Clement of Alexandria

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.