Quotes from Olivier Clement

For every person is a gaping space waiting to be filled with God.

It is therefore essential to let the 'heart spirit' settle like calm water. Then it becomes a tranquil lake in which the sky is reflected, in which the face of Christ can be seen.

In a society governed by Roman law which accords an absolute and indisputable value to private property, they practise mutual assistance and, with a free originality, a certain sharing of possessions. In a society that takes eroticism for granted and where utterly heedless cruelty holds sway in regard to the embryo and the new born child, Christians bear their witness to the chastity of conjugal love and they oppose abortion and the desertion of infants.

If Christians remain faithful to the message of the resurrection and become truly eucharistic people, they are in society like a forest in the middle of cultivated lands – an unlimited reserve of silence, peace and authentic life that makes possible all the good and lasting creations of history.

Woman has the same spiritual dignity as man. Both of them have the same God, the same Teacher, the same Church. They breathe, see, hear, know, hope and love in the same way. Beings who have the same life, grace and salvation are called … to the same manner of being. Clement of Alexandria Tutor,

Sacred Scripture does not set men and women in opposition to one another in respect to sex. Sex does not constitute any difference in the sight of God. Origen Homilies on Joshua,

Woman is in the image of God equally with man. The sexes are of equal worth. Their virtues are equal, their struggles are equal … Would a man be able to compete with a woman who lives her life to the full? Gregory of Nyssa Let us make Man in our Image and Likeness, 2nd

Many women have distinguished themselves no less than men in the spiritual warfare, and some of them more … It was not only men but also women who followed Jesus, and he accepted help from women as much as from men. Basil of Caesarea Shorter Rules,

if the ordination to the priesthood because of a whole liturgical symbolism (which is also psychological) is reserved to men, Christian antiquity was acquainted with charismatic Ammas, spiritual Mothers, who, equally with the Fathers, Abbas, practised the discernment of spirits and penetrating insight into souls.

humanity reaches its highest fulfilment in a woman, Mary, 'mother in all truth, of all those who live according to the Gospel' (Evagrius, Pseudo-Nilus, Letter

Today, the approach of the Fathers would be to invite well-fed societies to a collective ascesis that would make possible a better distribution of the world's resources, and prevent the gap between the rich and the poor of the planet from growing constantly wider.

Humanity has nothing so much in common with God as the ability to do good

The Word became man at the final hour; he became Jesus Christ. But before this visible coming in the flesh, he was already, without being man, mediator for humanity. Origen Commentary on John's Gospel,

Desire for vision: Faith. Desire for possession: Hope. Desire for love: Charity. By expectation, God increases desire. By desire, he empties out souls. In emptying them out, he makes them more capable of receiving him. Augustine of Hippo Commentary on the First Epistle of St John, 4,6

In union with God, the heart absorbs the Lord and the Lord the heart, and the two become one. Quotation attributed to St John Chrysostom by Callistus and Ignatius Xanthopoulos, 52 (Philokalia IV,252)

is better to keep silent and to be, rather than to speak but not to be. One who truly possesses Christ's words can also hear his silence in order to be perfect … Nothing is hidden from the Lord but our very secrets are close to him. Let us do everything in him who dwells in us so that we may become his temples. Ignatius of Antioch Epistle to the Ephesians, 15,1-3 (SC 10, p. 84)

To be deified is to enable God to be born in oneself. Dionysius the Areopagite Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, II, Intro. (PG 3,392)

In the midst of the fire he stood, not like burning flesh, but like bread baking. Martyrdom of St Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna,

the tree of the cross, which has become the tree of life, secretly identifies the earth with paradise and gives proof once again of the sacramental nature of things.

The book of the cosmos (the world, St Augustine says, is a 'first Bible') and that of the Scriptures match each other, since they have the same author. Both of them find their full revelation in Christ who, after writing them, made them his body and his face. The incarnate Logos frees the speechless tongue of creation and unites it with the world as logos alogos

once it has been granted that the Scriptures have God himself for their author, we must necessarily believe that the person who is asking questions of nature and the person who is asking questions of the Scriptures are bound to arrive at the same conclusions. Origen Commentary on Psalm 1,

God's love for humanity wraps the spiritual in the perceptible, the superessential in the essence. It gives form … to what is formless and, through a variety of symbols, it multiplies and shapes Simplicity that has no shape. Dionysius the Areopagite Divine Names, I, 4

All the art of the old Japanese painters (who in almost all periods were monks) is explained if it is understood that, for them, the visible world was a perpetual allusion to Wisdom, like that great tree which, with unutterable majesty, says No to evil for us' (ibid.).

We may gain some inkling of what God is if we attempt by means of every sensation to reach the reality of each creature, not giving up until we are alive to what transcends it … Clement of Alexandria Miscellanies,