The dramatic reception history of an ‘epoch-making book’: Pavel Florensky’s The Pillar and Ground of the Truth

When Pavel Florensky’s The Pillar and Ground of the Truth came out in 1908 (the revised edition was published in 1914), it was enthusiastically greeted as an ‘epoch-making book’, and it played an important role in the religious revival taking place at the time. Its reception up to the present has been largely determined by the Russian émigrés’ two very different readings. The Pillar continues to divide its readers into those who understand it as a theological treatise, which frequently deviates from theological dogma, and those who approach it as a religious-philosophical text, informed by a conviction in the continuing relevance of Christianity to a modernity in crisis.