Göttingen, Petrograd, and the Philosophers’ Ships

Vladimir Nikolaevich Lossky was born at Göttingen on 8 June 1903, the son of the philosopher Nikolai Onufrievich Lossky, and grew up in the house of one of the most productive minds of the Russian religious-philosophical renaissance. He studied two years at Petrograd University under Lev Karsavin and Ivan Grevs, watched the Bolshevik persecution of the Church at close range, and in November 1922, aged nineteen, was expelled from Russia with his whole family aboard the second of the two “philosophers’ ships.” He never returned except as a visitor.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

Birth and the Lossky Household

Vladimir Nikolaevich Lossky was born on 8 June 1903 (26 May, Old Style) at Göttingen, in the German Empire, where his father was then working (en.wikipedia.org, “Vladimir Lossky,” giving both the New and Old Style dates; orthodoxwiki.org, “Vladimir Lossky,” giving 26 May 1903; pagesorthodoxes.net, “Page Vladimir Lossky,” which adds that the birth fell at Pentecost). The German birthplace is an accident of his father’s academic itinerary and nothing more: the family was Russian, and Vladimir’s childhood was spent in St. Petersburg.

The decisive fact of his formation is the household itself. His father, Nikolai Onufrievich Lossky (1870–1965), was professor of philosophy at St. Petersburg University and one of the principal figures of the Russian religious-philosophical renaissance — the author of an “intuitivist” epistemology and a personalist metaphysics, later the historian of Russian philosophy for the English-speaking world (en.wikipedia.org, “Nikolay Lossky”; pagesorthodoxes.net, “Page Vladimir Lossky,” giving the dates 1870–1965). Vladimir grew up, in other words, inside professional philosophy — among books, arguments, and the particular Russian conviction that metaphysics is not an academic specialism but a matter of ultimate concern.

This inheritance is worth stating carefully, because Lossky himself later took pains to distance his theology from the tradition his father belonged to. He insisted that he was not a descendant of the “Russian religious philosophy” of Solovyov and his heirs (en.wikipedia.org, “Vladimir Lossky,” on his rejection of that lineage), and his lifelong opposition to sophiology is in part an opposition to the speculative habit of that whole generation (see Lossky Against Bulgakov). But the distancing is itself a philosopher’s son’s gesture. The intellectual seriousness, the appetite for metaphysical precision, and the readiness to argue with the Germans on their own ground are all family traits.

Petrograd University: Karsavin and Grevs

Lossky enrolled in the Faculty of Arts (historico-philological faculty) at Petrograd University in 1919 or 1920, and studied there until the expulsion in 1922 (en.wikipedia.org, “Vladimir Lossky,” giving 1919; pagesorthodoxes.net, giving 1920–1922). [Disputed: the year of matriculation — English Wikipedia gives 1919, the French Orthodox biographical notice gives 1920; both agree the studies ended with the deportation of November 1922.]

Two teachers mattered. Lev Platonovich Karsavin (1882–1952), historian of medieval Western spirituality and religious philosopher, introduced him to the Church Fathers and — a detail of some consequence — to the Filioque question, which would occupy Lossky for the rest of his life (pagesorthodoxes.net, “Page Vladimir Lossky,” on Karsavin’s introduction of Lossky to the Fathers and to the Filioque controversy). Ivan Mikhailovich Grevs (1860–1941), the medievalist, directed him toward Meister Eckhart — the subject to which Lossky would return for his doctoral work three decades later (en.wikipedia.org, “Vladimir Lossky,” naming Grevs and Eckhart). The shape of Lossky’s whole career is already visible in these two names: the Greek Fathers and the Latin West, read together, by a man trained as a historian of the Middle Ages.

The Persecution of the Church

The years at Petrograd were the years of the Bolshevik assault on the Russian Church. In the spring of 1922, during the campaign for the confiscation of church valuables, Lossky was present at the trial that led to the execution of Metropolitan Benjamin (Kazansky) of Petrograd — shot in August 1922 and later glorified by the Russian Church as a new martyr (en.wikipedia.org, “Vladimir Lossky,” recording that Lossky witnessed the trial). He was nineteen. Nothing in his published theology is autobiographical, and he never made capital of the experience; but a reader who wonders why a Paris medievalist should have felt so strong an obligation to the Church inside Russia may reasonably start here (see The New Martyrs of Russia).

The Expulsion of November 1922

In 1922 the Soviet government resolved to remove the leading non-Marxist intellectuals from Russia rather than imprison them. Two German steamers were chartered from Petrograd — the Oberbürgermeister Haken in late September and the Preussen in November — and the operation entered history as the “philosophers’ ships” (filosofskii parokhod) (en.wikipedia.org, “Philosophers’ ships”; Chamberlain, The Philosophy Steamer, on the two Petrograd sailings).

Nikolai Lossky was among the deportees on the second sailing. The Preussen left Petrograd on 16 November 1922 carrying, among others, the philosophers N. O. Lossky, L. P. Karsavin — Vladimir’s own teacher — and I. I. Lapshin, with families the total on that voyage amounting to some forty-four persons (en.wikipedia.org, “Philosophers’ ships,” and Russian accounts of the November sailing naming Lossky, Karsavin and Lapshin). Vladimir was expelled with the entire family (en.wikipedia.org, “Vladimir Lossky”: “expelled from Soviet Russia with his entire family” in November 1922; orthodoxwiki.org, “Vladimir Lossky”; fr.orthodoxwiki.org, “Vladimir Lossky,” exilé hors de Russie en 1922).

[Disputed: whether Vladimir Lossky personally sailed on the *Preussen* or left with the family by another route in the same expulsion. The sources consulted agree that the whole family was expelled in November 1922 and that his father was among the deportees on the November Petrograd sailing (en.wikipedia.org, "Vladimir Lossky"; en.wikipedia.org, "Philosophers' ships"); the biographical notices do not separately document Vladimir's own passage, and this collection does not assert the specific vessel for him.]

He was nineteen years old, and he had lost his country, his university, and the possibility of an ordinary career in a single act of state. The consequence for his theology was not bitterness — his writing is notably free of the émigré’s rancour — but a certain permanent condition of exile, and a conviction that the Orthodox tradition was not a national possession of the Russians but a catholic inheritance to be given to the West in the West’s own languages.

What He Carried Out

Three things went with him from Russia and never left him.

The first was the Fathers, received through Karsavin as living theology rather than as historical curiosities, and received with the Filioque already attached as the question that divides.

The second was Meister Eckhart, given him by Grevs — the Rhineland Dominican whose negative theology would be the subject of his own doctoral thesis and who is, in a sense, the hidden interlocutor of the whole Lossky corpus. That a theologian famous for opposing the East to the West should have spent his scholarly life on a Latin mystic is one of the more instructive ironies of his career (see Dionysius, Eckhart, and the Negative Way).

The third was the memory of the persecuted Church — the trial of Metropolitan Benjamin, the desecrations of 1922 — which is the necessary background to the jurisdictional choice he made in Paris and held to for the rest of his life (see Paris, Gilson, and the Medievalist’s Training).

References

“Vladimir Lossky.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org. (Birth 8 June 1903 / 26 May OS at Göttingen; father Nikolai Lossky; Petrograd University from 1919; Karsavin and Grevs; the trial of Metropolitan Benjamin; expulsion with the entire family, November 1922; Prague; Sorbonne 1927; Gilson; death 7 February 1958.)
“Vladimir Lossky.” OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org. (Dates; father Nicolas Onufriyevich Lossky; exile 1922; Prague and Paris.)
“Vladimir Lossky.” OrthodoxWiki (French), fr.orthodoxwiki.org. (Birth and death dates; the family’s exile in 1922; Karsavin and the Filioque; Prague 1922–1924; the Sorbonne 1924–1927 and Gilson.)
“Page Vladimir Lossky.” Pages orthodoxes La Transfiguration, pagesorthodoxes.net. (Birth at Göttingen at Pentecost; Petrograd 1920–1922; Karsavin’s introduction to the Fathers and to the Filioque; Prague under N. P. Kondakov; arrival in Paris, October 1924.)
“Nikolay Lossky.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org. (Nikolai Onufrievich Lossky, 1870–1965; professor at St. Petersburg; expulsion on the philosophers’ ship.)
“Philosophers’ ships.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org. (The two chartered German steamers Oberbürgermeister Haken and Preussen; the Preussen leaving Petrograd 16 November 1922 with N. O. Lossky, L. P. Karsavin and I. I. Lapshin aboard.)
Chamberlain, Lesley. The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia. London: Atlantic Books, 2006. (The 1922 deportation of the Russian intelligentsia.)