Pavel Florensky (Boris Jakim, trans. and ed.)
It seems eminently appropriate to publish this review on the 86th anniversary of Father Pavel Florensky’s execution by firing squad in Soviet Russia. May his memory be eternal.
In the interest of full disclosure, it’s somewhat embarrassing to admit that, while I have known of At the Watersheds for ten years, and while the condensed English version At the Crossroads appeared in 2014, the latter came to my attention only last week…and only (of all things) because Amazon recommended it as possibly relevant to other books I’ve purchased. If only Amazon had thought of this years ago! My reason for reviewing a book that’s nine years old is to introduce my readers to as much of Florensky’s thought as possible.
As my generalist readers around the planet and Florensky scholars everywhere are well aware, the chef d’œuvre for which Father Florensky is universally known is his monumental The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (hereinafter PGT), published in Moscow in 1914 and translated into English by Boris Jakim for publication in 1997. Subtitled An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters, Florensky conceived this weighty tome not so much in the usual sense of “theodicy,” i.e., the problem of God vis-à-vis evil and suffering, as in a more expansive sense of “justifying God”—and, by extension, the Orthodox faith—to the mind of the modern skeptic typical of the Russian intelligentsia at the turn, and during the opening decades, of the last century. Each of his twelve “letters” addresses a topic of widespread interest to Russia’s educated classes, among them the Trinity, the antinomical character of Orthodox theology, universal salvation, sophiology, and male homosexuality. Read More
ORTHODOXY IN DIALOGUE 