Why the world is so drawn to, even obsessed by, the “spiritual”: Insights from Pavel Florensky’s “Iconostasis”

The selections below form the second addendum to the post, “The Place Where Paradox Speaks” and comprise five pages (p. 45-50) of key passages from the 1922 work, Iconostasis, by Pavel Florensky, a polymath known as “Russia’s DaVinci,” who became an orthodox priest and was ultimately martyred in the Gulags.

His insights here, in many ways, provide one of the most comprehensive responses to the long-asked question of why so many worldly people are so drawn into, even obsessed by, “spirituality.” That is to say, if you spend any time at all reading articles, books, etc. on “spirituality and health” or “spiritual well-being” or note the types of institutions now rapidly being established in universities and medical schools across the country, be they “Spirituality Mind Body Institutes,” or “Centers for Spirituality and Healing,” etc. etc., then you would be greatly benefited by working to process the below synthesis of Florensky.

[And for those interested, his book, Iconostasis, can be found here with probably the most comprehensive biography of Florensky here.]

The Borderlands of spiritual seduction: Images of the ascent into the imaginal space constructed from psychic genesis, creating an empty image of the real (p. 45)

The image of ascent, on the other hand, even if bursting with artistic coherence, is merely a mechanism constructed in accordance with the moment of its psychic genesis. When we pass from ordinary reality into the imaginal space, naturalism generates imaginary portrayals whose similarity to everyday life creates an empty image of the real.

Vs

The art of symbolism, born of the descent, which “incarnates into real images the experience of the highest realm (p. 45-46)

The opposite art—symbolism—born of the descent, incarnates in real images the experience of the highest realm; hence, this imagery—which is symbolic imagery—attains a super-reality.

What is true of art and dream is also true of mystical experience: a common pattern holds everywhere. In mystical experience, the soul is raised up from the visible realm to where visibility itself vanishes and the field of the invisible opens: such is the Dionysian sundering of the bonds of the visible. And after soaring up into the invisible, the soul descends again into the visible—and then and there, before its very eyes, are those real appearances of things: ideas. This is the Apollonian perspective on the spiritual world.

The warning of confusing the two

How tempting it is to call 'spiritual' those images—those soul-confusing, soul-absorbing, soul-consuming dreamings—that first appear to us when our soul finds its way into the other world. (p. 46) Such images are, in fact, the spirits of the present age that seek to trap our consciousness in their realm. These spirits inhabit the boundary between the worlds; and though they are earthly in nature, they take on the appearances of the spiritual realm. When we approach the limits of the ordinary world, we enter into conditions that (like the ordinary) are continuously new but that have patterns which differ entirely from those of ordinary existence.

Here, then, is the area of our greatest spiritual danger: to approach this boundary while still willing earthly attachments; or to approach it without a spiritual mind—either one’s own or a spiritual director's; or to approach it before we are, in the spiritual sense, truly grown-up.

The reason for the warning: From entrance into its spiritual intoxication to enslavement by the delusions that proceed

What happens, at such an encounter of the boundary, is that the seeker is engulfed in lies and self-deceptions [The Hebrew word which expresses this is shav (שָׁוְא), which term is first given in the 3rd and 9th commandments—The most concise definition may be “The spiritual emptiness of vanity which is filled up by deceit and lies”]. The world then ensnares the seeker in that net of temptation in which—by granting him an apparent entry into the spiritual realm—it actually enslaves him to the world.

For it is not at all the case that every spirit guarding these points of entry is a true Guardian of the Threshold, i.e., a good defender of the sacred realms; for a spirit may well be not a genuine being of the higher realm but rather an accomplice of (in the Apostles phrase) "the prince of the power of the air"; for such spirits are the ones who keep the soul on the boundary of the worlds, tangled in the seductions of spiritual intoxication.

The contrasting experience of the yoke of spiritual sobriety (the Biblical term of which is sóphroneó [σωφρονέω], p. 46-47)

A day of spiritual sobriety, when it holds our soul in its power, is so sharply different from the spiritual realm that it cannot even pretend to be seductive, and its materiality is experienced not only as a burden but also as a yoke good for us in the way gravity is good for earth, a yoke restricting our movements but giving us a fulcrum, a yoke reining in the swiftness with which our will acts in self-determination (for both good and bad) and in general extending in the will its instant of the eternal, i.e., the will’s angelic self-determination toward this side or that, an instant lasting our whole life and making our earthy life not an empty existence passively manifesting every possibility but, rather, the ascetic exercise of authentic self-organization, the art of sculpting and ‘chasing our' our essence. This lot, or fate, or destiny, i.e., that which was decided from aboye, fatum from fari—this destiny of our simultaneous weakness and strength, this gift of our divine creativity, is time-space.

Time-space sobriety: Spiritual sobriety vs seduction

Time-space sobriety on earth is never seductive, then; neither is the angelic realm when the soul comes directly into contact with it. But in between, at the boundary of this world, are concentrated all the temptations and seductions: these are the phantoms that Tasso depicts in describing the Enchanted Wood.

Steadfastness enabling passage through the landscape of spiritual seduction

If one only possesses the spiritual steadfastness of will to go through them, neither fearful of nor yielding to their seductions, then one finds that they will lose entirely their power over the soul, becoming mere shadows of sensuality, empty dreamings of no value at all.

Vs

Weakening, yielding and finally, being overcome by their “spiritual siege”

But if, instead, one’s faith in God weakens in the midst of such a spiritual siege, then one looks back at these phantoms [cf. Gen 19:26]—and in so doing, one pours the reality of one's own soul into them. Then the phantoms will gain great power, seizing the soul and sucking from her the power to materialize still more, thereby weakening the soul into further fear and more yielding. In such a state, it is extremely difficult—almost impossible—to break their grip without the intervention of another spiritual power [Mt 12:28-29]. Such, then, are the elemental swamps at the boundary of the worlds.

Prelest:

Spiritual pride and conceit vs the renovating humility of metanoeó (p. 47-48)

This disastrous enslavement is called by the ascetic tradition prelest: it means spiritual pride or conceit, and it is the direst spiritual state a person can be in. In committing any other sin, a person acts in such a way that he falls into a relation with the external world, with its objective properties and laws, within which he is working against the sacred order of God’s creation, hitting against and striving to break it. Thus, an ordinary sinner can discover in this relation the fulcrum to change his consciousness and bring repentance (to repent in Greek is metanoiein, to change the totality of consciousness at the deepest level of being).

Prelest, however, is entirely different. Here, the deluded self does not seek superficial satisfaction of this or that passion; but—far more dangerously—it imagines itself to be moving along the perpendicular to the sensory world, withdrawn from it. Thus completely unsatisfied, the self-absorbed soul in prelest is held by the spirits who inhabit the boundary and who are, then, nourished by the soul’s own troubled, unsatisfled passions—that soul already burning with the fires of Hell. The soul closes into itself, and then all occasion is gone wherein the soul could—with intense agony—awaken once more into consciousness: the encounter with the objective world of God’s creation.

Sinful passions vs prelest-stirred passions

Prelest, of course, brings images that stir passions in us. But our real danger lies not in the passions but in our appraisal of them. For we may, if caught in prelest, take the passions as directly opposite to what they really are. Usually, we would see our sinful passions as a dangerous weakness, thereby finding the humility that heals us of them. In prelest-stirred passions, however, we see them as attained spirituality, as sacred energy, salvation, and holiness. Thus, where ordinarily we would seek to break the grip of our sinful passions—even if our attempts were weak and futile—in prelest, driven by spiritual conceit, spiritual sensuality, and (above all) spiritual pride, we seek to tighten the knots that bind us. An ordinary sinner knows he is falling away from God; a soul in prelest thinks it is drawing ever closer to Him, and while angering Him thinks he is gladdening Him.

The confusion of the images of ascent with those of the descent (p. 48-49)

Such disastrous confusion occurs in us because we confuse the images of ascent with the images of descent. We may put the whole matter this way:

The vision that appears to us on the boundary of the worlds may be either

(1) The absence of the reality of the visible world; that is, an incomprehensible sign of our own inner emptiness, our own prelest-impassioned banishing of God’s objective reality; and then, inhabiting the neat, empty room of our soul, we will find those masks of reality that are the total renunciation of the real world; or the vision may be

(2) the presence of the superior reality of the spiritual world.

Ascetic self-purification vs Pharisaical, “spiritual neatness” of Mt 12:43-45 (p. 50)

In this sense, then, ascetic self-purification also has for us the same double significance. When spiritual neatness becomes an end in itself, then Pharisaic self-consciousness arises and, inevitably, self-admiration. In such asceticism, the soul becomes empty and, freeing itself from all earthly attachments, grows still emptier; then, finding this growing emptiness ever more intolerable, one’s nature invites into the emptiness those spiritual forces that prompted the whole Pharisaic practice of self-purification in the first place, those greedy, twisted, and radically impure forces. Our Savior talks precisely of such self-centered asceticism in His parable about the swept room:

When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walks through dry places, seeking rest, and finds none.

Then he says, “I will return into my house from whence I came out”; and when he is come, he finds it empty, swept, and garnished.

Then he goes and takes with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first (Mt 12:43-45).

Thus, what was self-consciously intended issues finally in its direct opposite. This occurs because the man assures himself and others that he himself, in his innermost heart, is really good—that ail his mistakes and transgressions are somehow accidents, mere phenomena and not essenrialities, things that somehow just happened; and that all he spiritually needs to do is to tidy up the room a bit. Such a man is wholly desensitized to his own radically flawed will, inevitably seeing his actions as arising from outside God and solely from his own efforts; hence, he exhibits the complacent of spiritual self-satisfacrion.

The passage out of prelest into the presence of God (p. 50-51)

But if you continually acknowledge your own sinfulness, you never have the time to think whether or not you—in your own eyes are spiritually ‘tidied up’; instead, your soul hungers and thirsts for God, tremblmg in fear at the spiritual caastrophe of being without Him; and thus your one real concern becomes no longer yourself but that which is the most objective of all: God;

The transformation of desire

And what you genuinely now want is not a clean inner room to congratulate yourself about but—in tears—for God to visit the room of your soul, this even hastily-picked-up place, God who can with a word transform a tiny hut, even a hovel, into a splendid palace chamber.

The coming of true spiritual vision by grace into the human soul

With this direction to your inward life, a vision will come to you not when, by your own will, you are attempting to override the given boundaries of your spiritual growth, exceeding the measure of what is open to you; instead, it will come when—mysteriously, incomprehensibly—your soul has been lifted into the invisible world by the very powers of that world itself, and then (like the rainbow after the divine deluge, like "the sign of the covenant") the heavenly vision will appear in your soul, the visible image of the highest realm, given to you as both reminder and the revelatory 'news' of eternity and as teacher of the way to incarnate the invisible in the daylight consciousness of your entire life. Such a vision is more objective than the objectivities of earth, far weightier and more real than they; for it is the fulcrum of all our earthly creativity, the crystal wherein—conformed to its own crystaiiine laws—is crystallized out our ear experience, thereby becoming in its total structure a symbol of the spiritual world.