By Seraphim (Bruce) Foltz, Ph.D.
Eckerd College
A. The Transcendent Relation to Culture
Although largely focused on Church History and Patristics, the Collected Works of Fr George Florovsky also devotes an entire volume to the topic of Christianity and Culture. These essays soundly reject the “pietist” or “revivalist” accusation that culture is “a sinful entanglement”[1] But Florovsky himself maintains a somewhat chilly distance from the cultural sphere, only rarely mentioning one or two figures in modern philosophy, literature, or art, and then moving on without seriously engaging their significance. His cautious relation to modern culture represents less a rejection of it than a posture of externality and ultimate indifference. We may characterize his approach as “transcendent,” first because it assumes a detached position that largely transcends the concerns of cultural life, but second because it anchors itself in eternal, transcendent realities, largely setting aside more worldly, cultural horizons as auxiliary or secondary.
Florovsky traces the roots of this polarity back to the early centuries of Christianity and a historical tension between what he calls the Empire and the Desert, i.e. between Christian civilization as such, itself largely urban, and the more radically ascetic life of desert monastics who had largely left the city behind. But it is important to bear in mind that the monastic exodus from the cities was undertaken less to reject established Christian culture than “to realize in full the common ideal which was, in principle, set before every single believer.”[2] At the same time, however, Florovsky maintains that “monasticism was an attempt to build up another City. . . an ‘extraterritorial colony’ in this world of vanity,” orbiting outside the great urban centers.[3] Risking exaggeration, he concludes that the monasticism of the Desert “succeeded, much more than the Empire ever did, to preserve the true ideal of culture in its purity and freedom.”[4] This conclusion, however, overlooks the fact that much of what was greatest in Byzantine culture arose precisely when certain monastics returned to the city, often to serve as their Bishops and Patriarchs, and thus engaging and in fact shaping their shared culture from within, elevating it and advancing their common ideals of salvation, redemption, and theōsis. .
Florovsky’s approach yields important insights, especially through its emphasis on how divine transcendence showed itself to be irreducible to cultural assimilation, but it is also somewhat dismissive of culture and the need for engagement with it. And we must ask, was the monastery ever really another city, let alone as he puts it, an “anti-city, anti-polis”?[5] As Florovsky himself admits, the Desert shared the selfsame culture as the Empire, seeking only to pursue it in a more perfect manner. Were the monastics, then, those athletes of Christian culture, in fact culturally outside the city, external to it in any sense other than location? And thus, the monastery did not really transcend Early Christian culture at all, was not truly external to it. But if so, how much less can the ascetic struggles of contemporary Christianity (both within and beyond monastic walls) remain external to the culture of today, whose technological apparatus and entanglements permeate every corner of the world, no matter how remote, radiating into every aspect of our life in a way that was impossible in antiquity. Moreover, as Florovsky readily acknowledges, our contemporary culture is no longer Christian. As he notes, ours is a pluralistic world where Christianity mingles subtly “with rival beliefs”—a world where, as he observes, “many ’strange Gospels’ are preached.” How can we know, then, whether these conflicting beliefs, these strange Gospels, have surreptitiously entered into the Christian culture that we are ascetically striving to perfect and fulfil? Thus, an essentially external, transcendent relation to culture is not sufficient. We must also engage our culture from within, far more even than did the more detached relation of the early Christian monastics. And this seems especially urgent today, in a cultural milieu that is not merely pluralistic, not just a motley marketplace of beliefs, but as will be argued later, a hostile arena that is quietly but virulently dedicated to the suppression of Christianity itself—scorning not only Christian worship, but cultic worship as such.
B. The Immanent Relation to Culture
Therefore Christians today must also employ, in addition to the transcendent mooring, an immanent critique of culture—a critique that can discern, from within the vast and heavily sedimented cultural edifice, which Christian elements have been authentically realized and which covertly perverted. We need a critique that can discern the true elements of Christian culture from within its encrustations and distortions. But the challenge of an imminent relation to contemporary culture brings with it more pitfalls than does the transcendent relation. As an example, we may examine the immanent critique of Tolstoy, whose cultural roots were deeply planted in the civilization of Russian Orthodoxy. Like many recent critics of Western culture, however, he comes to reject a transcendent dimension altogether, proceeding instead from what he finds to be best within the world itself. Surveying the cultural landscape around him, a sphere within which he is highly accomplished, he recruits certain features that he himself values in order to generate a strident critique of the broader culture, championing a plethora of causes that remain popular today, from pacifism and vegetarianism to a radical egalitarianism to which Tolstoy himself, ostentatiously and often comically, aspired in his own life. And he promotes these causes, often quite energetically, in the belief that he is helping Russian culture to be true to itself.
But if Tolstoy proceeds from a wholesale rejection of transcendence, how then can he decide which cultural elements to champion and which to reject? Although drawing upon the great treasury of Christian culture, he must base his choices on purely immanent, purely worldly criteria—i.e. selecting only those remnants of Christian civilization in our cultural milieu that he feels are consistent with his own humanistic preferences, and which he will consequently certify as the authentic elements of true Christianity. Thus, he boldly presumes to instruct Elder Ambrose of Optina Monastery on true Christianity, even though he himself has long ago discarded the dogmatic teachings of the Church, retaining only a rather sentimental humanism. Unsurprisingly, this left the Elder saddened and concerned for the soul of his instructor.
Such elevation of subjective bias into normative principle necessarily drives any purely immanent approach, isolating it from the deepest potentialities of the culture it approaches. It is thus unable to discern and give new form to hidden possibilities, i.e. it cannot be creative. Consequently, it is left with no other strategy than negation, a process which will leave nothing standing, apart from whatever suits the critic’s own predilections. It is similar to the dialectic that was so seductively employed by Marx—an effective methodology for “getting on the right side of history” by negating everything in the past that is not consistent with timely preferences. In its drive for negation, it mimics the methodology of Goethe’s Mephistopheles, who haughtily proclaims himself as “part of that force which always wills what is bad, but always produces the good.” Marx himself adapted this dialectic of negation from Hegel, whose Phenomenology of Spirit begins with what is lowest and most completely immanent, i.e., with mere sensation, and then through radical, unrelenting negation claims to arrive at the highest realms of art and religion—which he finally negates as well, collateral damage suffered for the sake of completing his Absolute System, thereby crowning the unfolding of world history with himself. This is also the modus operandi of the Frankfurt School of Neo-Marxism and the Critical Theory that descends from it, with Marcuse basing his approach upon an activity of essential negation that he thinks will employ the essential energy of Reason itself. In this way, reason or ratio—the respective English and Latin renderings of the Greek Logos— both of them since antiquity invoking the Eternal Logos or Creative Principle of Creation as a basis for Christian culture—are now inverted into negation and rebellion. Uncritically accommodating itself to the world, this purely immanent critique of culture instinctively rebels against essential aspects of the ancient Christianity that has shaped and illumined Western culture, in deference to what seems current and “progressive.”
C. Florensky’s Incarnational Philosophy of Culture and His Critique of Modernity
Like Tolstoy, if less visibly, Fr Pavel Florensky was an important contributor to Russian culture. He was surely the greatest intellect of the Russian Silver Age, and doubtless the greatest polymath of the twentieth century. And like Tolstoy too, his thought takes its departure from within his cultural worldview. But beyond this, the contrast with the Tolstoian mode of critique could not be more dramatic. Studying the world from many perspectives—scientific, mathematical, philosophical, aesthetic, linguistic, and historical—Florensky in each case finds at the heart of reality itself, quietly embedded in every wrinkle of the world, and discoverable from within every methodology, not the neutral, value-free substratum of autonomous “nature” so axiomatic to modern thought and experience, but nothing less than Christ Himself: the Incarnate Presence of the “Cosmic Logos” through whom nature itself is created and presented to us, the “unshakeable order” of the universe (CSM 35, 109). Thus, immersing himself in the immanence of both culture and nature, he shows that an orientation to Christ is metaphysically unavoidable. At the same time, however, Florensky maintains that this very immanent orientation is itself epistemically unavoidable. For he argues that culture is inescapable, generating the underlying world-understanding that we all share beforehand, shaping our thought and our modes of consciousness, and reaching far beyond conceptual understanding into the deepest sources of our being, sources that lead us back to their Creator if pursued deeply, for they originate in cultic realities. That is, all culture is itself grounded—i.e. necessarily rooted—in this or that cultic relation that establishes and orients human culture, either by elaborating through integral cultural expressions their own deepest foundations, or by turning against them, becoming not just non-religious or secular in a neutral sense, but (often unknowingly) anti-religious, actively building barricades against sacred reality, and exercising the spirit of rebellion into which the immanent relation described above will, of its own momentum, necessarily degenerate. And most problematically, Florensky maintains that our modern culture is founded upon a radical development of this rebellion against the sacred, that ultimately seeks to negate and deny and destroy its own cultic foundations, thereby unwittingly advancing its own demise. But this summaryrequires more systematic explication.
Florensky’s Incarnational Philosophy of Culture, then, may be outlined through three propositions:
1. All culture is founded upon cult, either as an articulation and development of cult, or as a rejection of it.
For Florensky, the primary activity of the human spirit is theurgy, i.e. the transformation of visible reality through vital contact with the invisible. This forms the primordial matrix of all arts and sciences and indeed, of our very mode of consciousness. Thus, drawing upon his own philosophical understanding as well as the “sacral theory” developed by certain historians of religion (Frazer, Tylor, Durkheim, Mauss, etc.), Florensky argues that all aspects of culture are first constituted in cult: not in morality or dogma or even in myth, but cultic actions and words—in sacred realities such as “relics, rites, and sacraments,” i.e. in “everything that serves to establish links with other worlds,” bonds with deeper dimensions of reality.[6] For example, the eating of animals was originally a cultic practice, connected with their veneration, while their sacrifice was based on a sense of animals as themselves holy. Whereas the eating of grains was once connected with the veneration of elders and their commemoration, which still survives in the memorial kolyva (CSM 83). Painting, dance, and drama are originally and essentially cultic, as is illustrated respectively in Orthodox iconography, Native American ceremony, and Greek tragedy. But beyond these explicitly aesthetic expressions, the mode of consciousness fostered by the sacred cult is characterized by “the sensation that everything has absolute, mystical roots” (CSM 58n).
Today, however, our fervent loyalty to a secular, fiercely autonomous mode of living—to a self-enclosed, fortified bunker that defends us from the holy contours of life itself, while severed from the sacred depths that might otherwise whisper of a transcendent calling—now regards these depths and these whispers to be nothing less than “a sacrilege” for the accepted secular cult, unsavory and in need of suppression.[7] How can such a decline take place? Over time, the theurgic practices and beliefs of the religious cult becomes routine, degenerate into mechanical motions, become “sedimented” in Husserl’s sense, become “cold, soulless, and boring.” It then requires etymological excavation and philological explication even to approximate the mode of consciousness that had once belonged to them (CSM 110, 142). Thus, while the religious cult brought together the visible and invisible orders—uniting God and world, spirit and flesh, meaning and reality—a reaction against them arises, subverting the religious cult and causing its enervation. This results in an empty cultural edifice built of simulacra rather than symbols, a culture that dedicates itself not to joining these orders together, but to building a wall between them, to keeping them apart, i.e. to the insistence on a secular culture. While from the religious side, this may seem like utter decline and disintegration, the emerging epoch sees this as liberation and enlightenment, the dawn of a new era. The religious cult is replaced by a secular cult, which as it becomes increasingly abstract and sterile and superficial, will in turn be itself replaced by the rise of a new religious era
2 Two types of culture alternate rhythmically throughout history.
In his philosophy of culture, then, Florensky proceeds not from abstract principles, but with what is concrete and accessible to our living experience today: not cultural vitality, but the impending sense of cultural dissolution or disintegration—the sense that our cultural foundations are being upended, that the old order is dying. And this is accompanied by a second intuition, harder to discern, that a new epoch is rising from the ashes of the old order. Inspired by the prophetic views of Vladimir Solovyov in the nineteenth century, Florensky (together with many of his contemporaries, such as Berdyaev and Florovsky himself) believed that there were two kinds of culture, alternating organically in history: both a daytime culture of reason and enlightenment and world-mastery, and a nighttime culture of poetry and mysticism and world-contemplation. These cultures, Florensky held, were rooted in two different kinds of epochs, each with its own genius, and each with its own mode of consciousness.
“History has days and nights,” he maintains. “Periods of night are dominated by the mystical element, noumenal will, susceptibility, femininity. Daytime periods of history are characterized by a more active, superficial interaction with the world, phenomenal will, masculinity. The Middle Ages were a period of night; the modern age is a daytime period” (CSM 7). Moreover, in Florensky’s view, echoed later by Berdyaev, “we are now at the threshold of a new Middle Ages,” a nocturnal epoch that can nourish the life of the spirit, shading us from the harsh light of Enlightenment, a light too bright, a light that blinds us to deeper, subtler, more essential realities. Like the Age of Pericles, modernity is a diurnal age, but unlike the Era of Classical Antiquity, it oversteps the cyclical balance of day and night, becoming a radically hubristic epoch that dares to ignore the admonition of Socrates in the Phaedo, not to look directly at the sun, lest we be blinded. The transition to a “new Middle Ages,” then, holds great promise for our time, if trhis prophecy is reliable,, it also confrolnts us with peril—promise because “in its depths the Christian world-understanding is medieval,” and peril because not all the rising spiritual powers are beneficent and life-giving (CSM 7). (It should be noted, however, that when Florensky speaks of the Middle Ages, he is invoking the Russian Middle Ages, i.e. the mysticism of St Sergius rather than the rationalism of Thomas Aquinas, in which the rays of modernity already begin to glimmer.) Thus, we now inhabit a liminal promontory, teetering on the ridge or “watershed” between two epochs, as well as between two modes of consciousness, with the first hints of a new epoch slowly beginning to be discernible. “Evening has come,” Florensky announces, “and the Evening Star has risen. The sky will become emerald. Evening chill [is setting in].” (WT 1088). Thus, “we witness the heightening of our mystical sensitivity on the one hand, and on the other, we apprehend the descent to us of Divinity, of other worlds [of] mystical phenomena, both gracious and dark”—and this latte, invokes the increasing closeness to us of miracles, the resurgence of the religious cult, along with the growing fascination with mysticism. While at the sane tune, it occasions the widespread dabbling in the occult and the naïve embrace omany, whvesrinfgin menacing borrowers, benign eruptions emerging from dark sources. (CSM 67, BV 142). “Beneath the peeling husk” of modernity, writes Florensky, the tender, green buds of a new epoch are beginning to invesrige. (WT 1089). The fresh scent of “a change of consciousness” wafts toward us, gliding gently upon springtime breezes (CSM 15).
But Florensky’s Philosophy of Culture does not advocate here a kind of historicism imprisoning us within the blinders of one particular age. For he notes that even in the brightest sunlight of “enlightened,” secular ages, the deep solitude of asceticism and contemplation can allow us to draw near to mystical sources, just as during the daytime, the stars that are hidden by the sun’s brightness can be seen vividly from the bottom of a well. (CSM 15). Secondly, these two kinds of epochs, nocturnal and diurnal, are neither culturally nor spiritually equivalent. Every “enlightened” age is a decline into relative superficiality and alienation from the sources. Thirdly, and most importantly, in both kinds of epochs, the “primordial Logos”—“the source of knowledge and reality,” “who contains not only our own actions but the entire fullness of the past, present, and future”—ever continues to reign in all things, even in those epochs that require special efforts to discern this faithful sovereignty (CSM 95n4). The created world ever retains its Incarnational wellsprings; the grace of God still extends to us, pervading even the shell of our self-sufficiency and autonomy (CSM 94n, 95n). And it is on that basis that Florensky is able to exhort that “we cannot take anything from [the world] in its crude state.” Rather, we are called to “spiritualize” all that we encounter, transforming what is around us into “the image of Christ” that already abides within it (CC 14).
3. The culture of modernity, beginning with the Renaissance, has barricaded itself against the deeper sources of life, forging an anti-sacred cult of autonomy, a culture of active rebellion against God and the rootedness of creation in a transcendent order.
Florensky’s critique of modernity is radical and incisive, calling out this epoch as the uttermost alienation of humanity from its life-giving sources. But his critique is by no means delivered from an external or exclusively transcendent position. Florensky had mastered virtually all modes of knowledge of the modern age, from mathematics, science, and engineering to the principal disciplines of the humanities. Moreover, his critique carries not a nostalgic or retrograde tone, but a spirit of hopefulness, the sense of an incipient restoration of spiritual health.
We need not embrace it fully or uncritically in order to recognize the importance of its central insights. For example, the irreversible onset of cultural dissolution, of an end to modernity itself, is now widely acknowledged, especially in academic circles, where it is taken as indisputable that our culture is “post-modern.” But what this means, and what we might expect to replace the fading culture of modernity—this is by no means clear. Many of the postmortems, especially those of certain French post-structuralists, seem less to ameliorate than to intensify the worst features of modernity, articulating a worldview that is even more secular, abstract, and sterile than the Enlightenment paradigm.
Florensky saw the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution in his native Russia less as a triumph of communism as such than as a culminating victory of the secularism that had long been at work. But is this diagnosis of triumphant secularism consistent with his claim that culture is inherently rooted in cult? Forestalling this objection, Florensky argues that in the Modern Age, the religious cult has been progressively replaced by something that is indeed cultic, but that is hostile to all that is sacred. Thus, it is still determined by the cult, for it defines itself precisely by its systematic opposition to all that is sacred and religious. Perversely, it is an anti-religious cult—a cult of autonomy from God, whose ritual activity consists in banishing God from the world, engendering a culture that is inherently hostile to the sacred cult and its theurgic transformation of the world, thereby assaulting its moorings in a transcendent order.
D. Modernity’s Assault Upon the Sacred Cult
Only a brief outline of Florensky’s powerful critique of modernity is possible here. But his primary claim is straightforward: Modernity is founded upon a secular cult of autonomy, stridently dogmatic, its gospel proclaiming both the autonomy of nature and the autonomy of humanity. This autonomy frees itself not from sinfulness and passions, but from God Himself, renouncing the unseen infusion of nature with higher realms, while asserting the human will against everything higher than itself. Accordingly, we may identify the two great secular saints of modernity, our modern Sts Peter and Paul, as Galileo (who secures the naturalism of modernity) and Kant (who secures its humanism).
First, modernity is committed to a naturalistic metaphysic, recognizing as real only those aspects of nature that the natural sciences can identify and conceptualize, and unambiguously dismissing what science cannot comprehend, even to the extent of waging spiritual warfare upon it. Firstly, modernity wages war upon form, and upon the notion that the kosmos is always structured beforehand according to God-given forms, possessing their own integrity and related to one another in incalculable ways. Instead, it regards both physical world and humanity as raw material to be freely shaped and reconfigured, subject only to the decrees of human willing. In contrast, Florensky’s understanding of form assimilates and transforms the Platonic eidos, understanding form as inner intelligibility and ordering principle, but also as face or countenance, in accord with the original meaning of the Greek word eidos as “looks” or aspect. But his philosophy of form accords even more with the theological metaphysics of St Maximus the Confessor, who saw the logoi of creation as what give each creature its unique identity and intelligibility, while at the same time reflecting the Eternal Logos—a unique imaging of the face of Christ within creation. But for the metaphysics of modernity, physical reality has no inherent form or inner integrity, its infinite malleability submitting itself utterly to our utilization of it. Estranged from its Creator, material creation is understood through a new kind of Manichaeism, that sees physical things as impenetrable and self-enclosed, formless and recalcitrant, in need of human mastery and re-configuration.
Secondarily, modernity wages war upon the symbolic ontology of creation, i.e. upon the symbolic being of creation that has been created to serve as the essential hinge or interface between inner and outer, reality and meaning, being and appearance, surface and depth—between essence and energy. This symbolic being is the ontological capacity of what is lower to express and reveal what is higher, of the visible to manifest the invisible, “built in” to the very being of creation. However, Galileo severs the symbolic bonds between these two dimensions deliberately and forcefully, in relation to his scientific cosmology, but gratuitously rather than integrally and necessarily. The resulting self-enclosure of physical reality is fateful, thickening for subsequent generations the outer shell of creation, making the dancing surface of sensible energies into a hard shell, an impermeable armor against meaning and transcendence. Whereas nature was once translucent to higher realms, eloquent and sonorous to human experience, it now becomes mute and opaque, indifferent material available for unimpeded exploitation. No space remains open here for sacred epiphanies. In a closed world, barricaded against its own symbolic depth-dimension and fortified against transcendence altogether, divine epiphanies become unintelligible. How, asks Florensky, can we resort to such blasphemy as tracking within Euclidean coordinates either Gabriel’s arrival (The Annunciation) or Christ’s departure (The Ascension), employing the laws of the conservation of energy and indestructibility of matter? Furthermore, Florensky argues, “if one acknowledges that angels can appear, one would have to acknowledge that the world is not [fully] fortified, that no scientific construction is absolute.” (CSM 122). This would mean that,science would not be for us the only, or even the epistemically primary mode of world-understanding. Finally, this metaphysical hardening of nature, i.e. the naturalistic or materialistic world-understanding that permeates our culture, refuses the world as something given by God, a gift of divine creativity and love, but dogmatically insists on nature as an autonomous and self-subsisting realm, disconnected from its Creator, harboing no apertures for transcendence.
But the modern epoch is not just naturalistic, it is also humanistic, asserting the autonomy of humanity, while carrying out an unflinching amputation of anything exceeding our own self-determination. Florensky sees the anticipation of this modern cult of autonomy in the Phariseeism that Christ Himself considered his chief adversary. For the Pharisees had wrested the Law away from God to serve their own province. And this autonomous appropriation of the law—the very act of taking it upon ourselves to decide that the law is what is truly important in the cult—rejects the law as a God-given, life-giving blessing, bringing with it the gift of God’s transformative energies. Assigning the Law to ourselves—usurping God’s giving of the law by appointing ourselves as its true and proper guardians—becomes a kind of anti-theurgic larceny that presumes to give (as if it were ours to bestow) the Law to ourselves, auto-nomos. And it this, Florensky argues, that serves as the key both to explaining why Christ so unsparingly chastened the Pharisees, as well as understanding the humanistic autonomy of the modern age. The champion of this modern autonomy of humanity is Immanuel Kant, who argues that our human dignity consists in adherence to the law for the very sake of the law itself. He insists that authentic morality must be self-legislated, must be given to ourselves by ourselves, and therefore must be freed from anything external to our own practical rationality. Above all, it must be free from the Lawgiving Creator Himself, lest our human dignity be compromised and degraded.
Florensky maintains that this modern, humanistic declaration of autonomy, so proudly proclaimed as a banner of Renaissance and Enlightenment culture, is not just a matter of taste and fashion, but something radically errant, proud and sinful; it is nothing less than a spiritual infection. And he clarifies this diagnosis by stating that this disease may assume two forms. First, there can be an acute infection, “a more profound and conscious resistance to Christ,” lending an eschatological tone to the age, a state of crisis in which “every person will be absolutely free to say ‘yes’ either to Christ or to the Antichrist.” That is, there will no longer be cultural guardrails to save us from the precipice.
But there is another, chronic kind of infection, that is even more pernicious, because it is covert, hidden from view, even able to present itself as what is most authentically Christian. “While outwardly defending religion,” states Florensky, it proceeds, one step after another, to “wrest away from [Christianity] regions of personal autonomy,” imagining as it proceeds that each teaching it discards is merely one more historical accretion, fortuitous and non-essential. Eventually, all that is left of Christianity is one small corner of life, that is occupied by an outward, pharisaical morality (or more currently, an obsessive fixation on “social justice”) that passes for being the fundamental teaching of Christianity itself. True cultic activity, as a living relation to God, as a path to transforming world and self, is dismissed as superstitious, obscurantist, and reactionary.
Beneath the euphoric assertions of self-autonomy, however, lies a hidden reservoir of pride—of self-idolatry. In the place of the Christian cult, there is formed a new, secular cult of autonomy. This cult is not the same as a commitment to liberal democracy, contending as one polity among others, suitable for some nations and less so for others. It is much more than this, essentially different from any political philosophy. For while concealing its very status as a cult, the cult of autonomy demands fervent allegiance to the primacy of autonomy and individual choice, stridently insisting that all choices must be applauded, while any limitation or even disapproval of individual license is sinful and heretical, no matter how bizarre, destructive, or ungodly the choices in question. Moreover, its credo of autonomy must be affirmed as both universal and absolute, requiring its believers to act as missionaries of colonial power, imposing the cult of autonomy upon the nations of the world, often through military action, irrespective of their traditional beliefs and practices. The cult of autonomy hastens to bring about its own eschaton, the fulfillment of what neoconservatives and neoliberals alike regard as the culminating “end of history.” Unfortunately, the Orthodox Church is by no means immune from this spiritual contagion. Indeed, some of its influential figures maintain that this same cult of autonomy, this most virulent adversary of the Christian cult, is itself the very heart of Christian belief and practice.
E. Conclusion
Florensky robustly and persuasively maintains that culture pervades every aspect of thought and consciousness, perhaps most effectively when we are unaware of its influence upon us. His exposition shows the perils of believing that we need not engage the dominant culture, and what we may thus remain aloof from it. However, such an engagement falters if it interrogates culture only in search of inner contradictions, negating perceived inadequacies without reference to transcendent realities. For such efforts will end up either idolizing the conceits of the epoch itself, or like Tolstoy’s culture-critique, elevating personal preferences into fundamental principles. In contrast, Florensky’s Incarnational approach orients itself by seeking the Logos at work within the world, while mindfully discerning the dangers of all that opposes it. Especially in our hybrid, transitional culture, we need a thoroughgoing critique of culture that can prepare the way for a fully Incarnational worldview, and perhaps even for a new medieval epoch—while at the same time, just as during the waning of every age, remaining watchful for a more radical eschatological unfolding—the true eschaton, for which spiritual discernment will be far more necessary.
[1] Georges Florovsky, “Faith and Culture,” in Christianity and Culture, Collected Works Volume II, pp 16f.
[2] Georges Florovsky, “Christianity and Civilization,” in Christianity and Culture, Collected Works Volume II, pp 124f; italics added.
[3] Ibid, p. 125.
[4] Ibid., p. 126.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Pavel A. Florenskij, La filosophia del culto, a cura di Natalino Valentini (Milano: San Pauolo) 2016, p. 134
[7] Florenskij, La filosophia del culto, p. 125.