Sources (1982)

Sources: Les mystiques chrétiens des origines. Textes et commentaires was published by Stock in Paris in 1982. It gathers passages from the Christian writers of roughly the first six centuries into a thematic sequence and surrounds them with Clément’s commentary. Reprinted in French and reissued by Desclée de Brouwer, and translated into English as The Roots of Christian Mysticism, it became the most widely read of all his books and, arguably, the most widely read work of Orthodox spiritual theology in the modern West.

Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)

The book

French. Sources: Les mystiques chrétiens des origines. Textes et commentaires (Paris: Stock, 1982); reprinted 1992 (345 pp.); reissued by Desclée de Brouwer in 2008 in an expanded setting of 455 pp. (French Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément,” bibliography; publisher and bookseller listings, e.g. eyrolles.com, laprocure.com).

English. The Roots of Christian Mysticism: Text and Commentary (New York: New City Press, 1995), 380 pp., ISBN 1565480295 (Internet Archive catalogue record, The roots of Christian mysticism: text and commentary). A second edition, retitled The Roots of Christian Mysticism: Texts from the Patristic Era with Commentary, was issued by New City Press of the Focolare, Hyde Park, NY, in 2013, ISBN 9781565484856 (Open Library record OL28390786M). [Disputed: the translator of the English edition is not identified in the library catalogue records consulted for this guide, and is therefore not named here rather than guessed. Readers should take the attribution from the title page of the copy in hand.] [Disputed: the date of first English publication. New City Press issued the book on both sides of the Atlantic; catalogue records consulted give 1993 and 1995 for the first English printings and 1996 for a further impression. The 1995 New York issue is the one held by the Internet Archive.]

The subject matter is stated in the cataloguers’ own terms: “Mysticism — History — Early church (ca. 30–600)”; “Fathers of the church” (Internet Archive; Google Books record for the 2013 edition). That is the period: from the New Testament to roughly the age of St Maximus.

What is in it

The architecture is thematic rather than chronological or author-by-author. Clément takes the great questions in sequence — the hidden God and the God who reveals himself; creation; the incarnation; baptism and the eucharist; prayer and the invocation of the Name; the passions and their transfiguration; the light of Tabor; love of neighbour; the transfiguration of the world — and under each he sets a sequence of patristic passages, most of them short, each introduced and connected by his own prose.

The authors range across the whole early tradition: the Apostolic Fathers and the apologists, St Irenaeus of Lyons, Clement of Alexandria and Origen, St Athanasius, the Cappadocians — St Basil, St Gregory the Theologian, St Gregory of Nyssa — St John Chrysostom, the desert literature and the Apophthegmata, Evagrius and the Macarian homilies, Dionysius the Areopagite, St Maximus the Confessor, St John of Damascus, and, at the far edge, St Symeon the New Theologian. The publisher’s own description of the book is exact about the effect intended: it “links together a series of brilliantly chosen texts from the early centuries of the Church to lay bare the roots of the deeply mystical spirituality that has flourished among Christians throughout the ages” (New City Press catalogue copy, focolaremedia.com).

Clément’s own stated purpose, as summarized in the French publishers’ notices, was a return to the sources in order to expose the first Christian experience — mystical in character, but understood as existence wholly transfigured by “an immense dynamism of resurrection” — and to show a Christianity that is modest and strong and not ideological (bookseller descriptions of the Desclée de Brouwer reissue, e.g. laprocure.com, eyrolles.com, reproducing the publisher’s copy).

Four things about the selection deserve notice.

1. It is not a mysticism of extraordinary states. Despite the title, the texts are overwhelmingly about the ordinary Christian life — baptism, eucharist, prayer, forgiveness, marriage, work, the body, death. Clément’s “mystical” means the whole of existence understood as participation in God, not a specialist career of visions. This is a deliberate and pointed claim, and it is made almost entirely by selection.

2. It is patristic, not Byzantine-hesychast. The book stops, in the main, before the Palamite controversy. Clément assumes the essence–energies theology he learned from Lossky, but he demonstrates it from the pre-Byzantine Fathers rather than from Palamas, which is a large part of why the book travels so well in the West: it argues from sources that Roman Catholics and Protestants also acknowledge as their own. Contrast the Philokalia, whose centre of gravity is precisely the later hesychast literature.

3. The commentary is substantial. This is not a bare florilegium. Clément’s linking prose is where the argument lives, and it is written in the lyric, unhurried register that made his reputation as a stylist in French.

4. The Scriptural spine is visible. The Fathers are presented as readers of the Bible, and the anthology repeatedly returns to the texts they were expounding, which keeps the book usable by readers with no patristic training at all.

Reception

Sources was Clément’s breakthrough. It is described in every notice of his life as his best-known and best-selling work — “his bestselling work” (Ellopos Blog, “Remembering Olivier Clement,” 2009), and one of the two books, with You Are Peter, by which he is known in English at all (Orthodox Church in America, “In Memoriam: Olivier Clément”). It has remained continuously in print in both languages for four decades and has been reissued in a second English edition as recently as 2013.

Its readership is not confined to Orthodox. New City Press is the publishing house of the Focolare Movement — a Roman Catholic lay movement — and the book’s largest English-language audience has always been Western Christian: Catholic religious communities, Anglican retreat houses, seminaries of every description, and a large number of readers with no ecclesial affiliation who came to it as a book about prayer. That fact is the point of the book, and it is also the source of the criticism it has drawn (see Ecumenism, Method and the Anthology).

For the repository’s own treatment of the Fathers Clément anthologized, see The Church Fathers and the hub essay on Church Fathers.

Why it worked

Three reasons, in ascending order of importance.

Timing. It appeared in 1982, at the front edge of the French retour du religieux — the period in which a thoroughly secularized public began, without much reference to the institutional churches, to take religion seriously again as a subject. A book of ancient spiritual texts, offered without apologetic pressure, met that moment exactly (see Atheism, Nihilism and the Return of the Religious).

Form. The reader is not asked to accept a thesis. He is handed the texts. Whatever else is true of an anthology, it cannot easily be accused of special pleading — an advantage Clément exploited fully, and one his critics regard as a sleight of hand (see The Method of the Anthology).

The translator’s ear. Clément had spent thirty years explaining difficult things to seventeen-year-olds in a Paris lycée, and he wrote French of unusual clarity and warmth. The Fathers in his versions and his framing do not sound like a foreign civilization; they sound like people addressing the reader.

See Also

References

  • Clément, Olivier. Sources: Les mystiques chrétiens des origines. Textes et commentaires. Paris: Stock, 1982; repr. 1992; Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2008.
  • Clément, Olivier. The Roots of Christian Mysticism: Text and Commentary. New York: New City Press, 1995. ISBN 1565480295. (Internet Archive catalogue record, archive.org/details/rootsofchristian0000clem: New City Press, New York, 1995, 380 pp.; subjects “Mysticism — History — Early church (ca. 30–600)”; “Fathers of the church.”)
  • Clément, Olivier. The Roots of Christian Mysticism: Texts from the Patristic Era with Commentary. 2nd ed. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press of the Focolare, 2013. ISBN 9781565484856. (Open Library record OL28390786M.)
  • New City Press / Focolare Media, publisher’s description of The Roots of Christian Mysticism (focolaremedia.com).
  • Booksellers’ reproductions of the Desclée de Brouwer publisher’s copy for the French reissue (laprocure.com; eyrolles.com; labourseauxlivres.fr).
  • “Olivier Clément.” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org), bibliography. (Sources, Stock 1982; reprint 1992, 345 pp.; Desclée de Brouwer 2008, 455 pp.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. “In Memoriam: Olivier Clément.” oca.org, January 2009.
  • “Remembering Olivier Clement.” Ellopos Blog, 2009. (Roots of Christian Mysticism as his bestselling work.)