02 — Lossky, St Sergius and Contacts

Once inside the Church, Clément entered a specific world: the Russian émigré theology of Paris. Vladimir Lossky became his master and, after Lossky’s early death in 1958, Clément became one of the editors of his unpublished work. He taught at the St Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute for more than three decades, directed the review Contacts from 1959, and was among the founders of the Orthodox Fellowship in Western Europe.

Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)

The Paris of the 1950s in which Clément found himself was the most theologically productive Orthodox milieu in the world: Bulgakov had died in 1944, but Lossky, Evdokimov, Afanasiev, Florovsky’s influence, Schmemann and Meyendorff before their departure for America, and the whole apparatus of the St Sergius Institute were all in place. Clément was the first significant French figure to be formed inside it — not an émigré, not a Russian, but a Frenchman who had come in from the outside and who would spend his life carrying what he found there into the French language.

File Focus
Lossky the Teacher Lossky as the decisive influence; the master–disciple relation; Clément’s editorial work on Lossky’s posthumous texts; Orient–Occident: deux passeurs and the pairing of Lossky with Evdokimov
St Sergius, Contacts and the Fraternité Professor at the Institut Saint-Serge from 1962; the review Contacts from 1959; the Fraternité Orthodoxe en Europe Occidentale; the “Théophanie” series; the ecumenical committees

See Also