ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 discusses the notion of the icon as existing in “organic” unity with all aspects of Church ritual. Florensky’s essay on the topic is seen as part of the debate on the nature of the image and a reaction to the iconoclast policies on religious art of the new Bolshevik government right after the Revolution. The modern, organicist terminology and the notion of the synthesis of the arts, which is associated with the avant-garde (Kandinsky, for example, in the Russian context), should not obscure the spirit of Florensky’s text, which belongs to a long line of iconophile, mostly Eastern Orthodox theological literature. Church rituals (the icons alongside the singing of the choir, the burning of the candles, etc.) become the supreme examples of synthesis. At a deeper level, Florensky’s defence of the icon is also an attack on Kantian aesthetics and, ultimately, of the Enlightenment project of modernity.
