thou wilt hear in reply

Save Bacchus' own initiate, none may know."[[29]]

It is inconceivable that a Hebrew, or anyone but a Greek, could have written such a passage with its double series of allusions to Greek mysteries and to Euripides' Bacchæ. Clement is the only man who writes in this way, with an allusiveness beyond Plutarch's, and a fancy as comprehensive as his charity and his experience of literature and religion.

He had the Greek's curious interest in foreign religions, and he speaks of Chaldæans and Magians, of Indian hermits and Brahmans—"and among the Indians are those that follow the precepts of Buddha (Boûtta), whom for his exceeding holiness they have honoured as a god"—of the holy women of the Germans and the Druids of the Gauls.[[30]] Probably in each of these cases his knowledge was soon exhausted, but it shows the direction of his thoughts. Egypt of course furnished a richer field of inquiry to him as to Plutarch. He has passages on Egyptian symbolism,[[31]] and on their ceremonial,[[32]] which contain interesting detail. It was admitted by the Greeks—even by Celsus—that barbarians excelled in the discovery of religious dogma, though they could not equal the Greeks in the philosophic use of it. Thus Pausanias says the Chaldæans and Indian Magians first spoke of the soul's immortality, which many Greeks have accepted, "not least Plato son of Ariston."[[33]]

In the course of his intellectual wanderings, very possibly before he became a Christian, Clement investigated Jewish thought so far as it was accessible to him in Greek, for Greeks did not learn barbarian languages. Eusebius remarks upon his allusions to a number of Jewish historians.[[34]] His debt to Philo is very great, for it was not only his allegoric method in general and some elaborate allegories that he borrowed, but the central conception in his presentment of Christianity comes originally from the Jewish thinker, though Clement was not the first Christian to use the term Logos.

Clement does not tell us that he was born of pagan parents, nor does he speak definitely of his conversion. It is an inference, and we are left to conjecture the steps by which it came, but without the help of evidence. One allusion to his Christian teachers is dropped when he justifies his writing the Stromateis—"memoranda treasured up for my old age, an antidote against forgetfulness, a mere semblance and shadow-picture of those bright and living discourses, those men happy and truly remarkable, whom I was counted worthy to hear." And then the reading is uncertain, but, according to Dr Stahlin's text he says: "Of these, one was in Greece—the Ionian; the next (pl.) in Magna Græcia (one of whom was from Coele Syria and the other from Egypt); others in the East; and in this region one was an Assyrian, and the other in Palestine a Hebrew by descent. The last of all (in power he was the first) I met and found my rest in him, when I had caught him hidden away in Egypt. He, the true Sicilian bee, culling the flowers of the prophetic and apostolic meadow, begot pure knowledge in the souls of those who heard him. These men preserved the true tradition of the blessed teaching direct from Peter and James, John and Paul, the holy apostles, son receiving it from father ('and few be sons their fathers' peers'), and reached down by God's blessing even to us, in us to deposit those ancestral and apostolic seeds."[[35]] It is supposed that the Assyrian was Tatian, while the Sicilian bee hidden away in Egypt was almost certainly Pantænus.

Clement's education had been wide and superficial, his reading sympathetic but not deep, his philosophy vague and eclectic, and now from paganism with its strange and indefinite aggregation of religions based on cult and legend, he passed to a faith that rested on a tradition jealously maintained and a rule beginning to be venerable. He met men with a definite language in which they expressed a common experience—who had moreover seen a good many efforts made to mend the language and all of them ending in "shipwreck concerning the faith"; who therefore held to the "form of sound words" as the one foundation for the Christian life.

It says a great deal for Clement's character—one might boldly say at once that it is an index to his personal experience—that he could sympathize with these men in the warm and generous way he did. Now and again he is guilty of directing a little irony against the louder-voiced defenders of "faith only, bare faith"[[36]] and "straight opinion"—"the orthodoxasts, as they are called."[[37]] (The curious word shows that the terms "orthodox" and "orthodoxy" were not yet quite developed.) But he stands firmly by the simplest Christians and their experience. If he pleads for a wider view of things—for what he calls "knowledge," it is, he maintains, the development of the common faith of all Christians. It is quite different from the wisdom that is implanted by teaching; it comes by grace. "The foundation of knowledge is to have no doubts about God, but to believe; Christ is both—foundation and superstructure alike; by him is the beginning and the end.... These, I mean faith and love, are not matters of teaching."[[38]] As Jesus became perfect by baptism and was hallowed by the descent of the spirit, "so it befals us also, whose pattern is the Lord. Baptized, we are enlightened; enlightened, we are made sons; made sons we are perfected; made perfect we become immortal [all these verbs and participles are in the present]. 'I,' he saith, 'said ye are gods and sons of the Most High, all of you.' This work has many names; it is called gift [or grace, chárisma], enlightenment, perfection, baptism.... What is wanting for him who knows God? It would be strange indeed if that were called a gift of God which was incomplete; the Perfect will give what is perfect, one supposes.... Thus they that have once grasped the borders of life are already perfect; we live already, who are separated from death. Salvation is following Christ.... So to believe—only to believe—and to be born again is perfection in life."[[39]] He praises the poet of Agrigentum for hymning faith, which his verses declare to be hard; 'and that is why the Apostle exhorts 'that your faith may not be in the wisdom of men'—who offer to persuade—'but in the power of God'—which alone and without proofs can by bare faith save."[[40]]

"The real polymetis"

It was this strong sympathy with the simplest view of the Christian faith that made the life-work of Clement possible. He was to go far outside the ordinary thoughts of the Christian community round about him—inevitably he had to do this under the compulsion of his wide experience of books and thinkers—but the centre of all his larger experience he found where his unlettered friends, "believing without letters," found their centre, and he checked his theories, original and borrowed—or he aimed at checking them—by life. "As in gardening and in medicine he is the man of real learning (chrestomathés), who has had experience of the more varied lessons...; so, I say, here too, of him who brings everything to bear on the truth.... We praise the pilot of wide range, who 'has seen the cities of many men'... so he who turns everything to the right life, fetching illustrations from things Greek and things barbarian alike, he is the much-experienced (polypeiros) tracker of truth, the real polymêtis; like the touchstone—the Lydian stone believed to distinguish between the bastard and the true-born gold, he is able to separate,—our polyidris and man of knowledge (gnostikos) as he is,—sophistic from philosophy, the cosmetic art from the true gymnastic, cookery from medicine, rhetoric from dialectic, magic and other heresies in the barbarian philosophy from the actual truth."[[41]] This, in spirit and letter, is a very characteristic utterance. Beginning with the Lord as "the vine"—from which some expect to gather clusters of grapes in the twinkling of an eye—he ranges into medicine and sea-faring, from Odysseus "of many wiles, who saw the cities of many men and learnt their mind," to Plato's Gorgias, and brings all to bear on the Christian life. What his simple friends made of such a passage—if they were able to read at all, or had it read to them—it is not easy to guess, but contact must have shown them in the man a genuine and tender Christian as Christocentric as themselves, if in speech he was oddly suited,—a gay epitome of Greek literature in every sentence.