His brilliant talent, his excellent knowledge of the history of the Western Church and culture, his intense liturgical life, and his deep insight into the very essence of the patristic tradition allowed him to speak of Orthodoxy as the center of Truth with such force and conviction that very soon a French Orthodox community began to form in Paris.

During the Second World War, during the occupation of France by German troops, Vladimir Lossky joined the ranks of the French Resistance, but participation in the fight against fascism did not interrupt his theological studies and teaching. In December 1944, after the liberation of France, the French Orthodox Institute named after St. Dionysius was established in Paris, where Lossky taught courses in dogmatic theology and church history for several years. Since 1947, he has participated in the conferences of the Anglo-Russian Fellowship named after Saints Albania, the first martyr of England, and Sergius of Radonezh, which was created to find ways to a deep and fruitful dialogue between the Orthodox and Anglican Churches. Thanks to the work of this Fellowship, some of the works of V.N. Lossky, which will be discussed below, were translated and published in England.

In the last years of his life, Vladimir Lossky taught at the Pastoral Courses at the Western European Patriarchal Exarchate and took an active part in theological and philosophical conferences.

In 1956, V. Lossky visited Russia, the meeting with which after 34 years of separation was a great consolation for him. He died on February 7, 1958 in Paris, on the feast day of St. Gregory the Theologian.

Theology was the vocation of Vladimir Lossky. But it is not enough to have a gift, and it is not enough to be called. The gift must be revealed, and the call must be able to respond. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and everything that followed it forced many Russian people to rethink their entire existence, and life in emigration, in a foreign cultural, linguistic, everyday environment, and now a direct, face-to-face encounter with a different Christian tradition, demanded an answer to the question: what is Orthodoxy, which for many centuries was rather carelessly proclaimed the main source of Russia's political and national-cultural greatness? And did you lose the last thing in a few months of the civil war? What is Orthodoxy in the face of the Western tradition with its rather closed and self-sufficient history? Is Orthodoxy the guardian of the fullness of Divine Revelation addressed to all peoples and cultures, or is it only a form of national-ecclesiastical experience?

The work of Vladimir Lossky was a new, living and modern witness to Orthodoxy as the fullness of Truth. Brought up in the depths of Russian church life, he devoted many years of his life to a serious, close study of the Western spiritual tradition. An analysis of the causes of the church schism, which led to a divergence between East and West, required a new understanding of the patristic heritage, the experience of the holy teachers and pastors of the Church, in whose lives the Gospel was realized and whose way of life – the way of thinking and acting – the Church recognized as a model even before any division.

As early as the Second World War, Vladimir Lossky gave lectures on Orthodox mystical theology as an experimental knowledge of God. On the basis of these lectures, he wrote the book "An Essay on the Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church", which was published in French in 1944, and in 1958 appeared in English translation and for many years became for the West almost the only systematic exposition of Orthodox theology devoid of scholastic dryness. Together with L.A. Uspensky, he wrote the book "The Meaning of Icons". A course of lectures on the doctrine of the Orthodox Church became the basis of the second fundamental work of V.N. Lossky "Dogmatic Theology".

His reports at numerous conferences become the basis for articles, each of which is equal in its depth to serious theological work. Among them: "Tradition and Traditions", "Temptations of Church Consciousness", "Darkness and Light in the Knowledge of God", "St. John of Damascus and the Byzantine Teaching on Spiritual Life", "Palamite Synthesis", "Theology of the Image", "Catholic Consciousness" and many others. After the death of V. Lossky, several books were published, also compiled on the basis of his lectures: "Apophatic Theology and the Knowledge of God in the Teaching of Meister Eckhart" and "The Vision of God". Some of them were translated into Russian and appeared in different years in the publications of the Moscow Patriarchate, but the overwhelming part of the theological heritage of the outstanding Russian theologian of the 20th century has not yet reached the Russian reader.

According to Archpriest John Meyendorff, Vladimir Lossky was able to "show the West that Orthodoxy is not a historical form of Eastern Christianity, but an enduring and catholic truth."

Today the Russian Church is faced with the task of finding ways to revive a truly Christian life in Russia. We hope that the new edition of the main theological works of the remarkable Russian theologian Vladimir Nikolaevich Lossky will help our compatriots to understand how and on the basis of what experience such a life can be built.

Chapter I. Introduction. Theology and Mysticism in the Tradition of the Eastern Church

We set out here to consider some aspects of the spiritual life and experience of the Eastern Church in their connection with the basic data of the Orthodox dogmatic tradition. Thus, the term "mystical theology" in this case means an aspect of spiritual life that expresses one or another dogmatic attitude.