Father Pavel Florensky’s “Friendship,” structurally and thematically the culminating letter of the twelve which comprise his 1914 book The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, has proven a challenge to his readers from the time that he first wrote it as part of his master’s thesis to the present. A cursory reading in translation allows little room to imagine that it envisages “friends” in any conventional sense— the sort of friend of which a man might have two or three or several—or that he could have such a friend in addition to a wife.
