Iconostasis

St Vladimirs Seminary Press, August 1996. Paper Back. New. Pavel Florensky is concerned with boundaries-- between dreaming and waking, visible and invisible, heaven and earth. He sees in the iconostasis the perfect image of the boundary. Superficially it divides, in the Orthodox temple, the nave from the sanctuary; but its true function is to be the place where visible and invisible, heaven and earth are united. Florensky's own life represented the obliteration of boundaries: a brilliant young man raised in an agnostic home who converted to Orthodoxy; a mathematician and physicist who integrated into his vocation his growing understanding of philosophy and theology; a young theological student with ascetical, monastic yearnings who ultimately felt called to the married life; a priest whose brilliance compelled the newly empowered Bolsheviks to allow him to continue to teach mathematics though he refused to cease wearing his priestly cassock; and finally, an inhabitant of the Gulag who sacrificed outward righteousness by signing a false confession to save the life of another man. Iconostasis is Florensky's last book, a strange, singular, difficult work, which represents his apprehension of truth in realms normally considered disparate or even contradictory. It moves ceaselessly, as did Florensky himself, from one world to another, from concrete concerns of artistic technique to the seemingly arcane heights of Platonic metaphysics and Trinitarian theology.