“The Noblest of all Things is Water”

Abstract

In a series of lectures delivered in 1909 at the Moscow Theological Academy, Florensky presented an audacious thesis: philosophy – he claimed – was born of the worship of the god Poseidon. Significant aspects of Russian and European culture converge in the fervent scientific, philosophical, artistic, and religious terrain from which the thesis stems. Among them, certainly the varied, yet consistent, already ‘solid tradition of Russian Schellingianism’ – as Florensky calls it. This essay studies the connection of Schelling's thought with Florensky's ideas on the Milesian origin of Western philosophy, attempting to illuminate, on the borderline between the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of mythology, the powerful antinomian structure of Florensky’s thesis.