O the divine creations! O the divine commands! This water, let it roll within itself; this fire, let it check its rage; this air, let it spread to æther; and let earth be fixed and borne, when I will it. Man I yet wish to make; for his material I have the elements; I dwell with him my hands fashion. If thou know me, the fire shall be thy slave."[[118]]
"All[[119]] gaze on the supreme Administrator of the universe, as he pilots all in safety according to the Father's will, rank being subordinated to rank under different leaders till in the end the Great High Priest is reached. For on one original principle, which works in accordance with the Father's will, depend the first and second and third gradations; and then at the extreme end of the visible world there is the blessed ordinance of angels; and so, even down to ourselves, ranks below ranks are appointed, all saving and being saved by the initiation and through the instrumentality of One. As then the remotest particle of iron is drawn by the breath (pneúmati) of the stone of Heraklea [the magnet] extending through a long series of iron rings, so also through the attraction of the holy spirit (pneúmati) the virtuous are adapted to the highest mansion; and the others in their order even to the last mansion; but they that are wicked from weakness, having fallen into an evil habit owing to unrighteous greed, neither keep hold themselves nor are held by another, but collapse and fall to the ground, being entangled in their own passions."[[120]] This last clause raises questions as to evil and freewill. Clement believed in freewill; for one thing, it was necessary if God was to be acquitted of the authorship of evil. "God made all things to be helpful for virtue, in so far as might be without hindering the freedom of man's choice, and showed them to be so, in order that he who is indeed the One Alone Almighty might, even to those who can only see darkly, be in some way revealed as a good God, a Saviour from age to age through the instrumentality of his Son, and in all ways absolutely guiltless of evil."[[121]]
Clement also brings in the Platonic Idea to help to express Christ. "The idea is a thought of God (ennóema), which the barbarians have called God's Logos."[[122]] "All the activity of the Lord is referred to the Almighty, the Son being, so to speak, a certain activity (enérgeia) of the Father,"[[123]] and a little lower he adds that the Son is "the power (dynamis) of the Father."[[124]] As such he may well be "above the whole universe, or rather beyond the region of thought."[[125]] And yet, as we have seen, he leans to the view that the Logos is a person—the Great High Priest. In criticizing him, it is well to remember how divergent are the conceptions which he wishes to keep, and to keep in some kind of unity.
Once again, in many of Clement's utterances upon the Logos there is little that Philo, or perhaps even a pagan philosopher, could not have approved; but through it all there is a new note which is Clement's own and which comes from another series of thoughts. For it is a distinctive mark of Clement's work that the reader rises from it impressed with the idea of "the Saviour." The Protrepticus is full of the thought of that divine love of men, warm and active, which Jesus associated with "your heavenly Father," but which Clement, under the stress of his philosophy must connect with the Logos—"cleansing, saving and kindly; most manifest God indeed, made equal with the ruler of the universe."[[126]] He is our "only refuge" (monè kataphygé), the "sun of resurrection," the "sun of the soul."[[127]] And yet one group of ideas, familiar in this connection, receives little notice from Clement. The Logos is indeed the Great High Priest, but the symbolism of priest and sacrifice and sin-bearer is left rather remarkably unemphasized. He is "the all-availing healer of mankind,"[[128]] but his function is more to educate, to quicken, and to give knowledge than to expiate.
The great and characteristic feature of the Logos is that "he took the mask (prosopeîon) of a man and moulded it for himself in flesh and played a part in the drama of mankind's salvation; for he was a true player (gnesios agonistés), a fellow-player with the creature; and most quickly was he spread abroad among all men, more quickly than the sun, when he rose from the Father's will, and proved whence he was and who he was by what he taught and showed, he, the bringer of the covenant, the reconciler, the Logos our Saviour, the fountain of life and peace, shed over the whole face of the earth, by whom (so to say) all things have become an ocean of blessings."[[129]] Though essentially and eternally free from passion (apathés) "for our sake he took upon him our flesh with its capacity for suffering" (tèn pathetèn sárka)[[130]] and "descended to sensation (aísthesis)."[[131]] "It is clear that none can in his lifetime clearly apprehend God; but 'the pure in heart shall see God' when they come to the final perfection. Since, then, the soul was too weak for the perception of what is (tôn ónton), we needed a divine teacher. The Saviour is sent down to teach us how to acquire good, and to give it to us (choregós)—the secret and holy knowledge of the great Providence,"[[132]]—"to show God to foolish men, to end corruption, to conquer death, to reconcile disobedient children to their Father.... The Lord pities, educates, encourages, exhorts, saves and guards, and as the prize of learning he promises us out of his abundance the kingdom of heaven—this alone giving him joy in us, that we are saved."[[133]] All this was foreknown before the foundation of the world; the Logos was and is the divine beginning or principle of all things, "but because he has now taken the long-hallowed name, the name worthy of his power, the Christ, that is why I call it the new song."[[134]] And indeed he is right, for "the Epiphany, now shining among us, of the Word that was in the beginning and before it"[[135]] is new in philosophy; and it is a new thing also that the doctrine of a Logos should be "essentially musical." The Incarnation of the divine Teacher is the central fact for Clement.
The identification of this incarnate Logos with Jesus of Nazareth was part of Clement's inheritance, and as usual he accepted the form which the tradition of the Church had assumed. But Clement's theology altered the significance of Jesus. For the Abba Father whom Jesus loved, he substituted the great Unknowable, and then he had to bring in a figure unfamiliar to the thought of Jesus—the Logos, whom he clothed with many of the attributes of the Father of Jesus, and then identified with Jesus himself. Not unnaturally in this combination the historic is outweighed by the theoretic element, and indeed receives very little attention. The thought of Incarnation is to Clement much more important than the Personality.
The virgin-birth
Jesus is "God and pedagogue," "good shepherd," and "mystic Angel (or messenger)," "the pearl," "the great High Priest," and so forth.[[136]] In a few passages (some of them already quoted) Clement speaks of the earthly life of Jesus—of the crown of thorns, the common ware, and the absence of a silver foot-bath. But he takes care to make it clear that Jesus was "not an ordinary man," and that was why he did not marry and have children—this in opposition to certain vain persons who held up the Lord's example as a reason for rejecting marriage, which "they call simple prostitution and a practice introduced by the devil."[[137]] So far was Jesus from being "an ordinary man" that Clement takes pains to dissociate him from ordinary human experience. To the miraculous birth he refers incidentally but in a way that leaves no mistake possible. "Most people even now believe, as it seems, that Mary ceased to be a virgin through the birth of her child, though this was not really the case—for some say she was found by the midwife to be a virgin after her delivery."[[138]] This expansion of the traditional story is to be noted as an early illustration of the influence of dogma. The episode appears in an elaborate form in the apocryphal Gospels.[[139]] But Clement goes further. "In the case of the Saviour, to suppose that his body required, quâ body, the necessary attentions for its continuance, would be laughable (gélos). For he ate—not on account of his body, which was held together by holy power, but that it might not occur to those who consorted with him to think otherwise of him—as indeed later on some really supposed him to have been manifested merely in appearance [i.e. the Docetists who counted his body a phantom]. He himself was entirely without passion (apathés) and into him entered no emotional movement (kínema pathetikón), neither pleasure nor pain."[[140]] A fragment (in a Latin translation) of a commentary of Clement's upon the first Epistle of John, contains a curious statement: "It is said in the traditions that John touched the surface of the body of Jesus, and drove his hand deep into it, and the firmness of the flesh was no obstacle but gave way to the hand of the disciple."[[141]] At the same time we read: "It was not idly that the Lord chose to employ a body of mean form, in order that no one, while praising his comeliness and beauty, should depart from what he said, and in cleaving to what is left behind should be severed from the higher things of thought (tôn noetôn)."[[142]]
It is consistent with the general scheme of Clement's thought that the cross has but a small part in his theology. "It was not by the will of his Father that the Lord suffered, nor are the persecuted so treated in accordance with his choice"—it is rather in both cases that "such things occur, God not preventing them; this alone saves at once the providence and goodness of God."[[143]] Yet "the blood of the Lord is twofold; there is the fleshly, whereby we have been redeemed from corruption, and the spiritual, by which we have been anointed."[[144]] The cross is the landmark between us and our past.[[145]] On the whole Clement has not much to say about sin, though of course he does not ignore it. It is "eternal death";[[146]] it is "irrational";[[147]] it is not to be attributed "to the operation (energy) of dæmons," as that would be to acquit the sinner, still it makes a man "like the dæmons" (daimonikós).[[148]] God's punishments he holds to be curative in purpose.[[149]] He says nothing to imply the eternity of punishment,[[150]] and as we have seen he speaks definitely of the Gospel being preached to the dead.
The vision of the true gnostic