The Vision of God

by Vladimir Lossky

In this volume, Vladimir Lossky studies the meaning of the vision of God and its impact on the life and thought of the Church from its earliest days to the synthesis of St Gregory Palamas and those who followed him (14th century), a vision which is more than metaphor, but the purpose and goal of the Christian life.

Genres: Theology, Religion, Christian

175 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

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

Reviews

[Kevin de Ataíde · Rating 4 out of 5]

I rarely read theology books cover to cover. This is an enlightening and entertaining introduction and overview of the roots of Byzantine theology treating the Vision of God, in all its many aspects and from the varying perspectives of a host of early Church Fathers. At first, there is drawn up an opposition between a Western theological understanding of the perfect vision of God as being reached by the Saints in beatitude and an Eastern concept of God being ultimately unknowable even to the angels, different created being accessing the infinite mystery of God to the varying degrees that they are capable of. The end is reached in the East with a synthesis of the varying strands of tradition by Gregory Palamas. The Byzantine approach to the vision of God comes from the tradition of pseudo-Dionysios and Maximus the Confessor, with a developed understanding of a dual mode of existence of God in his essence and in his energies, the former being unknowable, the latter being knowable to various degrees. Lossky claims that the focus on either one to the exclusion of the other falls away from piety and orthodoxy. His own concern is to defend the position of the Hesychast mystics and in particular Gregory Palamos, which concerns deification of created things and goes beyond the intellectualism and neo-Platonic escapism of theologians like Clement of Alexandria and Origen, the result being a more eschatological vision-contemplation, by which the created being climbs beyond created reality through a cloud of unknowing, in order finally to arrive at a more perfect knowledge of God. It is, finally, that distinction between essence and energies in God that is the point of dispute between the Latin scholastics and Byzantine mystical theology, for what is a natural way to settle a theological problem for the Greeks cannot sit well at all with the Latin concepts of the unity of the Godhead. But deification... the Byzantine concept importantly unites the intellectual and sensible vision of God (separated by intellectualists) into a holistic ascent beyond created being. And communion... S. Simeon the New Theologian identifies the vision of God with an internal communion, by which a human person is known and loved individually and personally by God, even as God is known and loved by him. These two ideas, then, remain with me as a souvenir of this book.

[Samuel G. Parkison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some simplistic and reductionistic portrayals of western theology, but to be fair, there has always been quite a bit of that kind of thing going around, in the East and West. Overall, very helpful and stimulating.

[Marcelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great book on the vision of the Divine Light, by the major 20th century theologian of the Eastern Church.