Clement.

        Clement was himself a native of Athens and was probably of pagan parentage. He traveled widely about the world, pursuing his studies under a series of masters, of whom he speaks half playfully, but most obscurely, in the opening pages of his Miscellanies, which were in part at least the result of years of diligent notetaking.

        Now this work of mine is not a writing artfully constructed for display, but my notes are stored up for old age, as a remedy against forgetfulness, an image without art, and a rough sketch of those powerful and animated discourses which it was my privilege to hear, and of blessed and truly remarkable men.

        Of these, one was in Greece, an Ionian; another in Magna Graecia; another of them from Coele-Syria, and another from Egypt. Others were in the East, one born in Assyria, and another, a Hebrew, in Palestine.

        Clement seems to have had six teachers before he found his way to Pantaenus, but it is difficult to name any of them, except probably the Assyrian, who must have been Tatian. That Tatian's later views were very objectionable to Clement does not conflict with this.

        Clement probably began to assist Pantaenus about A.D. 190, and actively taught at Alexandria until about 202, doing most of his writing in these twelve years. The outbreak of the persecution of Severus drove him from Alexandria, and apparently he never returned. When Alexander (later bishop of Jerusalem) wrote his letter from prison to Antioch, A.D. 211, he sent it by Clement (Church History vi. 11. 6), so that Clement was still alive at that date, but we cannot trace him after that time. Alexander tells of the useful work that Clement (also called “the blessed presbyter”) has been doing for the church at Caesarea in Cappadocia while its bishop, Alexander himself, was in prison. In another letter, written to Origen not later than A.D. 217, Alexander speaks of Clement as deceased (Church History vi. 14. 9). Clement's death must therefore have occurred not far from A.D. 215. Our last glimpse of him is in Cappadocian Caesarea in A.D. 211, strengthening and building up the church there.

        It is interesting to observe that although Alexander of Jerusalem speaks favorably of both Pantaenus and Clement when he writes to Origen, Clement is not mentioned in Origen's reply-or indeed in any of his works. Scholars have rightly pointed out that the official church school of Alexandria began with Origen, not with Clement. Furthermore, it would appear that Origen actively disapproved of Clement. Forty years after the persecution of the year 202, in which Origen's father was a martyr, he still looked back to the period as a golden age of faith and devotion, but Clement had avoided martyrdom by leaving Alexandria!

        Clement had traveled and studied widely; he seems to have visited Ionia, Middle Syria, Palestine, southern Italy, and Egypt in his pursuit of learning. And he had studied well. His firsthand acquaintance with scripture and classics exceeds that of any Christian writer before him, and of this lore he made good use in his literary efforts to propagate the gospel.

        For Clement was not content, like his master Pantaenus, with lecturing to his pupils; he committed his views to writing and expressed himself in the form of books, and books on a grand scale. Whether he planned a great cycle, after the threefold organization of the pagan mysteries-Purification, Instruction, Revelation-may be doubted. Certainly such a plan was never completed, if he ever contemplated it.

        Eusebius gives a long list of Clement's works:

The Miscellanies (Stromateis), in eight books

The Outlines (of holy scripture), in eight books

The Address to the Creeks (the Protrepticus).

The Tutor (the Paedagogus), in three books

What Rich Man Can Be Saved? — a tract, or sermon

On the Passover

On Fasting

On Evil-speaking

On Patience, a discourse to the newly baptized

Against the Judaizers, on the rule of the church

Besides these ten works listed by Eusebius, Clement wrote one On Providence (two books) of which some fragments exist, and one, Palladius says,[63] On the Prophet Amos, but of this there are no remains.

        Of these twelve books, the majority have almost entirely disappeared, but three of Clement's major works survive: The Miscellanies, the Address, and the Tutor. We have also the tract or sermon, What Rich Man Can Be Saved? and part of the Outlines. All these books seem to have been written while Clement was still at Alexandria, that is, by A.D. 202.

        The Protrepticus, or Address, was directed to pagan readers and designed to clear the way for the presentation of Christianity by showing the folly of idolatry and the failure of their old faiths and philosophies to bring them the salvation they needed. The immoralities of Greek mythology, the prostitution of Greek art, and the vagaries of the philosophers are unsparingly set forth, with an extraordinary amount of direct quotation, often of Greek classics now lost. Yet these philosophers, Clement goes on to say, sometimes did find the truth and spoke by divine inspiration-Plato and Socrates and Cleanthes and Pythagoras. In the Greek poets, too, Clement often finds divine truth expressed. But the true teaching is to be found in the prophets. Clement calls upon the pagan Greeks to repent and accept the salvation offered them through Christ. The Address is a spirited, richly illustrated, penetrating, and moving appeal.

        The Tutor, the second book in Clement's sequence, for to that extent at any rate, his sequence did extend, rankly regards its readers as children in spiritual matters and proceeds to teach them in the name of Jesus, the divine Instructor. “We are the children,” says Clement. The true basis of morality is set forth and intemperance, extravagance, frivolity, luxury, matrimonial relations, dress, and personal habits are frankly and fully dealt with. Incidentally, an extraordinarily bold and detailed, almost photographic, picture emerges of ancient life, its vanities, foibles, and fashions, as the background against which a Christian morality was being developed. Modestly, frugality, simplicity, and decency are to be the Christian practice. Clement shows how the Christian is to dress, walk, talk, look, and even laugh, and what his attitude should be to jewelry, cosmetics, amusements, and public spectacles. After a veritable volley of scripture texts bearing on the good life, Clement closes with an extraordinary hymn, addressed to Christ. The hymn is uttered ostensibly by children, but really, of course, by all believers, thought of by Clement as children. It may have formed part of the liturgy of the Alexandrian church and, with its string of disconnected epithets, twelve of them at one time, recalls the Isis litany found some years ago at Oxyrhynchus.[64] It marks another step in Christian hymnology already being developed, as we have seen, in the Odes of Solomon.[65] It has been made the basis of a modern children's hymn, widely used, beginning “Shepherd of tender youth.”

        If Clement meant to produce a trilogy culminating in a Didascalus, or Teacher, as some have thought, he never reached his goal, although his tract called What Rich Man Can Be Saved? has been thought to be possibly a part of such a work-without much plausibility. In this short work Clement argues that it is not the possession of wealth so much as its misuse that is to be condemned. Still less can the Miscellanies be identified as such a third book.

        The Miscellanies, or Scrapbooks (Stromateis) disclaims any literary or orderly intention. It does this in its very title: “Scrap books of Gnostic Notes after the True Philosophy.” Into it Clement crammed things he wished to say or at least to preserve. The fact that the book does not seem to come to an end accords well with this; he kept putting things into it perhaps as long as he lived or kept at work. The eighth book has a very different air. It begins with a fragment on logic, which Westcott thought was part of the introduction to the lost Outlines. It includes also the Excerpts from the Valentinian Theodotus[66] and the Selections from the Prophets that are evidently incomplete notes and materials Clement never found time or inclination to write up. His method seems to have been to deal with an occasional sentence, allegorically or doctrinally.

        The Miscellanies have been well described as “a heterogeneous mixture of science, philosophy, poetry, and theology,” controlled by the conviction that Christianity can satisfy man's highest intellectual yearnings.[67] Clement is a great reconciler of the intellectual with the religious, as his hospitality to truth wherever he met it among the writings of the philosophers shows. He argues for the greater antiquity of Moses as against Homer and tells, in language evidently drawn from Tatian,[68] what the Greeks owed to other peoples. Like Tatian, too, he speaks of Christianity as a barbarian philosophy. He thinks that philosophies and in a sense even heresies help on the finding of the truth (vi. 15). Clement is not afraid to describe the true Gnostic, who attains gnosis (knowledge) through virtue and does right because he loves what is right, as the perfect man. Clement's wide acquaintance with books and his numerous quotations from all sorts of sources come out most strongly here, as do his breadth of view, his tolerance, and his genial good will. The Miscellanies makes a decidedly positive impression, but interwoven with its argument is an undercurrent of apologetic and also of antiheretical polemic, as Clement seeks to regain the honorable title of Gnostic from the sects that had appropriated and abused it.

        In the Outlines, Eusebius says, Clement gave concise accounts of the whole scriptures, “not passing over the disputed books; — I mean Jude and the rest of the Catholic letters and Barnabas and what is called the Revelation of Peter.” It was in the Outlines that he declared Hebrews to be the work of Paul and quoted the authority of “the blessed presbyter” Pantaenus for that view. This book, which would be of the utmost interest, has never been found, but a considerable fragment, covering I Peter, Jude, and I and II John, is preserved in a Latin translation by Cassiodorus, under the name of the Adumbrations of Clement. Smaller fragments are found in Eusebius and others. Photius says that irreligious and fabulous passages occurred in them (Bibliotheca 109) and this may have led to their disappearance.

        Of the homilies On Fasting and On Evil-speaking no pieces have been found, but there are fragments of the works On the Passover (called forth by Melito's book of that name), On Patience, and Against the judaizers. There are also traces of some of his letters, the most important of which is a copy of his Letter to Theodore which Morton Smith discovered in ig6o at the monastery of Mar Saba near Jerusalem. Written in an eighteenth-century hand on the flyleaves of a seventeenth-century book, the letter agrees perfectly with Clement's style and vocabulary and almost certainly comes from him. In it he warns Theodore about the Carpocratians' appeal to their own secret gospel of Mark but admits that the Church of Alexandria also possesses a secret gospel that Mark wrote after he had produced the ordinary gospel at Rome and had gone to Alexandria. Clement provides a few quotations to show the way in which the secret gospel differs from the ordinary one. This secret gospel, he says, is available only to those initiated in “the greater mysteries” at Alexandria. In the course of his writings Clement indicated his intention to write five other books, on various subjects, and some of these he may have written; but, if so, they have disappeared.

        Clement saw in Christianity the true philosophy and found in the works of Greek philosophers and poets an armory for its defense. It was not the least of his distinctions that he abandoned the types of Christian writing that had been customary and in the Address and the Tutor cast his views and arguments in literary forms more familiar to the Greek paganism he was seeking to reach.

        Clement's liberality was illustrated in his Christian scripture, to which he admitted not only Hebrews, but I Clement, Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hernias, the Revelation of Peter, the Preaching of Peter, and the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles; at any rate, he quotes these books as scripture. In fact, he goes further and some times quotes as scripture works now quite unknown. “Take away from you the heavy yoke, and take up the easy one, says the scripture.” “Ask, says the scripture, and I will do; think and I will give.” “The scripture exhorts us, Be ye skilful money-changers:” Clement sometimes quoted the Sibylline books and spoke of the Sibyl as a prophetess: “Let the Sibyl prophetess be the first to sing to us the song of salvation” (Address 8). He knew the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Gospel ofthe Egyptians, and the Traditions of Matthias, and, although he did not accept them as scripture, he did not dismiss them as heretical.[69]

        We are fortunate in possessing, almost complete, three of his major works; the beginning of the first book of the Miscellanies is missing, and the so-called eighth book, as we have seen, is a group of unrelated pieces, plainly unfinished. Of the Outlines we have little more than what Cassiodorus has left us in his translation, as the Adurrzbrations. Whatever the value of Clement's lost minor works might be, the recovery of the Outlines would have the utmost value for many phases of biblical study.