The Book of 1944

Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient began as a series of conferences delivered in Paris under the German occupation in 1941–1942 and was published by Aubier in 1944. Twelve chapters carry the reader from the unknowability of God to the deified saint in the light of the age to come, following the order of dogmatic theology while insisting at every step that dogma is the framework of an experience. Translated into English in 1957 by members of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, it became — and has remained — the standard introduction to Orthodox theology for Western readers.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

Origin: Lectures under the Occupation

The book was not conceived as a book. Its substance was delivered as a series of conferences on Orthodox mystical theology in Paris in 1941–1942, in the middle of the German occupation, and published in 1944 (pagesorthodoxes.net, “Page Vladimir Lossky,” dating the conferences to 1941–1942 and identifying them as the origin of the 1944 Essai; fr.orthodoxwiki.org, “Vladimir Lossky,” noting that the wartime lectures were published as Théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient in 1944).

The circumstances leave their mark. This is not a seminary textbook composed at leisure but a set of lectures given to a mixed and largely Western audience in a city under occupation, by a man whose family was in hiding (see Paris, Gilson, and the Medievalist’s Training). It accounts for the book’s characteristic tone — compressed, urgent, addressed to intelligent outsiders rather than to insiders, and unwilling to spend words on anything not essential.

The first edition is:

Vladimir Lossky, Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient. Paris: Aubier (Éditions Montaigne), 1944.

The Genre: An Essai

The French title’s first word is not decoration. Lossky called the book an essai — an attempt, a trial — and the English title’s dropping of the word has done him a certain disservice, because readers have taken for a systematic dogmatics what its author offered as a probing sketch. The book has no apparatus of scholastic divisions, no exhaustive treatment of any locus, and no pretension to completeness. It has instead a thesis, and it follows that thesis through the whole body of Christian doctrine to see what happens.

It is also, importantly, addressed to the West. Lossky wrote in French for French readers, in a Paris where the theological conversation was dominated by Catholic ressourcement and neo-Thomism, and where the Christian East was known chiefly as an exotic. The book’s polemical edge — the insistent contrast between Eastern and Western approaches — belongs to that setting, and any reading of it that ignores the setting will misjudge the tone (see Two Triadologies and Their Consequences).

The Twelve Chapters

The book proceeds in twelve chapters, following the classical order of dogmatic theology while treating each locus as simultaneously a doctrine and a mode of union with God (azbyka.ru, English text of The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, table of contents):

Introduction: Theology and Mysticism in the Tradition of the Eastern Church — the thesis: dogma and experience are inseparable (see Theology and Mysticism Inseparable).
The Divine Darkness — apophatic theology; Dionysius the Areopagite; unknowing as the way to God (see The Divine Darkness).
God in Trinity — the monarchy of the Father, the antinomy of essence and hypostases, and the Filioque (see The Filioque Thesis).
Uncreated Energies — the Palamite distinction (see Lossky as Expositor of Palamas).
Created Being — creation from nothing, by will, and the divine ideas as logoi in the energies rather than in the essence.
Image and Likeness — theological anthropology; person and nature (see The Image and the Likeness).
The Economy of the Son — the Incarnation and redemption.
The Economy of the Holy Spirit — Pentecost, grace, and the personal appropriation of what Christ has done for the nature.
Two Aspects of the Church — the Church as body of Christ and as fullness of the Spirit; the Christological and Pneumatological poles of ecclesiology.
The Way of Union — asceticism, prayer, the sacraments, the synergy of grace and freedom.
The Divine Light — the uncreated light of Tabor; the hesychast experience.
Conclusion: The Feast of the Kingdom — the eschatological horizon.

Two structural features are worth naming. First, the book is bracketed by apophaticism: it begins in the divine darkness and ends in the divine light, and the light of the last chapters is the same unknowable God of the first, now given. Second, chapters 7 and 8 are deliberately parallel and irreducible: the work of the Son and the work of the Spirit are two distinct economies, and Lossky’s whole ecclesiology in chapter 9 turns on refusing to subordinate the second to the first (see Two Triadologies and Their Consequences).

Sources

The Fathers Lossky uses most are Dionysius the Areopagite, the Cappadocians (especially Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory the Theologian), Maximus the Confessor, John of Damascus, Symeon the New Theologian, and Gregory Palamas. The book is, in effect, a demonstration that these authors constitute a single continuous tradition — that Palamas in the fourteenth century says what Dionysius said in the sixth and Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth, and that the tradition therefore has an identifiable and defensible shape.

That claim of continuity is itself part of what has since been contested. The book’s genealogy is clean in a way that historical scholarship since has found too clean, and the criticism is taken up in Section 08 (see The de Régnon Paradigm and Lossky’s Thesis).

The English Translation

The book reached the English-speaking world thirteen years after publication and one month before its author’s death was still a year off:

Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Translated by a small group of members of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius. London: James Clarke, 1957.

The Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius — the Anglican–Orthodox society of which Lossky was himself a member (en.wikipedia.org, “Vladimir Lossky”) — was the natural vehicle: an Anglican readership was the first Western constituency for Orthodox theology in English, and the translation was made by people who knew the author. James Clarke of Cambridge has kept it in print ever since, and St Vladimir’s Seminary Press has issued it in North America.

The consequences of the translation are hard to overstate. For half a century, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church has been the book handed to the enquiring Western reader — the most widely assigned introduction to Orthodox theology in Orthodox and non-Orthodox academic settings alike (see The Corpus and Its Influence). A very large proportion of what educated Westerners believe about Orthodoxy comes, at one or two removes, from this one wartime lecture course.

What Kind of Authority the Book Has

A distinction that matters, and that the book’s own success has tended to blur.

The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church is not a symbolic book of the Orthodox Church. It is a private theological work by a layman, published without ecclesiastical mandate, expounding doctrines that are indeed the Church’s within a framework that is the author’s. The doctrines it teaches — that God’s essence is unknowable and his energies participable; that the Father is the sole source within the Trinity; that the Filioque is not received; that the end of the Christian life is deification — are the faith of the Church, confessed by councils and Fathers, and this repository confesses them (METHODOLOGY §4.1). The architecture — the systematic opposition of an Eastern and a Western mind, the person/individual distinction, the derivation of Latin ecclesiology from Latin triadology — is Lossky’s construction, and it is his readers’ business to weigh it (METHODOLOGY §4.2; see The Critique).

Lossky himself would not have objected to the distinction. He was scrupulous about the difference between what the Church has defined and what a theologian may argue, and his own Filioque essay concedes, in passing and without embarrassment, “the possibility of an Orthodox interpretation of Filioque, as it first appeared at Toledo for example” — a concession no polemicist would make (Lossky, “The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine,” in In the Image and Likeness of God, p. 73).

References

Lossky, Vladimir. Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient. Paris: Aubier (Éditions Montaigne), 1944.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Trans. a small group of members of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius. London: James Clarke, 1957.
Lossky, Vladimir. “The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine.” In In the Image and Likeness of God, ch. 4. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976 [1974], pp. 71–96. (The concession about a possible Orthodox interpretation of Filioque at Toledo, p. 73.)
The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, English text with table of contents. azbyka.ru. (The twelve chapters and their titles.)
“Page Vladimir Lossky.” Pages orthodoxes La Transfiguration, pagesorthodoxes.net. (The conferences of 1941–1942 behind the 1944 book.)
“Vladimir Lossky.” OrthodoxWiki (French), fr.orthodoxwiki.org. (The wartime lectures published as the 1944 Essai.)
“Vladimir Lossky.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org. (Membership of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius; the 1944 French edition and the 1957 English translation.)
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (The place of the Mystical Theology in twentieth-century Orthodox theology.)