The Meaning of Idealism: The Metaphysics of Genus and Countenance
Pavel Florensky (Boris Jakim, Translator and Editor)
Brooklyn NY: Semantron Press, 2020
The Meaning of Idealism marks the latest testimony to Father Pavel Florensky’s (1882-1937) illimitable intellect to be translated by Boris Jakim. It comprises a series of course lectures on the topic of Platonism at the Moscow Theological Academy (which Jakim, for some reason, calls the Moscow Religious Academy [p.2]), originally published in 1915 when Florensky was 33 years old and four years a priest and father of his first child. In 1908, at age 26, he had been offered a teaching position in the Academy’s Chair of the History of Philosophy immediately upon graduating, but before the completion of his thesis. In September of that year, he delivered his maiden lecture, “The Universal Human Roots of Idealism,” and was thereupon appointed to teach a course entitled Introduction to the History of Ancient Philosophy. The lectures contained in the present volume were delivered several years into his teaching career and just months before his publication date, as his sources date as late as October 1914.
A word about the translator: Florensky studies in the English language would not exist without Boris Jakim. In 1997 he bequeathed Father Pavel Florensky’s magnum opus—The Pillar and Ground of the Truth—to the English-speaking world. This was followed twenty years later by Pavel Florensky: Early Religious Writings 1903-1909. I was delighted to learn of the release of The Meaning of Idealism so soon after Early Religious Writings. In the interim, the indefatigable Jakim went on to translate most of Father Sergius Bulgakov’s major theological works. Jakim never fails to impress with his apparent ease in translating some of the most abstruse texts and complex ideas to come out of Russian religious philosophy. This makes each of his translations as much his own masterpiece as that of the original author.
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ORTHODOXY IN DIALOGUE 