The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

by Vladimir Lossky

In his classic exposition of the theology of the Church, Lossky states that the Eastern Tradition..."has never made a sharp distinction between mysticism and theology; between personal experience of the divine mysteries and the dogma affirmed bu the Church." The term "mystical theology" denotes that which is accessible yet inaccesible' those things inderstood yet surpassing all knowledge.

Genres: Theology, Religion, Christianity, Christian, Nonfiction, Mysticism, Spirituality

252 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1944

About the author

Vladimir Nikolayevich Lossky was an influential 20th century Eastern Orthodox theologian.

Reviews

[Marcas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that changed my life and made me want to be a Christian after years of immersing myself in other 'Eastern' Religions, nihilism and Sufi Islam. This review should be seen in that light and in this respect is deeply personal.

Lossky's Mystical Theology spoke to me after I got to know Lossky through Iconography. How did this happen? I was actually reading a book on Islamic Gnostic Mysticism, which while profoundly critical of Christianity, had a little note by either Lossky or Von Balthasar about Iconography. Either way, it ultimately pointed me to an article by Lossky on Icons. Reading this simple explanation of the image of God by Lossky, incredible as it sounds, there and then convinced me that Christianity was true and I've never looked back. This book built on that firm foundation and strengthened it much further.

In a broad sense, one in which I believe others will agree, herein lies everything one could ask from a book on Theology- Gods majesty, the great call to Man and the importance of each person, the goodness of creation, the personal love that we are to share together and the importance of community.

Although a cradle Roman Catholic, this book brought Theology to life for me like no other at the time. I particularly welcomed the different emphasis on the Transfiguration and the Holy Spirit! Other Christians could gain immeasurably from this as a call to permanent personal change.

The critique of the idea of 'the dark night' was good, but could be balanced out by Merton's 'New Seeds...'.

Alas, I can't do justice to this beautiful book here, but would recommend it highly for any Christian seeking a broader and deeper understanding of the Triune God, in history and beyond space-time as we know it.
All of this, is put forward in a clear, eloquent and passionate witness; needless to say this will not be my last reading of Vladimir Lossky's Magnum Opus.

[Michael O'Brien · Rating 3 out of 5]

I encountered mention of this book in one of the other books I read on Orthodox Christianity about 2 years ago --- I think Bishop Kallistos Ware's book, "The Orthodox Way". Unlike Bishop Kallistos' book, however, this book is a very deep read ---- not an easy book to read. Unlike some 3-star ratings, this one is less one of what I view as its deficiencies so much as one of its practical interest and applicability to average readers (like me).

About half of it goes very in depth on the Orthodox Church's theology of the Trinity --- its scriptural basis, the thoughts and interpretations of the Early Church Fathers on it, and its development in response to heretical systems including gnosticism, arianism, and monophysitism.

The book in several places uses Greek words in Greek script --- no transliteration ---- and seems to assume the reader has some basic knowledge of Greek.

While I did find it interesting, I can't say it was a gripping read. It's probably not for everybody; however, this is almost certainly a great reference and work for Christian seminarians and clergy seeking insight in how the Orthodox Church's Christology and doctrine of the Trinity are reasoned and developed.

[David Withun · Rating 5 out of 5]

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[Elliot Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I began my journey in a Fundamentalist Christian home, equating spirituality with things like not drinking, not listening to secular music, not cussing, and the intensity of my concern about whether carbon dating is trustworthy. There was a formula to this, and every insider knew it. From Fundamentalism to Evangelicalism, Evangelicalism to conservative Anglicanism, and now to EO. What pattern exemplifies my journey? That of believing passionately what I confess, trying to see everything in the world in and through it, and finding them inadequate in some way. This was how my hunger was formed: seeking and not finding, seeking and not finding, and seeking and not finding. So imagine my joy when I sought and found!
People who know of my troubled history ask me how I remained a Christian in spite of all that's happened. The truth is... I didn't? The term "Christianity" is nebulous. It does not tell you much of anything until one asks: "Which Christianity? Whose Jesus?" I've rejected so many versions of Christianity, reacting mainly to Fundamentalism and its daughter (neo-)Evangelicalism, or those forms of the Christian religion that 1. I grew up in and 2. are marred by a deep compromise with Modernism. I am not saying that if you are Evangelical, I believe you to be misguided. Often, people are better than their beliefs, and I know many perfectly amazing Evangelicals. I talk about these things as systems, as entities that influence us in innumerable ways. My question is: What causal relationship does a religious system stand in relation to the individual and the community's spiritual flourishing? In EO as it was meant to be, I think there is a sense that someone would flourish *because* of EO. In Fundamentalism/Evangelicalism as they were meant to be, there's a sense in which someone can flourish only in virtue of *overcoming* Fundamentalism/Evangelicalism.
If this seems preposterous, consider this: Imagine a Fundamentalist Christian who grew up believing (as most of us did) that faith mainly concerns post-mortem places we will be sent to: a place of eternal bliss or corresponding torment and understanding the function of belief as ensuring that we end up in one place and not another. This isn’t the kind of thing you can believe alone. It becomes believable, it is believed, because of a whole gamut of stories and beliefs on offer that make this particular belief plausible. In other words, we have to go beyond mere beliefs to consider conditions for belief. A few discrete mistakes and arbitrary errors cannot explain the colossal mistake that is Fundamentalism. We must refer to a whole cluster of beliefs, a systematic derangement of all senses, or, better yet, total depravity. Even if one were to question these cartoonish beliefs (as many Evangelicals do nowadays), what about all the ills that led us there in the first place? Are we going to assume that cancer has been cured just because the sores have subsided?
Compare, then, the EO understanding of salvation as deification, or a partaking in the triune life of God in the place of the Son. EO has insisted that this, and nothing less than this, can be the full Christian account of salvation. If you understand what EO is getting at, what the truths they proclaim amount to, the chances are that you will be arrested by it for life.
I remember the moment when I finally "got" what EO is proclaiming. I've experienced something that I'd never before experienced in life: An understanding of God's peace that penetrated the deepest depths of my being, and JOY! I've been crushingly depressed for most of my life, and deep and persistent joy evaded me. But here was an encounter with Christianity all over again as life-changing and life-demanding joy!
Christianity aims at nothing less than the radical reconfiguration of your being, the total restructuring of your beliefs, desires, intentions, and imagination. It aims to leave nothing behind. The early Christian formulation and creeds are not to be understood as irrelevant and archaic. They make possible an understanding of Christianity that brings about these changes: the understanding of a loving God who generates a loving people (I could have easily replaced the two instances of the word “loving” in the last sentence with “empty” or “peaceable”).
A lot of spiritual writers talk about the necessity of surrender. They say something like, "Give up everything you have and they will all be given back to you, reconfigured!" This is a deep truth. I was stuck, monstrously stuck. Life demanded that I give up these "truths" and one by one I did. What I was given back were the very things I had given up, now transfigured and illumined. I know of no worthier thing than this: You have me! I am yours!

[Paul H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

"What almost always passes for Orthodox theology among English-speaking Orthodox these days is actually just a branch of the larger Orthodox picture. Indeed, it tends sometimes to be rather sectarian. The Orthodox Church is an ancient castle, as it were, of which only two or three rooms have been much in use since about 1920. These two or three rooms were furnished by the Russian émigrés in Paris between the two World Wars. This furniture is heavily neo-Palamite and anti-Scholastic. It relies heavily on the Cappadocians, Maximus, and Gregory Palamas. Anything that does not fit comfortably into that model is dismissed as Western and even non-Orthodox . . . this popular neo-Palamite brand of Orthodoxy, though it quotes Damascene when it is convenient, never really engages Damascene’s manifestly Scholastic approach to theology. Much less does it have any use for the other early Scholastic theologians, such as Theodore the Studite and Euthymus Zygabenus. There is no recognition that Scholasticism was born in the East, not the West, and that only the rise of the Turk kept it from flourishing in the East. Augustine tends to be classified as a Scholastic, which he most certainly was not. In fact, however, Augustine and the Scholastics represent only other rooms in the larger castle. The Russian émigré theology from Paris, which seems profoundly reactionary and anti-Western, is an inadequate instrument for evangelization."

--Patrick Henry Reardon



"The miniature ‘Library of the Fathers’ that Lossky is working from here would have appeared very strange indeed to any Orthodox of an age prior to the mid 20th century. Sts. Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius, and Maximus, all being, in the main, discoveries (that is as influential voices of Orthodox dogmatic tradition) of the 20th century Catholic patristic revival. . . . Lossky, using the lens of St. Gregory Palamas, understands the transcendent Godhead reaching out to the world through his energies, so that though his essence remains absolutely incomprehensible to all creatures, his hypostasis is immanent to those who know him. Deification (theosis) is thus the fundamental shorthand for the Orthodox sense of salvific redemption. Again, this reads today like some basic summation of the Orthodox faith such as one would find on any learned parish website. But it is again worth reminding ourselves that such a summa theologiae orthodoxae would have not been found widely much before the midpoint of the 20th century if one picked up any commonly available Orthodox catechism. The centrality of theosis as the primary metaphor of the redemption, allied to a Neo-Palamite understanding of the essence and energies, and routed through a hesychastic lens, has grown out of Lossky’s thesis to become very constitutive of many parts of Orthodox self-expression today. . . . If one did make a global review (which Lossky does not) of the mystical tradition of the West, would it be all that divergent in spiritual ethos? Were the western mystics (distinctive personalities though they surely were) all that individualistic and un-ecclesial? In setting out this thesis has not Lossky unconsciously fallen into that very type of Bergsonian polarization that he attacks. What is it that apophatic awareness of God contributes to the ecclesial tradition if it exceeds speech and thought? Can such a profoundly silent theological tradition actually teach? Or is it entirely turned away from discourse? Another way to put this is to ask how does the spiritual tradition of Orthodoxy contribute to the kataphatic dogmatic tradition? Or whether it only adds to the church’s ascetical praxis. The issue was crucial for St. Gregory Palamas who was being attacked for just this very point by Barlaam of Calabria. If apophaticism does not add to the knowledge of the Church, then it becomes simply a tool for closing down ecumenical discourse rather than advancing it: for pointing out that what the other tradition calls ‘theology’ is nothing of the kind, but some other form of discourse manqué.”

-- John McGuckin

[Lieutenant · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book isn’t philosophy, nor is it mysticism in the common sense of the term—or at least in the meaning it has acquired in the West. It is something entirely different.

It contains the summation of patristic spirituality. It is the teaching of Christ in its full depth, for the Gospels contain only the headings of Christ’s most profound teachings. Here, they are found unveiled.

The Patristic Fathers—such as Saint Maximos the Confessor and Saint Gregory Palamas—did not see theology as a matter of debate or the abstract discussion of ideas. Theology, for them, was inseparable from the direct experience of theosis (union with God). This is why one cannot authentically write theology without the corresponding spiritual experience—it would make no sense. Theology is not a system of thought; it is the sacred doctrine that leads directly into the experience of divine life. There is no theology apart from this, and there is no need to study anything that does not lead to becoming a partaker of the Divine Nature.

The West, whether one likes it or not, has a long and ancient tendency toward rationalization—toward trying to reason about that which is above and beyond reason. The Nous—spiritual intelligence, wrongly translated as “mind”—is actually superior to lowly discursive reason. But the West has lost its way long ago, and it is no surprise that the Orthodox and Eastern Christians are the only ones who still preserve the ancient faith exactly as it has always been.

This is due, in part, to:

The confusion of tongues: Biblical terms that refer to real spiritual transformation were mistranslated from the very beginning of Latin Christianity. Greek terms like gnosis—used by Saint Paul to mean spiritual knowledge—were translated into Latin as scientia, and later into “science,” stripping them of their spiritual meaning. This is just one of many examples.

The West became estranged from the spiritual tradition of the East—particularly the living tradition of spiritual paternity and the golden chain of Elders (those who had acquired the gift of discernment of spirits), the Staretz that Saint Symeon the New Theologian speaks about.

When one compares the writings of a Greek and a Latin Father from the same period, it is immediately apparent how the Latin mind had already become entangled in a kind of naturalism, a rationalistic approach. For the East, doctrines like the Holy Trinity were sacred mysteries revealed to initiates—those who had undergone the inner transformation and initiation into divine mysteries, and were seen in this light ONLY, as a doctrine that would provide a way for divinization. In the West, the same doctrine had been reduced to a matter of belief for the masses, with the expansive tendency found there, the idea that doctrine leads and is of fundamental importance to theosis and experience was completely forgotten.

When theology becomes merely a matter of belief, it inevitably devolves into politics. That is what happened in the West. This is also why Western historians can look at Church history and mock the passionate defense of dogma, to them, it was never more than ideas and systems. But in the East, these doctrines are not political; they are real teachings with direct implications for one’s spiritual development and inner praxis.

This is precisely why the East could never accept any distortions. It is not simply a matter of theological opinion, but a doctrine that has real consequences in the soul’s ascent to God.

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the Orthodox tradition, theology is inseparable from mysticism. The theologian is not one who seeks to conceive of God in any purely cognitive fashion, but rather one who unifies himself, heart and soul, with that divine infinitude which is inscrutable beyond being. God is not to be comprehended, but to be experienced as a mystery that defies comprehension, secluded in His interior nature from creation in a shroud of non-being, and yet pervading, sustaining, and illuminating created being through the effulgence of His uncreated energies. Over two thousand years, the Orthodox Church has bestowed the appellation of “Theologian” on three people: St. John the Apostle, St. Gregory Nazianzus, and St. Simeon the New Theologian. All three engaged the divine mystery in an ecstatic and poetical mode; the East has treated ascetics and hymnographers with all the reverence that the West affords to the vast and elaborate corpus of Aquinas.

In its radical apophaticism, Orthodoxy subordinates the “wisdom” of philosophy to the “foolishness” of revelation. Though the early Church interfaced extensively with Neoplatonism, it distinguished itself sharply from Greek thought by defending the incomprehensibility of God and the gratuitous nature of creation ex nihilo from the incursion of purely gnostic thought-schemes that did violence to the Trinitarian mystery by substituting an idolatrous theoretical apparatus in its place. The ecstasy of Plotinus entailed the contemplation of the One, a primordial unity of being that is antecedent to the multiplicity of the phenomenal world and thus ungraspable by it, while Christian mysticism, represented by Dionysius the Areopagite, entailed the rejection of being itself to foster the integration of the soul into the non-being of God.

The nature of God, as revealed in scripture and tradition, is expressed by the Church in the antinomy of the Holy Trinity: God is one in essence, and is also three hypostases who are distinct from one another but share the fullness of that essence. There is one God, and Three Who are God. The Father is the fount of divinity, begetting the Son and giving forth the Holy Spirit in an eternal movement of love. The Eastern tradition likens the Son and Spirit to “appendages” of the Father; they work in tandem in the economy of salvation in the created order.

While the West rejects the “monarchy” of the Father and professes that the Spirit proceeds ontologically from both the Father and the Son, the East maintains a distinction between the ontological nature of the Trinity and its economic manifestation in the created world through God’s uncreated energies. In the interior nature of the Trinity—in eternity—the Son and Spirit proceed from the Father alone, but in God’s temporal interaction with creation Christ and the Spirit have a symbiotic relationship: Christ imparts the Spirit to the members of His mystical body, while the Spirit draws each person to a fuller contemplation of the Son. The Orthodox argue that by “anchoring” the Godhead in the shared essence rather than in the Father, Western theology creeps away from a properly theistic understanding of God and toward a philosophical monism akin to Neoplatonism.

The dispute over the essence/energies distinction is itself an outgrowth of the filioque controversy: a more impersonal, “philosophized” God may be thought of, in Platonic or Aristotelian fashion, as a “first cause” that is inseparable from that which it causes, and thus the distinction between the eternal essence of God and the manifestation of His energies in creation is broken down. Without this distinction, either divine grace in the created world becomes a “creature”, something subordinate to the Trinity, and thus our divinization through grace becomes impossible, or else our divinization would bring us into the eternal nature of God, in which case there would have to be as many divine hypostases as there are saints. Palamism preserves the possibility of true theosis, the prime object of Christian life, as well as the concept of a personal God who created being from nothingness.

God’s creation of the cosmos was an act of will, not of necessity. Creation may just as well have never existed, but God chose to “make space” for something truly separate from His eternality. As beings created ex nihilo, the nothingness that underlies our own existence is every bit as mysterious and profound as the nothingness of God in apophatic theology. The telos of man is to freely reconcile the created with the uncreated through his own divinization and to return creation to the Father in a willful eucharistic act. In Adam our nature was turned away from the divine and subordinated to the unnatural conditions of sin and death, but in the kenosis of Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection, human nature has been redeemed and transfigured.

The Son unites human nature in His mystical body, while the Spirit distinguishes in personhood, differentiating the subjective experiences of all who enter into communion with the Church. We are united in Christ through the renunciation of our fallen nature, and yet the saints do not all meld together into some amorphous blob. It is precisely in refusing to exist for ourselves, to follow our most base, thoughtless, and self-serving inclinations, that our personhood most fully expresses itself. Thus in renouncing ourselves and entering the Church we become simultaneously united in nature and distinguished in personhood, representing in the created order the paradoxical distinction-within-unity characteristic of God Himself. As the Father finds His image in the Son, and the Son in the Spirit, the Spirit finds its image in the saints, who represent so many hypostases of the One Church.

[И~N · Rating 5 out of 5]

Не помня от кога не съм се чувствал така заситен, както след прочитането на тази книга!

[Harry Allagree · Rating 5 out of 5]

If the contents of Vladimir Lossky's "essay", as he calls it, were actual food, I think I'd be suffering from gout by now…it is so, so rich! Lossky remains absolutely and precisely focussed on the mystical theology of the Eastern Church as it has come down through the great writers, monks & mystics of the Eastern tradition. He is extremely fair, in my humble opinion, when he points out & explains the differences on certain theological teachings between the Eastern & Roman Catholic/Western Churches, without denigrating the latter. Though I have great respect for great Western theologians such as St. Augustine & St. Thomas Aquinas, under whose teachings primarily I was schooled, in fact, I find myself much more attuned to Eastern theology & spirituality than to the Western at this stage of my life. Lossky's explanation of basic catholic (small "c"), i.e., universal, theological subjects (the Holy Trinity, creation, Jesus/the Son of God, the Holy Spirit, the Church, the stages of the mystical way, the fullness of the reign of God), is one of the clearest, most comprehensive, & inspiring presentations I've ever read. Bear in mind, that this was first published at Paris in 1944! Had I had the opportunity to read this during my early seminary days, I'm quite sure it would have left a lasting impression & had significant on many areas of my life.

[Ben Smitthimedhin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I suppose this would be enjoyable if you prefer to spend your free time reading about how believing that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son is dreadfully wrong and why you should believe that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone instead. This was utterly dull for me, like listening to a man go on about how the color red has been misunderstood, and that what most people describe as red is actually Candy Apple Red™.

[Gage Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is for people who want to read about the experiential dogma of the Eastern Orthodox Church. If you don’t care about all that technical stuff, there’s some beautiful thoughts about God in here. I wish my movement/denomination discussed the beauty of union with God as much as the Eastern Church.

[Clarissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful and inspiring book, that focuses on contemplation as opposed to doctrine or morality. Vladimir Lossky's words have wisdom and depth of understanding. I would advise it to anyone interested in getting to know eastern spirituality.

[Ashraf Bashir · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the "must read"; to understand Orthodoxy !

[Truls Ljungström · Rating 5 out of 5]

En fruktansvärt svår, men väldigt intressant, bok. Den fördjupar och förklarar ett antal skillnader mellan västkyrkan och östkyrkan vad gäller religiösa instinkter och tolkningar. Bland de mest intressanta:
1) Oskapat v. Övernaturligt - i östkyrkan är ordet för det övernaturliga, såsom mirakulösa skeenden, det "oskapade". Dvs. det övernaturliga är mer naturligt än det naturliga.
2) Metanoia v. Botfärdighet - metanoia översätts snarare till omvärdering av information, eller till och med reformation.

Det finns massor av motsvarande intressanta diskussioner, såsom kring helige andes roll. Det gör boken till båden väldigt långsam läsning, och en man gärna diskuterar med folk. På det hela taget, känns östkyrkan mer mystiskt orienterad, mer ... platonsk, i ordets bättre betydelse, men också mer svår. Dess beskrivning av individualitet som en motsats till samvete är utmanande, framförallt om man är uppväxt med idén om det inre ljuset som en riktningsvisare för ett individuellt och gudagivet externt öde. Spännande var ordet, sa Bull.

Om man är troende, eller intresserad av religionsfilosofi, kan detta nog vara en rolig bok.

[Robert D. Cornwall · Rating 4 out of 5]

For those of us who are theological descendants of a Western tradition that goes back through Augustine, we often missed the wisdom and insight of the Easter Church. The way the Eastern Church, for example, approaches the Trinity is different. They start with the persons and move to unity rather than the other way around. In terms of salvation, the East has emphasized the doctrine known as theosis, the participation in the divine that draws us into God's person.

For those who wish to know something of this tradition, I would recommend this book by Vladimir Lossky. It was written long ago (Lossky died in 1958), but there is wisdom to be found here.

[HoePlayaBookReader · Rating 2 out of 5]

To me, a very dry, academic and not so mystical walkthrough of the orthodox theoloy. This book is heavily laden with specific philosophical, historical and theological concepts. The book criticises the scholastic, rationalist and enlightenment movement of the west (which I personally agree with). Ironically however it seems to present the orthodox church in this same extremely rational manner.

[Marcelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book that brings the day-to-day living of Christianity to new heights - heights that have been marginalized or lost in the Western world, even within Christianity itself.

[Adam DeVille, Ph.D. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Was a major text in its day, but much of it has not stood the test of time. E.g., his section on ecclesiology and the filioque is today acknowledged at a lot of bollocks.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Notes:

+ St. Isaac the Syrian’s 3 stages in the way of union
1. Penitence: conversion of the will (not a passing moment or stage to be left behind, but a condition which must continue permanently)
2. Purification: liberation from the passions
3. Perfection: the acquisition of that perfect love which is the fullness of grace



Quotes:

God condescends towards us in the ‘energies’ in which He is manifested; we mount towards Him in the ‘unions’ in which He remains incomprehensible by nature.

According to St. Maximus, freedom of choice is already a sign of imperfection, a limitation of our true freedom. A perfect nature has no need of choice, for it knows naturally what is good.

The Fathers of the ‘Christological centuries’, though they formulated a dogma of Christ the God-Man, never lost sight of the question concerning our union with God. The usual arguments they bring up against unorthodox doctrines refer particularly to the fullness of our union, our deification, which becomes impossible if one separates the two natures of Christ, as Nestorius did, or if one only ascribes to Him one divine nature, like the Monophysites, or if one curtails one part of human nature, like Apollinarius, or if one only sees in Him a single divine will and operation, like the Monothelites. ‘What is not assumed, cannot be deified’—this is the argument to which the Fathers continually return.

The union which is accomplished in the Person of Christ must be fulfilled in our persons by the Holy Spirit and our own freedom.

The opposition between active and passive no longer has any meaning: these two contrary dispositions belong to the domain of fallen nature, which is subject to sin… The human spirit, in its normal condition, is neither active nor passive: it is vigilant.

Repentance, like the way of ascent towards God, can have no end.

[Brian Cubbage · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lossky's work is a useful, impassioned overview of Eastern Orthodox theology and spirituality and what makes it different from Roman Catholic and Western spirituality. I liked it, and found it interesting, but I found its rhetorical style off-putting. I am not sure what it was about writers in 20th-century France that led them to write everything like a passive-aggressive polemic, but whatever it was, it detracted from the book for me. It's clear that Lossky wants to "work on" the reader, and I guess that's fine; however, I would prefer not to get worked on like this.

[Christian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Rewarding Dive into Darkness and Light

How does one encapsulate the mystical aspect of the Church in one volume? We generally hear in our day that this is impossible, that any synthesis of Orthodoxy must be relative to the author and taken as a single perspective. In this book, Vladimir Lossky challenges the common assumption that mystical theology can be compartmentalized; rather, he insists that all dogma is intertwined with mystical thought and that the two are entirely inseparable.

We are treated to a great deal of rumination. The apophatic "way of negation" maintains a respectful distance from God's essence while the divine energies are approachable through the transformation of human nature. There are myriad images given for this, prominent among them the quasi-visible operations of the Spirit as the light of Tabor and the prayer in stillness which issues from the mind freed from passions as it approaches the throne of the ineffable Godhead. The Church is presented as the body of Christ not only in the function of its members but also in its wills and two-natured reality. The central theme is union with God (theosis) achieved through repentance and progressive conformance to God's likeness, granted and sustained in cooperation with the actions of the Three persons and the participation in the divine nature by means of uncreated grace.

While ostensibly an introduction, I would advise against reading this as a beginner. It is a very thorough assessment on a few topics and not all are properly introduced; prior knowledge is needed of councils, history, and doctrines (i.e. the procession of the Holy Spirit). There are frequent Greek terms in use and many are left untranslated. If you are looking for refined understandings of ousia and hypostases then this may well be the book for you.

This had been sitting on my reading list for some time and comes recommended by Orthodox theologians up to the present day. Reading his most famous work, it quickly becomes apparent that Lossky was one of the foremost minds on religion in the 20th century. While dense, his words carry a precision and focus that is well-suited to expressing the difficult and often technical nature of Trinitarian theology.

[Brian Wilcox · Rating 5 out of 5]

When a United Methodist pastor, my Bishop, knowing my strong mystical leanings, encouraged me to find inspiration in Eastern Orthodoxy. My recall is this was the first resource I read, and immediately found a depth in this, and other Orthodox writings, that I had not found in Western sects of Christianity. This immediately appeared to me as a classic, and pointing to a depth that left an indelible impression on me. As far as spiritual faith, beyond rational religion, to me the Eastern Church is the most indepth-spiritually within the Christian communion. This is a remarkable read, speaking to a union of mind and heart.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my first book that was all about Orthodox theology. Who knew that I would anything about Christianity that would ever make any sense to me? Certainly not the me from even 1 year ago, let alone 10. I have a great respect for the Orthodox Church that I can only see continuing to grow from here on out, not just based on theology, but also on history.

The book is somewhat dense and will require careful reading, especially considering the heavy subject matter.

[John]

Dense, difficult, and occasionally overwhelming, Lossky's Mystical Theology is one of the twentieth century's most important works of Eastern Orthodox theology. Lossky, in line with other twentienth-century Orthodox, probably overstates the difference between East and West in both theological method and doctrine. Still, he captures the organic quality of Orthodoxy--the interconnectedness of dogma, ritual, and mysticism--as well as any other writer who has tackled this subject.

[Addie · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's funny that I am writing a review because I have no words to describe this book, rather, I have no words to describe what this book did in me.

But if I had to use words, I would say that this is the most thorough, in depth and beautiful exploration on the Trinity and how the mystery of the Trinity is the basis for all worship and doctrine. Ugh, so so good.

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful monograph on Eastern Christianity. Drawing on ancient and contemporary sources, Lossky outlines Orthodox dogma - not as a collection of dry doctrines, but as a spirituality whose high goal is union with God.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although I later became Eastern Catholic and don't often appreciate Lossky's tendency to be anti-western, this is the book which got me into Theology as it has been understood throughout most of Church history. It's absolute dynamite. Electrifying.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book drew my life further into the hesychastic fashion of life. I'm making no pretense that I am well developed in this. The point is that I am deeply interested.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

there's nothing i can add to the reviews of others about this book. it's dense and challenging, but if you're interested in Orthodoxy, this is a must read!

[Roger Burk · Rating 2 out of 5]

Finally gave up. Maybe a theologian would like this. Most of the time I had no idea what Lossky was talking about.