An Assessment

A weighing of the whole. Lossky wrote one of the genuinely great theological books of the twentieth century and put the Christian East back into the West’s intellectual conversation on its own terms. He also built that achievement on a historical frame that current scholarship has placed under serious pressure, intervened in the sophiology dispute in a way that did him no credit, and has been received — against his own practice — as though a layman’s private theology were the Church’s dogma. All of these are true together, and this file says so.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

What He Was

A layman. It is worth beginning there, because everything else follows from it.

Vladimir Lossky was never ordained, held no teaching office in any Church beyond the small institutions of the Russian emigration in Paris, and earned his living as a research scholar of the French state. He was a husband and the father of four children. He wrote in French, for Western readers, as a professionally trained medievalist whose principal scholarly master was a Catholic Thomist. He died at fifty-four with his thesis unfinished.

He is not a canonized saint. No Orthodox Church has glorified him, and this collection has been careful not to write a sentence that presupposes otherwise. He is correctly called “Vladimir Lossky” — never “Fr.,” never “St.”

What Stands

The recovery of Palamas. Together with Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae before him and Fr. John Meyendorff after, Lossky took the essence–energies distinction out of the footnotes of Byzantine studies and made it the centre of a working theology. That the distinction is now taught as Orthodox dogma rather than as a late-Byzantine curiosity is very largely his doing (see Lossky as Expositor of Palamas; The Palamite Revival).

The apophatic principle. The insistence that theology’s first duty is to refuse the idol — that a God who fits the mind is not God — belongs unambiguously to the Fathers, and Lossky restated it with a force that reached far beyond Orthodoxy. Whatever else is contested, this is not.

The inseparability of dogma and prayer. “There is no theology without mysticism” has been received across the Orthodox world as substantially right, and it has done real work in the West as well, where it arrived at the moment the ressourcement movement was making a parallel argument (see Theology and Mysticism Inseparable).

“Tradition and Traditions.” The distinction between the concrete traditions and the Tradition which is the life of the Spirit in the Church has worn better than almost anything else he wrote, and is still standard in Orthodox and ecumenical discussion (see Holy Tradition).

The book itself. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church is a masterpiece of theological compression: two hundred pages that carry a reader from the divine darkness to the feast of the kingdom without ever becoming a manual. It is very hard to write a book that is at once introductory and serious, and Lossky wrote one.

What Is Contested

The East–West frame. The systematic opposition of a person-first East to an essence-first West, and the derivation of Western ecclesiology and spirituality from Western triadology, is under sustained challenge as a modern construct traceable to Théodore de Régnon — from Michel René Barnes and Lewis Ayres for the fourth century, from André de Halleux for the Cappadocians and by name against Lossky, from Sarah Coakley for Gregory of Nyssa, from Marcus Plested for the Byzantine reception of Aquinas, and from the Orthodox scholars of Orthodox Readings of Augustine (see The de Régnon Paradigm and Lossky’s Thesis).

Person versus individual. The claim that the sharp person/nature distinction is patristic has been contested by Lucian Turcescu, and the whole personalist programme by Nikolaos Loudovikos and others; Alexis Torrance and Aristotle Papanikolaou have reassessed the debate in more nuanced terms (see The Person-versus-Individual Debate).

The origins of the method. Brandon Gallaher argues that Lossky’s antinomic apophaticism derives from the sophiological method he attacked, which would make the neo-patristic/sophiological opposition considerably less clean than the standard narrative allows (see Spor o Sofii and the Acts of 1935).

The systematization of Palamas. Rowan Williams’s “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism” raised the question, still open, of how much of the modern Palamite architecture the fourteenth-century texts actually bear.

The balance of apophatic and cataphatic. A standing objection, recorded in the repository’s hub essay, is that Lossky’s Dionysian emphasis undervalues the positive, incarnational knowledge of God (see Vladimir Lossky).

The Paradox, Stated Plainly

Lossky is the most-cited modern Orthodox authority in this repository, and several of his signature theses are contested by current scholarship.

Both halves are true, and a reference work that suppressed either would be dishonest. The right response is not to demote him: the criticism touches his historical frame, not the dogma he expounds, and the dogma is the Church’s whatever becomes of the frame. Nor is it to treat his prominence as authority: citation frequency in a modern knowledge base reflects the state of the English-language literature, not a magisterial judgment.

The right response is to read him as a great theologian in a live scholarly argument — which is what he was, and what he would have expected to be. He was, after all, the man who wrote that it is not the historian’s business “to judge dogmatic values as such,” while himself building a case that depended at every point on historical judgments (Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, p. 72). The irony is real, and it is not fatal.

What He Did Not Do

Two things should be said in his favour against his own followers.

He did not write a civilizational pathology. The repository’s Augustine collection is right that his framing is measured by comparison with Fr. John Romanides — he did not make Augustine the villain of a historical drama (see The Spectrum of Orthodox Opinion). He conceded the possibility of an Orthodox reading of the Toledan Filioque; he insisted that Orthodox triadology “is not a counter-blast to Filioquism”; he denied that the essential identity of the Three is ontologically posterior to their diversity (Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, pp. 73, 80). Those concessions were dropped by the tradition that grew from him.

He did not claim to be quoting the Fathers on personhood. He said in print that he had not found an elaborated doctrine of the human person in patristic theology (Lossky, “The Theological Notion of the Human Person,” in In the Image and Likeness of God). His successors were less careful, and much of the criticism aimed at “Orthodox personalism” lands on them rather than on him.

What He Did That Was Wrong

Biography with dignity requires the other side too (METHODOLOGY §4.2 and §3.5).

In 1935 a layman of thirty-two, holding no ecclesiastical office, supplied a distant hierarch with the theological case on which a priest of another jurisdiction was censured without a hearing, and then defended in print both the substance of the censure and the hierarch’s competence to issue it (Gallaher, SJT 66/3 [2013]; see Spor o Sofii and the Acts of 1935). The theological objections were serious — serious enough that Moscow and ROCOR, at bitter odds on everything else, converged on them in the same autumn. The manner was not edifying, and Fr. Georges Florovsky’s more restrained conduct in the same controversy stands as a reproach. This collection reports it and does not excuse it.

It is fair to add that Lossky’s later writing is free of polemic against Bulgakov by name, and that he devoted the rest of his life to building rather than prosecuting.

How to Read Him

For a reader of this repository:

Read the book. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church rewards being read whole rather than mined. Read Orthodox Theology: An Introduction alongside it as the shorter companion, and In the Image and Likeness of God for the essays.

Take the doctrine, weigh the frame. What he expounds of the Church’s faith — the monarchy of the Father, the uncreated energies, uncreated grace, deification, the unreceived Filioque — is the Church’s and may be held with her. What he constructs — the two theological civilizations, the derivation of papal centralism from a Trinitarian premise, the sharp person/individual opposition — is his own argument in a debate that is still running, and should be read as one contested position among others (see The Critique).

Read the critics. Barnes, Ayres, de Halleux, Coakley, Turcescu, Plested, Torrance, Papanikolaou, Gallaher, and above all Rowan Williams, whose Oxford thesis remains the fullest treatment. The critique of Lossky begins in admiration and is conducted by people who have read him closely; it is not an attack on Orthodoxy, and nothing in it requires the Orthodox reader to give up anything the Church confesses.

Do not confuse him with the Church. This is the single point the collection has repeated most often, and it is the one that matters. He was a layman with a typewriter, a heart condition, and an extraordinary mind. The Church has not glorified him, has not canonized his theology, and does not need him to be more than what he was — which was, by any reasonable measure, a great deal.

A Final Word

He died on 7 February 1958 in Paris, thirty-six years after the Preussen carried his family out of Petrograd, eighteen months after seventeen days back in a Russia he had left at nineteen, with the Eckhart thesis on his desk unfinished. Almost everything he is now read for was still in manuscript.

Whatever the scholarship finally concludes about the de Régnon paradigm, that is a serious life, and the book it produced changed how a great many people, in and out of the Orthodox Church, understand what it is to know God.

See Also

References

  • Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957.
  • Lossky, Vladimir. In the Image and Likeness of God. Ed. John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974/1976. (The historian’s competence, p. 72; the Toledo concession, p. 73; “not a counter-blast to Filioquism,” p. 80; “The Theological Notion of the Human Person,” on the absence of an elaborated patristic doctrine of the human person.)
  • Lossky, Vladimir. Orthodox Theology: An Introduction. Trans. Ian and Ihita Kesarcodi-Watson. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1978.
  • Williams, Rowan. “The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky: An Exposition and Critique.” DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1975; “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” Eastern Churches Review 9 (1977): 27–44.
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015.
  • Barnes, Michel René. “De Régnon Reconsidered.” Augustinian Studies 26, no. 2 (1995): 51–79.
  • Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
  • de Halleux, André. “Personnalisme ou essentialisme trinitaire chez les Pères cappadociens? Une mauvaise controverse.” Revue théologique de Louvain 17 (1986).
  • Turcescu, Lucian. “‘Person’ versus ‘Individual’, and Other Modern Misreadings of Gregory of Nyssa.” Modern Theology 18, no. 4 (2002): 527–539.
  • Coakley, Sarah, ed. Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
  • Plested, Marcus. Orthodox Readings of Aquinas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
  • Torrance, Alexis. “Personhood and Patristics in Orthodox Theology: Reassessing the Debate.” The Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 (2011): 700–707.
  • Papanikolaou, Aristotle. Being with God. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.
  • Gallaher, Brandon. “The ‘Sophiological’ Origins of Vladimir Lossky’s Apophaticism.” Scottish Journal of Theology 66, no. 3 (2013): 278–298.
  • Repository: The De Régnon Paradigm Critique; The Spectrum of Orthodox Opinion; The Palamite Revival; Vladimir Lossky.