09 — Legacy and Assessment

Lossky published one book of theology in his lifetime and died at fifty-four with his doctoral thesis unfinished. Nearly everything by which he is known — The Vision of God, In the Image and Likeness of God, the dogmatic lectures, the Eckhart study, the 1940 war diary — appeared posthumously. This section maps the corpus and its reach, and then weighs the whole honestly: what stands, what is contested, and what kind of authority a layman’s theology can properly carry.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

What This Section Covers

The first file is a guide to the corpus: what he wrote, when it appeared, in what form it is available, and how it travelled — into Orthodox seminaries, into Western academic theology, into the ecumenical conversation, and into the work of Zizioulas, Yannaras, Sophrony, Stăniloae and Clément.

The second file is the assessment. It states what is durable in Lossky, what is under serious scholarly pressure, and what the reader of this repository should do with a body of work that is simultaneously the most-cited modern Orthodox authority here and a body of contested theses. It also states plainly what this collection has said throughout: that he was a layman, that he is not glorified, and that his theology is his own work and not the Church’s dogma.

Files

File Description
The Corpus and Its Influence The works, their publication history, and their reception in Orthodoxy, the West, and the ecumenical dialogue
An Assessment What stands, what is contested, what kind of authority the work carries, and how to read him

See Also