The Divine Darkness

For Lossky, apophatic theology is not one theological method among others but the necessary form of all genuine theology: “It is by unknowing that one may know Him who is above every possible object of knowledge,” and “apophaticism is, therefore, a criterion: the sure sign of an attitude of mind conformed to truth.” The negations are not a confession of ignorance but the discipline by which the mind is stripped of the idols it makes, so that the God who is beyond every concept may be encountered rather than conceived.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Argument of Chapter 2

The second chapter of the Mystical Theology, “The Divine Darkness,” is the foundation of the book. Its argument runs in four steps.

First, God is not an object. Every concept we form is formed from creatures, and every concept therefore has creaturely limits built into it. To apply such concepts to God without qualification is to substitute an idol — a manageable God, a God of the size of our minds — for the God who is.

Second, the remedy is not silence but negation. Theology proceeds by affirming what revelation gives (God is good, wise, one, living) and then denying the creaturely mode of every affirmation (God is not good as creatures are good; he is beyond goodness as we conceive it). The negations are not the abolition of the affirmations but their purification.

Third — and this is Lossky’s distinctive emphasis — the negations do not stop at a higher concept. God transcends the opposition of affirmation and negation itself; he is beyond being and beyond non-being, beyond every category including the category of transcendence. Lossky takes this from Dionysius the Areopagite, for whom the ascent culminates not in a superior idea of God but in the “divine darkness” where the mind, having renounced everything, is united to what it cannot grasp:

“It is by unknowing that one may know Him who is above every possible object of knowledge.”

(Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, ch. 2, “The Divine Darkness”; text at azbyka.ru.)

Fourth, the whole procedure has an existential rather than a merely logical character. The point of the negative way is not to arrive at a correct formula about divine incomprehensibility but to change the theologian. Hence the sentence in which Lossky states the doctrine’s function:

“Apophaticism is, therefore, a criterion: the sure sign of an attitude of mind conformed to truth.”

(Lossky, The Mystical Theology, ch. 2; text at azbyka.ru.)

A criterion, not a conclusion. Apophaticism, on this account, is the test one applies to any theology — including one’s own — to see whether it has begun to treat God as a manageable object.

Not Agnosticism

The commonest misreading is that apophatic theology asserts that God is unknown and unknowable, full stop — a religious agnosticism dressed in patristic clothes. Lossky forecloses this at every turn, and the foreclosure is doctrinally load-bearing.

God is genuinely known: in the economy, in Christ, in the Scriptures, in the sacraments, in the experience of grace. What is unknowable is the divine essence — what God is in himself, the ground of his being. What is genuinely given is the divine energy — God himself in his act, his grace, his light, his life, truly communicated to creatures. The whole point of the Palamite distinction, as Lossky reads it, is to hold these two together: to say that the God who exceeds every concept is nonetheless really partaken (see Lossky as Expositor of Palamas; St. Gregory Palamas).

The repository’s Palamas collection states the resulting balance in Lossky’s own framing: “The energies are not ‘something of God’ but God himself in his action and revelation… The distinction between essence and energies is the dogmatic basis of the real character of all mystical experience” (Lossky, Mystical Theology, ch. 4, as cited in Apophaticism and Grace). A God who could be comprehended in his essence would be an idol; a God who could only be negated would leave the creature in the dark. The essence–energies distinction is what permits both the “No” and the “Yes.”

The Antinomic Structure

Lossky’s apophaticism is characteristically antinomic: it works by holding contradictory-seeming affirmations together rather than by resolving them. God is absolutely simple and really three; absolutely transcendent and really participable; absolutely unknowable in essence and really known in energy. The theologian’s task is not to remove the tension by subordinating one term to the other but to preserve it, because the tension is the shape of the mystery as revealed.

This is why Lossky’s most severe criticism of the Latin tradition is not that it errs on a particular point but that it resolves. In the Filioque essay he charges Filioquist triadology with bringing about “a certain rationalization of the dogma of the Trinity, insofar as it suppresses the fundamental antinomy between the essence and the hypostases,” and adds that “one has the impression that the heights of theology have been deserted in order to descend to the level of religious philosophy” (Lossky, “The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine,” in In the Image and Likeness of God, p. 80). The negative approach, by contrast, “places us face to face with the primordial antinomy of absolute identity and no less absolute diversity in God” and “does not seek to conceal this antinomy but to express it fittingly” (ibid.).

Whether that antinomic method is a patristic inheritance or a modern Russian one — and specifically whether Lossky took it from Bulgakov’s sophiological “antinomism” — is the substance of Brandon Gallaher’s contested thesis (Gallaher, “The ‘Sophiological’ Origins of Vladimir Lossky’s Apophaticism,” SJT 66/3 [2013]: 278–298; see Spor o Sofii and the Acts of 1935). It is worth noting that antinomic thinking has an older Russian pedigree still, in Fr. Pavel Florensky’s The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (1914), and that the Cappadocians themselves are read by many as working in a comparable mode. The question is genuinely open.

Apophaticism and the Person

There is a second reason, less often noticed, why apophaticism is foundational for Lossky: it is what makes his doctrine of the person possible.

If the person — divine or human — is irreducible to nature, then the person cannot be defined, since to define is to specify a nature. What can be said of a person is only what he is not: the Father is not the Son and not the Spirit; this human being is not reducible to the human nature he shares with every other. Lossky’s theology of the person is therefore apophatic in form, and his conclusions about the human person are characteristically negative and reserved — “only God can know” what a person finally is (Torrance, “Personhood and Patristics in Orthodox Theology: Reassessing the Debate,” Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 [2011]: 700–707, on the apophatic character of Lossky’s conclusion). This is a point in Lossky’s favour against some later personalists who spoke of personhood with much greater positive confidence (see Person versus Individual).

The Standing Objection

The recurring criticism — recorded in the repository’s hub essay — is that Lossky’s apophaticism is so heavily weighted toward Dionysius that it undervalues the cataphatic: the positive, revealed, incarnational knowledge of God, and specifically the concreteness of Christ (see Vladimir Lossky, “Criticisms”). Rowan Williams pressed related questions in the first sustained critical study of Lossky’s thought, asking how the negative way can ground a theology that also claims genuine knowledge (Williams, DPhil thesis, Oxford, 1975; “The Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology,” 1980). Aristotle Papanikolaou has shown that the later divergence between Lossky and Metropolitan John Zizioulas turns precisely on this: “For Lossky, apophaticism is the central precondition for a trinitarian theology; for Zizioulas, apophaticism has a much more restricted role in theological discourse” (Papanikolaou, “Divine Energies or Divine Personhood: Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas on Conceiving the Transcendent and Immanent God,” Modern Theology 19, no. 3 [2003]).

Lossky’s own answer is embedded in the doctrine: apophaticism is not a competitor to the cataphatic but its safeguard, and the negations are made of affirmations that revelation supplies. The dispute is over whether the safeguard, as he deploys it, leaves the affirmations enough weight. The collection reports the disagreement and does not settle it.

See Also

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. Ch. 2, “The Divine Darkness”; ch. 4, “Uncreated Energies.”
  • The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, English text. azbyka.ru. (Source of the verbatim quotations: “It is by unknowing that one may know Him who is above every possible object of knowledge”; “Apophaticism is, therefore, a criterion: the sure sign of an attitude of mind conformed to truth.”)
  • 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 antinomy passage and the charge of rationalization, p. 80.)
  • Papanikolaou, Aristotle. “Divine Energies or Divine Personhood: Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas on Conceiving the Transcendent and Immanent God.” Modern Theology 19, no. 3 (2003): 357–385.
  • Torrance, Alexis. “Personhood and Patristics in Orthodox Theology: Reassessing the Debate.” The Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 (2011): 700–707.
  • Williams, Rowan. “The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky: An Exposition and Critique.” DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1975.
  • 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.
  • Florensky, Pavel. The Pillar and Ground of the Truth. 1914. (The older Russian pedigree of antinomic method.)
  • Repository: Apophaticism and Grace; Vladimir Lossky.