In May 2017, my 801-word Conjugal Friendship ignited a firestorm when it appeared on Public Orthodoxy. It has been read over 11,000 times and remains one of Public Orthodoxy’s most viewed articles ever. In June 2018, I published a much expanded version in The Wheel, where the late Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) made positive mention of it in his foreword. In November 2020, I posted my PhD thesis proposal on academia(.)edu, where it has been viewed 3500 times, fluctuating between the site’s top 2% and 4% of papers read. My several articles on Orthodoxy in Dialogue covering different aspects of my topic have been viewed tens of thousands of times.
At the present time, for reasons explained below, I have put the thesis on indefinite hold and begun writing a shorter, simplified book version. The director of one of the most prominent university presses in the US has expressed keen interest in what I’ve written so far, invited me to submit the book proposal to their religion editor when it’s ready, and thanked me for my LGBTQ advocacy in the Orthodox Church. Progress is moving along at a good clip. Please pray for me and for the success of this project.
Here I share the book’s foreword and introduction.
Giacomo Sanfilippo
Faustum praelium. Бой счастливой. Happy battle.
Conjugal Friendship: The Sacrament of Love
Father Pavel Florensky’s Orthodox Theology of Same-Sex Love
AUTHOR’S FOREWORD
This brief study of Father Pavel Florensky’s theological response to homosexuality, published in Moscow in 1914 as the culminating chapter of The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, comprises a simplified version of what I had planned as my PhD thesis in Theological Studies at Trinity College in the University of Toronto. Halfway through year six of my program in December 2022, with little writing to show after my committee had approved my proposal two years before, I forced myself to say the unspeakable to my supervisor: I was dropping out. As I inched closer to my 70th birthday, a series of escalating setbacks—medical, personal, a vortex of painful spiritual crises one after the other—had converged to create an impasse where it finally became impossible to imagine continuing in my doctoral program.
I had seldom felt more a failure or more a disappointment to myself. Worse, I was letting down my supervisor, committee members, and countless online followers around the planet—my LGBTQ Orthodox brothers, sisters, and siblings, our families, our allies among the hierarchy, clergy, and laity of the Orthodox Church—who had eagerly, and patiently, awaited the completion and publication of my thesis.
My supervisor shared none of my disappointment. He suggested instead that an abridged presentation of my years of research, prepared for publication in the form of this little volume, might seem a more manageable undertaking. He graciously accepted to stay on informally as my advisor. If any good comes of this project, I owe an incalculable debt of gratitude to Rev. Dr. David Neelands of Trinity College for his friendship, his support, and his unwavering belief in me and in the importance of my topic on a scholarly, pastoral, and popular level.
The crossover character of this book reflects an attempt to reach both a general and an academic audience. With annotations and details of secondary and tertiary relevance reduced to a minimum, I have hoped to produce a text accessible to the faithful in our churches who consider the intersection of sexual diversity and ecclesial life to be a matter of great personal and pastoral consequence, and, at the same time, to demonstrate the highest standards of scholarly due diligence. I pray that this offering be received equally as a worthy contribution to Florensky studies and to the Orthodox Church’s formulation of a more holistic—indeed more truthful—theological, spiritual, and pastoral approach to same-sex orientation in human nature.
It remains to my readers in the Church and in the academy to judge whether I have acquitted myself of this task with honour.
INTRODUCTION
In 1914, under the clouds of imminent world war and revolution gathering ominously over the vast Russian landscape, Father Pavel Florensky published his monumental The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters.[1] He was thirty-two years old, married for four years, and an ordained priest for three. The first of his five children was three years old. The young priest’s magnum opus marked him immediately as one of the foremost voices of Russia’s Silver Age, the Russian Religious Renaissance, and Russian religious philosophy. His expertise in a superhuman range of fields, both religious and secular, went on to secure his reputation as “Russia’s da Vinci”—arguably the most encyclopedic intellect in twenty-one centuries of Orthodox history.
On the face of it, the bare facts of Florensky’s marriage, ordination, and family life at the time of PGT’s appearance make him indistinguishable from a thousand other Russian priests of his generation. Yet, he dedicates his book and addresses its letters with aching tenderness to the deceased Sergei Troitsky, his roommate during their years at the Moscow Theological Academy.[2] They had dreamed fervidly of spending the rest of their life after graduation in a relationship resembling Christian marriage in virtually every respect. Florensky thus crowns PGT with “Letter Eleven: Friendship,” his theological vision of what we now call same-sex love. The first attempt of its kind in all Christendom, East or West—all the more astonishing for germinating in the deep religious soil of Orthodox Russia—his autobiographical account of an explicitly conjugal form of male friendship[3] stands as a perpetual memorial to the seminarians’ spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and bodily union. Florensky weaves his love for his “distant Friend and Brother,” abiding beyond death through the early years of his marriage, priesthood, and fatherhood, like a golden thread through the fabric of his entire book, sometimes gleaming on the surface, sometimes shimmering just beneath the translucent gossamer of his luminous prose.
The middle 19th century’s invention of “the homosexual” as a morally neutral, if psychologically dubious, category of personal identity signals a critical juncture in the sociohistorical moment wherein Florensky was born and raised, grew to young adulthood, loved, and composed “Friendship.” Michel Foucault famously describes this transition in the era’s social consciousness:
The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology…. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.[4]
He lends further context to “Friendship” when he remarks,
[Over against its pathologization] homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or “naturality” be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.[5]
Fully conversant in the controversies of his day swirling around sex and gender in Russian society, arts, religious thought, legislation, jurisprudence, medicine, the ecclesiastical apparatus, etc.—much like our own day—Florensky exhibits nothing of the defensive posture that we might expect in an early 20th-century, heavily censored, often reactionary Russian Orthodox environment. Page after page, beginning with a playful woodcut of two naked male cupids facing off in “happy battle,” one throwing his hands up in laughing surrender to the other, “Friendship” flows lyrically from the joyful “naturality” and primordial innocence of same-sex desire.
Scholars of fin-de-siècle Russia see plainly what many of Florensky’s contemporaries in the Russian Church regarded with extreme disdain, namely, that he wrote “Friendship” as an apologia for homosexuality. Fierce opposition to my preliminary writing online and in one print journal—sometimes bordering on hysteria—has come mainly from the religiose imagination of Orthodox clerics and laymen who have perhaps (or perhaps not) given “Friendship” a cursory reading, and who know nothing of the ancillary sources, both primary and secondary. The present book sets forth the evidence gathered from ten years of research, reflection, and prayer more adequately than I can in a blogpost. I strove relentlessly over the course of this project to disprove my own thesis. In the end, I stand fully convinced of all that follows.
This study consists of two parts. The first establishes authorial intent conclusively as a response to homosexuality. This becomes virtually undeniable when we examine the confluence of historical, cultural, social, ecclesiastical, and especially biographical factors that set the stage for its writing and publication in its particular time and place. Any other interpretation is hardly tenable. Orthodox readers will be compelled to take a stand for or against what Florensky says about same-sex love. We have no basis, however, to dispute what he intends to say.
The second part situates “Friendship” within PGT’s overall structure and organizes the material thematically. This facilitates interpretive commentary on each of its subthemes in sequence as they initially appear in Florensky’s text. Writing as a Symbolist, Florensky adopts a stream-of-consciousness method of disquisition, whereby he meanders from one aspect of his topic to another and back again.
More than that, Symbolism presents challenges to the reader insofar as—by definition—it is rather more suggestive as a literary device than declarative. PGT’s earliest critic, while naming (and excoriating) “Friendship”’s homophile motif, complained that Florensky never says exactly what he means. The converse must needs be true: he always means more than he says. Never considered before or after to be a medium of theological discourse, Symbolism allowed Florensky to produce a treatise on a contentious sexual topic with the nuance, indeed delicacy, that suited his temperament and the spirit of Orthodox piety admirably well. In the present study, I seek to remain faithful to his sensibilities. The 21st-century reader does well not to come with an expectation of allusions to specific practices of conjugal intimacy between men.
In a similar vein, we do well to avoid the facile transposition of contemporary nomenclature around homosexuality to Florensky’s person, thought, and social milieu. The anachronism of gay, for instance—a term laden (rightly or wrongly) with assumptions of the prevailing, if not defining, tastes and mores of gay culture today—would prove more misleading than helpful. Florensky’s portrayal of the “sacrament of love” is predicated on the couple’s lifelong exclusivity, frequent participation together in the holy mysteries, and partnership in the fundamentally ascetical ethos of Orthodox life for all.
Two book-length precursors to this study have appeared in English: the first, Pavel Florensky: A Metaphysics of Love (1984) by Robert Slesinski, a Byzantine Catholic priest, and the second, Closest to the Heart: A Mystagogy of Spiritual Friendship in Pavel A. Florenskij’s The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (2020) by Glen Attard, a Carmelite priest. To these I return later.
In his preface to PGT, Florensky emphasizes the need for direct, living experience of the Orthodox faith from within the Church. In postmodern academia, we consider it almost compulsory for an author to state his or her “positionality.” The present work thus constitutes the first major study of “Friendship” by an Orthodox Christian—one who, like Father Florensky, has experienced in his own life the complex intersectionality of Orthodox identity, marriage, fatherhood to five children, priesthood, and same-sex orientation.
[1] Hereinafter PGT. When it becomes necessary to distinguish between the Russian original and the three translations at my disposal, I will use PGT-R (Russian), PGT-E (English), PGT-F (French), and PGT-I (Italian).
[2] Hereinafter MDA for Moskovskaia Dukhovnaia Akademia (Moscow Spiritual Academy). For reasons unknown to me, Russia’s spiritual academies—graduate level theological schools—are known in English as theological academies.
[3] Florensky never uses the term conjugal friendship. Early in my doctoral career, a cherished friend who prefers to remain unnamed suggested it over pints at the Duke of York one night. We had been tossing ideas back and forth for how to underscore the unambiguously nuptial character of “Friendship.”
[4] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 43.
[5] Foucault, 101.
Giacomo Sanfilippo is a PhD candidate in Theological Studies at Trinity College in the University of Toronto. He holds an MA in Theology (First Class) from Regis College/St. Michael’s College and an Hons. BA in Sexuality Studies from York University. He is also an alumnus of the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Earlier in life, he completed the course work for the MDiv at St. Vladimir’s Seminary. Visit his Patreon page if you wish to support him through to the completion of this book. Current Patreon supporters at the time of printing will be mentioned by name in the book’s Acknowledgments.
ORTHODOXY IN DIALOGUE 