https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/58391 Tue, 14 Apr 2026 23:29:27 GMT 2026-04-14T23:29:27Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/58419 Title: Pavel Aleksandrovic Florenskij : lectures on the Christian worldview Authors: Camilleri, Charló Abstract: The Florenskian text, here being subjected to our reactions and reflections, takes us back to Pavel Aleksandrovic Florenskij’s lectures in the Summer and Autumn of 1921 at the Moscovite Theological Academy. There are two versions of these lectures, Florenskij’s own brief notes, and a more complete transcription by his students. The text I was asked to react to is the latter. Florenskij’s personal notes are only published in Russian, in volume three of the Complete Works.1 The student’s transcriptions have also been published in Italian and in English.2 The context is that of the great famine which lasted till 1922 and which left no less than five million victims. This famine, as others in Russian history, was the result of the economic disruption sparked during World War I and amplified through four instabilities brought by, namely: the Russian Revolution; the Russian Civil War; the War Communism policy which started in 1918 and included the confiscation of religious property; the Bolshevik food apportionment policy which was made worse by inefficient rail systems that were unable to distribute food resourcefully. The 1921-1922 drought, then, aggravated the state of affairs to a national famine calamity. Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/58419 2019-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/58418 Title: Florensky and the personalisation of the word Authors: Fsadni, Ranier Abstract: What came first, the word or the deed? What are the origins of religion? What is its relationship to mass psychology? Is religion a form of magical thinking? These quintessential nineteenth-century questions waned around the middle of the twentieth but have returned with force today. They were initially raised in the light of the then new theories of socio-cultural and biological evolution; they faded because the initial speculative answers, based on little ethnographic data, were found to be naive once religions around the world were studied using fieldwork methods; but today, the richer ethnographic record together with advances in the neurological and information sciences, enable the questions to be approached with greater sophistication. For a social anthropologsist to read Pavel Florensky with this background can be a disconcerting experience. One reason, no doubt, has to do with this particular social anthropologist’s very limited knowledge of Florensky’s intellectual milieu. But the main reason is another. Florensky is clearly concerned with those same nineteenth-century questions, as well as others relating, say, to telepathy, kinetic energy and spiritualism. They are the same questions tackled, in a different milieu and in a completely different style by G.K. Chesterton in his polemics against public intellectuals that he considered either excessively materialist or excessively spiritualist. Unlike Chesterton, Florensky shows some familiarity with certain ethnographic theories, some of which he explicitly mentions, while the implied presence of others is impossible to miss. Throughout, what is arresting is the way that Florensky manages to be both a figure of his age and an uncanny precursor of several later intellectual developments. In the process he flies against the characteristic assumptions of both contemporaries and successors. Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/58418 2019-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/58417 Title: Volentem ducunt : guiding the willing out of a tunnel Authors: Zammit, Michael Abstract: In his Obratnaia perspekiva (Reverse perspective), a lecture written in October 1919, Pavel Florensky (1882-1937) notes: “The liveliness of the discussion that ensued brought home to me that the question of space was one of the fundamental ones in art and, I would go even further, in the understanding of the world in general.” Then again in a letter to his daughter Ol’ga, sent from Solovki on the 13th May 1937, the year of his assassination, he retorts: -- The secret of creativity lies in the preservation of youth. The secret of genius lies in the preservation of something infantile, an infantile intuition that endures throughout life. It is a question of a certain constitution that provides genius with an objective perception of the world, one that does not gravitate towards a centre: a kind of reverse perspective, one that is, therefore, integral and real. -- As the perception becomes drawn to gravitate towards some centre, the creativity that springs from the preservation of youthfulness becomes challenged. Innocence is lost. Genius is forfeited and perspective acquires the potential for the violation of the real. After Baudelaire, Florensky declares genius to be no more than childhood recaptured at will; “childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.” Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/58417 2019-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/58416 Title: The Church as body of Christ : Pavel Florenskij’s, The Concept of Church in Sacred Scripture Authors: Sciberras, Paul Abstract: Constraints of space demand finer focusing. Coming from the biblical exegetical field of studies, in this paper I will be concentrating on the parts of Florenskij’s book, The Concept of Church in Sacred Scripture,1 that deal with Methodological Considerations and the Dogmatic-Metaphysical Definition of the Church, in the exegetical analysis of Ephesians 1:23, considered by the Russian author as the Biblical New Testament and the Pauline text that best offers this definition. Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/58416 2019-01-01T00:00:00Z