Clement of Alexandria

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Clement of Alexandria — Titus Flavius Clemens, active in the late second century and dead by about 215 — was a Greek-speaking Christian teacher who held that the philosophy of the Greeks was not a rival to the faith but a preparation for it, and who took the contested word gnosis and tried to claim it for the church. Little is fixed about his life. He was probably born to pagan parents around the middle of the century, perhaps at Athens; he traveled in search of teachers and settled at Alexandria, the most cosmopolitan city of the eastern empire, where he taught until the persecution under Septimius Severus drove him out around 202. He did not return.

What drew him to Alexandria, and held him there, was a teacher. Clement journeyed through Greece, southern Italy, the East, and finally Egypt searching for masters, and reports finding the last and best of them in a former Stoic named Pantaenus, head of the city’s catechetical instruction, in whose teaching he says he came to rest. Around 190 Clement first assisted and then succeeded Pantaenus at the head of that school. The Catechetical School of Alexandria — the Didascaleion — was less a seminary than a philosophical circle of the kind the city already knew well, a setting in which a Christian teacher could lecture on scripture in the idiom of Greek learning and gather a following of advanced pupils. It is the first recognizable institution of Christian higher study, and under Clement and after him under his pupil Origen it became the laboratory in which the faith was first thought through with the full apparatus of pagan philosophy. Alexandria was the place where this could happen: a city where the Greek philosophical schools, the largest Jewish community of the diaspora, the Egyptian temple-wisdom, and the new Christian movement all pressed against one another in a single Greek-speaking marketplace of ideas.

His surviving work is built as a sequence, a deliberate ascent. The Protrepticus, the “Exhortation,” calls the Greeks away from their gods: it sets the worn-out myths of Orpheus and the old singers against the Word itself as a new song, a music that tunes the cosmos and turns the hearer toward the God who made it. The Paedagogus, the “Tutor,” then takes the convert in hand — for the Word who exhorts is also the Word who trains — and schools conduct down to the details of food, dress, sleep, laughter, and speech, on the principle that the philosophical life is a life made orderly in its smallest motions. And the Stromateis — the “miscellanies,” literally the patchwork or carpet-bag — gathers, in studied disorder, the higher teaching he thought unsafe to set out plainly, scattering it among digressions so that only the serious reader, willing to dig, would assemble it. The three works compose a single curriculum: exhortation, then discipline, then the contemplative knowledge that crowns them. Across all of it runs one argument, pressed harder than anyone before him had pressed it: that Greek learning was given by God as a tutor, doing for the Hellenes what the Law had done for the Jews, so that reason and revelation converge rather than collide. Athens, on this account, was not the enemy of Jerusalem but its unwitting servant.

The argument receives its sharpest statement in the fifth chapter of the first book of the Stromateis, the chapter that names philosophy the handmaid of theology. There Clement bends to his own purpose the Pauline image from Galatians, in which the Law is a paidagogos, a child-minder leading the way to Christ. Philosophy, he writes, “was a schoolmaster to bring the Hellenic mind, as the law, the Hebrews, to Christ” — two parallel pedagogies, one for each people, converging on the same end. He grants the Greeks their own covenant of preparation: philosophy, he allows, “was given to the Greeks directly and primarily, till the Lord should call the Greeks,” a divine economy in which God is the author of all genuine good, of some things primarily — the Old and New Testaments — and of others by consequence, philosophy among them. Where his teacher Philo had read the Torah as a complete philosophical theology and made Greek learning the servant of revelation, Clement extends the same logic to the Greek inheritance itself and gives it a place in the history of salvation. The move was not eclectic borrowing but a theology of history: a single divine plan unfolding in two streams, the Hebrew and the Greek, both flowing toward the Logos made flesh.

The most charged element of that teaching was his use of gnosis. The term belonged in his day to the teachers he opposed — Valentinus, Basilides, and the rest of the currents later labeled Gnostic — who used it to name a saving knowledge reserved for an elect by nature, a spark of the divine trapped in some human beings and absent from the rest. Clement answered them on their own ground. He granted that there is a higher Christian, whom he called the true gnostic: one who has passed beyond mere faith into a settled, contemplative knowledge of God. But the marks of this perfection were not secret formulae or a privileged pedigree; they were love, prayer without ceasing, and apatheia, a calm freedom from the disordering passions that turns the soul toward the divine. In the seventh book of the Stromateis, his fullest portrait of the figure, the gnostic in contemplation passes beyond even the act of knowing into identity with what he knows — coming, in Clement’s phrase, “no longer to have science and possess knowledge, but to be science and knowledge.” This is assimilation to God, the old Platonic homoiōsis theōi, recast as the goal of the Christian life: knowledge that does not puff up but passes over into love and likeness. The point was polemical and appropriative at once. The prize the heretics claimed, he argued, belonged to the church, and was open in principle to anyone who would climb — not parcelled out by birth, but reached by faith deepening into understanding. Faith is the foundation; gnosis is the faith become full-grown.

This is also why Clement matters for the history of the very movements he fought. He read his opponents closely — he had their books, quoted them, and argued passage by passage — and so became one of the chief witnesses, hostile but attentive, by whom the teachings of the Gnostic schools survived to be read at all. From him come some of the few surviving lines of Valentinus and of Basilides, including the unsettling Basilidean answer to the problem of innocent suffering. The Excerpta ex Theodoto, a set of notes on the Valentinian teacher Theodotus that Clement compiled with his own running commentary, is among the most important documents of second-century Gnosticism precisely because it preserves the adversary’s voice alongside the churchman’s reply.

Beyond the trilogy stood a further work, now lost. The Hypotyposeis, the “Outlines,” ran to eight books and offered short expositions of passages across the whole of scripture, Old Testament and New, together with comment on writings the later church set outside the canon. It survived to be read in the ninth century by the Byzantine patriarch Photius, who recorded his verdict in his great catalog of books, the Bibliotheca: some of it was sound, but in places, he charged, it ran into impious and fabulous things — the eternity of matter, the createdness of the Word, a plurality of Logoi, docetism, and the transmigration of souls. The Greek text afterward perished, most likely in the catastrophes that overtook Constantinople, and the work survives only in fragments and in a Latin abridgement of part of it, the Adumbrationes, made in the circle of Cassiodorus. Photius’s charges, judged by the dogmatic standards of a much later age, have been weighed and largely discounted by modern scholarship, but they mark the beginning of the church’s long unease with Clement.

How far that learning makes him a Platonist in Christian dress is a question scholarship has worked over for more than a century. He read widely in Stoic ethics and in the Platonism of his century, quotes pagan poets and philosophers on nearly every page, and his God — unknowable, beyond name and form, reached at the limit of thought by stripping away every predicate — shares the apophatic features of the transcendent first principle of that philosophy. His debts to Philo are particularly dense: long stretches of the Stromateis rework Philo’s allegorical readings of the patriarchs, his reading of Hagar and Sarah as the preliminary studies and philosophy, his treatment of the tabernacle and the high priest’s vestments as figures of the cosmos. Later Christians were uneasy with all of this: his name was quietly dropped from the Western calendar of saints — venerated through the early modern period, he was removed from the Roman martyrology under Pope Clement VIII and the omission upheld by Benedict XIV, his orthodoxy thought too generous to be safe. Yet the unease never quite became condemnation, and the project did not die with him. Origen, traditionally counted his pupil, carried the Alexandrian wager further — and into deeper trouble — building the speculative cosmology that would one day be anathematized. What Clement left was the wager itself: that the Gospel had nothing to fear from the best of Greek thought, and might be its fulfillment; that the philosopher and the believer were, rightly understood, on the same road.

Texts, editions, and scholarship

Clement’s three principal works survive complete in Greek and have been edited and translated many times; a fourth, the homily Quis dives salvetur? (“Who Is the Rich Man That Is Being Saved?”), an exposition of the Gospel story of the rich young man, survives entire and is his most-read short piece. The lost Hypotyposeis is known only through Photius and a scatter of fragments. The standard modern critical text is the Berlin Griechische christliche Schriftsteller (GCS) edition by Otto Stählin, later revised by Ludwig Früchtel and Ursula Treu (4 vols., 1905–1980), which remains the reference for citation; it is in copyright. The accessible English public-domain translation is that of the Ante-Nicene Fathers (ANF), volume II, in the renderings of William Wilson, edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson — the version through which the trilogy is most often read in English and the source of the quotations above.

• The Stromata, or Miscellanies (Book I), trans. William Wilson, in Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. II (Roberts–Donaldson, 1885), public domain. Book I, chapter 5 contains the locus classicus of Clement’s case that philosophy was the Greeks’ schoolmaster unto Christ as the Law was the Jews’. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/02101.htm
• The Stromata, or Miscellanies (Book VII), trans. William Wilson, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. II, public domain. Book VII is Clement’s fullest portrait of the true Christian gnostic, whose perfection is apatheia, unceasing prayer, and an assimilation to God in which knowing passes into being known. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/02104.htm
• The Exhortation to the Heathen (Protrepticus), trans. William Wilson, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. II, public domain — the first panel of the trilogy, in which the Word is preached as the new song that supplants the myths of the old singers. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0208.htm
• Eric Osborn, Clement of Alexandria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; xviii + 324 pp.), the standard modern monograph, reading Clement’s thought as a unity organized around the divine economy, divine reciprocity, and the ascent from faith through knowledge to love. In copyright; pointer only. https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/9780511735080/type/book
• Annewies van den Hoek, Clement of Alexandria and His Use of Philo in the Stromateis: An Early Christian Reshaping of a Jewish Model (Leiden: Brill, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 3, 1988), the definitive source-critical mapping of how thickly Clement drew on Philo and how he reworked a Jewish allegorical model into a Christian one. In copyright; pointer only. https://www.lucepedia.nl/dossieritem/clemens-van-alexandrie/annewies-van-den-hoek-clement-of-alexandria-and-his-use-of-philo-in-the-stromate
• Henry Chadwick, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition: Studies in Justin, Clement, and Origen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), the classic short account of the Alexandrian engagement with Greek philosophy. In copyright; pointer only. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/early-christian-thought-and-the-classical-tradition-9780198266730
• “Clement of Alexandria,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (1908), the standard public-domain reference article on his life, the catechetical succession from Pantaenus, the trilogy, the lost Hypotyposeis, and the later removal of his name from the calendar of saints. Public domain. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04045a.htm
• G. R. S. Mead, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (2nd ed., 1906), “The Gnosis According to Its Foes,” which treats the heresiologists — Clement among them — as the involuntary preservers of the Gnostic teaching they set out to refute. Public domain; hosted in the Library and in full at sacred-texts. https://www.sacred-texts.com/gno/fff/index.htm

For the place of Philo as the Jewish-Hellenistic precedent on which Clement built, and for Origen as the school’s later systematizer, see the companion entries; the catechetical project belongs to all three, and to the city that made it possible.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906): The Gnosis According to its Foes

→ Related: Gnosis · Augustine Of Hippo · Thomas Aquinas · Neoplatonism · Logos · Alexandria · Philo Of Alexandria · Origen · Basilides · Gnosticism · Allegorical Exegesis · Apophatic Theology · Platonism · Stoicism