Iconic Dreaming

Fr. Pavel Florensky & Iconic Dreaming.

J.A. McGuckin

I. A Life lived in the Interstices.

On December 8th, in the bitter winter of 1937, the priest Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky was taken by Stalin’s NKVD from his labour camp on the Solovetsky islands in the White Sea, brought by lorry to the suburbs of Leningrad, and executed by close range pistol shot at the Rzhevsky artillery range near Toskovo, 30 kilometres to the south of the city. The day of his death, according to reports by the human rights group ‘Memorial’, saw the execution of a total of 509 dissidents in the Leningrad area. It had earlier been presumed that his body lay somewhere in the killing fields of Levashyovo , but in August of 2002 the remains of 30,000 victims were unearthed at Toksovo, another suburban area of St. Petersburg, finally settling an old question as to what had happened to the many thousands of purge victims of Stalin’s Leningrad-based terror that had remained unaccounted to date . That cold December morning was the feast, in the Orthodox calendar, of Saint Patapius the recluse, whose entry in the liturgical Synaxarion notes that he was a ‘source of healing and comfort to many people’, and had ‘spent many years in the wilderness.’ Today Pavel Aleksandrovich is himself enrolled in the calendar of those same saints of the Orthodox Church. The symbolic juxtaposition of himself and Patapius ( for the calendar of saints always lists the candidate on the day of their ‘struggle’, that is the death-day when they gave their ‘witness’) would have struck him as not inappropriate and, like Patapius in his own time, Florensky’s impact continues today to move out from his ‘seclusion’ and ‘wilderness experience’ under Stalinist Soviet oppression ( culminating in his final years in a labour camp) to a slowly expanding international reputation, (one that now often sees him designated the ‘Russian Da Vinci’) and an increasing intellectual following. From the 1960’s onwards Russian dissident religious intelligentsia began to take note of his work, and today with a growing amount of his writing available in English translation , his name is becoming more widely familiar among diaspora Orthodox theologians and other interested scholars.

His life had begun on January 9th, 1882, in Yevlakh, Azerbaijan, among a railroad worker’s family that was not particularly religious, but certainly literate, cultured, and very closely bonded, as his autobiographical writings reveal . The young Florensky showed an early aptitude for academics, and was well versed in mathematics and scientific studies (especially Physics) from his gymnasium years in Tbilisi. In his autobiographical notes he speaks of a certain crisis he had with a passionately held view of his childhood that empirical science could be a macro-theory for existence’s meaning. It was caused by his teenage reading of Tolstoy, which shocked him into a deeply felt realization of ‘the limits of knowledge’, as he described it. This early ‘loss of faith’ in Physics deepened his interest in Mathematics as a purer metaphysical guide, and in August 1900 he was accepted into the Mathematics Division of Moscow University , from which he graduated in 1904 with the reputation of being the most brilliant student of recent generations . His thesis won the highest honours, and on the strength of it the Mathematics faculty offered him an academic post in the department, which he turned down ( for what was widely regarded as an utterly mad reason) in order to enrol in the Moscow Theological Academy. After his graduation, however, he never ceased working as a scientist, activity which became a dominant intellectual obsession for the rest of his life. From this time onward he also developed a strongly symbolist philosophy, and (progressively) a distinctive religious vision that attempted to synthesize multi-dimensional realms of experience. His well known adherence to the Sophiological movement is part of this, though it will not be a major focus of this present essay. Florensky was the only leading member of that school to remain in Russia, and it cost him greatly. His thought, from the time of his growing rapprochement with the Orthodox Church, was marked by a deep interest in antinomies as descriptive of the inner character of being. His notoriously difficult writing style, his delight in ambiguity, his love of marginality in thought and practical existence, and his strong use of paradox and oppositional figuration as methods of pursuing insight, are all part and parcel of this overarching philosophical ‘journey’ to an experience of Truth through and in antinomy. It will be the subject of the second part of this essay to consider Florensky’s theory of Iconic dreaming in that context.

After he left the Mathematics department, two of Florensky’s professors remained important influences on him personally, NN Luzin who was the doyen of the Moscow school of mathematics, and his calculus teacher NV Bugaev. The latter was the father of the Russian symbolist poet Andrei Belyi , and Florensky thus came into the circle of his wider family. The symbolist poets Viacheslav Ivanov , and especially Belyi, exercised a powerful effect on Pavel Aleksandrovich, the latter encouraging his growing desire to enter into an explicit communion with the Orthodox Church into which he had been baptised as an infant. Bishop Anthony Florentsov became his confessor and guide at this period of his life , arranging for his entrance into the seminary course of the Moscow Theological Academy in 1904, and simultaneously steering the young ‘convert’ away from his expressed desire to enter monastic life, which Florentsov saw would have meant, in practice, a suppression of his many academic gifts, and cultural potentialities. Since the episcopal blessing was essential for Florensky’s ambition to enter the ascetic state (the Bishop had spoken to him glowingly of the famed Solovki monastery), the plan was apparently terminated. It would, however, like so many of the strange antinomies which Florensky saw as printed onto the pattern of existence, actually come to fulfilment much later in his life’s course. The monastic life is described in Orthodox tradition as the election of a ‘premature death’ to the world, and in some sense the solitary vocation of Pavel Aleksandrovich to the ‘death to self’ was indeed completed when he was led, years later, through the doors of that same Solovki monastery in Siberia (after it had been transformed into the most feared penitentiary labour camp in all Soviet Russia ).

Florensky’s growing desire to find a synthetic world view that would embrace all material phenomena clearly led to the strong development of his interest in Orthodoxy in his early twenties - something he would habitually refer to later as the discovery of the ‘ecclesial’ mind (Tserkovnost), a term that is sometimes badly rendered as ‘churchliness’ but is far more substantial a concept than mere ecclesiasticism , being comparable to what other Slavophiles such as Berdyaev, Khomiakov, and Bulgakov meant by ‘Sobornost’, that quest for essential unity given and symbolized in the mystical dimension of purposeful-turning which lay behind the diffracted variety of material phenomena. It was a religious impetus and aspiration as old as the Church itself, and had been taken up by foundational Christian theorists of antiquity in a conscious reaction to Neo-Platonic and Gnostic attempts to resolve the issue of the relation of ‘the One and the Many’.

The issue of cosmic unity-in-diversity provided by the ground of being which is rooted in the Divine Wisdom that forms, shapes, and transfigures the world (Logos-Sophia) was a dominant theme of the most significant intellectual tradition of early Christian thought: a line that stretched from Origen of Alexandria , through Athanasius , Gregory of Nazianzus , Maximus the Confessor , and Dionysius the Areopagite. This, the so-called Alexandrian tradition of mystical theology , was also the chief intellectual lineage that was transported to Rus when the Byzantine empire first planted the Orthodox church in Slavic lands. It gave a profound shape and form to the entirety of later Russian theology and philosophy. It was, accordingly, no surprise that Florensky’s desire to discover the deeper ‘ground and unity’ of being, should correspond with his growing interest in, and discovery of, the Russian Orthodox Church, in its practical ( iconic and liturgical) as well as its noetic (patristic, ethical, and mystical) manifestations. Here he found embodied, in sophisticated theory and praxis, a tradition of religious thought and action where the concept of deification (Theosis) was seen as a primary energy and end-goal (telos) of the inner springs of all material and personal existence .

In 1908 Florensky graduated from the Theological Academy with a thesis entitled ‘On Religious Truth’ and was immediately appointed to its faculty as Professor of Philosophy. Following the advice of Bishop Anthony he was married soon after , in 1910, and his close family was a source of great joy for him. His belief that the power of love was the main synthesizing energy of a re-unified cosmos was manifested for him in two primary loci : his priestly Eucharistic ministry and his enthusiastic role as loving father of a family of five children. In 1911 he was ordained as one of the ‘white clergy’ (married priests), and 1914 saw the publication of one his most important religious studies: The Pillar and Foundation of Truth. His intellectual life from that time on was characterised by a dizzying array of interests ( he learned Iranian and Indic languages, a cultural knowledge which often illustrated his essays) not least art history, geography, astronomy and cosmology, but scientific research remained the thematic grounding of his intellectual reflection and he sustained a serious commitment to empirical research. One of the reasons his reputation has taken some time to internationalise is that he was never afraid to think creatively: resulting in several decidedly odd (and sometimes unpalatable ) ideas.

After the Revolution he was removed from his theological post, not least since the Bolsheviks simply commandeered the Academy buildings, but throughout the 1920’s he was allowed to function in public academic life as a scientific lecturer, and as an art-historian. He continued, where rooms could be found, to give some theological lectures and to advise seminarians. He also publicly demonstrated his priesthood wherever he went, by regularly and provocatively wearing the cassock, even when he gave scientific lectures or attended committees. In 1919 Florensky was appointed head of a plastics-producing factory by the Bolsheviks, and in 1921 was appointed as Professor of Physics and Engineering in the new Moscow Technical Institute, where he inaugurated a series of new initiatives in research and practical science. 1922 saw the completion of his aesthetic-theological reflections on metaphysics which he entitled Ikonostasis . He had continued to write theology since 1917 even though he saw no immediate prospect of it ever being published, and the 1922 forced exile of the dissident intelligentsia gave him little grounds for optimism. In 1927 he announced his invention of a non-coagulating machine oil (which of course had immense advantages in a cold climate), and which was given the suitably revolutionary name ‘Dekanite’ . From 1927 to 1933 Florensky was the Editor of the important Soviet Technical Encyclopedia, but his ‘oddity’ ( a very obvious liminality in all he did and said) and his persistent public witness to his ecclesiality, were starting to draw unwelcome attention. In 1928 he was dismissed from his academic offices and given a low-level laboratory job in Nizhni-Novgorod, as a humiliation. The following year the demotion was reversed and he was reinstated at the University and given other senior responsibilities in Moscow’s academic life.

If it had been a warning to mend his profile, he was not willing to take it. In 1932 he became a member of one of the State’s highest Scientific Committees (to whose meetings he still wore his dramatic priestly robes) but less than nine months later in February of 1933 he was arrested, and after being compelled to sign a manufactured confession was given, in June of that year, a ten year sentence in a Siberian labour camp. After his first year of incarceration he was transferred to the Solovki Gulag, which was maintained as a centre for ‘unreformables’. Even here in this outpost of Hell, his work was vital and innovative and he produced significant research on the permafrost, and invented a new method for the production of iodine from seaweed. His most important work, perhaps, was the constant manner in which he tried to sustain hope and an iconic witness of love among the camp’s starving inmates. After his execution on December 8th, by special order of the Leningrad headquarters of the Secret Police, his family were merely informed that communication with an unreformable was no longer permitted. It was not until 1944 that his wife was notified by the state simply and blankly that her husband had died on December 15th 1943. The anti-Stalin revisionist movement of the next generation witnessed Florensky’s ‘exoneration’ of all charges in a municipal courthouse of the city of Moscow on May 5th 1958. His works began to be circulated as samizdat after that point, under the close direction of his immediate family.

Albeit a brief sketch, this biographical synopsis is meant to demonstrate that his life is not incidental to his thought but, on the contrary, that in Florensky we see a deliberately purposeful attempt to live out his totalist vision. A life in Art has wholly merged in his case with the art of life. That carefully elaborated life, his work, and his ideas sought a unity in a metaphysical nexus which he found to be energised by a state of liminality. That liminal state was, ultimately, fatal for one who lived as Stalin’s scientific advisor, and attended party meeting in his cassock. The aesthetic theory of dream perception, and how it illumined Florensky’s understanding of the Icon (a most highly charged sacramental synopsis of life in the Orthodox intellectual context) is a particular aspect of Florensky’s liminality to which we now shall turn our attention. The relation of both things, however, is not accidental. The life of the man, considered as a substantive icon, is part and parcel of what he understood as the Icon as a substantive (hypostatic ) revelation of life. Florensky’s recent canonisation as a martyr is also part and parcel of his lifelong endeavour to witness to the transparency of the veil between the visible and invisible aspects of human consciousness in a material and psychic environment. He is, at one and the same moment, both the icon and its commentary. Now let us consider his theory of iconic dreaming in more detail.

II. The Interstices as Dream Revelation.

More than merely a prefatory introduction, Florensky’s discussion of dreams and their spiritual structure occupies the place of ‘gateway’ to his work Ikonostasis . His opening remarks set out a cosmically large canvas for stating the metaphysical issue under consideration: that the problem and mystery of creation lies in its ambivalent nature, as material and physical reality; and something that is more than a simply dichotomous reality, rather one where both ontological aspects ( the two worlds) overlap and interpenetrate each other. Using markers drawn from the Book of Genesis and the Creed, which affirm God’s creation of ‘both heaven and earth’, and of ‘things visible and invisible’, Florensky turns his attention to the boundary between the two states, as something that at one and the same moment ‘separates them; yet simultaneously … joins them’ in order to posit the dream life of the soul as an empirical manifestation of the issue of boundary, or liminality, that allows an insight into the nature of the overlap of the worlds where either a revelatory experience, or an artistic-philosophical insight, can be expected to occur.

His initial image is one of a veil, palpitating, diaphanous, and porous to light. The image is highly suggestive of the biblical paradigms which lie behind Florensky’s imagination here: for the etymological root of the concept he ostensibly discusses (removing the veil) is ‘apocalypse’ : but we need to note that the term he actually uses in his text is ‘tearing the veil’. This is evocative of the literarily paired moments in the Gospel of Mark when the ‘veil of the heavens was rent in two’ at the manifestation of Sophia on earth (the Baptism in the waters which for Orthodox theology is a highly charged symbol of Transfiguration), and also the occasion when the ‘temple veil was rent in two’ at the death of Jesus . Around these two epiphanic moments of the archetypal joining together of spirit and flesh, and their separation, the Gospel of Mark is symbolically structured. For the Evangelist, the idea of the ‘rent veil’ turns on the ancient Christian notion (also witnessed in the Letter to Hebrews, and the Gospel of John, that the body of the incarnate Wisdom was itself the New Temple of God on earth, replacing the Jerusalem temple decisively. In its turn, the idea of the body of the Lord as New Temple is closely related in the Johannine narrative to the Genesis account of Jacob falling asleep and dreaming at Bethel (the ancient site of the northern Temple), where he rests his head on the sacred stone (seen in ancient Jewish mystical understanding as the Stone of Anointment which prefigured the altar of the Holy Temple. The interplay between the two narratives ( the Dream of Jacob, and the Temple of Incarnate Sophia) is clearly witnessed in John 1.51 where the ‘ascending and descending’ angels of God (which constitute the moment of apocalypse for the apostle Nathanael) are drawn as an explicit evocation of the ‘ascent and descent’ of the angels at Bethel, the awesome holy place, which is depicted in Genesis 28.10-19 as a porous aperture for the interpenetrative engagement of the worlds of ‘spiritual seeing’ and ‘material grappling’.

All of this symbolism of the ‘dream and the revelation’ is complex and elevated theology prefiguring Florensky’s interweaving of the symbols of ascentive and descentive dream in his treatise Ikonostasis. As a learned Russian priest, versed in his scriptures, he presumes and presupposes this context of ascent and descent in his dream aesthetic, echoing the biblical paradigm of the twin movement of Revelation-Salvation, which is given in the recurring motif of the Anabasis and Katabasis of the Son of Man. It is, however, a large presupposition which often eludes those less versed in his biblically and patristically coded symbolism. This is typical of Florensky’s difficult and highly allusive, symbolist and poetic style of writing. Like the biblical writers, and the Greek Fathers after them, Florensky expects his readers to know the root of the symbols he will now begin to re-use and reapply in a ‘modernist’ context. He does not believe in stating them except as mysterious symbols framing the gateway of his analysis. It is almost as if he deliberately sets a preliminary ‘test’ of initiation, for his readers, to determine who will be able to comprehend the ‘Gnostic’ initiation he decides to give. So much in the matter of necessary prelude ( almost like reading the runes carved around the gateway). Let us now pass on through to the argument itself. This is what he says in elaboration of his theory of dreaming: “How do we understand this boundary ( of the visible and invisible worlds)? Here, as in any difficult metaphysical question, the best starting point always is what we already know in ourselves. The life of our own psyche, yes, our own soul’s life, is the truest basis upon which we may learn about this boundary between the two worlds. For within ourselves, life in the visible world alternates with life in the invisible, and thus we experience moments – sometimes brief, sometimes even the tiniest atom of time – when the two worlds grow so very near in us that we can see their intimate touching. At such fleeting moments in us, the veil of visibility is torn apart, and through that tear – that break we are still conscious of at that moment – we can sense that the invisible world (still unearthly, still invisible) is breathing : and that both this and another world are dissolving into each other. Our life in such moments becomes an unceasing stream in the same way that air when warmed streams upward from the heat.”

The dream is the correct place to start with an initiation, for Florensky sees it as: ‘the simplest entry into the invisible world’ (in the sense that most people are fully habituated to it ). But while all dreams serve as a liminal gateway into the invisible world (a dimension that can be ‘made visible’ only to the psychic perceptions), many of them are of the lowest order of perception, being chaotic in form, and fuelled by material needs, desires, and sense-colourations. Even so, the dream itself functions without fail as a gateway; as Florensky says: ‘Yet we know this too: that when we stand on the threshold between sleep and waking, when we stand at the boundary between the two worlds, our soul is engulfed by dreams.’ He takes the empirical aspect that dream activity is seen to be most active at the boundaries of entering ‘deep sleep’, and again on re-entering waking consciousness, as sufficient proof of the liminal revelatory power of the dream. Time itself follows new rules as determined no longer by chronological sequence and measure, but now by psychic perception. Chronos, as it were, has been transformed into Kairos : “ A dreamer passes into another system, another dimension, another measure wherein time is understood and experienced in ways completely unlike the ways of time in the visible world. In this new experience of time, the dreamer’s time, compared to time in the visible world, runs at infinite speed.”

This, as Florensky points out, is a common experience, in which ordinary people can gain an empathy with Relativity Theory which would otherwise be beyond them if they had to rely on the theoretical rhetoric of the mathematicians. He attributes the first important modern theoreticisation of New-Time, or ‘Instantaneous Time’, to the obscure Baron Carl Duprel (omitting to name Einstein altogether), especially commending him for the simple insight that this could be the case. However, Florensky notes, the most important understanding that Instantaneous Time can also run forward (sequentially) and backward he reserves as an insight for the moment.

Florensky complains (in his day with some justification) that dreams have escaped sufficient analysis as part of the psychic development of each individual, since they have been commonly regarded as random, caused by trivial external stimuli, and were thus regarded by serious philosophers as basically ‘unworthy of consideration and thought’. But what is most significant for him is the issue of the ‘internal structure’ of the dream, which is always overlooked in favour of the more amusing or memorable dream narrative. It is the ‘sequence’ of the dream images, however, which demonstrates the chief epistemological point he wishes to abstract. Here at first sight is the most random and nonsensical aspect of the dream. One who recalls the sequence of dream images, can recount how remarkable twists of dream events are set off by preceding images in an apparently superficial way. The best example of this is the well-known humorous song in Gilbert and Sullivan of the mad adventures of the restless dreamer. For Florensky, however, a deeper perception of this apparently random set of associative ideas is given in the structural quality of the dream itself wherein the external cause of the dream ( a noise, or light, or other external stimuli that effects the sequence of images) which he designates Ω, is related to the internal sequence of dream images A – X, where A is the initial image of the sequence and X represents the ‘conclusive dream event’ or the ‘denouement’ where the dream’s inner logic is brought to full and final resolution in a satisfactory way. He is particularly interested in pursuing the notion that the Omega event and the denouement coincide: “What makes a the dreamer awake ? When we look at this question from the viewpoint of waking consciousness, we might want to say that it is Ω ( the noise or the light) that awakens us. From within the dream, however, it is plainly the conclusive dream event X – the denouement – that, precisely because it ends the dream, awakens us. Taken together, we can see that Ω and X almost perfectly coincide in such a way that the ‘dreamed content’ and the ‘wakened cause’ are one and the same. This coincidence is usually so exact that we never even wonder about the relation of X and Ω: the denouement is unquestionably a ‘dream paraphrase’ of some external stimulus invading our dream from without.”

Florensky gives the example of a series of dream narratives taken from Gilderbrand to illustrate this. His central point is that the episode of the external stimulus Ω that wakens the dreamer ( say a pillow falling on the chest ) enters synchronicity with the inner world of the dream when it is timelessly (almost without a faltering of sequential rhythm) absorbed into the dream itself to overprint the final X event of denouement (the dreamer wakes at that moment from a frightening encounter with someone who has fallen on him in an attempt to asphyxiate him. The external perception of the ‘accidental’ quality of the external event ( whether it was a falling pillow, or a noise in an adjacent room) is given the lie within the dream structure when such an event is entered into the entire fabric of the timeless sequence in an entirely organic ( non accidental) way. This insight is the root of how he will posit his theory of the correlation of two distinct spheres of consciousness, and their relevance in aesthetics: “But note what we are saying: the same event is being differently seen by two consciousnesses. By waking consciousness it is Ω, while by dream consciousness it is X. This would scarcely be worth our notice at all except for the extraordinary fact that X has a contradictory double status: in waking consciousness, it is a dream effect of external cause Ω while, in the dream it is the final effect of the dream’s strongly welded causal chain begun by trivial event A. Thus X concludes two entirely distinct lines of causation, lines whose respective starting points ( the external noise and dream event A) have no connection whatever: plainly Ω cannot in any sense ‘cause’ A to occur. But we can say that if A and all its chain of circumstances did not exist, then the whole dream would not occur, and consequently there would be no X – which means that Ω did not reach our consciousness.” The narrative structure of dreaming thus argues for Florensky that, ‘the denouement is pre-determined from the very start’: “A dream , in other words, is wholly coherent; it cannot be sundered anywhere without destroying it entirely. Just as is always the case with the well-written play, where a plot without its conclusive consequences lacks all significance, so we may say that the composition of the dream is teleological: its events occur because of its denouement.”

As Florensky notes, this issue of the dream sequence absorbing the denouement which is ‘pressed on it’ as it were from outside ( where X and Ω overlap) would not be particularly illuminating if it were not for the manner in which this absorption takes place seamlessly and timelessly within dream consciousness. He gives a long and final example of a renowned dream-narrative where a whole sequence of French Revolutionary events are concluded by the touch of the guillotine on the neck of the dreamer, an act that coincides with his waking to find that a piece of the cold metal bed frame had fallen on him. For Florensky this demonstrates the principle of time flowing in reverse: “The spiritual cause of the whole dream is this event X. In other words, in the time of the daylight world, event X should be the start of the dream’s drama and event A its denouement. But here, in the time of the invisible world, it happens inside out, and cause X appears not prior to all the consequence of A and ( in general) not prior to the entire series of consequences ( B,C,D …R, S, T ..) but following them, concluding the whole row and determining it not as its efficient cause but its final cause : Telos.” The spiritual importance of this, is the revelatory force that dreaming can bring to bear, because of its teleological character. The ‘connectiveness’ of the dreaming psyche to the spiritual cosmos which lies behind the veil of waking awareness, is the aspect of ‘ascentive’ dream which Florensky sees in ways similar to Gregory of Nyssa’s Epektasis – as the soul’s innate desire to ascend to higher levels of perception – a Jacob’s ladder to another world order. To this we shall return in a moment. The aesthetic importance of this, is the potentiality it gives to the initiated dreamer to enter the domain of imaginary space, which normally lies hidden from conscious awareness and reflective analysis, something that Florensky says ‘usually…only very dimly reaches our waking consciousness’: “Dream time is turned ‘inside out’, which means that all its concrete images are also turned inside out with it: and that means we have entered the domain of ‘imaginary space.’ The very same event that is perceived from the area of actual space as actual, is seen from the area of imaginary space as imaginary, that is as occurring before everything else in teleological time, as the goal or object of our purposiveness. Contrarily, the goal seen from here appears (in our failure to appreciate goals rightly) as something cherished but lacking the energy of

the ideal: but seen from ‘there’, through the other consciousness, the goal is comprehended as living energy that shapes actuality as its creative form.”

This is the point in which Florensky, the dreamer-poet, can be seen to be most wide-awake philosophically. The dream structure, he is suggesting, points to a form and method of articulating the spiritual teleology of the universe that is far wider and (potentially) much deeper than waking consciousness. I would express the insight’s aesthetic implications like this: the artist, who by definition is the ‘poet of vision’, must learn to be the skilled practitioner of this method of analysing form, or else is condemned to repeat merely a surface dabbling; his art will be bound (and doomed) to be a futile attempt to reproduce a surface impression of his own merely surface impression of reality. Such art will have merely decorative effect - the spiritual significance of a pretended bowl of fruit hung over an artificial fireplace, and the philosophical equivalence of existential trompe l’oeuil, a missing out on true connectiveness. It is an interesting coincidence, of course of Symbolist aesthetic theory, and the classical Christian vision that the invisible world informs and directs the purposiveness of the visible.

For Florensky, the unity which God has established in the ‘making of all things visible and invisible’ accounts for the fundamental reliability of the transition possible between the perception of both worlds in the dream state. Far from being a peripheral investigation, or a merely psycho-therapeutic tool, the dream analysis is indicative of ontological ‘progress’ (Epektasis) to a higher condition of perceptivity. Far from being meaningless it is, in essence, deeply revelatory of metaphysical meaning: Although it is something perceived, the dream is wholly teleological, saturated with the meanings of the invisible world, meanings that are invisible, immaterial, eternal, yet nevertheless visibly manifest and ( as it were) vividly material. A dream is, therefore, pure meaning, wrapped in the thinnest membrane of reality; it is almost wholly a phenomenon of the other world… the boundary where the final determinations of earth meet the increasing densifications of heaven.

The liminality is the key to the epistemological comprehensibility of the experience. Florensky notes that since the boundary possesses the characters of both sides of ontology ( visible and invisible) and follows the logical rules of existence characteristic of both sides, there can often be occasions when the different logics become muddled. He applies the old Philokalic principle of prelest to describe this: prelest being the state of mental and spiritual self-delusion where a person prefers their (wrong) estimation of reality to the reality itself. Based upon a wrong initial premiss ( that they can sing, or paint , or write, beautifully, for example) the prideful tenacity to wrong notions can lead a person ever deeper into blindness of the true order of existence ( people who have little talent often dream their lives away in pursuit of inappropriate life-goals – the New York art scene, might one say it ? is the domain par excellence of prelest !). To puncture this dangerous delusion the Russian Philokalic tradition insisted on the need for a guiding Starets, someone whose higher spiritual consciousness and perception could serve as a guide and a corrective. For Florensky, the dangers in the aesthetic domain are comparable to those of the mystical life. He is aware that many people might find it much to their taste to inhabit the borderland domains of the interstices all their lives, as if dreaming their life away. He regards the level of spiritual vision that is given on the borderland as not ultimately fulfilling – being neither purely actual, nor entirely spiritual, but having, as it were, a narcotic element derived from the refinement of matter ( or subtle materialisation of spirit). He even suggests that the border domain is haunted by lower level elemental spirits ( Plotinus would call them the Cthonic daemons) who, siren-like, have the desire to entrap and hinder human spiritual consciousness from its true teleological vocation – which is the progressive ascent into spiritual freedom, through ‘ascetic sobriety’. Without ascetic sobriety, Florensky argues, the Iconic face of reality cannot be perceived, and all one will see is seductive masks.

The contrast between the ‘vacant mask’, and the ‘iconic face’ which reveals spiritual grandeur and beauty, is one of the last elements of his dream theory, and one that manifests itself in relation to the art of the Icon proper. Of course, he is well aware of the complex and rich Orthodox theology of the Icon as sacramental representation of the divine. In this art form, above all others perhaps, we see an explicit attempt to depict in earthly colours and using artistic devices, the shape of things that make sense in the spiritual world. The Icon is (and is often described as such in Orthodox writing) itself a ‘gateway’ between heaven and earth. This is why his correlation of the concept of dreaming to the art of the Iconographer is a natural step for Florensky to make, though it issued on the scene in the Russian Silver age as a highly unusual (typically Florenskyan) set of ideas.

He is much taken with the idea of the ascent and descent witnessed in the dreaming state. This is that ‘crossing of the threshold’ which dreaming connotes (since without a transition between the two worlds, no dream is remembered or memorable): “We might say, then, that a dream happens whenever we cross from one shore to another: but it may be more accurate to say that the dream happens whenever our consciousness ‘hugs the boundary of the crossing’ and therefore sustains the double perceptiveness that occurs when we either lightly dream or drowsily keep awake. For there is where all significant dreaming takes place.” But the cross-over between the worlds means that the characteristics of the dream can either be primarily marked by ‘ascent’ or ‘descent’. It is the dreams of descent which are charged with spiritual meaning and which the Icon painter needs to learn from, to use as the method for the articulation of spiritual types and forms in his or her painting. The dreams of ascent still bear in themselves the material elements of sensuous consciousness and have a primarily earthly, Cthonic, character. Florensky calls them ‘psychic effluvia’, like the ‘outworn clothes’ of earthly consciousness the psyche is trying to shed from itself as it rises: what he also describes as ‘the images of our everyday emptiness.’ The dreams of descent, those which occur before awakening when the soul has been freed from the constraints of material rational consciousness for a longer time, are those where the characteristics of the spiritual dimension predominate, and are more clearly remembered by the waking reason. It is in the completely ascended dream state, and in the descentive dream that still captures that characteristic, that the soul is finally freed from effluvial and materially empty images so as to be charged with something else. The spiritual movement becomes synchronous with the exercise of the highest level of artistic creativity: “ What we say about the dream holds true (with minor changes) about any movement from one sphere to another. In creating a work of art, the psyche or soul of the artist ascends from the earthly realm into the heavenly; there free of all images, the soul is fed in contemplation by the essences of the highest realm, knowing the permanent noumena of things; then, satiated with this knowledge, it descends again to the earthly realm. And precisely at the boundary between the two worlds, the soul’s spiritual knowledge assumes the shapes of symbolic imagery: and it is these images that make permanent the work of art. Art is thus materialised dream, separated from the ordinary consciousness of waking life. The artist, especially the Iconographer, is thus the waking dreamer, the liminal ‘seer’. The dream images that come to the painter and enter into the flow of the artistic work must, of necessity (if they are to carry the charge of the spiritual world) be descentive images: “An artist misunderstands (and so causes us to misunderstand) when he puts into his art those images that come to him during the uprushing of his inspiration – if, that is, it is only the imagery of the soul’s ascent. We need, instead, his early morning dreams, those dreams that carry the coolness of the eternal azure . The other imagery is merely psychic raw material.”

In the coincidence of the dream and the artistic grappling with the archetypes of the spiritual world (which icon painters then have to translate into ‘prototypes’ recogniseable to the Orthodox believers ) the icon painter thus emerges as the true theologian, fulfilling a priestly task, symbolically, and authoritatively communicating the Word by transmission of the Archetype through artistic and sacramental prototypes. What Florensky evokes here is fundamentally the Orthodox ‘economy of salvation’: as the Word descended, (archetypally so in the Incarnation) for the revelation of the divine to the material world, so the iconographer, celebrating that mystery of revelation in the symbolic re-presentation of the economy, depicts the prototypes of the Katabasis, by revealing to the Church the images glimpsed in the descentive initiation. For Florensky, the artistic, aesthetic-spiritual, entrance into such a perception shows the artist-dreamer to be one and the same as the mystic-theologian: “ What is true of art and dream is also true of mystical experience: a common pattern holds everywhere. In mystical experience, the soul is raised up from the visible realm to where visibility itself vanishes and the field of the invisible opens: such is the Dionysian sundering of the bonds of the visible. And after soaring up into the invisible, the soul descends again into the visible – and then and there, before its very eyes are those real ‘appearances’ of things : ideas. This is the Apollonian perspective on the spiritual world.”

For Florensky, the actual icon, crafted from wood and the careful synthesis of colours, using reverse perspectives to signify its dissonance from the materialist trend of simple representational art, is the culmination of all this symbolic discourse on the structure of vision and revelatory experience. The artistic work is a complex synthesis in and of itself, not least because it is the work of the seer attempting to elaborate the inner vision, at one remove, and cannot be the vision itself which is not directly communicable in the waking reality of material existence: “ Although the most sensitive of us can sense the powerful motions of the angelic wings, we can experience these great motions only as the very faintest breathing. An icon is he same as this kind of heavenly vision: yet it is not the same, for the icon is the outline of a vision. A spiritual vision is not in itself an icon, for it possesses by itself full reality; an icon, however, because its outline coincides with a spiritual vision, is that vision within our consciousness; finally, therefore, the icon – apart from its spiritual vision – is not an icon at all, but a board.”

Florensky’s concept of the Icon within the context of dream-vision, is clearly part of the modern Russian Symbolist agenda in aesthetics, but it overlaps powerfully and positively with a profound re-statement of traditional Orthodox theology on iconography, economic soteriology, and sacramental witness. In addition to all these complex layers of his argument he certainly witnesses here no small degree of innovative psychological and metaphysical speculation. Florensky was undoubtedly a seer, a poet and dreamer himself. His greatest iconic statement, without doubt, was his own life: the witness of a perennially liminal figure, exercising what he called the necessary ‘ascetic sobriety’ to safeguard the soul’s purity of perception from all manner of seduction, both material and psychic. His own sobriety (the Greek word Sophrosyne is synonymous with the ‘monastic state’) brought him, in the end, to a bitter personal ascesis where, like the Icon of Trinity by Rublev (which he so admired as a canon of descentive, azure-cool painting), he was stripped down to the essentials of simplicity and became transparent, symbolical, and clean, in the purposefulness (or teleology) of his life’s trajectory and his mind’s vitality. In short, by no small degree of conscious elaboration, his own life became iconically organised. In Florensky the modernist, the ancient hope that icon, iconographer, and Archetype be bounded in communion, was graphically and startlingly made manifest: like a radiant colour epiphanically shining out in one of the gloomiest periods of the history of Russia.