THE Judaeo-Christian tradition includes many positive affirmations about God, his being, and even his name. Christians affirm that this God has made himself known in the most positive way possible in the human being Jesus. Alongside this tradition is another, which holds that God is beyond human knowing and cannot be named. Moses, meeting God on Mount Sinai, asked God his name; the Lord gave the enigmatic reply, “I am who I am.”
The tradition of negative, or apophatic, theology is stronger in Eastern Christianity than in Western. In the sixth century, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite was its influential proponent. Vladimir Lossky, a distinguished Russian Orthodox émigré theologian in Paris, took up and developed Dionysius’s teaching in his book The Mystical Theology of the Orthodox Church. Lossky also drew on the work of Gregory Palamas, who, in the 14th century, affirmed the distinction between God’s unknowable essence and his consubstantial knowable energies.
The Dominican Master Eckhart, in the same century, was influenced by St Augustine of Hippo, the Pseudo-Dionysius, and his brother Dominican St Thomas Aquinas. He, too, was concerned with the question of the knowability of God, and so was an appropriate subject for study by Lossky.
The book under review was written as a doctoral thesis, which was not quite finished when its author died prematurely in 1958. Much mid-20th-century scholarly discussion of Eckhart was based on his German sermons, to the relative neglect of his Latin sermons and biblical commentaries. Lossky’s thesis was based on the study of both bodies of work, and sets out, as Rowan Williams writes in his foreword, “to discuss Eckhart’s fundamental ideas about the knowability of God, and how exactly he had positioned himself in relation not only to Pseudo-Dionysius and to his own Dominican confrere Aquinas, but also to the wider medieval discussion that involved Jewish and Muslim thinkers”.
Lossky’s thesis was first published in French in 1960. This translation was undertaken by the Trustees of the Eckhart Society, founded in 1987 to promote research on Eckhart, a controversial mystic, preacher, and theologian. Some of Eckhart’s views had been condemned in a papal bull in 1329, though Pope John Paul II quoted him as a spiritual guide, so affirming his essential orthodoxy.
The Society exists to encourage continuing academic study of all of Eckhart’s writings, popular sermons as well as scholarly writings. Lossky’s book contributes largely to that purpose. Its length (499 pages), characteristic of French doctoral theses, enabled him to consider in detail Eckhart’s distinctive thought and its relation to earlier and contemporary theologians, both Christian and non-Christian.
The excellent English translation, by Monk Sophrony and Dr Jonathan Sutton, reflects Lossky’s sometimes complex French while being eminently readable. He had himself translated quotations from Eckhart’s German writings into French, while leaving untranslated the extensive quotations from Latin writers, from Augustine to Aquinas. The translators have followed his example, and left the Latin quotations untranslated. While this is not a book for the general reader, it is an important contribution to scholarly Eckhart studies.
Canon Hugh Wybrew was formerly Vicar of St Mary Magdalen’s, Oxford.
Eckhart’s Apophatic Theology: Knowing the unknowable God
Vladimir Lossky
James Clarke & Co. £88.50
(978-0-227-17977-2)
Church Times Bookshop £79.65