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.”
Recent Comments