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 travelled 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.

His surviving work is built as a sequence. The Protrepticus exhorts the Greeks to abandon their gods; the Paedagogus takes the convert in hand and schools conduct down to the details of food, dress, and speech; and the Stromateis — the “miscellanies,” literally patchwork — gathers, in deliberate disorder, the higher teaching he thought unsafe to set out plainly. Across them 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 most charged move 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 labelled Gnostic — who used it to name a saving knowledge reserved for an elect by nature. 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, marked less by secret doctrine than by love and a calm freedom from passion. 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, not parcelled out by birth.

How far this makes him a Platonist in Christian dress is a question scholarship has not settled. 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 shares features with the transcendent first principle of that philosophy. Later Christians were uneasy: his name was quietly dropped from the calendar of saints in the West, his orthodoxy thought too generous to be safe. He was also among the chief witnesses, hostile but attentive, by whom the teachings of his Gnostic opponents survived to be read at all. Origen, traditionally counted his pupil, carried the Alexandrian project further and into deeper trouble. What Clement left was the wager that the Gospel had nothing to fear from the best of Greek thought — and might be its fulfilment.

→ 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