Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: We Have Ceased to See the People. Ignat Solzhenitsyn, editor. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2025.

 

In each of these ten speeches, all but the last delivered while in exile from Russia, Solzhenitsyn “seek[s] not only to convince, educate, or grapple with his hosts,” as his son, the editor of this volume, writes, “but to reach across the Iron Curtain, and across the late Cold War decades, to buttress, censure, or inspire his own countrymen.” “It was this dual audience that the writer always bore in mind,” each in the grip of a version of one thing: modern ‘secularism,’ ‘humanism,’ ‘anthropocentrism.’ And it is indeed striking that these speeches, arranged in chronological order from the Nobel Lecture of 1972 to an address to the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1997, present a coherent, even step-by-step argument not only in opposition to modernity’s excesses, excesses originating in its core principles, but in defense of the traditions of piety, of humility before Being—traditions still followed, even if in attenuated form, by the peoples of the world, if not by the elites who rule them. By ceasing to see the people, by dismissing their beliefs, ‘ruling classes,’ incline—sometimes intentionally, sometimes unawares—to tyrannize over them in despotism ‘hard’ and ‘soft.’

Solzhenitsyn emphasizes his vocation as a literary artist, not as public figure, not as an intellectual, and most assuredly not as a prophet. He distinguishes artists who attempt to create “an autonomous spiritual world,” the l’art pour l’art aesthetes, weighed down by the attempt, from artists who believe that the only creator is God, for whom God bears the weight of creation, leaving the artist “even amid failure and at the lowest depths of existence—in poverty, in prison, in illness”—with “a sense of enduring harmony” that “cannot leave him.” This harmony derives from this artist’s sense that he alone isn’t in control of his own artistry, which cannot “be wholly accounted for by the artist’s worldview, by his conception, or by the work of his unworthy fingers.” The human capacity for art wasn’t created by the artist. “Back in the twilight preceding the dawn of mankind we received it from Hands that we did not manage to make out clearly. Neither did we think to ask: why this gift for us? how should we treat it?” 

Although Solzhenitsyn takes much of his literary style from ample Tolstoy, spiritually he much more resembles intense Dostoevsky. For a long time, Dostoevsky’s remark, “Beauty will save the world,” perplexed him. “Granted, it ennobled, it elevated—but whom did it ever save?” But beauty and “the nature of art itself” persuade in a way that philosophic systems do not, “prevail[ing] even over a resisting heart.” While philosophic systems may rest “on an error or on a lie” (Marxism being an excellent example), “a true work of art carries its verification within itself: artificial or forced concepts do not survive their trial by image.” Even when tyrants obliterate “the all-too-obvious, all-too-straight shoots of Truth and Goodness,” the “intricate, unpredictable, and unlooked for shoots of Beauty will force their way through and soar up to that very spot where Truth, Goodness, and Beauty once converged,” thereby fulfilling the task of all three. He is thinking of his own experience under Stalinist tyranny, when truths were censored, goodness punished, but he nonetheless began his own literary and spiritual journey. The linear force of tyranny can attack the linear results of reasoning, theoretical or practical, but art isn’t linear. It twists and turns, sometimes evading the censors and the police in its public display but before that, indispensably, in the soul of the artist.

It is true that many writers died in the Gulag. “An entire literary generation remained there,” and Solzhenitsyn shoulders the burden of trying not to speak for them, for their voices are irreplaceable, but to bring his listeners to understand something about the experience they shared. In the cold, the darkness, the exhaustion of the camps, “our field of vision…was filled with distinct physical objects and clear psychological impulses; and the unambiguous world that we imagined contained nothing to counterbalance this vision. These thoughts came not from books, nor were borrowed for appearance’s sake: they were forged in prison cells and around bonfires in the forest, in conversation with people now dead, tested by that life and springing from there.” Only when those few who survived found themselves outside the camps, back in ordinary life, did they see how “others tripped along to the tune of a carefree musical.” Jesus weeps but never laughs, Erasmus remarks; the spiritual concentration forced upon the zeks of the Gulag by a life stripped of distractions, superfluities, made them different from the others, deeper. They had experienced a compulsory asceticism, unintendedly experiencing the life of the desert monks. (One might add that the Russian Orthodox Church has always honored those monks, so the forced asceticism of the camps linked the zeks, perhaps unawares, to their country as well as to God.) “Man has from the beginning been so constituted that his view of the world (when not induced by persistent suggestion), his motivations and scale of values, his actions and his intentions, are all defined by his experience as an individual and as a member of a group.” This was more evident in earlier times, when human groups were small, unaware of almost all of the other humans on earth. In the world of poleis and tribes, “people were unfailingly guided by their life experience within their own circumscribed locality, their community, their society, and finally within their national territory.” Their convictions also were settled, for the same reason; they seldom encountered different “scale[s] of values.” 

Not so in modernity. We now know about one another, worldwide. “Humanity has become one, but it is not the stable unity of a former community or even that of a nation,” not a unity founded on “gradually acquired experience, not from one’s own eye…but rather—surmounting all barriers—a unity brought about by international radio and the press.” Information has outpaced the human capacity to assimilate it, to measure it on the moral scale that took so long to balance. “Of such different scales in the world there are, if not multitudes, then certainly several: the scale for close-by events and the scale for far-off ones; the scale used by old societies and that used by new ones.; the scale of the well-off and that of the unfortunate.” In the face of this confusing proliferation, we fall back, “prevent[ing] discomfort,” or salving it, by “wav[ing] off all alien scales as madness and error,” preferring to “judge the whole world according to our own homegrown scale,” which we attempt to rebalance. Human beings shouldn’t be blamed for this, as “man is simply built that way.” But under the conditions of modern unity without community, artificial if not artistic ‘communications,’ “such a mutual lack of understanding threatens to bring on imminent and violent extinction.” 

How, then, to “reconcile these scales of values,” and who can do that? “Who might impress upon a sluggish and obstinate human being someone else’s far-off sorrows or joys, and who might give him an insight into magnitudes of events and into delusions that he’s never himself experienced?” That person is the artist, especially the literary artist who, by bringing his readers into his own experiences, can “overcome man’s perverse habit of learning only from his own experience, so that the experience of others passes him by without profit.” That is because “art transmits from one person to another the entire accumulated burden of another being’s life experience,” bringing it into his soul by the path of imagination, as Solzhenitsyn did for the zek experience in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and as he did for the experience of the Russian and Soviet revolutions in The Red Wheel. In those books, Solzhenitsyn’s experience, or at least some sense of it, can enter the souls of Americans, Germans, Chinese. In imaginatively experiencing Russian experience, it may even be that one people might learn from another, learn “what one people has already endured, appraised, and rejected,” since “the sole substitutes for an experience that we’ve not ourselves lived through are art and literature.” “This could save an entire nation from a redundant, or erroneous, or even destructive course”; it could do this from one generation to another, within a nation. Literature, “together with language, preserve the national soul” in this way.

Far from being a hindrance to human understanding, national literatures and the nations whose experiences they present constitute “the wealth of mankind”—Solzhenitsyn’s sly play on Adam Smith’s teaching on “the wealth of nations.” “Woe to the nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force,” which “seal[s] up the nation’s heart,” erases its memory, destroys its identity. And woe to mankind when that happens, impoverished not in the commerce Smith had in mind but in the spiritual dialogue among men and nations who know and feel in different ways because their ways of life, their experiences, have revealed to them dimensions of reality that other men and nations have not seen and felt.

Literature counterbalances the partly natural, partly perverse human inclination to draw back from foreigners, to suppose they have nothing to teach us. “A primeval rejection of all compromise is given the status of theoretical principle and regarded as the high virtue that accompanies doctrinal purity,” bringing “ceaseless civil wars” with their “millions of victims.” This rejection “drones into our souls that there exist no lasting, universal concepts of good and justice, that all such concepts are fluid and ever-changing—which is why you should always act in a way that benefits your party,” “the rest of society be damned.” And when force meets force, the world succumbs to “the brazen conviction that force can do anything, and righteousness—nothing.” The un-word, the anti-word, the anti-human, triumphs, as in Dostoevsky’s The Demons. Just as Satan is the enemy of God, of the Word, so is brute force the enemy of human words. To succumb to force is to succumb to fear. “The spirit of Munich dominates the twentieth century,” in which “a timorous civilized world,” a world that wants to be ruled by words, “faced with the onslaught of a suddenly revived and snarling barbarism, has found nothing with which to oppose it but concessions and smiles.” Lack of courage is “the malady of the will of affluent people,” people who worry that they have too much to lose if they stand up to tyrants and their armies. If a nation takes “material well-being as the principal goal of life on earth,” they will almost invariably “choose passivity and retreat, just so long as their accustomed life might be made to last a little longer.” But “courage and victory come to us only when we resolve to make sacrifices.” 

But writers must not retreat, precisely because they have “taken up the word,” even as soldiers take up weapons. By this, Solzhenitsyn doesn’t propose the use of words as weapons, as rhetoricians or ‘propagandists’ do. To take up the word means to tell your experience to others who have not had that experience. “I am encouraged by a vivid sense of world literature as one great heart that beats for the cares and woes for our world, even if manifested and perceived in its own way in each of its corners.” The beauty of words can save mankind by “making everything the concern of all,” as Solzhenitsyn himself has experienced, with “the hundreds of friends whom I’ve never met in person and whom perhaps I may never see,” those touched by “the concentrated experiences” of his country, who have never set foot there. If “one people might discover, accurately and concisely, the true history of another people, with the same degree of recognition and pain as comes from actual experience,” a “world vision” might develop, inasmuch as we focus “with the center of our eye on what is close at hand,” which we ineluctably do, living in our own bodies, while also “begin[ning] to use our peripheral vision to take in what occurs in the rest of the world.” With the natural, dual capacity of the human eye, the human mind and heart so honed we might “proceed to correlate and to adhere to commons standards.”

How can this fine vision counteract brute force? Because “violence does not and cannot exist by itself: it is invariably intertwined with the lie,” that is, the false word. True, at the outset “violence acts openly and even takes pride in itself,” as in a war or a revolution. “But as soon as it gains strength and becomes firmly established, it begins to sense the air around it growing thinner, and it can no longer exist without veiling itself in a mist of lie.” We warriors, we revolutionaries, have triumphed—but now what? Insofar as the physical force we have deployed has no purpose consonant with human nature, or with the Being within and under which human nature can thrive, it must make something up in order to seem to justify that force and the regime it has boosted ‘into power.’ The “ordinary, brave man” can “refuse to participate in the lie,” refuse to “support false actions,” in the manner of Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia and thousands of refuseniks in Russia and in nations that have not the word “refusenik.” But Havel was more than an ordinary, brave man. “As for writers and artists, it is within their power to do more: to defeat the lie!” The Russian proverb is right: “One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.”

An example of Solzhenitsyn’s invocation of the common standards between the “two halves of the planet”—first of all the Communist East and the commercial republican West but perhaps behind that the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church—may be seen in his speech accepting the Golden Matrix prize from the Italian Catholic Press Union in 1974. “The true essence of the human condition today” can only be found if both sides “rise to a level well above political characterizations, formulas, and recipes” to see that “both systems are struck by malady, in fact a common malady, and thus neither of the systems, with their current worldview augurs a healthy outcome.” All of modern and civilized humanity “have been seated and fastened onto a single, rigidly interconnected carousel and taken a long orbital journey” from the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, “bloody physical revolutions, democratic societies, socialist projects.” In this journey, men attempted to impose, forcibly, “the Kingdom of God” on earth. But before the Renaissance, “the Middle Ages failed.” Specifically, the Church (and especially the Roman Catholic Church, with the “excesses” of the Inquisition) attempted to force men “toward the Spiritual,” prompting them to rebel and rush “headlong and unbounded” toward “the Material,” toward “a long era of humanistic individualism” founded “on the principle that man is the measure of all things, that man is above all.” Solzhenitsyn is no ‘reactionary,’ longing for the premodern world, romantically valorizing medieval life. Modernity has “greatly enriched humanity’s experience.” He was trained as a scientist. The dilemma nonetheless remains. In the “material sphere,” modernity poisons air, water, and soil. In what modern men flatter themselves to call the spiritual sphere, “our blustering civilization,” bombarding us with superficial ideas, “false science,” and “affectation in art,” “has completely robbed us of a concentrated inner life”—of genuine spirituality—which “drag[s] our soul into a bazaar, whether of commerce or of party politics.” In the “social sphere,” we find ourselves either on “the brink of anarchy” or under “stable despotism,” with “feeble and powerless” democratic regimes in between. The same immoderation prevails in the social sphere as in the others: “communities large and small have no wish to self-limit in favor of the Whole.” Having refused to put “limits on our passions and our irresponsibility” because we have rejected the Whole and valorized ourselves and our desires, the human journey in modernity has orbited full circle. Having torn ourselves “from the hold of violence…into the hold of violence we have returned” in the East, and will return in the West, too, if the democratic regimes continue to weaken. “If there are to be salvific revolutions in our future, they must be moral ones”—revolutions by the consent of the governed. “We have yet to discover, discern, or bring to life” such a revolution. As he told an English audience in a 1976 radio address, “human nature is full of riddles and contradictions” and these are what engender art—that is, the search for nonlinear formulations, imaginative solutions, complex explanations.” 

Among these riddles and contradictions, from which Solzhenitsyn draws his own literary art, is the paradoxical contrast between nations “utterly pinned down by slavery” which “nevertheless muster the inner strength to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit and then in body,” and nations “who soar unhindered over the peaks for freedom” but then “suddenly lose their taste for it, lose the will to defend it, and, fatefully adrift, being almost to crave slavery.” Oppression under tyranny, under regimes of the lie, concentrates men spiritually, while “societies with access to every kind of information suddenly plunge into lethargic mass blindness, into voluntary self-deception.” It was only his experience of living in the West that caused Solzhenitsyn to understand “to what extreme degree the West has already become a world of lost will, a world gradually petrifying in the face of danger,” a world which has lost its reason because it has lost the courage that enables reason to stand up to force. Having succumbed to the modern claim that “the only good in the world…was that which satisfied our feelings,” the (im)morality of humanist materialism, the west conquered the world, with Great Britain in the forefront, enslaving Africans and Asians “with the outward manifestations of Christianity and the flowering of its own freedom at home.”

This began to end in August 1914, the starting point of Solzhenitsyn’s vast novel-epic, The Red Wheel. In the First World War, “Europe would ravage herself as never before,” more than in the wars of religion, and this resulted in the founding of the Soviet tyranny, “a fissure [that] bared itself on [Europe’s] edge.” Yet the fissure was in the same earth, Marxism-Leninism being “the perfectly consistent manifestation of teachings that for centuries roamed Europe with considerable success,” teachings Dostoevsky had understood. He “predicted that socialism would cost Russia 100 million lives.” And so it may have done, if you count mass murder along with wars civil and international and deaths caused by industrial pollution and slave labor. 

What was Great Britain’s response? Nothing more than “the incomparable pragmatic worldview,” the “refusal to take moral decisions”—still another consequence of the denial of “higher spiritual powers above us.” The pragmatist thinks, “Should anyone have to perish today, let it be someone else, anybody—but not I, not my precious self, nor those close to me.” Hence the quick withdrawal of Western forces allied with the anti-Communist armies that fought on against the Communists, after the revolution. Solzhenitsyn quotes British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George: “Forget about Russia. It’s our job to ensure the welfare of our own society.” More, many in Europe, “the progressive and influential society of Europe (and most vividly—in Britain)” applauded the Soviet “experiment” in socialism, by them regarded as a happy transition from the ‘capitalist’ excesses of modern liberalism. Ignoring the Ukrainian famine, ignoring the Gulag, “your rulers, your Members of Parliament, your public speakers, your journalist, your writers, your leading thinkers” finally turned from complacency to “conscious, calculated hypocrisy.” Solzhenitsyn readily concedes that “with Hitler, Britain wholeheartedly assumed a moral stance,” but its victory in doing so only underscores his point: “A moral stance can suddenly turn out to be more farsighted than any pragmatic calculation.” If so with Hitler, why not with Lenin, Stalin, and all their underlings and successors? The aftermath of the Second World War saw not a reversal but a continuation of pre-war irresolution and unreason. “The lofty philosophy of pragmatism laid down that, once again, you must not notice a great many things,” such as mass deportations, political mass murders, and the imperial subordination of the nations of Eastern and Central Europe. “At the Nuremberg trials” of Nazi war criminals, the British sat “amicably side by side with judges who were every bit the murderers the defendants were—never ruffling your British sense of justice.” Soon, you had lost your empire. “There sometimes arises a direct, tangible link between the evil we long ago caused unto others and the evil that suddenly smites ourselves,” a “link between sin and punishment” whereby “the generation of today will have to pay for their fathers and grandfathers, who strove to block their ears to the lamentations of the world and to close their eyes to the chasms of its depravity.” Much of this thanks to a fatuous sympathy for socialism, from George Bernard Shaw in the 1920s to the Labour Party of the 1970s. “Allow me to remind you that force labor is promulgated by all the prophets of socialism including in The Communist Manifesto, so one ought not to think of the Gulag Archipelago as an Asiatic distortion of a lofty idea—but, rather, as an inescapable law.” How else, except by force, can a government equalize “the basic elements of personality that display too much variability in education, aptitude, thought, and feeling” to make human beings amenable to any strict egalitarianism? “Socialism hypnotizes modern society and prevents it from seeing the mortal danger it is in.” 

What Solzhenitsyn and “the oppressed peoples of Russia and Eastern Europe” can offer the British and the West as a whole is simply but crucially “the experience of our suffering.” We men of the East offer this so that you will not pay “the monstrous price in death and bondage that we have paid.” As of 1976, “your society spurns our voices of warning,” making Solzhenitsyn think that “all experience is intransmissible,” that “everyone must experience everything for himself.” What use is literary art if no one bothers to read? Or, perhaps more accurately, if no one reads anything that contradicts “the ruinous tilt of the Late Enlightenment”? “Will we manage to shake off this burden and to make room for the Spirit breathed into us from birth—that Spirit which alone distinguishes us from the animal world?”

Solzhenitsyn did not hesitate to rebuke Americans along with the Britons, first at a gathering of the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge, and then, most famously, at Harvard University in 1978—the one an association of American patriots, the other not so much. While “it is easiest to give in to rhetoric about the grim abysses of totalitarianism and to sing the praises of the shining strongholds of Western freedom,” he tells the patriots, “it’s far more difficult, but also more fruitful, to take a hard look at ourselves.” The regimes of liberty “have lost something of their inner strength and stability” because political liberty and personal freedom cannot be understood “without an evaluation of the objectives of our earthly existence.” Practical reasoning is one thing, pragmatism another; to achieve one’s aims, practical reasoning is indispensable, but an ideology of the practical can lead only to the pursuit of happiness redefined as the consummation of desires. To the contrary, “I hold the view that the life aim for each of us isn’t a boundless enjoyment of material goods, but, rather, a departure from this Earth as better persons than we arrived, better than our inborn inclinations alone would have made us; that is, a traversal, over the span of our life, of one path or another of spiritual improvement.” That is, freedom is a condition of “our undistorted development.” But “no less than external freedom, man needs unpolluted and uncrowded space for his soul, the opportunity to concentrate his spirit.” That condition of uncrowdedness, of “uncluttered space,” is exactly what “contemporary civilized freedom is reluctant to grant us.” The world of commercial advertisement, of pornography, of the tsunami of ‘news,’ of what André Malraux called “the arts of satiation,” produces “the shallowing of freedom”—an “unhinged freedom” that may well destroy itself or render itself vulnerable to tyrants. “Genuine freedom is a God-given inner freedom,” the “freedom to determine our own actions, but with moral responsibly for them”—freedom with honor, that “ancient and, by now, peculiar word.” 

At the Harvard Commencement, Solzhenitsyn summarizes and elaborates on his critique of the Western form of modernity. Recalling again the West’s imperial conquests, now much diminished, he points to “persisting blindness of superiority,” which has endured beyond the period of dominance, which “continues to support the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature towards the level of contemporary Western systems”—specifically, “Western multiparty democracy” and “the Western way of life.” By measuring “the essence of other worlds” by “a Western yardstick,” the West fails to comprehend those worlds in its ‘rush to judgment.’ This is especially true of the East-West, Communist-liberal divide; against the then-fashionable hope for “convergence” between the two regimes (happily combining political democracy with socialism, a synthesis Solzhenitsyn earlier showed to be impossible), “neither one can actually be transformed into the other without violence.” Further, the Western democracies now lack the civic courage needed to oppose Soviet oligarchy, a weakness Solzhenitsyn attributes to their founding principle, “that man exists on earth in order to be free and pursue happiness,” as seen in “the American Declaration of Independence.” The result has been the achievement of a “debased sense” of happiness, seen in Western license and material plenty. He warns the young graduates that the anxiety-ridden competition of these regimes “hardly swings open a pathway to a free development of the spirit.” Indeed, “even biology tells us that a high degree of habitual well-being is hardly advantageous to a living organism.” 

In addition to self-indulgence, the peoples of the West are also afflicted by legalism. True, the rule of law is a good thing; “a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed,” as the experience of ‘Soviet legality’ had taught him, harshly). “But a society with no scale but the legal one is also scarcely worthy of man.” To be ruled only by legal convention and not by conscience fosters “an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that deadens man’s noblest impulses.” One seldom hears or even thinks of “voluntary self-limitation” when we expect laws alone to govern us. The doctrine of ‘human rights,’ understood legalistically, weakens the sense of “human obligations.” It is in only in fulfilling our obligations to one another ‘from within’ that the West can develop the moral strength to “bear up under [the] trials” of “the menacing age that draws near.” The human right to freedom, whether legal or even natural, cannot defend itself against “the abyss of human decadence,” licentiousness. The “primary foundation” of this error “was laid by the humanistic and benevolent notion according to which man—the master of this world—bears no intrinsic evil within himself, and all the vices of life stem from faulty social systems”—an ideology derived from a simpliste version of Rousseau. 

For example (and here is where Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard speech obtained its bad reputation), freedom of the press easily veers toward press license. “What sort of responsibility do a journalist or a newspaper have to their readership or to history?” Are there any examples of journalistic repentance for “inaccurate information or wrong conclusions”? And because journalism aims at “instant, authoritative information,” hasty reportage resorts to “guesswork, rumors, and suppositions,” which then “settle into the public’s memory.” And even when journalists get the facts straight, do the people really have ‘the right to know’ everything? Do they have the right to know “secret matters pertaining even to the nation’s defense”? Do they have the right to know facts revealed by “shameless intrusions into the privacy of well-known people”? There is a superior “right of the people not to know,” “not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk.” By peddling information indiscriminately, “the press has become the dominant power in Western countries, exceeding that of the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary.” But who elected the journalists? It is easy to see why journalists took offense at this, and even supposed it dangerous, forever more giving Solzhenitsyn ‘bad press.’ In so doing, they failed to connect this part of his speech with the part immediately preceding. He wasn’t calling for censorship, for an extension of legalism, but for voluntary self-limitation. And given the fact that the souls of journalists, no less than everyone else, bear a measure of “intrinsic evil,” their error should not have been unexpected.

Solzhenitsyn might be more justly criticized for claiming that “the fecund spiritual development already experienced” by Russians “through profound suffering” makes “the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion” unenticing. It would have been better to say that the West’s spiritual exhaustion was unenticing in itself, but to admit that Russia’s own spiritual development, with the exception of certain rare souls such as Solzhenitsyn, remained awash in vodka, corruption, and libido dominandi. “The slackening of human character in the West” may have been “an indubitable fact” but “its strengthening in the East” was not. And while “the human soul longs for something higher, warmer, and purer than what is offered by today’s mass Western lifestyle, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting assault of advertising, by television stupor, and by intolerable music,” it is far from clear that servility under a decadent Communist Party (or under the oligarchies that would succeed it) can seriously be thought better.

Solzhenitsyn ascends to firmer ground in his critique of the American foreign policy of the 1970s, a blend of the pseudo-idealism of human rights campaigns with the pseudo realism of detente. He considers “the failure to understand the Vietnam War” as America’s “most serious blunder” of the period. Believing, or pretending, that the Communists in Vietnam and Cambodia fought for “self-determination,” the American antiwar movement has blinded itself to “the genocide and suffering” that afflicts Asians as a result of Communist tyranny in those country. Henry Kissinger (“your shortsighted politician,” a Harvard man) “signed the hasty Vietnam capitulation,” but the applause he garnered begs the question, “How can the West hope to stand firm in the future?” Looked at coldly but truly, “Western democracy has not won any major war by itself,” having availed itself of the forces of czarist Russia for much of the First World War and of those of Stalinist Russia for most of the Second World War. In so doing, in both instances it “raised up another enemy, one that would prove a more biter and powerful one,” namely, the Soviet Union. And in allying with China against Russia now, will its temporary ally not “turn around armed with American weapons” that may inflict “a Cambodia-style genocide” on the United States? That is, “the so-called world wars…were really about the internal self-destruction of the small progressive West”; “the next war—not necessarily an atomic one; I don’t believe it will be—may bury Western civilization for good.”

The weakness of will, of courage in the West may stem from the flaws of modern philosophy and ideology but this need not continue to be the case because it was not so in the American Founding. For Americans at that time, all individual rights were recognized on the premise that man is “god’s creature,” a person willingly shouldering his “religious responsibility.” At that time, “it would have seemed impossible, in America, that an individual be granted unbridled freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his cravings,” that Americans would seek and achieve “emancipation from the moral heritage of Christian centuries, with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice.” Yet that is what has happened, as “the legalistic egoism of the Western worldview” has hurled mankind into “a severe spiritual crisis and a political impasse.” In both “today’s West and today’s East,” “the logic of materialism’s development” has prevailed, “stamped out by the Party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West.” He adjures his young listeners instead to take up “perpetual, earnest duty, so that one’s entire journey may become, above all, an experience of moral ascent—to leave life a better human being than one started it,” struggling with themselves to find “a new level of life, where neither will our physical nature be consigned to perdition—as in the Middle Ages—nor will our spiritual nature, all the more crucially , be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.” “No one on Earth has any other way left but—upward.” 

If the excesses of the Roman Catholic Church led to the excesses of humanism, beginning in the Renaissance, what accounts for Russia’s catastrophe? Solzhenitsyn concurs with the explanation offered by elderly people when he was a child in the 1920s: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” At one time, “faith was the shaping and unifying force of the nation,” but the 17th-century Schism of the Russian Church “gravely undermined” Orthodoxy. [1] In its weakness, the Church was vulnerable to Peter I’s (Solzhenitsyn silently declines to call him ‘Great’) “forcibly imposed” modernization program, which “suppressed religious spirit and national life in favor the economy, the state, and foreign wars”—Russia’s “first whiff of secularism,” opening “a broad avenue for Marxism,” later on. “By the time of the Revolution, faith had evaporated in Russian educated circles and had diminished among the uneducated.” As Dostoevsky had observed, revolution begins with atheism, although “the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism,” a doctrine in which “hatred of God is the principal driving force,” not economic or political ideology. To implement political centralization aiming at social and economic totalitarianism, all institutions standing between the ruling party with its state apparatus and the people with their churches must go, and in order to impose conformity to the new, tyrannical regime the moral limits of Christianity must be erased. Although the West still enjoys religious freedom, it too has been struck by “the tide of secularism”; in fact, the Enlightenment movement in Europe animated Czar Peter. “This gradual sapping of strength from within is a threat to faith that is perhaps even more dangerous than any attempt to incinerate religion from without” because it wins the consent of souls without sparking their resistance. Solzhenitsyn might have called this insidious appeal “playing upon the strings of freedom” and, as a writer, he concerns himself especially with spiritual warfare in literature and the arts generally. In turning to the arts, he does in fact call the most recent efforts “playing on the strings of emptiness.”

In that realm, “the necessary equilibrium between tradition and a search for the new” in art “has been repeatedly upset by a falsely understood avant-gardism.” In politics as in art, radical progressivism or historicism was promised to generate “the New Life.” In politics, “revolutions dismantle the organic structures of society, disrupt the natural flow of life, destroy the best elements of the population while giving free rein to the worst.” And so it has been with literary ‘permanent revolution’: “It was even suggested that literature should start anew ‘on a blank sheet of paper.'” Solzhenitsyn remarks, sardonically, “some never ventured much beyond this stage”; the spectacle of the bohemian flaneur wasn’t limited to Paris. Avant-gardism “lower[ed] one’s standards of craftsmanship to the point of slovenliness and primitivity, at times combined with a meaning so obscure as to shade into unintelligibility.” In Russia, the partisans of this movement called themselves the “Futurists”; their work preceded the Russian and Soviet revolutions but was also ended by Lenin’s regime and the introduction of still another literary style, “so-called socialist realism,” which turned out to be more socialist than realist. Socialist realism fell “outside the bounds of art altogether,” as it “consisted of nothing more than servility” to Communist Party commands. By the early 1990s, after the Soviet dreams of future justice had been shown to have no future, young Russian writers, disillusioned by the lies, returned not to Orthodox religiosity or indeed to religiosity of any kind but to relativism, the denial of “absolute truth.” “In one sweeping gesture of alienated vexation, classical Russian literature—which never disdained reality but sought the truth—is dismissed as next to worthless.” ‘Postmodernism’ or “post-avant-gardism” has become the new ‘Futurism,’ both forms of nihilism. Postmodernism looks not, Nietzsche-like, to a more intensely lived life but to play, to the antics of Homo ludens. With play, “an author need have no accountability to anyone.” “There is no God, there is no truth, the universe is chaotic, all is relative,” and the world is misconceived as a text, one that “any postmodernist is willing to compose” to keep himself and his audience entertained. This again manifests the moral emptiness of the century, with its “deep-seated hostility toward any spirituality” and “relentless cult of novelty.” 

Nihilism descends when “we have ceased to see the purpose” of human life. Somewhat oddly, Solzhenitsyn claims that John Locke held it “inconceivable to apply moral concepts to the state and its actions,” despite Locke’s clear insistence that states, and their actions, should guard natural rights to life, liberty, and property. What he may have in mind is Locke’s utilitarian tendency, its offshoot in Benthamism and its cultivation of technological progress over moral and spiritual elevation—Locke’s preference for the ‘low but solid ground’ that stays away from the religious controversies that gave rise to religious warfare in Western Europe and Russia, alike. [2] Solzhenitsyn answers that “if state, party, and social policy is not based on morality, then mankind has no future to speak of,” that one must, as the Russian adage has it, “live by the truth,” which is not nearly exhausted by “material laws,” which by themselves “neither explain our life nor give it direction.” Modern men have become forgetful of “the human soul.” Having “allowed our wants to grow unchecked,” we “are now at a loss where to direct them.” ‘Interests’ are not purposes. “The paramount importance of self-limitation has only arisen in its pressing entirety before the humanity of the twentieth century,” with its dazzling material prosperity.

“It’s up to us to stop seeing [progress] as a stream of unlimited blessings and to view it, rather, as a gift sent to us for an exceedingly intricate trial of our free will.” The intricacy of that trial consists in the difficulty of making soul-sustaining choices among the seeming infinitude of things and actions modernity and its technological science offers, “seek[ing] or deepen[ing] ways of directing [the] might [of progress] towards the accomplishment of good.” Progress is nothing like the simple, linear (even if ‘dialectical’) thing historicists imagine. But if we “limit our wants,” adapt an attitude of “prudent self-limitation,” we will achieve genuine freedom. Man inclines to limit himself only if he considers himself not as the center of the universe but as a small part within it, flourishing only insofar as he adapts himself to what is greater than he—to “something Whole, something Supreme above us.” As the Russian philosopher Nikolai Lossky taught, “if a personality is not directed at values higher than the self, then it becomes inevitably invested with corruption and decay.” [3]

Self-limitation, humility before the Whole, should govern not only the individual but states. The political refusal of self-limitation yields the rule of force, of taking. In an important footnote, Ignat Solzhenitsyn cites the policies of Ukraine and Kazakhstan in the early 1990s, which rightly “denounc[ed] the collapsing Communist regime founded by Lenin,” but then wrongly “rushed to assert their claims to the fullest extent of the historical dubious borders personally drawn by Lenin.” What had been “relatively meaningless internal borders within the USSR” became “newly consequential international borders” encompassing “millions of ethnic Russians”—encompassed, it might be added, because Lenin wanted a substantial population of Russians within Ukraine and Kazakhstan in order to buttress Russian control of the native populations. “Solzhenitsyn repeatedly said that he didn’t oppose independence for those countries per se, but that those capricious borders ought to be revisited in order to avoid calamities in the future.” That is, what Lenin deranged, a future Putin might seek to correct, disastrously, and (given the modern inclination to seize, to overreach) even to over-correct.

This is not to imply that individual and political morality are exactly the same, even if they are closely related. Politics is a matter of civilization—a ‘being civil,’ “a milieu, a way of life,” a regime. Individual refinement and elevation are a matter of culture, “the sum total of our intellectual, philosophical, ethical, and aesthetical achievements,” consisting of “the development, enrichment, and refinement of the non-material life.” Without culture, civilization hollows out, weakens, becomes legalistic and often collapsing into the uncivilized rule of force. Without civilization, a proper milieu, culture will be tyrannized. It may concentrate itself in certain spiritually strong individuals, who may (or may not) cause it to rekindle or at least survive, as when Blaise Pascal warned the subjects of the Machiavellian-absolutist Bourbons, “the ultimate essence of things is accessible only through religious perception.” In 1997, nearing the end of his life, Solzhenitsyn told his fellow Russians that “one thing we must certainly absorb from the West is an active yet stable civic life”—a degree of civilization. Such absorption should emphatically not extend to Western culture. “The only normal, natural path of development of any culture is a rational, balanced integration of its own organic principles.” “Our people’s survival or extinction will depend on those who persist through these dark times, by way of concentrated labor or its material support in shielding from ruin, in lifting up, in strengthening and developing the inner life of our minds and souls—the life that is culture.”

 

Notes

1. The Schism of the Russian Church began in 1653, when Patriarch Nikon introduced reforms of Church ritual intended to conform Russian Orthodox practice with that of Greek Orthodoxy. This offended local priests and their parishioners, who regarded the Russian rites as legitimate. Worse, the reforms included centralization of the Church, including increased control of Church lands by the Patriarch. This brought the upper level of the Russian aristocracy into the controversy, which eventuated in civil war between the centralizers and the ‘Old Believers.’
2. Lockean morality derives from that of Thomas Hobbes, who calls death “the King of Terrors.” Solzhenitsyn attributes the fear of violent death to materialism. “Nothing so bespeaks the present helplessness of our spirit, our intellectual disarray, as the loss of a clear, calm attitude towards death. The more human well-being increases, the hasher the chilling fear of death that cuts into the soul of modern man.” Having “lost the sense of himself as a limited point in the universe,” modern man begins “to deem himself the center of his surroundings, adapting not himself to the world but the world to himself. And then, of course the thought of death becomes unbearable: it is the extinguishment of the entire Universe at a stroke.”
3. Nikolai Lossky was the father of the theologian Vladimir Lossky. For a consideration of the latter’s work, see “Orthodox Christianity: Is Mysticism a Higher Form of Rationality?” and “Orthodox Christianity: Manifestations of God” on this website under “Bible Notes.” Although the elder Lossky taught theology, his personalist philosophy (he was a friendly colleague of Berdyaev at one point) had strong affinities with Origen’s doctrines. 

Vladimir Lossky: The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Chapters 4-12. Translated by Members of the Fellowship of St. Albans and St. Regius. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1957 [1944].

 

Passing from a discussion of God’s being or ‘nature’ to His manifestations, including creation ex nihilo and the Christian Church, Lossky undertakes “a sort of apophaticism in reverse.” Those familiar with ancient philosophy know that it “knows nothing of creation in the absolute sense of the word”; the god of the philosophers is a natural force that orders inchoate primal matter, which exists eternally. In antiquity, the Bible alone posits creation, the appearance of “an entirely new subject, with no origin of any kind either int he divine nature or in any matter or potentiality of being external to God.” In creating, “God ‘makes room’ for something which is wholly outside of Himself,” something “entirely ‘other'” than Himself, and emphatically not an extrusion or diffusion from Himself—which would be a neo-Platonic, not a Biblical notion. Creation is “a work of will not of nature,” of free will. It is not, however, an arbitrary act but a rational one, as indicated by John the Apostle in his statement that in the beginning was the Logos. Creation is an act of “thought-will” or “volitional thought.” “The divine ‘willings’ are the creative ideas of things, the logoi, the ‘words.'” And creation “is an act proper to a God who is personal, to the Trinity whose common will belongs to the divine nature and operate according to the determination of thought.” Lossky distinguishes thought-will from the Augustinian and Thomistic understanding, that the ideas are “the eternal reasons of creatures contained within the very being of God”; nor, one might add, are they the arbitrary intentions of Allah, the god of the Muslims. They are, one might say, in-between those two claims. They express not God’s being but His willed manifestations, his energies. “If the divine ideas are not the essence of God itself, if they are thus as it were separated from the essence by the will, then it follows that not only the act of creation but also the very thoughts of God Himself can no longer be considered as a necessary determination of His nature and part of the intelligible content of the divine Being”; creation isn’t “a poor replica of the Godhead” but “an entirely new being,” “willed by God and the joy of His Wisdom,” what Gregory of Nyssa calls “a marvelously composed hymn to the power of the Almighty”—and also, quite likely, to His wisdom, justice, and grace.

The created world is a world of change, of becoming. The end or purpose of the phenomena is “outside themselves,” as “God alone remains in absolute repose; and his perfect inviolability places Him outside space and time,” “produc[ing] in creatures the love which makes them tend towards Himself.” “Every created thing has its point of contact with the Godhead; and this point of contact is its idea, reason or logos which is at the same time the end towards which it tends”—the ultimate end being the Logos Himself, “the second person of the Trinity who is the first principle and the last end [as well as the origin] of all created things,” as ordained by the one will of all three Persons of the Trinity. This is what Lossky means by the “deification” of created beings. God can be known by His creatures through His creation but also directly by the “mystical contemplation” of the few Christians, the true saints, who have “abandoned all” the things of the world for a glimpse of the divine thought-wills themselves.

More comprehensively considered, each of the three Persons causes created being, but in different ways. The Father is “the primordial cause”; the Son is the “operating cause”; the Holy Spirit is the “perfecting cause.” That is, “it is by the will of the Father” that created beings exist, the creative work of the Son that they “come into existence,” and by “the presence of the Spirit that they are made perfect.” All of these are acts of grace, which is “implied in the act of creation itself.” The philosophers’ understanding of nature is truncated because their “experience reaches only to nature in its fallen state.” They do not know, cannot know without divine revelation, that “created beings have the faculty of being assimilated in God because such was the very object of their creation.” Even in “the condition of mortality which is the consequence of the coming of sin, the spiritual nature of the soul maintains a certain link with the disunited elements of the body, a link which it will find again at the moment of the resurrection in order that the parts may be transformed into a ‘spiritual body,’ which is indeed our true body, different from the grossness of those we now have.” This is why the Orthodox Church “has never entered into alliance with philosophy in any attempt at a doctrinal synthesis.” It can “make use of philosophy and the sciences for apologetic purposes,” but has no need “to defend these relative and changing truths as she defends the unchangeable truth of her doctrines.” So, for example, “revelation remains for theology essentially geocentric,” even if natural physics has long abandoned that notion, because human beings find their salvation “under the conditions which belong to the reality of life on earth.” Philosophy can at most only “grasp the whole under the aspect of disintegration which corresponds to the condition of our nature since the fall,” while “the Christian mystic…entering into himself, and enclosing himself in the ‘inner chamber’ of his heart, finds there, deeper even than sin, the beginning of an ascent in the course of which the universe appears more and more unified, more and more coherent, penetrated with spiritual forces and forming one whole within the hand of God.”

Created nature consists of the intelligible universe and the sensible universe. The sensible universe consists of the heavens and the earth. The earth is the home of ‘man,’ male and female. The first man, Adam, was created in order to reach “perfect union with God and thus grant the state of deification to the whole creation,” of which he was ordained to be the ruler. “Man had only to give himself” to God “in a complete abandonment of love” to achieve this purpose. He failed, and so “it is in the work of Christ, the second Adam, that we can see what it was meant to be.” Just as Adam might have been “able to transform the whole earth into paradise,” into the Garden of Eden, so will Christ transform “the whole cosmos disordered by sin” into a new heaven and a new earth, an earth populated by those saved and transfigured by God’s grace. The path to this deification goes through the Church, inasmuch as “the history of the world is a history of the Church which is the mystical foundation of the world,” a “new body, possessing an uncreated and limitless plenitude which the world cannot contain,” energies that “appear as the grace in which created beings are called to union with God.”

Before considering the Church more fully, Lossky addresses the question of what the Bible means by saying that man was created “in the image of God.” “The Biblical narrative gives no precise account of the nature of the image,” although it does make it clear that this characteristic distinguishes man from other created beings. Orthodox theologians decline to identify the image of God as any one characteristic of human beings: his rule over the earth, his mind or his reason or his freedom or the immortality of his soul. It is all of these things, no one of them. More precisely, the image of God is the soul’s mingling with the Holy Spirit, its condition of being “helped by something greater than itself,” its intimate connection with divine grace. “It is a participation in the divine energy proper to the soul,” its “communion with God,” which “is meant by the phrase ‘part of the deity.'” It is therefore “impossible to define what constitutes the divine image in man,” any more than it is impossible to define, to find the limits of the God Who is limitless, infinite. This does not mean that man is God; man is still a created being, even if his soul is immortal. 

Man is therefore “not controlled by nature,” not an entirely physical entity operating whose actions are determined entirely by natural law. He has freedom. He is a person. “We do not know the person, the human hypostasis in its true condition,” its prelapsarian condition, “free from alloy.” As persons, we are distinct from nature. As “individuals,” we are mixtures of persons “with elements which belong to the common nature.” “The man who is governed by his nature and acts in the strength of his natural qualities…sets himself up as an individual, proprietor of his own nature, which he pits against the natures of others and regards as his ‘me,’ thereby confusing person and nature,” the latter being tainted with sin. Hence human egoism. But the person “is free from its nature, is not determined by it.” The “root principle of asceticism” is the intention of breaking egoism, ‘individualism,’ by renouncing “one’s own will,” which is “the mere simulacrum of individual liberty, in order to recover the true liberty, that of the person which is the image of God in each one.” “Far from realizing himself fully, a person who asserts himself as an individual, and shuts himself up in the limits of his particular nature, becomes impoverished. It is only in renouncing his own possession and giving itself freely, in ceasing to exist for himself, that the person finds full expression in the one nature common to all,” “enriched by everything which belongs to all.” This is “the foundation of all Christian anthropology, of all evangelical living,” a life lived in “imitation of the nature of God,” the God Who speaks to him Person to person.

Lossky cites St. Maximus, who distinguishes the natural will, “the desire for good to which every reasonable nature tends”—the human nature described by Aristotle—from the “choosing will, which is a characteristic of the person.” By nature, we desire, will, act; as persons, we choose, “accepting or rejecting what the nature wills.” Only the perfected person, the saint, has seen such a transformation in his nature that he “has no need of choice,” knowing “naturally what is good” because his nature has been thoroughly transformed by the grace of God within him. Since human nature is “overclouded by sin,” not knowing “its true good,” it “is always faced with the necessity of choice”; “this hesitation in our ascent towards the good, we call ‘free will.'” To make that ascent, “the concurrence of two wills is necessary”: God’s and man’s, “the human will which submits to the will of God in receiving grace and making it its own, and allowing it to penetrate all its nature.” “As the will is an active power of rational nature, it acts by grace to the extent in which nature participates in grace.” 

Just as grace enters us through our will, by the will of God, so “evil entered into the world through the will,” a will or perhaps more accurately a mind deceived, “tak[ing] a mere shadow of the good for the good itself.” “The Serpent me beguiled,” Milton’s Eve says. Evil “had its beginnings in the spiritual world,” in “the will of the angelic spirits” who intended to negate creation and indeed God in “a furious hatred of grace,” the first instance of what we now call ‘nihilism.’ Because God prevents them from destroying all of creation, “they seek to destroy creation from within, by turning human freedom towards evil.” Three wills, then, operate in man: God’s, “perfect and saving”; man’s, “not necessarily pernicious, but certainly not in itself a saving will”; and demonic, “seeking our perdition.” If the human will refuses repentance, attempting instead to justify the ways of man to God, attempting to absolve itself of its own guilt, it “hardens, and shuts itself off from God.” “Man has obstructed the faculty in himself for communion with God, has closed up the way by which grace should have been poured out through Him into the whole creation.” God accordingly limited human sin by “allowing it to end in death.” Only Christ, the second Adam, can restore the vocation of the first Adam. “In breaking the tyranny of sin, our Savior opens to us anew the way of deification, which is the final end of man.”

“What man ought to have attained by raising himself up to God, God achieved by descending to man,” by becoming man while remaining God in what St. John the Damascene calls “a mode of economic condescension.” The virgin birth of Jesus “suppressed the division of human nature into male and female.” His crucifixion unites paradise, Adam’s “dwelling place,” with the fallen earth upon which the sons of Adam now dwell, telling the thief who acknowledges Him as his Savior, “today thou shalt be with Me in paradise.” His ascension after death unites earth first with the sensible heaven and finally with the spiritual heaven, “the world of mind.” He finally “presents to the Father the totality of the universe restored to unity in Him, but uniting”—but not ‘synthesizing,’ as in Hegelianism—the “created to the uncreated.” Such divine providence, such divine love for man, “make[s] men profit greatly from all the vicissitudes of their wanderings, provided that man understands how to recognize the will of God.” By His providence, God “govern[s] the fallen universe by accomplishing His will without doing violence to the liberty of creatures.” The incarnation, the virgin birth, was itself both the work of God and, in the words of Nicolas Cabasilas, “the work of the will and faith of the Virgin.” “In the person of the Virgin, humanity has given its consent to the Word becoming flesh and coming to dwell among men.” Thus, while the Word became flesh, “deity did not become humanity, or was humanity transformed into deity.” Jesus took on the limitations, indeed the penalties, of fallen human nature—suffering, death—without becoming sinful Himself. This is why He could redeem human beings from their sin, by paying the penalties justly incurred for sin without having committed any sin. “While in the Trinity there is one nature in three hypostases, in Christ there are the two natures in the one hypostasis.” This hypostasis is defined apophatically: without sin, without mingling, without change, and without destroying either of the two natures. In a way, this also registers in the “self-emptying” character of agapic love, exemplified on the human side by saintly asceticism and on the divine side by Christ’s “renunciation of His own will in order to accomplish the will of the Father by being obedient to Him unto death and unto the cross,” by submitting not only to suffering and death but to abasement. “The outpouring, self-emptying of Himself only produces the greater manifestation of the deity of the Son to all those who are able to recognize greatness in abasement, wealth in spoliation, liberty in obedience.” 

Death by crucifixion followed by the Resurrection, revealing “the incorruptibility of nature” at its core as a work of the Creator-God, complete the work of Christ. But although “the work of Christ is consummation,” the “work of the Holy Spirit is waiting for accomplishment.” Christ has founded his Church, His assembly, but He has a co-Founder, the Holy Spirit. “The work of both is requisite that we may attain to union with God.” The Church is Christ’s “body”—one might suggest the politeuma, a ruling body or assembly. The Holy Spirit is he ‘that filleth all in all,'” as the Apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians. That is, the Holy Spirit “quickens” the Church, animates it, “fills her with divinity, for the Godhead dwells within her bodily as it dwelt in the deified humanity of Christ.” This, too, is part of God’s economy or manifestation in this world. As St. Symeon the New Theologian writes, the Holy Spirit “fulfils through the Son that which the Father desires as if it were His own will; for the Holy Trinity is indivisible as to its nature, substance and will.” “Christ returns to the Father so that the Spirit may descend,” bearing witness to the Son invisibly, in contrast to the Son, Who made Himself visible, taking on human flesh. Invisibly, the Holy Spirit reveals the Trinity, making the truths God imparts “luminous, manifest, almost tangible to us.” God’s grace “signifies all the abundance of the divine nature, in so far as it is communicated to men.” Whereas the work of Christ centers on human nature, which he “recapitulates in his hypostasis” and redeems, the work of the Holy Spirit “concerns persons, being applied to each one singly.” He does so “in a manner which is unique, ‘personal,’ appropriate to every man as a person created in the image of God.” St. Basil compares the Holy Spirit to a sunbeam, “whose gracious influence is as much his who enjoys it as though he were alone in the world, but which also blends with the air, and shines over land and sea.” enabling “all things that partake of Him [to] enjoy according to the capacity of their nature, not according to the extent of His power.” While Christ is “the sole image appropriate to the common nature of humanity,” the Holy Spirit “grants to each person created in the image of God the possibility of fulfilling the likeness in the common nature.” Christ unifies, the Holy Spirit diversifies, the first “lend[ing] His hypostasis to the nature, the other giv[ing] His divinity to the persons” by dwelling within each soul who accepts Christ and the presence of the Holy Spirit, witness of Christ. In this, the Holy Spirit bestows “the common energy of the Holy Trinity which is divine grace upon human persons.” With this, “the divine life” opens up “within us in the Holy Spirit,” who as it were “substitutes Himself…for ourselves,” as “the will of God” becomes “no longer external to ourselves” but internal, though remaining distinct from our still-fallen nature. The Spirit manifests Himself outwardly insofar as “our human will remains in accord with the divine will and cooperates with it in acquiring grace, in making it ours.” In this way, the Holy Spirit, in “communicating Himself to each member of this body, crates, so to speak, many Christs, many of the lord’s anointed.” Christ is the solid Rock, the cornerstone of the Church, while the Holy Spirit is “the source of personal deification”—dynamic, teleological.

The Church may appear to be a ‘totalitarian’ institution, with no individual rights respected, “but, at the same time, each person in this body is its end and cannot be regarded as a means,” unlike the way of modern tyrannies. The Church rules, after all, by the consent of the governed; no one is forced into it, and “the ultimate aspirations of each one are in accord with the supreme end of all, and the latter cannot be realized at the expense of the interest of any.” The human persons, not ‘individuals,’ can “only attain to perfection within the unity of nature,” and the Incarnation is “the foundation of this unity of nature,” while the Pentecost, the celebration of the Holy Spirit’s descent upon the Apostles, is “the affirmation of the multiplicity of persons within the Church.” This makes the “catholicity” of the Church more than simply universal, as it “comprehends not only unity but also multiplicity”; “each part possesses the same fullness as the whole.”

This is not to say that all persons within the Church share equally in the wisdom of the Holy Spirit. As “giver of wisdom He is hardly present in them all but only in those who have understanding, that is to say, in those who by their struggles and labors in God have become worthy of the deifying indwelling of the Holy Spirit.” All persons within the Church are “sons of God,” all saved, but the saints of the Church are few. Put another way, “in the Church our nature receives all the objective conditions” of the union of our persons with God, but “the subjective conditions depend only upon ourselves.” We have the freedom to pursue the Christian life more or less ardently and consistently. “We are called to fulfill and to build up our persons in the grace of the Holy Spirit,” “in the words of St. Maximus) “to reunite ‘the created nature to the uncreated nature through love, causing them to appear in unity and identity through the acquisition of grace.'” Lossky cautions that no one, not even the saints, can attain “perfect union with God” before the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment, with one exception: Mary, the Mother of God, who “entered into perfect union with the deity” on the day of the Pentecost. “In the two perfect persons—the divine person of Christ and the human person of the Mother of God—is contained the mystery of the Church.”

In terms of its ruling persons and visible practices, Lossky considers the status of Church bishops and the significance of icons, so conspicuous in Orthodox worship. “The bishop acts by divine authority: in submitting to the will of the bishop one is submitting to the will of God.” However, unlike the Pope in the Roman Catholic Church, an Orthodox bishop is not infallible with respect to doctrine. “If he has not himself acquired grace, and if his understanding is not enlightened by the Holy Spirit,” he might act “according to human motives” and “err in the exercise of the divine power which is conferred upon him.” If so, he is not only “responsible to his actions before God.” If he acts “contrary to the canons…he becomes the promoter of schism and places himself outside the unity of the Church.” As to the icons, like the consecrated objects in the Roman Catholic service, they exist not “simply to direct our imagination during our prayers” but form “a material center in which there reposes an energy, a divine force, which unites itself to human art” in still another manifestation of God

But of course these and other ruling institutions of the Church provide the framework for “the true end of the Christian life,” the “acquiring of the Holy Spirit.” By “acquiring” Lossky means an ever-increasing acquisition, inasmuch as all Christians have faithfully consented to the entry of the Holy Spirit into their souls. The place of good works in this continuing quest is simple: “only those good works which are done in the name of Christ…bring us the fruits of the Holy Spirit,” as “a work is good in so far as it furthers our union with Giod, in so far as it makes grace ours.” Genuine virtues are not natural qualities aiming at eudaimonia, as in Aristotle, but “the outward manifestations of the Christian life,” products of the “synergy of the two wills, divine and human, a harmony in which grace bears ever more and more fruit.” Aristotelian virtue is “rational” (both Pelagius and Augustine, his critic, ‘rationalize’ the virtues, as does Aquinas); Orthodoxy takes its bearings from grace, which is a mystery, inasmuch as it comes from God, Who does not explain why He grants it. There is no reason to suppose God’s grace to be irrational, only that we do not know what His reasoning is. The closest human beings can come to the perfection of virtue in this life is in the ascetic life of monasticism, the life of ardent hearts and calm spirits. By “heart” Lossky means “the center of the human being, the root of the ‘active’ faculties, of the intellect and of the will,” what St. Macarius of Egypt calls “a workshop of justice and injustice.” By the grace of God, the spirit (nous) guards the heart. “The spirit is the highest part of the human creature,” the “contemplative faculty by which man is able to seek God.” Contemplation is “the seat of the person, of the human hypostasis which contains in itself the whole of man’s nature—spirit, soul, and body.” “Without the heart, which is the center of all activity, the spirit is powerless. Without the spirit, the heart remains blind, destitute of direction” or almost inevitably churning off in the wrong direction. “The practice of spiritual prayer in the tradition of the Christian East consists in making the heart ready for the indwelling of grace by constantly guarding its interior purity.”

The ascent “towards perfect union” with God proceeds “simultaneously on two different but closely interrelated levels”: action and contemplation, as befits the transformation of the whole person, the experience of “spiritual realities,” the gnosis which consists in “the purifying the heart” in the person’s “active life,” cooperating with the “contemplative faculty,” which “coordinat[es] and unit[es] the human being in grace.” Taken together, activity and contemplation in this life make the human spirit “vigilant,” attentive to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, exhibiting “the faculty of discernment and of the judgment in spiritual matters which are characteristic of human nature in its state of wholeness.” This begins with the penitence, “the conversion of the will” from worldly things to spiritual things, continues with the addition of purification or “liberation from the passions.” Without discarding either continual penitence or continual purification, the final condition is perfection, “that perfect love which is the fullness of grace.” In this life, repentance, purification, and perfection “can have no end.” 

In this Christian life, prayer is even “more perfect than the practice of the virtues,” since “the virtues cannot possibly be assured if the spirit is not constantly turned towards prayer.” Agapic love or charity is “the greatest of the virtues” and “is itself the fruit of prayer” because “in prayer man meets with God personally—he knows Him and he loves Him.” A Christian’s prayer life begins with petition, with asking God for blessings, but petitioning ends “when the soul entrusts itself wholly to the will of God” in a condition of “absolute peace and rest.” In such a life, “prayer must become perpetual, as uninterrupted as breathing or the beating of the heart,” a condition achieved by the monks dedicate themselves, a “complete spiritual science.” This is ‘ek-static,’ a reaching out not only beyond the world but beyond oneself to God. This goes beyond the ordinary notion of ecstasy, which is temporary, a sort of ‘peak experience’ achieved rarely, the person who contemplates God has opened himself to His steady and perpetual love, a love that owes nothing to created nature, the realm of change. In keeping with the Great Commandment of Jesus, “love of one’s neighbor is the sign of having acquired the true love of God.” As St. Isaac the Syrian has it, such persons, if “cast into fire ten times a day for the sake of their love of mankind, even this would seem to them too little.” Such self-sacrificing love is not the imitatio Christi commended in the West but “a life in Christ,” the most intimate gnosis, knowledge of God. “Only a spiritual life that is fully aware, a life in constant communion with God, is able to transfigure our nature by making it like the divine nature, by making it participate in the uncreated light of grace, after the example of the humanity of Christ who appeared to the disciples on Mount Tabor clothe in uncreated glory.” The Church provides the conditions of such an ascent, but the Christian himself must bring “a firm resolve.” 

By “renouncing his own will and his natural inclinations,” the person who takes “the way of union” with God does not diminish himself. “It is just by this free renunciation of all which by nature belongs to it that the human personality comes to its full realization in grace” since “what is not free and definitely conscious has no personal value.” Consciousness or gnosis grows with his advance toward spiritual union. It is lack of awareness that is Hell, “the final destruction of the person.” As St. Macarius has it, God, being Light, “strengthens the rational powers,” “fill[ing] at the same time both intellect and the senses, revealing itself to the whole man, and not only to one of his faculties,” surpassing them all and “changing our nature.” “The blessed will see God face to face, in the fullness of their created being,” living “a conscious life in light, in endless communion with God.” Lossky quickly adds that “few, even of the great saints, reach this state in their earthly life.” It is rather in the parousia, the return of Christ to earth and His creation of a new heaven and a new earth, that “the whole created universe will enter into perfect union with God.”

That is, God “is more than an essence: He overflows His essence, manifests Himself beyond it, and, being incommunicable by nature, communicates Himself” through His energies, “pour[ing] the fullness of His deity upon all those who are capable of receiving it by means of the Holy Spirit.” His Church, His politeuma on earth, bears witness to this “fullness of the Holy Spirit.”

 

 

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.