Iconostasis

Publication Data: Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996
Format: softcover
Number of Pages: iv + 170
Dimensions (l × w × h): 21.6 cm × 14.0 cm × 1.2 cm
ISBN: 0‒88141‒117‒5

   
Pavel Florensky
translated by Donald Sheeran & Olga Andrejev
introduction by Donald Sheeran

“A powerful meaning arising from Fr. Pavel’s life informs the essential meaning of his book Iconostasis. We can approach the meaning this way: a life in God resembles an icon in that both are created not by their material causes in empirical history but by their final causes in sacred reality. In this sense, we may say that a life in God is ‘front-loaded,’ that is, it takes its shape from the teleological end-point toward which the whole life is moving and within which (when it arrives there) the life will reveal its long hidden but always determinative purposiveness. The end-point of Fr. Pavel’s life reveals the shaping purposiveness most plainly in his feeding the bread of his own scant meals to his starving fellow-prisoners. At this end-point, everything has been stripped mercilessly from him, and there is nothing he can any longer do, or even say; he must now simply and only be. And in this simplicity of being, he reveals who he truly is in Christ. Just so, the icon in Fr. Pavel’s understanding is ‘front-loaded’ from final cause: such is the guiding principle of Iconostasis.”
—“Introduction”

CONTENTS

   PREFACE
   INTRODUCTION
Pavel Florensky
ICONOSTASIS
   Introduction: The Spiritual Structure of Dreams
   Spiritual Sobriety and the Iconic Face
   Orthodox Services and the Icon
   The Councils on the Icon and the Iconpainter’s Canonic Life
   A Dialogue with Sophia Ivanova
      The History of Artistic Technique, Western and Iconic
      Iconic Clothes and the Meaning of Gold
      The Ontology of Making the Icon
      The Metaphysics of Light and St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians
   Conclusion: The Egyptian Death-Mask and the Life of the Saint
   Index