Aniane and the Secular Inheritance

Olivier Clément was born on 17 November 1921 at Aniane, in the Hérault, into a Cévenol family he himself described as déchristianisée — peasants and schoolteachers of the French anticlerical republican tradition. He was not baptized and received no religious formation. He took the agrégation in history and spent his professional life teaching in the French state lycée system, most of it at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris.

Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)

Aniane

Aniane is a small town in the Hérault, on the southern edge of the Cévennes, in the old Languedoc. It is a place with a Christian past of exactly the kind that had become invisible by 1921: the Benedictine abbey of Aniane was founded in the eighth century by St Benedict of Aniane, the great Carolingian monastic reformer. Clément was born there on 17 November 1921 (“Page Olivier Clément,” Pages orthodoxes La Transfiguration; French Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément,” giving the full civil name Maurice Olivier Clément). [Disputed: the order of his given names. English-language notices give "Olivier-Maurice Clément" (OrthodoxWiki, "Olivier Clement"); the French civil record as reported gives "Maurice Olivier Clément." He published always as Olivier Clément.]

A dechristianized family

The family was Cévenol — that is, from a region whose religious history is Protestant and violent, the country of the Camisard revolt — but by Clément’s generation the inheritance had passed into something else. He described his own milieu as déchristianisée: a family of peasants and schoolteachers (instituteurs) in which religion had simply ceased to be transmitted (“Page Olivier Clément,” Pages orthodoxes La Transfiguration). The centenary notice of the Archdiocese of Russian Orthodox Churches in Western Europe puts it more sharply still, describing the household as atheist, anticlerical and socialist (centenaire-archeveche.org, “Olivier Clément”).

This is worth stating precisely, because it is the specific French form of unbelief and not a generic secularism. The village schoolteacher of the Third Republic — the instituteur, the “black hussar of the Republic” — was an office with a doctrine: laicity, the Enlightenment, science against superstition, the school against the presbytery. A child raised in that world did not lapse from faith; he was never given any. Clément was not baptized as an infant and received no catechesis of any kind (Pages orthodoxes; French Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément”). His mother Émilie is reported to have attended Protestant worship, which qualifies the picture without changing it: the household as a whole transmitted nothing (French Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément”).

The consequence for his later theology was decisive. Clément did not experience Christianity first as a set of family habits to be either kept or rejected, and he did not experience the Orthodox Church as an ethnic inheritance. He met it as an adult, in books, as a proposition about reality. When he later wrote for unbelievers he was not condescending to them; he was writing to the man he had been.

The historian

Clément’s professional formation was entirely secular and entirely French. He obtained the agrégation in history — the competitive national qualification for teaching in the lycées and classes préparatoires — reportedly in 1943 (Pages orthodoxes La Transfiguration), and taught history thereafter in the state system. His long tenure was at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, one of the most demanding schools in France, where he taught in the classes préparatoires — the intensive post-secondary classes that prepare candidates for the grandes écoles (French Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément”). Estimates of the length of that career vary from “more than thirty years” (Pages orthodoxes) to “forty years” (Ellopos Blog, “Remembering Olivier Clement,” 2009). [Disputed: the exact span of the Louis-le-Grand years; sources give thirty-plus to forty. The substance is undisputed: it was the work of his adult lifetime, carried on alongside all his theological writing.]

Two things follow from this that matter for reading him.

First, he was never a professional theologian in the ordinary sense. He was a schoolmaster who wrote theology in the evenings and on holidays, and later a professor at an Orthodox institute that paid little and demanded much. He was a layman throughout, married, with children (French Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément,” which records three marriages — to Andrée Fruchier, Juliette Collos, and Monique Jouanne — and six children, among them the philologist Sophie Stavrou and the surgeon Denys Clément). The repository records this as it records the rest: without concealment and without commentary, per METHODOLOGY.md §2.

Second, he wrote as a historian. This is the least noticed and most consequential feature of his method. His books on the papacy, on Byzantium, on the Church, all proceed the same way: they set a theological question inside a historical narrative and let the narrative do much of the argumentative work. He published two short volumes with the Presses Universitaires de France in 1964 — Byzance et le christianisme and L’Essor du christianisme oriental — and the Que sais-je? volume L’Église orthodoxe (PUF, 1961), which went through repeated printings for four decades and was for two generations the first thing a French reader encountered about the Orthodox Church (French Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément,” bibliography). A Que sais-je? is a 128-page paperback sold in railway-station kiosks. That Clément’s introduction to Orthodoxy took that form, and stayed in print from 1961 into the 2000s, is a fair summary of his whole vocation.

The formation and the vocation

It is tempting to treat the secular formation as a mere prelude — the darkness before the light. Clément did not treat it that way. He kept the historian’s instincts, the republican schoolmaster’s suspicion of clerical self-importance, and a lifelong conviction that the Church owes an account of itself to people who do not believe. His later engagement with modern atheism and with what French commentators called the retour du religieux was not apologetic strategy; it was autobiography (see Atheism, Nihilism and the Return of the Religious).

He also kept the Languedoc. He died in Paris on 15 January 2009 and was buried at Marsillargues, in the Hérault, a few dozen kilometres from where he was born (French Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément”).

See Also

References

  • Clément, Olivier. L’Autre Soleil: quelques notes d’autobiographie spirituelle. Paris: Stock, 1975; repr. 1986.
  • Clément, Olivier. L’Église orthodoxe. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, coll. “Que sais-je?” no. 949, 1961 (repeatedly reprinted).
  • Clément, Olivier. Byzance et le christianisme; L’Essor du christianisme oriental. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, coll. “Mythes et religions,” 1964.
  • “Olivier Clément.” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org). (Civil name, birth at Aniane 17 November 1921, Cévenol family, agrégation, Louis-le-Grand, marriages and children, bibliography, burial at Marsillargues.)
  • “Page Olivier Clément.” Pages orthodoxes La Transfiguration (pagesorthodoxes.net). (Birth at Aniane in Languedoc; dechristianized family of peasants and schoolteachers; no baptism, no religious formation; agrégation in history 1943; more than thirty years at Louis-le-Grand.)
  • “Olivier Clément.” Centenary site of the Archdiocese of Russian Orthodox Churches in Western Europe (centenaire-archeveche.org). (Atheist, anticlerical and socialist household; original given name Maurice; agrégé of the University 1943.)
  • “Olivier Clement.” OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org). (Name form “Olivier-Maurice Clément”; career summary.)
  • “Remembering Olivier Clement.” Ellopos Blog, 2009. (Forty years at Louis-le-Grand; conversion at about thirty; roughly thirty books.)