Theology and Mysticism Inseparable

The thesis of Lossky’s masterwork is stated in a single sentence of its Introduction: “There is no Christian mysticism without theology; but, above all, there is no theology without mysticism.” Dogma is not a set of propositions about God to which mystical experience may or may not be added; dogma is the account of what is really there to be encountered, and the encounter is what dogma is for. This file sets out the thesis, its consequences for how Lossky understands Tradition, and the criticisms it has attracted.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Claim

The opening chapter of the Mystical Theology argues that the Christian East has never made the separation between dogmatic theology and mystical or spiritual theology that became standard in the West — the division of the curriculum into a science of doctrine and a science of the spiritual life, taught by different faculties and directed at different ends. In the East, Lossky says, these are two aspects of one thing:

“Far from being mutually opposed, theology and mysticism support and complete each other. One is impossible without the other.”

and, in the sentence that has been quoted more than anything else he wrote:

“There is no Christian mysticism without theology; but, above all, there is no theology without mysticism.”

(Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Introduction, “Theology and Mysticism in the Tradition of the Eastern Church”; text at azbyka.ru and orthodoxinfo.com.)

The order of the two halves matters. The first half is the less controversial: mystical experience without doctrinal control is exposed to delusion, and the Eastern ascetic tradition has always said so. The second half is the sharp one: theology without mysticism is not merely impoverished but impossible — not really theology at all, but something else wearing its name.

What “Mystical” Means Here

Lossky’s usage needs care, because the English word “mystical” carries associations he did not intend.

He does not mean extraordinary experiences. Visions, ecstasies, and revelations are not the subject; the Mystical Theology is notably restrained about them, and its chapter on the divine light is a doctrinal exposition rather than a phenomenology.

He does not mean ineffable feeling as opposed to doctrine. That is precisely the opposition he is attacking.

He means the personal appropriation of what the Church confesses — the movement by which a dogma ceases to be information about God and becomes the form of one’s own union with him. The dogma of the Trinity, on this account, is not a datum to be believed and then set aside; it is the description of the life into which the baptized are being drawn. The dogma of the two natures in Christ is the ground of the possibility that a human being should be deified. The Palamite distinction is what makes it true that the experience of grace is an experience of God and not of a creature (see Uncreated Grace and Deification).

Hence Lossky’s characteristic move throughout the book: each doctrine is expounded, and then the question is asked what difference it makes to the possibility of union with God. That is what he means by mystical theology.

The Consequence for Dogma

If this is right, then two familiar attitudes to dogma are excluded.

The first is dogmatic minimalism — the view that the conciliar definitions are regrettable necessities, technical fences erected against heresy, and that the real substance of Christianity lies elsewhere, in ethics or in experience. Lossky’s answer is that the fences mark out the only ground on which the experience is possible. The homoousion was not a Greek intrusion into a simple gospel; it is the statement of what must be true if the Christian is to be united to God in Christ rather than to a superior creature.

The second is dogmatic rationalism — the view that theology is a science of propositions whose object is a system, and that the theologian’s task is to secure and extend the system by inference. This is the target of Lossky’s most pointed criticism, and it is aimed principally at the scholastic tradition. The complaint is not that scholastics reason; Lossky reasons very hard. It is that a theology organized around the demand for logical clarity will, at the decisive points, resolve antinomies that ought to be preserved — and in resolving them, will lose the object (see The Filioque Thesis, where he charges Filioquist triadology with a “rationalization of the dogma of the Trinity” that “suppresses the fundamental antinomy between the essence and the hypostases”: Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, p. 80).

Tradition as the Life of the Spirit

The thesis has an ecclesiological form as well. If dogma and experience are inseparable, then Tradition cannot be understood as a deposit of propositions transmitted alongside Scripture. Lossky develops this in the essay “Tradition and Traditions,” written for the volume on icons he produced with Leonid Ouspensky, and in “Catholic Consciousness,” both later gathered in In the Image and Likeness of God.

The core distinction is between traditions — the plural, the concrete inherited forms: texts, canons, rites, iconographic types, customs — and Tradition, singular, which is not one more item in the list but the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church by which the whole list is understood. Tradition, on this account, is the “critical spirit of the Church”: the capacity, given by the Spirit, to recognize what is authentically the faith and to distinguish it from what merely accompanied it. It is neither a rival source of revelation alongside Scripture nor an accumulation of additions to it, but the horizon within which Scripture is read as what it is (Lossky, “Tradition and Traditions,” in In the Image and Likeness of God; cf. Holy Tradition).

This is one of the most durable parts of Lossky’s legacy and one of the least contested. The essay is regularly cited in Orthodox and ecumenical discussions of the Scripture–Tradition question, and it has worn better than several of his more famous theses.

Why the Thesis Landed

The Mystical Theology‘s claim arrived in the West at a moment when Western theology was itself in revolt against exactly the separation Lossky described. The Catholic ressourcement movement — Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, Yves Congar — was arguing for the recovery of a patristic theology in which doctrine and spirituality had not yet been divided; the Anglican and Protestant biblical-theology movements were making parallel arguments. Lossky’s book said, in effect: the tradition you are trying to recover never stopped existing in the East. That is a large part of why the book was read, and read by people who had no prior interest in Orthodoxy.

The Criticisms

Per METHODOLOGY §4.2, the objections belong here and not only in Section 08.

That the contrast is overdrawn. The sharpest historical objection is that the East/West opposition on which the thesis rests is a modern construction rather than a patristic datum — that Latin theology, including scholastic theology, is far less separated from prayer and far closer to the Greek Fathers than Lossky’s frame allows. This is the burden of the de Régnon-paradigm critique, taken up at length in Section 08 (see The de Régnon Paradigm and Lossky’s Thesis). It bears with particular force here, because the Introduction’s contrast between an Eastern unity and a Western division is where the whole book’s frame is set.

That the apophatic emphasis is one-sided. A recurring criticism, made from within Orthodoxy as well as outside it, is that Lossky’s insistence on the negative way undervalues the cataphatic — the genuine, positive, revealed knowledge of God given in Christ and in Scripture — and can leave the impression that Christian theology is a discipline of denial (the objection is recorded in the repository’s hub essay: Vladimir Lossky, “Criticisms”). Lossky’s own answer is that apophaticism is not a method of denial but a mode of union, and that its point is precisely to protect the reality of the positive encounter (see The Divine Darkness); whether the answer suffices is a live question.

That the account of experience is under-specified. Rowan Williams’s Oxford thesis — the first sustained critical study of Lossky, and still the fullest — presses on the coherence of Lossky’s account of what it is that the theologian “experiences,” and on the relation between apophatic method and the claim to a genuine knowledge of God (Williams, “The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky: An Exposition and Critique,” DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1975; and “The Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology: An Introduction to the Thought of V. N. Lossky,” in New Studies in Theology 1, ed. Stephen Sykes and Derek Holmes, 1980, pp. 95–117).

That the method is more indebted to sophiology than Lossky admitted. Brandon Gallaher argues that Lossky’s “antinomic theology” derives structurally from Bulgakov’s antinomism, so that the neo-patristic and sophiological strands are not the contraries the standard narrative makes them (Gallaher, SJT 66/3 [2013]: 278–298; see Spor o Sofii and the Acts of 1935).

None of these objections is adjudicated here. What can be said is that the central positive claim — that Orthodox dogma is ordered toward union with God and cannot be understood apart from that ordering — has been received across the Orthodox world as substantially right, and that the contested part is the historical frame in which Lossky set it.

References

Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Trans. members of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius. London: James Clarke, 1957. Introduction, “Theology and Mysticism in the Tradition of the Eastern Church.” (French orig. Paris: Aubier, 1944.)
The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, English text. azbyka.ru; and “Theology and Mysticism in the Tradition of the Eastern Church,” orthodoxinfo.com. (Source of the verbatim quotations: “Far from being mutually opposed…”; “There is no Christian mysticism without theology; but, above all, there is no theology without mysticism.”)
Lossky, Vladimir. “Tradition and Traditions” and “Catholic Consciousness.” In In the Image and Likeness of God, ed. John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974.
Lossky, Vladimir. “The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine.” In In the Image and Likeness of God, ch. 4, pp. 71–96. (The charge of a “rationalization of the dogma of the Trinity,” p. 80.)
Williams, Rowan. “The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky: An Exposition and Critique.” DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1975. (Available via the Oxford University Research Archive.)
Williams, Rowan. “The Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology: An Introduction to the Thought of V. N. Lossky.” In New Studies in Theology 1, ed. Stephen Sykes and Derek Holmes, 95–117. London, 1980.
Gallaher, Brandon. “The ‘Sophiological’ Origins of Vladimir Lossky’s Apophaticism.” Scottish Journal of Theology 66, no. 3 (2013): 278–298.
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015.
Repository: Vladimir Lossky. (The standing list of criticisms of Lossky’s apophaticism.)