Clement of Alexandria

Titus Flavius Clemens, commonly called Clement of Alexandria, was a Christian theologian, philosopher, and teacher of the late second and early third centuries, numbered among the Church Fathers and associated above all with the catechetical school of Alexandria in Egypt. Almost nothing about his family or childhood can be established from contemporary evidence. Later tradition often placed his birth in Athens, citing the breadth of his Greek learning, but ancient notices were not unanimous—some associated him with Alexandria itself—and a precise year of birth was never recorded. He was raised in a pagan household and received an extensive education in classical literature and philosophy. After converting to Christianity he traveled in search of living teachers of the faith, a journey that took him through Greece, Magna Graecia in southern Italy, Syria, and Palestine before he settled in Alexandria, then one of the great intellectual centers of the Roman Empire.

There he studied under Pantaenus, a converted Stoic who headed Alexandria's Christian school of instruction. Clement succeeded Pantaenus as the school's principal teacher, probably toward the end of the second century, and made the institution a meeting point between biblical religion and Hellenistic thought. He taught a wide circle of students; the most famous figure connected with the school in the next generation was Origen. Clement's own status in the church appears to have been that of a presbyter rather than a bishop. The bishop of Alexandria in his day was Demetrius. When a persecution of Christians broke out under the emperor Septimius Severus in the opening years of the third century, Clement left the city. He found hospitality in Cappadocia with Alexander, a former pupil who later became bishop of Jerusalem. Letters of Alexander preserved by the church historian Eusebius of Caesarea speak of Clement with respect and imply that Clement had died by the time those letters were written in the early third century, a death commonly placed around the mid-210s. The exact place of his death and burial is not known.

Clement's surviving writings are among the most important witnesses to Greek-speaking Christianity at the turn of the third century. A loosely constructed trilogy stands at the center of his work. The Protrepticus, or Exhortation to the Greeks, is an apologetic appeal calling educated pagans away from the cults of the traditional gods and toward Christ, whom Clement identifies with the divine Logos. The Paedagogus, or Instructor, addresses those already converted and sets out a Christian way of life, treating dress, food, speech, and household conduct as matters in which the Logos trains the believer. The Stromata, or Miscellanies, is a long, deliberately unsystematic work in which Clement discusses the relation of faith to knowledge, the proper use of Greek philosophy, the interpretation of scripture, and the character of the true Christian gnostic—the spiritually mature believer—as distinct from the dualist systems of Valentinus, Basilides, and other teachers he regarded as heretical. He argued that philosophy had been given to the Greeks as a preparation for the Gospel, much as the Law had been given to the Jews. A shorter treatise, Who Is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved?, interprets the Gospel story of the rich young man as a warning against the passion of avarice rather than against the mere possession of property. Other writings, including the Hypotyposes, survive only in fragments. Clement's pages preserve numerous quotations from classical poets and philosophers that would otherwise have been lost.

Theologically he developed a Logos Christology indebted to both the Gospel of John and Middle Platonism, stressed human free will against fatalism, and presented the Christian life as a gradual ascent in virtue and knowledge toward likeness to God. Later Byzantine critics, notably Photius in the ninth century, objected to certain cosmological and anthropological speculations in his works. He was never pope of Rome nor patriarch of any autocephalous see. No reliable source records whether he married or had children. In the Latin Church he was long honored as a saint, with a feast on 4 December in the Roman Martyrology, but his name was removed in the late sixteenth century because of reservations about some of his opinions, and he is not now in the General Roman Calendar. He remains commemorated in the Coptic Orthodox Church and in the Anglican Communion, typically on 4 December in Eastern Christian usage and on 5 December among Anglicans. His lasting importance lies in his effort to show that the Christian faith could absorb and transform the intellectual heritage of the Greek world without surrendering its biblical core.