Website dedicated to raising awareness of the Orthodox Christian patristic teaching concerning the Name of God
"Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after My Name? It is Wonderful." Genesis 32:29
February 9, 2013
Letter of Prof. Vladimir Lossky on the controversy concerning the Name of God
"You await from me an answer concerning name-glorifying[imiaslavie].I will attempt to answer your question very briefly and systematically, or more accurately – to outline only that which I would like to say (otherwise one would have to write volumes, so substantive is this theme). The (dogmatic) question about the Divine Name, about verbal-intellectual expressions (“symbols”) of the Divinity are as important as the question of icons. Just as then, the Orthodox formulation of the Truth about icons became a “triumph of Orthodoxy,” so too, now, the Orthodox teaching about names, as well as all the questions connected with it (the teaching of St. Gregory Palamas, forgotten by many – grace, prayer, authentic “anthropology,” teaching about the mind and heart, about the “inner man” and so on) – must lead to a new Triumph of Orthodoxy, to the appearance of new grace-filled strength and holiness. The question about “name-glorifying” stands somewhere in the depth of Church consciousness. It has not yet received an answer (a truer formulation: the Church always has an answer, but one needs to hear and express it). But the “name-glorifying controversies” outlined two currents in Russian theology, consciously or unconsciously being defined in relation to “name-glorifying.” One current – the opponents of name-glorifiers, rejecting the very question of the veneration of the Name: this is mere “iconoclasm,” rationalism, seeing in religion only a volitional aspect and blind to nature (Divine grace); such was Metropolitan Anthony [Khrapovitsky], as the most striking example. The other tendencies – not always openly and openly affiliated with name-glorifying – represent, nonetheless, an extreme, “name-worshiping” [“imiabozhnoe”] in its expression, where the very spoken matter, the “flesh” so to speak of the name becomes Divine by nature, a sort of natural power (just as if the opponents of iconoclasm began to affirm the Divine “uncreatedness” of the board and paint of the icon). This last tendency – in the broad sense – develops as Sophiology, where God and creation are confused. Both one and the other are false. The path to the Orthodox understanding of name-glorifying lies through the careful, still overly pale, formula of Archbishop Theophan (of Poltava): “In the Divine Name the Divinity is honored” (Divine energy). When there will be a clear formula, using spiritual experience and “obviously” spiritual – many questions will fall aside on their own, and many difficulties will become childishly simple."
January 6/19, 1937
(Cited in Sacred Mystery of the Church, Vol. 2, p. 205)