04 — Apophaticism
Apophaticism — the way of negation — is the foundation of everything else in Lossky. God’s essence is unknowable not because our minds are weak but because he is God; and the recognition of that unknowability is not a confession of failure but the condition of real encounter. “Apophaticism is, therefore, a criterion: the sure sign of an attitude of mind conformed to truth.”
Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)
What This Section Covers
The first file follows chapter 2 of the Mystical Theology, “The Divine Darkness”: what apophaticism is and is not, why it is not agnosticism, the antinomic structure Lossky gives it, and its function as the guard against idolatry in theology.
The second file traces the sources — Dionysius the Areopagite above all, but also Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus — and then turns to the fact that most complicates the picture of Lossky as an anti-Western thinker: the great scholarly labour of his life was a study of Meister Eckhart, a Latin Dominican, read as a genuine master of the negative way. It also takes up The Vision of God (1962), the posthumous historical study in which Lossky traced the question of seeing God from the Fathers to Palamas.
Apophaticism is the doctrine on which Lossky is most secure and least contested — it belongs unambiguously to the Fathers he cites — and simultaneously the doctrine whose provenance in his thought has been most sharply questioned by Brandon Gallaher’s argument about its sophiological structure (see Section 02).
Files
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Divine Darkness | Chapter 2 of the Mystical Theology: negation as a way of union, not a method of denial; apophaticism as criterion; the antinomy |
| Dionysius, Eckhart, and the Negative Way | The sources: Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus; the Eckhart thesis; The Vision of God |
See Also
- The Mystical Theology — the book in which the doctrine is set out
- Essence and Energies — the dogmatic form the apophatic principle takes
- St. Dionysius the Areopagite — the source
- The Critique — the questions raised about Lossky’s construction