The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

Vladimir Lossky’s book, published in French in Paris in 1944 and in English in 1957, and for many readers in the West the first account of Orthodox theology in its own terms. Its opening claim governs the rest: there is no Christian mysticism without theology, and above all no theology without mysticism. From there it moves through the apophatic way of the Areopagite, the Trinity as the ground of everything, the distinction between God’s essence and His energies, the person set against the nature, the work of the Son and the work of the Spirit, and deification as the goal of the whole. Lossky wrote as a son of the Russian emigration and a critic of Fr Sergius Bulgakov’s sophiology, and with Fr Georges Florovsky he shaped the return to the Fathers that marked Orthodox theology in the twentieth century. Later Orthodox scholars have found his contrast between East and West drawn too sharply in places, and have said so without ceasing to read him.