Voices and influences
Clement of Alexandria
The Alexandrian teacher who called Greek philosophy a tutor leading the world toward Christ.
Summary
This site quotes Clement of Alexandria 128 times across 32 books, and lists 0 works.
- Lived died 215.
- Quoted here most in Proverbs: 15 of 128.
Clement of Alexandria
- Lived
- died 215
- Tradition
- Early Church
5 of 128 quotations
Own words
Quoted in full, because Clement of Alexandria died in 215 and these works are out of copyright. Each citation below names its edition and its year. A citation naming a modernised text means that edition makes its own editorial changes, and that edition's terms are not in this site's record.
The Divinity is not angry, as some suppose, but when he makes so many threats he is only making an appeal and showing humankind the things that are to be accomplished.
The rest of the quotation
Such a procedure is surely good, for it instills fear to keep us away from sin.
Deuteronomy 32:23 I will heap disasters upon them; I will spend My arrows against them. BSB
By perverse, he means he will chastise sinners. For his natural uprightness … and his goodness toward those who believe obediently are immovable and unshakable.… Therefore, he treats them severely in the hope that perhaps he might curb their impulse toward death.
Psalms 18:26 to the pure You show Yourself pure, but to the crooked You show Yourself shrewd. BSB
Therefore, the Word is our educator who heals the unnatural passions of our soul with his counsel. The art of healing, strictly speaking, is the relief of the ills of the body, an art learned through human wisdom.
The rest of the quotation
Yet, the only true divine healer of human sickness, the holy comforter of the soul when it is ill, is the Word of the Father. Scripture says, "Save your servant, O my God, who puts his trust in you. Have mercy on me, O Lord, because I have cried to you the whole day through."
Psalms 86:2–3 Preserve my soul, for I am godly. You are my God; save Your servant who trusts in You. Be merciful to me, O Lord, for I call to You all day long. BSB
Wherefore by Solomon He commands the children to beware: "My son, let not sinners deceive thee, and go not after their ways; and go not, if they entice thee, saying, Come with us, share with us in innocent blood, and let us hide unjustly the…
The rest of the quotation
righteous man in the earth; let us put him out of sight, all alive as he is into Hades." This is accordingly likewise a prediction concerning the Lord's passion.
Proverbs 1:10–12 My son, if sinners entice you, do not yield to them. If they say, “Come along, let us lie in wait for blood, let us ambush the innocent without cause, let us swallow them alive like Sheol, and whole like those descending into the Pit. BSB
Ignorance involves a lack of education and learning. It is teaching which implants in us the scientific knowledge of things divine and human. It is possible to live uprightly in poverty. It is also possible in wealth.
The rest of the quotation
We admit that it is easier and quicker to track down virtue if we have a preliminary education. It can be hunted down without these aids, although even then those with learning, "with their faculties trained by practice," have an advantage. "Hatred," says Solomon, "stirs up strife, but education guards the paths of life."
Proverbs 10:12 Hatred stirs up dissension, but love covers all transgressions. BSB
Influence, on the record
This site quotes Clement of Alexandria 128 times across 32 books.
This site’s own count of what it does with the voice
The life, in order
The life told as one accountfrom this site's record
Titus Flavius Clemens was born around 150, probably at Athens, to pagan parents, and raised in the full Greek education — Homer, the tragedians, Plato, the mystery religions. He knew that world from inside, and he never pretended otherwise. After his conversion he traveled looking for teachers. He describes the search himself: one in Greece, one in southern Italy, one in Syria, one from Palestine. The last he found in Egypt, and he stopped. This was Pantaenus, head of the Christian school at Alexandria, and Clement said he was the best of them, the Sicilian bee. He stayed and eventually succeeded him. Alexandria was the intellectual capital of the empire, with the greatest library in the world and a Jewish and Greek scholarly tradition centuries deep. Clement's school was a catechetical school — where converts were taught before baptism — but under him it became something more: a place where a Christian could be an educated person without apology. His argument, made across three linked books, was that all truth is God's truth. The Law was the schoolmaster that brought the Jews to Christ, Paul says in Galatians. Clement said philosophy did the same office for the Greeks — a tutor, given by God, holding the Hellenic mind until Christ came. Whatever was true in Plato was on loan from the same source. The three books move a reader forward in stages. The Exhortation to the Greeks argues a pagan out of the temples. The Instructor takes the new convert and teaches him how to live — what to eat, how to dress, how to speak, how to laugh, how to handle money — with Christ himself as the tutor. The Miscellanies, a sprawling, deliberately unsystematic work, is for the mature: the true gnostic, Clement's phrase for the Christian who knows God, as against the heretical gnostics who claimed secret knowledge and denied the goodness of the created world. He also wrote a short piece asking Who Is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved? — the earliest Christian treatment of wealth, arguing that the sin is not owning but being owned. When the persecution under Septimius Severus struck Alexandria in 202, Clement left for Cappadocia. He did not return. Alexander of Jerusalem, writing around 215, refers to the blessed presbyter Clement in the past tense; that letter is how we know he was dead. His pupil Origen took the school and carried the work further than anyone. Sources: Eusebius, Church History V.11, VI.6, VI.11, VI.13–14; Clement, Exhortation to the Greeks, The Instructor, Miscellanies (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2.
128 quotations across 32 books
Where this voice is quoted
He humbled you, and in your hunger He gave you manna to eat, which neither you nor your fathers had known, so that you might understand that man does not…
“One who possesses the Word, who is almighty God, needs nothing and never lacks any of the things he desires, for the Word is an infinite possession and the source of all our wealth.”
You must not eat any detestable thing.
“Among the Jews, frugality was made a matter of precept by a very wise dispensation of the law. The Educator forbade them the use of innumerable things. He explained the reasons, the spiritual ones hidden, the material ones obvious, but all of which they trusted.”
Furthermore, the officers are to address the army, saying, “Has any man built a new house and not dedicated it?
“Again, the law in its humanity says that if a man has built a new house but has not yet moved in, or laid out a new vineyard but has not yet enjoyed the fruit, or become betrothed to a girl but has not yet…”
When you lay siege to a city for an extended time while fighting against it to capture it, you must not destroy its trees by putting an axe to them…
“The Logos in his goodness, richly equipped with love of humankind, teaches that it is not right to cut down cultivated trees, still less to cut crops for purposes of vandalism before harvest, and even less still to destroy, root and branch, cultivated fruit, whether…”
and put aside the clothing of her captivity. After she has lived in your house a full month and mourned her father and mother, you may have relations with her…
“The [Deuteronomic] law wishes males to have responsible sexual relations with their marriage partners, solely for the generation of children. This is clear when a bachelor is prevented from enjoying immediate sexual relations with a woman prisoner of war.”
Do not despise an Edomite, for he is your brother. Do not despise an Egyptian, because you lived as a foreigner in his land.
“At any rate [Scripture] says openly, "You shall not loathe Egyptians, since you lived as strangers in Egypt." By Egyptian it means "Gentile," in fact anyone from anywhere in the world.”
And today the LORD has proclaimed that you are His people and treasured possession as He promised, that you are to keep all His commandments,
“These are evidently symbolic—hands, of action; heart, of deliberation; mouth, of speech. There is an excellent text on the subject of the penitent: "You have chosen God today to be your God, and the Lord has chosen you today to be his people."”
I will heap disasters upon them; I will spend My arrows against them.
“The Divinity is not angry, as some suppose, but when he makes so many threats he is only making an appeal and showing humankind the things that are to be accomplished.”