The “old” and the “new” religious consciousness in the works of priest Pavel Florensky

Priest Pavel Florensky, a Russian religious philosopher, scientist, and theologian, is known for his effort to synthesize multiple areas of human knowledge and experience. It is this quality that actually provides Florensky’s work the diversity that continues to atract the special atention of various researchers of his heritage. Despite various influences, Florensky remained a fairly distinctive and original thinker. In this article, the author notes that Florensky imagined a future “update” of consciousness as achieving “integral knowledge”, in which the truths of religion for mankind will be as important as the truths of science. Using as examples Florensky’s relationship to the “Christian Fraternity of Struggle”, and the concepts developed by Merezhkovsky and Berdyaev, the author reviews his views on the idea of struggle for a new order of society, which seeks to create a new religion of “holy flesh” and new “anthropological revelation”. Te author concludes that though there is close resemblance between the concepts of Florensky and those of the representatives of the New Religious Consciousness movement, the two, nonetheless, exhibit some fundamental differences. According to Florensky, something new cannot cancel or modify the dogma of the Christian Church. In his opinion, future updates must occur in the “historical” Church and through the Church