The Method of the Anthology

Clément’s chief theological instrument was not the treatise but the anthology with commentary — a form with deep roots in the tradition itself, from the patristic florilegium to the Philokalia. This file sets out what the form does, why he chose it, what theological claims are built into it, and what its critics say it conceals.

Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)

The form has a pedigree

An anthology of authoritative texts, arranged for spiritual use, is not a modern popularizing device. It is one of the oldest genres of Christian theology.

The patristic florilegium — a collection of excerpts from earlier Fathers assembled to establish a doctrinal point — was standard equipment in the Christological controversies and at the ecumenical councils, where dossiers of citations were read into the acts as evidence of what the Church had always held.
The Philokalia of St Macarius of Corinth and St Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain (Venice, 1782) is an anthology of ascetic and hesychast texts spanning eleven centuries, assembled with almost no editorial commentary and offered as a practical guide to prayer. It became one of the most consequential books in modern Orthodox history (see The Philokalia).
The Fathers themselves worked by catena and citation, and the liturgical books of the Church are, among other things, anthologies of Scripture.

Clément’s Sources stands in that line, with one difference that matters: the commentary. St Nicodemus let the texts stand nearly bare; Clément wrote around and between them.

What the commentary does

Four things, at least.

1. It supplies the missing context. A fourth-century sentence dropped unannotated in front of a twenty-first-century reader will usually be misunderstood, because the reader supplies the wrong background — psychological where the Father meant ontological, moralistic where he meant sacramental. Clément’s linking prose keeps setting the frame.

2. It makes an argument by arrangement. The thematic order of Sources is itself a thesis: that the Christian mystical tradition is a single coherent thing, not a series of unrelated regional spiritualities, and that its centre is the transfiguration of ordinary existence rather than extraordinary experience. That claim is nowhere argued in the book; it is enacted by the table of contents.

3. It translates the vocabulary. Words like apatheia, nepsis, theosis, logoi have no serviceable French or English equivalents, and every rendering is an interpretation. Clément consistently chose renderings that avoided the two failure modes of Western patristic reception — Stoic moralism on one side, a vaguely psychological “mysticism” on the other.

4. It addresses the reader directly. The commentary is written to someone: someone who is not assumed to be Orthodox, or Christian, or churched at all. This is Clément’s constant register and the reason the book crossed over.

Why an anthology and not a system

Clément never wrote a dogmatics. He was not the man to write one, and he said as much in effect by the form he chose. Three reasons can be given, in ascending order of theological weight.

The practical reason. He was a schoolmaster with a full teaching load, writing in the margins of a working life, without the leisure a systematic theology requires.

The pedagogical reason. He believed that the Fathers persuade better than arguments about the Fathers do. A reader who is told that patristic anthropology is superior to modern anthropology will resist; a reader who is handed twenty pages of St Gregory of Nyssa on the human person may not.

The theological reason. This is the important one, and it is the neo-patristic conviction he inherited from Lossky and Florovsky: that theology is not a body of propositions deduced from revelation but the mind of the Church, held in her Tradition and enacted in her prayer. On that account, the properly theological act is not to construct a system but to hand on what has been received — and the anthology is the literary form that most nearly matches the thing being handed on. Compare the repository’s treatment of Tradition at Holy Tradition, and Fr Georges Florovsky’s programme of the “neo-patristic synthesis” at Georges Florovsky and The Patristic Revival.

There is a family resemblance here to Fr Dumitru Stăniloae’s Romanian Filocalia, where a translator’s commentary swelled until it became a theology in its own right (see The Added Commentary). Stăniloae and Clément arrived at the same solution to the same problem from opposite ends of Europe: how to think theologically in the twentieth century without either repeating the manuals or inventing a system.

The objections the form invites

The anthology is not an innocent form, and three objections to it are worth stating properly. They are developed further, with their answers, in Ecumenism, Method and the Anthology.

1. Decontextualization. An excerpt is a text with its argument amputated. St Gregory of Nyssa’s sentences about the infinity of God belong inside a polemic against Eunomius; Origen’s about the soul’s ascent belong inside a cosmology parts of which the Church later condemned. An anthology can make the tradition look more unanimous than it was, and can silently pass over the places where a Father was corrected.

2. The editor’s invisible hand. Because the anthologist does not argue, he cannot be answered. The selection carries the thesis and the reader has no way to see what was left out. A monograph exposes its argument to refutation; a florilegium exposes only its taste.

3. Spirituality without the Church. By presenting the patristic material as a spiritual path accessible to any serious reader, the form risks detaching that path from the sacramental and ecclesial body in which the Fathers assumed it was walked. This is the charge with the most force behind it, because the book’s success outside Orthodoxy is real: readers who have no intention of being baptized use The Roots of Christian Mysticism as a manual of prayer.

What can be said on the other side. Clément’s defenders answer, first, that the objection proves too much — it would indict the Philokalia and the conciliar florilegia along with him; second, that the commentary in Sources is precisely what distinguishes it from a bare excerpt-book, and that the commentary is relentlessly ecclesial and sacramental, insisting on baptism, eucharist and the Church at every turn; and third, that the alternative to a well-made anthology is not that Western readers meet the Fathers in critical editions, but that they do not meet them at all.

The method beyond Sources

The anthological habit runs through the whole corpus. Le Chant des larmes (1982) is an essay on repentance built around the Great Canon of St Andrew of Crete; Trois prières (1993) is a commentary on three received texts — the Lord’s Prayer, “O Heavenly King,” and the prayer of St Ephrem; Corps de mort et de gloire (1995) gathers his own earlier articles and draws freely on Scripture, the patristic tradition and Christian literature, as its reviewer noted (Jean-Claude Larchet, review in Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 77, no. 1 [1997]: 94). Even the two books of conversations with Patriarchs Athenagoras and Bartholomew are a species of the same thing: Clément setting down another’s words and framing them.

He was, throughout, a passeur — the word he used of Lossky and Evdokimov (see Lossky the Teacher). A ferryman does not manufacture the cargo.

References

Clément, Olivier. Sources: Les mystiques chrétiens des origines. Textes et commentaires. Paris: Stock, 1982.
Clément, Olivier. Le Chant des larmes: essai sur le repentir. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, coll. “Théophanie,” 1982. English: The Song of Tears: An Essay on Repentance Based on the Great Canon of St Andrew of Crete. Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2021.
Clément, Olivier. Trois prières: le Notre Père, la prière au Saint-Esprit, la prière de saint Éphrem. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1993. English: Three Prayers: The Lord’s Prayer, O Heavenly King, the Prayer of Saint Ephrem. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000.
Clément, Olivier. Corps de mort et de gloire: petite introduction à une théopoétique du corps. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, coll. “Théophanie,” 1995.
Larchet, Jean-Claude. Review of Olivier Clément, Corps de mort et de gloire. Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 77, no. 1 (January–March 1997): 94. (Available via Persée, persee.fr.)
Philokalia. Ed. St Macarius of Corinth and St Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain. Venice, 1782.
“Olivier Clément.” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org), bibliography.