I realized how ugly my sentence was upon reading it again. What I meant to say James said way more nicely: that the mysteries of the faith are self-implicating, and to understand them as what they are is to understand them as involving the individual. Hope that is more felicitious.

James,

I don’t think that the movement is from apophatic ecstasy to dogmatics but the other way around (although this still isn’t a very happy way of putting it). Orthodoxy doesn’t shy away from speaking of the “givens” of the faith and the certainty of revelation (here apophaticism doesn’t mean agnosticism), but understands that revelation involves infinite mysteries that are immune to certain kinds of rationalization. I think that rationalization in this context means something like abstracting, or distancing one’s self, from the givenness of the presence and revelation of God. I think that what someone like Lossky is able to hold fairly well together is this: that the subject/object of revelation given to us and to the Church, namely God in Christ in the Church in the world, given to us, is and loves and exists in such a way that various negations, understood as a spiritual and intellectual purifying, will be helpful within theology and within the theologian. Otherwise said, Lossky’s “personal ontology” has quite a bit of dogmatic depth to it.

1) As for Mark’s unfortunate abscence from this blog, I can testify first hand to the revolutions in Barth scholarship that he is currently concocting and keeping secret from the rest of the world. Soon the entire world (of Barth scholarship) will know the name Mark McDowell!

2) As for James’ comment: “I think Lossky is probably less helpful here since he explicitly rules out the conceptualization of the world and God in favor of a personal ontology,” I don’t think this is exactly getting at what Lossky is getting with his fear of “abstract speculation.” For Lossky there just are certain mysteries of the faith and to not see them as directly involving the individual, meaning “you,” is not to understand them at all. His “personal ontology” therefore stems from the mysteries of God, Christ, Church and the salvation of the world, and doesn’t preclude their articulation and deployment.

Again, I don’t know how Lossky actually puts this into practice, if that is in fact what he is doing. I will poke around a bit more and ask some questions.

I don’t know Lossky enough to know how he deals with dogmatic content. That would be later in the volume I think. It would be an interesting question to look into though.