Reception of Plato’s Doctrine on Eternal Ideas in Philosophical and Theological Works of Priest Pavel Florensky

The article discusses the problem of Priest Pavel Florensky’s perception of Plato’s teaching on eternal ideas. It is noted that this topic is of particular interest in the anthropological aspect of his philosophical and theological heritage. Fr. Pavel Florensky interprets Plato’s ideas as God’s creative plan for the world realized in eternity. On the basis of this concept, he develops his doctrine of Sophia as a consubstantial aggregate of ideal (deified) personalities. A man in such a concept represents a living unity of an ideal personality and its manifestation in the empirical world. Fr. Pavel Florensky identifies the ideal personality with the noumenon, the Name and the “Guardian Angel” of human. He identifies manifestation of the ideal personality in the world, as phenomenon, with empirical consciousness. Primary attention is paid to the problem of the relationship between the empirical consciousness and the eternal idea of human. The focus is on Fr. Pavel Florensky’s teaching about the “potentialities of consciousness” and the growth of energy tension with advancement to “deeper” subconscious and unconscious levels of human nature. The topic of this article requires to draw special attention to the fact that according to Fr. Pavel Florensky, the human personality does not consist of “two selves” (ideal and empirical), but is consciousness and self-consciousness formed in the empirical world and ontologically based on the eternal noumenon that can be called “ideal personality” only in a figurative sense. It is his interpretation of this reality that allows revealing Fr. Pavel Florensky’s interpretation of Platonism in the aspect of the doctrine of eternal ideas.