Ecumenism, Method and the Anthology

Beyond the papal question, four further criticisms attach to Clément: that his ecumenical practice blurred the line between charity and communion; that his openness to the non-Christian religions conceded too much; that the anthological method smooths the tradition and detaches its spirituality from the Church; and that his personalism owes more to Berdyaev and to modern philosophy than to the Fathers he cites. This file states each, and the counter-case.

Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)

1. The ecumenical practice

The objection. Orthodox canonical tradition treats liturgical participation as an expression of communion, and communion as presupposing unity of faith; the canons against common prayer with the heterodox exist because prayer is not a neutral act. Clément spent fifty years on the near side of that line: lecturing at Roman Catholic institutions of formation — the Institut Supérieur d’Études Œcuméniques, the École Cathédrale of the Paris archdiocese, the Jesuit Centre Sèvres (French OrthodoxWiki, “Olivier Clément”); publishing Catholic theologians in Contacts; writing at Taizé (Taizé, un sens à la vie, 1997) and counting Brother Roger among his friends (Orthodox Church in America, “In Memoriam: Olivier Clément”); and, in 1998, composing the meditations for a papal liturgy at the Colosseum. The objection is not that any single act crossed a canonical line but that the cumulative effect was to teach, in practice, that the line does not matter.

The counter-case. Clément held no ecclesiastical office and administered no sacraments. He did not concelebrate, did not commune, and did not at any point teach that the Orthodox Church is one denomination among several. The Ecumenical Patriarchate under which he served has been the most consistently engaged of all the Local Churches in the ecumenical movement since the encyclical of 1920, and Clément’s activity was carried out within, not against, the policy of his own Church (see The Ecumenism Debate). The Crete Council of 2016 affirmed such participation as “witness and responsibility, not compromise,” while ruling out any notion of the “equality of Confessions” — a formula under which Clément’s own practice can be defended and by which it can also be measured.

2. The non-Christian religions

The objection. Clément held a “seeds of the Word” account of the religions — the patristic doctrine, from St Justin Martyr, that the Word has sown fragments of himself throughout human history, so that whatever is true anywhere is Christ’s. The repository’s Seraphim Rose collection names him among the theologians of the Paris school who developed this, “suggesting that elements of truth and grace exist in other traditions as a preparation for the Gospel” (Eastern Religions Critique). The objection, argued most forcefully in English by Fr Seraphim Rose, is that the modern religious revival is a rival to the Gospel and not a preparation for it; that spiritual experience outside the Church may be real and yet not of God; and that a theology which distributes grace across the religions has conceded the uniqueness of the Church without noticing (see Seraphim Rose).

The counter-case. Clément’s own biography is the argument: he came to Christ through a decade in the wisdoms of Asia, and he never held that those years had been salvific in themselves — only that the search had been genuine and had been answered. His book with Mohamed Talbi, Un respect têtu (1989), is an exchange, not a synthesis; nothing in it proposes that Islam and Christianity are versions of one thing. And the “seeds of the Word” doctrine is not a modern invention: the Fathers’ relation to Hellenic philosophy is the standing precedent.

[Disputed: whether the "seeds of the Word" tradition licenses Clément's degree of openness. Both parties claim St Justin. The disagreement is not over whether truth exists outside the Church but over whether it constitutes a preparation to be met with recognition or a snare to be met with warning. Live intra-Orthodox dispute; no adjudication here.]

3. The anthology as a form

The objection. Three parts, set out at greater length in The Method of the Anthology.

Decontextualization: an excerpt is a text with its argument amputated. Origen’s ascent-passages sit inside a cosmology parts of which were later condemned; Gregory of Nyssa’s on divine infinity sit inside a polemic. An anthology can make the tradition look more unanimous than it was, and can pass in silence over the places where a Father was corrected.
The invisible hand: because an anthologist does not argue, he cannot be refuted. The reader sees the selection but not the omissions.
Spirituality detached from the Church: the book’s largest audience has always been non-Orthodox, and much of it non-practising. Readers with no intention of baptism use The Roots of Christian Mysticism as a manual of prayer. On the objection, this is not an accidental misuse but a predictable consequence of the form: a spirituality presented as accessible to any serious reader will be taken up by readers who take up nothing else.

The counter-case. The objection proves too much: it would indict the conciliar florilegia and the Philokalia along with Clément (see The Philokalia). Sources is not a bare excerpt-book — the commentary is half the volume, and it is relentlessly ecclesial and sacramental, insisting on baptism, eucharist, confession and the Church throughout. And the realistic alternative was never that Western readers would meet the Fathers in critical editions; it was that they would not meet them at all.

4. Berdyaev, and the neo-patristic purists

The objection. Clément’s personalism — the person as irreducible to nature, freedom as the mark of the person, the face as the site of the image of God — is expounded in patristic terms but was learned, in the first instance, from Nicolas Berdyaev, whose vocabulary of personality and freedom is that of modern religious philosophy rather than of the Cappadocians. On the strict neo-patristic view associated with Fr Georges Florovsky, that lineage is precisely the problem: Russian religious philosophy is the “Western captivity” of Orthodox thought in a new guise, and to build an anthropology on it while citing the Fathers is to run a modern engine under a patristic hood. The same charge, in its sharper form, was pressed against Fr Sergius Bulgakov’s sophiology and, in a milder form, against Paul Evdokimov (see Sergius Bulgakov and How Much Sophiology, and the Counter-Reading).

The counter-case. Clément never proposed a sophiology and never advanced a metaphysical doctrine of his own; what he took from Berdyaev was an idiom, not a system. His actual doctrinal commitments — apophaticism, the essence–energies distinction, deification, the person–nature distinction — are Lossky’s, and Lossky was the movement’s own leading French-language voice (see Lossky the Teacher). If reading Berdyaev with gratitude disqualifies a theologian, the disqualification will reach further than its authors intend.

5. The charge of “Paris School liberalism”

The four foregoing objections are often gathered under a single label. The traditionalist critique of the “Paris School” holds that the St Sergius milieu produced a permanently accommodating Orthodoxy — open to the West, at ease with modernity, impatient with ascetic strictness — and that Clément is among its purest specimens. The English-language site Orthodox England, in an article titled “The Paris School and the Future,” places him among French ecumenists whose positions it regards as approaching Roman Catholicism and Protestantism as closely as is possible short of lapsing, and argues that the Paris School generated theological problems not present in Lossky. [Disputed: this guide could not retrieve that article directly and relies on a secondary summary; the wording is a characterization, not a quotation, and its authorship is not established here.]

Three things should be said in response, none of which settles the matter.

The label is too broad to be useful. “The Paris School” is a construction that lumps together Bulgakov and Lossky, who were opponents in the sharpest intra-Orthodox controversy of the century (see Sergius Bulgakov and Vladimir Lossky). Whether it names anything real is itself contested among historians of the period.

Clément’s own record is mixed against the charge. His theology of the body, the point at which a “liberal” would be most exposed, was praised by Jean-Claude Larchet — a convert patristic scholar of exacting traditional temper — for its “remarkable sensitivity” and its Christian sophistication (Larchet, review of Corps de mort et de gloire, Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 77, no. 1 [1997]: 94). His most influential book is an anthology of the Fathers.

But the charge is not answered by that. The specific objections — on the papal proposal, on the effect of ecumenical gestures on the faithful, on the religions — are objections to particular positions and are not disposed of by pointing to the anthology. They are stated at full strength in The Papal-Primacy Question.

The friendly critique from the other side

It should be recorded that Clément has also been criticized for the opposite fault. His translator Jeremy Ingpen presents him as a corrective to “moralism and fundamentalism within Orthodox circles” and reports that Clément foresaw the dangers of a “Christianity on steroids” and of new gnosticisms (Ingpen, “A New (Old) Book by Olivier Clément,” Orthodoxy in Dialogue, 23 January 2019). Readers who share that diagnosis will find Clément not too accommodating but exactly timely; readers who think the greater danger runs the other way will read the same pages as evidence for the prosecution. Where a man’s writing is read as an antidote by one party and as a symptom by the other, both are usually responding to something real in it.

References

Clément, Olivier. Sources: Les mystiques chrétiens des origines. Paris: Stock, 1982.
Clément, Olivier, and Mohamed Talbi. Un respect têtu: islam et christianisme. Paris: Nouvelle Cité, 1989.
Clément, Olivier. Taizé, un sens à la vie. Paris: Bayard/Centurion, 1997. English: Taizé: A Meaning to Life. Chicago: GIA, 1997.
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.
Orthodox Church in America. “In Memoriam: Olivier Clément.” oca.org, January 2009. (Dialogue with Athenagoras, John Paul II, Brother Roger of Taizé and Bartholomew.)
“Olivier Clément.” French OrthodoxWiki (fr.orthodoxwiki.org). (Teaching at the Institut Supérieur d’Études Œcuméniques, the École Cathédrale and Centre Sèvres; participation in Catholic–Orthodox dialogue and Orthodox–Protestant encounters.)
“The Paris School and the Future.” Orthodox England (orthodoxengland.org.uk). (Consulted via secondary summary; see the note in the text.)
Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church. Relations of the Orthodox Church with the Rest of the Christian World, Crete, June 2016, §§18–19.