Vladimir Lossky > Quotes

“The divine persons do not assert themselves, but one bears witness to another. It is for this reason that St. John of Damascus said that 'the Son is the image of the Father, and the Spirit the image of the Son.' It follows that the third person of the Trinity is the only one not having his image in another person. The Holy Spirit, as person, remains unmanifested, hidden, concealing himself in his very appearing...

The Holy Spirit is the sovereign unction upon the Christ and upon all the Christians called to reign with him in the Age to come. It is then that this divine person, now unknown, not having his image in another member of the Trinity, will manifest himself in deified persons: for the multitude of the saints will be his image.”
― Vladimir Lossky

“When the cyclical law of repetition suddenly stops its rotating movement, creation, freed from vanity, will not be absorbed into the impersonal Absolute of a Nirvana but will see the beginning of an eternal springtime, in which all the forces of life, triumphant over death, will come to the fulness of their unfolding, since God will be the only principle of life in all things. Then the deified will shine like stars around the only Star, Christ, with whom they will reign in the same glory of the Holy Trinity, communicated to each without measure by the Holy Spirit.”
― Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God

“It is not by chance that the tradition of the Eastern Church has reserved the name of ‘theologian’ peculiarly for three sacred writers of whom the first is St. John, most ‘mystical’ of the four Evangelists; the second St. Gregory Nazianzen, writer of contemplative poetry; and the third St. Symeon, called ‘the New Theologian’, the singer of union with God.”
― Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

“This category of divine risk, which is proper to a personal God freely creating personal beings endowed with freedom, is foreign to all abstract conceptions of the divine dominion - to the rationalist theology which thinks it exalts the omnipotence of the living God in attributing to him the perfections of a lifeless God who is incapable of being subject to risk. But he who takes no risk does not love… God’s dominion must be thought of in these terms of God’s personal love...”
― Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God

“Love of God is necessarily bound up with love of one’s fellow-man. This perfect love will make a man like Christ, for, in his created nature he will be united to the whole of humanity, while in his person he will unite the created and the uncreated, the human complex and deifying grace.”
― Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

“Christianity is not a philosophical school for speculating about abstract concepts, but is essentially a communion with the living God.”
― Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

“The prayer of Gethsemane was an expression of horror in face of death, a reaction proper to all human nature, especially to an incorrupt nature which should not submit to death, and for whom death could only be a voluntary rending contrary to nature.”
― Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

“The eastern tradition has never made a sharp distinction between mysticism and theology; between personal experience of the divine mysteries and the dogma affirmed by the Church.”
― Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

“The Church is already the Body of Christ, but she is not yet ‘the fullness of Him who filleth all in all’ (Eph. i, 23). The work of Christ is consummated; the work of the Holy Spirit is waiting for accomplishment.”
― Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

“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.”
― Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

“The love of God for man is so great that it cannot constrain; for there is no love without respect. Divine will always will submit itself to gropings, to detours, even to revolts of human will to bring it to a free consent: of such is divine providence, and the classical image of the pedagogue must seem feeble indeed to anyone who has felt God as a beggar of love waiting at the soul’s door without ever daring to force it.”
― Vladimir Lossky, Orthodox Theology: An Introduction

“Our spiritual ascent does but reveal to us, ever more and more clearly, the absolute incomprehensibility of the divine nature. 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. Thus the ascent becomes infinite, the desire insatiable.”
― Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

“It is in virtue of this humiliation that Christ, the new Adam, incorruptible and immortal in His human nature–a nature which was completely deified by the hypostatic union–submitted voluntarily to all the consequences of sin and became Isaiah’s ‘Man of sorrows”
― Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

“theology must be not so much a quest of positive notions about the divine being as an experience which surpasses all understanding. ‘It is a great thing to speak of God, but still better to purify oneself for God,’ says St. Gregory Nazianzen.[47] Apophaticism is not necessarily a theology of ecstasy. It is, above all, an attitude of mind which refuses to form concepts about God. Such an attitude utterly excludes all abstract and purely intellectual theology which would adapt the mysteries of the wisdom of God to human ways of thoughts. It is an existential attitude which involves the whole man: there is no theology apart from experience; it is necessary to change, to become a new man. To know God one must draw near to Him. No one who does not follow the path of union with God can be a theologian. The way of the knowledge of God is necessarily the way of deification.”
― Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

“Пερί μυστικῆς θεολογίας,”
― Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

“Negative theology is not merely a theory of ecstasy. It is an expression of that fundamental attitude which transforms the whole of theology into a contemplation of the mysteries of revelation”
― Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

“The view which would base the unity of a local church on a political, racial or cultural principle is considered by the Orthodox Church as a heresy, specially known by the name of philetism.”
― Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

“Job’s attitude in accusing God is opposite to that of his friends, who, in assuming the hypocritical role of defenders of God, defended, without knowing it, Satan’s right to an unlimited dominion. Like most defenders of the status quo, in wishing to justify the legitimate character of the present condition of humanity, they gave an absolute value to the legal situation, projecting it on to the very nature of God. In this wrong perspective, the different levels of human, demonic, angelic, and divine reality, bound up in the complex and shifting economy of salvation, are telescoped together, welded together and crystallized in a single vision of a God-Necessity, comparable to the inexorable and impersonal Fate of Greek paganism. They speak solely of the God of the Law, but not the God of the Promise… But Job aimed higher than his friends, for he believed the Promise, without which the Law would have been a monstrous absurdity and the God of the Old Testament could not have been the God of Christians.”
― Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God

“The whole of the attention must be given to the words of the short prayer: ‘O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.’ This prayer, continually repeated at each drawing of breath, becomes to a monk as it were second nature. Far from rendering the interior life mechanical, it has the effect, on the contrary, of freeing it and turning it towards contemplation by constantly driving away from the region of the heart all contagion of sin, and every external thought or image; and this by the power of the most holy Name of Jesus.”
― Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

“When St. Seraphim of Sarov was asked if the Christians of his own day lacked any of the conditions necessary to produce the same fruits of sanctity which had been so abundant in the past, he replied: there is one condition only lacking–a firm resolve.”
― Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

“The person is the highest creation of God only because God gives it the possibility of love, therefore of refusal.”
― Vladimir Lossky, Orthodox Theology: An Introduction

“theology must be not so much a quest of positive notions about the divine being as an experience which surpasses all understanding.”
― Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

“Mysticism is accordingly treated in the present work as the perfecting and crown of all theology: as theology par excellence.”
― Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

“Negative theology is thus a way towards mystical union with God, whose nature remains incomprehensible to us.”
― Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

“Dionysius distinguishes two possible theological ways. One–that of cataphatic or positive theology–proceeds by affirmations; the other–apophatic or negative theology–by negations.”
― Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

“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.”
― Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

“The method of interior or spiritual prayer which is known by the name of ‘hesychasm’, is a part of the ascetic tradition of the Eastern Church, and is undoubtedly of great antiquity.”
― Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

“The perfection of man does not consist in that which assimilates him to the whole of creation, but in that which distinguishes him from the created order and assimilates him to his Creator.”
― Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church