[In the following essay, Ferguson summarizes Clement's ideas and his importance, crediting him with being the “real founder of a Christian philosophy of religion.”]

In his masterly book Christ and Culture H. Richard Niebuhr identified five main attitudes which Christians have taken towards secular culture. The first emphasizes the opposition between Christ and culture. The second claims a fundamental agreement between Christ and culture. In the third (“Christ above culture”), Christ is seen as the fulfillment of cultural aspirations, at once continuous and discontinuous with the culture that has gone before. The fourth sees “Christ and Culture in Paradox,” a dualist view in which man lives in two worlds and has responsibilities to both. The final attitude is conversionist; Christ is seen as the transformer of culture. In this debate Clement clearly belongs to the third group, of which he is the supreme representative. “There is only one river of truth, but a lot of streams disgorge their waters into it” (Str. 1,5,29).

He has, as Montdésert says, an “audacious optimism, his confidence in the power and authority of truth.” But the Logos, who reveals truth, also “loves concealment.” Hence, allegorical interpretation. Yet this, alien to our temper, springs from the assumption that there is a pattern in the universe, and that if you cut through the universe at different points you will find the same pattern. So too with Clement's rich use of imagery; it comes from a total view of life. Even his characteristic wordplay is linked to a belief that word and object are part of a single pattern.

Clement in his use of language appears at his most modern and at his most profound. He insists that we cannot speak of God as he is (Str. 2,16; 5,17). We can speak about God; we are not naming him, but pointing the mind in the right direction; we may think of One, or light, or reality—and go beyond that. A whole philosophy of religious language might be built on Clement's assertion that essential discourse is to say “God is the Lord of all” (Str. 6,17).

Clement's philosophy of life centers on God, who is one and beyond one (Paed. 1,8,71); it looks backward to the Middle Platonism of Maximus of Tyre and Albinus, and forward to the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus. His theology is based firmly on the Logos, as the revelation of God. He found in Philo woven together the Jewish Memra, the Word by which God speaks and it is done, and the Greek teaching of the Reason behind the universe, and he Christianized Philo; he declared that the Logos was revealed in Jesus (Protr. 1,7). It is astonishing that Clement was accused of denigrating the Son; it was a juster charge that he identified the Son too closely with the Father. But Clement's theology is not a systematic construct; it is an expression of experience.

The world is good; Clement will have nothing of Gnostic dualism; evil is not a substance. But man is fallen, and God becomes man so that man may become God (Protr. 8,4; Str. 7,101,4). Clement has a warm, joyous, healthy picture of human life as he portrays the Christian gentleman in the last two books of The Tutor and the fragment from To the Newly Baptized. From faith to fulfillment there are two roads, one moral and one intellectual, love and knowledge. Ultimately they are one; knowledge is the perfection of love (Str. 4,7,54), love the perfection of knowledge. The ultimate aim is knowledge of God. To know oneself is to know God; to know God is to become like God (Paed. 3,1). The true Gnostic has his fulfillment in the eternal vision of God.

As a man Clement's sanity attracts us. For many this was an age of anxiety. Already in the reign of Marcus Aurelius the frontier dams of empire were leaking, straining. The emperor himself had been a pensive, wistful, ineffective agnostic. Contrast the warm humanity of Clement with his insistence that joy is the keynote of the church and gladness of the Christian gnostic (Str. 7,101). Charles Bigg said of him: “No later writer has so serene and hopeful a view of human nature.”

Clement is the real founder of a Christian philosophy of religion. The Neo-Platonists were to come to their philosophical commitment in three stages—purification, initiation, vision. The Christian Platonist before them offers a parallel scheme. It was a remarkable achievement to conceive it, still more to go so far towards executing it. Adolf Harnack assessed it justly. He called it “the boldest literary experiment in the history of the church,” “the first attempt to use Holy Scripture and the church tradition—together with the assumption that Christ, as the Reason of the world, is the source of all truth—as the basis of a presentation of Christianity, which at once addresses itself to the cultured by satisfying the scientific demand for a philosophical ethic and theory of the world, and at the same time reveals to the believer the rich content of his faith.”