Justified True Belief

(●) The convert who refused to choose between the gospel and the best of Greek learning, and taught the church that it did not have to. + Every generation of Christians meets the same question in some new costume. A student comes home from a first year at university with a head full of things the Sunday school never mentioned, and someone at the kitchen table has to decide whether the right response is to shut the door or to open the book. In the second century after Christ the books were Homer and Plato, and the man who opened them was Clement of Alexandria. He was a pagan by birth and a philosopher by training, and after his conversion he did not throw the training away. He kept quoting it. His surviving pages name hundreds of Greek writers, and for a handful of lost poems and plays his quotations are the only place a line still stands. He argued, at length and against Christians who thought it dangerous, that Greek philosophy was not a rival to the faith but a preparation for it: a gift God had given the nations to keep them looking upward until the Word arrived in person. That decision shaped Christian education for the next eighteen centuries. When Basil told young men how to read pagan poets, when Augustine compared pagan learning to the Egyptian gold the Israelites carried out with them at God’s command and turned to a better use, when medieval scholars baptized Aristotle, and when a Christian college today puts Plato on a freshman reading list, all of them are working out an answer Clement pressed further and defended at greater length than anyone before him.

(●) c. 150 AD: Born to pagan parents, and came to Christ as a grown man rather than a child. + His full name was Titus Flavius Clemens, which tells us something before anything else does: those are Roman names, carried by a family with Roman citizenship and money enough to educate a son properly. Where he was born is genuinely uncertain. Epiphanius, a bishop writing in the fourth century, reports that people in his own day disagreed about it, some saying Athens and some saying Alexandria, and he does not settle the question. What is not uncertain is where Clement started out. He writes about the pagan mystery religions, the secret initiation rites of the Greek world, with the ugly specificity of a man describing something he has watched rather than something he has read about, and he addresses the Greeks throughout as people he understands from the inside. He was a convert, and an adult convert at that: he had spent years being formed by the very thing he later spent his life arguing with.

(●) c. 175–180 AD: He crossed the Mediterranean looking for teachers, and stopped when he found the one in Egypt. + Clement tells the story himself, in the opening pages of the Stromata, and it is one of the most human passages in early Christian writing. He went looking for Christian teachers the way a serious student goes looking for a supervisor, and he kept going until he was satisfied. One of them he found in Greece, an Ionian, a Greek from the old cities along the coast of Asia Minor. Two more he found in southern Italy, one of them from Coele-Syria in the Syrian interior and the other from Egypt. Others he found in the East, an Assyrian among them, and a Hebrew in Palestine. He names none of them, and that was deliberate rather than careless; he says they preserved the true tradition straight from Peter, James, John and Paul, the way a son receives from a father. The last one he found, he says, was hidden away in Egypt, and this one he ranked first of all. He calls him a Sicilian bee, gathering the spoil of the flowers of the prophetic and apostolic meadow and engendering a deathless knowledge in the souls of his hearers. Eusebius, the fourth-century church historian, identifies this man as Pantaenus, a former Stoic philosopher who taught Christians in Alexandria, and no one has proposed a better candidate. Clement stopped travelling and stayed. Alexandria was the right place to stop. It was the intellectual capital of the Roman world, a port city of perhaps half a million people with the ancient world’s greatest library, a large and learned Jewish community, and every school of Greek philosophy trading arguments in the same few streets. It also had teachers the church regarded as dangerous, and Clement would spend a great deal of ink on them.

(●) c. 190 AD: He took over the Christian teaching of Alexandria, and made a school of it. + Eusebius reports that Clement succeeded Pantaenus in the instruction of the church at Alexandria, and later Christian writers came to speak of this as the catechetical school, the class where candidates for baptism were taught the faith. How formal an institution it actually was in Clement’s lifetime is a fair question, and historians answer it differently; what the sources show plainly is a recognised teacher with recognised students, working under the eye of the bishop. He was ordained a presbyter, an elder of the church, which is how a letter written twenty years later would describe him. Two of his students can be named. One was Alexander, who became bishop of Jerusalem and who, writing years afterwards, called Clement his teacher. The other, according to Eusebius, was a boy named Origen, who would grow up to be the most formidable biblical scholar of the ancient church. Origen never says so himself, and scholars are careful about the claim, but the line of teaching from Pantaenus through Clement into Alexandrian Christianity is not in doubt whatever the classroom arrangements were.

(●) c. 190–202 AD: He wrote a trilogy that walks a reader out of the pagan temples, through the training of a new convert, and on into the hardest questions. + Clement’s three main books are not three separate projects. They are three stages of one journey, and reading them in order is like watching a person be walked through a house. The Protrepticus, the Exhortation to the Greeks, stands at the front door and argues the reader out of paganism, dismantling the myths and the mystery cults with the contempt of an insider and then holding out the new song of the Word. The Paedagogus, the Instructor, takes the new convert by the hand and trains the ordinary business of a life: what to eat, how to laugh, what to wear, how to treat a slave, whether to dye your hair. The Stromata, whose title means patchwork or carpet-bags, is the advanced work, a deliberately unsystematic pile of philosophy, Scripture, argument and digression, in which Clement takes on the pagan schools and the heretical teachers at full length. The disorder of the Stromata is on purpose, and he says so: he scatters the deeper matters through the mixture so that a careless reader will not stumble over them and a serious one will have to dig. It is an infuriating book and an indispensable one.

(●) c. 202 AD: Persecution under Septimius Severus drove him out of Alexandria, and he never came back. + In the tenth year of the emperor Septimius Severus, Eusebius reports, the persecution at Alexandria was severe, and Clement left the city. He was somewhere past fifty. Origen’s own father was beheaded in that persecution, and the boy, Eusebius says, had to be kept from following him to the executioner by his mother hiding his clothes. Clement’s departure has bothered some readers, because he had written strongly about the duty of endurance. He had also written, in the Stromata, that a Christian who deliberately provokes the authorities and throws his life away is not a martyr but an accomplice in his own killing, and that the Lord himself told his disciples to flee from one city to the next. Whatever weight he gave those words in the moment, the church that knew him best did not treat him as a deserter. It kept using him.

(●) c. 211 AD: A former student, now a bishop who had been in prison for the faith, sent him to Antioch carrying a letter that commended him to the church there. + Clement had gone east, most likely to Cappadocia in what is now central Turkey, where his old student Alexander was a bishop. Alexander had been imprisoned during the same persecution, and he signed himself a servant and prisoner of Jesus Christ when he wrote to the church at Antioch to congratulate it on its new bishop. He sent that letter in Clement’s hand. Eusebius quotes the lines Alexander wrote near its close: Clement is the blessed presbyter, a man virtuous and approved, who by the providence of the Master had been there and had strengthened and built up the church of the Lord. It is a small document, a few lines of courtesy at the end of somebody else’s letter, and it settles several things at once. The first is that Clement was an ordained presbyter, and it is a bishop who had sat under him saying so. The second is that he stood in good standing with a confessor, a Christian who had suffered for the faith without dying for it, and confessors were not casual about whom they praised; a good word from a man who had been in prison for Christ carried a weight that a compliment from anyone else did not. The third is the one worth sitting with. In his sixties, driven out of the only city he had worked in, Clement was still building up congregations that were not his own.

(●) c. 215 AD: He died in exile, and the next letter that mentions him speaks of him as already gone. + Around 215 or 216, Alexander wrote again, this time to Origen, and spoke of Pantaenus and of the holy Clement as fathers who had gone before, whom he hoped to reach. That letter is the reason for the date: nobody records Clement’s death, and we know only that by then it had happened. He was about sixty-five, and he had been away from Alexandria for more than a decade. There is a curious footnote to all this. For centuries Clement was honoured as a saint in the Western calendar, with a feast on the fourth of December, and then his name was quietly dropped when Clement VIII had the Roman martyrology revised, on the advice of Cardinal Baronius. The martyrology is the official roll of the saints commemorated through the year, church by church and day by day, so coming off it is a matter of the calendar rather than a verdict on a man’s soul. Benedict XIV later upheld the decision on three grounds: that Clement’s life was little known, that he had never had a public cult in the church, and that some of his teaching was at least open to suspicion. A public cult, in that phrase, means settled public veneration, congregations keeping his day and asking his prayers. Eastern Orthodoxy does not commemorate him either, though the Coptic church counts him a saint and Anglican calendars still keep his day. What survived either way was the work, and the work was doing its job in libraries long before and long after anyone kept a feast day.

What He Taught

(T1) Philosophy was God’s gift to the Greeks, given to walk them toward Christ as the law walked the Hebrews. + Paul had told the Galatians that the law was their guardian until Christ came: "So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith" (Galatians 3:24). The Greek word behind "guardian" is paidagogos, and it named a real person in a wealthy household, a trusted slave who walked the children to school, kept them out of trouble on the way, and handed them over at the door. He was not the teacher. He got you to the teacher. Clement’s boldest single move was to say that the Greeks had a guardian too, and that it was philosophy. God had not left the nations with nothing while Israel had the law. Philosophy kept the Greek mind reaching for one supreme Good, arguing about the soul, insisting that justice was real, and in doing so it walked them to the same door. Behind this lies a conviction Clement shared with Justin Martyr before him: whatever is true anywhere is true because the one Word, the Logos who became flesh in Christ, is the source of all truth. Christians call this general revelation, the knowledge of God available to anyone through creation, conscience and reason, as distinct from the special revelation given in Scripture. John says the same thing in a sentence: "The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world" (John 1:9). Clement went so far as to call philosophy a covenant with the Greeks and a stepping-stone to the philosophy that is according to Christ. He was arguing against fellow Christians who wanted the door shut. Some in Alexandria, he complains, were frightened of philosophy the way children are frightened of masks, sure that anything Greek would carry them off. His reply was that truth does not become dangerous by having a pagan for a previous owner.

(Q) "For this was a schoolmaster to bring ‘the Hellenic mind,’ as the law, the Hebrews, ‘to Christ.’ Philosophy, therefore, was a preparation, paving the way for him who is perfected in Christ." + Source: Clement of Alexandria, Stromata I.5 (Ante-Nicene Fathers translation, William Wilson). Clement is arguing that philosophy was necessary to the Greeks for righteousness before the Lord came, and remains useful now as a training ground for those who reach faith by argument. The words in single quotation marks are his echo of Paul in Galatians 3:24 (T1).

(T2) The Word who took flesh is the same Word who has been teaching the human race from the beginning. + Ask a Christian what the Word does and the ready answer is that he came, died and rose. Clement’s answer is longer, and the length is the point. The Word made us, and then taught us how to live, and then appeared in person to bring us home; it is one continuous work by one person, not three unrelated errands. This is why the Protrepticus opens with music. Greek legend had its singers whose songs moved stones and tamed animals, Amphion and Orpheus and the rest, and Clement runs through them politely before setting them aside for what he calls the new song: the Word himself, who tuned the universe into harmony and who has now made an instrument of a human life. The Word is not a newcomer to the world he entered. Two things follow, and Clement holds both. Nothing true anywhere is foreign to Christ, which is why he can quote Homer in a sermon without apology (T1). And nothing in that earlier teaching is a substitute for the arrival: the Instructor came in person, and became what we are. His way of saying that last point is startling, and it needs care. He writes that the Word became man so that we may learn from a man how a man may become God. Read quickly, that sounds like the one sentence a Christian teacher must never write, and anybody who stops short at it is reading attentively. Clement is not saying that a creature turns into the Creator, which he denies elsewhere in the plainest terms; he is saying what Peter says, that we are made partakers of the divine nature, and what Paul says, that we are being conformed to the image of the Son. The word later theology gives this is theosis, sometimes translated deification: the whole person, body and soul, remade in the likeness of God by grace and never by nature. Irenaeus in Gaul was writing something very similar in the same years, and Athanasius would put it in one famous line a century after that.

(Q) "The Word, who in the beginning bestowed on us life as Creator when He formed us, taught us to live well when He appeared as our Teacher; that as God He might afterwards conduct us to the life which never ends." + Source: Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus (Exhortation to the Heathen) I (Ante-Nicene Fathers translation, William Wilson). The three tenses of one work, laid out in a single sentence: creation, instruction, and the life to come (T2). Clement has just finished dismissing the old singers of Greek myth in favour of the new song.

(T3) Christ is the Instructor, and his curriculum is the ordinary conduct of an ordinary day. + The Paedagogus is the strangest thing in second-century Christian literature and the most immediately readable. Having argued the reader out of paganism, Clement does not move on to doctrine. He moves on to dinner. There are chapters on eating, on drinking, on furniture, on laughter, on jewellery, on shoes, on going to the public baths, on how to behave at a banquet, on perfume and garlands, on hair, on sleep, on how to treat household slaves, on what a Christian ought to look like in the street. He tells his readers not to make a noise while chewing. He is against dyed hair, gold anklets, and men who cannot walk past a mirror. He wants Christian women to stop keeping peacocks and monkeys for show and to keep the poor instead. Two convictions hold the fussiness together, and both are worth having. The first is that the Instructor is Christ himself, not Clement, so this is not etiquette but discipleship; Titus says that grace itself trains us "to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age" (Titus 2:12), and Clement is simply working out what that training looks like on a Tuesday. The second is that the body is good. The Instructor is not trying to get us out of our bodies. He is teaching us to use food, money and dress the way a person uses a tool, without being owned by it.

(Q) "Some men, in truth, live that they may eat, as the irrational creatures, ‘whose life is their belly, and nothing else.’ But the Instructor enjoins us to eat that we may live." + Source: Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus II.1 (Ante-Nicene Fathers translation, William Wilson). The opening move of his chapter on eating, and a fair sample of the whole book’s method: an ordinary human habit, examined, and handed back to the reader with Christ standing over it (T3). The words in single quotation marks are a borrowed line, one of the hundreds of scraps of Greek verse and proverb Clement keeps at his elbow.

(T4) Wealth does not damn a man; the grip of his soul on it does. + A rich man ran up to Jesus, asked what he must do to inherit eternal life, and was told: "You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me" (Mark 10:21). He went away sorrowful. Alexandria was a wealthy city, its church included wealthy members, and those members had read that story and drawn the obvious conclusion about themselves. Clement wrote a whole sermon for them, Who Is the Rich Man That Is Being Saved?, and it is the earliest Christian treatment of money that survives at length. His reading is not a discount, and that is worth being clear about before anything else. He insists that the command is real and that the man failed it. What he denies is that the command was about the coins. Money is a thing, and a thing is an instrument, no more virtuous or wicked in itself than a hammer, which builds a house or breaks a window depending entirely on the hand that holds it. A man can throw every coin he owns into the sea and carry the disease of wealth in his soul all the way to the bottom. What the Lord asked the man to sell was his grip. That reading has to answer an obvious objection, and Clement knows it: does this not turn a hard command into a comfortable one? His answer is to make the practical demand heavier rather than lighter. The rich Christian is to hold his property as a steward holds another man’s, to spend it on the poor and the imprisoned, to buy the prayers of the saints with it, which is his way of saying that the money should go to believers who will pray for the man who fed them, and to be ready to lose all of it without complaint. Paul had written the same instruction to Timothy: the rich are charged "not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God" and to be "rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share" (1 Timothy 6:17–18). Renunciation is not measured by what leaves your account. It is measured by what has stopped owning you.

(Q) "He does not, as some conceive off-hand, bid him throw away the substance he possessed, and abandon his property; but bids him banish from his soul his notions about wealth, his excitement and morbid feeling about it, the anxieties, which are the thorns of existence, which choke the seed of life." + Source: Clement of Alexandria, Who Is the Rich Man That Is Being Saved? 11 (Ante-Nicene Fathers translation, William Wilson). Clement is explaining what the Lord meant by "sell your possessions" in the story of the rich young ruler (T4). The thorns that choke the seed are from the parable of the sower (Matthew 13:22).

(T5) The mature Christian is the true knower, and the heretics had stolen a good word. + Alexandria in Clement’s lifetime was the headquarters of the Gnostics, teachers who promised salvation through secret knowledge, gnosis, available to a spiritual elite. In their systems the material world was the botched work of a lesser god, the God of the Old Testament was that lesser god, and most churchgoers were second-class believers who would never rise above simple faith. Irenaeus in Gaul answered them by refutation. Clement, characteristically, answered by theft. He took the word. The real gnostikos, he argued, the person who genuinely knows, is not the initiate with a secret but the mature Christian: the one who has grown from faith into understanding, who obeys God because he loves him rather than because he fears hell or wants heaven, who prays constantly and lives quietly and gives without being asked. Everything the heretics claimed for their elite, Clement claimed for ordinary sanctity, and he grounded it where they could not, in one good Creator and one Word made flesh. The claim that knowledge and love grow together is the hinge, and Paul had already fixed the order: "This knowledge puffs up, but love builds up" (1 Corinthians 8:1). Clement agrees so thoroughly that in his account knowledge without love is not knowledge at all. The gnostic’s knowing is a form of loving; that is why it can be preferred to everything else without pride, and why it ends in seeing God rather than in a diploma. Christians have not always been comfortable with how far he pushed this, and later readers were right to press him on where the mature believer stands in relation to the beginner (†3). What he was doing, though, is what apologists have done ever since: refusing to hand a good word over to the people who had misused it.

(Q) "Could we, then, suppose any one proposing to the Gnostic whether he would choose the knowledge of God or everlasting salvation; and if these, which are entirely identical, were separable, he would without the least hesitation choose the knowledge of God, deeming that property of faith, which from love ascends to knowledge, desirable, for its own sake." + Source: Clement of Alexandria, Stromata IV.22 (Ante-Nicene Fathers translation, William Wilson). An impossible question asked to make a point. The mature Christian does not treat God as the price of getting to heaven; he would take God alone if the two could be pulled apart, which they cannot (T5).

(Q) "The way of truth is therefore one. But into it, as into a perennial river, streams flow from all sides." + Source: Clement of Alexandria, Stromata I.5 (Ante-Nicene Fathers translation, William Wilson). One river, many tributaries. The image carries Clement’s whole programme in a line, and it stands in the same chapter as his claim that philosophy was a schoolmaster for the Greeks (T1).

What the Church Made of Him

(†) He turned a baptism class into something closer to advanced study, and the Alexandrian tradition ran on for centuries. + Before Clement, Christian teaching in a large city meant preparing candidates for baptism and answering the questions that came up. After him, it could mean something closer to a school of advanced study, where the Scriptures were read alongside Plato and the Stoics and a student was expected to work. Origen took the method further than Clement ever did, learning Hebrew, building the Hexapla with the Old Testament laid out in six parallel columns, and writing On First Principles, the first attempt at a systematic account of Christian doctrine. Through Origen the Alexandrian habits of mind reached Athanasius, the Cappadocian fathers, and eventually the whole Greek theological tradition: the confidence that the faith can be thought about rigorously, and that a Christian teacher owes his students argument rather than assertion. Eusebius is the reason we can say any of this. Writing in the early fourth century he quoted Clement at length, listed his books, preserved Alexander’s letters about him, and treated him as one of the pillars of the earlier church. Without those pages we would have the trilogy and very little idea who wrote it.

(†) His answer to the question of pagan learning became the church’s answer, and it still is. + The question of what a Christian may read did not go away, and Clement’s answer kept winning. Basil the Great wrote a short address telling young men how to get the good out of Greek poetry while leaving the rest, the way bees take from a flower and ignore the thorns. Augustine put it in the image everyone remembers: as Israel carried Egyptian gold out of Egypt at God’s command and designed it for a better use, so a Christian may carry off whatever truth the pagans hold and devote it to preaching the gospel. Aquinas made a career of it with Aristotle. Every Christian school that teaches the classics is standing where Clement stood. The pattern was not his invention. Paul had quoted a Greek poet to a Greek audience on the Areopagus: "as even some of your own poets have said, For we are indeed his offspring" (Acts 17:28). Clement made the practice into a principle, defended it against Christians who thought it reckless, and demonstrated it on nearly every page he wrote. He also gave later readers something rarer. Because he quoted so widely and so exactly, hundreds of lines of Greek literature survive nowhere but in his books, along with the fullest description we have of some of the mystery cults. The Christian apologist arguing against paganism turns out to be one of the better witnesses to what paganism actually was. Sixteen centuries later John Henry Newman, who had read the Alexandrians as a young Anglican, wrote in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua that "the broad philosophy of Clement and Origen carried me away."

(†) Where he went wrong: a secret tradition, a passionless ideal, and speculations his own readers could not defend. + The ledger has another column, and three entries belong in it. All three come from Clement himself rather than from what anyone later did with him. - The unwritten tradition. Clement held that the apostles handed down a deeper teaching orally to a few, and that he was one of the heirs of it; he says the Stromata deliberately hides such things where the careless will not find them. His motive was pastoral, and the content he actually produces is not exotic. But it concedes the shape of the argument to the very teachers he was fighting, who also claimed a secret apostolic line. His contemporary Irenaeus took the opposite road and was right: what the apostles taught, they taught publicly, and a gospel with a hidden second storey is not the gospel the apostles preached. - The passionless saint. Clement borrowed the Stoic ideal of apatheia, freedom from passion, and made it the mark of the mature Christian, who is to be beyond anger, beyond fear, and beyond desire itself. There is real Scripture behind the impulse, since the New Testament does command self-control. But the ideal, pressed as he presses it, does not fit the Lord it is meant to describe. Jesus wept at a grave (John 11:35), was angry in the temple, and was troubled in Gethsemane. A holiness defined as the absence of feeling has quietly swapped the Stoic sage for the Man of Sorrows. - The lost Hypotyposeis. His eight books of Outlines do not survive whole, and the reason is instructive. Photius, a ninth-century patriarch of Constantinople who had read them, reported that alongside sound material the work contained plain errors: eternal matter, souls transmigrating from body to body, and language about the Son that made him a creature. Photius himself left the door open, allowing that the blasphemies might be someone else’s written under Clement’s name, and since the book is lost the charge cannot be tested. What can be said is that Clement was a speculative man working more than a century before Nicaea and the councils that followed it drew the lines, that he sometimes ranked the Son below the Father in ways the church later refused, and that this is why he has always been read as a pioneer rather than as a standard. None of this is a reason to put him down. It is a reason to read him the way he asked to be read, as someone thinking out loud in the presence of a Scripture he never doubted, and to notice that the church kept the parts he got right for eighteen hundred years.