Reading the Fathers for a Secular Readership

Clément’s distinctive achievement was to present the Fathers to readers who had no reason to care about them — and to do it without the two standard evasions, the antiquarian and the apologetic. This file sets out the working rules that can be reconstructed from his practice, the place of that practice within the neo-patristic movement, and the standing question of what such translation costs.

Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)

The problem he set himself

By the middle of the twentieth century the Greek Fathers were available in the West in three registers, none of them much use to a general reader.

The scholarly register: critical editions and monographs, addressed to specialists — Migne, later the Sources chrétiennes series begun at Lyon in 1942, the German and English patrologies. Indispensable, and unreadable for anyone outside the guild.
The confessional register: the Fathers cited as ammunition, in Catholic manuals against Protestants, in Orthodox polemic against the Latins, in Anglican appeals to antiquity. Here the Fathers appear only as witnesses in someone else’s trial.
The devotional register: pious excerpting, usually moralized, usually stripped of the metaphysics that made the moral counsel intelligible.

Clément’s readership was outside all three: French readers, mostly baptized Catholics who no longer practised or who had never been given anything at all, of the kind he had been himself. What he wanted was for the Fathers to be read the way one reads a living writer — as someone making a claim on the reader now.

The working rules

Clément never wrote a methodological manifesto. But the practice is consistent enough across Sources (1982), Le Chant des larmes (1982), Trois prières (1993) and the shorter books that the rules can be stated.

1. Lead with experience, not with dogma. The order of exposition is not the order of the creed. Clément typically begins from something the reader already knows — mortality, desire, beauty, the sense of the absurd — and lets the doctrine appear as the account that makes sense of it. This is a pedagogical decision, not a doctrinal one; the dogma arrives intact, but later.

2. Never soften the strangeness. He does not domesticate deification into “spiritual growth,” or the uncreated light into a metaphor, or the resurrection of the body into the immortality of the soul. The material that a modern reader finds most alien — the energies, the transfiguration of the flesh, the demons, the tears of repentance — is exactly what he leaves standing. The translation is of idiom, not of content.

3. Quote at length. The reader is to meet the text, not a summary of it. See The Method of the Anthology.

4. Refuse the polemical frame. Clément almost never introduces a Father as a weapon against the West. Since much of his material predates the schism, the tactic is available to him honestly; and it means that a Catholic or Protestant reader is not obliged to become a partisan before he can listen. This is also, precisely, what his Orthodox critics distrust (see Ecumenism, Method and the Anthology).

5. Write well. Clément was, by common consent, one of the best religious prose stylists writing in French in his generation, and the fact is not decorative. A book of patristic excerpts survives in a secular market only if the prose around the excerpts is worth reading.

L’Église orthodoxe and the kiosk

The most underrated item in his bibliography is the smallest. L’Église orthodoxe appeared in 1961 as volume 949 of the Presses Universitaires de France’s Que sais-je? series — a 128-page pocket paperback, sold everywhere in France, in a series whose whole premise is that any subject can be explained to an intelligent stranger in a train journey’s reading. It was reprinted repeatedly across four decades (French Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément,” bibliography, listing printings from 1961 through 2002).

For an entire French generation, this was the Orthodox Church: not a cathedral, not a liturgy, but a small blue-and-white paperback written by a convert schoolmaster. The English-language equivalent is Metropolitan Kallistos Ware’s The Orthodox Church (Penguin, 1963) — published two years later, in the same kind of series, to the same kind of readership, with the same effect (see Kallistos Ware). That the two books appeared within two years of each other, in the two great mass-market non-fiction series of Europe, is one of the small facts that explains how Orthodoxy became visible in the West at all.

Clément and the neo-patristic movement

The programme of a “return to the Fathers” was announced by Fr Georges Florovsky at the First Congress of Orthodox Theology in Athens in 1936 and became the dominant current of twentieth-century Orthodox thought (see Georges Florovsky and The Patristic Revival). Clément belongs to it, but at an angle, and the angle is worth specifying.

What he shares with it. The conviction that the Fathers are not a historical period but the permanent mind of the Church; the priority of the Greek patristic tradition; the Palamite doctrine of the energies; hostility to the “Western captivity” of Orthodox academic theology.

Where he differs. Florovsky’s neo-patristic synthesis was formulated in polemic — against the Russian religious philosophers, against sophiology, against the Western scholastic idiom. Clément inherited the programme without the polemic. He read Berdyaev with gratitude, paired Lossky with Evdokimov as equals, published Roman Catholic theologians in Contacts, and treated the “two lungs” of Christendom as a real if damaged organism. Where Florovsky’s neo-patristic synthesis is a project of purification, Clément’s is a project of transmission.

[Disputed: whether that difference is a development of the neo-patristic programme or a departure from it. (a) The affirming reading holds that Florovsky's polemical phase was a necessary clearing operation and that Clément represents the constructive phase which the programme was always meant to reach — the Fathers actually handed on rather than merely defended. (b) The critical reading holds that the polemic was not scaffolding but substance, that the "return to the Fathers" was inseparable from a judgment about the West, and that a transmission which suspends that judgment transmits something other than the tradition. The dispute is real and unresolved; this guide states both positions and adjudicates neither.]

What the translation costs

There is a genuine cost, and Clément’s admirers do him no service by denying it.

The ascetic frame recedes. The Fathers Clément anthologizes wrote for monks, in monasteries, under obedience, in a life of fasting and vigil. Presented to a lay reader in a secular society, the same texts arrive without that container. What was a rule of life becomes a source of insight.

The ecclesial condition can become invisible. The patristic authors assume baptism, the eucharist, the bishop, and confession. A reader can take a great deal from The Roots of Christian Mysticism while assuming none of them. Clément’s commentary insists on all four — but the commentary is what a hurried reader skips.

Selection is judgment. Reading the Fathers “for” anyone means choosing which Fathers, and which passages, will do the work. The choices in Sources are defensible and are defended in The Method of the Anthology; they are still choices.

The counter-case is short and strong: the alternative on offer was not a better introduction but no introduction. Before Clément, a French reader who wanted the Greek Fathers had the Sources chrétiennes volumes, in Greek and French on facing pages, at scholarly prices. After him, that reader had a book he could read on the metro. Whatever was lost, that was gained.

References

Clément, Olivier. L’Église orthodoxe. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, coll. “Que sais-je?” no. 949, 1961; repeatedly reprinted to 2002.
Clément, Olivier. Sources: Les mystiques chrétiens des origines. Textes et commentaires. Paris: Stock, 1982.
Clément, Olivier. Le Chant des larmes: essai sur le repentir. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1982.
Clément, Olivier. Trois prières. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1993.
Florovsky, Georges. Address to the First Congress of Orthodox Theology, Athens, 1936; and Ways of Russian Theology, 2 vols. (Collected Works, vols. 5–6). Belmont, MA: Nordland / Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1979–1987.
Ware, Timothy (Kallistos). The Orthodox Church. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.
Sources chrétiennes. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, from 1942.
“Olivier Clément.” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org), bibliography.
Ingpen, Jeremy N. “A New (Old) Book by Olivier Clément: Some Thoughts from the Translator.” Orthodoxy in Dialogue (orthodoxyindialogue.com), 23 January 2019. (Clément as standing “in a direct line of descent from the flowering of theological creativity” that includes Lossky, Bulgakov and Stăniloae, engaging modernity while rooted in the tradition.)