The Synthesis of Hesychast Theology and Russian Religious Philosophy in the Essays of Aleksei Losev

This article examines how, in the years immediately 
preceding his arrest in 1930, Aleksei Fyodorovich Losev developed a philosophical apology for Imiaslavie (“deification of the name”) and formulated his interpretation of the theology of the uncreated energies. The relevance of the study lies in the fact that hesychast asceticism constitutes an important component of Orthodox spiritual and moral values, and its objective scholarly understanding is essential. The article demonstrates how Aleksei Losev offers an essential–energetic interpretation of the highest hesychast experience and, for the first time, analyzes his account of the gradual “de-essentialization” of human energies in the process of hesychast ascent; the “ladder method” is employed for this task. From the standpoint of historical contextualization, the author notes that Losev’s writings on Imiaslavie were composed before the major twentieth-century philological and theological studies of hesychasm, grounded in extensive source material. Consequently, his philosophical and theological essays of the 1920s could not offer an impeccable interpretation of hesychasm. During that period, “hesychasm” was often equated with “Palamism” and even regarded as a particular expression of Imiaslavie, whose origins were traced back to biblical times. The article argues that Losev’s interpretation does not present hesychast experience as a movement oriented toward synergic union with God, but rather as an experience shaped by the correlates of synergy, such as the sacralized invocation of the Divine Name, the appeal to a sophianic mode of being, and the use of ontologically significant symbols. Losev’s synthesis of Neoplatonic philosophy and hesychast theology proved significant not only for his own philosophical project. A similar reading of hesychast texts can later be found in Vladimir Bibikhin’s translation of The Triads by Gregory Palamas. The author concludes that the method of philosophical synthesis — so strikingly exemplified by Vladimir Solovyov and creatively adapted by Losev — does not provide an optimal framework for understanding the distinctiveness of hesychasm. A proper interpretation of the theology of the uncreated energies requires something different: the transformation of ancient philosophical tools and an attentiveness to the logic of synergy, which is characteristic of the Orthodox ascetic tradition.

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22. Ennead. Treatises VI–IX]. St. Petersburg : Izd-vo Olega Abyshko. [In Russian and Greek].

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