Hart’s treatment of Lossky in that article borders on the absurd. He quite grossly misrepresents Lossky as being vehemently anti-Western, when it is only a certain strain of Western though, the essentialism inherent to Neo-Scholasticism, which was the focus of Lossky’s criticism. It is, I think, quite inconceivable that Hart, who is smart enough to know that Western theology is not limited to Neo-Scholasticism, would make the error of misreading Lossky’s criticism of Neo-Scholasticism as a criticism of the entire theological output of the West in the past two thousand years, which puts him in the awkward position of either willfully misrepresenting Lossky or hastily criticizing Lossky’s theological output without having read it carefully.
The fact that Lossky keeps his criticism reserved for Thomism and Neo-Scholasticism in particular is mentioned by George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, who in “Augustine and the Orthodox: ‘The West’ in the East” point out that Lossky’s reading of Augustine does not exploit the difference between Augustine’s conception of apophasis from the Aeropagite’s conception of apophasis in order to attack St. Augustine as the author of Western errors, but rather links St. Augustine to later strains of Western mysticism based upon the mysticism of Dionysius, thus distancing the saint from the later Schoolmen and Augustinians, whose reading of Dionysius he rejected. Similarly, Lossky in In the Image and Likeness of God remarks on the possibility of an Orthodox reading of St. Augustine’s triadology, noting that no such in depth study of De Trinitate had yet been undertaken.
Hart is simply not correct in his reading of Lossky as “anti-Western,” for while it is true that Lossky did not care for a certain strain of Western thinking which he regarded as erroneous (that is, Neo-Scholasticism), it is not true that Lossky therefore rejected the West in its entirety as a consequence of his rejection of Neo-Scholasticism.
Similarly, I find Hart’s charge that Lossky misrepresents Western thought to be laughable. Lossky went through the trouble to study Thomas with none other than Etienne Gilson, so it should be quite unthinkable that Lossky’s interpretations of Thomas would not have been guided by current schools of Thomism at that time (in fact, one has to wonder if he did not pick up his intense distaste for Scholasticism from Gilson himself, though he clearly disagreed with Gilson’s view that Thomas Aquinas provided the answer to the problems caused by Scholasticism). Frankly, I’m not even sure why Hart brings Lossky up at all. Had he kept the article to criticizing Romanides’ treatment of the West, I wouldn’t find it so objectionable. But for him to try and lump Lossky in together with Romanides is quite untenable, I think.
