Ecumenical Commemoration
Theologian & Doctor of the Church
December 5 · d. 215
also known as Clement of Alexandria, Titus Flavius Clemens, Clement the Theologian
Clement of Alexandria was a teacher, a presbyter, and the head of the catechetical school at Alexandria, where Origen was among his pupils. He had come to the city after a long search for masters across Greece, southern Italy, Syria and Egypt, and he argued that the philosophy of the Greeks had been a schoolmaster leading them toward Christ. When persecution reached Egypt in 202 he left, and he was last heard of alive in 211, carrying a letter for a bishop who had once been his student.
Clement of Alexandria went looking for a teacher, and he kept going until he found one. He tells the story himself, and it is the only account of his early life anyone has. He crossed Greece and then Magna Graecia, the Greek south of Italy; he went on to Coele-Syria, to Palestine, to Egypt. Master after master, and none of them the end of the road. He does not give their names. He tells you only where each one came from, the way a traveller remembers countries better than faces.
Then, in Egypt, he found a man he calls "concealed" there, and the search stopped. This was Pantaenus, a former philosopher who taught Christians in Alexandria, and Clement wrote of him afterward that "he, the true, the Sicilian bee, gathering the spoil of the flowers of the prophetic and apostolic meadow, engendered in the souls of his hearers a deathless element of knowledge." That is Clement's own sentence, in William Wilson's translation, and it is the closest thing we have to a description of his happiness.
He stayed. When Pantaenus was gone, Clement took his place at the head of the school, and among the boys sitting in front of him was one named Origen, who would become the most formidable mind of the next generation. Eusebius, writing about a century later, records it flatly: Clement, having succeeded Pantaenus, "had charge at that time of the catechetical instruction in Alexandria, so that Origen also, while still a boy, was one of his pupils."
What Clement taught there was not safe, and not everyone liked it. He held that the philosophy of the Greeks had not been wasted breath, that it was "a schoolmaster to bring the Hellenic mind, as the law, the Hebrews, to Christ." He held that truth is one river fed from every side. He argued with the great Alexandrian gnostic teachers, Basilides and Valentinus, and he argued by quoting them at length, which is why we still know what they said. And he wrote a whole book asking whether a rich man could be saved, in which he told the story of the aged Apostle John riding out unarmed after a young man who had become a captain of robbers, and calling after him, "Why, my son, do you flee from me, your father, unarmed, old?" The young man threw down his weapons and wept.
Then in 202 the emperor Septimius Severus turned on the Christians of Egypt, and the ones hunted hardest were exactly the sort Clement taught: catechumens, new learners, people in the middle of being instructed. Clement left Alexandria. So far as anyone can tell, he never came back.
He went to Cappadocia, to a bishop named Alexander who had once been his student. Years later Alexander was in prison for the faith, and he wrote from there to the church at Antioch, and he sent the letter by Clement's own hand: "I have sent this letter to you by Clement, the blessed presbyter, a man virtuous and approved, whom you yourselves also know and will recognize. Being here, in the providence and oversight of the Master, he has strengthened and built up the Church of the Lord." An old teacher, sheltered by his own pupil, still being trusted with something to carry.
Nobody wrote down when Clement died, or where he was buried, or what his last words were. The only reason anyone knows he died at all is that Alexander wrote once more, this time to Origen, and spoke of his two teachers in the past tense: "Pantænus, the truly blessed man and master, and the holy Clement, my master and benefactor." That is the whole record of his ending. A man who spent his life crossing the world after teachers is remembered, at the last, by a student who could not stop calling him master.
You are allowed to want to understand. Clement crossed half the Mediterranean looking for someone who could teach him, and when he finally arrived he did not put his learning down at the door of the church; he carried it in, and argued that every true thing the Greeks had ever said was already a road toward Christ. That is a costly position. It made him suspect to some in his own century and to some in the seventeenth, and it is the reason a man of unquestioned devotion ended up quietly dropped from a calendar. What are you keeping outside the door of your faith because you have assumed it does not belong in there with you?
The documentary base for Clement is narrow but unusually good where it exists. His own writings survive in quantity and one passage, the opening of the Stromata, is autobiographical; everything else comes through Eusebius of Caesarea, writing in the early fourth century, about a century after Clement, and quoting from letters that no longer exist in any other form. Four passages in Book VI of Eusebius carry nearly the whole biography: Pantaenus named as Clement's teacher in Clement's own lost Hypotyposeis, the succession at the school with Origen among the pupils, Alexander's letter of 211 sent by Clement's hand, and Alexander's later letter to Origen speaking of Clement in the past tense. Because Eusebius is the only witness to those letters, his quotations cannot be checked against originals. He is also writing an institutional history of orthodox succession, into which an unbroken teaching lineage fits neatly.
Several things commonly printed about Clement have no ancient source at all. The birth date of about 150 is a modern back-calculation from his attested activity in the 180s and 190s, not a transmitted date. The claim that a bishop named Julian ordained him a presbyter before 189 could not be traced to any ancient text. The death date of about 215 is a terminus rather than a date: it rests on the past tense in Alexander's undated letter, with the 211 letter as the last proof of life. There is no death narrative, no burial place, and no martyrdom anywhere in the record.
His birthplace was already disputed in antiquity. Epiphanius of Salamis, writing about 375, reports that some said Clement was an Alexandrian and others that he was an Athenian, and does not decide between them. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1908 prefers Athens on the classicism of his Greek, while naming no ancient source. The question was open then and is open now.
Nothing is attested about his family: no parents, no siblings, no household, no class, no marriage, no children. That pagan parents are usually assumed is an inference from his own account of a philosophical search ending in Christian instruction, and should be held as inference.
His works survive by narrow margins. The Exhortation to the Greeks and the Instructor come down almost entirely in one manuscript, the Codex Arethae, copied in 913 or 914 by the scribe Baanes for Arethas, Archbishop of Caesarea, and most of the Instructor's first book is lost even there. The Stromata, with the Excerpta ex Theodoto and the Eclogae Propheticae, survives in an eleventh-century Florentine manuscript, Codex Laurentianus V 3, described as carelessly written, with names and numbers wrong and phrases dropped; its only other witness is a sixteenth-century copy of no independent value. The homily on the rich man travelled separately again, through an eleventh-century Escorial manuscript and a sixteenth-century copy made from it. The eight-book Hypotyposeis is lost altogether, surviving only in fragments quoted by later writers and in a Latin digest made by Cassiodorus in the sixth century, from which controversial passages were removed. Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople in the ninth century, is the last reader on record of the complete work, and he catalogued it as orthodox in places and impious in others. The circumstances of its loss are unknown. The first printed edition of Clement was Piero Vettori's, at Florence in 1550.
Clement was venerated in the West from antiquity onward, with a feast on December 4, and the Catholic Encyclopedia states that down to the seventeenth century he was venerated as a saint and that his name was found in the martyrologies. What is unusual is how that observance ended. In the course of the editorial revision of the Roman Martyrology between the late sixteenth and the mid eighteenth centuries, on the advice of Cardinal Cesare Baronius, Clement's name was struck; Benedict XIV reviewed the matter and upheld the removal, on the grounds that Clement's life "was little known," that "he had never obtained public cultus in the Church, and that some of his doctrines were, if not erroneous, at least suspect." Sources differ on which pope and which year the first removal belongs to.
There never was the usual apparatus of devotion around him. No life was written, no miracles collected, no relics claimed, no shrine, no pilgrimage; he was not a martyr and no one ever said he was. He was never canonized, because he predates the whole machinery of canonization, and was handled instead as an entry in a martyrology, and then as a deleted one.
Commemoration survives elsewhere. The Episcopal Church keeps him on December 5, which is the date Commontide uses; other Anglican sources keep the older December 4. OrthodoxWiki states that he is not commemorated as a saint in Eastern Orthodoxy today, though several modern Orthodox writers still give him the title. Coptic and Ethiopian veneration is reported but was not verified here; a Coptic Orthodox school in Florida bears his name and explains the choice by saying he exemplified how faith and reason coexisted in harmony.
Clement's works are available complete in English in William Wilson's translation, in volume 2 of the Ante-Nicene Fathers (Edinburgh, 1867 to 1872), hosted at CCEL, New Advent and Wikisource, all anchored by book and chapter. Wilson supplies every quotation below. The "Sicilian bee" passage and the account of Clement's travels are at Stromata I.1; the schoolmaster sentence and the one river of truth are at Stromata I.5, on the same page. The letter of the Apostle John narrative and the line "Why, my son, do you flee from me, your father, unarmed, old?" are at Quis Dives Salvetur XLII. Eusebius of Caesarea supplies the biography, all of it in Ecclesiastical History Book VI: the succession and Origen at chapter 6, Alexander's letter to Antioch at chapter 11, Pantaenus named as teacher at chapter 13, and "the holy Clement, my master and benefactor" at chapter 14. For the feast, the removal from the Martyrology, and Benedict XIV's three grounds, see the Catholic Encyclopedia (1908); for the Episcopal date, the Episcopal Church glossary; for the Orthodox position, OrthodoxWiki. The Greek text of record is Otto Stählin's, in the GCS series (volumes 12, 15 and 17, 1905 to 1909), as revised by Ludwig Früchtel and Ursula Treu; G. W. Butterworth's Loeb volume 92 (1919) gives the Exhortation and the homily on the rich man with facing Greek, and John Ferguson's Stromateis, Books One to Three (Fathers of the Church 85, 1991) is the only modern English translation made from the newer critical text.
Almighty God, you gave your servant Clement of Alexandria special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Pontificalis /ˌpɒntɪfɪˈkɑːlɪs/
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52