Dominique Ponnau

This article is a personal testimony by Dominique Ponnau in homage to the Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément. Belonging to the genre of commemorative meditation, it draws on memories of encounters and conversations to bring out the essential features of the deceased's thought and personality. The central idea is that Olivier Clément pursued, throughout his life, an uninterrupted quest for authentic beauty, understood as the splendor of Truth, from his cosmic sense of wonder and his extra-Christian spiritual explorations to the theology of the icon and the Divine Liturgy. The contribution of the article lies in the light it sheds on Clément's aesthetic sensibility and theological approach: his openness to non-Christian traditions, his relationship to Dostoevsky, to the art of Rublev and the Eastern Fathers, as well as his conception of beauty as a path of transfiguration and communion.