Clement of Alexandria

• 1. Introduction

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  Clement of Alexandria spent years wandering the ancient world before he ever arrived in Alexandria. Born around 150 AD under the full Roman name Titus Flavius Clemens, he had grown up in a pagan household and rejected that faith as a young man, troubled by what he saw as its moral corruption. He then set out on a journey through Greece, Asia Minor, Palestine, and Egypt, seeking teachers who could answer the questions that paganism had left open. In Greece he sat with an Ionian theologian. In the east he learned from an Assyrian and from a Jew. Each encounter sharpened the mind of a man who would eventually arrive at a school in Alexandria and transform Christian intellectual life in ways that would be debated for the next two thousand years. What made Clement so unusual was not simply that he was a Christian convert who knew Greek philosophy. It was that he believed those two worlds belonged together, that the wisdom of Plato and the Stoics was not a rival to the Gospel but a preparation for it. The questions his life raises are still live ones: How much can religious faith borrow from secular learning? Is mystical knowledge available to every believer, or only to an inner circle? And can a single thinker hold together a passion for orthodoxy and a hunger for ideas that orthodoxy has not yet settled?

• 2. The Road to Alexandria

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  Epiphanius of Salamis believed Clement was born in Athens, though another tradition places his birth in Alexandria itself. Neither his birthdate nor his birthplace can be confirmed. What the sources do preserve is the shape of his early formation: a pagan upbringing that gave him, as the Protrepticus makes clear, a detailed working knowledge of Greek religion and mystery cults, knowledge that could only have come from practice inside those traditions.

  His rejection of paganism was framed in moral terms. He found it ethically corrupt, and that verdict sent him traveling. Across Greece, Asia Minor, Palestine, and Egypt he gathered teachers. One Ionian figure has been identified by later scholars as Athenagoras of Athens. An Assyrian teacher has been linked to Tatian. A Jewish teacher has sometimes been identified as Theophilus of Caesarea. None of these identifications is certain, but the pattern they reveal is consistent: Clement was a collector of intellectual influences long before he became an authority himself.

  Around 180 AD he reached Alexandria and encountered Pantaenus, who taught at the Catechetical School there. Eusebius names Pantaenus as the head of that school, though whether the institution was formally organized at that point remains contested. What is clear is that Clement studied under Pantaenus, was ordained to the priesthood by Pope Julian before 189, and settled into a city that was, in the late second century, one of the most intellectually active places in the Roman world. His writings suggest he may have been married. His students would include Origen and Alexander of Jerusalem, two figures who would each leave their own marks on the church.

• 3. The Great Trilogy

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  Three works written across roughly a decade form the backbone of what survives from Clement. The Protrepticus appeared around 195 AD, the Paedagogus around 198 AD, and the Stromata ran from around 198 AD through around 203 AD. Together they were intended as a sustained educational arc: an exhortation to convert, a guide to Christian conduct, and an intellectual deepening into theology.

  The Protrepticus opens with a history of Greek religion in seven stages. Clement traces how humans first worshipped the sun, the moon, and heavenly bodies, then agricultural products, then personified emotions. The poets Hesiod and Homer arrive at a later stage, with Hesiod's Theogony giving a count of twelve deities. Eventually figures such as Asclepius and Heracles are proclaimed divine. Idolatry, Clement argues, began when natural objects like unshaped wood and stone were carved into forms. Following Plato, he calls artworks illusions and "deadly toys." His greatest praise in the work is reserved for Plato, whose apophatic approach to God he sees as already pointing toward Christian truth. Throughout the text, the figure of Orpheus serves as a symbol of pagan superstition, contrasted against the divine Logos of Christ.

  The Paedagogus takes a different angle entirely. Its title means tutor, and it presents Christ in that role, teaching humanity how to act and how to control the passions. The work draws on a division of life borrowed from Plato's Republic: character, actions, and passions. The first of these had been addressed in the Protrepticus; the Paedagogus turns to the other two. Homer alone is cited more than sixty times. Clement argues for the equality of the sexes, grounds salvation equally in all humans, and describes God the Father as possessing both female and male aspects, with the eucharist depicted as milk from the breast of Christ. He provides a list of inspirational women drawn from both Biblical and Classical Greek tradition. The practical second and third books address food, drink, clothing, furniture, music, perfumes, sex, cosmetics, and the company one keeps, all read through the lens of Christian simplicity. He opposes garlands because picking flowers kills a creation of God, and the garland resembles the crown of thorns.

  The Stromata is frankly miscellaneous, as its title signals. Clement had originally intended to write a more systematic follow-up to the Paedagogus, but the Stromata became something else: seven books of argument that range across Greek philosophy, faith, martyrdom, asceticism, and theological epistemology. André Méhat has theorized it was aimed at a limited, esoteric readership. Although Eusebius refers to eight books, only seven are certain to survive. Photius, writing in the 9th century, found appended text that led the scholar Daniel Heinsius to conclude the original eighth book is lost.

• 4. Faith, Philosophy, and Gnosis

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  Clement did something unusual with the word gnosis. He took it from the Gnostics, whom he opposed, and reinterpreted it in a specifically Christian direction. To him gnosis meant spiritual and mystical knowledge, but it was grounded in faith, not opposed to it. He distinguished between the pistic Christian, who lives according to God's law, and the Christian gnostic, who lives at the level of the Gospel and responds through discipline and love. This framework is considered a forerunner of the Christian monastic tradition that emerged in Egypt after his death.

  Philosophy, in Clement's account, had served for the Greek world the same role that the law served for the Jews: a preparatory discipline. He defined philosophy as "the desire for true being and the studies which lead to it." He went further, arguing in the Stromata that Greek culture had largely been derived from non-Greek sources. Most of the important figures in the Greek world were, he claimed, foreigners. Jewish culture was the most significant influence on Greece. In an attempt to establish the primacy of Moses, he produced an extended chronology in which he dated the birth of Christ to the 25th of April or May, 4-2 BC, and the creation of the world to 5592 BC.

  His second book of the Stromata is largely devoted to the relationship between faith and philosophical argument. Faith is prior because through it one receives divine wisdom. It is never irrational, Clement insists, because it is founded on knowledge of the truth of the Logos. Yet all knowledge ultimately proceeds from faith, since first principles cannot be proven outside a systematic structure. This placed Clement in an unusual position: he was neither dismissing Greek philosophy nor subordinating Christian revelation to it. He was arguing that they arrived at the same truth by different roads, and that road of philosophy had simply not gone as far.

• 5. On Wealth, Martyrdom, and the Edges of Orthodoxy

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  Written around 203 AD, the treatise known as Salvation for the Rich, or Who is the Rich Man who is Saved?, takes on a practical question with unusual directness. Clement begins with sharp criticism of the corrupting effects of money and the servile attitudes that surround the wealthy. He then turns to Mark 10:25, the camel and the eye of a needle, and argues that Jesus did not mean these words literally. The supercelestial meanings should be sought, he writes. Holding wealth is not wrong in itself; what matters is how it is used. Sinful passions, he argues, are more dangerous to the soul than external wealth. Material possessions can be instruments of charity toward neighbors, and that use is entirely compatible with salvation.

  In the fourth book of the Stromata, Clement takes up martyrdom with the same spirit of careful qualification. A good Christian should be unafraid of death, but Clement condemns those who actively seek a martyr's death. They show insufficient respect for God's gift of life. He is also ambivalent about whether any believing Christian who dies in a certain way can count as a martyr, or whether that status is reserved for those who have lived exceptional lives. Marcionites cannot become martyrs at all, because they do not believe in the divinity of God the Father.

  The fragments of his secret works, including the Hypotyposes, the Excerpta ex Theodoto, the Eclogae Propheticae, and the Adumbraetiones, reveal a different and more speculative Clement. These texts outline a celestial hierarchy that moves from the Face of God through seven protoctists, then archangels, then angels, then humans. According to Jean Daniélou, this schema was inherited from a Judaeo-Christian esotericism passed on orally among trusted Christians. Every thousand years, according to the Eclogae Propheticae, every member of each order moves up one degree. Humans can thus become angels, and the protoctists themselves can be elevated, though where they go is left unclear.

• 6. Veneration and Its Limits

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  Clement's feast day fell on the fourth of December, and for centuries his name appeared in the martyrologies of the Catholic Church. That changed when the Roman Martyrology was revised and Cardinal Baronius advised that his name be dropped from the calendar. Pope Benedict XIV later maintained this decision, citing three reasons: Clement's life was little known, he had never obtained public cultus in the Church, and some of his doctrines were, if not erroneous, at least suspect.

  The Eastern Orthodox Church officially ended any veneration of Clement in the 10th century. Yet the Prologue of Ohrid continues to refer to him as a saint, and so do various Orthodox authorities including the Greek Metropolitan Kallinikos of Edessa. The Coptic tradition has never withdrawn its veneration. Saint Clement Coptic Orthodox Christian Academy in Nashville, Tennessee is specifically named after him. Anglicanism commemorates him as well.

  The critique that did the most damage to his standing in the East came from Photios I of Constantinople, writing in the Bibliotheca. Photios was appreciative of Clement's learning and the literary qualities of his writing, but he attacked the Hypotyposes as syncretic to the point of heresy. Among the ideas Photios found unacceptable were the belief that matter and thought are eternal and did not originate from God; the belief in cosmic cycles predating creation, following Heraclitus; and ambivalence toward docetism, the doctrine that Christ's earthly body was an illusion. Photios also objected to the belief in the transmigration of souls. Later scholars have suggested that Photios may have misread Clement, mistaking his quotations from Gnostic sources for his own convictions.

• 7. A Legacy of Firsts

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  Eusebius, the fourth-century church historian, is the first writer to provide a connected account of Clement's life and works, doing so in his Ecclesiastical History. He quotes Alexander of Jerusalem describing Clement as "the holy Clement, who was both my master and benefactor," and names him among "the blessed fathers who have trod the path before us." Eusebius himself calls Clement "an incomparable master of Christian philosophy." Jerome, writing in the late fourth and early fifth century, calls him "the most learned of men" and records that his writings are "full of eloquence and learning, both in sacred Scripture and in secular literature." Theodoret writes that "he surpassed all others, and was a holy man." Cyril of Alexandria credits him with having "searched to the depths all the learning of the Greeks, with an exactness rarely attained before." Maximus the Confessor refers to him simply as "the great Clement."

  The accumulation of titles that later scholars have applied to Clement is striking in its breadth. He has been called the first Christian scholar, the first systematic teacher of Christian doctrine, the first great teacher of philosophical Christianity, the first self-conscious theologian and ethicist, the founder of Christian philosophical theology, the true creator of ecclesiastical theology, the first major commentator on the Bible, and the founder of Christian literature. One scholar, Coxe, called him "that man of genius who introduced Christianity to itself, as reflected in the burnished mirror of his intellect." Another, DeFaye, described him as "the most inquisitive and independent spirit that has perhaps ever appeared in the Church."

  He died around 215 AD, at an unknown location, having left Alexandria during the Severian persecution of 202-203. A letter from Alexander of Jerusalem in 211 commending Clement to the Church of Antioch suggests he may have been living in Cappadocia or Jerusalem at that time. The Mar Saba letter, attributed to Clement by Morton Smith, remains disputed: if authentic, it would push back by a century the tradition connecting the Apostle Mark with Alexandria, and would document a more spiritual Gospel that Mark allegedly wrote there and entrusted to the church on his death. Whether that letter is genuine, an ancient pseudepigraph, or a modern forgery, scholars have not yet settled.