SOURCE: “Lecture III” in The Christian Platonists of Alexandria, Clarendon Press, 1886, pp. 76-114.

[In the following excerpt, Bigg provides an overview of many of Clement's beliefs, including those concerning evil, fear, knowledge, and faith.]

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity.—I Cor. xiii. 13.

Clement did not admit the pre-existence of the soul or the eternity of Matter,¹ but in other respects followed closely the Philonic view of Creation. God of His goodness and love created the world of Ideas, the invisible heaven and earth, and in accordance with this divine model the Word gave shape and substance to the material universe.² The six days are not to be understood literally. They express in an allegory the differing dignity of the things recorded to have been created on each in succession.³ The pre-eminence of Man is further shown by the fact, that he was not called into existence by a mere command, but moulded, if we may so speak, by the very hands of God,⁴ who breathed into his nostrils the ‘spirit,’ or ‘intellect,’ the ‘sovereign faculty’ of the tripartite soul. Thus Man received at birth the ‘image,’ and may acquire by a virtuous life the ‘likeness,’ of God, or rather of the Son. The ‘image,’ the Reason, may be blurred and defaced, but can never be wholly destroyed. It is the ‘love-charm,’ which makes Man dear to God for his own sake. It is the fountain of that natural yearning, which makes the child always unhappy, when banished from his Father's home. It is by this that he receives, understands, recognises his Father's voice.

But here there arises a difficulty, which had never before been felt in all its force. If God made all things out of nothing, what is the cause of Evil? According to the heathen Platonist, and even in the eyes of Philo, it was Matter. God's purpose was limited and frustrated by the nature of the substance, on which He was compelled to work. The Gnostics carried this view so far as to maintain, that creation was the act of a rebellious spirit, who mingled together things that ought to have been kept apart. But the Christian believed that Matter, as well as Form, was created by God. How then were the imperfections of the universe, pain, sin, waste, inequality, to be accounted for? They can be no part of the intention of Him, who gave all things being because He is Good.

Here again Clement does not grasp the whole range of the problem. He is not affected by the disorder of external Nature, as was the troubled and far-glancing spirit of Origen. To the former all that seems to demand explanation is the existence of Sin, and for this he found an adequate reason in the Freedom of the Human Will.

This conception is as new as the difficulty out of which it sprang. It is to be found in the Apologists, but the Alexandrines were the first to define it and make it the foundation of a system.

St. Paul speaks of Freedom from conflicting motives, but never of Freedom of the Will. There are those who being servants of sin are free from righteousness, those again who being free from sin are servants to God. Between these stand a third class, who are in bondage yet longing to break their fetters—‘to will is present with me, but how to perform that which is good I find not.’ This is in fact the doctrine of the Platonist, who held that the soul has two instinctive and antagonistic movements, that of Reason towards the Ideal and that of Sense towards Gratification, and that the man is then only truly free, when his sovereign faculty soars freely towards the Good unimpeded by the clamour of Desire. In what sense Will itself is free the Greeks did not attempt to decide. Generally speaking they regarded it as the expression of character, and did not or could not clear up the previous question, how character itself is formed.⁵

Yet precisely at this point, where Plato and St. Paul are in substantial agreement, the Alexandrines broke loose from their allegiance. There were strong reasons for this revolt. They had to account for the Fall of the First Man. This was no mere academical thesis, it was pressed upon them by an active, subtle, and formidable antagonist. If Adam was created perfect, said the Gnostic, he could not have fallen. He was then created imperfect, and in that case the Creator was the cause of his imperfection, and must therefore be imperfect Himself.⁶ Closely connected with this argument is the Gnostic Dualism and their peculiar doctrine of predestination. At a later period, when Gnosticism was practically vanquished, Augustine did not hesitate to maintain that, though God predestines, He is yet not the author of evil. But to the Alexandrines this did not seem possible. Determinism in any shape appeared to them to impugn both the divine goodness and the divine right to punish sin, and though they held that in truth God does not punish, they would not acknowledge this in set terms. Hence they were driven to make Will an independent faculty, knowing both good and evil and choosing between them, selecting and in fact creating its own motive. The actual phrase Free Will, Liberum Arbitrium, is due to Tertullian, but it expresses with Latin precision what Clement and Origen really mean.

No wise man will attempt to find a precise solution for the eternal antinomy of Freedom and Necessity. It is enough to point out what the Alexandrines did. In their recoil from Gnosticism they abolished Necessity altogether, and gave Freedom a new meaning. We can only judge of their action by its results. It has become possible to ask whether God can do wrong, and almost a heresy to speak of Christ as begotten by the Will of the Father. And already the door is opened for all the barren disputes, that troubled the Church and the Schools from the days of Augustine to those of Pascal.⁷

Evil then in Clement's view is, not a Power, but an Act. It is not the Platonic ‘lie in the soul,’ nor the Pauline ‘law of sin,’ not a vicious motive nor a false belief, because these have no constraining force. Vice consists in acting the lie, and we need not act it unless we choose. Clement could not then believe in any inherited depravity of human nature. This follows indeed already from his opinion, that the Reason comes in each case fresh from the hands of its Maker. Adam was created perfect, yet not perfect; perfect inasmuch as every faculty was sound and apt for virtue, not perfect inasmuch as virtue was not yet actualised by obedience. He fell by lust, and so we all fall.⁸ There is no entailed necessity between his sin and ours. But though Free Will and Reason, both gifts of God, are enough for guidance in this world, they cannot tell us fully what God is, they cannot bring us into living communion with Him. ‘Each of us justifies himself.’ ‘The true Gnostic creates himself.’ Men may ‘choose to believe or to disbelieve.⁹’ Yet Faith itself is a grace;¹⁰ ‘the ball-player cannot catch the ball unless it is thrown to him.’ We are created capable of wisdom, goodness, felicity, which yet we can only attain by grasping the Divine Hand outstretched to lift us up. ‘Not without special grace does the soul put forth its wings.’¹¹

The secrets of this diviner life cannot be expressed in rules and formulas. But there is a point where grace and nature meet, which is the proper field of discipline. Knowledge must be gradually assimilated. Love must creep before it can fly. Christ has revealed to us all truth, but truth is precept before it is conviction. It is by obedience to Authority, that the carpenter and the pilot acquire their skill. So the Christian life begins in Faith,¹² that is belief in the desirability of the End, and willing submission to the Means in their regular progression. But we can learn only within the school, and we must first be cleansed. Hence the gate of the Church is the Baptism of Regeneration. Herein we receive Forgiveness, the only free forgiveness, of all past sins, which leaves the mind like a sheet of blank paper, not good yet ‘not bad,’ we are brought within the circle of light, within reach of all wholesome sacraments and aids. We have started fairly in the race for the eternal crown.¹³

Beyond this point stretches out the Christian Life, and here begins the most distinctive portion of Clement's teaching. We shall fail to do him justice unless we bear steadily in view the two influences that determined his path—on the one hand the love of St. Paul, on the other the dread of Gnosticism, a dread which did not prevent him from seeing that this peculiar form of error answered to a real and pressing need of the human mind. Gnosticism was in one aspect distorted Paulinism. The cure lay in a full and true presentation of the Apostle's teaching. But Clement only half understood St. Paul, and in his desire to win back the sectaries he draped Christianity in a Gnostic garb.

He saw around him a system little better than the liberal form of Judaism out of which it sprang. The new wine was fermenting in old bottles, the Christian still trembled beneath the handwriting of ordinances. If we read the Doctrine of the Apostles, we find there a law which differs from the Mosaic mainly in being more searching and elaborate. The circumstances of the time were such as to confirm and even justify this legalism. Crowds were pressing into the Church, mostly ignorant and undisciplined, some rich and wilful. They brought with them the moral taint, the ingrained prejudices of their old life. We learn from many sources that the same incongruous blending of the Gospel with pagan superstitions, which recurred during the conversion of the Northern Barbarians, existed in some degree in the second and third centuries.¹⁴ Discipline, teaching, supervision, direction, were absolutely necessary to the purity and maintenance of the Faith, and no wise man would attempt to weaken the growing authority of the Priest.

Yet there were those again for whom this atmosphere was not the best, devout souls whose life was hidden with Christ in God, men and women of cultivated thoughtful minds, who fretted under a system of routine and dictation administered, we may suppose, not unfrequently, by ignorant and fanatical officers. Social and personal distinctions were perhaps greater in those days than they have ever been since, and in times of intense religious excitement these distinctions shape themselves into forms of character, which, though held together by the most powerful of all bands, are yet as different as it is possible for children of the same family to be. Nowhere do we see this more clearly than in the history of the Martyrs. There were those who died, as Polycarp, Perpetua, Blandina, Christlike blessing their persecutors; there were those who brought their fate on their own heads by wild defiance, and went to meet it like Pristinus drugged to insensibility by the fumes of wine; there were others again, like Peregrinus, who found suffering for the Name an easy road to profit, and if the worst happened to notoriety.¹⁵ It was out of this divergence of type that the Gnostic made his gain. What was the Christian teacher to do? How was he to deal with the spirit of discontent and disillusion which he knew to be at work? It was impossible to alter the existing framework of the community. But there might be a life within a life, a Church within a Church, a quiet haven for the spiritually free.

Had Clement written a few years later he would have taken refuge in the distinction between nominal and real Christianity, between the Visible and the Invisible Church. But he lived in a time of transition. As yet the ancient view that all the brethren were in process of salvation, though shaken, was not abandoned. Hence he falls back upon his philosophy, and finds the solution in the Two Lives of Philo, the practical and contemplative Life of Plato and Aristotle, still more exactly in the Stoic distinction between Proficiency and Wisdom.¹⁶ He thought he found the same idea in certain antitheses of St. Paul's—the milk and the solid food—faith and knowledge or mysteries—the spirit of bondage and the spirit of adoption—faith and hope which are less than charity. There were indications in the Roman Clement, in Hermas, in Barnabas,¹⁷ that pointed in the same direction. Other cherished ideas appeared to fit in—the opposition between the servant and the son of God, between God the Lord and God the Father, between the letter and the spirit, between the Human and the Divine Natures of Christ. Gathering all these hints into one, Clement proclaims that the life of the ordinary believer, that is to say of the great body of the Church, is a lower life. Its marks are Faith, Fear and Hope¹⁸—unquestioning obedience to the letter of Authority, a selfish motive, a morality of abstinence from wrong. It is the sphere of discipline, of repression, of painful effort. Its crown is Holiness,¹⁹ the negative virtue of Self-Control. It is a state of salvation, but not of peace or joy. Above it stands the Higher Life, that of the true Gnostic, the life of Love, Righteousness, Knowledge, of serene and reasonable convictions, of glad and spontaneous moral activity, in which the spirit of man is so closely wedded to the spirit of his Lord that there is no more recalcitrance, and freedom is merged in the beata necessitas non peccandi.

Thus Clement insisted as against the Gnostic that purity is the condition of insight, as against the Orthodoxast that law is meant to issue in freedom. On these two piers he built his Via Media the Christian Gnosis. It is a compromise between the Church and the world, but the later history of Catholicism is enough to prove how inevitable is such a concession to a body that will govern and yet purify society.

As against the Gnostic, again, Clement protests that the Two Lives are not divided by any law of nature. The one must and should grow out of the other, the one is incomplete without the other. All men, all women are called, as he says, ‘to philosophise,’ to strive upwards to the highest ideal. Yet the distinction in itself is evil, and Clement has expressed it in such a way as to make not a distinction but a real difference, a breach of principle and continuity. The spiritual life is one because Love, its root, is one. But this Faith, which in the Lower Life leads through Fear and Hope to Love, is itself not Love, but imperfect intellectual apprehension; not personal trust in the Saviour, but a half-persuasion of the desirableness of what the Saviour promises.²⁰ The belief, the morality, the reward are all external. Fear and Hope are the life, not the outer husk which shields and protects the life till it is strong enough to act by itself. Clement has attempted to seize the Pauline doctrine of Grace without the Pauline doctrine of Faith.²¹ He has superposed the Gospel freedom upon the Aristotelian theory of Habit, upon ‘reasonable self-love,’ upon the legal Christianity of his time, without seeing that between these two an entirely new element must come into play.

This element he has endeavoured to supply by banishing Fear and Hope from the Higher Life. ‘Perfect Love casteth out Fear,’ which indeed is not a motive but a check. But disinterestedness, which is what Clement wants, does not depend upon the presence or absence of Hope, but on the nature of the thing hoped for. That which was mercenary in its original conception does not become less mercenary because Hope is swallowed up in fruition. In Clement's view the supreme End of all is not Love but Knowledge, and this misplacement of the Ideal involves an egotism which he vainly struggles to escape. He succeeds in placing felicity within the soul, in the fulness of spiritual life, but he has not really advanced beyond the point of view of Philo.

But Fear he has handled in a truly Christian spirit. It is not the fear of the slave who hates his master, it is the reverence of a child for its father, of a citizen for the good magistrate. Tertullian, an African and a lawyer, dwells with fierce satisfaction on terrible visions of torment. The cultivated Greek shrinks not only from the gross materialism of such a picture, but from the idea of retribution which it implies. He is never tired of repeating that Justice is but another name for Mercy. Chastisement is not to be dreaded, but to be embraced. ‘The mirror is not evil to the ugly face because it shows it as it is, the physician is not evil to the sick man because he tells him of his fever. For the physician is not the cause of the fever.’ Still more evidently true is this of Jesus. ‘The Lord who died for us is not our enemy.’ Here or hereafter God's desire is not vengeance but correction. In truth it is not He that punishes, but we that draw chastisement on our own heads.²²

The life of Faith, as he has described it in the later books of the Pedagogue, is in beautiful accordance with these maxims.²³ It is a life, like that of the Puritans in Milton's youth, of severe self-restraint, but built on broad principles, not captious and not gloomy. It should be as the Stoics taught, ‘according to Nature,’ hence all artificial desires are evil. But Clement condemns on the one hand the self-torture in which some of the Gnostics emulated the Hindoo Fakirs, on the other the Stoic paradox that things external are things indifferent. Here again he is Aristotelian. Innocent pleasure is the salt of life. Wealth rightly used is a blessing. The first requisite is the beauty of virtue, the second the beauty of health; Christ Himself was not beautiful in person.²⁴ Many thoughts are suggested by this charming and authentic picture of daily Christian life. We see the vulgarity and thinly-veneered barbarism of Roman luxury giving way to true courtesy and refinement. We see the Church, no longer oppressed by instant expectation of the Last Day, settling quietly down to her task of civilising the world. Already her victory is assured.

Those who have been trained in the school of Jesus the Pedagogue are fitted for, are imperatively summoned to a better service. Clement delights to speak of the Higher Life in terms borrowed from Eleusis. It is the Greater Mysteries, of which Christ is the Hierophant and Torchbearer. Such language is partly conventional and common to all the Platonists of the time.²⁵ Again it is intended to conciliate the Gnostics and the religious heathen, who had all been initiated, as probably Clement himself had been in his youth. But it is also connected with, and tends to strengthen, the unfortunate doctrine of Reserve.

In the Higher Life Faith gives way to Knowledge, Fear and Hope to Love, while Holiness is merged in Righteousness.

Knowledge, Gnosis, Clement has defined in words taken partly from Philo, partly from the Stoics. From the first he learned that it is the intuitive communion of the intelligence with the Ideas, from the latter that being science it is indefectible. To the Christian doctor Christ is not only the Sum of the Ideas, but the co-equal Son of God, and Gnosis therefore is the ‘apprehensive contemplation’ of God in the Logos, and not, as in Philo, of God above the Logos.²⁶ Yet there is a progress in the object of Knowledge, measured by the varying aspect of Christ, who in the Lower Life is manifested chiefly on the human side as Physician, Tutor, and so on, in the Higher chiefly on the divine as Light, Truth, Life. Holiness is the indispensable preliminary of knowledge, which is partly Theology, but still more the experimental knowledge of Christ. The Gnostic is the ‘pure in heart’ who ‘sees God.’ ‘He that would enter the fragrant shrine,’ says Clement, quoting the inscription over the temple gate of Epidaurus, ‘must be pure, and purity is to think holy things.²⁷’ He is the ‘approved money-changer,’ whose ‘practised senses’ are the touchstone of truth. His Faith has become Conviction, Authority is superseded by the inner light. To him the deep things of Scripture are revealed. He reads the spirit beneath the letter. In Christ he understands past, present, and future, the theory of Creation, the symbolism of the Law, the inner meaning of the Gospel, the mysteries of the Resurrection.²⁸ He sees the vital harmony of dogma with dogma, of all dogmas with Reason. In a word, he is an Allegorist. Moral purity and assiduous study of Scripture are the only training that is absolutely necessary.²⁹ But Clement well knew the importance of mental cultivation. His Gnostic still reads Plato in his leisure moments. ‘He is not like the common run of people who fear Greek philosophy as children fear a goblin lest it should run away with them.’³⁰

Of Knowledge Love is at once the life-element and the instrument. For ‘the more a man loves the more deeply does the penetrate into God.’³¹ But here again, most unhappily, Stoicism comes in, and casts the chill shadow of Apathy over the sweetest and simplest of Christian motives. Platonism also helped to mislead. For though the Alexandrines held that Matter is the work of God, they could not wholly divest their minds of the old scholastic dislike of the brute mass and the emotions connected with it. The first thought suggested by the Incarnation is Fear. Love is not of Jesus, but of the Logos, the Ideal. Clement could not bear to think that the rose of Sharon could blossom on common soil.³² This was the price he paid for his Transcendental Theology.

Love makes man like the beloved. But Christ, like God, was absolutely passionless. So too were the Apostles after their Master's Resurrection. So too must the Gnostic be. Self-control, Holiness, has made the reason absolute master of the brute in the centaur man. He will feel those desires which, like hunger or thirst, are necessary for self-preservation, but not joy nor sorrow nor courage nor indignation nor hatred. He lives in the closest union with the Beloved, so absorbed in the Divine Love that he can no longer be said to love his fellow-creatures in the ordinary sense of the word.³³

There were many in Clement's own time who shrank from this too ethereal ideal, which, to use his own pharase, ‘touches earth with but one foot.’ If we take away hope and joy, they urged, will not the Christian be swallowed up by the sorrows of life? And if all union with the Beautiful is preceded by aspiration, how can he be passionless who aspires to the Beautiful?³⁴ How can we rise without desire, and how can we desire the extinction of desire? It is the argument afterwards pressed with irresistible force by Bossuet and Bourdaloue against Fénelon. Clement replies, ‘Love is no more desire but a contented self-appropriation, which restores the Gnostic into oneness with Christ by faith, so that he needs neither time nor place. For by Love he is already in that scene where he will one day dwell. And having anticipated his hope by Gnosis he desires nothing, for he holds in closest possession the very object of desire.’ It is the Love which we mortals feel ‘in our diviner moments, when Love is satisfied in the completeness of the beloved object.’ So absolute is its content, that if it were possible to separate eternal salvation from the knowledge of God, and a choice were given to the Gnostic, he would without hesitation choose the latter. It is the paradox of Mysticism:—

Be not angry; I resign
Henceforth all my will to thine:
I consent that thou depart,
Though thin absence breaks my heart;
Go then, and for ever too;
All is right that thou wilt do.(35)

Of this Ideal (for it is perhaps no more³⁶) enough has been said. Clement no doubt overshot the mark. It remains to be seen whether by so doing he encouraged presumption, or led weakness astray. The answer is to be found in the rigour with which he insists upon Holiness as the indispensable condition, on Righteousness as the indispensable fruit of Love.

Like all the early Fathers he attached a very real sense to the word Righteousness. ‘Ye were justified by the name of the Lord, ye were made just as He is, and joined in the closest possible union with the Holy Spirit.’³⁷ It is not mere abstention from evil, which is Holiness, the virtue of the Lower Life, but the free active joyous service of those who are sanctified. It is life which needs no rule. The Gnostic, says Clement in language very like that of Madame de Guyon, has no virtue, because he is virtue. Nature is absorbed by Grace. It is easier to do good than to leave it undone, hence ‘good works follow Gnosis as shadow follows substance.’³⁸ Contemplation is the Gnostic's chief delight, the next is active beneficence, the third is instruction, the work of making others like himself. God gives him an exceeding great reward, the salvation of other men.³⁹

Thus Apathy, Detachment, make the sanctified believer not less but more useful to his kind. It is important to add, in view of the objections afterwards urged against the Quietists, that Clement lays great stress upon the observance of the existing Church discipline, the regular use of all the ordinary means of Grace. I will not here dwell upon what he says about Public Worship, the reading of Scripture, the Eucharist, Almsgiving, Fasting.⁴⁰ It will be sufficient to state his views on the subject of Prayer,⁴¹ the point on which the Quietists departed most widely from the lines he laid down.

The Gnostic prays without ceasing. He would rather forego the grace of God than enjoy it without prayer. But indeed this is impossible. For our holiness must cooperate with the providence of God, if the blessing is to be perfect. Holiness is a correlative of Providence. For God Himself is a voluntary agent. He does not ‘warm like fire’ as Plutarch thought, nor can we receive His best gifts involuntarily, even if they be given before we ask.

But God reads the heart, and therefore few words are needed or none. ‘Ask,’ He says, ‘and I will do, think, and I will give.’ Good is the prayer which Christians utter in the church, with head and hands uplifted, and foot raised at the Amen, as if to soar above earth. Good is prayer at the three hours,⁴² with face turned towards the East, as even pagans use. But better still is the inner colloquy of unspoken supplication for which no place or time is set apart, the praise of him who ploughs, of him who sails upon the sea. The Gnostic's prayer is chiefly Thanksgiving and Intercession, as was that of our Saviour. Beyond this he will ask only for the continuance of the blessings he enjoys, for he desires nothing that he has not, and the Father's Will is enough for him.

The prayer of the Gnostic, even when speechless, is still conscious and active. It is far removed from the blank vacuity of the soul which, as Molinos says, ‘lies dead and buried, asleep in Nothingness’⁴³—thinking without thought of the Unconditioned. The Silent Prayer of the Quietist is in fact Ecstasy, of which there is not a trace in Clement.

For Clement shrank from his own conclusions. Though the father of all the Mystics he is no Mystic himself. He did not enter the ‘enchanted garden’ which he opened for others. If he talks of ‘flaying the sacrifice,’ of leaving sense behind, of Vision, of Epopteia, this is but the parlance of his school. The instrument to which he looks for growth in knowledge is not trance, but the disciplined reason. Hence Gnosis when once attained is indefectible, not like the rapture which Plotinus enjoyed but four times during his acquaintance with Porphyry, which in the experience of Theresa never lasted more than half-an-hour.⁴⁴ The Gnostic is no Visionary, no Theurgist, no Antinomian.

These dangers were not far away in the age of Montanus and the Neo-Platonists. The Alexandrines have perhaps too much ‘dry light,’ but their faith was too closely wedded to reason and the written word to be seduced by these forbidden joys. Mysticism is as yet a Pagan solace. The time for a purely Christian mysticism, which Gerson evolves not from the reason but from the emotions, had not yet arrived. Yet Clement laid the fuel ready for kindling. The spark that was needed was the allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs. This was supplied, strange to say, by Origen, the least mystical of all divines.

Every baptised Christian, who has not been ‘cut off’ like a diseased limb by solemn judicial process, is a member of the Church upon earth, is therefore within the pale of salvation. The Church⁴⁵ is the Platonic City of God, ‘a lovely body and assemblage of men governed by the Word,’ ‘the company of the Elect.’ She is the Bride of Christ, the Virgin Mother, stainless as a Virgin, loving as a Mother. She is One, she is Catholic, because the doctrine and tradition of the Apostles is one; the heretic who has forsaken her fold has ‘an assembly devised by man,’ ‘a school,’ but not a Church. One in belief, but not in mechanism. Peter is the first of the Apostles, but the See of Peter is never named. The West is as unknown to Clement as it was to his favourite Homer. Yet in this One Church there is a distinction. There are those who within her fold live as do the Gentiles, these are the flesh of Christ's Mystical Body; there are those who cleave to the Lord and become one spirit with Him, the Sons of God, the Gnostics; these are the Holy Church, the Spiritual Church; these, and they who are in process to become as these, are the rings which have not dropped from the magnetic chain, but in spiritual union with saints and angels ‘wait for the Rest of God.’⁴⁶

The Stromateis were written during the Patriarchate of Demetrius amid the bustle and excitement of a revolution. But no echo of the strife penetrated the tranquil seclusion in which Clement lectured and composed. He reflects with calm fidelity the image of the antique times in which he had himself been reared. His heart is with the Republic; he is the Samuel of the new monarchy.

One of the chief pillars of the aggressive theory of Church polity was the claim of the Christian ministry to be regarded as lineal successors of the sacrificial hierarchy of the Jews. But to Clement the true antitype of Levite or Hiereus is the Gnostic, the son or daughter of God, who has been anointed like King, Prophet, or High Priest of the Law, but with the spiritual unction of the Holy Ghost. The Gnostic sacrifice is that of praise, of a contrite spirit, of a soul delivered from carnal lusts; the incense is holy prayer; the altar is the just soul, or the congregation of believers.⁴⁷ Beyond this there is no sacrifice except the ‘costly,’ the ‘fireless’ Victim once offered upon the Cross.⁴⁸ Clement quotes the famous verse of Malachi, but the ‘pure offering’ is the knowledge of God as Creator derived by the heathen from the light of the universal Word.⁴⁹ The much disputed text about the power of the keys he never cites at all, and in the Penance controversy, which was already agitating men's minds, he follows Hermas, allowing but one Absolution for mortal sin after Baptism, a view highly unfavourable to the growing authority of the Bishop.⁵⁰ He rarely mentions the three orders of Clergy,⁵¹ and never in connection with the Sacraments. The rich man should have a domestic chaplain or spiritual director, who is to be ‘a man of God.’⁵² The unlearned brother is not to trust his private judgment, but the interpreter of Scripture is no doubt the Gnostic. The one office assigned to the Presbyter is that of ‘making men better,’ and this is also the special function of the Gnostic.

It seems most probable that at this time, in the Church of Alexandria, the Eucharist was not yet distinguished in time, ritual, or motive from the primitive Supper of the Lord.⁵³ Of this, the Agape, the Love-Feast, or Banquet, there were two forms, the public and the private, the first celebrated at a full gathering of the brethren on fixed evenings in the church, the second in private houses.

The first was still disfigured by those excesses and disorders, which St. Paul sharply rebuked, but a century of discipline had not eradicated. It was preceded by reading of the Scriptures, psalms and hymns. After this the Bread and Wine were blessed, and then distributed by the deacons.⁵⁴ Viands of every kind, often costly and richly dressed, were provided by the liberality of the wealthier brethren. Clement does not attempt to lay any puritanical restrictions upon social enjoyment. He enforces the rule prohibiting the taste of blood or of meat offered to idols, he explains the code of good manners, and insists upon moderation. The Christian must eat to live, not live to eat. He must not abuse the Father's gifts. He must show by precept and example that the heavenly banquet is not the meat that perisheth, but love, that the believer's true food is Christ.⁵⁵

All that Clement says upon this subject is of the highest value to those who wish to recast for themselves a faithful image of the Church life of the end of the second century. But of all his phrases the most important are those which assure us, that the ordinary evening meal of a Christian household was in a real sense an Agape. It was preceded by the same acts of worship; it was blessed by thanksgiving; it was a true Eucharist. The house father is the house priest. The highest act of Christian devotion is at the same time the simplest and most natural. Husband, wife and child, the house slave, and the invited guest gathered round the domestic board to enjoy with thankfulness the good gifts of God, uplifting their hearts in filial devotion, expanding them in brotherly bounty and kindness. To us the word Eucharist has become a term of ritual, whose proper meaning is all but obsolete. To the Greek it was still a word of common life—thanksgiving, the grateful sense of benefits received, of good gifts showered by the good Father on mind and heart and body. ‘He that eateth eateth unto the Lord and keepeth Eucharist to God… so that a religious meal is an Eucharist.’⁵⁶

All these good gifts sum themselves up in one, the gift of the Son. In the Eucharist, in its narrower sense, we eat flesh and drink the blood of Christ, ‘hallowed food,’ of which the bread and wine given by Melchisedech to Abraham was a type.⁵⁷ It is ‘a mystery passing strange.’⁵⁸ ‘I will, I will impart to you this grace also, the full and perfect bounty of incorruption. I give to you the knowledge of God. I give to you my perfect Self.’ Christ's own Sacrifice, the charter of His High Priesthood, is the condition of His sacramental agency. But what is the special boon that He conveys in that supreme moment, when His sacrifice co-operates with ours, when ‘in faith’ we partake⁵⁹ of the nourishment which He bestows? Not forgiveness—that gift is bestowed in the laver of Regeneration, and if lost must be regained by the stern sacrament of Penance—but incorruption, immortality.⁶⁰ The Bread, the Wine mingled with Water, are an allegory. ‘The Blood of the Lord is twofold. One is fleshly, whereby we have been ransomed from corruption’—in Baptism—‘one is spiritual, with this we have been anointed’—in the Eucharist. The Body is Faith, the Blood is Hope, which is as it were the lifeblood of Faith. ‘This is the Flesh and Blood of the Lord, the apprehension of the Divine power and essence.’ ‘The Blood of His Son cleanseth from all sin. For the doctrine of the Lord which is very strong is called His Blood.’⁶¹

The elements are ‘hallowed food’; ‘the meat of babes, that is to say the Lord Jesus, that is to say the Word of God, is spirit made flesh, hallowed flesh from heaven.’⁶² These phrases have been interpreted in very different senses. One writer sees in them the doctrine of Transubstantiation, another the doctrine of Zwinglius. Those who read Clement as a whole, who reflect upon his strong antithesis of the letter, the flesh, to the spirit, who take into due account his language on the subject of Priest and Sacrifice, and his emphatic declaration that ‘knowledge is our reasonable food,’ will be inclined to think that the latter view is far nearer to the truth. Christ is present in the Eucharist as Gnosis, ‘in the heart, not in the hand.’ The Elements are a symbol, an allegory, perhaps a vehicle, an instrument, inasmuch as they are ordained by Christ Himself, and to substitute any other figure for the one so ordained is heresy. But the veil, though a holy thing because it belongs to the sanctuary, is not the mystery that it shrouds, the allegory is not the truth that it bodies forth.

The chief article of the Christian Gnosis was that of the Future Life. It was as interesting to Pagans as to Christians. ‘What will become of the soul after death?’ asks Plotinus, as he enters upon this universally fascinating theme. The immortality of the soul was positively denied by none but the ‘godless Epicureans.’ But the doctrine of the Resurrection was peculiar to the Church, and, while it strengthened her hold upon the masses, was a great stumbling-block in the way of the educated. The Platonist looked upon the body as the ‘dungeon of the soul,’ and could not understand how any pious man should expect a good God to renew and perpetuate that degrading bondage.

Within the Church itself there was some variety and much confusion of thought. Tertullian and many others held that the soul itself was material.⁶³ From this followed the terrible belief of Tatian, that it dies with the body, and is raised again with the body, by an act of Divine power, for an eternity of suffering or joy. Others, especially Arabian Christians, held that after dissolution the soul sleeps unconscious, till awakened to life by the restoration of its organism. But the majority believed in an intermediate yet conscious state of existence in Hades or Paradise, extending to the Day of Judgment, when the soul is reunited to the body, from which it has been for a time divorced.

The Resurrection itself they interpreted in the most literal sense. It would be a resurrection of ‘this flesh,’ of the identical body which had been dissolved by death. The ‘change,’ spoken of by St. Paul, was strictly limited to the accession of the new attribute of incorruption.⁶⁴ Closely allied to this view was the widespread opinion of the Chiliasts, who, resting upon the prophecies of Isaiah and the Apocalypse, believed that after the first Resurrection the saints should reign in the flesh upon earth for a thousand years under the sceptre of Christ. Chiliasm, which in vulgar minds was capable of the most unhappy degradation, was in turn strengthened by the urgent expectation of the End of the World. In the lower strata of Christian society prophecies on this subject were rife. At this very time a calculation, based on the numerical value of the letters composing the word Rome, fixed the downfall of the Empire and the coming of Christ for judgment for the year 195 a.d.⁶⁵ The Montanists held that the appointed sign was the appearance of the New Jerusalem in heaven; and this sign was given during the expedition of Severus against the Parthians, when for forty consecutive mornings the vision of a battlemented city hanging in the clouds was beheld by the whole army.⁶⁶

There were differences of opinion again as to the nature, object, duration, of the sufferings that await the wicked in the life to come, especially among the outlying sects. The Valentinians, as we have seen, taught ‘conditional immortality,’ and regarded the future life as a state of education, of progress through an ascending series of seven heavens. The Clementine Homilies, a work composed under strong Judaic influences, expresses different views in different places. In one the sinner is warned that eternal torments await him in the life to come. In another St. Peter proclaims that those who repent, however grievous their offences, will be chastised but for a time, that those who repent not will be tortured for a season and then annihilated.⁶⁷ The Church at large believed in an eternity of bliss or of woe. Yet among the Montanists prayers and oblations were offered up on behalf of the departed, and it was thought that these sacrifices could in certain cases quicken the compassion of God towards those who had died in sin. The widow prayed that her lost husband's pangs might be alleviated, and that she might share with him in the First Resurrection. Perpetua, the matron lily of martyrs, in that jail which seemed to be a palace while her baby was at her breast, cried for mercy upon the soul of her little brother, who had died unbaptised.⁶⁸

Clement never composed his promised treatise on the Resurrection, and it is not always easy to attach a definite meaning to his allusive style. But the general outline of his teaching is sufficiently clear. He rejects with scornful brevity the fancies of Chiliasm.⁶⁹ The Resurrection body is not ‘this flesh,’ but, as St. Paul taught, a glorified frame, related to that which we now possess as the grain of corn to the new ear, devoid in particular of the distinctions of sex.⁷⁰ The change is wrought by fire. Even Christ rose ‘through fire.’ Fire is here the agent not of chastisement, but of that mysterious sublimation by which our organism is fitted for existence in a new sphere.

For the sinner the fire burns with a fiercer intensity, because it has a harsher office. It is the pang of unsatisfied lusts that gnaw the soul itself for want of food, the sting of repentance and shame, the sense of loss. It is ministered not by fiends but by good angles,⁷¹ it is alleviated by the prayers of the saints on earth.

There can I think be no doubt (though it has been doubted) that Clement allowed the possibility of repentance and amendment till the Last Day. At that final Assize there will be found those who, like Aridaeus,⁷² are incurable, who will still reject, as man always can reject, the proffered grace. But he nowhere expressly limits probation to this brief life. All his theory of punishment, which is strictly Platonic, for he hardly ever quotes Scripture in this connection,⁷³ points the same way. And many passages might be adduced which prove how his maxims are to be applied. ‘Let them be chastised,’ he says of the ‘deaf serpents’ who refuse to hear the voice of the charmer, ‘by God, enduring His paternal correction before the Judgment, till they be ashamed and repent.’⁷⁴ In that fiery trial even Sodom and Gomorrha cried unto God and were forgiven. There is no difference between his teaching and that of Origen, except that he generally seems to be thinking of the doom of Christians, that he regards probation as ceasing at the Day of Judgment,⁷⁵ and that he does not contemplate the possibility of a fall from grace in the after-life.

Even the just must be purged by the ‘wise fire,’⁷⁶ before they are fit for the presence of the Most Holy God. Not at once can they see face to face, or enter into possession of those good things which ‘eye hath not seen nor ear heard.’ When the burden of sin has been laid down, when the angels have taken their appointed ‘toll,’⁷⁷ the spirit must still grow in knowledge, rising in due course through the seven heavens of the Valentinian, through the three ‘mansions’ or ‘folds’ prefigured by the triple hierarchy of the Church.⁷⁸ Some—those who have brought forth thirty, or sixty, or a hundredfold, yet have fallen short of what they might have been—mount no higher than this.⁷⁹ But the Gnostic, scaling from glory up to glory, will attain at last to the stature of the perfect man, and find rest upon the holy mountain of God, the Church that is above all. There in the changeless Ogdoad, a name borrowed from the Valentinian by the Catholic, as indeed is the greater part of this description, he shall dwell for ever with Christ, the God and Guardian of his faith and love, beholding the Father no longer ‘in a glass darkly,’ but with the direct unclouded vision of a pure heart, in light that never fades.⁸⁰

Clement speaks of this final consummation as Rest. But it is the rest of God, ‘who ceases not from doing good.’⁸¹ There is no absorption, no confusion of subject and object. It is the rest not of unity but of perfect similarity, perfect reciprocity, the polar rest of a soul energising in unimpeded knowledge and love. Farther than this Clement does not dare to pry into the sanctuary of Light. ‘I say no more glorifying the Lord.’⁸²

Notes

1. The eternity of matter is denied, Strom. v. 14. 89. The pre-existence of the soul is rejected, Strom. iii. 13. 93; iv. 26. 167; Eclogae Proph. § 17. Yet it appears to be implied, Q.D.S. 33, 36; Strom. vii. 2. 9.

2. Strom. v. 6. 39; 14. 93 sq.

3. Strom. vi. 16. 142.

4. Paed. i. 3.7.

5. The difficulty was felt but not removed by Aristotle.…

6. The Gnostics went so far as to assert that he who did not prevent evil is the cause of the evil. The argument is retorted upon them with nnanswerable force in the Recognitions, ii. The Demiurge is evil because he tolerates evil. Why then does God tolerate the Demiurge? The difficulty was strongly felt by Clement, whom it drove to the assertion that Christ's Passion was not ordained by the Father, Strom. iv. 12. 86 sq.

7. Origen has formally explained the Alexandrine doctrine of Freedom in the third book of the De Principiis. Neither he nor Clement clearly saw what Jeremy Taylor insists upon, that ‘in moral things liberty is a direct imperfection, a state of weakness, and supposes weakness of reason and weakness of love.’ But practically they admit, as we shall see, that at a certain point in the upward progress Grace absorbs the Will, and that at a certain point in the downward progress evil becomes second nature. Thus the demons have sinned so deeply ‘ut revocari nolint magis quam non possint,’ De Princ. i. 8. 4. But this point of irremediable depravity… they refused to fix. This seems to be the essential difference between the Alexandrines on the one hand and the Gnostics and Augustine on the other. Mehlhorn, Die Lehre von der menschlichen Freiheit nach Or., Zeitsch. für Kirch. Gesch. 2 Band, p. 234, is referred to by Dr. Harnack, but I have not seen the article.

8. The soul does not come from the parent, Strom. vi. 16. 135. For the original estate of Adam see Strom. iv. 23. 150; vi. 12. 96. The Serpent was pleasure, Protrept. xi. III, and the precise sin may have been that the first parents anticipated the time fixed by God for their marriage, Strom. iii. 17. 103. Compare Philo, De Mundi Op. 55 (i. 37) sqq. ‘Ita vix alia Adamum primo vixisse conditione noster censet quam posterorum infantes,’ Guerike, i. p. 143. Clement does not admit any hereditary guilt. For (i) God punishes only voluntary sins, Strom. ii. 14. 60.… (ii) The sins forgiven in Baptism are always spoken of as actual sins. (iii) Infant Baptism, a practice which is very closely connected with the tenet of Original Sin, is never certainly mentioned by Clement.… (iv) In Strom. iii. 16. 100 Clement replies to the Encratites, who forbade marriage on the ground that the children are accursed.… (v) The causes of sin are [discussed in] Strom. vii. 3. 16. Yet Adam is the type, though not the source, of sin, Protrept. xi. III. So also Adumb. in Ep. Judae, p. 1008, ‘Sic etiam peccato Adae subjacemus secundum peccati similitudinem,’ where the negative is omitted, as by Origen, in the well-known verse, Rom. v. 14. But I doubt very much whether this passage, which goes on to lay down the doctrine of Reprobation is from the hand of Clement.

9. Strom. iii. 9. 65: vii. 3. 13: iv. 25. 157.

10. Strom. ii. 4. 14: iii. 7. 57.

11. The ball-player, Strom. ii. 6. 25. So in Paed. i. 6. 28 regeneration is compared to waking or the removal of a cataract; we open our eyes and the light streams in. The words ‘no man can come to Me except my Father draw him,’ Clement explains differently at different times, Strom. iv. 22. 138; v. 13. 83. In the latter passage he quotes with approval the saying of Plato in the Meno, that virtue comes to those to whom it comes.… Compare also v. I. 7; vi. 6. 45; Q. D. S. 10, 21.

12. See especially Strom. ii. 2, 3, 4. Clement was very anxious to connect Faith, the Christian watchword, with philosophy.…

13. The locus classicus on Baptism is Paed. i. 6. It carries with it a double grace, Forgiveness and Light.…

14. See Münter, Primordia Ecclesiae Africanae, pp. 6, 68, 95. The curses on tombstones by which the grave was secured against violation were often copied with slight alterations from the formulas in use among Pagans. See Mr. Ramsay's article, Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia, Journal of Hellenic Studies, Oct. 1883, p. 400.

15. For Pristinus see Tertullian, De Jej. 12; Münter, Prim. Eccl. Afr. p. 183. The history of Peregrinus will be found in Lucian. He was actually a confessor, and it was not his own fault that he was not a martyr. That these were not isolated instances is clear from the earnestness with which Clement maintains against Heracleon that even those who had denied Christ in their lives washed away their sins by martyrdom; Strom. iv. 9. 72 sqq.

16. See the description of… Proficiency in Seneca, Ep. 75.

17. Clem. Rom. i. 1. 2; 7. 4; 36. 2; 40. 1; 41. 4; 48. 5; Hermas, Vis. i. 2. 1; Barnabas, 1. 5; ii. 2. 3; v. 4; vi. 9; ix. 8; x. 10; xiii. 7. In Hermas and Barnabas the connection of Gnosis with Allegorism is clearly asserted.

18. Strom. ii. 12. 55; iv. 7. 53. Sometimes he drops Fear, and speaks of… Faith, Hope and Charity, corresponding to the three mansions in the Father's House.

19. Strom. iv. 22. 135.…

20. Clement partly realised all this.… The spark of knowledge contains the spark of desire, and this is kindled to a flame by better knowledge gained through practice, Strom. vi. 17. 150 sqq.

21. How little Clement understood what St. Paul means by Faith will be seen from the following quotations. Strom. vi. 13. 108, ‘thy faith hath saved thee’ was said not to Gentiles, but to Jews who already abounded in good works. vi. 12. 98, Faith is not good in itself, but as leading to Fear and Hope.… vi. 12. 103, ‘Faith was accounted to Abraham for righteousness when he had advanced to that which is greater and more perfect than faith. For he who merely abstains from wrong is not righteous unless he adds well-doing and knowledge of the reason why he ought to do some things and not do others.’ iv. 18. 113, Love is the motive of the Gnostic, Fear that of Faith.

22. Paed. i. 8. 62.… For the mirror see Paed. i. 9. 88. The same simile is found in Epictetus, ii. 14. 21. It was probably a Stoic commonplace.

23. Clement's doctrine on the subject of Pleasure is to be found in Paed. ii, iii; Strom. iii. iv. His general aim is to moderate the antique rigour in favour of the wealthier classes.… His chief axioms are that pleasure as such is not to be desired by the Christian, and that to be ‘according to nature’ it must be strictly limited to the end which God intended it to promote. Hence the rule of marital continence, the prohibition of the use of the ‘bones of dead animals,’ ivory and tortoiseshell, of dyes, and artificial hair. No ring is allowed but a signet. There is a natural and an unnatural use of flowers. ‘For in spring-time to walk abroad in meadows dewy and soft and springing fresh with jewelled flowers delights us with a natural and wholesome fragrance, and we suck their sweetness as do the bees. But it is not meet for grave men to carry about in the house a plaited chaplet from meads untrodden.’ The stern prohibition of the use of cut flowers is one of the most singular features of primitive Christian discipline. It is hardly necessary to refer to the De Cor. Mil. of Tertullian. Art he desparages, but the signet may bear a simple Christian emblem, a dove, a fish, a ship in full sail, a lyre, an anchor, a fisherman. But he was quoted on this account in the Iconoclastic controversy as a favourer of Christian imagery, Photius, Cod. 110. Generally speaking, he gives innocent pleasure a liberal scope. ‘Wine,’ he says, quoting Plato, ‘makes a man good-tempered, agreeable to his company, more lenient to his slaves, more complaisant to his friends.’ He is much less austere than Origen.

24. Strom. iii. 17. 103; vi. 17. 151.

25. It is to be found in Plato himself and Aristotle (see Lobeck, Aglaophamus, p. 128), in Philo, and in Plutarch.…

26. Gnosis is always in Christ; Strom. iv. 25. 155; v. 3. 16; vi. 9. 78. Nay, the Saviour is our knowledge and spiritual paradise; vi. I. 2.

27. Strom. v. I. 13.…

28. Strom. vi. 7. 54.

29. The majority of the Christians had not received a regular education and some did not know their letters, Strom. i. 20. 99. Erudition is sometimes hurtful to the understanding, as Anaxarchus said,… Strom. i. 5. 35.

30. Strom. vi. 10. 80; 18. 162.

31. Q. D. S. 27.

32. The most singular instance of Clement's disparagement of human love is to be found in Strom. vii. 12. 70, where married life is regarded as superior to celibacy because it offers so many more temptations to surmount.

33. The leading passages on the subject of Apathy and disinterested Love are Strom. iv. 6. 30; 18. 111; 22. 135-146; vi. 9. 71; 12. 100; 16. 138.

34. Strom. vi. 9. 73.

35. It was insisted upon by the Quiestists. It is a paradox because the separation is impossible. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you. Milton makes Satan complain, ‘Which way I go is hell, myself am hell;’ and the converse is true also. But Clement knew this well; cp. Strom. v. 10. 63.… Nor did the Quietists think otherwise. Bossuet did not venture directly to deny the mystic paradox, which is in fact admitted in the Articles of Issy. But I must refer my readers to Mr. Vaughan's charming Hours with the Mystics, vol. ii. pp. 170, 380, ed. 1856.

36. Clement ascribes Apathy to Christ and to the Apostles after the Resurrection, Strom. vi. 9. 71. As regards men he uses sometimes very strong language. The Gnostic becomes a god upon earth, iv. 23. 149; vii. 3. 13.… On the other hand, Paed. i. 2. 4; Strom. iv. 21. 130; Q. D. S. 40, more sober language is employed; Christ is the only perfect man, passion cannot be wholly eradicated in this life, the wise man touches no known sin. It is the posse non peccare, not the non posse peccare. But Clement is less introspective than Origen. The mere frailty of human nature does not distress him so long as he feels that his heart is safe in Christ.

37. Strom. vii. 14. 87. On Righteousness, see especially the fine passage, Strom. vi. 12. 102. Origen distinguishes two modes of Righteousness, Innocence, the effect of Baptismal Forgiveness, and the active virtue of Justice. Clement speaks only of the latter. The just man is faithful, but the faithful man is not necessarily just. Faith is salvation, but not righteousness; it gives the will, but not immediately the power to do right. Faith is life, righteousness is health. It would seem then that we might be ‘saved’ without good works, but Clement never expressly deals with this question. He seems to assert the opposite, Strom. v. 1. 7.…On the necessity, the ‘merit’ of good works, see Strom. v. 13. 86; vii. 12. 72; 14. 108.

38. Strom. vii. 13. 82.

39. Strom. iv. 22. 136.…

40. Public Worship in the morning, Paed. ii. 10. 96: Fasting on Wednesday and Friday, Strom. vii. 12, 75.…

41. See generally Strom. iv. 23. 148; viii. 7. 35 sqq.

42. Strom. vii. 7. 40; the Gnostic rose also at intervals during the night to pray, Paed. ii. 9. 79; Strom. vii. 7. 49.

43. ‘Endormie dans le néant,’ Molinos, Guide Spirituelle, iii. 20. 201. I owe the reference to La Bruyère, Dialogues sur le Quiétisme, vol. ff. ed. Servois.

44. Porphyry, Vita Plotini, 23, p. 116, ed. Firmin-Didot. For St. Theresa see Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, L'École d' Alexandrie, pp. xlv, lxxix; for Gerson, ibid. lxii, xcviii. Vacherot in his third volume traces the connection of the Alexandrines with mediaeval mysticism. Dähne… insists that Clement himself was a mystic. It depends upon the meaning which we attach to the word. In one sense all believers in the unseen are Mystics; in another, all believers in whom the emotional element predominates largely over the intellectual. I have taken Mysticism as co-extensive with Ecstasy. Of this again there are several degrees, ranging from the inarticulate communion of the Quietists to pictorial visions. Such visions were regarded with suspicion by Mystics of the higher class, such as St. John of the Cross. See Vaughan, Hours with the Mystics.

45. Strom. iv. 26. 172; vii. 5. 29; iii. 6. 49; 11. 74; Paed. i. 6. 42; Strom. vii. 17. 107 (one, true, ancient, catholic), 108 (apostolic).

46. Strom. vii. 11. 68: in vii. 14. 87 the Gnostics are the Holy Church, the Spiritual Body of which those who only bear the name of Christian and do not live according to reason are the flesh. Had this point of view been habitual to him Clement must have written very differently about the Lower Life. The Invisible Spiritual Church, the Communion of Saints, is compared to a chain of rings upheld by a magnet, vii. 2. 9. It is the Church of the First Born, Protrept. ix. 82.…

47. The sacrifice, Paed. iii. 12. 90; Strom. ii. 18. 79, 96; v. 11. 67 (immediately after an allusion to the Eucharist); vii. 3. 14; 6. 31, 32. The last cited passage explains the terms altar, incense.

48. Strom. v. 11. 66, 70. See also passages quoted in Lecture II.

49. Strom. v. 14. 136. The verse had already been applied to the Eucharist in the Doctrine of the Apostles, Irenaeus and Justin.

50. Strom. ii. 13. 56. Clement follows Hermas, Mand. iv. 3, almost verbally, though without naming his authority. He supports this view by Heb. x, 26, 27. Clement nowhere expressly draws a distinction between mortal and venial sins, but it is implied here and in Strom. vi. 12. 97.… It is the first, repentance of mortal sin, that could only be repeated once after baptism. It is singular that in Q. D. S. he does not enter upon the question.…

51. Strom. vi. 13. 107. Bishop, Priest, and Deacon symbolise the ‘three Mansions,’ the three degrees of the Angelic Hierarchy.…

52. Q. D. S. 41. Probst, Sakramente, p. 261, unhesitatingly identifies the Man of God with the Priest. It is just possible that we have here the same admonition as in Origen, Sel. in Psalmos, Hom. ii. 6 (Lom. xii. p. 267), ‘tantummodo circumspice diligentius, cui debeas confiteri peccatum tuum. Proba prius medicum.’ He may mean that the chaplain is to be a priest, but a worthy priest. But were there more than twelve priests in Alexandria, and in any case can there have been enough to supply domestic chaplains to all the rich men who needed them? I do not doubt that the chaplain is to be a Gnostic who is a judge in spiritual matters, Strom. vii. 7. 45. Rufinus, before his ordination, seems to have held such a post in the household of Melania. Compare note above, p. 96. Probst, I may add, endeavours to prove that the Gnostic is the Priest by combining what Clement says of the Gnostic, of Moses, of the Law, and of Christ the Shepherd.

53. This statement, that the Eucharist at Alexandria was not yet separated from the Agape and that both were celebrated together in the evening, may seem doubtful, and indeed I make it with some hesitation. It may be argued, on the other side, (i) That the separation was already made in the West, as we see from Justin and Tertullian, and is found immediately after Clement's time in Palestine, teste Origen. (ii) That the word Eucharist is employed by Clement for the Elements, Strom. i. 1.5, and for the rite, Paed. ii. 2. 20; Strom. iv. 25. 161. (iii) That there was a morning service at Alexandria, though we are not told that it included the Eucharist, Paed. ii. 10. 96. On the other hand, (i) the Liturgy, so far as we can judge, is not nearly so developed in Clement's church as in that of Origen; (ii) the Agape in both its forms is distinctly mentioned, the Eucharist as a separate office is not; (iii) the word Eucharist is employed of the Agape, Paed. ii. 10. 96. (iv) The Agape is mentioned in the Sibylline Oracles—Or. viii. 402, 497, temp. Trajan or Hadrian; Or. v. 265, temp. Antoninus Pius—while the Eucharist is not: see Alexandre, ii. 547. It is true that both these authorities are anterior in date to Clement. (v) Dionysius of Alexandria still uses of the rite of Communion the same word… which in Clement means the Agape, Eus. H. E. vi. 42.5.… (vi) Lastly, I do not know of any passage in an Oriental writer before Clement's time in which the Eucharist appears as a distinct and substantive office. In the Doctrine of the Apostles Hilgenfeld observes… in chap. 10, ‘eucharistia vere coena communis nondum separata ab Agape.’ And from Socrates, v. 22, it appears that the Agape lingered on in the churches of Upper Egypt longer than elsewhere. We may infer from this perhaps that Alexandria also had clung to the primitive usage after it had been abandoned by others.

54. Supper followed the Eucharist, see Paed. ii. 1. 11.…

55. The description of the Agape will be found at the opening of Paed. ii. For a similar and equally graphic account of the coarse vulgarity of Alexandrine luxury, see Philo, De Vita Cont. 5 (ii. 477). The contrast between the heathen man of the world and the Christian gentleman as drawn by Clement is most instructive.

56. Paed. ii. 1. 10.…

57. Strom. iv. 26. 161. The figure is from Philo, and must be interpreted by Philo's light.…

58. … The chief passages on the subject of the Eucharist are, besides these two, Paed. ii. 2. 19 sq.; Strom. v. 10. 66. Other notices in Paed. i. 5. 15; 6. 38; Strom. i. 10. 46; 19. 96; v. 11. 70; vi. 14. 113; Q.D.S. 23.

59. Paed. ii. 2. 20.…

60. Paed. ii. 2. 19; iii. 1. 2.

61. For these four quotations see Paed. ii. 2. 19; i. 6. 38; Strom. v. 10. 66; Adumb. in Ep. Joan. I. p. 1009. I quote the last book always with hesitation.

62. Strom. iv. 26. 161; Paed. i. 6. 43. The two opposing views are maintained by Döllinger, Die Eucharistie in den drei ersten Jahrb., Mainz, 1826, and Probst, Liturgie, on the one hand, and by Höfling, Die Lehre der ältesten Kirche vom Opfer im Leben und Cultus, Erlangen, 1851. Upon the whole Höfling's view appears to me to be correct.…

63. A Montanist sister in one of her visions saw a soul ‘tenera et lucida et aerii coloris et forma per omnia humana,’ De Anima, 9. Tatian's doctrine in Oratio ad Graecos, 13. For the Arabians, Eus. H. E. vi. 37; Redepenning, Origenes, ii. 105 sqq.…

64. See Irenaeus, v. 13; Athenagoras, De Res.

65. The four letters composing the word Pωμη = 948, hence it was supposed the empire would last that number of years, Or. Sib. viii. 148. When this expectation was frustrated by the course of events, the authors of the last four Sibylline books struck off 105 years from the Roman Fasti and fixed upon the year 305 in the reign of Diocletian. See much curious information upon similar speculations which recurred again and again from the persecution of Nero downwards, Alexandre, ii. pp. 485 sqq.

66. Tertullian, Adv. Marc. iii. 24; Münter, Primordia Eccl. Afr. p. 141.

67. Eternal torments in i. 7; xi. 11: the other view in iii. 6.

68. Tertullian, De Monogamia, 10, the widow prays for her husband's soul; ‘enimvero et pro anima eius orat, et refrigerium interim adpostulat ei et in prima resurrectione consortium, et offert annuis diebus dormitionis eius:’ De Cor. Mil. 3, ‘oblationes pro defunctis, pro natalitiis, annua die facimus’ (here he rests the usage on tradition, and not on Scripture: but he may mean only that the oblation is not scriptural as the use of prayer is sanctioned by 2 Tim. i. 18): see also De Exhort. Cast. 11. All these treatises are Montanist according to Münter. Montanist also in the opinion of Valesius are the Acta of St. Perpetua. As to the latter it should be observed that the little brother Dinocrates for whom Perpetua intercedes had certainly died unbaptised. For his father was a Pagan—Perpetua herself was baptised in the prison—and the effect of her prayer is that Dinocrates is admitted to the benefits of baptism. ‘I saw Dinocrates coming forth from a dark place very hot and thirsty, squalid of face and pallid of hue.… And hard by where he stood was a tank full of water, the margin whereof was higher than the stature of the child, and he stood on tiptoe as if he would drink.’ Again, ‘on the day on which we lay in the stocks,’ she prays, and sees Dinocrates cleansed, dressed, and cool, drinking eagerly of the water. ‘Then I knew that he was released from pain.’ Further, the privilege of intercession is granted to Perpetua by revelation as a special mark of favour. So Clement appears to restrict it to the Gnostic. The practice of prayer for the dead was certainly uncommon at the end of the second century. It is not found in Origen, for in Rom. ix. 12 is confessedly from the hand of Rufinus.

69. Strom. vii. 12. 74.…

70. Paed. i. 4. 10; 6. 46. In this last passage it is said that Christ rose ‘through fire,’ which changes the natural into the spiritual body, as earthly fire changes wheat into bread. But the resurrection body may still be called flesh, Paed. ii. 10. 100; iii. 1. 2.

71. Strom. v. 14. 90; vii. 2. 12.…

72. Strom. v. 14. 90: in iv. 24. 154 the ‘faithless’ are as the chaff which the wind driveth away.…

73. Isaiah iv. 4 is quoted, Pued. iii. 9. 48, and Cor. i. 3. 10-13, Strom. v. 4. 26.

74. Strom. vii. 16. 102. Repentance is attributed to the dead again in Strom. vi. 14. 109. If it be asked which repentance Clement speaks of here (see note above, p. 102), the instance of Sodom and Gomorrha, Adumb. in Ep. Judae, p. 1008, is very strong. It rests upon Ezekiel xvi. 33, 55, and is employed by Origen in the same way.… The question of the orthodoxy or heterodoxy of the Alexandrines in this part of their teaching turns entirely upon the word ‘repentance,’ to which we shall recur in Lecture VIII.

75. See Strom. vii. 2. 12.…

76. Strom. vii. 6. 34.… Cp. Eclogae Proph. 25. p. 995, and Minucius Felix, xxxv, illic sapiens ignis membra urit et reficit; carpit et nutrit. There is an allusion to Isaiah iv. 4, but the actual phrase ‘wise fire’ comes from Heraclitus and the Stoics.

77. The Angels who guard the road up to the highest heaven ‘take toll’ of the passer-by, Strom. iv. 18. 117.

78. Clement may have taken the seven heavens from Valentinus or from the Revelation of Sophonias, Strom. v. 11. 77. He found allusions to them in Plato's Timaeus, p. 31; in Clemens Romanus, i. 20 (of the ‘lands’ beyond the ocean); in St. Paul, and elsewhere. The same idea is found in the book of Baruch (Origen, De Princ. ii. 3. 6), and in Aristo, Fragment iv. in Otto, Corp. App. vol. ix. p. 363. See also Hermas, Vis. iii. 4, and note there in the ed. of Gebhardt and Harnack. The seven days of purification are a type, Strom. iv. 25. 158.…

79. This seems to be clearly meant in Strom. iv. 18. 114; vi. 14. 108, 114; cp. also Ecl. Proph. 56. But if so, the poena damni never wholly ceases, Strom. vi. 14. 109.

80. Strom. iv. 25. 158; vi. 14. 108; vii. 10. 56, 57.

81. Strom. vi. 12. 104.

82. Strom. vii. 3. 13.