 Olivier-Maurice Clement was born on 17 November 1921, into an agnostic family from the Cevennes.He became a follower of Jesus Christ at the age of thirty, after a long search in atheism and in Asian spiritualities.He had discovered, through reading the Christian philosophers Nicholas Berdyaev and Vladimir Lossky (of whom he would become a student and a friend), the thinking of the Fathers of the ancient, undivided Church, and he received baptism in the Orthodox Church, within the French-speaking diocese of the Moscow Patriarchate in Paris.