Of Clement again there is little to be learnt beyond what can be gathered from his own writings. He alludes himself to the death of the Emperor Commodus as being "194 years, 1 month and 13 days" after the birth of Christ (it was in 192 A.D.); and Eusebius quotes a passage from a contemporary letter which shows that Clement was alive in 211 A.D., and another written in or about 215, which implies that he was dead.[[17]] We have also an indication from Eusebius that his activity as a teacher in Alexandria lasted from 180 to 202 or 203.[[18]] We may then assume that Clement was born about the middle of the century.
Epiphanius says that Clement was either an Alexandrine or an Athenian. A phrase to be quoted below suggests that he was not an Alexandrine, and it has been held possible that he came from Athens.[[19]] It also seems that he was born a pagan.[[20]] Perhaps he says this himself when he writes: "rejoicing exceedingly and renouncing our old opinions we grow young again for salvation, singing with the prophecy that chants 'How good is God to Israel.'"[[21]]
It is obvious that he had the usual training of a Greek of his social position. If his code of manners is lifted above other such codes by the constant suggestion of the gentle spirit of Jesus, it yet bears the mark of his race and of his period. It is Greek and aristocratic, and it would in the main command the approval of Plutarch. He must have been taught Rhetoric like every one else,—his style shows this as much as his protests that he does not aim at eloquence (euglôttía), that he has not studied and does not practise "Greek style" (helleíxein).[[22]] He has the diffuse learning of his day—wide, second-hand and uncritical; and, like other contemporary writers, he was a devotee of the note-book. No age of Greek literature has left us so many works of the kind he wrote—the sheer congeries with no attempt at structure, no "beginning, middle and end,"—easy, accumulative books of fine miscellaneous feeding, with titles that playfully confess to their character. Like other authors of this class, Clement preserves for us many and many a fragment of more interest and value than any original piece of literature could have been. He clearly loved the poetry of Greece, and it comes spontaneously and irresistibly to his mind as he writes, and the sayings of Jesus are reinforced by those of Menander or Epicharmus. The old words charm him, and he cannot reject them. His Stromateis are "not like ornamental paradises laid out in rows to please the eye, but rather resemble some shady and thickly-wooded hill, where you may find cypress and plane, bay and ivy, and apple trees along with olives and figs"[[23]]—trees with literary connotations. Such works imply some want of the creative instinct, of originality, and they are an index to the thinking of the age, impressed with its great ancestry. It is to be remarked that the writers of our period care little for the literature of the past two or three centuries; they quote their own teachers and the great philosophers and poets of ancient Greece.[[24]] Few of them have any new thoughts at all, and those who have are under the necessity of clothing them in the hallowed phrases of their predecessors. This was the training in which Clement shared. Later on, he emancipated himself, and spoke contemptuously of the school—"a river of words and a trickle of mind";[[25]] but an education is not easily shaken off. He might quarrel with his teachers and their lessons, but he still believed in them. It may be noted that in his quotations of Greek literature his attention is mainly given to the thought which he finds in the words—or attaches to them—that he does not seem to conceive of a work of art as a whole, nor does he concern himself with the author. He used the words as a quotation, and it is not unlikely that many of the passages he borrowed he knew only as quotations.
In philosophy his training must have been much the same, but here he had a more living interest. Philosophy touched him more nearly, for it bore upon the two great problems of the human soul—conduct and God. Like Seneca and Plutarch he was not interested in Philosophy apart from these issues—epistemology, psychology, physics and so forth were not practical matters. The philosophers he judged by their theology. With religious men of his day he leant to the Stoics and "truth-loving Plato"—especially Plato, whom he seems to have read for himself—but he avows that Philosophy for him means not the system of any school or thinker, but the sum of the unquestionable dogmata of all the schools, "all that in every school has been well said, to teach righteousness with pious knowledge—this eclectic whole I call Philosophy."[[26]] To this Philosophy all other studies contribute—they are "the handmaidens, and she the mistress"[[27]]—and she herself owns the sway of Theology.
Clement and the mysteries
At some time of his life Clement acquired a close acquaintance with pagan mythology and its cults. It may be that he was initiated into mysteries; in his Protrepticus he gives an account of many of them, which is of great value to the modern student. It is probable enough that an earnest man in search of God would explore the obvious avenues to the knowledge he sought—avenues much travelled and loudly vaunted in his day. Having explored them, it is again not unlikely that a spirit so pure and gentle should be repelled by rituals and legends full of obscenity and cruelty. It is of course possible that much of his knowledge came from books, perhaps after his conversion, for one great part of Christian polemic was the simple exposure of the secret rites of paganism. Yet it remains that his language is permanently charged with technical terms proper to the mysteries, and that he loves to put Christian knowledge and experience in the old language—"Oh! mysteries truly holy! Oh! stainless light! The daduchs lead me on to be the epopt of the heavens and of God; I am initiated and become holy; the Lord is the hierophant and seals the mystês for himself, himself the photagogue."[[28]] It is again a little surprising to hear of "the Saviour "being" our mystagogue as in the tragedy—
He sees, we see, he gives the holy things (órgia);
and if thou wilt inquire
These holy things—what form have they for thee?