Clement of Alexandria 150 AD – 215 AD

Titus Flavius Clemens, known as Clement of Alexandria, was a Christian theologian and the first major teacher of the catechetical school at Alexandria, where he helped to shape a learned Christianity in dialogue with Greek philosophy. His trilogy, the Protrepticus, the Paedagogus, and the Stromateis, articulates a vision of Christian wisdom that integrates Platonism and Stoicism with the Hebrew scriptures. He held that philosophy had been given to the Greeks as a preparation for the Gospel and developed an early Christian doctrine of the Logos. He fled the persecution of 202 and died in Cappadocia.

Clement of Alexandria — Titus Flavius Clemens — was born around 150, probably at Athens, of pagan parents. After a long philosophical journey through southern Italy, the Greek East, and Egypt he found in Pantaenus, the head of the Christian catechetical school at Alexandria, the teacher he had been seeking, and around 190 succeeded him as head of the school. He taught Origen as a young man.

His three principal works form an ascending program of instruction. The Protrepticus (Exhortation to the Greeks) summons the pagan reader to abandon the worship of images; the Paedagogus (The Tutor) treats the moral formation of the new Christian; the long, miscellaneous Stromateis (Patchwork) collects philosophical, theological, and scriptural reflections at the level of the mature Gnostic — in Clement's reclaimed sense of the word — Christian. The small treatise Who Is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved? is his most accessible work.

Clement claimed Greek philosophy as a tutor that had prepared the Greeks for Christ, treated philosophical argument as legitimate within Christian theology, and developed a contemplative ideal of the Christian sage. Forced from Alexandria by the persecution of Septimius Severus around 202, he spent his last years in Cappadocia and is reported to have died around 215. He stands at the head of the Alexandrian theological tradition that runs through Origen and the Cappadocians.