04 — Spiritual Anthropology
Clément wrote about the human person, the body, and sexual love with a directness and a beauty rare in modern Orthodox theology. Questions sur l’homme (1972; English On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology) and Corps de mort et de gloire (1995) are the two poles of this work: the first a general anthropology, the second a “theopoetics of the body” that takes on eros, fasting, silence, death, and the bioethical questions of the late twentieth century.
Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)
This is the part of Clément’s corpus least known in English and most characteristic of him. It is also the part where his convert’s biography shows most plainly: a man who had spent his youth among people for whom the body was either a machine or a means of pleasure, writing from inside a tradition that calls it a temple and expects it to rise.
The doctrinal foundations are not his own invention — they are the patristic and Palamite anthropology he took from Lossky and the Fathers, and the repository sets them out at Theological Anthropology and Theosis. What is Clément’s own is the application: the insistence that the transfiguration of the flesh is not a metaphor, and that eros is material for sanctification rather than an embarrassment to be managed.
| File | Focus |
|---|---|
| Body of Death and Body of Glory | Corps de mort et de gloire (1995): the body as person, the hesychast body, fasting and silence, death, and the bioethical chapters — with Jean-Claude Larchet’s review |
| Eros, the Person and the Face | Questions sur l’homme / On Human Being; the transfiguration of desire; the person as face; the debt to Berdyaev and Lossky; the relation to Evdokimov and Yannaras |
See Also
- Theological Anthropology — the doctrinal frame
- Paul Evdokimov — The Sacrament of Love, the neighbouring project
- Christos Yannaras — Person and Eros, the Greek parallel
- Vladimir Lossky — the theology of person and nature that underlies all of it