Lossky the Teacher

Vladimir Lossky (1903–1958) was the decisive figure in Clément’s conversion and his master afterwards. Clément became his student and friend; after Lossky’s sudden death he was among those who prepared his unpublished work for print, and he later co-edited the expanded French edition of Lossky’s dogmatic lectures. In 1985 he paired Lossky with Paul Evdokimov as the two passeurs — the two ferrymen who carried Orthodoxy across into the Western mind.

Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)

The book before the man

Clément met Lossky’s writing before he met Lossky. The Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient (Aubier, 1944) was among the books that brought him to the faith — it stands in the list alongside Dostoevsky, Berdyaev and Eliade in every account of his conversion (Pages orthodoxes La Transfiguration, “Page Olivier Clément”; English Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément”). He then became Lossky’s student and friend (OrthodoxWiki, “Olivier Clement”; English Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément,” which names Berdyaev and Lossky as the two through whom he “discovered Christian philosophy,” adding that Lossky was the one “whom he became a student of and befriended”).

What Lossky supplied was a theology built on three loads:

Apophaticism — the insistence that theology begins in the acknowledgment that God in his essence is unknowable, and that every affirmation about him must be crossed out and exceeded.
The essence–energies distinction — Palamas’s answer to the question of how a wholly transcendent God can be genuinely participated: not in his essence, but in his uncreated energies.
Person and nature — the transposition of Trinitarian and Christological categories into an anthropology in which the human person is irreducible to nature, and is free.

Each of these is treated at length in the sibling collection (Vladimir Lossky, especially Apophaticism and Person and Nature). All three passed into Clément intact, but changed key. Where Lossky wrote with a controlled severity — the tone of a man defending a position — Clément wrote lyrically, for readers who needed to be shown that the position was habitable. The doctrine is Lossky’s; the address is Clément’s own.

The disciple as editor

Lossky died on 7 February 1958, aged fifty-four, leaving most of his work unpublished. The task of getting it into print fell to those around him, and Clément was one of them: the French notices record that he “edited Vladimir Lossky’s unpublished manuscripts after his death” (Pages orthodoxes La Transfiguration, “Page Olivier Clément”).

The most durable piece of that work came much later. Lossky’s dogmatic lectures, delivered in the pastoral courses of the Moscow Exarchate, were serialized in the Messager de l’Exarchat du Patriarche russe en Europe occidentale in 1964–1965 and Englished as Orthodox Theology: An Introduction (SVS Press, 1978). A revised, annotated and expanded French edition was later prepared by Olivier Clément and Michel Stavrou; the English of that edition is Dogmatic Theology: Creation, God’s Image in Man, and the Redeeming Work of the Trinity, trans. Anthony P. Gythiel (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2017) (svspress.com, publisher’s listing; see The Corpus and Its Influence).

This is the plainest measure of the relationship: sixty years after Lossky’s death, the standard French text of his dogmatics carries Clément’s editorial hand.

Orient–Occident: deux passeurs

In 1985 Clément published Orient–Occident: Deux passeurs, Vladimir Lossky et Paul Evdokimov (Geneva: Labor et Fides, coll. “Perspective orthodoxe,” no. 6). A passeur is a ferryman — the one who takes you across the water.

The book’s argument is carried as much by its structure as by its sentences. Lossky and Evdokimov were, in the standard historiography of twentieth-century Orthodox theology, opposites: Lossky the neo-patristic critic who had attacked Bulgakov’s sophiology in 1935, Evdokimov the pupil of Bulgakov who never repudiated the sophiological inheritance. Putting them in one book, under one honorific, was a deliberate refusal of that opposition. Clément presented them as the two men who had between them carried the Orthodox tradition across into Western language and thought — different cargoes on the same crossing.

The repository’s Evdokimov collection treats this pairing as the definitive French statement of Evdokimov’s standing and as itself an argument in the sophiology controversy: it “places Evdokimov not as a sophiological survival but as one of the two founders of French Orthodox theology” (see How Much Sophiology, and the Counter-Reading, which sets out that case in full and is not repeated here). Clément also wrote the foreword to the English edition of Evdokimov’s L’Orthodoxie (Orthodoxy, trans. Jeremy Hummerstone, New City Press, 2011), describing it as an original synthesis engaging the Fathers creatively while drawing in twentieth-century Russian religious philosophy and the theology of the divine energies.

The passeur is also a self-description. Clément spent his life doing what he said Lossky and Evdokimov had done, in a language they had learned and he was born to.

What Clément took, and what he did not

Taken. Apophaticism as the basic theological posture; the uncreated energies and therefore a real deification; the priority of the person; the conviction that Orthodox theology is not a regional variant of Christian doctrine but the tradition of the undivided Church.

Modified. Lossky’s account of the Filioque as the root pathology of Western theology was the sharpest thing in his corpus, and it has a large downstream literature (see Vladimir Lossky, The Filioque and the Two Traditions and the repository’s Filioque). Clément held the Orthodox doctrinal position, but his temperament ran the other way: he was interested in what could be repaired rather than in the anatomy of the breach, and as editor of Contacts he gave space to Roman Catholic theologians working toward a rapprochement on the question — the review published, some twenty-five years before the 1995 Vatican Clarification on the procession of the Holy Spirit, an early article by the Dominican Jean-Miguel Garrigues whose line of argument the Clarification later reflected (noted in the discussion at bekkos.wordpress.com, “Remarks on Larchet’s critique of the 1995 Vatican Clarification,” 2025). [Disputed: how to read that editorial decision. To Clément's admirers it is the mark of a theologian confident enough in his own tradition to publish the other side; to his critics it is precisely the pattern of accommodation they object to. The dispute is treated in Section 08.]

Not taken. Lossky’s polemical vocation. Lossky made his name in an intra-Orthodox controversy and never lost the habits it formed. Clément almost never attacked anyone. This is the most obvious difference between master and disciple, and — depending on the reader — either his chief virtue or his chief weakness.

References

Clément, Olivier. Orient–Occident: Deux passeurs, Vladimir Lossky et Paul Evdokimov. Geneva: Labor et Fides, coll. “Perspective orthodoxe” no. 6, 1985.
Clément, Olivier. Foreword to Paul Evdokimov, Orthodoxy, trans. Jeremy Hummerstone. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2011.
Lossky, Vladimir. Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient. Paris: Aubier, 1944. English: The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957.
Lossky, Vladimir. Dogmatic Theology: Creation, God’s Image in Man, and the Redeeming Work of the Trinity. Trans. Anthony P. Gythiel; French edition ed. Olivier Clément and Michel Stavrou. Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2017. (Publisher’s listing, svspress.com.)
“Page Olivier Clément.” Pages orthodoxes La Transfiguration (pagesorthodoxes.net). (Lossky among the authors of his conversion; Clément’s editing of Lossky’s unpublished manuscripts.)
“Olivier Clément.” English Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org). (Berdyaev and Lossky; student and friend of Lossky.)
“Olivier Clement.” OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org).
“Remarks on Larchet’s critique of the 1995 Vatican Clarification.” De unione ecclesiarum (bekkos.wordpress.com), 7 May 2025. (Garrigues’s early article published by Clément in Contacts.)