Vladimir Lossky

The book's argument is that the negative or apophatic way is not a decorative flourish in Eastern theology but its structure: that God is unknowable in essence, known in His energies, and that deification — the real participation of the creature in the divine life — is the point of the whole Christian scheme rather than a rarefied extra.

Written in occupied Paris and published in 1944, it reached English in the 1950s and has been the standard entry to Orthodox dogmatic theology ever since. Almost every subsequent English-language account of Palamas, of the essence–energies distinction, and of theosis is downstream of it.

Lossky was at the centre of the sophiology controversy of the 1930s, in which he opposed the theological system of Fr Sergius Bulgakov and was among those who pressed the Moscow Patriarchate to examine it. The dispute was bitter, it divided the Paris emigration, and Lossky's part in it is remembered by some as courage and by others as the harshness of a young man.

He also stayed under the Moscow Patriarchate when much of the Russian emigration would not — a position that cost him friendships and looked, to many exiles, like accommodation with a Church captive to the Soviet state. Both of these belong in the record; a page that gave only the book would be giving half a man.

Vladimir Lossky wrote one short book that determined how the Orthodox Church would be explained in Western languages for the rest of the century. Deification, the essence–energies distinction, the apophatic way: these are commonplaces of English-language Orthodox writing now, and they are commonplaces because of him.

He was a layman throughout, he died at fifty-four, and he was a combatant in disputes that left lasting wounds. He is not glorified, and nothing here implies veneration — but a section recording the Church in living memory that omitted the man who gave it its vocabulary would be incomplete.