SOURCE: “The Image of God: A Study in Clement of Alexandria,” in The Church Quarterly Review, Vol. C, April-July, 1925, pp. 96-121.

[In the following essay, de Pauley summarizes Clement's views on God the Father and explores the difficulties involved with his use of the word “spirit” in analyzing man's psychic elements.]

Religion, mysticism, and idealist philosophy, even when their careers have run along different roads, have always made the problem of man's relation to God a central problem; for right thinking and right living presuppose that man is aware, more or less clearly, of his place in the order of things. The Alexandrian Fathers, though acquainted with the wealth of Greek speculation, did not pass by the simple intuitive insight of the Hebrew seer who conceived this mysterious relation after the analogy of a reality and an image of it. It will be the object of this study to describe as accurately as possible what Clement read into this metaphor. Before attempting to collect his teaching from his rambling and sometimes tedious chapters, we shall do well to remind ourselves what he thought about the Original, in whose image man was made, namely, God.

The references to the First Person of the Trinity may be said to fall into three groups: God as He is in Himself; God as He transcends His creation; and God as He is immanent in His creation.

First, like Philo his predecessor, and Plotinus his successor, both of them non-Christians, he would disentangle the Deity from all relationships with men and things. He who inhabits eternity must in His essence and existence be independent of the space and time relations of our changing world; and, by a method of analysis and elimination, Clement strips God of all the predicates of finite thinking. If we were to predicate any quality whatsoever of God, no matter how great or good, we should only be classifying Him under the categories of our own limited experience. We move in a world of life and death; we are creatures of appetite; how can we find a word in our vocabulary which may express the Unbegotten and Eternal? ‘Everything that falls under a name is begotten.’¹ When we have analyzed our concept of God, and then proceeded to think away in succession each of the elements, we are left with ‘God is one, and beyond the one, and above the monad itself.’² ‘If, then, abstracting all that belongs to bodies and the properties of things, we cast ourselves into the greatness of Christ, and thence go forward through holiness into immensity, we may attain somehow to the conception of the Almighty, not knowing what He is, but what He is not.… The First Cause is not, then, in a place, but above place, and time, and name, and conception.’³ God's existence cannot be demonstrated.⁴ His moral nature cannot be conceived after the analogy of human virtue. If He is self-sufficient, He needs nothing; if He is aloof from our fleeting sphere, He is not subject to perturbation, and, therefore, He does not practise self-control.⁵

In the sequel, we shall see the central place assigned to the idea of man as God's image in Clement's loosely organized system of doctrine; but, at the outset, it is important to observe that God's path is in the great waters and His footsteps are not known. In contrast with Stoicism, which allows God to be lost in the world, the Scriptural teaching of God's apartness had to be maintained, even though it is expressed in terms of Greek thought.⁶

Considered in relation to the world, God, in the first place, is First Cause. From the nature of the case, there can be only one First Principle, and, therefore, matter is not eternal.⁷ It is not quite clear whether Clement thought of creation as the ordering of a disorderly material, after the idea of Plato's doctrine in the Timaeus;⁸ but at least he holds that matter is no evil and recalcitrant power existing independently of God. One passage suggests a creation ex nihilo. He asks, ‘But how shall I tell what God makes?’ The reply is: ‘Behold the whole universe; it is His work: and the heaven, and the sun, and angels, and men, are the works of His fingers. How great is the power of God! His bare volition was the creation of the universe. For God alone made it, because He alone is truly God. By the bare exercise of volition He creates; His mere willing was followed by the springing into being of what He willed.’⁹ But whether Clement would subscribe to St. Augustine's belief on this point or not, he anticipated him in saying that the world is created not in time, but with time.¹⁰

As First Principle and Cause of all things, God is good, and His goodness is inseparable from His essence. ‘For God did not make a beginning of being Lord and Good, being always what He is. Nor will He ever cease to do good, although He bring all things to an end.’¹¹ Here again he avoids the extreme immanence of Stoicism, and tells us that good does not flow from God of necessity, and apart from His willing it. Fire emits heat, because it must: God is the source of good, because He wills good.¹² This world is the best of all possible worlds, as far as its constitution and nature are concerned, and God must not be charged with the evil which we experience in it.¹³ Thus while Clement almost equates sin with ignorance, he is careful to avoid that shallow optimism which would reduce evil to illusion by looking at it sub specie aeternitatis. There is evil in the world, and when we have agreed that it is not to be laid at the Gate of the Eternal, we shall be free to believe in God's providence. Even natural religion, when it is not warped by ungodly living, teaches God's providential rule;¹⁴ and revealed religion goes so far as to see particular providences in special cases, wrought within the general sphere of providence.¹⁵

Finally, God is immanent in His creation as a whole, and more particularly in its finest flower, man, who is created in His image. ‘The same One who is very far off has come very near—an unspeakable wonder. I am a God near at hand, says the Lord. He is far off in respect of essence—for how can that which is created apprehend the Uncreated?—but He is very near by His power in which all things have been embraced. Yes, the power of God is always present, laying hold of us by that power which sees, and is beneficent and disciplinary.’¹⁶ God lives in the world as well as above it.

In passing from Clement's beliefs about God the Father to his doctrine of man, we shall do well to remember that here also philosophy and religion are inseparable if not identical and mutually inclusive. He admits that there is much bad philosophy, but he maintains that Christianity is the true philosophy. The ancients, unless when blinded by wilful ignorance and enfeebled mentally by immoral living, were able to catch some broken lights of Truth.¹⁷ In the Christian religion, Truth in its totality is revealed, or, more exactly, it is evealed as fully as man of finite, mental capacity, limited by conditions of the body, can grasp it. Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, and the rest, often talked very excellent sense, and Plato, above all others, has much to pass on to the Christian. Philosophy, as expounded in his pages, Clement tells us, is to be treated as a nut: part of it you eat, and part of it you throw away. The edible kernel apparently contains good psychology, for in the Paedagogus Clement takes over the Platonic trichotomy, with the important difference that the spirited element, which, in his model, was the natural ally of reason, is now given a psychic value on a level with the appetites. ‘The irascible part, being brutal, dwells near to insanity.’¹⁸ Apparently the Stoic model of the wise man, notorious for cultivated apathy, is preferred to the more natural, and it must be said more Christian, virtue of moral enthusiasm.

Now while it is natural for a man who has not been within the sphere of Christian influence to search for God, and with some degree of certainty to attain his quest, he can reach only that knowledge of Him which will teach him to order his life here on earth. Virtue is the ability to order the affairs of this life after that harmony which is written so large in the conscience that all who run may read; but preparation for the life to come, when the portals of death are crossed, demands a fuller revelation, the revelation of Christ, the Divine Word. ‘The commandments issued with respect to natural life are published to the multitude; but those which are suited for living well, and from which eternal life springs, we have to consider, as in a sketch, as we read them out of the Scriptures.’¹⁹ In later times St. Thomas Aquinas was faced with the same difficulty. The virtues of Platonism—justice, wisdom, courage, and temperance—could not be gainsaid: there were men of old, even outside Israel, whose counsels and lives must be given a place in the Summa. These cardinal virtues, therefore, Thomas assigns to lex naturalis, and limits their scope to the life below, and the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love, he derives from lex divina. These three prepare the Christian for the immortality of the beatific vision.²⁰

The Platonic trichotomy, which may be reduced to a dichotomy of rational and irrational elements, is not an exclusive model: for an eclectic thinker must needs make room for the teaching of the Stoics, to say nothing of the difficulty of harmonizing these several and partial truths with the doctrine of the soul revealed in the Old and New Dispensations. A number of questions suggest themselves. What did Clement mean by the rational soul? How does he conceive its relation to God? What connexion has it with the ‘spirit’ of St. Paul? Is there a sharp line of distinction between the two main soul elements, the rational and irrational, introducing a fundamental cleft into the soul's unity?

In itself, the irrational and lower soul, the part which has not ‘logos,’ presents no difficulty: it is similar to the vital principle which animates sub-human forms of life. The chief passages in which it is treated shew that by the irrational soul Clement understands the five senses—sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste, which, taken together, are the basis of experience; the power of speech; the power of reproduction; the power of motion; the power of nutrition; the power of growth. All pleasure-pain and emotional reactions are within it. Clement regards these powers and functions as united and made coherent by what he calls the carnal spirit, the ‘pneuma sarkikon or somatikon.’²¹

The rational soul, or mind (‘nous’), is the ruling, ‘hegemonic,’ faculty; by it we reason, and exercise the powers of choice, investigation, study, knowledge and judgement. It is a ruling faculty, because it is adapted to rule the desires and emotions. In one passage the ruling faculty is distinguished from a spiritual principle, which is communicated to man at his creation, and said to be quite distinct from the manifestation of activity on the part of the Holy Spirit in a Christian;²² whereas, in another passage the two are identified, namely, ‘the intellectual or spiritual faculty, the “dianoetic” or “pneumatic,” or whatever you choose to call it.’²³ The possession of this rational soul, whose essence is purer than that of the animals, raises man above all other forms of animate life, in that it endows him with the capacity to know God, and invests him with the quality of being valuable in himself as an end, and not simply as a mere means to something outside himself.²⁴ As a merely irrational creature, man is said to be earth-born: as rational, he is a heavenly plant.²⁵

Now although this soul-complex of irrational and rational elements is a union of diverse elements, Clement believes that the two, in a very real sense, are one. Man's soul has a God-ward and a world-ward look; he has both the power to gaze at the stars and the power to search for the Principle who guides and sustains their movements. Perhaps the clearest statement is that ‘spirit is joined to the soul, which is inspired by it.’²⁶ Man's spirit, or reason, dwells in his irrational soul, in which it is a tenant with extraordinary rights. Ideally, spirit has complete control of its psychic habitat. Thus the rational man ‘rises up against the corporeal soul, putting a bit in the mouth of the irrational spirit when it breaks loose, because the flesh lusteth against the spirit.’²⁷ Plotinus afterwards taught that in the processions of soul from the One, the higher grades contain their emanations within them, while at the same time remaining outside them, so that in the case of man, there is always an element which does not ‘come down’ and mingle in sense-life. The difference here is that, in contrast with both Stoicism and Neo-Platonism, the higher and the lower elements are different in kind, and not simply in degree. The rational soul is in essence higher than the irrational soul in which it takes up its abode. Nor can the rational soul be regarded as an emanation from the One, in that its essence is distinct from and inferior to the essence of God. Thus the element which constitutes man a man, as distinct from an animal and distinct from God, is something sui generis, not capable of a decrescendo or crescendo into anything else. So Clement tells us that ‘the mercy of God is rich towards us, who are in no respect related to Him; I say either in essence or nature, or in the peculiar energy of our essence, but only in our being the work of His will.’²⁸ But just as the relation of man's rational soul to God is a real relation, so is its relation to his own irrational soul. The two are necessary to his earth existence. No doubt God tests us and values us after the quality of our higher nature, but His canon is rational control of the irrational soul. ‘For we men,’ he tells us, ‘hear the voice and see the bodily form, but the Lord searcheth the spirit, from which both speech and sight proceed. In like manner whether disease or accident befall the gnostic, ay, or even death the most terrible of all things, he continues unchanged in soul, knowing that all such things are a necessary result of creation but that, even so, they are made by the power of God a medicine of salvation.’²⁹ The body is animated by the irrational soul or corporeal spirit, but that spirit is under the control of the rational spirit proper. Sense impressions may be copied in the rational soul or mind, and sensations classified and interpreted there,³⁰ but it is in the motives of the rational soul that the source of bodily activity properly arises. Man is not constituted to react to sense stimuli; he can initiate action by the innate power of the rational soul.³¹ Thus he says that the corporeal spirit, under the influence of the rational spirit, moves the body to good actions.³² For this reason, all man's activities are placed in a relation of subordination to the rule of the rational soul.³³ If, from one point of view, as we have seen, spirit resides in the irrational soul, controlling, through it, the body, so, from another point of view, the irrational element is part of the rational. ‘We… assert that rational and ruling power is the cause of the constitution of the living creature; also this, the irrational part, is animated, and is part of it.’³⁴ Strictly speaking, human activity arises in the higher element, but since it is manifested in bodily action, the Decalogue may be said to be applicable to the twofold spirits, and to issue in clean hands as well as in pure hearts.³⁵

The term ‘spirit’ has two distinct ancestries, Greek and Hebrew, and Clement does not hesitate to confuse us by adopting both. In Stoic literature, ‘spirit’ is applied to any and every phase of what we should call soul activity. It is a material substance, conceived of as fire or warm air, akin to its ultimate origin, the Primal Fire or Spirit, which appears first in Greek thought in the fragments of Heraclitus, who conceives it to be the monistic principle of reality. In its different levels of manifestation, it is distinguished by what is called tension (‘tonos’), which is less intense in the lower than in the higher forms. First, it is said to appear as the principle of cohesion (‘hexis’) in what we call inanimate matter; second, it is growth (‘physis’) when we see it in the stratum represented by plants; third, it is soul (‘psyche’) in animals; and, finally, in man it is reason (‘nous’), where its peculiar tension makes him akin to the Deity. Relying on the spirit common to God and men, Cleanthes addresses God in this strain:

Thee it is meet that mortals should invoke,
For we thine offspring are, and sole of all
Created things that live and move on earth
Receive from Thee the image of the One.

Stoic psychology in this way deals with psychic elements as gradations or degrees of reality in which one and the same reality is active throughout, and attempts to keep this principle to the fore by using the term ‘spirit’ to cover each grade. Thus, although Stoicism makes use of reason or the ruling (hegemonic) power to mark off man's peculiar activity, the Platonic distinction between the rational and irrational elements, as differing in kind, is set aside. It is to Platonism that Clement reverts, though his terminology is Stoical, when he places the rational ‘spirit’ in the irrational ‘spirit.’ The ruling element, in Clement's view, ought to rule, because it is something sui generis, and more noble in essence than the ‘spirit’ in which it takes up its dwelling. His preference for the Platonic teaching is determined by Holy Scripture, where he learns that the Lord God breathed into man's nostrils ‘the breath of life; and man became a living soul,’ quite distinct in nature from the animals.³⁶ The Stoic might say that all things, whether inanimate, animate, or human, were images of God: Clement holds that nothing in the whole creation save man's divine soul is an image of God. He tells us that ‘it were wrong for what is mortal to be made like what is immortal.’³⁷ Perhaps his diatribe on image-worship may suggest the reason why he could not, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, both steeped in Greek traditions, see a trace of the Creator in the things of nature. ‘Let none of you worship the sun, but set his desires on the Maker of the sun; nor deify the universe, but seek after the Creator of the universe.’³⁸

We have remarked that Clement drew on Hebrew thought also in his use of the term ‘spirit.’ What has just been said in the last paragraphs applies to all men alike, whether pagan or Christian: it is an analysis of the ‘natural’ man of St. Paul. St. Paul treats the ‘natural’ man as a union of body and soul (‘psyche’), mind (‘nous’) being an element of the latter.³⁹ The differentia of the Christian he finds in the development of the Hebrew idea of ‘spirit,’ as witnessed in the experience of himself and of others who were transformed by the descent of the Holy Spirit into their souls. The Christian man, in his view, by virtue of baptism, is reconstituted or re-created, and receives a new element, ‘spirit,’ by which he becomes a ‘spiritual’ man. Something not his by nature takes possession of him and moulds him afresh. Similarly, Clement speaks of a new gift of the Holy Spirit, by which a man is perfected. Of the baptism of Jesus Christ by John the Baptist, he asks, ‘He is perfected by the washing—of baptism—alone, and is sanctified by the descent of the Spirit?’ and replies, ‘Such is the case. The same also takes place in our case whose exemplar Christ became. Being baptized, we are illuminated; illuminated, we become sons; being made sons, we are made perfect; being made perfect, we are made immortal…’⁴⁰ More explicitly, in another passage, he ascribes the growth of moral and spiritual life to this transcendent element: ‘He Himself formed man of the dust, and regenerated him by water; and made him grow by His Spirit; and trained him by His word to adoption and salvation; in order that, transforming earth-born man into a holy and heavenly plant by His advent, He might fulfil to the utmost that divine utterance, “Let us make man in our image and likeness.”’⁴¹

If the Stoics and Clement, in assigning to man the ability to know the morally good, appear to stand on common ground, the agreement is one about effects rather than about causes. The ‘innate ideas’ of the Stoics belong merely to a higher stratum in a series of strata rising from lower to higher by degrees of functioning, whereas to Clement the ‘witness inborn and competent, viz. faith, which of itself, and from its own resources, chooses at once what is best’ is the activity of a faculty transcendently higher than all other psychic elements, because it is inbreathed into man by God.⁴² And yet a further difference appears when we relate the effect to the cause: the Stoics say that senseexperience draws the innate ideas of morality into the clearer light of consciousness; Clement adds that the grace of the Divine Teacher, Jesus Christ, is an element of experience. ‘The heavenly and true divine love comes to men thus, when in the soul itself the spark of true goodness, kindled in the soul by the Divine Word, is able to burst into flame…’⁴³ Education and self-discipline can do much, but apart from grace, they may not do all. ‘The thoughts of virtuous men are produced by the inspiration of God.’⁴⁴

The duty of man, in the light of this psychology, will be to apprehend God's will and to perform it, and to bring the irrational elements of his soul into obedience to truth. ‘Christian conduct is the operation of the rational soul in accordance with a correct judgement and aspiration after the truth, which attains its destined end through the body, the soul's consort and ally.’⁴⁵ The task of living is, before all else, to gain insight into the principles of living, and, secondly, to gain control of the appetites in such a way that each is given its due in an ordered and balanced life. All men are born with this capacity for mental and spiritual growth; but, like Adam, all men have failed to live up to the light that is in them. Sin may be said to be either disobedience to the heavenly vision, or the deliberate failure to catch that vision at all.⁴⁶ In each case it is really preference for pleasure in place of the good. ‘The first man when in Paradise sported free, because he was the child of God; but when he succumbed to pleasure (for the serpent allegorically signifies pleasure crawling on its belly, earthly wickedness nourished for fuel to the flames) was as a child seduced by lusts, and grew old in disobedience; and by disobeying his Father, dishonoured God.’⁴⁷ Each man falls of himself, and must not trace his weakness to Adam, who is merely the type of all sinners.⁴⁸ He himself alone is responsible for his fall, and bears his own punishment, which, like his sin, is two-fold, being, first, ignorance, and second, the triumph of the irrational animal over the rational human. His two-fold penalty may be summed up in the single word death, which is not the separation of soul from body, but rather the separation of the rational soul from truth, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, its alliance with the desires of the irrational soul.⁴⁹

It is clear from the foregoing analysis of man's psychic elements, that the image of God is predicable only of man's rational soul, or more exactly, of man's rational soul as ‘informed’ by the Holy Spirit or the Divine Word. Mind only reaches its fullest expression when it is indwelt by Spirit, as Dr. Temple puts it in Christus Veritas. But mind is a higher stage of reality than mere life and mere matter, and it is only in the milieu of matter as ‘informed’ by life, or soul, that mind develops and reaches its fulness. We have been given a potential nature, which develops within the influence of a medium lower than itself, through the power of the Divine. We stand between the infinitely great and the infinitely little: the infinitely little is within us, and the more we permit it to influence us, the less shall we be in touch with the infinitely great. History is a perpetual witness to the conflict of the sense element, which clamours for the indulgence of passion and pleasure, with the higher element which refuses to be satisfied with less than fellowship with God. The potential element remains at a low level of potentiality: the image of God is blurred. In this light, Clement conceives the Incarnation as the revelation of our potential nature raised to the highest possible degree of actuality. The life which we were intended to live, a life of contemplation issuing in good conduct, was lived by Jesus Christ, who, at all times, was a perfect Image of God. Both the Hebrews and the Greeks caught some flashes of the ideal life, but in Jesus Christ we have the Light in all its radiance. No doubt, Clement's Christology is seriously defective, and refuses to give an adequate place to the body and the human soul of Jesus Christ; but, at least, he is convinced that the life of the Word on earth was a perfect reflexion of the life of God, and of the ideal human life, in terms which human mentality could grasp. ‘He ate not for the sake of His body, which was sustained by a holy energy, but that the false idea might not arise in the minds of His companions that He had been manifested only in semblance. He was altogether incapable of suffering: there entered into Him from without no emotion of pleasure or of pain.’⁵⁰ Thus Jesus Christ is not only without the evil consequences which attend life in contact with a human body but He lacks even the consequences which are not in themselves sinful. He is incapable of passion, and, therefore, passionless. St. Augustine was just as good a Platonist as Clement, but he was one of the ‘twice-born’ souls who came to Christ through great tribulation, and the ideal of impassibility did not attract him, as it did not the writer of the ‘spiritual gospel,’ who tells us that Jesus wept. He, however, belonged to the days when eye could see and hands could handle ‘concerning the Word of life.’ But, on the other hand, we must not imagine that the Word is a cold intellectual unit, for the final cause of the Incarnation is love.

‘The Saviour then could never be a hater of men, seeing that it was owing to His abounding love for man that He scorned not the weakness of human flesh, but having clothed Himself with it, has come into the world for the common salvation of men.’⁵¹ He asks, ‘What, then, does this instrument—the Word of God, the Lord, the New Song—desire? To open the eyes of the blind, and unstop the ears of the deaf, and to lead the lame or the erring to righteousness, to exhibit God to the foolish, to put a stop to corruption, to conquer death, to reconcile disobedient children to their father. The instrument of God loves mankind. The Lord pities, instructs, exhorts, admonishes, saves, shields, and of His bounty promises us the kingdom of heaven as a reward for learning; and the only advantage He reaps is, that we are saved.’⁵² His mission is one of ‘admonishing, upbraiding, blaming, chiding, reproving threatening, healing, promising, favouring,’⁵³ and when men are constrained to repent, ‘He rejoices, without suffering change.’⁵⁴

Into the drama of human history, which is being enacted by the blurred images of God, there bursts the Perfect Image, who, working outside them, reveals to them what they might be, and working within them, with their cooperation, removes the tarnish and cleanses them from corruption. By His work God's favoured handiwork may fulfil its destiny and reveal His glory. By His mediating grace men may become intelligent agents who know and do the good, and be images of the Image of Him whom none hath seen at any time. Christ is ‘in truth the Onlybegotten, the express image of the glory of the universal King and almighty Father, stamping on the mind of the gnostic the perfect vision after His own image, so that the divine image is now beheld in a third embodiment, assimilated as far as possible to the Second Cause, to Him, namely, who is the Life indeed, owing to whom we live the true life, copying the example of Him who is made to us knowledge, while we converse with the things which are stable and altogether unchangeable.’⁵⁵ We may, therefore, speak of individual men,⁵⁶ and of the Church which they compose, as indwelt by God. ‘The earthly Church is the image of the heavenly.’⁵⁷ Clement goes so far as to speak of men who have already attained to the perfection of the image as being ‘gods,’ meaning, most probably, that they share in immortality with God.⁵⁸

There are many allusions to, and some descriptions of, the human image of God as Clement pictures it. Sometimes he would appear to believe that here and now man may put on immortality,⁵⁹ but more often he limits human perfection by the Platonic qualification ‘as far as possible.’ Like all theologians, he is faced with the antinomy of man earning freedom in conflict with elements which reside in him, and from which he cannot completely free himself. The very impediments in the way to the attainment of self-mastery remain as conditions of self-mastery, even when it is won. Our only solace lies in the fact that we shall still continue to develop the image when the body has been laid aside.⁶⁰

The image, as we have seen, is the rational soul, and it is perfected when it is free from all attendant influences of the irrational soul to which it is united. The rational soul, to use a modern term, is the Ego, as it is in Stoicism. The influences which retard its development and expression are passions and emotions, because they introduce an unbalancing factor which clouds the judgements of reason Passion gives a bias to sanity and reduces its victim to the level of opinion. We halt between many opinions, and become vacillating creatures, unless we have accustomed ourselves to see things in the clear light of reason.⁶¹ Passions are described as ‘an abscess of the truth.’⁶² Men fear, are proud, lust, hate, because they have not learned to control the animal within.⁶³ If we could but learn to control bodily impulses, which, in themselves, are not evil, we should deal with them as a book-keeper deals with figures. The maxim, ‘Know thyself,’ Plato pointed out, really means ‘Know God,’ and Clement gives it a more comprehensive interpretation, as ‘to know for what we were born.’⁶⁴ We were born to be saved, to be impregnated with the Divine life, to be perfect and immortal replicas of our Creator, and the body with which we have been endowed is suited admirably to forward these ends. ‘Those, then, who vilify the body are wrong; not considering that the frame of man was formed erect for the contemplation of heaven, and that the organization of the senses tends to knowledge; and that the members and parts are arranged for good, not for pleasure. Whence this abode becomes receptive of the soul which is most precious to God; and is dignified with the Holy Spirit through the sanctification of soul and body, perfected with the perfection of the Saviour.’⁶⁵ Again, he tells us that ‘the harmonious mechanism of the body contributes to the understanding which leads to goodness of nature.’⁶⁶ If it be true that we become like the objects which we permit the mind to dwell upon, it is obvious that absorption in the many-coloured delights of sense-perception will disturb the unity of the mind; but if the body, through our control, is an organized system, with its activities directed to the service of the mind, we shall be at peace with ourselves, and in harmony with the Image on whom our attention is fixed. ‘Instruction harmonizes man, and by harmonizing makes him natural.’⁶⁷ The rational soul is akin to the Truth which it grasps, and provided that its grasp is enduring and perpetual, it is identified with the Truth.⁶⁸

The real or inner man is a rational being, who rules his appetites by preserving a studied aloofness from their delights. But Clement is a mystic, and it would be erroneous to suppose that the gnostic is devoid of all emotional tone. Plato's cold science of dialectic with its cope-stone of articulated and systematized knowledge is only an aspect of the Platonic good, for, in the Symposium, we learn that Philosophy and Love are identical.⁶⁹ ‘The simple truth is, that men love the good.’ Even Kant allowed himself to be moved by the starry heavens without, and the moral law within. Stoicism approves of three good affections (‘eupatheiai’), and ‘for the much derided “apathy” of the school is substituted the doctrine of “eupathy.”’⁷⁰ It obliges us to approximate to the state of Caution, which is subdivided into Shame and Sanctity, the latter being a disposition to avoid offences against the gods. Second, there is Readiness, that ‘reasonable stretching out after future advantage’; and, finally, Joy, ‘the reasonable appreciation of present advantages.’⁷¹ So also, we find that Clement's asceticism is tempered with delights such as pass the understanding of the man who lives after the flesh. Thus fear is commended, provided that it is balanced by reverence, and is quite distinct from fear accompanied by hate for the object feared.⁷² We ought to fear God.⁷³ Modesty is good.⁷⁴ Faith, Knowledge, and Peace delight the good man.⁷⁵ The motive of his actions is love.⁷⁶ He hopes, because his look is always to the future.⁷⁷ Nevertheless there is a difficulty in that courage, joy, desire are disapproved, even though they are produced rationally, on the ground that there is no object capable of arousing these states in the perfect man. Clement himself solves the difficulty by telling us that such a man loves God, and that from that love nothing can possibly dislodge him. If it is objected that the perfect man desires God, the reply is that he already possesses God, and, therefore, cannot be said to desire Him. In the same strain, Plato describes love as ‘the love of the everlasting possession of the good.’⁷⁸ Clement says that to exercise the love which is a gift from God is to be in one unvarying state.⁷⁹ And if the unvarying state is defined in strictly intellectual terms in such a passage as the following, ‘The perpetual exercise of the intellect is the essence of an intelligent being, which results from an uninterrupted process of admixture, and remains eternal contemplation, a living substance (“hypostasis”)’,⁸⁰ there is recognition of a desire which is in itself intellectual.⁸¹ True immortality is impassibility, and, in a sense, we can attain it here and now, because the rational soul has the power to abstract itself from its mundane partner for periods of time, and to retire into the Presence within.⁸²

The gnostic is spiritually alive, and carnally dead. His unbroken habit has been severance of soul from body, and when the final severance comes, he bears it with ease and without fear.⁸³ Simple Christians and ordinary folk, unskilled in the inner mysteries of the truth, cannot part from the body with gnostic resignation; it is not so clear to them that, in God's economy, dissolution of soul and body naturally follows upon their union.⁸⁴ In any event, whatever the soul's character may be, it passes as a more or less developed image of God into the great Beyond.⁸⁵ What has been, is. The disembodied soul, certain of its capacities of knowledge developed, and certain undeveloped, enters upon a fresh field of experience. It sets out on a new life with the advantages and disadvantages of its anterior life, as the case may be, and its future will be conditioned by its past. One additional advantage the disembodied soul will have over its incarnate state: ‘souls, although darkened by passions, when released from their bodies, are able to perceive more clearly, because of their being no longer obscured by the paltry flesh.’⁸⁶

Clement has not given us a detailed account of the life of the disembodied soul. It would appear that gnostics, who have won impassibility, and who are already immortal, when still in the flesh pass without any period of preparation into the presence of Jesus Christ. ‘No sooner does (the gnostic) hear the Master's call to depart, than he follows it; nay, owing to his good conscience even leads the way so to speak, hastening to offer his sacrifice of thanksgiving, and being joined with Christ there, to make himself worthy from his purity to receive by inward union the power of God which is supplied by Christ.’⁸⁷ That the gnostic enters immediately upon his inheritance is confirmed, as Dr Patrick points out, by the fact that he is said to ‘pity those who undergo discipline after death.’⁸⁸ Clement does say that the martyr is welcomed by the Saviour and conducted by Him to the Father's bosom.⁸⁹ Both the gnostic and the martyr appear to pass from glory to glory, until they reach the stage of the perfect man.⁹⁰ All other souls come under a purifying discipline, which is spoken of figuratively as fire, and is part of the same healing ministry of the Word which is exercised here on earth. It is sometimes said that Clement accepts the reformative and deterrent theories of punishment, and that retribution finds no place in his thoughts about Divine providence. Thus he tells us that ‘God does not take vengeance, for vengeance is a retaliation for evil, but He corrects with a view to the good, both public and private, of those who are corrected.’⁹¹ But Clement was too good a Platonist to drop retribution in toto. We are told that ‘God dispenses to all according to desert, His distribution being righteous,’⁹² and that ‘the Word will not pass over their transgressions in silence.’⁹³ Unlike St. Augustine, he had no sympathy with Marcionism, and he saw that God's love is just as active when He punishes as when He constrains. Clement lays it down as the truest of all truths, that ‘the good and godly shall obtain the good reward…; while, on the other hand, the wicked shall receive meet punishment,’ and the sufferings which evil souls endure are self-caused rather than God-caused.⁹⁴ This tendency to attribute Divine punishments to God's economy rather than to God Himself directly is an expedient which has often been adopted in order to lay the onus of the suffering on the sinner. Archbishop King wrote: ‘As to Punishments which God has affix'd by way of Sanction to Positive Laws, we must affirm, that they are to be esteem'd as Admonitions and Notices of the Mischiefs consequent upon evil elections, rather than that God Himself will immediately inflict them.’⁹⁵ If there is a God whose good providence has adapted creation to the moral and spiritual development of men, we must believe that creation takes sides with moral and spiritual, and that it sets its face against them that do evil. Penalty both here and hereafter is designed to lead to sinners' repentance. Clement believes that in the cleansing power of the Word imperfect souls may have removed from them those passions which still continue to taint the image, because even though they are out of the body, and the irrational soul is removed, the irrational effects of the latter still continue to glow in the rational soul. Or, to put the same thing positively, and from the side of the sinner, repentance is possible when death is past.⁹⁶

Purification and repentance, as mutual accompaniments, gradually work the imperfect soul up to a higher stage of perfection, and it passes from mansion to mansion, until it learns to become a better reflexion of the impassibility of Him whose image it is. While it pays the penalty of its misdeeds, it is aware of what might have been. St. Augustine combined with the doctrine of a literal fire this psychological truth that consciousness of failure to reach the ideal life constitutes the nature of punishment in the hereafter; whereas Clement more sanely identifies the two by treating fire as the symbol of the mental distress which may lead to repentance. ‘We say that fire sanctifies not flesh but sinful souls, and by fire, we mean not that which is all-devouring and common, but the fire which penetrates the soul which walks through the fire.’⁹⁷ Whether these imperfect souls, even when purified, ever reach to the full perfection of the image, the evidence in Clement's writings does not permit us to say. One passage suggests that they remain in mansions lower than those which the gnostic and the martyr inhabit. ‘The man of faith (the simple believer) is distressed yet further, either because he has not yet attained, or not fully attained, what he sees that others have shared. And, moreover, he is ashamed because of the transgressions which he had committed, which in truth are the greatest punishments to the man of faith. And although the punishments cease, as a matter of fact, at the completion of the full penalty, and the purification of each, those who have been deemed worthy of the “other fold” have the greatest abiding sorrow, the sorrow of not being along with those who have been glorified because of righteousness.’⁹⁸ However sinful, ignorant, foolish, imperfect the soul may be, it is a divine thing, and the possession of free will always leaves open the way to repentance and spiritual progress. Even the devil can repent.⁹⁹ On the other hand, the possession of freedom leaves open also the possibility of resistance to the influences of the Word, and Clement mentions ‘everlasting death’ as possible.¹⁰⁰ Farrar claimed the support of Clement for the idea of universal hope, but the passages adduced by him cannot bear this interpretation.¹⁰¹ One passage definitely excludes it: ‘God bestows life freely;… evil custom, after our departure from this world, brings on the sinner unavailing remorse with punishment.’¹⁰² But whatever Clement's considered judgement about the state of the impenitent may have been, if his optimism allowed him to face the problem at all, his great contribution to Christian theology may be said to be his belief in the power of the soul to grow more and more like Christ, the Divine Image of God.

If we peruse Clement's pages with a view to discerning his beliefs about the Resurrection and the nature of the Resurrection body, we shall look in vain. His projected treatise on the subject, if ever it was written, is not extant; and when he refers to the Resurrection the language is generally mystical. In one fragment, a comment on 2 Cor. v 16, he would seem to countenance the thought of the return of our Lord in a physical integument. ‘Christ…ceased to live after the flesh. How? Not by putting off the body? Far be it! For with it as His own He shall come, the Judge of all. But by divesting Himself of physical affections, such as hunger, and thirst, and sleep, and weariness. For now He has a body incapable of suffering and of injury.’¹⁰³ In the same strain, he speaks of our flesh as incorruptible. ‘Paul says, speaking of the Lord, “Because He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant,” calling the outward man servant, previous to the Lord becoming a servant and wearing flesh. But the compassionate God Himself set the flesh free, and releasing it from destruction, and from bitter and deadly bondage, endowed it with incorruptibility, arraying the flesh in this, the holy embellishment of eternity—immortality.’¹⁰⁴ But it is doubtful whether the context, which disapproves of adorning the body in an extravagant fashion, does not deal with the gnostic's body in this life. A few lines further, in commenting on Is. liii 2, 3, he asks, ‘Yet who was more admirable than the Lord?’ and answers, ‘But it was not the beauty of the flesh visible to the eye, but the true beauty of both soul and body, which He exhibited, which in the former is beneficence; in the latter—that is, the flesh—immortality.’ It is just possible that he may mean that a body perfectly controlled by a perfect soul is a visible impassible symbol of the real and invisible impassibility.

Whatever the nature of the Resurrection body may be, there is no doubt about an actual Resurrection. By ‘I will raise him up at the last day,’ he understands, I will raise up the man who apprehends Me by faith now in this world. This spiritual Resurrection is followed by another, when the world has come to an end, at which end the believer enters upon the actual realization of those joys already present within him in anticipation. ‘But faith is not lame in any respect; nor after our departure from this world does it make us who have believed, and received without distinction the earnest of future good, wait; but having in anticipation grasped by faith that which is future, after the Resurrection we receive it as present, in order that that may be fulfilled which was spoken, “Be it according to thy faith.”’¹⁰⁵ Elsewhere he speaks of the mystical Resurrection which the gnostic celebrates on the occasions when he resists temptation: ‘The gnostic carries out the evangelical command and makes that the Lord's day on which he puts away an evil thought and assumes one suited to the gnostic, doing honour to the Lord's Resurrection in himself.’¹⁰⁶ After the Resurrection at the end, of which this one is the prelude, he will not be a composite creature, for there is no composite thing, or creature endowed with sensation in heaven.¹⁰⁷

At this stage we may set about making a summary of this teaching, and by throwing the main features of the whole into different terminology, attempt to make it more vivid to the modern eye.

As we survey the wonderful expanse of creation, teeming as it is with variety and richness, which man's observation and reason cannot fully classify and explain, we see that it falls into three clearly marked divisions. First, there is the inanimate division, that group of lifeless earth, and rock, and planet, and sea, which does not grow, and is insensible to the influence of man's will. The chemist and the physicist can give us the formula for almost anything we care to name in this group, for its objects are simply collections of atoms combined in specific ways. The second division is the world of living things, and in it we have the first division raised to life. This second division is higher than the first, because in it we can see atoms organized by life, and more or less controlled by life in purposive directions. It may be possible to state the exact elements which go to make up the body of a dog; but the dog, as he stands before us, responding to his master's approach with wagging tail and welcoming bark, is a living unit, which can, to some extent, give direction to his body. A rock cannot hurl itself at me: but a dog may dislike me and bite me. The third division, to which we as men belong, is the world of spirit, or reason, or will. It includes the two lower divisions, the inanimate and animate, and gives them a definitely purposive direction. Man sets before himself deliberately a rational and spiritual end, and uses his body to reach it. The dog may have a rudimentary sense of duty; but he is not under the obligation we know, when conscience says ‘Thou shalt not.’ Man can use his organic collection of atoms to carry out the will of God, whom he may know, in conscience, in prayer, and in sacrament.

But if, instead of working up in this way, from the inanimate, through the animate, to the spiritual, we were to work down, we can see just what it is that gives to man his peculiar value. Working down from God, the Eternal who inhabits eternity, we start from One who is Infinite Wisdom, Infinite Power, Infinite Love, Infinite Life, we first come to men who are said, in the Book of Genesis, to be in His image. Whatever God is, man is in a less degree. Man has something of wisdom, something of power, something of love, something of life. If we want to know what God really is, Genesis says, Look at man.

We all know what happened. We do not require to go to Genesis to find out. We look at history, and we look at ourselves, and we see a blurred image. Man has preferred foolishness to wisdom, his own power to God's power, hate to love, death to life. Man defaced the image; man sinned. We all know what happened next. A new Image appeared on earth, who was the ‘express image of the Father,’ and by His manner of life, revealed the nature of God, and the nature of man. Before He passed to His death on the cross, He could say that He preserved the Image of God unblurred, without spot and without wrinkle. ‘I have glorified thee on the earth, having accomplished the work which thou hast given me to do.’

What did Jesus Christ do that marked Him out at all times as the Image of God? What is it that makes us say when we look at Him that we see God? He knew God. The particular gift given to man at his creation was the ability to know God. The man who knows God is His image. A mirror may give an image by reflexion. The face in the mirror is merely on the surface of the mirror. Remove the image, and the mirror is as it was. The image is external to the mirror, and does not affect it. The inanimate creation catches the glory of God on the surface, and is not adapted to reveal Him, so to speak, from the inside.¹⁰⁸ The next level of reality, the animate, in its higher forms, can be an image only by way of imitation.¹⁰⁹ The dog can imitate a man, by copying his movements; but it cannot be man-like in its soul. True it is that a man may sink to the brute level, and become brutish, but the brute cannot rise above its definitely fixed limitations. But at the spiritual level, we have a stratum of reality, which can, after a fashion, lead the kind of life that God lives. Man has something of God's wisdom, something of His power, something of His love, something of His life. Thus Christ is an expression of the nature of God in the highest possible human terms. He does not reflect God from the outside; He does not imitate God; but He lives, in the limitations of human nature, the kind of life which God lives outside our world of space and time. That kind of life He lived, because He knew, in the depths of His consciousness, the principles of living.

If to be like God is to live, as nearly as we may, the life which God lives, it must be true that ours will be an eternal life. If our thoughts are as God's, and our interests are as His, we too are eternal. ‘And this is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou thoudidst send, even Jesus Christ.’ Our destiny is not a future to be ended when the atoms of our bodies are separated, but an eternal future, when our souls shall live, because they have learned to know God, and in the process of learning, have become like Him.

It is our task to cultivate the image of God within us, given to us at birth, and studying His Perfect Image in the Gospel pages, and approaching Him in prayer and sacrament, to know Him, and in knowing Him, to become like Him, eternal. Only that which is like Him can enter into His presence, and live with Him; and in this world of time we are called upon by Christ to learn of Him, and to build up a knowledge of Him such as cannot fail to render us capable of seeing Him as He is.

Notes

1. Str. v 13, 83.

2. Paed. i 8, 71.

3. Str. v 11, 71.

4. Str. iv 25, 156.

5. Str. ii 18, 81; cf. iv 23, 151.

6. Str. v 14, 89.

7. Str. v 14, 89; ib. 115.

8. Str. vi 14, 142.

9. Prot. iv 63.

10. Str. vi 16, 142. Cf. Confess. xi 20; de Civ.Dei, xi 4.

11. Str. v 14, 141.

12. Str. vii 7, 42.

13. Str. vii 2, 8; i 17, 84; Pead. viii 63.

14. Str. v 13, 87; Prot. x 103.

15. Str. i 11, 52; vii 2, 12.

16. Str. ii 1, 5; cf. Prot. vi 68; x 91.

17. Prot. vii 74.

18. Paed. iii 1, 1; Str. vii 10, 59.

19. Paed. i 13, 103.

20. Summa i 2, q. 91, 2; q, 51, 1; q, 91, 4.

21. Str. vi 16, 134-136; cf. ii 11, 50.

22. Str. vi 16, 134.

23. Str. ii 11, 50.

24. Prot. x 100; Paed. i 3, 7; Str. v 13, 87.

25. Prot. x 98; Paed. i 12, 98; Prot. ii 25.

26. Str. ii 2, 20.

27. Str. vii 12, 79.

28. Str. ii 16, 75.

29. Str. vii 11, 61; cf. Str. i 24, 159; Paed. i 12, 102.

30. Str. vii 7, 36.

31. Str. ii 11, 50; vi 16, 136; v 3.

32. Str. vi 16, 136.

33. Str. vi 16, 135.

34. Ibid.

35. Str. vi 16, 136.

36. Gen. ii 7.

37. Str. ii 19, 20; cf.16, 74; 16, 136.

38. Prot. iv 63.

39. Rom. vii 23.

40. Paed. i 6, 25.

41. Ibid. i 12, 98.

42. Prot. x 95.

43. Ibid. xi 117.

44. Str. vi 17, 157.

45. Paed. i 13, 102.

46. Str. vii 16, 101.

47. Prot. xi III.

48. Str. ii 19, 98.

49. Prot. xi 115; Str. ii 7, 34; iv 3, 12.

50. Str. vi 9, 71. Cf. C. E. Raven, Apollinarianism, p. 15.

51. Str. vii 2, 8.

52. Prot. i 6.

53. Paed. i 9, 75.

54. Str. ii 16, 73.

55. Str. vii 3, 16.

56. Str. vii 3, 16.

57. Str. iv 8, 66.

58. W. R. Inge, Philosophy of Plotinus, i p. 100. ‘The Gnostic “trains himself to be God”; a phrase which was not shocking to Greek theology, since “god” meant an immortal being.’ Cf. J. B. Mayor, Str. vii 16, 101. Clement's position is safeguarded by Str. ii 16, 75, quoted above.

59. Str. vii 9, 56.

60. Str. vii 2, 12.

61. Str. ii 11, 52.

62. Paed. i 8, 64.

63. Str. vi 15, 115; cf. Quis dives salvetur? iv 25.

64. Str. vii 3, 20.

65. Str. iv 26, 163.

66. Str. iv 4, 17.

67. Str. iv 23, 149.

68. Str. i 28, 178; ii 2, 9.

69. Symp. 20id ff.

70. E. V. Arnold, Roman Stoicism, p. 323.

71. Cf. Seneca, Ep. 23, 4.

72. Paed. i 9, 87.

73. Str. i 27, 173.

74. Paed. ii 10, 100.

75. Str. ii 11, 51; cf. iv 23, 149.

76. Str. iv 22, 135.

77. Str. v 3, 16.

78. Symp. 201d ff.

79. Str. vi 9, 71, 72.

80. Str. iv 22, 136; cf. vi 1, 3.

81. Str. ii 2, 9…

82. Str. v 14, 133; Paed. ii 9, 82.

83. Str. iv 3, 12.

84. Str. iii 9, 64.

85. Str. vi 14, 109.

86. Str. vi 6, 46.

87. Str. vii 12, 79; cf. vi 13, 105.

88. Str. vii 12, 79. See Clement of Alexandria, p. 136. On this point C. Bigg, The Christian Platonists of Alexandria, p. 149, would appear to be incorrect, when he interprets Clement as of the opinion that all souls are disciplined.

89. Quis dives, 42; Str. iv 4, 14.

90. Str. vi 13, 107.

91. Str. vii 16, 102.

92. Str. iv 6, 29.

93. Paed. i 7, 58.

94. Prot. x 90.

95. An Essay on the Origin of Evil, 1731, p. 304.

96. Str. iv 6, 37.

97. Str. vii 6, 34.

98. Str. vi 14, 109. Cf. Patrick, Clement of Alexandria, p. 137.

99. Str. i 17, 83.

100. Paed. i 8, 74.

101. Cf. E. B. Pusey, What is of Faith as to Everlasting Punishment, p. 190.

102. On this passage R. B. Tollington, Clement of Alexandria, ii, p. 252, says, ‘Once indeed he speaks of fruitless repentance and requital in another state, but even in this passage he adds a reference to the knowledge that comes by pain… ’ But what the child is said to learn through suffering is that ‘superstition destroys…and piety saves.’ Prot. x. 90.

103. J. A. Cramer's Catenae (Oxford, 1840) vol. iii.

104. Paed. iii 1, 2.

105. Paed. i 6, 29.

106. Str. vii 12, 76.

107. Str. v 3.

108. Str. i 19, 94.

109. Str. iv 6, 30.

Works Cited

1. Clementis Alexandrini Opera omnia. Edidit R. Klotz. (Lipsiae. 1831-2.)

2. Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies Book VII. The Greek Text, with Introduction, Translation, Notes, Dissertations and Indices. By the late F. J. A. Hort, D.D., D.C.L., LL.D., and Joseph B. Mayor. (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd. 1902.)

3. Clement of Alexandria: Quis Dives Salvetur. Re-edited together with an Introduction on the MSS of Clement's Works. By P. M. Barnard. ‘Texts and Studies,’ V 2. (Cambridge: at the University Press. 1897.)

4. Clemens Alexandrinus. Herausgegeben von Dr. Otto Stählin. (Leipzig: Hinrichs. 1905-9.)

5. Clement of Alexandria. By R. B. Tollinton, B.D. Two volumes. (London: Williams and Norgate. 1914.)

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