Dionysius, Eckhart, and the Negative Way

Lossky’s apophaticism descends from Dionysius the Areopagite by way of Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus — a lineage he traced historically in The Vision of God (1962), his study of the problem of seeing God from the Fathers to Palamas. But the scholarly labour of his own life was devoted to a Latin: his unfinished doctoral thesis, published posthumously as Théologie négative et connaissance de Dieu chez Maître Eckhart (Vrin, 1960), reads the Rhineland Dominican as a genuine Western master of the negative way. The theologian best known for opposing East to West spent thirty years on a Latin mystic, and read him with sympathy.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

Dionysius the Areopagite

The primary source is the Corpus Dionysiacum — above all the short treatise The Mystical Theology, from which Lossky’s own book takes its name. Dionysius is the author who gives Lossky the crucial move: that the ascent to God passes through affirmation, then through negation, and finally beyond the opposition of the two, into a “darkness” that is darkness only by excess of light. God is neither one nor manyness, neither being nor non-being; the mind that would be united to him must let go of every predicate, including the predicate of transcendence.

Lossky’s engagement with the Areopagite was scholarly before it was theological. His first substantial publication was a technical study of Dionysian analogy in the leading French medievalist journal: “La notion des ‘analogies’ chez Denys le Pseudo-Aréopagite,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 5 (1930): 279–309 (Lossky 1930; pagesorthodoxes.net, “Page Vladimir Lossky,” on the early Dionysian studies).

He accepted, without embarrassment, the modern dating of the Corpus to around the year 500 and the pseudonymity of its author — the standard position of Orthodox academic theology, in the line the repository records as running through Lossky, Meyendorff and Golitzin (see The Orthodox Handling). The authority of the writings, for him, rests on their truth and their reception by the Church, not on the name they bear. The repository’s Dionysius collection records the result plainly: “The twentieth-century theologian Vladimir Lossky made Dionysian apophaticism the very starting-point of his influential Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, presenting the negative way not as one method among others but as the characteristic Eastern approach to the knowledge of God” (The Corpus in Orthodox Theology).

Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus, and the Chain

Lossky was careful never to rest the negative way on Dionysius alone — partly because a doctrine resting on a pseudonymous sixth-century author would be vulnerable, and partly because he genuinely believed the tradition was continuous.

St. Gregory of Nyssa supplies the theme of epektasis: because God is infinite, the soul’s approach to him has no term, and every arrival is a new beginning; the ascent of Moses into the cloud on Sinai is the paradigm of a knowledge that increases by passing beyond what it has known (Life of Moses). St. Maximus the Confessor supplies the metaphysics of the logoi — the divine intentions of created things, located not in the divine essence but in the divine will and energy — which permits Lossky to say that God is genuinely present in creation without creation being an emanation of the divine being (Ambigua; cf. St. Maximus the Confessor). St. John of Damascus supplies the classic formulation that the divine essence is unknowable and that what we know is what is “around” God.

The chain terminates in St. Gregory Palamas, who states as dogma what the earlier tradition had held: the essence is imparticipable, the energies are participable, and both are God (see Lossky as Expositor of Palamas).

The Vision of God

Lossky set out this history at length in a course of lectures given after the war, published posthumously as:

Vladimir Lossky, Vision de Dieu. Neuchâtel: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1962. English: The Vision of God, trans. Asheleigh Moorhouse. London: Faith Press, 1963; later editions from St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

[Disputed: the date of the first English edition. The French original is consistently dated 1962 (Delachaux & Niestlé, Neuchâtel); English-language catalogue records variously give 1963 (Faith Press) and 1973 or 1983 for St Vladimir's Seminary Press printings. The translator, Asheleigh Moorhouse, is not in doubt.]

The book is a historical study of a single question: what did the Fathers mean when they spoke of seeing God, given that Scripture says both that no one has seen God at any time and that the pure in heart shall see him? Lossky traces the answers from the apologists and Irenaeus through Clement and Origen, the Cappadocians, Dionysius, Maximus, Symeon the New Theologian, and the Byzantine tradition, to the synthesis of Palamas and his successors in the fourteenth century.

Its value is that it is Lossky at his most historical and least programmatic. Where the Mystical Theology asserts a continuous Eastern tradition, The Vision of God argues for one, with texts. Readers who find the Mystical Theology’s frame too schematic often find The Vision of God the more persuasive book.

The Eckhart Thesis

And then there is Eckhart.

Ivan Grevs had directed the young Lossky to Meister Eckhart at Petrograd before 1922 (en.wikipedia.org, “Vladimir Lossky”). He returned to him in Paris under Gilson, and worked on him for the rest of his life. The thesis was intended as his principal doctoral work at the Sorbonne; it was unfinished when he died, and Gilson’s own series published it:

Vladimir Lossky, Théologie négative et connaissance de Dieu chez Maître Eckhart. Études de philosophie médiévale 48. Paris: J. Vrin, 1960.

(Lossky 1960; vrin.fr, catalogue entry, giving the series and the publication data; abebooks and archive.org records for the 1960 Vrin first edition.)

The book is what its title says: a study of negative theology and the knowledge of God in a Latin Dominican of the fourteenth century, conducted with full technical apparatus and from a standpoint informed by the mystical theology of the Orthodox Church. It is regarded as a serious contribution to Eckhart scholarship in its own right, independent of Lossky’s theological reputation.

Two things follow, and both matter for how Lossky is read.

First, it refutes the caricature. The man who wrote that Latin and Greek Trinitarian theology are two irreducible systems spent his scholarly life demonstrating that a Latin theologian working inside the scholastic apparatus was a genuine master of the apophatic way. Lossky did not think the West had lost apophaticism; he thought it had subordinated it. Eckhart is his proof that the Western tradition contains what he wanted, and his implicit reproach that the Western tradition did not build on it.

Second, it explains the shape of his polemic. Because he knew Latin theology from the inside — Eckhart, Aquinas, the whole medieval apparatus — his objections are structural rather than caricatural. When he writes that Filioquist triadology rests on “relations of opposition” as the basis of the hypostases and that this principle was “formulated by Thomas Aquinas,” he is not repeating a slogan; he is citing the Summa (Lossky, “The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine,” in In the Image and Likeness of God, pp. 76–77, citing Aquinas, ST I, q. 36, a. 1 among others). Whether his reading of Aquinas is right is contested (see The de Régnon Paradigm and Lossky’s Thesis; cf. Plested, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas, 2012). That it is a reading, made by a competent Latinist, is not.

The Icons

One further strand belongs to the apophatic theme. With the iconographer Leonid Ouspensky, his fellow member of the Confrérie Saint-Photius, Lossky produced Der Sinn der Ikonen (Bern/Olten: Urs Graf, 1952), translated as The Meaning of Icons by G. E. H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky, later reissued by St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Lossky contributed the theological chapters, including the essay “Tradition and Traditions” (see Theology and Mysticism Inseparable).

The icon is, in Lossky’s frame, an apophatic art: it does not represent God as he is in himself — which would be idolatry — but bears witness to the humanity that God has assumed and to the deified state of the saints, and it does so by a deliberate refusal of naturalistic illusion (cf. Icons and Iconoclasm; Holy Icons).

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.
Lossky, Vladimir. Vision de Dieu. Neuchâtel: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1962. English: The Vision of God, trans. Asheleigh Moorhouse. London: Faith Press, 1963; later editions Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957. Ch. 2.
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. (Relations of opposition and the citation of Aquinas, pp. 76–77.)
Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. Der Sinn der Ikonen. Bern/Olten: Urs Graf, 1952. English: The Meaning of Icons, trans. G. E. H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky; later editions Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, catalogue entry for Théologie négative et connaissance de Dieu chez Maître Eckhart, vrin.fr. (Series and publication data; the work described as the doctoral thesis intended for the Sorbonne, left incomplete at Lossky’s death.)
“Vladimir Lossky.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org. (Grevs and Eckhart at Petrograd; the 1960 Vrin publication.)
“Page Vladimir Lossky.” Pages orthodoxes La Transfiguration, pagesorthodoxes.net. (The 1930 Dionysian studies; the lifelong Eckhart work.)
Plested, Marcus. Orthodox Readings of Aquinas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Repository: The Corpus in Orthodox Theology; The Orthodox Handling.