Abstract
The article attempts to compare personalist aspects in the works of Vasily Zenkovsky and Vladimir Lossky. It is shown that two types of philosophical personalism (metaphysical and existentialist) in the history of Russian thought set the framework for two types of theological personalism presented respectively by Zenkovsky and Lossky. The philosophy of Lev Lopatin was the important source for the principles of Zenkovsky’s personalist vision. The relevant philosophical background on Lossky’s personalism is provided by Nikolai Berdyaev’s works. The article considers the deep criticism by the French theologian Jean-Claude Larchet, who seeks to demonstrate philosophical and existentialist sources of Lossky’s theological personalism, rather than patristical ones. It is noted that the criticism addressed to Lossky’s theory may slide to challenging the very possibility of an Orthodox theological personalism as a line of thought. It is shown that Zenkovsky’s works, presenting a nonexistentialist type of personalism, do not provoke such criticism. It’s concluded that whereas Lossky’s legacy in its personalistic aspect is challenged, Zenkovsky’s personalism enables another way of conceiving “Orthodox theological personalism.”
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Notes
The chapters of the book are devoted to Ivan Kireevsky, Nikolai Danilevsky, Vladimir Soloviev, Vasily Rozanov, Lopatin, Petr Astafiev, Kozlov, Sergei Askoldov, Nikolai Lossky, Evgeny Bobrov, Berdyaev, Sergius Bulgakov, Pavel Florensky, Vladimir Ern, Lev Shestov, Lev Karsavin, Semyon Frank, Viktor Nesmelov, Vladimir Ilyin, and many others.
On September 7, 1935, the Moscow Patriarchate decreed that the sophiology of Archpriest Serguis Bulgakov was inconsistent with Orthodox dogma. This Decree was made, among other things, on the basis of the report prepared by Lossky as deputy head of the St. Photius Brotherhood. Later in 1936, Lossky published “The Dispute on Sophia,” which defended the theological points of the Decree of the Moscow Patriarchate, analyzed Bulgakov’s response theses and criticized once again the sophiological doctrine as non-Orthodox. On October 17/30, 1935, the Synod of Bishops of Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia also defined Bulgakov’s teaching as heretical. In early 1936, Metropolitan Euloge (Georgievsky), head of the Exarchate for Orthodox Parishes of Russian Tradition in Western Europe of the Patriarchate of Constantinople (whose jurisdiction covered the St. Sergius Theological Institute in Paris and personally Bulgakov as a priest), created a special Commission to look into Bulgakov’s works. In 1937 Zenkovsky—as a member of the commission and the St. Sergius Institute professor—presented a report in which he recognized Bulgakov’s sophiology as a private theological opinion (theologumen) which can be acceptable from the point of view of the Orthodox Church teaching (Lossky 2006; Kozyrev and Klimov 2016).
Although Zenkovsky would speak in detail about many of his acquaintances in the autobiographical book “My Encounters with Eminent People,” he never mentioned Vladimir Lossky, but mentioned his father Nikolay Lossky (Zenkovsky 1995, pp. 34–35). However, there is a certain selectivity in the choice of personalities in Zenkovky’s book: for example, he did not mention Semyon Frank, who he had been definitely familiar with. I thank sister Teresa Obolevitch for noticing this.
According to this typology, not just any religious philosopher can be classified to such “metaphysics of faith:” in the case of, for instance, Vladimir Soloviev, Sergius Bulgakov, Pavel Florensky, Semyon Frank, “the knowledge absorbs the faith, neutralizing its specificity” (Nizhkikov 2018, p. 78), whereas in the case of Vladimir Lossky, George Florovsky and Vasily Zenkovsky—on the contrary—“the faith comprises the knowledge, absorbing it without neutralizing its specificity” (ibid, p. 79). Yet such a typology, as any historical model, must not be absolutized.
Lossky seeked to show that the apophatic theology of the Fathers, which they themselves called “our philosophy,” derived from the fact of “revelation,” and thereby was “based on an approach opposite to that of speculation” (Lossky 1978, p. 18). At the same time “philosophy itself, on its summits, demands the renunciation of speculation” “ends in a mysticism and dies in becoming the experience of an Unknown God” (ibid, p. 21). Hence one “must therefore start from faith” in the revelation, and “that is the only way to save philosophy,” whose “summit is a question;” whereas theology “must reply” to this question “by bearing witness that transcendence is revealed in the immanence of the Incarnation” (ibid). As Lossky underlines, the Fathers, adhering to the apothaticism, just “employed philosophical terms” (Lossky 1976, p. 42), and the Church, “having no philosophical preferences, always freely makes use of philosophy and the sciences for apologetic purposes, but she never has any cause to defend these relative and changing truths as she defends the unchangeable truth of her doctrines” (ibid, p. 104).
Unlike Lossky, Zenkovsky insisted that “the Christian philosophy is possible” (Zenkovsky 2011a, p. 226) and, moreover, necessary as a scientific philosophical synthesis based on the evidence given in Christian revelation: “Dogmatics is the philosophy of faith, and Christian philosophy is the philosophy that originates from faith. Cognition of the world and man, a systematic summary of the basic principles of being are extrinsic to our faith, they must be cultivated and established by our free creative labour, but embraced by the light of Christ” (ibid).
It’s quite correct to stress that modern Christian anthropology is associated with philosophical and cultural processes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, so “Lossky’s project should be considered in the context of such projects as the one of Barth, Bultmann, Gilson, Balthasar, de Lubac, Mounier, Bergson, Heidegger, Scheler, Camus, Kierkegaard, Shestov” (Burmistrov 2018, p. 363). Lossky’s theology in the context of western thought is analyzed in Williams 1975; Coman 2020. There is no doubt that Lossky was also influenced by the Russian religious philosophy—Bulgakov, Florensky—in particular, in the question of the apophatic method (Antonov 2013; Pavluchenkov 2021). In our essay, we do not seek to reconstruct all of Lossky’s thought and take Berdyaev as the most significant existentialist author inside Russian religious philosophy, who can serve as a relevant background for considering only one aspect of Lossky’s system—his type of personalism.
Berdyaev himself mentions that this distinction was also provided by French Thomists, the current which Lossky knew very well. It’s important to underline that we do not indicate Berdyaev as the only source of Lossky’s personalist vision.
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Matsan, K.M. Two types of Orthodox theological personalism: Vasily Zenkovsky and Vladimir Lossky. Stud East Eur Thought (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-023-09600-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-023-09600-7