Vladimir Lossky: The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Chapters 1-3. Translated by Members of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius. Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976. Original French version published in 1944.
Lossky begins by stating his intention: an exposition of “a spirituality which expresses a doctrinal attitude.” That is what he means by “mystical theology.” In this, he insists on a sane balance: “in a certain sense, all theology is mystical, inasmuch as it shows forth the divine mystery,” namely, “the data of revelation”; however, mysticism must not be understood as utterly unknowable, entirely personal or ‘subjective,’ which would put it beyond theology—beyond a logos about God derived from God’s revelation. Properly understood, “theology and mysticism support and complete each other,” inasmuch as “the mystical experience is a personal working out of the content of the common faith,” while “theology is an expression, for the profit of all, of that which can be experienced by everyone.” Neither ‘subjectivism’ nor ‘objectivism’ will do: “Outside the truth kept by the whole Church personal experience would be deprived of all certainty, of all objectivity. It would be a mingling of truth and of falsehood, of reality and of illusion: ‘mysticism’ in the bad sense of the word. On the other hand, the teaching of the church would have no hold on souls if it did not in some degree express an inner experience of truth, granted in different measure to each one of the faithful”—if its noetic content did not change souls, reorient them in a manner that manifests itself in practice, in life. The purpose of theology is what Lossky calls “deification,” which most decidedly does not mean that human beings can become gods, as the Gnostics imagined. What it can do is aspire to “union with God,” but only thanks to the grace of God. The nature of that union needs careful inquiry, which Lossky seeks both to provide and to spur in his readers. Throughout its long history of opposing heresy, the Church addresses “the possibility, the manner, or the means of our union with God.”
‘Church’ means ‘assembly,’ and ‘assembly’ implies a regime, a ruling organization. Every regime has a purpose, and the purpose of the Church regime can only be to uphold the doctrines of the Church in order to change souls, bringing them closer to God. To understand the regime of the Orthodox Church, one must not fall into the error of taking it as “a federation of national churches, having as its basis a political principle,” namely, “the state-church.” This error is understandable, inasmuch as one speaks of the Greek Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, and so on. But “the view that would base the unity of a local church on a political, racial or cultural principle is considered by the Orthodox Church as a heresy, specifically known by the name of phyletism,” Greek for tribalism. Tribalism or nationalism obviously contradicts Christian universality or catholicity; Orthodox Christianity is no less catholic than Roman Catholicism. The territories governed by the Orthodox bishops or patriarchs “do not necessarily correspond to the political boundaries of a state,” a modern nation-state. At the same time, unlike the Roman Catholic Church, Orthodox Christians have no equivalent of the Pope even if the Patriarch of Constantinople “enjoys a certain primacy of honor, arbitrating from time to time in disputes, but without exercising a jurisdiction over the whole body of the ecumenical Church.” Church unity primarily “expresses itself through the communion of the heads of local churches among themselves”; its catholicity “is realized…in the richness and multiplicity of the local traditions which bear witness unanimously to a single Truth.” It is true that this has led to a “restless and sometimes agitated” ecclesiastical life, but Lossky regards this as “the price paid for religious vitality.”
The apex of Orthodox Christian mystical theology may be seen in monasticism, “the most classical” of the “forms of the spiritual life,” whereby monks seek “union with God in a complete renunciation of the life of this present world.” The way of life of the monastic regime harmonizes contemplation and activity in two ways: “the ascetic rule and the school of interior prayer” themselves “receive the name of spiritual activity“; moreover, the physical work the monks undertake in order “to overcome their rebel nature” and to “avoid idleness, the enemy of the spiritual life.” In order to “withstand all the assaults of the enemy,” Satan, and “every irrational movement of our fallen nature,” the monks must exercise “an unceasing vigil.” More, “human nature must undergo a change; it must be more and more transfigured by grace in the way of sanctification, which has a range which is not only spiritual but also bodily—and hence cosmic.” The monasteries have exerted “religious and moral influence” on political life, without aspiring to direct rule. Obviously, this influence cannot mean direct access to the monk’s spiritual life by outsiders, as “the way of mystical union is nearly always a secret between God and the soul concerned, which is never confided to others unless, it may be, to a confessor or to a few disciples.” Rather, by their fruits you shall know them, as the monks may transmit “wisdom, understanding of the divine mysteries” via “theological or moral teaching” to their fellow monks or to the laity. But the “inward and personal aspect of the mystical experience…remains hidden from the eyes of all.” Eccentricity does not arise because “the inner experience of the Christian develops within the circle delineated by the teaching of the Church: within the dogmatic framework which molds his person.” To show how this is possible, Lossky points to the way in which ‘secular’ political regimes do the same thing. Likely thinking of malign effects of tyrannical ideology in his lifetime, he observes, “Even now a political doctrine professed by the members of a party can so fashion their mentality as to produce a type of man distinguishable from other men by certain moral or psychical marks.” More broadly, as political philosophers have understood, regimes generally foster certain human types, often by habituation in accordance with custom: the Roman centurion, the Yankee trader.
To elucidate Orthodox mystical theology, Lossky turns to the fifth-sixth century writer who called himself Dionysius the Areopagite, thereby associating himself with the teaching of a first-century disciple of Paul who served as an Athenian judge, and eventual Bishop of Athens. Lossky considers Dionysius’ book, Concerning Mystical Theology, to be “a text inspired by the Holy Spirit.” Dionysius distinguishes “cataphatic” or “positive theology” via “apophatic” or “negative theology.” Of the two, negative theology is superior. Since “God is beyond all that exists,” one can only approach Him by “deny[ing] all that is inferior to Him, that is to say, all that which is.” One proceeds by negations of what one knows, through the senses or through reasoning about what we know through the senses—the way of classical philosophy—ascending “all that can be known,” all “knowledge of created things,” “in order to draw near to the Unknown in the darkness of absolute ignorance.” In the Roman Catholic Church, Thomas Aquinas “reduces the two ways of Dionysius to one, making negative theology a corrective to affirmative theology,” but for Dionysius and the Eastern Orthodox Church generally, apophaticism is “the fundamental characteristic of the whole theological tradition.” “It is necessary to renounce both sense and all the workings of reason, everything which may be known by the senses or the understanding, both that which is and all that is not, in order to be able to attain in perfect ignorance to union with Him who transcends all being and all knowledge,” abandoning “all that is impure and even all that is pure.” Dionysius finds in Moses’ ascent of Mount Sinai and his meeting with God a series of events, of “detachments,” in which the prophet “is freed from the things that see and are seen,” and reaching out to “what is entirely untouched and unseen: “he is united to the best of his powers with the unknowing quiescence of all knowledge, and by that very unknowing he knows what surpasses understanding.” At this ultimate level of ascent, Moses conceives of God not as an object of knowledge, not as an ‘object’ at all; he achieves “mystical union with God, whose nature remains incomprehensible.”
Lossky carefully distinguishes Dionysius from the neo-Platonists whom he resembles, contrasting Concerning Mystical Theology with Plotinus’ Sixth Ennead. Plotinus is a philosopher. The neo-Platonic ascent to God negates, abstracts, detaches itself from “the realm of being,” which is “necessarily multiple,” to comprehend “the absolute simplicity of the One.” That is, “the God of Plotinus is not incomprehensible by nature. Plotinus does not transcend being in the manner of Dionysius; Plotinus reduces being “to absolute simplicity.” The God of Dionysius is absolutely incomprehensible, neither One/Unity nor Many: “He transcends this antimony, being unknowable in what He is.” Thus, “the God of revelation is not the God of the philosophers,” not a nature but a Person. (Although Lossky too-generously describes Origen as a “great Christian thinker,” it should be clear that he is fundamentally a Neo-Platonist, on precisely the grounds that he conceives of God as “a simple, intellectual nature.”) It is also crucial to understand that this ascent cannot be undertaken by divinely ‘unassisted’ human effort but only by grace, by what Clement of Alexandria calls “God-given wisdom which is the power of the Father.”
God is unknowable in part because He is infinite. Unlike a natural object, unlike nature in its entirety, the cosmos, the soul in union with God does not thereby reach a telos, an end in the sense that it no longer desires, achieving noetic satisfaction. “Filled with an ever-increasing desire, the soul grows without ceasing, goes forth from itself, reaches out beyond itself, and, in so doing, is filled with yet greater longing” in an ascent that “becomes infinite, the desire insatiable.” In the words of John Damascene, “All that we can say” about God is that, in His revelation, He “does not show forth His nature but the things that relate to His nature,” or, as rabbis say, He ‘does not lack wisdom,’ ‘does not lack justice.’ Atheists who deny the existence of God are correct, but they fail to see that God is “above existence itself.” Nor does God’s unknowability imply agnosticism, suspension of belief. Nor does it imply nihilism, the assertion of nothingness by means of willful destruction. Gregory of Palamas puts it this way: “If God be nature, then all else is not nature. If that which is not God be nature, God is not nature, and likewise He is not being if that which is God is being.”
In terms of the soul, in Platonism and Neo-Platonism alike the ascent on Diotima’s ladder, the purification of the soul necessary for that ascent, the conversion or ‘turning around’ of the soul is “above all of an intellectual nature,” a turning away from the idols of the Cave that represents the opinions that rule the polis, with reason ruling the spirited and appetitive elements of the soul. In his “refusal to accept being as such, in so far as it conceals the divine non-being,” in renouncing “the realm of created things in order to gain access to that of the un-created,” Dionysius aspires to an “existential liberation involving the whole being of him who would know God” by acknowledging that “the only rational notion which we can have of God will…be that of His incomprehensibility.” Socrates know that he knows nothing but never supposes that he has achieved union with God thereby, having no revelation of God as Person. That is the most important difference between Socrates and Dionysius. “There is no theology apart from experience; it is necessary to change, to become a new man,” to become ‘deified’ not in pride, in the Machiavellian or Baconian sense, but in humility, giving oneself and all else up to God, a “communion with the living God.” “He who, in following this path, imagines at a given moment that he has known what God is has a depraved spirit”; apophaticism is “the sure sign of an attitude of mind conformed to truth.” In this, apophaticism utterly rejects idolatry, even the highest idolatry of Being, seen in philosophy. “There is no philosophy more or less Christian. Plato is not more Christian than Aristotle. The question of the relations between theology and philosophy has never arisen in the East.”
Where, then, does “cataphatic” or affirmative theology fit in? Instead of ascending toward God, affirmative theology “is a way that comes down to us” from God, in the “manifestations of God in creation.” The perfect such manifestation is “the incarnation of the Word,” Jesus Christ. “The Super-essential was manifested in human substance without ceasing to be hidden after this manifestation,” Dionysius writes, “or to express myself after a more heavenly fashion, in this manifestation itself.” It is also manifested in His Creation, in nature seen as a manifestation of His will.
This suggests that most Christians will never ascend to union with God in this life, even as they remain Christians. It is true, Gregory Nazianzen writes, that “the multitude” of men are “unworthy of [the] height of contemplation” reached by a Moses. Let such a lesser soul “remain below and listen to the voice alone, and the trumpet, the bare words of piety.” Lossky comments, “This is not a more perfect or esoteric teaching hidden from the profane, nor is it a gnostic separation between those who are spiritual, psychic or carnal, but a school of contemplation wherein each receives his share in the experience of the Christian mystery lived by the Church”—the same “divine Wisdom,” but “practiced in varying degrees, with greater or lesser intensity,” largely by the grace of God. It leads neither to One nor to Many but to the Holy Trinity, to a discussion of which Lossky now turns.
Although God evidently manifests Himself as a Person in Biblical account, Lossky demurs. While Orthodox apophaticism “is not an impersonal mysticism” along the lines of the ‘Eastern’ religions, its goal emphatically is “not a nature or an essence,” since the Trinity “transcends all notion both of nature and of person.” If the Trinity is neither a ‘what’ nor a ‘who,’ if it is beyond “what the mind can conceive,” how can one speak or write about ‘it’?
Created being changes, but “the Trinity is an absolute stability.” The “Godhead” or divine Essence cannot be contained by “created intelligence.” Created intelligence can approach rather than comprehend the Trinitarian Godhead by means of created intelligence’s very motion, “pursuing now the one, now the three, and retuning again to the unity,” “swing[ing] ceaselessly between the two poles of the antinomy, in order to attain to the contemplation of this threefold monad.” “Those unimaginative and pedestrian souls who are incapable of rising above rational concepts” must reconcile themselves to being left behind. The antimonies of reason are dualities, but the Trinity obviously is not: “Two is the number which separates, three the number which transcends all separation: the one and the many find themselves gathered and circumscribed in the Trinity.” Lossky cautions that “there is no question here of a material number which serves for calculation and is no wise applicable in the spiritual sphere, where there is no quantitative increase.” It is divine grace, not the human power of reason, that lifts the soul to the contemplation of the Trinity. The human mind inclines toward Sabellianism, the thought that the Trinity is “the essence [ousia] of the philosophers with three modes of manifestation,” three personae; alternatively, the mind might divide the Trinity “into three distinct beings, as did Arius.” But “Revelation sets an abyss between the truth which it declares and the truths which can be discovered by philosophical speculation.” That is, philosophy must admit, like Socrates, that it knows that it does not know.
So, how to speak about this? In the words of St Basil, “adoring the God of God, confessing the individuality of the hypostases, we dwell in the monarchy without dividing the theology into fragments.” Again, how? “It was a question of finding a distinction of terms which should express the unity of, and the differentiation within, the Godhead, without giving the preeminence either to the one or to the other.” For this, Greek philosophic vocabulary needed to be ‘baptized’ or ‘born again’ to fit the revealed Word. Ousia now means “all that subsists by itself and which has not its being in another.” Although hypostasis is sometimes used as a synonym for ousia, for the Church Fathers the difference is that “between common and particular.” The particular entities or hypostases that constitute the Trinity share the same ousia. “Though the Latins might express the mystery of the Trinity by starting from one essence in order to arrive at the three persons; though the Greeks might prefer the concrete as their starting point (that is to say, the three hypostases) seeing in them the one nature, it was always the same dogma of the Trinity that was confessed by the whole of Christendom before the separation” of West and East, Rome and Byzantium. The Father is “unbegotten”; the Son is “begotten” by the Father; the Holy Spirit is “proceeds” from the Father. These hypostases “dwell in one another,” while distinct from one another, but not in the manner of distinct human persons, whose works and wills are distinct, each from another. The works of the ‘persons’ that are the Trinity are those of “a single will, a single power, a single operation.”
What, then, is this matter of unbegotten, begotten, and proceeding? John Damascene rejects the inquiry. “You hear that there is generation? Do not waste your time in seeking after the how.” Orthodox theologians nonetheless distinguish their doctrine from the Roman Catholic doctrine, which holds that the Holy Spirit “proceeded from the Father and from the Son.” This was the filioque (i.e., ‘from the Son’) controversy that arose in the 9th century AD, “the primordial cause, the only dogmatic cause of the breach between East and West.” Otherwise, the ways of West and East “were both equally legitimate so long as the first did not attribute to the essence a supremacy over the three persons, nor the second [Person or Entity] to the three persons a supremacy over the common nature.” But the Eastern Church “saw in the formula of the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son a tendency to stress the unity of nature at the expense of the real distinction between the persons.” That is “the principle of unity in the Trinity is the person of the Father,” the “Source of the relations whence the hypostases receive their distinctive characteristics.” The Roman Catholic doctrine of the filioque “seems to impair the monarchy of the Father.” “The Father—source of all divinity within the Trinity—brings forth the Son and the Holy Spirit in conferring upon them His nature, which remains one and indivisible, identical in itself in the Three.” And so, as Gregory Nazianzen puts it, “When we look at the Godhead, or the First Cause, or the Monarchy, that which we conceive is One; but when we look at the Persons in whom the Godhead dwells, and at those who timelessly and with equal glory have their being from the Frist Cause—there are Three whom we worship.” As to the originating Father, he “derives from Himself His being” as “the beginning and cause of the existence of all things both as to their nature and mode of being.” “It is the Father who distinguishes the hypostases ‘in an eternal movement of love,’ according to an expression of St. Maximus,” conferring “His one nature upon the Son and upon the Holy Spirit alike,” although conferring that nature differently in each one. And so, for example, one can ‘know’ the Son only by the grace of the Holy Spirit.
Lossky is quick to insist that the Father does not occupy a position of superiority over the Son and the Holy Spirit. Each Person of the Trinity is equally God, “each God when considered in Himself,” as Nazianzen writes. The Holy Trinity is the “primordial fact, ultimate reality, first datum which cannot be deduced, explained or discovered by way of any other truth; for there is nothing which is prior to it.” This is what Orthodox theologians mean when they speak of the “incomprehensibility” or “unknowability” of God; there is nothing to explain him by, nothing behind or above Him. Everything else is ‘beneath’ Him—created by Him. His human creations can approach Him not by apprehending His nature but by “deification,” that is, by “possessing by grace all that the Holy Trinity possesses by nature,” by their “participation in the divine life of the Holy Trinity.” This approach, “deification,” participation is the path of “apophatic ascent,” a kind of crucifixion of the human-all-too-human elements of our nature, by discarding ‘worldly’ things. “This is the reason why no philosophical speculation has ever succeeded in rising to the mystery of the Holy Trinity” but can “receive the full revelation of the Godhead only after Christ on the cross had triumphed over death and over the abyss of hell.”
How is this mystical union, this “deification,” possible? In one sense, we can participate in the divine nature, in another sense we obviously cannot really become God. God is both “totally inaccessible and at the same time accessible.” His nature is what is “inaccessible, unknowable and incommunicable,” but His “energies or divine operations, forces to and inseparable from God’s essence, in which He goes forth from himself, manifests, communicates, and gives Himself,” are revealed to His human creatures. Gregory Palamas expresses the distinction: “to say that the divine nature is communicable not in itself but through its energy, is to remain within the bounds of right devotion.” Lossky distinguishes the term “theology,” which refers to teaching “about the divine being itself—the Holy Trinity,” from “the exterior manifestations of God—the Trinity known in its relation to created being—[which] belong[s] to the realm of economy.” The term Logos refers typically to this manifestation, this “economy,” which “is” God as Son, as Christ, from and of God the Father. “The very name of the Word—Logos—attributed to the Son is itself primarily a designation of the ‘economic’ order, proper to the second hypostasis as manifesting the nature of the Father.” Lossky quotes John Damascene: “all we can say positively of God”—i.e., not apophatically—manifests “not His nature but the things about his nature” that He chooses to reveal. These energies are not created things but energies that “flow eternally from the one essence of the Trinity,” “determined by a decision of the common will of the three Persons.” Creation ex nihilo is the first manifestation of divine will and energy. And the energies manifest God’s many “names”: Wisdom, Life, Power, Justice, Love, Being, indeed the name “God” itself. The name Logos “is the exterior manifestation of the nature of the Father by the Son.” And as for the Holy Spirit, it is by him that we know Christ, the Son. But we know the Trinity through the manifestations of the single will that they share, not directly, not noetically. That is why “the Trinity can remain incommunicable in essence and at the same time come and dwell within us,” thanks to divine grace. In receiving this gift, “the deifying energies, one receives at the same time the in-dwelling of the Holy Trinity.” “The union to which we are called is neither hypostatic—as in the case of the human nature of Christ—nor substantial, as in that of the three divine Persons: it is union with God in His energies, or union by grace, making us participate in the divine nature, without our essence becoming thereby the essence of God.” Christ became Man by His incarnation; we humans are already incarnate, but we can ‘become’ God, or more precisely participate in godliness, thanks to this indwelling of God in our souls.
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