Nutrientes, Metabolitos y Enzimas

Clément found in Orthodoxy a sense of mystery and a sense of freedom that held the answer he sought to the culture of death he had experienced in atheism and secular society. Michael J Buckley observes that Nietzsche interpreted the metaphor of the Madman in the marketplace: ‘The greatest recent event – that “God is dead”, that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable – is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.’471

John Henry Newman in the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, saw that ‘things are tending [...] to atheism in one shape or other. What a scene, what a prospect does the whole of Europe present at this day [...] and every civilisation through the world, which is under the influence of the European mind.’472

The prophetic nature of Nietzsche and Newman’s assessment pointed to a rise of atheism and the enormity of twentieth-century events in which religious indifference contributed to the possibility of power- hungry ideologues being able to impose totalitarianisms. Clément knew from his own conversion the importance of a personal religious experience that leads to a relationship with Christ in prayer,473 as opposed to the nationalist ‘projection’ that often exists as a moralistic religion ending in indifference to a God who seemed irrelevant. Buckley insists that apophatic theology ‘is primarily an experiential process, a process of entering into the infinite mystery that is God, so that

469 _{Clément, ‘Notes autobiographiques’, p. 409.} 470 _{Ibid., pp. 410-11.}

471 _{Buckley, ‘Atheism’, p. 680. Buckley cites Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book 5 (New}

York: Random House, 1974), p. 279.

472 _{Buckley, ‘Atheism’, p. 681. Buckley cites John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (New}

York, Norton 1968), p. 188.

473 _{Pope Francis I invites all Christians ‘to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at}

least an openness to letting him encounter them.’ Evangelii Gaudium: Apostolic Exhortation on the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World (London: CTS, 2013), p. 7.

gradually one is transformed by grace and this grace moves through the intense experience of darkness into the vision of the incomprehensible God.’474

What is important also here for Clément is that ‘apophatic theology involves both interpretation and criticism, conceptualisation and theological argument.’475 However praxis is essential to understanding: John of the Cross, in The Ascent of Mount Carmel, is not speculatively considering God and man, but affirming theology is essentially an experiential process by which God “takes His abode in a human being by making him (her) live the life of God.”’476 A transformation of the person by grace occurs, the gradual process of becoming God by participation in the divine nature. It is the Spirit of Christ who brings about this passive

transformation of the person through a process of purification, that John of the Cross calls ‘the fire that penetrates a log of wood [...] until it is so disposed that it can be penetrated and transformed into fire.’477

Thérèse of Lisieux, another saint whose journey into darkness transformed her – she trusted in God and resolved to keep faith during the dark night of the soul:478 the apparent absence of God was part of the spiritual journey. At the beginning she prayed for the murderer

Pranzini and experienced joy at his conversion, towards the end of her life she saw herself sitting at table with sinners, praying for universal salvation. Clément compares Thérèse with staretz Silouane of Mount Athos who experienced hell and heard Christ’s words ‘Keep your spirit in hell, but do not despair.’479

French Orthodox intellectual Antoine Arjakovsky480 argues for ecumenism as a living definition of the Church: ‘We all know saints are together. It is impossible to think that little Thérèse does not communicate with Seraphim of Sarov.’481

The communion of saints reveals unity and diversity: the Christian ‘we’, Clément discerns, is not a fusion, but like the Trinity ‘a unity of unique persons’.482

474 _{Buckley, ‘Atheism’, p. 690.} 475 _Ibid.

476 _{Ibid., p. 691}

477 _{Buckley, ‘Atheism’, 697, cites St John of the Cross, Living Flame of Love, 1, no.19, p. 586.} 478 _{Clément, Petite boussole, p.125.}

479 _{Ibid., pp. 125-6}

480 _{Antoine Arjakovsky with Fr Borys Gudziak, Eparch of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church}

Eparchy of Paris, established the Institute for Ecumenical Studies at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, 2004.

481 _{Antoine Arjakovsky, The Church cannot be Ethnic, <http://www.orthodox-christian-}

comment.co.uk>, 21 July 2004, [Accessed 2 July 2015]. See Clément, ‘Communion of Saints’, in The Living God, pp. 381-383.

Clément sees the dialectics of radical thinkers in the Enlightenment and through modernity as the Holy Spirit’s work, blowing where he will. ‘But today people who are cut off from the Holy Spirit are in danger of death. Modern humanism needs to be openly acknowledged as belonging within divine humanism, thus revealing Marx, Nietzsche and Freud to be also forerunners of this movement.’483 Clément speaks of the place of Christianity in today’s urban secular society,484 where there is no prevailing authority or ideology. We are in a pluralist

heterogeneous culture with no longer any hierarchy of wisdom or unified system. Modernity is the daughter of Christianity and its tendency to critique itself ironically can lead to a new understanding of the human person in relationship to God: a ‘spiritual anthropology’ seeks to identify what it means to be human, that is, humans in communion with God and with each other. ‘Christians must strive for a creative secularism,’ Clément argues, ‘We must hope to attract the post- industrial society of today by a rich, complex, open anthropology, which by its very openness respects the “fathomlessness” of the person and is capable of growing into a “theo-anthropology.”’485

Jesus’ words, ‘Render to Caesar what is of Caesar and to God that which is God’s’, free the secular world and open a space of liberty of the spirit.486 The culture that we call Western is an open culture, which Clément believes holds an implicit philosophy of the ‘other’; Christendom, he argues, had a philosophy of the ‘same’, where what was not the same as oneself was excluded, burnt or fought.487 Clément rejects the position of temporal authority and ecclesial power that he identifies with past Latin Catholic Christendom, a view that is reinforced by the historical religious landscape of his native Languedoc and the suppression of Cathars and Protestants by the Catholic Church. He evokes the historic day of prayer called by John Paul II at Assisi when leaders of all religions were invited to pray for peace; this is what the message of Christianity and the Gospels of peace bring to the ‘other’. Christians can no longer impose force, they must replace the logic of domination with the logic of

generosity.488

483 _{Ibid., p.106.}

484 _{Clément, Petite boussole, p. 110.} 485 _{Clément, On Human Being, p. 106.} 486 _{Clément, Petite boussole, p 111.} 487 _{Ibid., p. 112.}