The Search and the Baptism

Clément’s road to Christ ran through atheism, the religions and wisdoms of Asia, and a period of esoteric searching, and reached a crisis around 1950. He was brought over by reading — Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, Mircea Eliade, and above all Vladimir Lossky — and was baptized directly into the Orthodox Church at about the age of thirty by Fr Eugraph Kovalevsky, in the French-language Orthodox milieu of Paris. The exact year is reported variously as 1951 and 1952.

Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)

Clément’s own account is L’Autre Soleil: quelques notes d’autobiographie spirituelle (Stock, 1975), written, he said, after a health crisis, in his early fifties (laprocure.com, publisher’s notice for L’autre soleil; the book is a short volume of some 87 pages in its first edition). It is a reticent book — “some notes,” not a confession — and it is the primary source for everything that follows. [Disputed: the date of *L'Autre Soleil*. The first edition is Stock, 1975, with a reissue in 1986 and later editions from Desclée de Brouwer; the English Wikipedia article on Clément lists only a late Desclée de Brouwer printing, which has caused the date 1986 or 2010 to circulate. The French bibliography gives Stock, 1975.]

Three stages are consistently reported.

Atheism. The starting point was not doubt but settled unbelief, inherited whole from his family and his schooling (see Aniane and the Secular Inheritance). The Archdiocese centenary notice describes the household as atheist, anticlerical and socialist (centenaire-archeveche.org, “Olivier Clément”). Clément’s generation in France also lived through the war, the Occupation, and the postwar dominance of Marxist and existentialist thought in the universities and lycées; the political messianisms of that milieu are part of the background against which his search took place. [Disputed: how far Clément was personally committed to Marxism. Summaries of his life frequently list Marxism among the stages he passed through, but the French biographical notices consulted here specify only atheism, the spiritual traditions of Asia, and esotericism. This guide reports the documented stages and does not assert a formal Marxist commitment.]

Asia and esotericism. Through the 1940s he read and experimented in the religions of Asia — Hinduism and Buddhism — and in the esoteric currents then available in Paris (Pages orthodoxes La Transfiguration, “Page Olivier Clément”; OrthodoxWiki, “Olivier Clement,” which describes him as having “explored atheism and Asian spiritualities”). This mattered later. Clément never wrote about non-Christian religion as an outsider sneering, and his openness on this point is one of the things that drew criticism from Orthodox who thought he conceded too much (see Ecumenism, Method and the Anthology).

The crisis. By about 1950 the search had exhausted itself. The French notice puts him near a “point of asphyxia” — the image is of a man who could no longer breathe in the world his own thought had built (Pages orthodoxes La Transfiguration).

The books that converted him

What brought him over was reading, and the list of books is unusually well attested:

  • Fyodor Dostoevsky — the novelist as theologian, the standard door into Russian Christianity for French intellectuals of that generation.
  • Nicolas Berdyaev — the Russian religious philosopher who had died in Paris in 1948, whose personalism and philosophy of freedom spoke directly to a man formed by French secular humanism. Clément later devoted a book to him, Berdiaev: un philosophe russe en France (Desclée de Brouwer, 1991).
  • Mircea Eliade — the historian of religions, who gave Clément a way of taking religious phenomena seriously as an intellectual matter.
  • Vladimir Lossky — the decisive one.

(Pages orthodoxes La Transfiguration, “Page Olivier Clément,” listing Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, Eliade and Lossky; English Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément,” and OrthodoxWiki, “Olivier Clement,” both naming Berdyaev and Lossky and noting that he became Lossky’s student and friend.)

Lossky’s Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient had appeared in Paris in 1944. What it offered was not an argument for Christianity but a description of a Christianity that did not look like the thing French unbelief had rejected: apophatic, not moralistic; centred on deification rather than on juridical satisfaction; a theology whose end was union with God. For a reader who had spent a decade in the wisdoms of Asia, this was recognisable as a spiritual path and not merely as a Western institution’s doctrine (see Vladimir Lossky and Lossky the Teacher).

The Archdiocese notice adds one further detail, of a kind Clément would have appreciated: an encounter with an Orthodox icon in a Paris antique dealer’s shop (centenaire-archeveche.org, “Olivier Clément”). The same notice reports his own summary of the matter: “At one point, God came to seek me and I followed Him.”

The baptism

Clément was baptized as an adult, at about the age of thirty, and — unusually for a Western convert — he came to Orthodoxy directly, not by way of Roman Catholicism or Protestantism. The reviewer Adam DeVille later made this point in assessing You Are Peter: Clément wrote about the papacy as a man who had never been a Catholic and had no quarrel with Rome to settle (DeVille, review of You Are Peter, First Things, November 2004).

The details are reported as follows:

  • The date. [Disputed: French Wikipedia ("Olivier Clément"), the Archdiocese centenary notice (centenaire-archeveche.org) and the Ellopos memorial notice give 1951. *Pages orthodoxes La Transfiguration* gives 1 November 1952, at age thirty, and adds Clément's own recollection of the day — that it was raining, that he walked a long time in the rain, and that "the water was cold and pure" — and his insistence that it was "a lucid and serious choice." This guide reports both; the range 1951–1952 is not resolvable from the sources consulted.]
  • The minister. He was baptized by Fr Eugraph Kovalevsky (1905–1970), later consecrated bishop with the name Jean-Nectaire of Saint-Denis (OrthodoxWiki, “Olivier Clement”; French Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément”).
  • The place and jurisdiction. The French sources place the baptism at the parish of Saint-Irénée in Paris, in the French-language Orthodox community that Kovalevsky led (French Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément”). English Wikipedia describes the setting as “the French-speaking diocese of the Moscow Patriarchate in Paris” — which is consistent, since Kovalevsky’s French Orthodox community stood under the Moscow Patriarchate at that date and separated from it in the years following. [Disputed: the precise canonical description of Kovalevsky's community at the moment of Clément's baptism. The two source-descriptions — "the parish of Saint-Irénée under the Église catholique orthodoxe de France" and "the French-speaking diocese of the Moscow Patriarchate" — reflect a jurisdictional situation that was itself changing in 1951–1953. Clément did not remain in that body.]

Clément subsequently belonged to the mainstream of Russian-tradition Orthodoxy in France, and was long associated with the Archdiocese of Russian Orthodox Churches in Western Europe, then under the Ecumenical Patriarchate — the jurisdiction whose centenary site counts him among its representative figures (centenaire-archeveche.org, “Olivier Clément”). The repository’s hub essay on the ecumenism debate likewise identifies him as “of the Ecumenical Patriarchate tradition” (The Ecumenism Debate).

Why the conversion is the argument

Clément’s conversion is not a preliminary to his theology; it is the shape of it. Three features of his writing follow directly from it.

  1. He addressed unbelievers as equals. He had held their position and did not treat it as stupidity.
  2. He came to Orthodoxy as a spiritual path, not as an ethnicity. He therefore had no investment in the cultural furniture that so often travels with Orthodoxy in the West, and he was impatient with converts who acquired the furniture instead of the faith.
  3. He had no confessional grievance. Having never been Catholic or Protestant, he approached the Western confessions without the convert’s characteristic need to justify a departure — which made him unusually free in ecumenical conversation, and, in the judgment of his critics, unusually careless of what such freedom costs (see The Critique).

See Also

References

  • Clément, Olivier. L’Autre Soleil: quelques notes d’autobiographie spirituelle. Paris: Stock, 1975; repr. 1986.
  • Clément, Olivier. Berdiaev: un philosophe russe en France. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1991.
  • DeVille, Adam A. J. Review of Olivier Clément, You Are Peter: An Orthodox Theologian’s Reflection on the Exercise of Papal Primacy. First Things, November 2004.
  • Lossky, Vladimir. Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient. Paris: Aubier, 1944.
  • “Olivier Clément.” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org). (Conversion at about thirty; baptism 1951 at Saint-Irénée, Paris, by Eugraphe Kovalevsky; influence of Berdyaev and Lossky.)
  • “Page Olivier Clément.” Pages orthodoxes La Transfiguration (pagesorthodoxes.net). (The search through Asian spiritualities and esotericism; the “point of asphyxia” around 1950; Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, Eliade, Lossky; baptism 1 November 1952 at age thirty, with Clément’s recollection of the rain and the cold, pure water, and his description of the step as “a lucid and serious choice.”)
  • “Olivier Clement.” OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org). (Baptism at the hands of Fr Evgraph Kovalevsky, later Bishop Jean-Nectaire of Saint-Denis.)
  • “Olivier Clément.” English Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org). (Agnostic family of the Cévennes; conversion at thirty after atheism and Asian spiritualities; baptism in the French-speaking diocese of the Moscow Patriarchate in Paris; L’Autre Soleil.)
  • “Olivier Clément.” Centenary site of the Archdiocese of Russian Orthodox Churches in Western Europe (centenaire-archeveche.org). (Atheist, anticlerical, socialist household; the icon in the antique shop; “At one point, God came to seek me and I followed Him”; conversion directly to Orthodoxy without passing through another Christian confession.)
  • “Remembering Olivier Clement.” Ellopos Blog, 2009. (Conversion to Orthodoxy in 1951; attraction to Orthodoxy’s union of “a sense of mystery and a sense of liberty.”)