Atheism, Nihilism and the Return of the Religious

A substantial part of Clément’s writing was addressed not to the Church but to the culture: L’Esprit de Soljénitsyne (1974) on the Russian dissident as a spiritual event; La Révolte de l’Esprit (1979), written with the Catholic priest Stan Rougier, on the spiritual situation of the day; Les Visionnaires: essai sur le dépassement du nihilisme (1986); the collection Anachroniques (1990); and Un respect têtu (1989), a book of exchanges on Islam and Christianity with the Tunisian historian Mohamed Talbi.

Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)

The situation Clément was writing into

France in the second half of the twentieth century was the most thoroughly dechristianized major country in Western Europe, and its intellectual life had been dominated in succession by three post-Christian settlements: existentialism, Marxism, and structuralism. By the mid-1970s all three were visibly exhausted, and commentators began speaking of a retour du religieux — a return of the religious that was not a return to the churches. Interest in religion revived as private spiritual search, in Asian forms, in esotericism, in the sects, and in a diffuse and consumerist “spirituality.”

Clément had walked that road personally, thirty years earlier, and reached its end (see The Search and the Baptism). His writing about the spiritual situation of the West is therefore neither the alarm of an insider watching outsiders nor the enthusiasm of an apologist scenting opportunity. It is the report of a man who had made the same search and thought most of it a dead end — but who refused to say that the hunger driving it was illegitimate.

Solzhenitsyn

L’Esprit de Soljénitsyne (Paris: Stock, coll. “Le Monde ouvert,” 1974), 384 pp., appeared in the year Alexander Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union — the year the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago was published in the West and detonated in French intellectual life, where a large part of the intelligentsia had been Marxist or fellow-travelling. An English version appeared as The Spirit of Solzhenitsyn (1976) (English Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément,” bibliography). Clément also published a related essay, “Soljénitsyne ou l’avènement de la conscience,” in the Revue théologique de Louvain 5, no. 1 (1974): 47–54 (French Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément,” list of articles).

The book reads Solzhenitsyn not primarily as a political witness but as a religious one: the recovery of conscience, of personal responsibility, and of the reality of good and evil against an ideology that had abolished all three. For Clément the significance of the moment was that the deepest critique of the great atheist experiment had arrived in explicitly Christian terms, from inside Russia, and from an Orthodox writer.

Nihilism and its overcoming

Les Visionnaires: essai sur le dépassement du nihilisme (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, coll. “Connivence,” 1986), 264 pp., is the most direct statement of the theme (French Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément,” bibliography). The title is exact: an essay on the overcoming of nihilism, not on its refutation.

The distinction matters. Clément did not think nihilism could be argued away, because he did not think it was primarily an error in reasoning. He treated it as the accurate perception of a world from which God has been withdrawn — and therefore as a condition to be passed through rather than a mistake to be corrected. What overcomes it is not a better argument but a different fact: the resurrection, and the experience of a reality that death does not have the last word over.

This is why his Christian address to unbelief so rarely takes the form of apologetics in the classical sense. He proposes almost no proofs. He describes.

La Révolte de l’Esprit: repères pour la situation spirituelle d’aujourd’hui, written with the Roman Catholic priest Stan Rougier (Paris: Stock, coll. “Le Monde ouvert,” 1979), 439 pp., is the survey volume of the same enterprise — a joint Orthodox–Catholic reading of the spiritual situation, offered as “landmarks” rather than as a system (French Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément,” bibliography). Anachroniques (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1990), 363 pp., collects shorter interventions; the title is a wry claim about being deliberately out of step with the times.

He also wrote, unusually for an Orthodox theologian, on suicide — an essay and a published exchange with the oncologist Léon Schwartzenberg in the review Autres Temps in 1988 — and returned to the subject in Corps de mort et de gloire, where he set compassion explicitly against “sterile moralism” (French Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément,” list of articles; Jean-Claude Larchet, review of Corps de mort et de gloire, Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 77, no. 1 [1997]: 94).

Islam, and the other religions

Un respect têtu: islam et christianisme, with Mohamed Talbi (Paris: Nouvelle Cité, coll. “Rencontres,” 1989), 311 pp., is a book of exchanges between Clément and the Tunisian historian of Islam — one of the leading Muslim advocates of a historically critical and liberal reading of the Islamic tradition (French Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément,” bibliography). The title — “a stubborn respect” — states the method.

Behind this lies the wider and more contested question of Clément’s approach to non-Christian religion. The repository’s Seraphim Rose collection registers the point directly: Clément is named among “theologians influenced by the Paris school” who “have explored the concept of ‘seeds of the Word’ (logoi spermatikoi, following St. Justin Martyr) in non-Christian religions, suggesting that elements of truth and grace exist in other traditions as a preparation for the Gospel” — a position that collection sets against Fr Seraphim Rose’s much sterner reading of Eastern religion (see Eastern Religions Critique).

The two positions should be stated fairly.

The “seeds of the Word” position, which Clément held, appeals to St Justin Martyr’s teaching that the Word who is Christ has sown fragments of himself throughout human history, so that whatever is true anywhere is his; and to the practice of the Greek Fathers, who took what they could use from Hellenic philosophy. On this account, engagement with Hinduism, Buddhism or Islam is not a compromise but an act of recognition — and Clément’s own biography is the illustrative case, since his years in the wisdoms of Asia were, on this reading, a preparation and not a detour.

The opposing position, argued most forcefully in English by Fr Seraphim Rose, holds that the modern religious revival is not a preparation for the Gospel but a rival to it, that its spiritual experiences may be real and yet not of God, and that a theology which finds grace distributed through the religions has conceded the uniqueness of the Church. That case is set out in the repository at Seraphim Rose.

[Disputed: how far the "seeds of the Word" tradition extends. Both parties claim St Justin. The dispute is not over whether truth exists outside the Church — no Orthodox party denies that — but over whether that truth constitutes a *praeparatio evangelica* to be met with recognition, or a snare to be met with warning. This is a live intra-Orthodox disagreement and this guide adjudicates nothing.]

The tone, and the objection to it

Clément’s characteristic move, in all this material, is to grant the unbeliever’s premises as far as they will go. Modern atheism is right that the God of a certain kind of religion is dead; nihilism is right about a world without God; the spiritual seekers of the retour du religieux are right that the hunger is real. What he then offers is not a rebuttal but a fact of a different order.

The strength of this is obvious and the risk is equally so, and his translator names it from the friendly side: Ingpen reports that Clément foresaw dangers on both flanks — “Christianity on steroids” and new forms of gnosticism — and offers his work as “a greatly needed breath of fresh air” against moralism and fundamentalism within Orthodox circles (Jeremy N. Ingpen, “A New (Old) Book by Olivier Clément,” Orthodoxy in Dialogue, 23 January 2019). Readers who hold that the greater present danger runs the other way — that Orthodoxy in the West is more likely to dissolve into the surrounding spirituality than to harden into fundamentalism — will read the same passages as evidence for the prosecution. That argument is taken up in 08 — The Critique.

References

Clément, Olivier. L’Esprit de Soljénitsyne. Paris: Stock, coll. “Le Monde ouvert,” 1974. English: The Spirit of Solzhenitsyn. 1976.
Clément, Olivier. “Soljénitsyne ou l’avènement de la conscience.” Revue théologique de Louvain 5, no. 1 (1974): 47–54.
Clément, Olivier, and Stan Rougier. La Révolte de l’Esprit: repères pour la situation spirituelle d’aujourd’hui. Paris: Stock, coll. “Le Monde ouvert,” 1979.
Clément, Olivier. Les Visionnaires: essai sur le dépassement du nihilisme. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, coll. “Connivence,” 1986.
Clément, Olivier, and Mohamed Talbi. Un respect têtu: islam et christianisme. Paris: Nouvelle Cité, coll. “Rencontres,” 1989.
Clément, Olivier. Anachroniques. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1990.
Clément, Olivier. “Le suicide,” and “Entretien sur le suicide” (with Léon Schwartzenberg). Autres Temps: les cahiers du christianisme social, no. 20 (1988): 37–42, 43–51.
Larchet, Jean-Claude. Review of Olivier Clément, Corps de mort et de gloire. Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 77, no. 1 (1997): 94.
Ingpen, Jeremy N. “A New (Old) Book by Olivier Clément: Some Thoughts from the Translator.” Orthodoxy in Dialogue (orthodoxyindialogue.com), 23 January 2019.
“Olivier Clément.” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org), bibliography and list of articles.
“Olivier Clément.” English Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org). (The Spirit of Solzhenitsyn, 1976.)