Paris, Gilson, and the Medievalist’s Training

From Prague in 1922 to Paris in 1924, Lossky became a professional medievalist under Étienne Gilson at the Sorbonne, and remained one: his doctoral work was on Meister Eckhart, and he earned his living from 1942 at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He was a layman, married with four children; a founding member of the Confrérie Saint-Photius; a Russian who chose to stay under the Moscow Patriarchate when most of the emigration did not; a fugitive and a resistant under the Occupation; the first dean of the Institut Saint-Denys; and, for seventeen days in August 1956, a visitor to the Russia he had left thirty-four years before. He died in Paris on 7 February 1958, aged fifty-four.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

Prague, and Kondakov

The expelled Losskys went first to Czechoslovakia, where the government of Tomáš Masaryk had organized a generous programme of support for Russian émigré scholars and students. Vladimir continued his studies at Prague, where he worked under the great Byzantinist and historian of art Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov (1844–1925) (pagesorthodoxes.net, “Page Vladimir Lossky,” naming Kondakov as his Prague teacher). The Prague years gave him Byzantine art and iconography — an interest that would resurface thirty years later in the volume he wrote with Leonid Ouspensky (see The Corpus and Its Influence).

[Disputed: the length of the Prague period. English Wikipedia gives 1922–1926 for the Prague studies with a Sorbonne degree in 1927; the French Orthodox notices give Prague 1922–1924 with arrival in Paris in October 1924 and the Sorbonne degree taken 1924–1927 (en.wikipedia.org, "Vladimir Lossky"; fr.orthodoxwiki.org, "Vladimir Lossky"; pagesorthodoxes.net, "Page Vladimir Lossky"). All sources agree on the Sorbonne qualification of 1927.]

The Sorbonne and Étienne Gilson

Lossky settled in Paris — the sources that specify the month give October 1924 — and took his degree in medieval history at the Sorbonne, completed in 1927 (fr.orthodoxwiki.org; pagesorthodoxes.net; en.wikipedia.org, “Vladimir Lossky,” giving 1927 for the Sorbonne qualification in medieval philosophy). There he studied under Étienne Gilson (1884–1978), the pre-eminent historian of medieval philosophy of the century and the architect of the modern recovery of Thomas Aquinas. The two remained friends for life (en.wikipedia.org, “Vladimir Lossky,” on the lifelong friendship with Gilson).

The importance of this cannot be overstated, and it complicates every simple account of Lossky as an anti-Western polemicist. He was not a seminary-trained dogmatician who came to the Latin West through controversy. He was a professionally trained Latin medievalist whose closest scholarly master was a Catholic Thomist, and who read Aquinas, Eckhart, and the scholastic tradition in the original with the competence of a specialist. When he later argued that Latin and Greek Trinitarian theology represent two irreducibly different systems, he was arguing as a man who knew both from the inside — which is precisely why the argument carried, and precisely why its critics have had to engage it on scholarly rather than merely confessional ground (see The de Régnon Paradigm and Lossky’s Thesis).

His first published research belongs to this world: “La notion des ‘analogies’ chez Denys le Pseudo-Aréopagite,” in the Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 5 (1930), pp. 279–309 — a technical study, in the leading French medievalist journal, of the Areopagite whose apophaticism would become the axis of his theology (Lossky 1930; pagesorthodoxes.net, noting the early studies on Pseudo-Dionysius and medieval theology in the Archives d’histoire doctrinale).

The Eckhart Thesis

The great unfinished work of his life was the doctoral thesis on Meister Eckhart, the subject Grevs had given him at Petrograd. It was never defended: Lossky died with it incomplete, and it was published posthumously as Théologie négative et connaissance de Dieu chez Maître Eckhart, in Gilson’s own series, Études de philosophie médiévale 48 (Paris: J. Vrin, 1960) (Lossky 1960; vrin.fr, publisher’s listing for the volume in the Études de philosophie médiévale series).

That the author of The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church spent his scholarly career on a Latin Dominican is not a paradox but a key. Lossky read Eckhart as a Western master of the negative way — a theologian in whom the Dionysian inheritance is genuinely alive inside the scholastic apparatus — and the study is conducted with sympathy, not as a prosecution. The book is a standing correction to the caricature of Lossky as a man who thought the Latin West had nothing (see Dionysius, Eckhart, and the Negative Way).

From 1942 until his death he was attached to the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique — that is, he was a paid research scholar of the French state, not a churchman (en.wikipedia.org, “Vladimir Lossky,” giving 1942–1958 for the CNRS membership). He also lectured at the École pratique des hautes études and at the Collège philosophique (pagesorthodoxes.net).

The Confrérie Saint-Photius and the Moscow Patriarchate

In 1925–1926 a group of young Russians in Paris founded the Confrérie Saint-Photius (Brotherhood of St. Photius), a lay association dedicated to Orthodox witness in the West — among the founders were the three Kovalevsky brothers, Eugraph, Maxime and Pierre, together with Leonid Ouspensky and Grégoire Krug (fr.orthodoxwiki.org, “Vladimir Lossky,” dating the foundation 1925–1926 and naming Ouspensky and Krug; orthodoxes-parisiens.over-blog.net, “Confrérie Saint Photius,” naming the eight founders of 1925 and dating Lossky’s active participation from his arrival in Paris in 1924, with Eugraph Kovalevsky bringing him fully into the group in 1928). Lossky became one of its leading figures and served as its vice-president (Gallaher, “The ‘Sophiological’ Origins of Vladimir Lossky’s Apophaticism,” SJT 66/3 [2013], on Lossky as vice-president of the Brotherhood).

The Brotherhood’s defining commitment — and Lossky’s — was loyalty to the Moscow Patriarchate. This requires careful statement, because it is easily misread. In the 1920s and 1930s the Russian emigration in Western Europe fractured into three jurisdictions: the Russian Church Abroad (ROCOR); the Paris archdiocese under Metropolitan Evlogy, which in 1931 placed itself under the Ecumenical Patriarchate and to which the St. Sergius Institute belonged; and a much smaller body of parishes that remained under the Patriarchal Exarchate of Moscow. Lossky belonged to the third, and stayed there. He was thus not a member of the milieu of the St. Sergius Institute — the milieu of Bulgakov, Florovsky, Kartashev and Zenkovsky — and this institutional distance is part of the explanation of his position in the sophiology dispute (see Lossky Against Bulgakov).

The choice should be reported without polemic in either direction. It was not an endorsement of Soviet policy — Lossky had watched the Church persecuted at first hand — but a judgment that the canonical mother church, however afflicted, remained the mother church, and that the emigration’s departure from it was a wound. Others in the emigration, in equal good faith, judged that the Moscow administration under Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) was too compromised by state pressure to be freely obeyed from abroad. The repository does not adjudicate that dispute (cf. Twentieth-Century Fragmentation).

He was also a member of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, the Anglican–Orthodox society, whose members would translate the Mystical Theology into English (en.wikipedia.org, “Vladimir Lossky,” listing membership of both the Brotherhood of St. Photius and the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius).

Marriage and Family

On 4 June 1928 Lossky married Madeleine Schapiro (en.wikipedia.org, “Vladimir Lossky,” giving the date; fr.orthodoxwiki.org, giving the marriage in 1928). They had four children (fr.orthodoxwiki.org, “Vladimir Lossky”). The eldest, Nicolas Lossky (20 November 1929 – 23 October 2017), became a distinguished scholar in his own right — professor at the University of Paris-Nanterre and at the St. Sergius Institute, and a leading Orthodox figure in the ecumenical movement (orthodoxie.com, “In Memoriam: P. Nicolas Lossky (1929–2017)”; orthodoxwiki.org, “Nicholas Lossky”). It was Nicolas who prefaced the posthumous publication of his father’s 1940 war diary (editionsducerf.fr, catalogue entry for Sept jours sur les routes de France, noting the preface by Nicolas Lossky and the postface by Marie Sémon and Catherine Aslanoff).

The War

On 13 June 1940, as the German army approached Paris, Lossky left the city on foot and by whatever transport he could find, intending to enlist in the French army. The army he was looking for kept receding: he was directed and misdirected from town to town, and after seven days and some six hundred kilometres he found no unit to receive him and rejoined his family in the south (svspress.com, publisher’s description of Seven Days on the Roads of France). He wrote the experience down at once. The diary remained unpublished for nearly sixty years and appeared as Sept jours sur les routes de France: juin 1940 (Paris: Cerf, 1998), with a preface by Nicolas Lossky; the English translation, by Michael Donley, is Seven Days on the Roads of France, June 1940 (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012), the second volume of the press’s Orthodox Christian Profiles series (editionsducerf.fr; svspress.com). [Disputed: the date of the French first edition — Éditions du Cerf and most catalogue records give 1998; one French Orthodox biographical notice gives 2001, presumably a reprint (editionsducerf.fr; pagesorthodoxes.net).]

The little book matters out of proportion to its length. It is the only substantial piece of autobiographical writing Lossky left, and it shows the theologian of the Filioque as a man in love with France — with its roads, its village churches, its saints — at the moment of its collapse.

Under the Occupation the family was in danger: Madeleine Lossky was of Jewish origin, and the family went into hiding. French Orthodox sources record that Lossky took part in the Resistance during the years 1940–1944 (pagesorthodoxes.net, “Page Vladimir Lossky,” on the Resistance participation and on the family’s concealment because of his wife’s Jewish origins). The nature and extent of that participation is not documented in detail in the sources consulted here, and this collection reports it as the biographical notices report it, without embroidery.

It was in the middle of the Occupation, in 1941–1942, that he delivered the series of conferences in Paris that became the Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient, published in 1944 (pagesorthodoxes.net, dating the conferences 1941–1942; fr.orthodoxwiki.org, noting the wartime lectures behind the 1944 book; see The Book of 1944).

The Institut Saint-Denys

At the end of the war Lossky and Eugraph Kovalevsky founded, with a group of French intellectuals, the Institut de théologie orthodoxe Saint-Denys in Paris, placed under the patronage of Dionysius the Areopagite; the Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel served as its first registrar. Lossky was its first dean and taught dogmatic theology and church history there until 1953 (orthodoxwiki.org, “St. Denys Theological Institute (Paris, France),” on the foundation, Marcel’s role, and Lossky’s deanship to 1953; fr.orthodoxwiki.org, “Vladimir Lossky,” on the co-foundation and the teaching to 1953). [Disputed: the founding year — English OrthodoxWiki and the Institute's own historical notices give 1944; the French OrthodoxWiki entry gives 1945.]

He left in 1953, as the Saint-Denys circle around Kovalevsky moved toward the constitution of a distinct Western-rite “Église orthodoxe de France” and away from the Moscow Exarchate. From 1953 until his death Lossky taught at the pastoral courses of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Western European Exarchate in the rue Pétel, Paris (en.wikipedia.org, “Vladimir Lossky,” giving 1953–1958 for the rue Pétel teaching; fr.orthodoxwiki.org, on the shift in 1953 to the Patriarchate’s pastoral courses). It is these later lecture courses that lie behind the posthumous dogmatic text known in English as Orthodox Theology: An Introduction.

He also collaborated in these years with Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov), the disciple of St. Silouan, on the Messager de l’Exarchat du Patriarche russe en Europe occidentale — the Exarchate’s theological journal — between about 1950 and 1957 (orthodoxwiki.org, “Vladimir Lossky,” on the collaboration with Elder Sophrony on a theological journal, 1950–1957; see St. Sophrony of Essex).

The Return of 1956

From 8 to 25 August 1956 Lossky travelled to the Soviet Union as a member of a delegation of the Western European Exarchate, visiting Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and Vladimir (eparhia-saratov.ru, “Русский богослов на Западе. К 120-летию В. Н. Лосского,” giving the dates and the itinerary; pagesorthodoxes.net, describing the journey as an encounter with the suffering Church). It was thirty-four years since the Preussen had left Petrograd. The biographical notices describe the journey as one of the great consolations of his life (eparhia-saratov.ru).

Death

Lossky died in Paris on 7 February 1958, of a heart attack; the French notices attribute it to a congenital cardiac condition aggravated by the privations of the revolutionary years (en.wikipedia.org, “Vladimir Lossky,” giving the date and the heart attack; pagesorthodoxes.net, on the congenital condition). He was fifty-four years old — in his fifty-fifth year. [Corrected: some accounts, including pagesorthodoxes.net, give his age at death as fifty-five; on the birth date of 8 June 1903 universally attested, he had not yet reached his fifty-fifth birthday on 7 February 1958 and was therefore fifty-four.]

He left the Eckhart thesis unfinished, the dogmatic lectures unpublished, the essays scattered across journals, and one completed book. Nearly everything by which he is now known appeared after his death (see The Corpus and Its Influence).

See Also

• Göttingen, Petrograd, and the Philosophers’ Ships — the first half of the life
• Lossky Against Bulgakov — the jurisdictional choice in its theological context
• The Book of 1944 — the wartime lectures that became his masterwork
• Dionysius, Eckhart, and the Negative Way — the Latin medievalist behind the Orthodox theologian
• The Corpus and Its Influence — the posthumous publication history
• St. Sophrony of Essex — his collaborator on the Exarchate’s journal
• Twentieth-Century Fragmentation — the jurisdictional divisions of the emigration

References

• Lossky, Vladimir. “La notion des ‘analogies’ chez Denys le Pseudo-Aréopagite.” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 5 (1930): 279–309.
• Lossky, Vladimir. Théologie négative et connaissance de Dieu chez Maître Eckhart. Études de philosophie médiévale 48. Paris: J. Vrin, 1960. (The unfinished doctoral work, published posthumously.)
• Lossky, Vladimir. Sept jours sur les routes de France: juin 1940. Preface by Nicolas Lossky; postface by Marie Sémon and Catherine Aslanoff. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1998.
• Lossky, Vladimir. Seven Days on the Roads of France, June 1940. Trans. Michael Donley. Orthodox Christian Profiles 2. Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012.
• “Vladimir Lossky.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org. (Prague; Sorbonne 1927; Gilson; marriage to Madeleine Schapiro, 4 June 1928; CNRS 1942–1958; St. Dionysius Institute deanship; rue Pétel 1953–1958; Brotherhood of St. Photius and the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius; death 7 February 1958.)
• “Vladimir Lossky.” OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org. (Deanship of the St. Denys Institute 1944–1953; the pastoral courses of the Moscow Exarchate; collaboration with Elder Sophrony on a theological journal, 1950–1957.)
• “Vladimir Lossky.” OrthodoxWiki (French), fr.orthodoxwiki.org. (Prague 1922–1924; Sorbonne 1924–1927; the Confrérie Saint-Photius 1925–1926 with Ouspensky and Krug; marriage 1928 and four children; the Institut Saint-Denys and the change of 1953.)
• “Page Vladimir Lossky.” Pages orthodoxes La Transfiguration, pagesorthodoxes.net. (Kondakov at Prague; arrival in Paris October 1924; the 1930 Archives d’histoire doctrinale studies; the Resistance 1940–1944 and the family’s concealment; the conferences of 1941–1942; the École pratique des hautes études and the Collège philosophique; the 1956 journey; the congenital heart condition.)
• “Confrérie Saint Photius.” Le Monde Orthodoxe, orthodoxes-parisiens.over-blog.net. (Foundation in 1925 by eight young Russians including the three Kovalevsky brothers; Lossky’s participation from 1924 and his full entry into the group in 1928.)
• “St. Denys Theological Institute (Paris, France).” OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org. (Foundation in 1944; Gabriel Marcel as first registrar; Lossky dean until 1953.)
• Gallaher, Brandon. “The ‘Sophiological’ Origins of Vladimir Lossky’s Apophaticism.” Scottish Journal of Theology 66, no. 3 (2013): 278–298. (Lossky as vice-president of the Brotherhood of St. Photius.)
• “In Memoriam: P. Nicolas Lossky (1929–2017),” by Carol Saba. Orthodoxie.com. (Dates of Nicolas Lossky, son of Vladimir.)
• “Nicholas Lossky.” OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org. (Professor at Paris-Nanterre and at the St. Sergius Institute.)
• Éditions du Cerf, catalogue entry for Vladimir Lossky, editionsducerf.fr. (Publication of Sept jours sur les routes de France, 1998.)
• St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, publisher’s description of Seven Days on the Roads of France, svspress.com. (13 June 1940; seven days and six hundred kilometres; Michael Donley’s translation, 2012.)
• “Русский богослов на Западе. К 120-летию В. Н. Лосского.” Saratov Diocese, eparhia-saratov.ru. (The visit to the USSR, 8–25 August 1956, with the delegation of the Western European Exarchate; Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and Vladimir.)
• Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, catalogue entry for Théologie négative et connaissance de Dieu chez Maître Eckhart, vrin.fr. (Études de philosophie médiévale series; publication data.)