Florensky and the personalisation of the word

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.