Body of Death and Body of Glory

Corps de mort et de gloire: petite introduction à une théopoétique du corps (Desclée de Brouwer, 1995) is Clément’s most concentrated writing on the body. It treats the body as the personal reality of a human being rather than as his possession; sets it in relation to the body of Christ and to the liturgy; gives it a central place in hesychast prayer; and goes on to fasting and silence, the ascetic transformation of desire, eroticism and the sacrament of love, death and what follows it, and the bioethical questions of abortion, contraception and assisted reproduction.

Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)

The book

Corps de mort et de gloire: petite introduction à une théopoétique du corps (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, coll. “Théophanie,” 1995), 139–140 pp. It is a gathering of previously published articles rather than a continuous treatise (Jean-Claude Larchet, review in Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 77, no. 1 [1997]: 94).

The title is Pauline: “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (Romans 7:24), set against “he shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body” (Philippians 3:21). The one body is both. That is the whole argument of the book compressed into five words, and Larchet’s review catches the animating hope exactly: the transformation of “this body of misery” into “a body of glory.”

The subtitle is the more provocative half. A théopoétique du corps — a theopoetics of the body — announces at the outset that this will not be a moral theology of sexual conduct. Clément’s subject is what the body is in a world where God has taken flesh, and the register is deliberately closer to poetry than to casuistry.

The contents, as reported

Larchet’s review lists the book’s territory, and it is worth reproducing because the range is the point:

the personal reality of the body — the body not as something a person has but as the mode in which a person is;
the body’s relation to the body of Christ and its liturgical embodiment;
the central place of the body in hesychast spirituality;
the ascetic transformation of desire;
the spiritual functions of fasting and silence;
eroticism and the sacrament of love;
death and what lies beyond it;
and, in two supplementary sections, the New Age doctrine of reincarnation answered from Christian personalism, and a compassion-based approach to the contemporary epidemic of suicide, explicitly set against “sterile moralism”;
together with the ethical questions raised by abortion, contraception and assisted reproduction.

(Larchet, review of Corps de mort et de gloire, RHPR 77, no. 1 [1997]: 94.)

The body as person

The foundational move is the refusal of dualism in either direction. Clément denies that a human being is a soul temporarily housed in a body, and he denies with equal force that he is an organism which has generated a mind. The body is the person’s own visibility — the way a person is present, is addressed, and addresses. This is straightforwardly the patristic position, worked out against both Platonizing spiritualism and materialism, and the repository sets out its dogmatic form at Theological Anthropology.

Two consequences run through the book.

The body is capable of God. In Palamite terms, the uncreated energies deify the whole man, body included; the light of Tabor is seen with the eyes of a body. This is why hesychasm matters so much to Clément’s anthropology and why the hesychast material occupies a central chapter: the psychosomatic method of the Jesus Prayer — the attention brought down into the heart, the regulation of the breath, the whole body engaged in prayer — is not a curiosity of Byzantine technique but the practical proof that the body prays (see The Jesus Prayer, St Gregory Palamas, and The Jesus Prayer).

The body is liturgical. It is baptized, chrismated, fed with the eucharist, censed, buried and expected to rise. Clément’s account keeps returning to the sacraments as the actual place where the transfiguration of the flesh is transacted, which is the standing answer to the charge that his spirituality floats free of the Church (see The Divine Liturgy and The Holy Mysteries).

Asceticism as the transformation of desire

Clément’s account of asceticism is not renunciation but redirection. Fasting, silence, vigil and continence are not attacks on the body; they are the training by which desire is unhooked from its objects and given back its proper direction, which is God. The passions in the patristic sense are not the emotions but the disordered use of powers that are themselves good — and the ascetic project is therefore the healing of a misdirection, not the amputation of a faculty.

This is standard patristic doctrine, and it is where Clément is least original and most useful, because he states it in a French that a reader with no ascetic vocabulary can follow. It is also where his tone diverges most sharply from a certain register of Orthodox writing. He was insistent — and this is the note his critics dislike — that a Christianity which speaks to the modern West mainly by prohibition has already lost. The supplementary section on suicide, which proposes compassion in place of “sterile moralism,” is the clearest instance (Larchet, review, 94).

Eros and the sacrament of love

The chapter on eroticism and the sacrament of love is the one for which the book is best known. Clément held that sexual love between husband and wife is not a concession to weakness but a place where the person is disclosed and, in the sacrament of marriage, taken up into Christ. He wrote about it with an unembarrassed frankness and a lyricism unusual in the Orthodox theological literature of the period.

He was not alone in this. His colleague at St Sergius, Paul Evdokimov, had published Sacrement de l’amour in 1962, and the repository treats it at length (Marriage as Sacrament and Way); the Greek theologian Christos Yannaras published Το πρόσωπο και ο έρως (Person and Eros) in 1970 (see Christos Yannaras). Clément’s contribution is the least systematic of the three and the most immediately readable. The three should be read together; this guide does not repeat the Evdokimov material.

The further material on desire and the person is treated in Eros, the Person and the Face.

Death, and the bioethical chapters

The book’s last movement turns to death — treated as the enemy that Christ has defeated rather than as a natural transition to be accepted — and to the modern questions in which the status of the body is actually contested: abortion, contraception, assisted reproduction, and the New Age doctrine of reincarnation.

On reincarnation Clément’s answer is anthropological rather than polemical: a person is not a soul cycling through interchangeable bodies, because a person is not detachable from his own history and his own flesh; the Christian hope is the resurrection of this body, not the reissue of a soul (Larchet, review, 94).

On the bioethical questions, Clément wrote as an Orthodox layman engaging problems on which the Orthodox Churches had not, at that date, produced a common conciliar statement. [Disputed: how much authority his positions carry. They are the reflections of a lay theologian, not a synodal document, and this guide does not present them as the teaching of the Church.] For the Church’s own positions and the state of the discussion, see the repository’s treatment at Social Ethics.

The reception

The book was reviewed for the Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses by Jean-Claude Larchet — himself a French convert to Orthodoxy, a patristic scholar and theologian of the body in his own right, and not a man given to indulgence toward the Paris school. Larchet praised Clément’s “remarkable sensitivity” to the concerns of contemporary people and the sophistication of his Christian approach, and noted that he drew freely on Scripture, the patristic tradition and Christian literature (Larchet, review, RHPR 77, no. 1 [1997]: 94).

That endorsement is worth registering carefully, because it complicates the standard picture of Clément as a “liberal” whom traditionally minded Orthodox rejected. On the body — the subject where he was most exposed — the verdict from that quarter was favourable. The serious Orthodox criticism of him concerns the papacy and ecumenism, not his anthropology (see The Critique).

References

Clément, Olivier. Corps de mort et de gloire: petite introduction à une théopoétique du corps. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, coll. “Théophanie,” 1995. 139 pp.
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. (Contents of the volume; Larchet’s assessment of Clément’s “remarkable sensitivity”; the hope of transforming “this body of misery” into “a body of glory.” Available via Persée, persee.fr.)
Clément, Olivier. Questions sur l’homme. Paris: Stock, coll. “Questions,” 1972. English: On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2000.
Evdokimov, Paul. Sacrement de l’amour. Paris: Éditions de l’Épi, 1962. English: The Sacrament of Love, trans. Anthony P. Gythiel and Victoria Steadman. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.
Yannaras, Christos. Person and Eros. Trans. Norman Russell. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007. (Greek original 1970.)
“Olivier Clément.” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org), bibliography.