Dialogues with Patriarch Athenagoras

In the summer of 1968 the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I invited Clément — then a French lycée teacher in his forties, known only in a small Orthodox world — to Istanbul, in order to have the student revolt of May 1968 explained to him. The three weeks of conversation that followed became Dialogues avec le patriarche Athénagoras (Fayard, 1969), the book that made Clément’s reputation.

Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)

The invitation

Athenagoras I (Aristokles Spyrou, 1886–1972) had been Ecumenical Patriarch since 1948. He was by 1968 the most conspicuous Orthodox churchman in the world, chiefly because of what he had done with the Bishop of Rome: the meeting with Pope Paul VI in Jerusalem in January 1964, the first between a pope and an Ecumenical Patriarch since the fifteenth century, and then the Joint Catholic–Orthodox Declaration of 7 December 1965, read simultaneously at St Peter’s and at the Phanar, by which the mutual anathemas of 1054 were lifted from the memory of the Church (see the repository’s account at The Ecumenism Debate and The Great Schism).

In the summer of 1968 Athenagoras invited Clément to Istanbul, and the stated occasion was, characteristically, not theological: the Patriarch wanted the French student uprising of May 1968 explained to him by someone who taught the students. The conversations then ran for about three weeks and ranged over the whole of the Patriarch’s life and work (bookseller and library descriptions of the Fayard volume, e.g. the Église orthodoxe celtique de France notice at eocf.free.fr, “Dialogues avec le Patriarche Athénagoras”; La Grande Ourse and Amazon.fr listings of the Fayard edition). [Disputed: the number and dating of Clément's meetings with Athenagoras. The accounts consulted describe a three-week period of conversation in the summer of 1968; whether all the material in the book derives from that single visit is not established by the sources used here.]

The choice of interlocutor is itself the interesting fact. Athenagoras could have had any Greek theologian; he chose a French convert layman with no ecclesiastical rank. It says something about both men.

The book

Dialogues avec le patriarche Athénagoras (Paris: Fayard, 1969; reprinted 1976, 589 pp.) (French Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément,” bibliography). It was a considerable success in France and remains in print (eocf.free.fr; French bookseller listings). An English edition, Dialogues with Patriarch Athenagoras, has appeared more recently. [Disputed: the details of the English edition. Bookseller records (e.g. alibris, buecher.de) list an English *Dialogues with Patriarch Athenagoras* under Clément's name, but this guide has not been able to verify the translator, publisher and date from a library catalogue and therefore does not state them.]

The book is not an interview in the journalistic sense and not a biography. It is a composite: the Patriarch’s own words at length, his recollections of a life that had run from Epirus through Corfu, Athens and twenty years in America to the Phanar; his reading of the twentieth century; his vision of the Church; and Clément’s framing narrative and commentary. Nearly six hundred pages of it.

The “dialogue of charity”

The phrase used at the time for the Athenagoras–Paul VI rapprochement was the dialogue of charity — the deliberate decision to begin the repair of a thousand-year breach not with the disputed doctrines but with the restoration of ordinary Christian courtesy: mutual visits, exchanged letters, the lifting of the anathemas, the return of relics. The theological dialogue proper followed only later, with the establishment of the Joint International Commission in 1979 (see Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism and The Official Dialogue).

Clément’s book is the principal literary monument of that phase, and it did three things.

It made Athenagoras legible in the West. French readers who knew of the Patriarch only as a figure in a newspaper photograph embracing the Pope met him here at length, in his own voice.

It gave Clément his subject. Everything he later wrote about Rome — Rome, autrement thirty years later, the Colosseum meditations of 1998 — descends from this encounter. The scholarly literature makes the connection explicit: Hugh-Donovan’s study of Clément’s response to Ut Unum Sint is subtitled “and the Ecclesial Legacy of Patriarch Athenagoras I,” and identifies Clément’s collaboration with Athenagoras as one of the “early defining influences” on him (Hugh-Donovan, The Downside Review 134, no. 3 [2016]: 70–87).

It put a lay theologian at the centre of a patriarchal initiative. This was, in 1969, unusual, and it is one of the reasons Clément’s name carries the weight it does in the ecumenical historiography.

The criticism, then and since

The Athenagoras–Paul VI rapprochement was contested inside Orthodoxy from the beginning, and any account of Clément’s part in it that omits the fact is incomplete.

The objections raised at the time. That the anathemas of 1054 had been lifted without any resolution of the doctrinal issues that caused them — the Filioque, the papal claims, and the rest (see Filioque and Papal Primacy); that lifting an anathema is not the same as restoring communion, but that the public gestures blurred the difference; that the Ecumenical Patriarch had acted with insufficient consultation of the other Local Churches; and that the whole enterprise created among the faithful an impression of imminent reunion that the doctrinal situation did not warrant.

Where the objection was loudest. The monasteries of Mount Athos. The protest was sustained and public: Esphigmenou monastery raised black flags over its walls in protest against the meetings between Athenagoras and Paul VI, and the anti-ecumenist current on the Holy Mountain dates its modern intensity from this period (Wikipedia, “Monastic community of Mount Athos”; see Mount Athos). [Disputed: the date usually given for the Esphigmenou black-flag protest. Reference works place it in connection with the Athenagoras–Paul VI meetings; the specific year attached to it varies between accounts. The fact of a sustained Athonite protest against the rapprochement across the later 1960s and early 1970s is not in dispute.]

How this bears on Clément. He was not a party to the patriarchal acts and had no authority in them; he was their interpreter and advocate. But the criticism that later attached to him personally over Rome, autrement is continuous with this earlier controversy, and both sides of it understood that. Per METHODOLOGY §4.2, the dispute is reported here from both sides and adjudicated by neither; the fuller treatment is in The Papal-Primacy Question.

Athenagoras’s own theology, as Clément presents it

Two themes recur, and they are worth naming because they became Clément’s own.

Communion before jurisdiction. Athenagoras’s instinct was that the Church is constituted by eucharistic communion between local churches, not by a legal order superimposed on them — the ecclesiology developed at St Sergius by Fr Nicholas Afanasiev (see Nicholas Afanasiev and Ecclesiology). The whole of Clément’s later argument about the papacy rests on this foundation.

Memory and its healing. The lifting of the anathemas was framed as an act upon memory: not the abolition of a history but the refusal to let it continue to determine the present. Clément took the theme up permanently.

References

Clément, Olivier. Dialogues avec le patriarche Athénagoras. Paris: Fayard, 1969; repr. 1976, 589 pp.
Hugh-Donovan, Stefanie. “An Eastern Orthodox Reflection on Papal Primacy: Olivier Clément’s Response to Ut Unum Sint and the Ecclesial Legacy of Patriarch Athenagoras I.” The Downside Review 134, no. 3 (2016): 70–87. (Clément as a major figure of the “Paris School” from the 1950s; his collaboration with Athenagoras I as an early defining influence.)
“Dialogues avec le Patriarche Athénagoras — Olivier Clément, Fayard.” Notice at eocf.free.fr. (The 1968 invitation to Istanbul; Athenagoras’s wish to have the events of May 1968 explained; three weeks of conversation; the book’s success and its 1976 reprint.)
Joint Catholic–Orthodox Declaration of Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I, 7 December 1965.
“Olivier Clément.” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org), bibliography.
“Monastic community of Mount Athos.” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org). (Athonite opposition to the Athenagoras–Paul VI rapprochement; the Esphigmenou black flags.)