The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

It follows that the language of the Bible is not to be taken literally when it attributes feelings to God. Clement has cited texts which speak of "joy" and "pity" in connexion with God, and he has to meet the objection that these are moods of the soul and passions (tropàs psychês kaì pathe). We mistake, when we interpret Scripture in accordance with our own experience of the flesh and of passions, "taking the will of the passionless God (toû apathous theoû) on a line with our own perturbations (kinémasi). When we suppose that the fact in the case of the Almighty is as we are able to hear, we err in an atheistic way. For the divine was not to be declared as it is; but as we, fettered by flesh, were able to understand, even so the prophets spoke to us, the Lord accommodating himself to the weakness of men with a mind to save them (soteríos)." Thus the language of our emotions, though not properly to be employed, is used to help our weakness.[900] For God is, in fact, "without emotion, without wrath, without desire" (apathès, athumos, anepithúmetos).[901] Clement repeatedly recurs with pleasure to this conception of "Apathy"; it is the mark of God, of Christ, of the Apostles, and of the ideal Christian, with whom it becomes a fixed habit (héxis).[902]

God is not like a man (anthropoeidès), nor does he need senses to hear with, nor does he depend on the sensitiveness of the air (tò eupathès toû héros) for his apprehensions, "but the instantaneous perception of the angels and the power of conscience touching the soul – these recognize all things, with the quickness of thought, by means of some indescribable faculty apart from sensible hearing. Even if one should say that it was impossible for the voice, rolling in this lower air, to reach to God, still the thoughts of the saints (agíon) cleave, not the air alone, but the whole universe as well. And the divine power instantly penetrates the whole soul like light. Again do not our resolves also find their way to God, uttering a voice of their own? And are not some things also wafted heavenward by the conscience? … God is all ear and all eye, if we may make use of these expressions."[903] Thus it would seem that God is not so far from every one of us as we might have supposed from the passages previously quoted, and the contrast between the two views of God grows wider when we recall Clement's words in the Protrepticus about the Heavenly Father. While a Greek, the pupil of the philosophers, could never use the language of a Jew about "God our Father" with the same freedom from mental reservation, Clement undoubtedly speaks of God at times in the same spirit that we feel in the utterances of Jesus. He goes beyond what contemporary philosophers would have counted suitable or desirable, as we can see in the complaints which Celsus makes of Christian language about God, though Celsus, of course, is colder than the religious of his day. But the main difference between Christians and philosophers was not as to God the Father, but as to Christ.

When Clement, in his work of restatement, came to discuss Christ, he found Philo's Logos ready to his hand and he was not slow to use it. It is characteristic that, just as he unquestioningly accepted the current philosophic account of God and saw no great difficulty in equating a God best described in negations with the Abba Father of Jesus, so he adopted, not less light-heartedly, the conflate conception of the Logos. Whether its Platonic and Stoic elements would hold together; whether either of them was really germane to the Hebrew part; whether in any case any of the three sets of constituents corresponded with anything actually to be reached by observation or experience; or whether, waiving that point, the combination was equal to its task of helping man to conceive of God at once as immanent and transcendent, Clement hardly inquired. So far he followed Philo. Then came in a new factor which might well have surprised Plato, Zeno and Philo alike. Following once more, but this time another leader, Clement equates the Philonian Logos with the historic Jesus of Nazareth.

So stated, the work of Clement may well look absurd. But after all he is not the only man who has identified the leading of instinct with philosophic proof. In succession he touched the central thoughts of his various leaders, and he found them answer to cravings within him. He wanted a God beyond the contagion of earth, Supreme and Absolute; and Plato told him of such a God. Yet the world needed some divine element; it must not be outside the range and thought of God; and here the conception of divine Reason, linking man and nature with God Himself, appealed to his longing. Lastly the impossibility of thinking Jesus and his work to be accidental, of conceiving of them as anything but vitally bound up with the spiritual essence of all things, with God and with God's ultimate mind for man and eternity, was the natural outcome of entering into the thoughts of Jesus, of realizing his personality and even of observing his effect upon mankind.[904] When one remembers how in every age men have passed through one form and another of experience, and have then compacted philosophies to account for those experiences, have thought their constructions final, and have recommended their theories as of more value than the facts on which, after reflection, slight or profound, but perhaps never adequate, they have based them, it will not seem strange that Clement did the same.

Ah yet, when all is thought and said,The heart still overrules the head;Still what we hope we must believe,And what is given us receive.

The old task is still to do. The old cravings are still within us; still the imperishable impulse lives to seek some solution of the great question of the relations of God and the soul and the universe, which may give us more abiding satisfaction than Clement's can now have, and which will yet recognize those old cravings, will recognize and meet them, not some but all of them.

"Most perfect, and most holy of all," says Clement, "most sovereign, most lordly, most royal and most beneficent, is the nature of the Son, which approaches most closely to the One Almighty Being. The Son is the highest Pre-eminence, which sets in order all things according to the Father's will, and steers the universe aright, performing all things with unwearying energy, beholding the Father's secret thoughts through his working. For the Son of God never moves from his watch-tower, being never divided, never dissevered, never passing from place to place, but existing everywhere at all times and free from all limitations. He is all reason, all eye, all light from the Father, seeing all things, hearing all things, knowing all things, with power searching the powers. To him is subjected the whole army of angels and of gods – to him, the Word of the Father, who has received the holy administration by reason of Him who subjected it to him; through whom also all men belong to him, but some by way of knowledge, while others have not yet attained to this; some as friends, some as faithful servants, others as servants merely."[905]

The Logos

The Logos is the source of Providence, the author, as already seen, of all human thought and activity, of the beauty of the human body too,[906] Saviour and Lord at once of all men – man being "his peculiar work," for into him alone of animals was a conception of God instilled at his creation. "Being the power of the Father, he easily prevails over whomsoever he will, not leaving even the smallest atom of his government uncared for."[907] "He it is in truth that devises the bridle for the horse, the yoke for the bull, the noose for the wild beast, the rod for the fish, the snare for the bird; he governs the city and ploughs the land, rules and serves, and all things he maketh;

Therein he set the earth, the heaven, the sea,And all the stars wherewith the heaven is crowned.

O the divine creations! O the divine commands! This water, let it roll within itself; this fire, let it check its rage; this air, let it spread to æther; and let earth be fixed and borne, when I will it. Man I yet wish to make; for his material I have the elements; I dwell with him my hands fashion. If thou know me, the fire shall be thy slave."[908]

"All[909] gaze on the supreme Administrator of the universe, as he pilots all in safety according to the Father's will, rank being subordinated to rank under different leaders till in the end the Great High Priest is reached. For on one original principle, which works in accordance with the Father's will, depend the first and second and third gradations; and then at the extreme end of the visible world there is the blessed ordinance of angels; and so, even down to ourselves, ranks below ranks are appointed, all saving and being saved by the initiation and through the instrumentality of One. As then the remotest particle of iron is drawn by the breath (pneúmati) of the stone of Heraklea [the magnet] extending through a long series of iron rings, so also through the attraction of the holy spirit (pneúmati) the virtuous are adapted to the highest mansion; and the others in their order even to the last mansion; but they that are wicked from weakness, having fallen into an evil habit owing to unrighteous greed, neither keep hold themselves nor are held by another, but collapse and fall to the ground, being entangled in their own passions."[910] This last clause raises questions as to evil and freewill. Clement believed in freewill; for one thing, it was necessary if God was to be acquitted of the authorship of evil. "God made all things to be helpful for virtue, in so far as might be without hindering the freedom of man's choice, and showed them to be so, in order that he who is indeed the One Alone Almighty might, even to those who can only see darkly, be in some way revealed as a good God, a Saviour from age to age through the instrumentality of his Son, and in all ways absolutely guiltless of evil."[911]

Clement also brings in the Platonic Idea to help to express Christ. "The idea is a thought of God (ennóema), which the barbarians have called God's Logos."[912] "All the activity of the Lord is referred to the Almighty, the Son being, so to speak, a certain activity (enérgeia) of the Father,"[913] and a little lower he adds that the Son is "the power (dynamis) of the Father."[914] As such he may well be "above the whole universe, or rather beyond the region of thought."[915] And yet, as we have seen, he leans to the view that the Logos is a person – the Great High Priest. In criticizing him, it is well to remember how divergent are the conceptions which he wishes to keep, and to keep in some kind of unity.

Once again, in many of Clement's utterances upon the Logos there is little that Philo, or perhaps even a pagan philosopher, could not have approved; but through it all there is a new note which is Clement's own and which comes from another series of thoughts. For it is a distinctive mark of Clement's work that the reader rises from it impressed with the idea of "the Saviour." The Protrepticus is full of the thought of that divine love of men, warm and active, which Jesus associated with "your heavenly Father," but which Clement, under the stress of his philosophy must connect with the Logos – "cleansing, saving and kindly; most manifest God indeed, made equal with the ruler of the universe."[916] He is our "only refuge" (monè kataphygé), the "sun of resurrection," the "sun of the soul."[917] And yet one group of ideas, familiar in this connection, receives little notice from Clement. The Logos is indeed the Great High Priest, but the symbolism of priest and sacrifice and sin-bearer is left rather remarkably unemphasized. He is "the all-availing healer of mankind,"[918] but his function is more to educate, to quicken, and to give knowledge than to expiate.

The great and characteristic feature of the Logos is that "he took the mask (prosopeîon) of a man and moulded it for himself in flesh and played a part in the drama of mankind's salvation; for he was a true player (gnesios agonistés), a fellow-player with the creature; and most quickly was he spread abroad among all men, more quickly than the sun, when he rose from the Father's will, and proved whence he was and who he was by what he taught and showed, he, the bringer of the covenant, the reconciler, the Logos our Saviour, the fountain of life and peace, shed over the whole face of the earth, by whom (so to say) all things have become an ocean of blessings."[919] Though essentially and eternally free from passion (apathés) "for our sake he took upon him our flesh with its capacity for suffering" (tèn pathetèn sárka)[920] and "descended to sensation (aísthesis)."[921] "It is clear that none can in his lifetime clearly apprehend God; but 'the pure in heart shall see God' when they come to the final perfection. Since, then, the soul was too weak for the perception of what is (tôn ónton), we needed a divine teacher. The Saviour is sent down to teach us how to acquire good, and to give it to us (choregós) – the secret and holy knowledge of the great Providence,"[922] – "to show God to foolish men, to end corruption, to conquer death, to reconcile disobedient children to their Father… The Lord pities, educates, encourages, exhorts, saves and guards, and as the prize of learning he promises us out of his abundance the kingdom of heaven – this alone giving him joy in us, that we are saved."[923] All this was foreknown before the foundation of the world; the Logos was and is the divine beginning or principle of all things, "but because he has now taken the long-hallowed name, the name worthy of his power, the Christ, that is why I call it the new song."[924] And indeed he is right, for "the Epiphany, now shining among us, of the Word that was in the beginning and before it"[925] is new in philosophy; and it is a new thing also that the doctrine of a Logos should be "essentially musical." The Incarnation of the divine Teacher is the central fact for Clement.

The identification of this incarnate Logos with Jesus of Nazareth was part of Clement's inheritance, and as usual he accepted the form which the tradition of the Church had assumed. But Clement's theology altered the significance of Jesus. For the Abba Father whom Jesus loved, he substituted the great Unknowable, and then he had to bring in a figure unfamiliar to the thought of Jesus – the Logos, whom he clothed with many of the attributes of the Father of Jesus, and then identified with Jesus himself. Not unnaturally in this combination the historic is outweighed by the theoretic element, and indeed receives very little attention. The thought of Incarnation is to Clement much more important than the Personality.

The virgin-birth

Jesus is "God and pedagogue," "good shepherd," and "mystic Angel (or messenger)," "the pearl," "the great High Priest," and so forth.[926] In a few passages (some of them already quoted) Clement speaks of the earthly life of Jesus – of the crown of thorns, the common ware, and the absence of a silver foot-bath. But he takes care to make it clear that Jesus was "not an ordinary man," and that was why he did not marry and have children – this in opposition to certain vain persons who held up the Lord's example as a reason for rejecting marriage, which "they call simple prostitution and a practice introduced by the devil."[927] So far was Jesus from being "an ordinary man" that Clement takes pains to dissociate him from ordinary human experience. To the miraculous birth he refers incidentally but in a way that leaves no mistake possible. "Most people even now believe, as it seems, that Mary ceased to be a virgin through the birth of her child, though this was not really the case – for some say she was found by the midwife to be a virgin after her delivery."[928] This expansion of the traditional story is to be noted as an early illustration of the influence of dogma. The episode appears in an elaborate form in the apocryphal Gospels.[929] But Clement goes further. "In the case of the Saviour, to suppose that his body required, quâ body, the necessary attentions for its continuance, would be laughable (gélos). For he ate – not on account of his body, which was held together by holy power, but that it might not occur to those who consorted with him to think otherwise of him – as indeed later on some really supposed him to have been manifested merely in appearance [i. e. the Docetists who counted his body a phantom]. He himself was entirely without passion (apathés) and into him entered no emotional movement (kínema pathetikón), neither pleasure nor pain."[930] A fragment (in a Latin translation) of a commentary of Clement's upon the first Epistle of John, contains a curious statement: "It is said in the traditions that John touched the surface of the body of Jesus, and drove his hand deep into it, and the firmness of the flesh was no obstacle but gave way to the hand of the disciple."[931] At the same time we read: "It was not idly that the Lord chose to employ a body of mean form, in order that no one, while praising his comeliness and beauty, should depart from what he said, and in cleaving to what is left behind should be severed from the higher things of thought (tôn noetôn)."[932]

It is consistent with the general scheme of Clement's thought that the cross has but a small part in his theology. "It was not by the will of his Father that the Lord suffered, nor are the persecuted so treated in accordance with his choice" – it is rather in both cases that "such things occur, God not preventing them; this alone saves at once the providence and goodness of God."[933] Yet "the blood of the Lord is twofold; there is the fleshly, whereby we have been redeemed from corruption, and the spiritual, by which we have been anointed."[934] The cross is the landmark between us and our past.[935] On the whole Clement has not much to say about sin, though of course he does not ignore it. It is "eternal death";[936] it is "irrational";[937] it is not to be attributed "to the operation (energy) of dæmons," as that would be to acquit the sinner, still it makes a man "like the dæmons" (daimonikós).[938] God's punishments he holds to be curative in purpose.[939] He says nothing to imply the eternity of punishment,[940] and as we have seen he speaks definitely of the Gospel being preached to the dead.

The vision of the true gnostic

The Christian religion, according to Clement, begins in faith and goes on to knowledge. The heavier emphasis with him always falls on knowledge, though he maintains in a fine chapter that faith is its foundation.[941] "The Greeks," he says, "consider faith an empty and barbarous thing,"[942] but he is far from such a view. Faith must be well-founded – "if faith is such as to be destroyed by plausible talk, let it be destroyed."[943] But the word left upon the reader's mind is knowledge. A passage like the following is unmistakable. "Supposing one were to offer the Gnostic his choice, whether he would prefer the knowledge of God or eternal salvation, one or the other (though of course they are above all things an identity); without the slightest hesitation he would choose the knowledge of God for its own sake."[944] The ideal Christian is habitually spoken of in this way, as the "man of knowledge" – the true "Gnostic," as opposed to the heretics who illegitimately claim the title. A very great deal of Clement's writing is devoted to building up this Gnostic, to outlining his ideal character. He is essentially man as God conceived him, entering into the divine life, and, by the grace of the Logos, even becoming God.

This thought of man becoming God Clement repeats very often, and it is a mark of how far Christianity has travelled from Palestine. It begins with the Platonic ideal of being made like to God, and the means is the knowledge of God or the sight of God given by the Logos. "'Nought say I of the rest,'[945] glorifying God. Only I say that those Gnostic souls are so carried away by the magnificence of the vision (theopía) that they cannot confine themselves within the lines of the constitution by which each holy degree is assigned and in accordance with which the blessed abodes of the gods have been marked out and allotted; but being counted as 'holy among the holy,' and translated absolutely and entirely to another sphere, they keep on always moving to better and yet better regions, until they no longer greet the divine vision in mirrors or by means of mirrors, but with loving souls feast for ever on the uncloying never-ending sight, radiant in its transparent clearness, while throughout the endless ages they taste a never-wearying delight, and thus continue, all alike honoured with an identity of pre-eminence. This is the apprehensive vision of the pure in heart. This, then, is the work (enérgeia) of the perfected Gnostic – to hold communion with God through the Great High Christ being made like the Lord as far as may be. Yes, and in this process of becoming like God the Gnostic creates and fashions himself anew, and adorns those that hear him."[946] In an interesting chapter Clement discusses abstraction from material things as a necessary condition for attaining the knowledge of God; we must "cast ourselves into the greatness of Christ and thence go forward."[947] "If a man know himself, he shall know God, and knowing God shall be made like to him… The man with whom the Logos dwells … is made like to God … and that man becomes God, for God wishes it."[948] "By being deified into Apathy (apatheian) a man becomes Monadic without stain."[949] As Homer makes men poets, Crobylus cooks, and Plato philosophers; "so he who obeys the Lord and follows the prophecy given through him, is fully perfected after the likeness of his Teacher, and thus becomes a god while still moving about in the flesh."[950] "Dwelling with the Lord, talking with him and sharing his hearth, he will abide according to the spirit, pure in flesh, pure in heart, sanctified in word. 'The world to him,' it says, 'is crucified and he to the world.' He carries the cross of the Saviour and follows the Lord 'in his footsteps as of a god,' and is become holy of the holy."[951]

We seem to touch the world of daily life, when after all the beatific visions we see the cross again. Clement has abundance of suggestion for Christian society in Alexandria, and it is surprising how simple, natural and wise is his attitude to the daily round and common task. Men and women alike may "philosophize," for their "virtue" (in Aristotle's phrase) is the same – so may the slave, the ignorant and the child.[952] The Christian life is not to eradicate the natural but to control it.[953] Marriage is a state of God's appointing – Clement is no Jerome. Nature made us to marry and "the childless man falls short of the perfection of Nature."[954] Men must marry for their country's sake and for the completeness of the universe.[955] True manhood is not proved by celibacy – the married man may "fall short of the other as regards his personal salvation, but he has the advantage in the conduct of life inasmuch as he really preserves a faint (olígen) image of the true Providence."[956] The heathen, it is true, may expose their own children and keep parrots, but the begetting and upbringing of children is a part of the married Christian life.[957] "Who are the two or three gathering in the name of Christ, among whom the Lord is in the midst? Does he not mean man, wife and child by the three, seeing woman is made to match man by God."[958]

The real fact about the Christian life is simply this, that the New Song turns wild beasts into men of God.[959] "Sail past the siren's song, it works death," says Clement, "if only thou wilt, thou hast overcome destruction; lashed to the wood thou shalt be loosed from ruin; the Word of God will steer thee and the holy spirit will moor thee to the havens of heaven."[960] To the early Christian "the wood" always meant the cross of Jesus. The new life is "doing good for love's sake,"[961] and "he who shows pity ought not to know that he is doing it… When he does good by instinctive habit (en héxei) then he will be imitating the nature of good."[962] God breathed into man and there has always been something charming in a man since then (philtron).[963] So "the new people" are always happy, always in the full bloom of thought, always at spring-time.[964] The Church is the one thing in the world that always rejoices.[965]