Clement of Alexandria

Dates

around 150 - around 215 — Both dates approximate. He left Alexandria during a persecution and died elsewhere.

Region

Alexandria; later Cappadocia

Language of composition

Greek

Life

Clement taught at Alexandria, the intellectual capital of the eastern Mediterranean, in the decades before Origen. He was widely read in Greek literature and philosophy and used both constantly.

His major surviving works form something like a sequence: an Exhortation urging Greeks to abandon their myths, a Paedagogus on Christian conduct, and the Stromateis, a deliberately unsystematic set of 'miscellanies' on Christian knowledge.

Works

Generally accepted as authentic

• Exhortation to the Heathen
• The Instructor (Paedagogus) — Not archived here.
• The Stromata — Not archived here.

Theological and spiritual contribution

Clement's central claim is that philosophy was to the Greeks what the law was to the Jews: a schoolmaster leading to Christ. That gave later Christian thought a way of taking pagan learning seriously without simply adopting it.

He also developed an account of the mature Christian — the true gnostic, a term he deliberately took back from his opponents — whose knowledge is inseparable from love and from a disciplined life. The vocabulary is confusing to modern readers, and the substance is not the Gnosticism Irenaeus attacked.

Controversy and reception

Clement's reception is uneven, and it would be inaccurate to present him simply as a saint of the Orthodox Church. He was honoured in the early centuries and appears in some calendars; his name was removed from the Roman martyrology in the sixteenth century, and Orthodox usage is not uniform. Some of his speculative positions, particularly where they anticipate Origen, were not received.

This site therefore classifies him as an ecclesiastical writer rather than as a canonised Father, and marks the question of his commemoration as one it has not been able to settle from official sources.