Kindled by the Word: Clement of Alexandria's Erotic Theology

Clement of Alexandria represents the apex in his own time of the synthesis of a largely Platonic philosophy and Christian faith. This can be seen nowhere more clearly than in Clement’s conception of love, in which he draws on both New Testament and Platonic paradigms. Central to Clement’s understanding of love is the possibility of the transformation of desire by grace, rather than its mere policing: “Human self-control (I am referring to the views of the Greek philosophers) professes to counter desire rather than minister to it, with a view to praxis. Our idea of self-control is freedom from desire.” (Strom. III.7.57.1-2) This process occurs through the “curdling” of desire which ultimately results in an assimilation to God, where the soul bears an analogical dispassionate freedom from desire as God does. This transformative movement has caused many scholars to posit the gradual disappearance of eros from Clement’s Gnostic, which is gradually replaced by an agapic apatheia. What these scholars miss, however, is the abiding theme of eros throughout the Gnostic’s life, even at its most mature stages. Eros, I argue, is for Clement not a stage of human passion to be overcome but instead the abiding backdrop to this transformation, a backdrop which preserves the continuity of nature and grace and thus makes the grammar of transformation itself possible. 

In Clement’s Protreptikos, Clement has three distinct conceptions of eros, which I call mythic, philosophic, and divine. While Clement quickly discounts mythic eros as apotheosized lust, Clement praises philosophic eros as a preparatory stage to Christian revelation, even while he views it as lacking and incomplete. Divine eros, on the other hand, is birthed in the soul through contact with the Logos who is Christ. The “divine Logos'' produces “divine eros” in the soul by kindling within it its latent spark of nobility. Echoing a passage from the Chaldean Oracles, Clement envisions divine eros as guiding the soul’s spark toward God. Moreover, because of the abiding presence of the Logos and its union with the soul in the Incarnation, Clement is able to conceive of a divine eros which is characterized not by lack (as is philosophic eros) but by plentitude, because desire and the object of its enjoyment are here “yoked together.” Because Clement conceives of assimilation to God as “the unending end” of the Gnostic, eros seems to perpetually characterize the life of the Gnostic. 

The reason why eros can coexist in the soul of the Gnostic, moreover, is because Clement has linked divine eros with the “wish” of Christ Himself for the salvation of the world. In the Paedagogus, as Catherine Osborne insightfully noted, Clement’s concept of incarnational philanthropia contains within it the germ of the characterization of Plato’s lover in the Symposium, with Christ undergoing his kenosis for humanity in response to humanity’s fundamental desirability. This philanthropia remains even at the highest levels of the stage of the Gnostic’s dispassionate agape. In Clement’s homily “Who is the Rich Man that Shall Be Saved?,” agape “flutters with excitement (ἐπτόηται)” for the neighbor and “is chastely wild” (σωφρόνως μαίνεται; Quis Dives Salvetur 38).  It is thus through the concept of assimilation rendered possible by the pedagogy of the Incarnation— "Yea, I say, the Word of God became a man so that you might learn from a man how to become a god." (Prot. 1). These examples show that eros does not transform into something else in Clement’s corpus, but is instead increasingly purified into a truer version of itself according to the pattern of Christ. 

i.Clement of Alexandria. Stromateis: Books One to Three. Translated by John Ferguson. Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1991.

ii.Clement of Alexandria. The Rich Man’s Salvation. Translated by G.W. Buttersworth. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1919.

iii. Clement of Alexandria, The Exhortation to the Greeks [The Protreptikos]. Translated by G.W. Buttersworth. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1919.