Clement of Alexandria

Biography

Its life is little known. Paîen of birth, it was familiarized with all the systems of philosophy of its time. It converts with the Christianisme and starts a series of voyages (Greece, Italy). It meets in Egypt, with Alexandria, where reigned the intellectual movement more animated this time, the sect of the eclectic , that which will become its Master, Pantène, which then directed the theological École of Alexandria. Indicated by the pope Démétrius I {{er}} (12th pope of Alexandria) to go to lead a Christian mission to the Indies, Pantène must give up the direction of the Theological School of Alexandria. It then chooses more the brilliance of its pupils, Clément of Alexandria, to take its succession. Clement of Alexandria takes thus front Origène the direction of the School of Alexandria.

In 202, persecutions of Septime Sévère oblige it to find refuge in Cappadoce, near the bishop Alexandre.

Clement of Alexandria east one of the first theorists of the Church to have presented Christianity like a philosophy, while seeking to reconcile the biblical prophets and the Greek philosophers.

In its Protreptique , while polemizing against the pagan gods, he endeavors to show the imposing unit of the divine revelation in the work of the philosophers, the poets and their Masters with all, the prophets of the Old Testament. The divine Logos, appeared in the form of the Christ, unifies all these messages.

In its Pedagog , he affirms that any Christian is “spiritual” able to perceive God. The matter of the book is to take in hands Christian education: it presents an ethics adapted to the needs for the Christians of the middle-class. Divided into three books, the first part develops the formation that God gives to his children by the educational action of his Son. The second part (books II and III) provides to the Christian the rule daily life which must impregnate example evangelic.

The Stromates is a more complicated work. Work is essentially a refutation of the heresies and a talk of the “true gnosis”, which leads to the mystical union with God. Its very allegorical exegetic demonstrations made fear with the Christian scientists of the following centuries.

In his epistle of Mar Sheba (of the name of the Monastery Mar Sheba), Clément of Alexandria refers to the secret Évangile of Marc, a Gospel Apocryphe. It is about single allusion to this Gospel which did not reach us. He condemns the use which is made by it by the Carpocratien S, a gnostic sect of Alexandria.

He is honoured by the Catholic church the December 4th. However its orthodoxy and its holiness were disputed: since Benoit XIV, it does not appear any more in the Roman Martyrologe.

Old editions

It remains of him a Exhortation in Gentili , a collection of Christian and philosophical thoughts; the Pedagog, treaty of Christian morals.

To the 19th century, the dictionary Bouillet indicates that the best edition of its Œuvres is that of John Potter, Greek-Latin, Oxford, 1715, 2 volumes in-8. They were translated into French by Antoine Eugene Genoud, 1837 - 1843, 3 volumes in-8.

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