Anthony Florensov

Bishop Anthony Florensov (in the world Mikhail Simeonovich Florensov) was born on 27 August 1847 in the village of Trusleika in the Simbirsk province and died in Moscow on 20 February 1918, according to some sources on 18 February 1920. He was bishop of Vologda and Totma from 1884 to 1895, though other parts of our source give 1894 for his appointment. Our sources show no canonization and give no feast day: he is a hierarch honoured among the people as a man of prayer, who was the spiritual father of Father Pavel Florensky.

Family and studies

He was the son of the sexton Simeon Ivanovich Florensov (died 10 February 1870) and Elizaveta Markellovna, née Dragomanova (died 23 October 1887), a daughter of a priest of the Holy Trinity cathedral. He studied at the school and seminary of Simbirsk and in 1874 graduated from the Kyiv Theological Academy with the degree of candidate in theology. He was a teacher at the Kharkov seminary and then at that of Simbirsk.

On 7 January 1876 he married Ekaterina Pavlovna Okhotina (1860 to 13 February 1882, buried in the Pokrovsky necropolis). He was ordained deacon on 4 December 1878 and priest on 6 December and served at the cathedral of Saint Nicholas in Simbirsk. He was inspector of the Simbirsk seminary in 1881 and in 1884, worked on the council of the diocesan girls' school and in the pedagogical assembly of the seminary, and from 1886 was secretary of the council of the Three Hierarchs spiritual brotherhood of Simbirsk. He was widowed on 13 February 1882.

Monk and bishop

On 2 August 1887, at the Intercession monastery in Simbirsk, Bishop Varsonofy (Okhotin) tonsured him a monk with the name Anthony, in honour of Saint Anthony the Roman, and on 6 August raised him to archimandrite. He was censor of the Samara diocesan gazette, from 1888 chairman of the Samara diocesan school council and a member of the committee of the Orthodox Missionary Society. He was rector of the Samara seminary.

On 12 August 1890 he was consecrated bishop of Ostrog, vicar of the diocese of Volhynia, in the Trinity cathedral of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. As vicar he governed the Derman monastery and supervised the seminary and the girls' school of Volhynia. On 30 April 1894 he was appointed bishop of Vologda and Totma. On 12 December 1895 he was retired, with the governance of the Yakovlevsky monastery in Rostov, and on 11 February 1898 he was removed from the governance of the monastery and settled at the Donskoy monastery in Moscow.

A man of spirit

Bishop Anthony loved and knew the culture of ancient Greece and had a grounding in philosophy, psychology, history, art, literature and mathematics. S. M. Solovyov, V. F. Ern, A. V. Elchaninov, A. A. Blok and A. Bely often came to his house. From 1904 until his death he was the spiritual father of Priest Pavel Florensky. In 1907 and 1908 he worked much on the restoration of the Solovetsky hermitage at Simbirsk, between the rivers Sviyaga and Volga, where he wished to make a nature reserve. Metropolitan Manuil (Lemeshevsky) says that in Moscow he was held to be locally venerated, as a great righteous man and ascetic, and that his name was entered in hundreds and thousands of the commemoration lists of the faithful of Moscow.

He fell asleep on 20 February 1918 (by other accounts, on 18 February 1920) and was buried, it is said, on the left side of the old cathedral of the Don icon of the Mother of God at the Donskoy monastery. The exact place of his grave is not known with certainty; the most likely is the Danilovsky cemetery, but in the 2020s a nameless granite slab was set to the left of the entrance of the small cathedral, apparently in his memory.

Writings

He wrote, among other things, a study of the Palinodia of Zakhariya Kopystensky (1873), the speech made at his naming as bishop of Ostrog (1890), a teaching for a feast of the Mother of God (1906), the speech at the burial of Archbishop Palladius of Volhynia (1893) and the speech given as a spiritual son at the burial of Archimandrite Alexei Kudryavtsev (1908).