Quest Magazine

Pavel Florensky, A Quiet Genius: The Tragic and Extraordinary Life of Russia’s Unknown da Vinci

Avril Pyman
New York: Continuum, 2010. xxiii + 304 pages, hardcover, $29.95.

One of the most remarkable but least known figures in the Russian spiritual renaissance of the early twentieth century, Pavel Florensky (1882–1937) was a polymath genius. An ordained Russian Orthodox priest, he made wide-ranging and seminal contributions to mathematics, physics, electrodynamics, folkloristics, philology, marine botany, art history, earth science, philosophy, theology, and esotericism that were part of his lifelong quest for a comprehensive worldview that would unite science, religion, and art; reason and faith; Orthodox tradition and futuristic thaumaturgy. Works by and about Florensky, long suppressed, have only in recent years begun to reappear, and Avril Pyman’s fine book is the first extensive study of him in English.

Especially valuable are her chapters on Florensky’s family and early years, disclosing the Armenian, Georgian, and Azerbaijanian contributions to his breadth of culture and soul. Pyman also describes Florensky’s deep Platonic friendships with a series of brilliant young men; his unromantic but happy marriage to a good woman from a simple peasant background; his devotion to his family; his happiness in daily service as parish priest; and later, after his arrest in Stalin’s terror, his iconic stature among his fellow gulag prisoners. In all this, Pyman helps us see Florensky not only as an extraordinary genius but also as an exceptionally good man.

Although the book generally gives a clearer picture of the man than of his ideas, Pyman does provide valuable guidance to Florensky’s difficult spiritual classic, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, and helps unravel his profound but challenging ideas, such as the connection between discontinuity in non-Euclidian mathematics and the semiheretical Russian spiritual practice of imiaslavie (name worship). Indeed, Florensky’s great theme was the relationship of the latest advances in mathematics and physics to the deepest traditions of mystical Orthodox spirituality. The image that sticks is of Father Pavel in a worn white priest’s cassock lecturing about electrification projects to workers and uniformed communists in a village classroom with a bust of Lenin beside the podium.

Florensky died in Stalin’s gulag in 1937. The publication that led to his last arrest and eventual execution was a paper arguing that the geometry of imaginary numbers predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity for a body moving faster than light is the geometry for the kingdom of God. Even while serving his sentences in Siberia and in the furthest north, Florensky continued to conduct important scientific research on permafrost and on the extraction of iodine from seaweed. Though unable to conduct religious services in the gulag, he did serve as shepherd, friend, and comforter to his fellow inmates.

If, as it should be, this excellent book is eventually reprinted, a few minor errors could be corrected. In the useful glossary of names, and elsewhere in the text, the birth year of the Russian thinker Nikolai Fedorov should be 1829; the name of Fedorov’s friend and follower should be Vladimir Aleksandrovich (not Valentin Alekseevich) Kozhevnikov; and the birth year of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel should be 1770.

George M. Young

The reviewer, a specialist in Russian literature and thought, is adjunct in English and language studies and fellow of the Center for Global Humanities at the University of New England.

Transcribed and annotated by Michael Gomes
The Hague: I.S.I.S. Foundation, 2010. xvi + 687 pp., hardcover, $103.10.

The publisher of this work is not the Egyptian goddess, but the International Study-centre for Independent Search for Truth of the Dutch Point Loma Theosophical Society, which has done a notable work in making this book available.

Shortly after the publication of her major work, The Secret Doctrine, in 1888, H. P. Blavatsky met with a few of her students to explore their many and confused questions about that book. Those meetings were recorded by a stenographer, but until now only a severely edited version of the first twelve sessions had been published. This volume is a full transcription of all twenty-two sessions held during the first six months of 1889. As such, it is an invaluable guide to the study of HPB’s major work and, in repeated spots, a delightful read because of the informal nature of the discussions and the witty interchange between HPB and her disciples.

The editor of the volume, Michael Gomes, is one of our best Theosophical historians, noted for such works as The Dawning of the Theosophical Movement (Quest, 1987) and Theosophy in the Nineteenth Century: An Annotated Bibliography (Garland, 1994), as well as his excellent abridgments of HPB’s major works: Isis Unveiled (Quest, 1997) and The Secret Doctrine (New York: Tarcher Penguin, 2009). New as it is, this volume is clearly a major Theosophical classic, which every student of Theosophy needs to know and which even the casual reader can find informative and entertaining.

John Algeo

The reviewer is past president of the Theosophical Society in America and past vicepresident of the international Society.

The Masters Speak: An American Businessman Encounters Ashish and Gurdjieff

Seymour B. Ginsburg
Wheaton: Quest, 2010. xi + 307 pp., paper, $18.95.

Seymour B. Ginsburg has written a useful book that might have been better titled “Notes on the Path to the Higher Self.” In fact there are no masters here, and they do not speak. What we have is the story of Ginsburg’s progression toward the higher Self. Beginning as a businessman (he was the first president of the Toys “R” Us chain), Ginsburg found himself increasingly dissatisfied with the “ruthless competition in the business world.” Finally, the shock caused by the death of his young wife in 1971 led him to question the foundations of life.

Ginsburg’s search initially led him to the writings of H. P. Blavatsky (he has long been involved in the Theosophical Society in southern Florida). In 1978 he journeyed to India, where he met Sri Madhava Ashish, a Scotsman (born Alexander Phipps; 1920–97) who had become a Hindu monk and was living in a small ashram in the foothills of northern India. Ashish is best known to Theosophists as coauthor (with his teacher, Sri Krishna Prem) of Man, the Measure of All Things, a commentary on the Stanzas of Dzyan in The Secret Doctrine. Writing on his own, Ashish also produced a sequel, Man, Son of Man. Ashish’s letters to Ginsburg over the following nineteen years form the core of The Masters Speak.

Around the time of his meeting with Ashish, Ginsburg was drawn to the ideas of the spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff (1866?–1949). Gurdjieff was born of a Greek father and an Armenian mother and brought up in Kars, an area on the Turkish-Armenian border then recently incorporated into Russia and inhabited by a mixture of peoples: Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Kurds, each with its traditions, folklore, and faiths. As a young man, he traveled in search of wisdom to the Middle East and especially to Central Asia. Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, he went to Moscow and St. Petersburg and started speaking about what he had learned.

Much of Central Asian Sufism—a likely source of Gurdjieff’s teachings— is expressed through sacred dance. Gurdjieff disassociated the dances from their Islamic context, but not from their aim of self-awareness and self-observation. In regard to this approach, Ashish advised Ginsburg: “Your loyalty must be to the goal itself and nothing more or less. The ancient wisdom is nothing if it is not present here, present as a living reality and not merely as a series of texts and mouthed words. It is nothing to you unless you find it in yourself. . . . Dances, postures, movements, and other exercises may provide opportunities for identifying particular states of mind that will help you on your path, but you will not travel further by seeking out new exercises. All that you need is already in you.”

The Gurdjieff “Work” (as it is called) sets out some techniques for moving toward the higher Self. Gurdjieff was once asked what it would be like to have higher consciousness, and he replied, “Everything more vivid.” Since in Gurdjieff’s view the higher Self is a “more vivid” version of the lower self, it is with the components of the latter that the higher must be reached: the body, the chakras, the emotions, intuition, will, and the mind. The physical body is the most concrete of these components, and thus it is used as a starting-point for much of the Gurdjieff work, as the mind is often the starting- point for many Buddhist schools. Despite these differences, there is wide agreement that, as Ashish advised, “The path is inward, inward into the heart of your own being, the center of your own being. . . . When in doubt, go to the source—namely meditate, cultivate awareness, hold back from unnecessary activities, don’t let the mind run on recriminations and self-justifications. . . . Seek for the thing where it is—within.”

The passage to the higher Self is usually gradual. For some, there can be a dramatic breakthough, such as a powerful dream or an experience of wholeness and unity. But for most people, segments of the old Self will fall away more gradually: the emotions are refined; intuition becomes clearer, the will more focused, the mind a better servant. As Ashish writes, “When the condition of the Higher Self is reached, the individuality does not vanish; personality is illuminated in every aspect and can play its true role, which is to bend and adapt to every changing need.”

The Gurdjieff groups with which Ginsburg was associated discouraged members from following more than one path at a time as well as from speaking about their experiences, doubts, or sentiments with those outside the group. Such prohibitions can lead to a sectarian approach, and in such a context one can easily become locked into a system. In response to these issues Ashish wrote to Ginsburg: “You’ve found the path. Travel it. Don’t let yourself be pulled away from it. Once you can get your aim clear, problems about how to live, what to do, how to reconcile the outer life with the inner, etc. begin to get straightened out. This is why I try to get people to clarify their inner aim first. . . . Our work is so difficult that we need every bit of help we can get. It really does not matter where or from whom we take help, provided that we have enough intelligence and a clear enough view of our goal to be able to take help that is consonant with our aim and to reject those components that are contrary to it.”

It is always useful to follow the story of the spiritual development of others. This is no substitute for one’s own steps on the path, but it is always helpful to know that one is not alone.

René Wadlow

The reviewer is editor of the online journal Transnational Perspectives, which focuses on world politics and social policy.

Toward a True Kinship of Faiths: How the World’s Religions Can Come Together

The Dalai Lama
New York: Harmony, 2010. 208 pages, hardcover, $25.

In these days of controversy and divisiveness it is encouraging to hear the voices of those who speak out for unity and reconciliation. One such voice is that of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, whose recent book, Toward a True Kinship of Faiths, addresses the issue of religious tolerance. His Holiness urges the followers of all traditions to consider the possibility that their chosen approach to religious truth may not be the best choice for others.

This idea was not always appreciated by His Holiness, as he admits. He recollects that in his early days of isolation beyond the Himalayas, he was taught that Buddhism was the “only true religion.” The traditional curriculum of religious studies presented to young Tibetan monks included a study of the tenets of various philosophical systems, including those of non-Buddhist approaches, but the message was that these approaches were seriously flawed and that only Buddhism represented the pure and unadulterated truth.

This was all to change when His Holiness visited India in 1956. There, he says, he was exposed to an age-old culture of pluralism and to the influence of the Theosophical Society, in which religious inclusiveness has been a dominant theme since its foundation in 1875. Describing this experience, His Holiness writes: “My visit to the Theosophical Society in Chennai (then Madras) left a powerful impression. There I was first directly exposed to people, and to a movement, that attempted to bring together the wisdom of the world’s spiritual traditions as well as science. I felt among the members a sense of tremendous openness to the world’s great religions and a genuine embracing of pluralism. When I returned to Tibet in 1957, after more than three months in what was a most amazing country for a young Tibetan monk, I was a changed man. I could no longer live in the comfort of an exclusivist standpoint that takes Buddhism to be the only true religion.”

When finally forced to leave Tibet and to live as a refugee in India, His Holiness continued to pursue the idea of tolerance and interfaith dialogue. The present book is the product of his mature thought along these lines. In the first two chapters he explains the necessity for stepping outside the comfort zone of one’s own culture and for accepting a plurality of faiths that offer consolation and meaning to their followers. Chapters 3–6 consist of short commentaries on the traditions of Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Chapters 7–10 explain how the common teaching of compassion can provide a remedy for exclusivism and make possible genuine communication between the followers of the world’s religions. His proposal for unity is fourfold: dialogue among scholars; sharing of deep spiritual experiences between practitioners; high-profile meetings of religious leaders; and joint pilgrimage to holy places. All in all, this book is a good read, and its suggestions could offer a solution to one of the most serious problems facing mankind.

Doss McDavid

The reviewer is an adjunct professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and a longtime member of the Theosophical Society.