Founded in 1949 to bring together Orthodox Christians living in France in an existential testimony to Orthodoxy in the West, the Revue Contacts aims to articulate the essential message of Orthodoxy in a spirit of full openness to all its historical and geographical expressions, discerning in each the mark of universality. It seeks to promote a bond that does not confine within narrow limits: texts on spirituality, articles on theology, liturgy, and ecclesiastical history, as well as chronicles, come from all horizons, addressing contemporary questions alongside direct reflection on Scripture, patristic commentary, and religious thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this way, Contacts endeavours — placing itself under the spiritual obedience of the Assembly of Orthodox Bishops of France — to manifest concretely the unity and universality of the Orthodox Church across space and time, in the perspective of drawing Christians closer together.
Historically, the Revue Contacts is linked to the Orthodox Fraternity in Western Europe, an ecclesial movement for the founding of wich three renovators of the Review in 1959 — Olivier Clément, Boris Bobrinskoy, and Elisabeth Behr-Sigel — played a decisive role.
Perspectives
In 1949, Contacts began as a modest bulletin within an uncertain “jurisdiction,” before becoming a Review of some hundred pages in service of Orthodox unity, finding its true meaning and place in 1959. It was a long adventure of faith and friendship, initiated by Jean Balzon and soon gathering Germaine Revault d’Allonnes, Élisabeth Behr-Sigel, and Olivier Clément. It is to the tireless and exceptional work of Olivier Clément that we owe the development of Contacts over more than forty years — a Review that has drawn inspiration from authentic spiritual figures and theologians: Father Sophrony (disciple of Saint Silouan of Athos), Father Lev Gillet, Paul Evdokimov, Olivier Clément, Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, and Father Boris Bobrinskoy.
Already in the foreword to the first issue, the founder of Contacts, our friend of blessed memory Jean Balzon, wrote: “Orthodoxy is no longer a religion of isolated communities in the West; it has become an organic element of our country.” Half a century later, rooted in Western lands for two or three generations — some of us Western by descent — we are acutely aware of the extraordinary situation and the challenge represented by the gradual elaboration of an Orthodoxy truly planted in Western Europe.
In this sense, the ecclesiological anomaly represented by the separation of the various Orthodox communities of our regions along cultural and ethnic lines — falling under parallel episcopal jurisdictions, even if such division results from the weight of history — becomes more tangible with each passing day. In this regard, the recent establishment of an Assembly of Orthodox Bishops of France (AEOF) is to be welcomed as the embryo of a future synod. In this spirit, Contacts will do everything in its power, in the wake of the work of the pre-conciliar inter-Orthodox preparatory commission for the future Great Council, to support the local organisation of a canonically unified Orthodox Church in Western Europe — one that, while guaranteeing the continuity of the diverse liturgical traditions, upholds the fundamental ecclesiological principle of the ancient Church: one bishop in each local diocese, that Christ may not be divided.
Much has changed, of course, since the Review’s founding. For political and economic reasons, Orthodoxy is now present on every continent. In Eastern Europe, persecutory totalitarianism has collapsed. Catholicism has undergone the profound transformation of the Second Vatican Council. Ordinary materialism has now replaced militant atheism, heralding the dissolution of spiritual reference points. The temptation of despair finds no other abyss than religious ignorance to counter its vertigo — even as, at every moment, Christ comes secretly to save the world by revealing the mystery of the person growing in freedom and love.
Globalisation daily unsettles individual and collective certainties ever more deeply. The games of money and the market, the triumph of derision, violence, and eroticism; the exploration of knowledge in ever-growing diversification — remarkable in its achievements yet incapable of unifying or harmonising the various domains of its successes; the revival of scientistic dreams through advances in biology; the threats to the very life of the planet — all of this gives rise to a spiritual void into which Eastern religions, duly adapted, and above all the pride and ideal of fusion promoted by the sects, rush headlong.
Now more than ever, the good news of the Resurrection imposes itself upon us — the Resurrection that can raise us de profundis — and of Pentecost, which can make us workers in the pacification and transfiguration of the world. We are conscious of the duty of the Orthodox Church, which remains in full continuity with the message of the Apostles and the Fathers and possesses an immense patrimony of intelligence of the faith, of holiness and beauty — provided we know how to speak to the person of today in a language accessible to them.
Christian intelligence of the world cannot, in effect, evade the debate between Western modernity, today globalised, and Orthodoxy, today universal — a debate that touches all the traditional domains of religious and cultural concern: theological, spiritual, anthropological, historical, artistic. Nor can it avoid — and must indeed address, with prudence yet in full awareness of contemporary urgencies — the multiple fields of knowledge and of life that modernity has conquered (political, economic, scientific, technological) or at times annexed (social, ethical).
In this spirit and in response to these new necessities, Orthodoxy cannot do without several dialogues. First, within itself — notably between what it is becoming in the West and what it wishes to remain in countries long marked by its genius. Will the ecclesiology of communion, vigorously recovered and defined by its great Western theologians from Saint Sergius (Paris) to Saint Vladimir (New York), be able to prevail against the hardening of autocephalies, and will the articulation of these autocephalies with universal primacy once again become reality? We seek modestly to contribute to the radiance of this authentic theology, which belongs to the undivided Tradition of the Church of the first millennium. While recalling the principles of a sound ecclesiology, Contacts also intends to remain apart from the quarrels and tensions that periodically agitate the Christian East and reverberate in the West.
By virtue of the Saviour’s own call, we would wish to remain open, against all odds and especially today, to ecumenical dialogue. Whatever its causes, the division of Christians is a counter-witness.
This is why the Revue Contacts remains attentive to relations among Christians, especially in the domain of faith, the key to unity. We report in particular, insofar as possible, on the progress and the obstacles of the official dialogue begun more than twenty years ago with the Roman Church, following the mutual lifting of the anathemas of 1054. Nor do we forget the Protestant world’s call to know more deeply, inseparably, the Scripture — that “body of the Word” — and the concrete misery of humanity. Mutual knowledge, analysis without bitterness and without complacency of the theological and historical factors still at work, in absolute fidelity to the Truth who is Christ. We welcome in the pages of the Revue Contacts whoever, of whatever confession, intends to serve truth and therefore unity.
At the same time, Contacts wishes to foster the deepening of Christian unity by treating Orthodox liturgical prayer — especially the Eucharistic liturgy, the foundation of communion — and the great ways of interiority, notably the tradition of Hesychasm and the “Jesus Prayer.” This proves precious in a world lost in exteriority or tempted, conversely, by the vertigo of a supra-personal absolute and a fusion in which the humble yet infinite reality of the person would be abolished. In parallel, a place remains reserved for the study of the saints, for liturgical art and the question of sacred images, where Christians can find a place of deepening and communion. Finally, the grave ethical questions linked to techno-scientific progress and to the evolution of contemporary society provide an occasion for sharing with other Christian traditions.
Beyond Christianity, the Review remains open to inter-religious dialogue, inevitable in our age. Orthodox Christians — most often Arab — of the Patriarchate of Antioch have long engaged and already advanced far in dialogue with Islam. Certain Russian and Greek missionaries have encountered Buddhism in depth in northern and eastern Asia. Others have lived in India and the Near East and shown — even experienced — the convergences between Hesychasm, Sufism, and the high spiritual traditions of Hinduism.
And certainly nothing will be possible without a renewed openness to the Holy Spirit, to the “newness of the Spirit,” so that the Spirit may make us collaborators in that inspired creation which the new age of Christianity awaits — that Christianity which, as Alexander Men said, “is only just beginning,” and cannot renew itself without “life in Christ,” true God and true man.
To echo the closing words of the first issue of Contacts (1949), we earnestly ask all who will read this Review to “support us with their prayer, their sympathy, and their collaboration.”