03 — The Roots of Christian Mysticism

Sources: Les mystiques chrétiens des origines. Textes et commentaires (Stock, 1982) is Clément’s most influential book. It is an anthology of patristic texts, arranged thematically and knitted together by his own commentary, and it did what no scholarly monograph had done: it put the Fathers into the hands of ordinary Western readers, Christian and not, as living spiritual writers rather than as historical exhibits. In English, as The Roots of Christian Mysticism, it became one of the most widely read Orthodox books ever published in the West.

Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)

The book is easy to underestimate. It contains almost no original doctrine; nearly every page is somebody else’s words. Its importance is that of a form invented for a purpose — and the purpose was the one Clément had been given by his own life: to make the ancient Christian experience audible to people who had never heard it.

File	Focus
Sources (1982)	The book itself: what is in it, how it is arranged, its publishing history in French and English, and its reception
The Method of the Anthology	Why an anthology; the theology of the florilegium; what commentary does to a text; the objections the form invites

See Also

• 05 — The Fathers for the Modern West — the wider project of which Sources is the centrepiece
• The Church Fathers — the repository’s collection on the Fathers themselves
• The Philokalia — the tradition’s own great anthology, and the model behind Clément’s
• Ecumenism, Method and the Anthology — the criticism the method has drawn