01 — From Unbelief to Orthodoxy

Olivier Clément was born in 1921 into a dechristianized family of the Languedoc, was never baptized as a child, received no religious instruction, and came to Christ as an adult after a search that ran through atheism, the wisdoms of Asia, and a period of esoteric experiment. He entered the Orthodox Church directly — without passing through Catholicism or Protestantism — at about the age of thirty. This section covers the formation and the conversion.

Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)

Everything Clément later wrote was written by a man who had arrived from outside. He did not inherit the faith and then think about it; he thought his way toward it from a starting point of total unbelief, and he never lost the memory of what that unbelief felt like from the inside. It is the single most important fact about him as a writer, and it explains both his gifts — the ability to say the ancient things in a language a secular reader could hear — and the suspicion he sometimes attracted from Orthodox who thought the translation cost too much.

He told the story himself, briefly and reticently, in L’Autre Soleil: quelques notes d’autobiographie spirituelle (Stock, 1975). The subtitle is characteristic: not an autobiography but “some notes.”

File Focus
Aniane and the Secular Inheritance Birth at Aniane in 1921; a Cévenol family of peasants and schoolteachers in the anticlerical republican tradition; an unbaptized childhood; the agrégation in history and the lycée career
The Search and the Baptism Atheism, Asia, esotericism; the reading of Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, Eliade and Lossky; the crisis around 1950; the baptism, its disputed date, and the priest who administered it

See Also