09 — Legacy and Assessment

Clément died in Paris on 15 January 2009, aged eighty-seven, and was buried at Marsillargues in the Hérault, some forty kilometres from Aniane where he was born. He left about thirty books, a review he had run for half a century, a lay movement, and a French-speaking Orthodoxy that had not existed when he was baptized. This section catalogues the corpus and offers a provisional assessment.

Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)

On the provisionality. Clément has been dead for seventeen years at the time of writing. That is long enough for the shape of a career to be visible and much too short for the Church’s judgment on a contested figure to have settled. The assessment offered here is the judgment of a moment still close to the events, and is marked as such — following the practice this repository adopts for recently reposed figures.

File	Focus
The Clément Corpus	The bibliography: French works with publishers and dates, English translations with translators where verifiable, and what has and has not crossed into English
Influence and Assessment	What he changed; the standing of his books; the verdicts of those who knew him and of the scholarship; a provisional summing-up

See Also

• 08 — The Critique — the arguments any assessment must reckon with
• Vladimir Lossky; Paul Evdokimov; Elisabeth Behr-Sigel — the French Orthodox generation to which he belonged
• The Ecumenism Debate