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The Library of Orthodox Theology
No. 2
THE VISION OF GOD
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The Library of Orthodox Theolog Ly
Published under the direction of
B. Bobrinskoy, O. Clément, B. Fize, J. Meyendorff
and N. Struve
No. zr. THE PRIMAGY OF PETER
J. MEYENDORFF, A. SCHMEMANN
N. AFANASSIEFF, N. KOULOMZINE
THE VISION OF GOD
(27
536/ 3
BY
1963 VLADIMIR LOSSKY |
TRANSLATED BY ASHELEIGH MOORHOUSE
PREFACE BY JOHN MEYENDORFF
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THE FAITH PRESS
7 TUFTON STREET LONDON SWI
AMERICAN ORTHODOX PRESS
CLAYTON, WISCONSIN
FIRST PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH IN 1963
This translation © Asheleigh Moorhouse, 1963
Translated from the French
(Editions Delachaux et Niestlé Neuchatel and Paris)
LIBRARY
CLAREMONT SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY
1325 N. COLLEGE AVE.
CLAREMONT, CA 91711-3199
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
in II point Garamond type
BY THE FAITH PRESS LTD
LEIGHTON BUZZARD
PREFACE
AMONG Orthodox theologians of our generation Vladimir Lossky
was one who sought to present Orthodoxy to the West not just as
the historic form of Eastern Christianity, but as permanent and
catholic truth. This witness was the major concern of his life and
led him to work in two fields complementary in spirit: Byzantine
theology, the organic continuation of the tradition of the Greek
Fathers; and the Latin Middle Ages, where he sought, notably in
Meister Eckhart, possible points of contact with the Orthodox East.
This double interest was a continuation on a strictly scientific
plane of the tradition of the best academic circles of old St. Peters-
burg, to which the Lossky family belonged, a tradition which had
produced not only great Byzantine scholars but also medievalists
of note. But it was the spiritual aspect of the schism between East
and West which led Lossky into the path which he followed in
his work as a scholar and theologian. The points which seemed to
him to divide most Christians attracted his attention in the highest
degree—the doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit, and the
doctrine of the uncreated energies of God—and, in all his writings
one is constantly aware of the double intention of preserving the
integrity of Orthodoxy while maintaining a dialogue with the
Christian West.
As a controversialist and apologist, Vladimir Lossky was some-
times intransigent and harsh. However in the last years of his life
one sees him developing more and more that serene wisdom
which made his personality so engaging, and Etienne Gilson could
write in his preface to the posthumous edition of Lossky’s doc-
toral thesis on Eckhart: ‘A kind of peace radiated gently from
this man who was so modest, so perfectly simple and good, whose
secret was perhaps to incarnate among us the Christian spirit itself,
and to do so as if by virtue of an almost natural vocation.’
In his book on The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church,
which has become a virtual classic, Vladimir Lossky gives a sys-
tematic exposition of what theology was for the Fathers; the con-
templation of God and at the same time the expression of the In-
expressible. The thought of St. Gregory Palamas on the essence
5
PREFACE
and energies of God already occupies a central place in this work.
The series of lectures on “The Vision of God,’ which we are
now publishing in the Orthodox Library and which was given at
the Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes (5th section) at the Sor-
bonne in 1945-6, is of a more historical nature and is presented
above all as a patristic introduction to what has been called
‘Palamism.’
Having worked ourselves to ‘introduce’ Palamas to the western
reader, we hasten to confess here the special and personal pleasure
which we experienced in reading Lossky’s manuscript and in dis-
covering there, treated in a manner infinitely more elegant and
thorough than we could have achieved, an aspect of the problem
which we have not dealt with in detail: the patristic origins of the
terminology of Palamas. In preparing his lectures Lossky certainly
ignored recent works, notably that of P. Sherwood on St. Maximus
the Confessor, which would have helped to clarify his thought
even more; but his exceptional erudition and scrupulosity give his
book an incontestable value. The very evident tendency in Lossky
to integrate the theology of grace into a soteriological and also of
course Christological, ecclesiological and sacramental context, is
particularly welcome. This new accent was inevitable in an ex-
position of the general thought of the Greek Fathers on the vision
of God and deification. It is, in fact, impossible to understand
fully the theology and formulae of Palamas with reference only
to the Cappadocians and Pseudo-Dionysius; it is by way of the
post-Chalcedonian Christology and St. Maximus the Confessor that
we are truly led to the ultimate developments of Byzantine
theology.
As a historian of thought and as a theologian, Lossky invites us
here to a dialogue, a dialogue which would really go to the bottom
of things and would seek the truth which unites and liberates,
which is neither Byzantine nor Latin, but whose one source is ‘the
Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father.’
JOHN MEYENDORFF
