[13] Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky enrolled as a student at the faculty of Arts at Petrograd University in 1919, and, in the spring of 1922, was profoundly struck when he witnessed the trial which led to the execution of Metropolitan Benjamin of St. Petersburg by the Soviets.

From 1922 to 1926, he continued his studies in Prague, and, subsequently, at the Sorbonne in Paris, where in 1927, he graduated in medieval philosophy.

[16] He taught dogmatic theology and ecclesiastical history in this institute until 1953, and, from 1953 to 1958, in the diocese of the patriarchate of Moscow, "rue Pétel" in Paris.

[citation needed] His best-known work is Essai sur la theologie mystique de l'Église d'orient[17] (1944) (English translation, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1957).

He argued in The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1944) that theologians of the Orthodox tradition maintained the mystical dimension of theology in a more integrated way than those of the Catholic and Reformed traditions after the East–West Schism because the latter misunderstood such Greek terms as ousia, hypostasis, theosis, and theoria.

[citation needed] Georges Florovsky termed Lossky's Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church a "neopatristic synthesis".

[20] The genius of Eastern mystical theology lay, he contended, in its apophatic character, which he defined as the understanding that God is radically unknowable in human, thus philosophical, terms.

"[21] The Trinitarian processions in revelation thus produce the energies which human beings experience as grace and by which they are sanctified or "deified".

In his Mystical Theology he argued that the theologians of the undivided Church understood that theosis was above knowledge (gnosis).

"[10] The term Russian religious philosophy had its origin in the works of the slavophile movement and its core concept of sobornost, which was later used and developed by Vladimir Soloviev.

He interprets Ephesians 1:22ff (the church is [Jesus'] body; the fullness of him who fills everything in every way) stating that "if Christ is 'head of the church which is his body,' the Holy Spirit is He 'that filleth all in all'" meaning that while particular believers of Jesus are members of the corporate Christ which relating only to portions of the entire Christ, instead touching and relating only to particular 'parts of the body,' they however receive the Holy Spirit in fullness as opposed to part.

"[25] God and experience enter into a person from the external world and into the soul by the influence of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit and the Christ being the hands of God the Father, reaching in from the infinite into the finite[d] (see Irenaeus).

The Trinity having existences (hypostasis) that are comprehensible, but a being that is not created and beyond all things (including nothingness) therefore God's hyper-being (ousia) is incomprehensible.

Without dogma future generations lose the specific orthodoxy (right mind) and orthopraxis (right practice) of the Eastern Orthodox path to salvation (see soteriology).