Who Was Clement of Alexandria?
Titus Flavius Clemens, known to history as Clement of Alexandria, was born around 150, probably to pagan parents, and probably in Athens. After his conversion to Christianity he traveled widely through Greece, Italy, Syria, and Palestine in search of teachers, eventually arriving in Alexandria, where he became a student and then a colleague of Pantaenus, head of the city's Catechetical School. Clement succeeded Pantaenus as the school's leading teacher, a position he held until persecution under Septimius Severus forced him to flee around 202–203. He died sometime between 211 and 215.
Clement's major surviving works form a loose trilogy: the Protrepticus (an exhortation inviting pagan readers to abandon idolatry for Christ), the Paedagogus (instruction in Christian conduct for new converts), and the Stromata, or “Miscellanies” – a sprawling, deliberately unsystematic work that takes up the relationship between Christian faith and Greek philosophy at length. Clement's basic move in the Stromata is to treat Greek philosophy – Plato above all, but also the Stoics and others – not as Christianity's enemy but as containing genuine, if partial and scattered, fragments of truth, which Clement describes as having their ultimate source in the same Logos that became incarnate in Christ.
Clement is significant for TLA because he is, in effect, the patristic source of the mechanism this site calls Borrowed Moral Capital. Where TLA observes that secular fiction often generates moral claims its own frameworks cannot fully ground – claims that turn out, on inspection, to depend on a Christian moral inheritance the fiction does not acknowledge – Clement makes the same observation about Greek philosophy eighteen centuries earlier, and makes it as a positive program rather than a diagnosis: the truth scattered through pagan thought is real truth, on loan, so to speak, from its proper source, and Christian engagement with that thought consists of reclaiming what was always, in the deepest sense, on loan from the Logos in the first place.
In Their Own Words
“Philosophy is a clear image of truth, a gift of God to the Greeks.”
– Stromata“He, the true, the Sicilian bee, gathering the spoil of the flowers of the prophetic and apostolic meadow.”
– Stromata, on his teacher Pantaenus“Bridle of untamed colts, wing of unwandering birds, sure helm of babes, shepherd of royal lambs.”
– Paedagogus, closing hymn to ChristSelected Bibliography
- Protrepticus (Exhortation to the Greeks) – c. 195
- Paedagogus (The Instructor) – c. 198
- Stromata (Miscellanies) – c. 198–203
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