Influence and Assessment

Olivier Clément made Orthodoxy audible in French. He did it as a layman, without office, over fifty years, chiefly by writing well about the Fathers. He also lent his name and his pen to an ecumenical project whose outcome remains contested, and the argument about that project is the argument about him. This file sets out what he changed, what the record shows, and — provisionally, seventeen years after his death — what can reasonably be said.

Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)

What he changed

A French-language Orthodoxy. When Clément was baptized around 1951–1952, Orthodoxy in France was overwhelmingly an affair of Russian and Greek immigrants, worshipping in their own languages, writing in their own languages, and organized as a diaspora. When he died in 2009 there was an Orthodoxy that thought and prayed and published in French: a review he had directed for half a century, a lay fellowship spanning the jurisdictions, a body of translations, a publishing series, and an educated public that knew what the word meant. He was not the sole author of that change — Lossky, Evdokimov, Behr-Sigel, the clergy of several jurisdictions and thousands of ordinary parishioners built it too — but he was its most visible and most persistent agent.

The Fathers on the general market. L’Église orthodoxe in the Que sais-je? series (1961) and Sources (1982) between them put Orthodoxy and the patristic tradition into ordinary French bookshops and kept them there for four decades. The English career of The Roots of Christian Mysticism — two editions, thirty years in print, an audience overwhelmingly outside Orthodoxy — extended the same achievement into a second language (see Sources (1982)).

A lay theological voice. Clément was never ordained and never sought to be. That an unordained schoolmaster could hold a chair at an Orthodox theological institute, direct the leading French Orthodox review, advise the assembled Orthodox bishops of France for thirty years, and be sought out by two Ecumenical Patriarchs and a Pope is a fact about twentieth-century Orthodoxy as much as about him.

An ecumenical position with a name attached. For better or worse — and both are argued — Clément is the person whose name is attached to the proposition that an Orthodox theologian can address the papal question constructively without conceding the papal claims (see 08 — The Critique).

The judgments on record

From the Orthodox Church in America, at his death: Clément was “one of the most significant witnesses of Orthodoxy in the West in the second half of the twentieth century” (OCA, “In Memoriam: Olivier Clément,” January 2009).

From the French Orthodox world: the standard description is “the voice of Orthodoxy” in France (centenaire-archeveche.org, “Olivier Clément”), and the notices consistently rank him among the pioneers and pillars of twentieth-century Orthodox theological renewal (Pages orthodoxes La Transfiguration).

From the scholarship: Stefanie Hugh-Donovan’s studies treat him as a major figure of the “Paris School” from the 1950s and as the significant Orthodox respondent to Ut Unum Sint — the theologian who sought a new paradigm for ecumenism through eucharistic ecclesiology, an ecclesiology of communion, and a synthesis of culture and Christian values (Hugh-Donovan, “Olivier Clément on Orthodox theological thought and ecclesiology in the West,” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 10, nos. 2–3 [2010]; and “An Eastern Orthodox Reflection on Papal Primacy,” The Downside Review 134, no. 3 [2016]: 70–87).

From his translator: Jeremy Ingpen places him “in a direct line of descent from the flowering of theological creativity” that includes Lossky, Bulgakov and Stăniloae — thinkers who engaged modernity fearlessly while staying rooted in the tradition — and commends him as an antidote to moralism and fundamentalism (Ingpen, “A New (Old) Book by Olivier Clément,” Orthodoxy in Dialogue, 23 January 2019).

From an exacting quarter: Jean-Claude Larchet, reviewing Corps de mort et de gloire, praised Clément’s “remarkable sensitivity” to contemporary concerns and the sophistication of his Christian approach (Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 77, no. 1 [1997]: 94).

From the traditionalist side: he is counted among the French ecumenists whose positions approach Roman Catholicism and Protestantism as closely as is possible short of lapsing (Orthodox England, “The Paris School and the Future”; consulted via secondary summary — see The Papal-Primacy Question).

From the Catholic reviewers of You Are Peter: warm, and grateful for the rarity of an Orthodox answer, with reservations about the uniatism material and about the book’s wandering postscript (Adam A. J. DeVille, First Things, November 2004; Catholic Books Review, 2003).

Lines of influence

Downstream of Lossky. The repository’s Lossky collection places Clément in the line of influence running out of the Mystical Theology — with Zizioulas, Yannaras, Sophrony and Stăniloae — and names him “among Lossky’s closest heirs in France,” and later co-editor of the expanded French edition of the dogmatic lectures (see The Corpus and Its Influence).

Advocate for Evdokimov. His pairing of Lossky and Evdokimov as the “two passeurs” is the definitive French statement of Evdokimov’s standing, and is treated as such in the repository’s Evdokimov collection (see Influence and Reception).

The ecological convergence. Clément’s cosmic sacramentalism is one of several independent Orthodox routes to the ecological theology that formed around Patriarch Bartholomew’s initiatives, alongside Stăniloae’s world-as-gift and Zizioulas’s priest-of-creation (see The Priest of Creation and Environmental Ethics).

The convert generation. Clément is the type-case of a phenomenon that has become normal since: the Western European or American convert who becomes a theological voice within Orthodoxy rather than an exotic addition to it.

A provisional assessment

Offered as the judgment of a moment still close to the events, and marked as provisional.

What seems secure. The anthology will last. The Roots of Christian Mysticism has already outlived most of the theology written around it and will probably still be handed to beginners in fifty years, for the same reason that anthologies generally outlive arguments: it contains something other than its editor’s opinions. The theology of the body and the person is likewise durable and, in English, still largely undiscovered. The institutional work — a French Orthodoxy with its own voice — is done and will not be undone.

What remains contested. The ecumenical programme. Clément wrote in a period, running from 1964 to the turn of the century, when reunion between Rome and Orthodoxy could plausibly be described as a live prospect. That period has closed, for reasons largely unconnected with him: the doctrinal core of the division is where it was; the Catholic–Orthodox dialogue has produced agreed texts on the first millennium and has not resolved the second; and Orthodoxy since 2016 has had its own crisis of communion to attend to (see The Crete Council 2016 and Ukraine Autocephaly and the 2018 Schism). Whether Clément’s proposals will look, in another generation, like a road not yet taken or like the artefact of an optimism that could not be sustained is not something this guide can decide, and it declines to pretend otherwise.

What is not in question. He was received into the Orthodox Church as an adult, taught in her institutions for thirty-five years, served her bishops for thirty, wrote some thirty books in her defence and explanation, and died in her communion. He is not a saint, has not been proposed as one, and this guide asserts nothing about his standing before God. He was a serious man who did an enormous amount of work.

The final proportion. If Clément is remembered chiefly for a hundred-page essay about the papacy, the memory will be inaccurate. What he actually did, for fifty years, was hand people the Fathers.

References

Orthodox Church in America. “In Memoriam: Olivier Clément.” oca.org, January 2009.
“Olivier Clément.” Centenary site of the Archdiocese of Russian Orthodox Churches in Western Europe (centenaire-archeveche.org). (“The voice of Orthodoxy” in France; some thirty works; death 15 January 2009 in Paris; burial at Marsillargues.)
“Page Olivier Clément.” Pages orthodoxes La Transfiguration (pagesorthodoxes.net).
Hugh-Donovan, Stefanie. “Olivier Clément on Orthodox theological thought and ecclesiology in the West.” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 10, nos. 2–3 (2010).
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.
Ingpen, Jeremy N. “A New (Old) Book by Olivier Clément: Some Thoughts from the Translator.” Orthodoxy in Dialogue (orthodoxyindialogue.com), 23 January 2019.
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.
DeVille, Adam A. J. Review of You Are Peter. First Things, November 2004.
“Olivier CLÉMONT [sic]: You Are Peter.” Catholic Books Review (catholicbooksreview.org), 2003.
“The Paris School and the Future.” Orthodox England (orthodoxengland.org.uk). (Consulted via secondary summary.)
“Olivier Clément.” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org); English Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org).