Vladimir Lossky
Russian émigré theologian in Paris, and the most widely read modern Eastern Orthodox systematician. On the question here he is decisive and unembarrassed: the Trinity, he writes, “can be deduced from no principle nor explained by any sufficient reason, for there are neither principles nor causes anterior to the Trinity”.
Lossky left Russia as a child, took his degree in Paris, and wrote the book by which most English-speaking readers first meet Eastern theology. *The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church* is not a monograph on one question; it is an account of what the whole tradition is doing, and its third chapter is where the doctrine of the Trinity is set out.
What makes him load-bearing for this material is that he says the thing a reader might expect an Orthodox theologian to avoid. The Trinity, he writes, can be deduced from no principle and explained by no sufficient reason, because there is nothing prior to it from which a deduction could start. Of Gregory of Nazianzus's monad–dyad–triad sentence — the passage most often produced as a proof — he says plainly that Gregory "is not seeking to vindicate the trinity of persons before the human reason".
Two things follow, and they point in opposite directions. A programme of research that fails to find a derivation has not caught Orthodoxy out; it has confirmed from outside what Orthodoxy states from inside. And any presentation of the faith that advertises such a derivation is, on Lossky's terms, promising something the tradition says cannot exist.
Where this comes up
Sources
- Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (SVS Press, 1976), ch. 3
- Vladimir Lossky, “The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine”, in In the Image and Likeness of God, ch. 4