowned centuries-old inscription from the baptistery of the Lateran basilica: Here is born a noble people from heaven. The Spirit gives them life in the fecund waters. Sinner, descend into the sacred font to be washed from your sins: You go down old, and return renewed in youth. Nothing can separate those who are reborn. They are one: one Baptism, one Spirit, one Faith.27 Florenskij affirms that the true Body of Christ manifests itself in distinct liturgies, and is present in every particle of the Body and the Blood; just as one cannot say that a particle of the Body or Blood is a “fragment” of the Body of Christ, so also one cannot say that a particular local Church is just a “part” of the Church-Body. The Church in that particular expression iswhole .28 I could see in this an anticipation of the ecclesiological debate in the 1990s, in particular between Walter Kasper and Joseph Ratzinger, regarding the relationship between the local Church and the universal Church. Which comes first? The chicken or the egg? When Florenskij speaks of the infinite springs of divine grace29 as experienced by the members of the Church, I recall the masterpiece by Jean Corbon, The Wellspring of Worship – an excellent work with a highly elaborated pneumatological perspective on the liturgy.30 I am happy to note that Florenskij also dwells upon the ethical responsibility of the baptized and thus their contribution to the holiness of the Church.31 This is an aspect I have often researched and written about, from time to time, namely the effect of transforming sacramental grace which leads individuals to orthopraxis.32

25 See ibid., 196. 26 See ibid. 27 Baptism. Ancient Liturgies and Patristic Texts, Alba Patristic Library 2, ed. Adalbert Hamman (Staten Island/New York: Society of St Paul, 1967), 16-17. 28 See Florenskij, Il concetto di Chiesa, 197. 29 See ibid., 203. 30 Jean Corbon, The Wellspring of Worship (Eugene/Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2001). 31 See Florenskij, Il concetto di Chiesa, 204. 32 See Hector Scerri, Koinonia, Diakonia and Martyria: Interrelated Themes in Patristic Sacramental Theology as Expounded by Adalbert-G. Hamman O.F.M., Melita Theologica Supplementary Series 4 (Malta: Foundation for Theological Studies, 1999); “Dall’actuosa 104 MELITA THEOLOGICA

Florenskij insists that the Church exists not because we enter to become part of it, because for its existence it does not need us. It is rather a metaphysical reality and we can decide to enter or not to enter to be part of it. The metaphysical reality of the Church will not suffer any harm on account of our decision. We are in communion with the Body of Christ and we participate in it.33 In Chapter 5, on the “Correlation between the Attributes of the Church and its Symbolic Definition,” Florenskij delves into the actual meaning of “body” and offers his interpretation, even by means of mathematical terminology.34 This brings to mind the paper, delivered earlier in this symposium, by my colleague from the Department of Mathematics, Josef Lauri. His reflections enable us to start to understand Florenskij’s original and unique presentation on the Church using mathematics. Florenskij then elaborates on the concepts of “body,” “building” and “spouse,” and subsequently upon “Body of Christ,” “Building of Christ” and “Bride of participatio ad un’ortoprassi eucaristica autentica,” in Actuosa Participatio. Conoscere, comprendere e vivere la Liturgia. Studi in onore del Prof. Domenico Sartore, Monumenta Studia Instrumenta Liturgica 18, ed. Agostino Montan and Manlio Sodi (Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2002), 507-520; “Fides quaerens intellectum practico-socialem in the Writings of Adalbert-G. Hamman (1910-2000),” in Melita Theologica 55 (2004): 3-13; “The Social Morality of John Chrysostom: The Contribution of Adalbert Hamman (1910-2000),” inGiovanni Crisostomo. Oriente e occidente tra IV e V secolo. Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum 93/1, XXXIII Incontro di studiosi dell’antichità cristiana, Roma, 6-8 maggio 2004 (Roma: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, 2005), 649-660; “Quotidienneté in the Writings of Adalbert-G. Hamman (1910-2000): The Existential Concern of a Twentieth-century Patristic Scholar,” in Studia Patristica 40, Papers presented at the Fourteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 2003, ed. F. Young, M. Edwards and P. Parvis (Leuven, Paris and Dudley/ MA: Peeters, 2006), 331-336; “The Altar at the Crossroads,” inThe Times [Malta] (24 April 2009): 8; “The Eucharist and Freedom: Recalling the Impact of the Magisterium of Pope John Paul II at the International Eucharistic Congress at Wroclaw (1997),” in The Person and the Challenges 2/1 (2012): 193-206; “The Christian Agape Meal: A Manifestation ofKoinonia and Diakonia. The Contribution of Adalbert-Gautier Hamman,” inMelita Theologica 62 (2012): 55-71; “The Inextricable Relationship Binding Together Participation in the Sacrament of Christ’s Love and Eucharistic Orthopraxis,” in The Holy Eucharist and the Hymn ‘T’Adoriam, Ostia Divina’: Singing its Praises and Praising its Transforming Grace, ed. Hector Scerri and Joe Zammit Ciantar (Malta: Foundation for Theological Studies and Faculty of Theology, 2014), 11-31; “The Eucharist and Freedom in Contemporary Theologians and in the Magisterium of Pope John Paul II,” in The Quest for Authenticity and Human Dignity. A Festschrift in Honour of Professor George Grima on his 70th Birthday, ed. Emmanuel Agius and Hector Scerri (Malta: Faculty of Theology/University of Malta and Foundation for Theological Studies, 2015), 395‑417. 33 See Florenskij, Il concetto di Chiesa, 213, note I. 34 See ibid., 227. The Reaction and Response of a Systematic Theologian Hector- Scerri 105

Christ,”35 as well as upon the presence, in the Church, of the laity, the clerics and the charismatics.36 Florenskij also focuses upon the foundation of the Church, namely the profession of faith in Christ,37 the different charisms and the corner-stone.38 The Building-image, he affirms, is insufficient, and so he proceeds to the Body-image,39 and later to the image of Church as bride.40 The latter would be developed widely by twentieth-century theologians, such as Yves Congar (I Believe in the ),41 Charles Journet (L’Église du Verbe Incarné)42 and Hans Urs von Balthasar (Sponsa Verbi).43 The image of the tree,44 which Florenskij uses, reminds me of the text on the development of the Church and the development of dogma by Vincent of Lerins in his Commonitorium (22). Florenskij beautifully presents the image of the disciples as “friends of the bridegroom”45 in the context of the intimate relationship Christ–Church, as well as the particular role of John the Baptist.46 In Chapter 6, on the “Allegorical Definition of the Church and its Relation to the Kingdom of God,” Florenskij explains that if it is difficult to trace a clear distinction between the metaphysical and symbolic definition of the Church, it is even more difficult to make the distinction between the symbolical and the allegorical.47 He distinguishes between the Church and the Kingdom of God, although there is a very close relationship between the two. This was pronounced clearly, decades later, in the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium of Vatican II. All in all, the work by Florenskij offers an interesting presentation on the Church – a presentation with strong biblical and patristic foundations, while offering, what to my mind, is an innovative perspective on the Church as a metaphysical reality. Etymological insights also provide the reader with a path to grasp the theme holistically. Finally, my encounter with Florenskij, and

35 See ibid., 230, 234. 36 See ibid., 232. 37 See ibid., 237. 38 See ibid., 240. 39 See ibid., 255. 40 See ibid., 275. 41 Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, 3 vols (New York and London: Seabury Press and Geoffrey Chapman, 1983). 42 Charles Journet, L’Église du Verbe Incarné: Essai de théologie spéculative, II, Sa structure interne et son unité catholique (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1952). 43 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Sponsa Verbi (Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1971). 44 See Florenskij, Il concetto di Chiesa, 256. 45 See ibid., 278. 46 See ibid. 47 See ibid., 307. 106 MELITA THEOLOGICA in particular The Concept of Church in Sacred Scripture which my colleague, Paul Sciberras, and I have presented, leads me to affirm unhesitatingly that in the Russian theologian, I could glimpse a forerunner of what Henri de Lubac would later elaborate upon in his several works (a least five) on the mystery of the Church, in particular The Splendour of the Church.48 Perhaps both budding scholars as well as seasoned theologians might explore the interface between Florenskij’s ecclesiogy and de Lubac’s. That could be the theme of a future colloquium … either in Moscow or in Lyon … or, perhaps, in Malta!

Hector Scerri Department of Fundamental and Dogmatic Theology Faculty of Theology University of Malta Msida MSD 2080 Malta [email protected]

48 Henri de Lubac, The Splendor of the Church (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986). MELITA THEOLOGICA Paul Sciberras* Journal of the Faculty of Theology University of Malta 69/1 (2019): 107-115

The Church as Body of Christ: Pavel Florenskij’s, The Concept of Church in Sacred Scripture

onstraints of space demand finer focusing. Coming from the biblical Cexegetical field of studies, in this paper I will be concentrating on the parts of Florenskij’s book, The Concept of Church in Sacred Scripture,1 that deal with Methodological Considerations and the Dogmatic-Metaphysical Definition of the Church, in the exegetical analysis of Ephesians 1:23, considered by the Russian author as the Biblical New Testament and the Pauline text that best offers this definition. Florenskij’s ecclesiology is definitely one of communion – corporate ecclesiology – hinging on the Church as Body. Like any other body, the Church needs renewal, a renewal that is to be inspired by the mystery of God and his revelation in Christ Jesus. It is impossible to think that the seminarian Florenskij did not know the vast and fundamental theological merits of the great Filaret Drozdov (1782-1867), who authored the renowned Extended Christian Catechism of the Oriental Catholic Orthodox Church (1823, 1839), adopted by all the Greco-Russian Orthodox Churches as their doctrinal text.2 TheCatechism deals precisely with the renewal of theology and the Church’s teaching, a renewal founded not only

* Paul Sciberras is full-time Senior Lecturer since September 2012, and since October 2013 Head, Department of Sacred Scripture, Hebrew & Greek, Faculty of Theology, University of Malta. He also is member of the Commission for the Revision of the Bible in Maltese. 1 Pavel A. Florenskij, Il concetto di Chiesa nella Sacra Scrittura, Classici del Pensiero Cristiano, vol. 15, ed. Natalino Valentini and Lubomír Žák (Cinisello Balsamo [Milano]: San Paolo, 2008). 2 Lubomír Žák, “‘Immaginare la Chiesa Ortodosa.’ Florenskij e il progetto di un’ecclesiologia di communione,” in Il concetto di Chiesa nella Sacra Scrittura, 43.

107 108 MELITA THEOLOGICA on the introduction of the Russian language within the theological academies, and on his critique of the Scholastic manuals and their method, but also on the struggle within theology for the centrality of Sacred Scripture, read and studied in Russian, not in Latin. Being a biblical scholar by formation, Filaret Drozdov did not limit himself to quote the Bible as a simple proof or witness in his theological works: he “proceeded from the sacred texts.”3 The originality of the dialectic-symbolic method characterising Florenskij consisted of: 1) his peculiar method of interpreting Bible texts; 2) his dialectic concerns in his “process” conception of Church, elaborated in a symbolic-revelative key.4 The method of knowing must be understood in the intertwining of internal composition and interconnections of elements and levels.5 It has also to respect the “veil-like” (or “onion-like”) composition of reality, in the sense that, going under the “skin” of a concrete object, it continues to submerge itself in further knowledge from one “veil” or “skin” to the next, deeper, one. In so doing one has to grasp the interconnection between one veil and the next, so that each veil is understood as a way to the next veil, and thus as a place of its hiding and revelation, at the same time. Specifically, within this discourse, the idea of σῶμα (sôma), body, is that of covering, raiment, veil!6 Florenskij posits the foundations of the “dialectic” thought already during his studies in physics and mathematics at the University of Moscow, and The Concept of Church in Sacred Scripture represents one of the first attempts of its applications in the field of Theology.7 Seeing that the endeavour to define and describe the Church in terms of dogma rests upon the right interpretation of Scriptures, and considering that this method has its own structuring of symbol, Florenskij emphasises the need of “re- vealing” and of formulating the idea of Church, putting contemporaneously into act three levels of language of dogma: metaphysical, symbolic, and allegorical. These three levels do not have one and the same importance: the dogmatic-

3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 81. 5 For a summary of intertextuality, see Michael J. Gorman, “Detailed Analysis of the Text,” in Elements of Biblical Exegesis. A Basic Guide for Students and Ministers (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2001), 109-110; Gail R. O’Day, “Intertextuality,” in Methods of Biblical Interpretation, ed. John H. Hayes (Nashville: Abingdon, 2004), 155-157. 6 See Plato’s idea in E Schweizer, “σῶμα,” in Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Horst Balz and Gerhard Schneider (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 3:321-325, especially 322. 7 Žák, “Immaginare la Chiesa Ortodosa,” 83. The Church as Body of Christ -Paul Sciberras 109 metaphysical one represents “the only possible key for understanding the ideas of Church that are present in Sacred Scripture.”8 Consequently, with this methodological premise, Florenskij elaborates his reflection on the Church departing from the pericope of Ephesians 1:23, considered, from the formal point of view, “a complete definition of the Church, understood as Body of Christ, that is, as fullness of him who is realised completely in all things.”9 Trying to penetrate the deeper meaning or ‘veils’ of such a definition, Florenskij refers to other texts – the process of intertextuality – weaving, with their help, an even bigger carpet, identifying the correlations and the interdependencies between the chosen text and other scriptural witnesses, and highlighting their reciprocal interpretation.

The Dynamics of “The Temple is No More” Florenskij’s reflection on the Church considers its internal dynamic as that of πάντα ῥεῖ (pánta hrei) of numerous and different schematisations of the same reality. I dare say that this is the dynamics of “The Temple is no more,” seeing that both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Bible end with the absence of the Temple (2 Chr 36:23; Rev 21:22), given that “worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him” (Jn 4:23).10 No single veil is enough or full in itself; no Temple is finite … indeed, the Temple is no more! It is absent but its function still has to manifest itself in one way or another.

Methodological Considerations A premise imposes itself here: the Church is not strictly speaking a human reality; it is above any believer. In scientific circles this sacred veneration in front of the “great mystery” of the Church (Eph 5:32) dons a particular nuance, taking on the form of utmost prudence: “Wading in the supernatural order, we must here gird ourselves with the shield of prudence.”11

8 Ibid., 84. 9 Ibid. 10 Furthermore, the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah underline in no unclear terms that the holiness of the People of God show the way out to the Temple, even though Ezra 1:1-3 says the same things that 2 Chronicles 36:22-23 does. See, for example, Ezra 8:28. 11 Paul Jalaguier, De l’Eglise (Paris: Fischbacher, 1900). 110 MELITA THEOLOGICA

Filaret Drozdov had given a juridical definition of the Church that was definitely earthly, empirical and legalistic because it was founded on the principle that “just by naming a thing one already gets the idea one has of it.”12 Words only envelope the meaning. Therefore in order to get the concept of Church in Scripture one has to study and analyse not only the words in themselves with which it has been expressed in Scripture but also “the emotions that it raises in the spirit, captivating in the words, as it were, some sort of living image, whose spirit remains unaffected only if one comes closer to it without intermediations, in naked spirit.”13 Observations in our analysis are not preconceived schemas in which we intend to insert the data from Scripture, but they are abstractions from the biblical text itself.

Dogmatic-Metaphysical Definition of Church From a formal point of view, a complete definition of Church is to be found in Ephesians 1:23. However, we have first to establish the consequentiality of the preceding thought by the Apostle.14 Paul blesses God for his Heilungswerk, his work of salvation, whose final aim is to “recapitulate all things, those in heaven and those on earth” (Eph 1:10) in Christ, who is the ἀρραβών (arrabôn, pledge, Eph 1:14) of salvation. This saving power manifests itself in a fulfilled manner when: “God put this power to work in Christ … And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph 1:20.22-23). All things have been subjected to Christ, all things are at his feet. But this would be tantamount to coercion. God, on the contrary, wants the complete transcending of all things. He has in mind “to gather (ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι, anakephalaiôsasthai) all things in heaven and on earth” (Eph 1:10). Thus it does not suffice to him that all things be simply submitted to Christ. An organic union, and not a mechanical submission, is necessary, of which the Church is guarantee. God, Paul states, has constituted Christ as head of the Church, rendering her

12 Florenskij, Il concetto di Chiesa nella Sacra Scrittura, 105. 13 See, “Narrative Analysis,” in The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (Vatican City: Pontifical Biblical Commission, 1993), 44-47. For a detailed description of this method, see Jean Louis Ska, “Our Fathers Have Told Us”: Introduction to the Analysis of Hebrew Narrative, Subsidia Biblica 13 (Rome: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 2000), especially 54-63; Edgar V. McKnight, “Reader-Response Criticism,” in Methods of Biblical Interpretation, ed. John H. Hayes (Nashville: Abingdon, 2004), 179-183. 14 Florenskij is taking for granted that Ephesians is genuinely Pauline. The Church as Body of Christ -Paul Sciberras 111 interiorly bound to Christ: “which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph 1:23). The Church, thus, exists in complete dependence – interior but also exterior – on Christ, its Head. Inversely: it is because Christ is its Head that the Church is his body, and body not in its contingent signs, but in its substance. It ensues that, placed at the end of the reflection, verse 23b (that is, the phrase that begins with ἥτις, hētis, relative “which”) has a semantically central importance. The copula ἐστὶν estìn( ) can only have a real, literal, metaphysical meaning, to be interpreted similarly as in Matthew 26:27; Mark 14:22; Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24.

The Predicate of the Whole Verse: τὸ σῶμα and τὸ πλήρωμα In Ephesians 1:23b τὸ σῶμα means the body as the reality that in its highest grade gathers together in itself all that for which all individual bodies are called, so the body in itself - The Body.15 Paul makes this affirmation by using the least words possible: “The Church is the Body of Christ.” Σῶμα derives with strong evidence from the Sanskrit root ska, in Greek σως (sôs), that is at the root of words like: σώξω (sôzô), σαόω (saóô), I cure, I save; σωτήρ (sôtēr), saviour, healer; σάος (sάοs), healthy, integral; ςῶος (sôos), σῶς (sôs), prosperous, saved; σῶκος (sôkos), strong, in health.16 Σῶμα probably refers to the casing, covering, wrapping (veil or skin). Later Greek uses it for an animated body, seeing body as the receptacle of life, as against the soul, the contents ψυχή (psychē) as in σῶμα ψυχικόν (sôma psychikón), the spiritual body. The Fathers of the Church show that σῶμα indicates the substance, or the material, that united to the soul gives the form to the human being in all its entirety. Finally, σῶμα indicates any sort of person united in a whole unity, in a corporative body or σωμάτιον (sômátion). Drawing conclusions: σῶμα is submitted to a superior principle, for which it serves as container, wrapping, instrument, cover; it is a passive principle, a receiver, that has its source of action somewhere else,17 that does not act by itself,

15 See Michael J. Gorman, Apostle of the Crucified Lord. A Theological Introduction to Paul and His Letters (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 508-509. Also, James D.G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 548-552. 16 See Werer Foerster, “σῴξω, σωτηρία, σωτήρ, σωτήριος,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Friedrich (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971), 7: 965-969; also Henry G. Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1883), ad loc. 17 Normally, the ending of a noun –μα already indicates the concrete result of an action: see Friedrich Blass and Albert Debrunner, A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. A Translation and Revision of the ninth-tenth German Edition 112 MELITA THEOLOGICA albeit it has a proper reality. In its connotation of dependence, σῶμα has evidently a functional aim, that of instrument through which the action is carried out. In Ephesians 1:22, it means that Christ saves through his Body, the Church. We must here underline that the Church is the saved and saving Body of Christ. Therefore, σῶμα is identified as truea reality (as against ghost, phantasm, appearance, word) that is instrument, intermediary (as against an independent reality, self-sufficient, agent and all autonomous)of salvation and of any sort of good (as against the instrument that brings damage and evil of all sorts) for the whole living being and for the individual organs, in as much as they are linked to the entire organism. The formula: “The Church is the Body of Christ” thus means: “The Church is the instrument of salvation of the Spirit of Christ”, or in sum, “It is the instrument of salvation of Christ.” Paul states that the Church is τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ τὰ πάντα ἐν πᾶσιν πληρουμένου (Eph 1:23b), the fullness of him who fills all in all. Structured, this stich appears as:

ἥτις [ἡ ἐκκλησία] ἐστὶν τὸ σῶμα αὐτοῦ [of Christ] τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ τὰ πάντα ἐν πᾶσιν πληρουμένου

The same subject,ἡ ἐκκλησία, is the Body of Christ (τὸ σῶμα) and the Fullness (τὸ πλήρωμα) …. What is the meaning of τὸ πλήρωμα (tò plērôma)? From the verb πληρόω (plēróô), it has its roots in the Sanskrit pul, to be big, to be with, to be in a mass. Thus, πληρόω would have the double meaning of: 1) to fill, render full, render abundant; 2) to complete, to bring to completion, to fulfil, to accomplish. From the meaning of πληρόω, the general content of πλήρωμα results is evident, but what about the modus of that fulfilment/accomplishment? In general πλήρωμα can be understood as: 1) what is filled, completed with something, that is,a passive form and an active meaning. Thus understood, πλήρωμα is the πεπληρωμένον peplērômenon( ), the one who has been filled. In this case the action of completion has origin in the object given by the genitive;

Incorporating Supplementary Notes of A. Debrunner by Robert W. Funk (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1961), 58-59, §109. “–μα properly designated the result of the action as opposed to –σις denoting the action itself,” Carl Darling Buck and Walter Petersen, A Reverse Index of Greek Nouns and Adjectives. Arranged by Terminations with Brief Historical Introductions (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1945), 221. The Church as Body of Christ -Paul Sciberras 113

2) with what the thing is filled, and thus in πλήρωμα one should seean active form and a passive meaning. Thus understood, πλήρωμα = πληροῦν (plēroun) (act of filling), which in this case is directed to the object in the genitive case; 3) in the absolute sense: result of the abstract action (the ending –μα).18 Πλήρωμα, understood as the fulfilling or completion, gives us to understand that the Church completes Christ. John Chrysostom explains how this is possible: The last words of v.23 mean that the Church is completion of Christ just as the head completes the body and the body is brought to completion by the head … The head is brought to completion only if it is placed in a perfect body. Through all members, therefore, his body is made full. Then the head is fulfilled, then the body becomes perfect, when we are all combined and gathered into one.19 So also Theophylact: “Christ finds his completion and appears to complete his members through the believers: his arm will be the charitable person, his leg are they who preach or visit the sick; his other members are the other faithful.”20 Bishop Theophanes writes: The Church is the completion of Christ just as the tree is the completion of the seed. That which in the seed is contained in reduced form, in the tree it is present in all its development … Just as the faithful are the Church, it follows that the Church is the fulfilment/completion of Christ, its Head.21 The fullness of Christ is fullness of God, and in this sense the Church is therefore seen as the fullness of the Father and his completion. Finally, Christ, being “full” of the divine, one can say the same about him as well: he is completion of the Divine. If we apply πλήρωμα to the Church and ὁ πληρούμενος to Christ, it will be ascertained that between Christ and the Church there is a relationship of reciprocal determination, on the strength of which the Church is what of Christ it fills itself and what completes Christ at the same time. The text following πλήρωμα will decide the question of the form of πληρουμένου. But given that in this form the verb πληρόω can form both the

18 Florenskij, Il concetto di Chiesa nella Sacra Scrittura, 151-152. 19 Homily on Ephesians 3.1.20-23, in Interpretatio omnium epistularum Paulinarum, ed. Frederick Field (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1849-1862). 20 Expositio in Epistulam ad Romanos, PG 124, 404. 21 See excerpt quoted in Florenskij, Il concetto di Chiesa nella Sacra Scrittura, 157. 114 MELITA THEOLOGICA middle participle as well as the passive participle, the issue induces us to turn to τὰ πάντα ἐν πᾶσιν πληρουμένου on which πληρουμένου depends.22 In Ephesians 1:23b τὰ πάντα (in the accusative case) and ἐν πᾶσιν (dative with preposition) have to be analysed separately. Τὰ πάντα indicates the totality, the entirety of something that is more fully determined than ἐν πᾶσιν, since τὰ πάντα is accusative plural and ἐν πᾶσιν is only instrumental. At the same time τὰ πάντα is certainly the accusative of compliment, depending on the middle participle, and must be translated by an active form with the addition of “in itself ”, that is, “for the completion”, for the fulfilment, for the realization of its own plans, of its own intentions.23 Τὰ πάντα is the plurality that is made complete and is total unity (to which the neuter points), while ἐν πᾶσιν is only plurality, without the trait of unity. Almost all scholars agree that ἐν πᾶσιν carries a masculine (not neuter) connotation, referring to the faithful (see 1 Cor 12:6; 15:28; Col 3:11). The meaning of πλήρωμα is fixed when τοῦ πληρουμένου is substituted with its equivalent τοῦ Χριστοῦ, obtaining: τὸ πλήρωμα τῶν πάντων τοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐν πᾶσιν (the completion hoped for by Christ, of all things in everyone). The genitive of the object that receives the action (τῶν πάντων) bound to the genitive of the agent subject (τοῦ Χριστοῦ), both dependent on τὸ πλήρωμα, gives the construct requested. It is τὸ πλήρωμα referred to the process of the completion. The contents of Ephesians 1:23 are therefore rendered as: “the fullness/ completion of everything in all believers through Christ,” that is, the life of Christ (and only of Christ) in regenerated human beings. The Church is the fullnesspar excellence, the essential fullness, the fullness of substance. The Church is not one of the fullnesses, but The Fullness. Seeing that πληρουμένου carries the article τοῦ, in this case it means that the action of filling is not only found in relation to the subject of action (Christ), but is attributed to him as something that is substantial to him (and proper to him). Therefore: τὸ πλήρωμα (the fullness par excellence, the only fullness of energies and forces, that therefore has impressed in it the essential traits) τοῦ τὰ πάντα ἐν πᾶσιν πληρουμένου (of him who fills everything in everyone), that is, of Christ, of him whose body she is and whose head he is.

22 See Stefano Romanello, Lettera agli Efesini. Nuova versione, introduzione e commento, I libri Biblici. Nuovo Testamento (Milano: Paoline, 2003), 10:73-75; also Florenskij, Il concetto di Chiesa nella Sacra Scrittura, 157. 23 Florenskij, Il concetto di Chiesa nella Sacra Scrittura, 159, completely contradicted by Romanello, Lettera agli Efesini, 74. The Church as Body of Christ -Paul Sciberras 115

Conclusion Florenskij analyses the definition of the Church not on the founding text of Matthew 16:17-19 – controversial on many fronts for different denominations – but on the text that depicts the nature of the Church in Ephesians 1:23. In so doing, the Russian theologian understands the Church as a living organism, rather than pointing to its founding historical moment.

Paul Sciberras Department of Sacred Scripture, Hebrew, and Greek Faculty of Theology University of Malta Msida MSD 2080 Malta [email protected] MELITA THEOLOGICA Vladimir Fedorov* Journal of the Faculty of Theology University of Malta 69/1 (2019): 117-126

Beauty, Goodness, and Truth in Pavel Florensky’s The Pillar and Ground of the Truth

ddressing his reader, the author of the book, priest Pavel Florensky, warned Athat he took this collection of reflections as something intermediate: “it is an exclusively preparatory one, for catechumens.”1 These letters are intended to provide “some sustenance for them until they are able to receive nourishment directly from their Mother’s hand.”2 His utmost goal was making people regard “living religious experience as the sole legitimate way to gain knowledge of the dogmas.” 3 The book was first published 103 years ago, and with the passage of time shows that the most diverse readers have gained spiritual support from it. Much has been revealed to them, not only the unknown, but also what is unimaginable by the depth of penetration into the mystery of knowledge, the mystery of beauty, the mystery of love, the mystery of faith, the mystery of life, and the mystery of the Church.

* Vladimir Fedorov was born in 1945 in Russia. His first education was in mathematics at the State University (Leningrad), then in theology at Leningrad theological academy (PhD in Philosophy, 1977), and he was ordained a priest in 1978, teaching theology and Church history. From 2002-2007 he was WCC consultant on theological ecumenical education in Eastern and Central Europe. From 2003-2018 he has been teaching social psychology at the St. Petersburg State University, and religious conflictology at the Theological Academy. 1 “A catechumen is one receiving rudimentary instruction in the doctrines of Christianity, preliminary to admission among the faithful of the church.” See Pavel Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004), 6. 2 Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (PGT), 7. 3 PGT, 5.

117 118 MELITA THEOLOGICA

As catechumenal reading, the book is no less, and probably even more relevant today than a hundred years ago. By today, the secular era has given way to the post-secular, with unexpected trends towards a revival of religious ardour, and sometimes is ossified into and fraught with the old disease of clericalism. And yet the mass consciousness remains secular. Moreover, there is a new and growing wave of aggressive in today’s Russia. It is, precisely, our time that needs so much this highly heartfelt and poetic collection of Florensky’s letters. I think these letters, these reflections, can well be recommended as exceptionally wise and a promising means of catechization. In Russia, after the abolition of the totalitarian atheistic ideology a quarter of a century ago, the most important mission of the Church became the catechumenate. This was understood by many as “churching” of people who knew about their Christian roots and were willing to find the lost spiritual ground, but did not remember anything about their historical religious culture. The process of churching primarily took the form of teaching and of acquaintance with Church life, rituals, customs, and with external forms of churchliness as in clothes, gestures or meals. The degree of churching is often judged just by the carefulness of observation of these external rules of conduct. So the basic question of churching should be: what is churchliness? What should be the tone of catechization? By his book, Florensky helps us understand and feel what it is like to bring the catechumens to experience the churchliness.

Ecclesiality4 —that is the name of the refuge where the heart’s anxiety finds peace, where the pretensions of the rational mind are tamed, where great tranquility descends into our reason.5 Let it be the case that neither I nor anyone

4 Translator’s comments: “It would be presumptuous of me to define ecclesiality[tserkovnost’ in Russian] when Florensky himself says that he cannot. Using Florensky’s own language, ecclesiality is the essence of the church (existing before the institution of the church), ‘the Divine- human element out of which the sacraments, the dogmas, the canons, and even to some degree the temporary, everyday routine of the Church are crystallized in the course of Church history.’ Ecclesiality = spiritual life. Ecclesiality, as Florensky sees it, appears to be a peculiarly Or­thodox concept, and he claims that only the Orthodox, among the branches of the Christian church, have preserved it in its purity.” See ibid., 7. 5 Translator’s comments: “I use the word reason to render razum (equivalent to the German Vernunft) and ratio­nality/rational mind to render rassudok (equivalent to Verstand). The corresponding adjectives­ razumnyi and rassudochnyi are rendered as reasonable (used in the sense of pertaining to reason) and rational. ‘Reason’ is the mind or intelligence in man that comes from God and is able to see things integrally; the ‘rational’ mind comes from man and tends to oppose what comes from God. The rational mind must be “killed off ” by an act of ascesis, self- sacrifice, and then it is replaced by ‘reason,’ the mind that is in its proper subservient place, i.e., subservient to spirit in man.” See ibid. Beauty, Goodness, and Truth - Vladimir Fedorov 119

else can define what ecclesiality is! … Indeed, do not its very indefinability, its ungraspableness by logical terms, its ineffability, prove that ecclesiality is life, a special, new life, which is given to man, but which, like all life, is inacces­sible to the rational mind?6 Florensky reminds us of the Apostle’s words: The Church is the body of Christ, ‘the fullness of him (τὸ πλήρωμα) that filleth all in all’ (Eph 1:23), … what the Apostle told us: namely that … How then can this ‘fullness’ of Divine life be packed into a narrow coffin of logical definition?7 But this impossibility is not a barrier. Churchliness is The Divine-human element out of which the sacraments, the dogmas, the canons, and even, to some degree, the temporary everyday routine of the Church, have been crystallized in the course of Church history—to that extent one can preeminently apply to the Church in this fullness of the Apostle’s prophecy: ‘there must also be divergences among you (δεῖ – καὶ αἱρέσεις ἐν ὑμῖν εἶναι)’ (1 Cor 11:19), – i.e., divergences in the interpretation of ecclesiality. Nevertheless, anyone who does not flee the Church receives into himself by his very life the unitary element of ecclesiality and knows that ecclesiality is and what it is.8 Florensky’s letters are a sort of reading that allows one to feel the taste, the aroma, and the charm of spiritual life. Without this experience of sensing the phenomenon of churchliness, any speculations on the spiritual life are meaningless. Florensky says: “Where there is no spiritual life, something external must exist as an assurance of ecclesiality.”9 With reference to Catholicism and Protestantism, he proceeds: A hierarchy—that is the criterion of ecclesiality for Roman Catholics. On the other hand, a specific confessional formula, the creed, or a system of formulas, the text of the Scripture, is the criterion of ecclesiality for Protestants… If in Catholicism one can perceive the fanaticism­ of canonicity, then in Protestantism one can perceive the equally great fanaticism of scientism.10 These quotations betray the influence of the false confessional stereotypes that were prevailing in the Russian theological and religious-philosophical thought of the XIX century. I can only note that ten years after the publication of the Pillar, Florensky wrote about the need for Christian unity in a completely

6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 7-8. 120 MELITA THEOLOGICA different state of mind. So what he said about the Orthodox spirituality and ecclesiality in 1914 can, and should now, be attributed to the idea of Christian ecclesiality as a whole, which is certainly diverse and abundant in traditions. The indefinability of Orthodox (I read it as Christian, V[ladimir] F[ederov]) ecclesiality, I repeat, is the best proof of its vitality… There is noconcept of ecclesiality, but ecclesiality itself is, and for every living member of the Church, the life of the Church is the most definite and tangible thing that he knows. But the life of the Church is assimilated and known only through life—not in the abstract, not in a rational way. If one must nevertheless apply con­cepts to the life of the Church, the most appropriate concepts would be not juridical and archaeological ones but biological and aesthetic ones. What is ecclesiality? It is a new life, life in the Spirit. What is the criterion of the rightness of this life? Beauty. Yes, there is a special beauty of the spirit, and, ungraspable by logical formulas, it is at the same time the only true path to the definition of what is Orthodox [I mean, what corresponds to Christianity, V.F.] and what is not Orthodox.11 Since Florensky speaks of the Eastern Christian tradition, he cannot fail to mention the startsy:

The connoisseurs of this beauty are the spiritual elders, thestartsy, 12 the masters of the ‘art of arts,’ as the holy fathers call asceticism. Thestartsy were adept at assessing the quality of spiritual life. The Orthodox taste, the Orthodox temper,

11 Ibid., 8. 12 Translator’s comments: “A starets (derived from staryi, old; startsy is the plural) has been likened to the directeur de conscience of Roman Catholicism. According to Igumen [Abbot] Feodosius (Popov), starchestvo (the relationship between a starets and those he directs) ‘consists in a truthful spiritual relationship of spiritual children to their spiritual father.” (See Feodosius’ memoirs in Sila Bozhiya i nemosbch’ cheloveka [God’s Power and Man’s Impotence], ed. Sergei Nilus, 2nd reprint edition [Sergiev Posad, 1992], 171.) Feodosius further points out that, in the Philokalia [see Florensky’s Note 135], Clement and Ignatius have named five distin­guishing features of this relationship: (1) complete trust in the starets·, (2) perfect candor before him in word and deed; (3) complete eradication of one’s own will and complete obedience to the will of the starets·, (4) abstention from argument and disputation regarding questions of faith; and (5) complete and truthful confession of one’s sins and profoundest secrets. Rooted in evangelical, apostolic, and patristic teaching, starchestvo is an exercise whose purpose is to empty oneself of one’s own will and intellect, indeed of oneself. It is through the monk’s own will that Satan attacks him, and by entering into the relationship of starchestvo the monk closes the doors of his soul to Satan. He closes the doors to Satan and opens the doors to God’s radiance, and, at the extreme limit of saintliness, he is deified’ [see notee on p. 94]. Essential to starchestvo is the relationship with another person. God is attained and Satan is defeated through another person. Many spiritual writ­ers have pointed out the dangers of the solitary ascetic path (ibid., 171 ff ). “Following Theophanus the Recluse [See notea on p. 12], Feodosius indicates that the starets does not absolve or punish. His role is rather to understand and define the spiritual state of the Beauty, Goodness, and Truth - Vladimir Fedorov 121

is felt but it is not subject to arithmetical calcula­tion. Orthodoxy is shown, not proved. That is why there is only one way to understand Orthodoxy: through direct Orthodox experience.13 Here, too, we can rightfully substitute the epithet Orthodox for Christian, because we know the devotees both in the Roman Catholic tradition and in several Protestant traditions, who shaped the respective confessional ways of spiritual life. Florensky helps us get aware that introducing the catechumens to churchliness, that is to true spiritual life, is only possible, and necessary, by warming up their longing for a search of Truth, Good, and Beauty. The bookThe Pillar and Ground of the Truth was the development of his thesis “On Spiritual Truth.” He felt the need to explain still more thoroughly the statement of the Apostle Paul that it is the Church that is the Pillar and Ground of the Truth. Hunger for the Truth leads to the Church, where the triune of the values of the Truth, Beauty and Good becomes obvious. In Letter Four, Florensky concludes: “‘Truth, Good, and Beauty.’ This metaphysical triad is not three different principles, but one principle. It is one and the same spiritual life, but seen from different points of view.”14 One of the most original and acute Russian religious writers of the early XX Century noted “burning enthusiasm for the truth” as an inherent feature of Florensky. Here I cannot help but recall that, thirty years ago, when I was in Germany in the crypt of the cathedral of Speyer, I saw on the wall a nun’s profile and words that struck me with their simplicity and at the same time, their depth. These words were: “Whoever seeks the truth is seeking God, whether consciously or unconsciously.”15 These words were said by a Carmelite nun, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) who ranks among the eminent personalities of the European philosophical and cultural elite. An uncompromising search for truth led her from atheism to the heights of holiness. She perished in martyrdom in one he directs, to explain to him how he has come to sin, and to indicate how he can avoid this sin in the future, and how he can extinguish the passion from which the sin arose (ibid.). “The practice ofstarchestvo has a long tradition in the Christian East. It flourished in the ancient Egyptian and Palestinian monastic communities in the 4th to 6th centuries. It was then transplanted to Mount Athos [see note d on p. 185] in Greece, and finally transported to Russia. In Russia, starchestvo is chiefly associated with Optina Pustyn’ [see noted on pp. 92-93].” See PGT, 8-9. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 56. 15 From a letter to a Benedictine nun. See Pope John Paul II, “Homily at Canonization Eucharist,” in Holiness Befits Your House, ed. John Sullivan (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000), 9. 122 MELITA THEOLOGICA

Auschwitz in 1942. In 1987, she was beautified as a martyr; and, in 1998, Pope John Paul II canonized her and ranked among the saint patrons of Europe. Edith was born into an observant Jewish family, and her way, from Judaism, through the teenage atheism, through a fervent search of the philosophical truth while Husserl’s assistant in Freiburg, led her to Christ; and in 1933, she chose the life of a nun of the strict Order of Discalced Carmelites. For me, these are not only two comparable ways, from faithlessness to faith of a Russian-Armenian young man in my country and a Jewish girl in Germany, but also a model of spiritual salvation for the secular postmodern consciousness today. Pavel Florensky and St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross were contemporaries; Teresa was nine years younger, and she took her martyrdom five years after the shooting of Fr. Pavel. When a student at the Moscow University, Florensky wrote to his parents: “Now the immediate task, not mine of course, but the task of time, is to create a religious science and a scientific Religion.” He set the goal of his life “to synthetize ecclesiastical and secular culture … to perceive all the positive teaching of the Church and the scientific and philosophical worldview, together with art.”16 The understanding of spiritual life as a synthesis and symphony of faith and reason, religion and science, requires a clear picture of what is meant by Truth and the definition of the criteria of Truth. Twenty years ago Pope John Paul II, in his homily for the canonization of Edith Stein, said: In our time, truth is often mistaken for the opinion of the majority. In addition, there is a widespread belief that one should use the truth even against love or vice versa. But truth and love need each other. St. Teresa Benedicta is a witness to this.17

In this regard, I would like to recall the epigraph of the Book, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: ή γνῶσις ἀγάπη γίνεται - knowledge becomes love.18 A search for Truth, the process of cognition, is generated by love and generates love. Letter Four, “The Light of the Truth,” reveals this subject figuratively and in detail. Florensky emphasizes that it is not “a juridical-moral but a metaphysical sense” that he means; he quotes from the Apostle John:

16 http://esxatos.com/florenskiy-filosofiya-rossii-pervoy-poloviny-xx-veka. Accessed July 5, 2018. 17 Homily of John Paul II for the canonization of Edith Stein. https://w2.vatican.va/content/ john-paul-ii/en/homilies/1998/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_11101998_stein.html. Accessed July 5, 2018. 18 St. Gregory of Nyssa De Anima et Resurrectione, in PG, XLVI, 96C. See PGT, 1. Beauty, Goodness, and Truth - Vladimir Fedorov 123

‘He that saith he is in the light [the truth], and hateth his brother, is in darkness [in ignorance] even until now. He that loveth his brother abideth in the light, and there is no occasion of stum­bling [i.e., no darkness of ignorance] in him. But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes’ (1 John 2:9‑11). Light is the Truth, and this Truth unfailingly manifests itself. The mode of the transmission of this Truth to another person is love, whereas the mode of the transmission to another of dark, stubborn igno­rance, which does not desire to recognize itself as dark ignorance, is hate. ‘He that doeth good is of God: but he that doeth evil hath not seen God’ (3 John 1:11)…If there is no love, there is no truth. If there is truth, there is inevitably love… Love follows from the knowledge of God with the same necessity as light radi­ates from a lamp or nocturnal fragrance emanates from the open calyx of a flower: ‘knowledge becomes love.’ Therefore,­ the mutual love of Christ’s disciples is the sign of their learning, their knowledge, their walking in the truth. Love is the characteristic sign by which a disciple of Christ is recognized: ‘By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another’ (John 13:35). Florensky emphasizes that One cannot make a greater error than to identify the spiritual love of one who knows the Truth with altruistic emotions and the striving for the ‘good of mankind,’ a striving that, at best, is grounded in natural sympathy or in abstract ideas… Even moral activity (philanthropy­ and so on) is, taken in itself, an absolute zero.19 This, as Florensky maintains, is clearly stated in 1 Corinthians 13: 1-3.20 Florensky’s philological analysis of the exact meaning of love in Greek thought and in the Old and New Testaments was an attempt to introduce philosophical rigor into the discussion. He distinguished between the Greek concepts of eros, agape, philia, and storge, arguing that agape and philia constitute the truly Christian understanding of love, and downgraded eros. Today’s Russian post-communist society very often discusses the need for ideology for the new Russia; there is a demand for a good national idea. Voices are constantly heard that proclaim the priority of spiritual values over material ones. But this is perceived by many as demagoguery which devaluates the very concept of ‘spirituality.’ In this atmosphere of the spiritual quest for society, the topic discussed today is very relevant. The topic of “Truth, Good, and Beauty” became quite congenial to the atmosphere of postmodernism. “This metaphysical triad is not three different

19 PGT, 65. 20 Ibid., 66. 124 MELITA THEOLOGICA principles, but one principle. It is one and the same spiritual life, but seen from different points of view.”21 Nowadays postmodernists claim that knowledge is constructed and not discovered and should not have universal pretensions. Postmodernists give themselves freedom to create their own world view, and are not constrained by objectivity and rationality. Postmodernists want to replace philosophy, which is a love of wisdom, by philodoxy, which is the love of opinion. According to postmodernists, truth is dead. The Platonic tradition with its questions about the nature of Truth, Beauty and the Good is not worth continuing because these big questions have lost their relevance. For post-modernists, great questions about the nature of reality and our place in the universe are pointless. There is no truth; there are only provisional statements that are neither valid nor invalid. Distinctions between good and evil, beautiful and ugly, and true and false are not discernible any more. Postmodernists insist that there are no ideals behind appearances; there is only becoming, and no being; profanum and no sacrum, and everything is ordinary. People are motivated by base instincts, human behaviour is just a power game, and nothing is serious any more. Postmodernists distrust Reason. For Platonists, belief in Reason (Logos) is the core itself of philosophy. Socrates linked Reason with the Good. God was, for him, good and rational; He created an orderly world and gave us mental powers to discover this order. According to post-modernists, ordinary people know very well what is good for them. Those insisting on canons, standards and values are branded as elitists whose motives are highly suspicious. What they supposedly want is to create an intellectual apartheid. The democratisation of truth and moral norms, when only the majority has the power to legitimise them, is the source of today’s relativism. Thanks to Florensky the question of truth, is once again at the centre of our attention. Nowadays in Russia and not only in Russia it is very topical. It also seems to me important to develop Florensky’s reflections on the metaphysical triad “Truth, Good, and Beauty” in the context of his revised world outlook, because later, he would assert that “the basic law of the world is the second principle of thermodynamics - the law of entropy, taken broadly, as the law of Chaos in all areas of the universe. The world is opposed by the Logos - the beginning of ectropy” (i.e., the change towards ordering, greater organization, complexity, i.e., in the direction opposite to entropy leading to chaos, degradation).

21 Ibid., 56. Beauty, Goodness, and Truth - Vladimir Fedorov 125

Every culture represents a purposeful and tightly connected system of means for the realization and disclosure of some value accepted as fundamental and unconditional, i.e., serves some subject of faith. The first refractions of this belief in the inalienable functions of a person are determined by the angles of view on the areas associated with these functions, i.e., to all being, as it is correlated with man. These angles are categories, but not abstract, but concrete; manifestation of their action is a cult. Culture, as evidenced by etymology, is a derivative of the cult; ordering the whole world by categories of worship. Faith defines the cult, and the cult is a world outlook, from which culture follows. But this is a topic for special research.22 And one more unexpected thought has arisen by discussing not only the triad “Truth, Good, and Beauty,” but generally speaking, the whole corpus of Florensky’s works. The latter is invaluable as a pool of illustrations to the contemporary original theories and scientific attempts to penetrate the mystery of psychology of personality. At the beginning of the XX Century, psychologists designed some techniques to assess IQ, the human cognitive intelligence quotient. Over time, psychologists have come to a unanimous agreement on the definition of intelligence as “an individual’s ability to understand the relations existing between the elements of a certain situation, and adapt to them so as to be able to achieve his goals.”23 By 1995 studies in emotional intelligence by Daniel Goleman, have become well-known; along with the IQ, he introduced the concept of EQ, that is emotional intelligence quotient. To continue, in1997, Danah Zohar coined the term “spiritual intelligence” in her book Rewiring the Corporate Brain.24 That same year, in 1997, Ken O’Donnell, an Australian author and consultant living in Brazil, also used the term “spiritual intelligence” in his book Endoquality - the emotional and spiritual dimensions of the human being in organizations.25 Howard Gardner, the originator of the theory of multiple intelligences, chose not to include spiritual intelligence amongst his “intelligences” due to the challenge of codifying quantifiable scientific criteria.26 Instead, he suggested

22 P. A. Florenskij, “Avtoreferat,” Sochineniya v 4-kh tomakh, t.1 (Moskva: Mysl’, 1994), 39. 23 Norbert Sillamy, Dictionar ‘de Psihologie Larousse (Bucuresti: Univers Enciclopedic, 1998). 24 Dinah Zohar, Rewiring the Corporate Brain: Using the New Science to Rethink How We Structure and Lead Organizations (San Francisco: Berrett-Koeler, 1997), 14, 120. 25 Ken O’Donnell, Endoquality - as dimensões emotionais e espirituais do ser humano nas organanizões (Salvadore, Brazil: Casa da Qualidade, 1997). 26 Howard Gardner, “A Case Against Spiritual Intelligence,” The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 10, no. 1 (January 2000): 27-34. 126 MELITA THEOLOGICA an “existential intelligence” as workable.27 However, contemporary researchers continue to use the practicability of Spiritual Intelligence (often abbreviated as ‘SQ’) and to create tools for measuring and developing it. Cindy Wigglesworth defines spiritual intelligence as “the ability to act with wisdom and compassion, while maintaining inner and outer peace, regardless of the circumstances.”28 Frances Vaughan, Doctor of psychology, former president of the American Association of Transpersonal Psychology writes: As a psychotherapist, I am convinced that the spiritual intelligence opens the heart, illuminates the mind and inspires the soul. It is one of several types of intelligence and it can be developed relatively independently. Spiritual intelligence calls for multiple ways of knowing and for the integration of the inner life of mind and spirit with the outer life of work in the world. It can be cultivated through questing, inquiry, and practice. Spiritual experiences may also contribute to its development, depending on the context and means of integration. Spiritual maturity is expressed through wisdom and compassionate action in the world.29 According to Stephen Covey, “Spiritual intelligence is the central and most fundamental of all the intelligences, because it becomes the source of guidance for the others.”30 I can only add that an essential understanding of the triunity of intelligence, ethics, and aesthetics can be found in the theological and philosophical interpretation by Florensky of the triad of Truth, Good, and Beauty.

Vladimir Fedorov Department of Theology and Religious Pedagogy Russian Christian Humanitarian Academy St Petersburg Russia [email protected]

27 Howard Gardner, Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 53. 28 Cindy Wigglesworth, SQ21: The 21 Skills of Spiritual Intelligence (New York: SelectBooks, 2012), 7. 29 Frances Vaughan, “What is Spiritual Intelligence?” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 42, no. 2 (April 2002): 16-33. http://francesvaughan.com/attachments/Spiritualintell.pdf . Accessed July 5, 2018. 30 Stephen R. Covey, The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 53. GUIDELINES FOR CONTRIBUTORS MELITA THEOLOGICA welcomes the submission of unpublished papers of up to 10,000 words, including footnotes, on any branch of theological studies. Submissions are considered for publication on the understanding that the author offersMelita Theologicaan exclusive option to publish, and the contribution is not currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. It is the responsibility of the author to obtain permission for using any previously published material.

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