Eros, the Person and the Face

Questions sur l’homme (Stock, 1972), Englished as On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology, is Clément’s general account of what a human being is. Its centre is the category of the person — irreducible to nature, constituted in relation, disclosed in the face — and its most distinctive move is the treatment of eros not as a problem for the spiritual life but as one of its materials.

Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)

The book

Questions sur l’homme… (Paris: Stock, coll. “Questions,” 1972), 221 pp.; reissued by Anne Sigier in 1989 (French Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément,” bibliography). The English translation is On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2000; also issued in the United Kingdom by New City, ISBN 0904287726). The three-dot ellipsis in the French title is Clément’s own, and the point of it is that the book is a series of questions rather than a system.

Person and nature

The organizing distinction is the one Clément took from Lossky, who took it from the Cappadocians and St Maximus the Confessor: the difference between nature (physis, ousia) — what a thing is, shared with others of its kind — and person (hypostasis, prosopon) — who someone is, unrepeatable, not a specimen of anything.

The distinction was forged in the Trinitarian and Christological controversies: one divine nature in three persons; one person of Christ in two natures. Lossky’s move, which shaped a whole generation, was to carry it into anthropology — the human person is not a part of human nature nor an instance of it, but the one who has a nature, and who is therefore free with respect to it (see Vladimir Lossky, Person and Nature and the hub essay on Lossky).

Clément takes that inheritance and does two things with it.

He makes it existential. In Lossky the distinction does most of its work as dogmatic grammar. In Clément it becomes a description of ordinary experience: the difference between being treated as a function and being addressed as a you; between a face and a physiognomy; between a body used and a body loved.

He connects it to freedom, via Berdyaev. Nicolas Berdyaev — the Russian philosopher of freedom and personality who had died in Paris in 1948, and one of the authors who brought Clément to Christianity — supplied the vocabulary in which a French intellectual of the 1950s could hear the patristic claim: that the person is not derivable from nature, from society, or from necessity, and that freedom is therefore not an illusion produced by ignorance of causes. Clément devoted a book to him twenty years later, Berdiaev: un philosophe russe en France (Desclée de Brouwer, 1991).

The relation to Berdyaev is also the point at which the neo-patristic purists grow uneasy: Berdyaev is a religious philosopher, not a Father, and his personalism is not simply the Cappadocians restated (see Ecumenism, Method and the Anthology; the parallel debate over Evdokimov’s sophiological inheritance is treated at How Much Sophiology).

The face

Clément’s recurrent image for the person is the face — the point at which a body becomes a summons. He published a book under that title, Le Visage intérieur (Stock, 1978; reissued 2001 and 2017), and the theme recurs everywhere in the corpus: the face as the place where the image of God in a human being becomes visible and unavoidable, the face of the icon, the face of Christ, the face of the poor.

Two consequences follow.

Theological. The image of God in man is not a faculty located somewhere inside him — not reason, not free will considered as a mechanism — but the whole person in his capacity for relation. This is the patristic teaching on the image and likeness (see Theological Anthropology), and it links directly to the theology of the icon, where the face of a deified person is painted precisely because grace has become visible in flesh (see Holy Icons and Icons and Iconoclasm).

Ethical. If the person is disclosed in the face, then the fundamental moral fact is not a rule but an encounter. Clément’s ethics — such as they are, and he never wrote a systematic moral theology despite holding the chair of moral theology at St Sergius — proceed from there.

Eros

Clément’s account of eros has three moves.

1. Eros is not the enemy of agape. He refuses the standard modern partition — usually traced to Anders Nygren’s Eros and Agape (1930–1936) — by which eros is acquisitive human desire and agape divine self-giving love, with the two set in opposition. The Greek Fathers, and above all St Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius the Areopagite, used eros freely of the soul’s love for God and even of God’s love for the world. Clément stands with them.

2. Eros is a movement of the whole person toward another person, and is therefore capable of God. Desire is not a bodily appetite that the spirit must supervise; it is the person in motion. Consequently desire can be misdirected — this is what the tradition calls passion in the pejorative sense — but it cannot be simply suppressed without damaging the person himself. The ascetic task is the reordering of eros, not its extinction (see Body of Death and Body of Glory).

3. In marriage, eros is sacramental. The love of husband and wife is not tolerated but consecrated, and Clément treats the marriage rite’s crowns as meaning what they say: a martyrdom and a kingdom. Here he stands beside Evdokimov’s Sacrement de l’amour (1962) and Yannaras’s Person and Eros (1970), the three of them constituting the twentieth-century Orthodox recovery of a theology of sexual love (see Paul Evdokimov and Christos Yannaras).

The frankness is deliberate. Clément believed that a Church which could not speak about the body except in warnings had conceded the subject to everyone else — and that the concession was theologically indefensible, since the Word became flesh.

[Disputed: whether the emphasis is proportionate. The affirming reading holds that Clément recovered a genuinely patristic account of eros that Western Christianity had largely lost and that Orthodox practice had often left unarticulated. The critical reading — voiced generally rather than in a single named source — holds that the modern Orthodox literature on eros and marriage risks flattering a culture already saturated with sexual self-expression, and that the tradition's ascetic and monastic centre of gravity is thereby displaced. This guide reports both and adjudicates neither.]

Where the anthropology leads

Clément’s anthropology is not a self-standing discipline; it opens directly onto three other things.

  • Theosis. If the person is capable of relation to God and the body is capable of glory, then deification is the natural terminus of the account (see Theosis). Clément’s near-contemporary Panayiotis Nellas made this the explicit architecture of an anthropology in Deification in Christ (see Panayiotis Nellas).
  • The cosmos. The human person is, for Clément as for the Fathers, the priest of creation — the one through whom the material world is offered and returned. This is the root of his ecological writing, and it converges with the theology developed independently by Metropolitan John Zizioulas and by Patriarch Bartholomew (see Environmental Ethics and John Zizioulas).
  • The address to unbelief. An anthropology that begins from freedom and the face is one that a secular reader can enter without first conceding anything. That was the design (see 05 — The Fathers for the Modern West).

See Also

References

  • Clément, Olivier. Questions sur l’homme…. Paris: Stock, coll. “Questions,” 1972; repr. Anne Sigier, 1989. English: On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2000 (ISBN 9781565481435); UK edition New City, ISBN 0904287726.
  • Clément, Olivier. Le Visage intérieur. Paris: Stock, 1978; repr. 2001; Salvator, 2017.
  • Clément, Olivier. Berdiaev: un philosophe russe en France. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1991.
  • Clément, Olivier. Corps de mort et de gloire: petite introduction à une théopoétique du corps. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1995.
  • Evdokimov, Paul. Sacrement de l’amour. Paris: Éditions de l’Épi, 1962.
  • Nygren, Anders. Den kristna kärlekstanken genom tiderna: Eros och Agape. Stockholm, 1930–1936. English: Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson. London: SPCK, 1953.
  • Yannaras, Christos. Person and Eros. Trans. Norman Russell. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007. (Greek original, Athens, 1970.)
  • “Olivier Clément.” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org), bibliography. (Questions sur l’homme, Stock 1972, 221 pp.; Le Visage intérieur, Stock 1978.)
  • “Olivier Clément.” English Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org). (On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology, New City Press, 2000.)