This, then, is the man, a Greek of wide culture and open heart, who has dipped into everything that can charm the fancy and make the heart beat,—curious in literature, cult, and philosophy, and now submitted to the tradition of the church and the authority of Hebrew prophet and Christian apostle, but not as one bowing to a strange and difficult necessity. Rather, with the humblest of God's children—those "tender, simple and guileless" children on whom God lavishes all the little names which he has for his only Son, the "lamb" and the "child"[[42]]—he finds in Christ "thanksgiving, blessing, triumph and joy," while Christ himself bends from above, like Sarah, to smile upon their "laughter."[[43]] Such was the range of Clement's experience, and now, under the influence of the great change that conversion brought, he had to re-think everything and to gather it up in a new unity. Thus in one man were summed up all the elements of import in the general situation of the church of his day. He was representative alike in his susceptibility to the ancient literature and philosophy and his love of Scripture—"truth-loving Isaiah" and "St Paul"—in his loyalty to the faith, and, not less, in his determination to reach some higher ground from which the battle of the church could be fought with wider outlook, more intelligent grasp of the factors in play, and more hope of winning men for God.

Faith and philosophy

Clement did not come before his time. Philosophy had begun to realize the significance of the church. The repression of the "harmful superstition" was no longer an affair of police; it was the common concern of good citizens. The model Emperor himself, the philosopher upon the throne, had openly departed from the easy policy laid down by Trajan and continued by his successors. He had witnessed, or had received reports of, executions. Writing in his diary of death, he says: "What a soul is that which is ready, if the moment has come for its separation from the body, whether it is to be extinguished, or dissolved, or to continue a whole. This readiness—see that it come from your own judgment, not in mere obstinacy, as with the Christians, but reflectively and with dignity, in a way to persuade another, with nothing of the actor in it."[[44]] This sentence betrays something of the limitations of a good man—a beautiful spirit indeed, but not a little over-praised by his admirers in modern days. Celsus at once taunts his Christian opponents with their prospects of painful death and demonstrates the absurdity of their tenets from the point of view of philosophy. The Apologists say, too, that the philosophers lent themselves (as did also the dæmons) to inciting the mob to massacre. But after all the dialectical weapons of Philosophy were the more dangerous, for they shook the faith of the Christian which death did not shake.

Again, the candid and inquiring temper of some notable converts and friends had led them to question the tradition of the church and to examine their Christian experience with a freedom from prejudice, at least in the evangelic direction, which had resulted in conclusions fatal, it seemed, to the Christian movement. Their philosophy had carried them outside the thoughts of Jesus—they had abandoned the idea of the Abba Father, of the divine love, of the naturalness and instinctiveness of Christian life. Incarnation and redemption they rejected, at least in the sense which made the conceptions of value to men. Jesus they remodelled into one and another figure more amenable to their theories—a mere man, a demi-god, a phantom, into anything but the historic personality that was and could remain the centre and inspiration of Christian life. Of all this mischief philosophy, men said, was the cause.[[45]]

"I know quite well," writes Clement, "what is said over and over again by some ignorantly nervous people who insist that we should confine ourselves to the inevitable minimum, to what contains the faith, and pass over what is outside and superfluous, as it wears us out to no purpose and occupies us with what contributes nothing to our end. Others say philosophy comes of evil and was introduced into life for the ruin of men by an evil inventor."[[46]] They were afraid of philosophy, as children might fear a ghost, in case it should take them away[[47]]—but this, as Clement saw, was no way to meet the danger. The Christian must not philosophize, they said—Tertullian said it too; but how could they know they must not philosophize unless they philosophized?[[48]] Whether philosophy is profitable or not, "you cannot condemn the Greeks on the basis of mere statements about their opinions, without going into it with them till point by point you discover what they mean and understand them. It is the refutation based upon experience that is reliable."[[49]]

His defence of philosophy

So Clement has first of all to fight the battle of education inside the church, to convince his friends that culture counts, that philosophy is inevitable and of use at once for the refutation of opponents and for the achievement of the full significance of faith. Then he has to show how philosophy at its best was the foe of superstition and the champion of God's unity and goodness—a preparation for the Gospel. Lastly he has to restate the Christian position in the language of philosophy and to prove that the Gospel is reaffirming all that was best in the philosophic schools and bringing it to a higher point, indeed to the highest; that the Gospel is the final philosophy of the universe, the solution of all the problems of existence, the revelation of the ultimate mind of God.

Clement boldly asserts the unity of all knowledge. Everything contributes, everything is concentric. "Just as every family goes back to God the Creator, so does the teaching of all good things go back to the Lord, the teaching that makes men just, that takes them by the hand and brings them that way."[[50]] And again:—"When many men launch a ship, pulling together, you could not say there are many causes, but one consisting of many—for each of them is not by himself the cause of its being launched but only in conjunction with others; so philosophy, which is a search for truth, contributes to the perception (katalepsis) of truth, though it is not the cause of perception, except in conjunction and co-operation with other things. Yet perhaps even a joint-cause we might call a cause. Happiness is one, and the virtues more than one which are its causes. The causes of warmth may be the sun, the fire, the bath and the clothing. So, truth is one and many things co-operate in the search for it, but the discovery is by the Son.... Truth is one, but in Geometry we have geometrical truth, in Music musical; so in Philosophy—right Philosophy—we should have Greek truth. But alone the sovereign Truth is unassailable, which we are taught by the Son of God."[[51]] Elsewhere, when challenged to say what use there is in knowing the causes that explain the sun's motion,[[52]] geometry and dialectics, when Greek philosophy is merely man's understanding, he falls back upon the mind's instinctive desire for such things, its free will (tèn proaíresin toû noû), and quickly marshals a series of texts from the Book of Wisdom on the divine source of wisdom and God's love of it, concluding with an allegory drawn from the five barley loaves and the two fishes on which the multitude were fed, the former typifying the Hebrew Law ("for barley is sooner ripe for harvest than wheat") and the fishes Greek philosophy "born and moving amid Gentile billows." ("If you are curious, take one of the fishes as signifying ordinary education and the other the philosophy that succeeds it....

A choir of voiceless fish came sweeping on,

the Tragic muse says somewhere"[[53]]). His appeal to the mind is a much stronger defence than any such accumulation of texts, but for the people he had in view the texts were probably more convincing.