The Spiritual Roots of Western Culture

Abstract

The Russian thinker Florensky and the French philosopher Weil devoted much space in their writings to the crisis of the West. The article highlights the many convergences that exist between their explanations of the reasons for this state of things, but also between their proposals for a solution based on the analysis of what they both consider to be the foundation stone of Western culture: ancient Greece, specifically its culture and thought imbued with an arcane religious-mystical tradition, the best representative of which is Plato. Florensky and Weil agree that the renewal of Western culture should consist in rediscovering its ancient roots and, simultaneously, in reappropriating that which founds the culture and thought of ancient Greece: the gaze on the transcendent, that is, on that reality of which the real (the world, life, etc.) is an ontological symbol.