“Restrainers of Rationality”: Pavel Florensky’s Ascetic Reception of Schelling’s Personalism

This paper investigates the relationship between Schelling’s philosophy and Russian personalism. By examining Pavel Florensky’s formulation of personhood, I will demonstrate how the language of Orthodox spirituality, with particular focus on asceticism, was key for the critical appropriation of Schelling’s thought. Both Schelling and his Orthodox readers were keen to uphold an account of the person as irreducible to the thing-like categories of concepts. But, I argue, Florensky dramatically reconfigured Schelling’s positive solutions by appealing to a theological conception of God’s essence as love and an understanding of asceticism as the practice by which one comes to appropriate this loving essence as the very content of one’s own life. By tightly identifying this kind of ascetic practitioner with the “restrainers of rationality,” Florensky transposed Schelling’s personalist insights into an Orthodox Christian key.