This first English translation of a book that provides a deeper understanding of one of the most original and influential Orthodox thinkers of the twentieth century is to be welcomed. Olivier Clément (1921-2009) tells in this early ‘spiritual autobiography’, first published in French almost fifty years ago (L'autre soleil. Quelques notes d'autobiographie spirituelle, Paris, Stock, 1975), when he was only fifty-four, not so much the story of his life or the account of his conversion, rather, from an inverted perspective, the story of God who surreptitiously introduced Himself into his life, as he explains from the first page: ‘I feel it impossible to talk about myself […] However, I would like to try to talk about him. About how he seeks us out. About how he sought me out, and found me’ (p. 1).
This spiritual itinerary is that of a ‘Mediterranean pagan’, as Olivier Clément defines himself, born into an atheist family from the Cevennes, in South France, a region marked by the wars of religion, Protestantism and socialism. As a precocious child, he wondered about death and God, but those around him, steeped in a culture still marked by Christian values, but no longer rooted in the Gospel, gave him few answers. During the Second World War, Clément joined the French Resistance alongside Alphonse Dupront, his history professor at the University of Montpellier, and young Marxists with whom he entered into dialogue. As a young history teacher in Paris, he was first attracted to Buddhism and Hinduism, then discovered Christianity through reading Dostoyevsky and Nicolas Berdyaev. It was above all his contacts with the theologians of the Russian Orthodox emigration, in particular Vladimir Lossky and Paul Evdokimov, that led him to discover Christ, the ‘other Sun’, and to receive baptism in the Orthodox Church in 1952 in Paris at the age of thirty, an event with which the book ends.
As the title indicates, light is like a thread that runs through the autobiography. The Epilogue of the book sums up perfectly Olivier Clément's path, from the Mediterranean light to the light of God, as he explains in connection with a visit to an Orthodox church in Greece: ‘Going into this church was like a summing up of my entire journey: from an azure sky that was empty to one that was full; from a blue sky enclosed in its own beauty, but with darkness beyond, to one that radiates around the Face of faces, with love filling all that is beyond. From light to another light’ (p. 191).
Yet the two lights – that of the Mediterranean sky and that of Orthodoxy – are not unrelated, as Olivier Clément explains in a passage where he brings the Mediterranean light closer to the ‘Orthodox conception of grace’, interior to things, opposed, according to him, to the Protestant ‘extrinsic grace’ and to the Catholic ‘created grace’: ‘On the few rare occasions in my childhood when, for short periods, I had left the Mediterranean region, everything had seemed black and slimy. The light that occasionally came to rest on things was, as it were, alien, something extraneous. An extrinsic grace, in the sense understood by Protestant theology! Near the Mediterranean, on the other hand, the light is at the very heart of things. Today I would compare this to the Orthodox conception of grace. As for Catholics, they know the light is there but, to be safe, have preferred to depict it in their own way, with all the colours of Thomistic logic. They even call it created grace!’ (p. 79).
Even if certain theological reflections, such as these, may appear too simplistic and give rise to discussion, Olivier Clément's view is never polemical. Just as Lossky and Evdokimov were ‘passeurs’ between East and West, Olivier Clément considers that his vocation is to promote dialogue between Eastern and Western Christianity, or, more precisely, to help Catholicism to ‘rediscover Orthodoxy’ as a dimension internal to itself. As he states, ‘Catholicism has begun what one might call the apprenticeship of freedom. Juridical and philosophical structures have collapsed together, and everywhere people are groping about for the living Tradition, though this is something which cannot be externally imposed. So far, and it is a good thing, Catholicism has attempted to come to terms with the Reformation and socialism. Now, I think it is time for it to rediscover Orthodoxy – not as another confession but as its own roots. Only in this way will it be able to combine freedom and mystery’(p. 148).
In an ecumenical perspective similar to the ‘exchange of gifts’ later promoted by Pope John Paul II, Olivier Clément calls for an encounter between the Eastern mystery of transfiguration and the Western sense of historical responsibility. Indeed, ‘What is needed is a mutually enriching encounter between the Eastern sense of mystery and the Western sense of historical responsibility. Orthodoxy reminds the West that though God was crucified, humanity was deified. The Christian West reminds Orthodoxy that one cannot say without doing. Such an encounter would sketch out the new face of a divine-humanity’ (p. 193).
Olivier Clément's poetic language is not always easy to translate. Michael Donley succeeds in keeping the author's intuitive style in his accurate English edition. His Introduction aptly identifies four major leitmotivs in the autobiography, which are also those of Clément's work and thought: the theme of divine-humanity inherited from Russian religious philosophers; a ‘spirituality of resurrection’ as an antidote to a Western approach – especially in religious art – focusing too much on Christ's death; the insistence of creativity within Tradition and on human freedom (as Clément confesses: ‘I must stress that what prevented me from becoming a Christian at the time I am writing about was the absence, as it seemed to me, of a genuine theology of freedom as well as of any real theology of the Holy Spirit, of any actual experience of the Holy Spirit’, p. 143); and the importance of a ‘philokalic’ access to God through Transfiguration and beauty. The division into chapters and insertion of subtitles by Donley facilitate the reading of the text, the original of which is in one piece. Finally, the translator's notes will be of great help to the English-speaking reader not necessarily familiar with the French cultural context of the mid-twentieth century or with Orthodox terminology and references.
In short, this first English edition of The Other Sun not only translates but makes more accessible a classic book of twentieth-century Orthodox literature. In this respect it allows Olivier Clément's thought to continue its dialogue between East and West, and also between Christian tradition and the questions of contemporary societies, to which his youth and interests has made him particularly attentive. This translation is a great service to all those who, in the East and in the West, strive to be, as Clément was, ‘passeurs’.
