Quick Answer
The book Western readers reach for when they want to know what Eastern Orthodoxy actually believes, written in Paris in 1944 by a Russian exile who thought the West had been wrong about God for a thousand years. Lossky's argument is that theology and mysticism are one thing, that God is unknowable in his essence and truly shared in his energies, and that the purpose of a human life is to become god by grace. It is dense, patristic, unapologetically polemical, and the most coherent single statement of a vision of Christianity that most Western readers have never met.
Key Takeaways
- Theology is mysticism. The East never separated them; that is the book's thesis and title.
- God is unknowable in essence, and negation is the way, not a footnote.
- The energies are how the unknowable God is really shared.
- Deification is the point of everything else.
- The West went wrong, on Lossky's account, at the filioque. He does not soften it.
17 min read
What This Book Is
Essai sur la théologie mystique de l'Église d'Orient was published in Paris in 1944, in the last year of the German occupation, by Vladimir Lossky, then forty-one. It was translated into English in 1957 by a group of members of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius and published by James Clarke, and it has been the standard English introduction to Orthodox theology ever since.
It is a systematic exposition in twelve chapters, moving from the method of theology through the Trinity, the divine energies, creation, the human being, the incarnation, the Spirit and the Church to the way of union, the divine light and deification. Each chapter draws on the Greek Fathers and each connects doctrine to the experience the doctrine expresses.
It is around two hundred and fifty pages, and it is dense. Lossky does not simplify, does not repeat himself, and does not explain what the Fathers assumed. A reader who finishes it has read a short book and learned a great deal.
What it is not. This is not an introduction to Orthodoxy as a religion, with its liturgy, icons, calendar and customs. Timothy Ware's The Orthodox Church does that. Lossky's book is the theology beneath the practice, presented as a single argument, and it assumes the reader wants the argument rather than the picture.
Who Vladimir Lossky Was
Vladimir Nikolaevich Lossky was born in Göttingen in 1903, the son of the Russian philosopher Nikolai Lossky, and grew up in St Petersburg. In 1922 the family was among the intellectuals expelled from Soviet Russia on Lenin's order, and after Prague they settled in Paris in 1924.
He studied medieval philosophy at the Sorbonne under Étienne Gilson, wrote a thesis on Meister Eckhart that was published after his death, and taught at the Institut Saint-Denis, the French-language Orthodox theological school he helped found. He stayed with the Moscow Patriarchate when most of the Russian émigré church broke with it, and was involved in the resistance during the occupation. He died suddenly in 1958, at fifty-four.
His other works, The Vision of God, In the Image and Likeness of God and the Eckhart thesis, extend this book. This is the one that made the argument, and the one the tradition adopted.
Theology and Mysticism as One
The claim in the title, stated in the first chapter.
In the West, Lossky says, theology and mysticism have been separated: theology is a science of God practised by scholars, and mysticism is a personal experience of God had by saints, and the two are different departments. In the East no such separation exists. Doctrine is the articulation of the Church's experience of God, and the experience is formed by doctrine. A theologian who does not pray is not a theologian, and a mystic whose experience contradicts the faith is not a mystic.
The consequence is that every doctrine in the book, the Trinity included, is presented as something lived rather than something thought, and the book's structure moves toward union with God as the point of all of it. The reader is asked to hold theology as a path and not as a description, and everything that follows depends on that.
The Divine Darkness
The second chapter, and the method.
Lossky begins where Dionysius the Areopagite begins: with the God who is beyond every name and concept, who is known only by unknowing, and whom Moses met on Sinai in the darkness of the cloud. Apophatic theology, the way of negation, is for Lossky not a corrective to positive theology but its foundation. Every affirmation about God must be denied, and the denial too, because God exceeds both. What remains is not a concept but an encounter.
He distinguishes this from Neoplatonic negation, which he says reaches an impersonal One, and insists that the Christian darkness is the darkness of a personal God who reveals himself precisely as unknowable. The distinction is the hinge of the whole book, and readers of the Cloud of Unknowing or of Eckhart will recognise the terrain and notice where Lossky says the West misread it.
The Trinity
The third chapter, and the doctrine Lossky places at the centre.
The Trinity, for the Eastern tradition as Lossky presents it, is not a puzzle to be solved but the primary datum of revelation, the way God is, from which everything else follows. He sets out the Cappadocian formulation, one essence in three persons, and insists that the persons are not modes or relations within an essence but irreducible realities, so that the Father is the source, the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds, each fully God, and the unity is in the Father's monarchy rather than in an abstract shared nature.
The chapter is precise and technical, and it is where a reader learns that the Orthodox understanding of God as person, rather than as being or substance, governs everything the tradition says about human beings, who are persons in the image of persons.
The Filioque
The controversy that Lossky treats as the root of the schism, and the book's most polemical section.
The Latin Church added to the creed the phrase that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, filioque. The Greek Church rejected the addition. Lossky argues that the dispute is not a quibble but a difference in the doctrine of God itself: the filioque, by making the Son a co-source of the Spirit, subordinates the persons to the essence, treats the divine unity as something prior to the persons, and so opens the way to a theology in which God's essence becomes an object of knowledge and the Spirit becomes an impersonal bond. From this, on his account, flow the Western separation of theology from experience, the scholastic God of the philosophers, and the West's difficulty with deification.
The argument is contested, and Western theologians have answered it at length. What is not contested is that Lossky states the Eastern objection with a clarity nobody had achieved in a Western language before, and that the section is the place to understand why the Orthodox think the filioque matters.
Essence and Energies
The fourth chapter, and the doctrine the book is most associated with.
If God is unknowable in his essence, how can he be known at all, and how can a creature be united with him without either dissolving into him or remaining forever outside? The Eastern answer, which Lossky presents as the tradition's constant teaching and which was formulated definitively by Gregory Palamas, is the distinction between essence and energies. God's essence is beyond all participation. God's energies, his activities, his grace, his glory, are God himself going out from himself, uncreated, and in them creatures truly participate. The distinction is real and it does not divide God, any more than the sun is divided from its rays.
This is the doctrine that makes deification possible without pantheism. It is also the doctrine the Latin West never accepted, holding grace to be created, and Lossky treats the difference as decisive for everything that follows.
Gregory Palamas
The fourteenth-century theologian whose work Lossky brought to Western attention.
Palamas, a monk of Athos and later archbishop of Thessalonica, defended the hesychast monks who practised the prayer of the heart and claimed to see the uncreated light of Tabor, against a Calabrian scholar named Barlaam who held that God could not be experienced directly and that the monks' light was created or imaginary. Palamas's reply, that God is unknowable in essence but known in his uncreated energies and that the monks saw the light that the apostles saw at the Transfiguration, was upheld by councils in 1341 and 1351 and became Orthodox doctrine.
Lossky's book is, among other things, the presentation of Palamas to the West as the culmination of the patristic tradition rather than as a late Byzantine oddity, and it succeeded. The Palamite revival in twentieth-century Orthodoxy is largely his doing.
Created Being
The chapter on the world, and on what a creature is.
Lossky sets out the doctrine of creation from nothing, the distinction between the uncreated God and everything else, and the Eastern teaching, drawn from Maximus the Confessor, that every created thing has its logos, its divine idea or word, which is God's will for it, so that the world is a book in which the divine intentions are written. Creation is not a static fact but a movement toward union with God, and the human being is the creature through whom that movement passes.
The chapter also treats the angels, the fall of the angels, and the question of evil, which Lossky, following the Fathers, holds to be a privation with no substance of its own, arising from created freedom.
Image and Likeness
The anthropology, and one of the book's most read chapters.
The human being is made in the image of God and called to the likeness. The image is given, in the person, in freedom, in the capacity for God; the likeness is the task, achieved through the free cooperation of the will with grace. Lossky draws out the Eastern distinction between nature and person: nature is what we share, person is who each of us irreducibly is, and the person is not a part of nature but its bearer, as the divine persons are of the divine essence.
The fall, in this account, damaged nature but did not abolish the image, so that the Eastern tradition is more optimistic than the Augustinian West about what remains of the human capacity for God, and less inclined to speak of inherited guilt. The chapter explains why Orthodoxy has no doctrine of original sin in the Western sense, and it is the place where a Western reader sees the difference most sharply.
The Two Economies
The chapters on the incarnation and the Spirit, treated as a pair.
Lossky presents the work of salvation as two economies, two dispensations. The Son becomes incarnate to restore human nature, uniting it with God in his own person and defeating death by his resurrection; this is the objective work, done once for all. The Spirit descends at Pentecost to give the restored nature to each person, so that what Christ did for human nature becomes the possession of each human person; this is the subjective work, done in every believer. The two are inseparable and neither is subordinate.
The scheme is Lossky's own arrangement of patristic material and it has been criticised as too neat, but it explains a great deal about the Eastern balance between Christ and the Spirit, and about why Orthodox spirituality is so thoroughly pneumatological.
The Church and the Spirit
The chapter on the Church as the place of union.
The Church, for Lossky, is not an institution that administers salvation but the body in which the two economies meet: the body of Christ, in which human nature is restored, and the temple of the Spirit, in which persons are deified. Its unity is the unity of nature in Christ; its diversity is the diversity of persons in the Spirit. The sacraments are the means by which the divine energies are given, and the saints are the evidence that they work.
The chapter is the least likely to interest readers outside the tradition and the most important for understanding why, in the Orthodox view, mysticism is never private. Union with God happens in the Church or not at all.
The Way of Union
The tenth chapter, and the turn from doctrine to path.
Lossky describes the ascetic and mystical life as the tradition understands it: repentance, the guarding of the heart, the struggle with the passions, prayer, and the stages by which the whole person, body included, is brought into the divine energies. He is emphatic that the body is not left behind, that the hesychast prayer involves breath and posture, and that the transfiguration of the person is physical as well as spiritual. He discusses the gifts of tears, of discernment and of the vision of light, and warns, with the tradition, against seeking experiences.
The chapter is where the book's title pays off: the doctrines of the earlier chapters become the map of a path, and a reader who has followed the argument sees why the path has the shape it has.
The chapter on union contains the book's clearest statement of what the whole argument was for. The unknowable God, the essence and energies, the two economies, the Church: all of this exists so that a particular person, praying in a particular cell with the name of Jesus on the breath, can be touched by the uncreated light and changed by it, bodily. Lossky was a scholar of Eckhart and a philosopher's son, and he insists that the philosophy is worthless unless it ends here. That insistence is the difference between the book and a textbook, and it is why monks have read it as well as professors.
The Divine Light
The eleventh chapter, on the experience the doctrine of energies exists to explain.
The uncreated light, seen by the apostles on Tabor, by the hesychasts on Athos, by Seraphim of Sarov in a snowy forest in 1831 as his disciple Motovilov watched his face blaze: this light, Lossky says, is not a symbol or a metaphor or a created effect. It is God in his energies, visible to a transfigured body, and it is the beginning of the deification that will be complete in the age to come. He gives the testimonies and the theology together, as the tradition does, and he does not hedge.
The chapter is where readers outside the tradition must decide what they think. Lossky is claiming that the light is real, that it has been seen, and that the doctrine of energies is the account of what was seen.
Deification
The last chapter, and the end of the argument.
Theosis, deification, becoming god by grace: the Fathers said that God became man so that man might become god, and Lossky takes the saying at full strength. The human person, united with the divine energies, is transformed in nature and in person, without ceasing to be a creature, into a partaker of the divine nature. This is not a metaphor for moral improvement. It is the destiny of the human being and of the whole creation, begun now in the saints and completed at the resurrection.
Everything in the book has been leading here. The apophatic God, the energies, the image, the two economies, the Church, the light: each is a condition of deification, and Lossky's achievement is to show that the tradition is a single vision with this at its end.
The Polemic Against the West
It must be faced, since it runs through the whole book.
Lossky holds that the Latin Church, from Augustine onward and decisively from the filioque, took a path that led away from the patristic vision: toward a knowable divine essence, a created grace, a separation of theology from experience, a rationalist scholasticism on one side and an emotional or Neoplatonic mysticism on the other, and a loss of deification as the goal. Western mystics such as Eckhart, whom he studied all his life, are read as attempting, within a defective framework, to recover what the East had kept.
The polemic is sharp, learned and one-sided. Western scholars have shown that the Latin tradition is more various than Lossky allows, that deification is present in Augustine and Aquinas, and that the East is less uniform than his synthesis. But the polemic is also the book's energy, and a reader who wants to understand why the two halves of Christendom still do not understand each other will find no better guide to the Eastern side of the argument.
The Book's Reception
How the tradition took it.
Within Orthodoxy, the book became the founding text of the neo-patristic synthesis, the school of thought, associated also with Georges Florovsky, that returned to the Greek Fathers as the norm of theology against the Russian religious philosophy of the previous generation. It shaped the theology of the Greek and Russian diasporas, the revival of Palamas, and the way Orthodoxy presented itself to the ecumenical movement. Nearly every Orthodox theologian writing in English since has begun from it.
Outside Orthodoxy, it introduced Western Christians to the energies doctrine, to Palamas and to deification, and it has been the book Catholics and Protestants read to understand the East. Its influence on the recovery of deification in Western theology has been considerable.
The Objections
Three, and Orthodox theologians have raised the first two.
The East-West opposition is too sharp. Lossky's Latin Church is a construction, and his Greek tradition is more unified than the sources show.
The synthesis is his. The two economies, the sequence of chapters, the reading of Dionysius as the foundation: these are Lossky's arrangement of the Fathers, presented as the tradition's own.
The difficulty. The book assumes a knowledge of patristic theology that most readers lack, and does not supply it.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you know Western Christian mysticism and have wondered what the other half of Christendom believes and why it thinks the West lost something.
Read it if you practise the Jesus Prayer or read the Philokalia and want the theology that makes the practice intelligible.
Read it if you are interested in a Christianity in which the unknowability of God is the foundation rather than a problem.
Read it slowly, with a patristic dictionary within reach, and read Ware's The Orthodox Church first if you know nothing of the tradition.
The idea that reaches furthest beyond the tradition is the essence-energies distinction, because it solves a problem every mystical theology faces. If God is wholly beyond, union is impossible; if God is wholly available, union is dissolution. The Eastern answer is that both are true of different aspects of the same God: unreachable in what he is, given entirely in what he does, and the creature is united to the second without ever touching the first. That is a way of holding transcendence and intimacy together that does not collapse either, and it explains why the tradition could say a human being becomes god without anyone thinking they had become God. Lossky's book is the clearest statement of that answer in any modern language.
The unknowable God, the uncreated energies and deification: Orthodox theology as one vision.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our comments on the book's polemic and its difficulty are set out above and were not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church about?
The theology of the Orthodox Church presented as a single vision in which doctrine and mystical experience are inseparable: the unknowable God approached through negation, the Trinity, the uncreated energies, the creation, the fall, the incarnation, the Spirit, the Church and the deification of the human being.
Who was Vladimir Lossky?
A Russian émigré theologian, 1903 to 1958, expelled from the Soviet Union with his philosopher father in 1922, who settled in Paris, studied medieval philosophy at the Sorbonne, and became the leading voice of Orthodox theology in the West in the mid-twentieth century.
Why mystical theology?
Because Lossky holds that in the Eastern tradition there is no separation between theology and mysticism: doctrine is the expression of an experience of God, and the experience is shaped by doctrine. The title asserts the union the West had lost.
What is apophatic theology?
The way of negation, from the Greek apophasis: knowing God by denying every concept of him, since he exceeds all of them. Lossky follows Dionysius the Areopagite in making this the foundation of all theology rather than a supplement to it.
What are the uncreated energies?
The doctrine, formulated by Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century, that God is unknowable in his essence but truly known and shared in his energies, which are God himself in action. It allows real union with God without dissolving the distinction between creature and creator.
What is deification?
Theosis, the doctrine that the purpose of human life is to become god by grace, participating in the divine energies until the whole person is transfigured. Lossky presents it as the goal to which every doctrine in the book points.
Is it polemical?
Yes. Lossky argues throughout that the Latin West took a wrong turn, above all in adding the filioque to the creed and in treating the essence of God as knowable, and that Western mysticism and scholasticism both suffer from the result.
Is it difficult?
Yes, in the sense that it is dense, assumes familiarity with the Church Fathers, and does not simplify. It is clear in argument and around two hundred and fifty pages, and a patient reader without theological training can follow it.
What sources does it use?
The Greek Fathers above all: Dionysius, the Cappadocians, Maximus the Confessor, John Damascene, Symeon the New Theologian and Gregory Palamas, with the Russian tradition of Seraphim of Sarov and the nineteenth century.
How does it relate to the Philokalia?
The Philokalia is the practice; Lossky is the theology behind it. The hesychast prayer of the heart assumes the doctrine of the energies, and this book explains why the prayer can reach what it claims to reach.
Is it accepted within Orthodoxy?
Largely. Lossky's neo-patristic synthesis became the dominant school of twentieth-century Orthodox theology, though later writers have questioned his sharp opposition between East and West and his reading of some Fathers.
Who should read it?
Readers of Western Christian mysticism who want to know what the East believes and why it thinks the West went wrong, readers of the Philokalia or the Jesus Prayer who want the theology, and anyone interested in a Christianity that keeps the unknowable God at its centre.
Try the negation
Lossky's method can be practised without his church. Take the idea of God you carry, whatever it is, and deny it: not that, not that either, not even the denial. Dionysius said that this is how Moses climbed, and Lossky said it is how all theology begins. What is left when the concepts are gone is not nothing, on their account; it is the place where something other than a concept can arrive. Most people have never emptied the word of its furniture. The book's first chapter is an invitation to, and the invitation does not require a creed.
Sources & References
- Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, trans. members of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, James Clarke / St Vladimir's Seminary Press.
- Lossky, Vladimir. The Vision of God and In the Image and Likeness of God.
- Palamas, Gregory. The Triads, trans. Nicholas Gendle, Classics of Western Spirituality.
- Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas.
- Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church and The Orthodox Way.
- Papanikolaou, Aristotle. Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion, on Lossky's synthesis and its critics.