Pavel Florensky: At the Boundary of Immanence and Transcendence

Abstract

This chapter discusses four themes in the religious philosophy of Pavel Florensky (1882–1937): Georg Cantor’s mathematics, truth, philosophy of language, and the visual arts. Apart from Church doctrines, the key ideas that emerge in his work are ‘antinomy’, ‘discontinuity’, ‘actual infinity’ and ‘realism’. Deeply rooted in the Christian-Platonic tradition, Florensky is critical of rationalism, empiricism, Kantianism, and positivism. He anticipates postmodern insights in the sense that his worldview allows for synchronic difference as well as time and diachronic change. But unlike postmodern thought, which tends to interpret synchronic difference and the flux of time in terms of relativistic perspectivism and historicism, Florensky provides difference and change with a realist underpinning. And despite his emphasis on antinomicity and discontinuity in his conception of truth, he affirms the grandeur of reason and rejects irrationalism and fideism.