The birth of Trinitarian ecclesiology: commentary on the fourth letter of Pavel Florensky’s “The pillar and ground of the truth”

Fr. Pavel Florensky’s well-known work “The Pillar and Ground of the Truth” has long been studied by various researchers. However, we cannot say that the problems of Russian religious thought associated with it have been completely resolved. In particular, the fourth letter “The Light of the Truth” in “The Pillar and Ground of the Truth” expresses the complex of ideas that provide a metaphysical basis for the Trinitarian model of the Church. These ideas seem to be underestimated although they might be considered central to the whole work because they reveal the meaning of its epigraph: amoris finis, ut duo unum fiant. The analysis of their genesis points to certain representatives of Russian academic theology and religious philosophy, from whose works Florensky borrows the elements he needs, having freely transformed them in his synthesis. However, it is Florensky’s statement on the passiveness of created love directed at God (in spite of his characteristic critical attitude to the Western tradition) that proves to be the most interesting thing in this respect. This concept, which does not agree with the Eastern perception of deification as a purposeful ecstatic process, made Pavel Florensky draw the conclusion that “godlike” active love for a created person is possible only in relation to another created person. The metaphysics of interpersonal relations thus reconstructed in accordance with the divine model forms the ground of Trinitarian ecclesiology.