The Corpus and Its Influence

Lossky’s published corpus is small and mostly posthumous: one theological book in his lifetime, a pamphlet, a volume on icons written with Leonid Ouspensky, and a scattering of journal articles. The Eckhart thesis, The Vision of God, the collected essays, the dogmatic lectures and the war diary all appeared after 1958 — the last of them forty years after his death. From that small body of work came the standard modern presentation of Orthodox theology in the West and a line of influence running through Zizioulas, Yannaras, Sophrony, Stăniloae, Clément and beyond.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

Published in His Lifetime

“La notion des ‘analogies’ chez Denys le Pseudo-Aréopagite.” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 5 (1930): 279–309. The first substantial publication; a technical medievalist study of Dionysian analogy.

Spor o Sofii [The Dispute about Sophia]. Paris: Brotherhood of St. Photius, 1936. The pamphlet against Bulgakov’s sophiology and in defence of the Moscow ukaz. Still untranslated into English in full (see Spor o Sofii and the Acts of 1935).

Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient. Paris: Aubier, 1944. The masterwork, from lectures of 1941–1942. English: The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, trans. members of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius (London: James Clarke, 1957) (see The Book of 1944).

“The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Triadology.” Eastern Churches Quarterly 7 (1948), supplementary issue, pp. 31–53. Reprinted as chapter 4 of In the Image and Likeness of God (see The Filioque Thesis).

Der Sinn der Ikonen, with Leonid Ouspensky. Bern/Olten: Urs Graf, 1952. English: The Meaning of Icons, trans. G. E. H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky; later editions from St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Lossky supplied the theological chapters, including “Tradition and Traditions.”

Numerous shorter essays appeared in the Messager de l’Exarchat du Patriarche russe en Europe occidentale, in Dieu Vivant, and in other journals during these years; most were gathered posthumously.

Published After His Death

Théologie négative et connaissance de Dieu chez Maître Eckhart. Études de philosophie médiévale 48. Paris: J. Vrin, 1960. The unfinished doctoral thesis, published in Gilson’s series two years after Lossky’s death (vrin.fr; see Dionysius, Eckhart, and the Negative Way).

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). The historical study of the patristic doctrine of seeing God, from the apologists to Palamas. [Disputed: catalogue records give the English edition variously as Faith Press 1963 and St Vladimir's Seminary Press 1973 or 1983; the French original of 1962 and the translator Asheleigh Moorhouse are not in doubt.]

“Théologie dogmatique.” Serialized in Messager de l’Exarchat du Patriarche russe en Europe occidentale, 1964–1965. The dogmatic lectures from the pastoral courses of the Moscow Exarchate. English: Orthodox Theology: An Introduction, trans. Ian and Ihita Kesarcodi-Watson (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1978) — a short, accessible companion to the Mystical Theology, organized around Tradition, the knowledge of God, creation, the image of God in man, and redemption. A revised, annotated and expanded French edition was later prepared by Olivier Clément and Michel Stavrou; the English of that edition is Dogmatic Theology: Creation, God’s Image in Man, and the Redeeming Work of the Trinity, trans. Anthony P. Gythiel (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2017) (svspress.com, publisher’s listing).

À l’image et à la ressemblance de Dieu. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1967. English: In the Image and Likeness of God, ed. John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974; repr. 1976). The collected essays, and after the Mystical Theology the most important single volume: it contains “Tradition and Traditions,” “The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine,” “The Theological Notion of the Human Person,” “The Theology of the Image,” “Redemption and Deification,” and “Catholic Consciousness.”

La paternité spirituelle en Russie, with Nicolas Arseniev. 1977 (pagesorthodoxes.net, listing).

Sept jours sur les routes de France: juin 1940. Preface by Nicolas Lossky. Paris: Cerf, 1998. English: Seven Days on the Roads of France, June 1940, trans. Michael Donley (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012) — the war diary, published fifty-eight years after it was written (see Paris, Gilson, and the Medievalist’s Training).

Reach: The West

The most conspicuous effect of the corpus is that The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church became, and remains, the standard introduction to Orthodox theology in the English-speaking world — the most widely assigned such text in Orthodox and non-Orthodox academic settings alike, and the book most often handed to the enquiring Western reader (see Vladimir Lossky, “Influence and Legacy”).

This has had two consequences worth stating.

The first is that Lossky’s emphases became, for Western readers, the definition of Orthodoxy: apophaticism, the essence–energies distinction, theosis, the Filioque as substantive, the inseparability of dogma and prayer. Where Orthodox theology had previously been encountered in the West chiefly through liturgy, iconography or Slavophile romanticism, it now had a rigorous conceptual profile — and the profile was Lossky’s.

The second is that the profile was received as though it were the Church’s own self-description rather than one theologian’s. That misreception is the reason this collection insists on the §4.1/§4.2 distinction throughout.

Reach: Within Orthodoxy

Lossky’s influence inside Orthodoxy has been at least as great and rather more diffuse.

Metropolitan John Zizioulas took the theology of the person further than Lossky did and in a different direction, making hypostasis rather than energy the ground of the realism of divine–human communion — a divergence Aristotle Papanikolaou has analysed as a genuine paradigm question in contemporary Orthodox theology (Papanikolaou, “Divine Energies or Divine Personhood,” Modern Theology 19, no. 3 [2003]; see Metropolitan John Zizioulas).

Christos Yannaras developed a personalist and existential Orthodox philosophy in the same lineage (see Christos Yannaras).

Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov), his collaborator on the Exarchate’s journal between about 1950 and 1957 (orthodoxwiki.org, “Vladimir Lossky”), built his mature theology on what his interpreters call the hypostatic principle (see The Hypostatic Principle).

Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae worked in parallel on person, communion and deification within a Palamite frame (see Person, Communion, and Deification).

Olivier Clément, the French convert theologian, was among Lossky’s closest heirs in France and was later co-editor of the expanded French edition of the dogmatic lectures (see Olivier Clément).

Fr. John Meyendorff supplied the historical scholarship that Lossky’s Palamite theology needed, and the two are conventionally paired as the architects of the modern Palamite recovery (see Fr. John Meyendorff; The Palamite Revival).

Beyond these, Lossky’s framing shaped the presentation of Orthodoxy in the ecumenical movement — his son Nicolas Lossky carried much of that work forward — and his essay “Tradition and Traditions” remains a standard reference in Orthodox and ecumenical discussion of the Scripture–Tradition question (see Holy Tradition).

Reach: In This Repository

Lossky is cited throughout the present knowledge base: in the treatments of Palamas and the essence–energies distinction, of Dionysius and apophaticism, of Augustine and the Filioque, of scholasticism, of eschatology and theosis. He is the most-cited modern Orthodox authority here.

That prominence is a fact about the state of Orthodox theological literature in English as much as about Lossky. It is also, as Section 08 states plainly, in tension with the current scholarly assessment of several of his signature theses — and the tension is one this collection names rather than hides (see The Critique; An Assessment).

Scholarship on Lossky

The essential secondary literature:

  • Rowan Williams, “The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky: An Exposition and Critique,” DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1975 — the first and fullest critical study, available through the Oxford University Research Archive; and “The Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology,” 1980.
  • Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present (SPCK, 2015), ch. “Apophatic theology and deification: Myrrha Lot-Borodine and Vladimir Lossky” — the best short placing of Lossky in the century.
  • Aristotle Papanikolaou, Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion (Notre Dame, 2006), and “Divine Energies or Divine Personhood,” Modern Theology 19, no. 3 (2003).
  • Brandon Gallaher, “The ‘Sophiological’ Origins of Vladimir Lossky’s Apophaticism,” Scottish Journal of Theology 66, no. 3 (2013): 278–298.
  • Alexis Torrance, “Personhood and Patristics in Orthodox Theology: Reassessing the Debate,” The Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 (2011): 700–707.

See Also

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. Spor o Sofii. Paris: Brotherhood of St. Photius, 1936.
  • Lossky, Vladimir. Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient. Paris: Aubier, 1944. English: The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957.
  • Lossky, Vladimir. “The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Triadology.” Eastern Churches Quarterly 7 (1948), suppl., 31–53.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Lossky, Vladimir. À l’image et à la ressemblance de Dieu. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1967. English: In the Image and Likeness of God, ed. John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974.
  • Lossky, Vladimir. Orthodox Theology: An Introduction. Trans. Ian and Ihita Kesarcodi-Watson. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1978. (Chapters originally in Messager de l’Exarchat, 1964–1965, as “Théologie dogmatique.”)
  • Lossky, Vladimir. Dogmatic Theology: Creation, God’s Image in Man, and the Redeeming Work of the Trinity. Trans. Anthony P. Gythiel; French edition ed. Olivier Clément and Michel Stavrou. Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2017. (Publisher’s listing, svspress.com.)
  • Lossky, Vladimir. Sept jours sur les routes de France: juin 1940. Paris: Cerf, 1998. English: Seven Days on the Roads of France, June 1940, trans. Michael Donley. Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012.
  • Lossky, Vladimir, and Nicolas Arseniev. La paternité spirituelle en Russie. 1977. (Listed at pagesorthodoxes.net.)
  • Williams, Rowan. “The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky: An Exposition and Critique.” DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1975.
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015.
  • Papanikolaou, Aristotle. Being with God. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006; “Divine Energies or Divine Personhood,” Modern Theology 19, no. 3 (2003): 357–385.
  • Gallaher, Brandon. “The ‘Sophiological’ Origins of Vladimir Lossky’s Apophaticism.” Scottish Journal of Theology 66, no. 3 (2013): 278–298.
  • Torrance, Alexis. “Personhood and Patristics in Orthodox Theology: Reassessing the Debate.” The Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 (2011): 700–707.
  • “Vladimir Lossky.” OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org. (The collaboration with Elder Sophrony on the Exarchate’s journal, 1950–1957.)
  • “Page Vladimir Lossky.” Pages orthodoxes La Transfiguration, pagesorthodoxes.net. (Bibliography, including La paternité spirituelle en Russie.)