05 — The Fathers for the Modern West
Clément’s lifelong project was to make the patristic tradition audible to a secularized Western readership — not by diluting it, but by removing the archaeological glass case from in front of it. That project had a second face: a sustained engagement with modern unbelief, with nihilism, and with what French commentators of the 1970s and 1980s called the retour du religieux, the return of the religious.
Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)
The two files in this section treat the positive and the negative sides of one enterprise. The first asks what Clément did to the Fathers to make them speak in French to people with no Christian formation. The second asks what he thought he was speaking to: the specific condition of a culture that had lost its faith without losing its hunger.
| File | Focus |
|---|---|
| Reading the Fathers for a Secular Readership | The rules Clément worked by; the Que sais-je? on the Orthodox Church; what “translation” costs and what it gains; his place in the neo-patristic movement |
| Atheism, Nihilism and the Return of the Religious | L’Esprit de Soljénitsyne (1974), La Révolte de l’Esprit (1979), Les Visionnaires: essai sur le dépassement du nihilisme (1986), Anachroniques (1990); the dialogue with Islam; the “seeds of the Word” question |
See Also
- 03 — The Roots of Christian Mysticism — the centrepiece of the project
- 01 — From Unbelief to Orthodoxy — the biography behind it
- The Church Fathers — the sources
- Georges Florovsky — the neo-patristic programme in its original form