The Church Fathers between the West and the Easts

This article by Olivier Clément examines the place of the Church Fathers of the first millennium in the dialogue between Eastern spiritual traditions and Western sensibility. Belonging to the field of comparative theological study, it is organized around three themes — the heart, the symbol, and light — to show that the Greek and Syriac Fathers belong neither to an East nor to a West, but operate an original synthesis between divinism and humanism. The central idea is that patristic Christianity, by affirming the union of God and man "without separation or confusion," transcends both the impersonalism of Asian traditions and Western individualism. The theological contribution lies in the highlighting of the notion of the person, symbolic knowledge of the cosmos, and the mysticism of light as distinctive elements of the patristic tradition in relation to the spiritualities of India, Buddhism, and Sufism.