His father, Onufry Lossky, had Belarusian roots (his grandfather was a Greek-Catholic Uniate priest[2]) and was an Eastern Orthodox Christian; his mother Adelajda Przylenicka was Polish and Roman Catholic.
At the same time, Lossky survived an elevator accident that nearly killed him, which caused him to turn back to the Russian Orthodox Church under the direction of Fr.
These criticisms and conversion cost Lossky his professorship of philosophy and led to his exile abroad, on the famed Philosophers' ship (in 1922) from the Soviet Union as a counter-revolutionary.
Lossky's Гносеология or gnosiology is called Intuitivist-Personalism and had in part adapted the Hegelian dialectical approach of first addressing a problem in thought in terms of its expression as a duality or dichotomy.
[3] Lossky also followed and developed his ontological and gnosiological interpretation of objective reality from Christian neoplatonism based on the Patristic Fathers.
This validation as part of gnosiology or Christian mysticism (Orthodoxy) as opposed to the Russian Materialist and nihilist position that states that objects have no "thing in itself" or no essence, substance behind their phenomenon (as in Positivism).
One of the main points of Lossky's онтология or ontology is, the world is an organic whole as understood by human consciousness.
Intuition, insight (noesis in Greek) is the direct contemplation of objects, and furthermore the assembling of the entire set of cognition from sensory perception into a complete and undivided organic whole, i.e. experience.
Rational or logical thought via the dianoia of the nous, then works in reflection as hindsight to organize experience into a comprehensible order i.e. ontology.
Lossky's ontology being consistent with Leibniz's optimism expressed as the Best of all possible worlds in contrast to the pessimism and nihilism of more pro-Western Russian philosophers.
Lossky believed that philosophy would transcend its rational limits and manifest a mystical understanding of experience.
Much of Lossky's working out of an ontological theory of knowledge was done in collaboration with his close friend Semen L. Frank.
Lossky as a metaphysical libertarian taught that all people have uncreated energy (Aristotle) or potential (Plotinus).
Though Lossky did not strictly adhere to vitalism but rather to its predecessor Monadology and its living forces (dynamis) theory.
The system of spatiotemporal and numerical forms provides room for activities that are opposed to one another in direction, value, and significance for the world.
Material freedom means the degree of creative power possessed by an agent, and finds expression in what he is capable of creating.
Lossky proves that the will is free, taking as his starting point the law of causality but defending a dynamistic interpretation of it.
Only supertemporal substantival agents – i.e., actual and potential personalities – are bearers of creative power: they create events as their own vital manifestations.
According to the dynamistic interpretation of causality it is necessary to distinguish among the conditions under which an event takes place the cause from the occasion of its happening.
The cause is always the substantival agent himself as the bearer of creative power, and the other circumstances are merely occasions for its manifestations, which are neither forced nor predetermined by them.
[6]Much of the theology that Lossky covers (as his own) in the book History of Russian Philosophy is inline with the idealism of Origen.
In that the relationship between the mystic, religious understanding of God and a philosophical one there have been various stages of development in the history of the Roman East.
God did this for the purpose of, through love and compassion, guiding his creations back to contemplation of His infinite, limitless mind.
Lossky taught this co-operation as organic and or spontaneous order, integrality, and unity called sobornost.
In biographical reminiscences recorded in the early 1960s, philosophical novelist and Objectivism founder Ayn Rand recalled only Lossky among her teachers at the University of Petrograd or University of St. Petersburg, reporting that she studied classical philosophy with him prior to his removal from his teaching post by the Soviet regime.
Lossky also influenced the theologian-philosopher, Professor Joseph Papin, whose work Doctrina De Bono Perfecto, Eiusque Systemate N.O.
Papin's volume is the most profound study of Lossky's work in relation to Christian teachings in Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
The idea of Sobornost was prominent in the VI volume: The Church and Human Society at the Threshold of the Third Millenium (Villanova University Press, 1974).
The Dean of Harvard Divinity School, Krister Stendahl, gave his highest praise to Papin for his efforts in overcoming the divisions separating Christians: "It gladdens me that you will be honored at the time of having completed a quarter century of teaching us all.
Your vision of and your dogged insistence on a truly catholic i.e. ecumenical future of the church and theology has been one of the forces that have broken through the man-made walls of partition.