The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

All these admonitions imply an audience with some degree of wealth. The Christian artisan of Celsus had no temptation to use a silver foot-bath or to plaster himself with cosmetics. It may also be remarked that the man who gives the advice shows himself well acquainted with the ways of good society – and perhaps of society not so well gifted with taste. With all this refinement went education. The children of Christian parents were being educated, and new converts were being made among the cultured classes, and the adjustment of the new faith and the old culture was imperative. The men to make it were found in a succession of scholars, learned in all the wisdom of Greece, enthusiastic for philosophy and yet loyal to the Gospel tradition.

The first of these, whose name we know, was Pantænus; but beyond his name there is little to be known of him. Eusebius says that he began as a Stoic philosopher and ended as a Christian missionary to India.[806] His pupil, Clement, is of far greater importance in the history of Christian thought.

His classical training

Of Clement again there is little to be learnt beyond what can be gathered from his own writings. He alludes himself to the death of the Emperor Commodus as being "194 years, 1 month and 13 days" after the birth of Christ (it was in 192 A.D.); and Eusebius quotes a passage from a contemporary letter which shows that Clement was alive in 211 A.D., and another written in or about 215, which implies that he was dead.[807] We have also an indication from Eusebius that his activity as a teacher in Alexandria lasted from 180 to 202 or 203.[808] We may then assume that Clement was born about the middle of the century.

Epiphanius says that Clement was either an Alexandrine or an Athenian. A phrase to be quoted below suggests that he was not an Alexandrine, and it has been held possible that he came from Athens.[809] It also seems that he was born a pagan.[810] Perhaps he says this himself when he writes: "rejoicing exceedingly and renouncing our old opinions we grow young again for salvation, singing with the prophecy that chants 'How good is God to Israel.'"[811]

It is obvious that he had the usual training of a Greek of his social position. If his code of manners is lifted above other such codes by the constant suggestion of the gentle spirit of Jesus, it yet bears the mark of his race and of his period. It is Greek and aristocratic, and it would in the main command the approval of Plutarch. He must have been taught Rhetoric like every one else, – his style shows this as much as his protests that he does not aim at eloquence (euglôttía), that he has not studied and does not practise "Greek style" (helleíxein).[812] He has the diffuse learning of his day – wide, second-hand and uncritical; and, like other contemporary writers, he was a devotee of the note-book. No age of Greek literature has left us so many works of the kind he wrote – the sheer congeries with no attempt at structure, no "beginning, middle and end," – easy, accumulative books of fine miscellaneous feeding, with titles that playfully confess to their character. Like other authors of this class, Clement preserves for us many and many a fragment of more interest and value than any original piece of literature could have been. He clearly loved the poetry of Greece, and it comes spontaneously and irresistibly to his mind as he writes, and the sayings of Jesus are reinforced by those of Menander or Epicharmus. The old words charm him, and he cannot reject them. His Stromateis are "not like ornamental paradises laid out in rows to please the eye, but rather resemble some shady and thickly-wooded hill, where you may find cypress and plane, bay and ivy, and apple trees along with olives and figs"[813] – trees with literary connotations. Such works imply some want of the creative instinct, of originality, and they are an index to the thinking of the age, impressed with its great ancestry. It is to be remarked that the writers of our period care little for the literature of the past two or three centuries; they quote their own teachers and the great philosophers and poets of ancient Greece.[814] Few of them have any new thoughts at all, and those who have are under the necessity of clothing them in the hallowed phrases of their predecessors. This was the training in which Clement shared. Later on, he emancipated himself, and spoke contemptuously of the school – "a river of words and a trickle of mind";[815] but an education is not easily shaken off. He might quarrel with his teachers and their lessons, but he still believed in them. It may be noted that in his quotations of Greek literature his attention is mainly given to the thought which he finds in the words – or attaches to them – that he does not seem to conceive of a work of art as a whole, nor does he concern himself with the author. He used the words as a quotation, and it is not unlikely that many of the passages he borrowed he knew only as quotations.

In philosophy his training must have been much the same, but here he had a more living interest. Philosophy touched him more nearly, for it bore upon the two great problems of the human soul – conduct and God. Like Seneca and Plutarch he was not interested in Philosophy apart from these issues – epistemology, psychology, physics and so forth were not practical matters. The philosophers he judged by their theology. With religious men of his day he leant to the Stoics and "truth-loving Plato" – especially Plato, whom he seems to have read for himself – but he avows that Philosophy for him means not the system of any school or thinker, but the sum of the unquestionable dogmata of all the schools, "all that in every school has been well said, to teach righteousness with pious knowledge – this eclectic whole I call Philosophy."[816] To this Philosophy all other studies contribute – they are "the handmaidens, and she the mistress"[817] – and she herself owns the sway of Theology.

Clement and the mysteries

At some time of his life Clement acquired a close acquaintance with pagan mythology and its cults. It may be that he was initiated into mysteries; in his Protrepticus he gives an account of many of them, which is of great value to the modern student. It is probable enough that an earnest man in search of God would explore the obvious avenues to the knowledge he sought – avenues much travelled and loudly vaunted in his day. Having explored them, it is again not unlikely that a spirit so pure and gentle should be repelled by rituals and legends full of obscenity and cruelty. It is of course possible that much of his knowledge came from books, perhaps after his conversion, for one great part of Christian polemic was the simple exposure of the secret rites of paganism. Yet it remains that his language is permanently charged with technical terms proper to the mysteries, and that he loves to put Christian knowledge and experience in the old language – "Oh! mysteries truly holy! Oh! stainless light! The daduchs lead me on to be the epopt of the heavens and of God; I am initiated and become holy; the Lord is the hierophant and seals the mystês for himself, himself the photagogue."[818] It is again a little surprising to hear of "the Saviour "being" our mystagogue as in the tragedy —

He sees, we see, he gives the holy things (órgia);

and if thou wilt inquire

These holy things – what form have they for thee?

thou wilt hear in reply

Save Bacchus' own initiate, none may know."[819]

It is inconceivable that a Hebrew, or anyone but a Greek, could have written such a passage with its double series of allusions to Greek mysteries and to Euripides' Bacchæ. Clement is the only man who writes in this way, with an allusiveness beyond Plutarch's, and a fancy as comprehensive as his charity and his experience of literature and religion.

He had the Greek's curious interest in foreign religions, and he speaks of Chaldæans and Magians, of Indian hermits and Brahmans – "and among the Indians are those that follow the precepts of Buddha (Boûtta), whom for his exceeding holiness they have honoured as a god" – of the holy women of the Germans and the Druids of the Gauls.[820] Probably in each of these cases his knowledge was soon exhausted, but it shows the direction of his thoughts. Egypt of course furnished a richer field of inquiry to him as to Plutarch. He has passages on Egyptian symbolism,[821] and on their ceremonial,[822] which contain interesting detail. It was admitted by the Greeks – even by Celsus – that barbarians excelled in the discovery of religious dogma, though they could not equal the Greeks in the philosophic use of it. Thus Pausanias says the Chaldæans and Indian Magians first spoke of the soul's immortality, which many Greeks have accepted, "not least Plato son of Ariston."[823]

In the course of his intellectual wanderings, very possibly before he became a Christian, Clement investigated Jewish thought so far as it was accessible to him in Greek, for Greeks did not learn barbarian languages. Eusebius remarks upon his allusions to a number of Jewish historians.[824] His debt to Philo is very great, for it was not only his allegoric method in general and some elaborate allegories that he borrowed, but the central conception in his presentment of Christianity comes originally from the Jewish thinker, though Clement was not the first Christian to use the term Logos.

Clement does not tell us that he was born of pagan parents, nor does he speak definitely of his conversion. It is an inference, and we are left to conjecture the steps by which it came, but without the help of evidence. One allusion to his Christian teachers is dropped when he justifies his writing the Stromateis– "memoranda treasured up for my old age, an antidote against forgetfulness, a mere semblance and shadow-picture of those bright and living discourses, those men happy and truly remarkable, whom I was counted worthy to hear." And then the reading is uncertain, but, according to Dr Stahlin's text he says: "Of these, one was in Greece – the Ionian; the next (pl.) in Magna Græcia (one of whom was from Coele Syria and the other from Egypt); others in the East; and in this region one was an Assyrian, and the other in Palestine a Hebrew by descent. The last of all (in power he was the first) I met and found my rest in him, when I had caught him hidden away in Egypt. He, the true Sicilian bee, culling the flowers of the prophetic and apostolic meadow, begot pure knowledge in the souls of those who heard him. These men preserved the true tradition of the blessed teaching direct from Peter and James, John and Paul, the holy apostles, son receiving it from father ('and few be sons their fathers' peers'), and reached down by God's blessing even to us, in us to deposit those ancestral and apostolic seeds."[825] It is supposed that the Assyrian was Tatian, while the Sicilian bee hidden away in Egypt was almost certainly Pantænus.

Clement's education had been wide and superficial, his reading sympathetic but not deep, his philosophy vague and eclectic, and now from paganism with its strange and indefinite aggregation of religions based on cult and legend, he passed to a faith that rested on a tradition jealously maintained and a rule beginning to be venerable. He met men with a definite language in which they expressed a common experience – who had moreover seen a good many efforts made to mend the language and all of them ending in "shipwreck concerning the faith"; who therefore held to the "form of sound words" as the one foundation for the Christian life.

It says a great deal for Clement's character – one might boldly say at once that it is an index to his personal experience – that he could sympathize with these men in the warm and generous way he did. Now and again he is guilty of directing a little irony against the louder-voiced defenders of "faith only, bare faith"[826] and "straight opinion" – "the orthodoxasts, as they are called."[827] (The curious word shows that the terms "orthodox" and "orthodoxy" were not yet quite developed.) But he stands firmly by the simplest Christians and their experience. If he pleads for a wider view of things – for what he calls "knowledge," it is, he maintains, the development of the common faith of all Christians. It is quite different from the wisdom that is implanted by teaching; it comes by grace. "The foundation of knowledge is to have no doubts about God, but to believe; Christ is both – foundation and superstructure alike; by him is the beginning and the end… These, I mean faith and love, are not matters of teaching."[828] As Jesus became perfect by baptism and was hallowed by the descent of the spirit, "so it befals us also, whose pattern is the Lord. Baptized, we are enlightened; enlightened, we are made sons; made sons we are perfected; made perfect we become immortal [all these verbs and participles are in the present]. 'I,' he saith, 'said ye are gods and sons of the Most High, all of you.' This work has many names; it is called gift [or grace, chárisma], enlightenment, perfection, baptism… What is wanting for him who knows God? It would be strange indeed if that were called a gift of God which was incomplete; the Perfect will give what is perfect, one supposes… Thus they that have once grasped the borders of life are already perfect; we live already, who are separated from death. Salvation is following Christ… So to believe – only to believe – and to be born again is perfection in life."[829] He praises the poet of Agrigentum for hymning faith, which his verses declare to be hard; 'and that is why the Apostle exhorts 'that your faith may not be in the wisdom of men' – who offer to persuade – 'but in the power of God' – which alone and without proofs can by bare faith save."[830]

"The real polymetis"

It was this strong sympathy with the simplest view of the Christian faith that made the life-work of Clement possible. He was to go far outside the ordinary thoughts of the Christian community round about him – inevitably he had to do this under the compulsion of his wide experience of books and thinkers – but the centre of all his larger experience he found where his unlettered friends, "believing without letters," found their centre, and he checked his theories, original and borrowed – or he aimed at checking them – by life. "As in gardening and in medicine he is the man of real learning (chrestomathés), who has had experience of the more varied lessons…; so, I say, here too, of him who brings everything to bear on the truth… We praise the pilot of wide range, who 'has seen the cities of many men'… so he who turns everything to the right life, fetching illustrations from things Greek and things barbarian alike, he is the much-experienced (polypeiros) tracker of truth, the real polymêtis; like the touchstone – the Lydian stone believed to distinguish between the bastard and the true-born gold, he is able to separate, – our polyidris and man of knowledge (gnostikos) as he is, – sophistic from philosophy, the cosmetic art from the true gymnastic, cookery from medicine, rhetoric from dialectic, magic and other heresies in the barbarian philosophy from the actual truth."[831] This, in spirit and letter, is a very characteristic utterance. Beginning with the Lord as "the vine" – from which some expect to gather clusters of grapes in the twinkling of an eye – he ranges into medicine and sea-faring, from Odysseus "of many wiles, who saw the cities of many men and learnt their mind," to Plato's Gorgias, and brings all to bear on the Christian life. What his simple friends made of such a passage – if they were able to read at all, or had it read to them – it is not easy to guess, but contact must have shown them in the man a genuine and tender Christian as Christocentric as themselves, if in speech he was oddly suited, – a gay epitome of Greek literature in every sentence.

This, then, is the man, a Greek of wide culture and open heart, who has dipped into everything that can charm the fancy and make the heart beat, – curious in literature, cult, and philosophy, and now submitted to the tradition of the church and the authority of Hebrew prophet and Christian apostle, but not as one bowing to a strange and difficult necessity. Rather, with the humblest of God's children – those "tender, simple and guileless" children on whom God lavishes all the little names which he has for his only Son, the "lamb" and the "child"[832] – he finds in Christ "thanksgiving, blessing, triumph and joy," while Christ himself bends from above, like Sarah, to smile upon their "laughter."[833] Such was the range of Clement's experience, and now, under the influence of the great change that conversion brought, he had to re-think everything and to gather it up in a new unity. Thus in one man were summed up all the elements of import in the general situation of the church of his day. He was representative alike in his susceptibility to the ancient literature and philosophy and his love of Scripture – "truth-loving Isaiah" and "St Paul" – in his loyalty to the faith, and, not less, in his determination to reach some higher ground from which the battle of the church could be fought with wider outlook, more intelligent grasp of the factors in play, and more hope of winning men for God.

Faith and philosophy

Clement did not come before his time. Philosophy had begun to realize the significance of the church. The repression of the "harmful superstition" was no longer an affair of police; it was the common concern of good citizens. The model Emperor himself, the philosopher upon the throne, had openly departed from the easy policy laid down by Trajan and continued by his successors. He had witnessed, or had received reports of, executions. Writing in his diary of death, he says: "What a soul is that which is ready, if the moment has come for its separation from the body, whether it is to be extinguished, or dissolved, or to continue a whole. This readiness – see that it come from your own judgment, not in mere obstinacy, as with the Christians, but reflectively and with dignity, in a way to persuade another, with nothing of the actor in it."[834] This sentence betrays something of the limitations of a good man – a beautiful spirit indeed, but not a little over-praised by his admirers in modern days. Celsus at once taunts his Christian opponents with their prospects of painful death and demonstrates the absurdity of their tenets from the point of view of philosophy. The Apologists say, too, that the philosophers lent themselves (as did also the dæmons) to inciting the mob to massacre. But after all the dialectical weapons of Philosophy were the more dangerous, for they shook the faith of the Christian which death did not shake.

Again, the candid and inquiring temper of some notable converts and friends had led them to question the tradition of the church and to examine their Christian experience with a freedom from prejudice, at least in the evangelic direction, which had resulted in conclusions fatal, it seemed, to the Christian movement. Their philosophy had carried them outside the thoughts of Jesus – they had abandoned the idea of the Abba Father, of the divine love, of the naturalness and instinctiveness of Christian life. Incarnation and redemption they rejected, at least in the sense which made the conceptions of value to men. Jesus they remodelled into one and another figure more amenable to their theories – a mere man, a demi-god, a phantom, into anything but the historic personality that was and could remain the centre and inspiration of Christian life. Of all this mischief philosophy, men said, was the cause.[835]

"I know quite well," writes Clement, "what is said over and over again by some ignorantly nervous people who insist that we should confine ourselves to the inevitable minimum, to what contains the faith, and pass over what is outside and superfluous, as it wears us out to no purpose and occupies us with what contributes nothing to our end. Others say philosophy comes of evil and was introduced into life for the ruin of men by an evil inventor."[836] They were afraid of philosophy, as children might fear a ghost, in case it should take them away[837] – but this, as Clement saw, was no way to meet the danger. The Christian must not philosophize, they said – Tertullian said it too; but how could they know they must not philosophize unless they philosophized?[838] Whether philosophy is profitable or not, "you cannot condemn the Greeks on the basis of mere statements about their opinions, without going into it with them till point by point you discover what they mean and understand them. It is the refutation based upon experience that is reliable."[839]

His defence of philosophy

So Clement has first of all to fight the battle of education inside the church, to convince his friends that culture counts, that philosophy is inevitable and of use at once for the refutation of opponents and for the achievement of the full significance of faith. Then he has to show how philosophy at its best was the foe of superstition and the champion of God's unity and goodness – a preparation for the Gospel. Lastly he has to restate the Christian position in the language of philosophy and to prove that the Gospel is reaffirming all that was best in the philosophic schools and bringing it to a higher point, indeed to the highest; that the Gospel is the final philosophy of the universe, the solution of all the problems of existence, the revelation of the ultimate mind of God.

Clement boldly asserts the unity of all knowledge. Everything contributes, everything is concentric. "Just as every family goes back to God the Creator, so does the teaching of all good things go back to the Lord, the teaching that makes men just, that takes them by the hand and brings them that way."[840] And again: – "When many men launch a ship, pulling together, you could not say there are many causes, but one consisting of many – for each of them is not by himself the cause of its being launched but only in conjunction with others; so philosophy, which is a search for truth, contributes to the perception (katalepsis) of truth, though it is not the cause of perception, except in conjunction and co-operation with other things. Yet perhaps even a joint-cause we might call a cause. Happiness is one, and the virtues more than one which are its causes. The causes of warmth may be the sun, the fire, the bath and the clothing. So, truth is one and many things co-operate in the search for it, but the discovery is by the Son… Truth is one, but in Geometry we have geometrical truth, in Music musical; so in Philosophy – right Philosophy – we should have Greek truth. But alone the sovereign Truth is unassailable, which we are taught by the Son of God."[841] Elsewhere, when challenged to say what use there is in knowing the causes that explain the sun's motion,[842] geometry and dialectics, when Greek philosophy is merely man's understanding, he falls back upon the mind's instinctive desire for such things, its free will (tèn proaíresin toû noû), and quickly marshals a series of texts from the Book of Wisdom on the divine source of wisdom and God's love of it, concluding with an allegory drawn from the five barley loaves and the two fishes on which the multitude were fed, the former typifying the Hebrew Law ("for barley is sooner ripe for harvest than wheat") and the fishes Greek philosophy "born and moving amid Gentile billows." ("If you are curious, take one of the fishes as signifying ordinary education and the other the philosophy that succeeds it…

A choir of voiceless fish came sweeping on,

the Tragic muse says somewhere"[843]). His appeal to the mind is a much stronger defence than any such accumulation of texts, but for the people he had in view the texts were probably more convincing.

The impulse to Philosophy is an inevitable one, native to the human mind, and he shows that it is to the Divine Reason working in all things, to Providence, that we must attribute it. "Everything, so far as its nature permits, came into being, and does so still, advancing to what is better than itself. So that it is not out of the way that Philosophy too should have been given in Divine Providence, as a preliminary training towards the perfection that comes by Christ… 'Your hairs are numbered' and your simplest movements; can Philosophy be left out of the account? [An allegory follows from Samson's hair.] Providence, it says, from above, from what is of first importance, as from the head, reaches down to all men, as 'the myrrh,' it says, 'that descends upon Aaron's beard and to the fringe of his garment' – viz.: the Great High Priest, 'by whom all things came into being, and without him nothing came' – not, that is, on to the beauty of the body; Philosophy is outside the people [possibly Israel is meant] just as raiment is. The philosophers then, who are trained by the perceptive spirit for their own perception, – when they investigate not a part of Philosophy, but Philosophy absolutely, they testify in a truth-loving way and without pride to truth by their beautiful sayings even with those who think otherwise, and they advance to understanding (synesin), in accordance with the divine dispensation, that unspeakable goodness which universally brings the nature of all that exists onward toward the better so far as may be."[844]