Lossky's Last but Not Final WordEckhart's Apophatic Theology: Knowing the Unknowable God, VladimirLossky trans. MonkSophrony and JonathanSutton, Cambridge, James Clarke, 2024 (ISBN 9780227179758), xxix + 499 pp., Pb $47

In a useful Foreword, Rowan Williams points out that Lossky's The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (published in English translation in 1957) served many of its readers in the 1960s and 1970s as a first—and alluring—introduction to Russian Orthodox theology, long before the ultra-nationalism of the current Moscow Patriarchate cast a long and depressing retrospective shadow over the great achievements of modern Russian theology. Of course, Russian thought in general has long had to negotiate complex political terrain, and Lossky himself was one of those expelled from Russia on the so-called ‘Philosophy Steamers’. Like many of these, Lossky settled in Paris, which became the scene for his major academic work. He died in 1958, leaving a near complete thesis that he was to have submitted to the Sorbonne for a doctorate. This is the work which, with minor editing, is now appearing in English translation as Eckhart's Apophatict Theology, having first appeared in French in 1960. It is, in the words of Étienne Gilson, who supported Lossky in his work, a ‘fine, but difficult book’ adding that one of its great merits was a ‘refusal to over-simplify its subject-matter’ (p. xxv). This claim is certainly true. Gilson himself was one of the major figures in the development of an open and humane Neo-Thomism in the interwar years and was personally acquainted with the major intellectual figures of the Russian Emigration. He was also a thinker who put the concept of Being at the very centre of his interpretation of medieval thought and, as such, identified this decision as amongst the Medievals' most important contributions to contemporary thinking. This recognition immediately takes us to the heart of Lossky's study, which can also be understood as a sustained meditation on the role of Being in the human attempt to name God (the book itself capitalizes ‘Being’ and I shall follow this practice for the purposes of this review). Lossky begins by observing that ‘there are as many “ineffabilities” as there are negative theologies’ (p. 1), adding that to say (as Eckhart said) that God is above all names can already be understood in two ways: either as saying that God has no name or that his name is ineffable. In distinction from both Augustine and Thomas, for whom ineffability is in the end only a penultimate stage in the quest for knowledge of God, Eckhart sought to maintain ineffability ‘in its absolute sense’ (p. 4). For the two Western Fathers, Being is the lynchpin of knowledge of God and Eckhart too affirms the appropriateness of speaking of God in terms of Being. In his case, however, it is precisely as Being that God is unknowable. At the same time, this distinguishes his position from that of Dionysus, for whom God transcends even Being itself—a God ‘beyond being’ who made a spectacular return to philosophy and theology in the last quarter of the twentieth century. As Lossky's argument develops, however, this opening position is refined further. Following Eckhart, he discerns two aspects of God, for God is both unnameable and yet also a God of many names—both of these being positions which, for Eckhart, are not only philosophically requisite but grounded in scripture and, as such, call for reconciliation. These provide the headings for the first two chapters, ‘Nomen Innominabile’ and ‘Nomen Omninominabile’. Here, Eckhart distinguishes between the internal and external action of the divine power: the former is named within the unity of the divine being in the intimate silence of the bond between Father and Son (for Eckhart the Spirit is essentially defined by the love between Father and Son), the latter in the Word spoken to creation. Or, as Eckhart/Lossky also puts it, the divine Word is spoken twice, in heaven and on earth—although these are different only from the point of view of created being. With reference to creatures, the One is First Cause, but in God, it (the One) is not cause but ‘the principle of the procession of divine persons’ (p. 61) which is not a causal relationship and, as such, does not exclude the differentiation of the divine persons that proceed from (or perhaps better, within) it. In this original unity each is at the same time its opposite, performing a ‘total turning of Being upon itself’—Eckhart's famous image of divine ‘ebullition’ (p. 71). It is the difference between what is ‘a deo’ and ‘in deo’, ‘from God’ and ‘in God’, a formula that recurs throughout the book and, in a sense, we might say that Eckhart's Apophatic Theology is not so much an argument as a series of interactive variations on just this theme of a difference that is no difference because it derives from a fundamental identity. However, even if Being in God and in creatures is different only from the point of view of the creature, this difference does nevertheless seem unavoidable for creatures, thus returning us to the problem as to how God can be known. Acknowledging that the term itself would not be coined until several centuries after Eckhart's death, Lossky finds Eckhart's answer in a radical version of the analogy of attribution in which Being itself provides the point of identity and can do so because creaturely being, which is entirely passive, derives entirely from divine Being, which is supremely active. Given that it is divine Being that is the supreme Exemplum and source of all Being, we might then say that—to borrow a term once popular in postmodern philosophy—it is not God who is ‘otherwise than being’ but the creature. This distinction also prompts Lossky to ask, though, whether the affirmation of unity with the divine does not then mean the annihilation of the creature, those ‘mendicant essences’ (p. 435) that are totally dependent on God for their very being? Such might be the case if the creature was a ‘naked nature’, but as it exists concretely and not merely in the form of its species it exists as being, life and intelligence. A stone, which simply ‘is’ but has neither life nor intelligence, may have a certain formal identity with God qua ultimate source of its being, but it neither feels nor knows this fate. The human being, however, does know it and it is in the intellectual act that a human ‘knows how much God is close to him and because he knows that he knows God’ (Eckhart, quoted on p. 445). On the principle that knowledge enacts the identity of knower and known, it is here that human beings know their identity as being ‘in’ and not merely ‘from’ God. Already in the opening pages, Lossky had pointed out that, for Eckhart, ‘the God of Esse remains ineffable, then, yet this Esse absconditum is not external to the one who seeks Him, thus it is not a going-out of oneself, but rather, an entry into oneself, towards the intimacy of the esse, more of an enstasy than and ecstasy, which will lead to the mystery of the unnameable name’ (p. 6). In parenthesis, it might be noted that Eckhart approves Aristotle as far as knowledge of creatures is concerned, but when it comes to God it is only Plato and, of course, the Christian revelation that can guide us further in this interior quest (pp. 474–8). More importantly, it will be clear from this very superficial survey of Lossky's exposition that Eckhart's mysticism (and Lossky affirms the appropriateness of calling Eckhart a ‘mystic’) was very much an intellectual mysticism, even a metaphysical mysticism. For Lossky himself, mysticism must refer to personal experience but, on the basis of his study, an Eckhartian mysticism seems very far from the affective or existential passions often associated with the term. Eckhart's Apophatic Theology, it should be said, cites almost (though not entirely) exclusively from the Latin works, but we know from the German sermons that Eckhart's message was not only for scholars of Plato and the scriptures. It was said of him that wherever he preached in Germany, people heard him in their own dialects—at that time often mutually incomprehensible. The anecdote indicates that the ‘knowledge’ that is at issue here is something as accessible to the unlearned as to the learned, a kind of direct seeing rather than a process of inference or deduction. In the sense used here, intellect is not exclusive to the educated but is a mark of humanity. It is not to criticize Lossky that the further exposition of what this might mean ‘existentially’ would require a whole different and indeed a different kind of book (in fact, it is this ‘existential’ aspect that has most dominated a significant strand of recent philosophical literature on Eckhartian mysticism, from Heidegger to Schürmann). It seems that Lossky had planned a further major work that would compare Eckhart with Gregory Palamas, thus bringing together the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ aspects of his researches (p. xiv). There are occasional hints as to how this might have developed, as when Lossky compares the difference between the interior and exterior divine action in Eckhart with the distinction between ousia and the divine energies in Palamas (a distinction that is at the heart of Palamas's own thinking about theōsis). That synthesis (if it was to be a synthesis) never took place, although some scattered ecumenical spirits continue to seek it in practice and in theory. We have already heard Gilson's testimony that this is a ‘difficult’ book, and while The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church probably remains usable by undergraduate students, Eckhart's Apophatic Theology will speak most to graduate students and senior researchers, not only on account of the amount of untranslated Latin (though the introduction suggests that these have been much edited down from Lossky's original drafts) but mostly on account of the sustained intensity of its highly abstract argument. For these it will be compelling reading: as a study in Eckhart, as a subtle and insightful essay in the metaphysics of being, and as filling out our knowledge of Lossky's own theological vision.