Florence, Council of (1438–1439)

DIMITRI CONOMOS

After roughly three-and-a-half centuries of schism, the churches of the East and West met in the Council of Florence between 1438 and 1439 to discuss unity. Meeting first at Ferrara, a transfer to Florence was soon effected because of plague and because the city fathers there were willing to defray the costs. On the Latin side there was a genuine desire to end the schism, but they also desired to extend the jurisdiction of the papacy over all Christendom. The Greeks also had the genuine Christian desire for church union, but also what made them accept the West as a venue was the fact that Constantinople, with a population of less than 50,000 inhabi­tants, was then in terminal decline. The Turks had conquered most of its ancient empire; surrounding it on all sides, they were now only awaiting the opportunity to deliver the coup de grace. The Byzantine Empire was in most urgent need of help to be able to defend itself. Hope for that lay only in the West. The one institution there that might channel effective aid was the papacy, which had launched and directed so many Crusades of European Christianity. The Byzantine emperor believed that the pope was able to speak for all Latins and raise immediate military help against the Ottomans. The best way of winning papal support would be the union of the churches. So the Greeks came to Florence in 1439 to discuss unity with the Latins.

Indeed, it was not only the Greek Church that came but also the Oriental Church, for the Council of Florence was, to all appearances, the most ecumenical of coun­cils. Emperor John VIII Palaeologos attended, as did Joseph, Patriarch of Constantinople, accompanied by twenty Greek metropolitans, as well as bishops from Russia, Georgia, and Moldo-Wallachia. Moreover, five of the Greeks were procura­tors of the oriental patriarchates, nominated as delegates by those patriarchates them­selves. Delegates from Ethiopia were sent by Emperor Zara Yacqob at the pope’s request.

A decree of union, signed on July 6,1439, was the result, for agreement had been reached by the delegates on the main doc­trinal points that were held to divide the two churches: Purgatory, papal primacy, the use of leavened or unleavened bread in the Eucharist and, more especially, the filioque, both in regard to its legitimacy as an addition to the creed apart from an ecumenical council and in terms of its orthodoxy as a doctrine. Only Markos Eugenikos, metropolitan of Ephesus, who was later canonized by the Orthodox Church, refused to sign. He proved to rep­resent the prevailing mentality of the Orthodox populations in the East. Patriarch Joseph died two days after the agreement, and the Orthodox hierarchs did not then elect another leader but took the position that the Florentine decision needed ratifica­tion by an eastern synod. Thus, the Union of Florence, though celebrated throughout Western Europe (bells were rung in all the churches of England), proved no more of a reality in the East than its predecessor at Lyons (1274). Emperor John VIII and his successor, the last Emperor Constantine XI, both remained loyal to the Union, but they were powerless to enforce it on their subjects and did not even dare to proclaim it publicly in Constantinople until 1452, after which many Orthodox refused to attend services at Hagia Sophia. The Grand Duke Lucas Notaras remarked on this occasion: “I would rather see the Mos­lem turban in the midst of the city than the Latin mitre.”

SEE ALSO: Filioque, St. Mark of Ephesus (1392–1445)

Plate 24 Emperor John VIII Palaeologos depicted as one of the Magi by Benozzo Gozzoli (1420–1497). Florence, Palazzo Medici-Riccardi. © 2010. Photo Scala, Florence. Courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att.

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Alberigo, G. (ed.) (1991) The Council of Ferrar- Florence. Louvain: Presses Universitaires de Louvain.

Conomos, D. (2003) “Music as Religious Propa­ganda: Venetian Polyphony and a Byzantine Response to the Council of Florence,” in J. Behr, A. Louth, and D. Conomos (eds.) “Abba”: The Tradition of Orthodoxy in the West. New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, pp. 111–34.

Geanakoplos, D. J. (1955) “The Council of Florence (1438–9) and the Problem of Union between the Byzantine and Latin Churches,” Church History 24: 324–46. Reprinted in D. J. Geanakoplos (1989), Constantinople and the West. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 224–54.

Gill, J. (1959) The Council of Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Siecinski, E. (2010) The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Florensky, Pavel

Alexandrovich

(1882–1937)

BRUCE FOLTZ

Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky was a mathematician, physicist, engineer, and inventor, as well as a distinguished linguist, art historian, theologian, and philosopher, who is often compared to Leonardo and Leibniz, as one of Europe’s great polymaths. Of Russian and Armenian ancestry, his youth in the Caucasus Mountains gave him an enduring, mystical affinity for nature. He graduated with highest honors from Moscow University in 1904, with an extraordinary thesis that earned him the offer of an immediate position in the math­ematics faculty. Instead, Florensky entered the Moscow Theological Academy, where he was later appointed senior lecturer in philosophy. Ordained an Orthodox priest in 1911, he insisted on wearing cassock and cross while conducting his university duties, even through the Stalinist purges. He was exiled to the labor camps in Siberia in 1933, and ultimately to the infamous Solovetsky gulag on the White Sea, where he nevertheless conducted original scientific research on Arctic flora, while ministering to his fellow prisoners. He was murdered by the KGB in 1937, a loss lamented in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.

Plate 25 Mikhail Vasilievich Nesterov (1862–1942), The Philosophers. Painting of Pavel Florensky and Sergius Bulgakov. State Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia/Bridgeman Art Library.

Florensky’s major work, The Pillar and Ground of Truth (Russian original, 1914; English translation, 1997), brings to the tradition of Byzantine philosophy and the­ology the rich resources of Russian mystical spirituality and a thorough grasp of western philosophy. The book is dialectical and synthetic, traversing dichotomies in ways that may seem paradoxical to the concep­tual landscape of Western Europe. And it is indeed one of its primary claims that the truth that matters most must appear antinomial to discursive thought – that it is something paradoxical, best encountered in “discontinuities.” In a series of twelve letters, each beginning like a haiku poem with reflections infusing seasonal and affec­tive ambience with metaphysical insight, he proceeds from the principle of identity (A = A) to an affirmation of radical other­ness (A † [-A]), maintaining that “the act of knowing is not just gnoseological but also an ontological act,” and that “knowing is a real going of the knower out of himself” Genuine knowledge thus entails a union of love between the knower and the known, which Florensky understands in trinitarian terms: from the side of the knower, it is truth; from the side of the known, it is love; and from the extrinsic perspective of a third party, it is beauty. Florensky main­tains that the only escape from the torment of doubt, and from a skepticism that cannot ground even itself, is to be caught up in the love of a trinitarian God whose unity of “one essence” (homoousion), affirmed in the Nicene Creed, consists in the love that radically unites what is both same and other: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Pillar and Ground is also known for its elucidation of the Divine Sophia, or Holy Wisdom, understood aesthetically as a numinous depth of nature and principle of cosmic ordering, while stopping short of theologi­cal claims that would become controversial in the case of his friend and colleague, Fr. Sergei Bulgakov. It is a masterpiece of extraordinary intellectual achievement, rare poetic beauty, and compelling spiritual power.

Many of his later essays have been published posthumously (in Russian) as From the Watersheds of Thinking (1990). In his aesthetics, Florensky was associated with the Russian Symbolists, and some of his more important essays on the theory and history of art have been translated into English.

SEE ALSO: Bulgakov, Sergius (Sergei) (1871–1944); Russia, Patriarchal Orthodox Church of

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Bychkov, V. (1993) The Aesthetic Face of Being: Art in the Theology of Pavel Florensky, trans. R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Florenskij, P. (1995) “Christianity and Culture,” in R. Bird (ed.) Culture and Christian Unity: Essays by Pavel Florenskij and Lev Lopatin. New Haven: The Variable Press.

Florenskij, P. (1995) The Trinity: St. Sergius Lavra and Russia, trans. R. Bird. New Haven: The Variable Press.

Florensky, P. (1986) “Mysteries and Rites,” trans. R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky. St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 30, 4.

Florensky, P. (1993) “The Point,” Geografitty 1, 1: 28–39.

Florensky, P. (1996) Iconostasis, trans. D. Sheehan and O. Andrejev. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Florensky, P. (1997) The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters, trans. B. Jakim. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Florensky, P. (2002) Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, ed. N. Miller, trans. W. Salmond London: Reaktion Books.

Florensky, St. P. (1999) Salt of the Earth: An Encounter with a Holy Russian Elder, trans. R. Betts. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood.

McGuckin, J. A. (2009) “Fr. Pavel Florensky (1882–1937) on Iconic Dreaming,” in J. Gattrall and D. Greenfield (eds.) Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 207–23. Slesinski, R. (1984) Pavel Florensky: A Metaphysic of Love. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.