Sophiology of P. A. Florensky: culturological aspect
The article is an explication of the sophiology of P. A. Florensky. The relevance of the study is due to the lack of works directly devoted to the father Pavel’s notion about the essence of Sophia the Wisdom of God. The novelty of the obtained results is that, for the first time, P. A. Florensky’s sophiology was correlated with his culturological views and generally science of culture. In the introduction the urgency of the conducted research is substantiated, and the prerequisites and circumstances of the formation of Russian sophiology are revealed. In the main part the P. A. Florensky’s interpretation of Sofia is explicated, and also the specific features of this interpretation are shown. In particular, it is concluded that when P. A. Florensky understands the essence of culture as a process of restoring the lost links of humanity with his Creator, as a result of the Fall, and also as a return to the original state of ideal harmony, Sophia the Wisdom acts simultaneously as the goal and means of implementing this process: human’s activation of wisdom in himself as the image of God and the quality that distinguishes him from the natural world and is a culture understood in its Latin variant as cultura, that is, the process of growth, cultivation, refining the affected person of his sin nature. Also, Sofia, regarded as total-unity, as a factor of the inner kinship of all mankind among themselves, in this context again comes close to culture, namely in the sense of communicative and integrative functions of culture: culture, as a property inherent only to man, acts as a factor uniting mankind, as well as Sofia. In the conclusion it is formulated the features that give to father Pavel’s sophistry character of cultural studies, the place of sophiology of P. A. Florensky in the Russian philosophy of unity is defined. The obtained results can find application in the teaching of the disciplines of the socio-humanitarian cycle, first of all the history of philosophy and science of culture.