Clement's Birthplace

Because Early Alexandrian Church fathers wrote their works in Greek, later scholars proposed they were not all Egyptians. Clement's birthplace is not known with certainty. Other than being Egyptian, Athens is proposed as his birthplace by the 6th-century Epiphanius Scholasticus, supported by the classical quality of his Greek. His parents seem to have been wealthy pagans of some social standing. The thoroughness of his education is shown by his constant quotation of the Greek poets and philosophers. He travelled in Greece, Italy, Palestine, and finally Egypt. He became the colleague of Pantaenus, the head of the Catechetical School of Alexandria, and finally succeeded him in the direction of the school. One of his most popular pupils was Origen. During the persecution of Christians by Septimius Severus (202 or 203) he sought refuge with Alexander, then bishop (possibly of Flaviada) in Cappadocia, afterward of Jerusalem, from whom he brought a letter to Antioch in 211.

[edit]Literary work

[edit]Great trilogy

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Clement of Alexandria's great trilogy

Protrepticus - Paedagogus - Stromata

The trilogy into which Clement's principal remains are connected by their purpose and mode of treatment is composed of:

the Protrepticus ("Exhortation to the Greeks")

the Paedagogus ("Instructor")

the Stromata ("Miscellanies")

Overbeck[citation needed]calls it the boldest literary undertaking in the history of the Church, since in it Clement for the first time attempted to set forth Christianity for the faithful in the traditional forms of secular literature.

The first book deals with the religious basis of Christian morality, the second and third with the individual cases of conduct. As with Epictetus, true virtue shows itself with him in its external evidences by a natural, simple, and moderate way of living.

Clement wrote of apocatastasis, the restoration of all things, in his Stromata. He wrote that the punishments of God are "saving and disciplinary, leading to conversion." This was incorrectly identified as universal reconciliation by the Universalist historian George T. Knight (1914).[6]

[edit]Other works

Besides the great trilogy, the only complete work preserved is the treatise "Who is the Rich Man that Shall Be Saved?" based on Mark 10:17-31, and laying down the principle that not the possession of riches but their misuse is to be condemned. There are extant a few fragments of the treatise on the Passover, against the Quartodecimanism position of Melito of Sardis, and only a single