Clement of Alexandria and the Shaping of Christian Literary Practice: Miscellany and the Transformation of Greco-Roman Writing 9781108918640, 9781108843423

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Clement of Alexandria and the Shaping of Christian Literary Practice

Clement of Alexandria’s Stromateis were celebrated in antiquity but modern readers have often skirted them as a messy jumble of notes. When scholarship on Greco-Roman miscellanies took off in the 1990s, Clement was left out as ‘different’ because he was Christian. This book interrogates the notion of Clement’s ‘Christian difference’ by comparing his work with classic Roman miscellanies, especially those by Plutarch, Pliny, Gellius and Athenaeus. The comparison opens up fuller insight into the literary and theological character of Clement’s own oeuvre. Clement’s Stromateis are contextualised within his larger literary project in Christian formation, which began with the Protrepticus and the Paedagogus and was completed by the Hypotyposeis. Together, this stepped sequence of works structured readers’ reorientation, purification and deepening prayerful ‘converse’ with God. Clement shaped his miscellanies as an instrument for encountering the hidden God in a hidden way, while marvelling at the variegated beauty of divine work refracted through the variegated beauty of his own textuality. J. M. F. Heath is Associate Professor of Theology and Religion at Durham University. She is the author of Paul’s Visual Piety: The Metamorphosis of the Beholder.

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Clement of Alexandria and the Shaping of Christian Literary Practice Miscellany and the Transformation of Greco-Roman Writing

J. M. F. HEATH University of Durham

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University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108843423 doi: 10.1017/9781108918640 © Cambridge University Press 2020 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2020 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. isbn 978-1-108-84342-3 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

page vii

1

Introduction: A Christian among Roman Miscellanists

1

2

Clement’s Miscellanism and the Scholarly Trope of Christian Difference

9

3

Studying Ancient Miscellanism: Defining Features, Scope and Method

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Early Imperial Cultures of Miscellany-Making: Clement’s Social and Institutional Contexts

56

5

Self-Introductions and Clement’s Miscellanistic Vocation

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6

Miscellany Titles and Clement’s Divine Paratexts

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The Miscellanist’s Trope of Deselecting Titles and Clement’s Conversion of Imagery

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Muses in the Miscellanists’ Frame

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Clement’s Theology of Hiddenness and the Logic of Christian Miscellanism

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Mystery Initiation and Clement’s Literary Paideia: The Making of a Christian Miscellanist

271

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11 12

Poikilia: Theological Interpretation of a Miscellanistic Aesthetic

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Conclusion

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Appendix The Literary Sequence of Protrepticus, Paedagogus, Stromateis (and Hypotyposeis) Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgements

The initial time and space that were needed to get this project off the ground came in the form of an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2014–2016). For this, I am grateful to my academic hosts, Christoph Markschies and Markus Asper at the Humboldt University in Berlin, to the trustees of the Foundation for supporting my work and to my home institution, Durham University, for granting me leave to take up this post and still welcoming me back at the end of it. Thank you to Carol Harrison and Michael Squire for encouraging me to pursue this in the first place. For critique of drafts, I am especially indebted to Lewis Ayres, who cheerfully offered to read the whole thing . . . a thankless task if ever there was one. Likewise, Teresa Morgan provided challenging and gracious criticism at key points. Others have read and responded helpfully to portions of the work in earlier versions: thank you especially to George Boys-Stones, Ruth Edwards, Dawn LaValle Norman and to those who gave feedback at research seminars and conferences in Berlin, Durham, Göttingen, Münster, Olomouç and Oxford. For generosity with their time and wisdom in conversation about all this, thank you especially to John Barclay, Jason König, Oswyn Murray, Ilaria Ramelli and Francis Watson. From 2016 onwards, the opportunity to work with the ACU-funded research project on ‘Modes of Knowing and Ordering Knowledge in Early Christianity’ was a particular gift, and I am grateful for discussion with ACU colleagues, especially Matthew Crawford, Michael Champion, Dawn LaValle Norman, Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, David Runia, Jonathan Zecher and Lewis Ayres. To the anonymous readers for CUP, thank you for your constructive suggestions, which I have sought to take on board in vii Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108918640

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revising the manuscript. It goes without saying that the weaknesses that remain are my own (and I don’t doubt that they are many). I am grateful to Beatrice Rehl, the contact editor at the press, whose swift and helpful replies guided me so helpfully through the process. The intellectual community in the Department of Theology and Religion in Durham has been a blessing. Our brilliant students have both challenged and encouraged me in my own endeavours: thank you especially to Victoria Downey, Luke Irwin, Georgie Moore, Isaac Soon, Sunny Wang and Matthew Williams, among others. It is an enormous privilege to work with such people, and I cherish the opportunity. Among colleagues, in addition to those whom I mentioned above, I owe special debts of thanks to Chris Cook, Robert Hayward, Alec Ryrie, Mike Snape and Robert Song, who were in different ways kind, patient and generous friends and mentors along the way. Further afield, I would like to thank Thirza Hope for her unfailing interest and companionship. For the original intellectual debts from which all this comes, thank you to colleagues in Germany who introduced me to Clement of Alexandria, first at the ‘Kirchenväterkolloquium’ in Heidelberg in 2005–2006, then as a guest member in Rainer Hirsch-Luipold’s ‘Ratio Religionis Projekt’ in 2007–2011. Lastly, thank you to my Classics teachers at school and university, who nurtured skills and enthusiasm for this kind of work, and thank you to my parents, who supported my idiosyncratic academic path despite every hurdle that stood in the way.

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1 Introduction A Christian among Roman Miscellanists

It must be confessed that Clement of Alexandria’s literary form in the Stromateis has found few admirers. Many scholars who have written on him have begun with an apologia for their choice of topic, and one of the things that they have routinely bemoaned is his literary form. ‘The Stromateis is easily his masterpiece of rambling obscurity’, wrote Robert Casey, adding that ‘the value of the book, therefore, lies in its ideas’.1 Eugène de Faye acknowledged, ‘Unfortunately, the study of Clement of Alexandria is extremely arduous. His writings are hard to read and often dull. The length and endless digressions obscure his thought. In addition, his style is generally turgid and diffuse . . .’.2 Similarly, Johannes Munck observed, ‘Clement of Alexandria cannot lay claim to any great interest. He himself took pains to bring that about, inasmuch as he wrote for the few . . .. Only a patient person, who does not suffer fatigue, will benefit.’3 And yet, the one thing that we know about Clement’s literary form, which could help make sense of it in relation to other ancient works, has never been properly studied, namely, that he was adapting a genre of his pagan contemporaries. It is well-recognised that the form of the

1 2

3

Casey 1925, 70. De Faye 1906, 2, ‘malheureusement l’étude de Clément d’Alexandrie est extrêmement ardue. Ses écrits sont d’une lecture pénible, souvent fastidieuse. Des longueurs et des digressions interminables obscurcissent sa pensée. Ajoutez que son style est en général lourd et diffus . . .’. Munck 1933, 1, ‘Klemens Alexandrinus kann auf kein grösseres Interesse Anspruch erheben. Dafür hat er selbst Sorge getragen, indem er für die Wenigen schrieb . . .. Nur der Geduldige, der nicht ermüdet, wird belohnt.’ Similarly: Mondésert 1949 (= SC 2), 5–8; Völker 1952, 12–14.

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Stromateis owes much to contemporary pagan ‘miscellany’ literature. But rather than interrogating Clement’s reception of Classical ‘miscellanism’, scholars have repeatedly stated that Clement was somehow ‘different’ from the pagan authors whom he was imitating. André Méhat, who wrote the fullest study of the literary form of the Stromateis in the twentieth century, suggested that the similarities were only superficial; ‘within this literature’, he said, the Stromateis ‘occupy a place apart’,4 such that they had better be compared with such later works as Augustine’s Civitas Dei, and Montaigne’s Essais.5 Méhat’s emphasis on Clement’s Christian difference chimed with scholarship both prior6 and subsequent to his work; in the surge of research interest in Classical miscellanism at the end of the twentieth century, Clement never received close attention: one pagan ‘miscellanist’ after another became the subject of investigation, but Clement was left out. He was always bracketed separately as somehow ‘different’. The trope of Christian difference has thus become a rhetorical commonplace in modern scholarship, which has put a stop to conversation about Clement’s relation to Classical miscellanism before anyone has closely interrogated his similarities and differences from pagan authors, or sought to understand how he was working within a Classical culture of miscellany-making. The only partial exceptions of which I am aware are two outstanding doctoral theses in Classics, by Lawrence Emmett (2001) and Stuart Thomson (2014) respectively. Both authors took seriously the idea that Clement was operating within the rhetorical culture of his day. Both critiqued the lack of attention to Christian texts in modern study of the Second Sophistic.7 However, neither of their dissertations has yet been published, and both authors are currently working outside acdemia.8 The present book addresses the need for a better understanding of Clement’s relation to Classical miscellanism. I suggest that this can contribute to three overlapping conversations. Firstly, within the study of Clement, there is a long tradition of reading him alongside Greek and Roman philosophers to interpret his ideas, but 4 5 7

8

Méhat 1966, 523, ‘à l’intérieur de cette littérature, ils occupent une place à part’. 6 Méhat 1966, 525, 527. E.g., Munck 1933, 76–77; Pohlenz 1943, 121. The problems with the name ‘Second Sophistic’ have often been rehearsed: the expression stems from Philostratus, but it has become a modern technical term that is used with diverse referents – for a period, a culture, a style of literature. Alternative names, such as ‘Greek renaissance’ and ‘Postclassism’, carry different baggage of unwanted associations. See, e.g., Whitmarsh 2001, 42–45; 2005, 4–10; 2013, 1–5. Emmett 2001; Thomson 2014. See further below, pp. 16–17.

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when his literary form has been studied, questions of structure have been prioritised, drawing on evidence internal to his corpus. It is characteristic of philosophical strands of Theology and of Classics alike to assume that one can study ideas apart from the literary form in which they are articulated (as Casey implied in the comment quoted above, that the ‘value’ of the Stromateis ‘lies in their ideas’); but this separation fails to respect the relationship between form and function in literature. Paying more attention to formal features of a literary work can help us better to understand both the ideas themselves (for modes of expression are integral to what is communicated)9 and their social purpose (for literary forms are not disembodied vehicles of spiritual ideas, but embodied things that affect people in the social context of a particular literary culture).10 Secondly, since the topic of Clement’s miscellanism currently falls at the intersection between the scholarly disciplines of Patristics (where Clement is traditionally studied) and Classics (where Roman miscellanism has been researched), the attempt to read Clement among Roman miscellanists often discloses issues that have hindered interdisciplinary dialogue in the past. This is an area of current disciplinary shifts, as recent years have witnessed a significant growth in conferences, publications and syllabi that have sought to overcome the historic divisions between Classics and Theology. The foundation of university disciplines, programmes and curricula in Early Christian Studies and in Late Antiquity has provided one mode of reinventing the study of Roman and Christian antiquity in all its aspects.11 The widely read online journal, BMCR, now frequently publishes reviews of books on ancient Christian and Jewish themes, where once it was devoted to Classical scholarship alone. The Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism has been established to ‘examine the ways in which the Greco-Roman world was the world of the New Testament and early Judaism’.12 In this setting, a closer study of Clement of Alexandria among Roman miscellanists may provide a better understanding of some of the sticking points in interdisciplinary dialogue, and hopefully suggest ways beyond them. Thirdly, the enquiry into Clement’s literary form may also contribute to current debates about early Christian textuality. Scholarship in recent years has drawn attention to the lively culture of Christian experimentation with different modes of textuality during this period. Indeed Christians were some of the most innovative participants in 9 11

10 Lavery and Groarke 2010. Goldhill 1999. 12 Brakke 2002; Clark 2008; Vessey 2008. www.jgrchj.net/current.

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Introduction

contemporary book culture, as witnessed, for example, by their early adoption of the codex, their use of nomina sacra, the emergence of a ‘gospel’ genre, and the idea of a ‘four-formed gospel’.13 Questions such as what scripture was, who could compose it and how, were still open to interpretation.14 In this setting, Clement presents us with an unprecedented literary experiment when he produces a Christian interpretation of Classical miscellany-making within a longer literary project in Christian formation. In antiquity, he soon became known among Christians as ‘the Stromatist’, underscoring that what he had done in his ‘stromatic’ work stood out even to ancient readers.15 Both the Christian character of his work, and its relation to the Classical tradition, deserve fuller study. How to approach this raises several issues, which will be addressed more fully in Chapters 2–4. However, it may be helpful to anticipate the lengthier discussion by highlighting two aspects of my method and approach that may need a word of comment. Firstly, at a formal level, we must take into account not only that the Stromateis is a miscellany, but also that it is not a stand-alone work, but the third in a stepped sequence within a literary programme in Christian formation. This claim has been widely accepted in modern scholarship, but has rarely informed the way in which Clement is studied. Many scholars pick just one of Clement’s major extant works to engage with, or else they systematise his ideas without exploring his sequential presentation of them. But if the Protrepticus, Paedagogus, Stromateis and Hypotyposeis were intended to constitute a programme of Christian formation by sequential reading, then we cannot understand the Stromateis in isolation from its context within Clement’s longer literary project. The present book therefore attempts to engage with the full sequence in so far as it is extant: most chapters will discuss how the Christianisation of miscellany motifs in the Stromateis develops what came before in the Protrepticus and the Paedagogus, as the next step in Christian formation within Clement’s work. This makes for a lengthy discussion at times, but I felt it was necessary for understanding the literary shape of Clement’s project, especially in a research context where this way of studying Clement has often been neglected. However, I have limited my attention to the parts of the project that are largely extant, that is, Protrepticus, 13

14

Reed 2002; Mitchell 2006; Heath 2010; Watson 2013; Kloppenborg 2014; Crawford 2019. 15 Markschies 2003; 2007; Brakke 2012; Kreps 2016. Méhat 1966, 98 n. 14.

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Paedagogus, Stromateis I–VII, without attempting to piece together the fragments of Str. VIII or the Hypotypoesis, which have been well studied by others in recent years.16 Secondly, in approaching Clement’s project in relation to the wider culture of Classical miscellanism, I have found it necessary to recur to a sample of the best-known Classical miscellanists, in order to put the comparative study of Clement’s miscellanism on a concrete evidential basis. Plutarch’s Table Talk, Pliny’s Natural History, Gellius’ Attic Nights and Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists are frequently cited in modern studies of Classical miscellanism; in this book, they have been made case studies for comparison with Clement’s approach. This comparative method brings to the discussion table authors who are usually kept apart in the modern academy, as they have been portioned out between the disciplines of Classics and Theology. The consequences of treating them together may frustrate some readers: parts of the book acquire a somewhat miscellanistic quality by the juxtaposition of different authors, and at times the argument is slowed down with close study of aspects of Classical miscellanies that turn out to work rather differently in Clement. Parts (but not all) of the Classical material discussed here are well-known within the field of Classics, and readers from that discipline may wish to skim through those sections quickly. Conversely, at times I have given more introduction to issues within Clement scholarship than Patristics scholars may need, because of the hope that some Classicists may also read this work. I have found working with particular case studies important to the argument for several reasons: firstly, the genre of ‘miscellany’ is a modern and potentially nebulous construct, therefore it is important to work with particular examples in order to be sure that our discussion is grounded in evidence; secondly, ‘miscellanies’ are very diverse among themselves, so if we are to interrogate the trope of ‘Christian difference’, then we must give a viewpoint that allows the differences among Classical miscellanies to emerge as well; thirdly, the fact that these Classical authors have never been much discussed in relation to Clement means that for many Clement scholars, at least, it will be helpful to present a fuller account, even when parts of it may be familiar to Classical readers. The book begins with three introductory chapters. Chapter 2 shows why and how the topic of Clement’s miscellany-making fell into the

16

For a fuller defence of this approach, see below, pp. 49–52, 60–62 and Appendix.

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cracks between Classics and Theology in the modern academy, and why further investigation is now timely. Chapter 3 explores definitions of miscellanism in order to discover the best method for studying Clement. It argues that we should begin from Clement’s reception of characteristic tropes of literary miscellanism, and compare his literary project with individual miscellanists as case studies. Chapter 4 sketches some of the social and institutional contexts associated with miscellanism in the Classical world, in order to give a sense of why Clement would engage with this literary culture at all, and how his Christian Alexandrian context could have affected the conditions for participation in this mode of writing. The next three chapters (Chapters 5–7) focus on widely recognised genre markers of Classical miscellanism: Chapter 5 looks at the intertwined issues of how the author presents himself as a miscellanist, how he presents his miscellanies and how they are intended to function for his readers; Chapters 6 and 7 turn to the titles, with their associated imageries, which are typical of this literature, including the titles that miscellanists choose for their works (Chapter 6) and the literary device of listing titles of other people’s miscellanies (Chapter 7). Each of these topics has been significant in studies of Classical miscellanism, and in observing Clement’s ‘Christian difference’ in the past. By juxtaposing Clement’s approach with four case studies in Classical miscellanism – Plutarch, Pliny, Gellius and Athenaeus – we are able to get a better perspective both on the nature and the degree of Clement’s ‘difference’. His miscellanism is not necessarily more different than any one Classical miscellanist is from any of the others. The interest lies in Clement’s Christian interpretation of the literary form. In these chapters, we see that he perceives his miscellanistic vocation as a call from the Lord to compile such notes as may benefit listeners who participate in the liturgy and collective life of the church. He prepares to take up this calling through self-examination and prayer for cleansing in spirit, and he portrays the climax of his own educational pilgrimage as coming to rest with a scriptural miscellanist, whom he could love chastely and intimately in Egypt. The titles of the works in his literary project are made the subject of reflection within his text. He seeks to show how the protreptic and pedagogical roles of God are discovered in scripture, and through them to put people in a relation to the voice of the Lord. With the name Stromateis, he chooses a deliberately clichéd miscellany title and engages with it in such a way as to point the readers beyond the word to the deity who lies beyond the text. When he draws attention to miscellany

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titles that he does not choose, he directs his readers’ attention to themes in his imagery that provide Hellenised points of access to his Christian doctrine. The three following chapters (Chapters 8–10) belong closely together as a response to Clement’s emphasis on ‘hiddenness’, which has often been treated in scholarship as both the reason that he chose the miscellany genre and the issue that sets him apart from Classical miscellanies. It has been claimed that Clement had something to hide, and his pagan counterparts did not, and that Clement’s attempt to hide things through miscellanism was an imitation of Scripture hiding things through aenigma. In these three chapters, I argue that hiddenness is a much more wide-ranging imagistic discourse than has been recognised in previous scholarship, and it points readers to the divine economy of hiddenness and revelation in which his work participates. In the Classical world, the miscellanists too participated in an economy of hiddenness and revelation through texts, but the deities that presided over it from their perspective were the Muses. Clement debunks and displaces the Muses from his literary frame. In their place, he has the Christ-Logos, who is his apian source of insight (Chapter 8). His so-called esoteric tropes point the reader to his imagistic discourse of hiddenness, by which he conveys that miscellanism is the typical and normative way of life for a gnostic within the immanent economy of divine hiddenness and revelation. God is the one who is hidden, and miscellanism involves selective appropriation and reordering of texts unto the rhetorical scopos and ethical telos that is made known in Christ (Chapter 9). Far from hiding some things from some readers, Clement aims to train as many readers as possible to ‘listen in a hidden way’ so as to discern that which is hidden, which is of God. He portrays this as a mystagogical curriculum: the mystery imagery resonates with the rhetoric of contemporary pagan educational literature. Clement seeks to initiate his readers not only in contemplative insight and practical ethics, but also in the textual practices of good miscellanism and the rhetorical exercises of good teaching. In the Stromateis, it is evident that he develops his theory and practice of miscellanism within a social context where other Christians were miscellanising too, such that they increasingly needed to debate and articulate rules for what constituted good and bad miscellanism. Clement’s theory of miscellanism, however, is closely bound up with his Christian doctrine (Chapter 10). Chapter 11 turns to Clement’s miscellanistic aesthetic: poikilia. Having seen that he did not miscellanise for the pragmatic purpose of hiding some things from some readers, we are able to take a fresh look at Clement’s

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variegated form and recognise its intended beauty. However, this is not a beauty that is divorced from the True and the Good; even Classical miscellanists were often able to find meaning in the deliberate variety of this literary form; Clement develops this much further by highlighting a limited vocabulary of variegation – especially poikilia – and using it in different ways at different stages of his literary project. The Protrepticus cultivates a focus on the true God; the Paedagogus builds on this and fosters the readers’ ethical simplicity to perceive the true God amidst all the varied distractions of social life; the Stromateis, intended for readers who have advanced through this prior formation, allow delight in the poikilia of variegated wisdom, which is divine, and in which Clement’s own poikilic miscellanies participate. Overall, this book shows that Clement’s miscellanism is distinctively Christian, but in much more interesting and profound ways than has been appreciated before. Clement consistently reinterprets topoi and tropes of the Classical form through a Christian theological vision, and thus sets before his readers a project in formation that ultimately enables them at once to delight in the variegated beauty of God and to become ever more focused on the contemplation of the One Teacher, into whose likeness they are growing.

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2 Clement’s Miscellanism and the Scholarly Trope of Christian Difference

Since the topic of the present book falls in the interstices between the disciplines of Classics and Theology, it is more than usually necessary to begin with an archaeology of the scholarly lacuna. Questions, methods and priorities in any discipline have a history, and while we may assume some measure of familiarity with these things in our own field, when we turn to an issue that straddles disciplines, we need to give a fuller account of the histories of debate and the reasons why debate has not happened across the disciplinary fence. In this chapter, I will therefore sketch a brief history of scholarship on Clement of Alexandria and on Classical miscellanism, and highlight the issues that have obstructed previous examination of the relationship between the two. This will inform the way that I construct my argument and supposed interlocutors in the course of my book. Even though Classics and Theology have in many areas worked more closely together in recent years than they had for a long time, nonetheless, this particular debate has been bedevilled by a number of traditional stereotypes about ‘Christian difference’.

before me´ hat (1966): modern neglect of classical miscellanies Prior to the nineteenth century, Classical and Christian traditions of miscellanism were closely intertwined in European literary culture.1

1

For continuities in the history of miscellanism prior to the nineteenth century, see also Morgan 2011; Fitzgerald 2016, 149–95.

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Clement’s Miscellanism

It was unremarkable to list alongside each other Classical and Christian exponents of the genre2 or playfully to Christianise Classical tropes of miscellanism.3 However, with the advent of the nineteenth-century university, the relationship between Classics and Theology changed drastically, and so did attitudes towards ancient miscellanies. At a time when some intellectuals had been shaken out of their Christian convictions and were seeking alternative disciplines in which to pursue the study of antiquity, the creation of Classical Philology established an alternative disciplinary career path.4 At the same time, hitherto well-loved miscellanists, such as Gellius and others, were left off the Classical syllabus in prestigious universities; authors from ancient canons, such as Vergil, Horace, Cicero and Livy, were prioritised over imperial miscellanists in forming the modern ‘canon’ of Classical authors; literature of the early empire came to be widely regarded as degenerate.5 This situation persisted well into the twentieth century, and shaped the way in which Clement’s oeuvre was handled – or overlooked. In Patristics scholarship, there was considerable interest in Clement’s literary form in the first half of the twentieth century, but the focus was not his relationship to Classical miscellanies. Two issues dominated debate: first, the relationship between Clement’s extant works, and second, the question of whether the Stromateis had any structure at all. In 1898, Eugène De Faye argued that the Stromateis could not possibly have been the Didaskalos that Clement had planned.6 Rather, it must be a mere afterthought, a mess, a draft in need of revision. De Faye’s work sparked much debate, but in 1966, André Méhat published what came to be regarded as the landmark study of the literary form of the Stromateis. Méhat laid much weight on Clement’s promise in his preface to present a ‘systematic layout of chapters’ (κεφαλαίων συστηματικὴ ἔκθεσις, Str. I.i.14.2). The phrase only occurs once in Clement, and the chapters 2

3 4

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The term ‘miscellany’ as a book title dates to Politian’s Miscellanea, published in 1489. He listed Aelian, Gellius and Clement alongside each other as exempla of the genre that he was adopting for his work. See Thomson 2014, 92–93. Anderson 2003. ‘The most prudent thing a negative theologian can do is to change over to another faculty’, wrote Jakob Burckhardt, who switched to history: see Howard 2000, 124–36 (quotation from p. 136). Friedrich August Wolf, one of the founding fathers of Classical philology, enrolled as a student of philology rather than theology, against his teacher’s advice, and later excluded theology students from his seminars, as he sought to professionalise the Classics: Bolter 1980; Baertschi 2014, 234–35. On theology and the arts in general in the nineteenth century: Rüegg 2004. 6 Morgan 2011, 55–57. De Faye 1906, 87–121.

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(κεφαλαία) are unmarked in the extant Stromateis. Rather than inferring from this that it was a mere throwaway expression, Méhat took it as the key to Clement’s method and structure. He understood the kephalaia as the blocks of raw material that Clement worked with from his notes, and he focused on discerning the breaks and joins between them and the signals that Clement gave for the development of thought.7 None of this discussion paid much attention to Clement’s relation to the Classical culture of miscellany-making. De Faye and Méhat focused on evidence internal to Clement’s text. Like other scholars of the time, they recognised that Clement had ‘adopted’ a genre of his pagan contemporaries, but they regarded his own work as ‘occupying a place apart’.8 The Danish scholar, Johannes Munck, who had been a student of De Faye in Paris, devoted a couple of pages to comparison between Clement and Classical miscellanists, but concluded that ‘the extant parallels are bad parallels’, since they lack a ‘hidden Tendenz’ such as one finds in Clement.9 Max Pohlenz concurred: what differentiates Clement from the pagan miscellanies is that he had a serious purpose and coherent, underlying system, whereas they sought only to stuff a book full of curiosities fit for conversational repartee.10 The neglect of Classical comparanda was partly a symptom of the motivation that scholars had for studying Clement at all. Scholars of Clement were generally Christian theologians; many of them were turning to the fathers in the context of the renewal movement in Catholic theology, which gained ground from the 1930s onwards. Known as Catholic ressourcement, this movement was characterised by efforts to resource the church with greater familiarity with the church fathers and access to the Bible, and to enhance rapprochement between East and West.11 Clement was among the earliest authors to be published in the newly established Sources chrétiennes series,12 and was the subject of monographs by leading figures of Catholic ressourcement both in France and Germany in the 1940s and 7

8 10 12

Méhat 1966, 119–24, 178–279. Cf. Völker 1952, 14. Méhat developed this work in a thesis that he submitted the same year as his monograph was published, entitled Kephalaia, recherches sur les matériaux des Stromates de Clément d’Alexandrie et leur utilisation: see van den Hoek 1988, 13–16. 9 Méhat 1966, 523. Munck 1933, 76–77. 11 Pohlenz 1943, 121. See also De Faye 1898, 96–99; Casey 1925, 70. Flynn 2012. In 1941, the Protrepticus appeared as the second volume in the SC, with an introduction by Claude Mondésert. This was followed in 1949 by a re-issue of Le Protreptique with Greek text included; and in 1951, Stromateis I was issued as volume 30 in the series. On the Sources chrétiennes, see Mondésert 1988; Fouilloux 1995; Fédou 2011; Flynn 2012, 8–9; Pottier 2012, 252–53.

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1950s.13 This affected the interests that scholars brought to Clement: the aims of la nouvelle théologie were spiritual and ecclesial. André Méhat’s study of the Stromateis reflected this: Méhat was delighted to discover the fathers because they deepened his experience of prayer.14 He had been a student with Jean Daniélou, a leader of Catholic ressourcement, and it was Daniélou who introduced him to Origen, from whom he found his way to Clement. He regarded Clement’s literary form as no more than superficially similar to the Classical genre of miscellanies; in his eyes, the Stromateis could be called the first summa, and compared with Augustine’s City of God and Montaigne’s Essais.15 This is manifestly wide of the mark, but reflects the Christian horizon of Méhat’s interest, and of la nouvelle théologie. At this period, the attitude towards miscellanies among Classical scholars did little to encourage a more nuanced or sympathetic comparative method. Classical scholars did not much like miscellanies either. Classicist B. A. van Groningen’s pungent criticism of ‘General Literary Tendencies in the Second century AD’ has been often quoted: There is no real activity: nobody sets out on an exploration; everybody walks on trodden paths. Why? Because they themselves are weak, unable to display psychic energy. They are tired; they sit down comfortably in well-known surroundings, and they are waiting, waiting for something they will not find, because it is not really looked for. Meanwhile they beguile the time in culling artificial flowers of language and style.16

It is easy to recognise ‘culling . . . flowers’ as a trope for miscellanistic activity. In this intellectual environment, it is no wonder that nobody seriously compared Clement with other Roman imperial miscellanists.

after me´ hat: rise of scholarship on classical miscellanies – excluding clement In the years that followed the publications of Méhat and van Groningen, the scholarly landscape changed significantly in two ways: firstly, the rise 13

14 16

Mondésert 1944; Völker 1952; Daniélou 1961, EV 1973. Pottier 2012, 255–58 explains that Daniélou was only goaded into writing on Clement when his German rival, Walther Völker, brought out a major work on Clement in 1952, following earlier studies of Philo and Origen. Völker explained that he aimed to pave the way for a deeper understanding of the ascetical and mystical tradition of the Eastern church, beginning with Gregory of Nyssa – who happened to be Daniélou’s favourite author. In 1961, Daniélou himself gave significant attention to Clement in his Message évangélique et culture hellénistique aux IIe et IIIe siècles. 15 Méhat 1976, 60–61. Méhat 1966, 523, 525, 527. van Groningen 1965, 56. The text of the lecture was delivered orally in 1964.

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of postmodernism destabilised the relation between text, author and reader, to the point where Roland Barthes in 1967 could describe a text – any text – as but ‘a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture’.17 On this perspective, it would seem that all texts were miscellanies of some sort. Secondly, the study of the early Roman Empire took a new turn in the late 1960s with the publication of Bowersock’s Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire, which drew attention to the historical significance of this period.18 In the second half of the twentieth century, and particularly in its closing decades, Classical scholarship on the ‘Second Sophistic’ blossomed. In this setting, authors of the early empire who had long been neglected became interesting to Classicists in a new way. Many ‘miscellanists’ were now published again or translated for the first time. Aelian’s Varia Historia was rendered into English three times in the late 1990s, though the most recent version before that dated to 1665!19 Athenaeus received a new translation in Loeb in 2007–2012.20 Monographs and edited volumes appeared on individual miscellanists such as Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights,21 Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists,22 Pliny’s Natural History23 and Plutarch’s Table Talk.24 Previously, scholars had used compilatory texts such as these as sources, but much more rarely, if at all, studied them in their own right. In addition, there were a number of more wide-ranging works on different aspects of miscellanism: Ordering Knowledge in Late Antiquity, edited by Jason König and Tim Whitmarsh, drew together a range of approaches to the literary architecture of knowledge in the

17

18

19 20

21

22 23

24

Barthes 1967. Barthes’ article was first published in the English translation of Richard Howard in Aspen 5+6, in 1967. The French came out in Manteia one year later. See Logie 2013, 497. Bowersock 1969. Bowersock’s emphasis on Roman prosopography competed with those who saw the ‘Greek renaissance’ as a firmly Hellenising movement, grasping for a Greek identity in the face of the expansion of Roman power: Bowie 1970; 19711; Swain 1996. For a summary of this scholarship: Whitmarsh 2013, 8. For a critique of the historiography of the Second Sophistic, especially Bowersock: Brunt 1994. See review by Dilts in AJP 121/2 (2000). By S. Douglas Olson, published 2007–2012, replacing the volumes translated by Charles Burton Gulick in 1927–1941. Holford-Strevens 1988, rev. ed. 2003; Holford-Strevens and Vardi 2004; Keulen 2009; Heusch 2011. Braund and Wilkins 2000; Jacob 2013. See also: J. König 2012, 90–120. Beagon 1992; 2005; Carey 2003; Murphy 2004a; Gibson and Morello 2011. See also: Howe 1985; Doody 2009; Beagon 2013. Klotz and Oikonomopoulou 2011; Ruffy 2012. See also: Klotz 2007; J. König 2007; 2012, 60–89; Stadter 2015, 98–115.

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Empire. Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance, edited by Jason König and Greg Woolf, underscored the intertwining of encyclopaedic and miscellanistic literature that developed in this period. Popular Morality in the Roman Empire, by Teresa Morgan, explored the role of gnomologies in popular ethics and education. Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept, by William Fitzgerald, drew attention to the richness of the concept of ‘variety’ in literature prior to the twentieth century.25 It might be thought that this would be the time for a monograph on Clement of Alexandria as a miscellanist, but none was ever produced, either in Patristics or in Classical scholarship. In Patristics scholarship, the focus remained elsewhere.26 Clement’s relation to the philosophical tradition continued to attract attention,27 and the integration of his fragmentary works into the discussion shed some new light on the literary architecture of his project as a whole.28 Several scholars of Early Christianity drew attention to the ways in which Christians participated in the Second Sophistic,29 and some innovatively explored Clement’s reception of Classical tradition in his literary imagery: for example, Fabienne Jourdan studied the figure of Orpheus in the Protrepticus, Denise K. Buell the metaphorical portrayal of Christians as newborn children in the Paedagogus and John D. Penniman the emphasis on milk as a figure for formative teaching.30 This underscored and contextualised Clement’s rhetorical interaction with Classical culture, but did not cast light on his miscellanistic form. The main context in which Patristics scholars discussed Clement’s miscellanism was in connection with his motif of concealment. However, most scholars focussed their discussion on Clement’s apophatic doctrine of God or of scripture, and his esoteric method of teaching. For context, they turned to philosophical or other non-Christian traditions of

25

26 27

28 29 30

J. König and Whitmarsh 2007; Morgan 2007a; J. König and Woolf 2013; Fitzgerald 2016. For surveys of scholarship on Clement: Wagner 1971; Osborn 1983. E.g., Osborn 1957; 2005; Lilla 1971; Clark 1977; Colpe 1979; Wyrwa 1983; Riedweg 1987; Schneider 1999; Behr 2000; Hägg 2006; Ashwin-Siejkowski 2008; Itter 2009; Osborne 2010; Afonasin 2013; Gibbons 2015; 2017. Cf. Choufrine 2002; Bucur 2009a; 2009b; Havrda 2016. E.g., Nasrallah 2010; Eshleman 2012; Friesen 2015. Buell 1999 (children); Jourdan 2010 (Orpheus); Penniman 2017, 91–106 (milk). See also Friesen 2015, 118–33 (Euripides’ Bacchae).

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esotericism.31 Miscellanism is mentioned somewhat briefly and without detail about what exactly it is.32 The most extended discussion of Clement’s miscellanism as a creative, Christian textuality was Judith Kovacs’ work on Clement’s pedagogical imitation of the divine Logos. In two articles sixteen years apart, she worked out this idea, first in relation to Classical miscellanism and the enkyklios paideia,33 and later in relation to scriptural miscellanism and the ‘polyphonic’ and ‘polytropic’ character of the prophetic and apostolic voice in salvation history.34 However, Kovacs did not look closely at the relationship between Classical and scriptural miscellanism in Clement’s work. Her earlier article did not systematise the theology of how Clement could be said to be imitating the Logos as manifested in providence, in scripture and in the pedagogical practice of Jesus, as well as the Gnostic who imitated Jesus and articulated Clement’s own ideal. Her later article no longer referenced Classical miscellanism, but underscored Clement’s imitation of God’s own sequential ordering of his pedagogical programme. Kovacs explained that God first gave Greek philosophy and the prophets of Hebraic scriptures, but later he gave the Gospel; so too Clement’s Protrepticus gives most prominence to the prophets, while the Stromateis lets Wisdom literature, Paul and the Gospel say more. This corresponds to a progressive formation in which people first learn to fear and trust God (Protr), then are gradually initiated into intimate love and knowledge (Str). Kovacs’ essays were valuable for pointing the way to locating Clement’s imitation of the Logos in relation to his own miscellanistic practice. However, the notion of Classical miscellanism remained vague in her work as in other Patristics scholarship, even when it is acknowledged that Clement adapted this Classical ‘genre’. There has been no special attention to the tropes or form of his miscellanism, or how or why he advertises a relationship to the Classical tradition through this form. The discussion of his theology of Classical literature (both poetry and philosophy) has been kept largely separate from the discussion of his Christianisation of the miscellany.35 31

32 33 35

Fortin 1966; Riedweg 1987, 123–61; Stroumsa 2005, 111–17 (Jewish esotericism); Hägg 2006, 140–50; Deutsch 2008; Itter 2009; Ramelli 2017; Steenbuch 2017. Kovacs 2001, 25; Hägg 2006, 150 (without using the term); Itter 2009, 80. 34 Kovacs 2001. Kovacs 2017b, citing the allusion to Heb. 1.1 in Protr. i.8.3. On Clement’s theological explanations of how truth is found in Greek philosophy and poetry: Lilla 1971, 9–59; Daniélou 1973, 48–73, 89–99; Dawson 1992, 199–205; Friesen 2015, 120–23.

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Classicists are more specific about the literary points of contact between Clement and other imperial miscellanists. They often mention him in passing, as an example of particular tropes of miscellanistic rhetoric, such as his use of titles, sub-titles and rejected titles;36 imagery of seeds and fodder;37 spontaneity and deliberate disregard for organisation;38 encouragement of reader-participation;39 designation of his work as a memory-aid40 and his citation of his teacher’s words.41 But rather than pursuing this, Classicists have repeated the trope of Christian difference. They have identified Clement’s ‘Christian twist’ as his emphasis on salvation and observed that he used the genre distinctively, for ‘imparting not a general culture but a specific message’,42 and using it to compose ‘an original and highly systematic introduction to theology, which patrologists do not regard as a miscellany in classicists’ sense’.43 The only real exceptions to this pattern of neglecting Clement’s miscellanism on account of his Christian difference have been the two excellent but unpublished doctoral theses, which approached Clement as a ‘divine rhetor’ (Emmett 2001) and ‘barbarian sophist’ (Thomson 2014) of the Second Sophistic. Emmett focused on Clement’s rhetorical attempt to legitimise his own philosophy in the marketplace of competing philosophies, each with their own rhetorically trained wise men or sophists. By comparing Clement with Arrian, Aelius Aristides and Gellius, he argued that Clement’s portrayal of his work as a disorderly jumble of notes (hypomnêmata) appeals for trust by underscoring that the work is a private memoir, not a public piece for rhetorical display. Overall, his claim was that the genre of Clement’s Stromateis was fashionable in literary circles in the second century. Thomson’s dissertation on ‘The Barbarian Sophist’ offered a much fuller account of Clement’s engagement with the self-fashioning of the Second Sophistic, and he dedicated a whole chapter to Clement’s use of genre in the Stromateis. He identified the title as a deliberate generic marker, and pointed out how Clement re-oriented the rhetoric of the Alexandrian ‘universal library’ around the Christian scriptures, while also 36 38

39 41 43

37 Vardi 2004, 160 n. 5, 163–64. Fitzgerald 2016, 167. Holford-Strevens 2003, 34 compares Pamphila, Gellius and Pliny; Bowie 2006 compares Gellius and Solinus; Fitzgerald 2016, 154 contrasts Meleager’s emphasis on heterogeneity. 40 Fitzgerald 2016, 168. Holford-Strevens 2003, 31. 42 Holford-Strevens 2003, 69. Holford-Strevens 2003, 29, 38. Morgan 2007, 53, cf. 51.

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Issues at Stake in Neglecting Clement

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cultivating the dynamic relationship between author, reader and text that characterises miscellanism. In his view, the miscellanistic genre cultivates active, independent engagement on the part of the reader, who is to imitate Clement, the miscellany-maker, while he imitates the Logos. Thomson considered that the reinterpretation of generic markers urges readers to ‘ponder the question of generic ordering as an introduction to his [Clement’s] larger project of leading us to question the order and disorder of the whole cosmos’.44 Emmett’s and Thomson’s approaches, however, are the exception rather than the rule, and both, in any case, are grounded more in the social historical approaches of Classics than in the literary-theological tradition of Patristics. In general, the trope of ‘Christian difference’ marks the stagnation of discussion on both sides of the fence; but this tells us less about antiquity, and more about the ways in which antiquity is studied in the contemporary academy.

issues at stake in neglecting clement as a christian among roman miscellanists The assumption of ‘Christian difference’ does more than just demarcate territory that places ancient sources on different sides of a boundary marker. It also implies assumptions about the nature of the difference. Thomson sums up how Classicists typically tell the story as a ‘narrative of ludic pagans and oppressive Christians’.45 The perception is that Christians are/were dull and authoritarian, merely mouthing what the Logos tells them to. For example, in recent Classical discussion of the ‘End of Dialogue’ in antiquity, Goldhill and others have argued that the dialogue as a generic form was ‘integral for democracy and difficult for early Christianity’,46 and that one of the places where this is best seen is in the transformation of the literary symposium from open-ended debate to a scene where everyone listens obediently to the voice of the Logos.47 This is pertinent to the neglect of miscellanism, because miscellanies, like symposia, are typically associated with open-endedness in

44 46

47

45 Thomson 2014 (quotations from pp. 121, 112, respectively). Thomson 2014, 21. Goldhill 2008a, 8. For critical attempts to nuance this discussion: Cameron and Gaul 2017; Rigolio 2019. This perspective shapes J. König 2008; 2012, 145–49, although he presents it in a highly nuanced and qualified form.

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interpretation.48 Indeed, many miscellanies are sympotic in literary form, or at least in imagery. One of the challenges for engaging with the Classical tradition of scholarship, then, is to question the role of authority and debate in how Clement handles this literary form. Closely connected with this is the place that is given to theology and spirituality in the study of ancient sources, whether pagan or Christian. Modern Classics has often taken revisionist approaches to nineteenthcentury paradigms for thinking about antiquity, such as the notion of literature as a kind of transcendent, disembodied category that conveys the spirit (Geist) of a nation.49 But the way in which revisionism has been practised has tended to focus on issues such as the significance of the body, or of cultural identity or on denationalisation by giving voice to the ideologies of suppressed groups (such as the Jews).50 It has not had much sensitivity towards things spiritual or theological. In some cases, the concept of ‘theology’ has been practically reduced to a social instrument of oppression. If theology is defined as a ‘fundamental element of religious observance – the injunction always to care an iota’ and this is evaluated by what it does to a Christian’s ‘miserable body’, then all that is left of religion is an oppressive ‘invention . . . with its claims that the correct reading is necessary for life while incorrect reading is punishable even to the point of death’ and ‘the cult of the holy book’ is a ‘concomitant development’.51 We need a richer concept of theology, and of what to associate with terms like God, Logos and Spirit, if we are to engage with Clement’s Christianisation of the Classical genre. The challenge of framing the discussion reaches deeper than interdisciplinary dialogue across the Classics-Theology divide. As Thomson points out, ‘some of the most energetic theological authors on early Christianity, especially those most widely read across disciplinary boundaries, have themselves come out of post-structuralist traditions. Often they are concerned with exposing a patriarchal manipulation of power inherent in the incipient Christian Catholic tradition, often in contrast to more liberal, open, egalitarian christianities, repressed by the conformist orthodox patriarchy’.52 Over recent decades, the fragmentation of Patristics into non-theological disciplines with a common interest in ‘late antiquity’ has intensified debate about the character, methods, aims, scope and social structures of the disciplinary fields within which early 48 49 52

J. König 2007, esp. 47–50; Too 2010, 63; Thomson 2014, 126. 50 51 See esp. Goldhill 1999. Whitmarsh 2013, 3, 11–47. Goldhill 1999, 76–77. Thomson 2014, 22.

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Issues at Stake in Neglecting Clement

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Christian authors are studied.53 There are many scholars now who take theoretically informed perspectives to ancient texts, viewed within a larger cultural discourse. In Clement scholarship, we have learnt about Clement’s attitudes to the body and society, his construction of ethnicity, his thought about women and his engagement with medical discourse.54 These studies often give attention to embodied life, less to literary form and less still to theology or spirituality. Conversely, in the tradition of Patristics, theology has often been studied at the expense of wider aspects of social and cultural history. Patristics is traditionally defined by a list of ecclesial authors, an approach that began with Jerome, who had a vision of being rebuked before the divine throne for reading Cicero with too much devotion.55 Those who continue to study Clement as a ‘church father’ today often focus on philosophy and systematic theology.56 The idea that literary form may be a material expression of a social relationship, which is theologically and spiritually (devotionally) structured, falls at the interstices of different disciplinary and sub-disciplinary approaches. These issues are poignantly encapsulated in modern stories of origins of the study of the ‘Second Sophistic’, to which Clement belonged. The way scholars interpret the significance of key figures in the history of a debate shapes their own research agendas. Classicists have emphasised the significance of Erwin Rohde as the founding father of modern scholarship on die zweite Sophistik.57 From a theologian’s perspective, it is striking that they do not study him alongside his friend, the theologian Franz Overbeck, who was a great admirer of Clement58 and had wanted to influence Rohde’s approach to

53 54

55 57 58

Brakke 2002; Clark 2008, 14–27; Vessey 2008, 55–59. E.g., P. Brown 1988, 122–30; Kinder 1989/90; Buell 1999; 2008; Desjardins 2005; Pujiula 2006; Maier 2013; Chalmers 2014; LaValle 2015. 56 Jerome, Ep. 22.30; Vessey 2008, 46. See above, n. 30. Whitmarsh 2005, 6–7; 2011; 2013, 12–13. See Rohde 1876; 1886; 1914. Wilson 2002. Between 1868 and 1870 as a Privatdozent at Jena, Overbeck fully translated the Stromateis; it was the first ever German translation of this work, though it lay unpublished until 1936, by which time it had been superseded (cf. Lohmeyer 1938). In 1870, he sketched the outlines of his understanding of Clement in a lecture ‘Christliche Literaturgeschichte bis Eusebius von Caesarea’. He presupposed this perspective in his more influential works, Über die Christlichkeit der heutigen Theologie (1873) and Entstehung und Recht einer rein historischen Betrachtung der Neutestamentlichen Schriften in der Theologie (1870). In 1882, he produced the pamphlet, Über die Anfänge der patristischen Literatur, which developed a fuller account of Clement’s place in Christian literature.

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the history of Greek literature by drawing attention to the Christian tradition.59 Rohde’s history of imperial literature was anti-Jewish and antiChristian and portrayed a narrative of the revival of the Hellenic spirit against Roman and oriental influence.60 Overbeck, on the other hand, argued that Clement marked the beginning of ‘patristic literature’, because he was the first deliberately to adapt Greek literary forms for Christian theology.61 For his part, Overbeck was interestingly ambiguous about whether this ‘secularising’ of Christian literature bankrupted Christianity. He has often been held to have lost his faith, but recent scholarship has argued that it is more likely that Overbeck was taking a leaf out of Clement’s book by writing ironically and in a hidden way, like Clement in the Stromateis. If so, Overbeck appears to have found the Stromateis the most modern of literary genres, adapted for the challenges of faith and reason, secularism and the sacred, in the academic discourse of his day.62 In the twenty-first century, revisionist work in Classics has recurrently returned to Rohde to critique how the Second Sophistic has been and should be studied. But while scholars have sought to de-nationalise Rohde’s approach and draw attention to other cultural identities and narratives, such as those of the Jews,63 the place of Christianity in the Second Sophistic long remained relatively understudied.64 This has been changing in recent years, but there is still some way to go.65 A small number of theologians, meanwhile, have hailed Overbeck for originating a programme for a new literary history that will overcome persistent blindspots in modern debate. Unlike many later scholars in the twentieth century, Overbeck did not downplay Clement’s relationship to the Greco-Roman literary form but saw it as constitutive of what was innovative and distinctively ‘patristic’ about Clement’s writing. Mark Vessey, echoing Martin Tetz, reaffirmed Overbeck’s vision for a ‘history of a literary tradition that was also a doctrinal tradition and whose

59

60 61 62 64 65

He eagerly awaited the reaction of this esteemed friend and scholar to his work on Anfänge der patristischen Literatur. Rohde’s brief response disappointed him, and he only discovered many years later that Rohde had not intended to write a griechische Literaturgeschichte at all. See Cancick and Cancick-Lindemaier 2010, 15, 25. Rohde 19143, 19, 319. Whitmarsh 2011; 2013, 12–13. Overbeck 1882, 444: ‘die griechisch römische Literatur christlichen Bekenntnisses’. 63 Wilson 2002, 27–38, esp. 28, 35; 2017. Whitmarsh 2011. As remarked in Emmett 2001, 35; Whitmarsh 2013, 4; Thomson 2014, 17–29. E.g., J. König 2009a; Nasrallah 2010; Eshleman 2012; Friesen 2015.

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literary and doctrinal aspects are ultimately inseparable’. In this new literary history he hoped for ‘a special interest in the interaction between the aims of Christian edification and the aesthetic norms of classical culture’.66 To be sure, Overbeck’s programme is dated now. There is little appetite today for defining the beginning of ‘Patristics’ in literary terms as Overbeck sought to do. He was surely wrong that Christian literature prior to Clement did not participate in Classical literary forms, and he underemphasised the significance of culture. Nonetheless, Overbeck still deserves to be heard in this respect: he underscored that Christians’ use of literary forms was theologically informed and that Clement’s literary form has light to shed on the relationship between Classical and Christian traditions in antiquity, and he saw the potential this has for shaping how Classics and Theology are studied in the modern world.

conclusion Scholarly neglect of Clement as a Christian miscellanist has arisen in close connection with a scholarly trope of ‘Christian difference’. That trope is a symptom of the fracturing of relations between Christian Theology and other intellectual disciplines since the nineteenth century, which in turn is a symptom of wider changes in religious demography. Shifts in attitudes to the literary form of the miscellany have been constrained by this problematic divide in our institutional structures of knowledge production. Clement’s miscellanies have been thought of as ‘different’ from the Classical miscellanists, but without close examination of the sources, and often in ways that resonate with anti-Christian stereotypes, which portray Christians as boring and authoritarian users of texts, by contrast with open-minded and playful pagans. The present book will question the nature and extent of Clement’s Christian ‘difference’ from Classical miscellanies. Every miscellany is different from every other, and the Christian difference is not more thoroughly different just for being Christian. The interesting and important challenge is to understand more deeply what the relationship is, both in its similarities and its differences. In setting out on this task, my approach is shaped by traditions of Classical and Theological scholarship in different ways. From Classics, 66

Vessey 1991, 352–53. Cf. Tetz 1961.

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I have learnt to value close attention to literary form in comparison with Classical authors and to be sensitive to the notion that rhetorical play can be fun. I shall suggest that Clement’s creativity with Classical tropes for his classically educated Christian audience is not just serious and theologically informed (though it is that), but also fun. From theology, however, I have learnt attention to the theological significance of Clement’s way of treating his literary tropes. I try to go further than Kovacs did in explaining how Clement’s text relates to and works with the divine logos, and how miscellanism engages with different forms of revelation. The present book shows that, while Clement works with Classical rhetorical tropes, he Christianises them deeply, in order to construct an innovative theologically Christian miscellany for use in Christian formation.

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3 Studying Ancient Miscellanism Defining Features, Scope and Method

what is a ‘miscellany’? It will be hard to get very far with a study of Clement among Classical miscellanists without defining the key terminology: ‘miscellany’, and along with it, ‘miscellanist’ and ‘miscellanism’. However, this is easier said than done. The term ‘miscellany’ was not an ancient genre name; it derives from Politian’s Miscellanea (1489) and some modern European languages have not adopted it at all; for example, German prefers ‘Buntschriftstellerei’, which emphasises varied (bunt-) rather than the mixed (misc-) composition.1 In English and French language scholarship on Clement, the term has often been used vaguely to refer to anything that has ‘miscellanistic’ traits. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘miscellanistic’ as ‘of mixed composition or character’, or ‘having various qualities or aspects’. But this is problematic for our discussion, since if a work of literature did not have ‘various qualities or aspects’ then it would not be a work of literature at all. If miscellanies are defined too broadly, then everything starts to seem like a miscellany, and it ceases to be a useful classificatory term. Scholars have taken different approaches to this problem. Clement scholars have generally used the term vaguely to refer to a ‘genre’ that Clement ‘chose’, but without saying much to define the genre.2 They may have notional paradigms of authors in mind to compare with Clement:

1

2

As pointed out by Fitzgerald 2016, 223 n. 25. For Politian, see: Guest 2007; Thomson 2014, 92–93. Kovacs 2001, 24–25; Hägg 2006, 150; Itter 2009, 30.

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Johannes Munck, for example, cites Gellius, Plutarch, Aelian and Athenaeus; Max Pohlenz mentions Gellius; Méhat compares Gellius, Aelian, Athenaeus and Pliny; Roberts discusses Gellius and Macrobius. But they give no explicit rationale for this selection, or only the ‘obvious similarities’ between these kinds of ‘jumbled collection’, such as the fact that ‘they involve compilation; they have similar titles; they are to be memory aids; they claim to be unified works rather than simple sets of notes’.3 In Classics, many scholars have declined to speak of a ‘genre’ of the miscellany at all, preferring to acknowledge ‘miscellanistic characteristics’ across a range of different types and genres of literature.4 Those who seek a particular ancient guide in modelling the genre often turn to Gellius: not only were his Nights particularly influential among Renaissance miscellanies, but he lists titles of other works in his preface to compare and contrast with his own. Rust suggests that ‘knowledge collection’ fits Gellius’ list better than ‘miscellany’.5 Others import a modern concept of a ‘miscellany’ as a collection of excerpts for readers to browse through.6 However, this is anachronistic for ancient book roll culture, where the practicalities of reading left no place for browsing: skipping a passage could be done, but ‘dipping in and out’ is much harder without a codex.7 Two scholars, however, have tried to find more precise definitions of miscellanies: Teresa Morgan defines a broad concept of miscellanies, grounded in the cultural history of educational praxis; William Fitzgerald gives a narrower definition, grounded in the recurrence of literary tropes. This chapter considers each of these definitions in turn. Formally and socially broad definitions of miscellanism help us to understand miscellanism as a practice, and this will be significant in later parts of this book when we come to explore Clement’s invention of his own 3

4 5 7

Munck 1933, 76; Pohlenz 1943, 120; Méhat 1966, 523. The quotation comes from Roberts 1981, 212. Like Méhat, he focused on the technical terms that Clement uses to characterise his purpose and method, even though these are hapaxes in the Stromateis. He analysed the structure with an emphasis on Stoic hermeneutics and rhetorical theory, but betrayed the weakness of his argument in his comment that ‘other examples of the genre would be helpful’ (p. 222). J. König 2007, 43. Similarly: Bowie and Krasser 2006, esp. Krasser’s contribution. 6 Rust 2009, 31–32. Cf. Neuhausen 1993; Morgan 2007b; 2011, 52–53. Morgan 2007; Rust 2009, 21–24; Too 2010, 67–68; Fitzgerald 2016, 167. Clement, of course, may have used codices, as was increasingly common among Christians in Egypt in the late second century: Meyer 2007; Bagnall 2009. But even if he did, his Stromateis are clearly not a collection of excerpts for browsing, as per the modern definition.

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mystagogical curriculum in training the practices of a Christian miscellanist. However, these definitions are of limited use in locating Clement’s literary form within his elite social and intellectual context in the pagan world. Clement uses rhetorical tropes to advertise his relationship to a self-consciously literary strand in wider Classical miscellanism; he thereby invites his readers to reflect on both his and their relationship to that segment of literary culture.

enkyklios paideia and widespread miscellanistic praxis The most programmatic attempt to render convincing a broad conception of the ‘miscellany genre’ has been by the historian of education, Teresa Morgan. She argued that the category is useful not so much on formal literary grounds as on cultural ones. From a formalist perspective, her definition was deliberately expansive: a miscellany is ‘a number of short works, in any form, by one author or more, on one theme or more, brought together to form a larger work.8 Or, more fully: A miscellany may historically be a collection of smaller works, excerpts of works, snippets of information, stories or maxims, arranged thematically, alphabetically, chronologically, randomly or in any other way. The contents may be limited – by author, genre or subject – as much or little as the compiler chooses, though before the twentieth century, a degree of thematic unity was the norm. Anthologies, encyclopaedias, companions and even dictionaries and commentaries are therefore more or less closely related to miscellanies, if not identical to them.9

She included works from every social stratum and educational level, ranging from excerpts collected for school use, to learned, lengthy prose works such as Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists. Thus defined, the generic category encompasses, for example, Lucian’s essays, the letters of Pliny or Seneca, Horace’s poetry books, Suetonius’ Lives and Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers, the Hippocratic Corpus, Dio Chrysostom’s speeches and Epictetus’ discourses, handbooks of chreiai and apophthegmata, gnomologies of Pythagoras and the Distichs of Cato.10 Morgan found coherence and significance in viewing these as a group because they all point our attention to the educational system that was the common ground of this culture. All miscellanistic works, in the broad 8

Morgan 2011, 50.

9

Morgan 2007a, 135.

10

Morgan 2011, 51–52.

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sense, depended on practices of ‘collecting, sorting, breaking down, recombining, analysis of the subject’, which were the very practices that were cultivated in the enkyklios paideia, and were part of the formation of people at all levels of education.11 In this broadest sense, miscellany-making was also common among Jews and Christians in antiquity: we find sayings collections such as the Gospel of Thomas and putative Q; the gospels contain sections in which they collect teachings of Jesus or miracle stories; Paul’s letters were soon circulated as a collection; apologetic works often rely on patchworks of quotations, as in Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho.12 Some authors thematise key aspects of miscellany-making: the fourth evangelist emphasises the selectivity of his gospel, which includes only some out of many signs that Jesus did;13 the motif of the disciples being reminded of Jesus’ words in a later context that makes sense of them evokes the way some miscellanies were used, as collections of things that would be useful to remember later at the apposite time;14 Irenaeus’ image of piecing together the scriptures into the right picture (a king, not a fox) portrays the core miscellanising praxis of excerpting and re-ordering material.15 In this broad sense, then, much of imperial literature was miscellanistic, but these ‘miscellanies’ were so diverse in literary form, intellectual character and social purpose that the category is of limited use. To place Clement’s work, we require a narrower perspective on what kind of miscellanism is in view, and closer attention to the theology of his textuality. In the following sections, I shall introduce two ways to discern Clement’s relationship to Classical miscellanism: first, by highlighting rhetorical tropes; secondly, by comparison with individual miscellanists.

rhetorical tropes and literary miscellanism Clement is not known as a miscellanist just because he wrote a messy book, but because he advertised his work as a miscellany through his use of well-known rhetorical tropes. If Clement had not called his work Stromateis and used imagery of meadows and bees, for example, we might not ponder its relation to the Classical tradition of miscellanism at all. The use of rhetorical tropes puts his work in a relationship not just 11 12 14 15

Morgan 2011, 58–59. 13 Turner 1996; Albl 1999; Doering 2005; Mitchell 2006; Reece 2016. John 20:30. Luke 24:8; John 2:17, 22; 12:16; 16:4. Cf. Gell. NA pr. 2; Morgan 2004. Iren. Adv. haer. 1.8.1.

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to miscellanies at large – that is, not just to any text that happens to rely on excerption and reordering of material, be it a school-book, a dictionary, or a letter collection – but to a strand in artful, literary miscellanism, where authors thematised their miscellany-making in ways that signalled their deliberate self-positioning in relation to a wider literary culture. The common characteristics of this artful miscellanism have been best studied in recent years by the literary scholar William Fitzgerald. In his work on Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept, he tackled head-on the thorny challenge of ‘how does one interpret a miscellanistic book as a miscellanistic book’, without analysing it into something that it is not. He proposed a typology of the ‘metatextual moments’ by which authors of literary miscellanies thematised their own participation in a shared culture of miscellany-making.16 I shall give a modified version of his breakdown of typical features of Classical miscellanies, and indicate how Clement signals his own participation in this tradition:

(1) Imagery and Titles Fitzgerald first draws attention to ‘titles, which characterise the miscellany by comparison with objects (meadows, bouquets, bees, honeycombs, tapestries)’.17 This packs two issues – distinctive imagery and use of titles – into one: imagery, whether titular or not, was one of the most vivid and easily recognisable ways of signalling participation in the wider generic discourse. As bees gather pollen from various flowers to combine into a honeycomb, as flowers are gathered and woven into a garland,18 as meadows and woods grow from a diverse abundance of foliage, as threads are woven into a tapestry, as foods are brought together at a feast, so are the poems, stories, citations or other sources of the miscellanist drawn together into the pleasing composition of the book. These images often appear not only in the body of miscellanistic works, but also in their titles: Honeycombs, Garlands, Violets, Meadows, Woods, Tapestries are all characteristic of the genre. The significance of titles is formally distinct from the choice of imagery: it is characteristic of authors to signal a relationship to the group of miscellanies (as we would call them) by repeating each other’s titles, or 16 18

17 Fitzgerald 2016, 149–95, quotations at p. 151. Fitzgerald 2016, 152. Barns 1950 traces the history of the bee and garland images for anthologising, and points out a key difference: the bee selects what is nourishing, the weaver of garlands selects what is beautiful.

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by collecting titles such as these together into a group and listing them. The act of collecting, arranging and listing is the characteristic miscellanistic act, and the lists of titles can include those with typical imagery (as above) but may also include others that the author wishes to view alongside them: Pliny compares Antiquities, Instances and Systems; Gellius adds others such as Moral Epistles (Seneca) and Natural History (Pliny’s own work). In different ways, Pliny and Gellius are both witty and ironic in their lists of alternative titles: the lists are not a dispassionate act of scholarly classification but a well-crafted rhetorical display. These authors were artfully positioning their work in relation to a wider literary discourse, even in the absence of a genre name. Clement asserts his relationship to Classicising miscellanism most obviously with his own choice of title: Stromateis, which has often been anachronistically translated Miscellanies, but is better rendered as Tapestries or even Carpets, bringing out the weaving metaphor of Classical miscellanism. Stromateis was not a new coinage, but a repetition of a title that others had already used: it featured on Gellius’ list of names that other people gave their miscellanies; scholars have traced it to Caesellius Vindex, who had composed a Stromateis sive Commentaria lectionum antiquarum in the Hadrianic period, which was an ‘alphabetical lexicalisation of linguistic-antiquarian material under linguistic aspects’;19 Plutarch is also said to have written a Stromateis, which does not survive.20 By choosing this title, then, Clement signalled that he wanted his readers to consider his work in relation to the Classical tradition of learned miscellany-making. But Clement’s composition was not ordered by the alphabet, as Caesellius Vindex’s had been. Learned it was, but also literary. In prefaces and in the body of his work, he thematised the imagery of the bee plucking flowers, of meadows, garlands, festive offerings and woods, often for characterising his own miscellanistic form and how readers should engage with it. Like Gellius and Pliny, he included a list that collected together titles of polymathic miscellanies that could be compared with his own, mentioning Meadows, Helicons, Honeycombs and Peploi, all of which were found on Gellius’ list. 19 20

Schmidt 2006. The Lamprias catalogue of Plutarch’s works mentions among them a book of Στρωματεῖς ἱστορικοὶ καὶ ποιητικοί (Méhat 1966, 104). We know little of the content of Plutarch’s Stromateis beyond this title. The only attributed fragment is cited by Eusebius (P.E. 1.8.1–12), but its authenticity is widely disbelieved (Sandbach 1969 (= LCL 429), 324–27 on fr. 179).

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(2) What the Work Is Not Fitzgerald’s second genre marker is: ‘negative descriptions that emphasise what the work in question is not’.21 He pointed out that even if ancient authors did not have a genre name for ‘miscellany’, they could often proclaim which genres their work did not exemplify, such as history, encyclic learning or epic. They could underscore that it was not highly ordered, but rather marked by disorder, and even by unevenness in the quality of its contents. Plutarch and Gellius declare (disingenuously) that they have not arranged their material in any order, but that they composed just as the memories or notes came to hand. Clement too uses his authorial preface to portray his Stromateis as ‘not a writing crafted for display’ (Str. I.i.11.1). (3) What the Miscellany Does Thirdly, Fitzgerald draws attention to ‘descriptions of what the miscellany does’ – not what it is, but what it does.22 It may juxtapose diverse elements of content: this sets each of them off against the others. It may draw together different readers with diverse interests and give a focus to their social community; it is no accident that sympotic imagery is characteristic of miscellanism, which cultivates literary conviviality. It may assemble a stock of quotations, facts and exemplary discourses to prepare readers for wider social life. Clement emphasises that the Stromateis hide seeds of gnosis, by covering the truth with the teachings of philosophy and making a body out of much learning (Str. I.i.18.1, 20.4).

(4) Author’s Biographical Fictions Fourthly, Fitzgerald observes the frequency of ‘biographical fictions of how the work came to be’:23 authors often include ‘biographical fictions of how the work came to be’, which emphasise the origins of the work’s miscellaneity. It may be portrayed as originating in dinner party conversations (Plutarch), or in nocturnal note-taking (Pliny) or in the collecting and noting down of all that caught a person’s attention, whether in social life or in reading books (Gellius). Clement also locates the origins of his hyopmnêmata biographically in his memories of his inspired teachers (Str. I.i.11.1–2, 14.1–2). 21 23

Fitzgerald 2016, 152, 157–59. Fitzgerald 2016, 152, 168–77.

22

Fitzgerald 2016, 152, 159–65.

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Studying Ancient Miscellanism (5) Reader’s Experience

Fifthly, Fitzgerald observes that miscellanists often draw attention to ‘characterisations of the reader and reading of the miscellany’.24 Some emphasise that readers are expected to delight in the variety that alleviates tedium, or that the reader is also expected to engage in a miscellanistic practice of his own, excerpting from the work and reordering its contents according to his own tastes or intentions. Clement emphasises that his stromatic notes require a diligent reader passionately in love with the truth, who will hunt it out where it lies hidden and patiently cultivate the seeds of gnosis that he discovers (Str. I.i.18.1, 21.1; xii.56.3).

(6) Programmatic Variety While Fitzgerald does not include it in his typology, he uses case studies to draw attention to the significance of how authors crafted parts of their work to highlight variety, particularly at programmatic points such as the beginnings of books. This is harder to classify as a rhetorical trope (and Fitzgerald does not attempt to do so), but it works in conjunction with the rhetorical tropes to underscore literary self-awareness in relation to other miscellanistic works. Horace in his Odes begins with a ‘parade’ of odes in each of the different metres that he uses, as well as the main topics and roles that he adopts. The Younger Pliny does something similar at the start of his Letters, exhibiting the different letter types and principal themes in subject matter as the reader enters the work. Gellius’ contents table (by contrast with Pliny’s) underscores not the order but the variety of the content of his work. Within such works, there are also many artful juxtapositions or associative transitions between one topic and another that point up for the reader the shifting contours of the contents of each book. Similarly, for a reader working through Clement’s lengthy prose, the variegated composition and miscellanistic character is not only advertised in the tropes and imagery, but is also a vivid part of the experience of encountering the work. This is most intensively experienced in the Stromateis, but is also a characteristic of the Protrepticus and Paedagogus. After the preface, the Protrepticus embarks on a lengthy, miscellaneous critique of Greek mystery cults, in which Clement parades

24

Fitzgerald 2016, 152, 165–68.

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his miscellanistic learning;25 once he moves into the scriptural portions later in the Protrepticus, the thread of his thought is particularly hard to discern; in the instruction books of the Paedagogus (II–III), he slips between quotation, exegesis, ekphrasis, invective, exemplary discourse and injunction, with elusive ease. In the Stromateis, although the overarching structure and thematic progression is clear, at a closer level of encountering the text, Clement glides seamlessly from one thought to another by associative transitions and strings together citations at length. The architecture of the literary project as a whole, which orders a series of works in formally different genres into a coherent sequence (Protrepticus, Paedagogus, Stromateis, probably originally followed by a more exegetical work, Hypotyposeis), is itself a form of generic miscellaneity that performs on a grand scale the kind of deliberate variegation that is found Horace’s Odes, where poems in different metres (and thus different poetic traditions) are juxtaposed within one book.26

Summary Clement rhetorically advertises his relationship to a literary strand within Classical miscellanism, and this demonstrates an intentionality about it that makes it worthy of closer investigation. What we are investigating is not just how he was trained in basic practices of excerption, selection and reordering of material, but how and why he artfully deployed rhetorical tropes, imagery and metatextual observations to thematise his intentional participation in a wider discourse of learned literary miscellanism. However, this needs further definition in both literary and cultural terms. Fitzgerald’s typology of tropes allowed him to analyse a very wide range of literary forms together: not only the classic miscellanistic paradigms such as Gellius’ Nights, but also letter collections (Seneca, Pliny the Younger), poetry collections (Horace, Martial), and even Renaissance and early modern miscellanies (Jonson, Ronsard). His typology did not allow for non-literary works such as school-books or dictionaries, which Morgan had brought into the picture by her emphasis on the enkyklios paideia; but it still retained a much broader scope than is immediately relevant for Clement. 25

26

Modern scholars often suggest that he used excerpt collections for this passage (e.g., Riedweg 1987, 120; Jourdan 2010, 165); more interesting in the present context, however, is his use of a rhetoric of miscellanism. See further below, Chapter 10. For Horace’s generic miscellaneity: Fitzgerald 2016, 178–79, 184–85.

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For a study of Clement, we should attend primarily to those miscellanies that are most similar to his in form and social background within the Classical world. This encourages a focus on learned, prose miscellanism of the early empire, and indeed whenever comparisons have been drawn between Clement and Classical miscellanists, it is always prose authors, such as Gellius, Plutarch or Athenaeus, who have come up. This focus retains fuzzy edges, both in social context and in literary form: socially, it would be artificial sharply to demarcate the literary culture of miscellanists from that of other learned prose writers at the time; and in formal, literary terms, ‘miscellanism’ remains diverse, with a particularly fluid boundary between learned miscellanism and encyclopedism.27 The next section explores these contours of Clement’s literary culture by introducing paradigmatic miscellanists to compare.

a comparative literary method: individual miscellanists as case studies Throughout the history of the attempt to conceptualise Buntschriftstellerei, or miscellanism, it has been necessary to recur to some classic examples of this form of literary endeavour. Already in the Renaissance, it was approached with special respect for particular ancient miscellanists: Gellius above all, but also Plutarch, Athenaeus and Macrobius. Modern scholarly research has ferreted out the tokens and traces of many lost miscellanies, but has had to base more detailed accounts on the works that are preserved. The present study focuses on four comparative texts, in particular: Plutarch’s προβλήματα συμποσιακά, Pliny’s naturalis historia, Gellius’ noctes Atticae, and Athenaeus’ Δειπνοσοφισταί. These span the late first to early third century. They share a number of features with each other and with Clement. There are some direct literary relationships between them as well: Gellius certainly worked with both Plutarch and Pliny, and Athenaeus had read at least some of Plutarch. In his Zitatenregister to Clement, Stählin finds more citations to Plutarch’s προβλήματα συμποσιακά than to any of Plutarch’s other works.28 He finds none to Athenaeus,29 but Clement has often been compared with Athenaeus, 27 29

28 Too 2010, 63–64; König and Woolf 2013a, 52–58. Stählin 1980 (Register), 54. If O. Murray 2015, 31–32; 2018, 695–98 is correct about Athenaeus’ dates, as I think he is, then Athenaeus was writing slightly too late for Clement to have read his work. The earliest attested reader was Aelian (c. 170–c. 235 AD).

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particularly in his quotation technique.30 Athenaeus, in turn, has been compared with Plutarch, Gellius, Pliny and Clement.31 This section introduces each of these works by locating them in their broader literary and social setting and indicating the most prominent ways in which they engage with the task of finding order within variety, without ceasing to relish in variety itself. I try to understand why this matters to them and how their work operates constructively at the intersection between literary and cultural formation. The purpose is in part simply to provide an introduction to authors who are not normally read together: Classicists reading this book may skip the sections on Classical authors, and Clement scholars may skim through the portion on Clement. However, this chapter also has a function within my larger argument: attentiveness to the individual miscellanies brings out the diversity of the group and the uniqueness of each miscellanistic author. This problematises the approach to Clement that sees his miscellany as peripheral to imperial miscellanism. If every miscellany is unique, experimental and different, then there is no immediate reason to regard Clement as more different or alien to the wider culture of miscellany-making. Furthermore, the differences and coherence of each project gives rise to a methodological point that will be important in this work: each miscellany should be considered separately when comparing it with Clement; we cannot do justice to the character of these works or this literary culture by dissolving the differences into a set of common denominators.

Plutarch’s Quaestiones Convivales, or Table Talk Plutarch’s Quaestiones Convivales (QC), or Table Talk, in English, is one of the most significant examples of miscellany writing both because of its literary quality and its influence on later miscellanists, including Gellius, Athenaeus and Clement.32 It was written towards the end of Plutarch’s life: he probably died in the early 120s, and the QC is thought to have been composed under Trajan, some time between AD 99 and 116.33 It is dedicated to a Roman, Sossius Senecio, Plutarch’s friend, a favourite of

30 31

32

33

Inowlocki 2011, 208; J. König 2012, 147. Irvine 1994, 164; Keulen 2009, 27; Jacob 2013, 15–18, 74 n. 8; J. König and Woolf 2013a, 58. For the influence of QC, see J. König 2007, 45 n. 5. On Gellius, in particular: Klotz and Oikonomopoulou 2011b. Klotz and Oikonomopoulou 2011a, 4.

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Trajan (AD 98–117) of equestrian rank. The conversations it recounts are set much earlier, from in the 60s, when Plutarch was a student, to perhaps the early 90s. Purportedly, the Quaestiones record Plutarch’s memories from banquets held in many different locations over many years, involving a range of participants. The QC is a good example of the crossing of literary genres, which was common in this period. Plutarch calls it συμποτικὰ ζητήματα (3 pr. 645c and 4.1, 660d) or προβλήματα (612e, 629e), which evokes both the tradition of philosophical sympotic literature inspired by Plato’s Symposium and the ‘literary and intellectual tradition’ of ‘problems’ to which the Peripatetics ‘made a distinctive contribution’.34 Both of these genres were well-established and widely practised by Plutarch’s day. In addition, the epistolary prefaces to each book situate the whole in a relationship between author and addressee, presenting the work as personal gift from Plutarch to his friend. This hybridity of form proves integral to the character of the miscellaneity. Variety is introduced in many ways. In the early books, Plutarch exploits the potential of the epistolary preface to highlight elements of variety in the composition: the questions mix together those that are needed at the symposium and those that are good to contemplate and suit the moment (2 pr. 629c–d); the haphazard and scattered presentation of the material corresponds to the way it came to Plutarch’s memory (2 pr. 629d–e). The quaestiones themselves are diverse enough to include philosophy, cosmology, sympotica, dialectics, geometry, botany, theology and literature. The transition from one conversation to the next sometimes depends on narrative continuity, moving smoothly onto the next question at the same symposium; at other times, the location and setting shift abruptly. The conversations vary in mood and tone, from earnest to playful. The participants are diverse in age (both young and old are involved), profession (including grammarians, rhetors, philosophers) and in philosophical allegiance (Epicurean, Stoic, Platonic). There are different narrative distances to the voices that are engaged in the conversations, since they include not only the participants in the dialogues, but also quotations of texts from the past. The citations and quotations are drawn from diverse texts, in different genres and carrying different types of authority. The guests cite them with different intentions and in varied ways. Klotz refers to ‘social poikilia’ in the mode of carrying on the 34

Oikonomopoulou 2011, 105; on the literary genre: Klotz and Oikonomopoulou 2011a, 12–24; Kechegia 2011, 78–81.

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conversation, where it is ‘not restricted to the pepaideumenos, and everyone is invited, at times compelled, to join in’.35 Plutarch himself, as author, participates in many of the conversations and is represented at different stages of his life, without any linear development in the course of the book.36 The conversations themselves vary in length. They are located at diverse geographical sites, social occasions and temporal moments. Plutarch lends order to variety in the first place through his handling of the literary form. The work is divided into nine books, each with a preface, and ten questions per book, except for the last, which has fifteen. This formal structure provides an overarching sense of order and deliberate artistry. The whole is framed in the context of the single personal relationship between the author, Plutarch, and his dedicatee, Sossius Senecio. The prefaces often highlight aspects of order, and here one of Plutarch’s characteristic approaches to ordering material emerges: he is fond of binary distinctions. Some of these are traditional, others he develops with originality and sophistication. Issues of order at the symposium are also brought up in the quaestiones themselves from early in the first book (QC 1.2, 4). This keen awareness of order is complemented by a teleological attitude to the symposium: one speaker describes ‘the sympotic telos’ (τὸ συμποτικὸν τέλος) as friendship (1.4, 621c), and Plutarch’s own prefaces often emphasise friendliness as the aim and the character of the symposium, as well as of sympotic reflections such as those he presents to his reader. The ‘friend-making character of the table’ is the principle of selecting what is recollected and recorded (τὸ φιλοποιὸν τῆς τραπέζης, 1 pr. 612d), just as friendliness and harmony is the most significant principle in the very first question, concerning whether philosophy should be discussed over the cups. This emphasis on sympotic friendship seems to be shared with many other Roman elites. The unity of the sympotic experience also has a religious dimension, as the symposium is dedicated to Dionysus (cf. 1 pr. 612e; 1.1, 615a). The QC repeatedly model the step from the sympotic context to consideration of issues of a cosmic scale. This invites us to reflect on what they suggest about variety and coherence in the wider world. Many scholars have interrogated this from a philosophical or a political perspective. It is generally agreed that QC has no independent political programme. Nonetheless, König points out that it does attempt to organise knowledge

35

Klotz 2011, 165.

36

Klotz 2011.

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in an imperial setting. Through the choice of questions, locations, perspectives and speakers, Plutarch attempts to respect local identities while bringing them into relation with an overarching, imperial identity. At the same time, he seeks to preserve ultimate allegiance to philosophical truth, Platonically conceived.37 However, like all miscellanies, the most important way in which the work finds unity is in organising the life of the reader. Jason König emphasises primarily the open-endedness, which leaves responsibility with the reader to find meaning. This is consistent with the theory in Plutarch’s educational treatises, which emphasise the need for the individual to respond and receive something beneficial for his or her own formation (e.g., de aud. 42b).38 The implication of this is that the coherence is found primarily within the individual’s own life. The idea of the active, critically engaged reader is integral to the philosophical purpose of Plutarch’s work.

Pliny the Elder, Natural History Pliny the Elder, born in AD 23/24, pursued a typical equestrian career, serving as a cavalry officer, a provincial administrator, an imperial adviser and a legal orator, in addition to his expansive literary endeavours. His dramatic death during the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 was recounted by his nephew, known to moderns as Pliny the Younger (Ep. 6.16). Since it occurred in the course of his attempt to investigate the eruption, it was often portrayed romantically in art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as an iconic death of a ‘protomartyr of empirical observation’.39 However, the Natural History is a work of literary more than of empirical research. Pliny claims to have gathered 20,000 noteworthy facts from reading around 2,000 books, researching 100 authors, and adding other things that earlier generations missed (pr. 17). His thirty-six40 volumes frequently cite literary authorities, and the monumental character of ‘these little books of a rather light work’ (‘levioris operae hos . . . libellos’, pr. 12) puts flesh on the Younger Pliny’s description of his uncle at work: any time that was not spent on work he 37 39 40

38 J. König 2007, 62–68; Oikonomopoulou 2011. J. König 2007, esp. 47–50. Murphy 2004a, 4. NH appears as thirty-seven volumes in modern editions, but Pliny himself counted thirtysix, as the preface was excluded. The number (4 x 9) may be significant, as four times the number of the Muses, cf. Chapter 8, below.

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considered wasted; he slept as little as possible, made notes on his reading even during mealtimes and when being rubbed down or travelling and ceased from his labours only when fully immersed in the bath (Ep. 3.5.7–17). The Natural History is a unique project. Pliny calls it a ‘novicium Camenis Quiritium tuorum opus’ (‘a novel work for the Muses of your Roman citizens’, pr. 1) – choosing the terms Camenae for the Muses and Quirites for the citizens of Rome, both of them terms that reverberate with native Roman tradition. The author’s claim to novelty is in itself nothing new: many authors asserted the distinctiveness of their project. However, Pliny’s claim to originality strikes an unusually accurate note. Modern scholars have tried to situate his work in relation to earlier literary projects that sought to encompass the whole of knowledge in a book, but there are few to be discovered. Greek literature does not appear to have had any tradition of encyclopaedic prose. Early Latin literature may possibly have attempted it but much has been lost and of those works that we know anything of, there is nothing that approaches Pliny’s work in the scale, architecture or novelty of its conception. Pliny himself cites not predecessors but nonpredecessors, including poets and historians. His ambition is to do something entirely new. In this – it has been generally agreed – he has succeeded.41 Pliny claims as his subject matter ‘nature, that is, life’ (‘rerum natura, hoc est vita’, pr. 13). It is nature, in the sense of the physical cosmos, that provides the most overt literary structure for the contents of the work. The whole of the first book is given over to a table of contents, of which Pliny is rather proud (pr. 33). In it, he maps the structure of the work, book by book, listing first its contents, then the authorities from which it comes. The contents work their way from the world (‘mundus’) (NH 2), through the sites, races, seas, towns, harbours, mountains, rivers and peoples of Europe, Africa and Asia (NH 3–6); the human being (NH 7); other animals of land, sea and air (NH 8–10); insects (NH 11); plants, including trees of various kinds, their origins and uses (NH 12–17); crops, medicinal garden plants, flowers, herbs (NH 18–22); medicines from trees and plants and other drugs (NH 23–27); drugs from animals (NH 28–32); properties of metals (NH 33–34), painting (NH 35), stones and gems (NH 36–37).

41

Murphy 2004a, 195–97; Doody 2009; J. König and Woolf 2013a, 37–44.

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This looks like a highly ordered structure. It is a display of organisation that seeks to bring the whole work into a single place, just as the work seeks to bring the whole world into a single place. The correspondence between the work and the subject matter is one of the central features of this great ‘opus’; at the start of book 2, Pliny describes the world: It is sacred, eternal, immeasurable, wholly within the whole, or rather, entirety itself; finite yet resembling the infinite; certain of all things yet resembling the uncertain; embracing all things within and without; and at once a work of nature and nature herself (idemque rerum naturae opus et rerum ipsa natura). (Pliny, NH 2.1.2, tr. Carey 2003, 19)

Sorcha Carey points out that this is also a description of Pliny’s own work. That too is a ‘rerum naturae opus’, in the sense of an opus that describes ‘the things of nature’. His work too seeks to encapsulate the infinite in the finite, to embrace all things within and outside itself.42 There are many occasions where Pliny draws attention to his role in ordering and classifying material: when he is abbreviating or excluding, he feels the need to mention and defend it, as if there were a larger purpose to which his order adheres. Nature is an arch-classifier of things, and Pliny is doing something similar in his literary composition. He uses the authorial voice to explain systems of classification, to cross-reference within his work, to list and to structure units and sub-units of material through introductions and conclusions.43 So why is this work included in my selection of imperial miscellanies? If it has so much ostensible order, what makes it a fitting work to discuss alongside Plutarch, Gellius, Athenaeus and, eventually, Clement? We saw that Plutarch combined elements of formal structure with a high degree of interest in variety and miscellaneity. This is true also of Pliny. The abundance and variety in nature feeds his impulse to search out, catalogue and classify all that he discovers. So important is variety that it emerges as a distinguishing characteristic of humanity itself, for whose sake nature furnished all the rest (7.1.1; 36.1.1). With only ten features in the human physiognomy (on Pliny’s count), nature renders every human face distinct, thus surpassing any art (7.1.8). Indeed, as Mary Beagon points out, there is something peculiarly human about variety, according to Pliny:44

42 44

43 Carey 2003, 19. Naas 2002, 171–234; Carey 2003, 26–32; Beagon 2005, 34. Beagon 2005, 24–25, 43–46, 215.

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A thought suddenly flitting across the mind of either parent is supposed to produce likeness or to cause a combination of features, and the reason why there are more differences in man than in all the other animals is that his swiftness of thought and quickness of mind and variety of mental character impress a great diversity of patterns, whereas the minds of the other animals are sluggish, and are alike for all and sundry, each in their own kind. (Pliny, NH 7.12.52–53, tr. Rackham, LCL 352, pp. 540–41)

The proper response to the variety in nature is the one that Pliny models: the learned enquiry that seeks out and charts the abundant diversity of nature. This challenges him to find reliable information and order it effectively. Pliny commits himself to accountability throughout his work: he lists his authorities in the index at the beginning and cites them in detail as he gives his account. In addition to learned writers, he cites what is known by reputation, tradition, story or myth. He selects and classifies. In doing so, he is faced with the task of assigning value. Often he picks out the first, greatest or best in a particular category, delighting in the particularity, the detail, the specific, the names and places that answer to these descriptions of ‘first’, ‘best’, ‘most famous’ (7.39.128, 41.133; 36.4.32, 5.44, 6.47, etc.).45 Pliny acknowledges the danger of overreaching himself on account of the sheer abundance and natural diversity of the world (7.29.107), where fortuna changes people’s fortunes so often that the instances are ‘innumerable’ (7.42.134). Sometimes he resorts to examples, as these can be noted without needing to list the complete set (7.49.165). Another challenge arises from the relativity of all systems of ordering and selection. Precisely because humanity is so diverse, the systems of classification and rank are varied too (7.40.130; 36.5.44). Nonetheless, some value judgements are integral to the architecture of knowledge in the work as a whole. Rome’s pre-eminence could not be disputed without undoing the fabric of Pliny’s organisation of material (7.40.130; 36.24.101).46 Pliny models an approach of a scholar-author whose concerns are at once philosophical and patriotic. Both the world as a whole, and Rome in

45

46

The interest in ‘firsts’ and superlatives was shared with many intellectuals. For this feature in Favorinus’ largely lost miscellanies, see Sandy 1997, 79–80. Cf. Beagon 2005, 50–52 (pp. 51–52: ‘Overall, Pliny’s comments on the Roman achievement epitomize the two basic characteristics of the human race as a whole, discussed earlier: variety and universality. Rome offers many examples of every kind of excellence and outstrips in her variety and comprehensiveness the whole of the rest of the world. The Roman race is a microcosm of the human race, a fact which justifies its predominance among the examples of book 7.’); Beagon 2013.

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particular, come under his purview, and their significance often coincides. As a scholar, he busies himself with researching, selecting and ordering facts, and showing reverent esteem for the sheer variety of nature that presents itself before him. He invites his readers to participate in this delight in enquiry, so as to preserve for social memory all that is in danger of being forgotten. To remember well is a cultural necessity (e.g., 2.117–18; 14.1–2). It is also an individual distinction. One of the examples of a good memory that impresses him is the person able to quote from memory any books from a library (7.24.88–89). It is an accomplishment we might expect to appeal to a learned author of miscellanies.47 Alternative responses to the variety of nature are often criticised: luxury is the immoral response to nature’s variety, but is a pervasive problem in the world he describes.48 Just as humanity alone is characterised by variety, so luxury affects no other species but humankind, and it comes in countless forms, touching every part of the human being (7.1.5). People are tempted to variegate even the marble walls of their homes with engraving and painting (35.1.3). Epicures delight in dishes of dying mullet that exhibit a variety of changing colours (9.30.66), and indeed the variety of the sea generally causes abundant trouble to the stomach (9.53.104). Romans have given a special name to pearls as ‘unique gems’, suggesting their pleasure in the variety that produces no two alike (9.56.112). Less morally reprehensible, but still less worthy of respect than the scholarly enquiry of the historia, is the form of curiosity that seeks out wonders and marvels simply to be amazed at them. In comparing his work with his non-predecessors, Pliny pointed out that their miscellanies contained mere trivia. His own work often draws attention to mirabilia, and it stands in part in the style of paradoxography that was popularised in Hellenistic Alexandria. He does cater to the kind of reader who is merely curious in a light-hearted way; his ‘levior opus’ can speak to the armchair dilettante of his generation. However, his desire is to deepen his reader’s curiosity into a reverence for the mighty deity of nature herself.49 From a formal perspective, the Natural History is on the edge of the circle of ‘miscellanies’ singled out for attention here, but it deserves a place in the discussion. Among extant prose works of the period, it shares a great deal with the miscellanists, while its differences also underscore

47

Cf. Too 2000.

48

Fitzgerald 2016, 36.

49

Beagon 2011.

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the fluidity of this style of writing. Pliny faces similar issues to the miscellanists in terms of acquiring and arranging material for his readers, and using an expansive literary composition of his scattered researches to try to mediate a perspective on the world. He conveys his respect for his readers’ rights to miscellanise his own work by glossing his table of contents as a precaution against his dedicatee actually having to read the books (pr. 33). Scholars have seen this as a way of authorising alternative readings of his work and encouraging readers to excerpt from his books in composing their own.50 Indeed, Pliny became important to one of the undisputed and best-known miscellanists, to whom we now turn.

Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights Gellius was born between AD 125 and 128 in one of the coloniae, he was educated in Rome and Athens, he later lived in Rome and had a residence in Praeneste. He wrote during the reign of Antoninus Pius (AD 138–161) and probably continued during Marcus Aurelius’ reign (AD 161–180). It is not known when he published, and Holford-Strevens suggests it may have been after Marcus’ death. Others argue for an earlier date on the basis of silences about events that he might have been expected to mention, such as the death of Peregrinus Proteus in AD 165.51 His teachers and friends included some of the most distinguished literary men of his day, C. Sulpicius Apollinaris and Favorinus. He was also acquainted with Cornelius Fronto and was a guest of Herodes Atticus in Athens.52 Gellius had read both Plutarch’s Table Talk and Pliny’s Natural History, at least in part, and he interacts with both of them. Abjuring Plutarch’s sympotic framework, Gellius presents itemised notes and anecdotes as the fruit of his leisure time, or ‘otium’. Otium was a resonant term in Roman culture, especially in the empire: it was the time when a Roman was at leisure from serving the empire in negotium. During the late Republic and early Empire, otium became an increasingly important part of the aristocratic lifestyle. Some of the great sophists were content to be seen to engage in a variety of pursuits in their otium, diversifying their intellectual labours with grape-picking or hunting. Gellius was not: like Plutarch and Athenaeus, he was absorbed by the culture of the

50 52

51 Too 2010, 63. Rolfe 1927 (= LCL 195), xiv. Holford-Strevens 2003, 11–26.

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pepaideumenoi, and this is the focus of all his notes and self-presentation in the Noctes Atticae.53 Not only are Gellius’ Nights often about what he did in his leisure time, but they are also composed during his leisure hours (pr. 1–4, 10). The interests he caters to are often linguistic and bookish. He quotes books at length, and books provide the starting points for many of his commentarii. Both he and those to whom he listens appear to be fascinated by etymologies, grammatical accuracy, pronunciation and comparisons between Greek and Latin. It is deemed entertaining at Favorinus’ symposium that someone reads a book to the guests called On Verbs and Substantives, and the guests discuss a grammatical point over dinner (3.19).54 The intense preoccupation with book-learning and libraries is shared with Pliny and even more with Athenaeus. Plutarch’s Table Talk strikes a different note: books are respected but bookishness hardly arises. However, the formal presentation of Gellius’ commentarii in discrete, bite-sized chapters recalls the sympotic problems of Plutarch. Like Plutarch, Gellius exploits this form of arrangement for the sake of variety. The items vary in length, subject, tone and literary form. They include narrative, scientific problems, marvels and debates about language. They deal with music, measurement, law, religion, anatomy, the calendar and many other things. Some are framed as personal recollections; others arise more immediately from reading. Some involve Gellius; others are principally about other people. Issues of variety are foregrounded within individual anecdotes in different ways. There are anecdotes that focus on issues of variety, such as the variety of colour names in Greek and Latin (2.26) or the variety of usages of certain Latin particles (11.3). There are items that comment on the charming variety of someone else’s rhetorical style, such as the one on Publius Nigidius’ differentiation between falsehood (‘mendacium dicere’) and lying (‘mentiri’). Gellius comments: ‘With variety, by Hercules, and charm did Nigidius differentiate so many views about the same thing, as if he were saying something different each time!’ (‘varie me hercule et lepide Nigidius tot sententias in eandem rem, quasi aliud atque aliud diceret, disparavit,’ 11.11.4). A question of translation of a book title, Περὶ Πολυπραγμοσύνης, provides the occasion for a careful differentiation between various kinds of multiplicity and the etiquette of attitudes towards them (11.16). 53 54

Vardi 2004, 183–86; Heusch 2011, 306–27. Johnson 2010, 98–136; Too 2010, 63–67.

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There are fewer overt systems of ordering material than in Plutarch or Pliny. Gellius does use a table of contents, in imitation of Pliny, but the number of items in each book varies, and there is no situational or thematic unity, unlike Plutarch’s sympotic situation or Pliny’s ‘nature’ theme. To be sure, the arrangement is a product of literary construction, not merely ‘haphazard’ as he claims in the preface: variety is actively cultivated in the juxtaposition of unlike material, and the selection of anecdotes at key positions in the work, such as the very first one on how to measure Hercules, is deliberate.55 But in no strong sense does the literary form provide us with an ordering principle through which to engage with the work. Consistency of perspective arises instead through recurrence of themes and standpoints. Some of these have already been highlighted: the experience of otium as a space for intellectual engagement, the authorial persona of Gellius, the interest in books and language. In addition, there is a cast of characters who are repeatedly mentioned, including learned sophists whom Gellius respects, such as Favorinus, Fronto and Calvenus Taurus,56 and ignorant pseudo-sophists whom he delights in debunking.57 There are overarching values, such as friendship,58 and consistent approaches to the world and the things in it, such as the eye for detail and fine distinctions.

Athenaeus, Deipnosophists Athenaeus came from Naucratis, the oldest Greek city in Egypt, a port city and centre of trade to the east of Alexandria. During the Empire, sophistic culture flourished there – Proclus (Philostratus’ teacher), Apollonius, Ptolemy and Pollux all originated there.59 Athenaeus moved to Rome, but at what date is uncertain: if his self-portrayal as a member of Larensis’ circle is historical, then that would place him in the late second century. Many scholars have supported this, but Oswyn Murray’s reconstruction is more convincing: he points out that an early third century dating accords better with some passing allusions to near-contemporaries, such as ‘Oppian of Cilicia, who lived a little before us’ (1.13b) and Commodus ‘in our day’ (12.537f ). He suggests that the celebration of Larensis is likely nostalgic, as the bibliophilic author imagines the book

55 57 59

56 Morgan 2004, 190–91. Holford-Strevens 2003, 83–154; Heusch 2011, 251–70. 58 Vardi 2001; Keulen 2004. Morgan 2004. On the significance of Naucratis: Bowersock 1969, 20.

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world of an earlier generation, contemplated from a vantage point post AD 192, when several of the most significant libraries in Rome went up in flames.60 In the dramatic context of the narrative, Athenaeus is under the patronage of Larensis, who is the wealthy equestrian who hosts of the banquets in the Deipnosophists. Jacob points out the geographical dynamic signalled in the link between Athenaeus and Larensis – the author’s name evokes Athens (cf. ‘Athenaios’), his hometown evokes Alexandria, and his patron is a powerful Roman at the heart of Rome, which is also the physical and spiritual location of the banquets depicted. This triangle – between Athens, Alexandria and Rome – was culturally significant in the Empire, where Athens symbolised the spiritual home of Greek language and literature, Alexandria the Hellenistic tradition of scholarship with its library, museum and famous alumni, Rome the centre of political power in the Mediterranean world and beyond.61 The Deipnosophists is a sprawling work. It stretches to fifteen books.62 In it, Athenaeus recounts to his friend Timocrates the occasion of a banquet, or series of banquets, hosted by the Roman procurator Larensis. The guests are all learned men of the age. The epitomator’s description opens by signalling its variety in subject matter: [Athenaeus] omits no one’s finest sayings; for he included fish in his book, and the ways they are prepared and the derivations of their names, as well as every sort of vegetable, animals of every kind, and authors of historical works, poets, and philosophers. He also described musical instruments, a million types of jokes, different styles of drinking cups, the wealth of kings, huge ships – and so many other items that I could not easily mention them all, or else the day would end as I was still going through them category by category. (Athen. Deipn. 1.1a–b, tr. Olson, LCL 204, pp. 2–5)

Abundance and variety go hand in hand, but the epitomator also points to the way it is structured: The account is arranged to imitate the extravagance of the dinner party, and the book’s structure reflects how the dinner was organized. This is the sort of delightful feast of words this marvellous chief literary steward Athenaeus introduces. (Athen. Deipn. 1.1b, tr. Olson, LCL 204, 205) 60 61

62

O. Murray 2015, 31–34; 2018, 702–4. Jacob 2013, 11. On Athenaeus’ Egyptian context: Thompson 2000. On his Roman patron: Braund 2000. Earlier scholarship thought that the fifteen books were themselves a mere excerpt of a much longer work, originally stretching to twice that length. However, recent scholarship has shown that this is very unlikely: Rodríguez-Noriega Guillén 2000.

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Conversation follows the course of the banquet itself. Most of it turns on what is set before the guests at the table, or in the entertainment that follows. Larensis follows the personal rule of never eating anything till he has asked whether or not a word is found in literature. The discussion comprises the learned citation of literary passages that mention or discuss the dishes. This description already gives an indication of the relationship between variety and order in this work: variety comes through subject matter, speaker, speaker’s character and perspectives, quotations and uses of quotations. The dishes set before the guests are lavishly rich and varied, but the memories they evoke through literary citation and quotation are even more so. Quotations are piled up in abundance. Just as the meal prompts literary enquiry concerning issues such as where a piece of food is first cited in literature, so too the literary quotations themselves prompt further enquiry and further quotation. Athenaeus has been much cherished by later scholars hunting for fragments of lost literary classics, and it is no wonder: he quotes at length, and he does so systematically, naming the source from which he cites and copying accurately (where we can check).63 These practices not only lend quotations precision, but also enhance the dazzling variety of voices and sources who are brought into this conversation. The positive value of variety (poikilia in Greek) as a literary principle is foregrounded in the opening of the second book, where Timocrates comments to Athenaeus that the logoi kept him awake because of their varied character (ὄντες ποικίλοι, Deipn. 2.35a).64 At the opening of the tenth, Athenaeus quotes from a satyr play, Heracles: ‘Like the varied [ποικίλην] bounty of a rich dinner, such must be the fare provided by the clever poet for the spectators, so that each departs after getting his fill, having eaten and drunk again what he likes, and the entertainment is not one monotonous dish [σκευασία μὴ μί᾽ ᾖ τῆς μουσικῆς]’ (Deipn. 10.411a, tr. Gulick, LCL 2351, 365).65 An overarching sense of order is attained through the narrative unity of the symposium and the mimetic relationship between the subject matter and the literary form.66 Within this overarching structure, Athenaeus uses literary devices for organising the work: two conversations are kept in

63 65

66

64 Arnott 2000, 41. Wilkins 2000, 31. Lukinovich 1990, 269. On Athenaeus’ poikilia in general: Lukinovich 1990, 266–68. For the quotation on this occasion I have preferred Gulick’s translation from the older LCL edition, both on grounds of word order and colourful diction. Lukinovich 1990; Romeri 2000.

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view, that of Athenaeus reporting the banqueting to Timocrates (who says little), and that of the Deipnosophists and other characters talking among themselves at dinner. Most books open and close with dialogue between Athenaeus and Timocrates. The meal is marked by some significant turning points: the main courses begin in book 5 and the deipnon ends in book 10. Throughout, Plato’s Symposium lies in the background, as a model to emulate.67 There are some characteristic patterns of interaction between the guests, whose core group remains stable throughout the work. Ulpian is prickly, pedantic, eats little, and yet is accused of gluttony; Cynulcus is his opposite number, delighting in the food and, equally, being charged with gluttony. Among literary ordering devices, lists and catalogues take a prominent place.68 Athenaeus has often been compared with Plutarch, because he shares in the attempt to write a sympotic miscellany, and these are the two imperial sympotic miscellanies that are most fully extant today. To what extent Athenaeus intended to invite comparison with Plutarch is unclear. He only once explicitly attributes material to Plutarch; one character at the banquet is named ‘Plutarch’, which may be a playful allusion to Plutarch of Chaeronea, but the sympotic literary form was widespread and a deliberate response to Plutarch’s QC, in particular, cannot be proved.69 Christian Jacob draws attention to several differences between Plutarch and Athenaeus: in narrative structure and setting, Plutarch’s banquets are spread over a variety of geographical locations and a long time period; different occasions have different interlocutors, and different circumstances in play. With Athenaeus, on the other hand, several banquets are condensed into one with a single, unchanging circle of guest speakers. In intellectual level, Plutarch’s guests span different stages of learning, and the conversation has to be accessible to all, so as not to spoil the conviviality and friendly spirit of the feast; in Athenaeus, all the guests are well-educated almost to the point of caricature, the discussion is convivial and collaborative but at the most obsessively learned level. The nature of authorial presence also differs: Plutarch has a much more prominent authorial presence in the banquets than Athenaeus – though both depart from Plato in introducing authorial presence to their account

67

68 69

Rodríguez-Noriega Guillén 2000, 251–52 sets out the structure clearly in tabular form; Wilkins 2000, 23–24. On Plato and Athenaeus: Trapp 2000. Wilkins 2000, 24–29, 31–32. Cf. Klotz and Oikonompoulou 2011a, 17. Athenaeus cites Plutarch of Chaeronea at 2.52d, cf. Plut. QC 1.6, 624c.

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of the philosophical symposium at all. Subjects for discussion differ: in Plutarch the discussion is far more varied, in Athenaeus it is more focused on food.70 The conceit of speaking being like eating is handled differently by Plutarch and Athenaeus: it was traditional to play on it, but different authors do so in different ways. Plutarch tried to keep food out of the discussion; he portrayed symposia, and left aside the ‘deipnon’ (meal) that preceded the drinking. Larensis’ guests spend most of their time talking and listening to one another. Their conversation is always prompted by the food, but the consumption of the food itself is repeatedly delayed while the words take their course.71 The comparison with Plutarch is an obvious one to pursue because of the sympotic form. However, Athenaeus could also be fruitfully compared with both Pliny and Gellius. Pliny’s project, as we have seen, is usually thought to be unique. It has often been compared with earlier encyclopaedic-style works, but can also be compared, perhaps more readily, with the tradition of writing about ‘nature’. Doody suggests that the Natural History would have been stored alongside Seneca’s Natural Questions rather than Varro’s Disciplines or Celsus’ Arts. Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists does in effect catalogue natural history: animals, vegetables and other foods from the earth are carefully arranged here. It has a strong sense of geography and of human interaction, but also celebrates luxury and human ordering.72 There are similarities in approaches to ordering material, both on large and small scale. Just as Pliny tries to organise a nature-shaped work about nature, so Athenaeus pursues the slightly easier task of organising a banquet-shaped work about banqueting.73 Like the scholars of Alexandria and of the Roman Republic, Pliny and Athenaeus share values of polymathy, interpreted by abundance as well as range of learning, and they both have a strong antiquarian interest. They long to preserve a cultural world through books and learning, through citation and quotation. Through their methods of compilation, excerption and library work, they pursue this project on a massive scale. In giving shape to their material, they make use of similar ordering devices such as lists and the citation of ‘firsts’.74 Could we see Athenaeus as a Greek response to Pliny’s Roman project? Pliny’s Naturalis Historia was a well-respected, major work; his importance for later miscellanists with aspirations to make a mark in Roman 70 72 74

71 Jacob 2013, 15–18 for a fuller treatment. Wilkins 2000, 26–27. 73 Wilkins 2008. Beagon 2013, 86, (Pliny); Jacob 2013, 6 (Athenaeus). Comparison with Pliny and Gellius in Jacob 2000, 105–8.

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culture is evident in Gellius’ use of him. To be sure, he wrote in Latin, and Athenaeus in Greek. However, Athenaeus lived in Rome, where bilingualism was common. He writes in Greek because it is the language of the educated within this culture, but he includes discussions of Latin and the culture he portrays is bilingual, even though the discussion is wholly in Greek.75 Larensis, the host of the banquet, is specifically celebrated for his mastery of both Greek and Latin, which he displayed as a priest, charged with administering both Greek and Latin rites in Rome. Athenaeus dubbed him ‘a kind of Asteropaeus’, alluding to an ambidextrous Trojan hero who exceeded all other Greeks and Trojans in height (1.2c). It is plausible that Athenaeus was bilingual himself. The suggestion that his work emulates Pliny’s is consistent with the competitive culture of the imperial world.76 There are points of comparison with Gellius too. Gellius participates in the culture of antiquarianism that is embraced so obsessively by both Pliny and Athenaeus. Athenaeus’ sympotic scene locates learning within the temporal and social space of otium, which is central to Gellius’ project. The culture that Athenaeus depicts revolves around books, literary citation and evaluation and philological details of language. These are much the same interests that occupy Gellius in his Nights. Modern scholars tend to have a rather low opinion of Gellius’ intellectual credentials, and doubtless he would have found Larensis’ banquet somewhat heavy going – but then, the occasion at Larensis’ house is intended as a comic extreme. It is in fact rather reminiscent of the banquets that Gellius describes, where people listen to readings from grammar books and discuss the finer points of syntax and etymology. One of the ongoing jokes in the Deipnosophistae is that the guests keep talking about literary citations for the food set before them, but they struggle to get through the learned discourse so as actually to eat.

Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis, or, The Stromateis of Gnostic Hypomnêmata according to the True Philosophy, and the Larger Corpus We have less information about Clement’s biography than about any of the four pagan miscellanists introduced above. We can be confident that

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E.g., Athen. Deipn. 3.121e–f, Braund 2000, 19–21; Wilkins 2000, 25, 540 n. 12. Lukinovich 1990, 266 refers to Deipnosophistae as ‘a veritable encyclopaedia of sympotic literature’.

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Clement was working on the Stromateis in Alexandria in the late second century; his dates have been plausibly estimated as ca. 150–ca. 215.77 For information about his life, most scholars turn to his autobiographical passage in the beginning of the Stromateis, supplemented by patristic witnesses, especially Eusebius. However, these are dubious sources of evidence: the former is stylised and allusive (as will be seen in more detail in Chapter 5), while the latter is enthusiastic but under-informed and overly crafted for the author’s ends.78 Clement’s Stromateis is his most obviously miscellanistic work, and its full title reinforces its miscellanistic character: The Stromateis of Gnostic Hypomnêmata according to the True Philosophy. The name Stromateis was on Gellius’ list of rejected titles for his Attic Nights; hypomnêmata corresponds to Gellius’ description of his work as ‘commentarii’, and recalls the famous (but now lost) miscellany of Pamphile of Epidaurus, who published Historika Hypomnêmata in thirty-three books.79 The most significant difference between Clement’s literary architecture and that of the Classical miscellanies discussed above is the use of the larger literary corpus. With Bucur, Kovacs, Osborn and many other scholars, I believe that the extant Protrepticus, Paedagogus and Stromateis were composed as steps in a sequentially ordered literary project in Christian formation, whose fourth and final step was the now lost Hypotyposeis. This sequential reading of the works has a long tradition in Clement scholarship, but has sometimes been disputed; a detailed engagement with the issues would be out of place here, but further discussion can be found in Chapter 7 (on the Didaskalos)80 and in the Appendix (on indications of sequential ordering of Protr. Paed. Str.). For now, working on the basis of the sequentially ordered corpus, we can say that Clement’s Stromateis are distinctive for being contextualised within a larger project of this kind. This literary architecture signals that the disorder of the miscellanistic material is ordered to another end, comprising the goal of the project as a whole. Whereas Pliny wrote a nature-shaped work about nature, and Athenaeus wrote a symposium-shaped work about the symposium, Clement’s literary project takes its shape from his understanding of the

77

78

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Cf. Julius Africanus thinks Clement floruit under Commodus (fr. 52), Jerome places his floruit under Severus and Caracalla (de vir. ill. 38). Pujiula 2006, 14–15. Corke-Webster 2019, ch.3, esp. pp. 91–92, 94–95, 102–115. Cf. H. König 2005, 36–88 for a more positive assessment of Eusebius’ value as a source for Clement’s life. 80 Fitzgerald 2016, 153. Below, pp. 196–202.

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progressive formation of the human being to become closer to God and more like God’s image in Christ.81 This ideal of the formation of the reader as a perfected ‘gnostic’ Christian controls the ordering and character of the project as a whole: the Protrepticus focuses on turning people away from ‘custom’ towards Christ; the first book of the Paedagogus constructs them as children of God through baptism, with the Logos as their Pedagogue; the second and third books of the Paedagogus deliver the Pedagogue’s instructions for how to behave well; the Stromateis begins by inviting readers carefully to farm his literary work for hidden gnosis; the different books of the Stromateis then proceed to address the core Christian virtues, beginning with faith, hope and charity (Str. II), followed by books on the theology and ethics of the body, first sexuality (Str. III), then death and martyrdom (Str. IV) and the reading of the scriptures and the plagiarism of the Greeks (Str. V–VI). The extant work culminates in the detailed portrayal of the gnostic (Str. VI–VII), who is the goal of Christian formation, together with a critique of rival Christians’ heretical uses of scripture (Str. VII). It is likely that the Hypotyposeis originally followed this, with more orderly material comprising scriptural exegesis. This large scale ordering of Clement’s work is not explicitly articulated in an index such as Pliny’s or Gellius’, although Clement does list contents at the start of each of the books of the Pedagogue’s instructions in a manner similar to Gellius’ contents tables. The most prominent explicit ordering devices that Clement uses are to be found in his prefaces and sometimes conclusions to particular books, although these can also be misleading: they include some allusions to structural plans that may have been intended at one point, but not realised in the work in its present form.82 Scholars of earlier generations emphasised other signals of order, such as the vocabulary of kephalaia, observed by Méhat.83 However, these are subtle indicators of modes of thinking about the material in itemised and sequenced form, rather than prominent structural markers for the work as a whole. A more visible and less well-studied method of structuring the material is to be found in Clement’s use of imagery.84 He chooses a limited range

81

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83

E.g. Choufrine 2002; Russell 2004, 121–40. For more detail on the Christian telos, see below, Chapter 9, pp. 251–66. Most recently: Havrda 2019 and Havrda (forthcoming). See also: Méhat 1966, 148–75; Ferguson 1974, 179–91. 84 Méhat 1966, 246–79. See Appendix for further discussion.

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of themes in his imagery and often develops them across different works. For example, children appear briefly at the end of the Protrepticus, as Clement urges his readers not to keep dribbling on their ancestors’ bosoms (x.89.1); in the Paedagogus, the imagery of readers as children is developed extensively as they are baptised into God’s family, nurse on the breast of mother church and receive instruction from the Logos Pedagogue, on the way to the Didaskalos; at the end of the Stromateis, the heretics are imaged as naughty children locking out their pedagogue.85 With the Classical miscellanists, we might compare Clement’s imagery of nourishment: whereas Plutarch emphasised the symposium and Athenaeus underscored the delights of the banqueting table, Clement’s metaphorical imagery of nourishment thematises the foods of Christian rituals. Readers of the Paedagogus are portrayed as children who feed on the milk of mother church (Paed. I.vi.35.3); readers of the Stromateis are portrayed as adults preparing to receive communion (Str. I. i.5.1–3). In between the two are the Pedagogue’s instructions for how to behave properly when eating and drinking together (Paed. II), which includes some allusion to the Eucharist (Paed. II.ii.19.3–20.1). It is part of Clement’s idea of Christian formation that people should begin to absent themselves from symposia that are not pious occasions (Str. VII. vii.36.4), but these ritual experiences of baptismal milk, communal meals at the agape and the celebration of the Eucharist, structure his understanding of the Christian life as also his ordering of his literary work. As Athenaeus ordered his material according to the shape of the banquet, so Clement orders his according to the ritual eating and drinking of Christians. Just as philosophers contemporary with Clement devised structured curricula and even reading programmes for students to advance gradually to a deeper knowledge of wisdom,86 so too Clement indicates various 85 86

Str. VII.xvi.99.2. Plato in the Republic had sought to organise a programme of education that began with myths to shape children’s souls, and concluded with dialectic to raise them to encounter with the good. Plato’s own works were ordered in a syllabus by his followers: Thrasyllus (fl. early first cent. AD) divided the dialogues into three blocks of four; Theon of Smyrna (fl. early second cent. AD) is said to have written a book entitled On the Order in Which One Should Read Plato’s Works, and on Their Titles; Albinus (fl. late second cent. AD) outlined two alternative reading programmes for different kinds of students, one that has come to be known as the ‘short course’, and also a ‘long course’. However, he affirmed that reading should not be thought of linear with a single, defined starting point, but rather Plato’s work is perfect like a circle, which can be started in different places, but each person should start reading according to how they personally stand in relation to the

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kinds of structured progress for readers working through both his own books and the books that he cites:87 in the Protrepticus, readers progress from Homer and other Greek literature to Scripture; in the Paedagogus, he envisages a progress from one mode of reading scripture to another, which he leaves to the Didaskalos.88 He knows of pre-catechetical formation as well as catechesis for baptisands.89 He writes of the pre-mysteries before the mysteries in articulating the architecture of the Stromateis.90 He plans to describe the gnostic without the phraseology of Scripture prior to using more scriptural language, so that the Greeks who are less accustomed to the Scriptures may understand.91 He uses imagery of a journey along a path, in a ship or up a ladder, which suggest progress;92 the prefaces to several of the books of the Stromateis draw attention to progression through the work;93 his way of envisaging Christian formation emphasises becoming closer to God and more like God.

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88 90

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logos (Prol. 4–5). For the ideal student, the short course began with the Alcibiades as a form of protreptic, proceeded to the Phaedo, which explains what a philosopher is; then should come the Republic as an education about education; finally, the Timaeus, as a course in nature and beholding the divine. This formed the basis for Iamblichus’ later more detailed curriculum, which became standard in Late Antiquity. Galen wrote a work On the order of my own books, which also legitimised different strategies for working through his own oeuvre, depending on a reader’s level and needs (Gal. Ord. lib. ed. Kühn 1965, vol. 19, 49–61; English translation: Singer 1997, 23–39). Pliny’s index had done the same. Plotinus composed his Enneads in a sequence that corresponded to the ethics – physics – epoptics pattern (Hadot 1979; Löhr 2010, 166; R. C. Fowler 2016, 51; BoysStones 2018, 54–55, 59). We can compare other early Christian reading curricula: Origen thought that the threefold pattern, ethics – physics – epoptics, was reflected in the three works of Solomon, Proverbs – Ecclesiastes – Canticles. To this scheme corresponded also an order for reading the Old Testament as a whole: law – prophets – the beginning of Genesis, Ezekiel’s throne-vision and Canticles; and an order for reading the New: Matthew and Luke – Mark – John (Str. I.xxviii.176; IV.i.3; VI.xviii.168, with Niculescu 2007; Bucur 2009, 18–21; 2017, 140–41). Manuscript compilations of Christian texts, along with early canonical documents such as the Muratorian canon, give further examples of early attempts to order books for a Christian readership. 89 Paed. II.viii.76.1. Neymeyr 1989, 51–54; van den Hoek 1997a, 67–71. E.g., Str. I.i.15.3; IV.i.3.1. Riedweg 1987, 5, 125–30 highlights the three-step system of initiation is articulated in Str. V.xi.70.7–71.2 (καθάρσια, μικρά μυστήρια, μεγάλα μυστήρια) and contextualises it in a wider Platonic and Aristotelian tradition of systematic comparison between stages of initiation into the mysteries and stages in philosophical learning. Str. VII.i.1.1–6. E.g. Protr. x.100.1–3 (path); xii.118.1–3 (ship); Hymn. 34 (path); Str. IV.xxii.135.1 (ladder). Str. IV.i.1.1–3.4; V.i.1.1; VI.i.1–4.

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The overarching structure of Clement’s project, and its purpose, are thus not too difficult to discern in his work. However, at the more detailed level of his text, the messiness, disorderliness and sheer miscellaneity are nakedly apparent. Clement glides seamlessly from one thought to another by associative transitions; he strings together citations at length; he hooks one thought onto another. At the start of the Stromateis, he thematises the varied character of his work using tropes similar to Gellius and Plutarch, who also underscore that they scattered their material and deliberately left it disordered. Furthermore, despite the fact that the Protrepticus and Paedagogus lack formal genre markers of miscellaneity (by contrast with the Stromateis), they too contain much miscellaneous ordering of material. The contest between fragmentation into disorder and that which draws the threads together is characteristic of the ‘genre’ of miscellany. The ways in which we find this in Clement ought to inform the ways in which we approach his work. Above all, the fact that the miscellany proper, the Stromateis, is the third work in a literary corpus that was designed to be read sequentially ought to shape the way we approach his use of miscellanistic tropes. Readers of the Stromateis have been prepared for this miscellany by reading the Protrepticus and the Paedagogus beforehand. These earlier works must therefore be integrated into the discussion of Clement’s literary method and use of miscellanism. At the same time, our study must remain comparative if we are to contemplate his miscellanism fruitfully in relation to the literary culture that he was engaging with.

conclusion: reading individual miscellanists All too often, miscellanists have been approached only for the sake of ransacking them for quotations, citations and snippets of information. This is as true for Classical miscellanists as it is for Clement the Christian author. In a sense, of course, that is precisely what they seem to be for. They gather together varied material so that people can take it up as it suits their needs in a particular context. Dipping in and plucking out were what the reader was expected to do.94 However, this is not the only thing the reader was expected to do, nor is it the only mode of reading that miscellanists encouraged. Teresa Morgan has amassed evidence that miscellanists generally encouraged 94

J. König 2007, esp. 47–50; Too 2010, 63.

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their readers to read straight through. They included introductions and sequenced them, and they built associations between one book and the next, or one chapter and the next.95 If this is how miscellanists wanted to be read, then it is important to study them individually, as we have done here. This opens up a new vantage point from which to critique the way Clement has been contrasted with Classical miscellanists in much modern discussion. Once one accepts that miscellanies are not merely ‘jumbled collections of notes’, but works that play with principles of order and variety, then the comparison between different miscellanies becomes more significant. Clement has often been treated as different from pagan miscellanists, and the grounds given were usually that his work was more systematic, more committed to philosophy and more serious about theology and spirituality. The case studies here tell against all those assertions. Every learned pagan miscellanist uses the literary form creatively and with purposes of his own. Plutarch, Pliny, Gellius and Athenaeus are widely different from one another, and each has a serious purpose. Why should we regard Clement as any more ‘unique’ than any of the others, or as any more serious? All of the pagan miscellanists engage with the genre as an invitation to experiment with patterns of order amidst variety: so why should we regard Clement’s pursuit of order within variety as unique? Plutarch and Pliny, we have seen, are particularly earnest in both their philosophy and their theology; Clement’s concern for these things from a Christian perspective cannot be easily sidelined as the odd one out. This study, then, will emphasise juxtaposition and comparison with the individual exemplars of this very diverse form of prose writing, as has been begun here already. This approach has some weaknesses: it means that this book on Clement’s miscellanies becomes rather miscellaneous, and this may be distracting; also, since Clement himself was not engaging closely with these literary works in particular, but rather was referencing widespread tropes, our comparison does not have value for understanding his intentional intertextuality with particular authors – that needs to be studied separately and in addition. But the method of juxtaposition and comparison is helpful for our discussion now in the early twenty-first century. Scholars have often generalised about these works without looking closely at extant examples; they have classed Clement apart, and given grounds for it that do not stand up to scrutiny. In response,

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Morgan 2007a, 257–73; 2007b.

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we must begin by comparing his literary miscellanism closely with the use of this ‘genre’ among other learned prose writers of the early empire, especially those who have shaped our perceptions of what ‘miscellanism’ was, and those that have been important for modern readers in defining the character of his ‘Christian difference’.

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4 Early Imperial Cultures of Miscellany-Making Clement’s Social and Institutional Contexts

Clement’s title and other tropes of miscellanism deliberately advertise a relationship between his project and the literary miscellanies of the Roman Empire. This invites us to read his project in comparison with others. Most of this book will take a literary and theological approach to this comparative task, as already indicated in earlier chapters. However, before embarking on that, we should pause to consider Clement’s work in an embodied context. His use of Classical literary devices of miscellanism is not a purely aesthetic choice, but a social act. Why, then, would this erudite Christian in Alexandria in the late second century write a literary project in Christian formation, but compose it in such a way as artfully to parade participation in the Classical discourse of literary miscellanism? Scholars of Clement have sometimes claimed that Clement was ‘appealing to the taste of his contemporaries’ in the Stromateis,1 or using a ‘popular genre’ by writing miscellanies2 – but what does this mean? Who were Clement’s audience, such that they might have shared some of the literary tastes and expectations of Greco-Roman pepaideumenoi? Can we envisage how the ancients might have enjoyed this ‘popular’ genre, which has repelled so many modern readers? What structures of social life would have supported this sort of writing among the literary elites, and how would Christians such as Clement and his readers have participated in them? This chapter begins by sketching Clement’s social context in order to bring light to his and his audience’s relationship to the Classical tradition. 1 2

Méhat 1966, 331; H. König 2005, 130. Irvine 1994, 164; Holford-Strevens 2003, 29.

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The rest of the chapter starts from aspects of the Classical culture of miscellany-making and indicates how they were shared or transformed in Clement’s Christian setting. This is not a substitute for a social or cultural history of miscellanism, but it helps to contextualise the more literary and theological studies later in the book. It encourages us to imagine how Clement and his audience could have taken delight in the rhetorical aesthetics of miscellanism, and could have been attracted or impressed by the social and intellectual lifestyle within which it was cultivated, such that they sought to inhabit it and make it their own. Miscellanism was neither peripheral nor boring in the lives of imperial literary men, but it took people to the heart of the friendship circles, activities and institutions that framed and supported the culture of the pepaideumenoi.

clement’s social context and the classical tradition If we are to get a sense of who Clement’s audience was and why they might have been receptive to the literary tradition of Classical culture, then we need to begin with Clement’s social and institutional context, and then turn to the literary pointers within his work that suggest who he was writing for and why. Several aspects of Clement’s Sitz im Leben have been so often discussed that they have become standard items of introductory material, even though there is little evidence: these include whether he presided over a ‘school’ and what form it took, and whether he was a ‘presbyter’ in the church. In this section, I will touch on these issues, but my main concern is to highlight points of contact with the intellectual, social and literary culture of the Classical world, especially those aspects that underpinned miscellanism. Clement lived and worked in Alexandria in the late second century. At this time, Alexandria was a bustling port city with a cosmopolitan population. Despite the growth of Athens and Rome as leading centres for education, Alexandria retained her lustre.3 The significance of the Library had dwindled in the late Republic, when it had been badly damaged by fire.4 However, many books were retained or replaced and were rehoused 3

4

Wilken 1984; Jakab 2001; Hägg 2006, 15–34; Pujiula 2006, 62–70; Watts 2006, 143–68; Nasrallah 2010, 268–72. Gell. NA 7.17; Plut. Caes. 49.6–7; DC 42.38.2, but the cause of the library’s destruction remains controversial: Bagnall 2002; Hatzimachili 2013, 167–72.

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in various locations around the city. The Mouseion continued to function; some intellectuals moved away to Rome to pursue their career, but others continued to flock to the city to teach and develop their following; it was a desirable place in which to arrange for one’s literary work to circulate.5 Thus, the city provided opportunities to read and to meet and talk with diverse intellectuals. These may not have included Jews. The once flourishing Jewish population had been largely or wholly wiped out in the revolts of AD 115–117. Much of their literature was preserved, and Clement had read works by Demetrius, Aristobulus, Aristeas, Artapanus, Ps-Hecateus and Ezekiel Tragicus, as well as the Assumption of Moses.6 He valued Philo above all, and used him extensively – but he termed him a ‘Pythagorean’ rather than a ‘Jew’ (Str. I.xv.72.4; II.xix.100.3);7 indeed ‘Jew’ in Clement often depicts a doctrinal position, namely, that of accepting the Scriptures but rejecting the claim that Jesus is prophesied in them, rather than an ethnic group.8 His interest in Judaism is substantially theoretical,9 and his explicit engagement with Jews is so scant that many have doubted whether he actually knew many Jews or was concerned with them.10 Christians, however, were easy to come by – at least the selfproclaimed variety, some of whom Clement would brand as ‘heretics’.11 By the second century, the city was home to a range of Christian teachers and texts. Basilides and his circle were based there; Valentinus is said to have begun his career in Alexandria before moving to Rome; the Gospel of the Egyptians and the Gospel of the Hebrews may have originated in Alexandria; many early Christian texts did circulate there early on – not only those that became scriptural, but also many others, such as Hermas, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Preaching of Peter, the Apocalypse of Peter, Irenaeus and others.12 Clement often engages critically with the doctrines, teachings and sometimes the practices of Basilideans, Valentinians and

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8 11

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Russell 2004, 117; Watts 2006, 143–54; Hatzimachili 2013, 172–82. See Carleton Paget 1998, 88 n. 10; Sterling 1999 (on Philo’s library and its preservation among Christians). For discussion of Philo as ‘Pythagorean’: Runia 1995; Otto 2013. On Clement and Philo: van den Hoek 1988. On Clement’s reception of Pythagoreanism, including Philo: Afonasin 2013. 9 10 Otto 2013, 129–34. Gibbons 2017, 3–5. Carleton Paget 1998. On Christian ‘gnostics’ in Alexandria: Löhr 2013. Also: Löhr 1996 (Basilides); Marjanen and Luomanen 2008 (second century ‘heretics’). Kovacs 2017a, 4–9 on Clement’s authoritative books.

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Marcionites, as well as some other Christian groups.13 He was ‘one Christian teacher among many’.14 Further opportunities for contact with a choice of teachers lay beyond the shores. Alexandria was well connected by sea-routes across the Mediterranean, and Clement’s motif of the Greeks crossing the seas to carry off barbarian wisdom underscores the idea that wisdom could be transported.15 He portrays a journey of his own, criss-crossing the Mediterranean in search of wisdom, though ending up in Egypt.16 Books and ideas could travel fast: Hermas, written in Rome, was read in Alexandria and yet further afield; Irenaeus in Gaul knew the work of Justin, Tatian and Theophilus; Tertullian in Carthage read Irenaeus as well.17 Clement and his readers thus had a wide range of opportunities to engage with intellectual and religious cultures alternative to the one that Clement taught. In the Paedagogus, he dangles the lifestyle of the wealthy before our eyes, with tortoise-shell decorations, purple dresses that sweep the ground and the delights of the bath.18 We can imagine that Clement’s readers had the opportunity to participate in the social and intellectual culture of the contemporary elites, and furthermore that these elites might come from all over the Mediterranean world. Christians and pagans bathed together, shopped together and were able to dine and drink together.19 They could also send their children to school together for the enkyklios paideia;20 they could go to the library together and read each other’s books;21 they could form groups for teaching and learning by instruction.22 And indeed, Clement’s work strongly suggests that they did, and that he expected them to do so. His work assumes that many of his readers were sufficiently steeped in Classical literature, philosophy 13 15 18

19

20

21

22

14 Le Boulluec 1985, 263–438. Buell 1999, 12; similarly: Dawson 1992, 219–23. 16 17 Str. II.i.2.3. Str. I.i.11.1–2; see Chapter 5. Gamble 1995, 109, 113. Paed. II.iii.35.3 (tortoise shell); x.109.1 (purple clothing); 113.2 (sweeping the ground); 114.4 (purple clothing); III.v.31.1–33.3, ix.46.1–x.49.1 (baths). This is the implication of Clement’s portrayal of social life in Paed. II–III, even if he advised moderation in aspects of Christian conduct within this culture. Cf. Str. VII. vii.36.4. On early Christianity and Classical paideia: Jaeger 1961; Kaster 1988, 70–95; Young 2006 (esp. Origen); Watts 2008, 151–54; Henning 2014, 48–53. Cf. Irvine 1994, 164–65 (Clement’s grammatikê). The Christians may have had their own library (cf. Sterling 1999, 160–64) but the quantity of literature that Clement quotes underscores his wider resources (cf. Steneker 1967, 78–79), and he emphasises that the Septuagint made scripture available to the Greeks in their own language (Str. I.xxii.148.1–150.5). Löhr 2010 (philosophy schools); cf. Runia 1999 (Philo and the Greek hairesis model).

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and rhetoric to appreciate his performance of his own Classical learning and his intellectual and rhetorical skills in these fields. In the Stromateis, he encourages his readers to select what is useful from the enkyklios paideia and from philosophical literature, whether for themselves or for those whom they are instructing.23 This still leaves many debates about the audience of Clement’s works. Scholars debate whether the audiences of the three works were the same; whether pagans were among the intended readership of some of the works, and whether the three works were read together, or reserved for different stages of formation. Some have supposed that the Protrepticus was intended to convert pagans to Christianity,24 but this places too much emphasis on the probably secondary ‘pros Hellênas’ in the traditional title, and misses the work’s literary wit and sophistication in seeking to delight readers who are deeply at home in both Classical and Christian learning.25 The Paedagogus is generally held to be for catechetical instruction in connection with baptism, though the nature of the connection to baptism remains disputed.26 Verdicts on the audience of the Stromateis have ranged from claims that Clement wrote only for Christians27 to claims that he wrote only for pagans,28 and (more commonly) various suppositions in between.29 In fact, Clement is so explicit about hoping for audiences of diverse persuasions, and he engages with so many different positions and different texts in his work, that the answer must be somewhere in between. From the perspective of Clement’s theological pedagogy, it is in any case a moot point at what stage his readers should be classified as Christian rather than pagan, and on what grounds. Clement problematises our modern binaries between Christian and pagan and allows ecclesial structure largely to recede into the background, as he is far more concerned with whether people are truly inhabiting their Christian vocation.30 He says that he writes the Stromateis for good 23 24 25

26 27 28

29 30

See further, Chapter 10. E.g., Knauber 1972, 316; Pujiula 2006, 84; Friesen 2015, 128. Emmett 2001, 162–70; Stockhausen 2006, 83–93. On Clement’s literary art in the Protrepticus, see esp. Steneker 1967. Knauber 1972; Pujiula 2006, 84–94; Stockhausen 2006, 92; H. König 2005, 102–3. Overbeck 1882, 466. Knauber 1951 argues that the Stromateis are teaching notes. This forms a basis for discussion also in Schneider 1999, 31–32, though he reaches different conclusions. For a summary of the debate, see: H. König 2005, 122–23 n. 284. Wyrwa 2005, 297–98 rightly cautions against losing sight of Clement’s interest in ecclesial structures entirely. Nonetheless, Clement’s reflective focus clearly lies elsewhere.

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‘farmers of the faith’ who are on their way to becoming gnostic Christians,31 but these people can be drawn from all different theological traditions, and at times he gives special notice to Jews and Greeks.32 A better avenue to Clement’s audience may be through considering the relationship between the three works. Those who view them as parts of a continuous literary project stress continuities in the prospective audience: for example, Annette Stockhausen suggests that the Protrepticus gives pre-baptismal formation for Christians who still need to prise themselves away from pagan deities; the Paedagogus provides instruction in preparation for baptism and for the newly baptised; the Stromateis helps readers after baptism to advance towards the goal of gnostic perfection.33 There is some support for this in Clement’s imagery: the Protrepticus addresses the audience as having already undergone pre-catechetical instruction (ὑμᾶς ... προκατηχημένους, Protr. x.96.2);34 Paedagogus portrays baptism in the first book and this makes sense of the dominant imagery of childhood, for in baptism, Christians are ‘reborn’ as children of God (Paed. I.vi.32.4, etc.); Stromateis opens by demanding of readers the self-examination that is a part of the preparation for the Eucharist (Str. I.i.5.1–3). However, this interpretation implies that people came to the different works at very different stages of life and tended to read them separately. This may be part of their reception, but I doubt that it is the full story, or even the most important one. For my part, I readily accept that the Protrepticus, Paedagogus, and Stromateis portray a stepped progress in Christian formation. Correspondingly, their rhetoric positions their readers at different steps in the formational process. But this does not mean that the works were only to be read at different stages of formation, rather than enjoyed and savoured all together. The latter may even be the best reading, for it is at higher stages of progress that people can both make some sense of the Stromateis, and also perceive its resonances with earlier parts of the project. The notion that Clement shaped his writing with artful care goes against the grain of scholarship that portrays it as utilitarian or slapdash. However, my reading of Clement’s work highlights his rhetorical skill in the networking of imagery and prefaces that structure his text. Some of these literary networks are set out more fully in the Appendix; others are discussed in the course of this book (esp. Chapter 7). This encourages 31 33

E.g., Str. I.i.18.1; xii.56.3. Stockhausen 2006, 92–93.

32 34

Str. II.i.2.1; VI.i.1.4; Thomson 2013, 22. Stockhausen 2006, 89–90.

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readers to return to the work again and again and notice the literary connections, perhaps stepping from this aesthetic delight to notice other connections between passages across his works. Devotionally and formationally, no part of the work becomes irrelevant after baptism. This is true on many levels: in a simple sense, all parts point to Christ and the project as a whole presents the structure of progress in becoming Christ-like, thus in itself it presents a kind of icon of the gnostic, just as Quintilian’s Institutes portray the vir bonus by pursuing him through the stages of his formation.35 On a more banal note, until the Christian attains gnostic perfection, he/she continues to wrestle with the temptations and passions that are highlighted in earlier parts of the work. Even if a Christian has been baptised, the social situations that Paedagogus II–III portray do not disappear, and the passions of the soul are not eradicated all at once. Even if a Christian were to advance far enough to become a teacher, he would still be a ‘fellow-listener along with his hearers’ (as Clement portrays himself in Str. I.i.12.3), and so would find material that was helpful in this structured pedagogy. Most of all, however, the practice of repetition and re-reading is crucial to learning and formation. This is apparent both in the wider culture of education, where re-reading and repetition were advocated at all levels of progress,36 and also in Christian culture: Clement himself envisages literary life involving days filled with reading (Paed. II.ii.22.1; x.96.2) and getting up early for ‘philology’ – devotion to the logos (Paed. II.ix.81.5). He advocates returning to the scriptures many times (Str. V.ix.56.3), and his own work is for those who search hard and labour diligently and farm the seeds that they find (Str. I.i.18.1; xii.56.3). Re-reading is part of formation, and it is plausible that Clement’s own project could contribute to this. Clement, then, presupposes learned, literary-minded readers, who had enjoyed a socially privileged formation in Classical and Christian letters and had a keen personal interest in Christianity. His emphasis on the literary life is not fully consistent with his rhetoric that Christian philosophy is essential for everyone, whether or not they can read, and no matter whether they are Greek or barbarian, slave or free, young or old, male or female.37 In this sense, his writing is elitist in practice, though his theology is not elitist in theory.

35 36

37

Walzer 2003. Quint. Inst. 10.1.19; Gell. NA 17.2.1. See discussion in Johnson 2010, 30–31; Howley 2018, 144. Paed. III.xi.78.1–2; Str. IV.viii.58.2–69.4.

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In this we begin to see the basis for how Clement’s readers could be expected to participate in a cultural world where the literary pursuits of their pagan neighbours could inspire their own. They shared the same formation in the enkyklios paideia; they read many of the same books, perhaps often in the same libraries; some of them spent their days largely in reading as well. However, there were also some social and institutional structures that set them apart: we have already mentioned the sacramental rites of baptism and the Eucharist. Clement also makes clear that he recommends that the Stromateis should be read in company with a teacher or guide.38 He is clearly engaged in ecclesial life, though he does not make the structures of the church a particular focus of discussion.39 He assumes a church hierarchy of bishops, presbyters and deacons; he knows of widows as a formal group in the church, and he distinguishes between clergy and laity.40 He depicts the ideal rhythm of a Christian’s life involving ceaseless thanksgiving in a mixture of scholarly and liturgical activities, such as listening, reading and enquiry, and offerings, prayer, praise, hymns, blessings and psalms (Str. VI.xiv.113.3). Whether he was himself head of a catechetical school (as Eusebius thought)41 or a presbyter (as Alexander of Jerusalem claimed)42 is unclear. At any rate, Clement is never explicit about these things. If he did have a school, it was likely an informal gathering of students in devotion to him as teacher, as in the case of other philosophical schools of the time.43 However, he clearly anticipates that people will read his work without him there to explain it, and that it may be interpreted in different ways. He hopes that they will have a good teacher at their side, but he knows that they may have none.44 The book trade allowed works to circulate widely, and we 38 39 40

41

42

43

Str. I.i.14.4; V.ix.56.4. Albano 2016a, 14–15. H. König 2005, 143–97; Thomson 2014, 74–86. E.g., Paed. III.xii.97.2–3 (πρεσβυτέροι, ἐπισκόποι, διακόνοι, χήραι); QDS 42.2 (κλῆρος); Str. III.xii.90.1 (λαικός), with H. König 2005, 147–48; Thomson 2014, 77. The historical debate is well-worn; see: Bardy 1937; Knauber 1951; Neymeyr 1989, 42–45; Dawson 1992, 219–22; van den Broek 1996, 197–205; 1997a; Jakab 2001, 91–106; Wyrwa 2005. For German and French historiography of the debate in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, see Le Boulluec 1987. Particularly valuable for current scholarship is Thomson 2013, who treads different ground from those who have preceded him by looking less for information behind the text and more for how Clement gives us ‘a textual embodiment of dynamic relationships’ in his contemporary culture. Eus. HE 6.11.6, which is taken as conclusive evidence by Wyrwa 2005, 298. The evidence of Clement’s own writings is meagre and open to different interpretations. Cf. van den Hoek 1997a, 66; H. König 2005, 75–83; Thomson 2014, 75–76 44 Löhr 2010, 164; 2017, 154. Str. I.i.18.4.

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can expect that Clement’s work could be read far beyond his immediate circle after it was published.45 As we turn from Clement to the social context of miscellanism, we take with us a picture of Clement’s implied readers as people who had intellectual and social opportunities alongside their pagan neighbours, but who were also engaged in the daily prayers, thanksgivings and liturgies of the church. Like Clement, they are imagined as studious readers who devote their days to books. In this context, Clement’s choice of a bookish mode of writing that was common among pagan contemporaries is less surprising. The following two sections push this further by starting from miscellanism in the Classical host culture. First, I shall explore the friendship circles of a miscellany-maker, and the emotions with which he engaged in miscellanism. I give close attention to Gellius, who was a less erudite man than Clement, and whose work recalls his student days in Athens for a Roman audience – thus it takes us to the other two prestigious centres of learning in the Mediterranean. Gellius gives us vivid insight into what a culture of miscellanism could look and feel like in this Mediterranean world of paideia, and thus can be an interesting comparison for Clement. Secondly, I will explore practices, institutions and social intentions of miscellanism that were often significant, and show how Clement’s Christian context modified his relation to each of these.

literary circles of friends and the emotions of miscellany-making What motivated Clement to choose Classical miscellanistic tropes in his cultural setting? What was the emotional resonance that those tropes would have had for his readers, or readers in the wider literary culture? These are questions to which we have no detailed answers, and the resonances would have varied from one individual to another. But we can catch a glimpse of the ways in which miscellanism was experienced among some pagan authors from the evidence of their works. The authors of the learned miscellanies that we know about often knew one another and even belonged to the same study circles or friendship groups. They read the same works, and they read one another’s works. Literary connections and personal connections often overlap. For example, Favorinus’ Ἀπομνημονεύματα (five-plus books) and 45

Gamble 1995, 82–143; Andrews 2019, 57–64.

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Παντοδαπὴ ἱστορία (twenty-four books) are mostly lost to us, but Gellius is fond of quoting and telling anecdotes about Favorinus, whom he revered as a teacher and friend.46 Apuleius has passages so close to Gellius as to make literary connection probable, even before the Nights were published; it is plausible that Gellius and Apuleius met and studied together at Athens.47 At any rate, they became acquainted and belonged to the same friendship circle. Favorinus’ circle included Plutarch. Apuleius and Gellius both wrote works entitled Quaestiones Convivales, which renders Plutarch’s title in Latin, and suggests a similar form. Pamphile of Epidaurus was one of the earliest and best loved imperial miscellanists: she wrote a work of thirty-three books under Nero and called it Σύμμικτα Ἱστορικὰ ῾Υπομνήματα. Like Favorinus’ mighty tomes, it is lost to us, but this same group of writer-readers testify to its significance: Apuleius, Gellius and Favorinus were all readers and quoters of Pamphile. Müller-Reineke has argued suggestively (and I think persuasively) that Apuleius’ inclusion of Pamphile as a character in his Metamorphoses is intended to allude punningly to the great miscellanist, the ‘All-lover’ (πᾶνφίλη).48 Other literary connections between imperial miscellanies include Gellius’ creative reworking of Pliny’s preface in composing his own,49 and Athenaeus’ reinvention of the sympotic miscellany as a cultural encyclopedia of the table. We get an impression of a circle where similar works were being read, and each person was trying to compose a miscellany in his or her own way. Those who participated in the culture wanted to show that their own was the best and the others were inferior. An anecdote from Gellius gives us a window onto an experience of participating in this culture.50 Gellius recounts how a friend heard about his literary project and offered to lend him a book of his own that could provide material to assist and adorn his Nights. Gellius was excited: his friend was a learned, literary man, the book was big and the way the friend spoke of it made it sound as though it was ‘overflowing with

46

47 48

49 50

On Gellius and Favorinus: Holford-Strevens 2003, 98–130. Anecdotes about Favorinus include, e.g., NA 2.26 (on colour names); 3.1 (discussion en route to baths). Holford-Strevens 2003, 22–26. Müller-Reineke 2006. The woman in the Metamorphoses is a specialist in sex and witchcraft, which is a witty allusion to another literary work attributed to Pamphile, under the title Περὶ ἀφροδισίων. It need not actually have been written by the famous miscellanist for a lover of miscellanies to delight in alluding to her through the homonymous figure of the erotic witch. Minarini 2000. Also discussed in Holford-Strevens 2003, 38–40, 116–18; Vardi 2004, 161–62.

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learning of every kind. He said that he had compiled it as the result of wide, varied and abstruse reading, and he invited me to take from it as much as I liked and thought worthy of record’ (‘librum grandi volumine doctrinae omnigenus, ut ipse dicebat, praescatentem, quem sibi elaboratum esse ait ex multis et variis et remotis lectionibus, ut ex eo sumerem quantum liberet rerum memoria dignarum’, NA 14.6.1, tr. Rolfe, LCL 212, 43). Gellius seized it eagerly ‘as if I had got possession of the horn of plenty’, and closeted himself away to read it. But oh what a disappointment when he looked inside! It was ‘mera miracula’! Gellius lists the sorts of curiosities he found there, then reports the quip with which he returned it to his friend: Quem cum statim properans redderem: ‘ὄναιό σου’, inquam, ‘doctissime virorum, ταύτης τῆς πολυμαθίας et librum hunc opulentissimum recipe, nil prosus ad nostras paupertinas litteras congruentem. Nam meae Noctes, quas instructum ornatumque isti, de uno maxime illo versu Homeri quaerunt, quem Socrates prae omnibus semper rebus sibi esse cordi dicebat: ‘ὅττι τοι ἐν μεγάροισι κακόν τ᾿ ἀγαθόν τε τέτυκται.’ Hastening to return it to him at once, I said: ‘I congratulate you, most learned sir, on this display of encyclopaedic erudition; but take back this precious volume, which does not have the slightest connection with my humble writings. For my Nights, which you wish to assist and adorn, base their inquiries especially on that one verse of Homer which Socrates said was above all other things always dear to him: Whate’er of good and ill has come to you at home.’ (Gell. NA 14.6.5, tr. Rolfe, LCL 212, pp. 45–47)

Gellius’ anecdote suggests both the popularity of this kind of writing and the competitiveness of this learned society. His comment that his own work has nothing in common with that of his friend is a jocular piece of one-upmanship and self-styling. After all, there was nothing on first glance that made either him or his friend think that the friend’s book was not just like Gellius’ work. On the contrary, Gellius’ account of the way the work was advertised to him and the way he at first received it is an eloquent summary of the hallmarks of this kind of writing. The book is distinguished by large size (‘grandi volumine’), variety (‘omnigenus’) and learning (‘doctrinae’). The book to be read also mirrors the author as reader. Like the book itself, the authorial act of composition is characterised by quantity (‘multis’), variety (‘variis’) and recondite literary lore (‘remotis lectionibus’). Gellius’ own act of reading and composition is expected to imitate this further. As a reader of the friend’s book, he will select the quantity (‘quantum liberet’) of items from within it that he will extract for use (‘adiutum’) or adornment (‘ornatum’), and as worthy to remember (‘rerum memoria dignarum’).

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The vignette bespeaks a culture of reading itemized material, selecting from it and composing anew. Authors, readers and books are in a mimetic relationship to one another; the ideal involves both quantity and variety of learning, but also selectivity with a view to benefit, beauty and memory. Gellius’ tongue-in-cheek compliment to his friend affirms the same ideal: the friend’s work is a marvel of polymathy (πολυμαθία, 14.6.5), while his own writings are peasant fare, he proclaims (‘nostras paupertinas litteras’). However, he has slipped into Greek to compliment his friend’s polymathy, thereby signaling his own participation in this learned, bilingual culture even as he protests his difference. The Latin adjective that he applies to his own writings, ‘paupertinus’, carries the nuance of the frugality that is deemed an ancestral Roman virtue. The closing quotation is archly witty: the very words that ostensibly proclaim his work ‘homespun’ are made to reverberate with the voice of not one but two of the greatest icons of Hellenic culture – he is quoting Socrates, quoting Homer, he says. The allusiveness glistens with cheeky brilliance. Some scholars have tried to identify the anonymous friend in Gellius’ anecdote: Favorinus was suggested by Nietzsche, as Gellius’ description of the friend’s book as ‘doctrinae omnigenus’ sounds rather like Favorinus’ title, Παντοδαπὴ ἱστορία. Against this, Holford-Strevens points out that a one-volume version of Favorinus’ twenty-four-volume work would have been ‘an impractical monstrosity’;51 at best, Gellius is fictionally reimagining it. Favorinus is in fact far from the only figure who is evoked by this story. The resonances with real-life miscellanism point off in so many different directions that this may well be a ben trovato anecdote styling the sorts of conversations that are to be had in Gellius’ circle. It often recalls his preface, and puts flesh on the protestations there. Firstly, he says he received the book initially ‘as if I had obtained a cornu copiae (“Horn of Plenty”)’. This renders in Latin the fourth in the list of titles that he rejected in his preface: ‘some have entitled their works Musae, others Silvae, that guy called his Πέπλος, this one Ἀμαλθείας Κέρας (“Horn of Plenty”)’ (pr. 6).52 Secondly, the form of the anecdote continues the creative reworking of Pliny’s preface, which Gellius had begun in his own: Pliny had described being lured by attractive titles, ‘but when you get inside, ye gods and goddesses, you will find nothing in the middle!’ (‘at cum intraveris, di deaeque, quam nihil in medio invenies!’ 51

52

Holford-Strevens 2003, 116–17. For other discussions: Sandy 1997, 80–81 (favours the identification). Vardi 2004, 162 n. 10.

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NH pr. 24). Gellius’ experience is similar: he describes being lured in by the attractive description and hiding away to devote himself to reading, ‘but what had been written there, by Jupiter – mere marvels!’ (‘at quae ibi scripta erant, pro Iuppiter, mera miracula’, NA 14.6.2). Gellius’ anecdote gives us a glimpse of miscellany writing as far more than a literary form: it was a social practice, and people participated in it emulously.53 Miscellanies were not automatically valued just for being miscellanies. Just as modern critics of miscellanism have focused on their triviality and unoriginality, so people in antiquity made similar criticisms about other people’s attempts at this style of literary composition and tried to do better themselves. What Gellius aspires to, beyond what his friend produces, is ostensibly something that can be truly transformative for readers, and relevant to their lives, even at home: ‘de uno maxime illo versu Homeri quaerunt, quem Socrates prae omnibus semper rebus sibi esse cordi dicebat: “‘Oττι τοι ἐν μεγάροισι κακόν τ᾿ ἀγαθόν τε τέτυκται”’. In Gellius’ idealised world of literary elites, this probably referred to something erudite and obscure, for it is characteristic of the literary events that he portrays that they focus on antiquarian facts, particularly problems of etymology or philology. The people he portrays are not just those who know their literary Classics, but those who know who said what in the various commentaries on the Classics. In William Johnson’s words, ‘A defining aspect of Gellius’s program is the obscurity and implied difficulty of access for many of the texts he mentions. This is in the nature of the enterprise: the texts must be worthy of the literary snob appeal that is fundamental to Gellius’ type of work.’54 In this sense, Gellius’ ideal literary circle is ‘esoteric’.55 Of course, Gellius’ vision of literary life is not to be taken as typical of all miscellanists’ modes of going about their literary pursuits. William Johnson has shown us that there were many learned authors in the high Roman Empire who used their writing to try to negotiate and promote their own ideals of the vir magnus and his literary circle of amici, and they each had a different vision of this and a different mode of presenting it. However, we have seen that Gellius’ vignette resonates with motifs in other authors, and it suggests a Classical context for miscellany-making that makes Clement’s citation of Classical tropes of the genre less startling. The social interaction around Classical miscellany-making 53

54

Gellius tells other anecdotes about reading miscellanies: NA 1.8 (Κέρας Ἀμαλθείας of Sotion); 2.24.2 (Coniectanea of Ateius Capito); 3.6 (Plutarch’s Symposiaca). 55 Johnson 2010, 132. Johnson 2010, 110, 131–36.

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encouraged different authors to advertise their relationships and nonrelationships with other works. There was an expectation that others would also be enthusiastic for a new miscellany, and that some readers would also be seeking to make miscellanies of their own. So, when Clement chose his title and introduced his work as a miscellany, he likely assumed that this would motivate his readers to receive it as both source and model for their own miscellany-making. He underscores this by his emphasis on their need to hunt diligently within it for the truth, to select well and to cultivate the ‘seeds of gnosis’ that they discover.56 Just as Gellius was seeking to construct a miscellany that could be formative for his readers with a serious and ennobling purpose, so too was Clement, albeit his ideal for the goal of personal formation was vastly different.

aspects of clement’s continuity with the greco-roman cultural context of miscellany-making The authors studied in this volume were all elite literary men, and the social, institutional and religious structures within which they practised miscellanism were in many ways similar. This section highlights connections between this cultural context and Clement’s literary project in Christian miscellanism.

Scholarly Practices: Selection, Excerption, Note-Making, Annotation, Arranging, Memorising In Chapter 3 we saw that the practices of selection, excerption, analysis and reordering of material, which underlay miscellanism of all kinds, were initially cultivated in the enkyklios paideia, which was basic to education across a wide social spectrum. As we turn now to the erudite end of the spectrum, we still find those same basic practices, but developed with resources, methods and social settings that befitted the elite context. Book-based scholarly work involved reading, selecting and making excerpts from papyrus rolls, either oneself or with the help of a slave.57 Tablets were used for initial note-taking, but the excerpts were then transcribed into book rolls, and may have been loosely organised according to subject, for example, using a different roll for a different 56

Str. I.ii.20.4.

57

Plin. Ep. 3.5.

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theme. The degree of systematisation varied according to the purpose and intention of the author: literary miscellanists such as Gellius deliberately cultivated artful variety, while the antiquarians of the Republican age were known for highly systematic ordering of material; encyclopedic miscellanists such as Pliny and Athenaeus cultivated both a high level of systematisation and rich variety. Similarly, the degree of authorial commentary could vary from one writer to another, or from one stage in the process to another: early on, scholars probably focused on excerption, but later they could introduce more of their own annotation.58 The extent to which learned authors of excerpts also relied on collections of excerpts made by others is debated: in the past, it was often assumed that Classical and Christian authors alike were heavily reliant on anthologies or florilegia, but more recent research has advocated greater agnosticism and suggested that a balance between use of complete originals, and others’ excerpts, was likely.59 Collections of notes could fetch a significant price if sold on the book market; they could be shared about among friends; but authors also often made them for their own private use.60 In conjunction with these bookish practices of selection, excerption, noting down, annotating and organising written material, there was also a flourishing oral culture of learning. Not all notes were made from reading: some things were noted down from what others said, or from events that seemed worth remembering. Even notes from reading were often orally mediated by listening to someone (usually a slave) reading a book aloud. .Clement’s emphasis on hypomnêmata as the origin of his Stromateis draws attention to his participation in this culture of selecting, noting down, annotating and assembling a collection of memoranda. He claims that the hypomnêmata originate in what his teachers said; however, since he does not mention them by name or portray them in narrative, it is his own book learning that stands out. It is not at all implausible that his teachers gave text-based lectures, and that his hypomnêmata are at least shaped by his own formational experience with his teachers, but they must have been supplemented by extensive reading of his own. Some of this reading may have involved the use of others’ excerpt collections: for example, some scholars suppose that his account of pagan culture in the first half of the Protrepticus was dependent on excerpt collections, worked over to fit his own literary design; or again, his special interest in Proverbs is unusual in early Christianity, but it shows his attentiveness to a scriptural 58 60

59 J. König and Woolf 2013a, 44–45. Morgan 2011, 64–66. On the whole system of notetaking: Skydsgaard 1967, 102–7.

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miscellany.61 However, even if Clement used excerpt collections of others, he was himself also a very learned author: all in all, Clement draws on over 400 different sources, including 363 pagan ones (according to Stählin’s index). It seems likely that he read many of the works himself, drawing on extant library collections in Alexandria, as well as in the other cities he had visited in his youth.62 The same practices that were trained among other scholars were his practices too; it is his choice of material, his ordering principles and value judgements, which set his work apart. In this wider cultural setting, memory work was both a first- and a second-order skill: it was both basic to the ability to note down what had been heard and then compile it, and it was also valued as the source of inventive thinking and a foundation of personal and communal wisdom.63 Memory exercises were part of rhetorical training, and stories of learned conversation attest to assumptions that people would memorise what they heard to a much greater extent than today.64 When Plutarch wrote his Quaestiones Convivales, he emphasised the importance of selectivity in what is recalled, but also meditation to learn from the things that are worth remembering (QC 1 pr.612c–e, 2 pr. 629e; 6 pr. 686c–d). Pliny celebrates a person able to quote from memory any books from a library (NH 7.24.88–89) and promotes his own scholarly endeavour as a way to preserve for social memory all that is in danger of being forgotten, for to remember well is a cultural necessity (e.g. NH 2.117–18; 14.1–2). Athenaeus draws attention to the Deipnosophists’ prodigious feats of memory, and his own need for memory in order to recollect and record what they said (Deipn. 15.643a–e, 665a).65 Gellius presented his Nights as a memory aid for busy people (NA pr. 2) and shared Athenaeus’ sensitivity to the virtue of producing an apposite quotation at the right moment.66

61

62 63

64

65 66

On Clement’s use of Proverbs: van den Hoek 2017. Further, on Clement’s use of anthologies: Friesen 2015, 121–23. On his techniques of quotation: van den Hoek 1996. For Clement’s reception of Philo’s library at Alexandria: Sterling 1999, 160–61. The classic studies, though of a later period, are still Carruthers 1998; 2008. See further n. 72, below. Johnson 2010, 118–20, with examples from Gellius. Johnson also quotes Galen, ‘This work will, I hope, be of assistance to the man of natural intelligence who also had that early training which gives him the ability, preferably, to repeat immediately what he hears, or at least to write it down’ (de peccat. dign. 5.65K). Too 2000, 122. Memory in the miscellanists has been much discussed: on Gellius, see Rust 2009, 101–2; Johnson 2010, 118–20; Heusch 2011; Howley 2018, 143–48; Pliny: Beagon 2005, 78, 253, 272–76; Athenaeus: Jacob 2000, 108–10; Too 2000.

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Like Gellius, Clement portrays his miscellany as a memory aid; like Athenaeus, he ostentatiously positions it at the cusp between remembering and forgetting; like Plutarch, he encourages his readers in a meditative praxis that picks out what is worthy of meditation in his work and enters into it more deeply. What sets Clement apart is not the significance of memory work, but its focus on the scriptures and its purpose in growing closer to God.67

Institutional Contexts: Libraries, Universal Books and Walking Libraries The most significant institutional context and resource for the scholarly work of selection, excerption, compilation, etc. was the library. Again, Clement differs not in the use that he made of libraries, but in reorienting the ideology of the library and evoking a rationale for structuring its resources in light of a Christian hierarchy of books. ‘Libraries’ in antiquity ranged from private collections of books (which may be shared among friends) to public institutions; the latter especially were more than just a practical necessity: they were part of the cultural capital of the scholarly tradition that learned miscellanists received. Furthermore, the traditions of the library in Alexandria (where Clement worked) and Rome (where much of our evidence for imperial prose miscellanism originates) were interlinked. The royal library and Mouseion at Alexandria in the Hellenistic age had been famous across the Mediterranean as a centre of learning, scholarship and erudite, witty poetic production.68 Jews too had been captivated by it, and ‘Aristeas’ had become the first (but not the last) author to record a tradition that associated the origins of the Septuagint with King Ptolemy Philadelphus’ desire to complete his universal collection of books.69 In 48/47 BC, the library had been badly damaged by fire when Julius Caesar invaded,70 but the myth of the Alexandrian library lived on, together with the scholarly tradition that it inspired. Both acquired a significant Roman dimension.71 Julius Caesar himself aspired to found a

67

68 69 70 71

For Clement’s memory work and scriptural practice, see now Ward 2017a. Cf. Itter 2009, 113–39. Fraser 1972, vol. 1, 305–35; Nesselrath 2013. On the legend of the Septuagint: Wasserstein and Wasserstein 2009. See above, n. 4. For critical appraisal of traditional narratives of the history of the ancient library: Hendrickson 2014.

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universal library at Rome, rivalling the Alexandrian tradition. He died before the project could be realised, but the first public library was established at Rome in 37 BC under the patronage of Asinius Pollio. Augustus and his successors had several more public libraries built in Rome, and in the early second century, provincial governors widely imitated this form of patronage.72 Libraries not only provided the practical resources needed for antiquarian and later miscellanistic and encyclopedic learning to flourish but also shaped the ideology of many of these literary compositions. The idea of a library was often both universalising and selective in aspiration: the organisation of libraries required selection and deselection of books. In public libraries this was often done with the aim of housing together all the books that were worth reading, and all that was worth storing in the collective memory of the culture. In this way, libraries were of special interest to rulers, whose collection, selection and deselection of books asserted their sense of mores and auctoritas. The Alexandrian library had been intended as a universal library to house all the books that were important in the world. Julius Caesar aspired to found a better universal library in Rome. Augustus had Ovid excluded; Tiberius had three Greek poets added; Caligula is said to have wished to expel both the works and the images of Homer, Virgil and Livy from all the libraries (Suet. Calig. 34).73 The encyclopedists transferred the locus of the universal library to their own literary projects: Diodorus’ Bibliothêkê was a universal history in forty-four books; Pliny cites his work respectfully in his preface (NH pr. 25), but aims himself to compose a history of the whole of nature in thirty-six books. Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists constituted a kind of library of all books and literature about the symposium. Even the smaller scale and more explicitly variegated works like Plutarch’s Table Talk and Gellius’ Attic Nights aspired to include excerpts of things worth remembering from different sources, thus parading a similar act of selection to that which was required to found a library collection. Beyond the library as book, the ideal of the human person as a walking library came into its own after the Hellenistic age74 and was prominently portrayed in miscellanists such as Gellius and Athenaeus. This image not

72

73 74

On Roman libraries: Nicholls 2005; Houston 2008; 2014. On provincial imitation of imperial library building: Petsalis-Diomidis 2010, 216. Dix 1994; Houston 2014, 233; Hall 2015, 10. I follow Too 2000 for the following account.

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only epitomised the educational ideal of a person with an all-round training, a prodigious memory and impeccable skill in drawing on it creatively to craft the appropriate remark or citation at the apposite moment (inventio). It also responded to a practical problem: with the proliferation of books and the desire to accumulate the best library, many faulty copies entered circulation. The authenticity of texts needed to be established, and the only person who could authenticate them was someone with an intimate knowledge of the original. If at first this person should be the librarian attached to the library itself, later the notion of the human library became dislocated from any one particular place: Longinus was remembered as a ‘breathing library and a walking museum’.75 However, as books continued to multiply, the impossibility of any one person remembering everything became vividly apparent; even the prolifically learned guests at Larensis’ banquet in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists forget things. Thus, the ‘walking library’ also became a selective purveyor of cultural memory, able to communicate and portray only what he deemed worthy of note. Clement, as we have seen, required extensive library resources, but he provided a Christian answer to the Classical traditions of libraries of books, and books as libraries. Stuart Thomson points out that he began his list of barbarian inventions with citations of encyclopedic authorities who were connected with the tradition of the Alexandrian library; Clement, however, has assembled and digested these into his encyclopedic miscellany and exposed only Scripture as really worth knowing. Indeed, Clement’s philosophy of literature both celebrated the Logos disclosed in Greek literature and provided a rationale for the ultimate thinning out of library resources: he acknowledged and even welcomed the revelation that came through Classical literature, but he made clear that once the light of Scripture had been perceived, it was only scriptural authors that needed to be read.76 His own educational pilgrimage, portrayed in Str. I. i.11.1–2, culminated with a bee in Egypt who anthologised a prophetic and apostolic meadow; this implied that the most perfect miscellany was a scriptural one, composed of works by prophets and apostles alone.77 75 76 77

PhiloStr. Vit. Soph. 456, quoted in Too 2000, 116. Cf. Protr. viii.77.1–88.3; Str. VI.xvii.149.1–4; xviii.162.1–5. This contrasts with Eusebius’ later reception of the image, where he portrays his own practice of plucking from literary meadows, but his sources include other, non-scriptural texts as well: ἡγούμεθα τῶν αὐτοῖς ἐκείνοις σποράδην μνημονευθέντων, ἀναλεξάμενοι καὶ ὡς ἂν ἐκ λογικῶν λειμώνων τὰς ἐπιτηδείους αὐτῶν τῶν πάλαι συγγραφέων ἀπανθισάμενοι φωνάς (Eus. HE 1.1.4), with Corke-Webster 2019, 13–16. However, Clement’s notion of

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His own fourth work in the pedagogical sequence, the Hypotyposeis, probably focused exclusively on Scripture.78 The extant works, however, draw together hundreds of books in the service of disclosing the one true Logos, who was made flesh. As for the notion of a human library, the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, summarised by John the Evangelist as ‘the Logos became flesh’, meant not only that the ordering principle of the cosmos (cosmic Logos) became flesh, but also that the meaning of the authoritative texts was embodied in human form.79 Clement grounded his notion of Christian formation in this theology: just as the textual revelation was embodied in the anthropomorphic one, so it was possible for readers of his text and of Scripture to become better embodiments of the divine.80 Just as all the texts that revealed God were summed up in one personal revelation, so all the texts drawn together in his work can be portrayed through an individual gnostic life (as, indeed, Clement begins to attempt to describe in Str. VII).81

Social Traditions: Symposium The cultural importance of the symposium began much earlier than the library culture of the Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic age. In archaic societies, the symposium was a central organ of communal life, and it long retained its traditional function of representing a microcosm of society, where central beliefs, values and patterns of relationship were rehearsed and performed.82 Miscellanism was closely connected with the symposium from the start, and this aspect was only enhanced in the literary symposia of the post-Hellenistic age. The gathering around the cups had always provided a venue for citing texts and performing textual

78 80 81

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miscellanising a prophetic and apostolic meadow to reach the true interpretation of the scriptures already suggests a canonically significant broadening of the Aristarchan principle of interpreting one text by other passages within the same text: Berglund 2019 has recently drawn attention to Heracleon’s move to interpret the Gospel of John with other gospel and apostolic writings and pointed out the canonical significance of this. Clement’s notion of a prophetic and apostolic meadow highlights a larger canon, including OT and NT. On Clement’s concept and use of scripture, see Kovacs 2017a, and the other essays in Černušková, Kovacs and Plátová 2017. 79 Bucur 2009b, 27. E.g., Str. V.i.7.7–8; iii.16.5. Cf. Str. III.42.4–43.2; IV.xxi.134.1–4. On Clement’s economy of revelation through cosmic, textual, and anthropological modes, see further Chapter 9. On the history of the symposium: O. Murray 1990; 2018; J. König 2008; 2012.

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memory, and the conviviality of the occasion depended on proper harmonies and mixtures of food and drink, entertainments, conversations and guests. Plutarch’s Quaestiones Convivales and Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae present two different models of sympotic miscellanism that both enhance the miscellaneity of the occasion, the former through variety and selectivity, the latter through bookish encyclopedism.83 The connection between sympotic conviviality and the miscellany is pertinent to interdisciplinary study of Christian miscellanism, because the trope of Christian difference has often been developed through histories of the literary dialogue and the symposium. Scholars pointed out that sympotic dialogue was a prominent literary tradition in the Classical world, but in Jewish texts even during the Second Temple period, no real debate was portrayed in the sympotic setting. Philo’s Therapeutae listen attentively to Scripture being read out and authoritatively interpreted for them. In the Christian tradition, Methodius’ banquet of virgins (late third century) recrafts traditional sympotic discourse with a new concern to discover Christian consensus and to elevate agonistic elements to engage with the universal agon of temptation.84 Corresponding to the transformation of the literary symposium, the embodied practice of conviviality was also transformed in Christian culture by the Eucharist, which configured relationships to other people and to God in a very different way from the Classical tradition. Clement has been drawn into this scholarly debate because his Paedaogus gives instructions for sympotic behaviour. Jason König contrasted Paed. II with Plutarch’s Quaestiones Convivales and Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists: according to his reading, the pagan miscellanies cultivate diverse voices at the sympotic gathering, but Clement ventriloquizes the divine Logos in giving instructions for proper behaviour.85 However, by focusing this discussion on the instructions in the Paedagogus rather than the Stromateis, an opportunity is missed for comparative miscellanism. Miscellanies were characteristically compositions of different voices, brought into conversation with one another through the literary form of the book, with an invitation to the reader to differentiate between them. Just as the symposium provided a venue for encountering the voices from past authors in the present and dialoguing with them,86 so too the

83

84 86

Trapp 2000, 354; Klotz and Oikonomopoulou 2011a, 13–15; J. König and Woolf 2013a, 56–57. 85 On Methodius, see J. König 2008, 102–6; 2012, 151–76. J. König 2012, 142–49. J. König 2011.

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Christian miscellany compiles voices from different parts of Scripture, and some pagan texts, and invites the reader to hunt through them to discover the seeds of truth and make them grow.87 Conversely, Plutarch’s sympotic miscellany does not leave the reader without any sense of direction as to the philosophical perspective on the cosmos that Plutarch espouses. Oikonomopoulou has argued that, for all his eclecticism, Plutarch does guide readers in a Platonist style of philosophical activity. She argues that this is effective through his programmatic emphasis on memory and meditation in order to learn, and through the emphasis on philosophical ‘food for the soul’.88 Clement does not compose his miscellanies by dramatising a symposium or set of symposia, by contrast with Plutarch and Athenaeus. As we saw in Chapter 3, his Christian difference from Classical topoi of food as nourishment is that his readers are fed through Christian traditions of ritual commensality.89 Thus, the reception of milk and honey at baptism is at the centre of Paedagogus I (Paed. I.vi); in Paedagogus II, the Pedagogue gives instructions for how to behave at table together (Paed. II.i–viii); and the Stromateis opens with a vignette that portrays the writing and reception of these hypomnêmata through imagery of receiving the Eucharist (Str. I.i.5.1–6.1); he uses similar imagery a little later for receiving the Scriptures as the literary form of the eucharistic bread (Str. I. x.46.1). Clement’s point is that one should prepare oneself to write or to read the Stromateis in the same way as one would prepare to receive the logos in the Eucharist; similarly, the Eucharist is a paradigm for rational (logikôs) eating, which should be the way in which one takes nourishment from the Scriptures. Clement does not strongly emphasise or develop this imagery through the Stromateis, but when he moves towards a climax in depicting the gnostic, who represents the telos of the ideal reader and product of divine pedagogy, he underscores that the gnostic is someone for whom attending the public liturgy, offering the sacrifice and hearing the public reading of Scripture is a central part of his practice to be [a] G/god (μελετᾷ εἶναι θεός, Str. VI.xiv.113.2–3). In Str. VII, it is shown that eventually his life transcends the liturgy, as he is caught up in ceaseless eucharistia and contemplation of the epoptic vision of God. But even then he continues to attend the public services and the reading there for the sake of others in the church, and his own reading of Scripture is constantly attended by

87

Str. I.i.18.1, xiii.57.3.

88

Oikonomopoulou 2011.

89

Above, p. 51.

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prayers of thanksgiving. Thus his whole life is a festival, characterised by unbroken eucharistia (Str. VII.vii.49.3). This use of imagery suggests that the social meal by which Clement structures his ideas of miscellanistic interaction is the Eucharist, viewed in the context of the longer liturgical life, which begins with reception into the family of God through baptism (Paed. I) and proceeds to refine the passions through learning proper ways of participating in social meals (Paed. II–III, esp. II.i–ii, iv, viii). To portray the reception of the Stromateis and the Scriptures as eucharistic does displace the conversations on the horizontal level that were characteristic of sympotic debate, but Clement does not become the mere ‘mouthpiece of the divine Logos’, nor does Christian engagement with miscellanies become non-dialogical.90 On the contrary, the dialogical reading of the text is absorbed into the structure of the church: reading is best done alongside a ‘helper’ figure who guides the reader’s interpretation;91 the true Logos is handed down in a tradition;92 and the reader’s proper disposition when attending to the Logos is one of prayerful thanksgiving (see further Chapter 5).

Social Purposes: Education and Formation The social purposes of miscellanists were characteristically educational and formational. Libraries and symposia were both, in different ways, institutions for education: the symposium could function as a microcosm of society, a venue for purveying and practising traditional values and social virtues; a place where literature was discussed, and where philosophical questions were debated; the young might be present to learn from their elders over the cups.93 The library, meanwhile, cultivated learning through research and the scholarly practices that we have already documented. Typical rhetorical tropes of literary miscellanism, such as the bee and the garden, underscored the educational function of this literature: bees were common images in educational discourse, portraying the discerning reader or listener, who picks out what is useful, as the bee extracts pollen for honey.94 Unformed natures of children were often portrayed as seeds or plants, growing in the soil, needing good cultivation. Some of the titles 90 92 93 94

91 Cf. J. König 2012, 145. Str. I.i.14.1; V.ix.56.4. For the ‘paradosis’ in Clement, see e.g.: Str. I.i.13.4, 16.2; V.x.61.1; VII.xvi.104.2. Roskam 2009. Cf. Eshleman 2013. Plut. aud. poet. 32ef; de rect. rat. aud. 41ef; Barns 1950, 132–34; Xenophontos 2013.

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of other people’s miscellanies that Gellius lists also have a strongly didactic ring: Discoveries (Εὑρήματα), Problems (Προβλήματα), Handbooks (Ἐγχερίδια) and Instructions (Διδασκαλικά) (NA pr. 7–8). Individual authors frequently underscored the didactic purpose of their work: Gellius presented his books as composed for his sons, which was a typical motif of didactic literature; he claimed to be presenting things that were useful (though some modern readers have doubted it).95 Plutarch’s Quaestiones Convivales were similarly didactic in form, selecting the things that were worthy of memory, and urging Sossius Senecio, his addressee, to ponder them more deeply.96 Clement’s Stromateis emphasise the educational tropes of farming and growing seeds;97 like Gellius, he evokes the wisdom trope of instructing a child at the start, though in Clement’s case, it is Solomon’s teaching that he quotes;98 his imagery of bees and farming would be familiar to his readers as a way of imaging the process of education; furthermore, his miscellanies form part of a longer project in formation, which underscores the didactic purpose. However, Clement’s didactic language persistently points readers beyond his own work to the divine paideia in which both he and his readers are formed: they are fellow-listeners to One Teacher (Str. I.i.12.3); they participate in ‘paideia in Christ’ (Str. IV.xvii.108.4); the educational programme begins with the ‘progymnasmata of gnostic ascesis’ (Str. IV.xxi.132.1), and culminates in being transformed in time by learning, thanks to the Lord’s provision (Str. IV.xxiii.149.5). It is in this context that he reinterprets the generic discourse markers in order to form people towards a Christian telos.

Spirituality and Theology of Classical Miscellanism: The Muses An aspect of imperial miscellanism that has been omitted in much previous discussion is the significance of the Muses, which I shall take up more fully in Chapter 8. Such is their importance, however, that it is worth introducing them here. Indeed, the other aspects of cultural context that we have discussed might lead us to expect them to be significant: they were patrons of the poetic and musical entertainment at symposia, patrons of libraries, patrons of education and the daughters of memory 95

96 98

Gell. NA pr. 1–3, 12–18, whose sincere educational intention is defended by Morgan 2004. 97 Plut. QC 1 pr. 612c–e. Str. I.i.1.3, 7.1, 9.1, 10.2–5, 15.2, 17.4, 18.1, etc. Str. I.i.1.2.

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who therefore had special insight through remembering. And yet, just as there has been a tendency in some Classics scholarship to reduce Christian theology to a social tool of oppression and control over the ‘miserable body’,99 rather than view it in terms of the transcendent, so too in Classical scholarship on the Muses there has been a tendency to reduce the ‘biography of the Muses’ to the ‘history of a fading metaphor’, and focus on power dynamics rather than on spirituality, transcendence or theology.100 The Muses are prominent in framing many imperial miscellanies: for example, Plutarch’s Quaestiones Convivales is presented as a gift to the Muses, and includes extensive dialogue about these deities. Muses and Helicons were among the titles on Gellius’ list of rejected book names; and he and other imperial miscellany-makers alluded to the Muses in the preface to his own composition of notes. And yet, the role of the Muses in imperial miscellanism has been overlooked in scholarship: it is not even discussed. Clement, however, was probably more sensitive to the significance of the Muses than modern scholars have been. He introduced his literary project in Christian formation through imagery of music, portraying Christ as the counterpart to Apollo (leader of the Muses) and to Orpheus (child of the Muses). He was reticent about mentioning the Muses by that name, but he gave much attention to the miscellanistic bee, and ancient readers would be familiar with the idea that bees were a typical form of Muse epiphany. In the course of this book, I shall have occasion to develop a fuller account of Clement’s reception of the spirituality of the Muses, and his attempt to reconfigure it in Christian form (see Chapter 8).

conclusion This chapter has highlighted aspects of the literary culture that allowed miscellanism to flourish in the early Empire and has positioned Clement’s miscellanistic practice in relation to them. The purpose of drawing out these themes here has been to make sense of the social resonance of Clement’s Christianisation of Classical miscellanism in the early empire. The rest of this book moves away from social history in order to focus on a literary-theological approach to studying Clement’s relation to the Classical tradition. However, many of the themes that have emerged in this chapter will return in the course of the study. 99

Goldhill 1999, 76–77.

100

Commager 1962, 3; Spentzou and Fowler 2002.

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5 Self-Introductions and Clement’s Miscellanistic Vocation

Chapters 2–4 have shown why it is important to juxtapose Clement and selected Classical miscellanists; so here we begin to pursue that comparison by examining how miscellanists presented themselves and their works to their readers.1 Literary miscellanies typically encouraged reader participation to a greater degree than other forms of writing. The author compiled many different items of interest, and the reader was expected to miscellanise, at least in the sense of being selective in contemplation and application of the material, if not also by composing literary miscellanies of her own.2 Classical scholars have frequently emphasised and even celebrated the notion of miscellanies as ‘open-ended texts’ that expect ‘active readers’ who are at liberty to read the text in their own way, and indeed must do so, in order for it to be useful in their own context.3 Sometimes they have contrasted this with Clement’s miscellanies, perceiving him as merely a ‘mouthpiece of the divine Logos’,4 or as conduit of a ‘specific message’.5 Meanwhile, in Early Christian Studies, Clement has been seen as

1 2

3 4

Cf. Fitzgerald’s genre markers of miscellanies, Chapter 3, especially (3)–(5). I am not claiming that all readers of miscellanies also authored miscellanies, only that this was one way of using them, as in the vignette of Gell. NA 14.6, discussed above (pp. 65–68). For many readers, the purpose of reading miscellanies may be only the philosophical one of ‘using his or her reading as a resource, a starting-point for his or her own coherent philosophical development’ (J. König 2007, 44), cf. Plut. de recta rat. aud. 48c, discussed in Thomson 2014, 123–24. J. König 2007, esp. 44–46; Too 2010, 63; Thomson 2014, 124, 126. 5 J. König 2012, 145. Holford-Strevens 2003, 29.

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developing rhetorical strategies to authorise and promote his own voice in the context of social competition among different teachers of Christianity.6 Implicit in these portrayals of Clement’s authorial voice is a theological question of the relation between author, reader, text and God. Is the author inspired to speak God’s truth for his readers, such that he assumes authority to talk as God to others? Or do others have the chance to discern their own truth, in dialogue with one another and in dialectic relation to the text itself? Clement is familiar with the idea of prophets as ‘instruments of God’ who channel the divine voice – he accepts this as a mode of speech both for Classical authors, who are unaware of what they are saying, and of barbarian prophets, who convey the truth in scripture.7 But I hope to show that this is not his understanding of his own miscellanistic vocation. Rather, by juxtaposition and comparison with the way imperial miscellanists handled their authorial role in relation to their patrons, text and readers, I hope to bring out the ways in which Clement reinterpreted this literary relationship in light of his Christian spirituality and incipiently Trinitarian theology.

how classical authors present themselves and their miscellanies The way in which authors introduce themselves and their works is a crucial ‘hermeneutical bridge between writer and audience, creation and fruition, world and text, intention and reception’.8 This first part of the chapter takes the comparative authors who were introduced in Chapter 3, and shows how they create this ‘hermeneutical bridge’ with their own methods of presenting themselves and their miscellanies for their readers.

Pliny and Athenaeus: Receding Authors of Totalising Texts Compared with Plutarch and Gellius, Pliny and Athenaeus have more totalising aspirations for their works, and they are more reticent about the authorial voice or presence. Our question, then, is how, if at all, these

6

7 8

Dawson 1992, 219–34; Buell 1999; Emmett 2001, 32–71; Thomson 2013; Gibbon 2017, 33–47. Str. VI. xviii.168.2–3, cf. Str. I.viii.42.1; IV.xxvi.171.4; VI.ix.45.1, xvii.151.5–152.1. Peirano 2013, 255.

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writers shaped their audience’s engagement with their miscellanies through their own self-presentation as miscellany-makers. Pliny’s Preface: Literary Ambition and Relationships to the Imperial House We begin with Pliny. Pliny is most present as author in the preface to his Natural History. Thereafter, he sometimes appears in his own person at the beginnings of books, or in transitions from one kind of material to another or if he lights upon a piece of information that is particularly meaningful to him and seeks to draw attention to it. Often, however, he retreats behind an aggregation of facts and allows them to stand unadorned before his reader. Pliny’s voice in the preface is difficult to interpret. It is thickly laden with irony and at odds with the main body of the work, with the result that it is hard to know what he is getting at.9 He advertises his miscellanistic mode of composition rather late in the preface through his list of titles of his non-predecessors, most of which are typical of the so-called miscellany genre, and by portraying himself labouring at his notes and excerpts by night (NH 17–19). He defines what this project means to him by his social relationship to his patron, Titus, and to the Roman people, and by his ambitions for the work. I want to draw out two aspects: his anxiety about the reception of his own work and his literary ambitions for it. These will form points of comparison with Clement later in the chapter. It was conventional for authors to express modesty in their prefaces, while also indicating their literary ambitions, but Pliny seems extreme in both directions. He dedicates the work to Titus, who is both heir to the imperial throne and a personal friend. This is sensitive, which partly explains why Pliny’s personal voice is inconsistent and sometimes startling. He addresses Titus, ‘iucundissime imperator!’ at the start, which is somewhat jarring, as ‘iucundissme’ was an intimate form of address, not the way to speak to future emperors.10 Pliny portrays Titus as both a chum from military camp, and as the bearer of many public roles, who encapsulates all the power and authority of the state in himself.

9

10

Morello 2011, 149, 151; Howe 1985, 562. For appreciative notes on Pliny’s style in his preface: Baldwin 2005. Roche 2016, 435. Baldwin 2005, 93 points out Suetonius’ use of this vocative in addressing Tiberius, and his description of Titus’ banquets as ‘iucunda’.

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He is very self-effacing in introducing his work. His opening sentence begins not with a reference to himself as author, but to his books as ‘an innovative work for the Muses of your Roman citizens’ (‘libros Naturalis Historiae, novicium Camenis Quiritium tuorum opus’, pr. 1). He does not describe his act of composition in the first person at all, but minimises the presentation of his own agency: these books were ‘born at my place’, a ‘very recent brood’ (‘natos apud me proxima fetura’, pr. 1). The active first person is reserved for his decision to recount (or dedicate)11 them to Titus. This downplays Pliny’s authorial agency and emphasises instead his agency in bestowing them as a gift. In his quotation from Catullus, he makes the first person less prominent by switching the position of ‘nugas’ and ‘meas’ so that ‘trifles’ comes first, as a description of the books ahead.12 Pliny then heaps up apologies for his work. He finds it unsettling to have such a brilliant dedicatee, he says, particularly when it is by his own choice (pr. 6–11). Titus is luminous with rhetorical power and his mind is magnificently fertile (pr. 5). Perched at the summit of the human race, he is endowed with the utmost eloquence and learning (pr. 11). Pliny mentions all the excuses that he would have made if Titus had simply fallen upon the work and decided to read it (pr. 6). But since he himself has chosen to dedicate it to Titus, he finds other ways of downplaying it before Titus gets any further: it is lightweight and boring; its subject matter is barren (‘sterilis’, quite the opposite of Titus’ ‘fecund’ mind, pr. 13 cf. 5); it is limited in scope (pr. 18), and he would like to sign it off as unfinished, the way Greek artists signed their works (pr. 26–27). He has even been thoughtful enough to add an index to save Titus or anyone else from having to read it. Titus, in particular, will have more important things to do (pr. 33). On the other hand, Pliny also stakes some big claims for his work: it is original, a path that no Roman or Greek has accomplished before. It is useful and dedicated for the public good. Diodorus’ Bibliothêkê is the only title he would compare with his own, and with that, Diodorus ‘ceased to play’ (‘desiit nugari’) – perhaps Pliny too ‘means business’ with what he calls his nugae (pr. 25 cf. 1).13 He is proud of how he has worked: it took real effort, not just indulging in a pasture where it is delightful to roam; he found it difficult to ‘give novelty to what is old, authority to what is new, brilliance to the common-place, light to the obscure, 11 13

Variant readings: narrare/nuncupare, pr. 1. Morello 2011, 163–65.

12

Howe 1985, 567.

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attraction to the stale, credibility to the doubtful, but nature to all things and all her properties to nature’ (pr. 15, tr. Rackham, LCL 330, 11). This suggests that Pliny does not think his work is quite so boring as he said at first. Furthermore, he wants us to understand that he has surpassed the Greek enkyklios paideia with its contents (pr. 14). The Roman people and the nation have also been well served by his mode of study: he was amassing facts that nobody else discovered from a vast range of books, using the night hours for this, since the days were devoted to imperial service (pr. 17–18). One partial explanation for the perplexing oscillation and irony in the tone of the preface is that Pliny was writing an innovative work, and that comes with risks, whether he succeeds or fails. His self-effacement gave Titus and other readers every opportunity to take him at his word. They could choose not to read his work. They could affirm that it is indeed dull and boring stuff and just admire the index. However, the novelty was also ambitious, and those ambitions were strongly marked by political, social and cultural aspirations. Natural history was an intrinsically political theme. Augustan rhetoric celebrated the emperor as the arbiter of all that was to be known. Pliny now took it upon himself to define that for the Roman world.14 As many scholars have argued, he did so from a particularly Roman perspective. He shaped his material like a Roman triumph,15 like Agrippa’s map of Rome16 or like a journey along roads that now criss-crossed the emperor’s domain.17 In offering an index, he not only made it possible to take in all this at a glance, but he also emphasised the totalising character of his encyclopedic vision. He has domesticated the Greek enkyklios paideia in a way that literally put the whole world at Roman fingertips. In his preface, he hints at how his project rivals others. It is not just the frivolous Greek miscellanies like the Honeycomb or the Horn of Plenty that he seeks to surpass. He also positions his prose treatise in a way that potentially usurps Virgil’s place in writing the foundational piece of literature for the Roman world.18 The ideology of Pliny’s challenge, however, was not totally novel: he cites Varro approvingly in his preface, 14 17 18

15 16 Murphy 2004a, 197–209. Murphy 2004a, 129–64. Carey 2003, 61–74. Beagon 2013, 98–103. The vignette of peasants bringing their milk and grain to honour the emperor hints at the moral programme of Virgil’s Georgics, which discredits luxury and encourages the Roman people to respect the natural world. Some scholars find an echo of Georgics 2.173 in the conclusion to the Natural History. See Bruère 1956, 228–46; Howe 1985, 570–72.

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and Varro is his great model and forebear. What he at first called Catullan ‘nugae’ turn out to be produced ‘while we are, as Varro puts it, “muginamur” – “dallying with these trifles”’ (pr. 18, tr. Rackham, LCL 330, 13).19 This is the activity of excerpting and collecting facts during the night in order to put them together for the public good. The universalistic scope is in keeping with the ambition of other compilatory works for public benefit: Vitruvius and Diodorus Siculus also thought that they were serving Roman citizens by bringing everything that mattered into one place.20 Pliny extends his authorial role beyond the organisation of the world by purveying also an ethos for how to engage with it. Luxury is consistently criticised, while ‘curiositas’ is encouraged provided it is kept within the limits of reverence for nature, and thus functions as a goad to study – as modelled by Pliny himself.21 Pliny alludes to sensitivities in his other interactions with Titus concerning literature: there was an ‘impudent letter’ that had not satisfied Titus (pr. 2), and there is a Flavian history that Pliny says he is not going to publish during his lifetime (pr. 20). He gives compunction as a reason – he does not want anyone to think he was ambitious for office. However, this deflection only underscores his ambition in publishing the Natural History. A political history of the ruling house could not have constructed a Roman worldview the way this can. Pliny submits it to Titus with a reminder that his rise to power changes only one thing about him: it extends his opportunity to bestow benefits (pr. 3). He portrays his authorial role within an economy of exchange of knowledge and books, where the emperor, the Roman public and the authors whom Pliny has read each have a role to play. He presupposes a culture where buying books and knowledge is demeaning, but receiving them as gifts is honourable. In return, it is polite to acknowledge one’s sources. Construed in financial imagery, an author is either a borrower/ debtor or a thief: a good borrower/debtor repays at interest what has been bestowed by acknowledging sources and extending their influence; but a thief takes what is given and does not acknowledge where it comes from (pr. 21–23). Pliny’s practice of acknowledging his authorities shows that he is a good borrower/debtor.22 He also acknowledges Titus himself as the one who ‘offers’ the material for his work, which gives it value 19

20

Edd. ‘musinamur’, Beaujeu 1950 (Budé), 52. For the textual issue: Holford-Strevens 2003, 260 n. 1, suggesting that Gell. NA 5.16.5, ‘non diutius muginandum’ establishes ‘muginamur’ as correct in Plin. NH pr. 18. 21 22 Beagon 2013, 92. Beagon 2011. Murphy 2004a, 49–73, esp. 54–66.

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(‘tu praestas quod ad te scribimus. haec fiducio operis, haec est indicatura’, pr. 19). In return, he dedicates his own literary work to Titus (pr. 11–12) and ‘offers’ it for the Roman people. Here he draws a comparison between himself and Livy, who worked for his own mental relief rather than for Rome’s benefit: those who have knowledge but treasure it up for themselves are despised (pr. 16). Having ‘offered’ the index so that neither Titus nor others need read his work in full (pr. 33), he now depends on Titus himself to ‘offer’ it to the public so that it reaches the breadth of readership at which Pliny aims (pr. 33 cf. 4, 16).23 As an author, then, Pliny knew he was writing something fabulously new and politically and socially potent. He advertised the fact that this was grounded in his labours of excerption and selection from scanning thousands of books – the very same kind of activity that underlay miscellanism, including the miscellanies that he thought were frivolous. He thus recognised miscellanism as a way of writing through which he could achieve personal but also public, Roman ambitions. Murphy emphasises the open-endedness of his work: he finds it impossible to track down a ‘real Pliny’ behind the aggregate of facts, self-contradictions and culturally platitudinous views. He thinks that the index confirms that Pliny wants to make it possible for people to read and use the work in their own way. He deliberately abjures authorial control and authorises individual responses.24 However, this can be overemphasised: Pliny does invite individual, miscellanistic approaches to his compilation, but he also marks it with a particular ethos and structures it with a dominant worldview. It is a Rome-centred account of nature, promoting a Roman ideal of simplicity, an antiquarian delight in learning and broadly Stoic reverence for nature. That it is ‘offered’ into a social economy of exchange underscores that the author takes his place within an existing social system and network of knowledge and power, even as he seeks to establish it. Athenaeus’ Conversational Frame: Miscellanising the Miscellanists for Timocrates Athenaeus’ project has some similarities to Pliny’s, and may even be a mimesis of it, as suggested in Chapter 3. He too attempts an encyclopedic, universalising work of Roman antiquarianism. It is brimming with quotations and citations of sources, and the authorial presence often recedes from view behind the conversations at the feast. However, his subject matter is the symposium, and unlike Pliny, he presents himself as a 23

Gunderson 2003, 645; Morello 2011, 163.

24

Murphy 2004a, 9–11, 32, 206.

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character in a dramatic setting: he was at the banquet that he recounts to Timocrates. Athenaeus’ work is both a comic burlesque of contemporary antiquarian society and a witty intervention in the tradition of sympotic literature that goes back to Plato. His authorial presence is organised through both frames. Although the preface is lost, it is clear that the Epitomator did not find him an absent, silent author. He calls him ‘the father of this book’ (1.1a), ‘that amazing steward of the banquet’, who ‘introduces a most pleasurable word-feast (λογόδειπνον)’ and who surpasses himself in his passionate rhetoric, ‘like the Athenian orators’ (1.1b–c). He recounts that the guests were likened to ‘a military roll-call’ and Athenaeus dramatised the dialogue ‘in rivalry with Plato’ (1.1f ). The Epitomator is thus conscious of Athenaeus’ authorial presence, which shapes and displays his own literary genius. From his perspective, Athenaeus competes with the best Greek Classics in several genres, especially Athenian oratory and Plato’s sympotic dialogues. The observation that Athenaeus emulates Plato (ζήλῳ Πλατωνικῷ, 1.1f ) highlights Athenaeus’ literary wit in handling his material. His opening lines artfully combine allusions to the Phaedo and to the Symposium: he begins with an encounter with Timocrates who asks him, ‘Athenaeus, were you present yourself at that splendid gathering of those now called Deipnosophists, which became the talk of the town in the city?’ (1.2a). The phrasing αὐτός, ὦ Ἀθήναιε, and the response αὐτός, ὦ Τιμόκρατες, recalls the Phaedo, while the topic – a sympotic ‘gathering’ that everyone is talking about – recalls the Symposium. Plato presents the Phaedo as a report of a conversation among friends but set the narrative of the Symposium at a double distance from the narrative present, as a report of a report of a conversation among friends that had happened long ago. Athenaeus not only shows off by combining allusions to both but also caps Plato’s sympotic drama, since his is a first-hand report to Timocrates.25 The Platonising way of framing the account as a conversational reminiscence frequently pushes Athenaeus and his interlocutor out of sight. Most of the individual books begin, and some end, by drawing attention to the dialectic frame. But there is minimal characterisation of either Athenaeus or Timocrates. Timocrates, whose name means ‘he who honours power, is largely silent.

25

Trapp 2000, 353–55.

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Only on a few occasions is the external frame of the conversation between Athenaeus and Timocrates developed, but even in such cases, Athenaeus is sometimes doing no more than underscoring his diminutive authorial role. For example, at the start of Book 6 he takes issue with Timocrates’ constant questioning (which is not reported) as if he thought that ‘we’ (Athenaeus? Athenaeus and Timocrates?) were discovering novel things. He tells Timocrates firmly (with lengthy quotations to support his point) that ‘we’ are merely giving away the Deipnosophists’ leftovers, not actually giving the logoi themselves. Anything he renders is from the Deipnosophists first (6.222a–23d). This is a piece of literary self-abnegation with social significance. Athenaeus portrays himself as Larensis’ client; his account of the Logodeipnon is supposed to celebrate Larensis; he himself retreats. A little later in this same book, he will recount a conversation about flattery, which Tim Whitmarsh has argued is particularly pertinent to Athenaeus and the society he portrays (6.224c, 228d, 234c–62a). These learned guests protest at the flattery of foreign despots and luxurious excess, but are not they themselves guilty of something like it? They are enjoying a Greek symposium at Rome, hosted by a Roman Hellenophile whose library is stuffed with the books that come from conquered Greece. In representing this for the delight of Timocrates and other Roman readers, Athenaeus reminds us that he and they are complicit in the same social framework. At the same time, he invites his readers to enjoy the aesthetic of his literary art, not in order to trump politics with pleasure, but to allow a constructive dialectic between poetics and power.26 However, the comment about relaying leftovers is also a literary statement about his miscellanism – and miscellanism in general – as an art form. The guests whom he describes at the dinner are miscellanisers of ancient literature. Athenaeus as author of the present work is a miscellaniser of the miscellanists. When he tells Timocrates that his work is more derivative than theirs, he is being provocative about the character of miscellanistic authorship. His miscellany is glisteningly novel, as he well knows, but it is part of the miscellanist’s art to create new things by putting together leftovers from others. What is more, the game need not stop with Athenaeus. It is Timocrates who has the feeling that they are piecing together something novel; those who read and listen with

26

Whitmarsh 2000.

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Timocrates have every chance to develop miscellanies of their own on the basis of Athenaeus’. Athenaeus’ self-awareness as an author is thus focused on the practice and novelty of miscellanism itself. When he does draw attention to his authorial intervention, it is to underscore the characteristic activities of miscellanism. He highlights his prerogative to order and select his material with a view to his audience, both internal and external to the dialogue. When Timocrates expresses interest in Macedonian material, he responds by including that next (3.127d); he organises his account of fish alphabetically so that Timocrates may find it easier to remember (7.227c)! He draws attention to his decision to select only what is worth mentioning or remembering (9.368f ), or to omit or summarise in places for the sake of brevity (14.616e).27 On one occasion, he puts a stop to a conversation about fish lest readers should think that they, like Empedocles, were once incarnated as fish (8.365e). His self-portrayal of his authorship thus highlights his role as selector, excerpter but also dialogue partner with a Roman friend who is eager to learn and attentive with him to a wider reception. Readers are invited to participate in the shared experience of this kind of miscellanism. Timocrates is an internal focaliser for their encounter with the Logodeipnon, but so is Athenaeus himself. Furthermore, Athenaeus deliberately blurs the boundaries between different frames of narration: there are four different levels of enunciation – the external narration, where Athenaeus tells the reader about his conversations with Timocrates; the external dialogue, where Athenaeus and Timocrates are in conversation; the dialogue of the Deipnosophists at Larensis’ table; and the ancient authors who are brought into this interplay.28 These different layers of enunciation are frequently made to intersect, so that it is not clear where the symposium ends and where the readers’ experience as readers begins. The Deipnosophists’ play with the texts is showcased as an exceptional event; to this extent, Athenaeus’ narrative is a monument to an unrepeatable occasion. The dialectic frame invites them to step into an imaginative world of Platonic tradition (and the traditions of the other Hellenic literature quoted) and inhabit it afresh. But through Athenaeus’ authorial work, he is inviting them actively to take up that invitation, not just to be spectators in the imagination, but also participants. The social dynamics 27 28

Rodríguez-Noriega Guillén 2000, 247–48; Wilkins 2000, 31. Ceccarelli 2000, 273.

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of the occasion, the literary texts and interactions, can go beyond the confines of his fifteen volume work. Summary Both Pliny and Athenaeus practise a totalising, encyclopedic form of miscellanism. Both aspire to act as authorities in selecting and arranging material for an audience that may struggle with its length. Both write within a patron-client relationship, which means that they must tread a careful line between writing for their patron and promoting their work for a wider audience within an economy of exchange of books and knowledge. Despite their aspirations to produce monumental, encyclopedic works, one on nature, the other on sympotica, they also both stage a retreat from the authorial role. They aim to let their readers enter into the imaginative world and social ethos of their miscellanism, and to participate actively in the encounter with the text and the social and literary world that it portrays. Plutarch and Gellius: Putting the Author into the Mix Plutarch and Gellius assume the mantle of miscellanistic authorship in a rather different way from Pliny and Athenaeus. Neither is writing within a complex social dynamic of subordinacy and patronage. Neither of them attempts an encyclopedic work. Both of them establish a prominent authorial presence, not only in their preface(s) but also in their personal involvement in many of the occasions that they recall in their miscellanies. They write didactically and portray the primary recipients as social equals. Tendencies that were apparent in Pliny and Athenaeus become more pronounced here: a careful combination of self-promotion and selfeffacement and an invitation to the reader to participate in the shared miscellanistic activity. In their case, far more obviously than in Pliny and Athenaeus, the author is a model more than he is an authority. The spirit of their miscellanism aims more at collaborative development than at the construction of a monumental set piece. That is not to deny that they have literary ambitions, but only to point out that their social aspirations for their work are different. Plutarch’s Prefaces and Remembered Sympotic Conversations Plutarch’s nine books of Quaestiones Convivales are presented as reminiscences of sympotic conversations in many of which Plutarch took part, sometimes together with his addressee, who is a friend and Roman

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senator, Sossius Senecio. As author, Plutarch takes a prominent role as the voice narrating every preface and every mise en scène, as well as being one of the most frequent conversation partners at the recorded symposia. Questions about the historicity of these conversations have proved difficult to answer in detail. The characters are often real, and some of them may well be based on real conversations. Chris Pelling suggests that places where one can actually detect Plutarch tweaking historicity are rarer in Table Talk than in the Lives.29 And yet, few scholars today would regard the conversations as a historical record. Plutarch’s intentions are clearly literary, philosophical and didactic, as he indicates in the preface to the whole. He places his work in a tradition of philosophical sympotic literature, which stretches back to Plato, and whose authors he can list as a succession of ‘the most distinguished among the philosophers’: ‘Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, Speusippus, Epicurus, Prytanis, Hieronymus, and Dio of the Academy’. All these, according to Plutarch, ‘valued the task of writing up the conversations that occurred during the drinking as worthy of some serious effort’ (1 pr. 612d). So does Plutarch. He seeks to preserve the same spirit that they modelled, of honouring the ‘friend-making character of the table’ in what he deems worthy of memory. Thus, he explicitly privileges the spirituality of this sympotic tradition over the historical completeness of his own account. Plutarch’s self-presentation as author participates in this commitment to composing good literary philosophy about the symposium. Plato may be the fountainhead of this tradition, but Plutarch’s sympotic art leads him to do almost the opposite of Plato in managing his authorial persona. Whereas Plato was famous even in antiquity for absenting himself from his dialogues, and thereby escalating the challenge for the reader to find the authentic response to the work,30 Plutarch is noticeably prominent in his Table Talk. In all the variety of his work, his own presence provides a thread of continuity. As Klotz and Oikonomopolou observe, this creates interpretive problems of its own: ‘just as Plato’s absence from the Symposium serves to complicate his philosophy, so Plutarch’s presence, in a different way, does the same’.31 Plutarch never gives an account of his life as a whole, but portrays himself in sympotic conversations at various ages, at various locations, in various circumstances. This disrupts any attempt on the reader’s part to 29 31

30 Pelling 2011, 224. Ní Mheallaigh 2005. Klotz and Oikonomopoulou 2011a, 8.

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glean a narrative of Plutarch’s personal history; his autobiography becomes itself a miscellany. The fullest discussion of this phenomenon is by Frieda Klotz. She rightly argues that the effect is to open up the possibilities for readers to take up Plutarch’s model in their own lives. What he models is an ethos and practice of miscellanism, grounded in philosophical conversation with friends at the symposium. It is more than a memory of a social past-time. The Table Talk offers to the reader the notes from Plutarch’s experiments and enquiries into his own past. It is ‘meant to stimulate not just emulation but also self-exploration, intellectual inquiry, and further discussion in those who encounter his text’.32 The sympotic context underwrites Plutarch’s authorial selfpresentation in the Table Talk. Jason König has pointed out that there is a curious discrepancy between the way he handles the authorial persona in different parts of the work. In the prefaces, he tends to be more selfeffacing: he often avoids the first person where he could have used it; the work itself is composed only because Sossius Senecio asked for it, and Plutarch describes it as containing ‘our’ memories, not just his own. Conversely, Plutarch is often more self-assertive in the quaestiones. He is often the final speaker and the most astute, though there are also cases where he is trumped by others. König argues that this combination of self-promotion and self-effacement is grounded in the character of the symposium: it was both a place of conviviality where guests were bound together in ties of friendship, and a place of competition where speakers traditionally sought to outdo one another in their rhetorical virtuosity or wit.33 Plutarch’s self-presentation as fragmentary, miscellanistic and yet ever present can be compared with the presentation of the literary authors themselves who are quoted at the symposium. In Athenaeus, there was a pronounced tendency to transgress the boundaries between enunciative levels, such that the distinction between the miscellanists and their material became blurred. Jason König points out that Plutarch does something similar in reporting the role of the authors cited at the symposia. Sometimes they are portrayed as if they were participating in the conversation on equal terms with the speakers themselves. Euripides is a ‘friend’ (φίλος) of Plutarch but has not persuaded him on a certain matter (7.7, 710e); Plutarch knows some young men who have only recently started ‘frequenting the school of’ ancient authors 32 33

Klotz 2011, passim, with the quotation at p. 178. J. König 2011, 179–80, 184–95. See also: Brenk 2009.

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(προσπεφοιτηκότες 3.6, 653b).34 In this way, the reader is not invited to contemplate a history of literature any more than (s)he is shown a history of Plutarch. The barriers between miscellanist and miscellanised break down. Through memory and meditation, the symposia occur in a timeless present among a group of friends who can meet and continue their conversations anywhere. Readers are invited to enter into this shared activity, drawing on their own memories and extending the practice beyond the confines of the text. Gellius’ Personalised Memoranda Gellius styles his work commentarii. This rather vague term corresponds to Greek hypomnêmata (which Clement uses for his Stromateis) or, sometimes, apomnêmoneumata (used by Justin Martyr for the memoirs of the apostles, as well as by Favorinus for one of his miscellanies). Gellius uses it in the course of NA to refer to exegetical commentaries and scholarly treatises, as well as miscellaneous works, which are the point of comparison for his own work. His extant dedication is to his children. The earliest example of the literary tradition of dedicating a didactic work to one’s children is Cato, whose ad filium is lost, but has sometimes been regarded as a predecessor for Pliny’s encyclopedic project. Gellius’ dedicatees, however, are adult children, who are to read the Nights when they have freedom from business (‘negotia’, pr. 1).35 Like Plutarch, Gellius often includes himself as a character in his memoranda, but the differences in context and development are also significant. Gellius’ authorial presence is notably prominent throughout his work, as Vardi and others have observed.36 Not only does the preface serve to frame the origin and purpose of the work in the context of his life and his social relationships, but he himself also appears frequently in his chapters. This is a deliberate stylistic choice: often Gellius frames things in personal ways even when he could have avoided the first person entirely. Where objectivity may lead us to discuss texts and avoid the first person, he personalises the act of reading, learning or responding. A proverb is not just a proverb, but a proverb ‘which I have heard quoted thus’ (3.9.7); a story in a text is not just told as a story, but as an event in his own experience of reading: ‘in the books which I read, I found ... and was surprised ... but learned ...’ (3.4.1). A friend is not just ‘very learned’, but ‘the most learned person in my recollection’ (1.22.9). A speaker is not 34 36

35 J. König 2011, 195–202. Heusch 2011, 303–5. As observed by Vardi 2004, 179; Pausch 2009, 325.

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named, but defined only in relation to Gellius, ‘my friend’ (‘amicus noster’, 1.7.4, 16, 18). The significance of a phrase is not just declared, but the readers are personally addressed: ‘I want you to infer’ (2.20.2). In these and other such cases, Gellius seeks ways of personalising his notes. Gellius most often represents himself engaging in the activities that are characteristic of miscellanism. ‘I enquired’, ‘I read’, ‘I am quoting’, ‘I remember’, ‘I asked’ are frequent. Sometimes he sketches a situation in which he read, heard or discussed something. He remembers being in a court of a learned praetor, when a particular issue came up (1.22.9). Another time Favorinus took him to visit a sick friend, and there was a discussion about the vocabulary of colour (2.26). Once he was in a boat with a mixed bunch of Greek and Roman students crossing from Aegina back to Piraeus, and they gazed at the stars and talked about the words used to describe the constellations (2.21). Often he attended lectures or symposia that Favorinus held and praises this learned man’s style or thinks over the conversation (2.5.1; 22.27, etc.). Gellius’ very personal approach to his notes means that miscellanistic activity is primarily focalised through him. The reader is constantly presented with him as an example of how to read, how to critique what one reads, how to enquire and so on. Gellius’ prominence highlights his exemplary function. Sometimes he draws attention to the first person in order to give an opinion or answer, but far more often it is simply to underscore that he is the main actor in the task of thinking, questioning and remembering, which lies behind the notes. These are his notes, and he was the one who collected and thought about these things. This underscores his role not so much as a figure of authority, but as an example to his readers. Plutarch’s open-endedness had a similar function of inviting the reader in; Gellius takes it even further. Gellius’ exemplary purpose is confirmed in his programmatic statement in his preface. He introduces the notes in a way that suggests their didactic function in the first instance – they are for his sons. The ‘son’ is the typical recipient of a didactic text. But he goes on to draw out their wider social purpose: he hopes that others too will join in this pattern of miscellanistic activity. This is underscored by the prominence of biography and other personal narratives and exempla in Gellius’ work. Again, as in Athenaeus and Plutarch, these are stylised and probably not an attempt to portray how things actually happened.37 He includes plenty

37

Beall 1999; Vardi 2004, 181.

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of stock figures of incompetent sophists whom he mercilessly debunks. They are flat characters, who are there apparently to dig at a class of professional scholars rather than at any particular individuals.38 Those he knows, such as Favorinus or Fronto, are much more rounded figures, but even with them he tells us half-truths and tries to show them in a good light. Holford-Strevens points out that Favorinus was vilified by other contemporaries for what they perceived as physical deformity; he was ugly and had a physical condition that gave him secondary female characteristics. None of that is mentioned by Gellius. Like Athenaeus writing about Larensis’ hospitality, Gellius was a social subordinate. His notes are recollections of times when he moved with social ease among the intellectual elites. He was often a guest, although never a host.39 Vardi has drawn attention to the fact that Gellius (like Plutarch) fails to give any narrative autobiography. Indeed, his account of his own authorial engagement with the material spans several places and times. The occasions are far more varied than in Plutarch’s sympotic questions and stand out among ancient literature for that variety. Here one can find all sorts of occupations, from dinner parties to lectures, shopping and boating, walking in the park, looking at statues or reading books. No other known miscellany has such uncompromising commitment to diversity of scene and setting. And yet, one thing is conspicuously absent: there is nothing on political life. As Vardi argues, Gellius programmatically portrays the life of scholarly otium. Unlike Pliny, who declares publicly at the start that he spent his days in imperial service, and only his nights on miscellanistic labour with books, Gellius portrays himself snatching opportunities for intellectual reflection during every kind of otium. He shows that the intellectual life can be enjoyed at any time and place, and offers his readers a treasury to accompany, inspire and delight them.40 Summary Plutarch and Gellius each make themselves a subject of their miscellanies far more than Pliny and Athenaeus. And yet, the purpose of their ‘I’ and autobiographical anecdotes is not primarily to inform the readers about themselves or their personal history. Rather, they are composing personal meditations that invite the reader into a way of inhabiting social space, be it the symposium (as in Plutarch) or the otium of the comfortably well-off elites (as in Gellius). They each portray a culture that is grounded in the 38 40

39 Vardi 2001. Holford-Strevens 1997, esp. 93–95, 108–12. Vardi 2004, 179–86.

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delight of learned conversation, as part of a culture that can be shared across time and place and that roots itself in a tradition that is imagined to stretch back to Plato – the first author of a sympotic dialogue and other famous enquiries that took place with Socrates during Attic nights. As authors, they are not only compilers but visionaries: they have a sense of vision or nostalgia about this timeless culture of intellectual activity, which binds them through language and literature to one another and their past. They are not only authorities, for they show that they can learn and make mistakes. They offer themselves as models, examples and friends for their readers, to share in a conversation that happens through books and over books, in a world where the voice from the text can become the dialogue partner in one’s own group of friends. Conclusion We have approached Pliny and Athenaeus, Plutarch and Gellius as two groups of miscellanists with different modes of presenting themselves and their miscellanies to their readers. On the one hand, there are totalising miscellanies, where the author acts as an authority for a worldview and purveys an ethos but himself tends to recede behind the mass of material. On the other, there are more compact and selective works of miscellanism, which are personalised within the author’s recollection. The author offers a model for readers to emulate and befriend in their own miscellanistic activity. This differentiation is far from watertight: Athenaeus has some characteristics of both, and no two miscellanies handle the authorial role in the same way. These writers are all keenly self-aware as miscellanistic authors. Pliny and Gellius use their preface to portray their mode of working as miscellanists; Athenaeus and Plutarch highlight editorial decisions in their work. Plutarch, Gellius and Athenaeus even miscellanise themselves. As authors, they hope to make their mark by practising miscellanism in a way that is pertinent to their own social setting. Pliny draws attention to the ‘novelty’ of his compilatory enterprise` and its public utility. His work is for a Roman public and enters a Roman economy of knowledge exchange, headed by the ruling house. Athenaeus glibly insists that novelty is the achievement of the learned excerpters whose discourse he in his turn excerpts; but he is making it available for Timocrates and through him, for Rome at large. Plutarch and Gellius value miscellanism because it cultivates memory work in a socially responsible way by offering material that is relevant to meditate upon for like-minded Roman citizens.

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clement’s preface to the stromateis : the author’s notes ( str. i.i.1–14) One of the central characteristics of the Classical examples above is the authors’ strong sense of identity as miscellanists, who model their miscellanistic lifestyle or ethos for their readers. In Pliny and Gellius, this takes place in the preface through self-portrayal in nocturnal notetaking;41 in Athenaeus and Plutarch, it comes across in passages of exchange with the internal audience that showcase acts of miscellanistic selection, de-selection and ordering of material; in all the miscellanists, there is a certain ethos of enquiry that is displayed through the author’s approach to his own work. In older scholarship, Gellius’ vignettes were often taken as historical portrayals of his own life; Athenaeus’ narrative is still today often regarded as grounded in a historical relationship to Larensis, his patron. And yet, for the most part, modern scholars have found it more fruitful to recognise their stylised character and focus on their literary purposes.42 In turning to Clement, I want to make a similar shift in method and focus: Clement’s autobiography in the preface to the Stromateis is well-known and widely discussed; rather than approaching it as a mine of historical facts as has often been done, I want to recognise its stylised character and explore its contribution to how Clement models and facilitates Christian miscellanism for his readers. Just as Classical authors are shown to be self-conscious miscellanists who model their own patterns of miscellanism, so I will show that Clement does this in a Christian way. I will limit the scope of discussion to his autobiographical preface, which is, in Lauraux’s words, ‘une machine à fabriquer le lecteur’.43 I will begin with a brief review of previous discussions of Clement’s autobiography, but will then argue that it has too often been excerpted from its context within his preface and studied alone. By reading it closely within its miscellanistic context in the preface and studying it in relation to Classical intertexts of various kinds, we can discover Clement’s understanding of miscellanism as vocational, ecclesial and ascetic. We can lay to rest the notion (present in some Classical scholarship) that he is merely channelling the divine voice as a mouthpiece of the Logos,44 when we see how his theology of miscellanism differentiates Lord, Word and Spirit; and his spirituality of miscellanism finds rest

41 42 43

Fitzgerald 2016, 168–77. Holford-Strevens 1982; 1997; Titchener 2009; Howley 2018, 36–37. 44 Loraux 1988, 426, quoted in Le Boulluec 2012, 113. J. König 2012, 145.

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in a pattern of chaste love, practised through Christian modes of miscellany-making and imaged in the bee that anthologises the scriptural meadow in Egypt.

Clement’s Self-Introduction in Previous Scholarship Close to the start of the Stromateis, Clement launches into a short piece of narrative autobiography (Str. I.i.11.1–2). He describes his journey around the Mediterranean, listening to the wisdom of blessed men, worthy of note. But he came to rest at last in Egypt, where the ‘Sicilian bee’ was hidden, plucking from prophetic and apostolic meadows and begetting pure knowledge in the souls of his listeners: ἤδη δὲ οὐ γραφὴ εἰς ἐπίδειξιν τετεχνασμένη ἥδε ἡ πραγματεία, ἀλλά μοι ὑπομνήματα εἰς γῆρας θησαυρίζεται, λήθης φάρμακον, εἴδωλον ἀτεχνῶς καὶ σκιαγραφία τῶν ἐναργῶν καὶ ἐμψύχων ἐκείνων, ὧν κατηξιώθην ἐπακοῦσαι, λόγων τε καὶ ἀνδρῶν μακαρίων καὶ τῷ ὄντι ἀξιολόγων. τούτων ὃ μὲν ἐπὶ τῆς Ἑλλάδος, ὁ Ἰωνικός, οἳ δὲ ἐπὶ τῆς Μεγάλης Ἑλλάδος (τῆς κοίλης θάτερος αὐτῶν Συρίας ἦν, ὃ δὲ ἀπ’ Αἰγύπτου), ἄλλοι δὲ ἀνὰ τὴν ἀνατολήν· καὶ ταύτης ὃ μὲν τῆς τῶν Ἀσσυρίων, ὃ δὲ ἐν Παλαιστίνῃ Ἑβραῖος ἀνέκαθεν· ὑστάτῳ δὲ περιτυχὼν (δυνάμει δὲ οὗτος πρῶτος ἦν) ἀνεπαυσάμην, ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ θηράσας λεληθότα. Σικελικὴ τῷ ὄντι ἦν μέλιττα προφητικοῦ τε καὶ ἀποστολικοῦ λειμῶνος τὰ ἄνθη δρεπόμενος ἀκήρατόν τι γνώσεως χρῆμα ταῖς τῶν ἀκροωμένων ἐνεγέννησε ψυχαῖς. ἀλλ’ οἳ μὲν τὴν ἀληθῆ της μακαρίας σῴζοντες διδασκαλίας παράδοσιν εὐθὺς ἀπὸ Πέτρου τε καὶ Ἰακώβου Ἰωάννου τε καὶ Παύλου τῶν ἁγίων ἀποστόλων, παῖς παρὰ πατρὸς ἐκδεχόμενος (ὀλίγοι δὲ οἱ πατράσιν ὅμοιοι), ἧκον δὴ σὺν θεῷ καὶ εἰς ἡμᾶς τὰ προγονικὰ ἐκεῖνα καὶ ἀποστολικὰ καταθησόμενοι σπέρματα. καὶ εὖ οἶδ’ ὅτι ἀγαλλιάσονται, οὐχὶ τῇ ἐκφράσει ἡσθέντες λέγω τῇδε, μόνῃ δὲ τῇ κατὰ τὴν ὑποσημείωσιν τηρήσει. Now a writing skilfully crafted for display is not what this treatise is, but rather it is treasured up as my notes for old age, a remedy against forgetfulness, an image unskillfully composed and a shadow-drawing of those vividly alive souls, to whom I was deemed worthy to listen. Both the words and the men were blessed and truly word-worthy. One of them was in Greece, the Ionian; others were in Great Greece (one of them was from Coele Syria, another from Egypt), while others were distributed through the East, and there, one was from the land belonging to the Assyrians, another was in Palestine, a Hebrew by descent. When I chanced to encounter the last one – in power he was first – I came to rest, having hunted him out where he was hidden in Egypt. Truly Sicilian was the bee of the prophetic and apostolic meadow; plucking its flowers, he begat a pure resource of knowledge in the souls of those who listened to his lectures. But they, preserving the true tradition of the blessed teaching straight from Peter and James, John and Paul, child receiving from father (and men who are like their fathers are scarce), they have come now with God even unto us to deposit those generative and apostolic seeds. And I know well that they will be jubilant – not,

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I mean, pleased with this verbal description, but only with its being held to the way it was noted down. (Str. I.i.11.1–2)

This passage has almost always been treated as a source of historical, biographical information about Clement. Many studies of Clement of Alexandria begin with a reference to it, and they treat it as the basis for an account of his life.45 And yet, for those hunting for traces of historical information about Clement, it is disappointing.46 Given the plausibility of what Clement describes, the information that he discloses may well be accurate – but it is frustratingly allusive. It does not settle the later dispute known to Epiphanius over whether he was born in Athens or Alexandria.47 It tells us nothing of his conversion, which Eusebius is the first to attribute to him.48 It fails to disclose the names or precise locations of his teachers.49 And while there is general agreement that the last teacher, who ‘lay hidden in Egypt’, was Pantaenus, who is mentioned by name elsewhere in Clement’s extant writings,50 no consensus has been reached over the significance of his description as a bee ‘from Sicily’: some scholars infer that Pantaenus must really have come from Sicily, others insist that the adjective is purely symbolic, chosen because bees from Sicily were known to produce the tastiest honey.51 Amidst the disappointment over these all too slight biographical intimations, a few scholars have developed an alternative emphasis, observing that this same passage is saturated with literary allusions and rhetorical topoi. Wyrwa examines how Plato’s Phaedrus is heard in the combination of anxiety about writing and the phrasing of notes ‘stored up for old age, as a remedy against forgetfulness’.52 Emmett points out that the journey to find wisdom was a culturally resonant claim that enhanced the credibility of a teacher. The places to which Clement claims to have travelled 45 46

47 48 49

50

51 52

E.g., Osborn 1957, 3; Hägg 2006, 54; Ashwin-Siejkowski 2008, 22–24. Mondésert 1951 (SC 30), 28, ‘L’historien regrettera toujours l’imprecision de ce souvenir qui ne lui apprend rien sur la filiation intellectuelle et spirituelle de l’auteur, ni sur les épisodes de sa vie.’ Epiphanius Pan. 32.6.1. Ashwin-Siejkowski 2008, 19–25. Ashwin-Siejkowski 2008, 22–3. This has not prevented debate: Bardy 1937, 71; Caster 1951 (SC 30), 51 n. 4; Osborn 1959, 337. Ecl. xviii.56.2–3. However, some scholars dispute this assumption (Neymeyr 1989, 42; Dawson 1992, 220). Others have argued that Clement’s references to the ‘presbyter’ throughout his oeuvre are also allusions to Pantaenus, as Eusebius thought: van den Hoek 1997a, 77 nn. 94–95. Telfer 1926–1927, 170; Ashwin-Siejkowski 2008, 24. Wyrwa 1983, 25–46, esp. 32.

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are of symbolic value in the topography of ancient wisdom, with its emphasis on Athens, Egypt and Palestine (the last was important from a Christian or Jewish perspective).53 Stuart Thomson thinks that Clement is transforming the traditional pattern of a narrative of philosophical conversion, where an author claims to have tried out a range of philosophical sects before landing with the true one; Clement innovatively portrays his experience as cumulative, culminating in the best, but without displacing the value of the earlier studies.54 Telfer and others recognise the ‘bee’ as a widespread literary topos associated with both selectivity and anthology, gathering from a wide range of texts and combining them into a single product that is both sweet and useful.55 From the perspective of the current study, what stands out in this history of debate is that very little attention has been paid to the way the autobiography implicates Clement’s intentions as a miscellanistic author or writer of hypomnêmata. The next section will argue that Clement discloses his self-undertanding as a miscellanistic author in the way he embeds his autobiographical remarks in the wider context of his preface.

Authorial Identity As Miscellanist (Str. I.i.1–15) If Clement’s autobiographical passage is not to be mined for historical facts, then how does one properly receive its discursive mode of transaction with the reader? We ought first to consider how it is framed in its literary context. Clement’s mini-autobiography is hardly a stand-alone item in his preface (although it has often been excerpted and treated that way in scholarship). In the GCS edition of the extant text, it does not appear until the sixth page. It is not strongly marked out from its surrounding context; it shares themes, images and vocabulary with the text around it. From the very start of the extant preface, the compilatory method of writing is apparent. Clement moves from quotation to quotation, from image to image and from thought to thought. He quotes by name Solomon, ‘the Lord’, ‘the Apostle’, David, Isaiah and even ‘the philosopher of the Hebrews, Plato’. He draws on imagery of farming, financial exchange, travel (moving, flying, leaping), the Eucharist, visiting buildings,

53 55

54 Emmett 2001, 3–4. Thomson 2013, 21. Telfer 1926–1927; Emmett 2001, 4–5.

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nourishment, seeing the face and lighting a spark. He develops thoughts about teaching; the written and oral mode of expression; the duty of author and reader; work, faith, love and knowledge; judgement and salvation; the spirit and self-promotion. The quotations, images and arguments are not separated out from one another, nor is the argument developed sequentially in logical order. Rather, the pattern of thinking is additive and associative. Citation, imagery and argument are intertwined, and layers are decked on top of one another, such that the issues and perspectives are disclosed through a fractured, kaleidoscopic lens. The reader is immersed in miscellanism from the start. Clement’s autobiographical passage is not detachable from this context. Rather, it is another segment of the multilayered preface, another scrap in the collage that he is amassing. This is best seen by close study of how the motifs of the autobiography are linked to themes in the surrounding material. For example, Clement emphasises at the start of his autobiography that ‘this piece of study is not a writing crafted for show’ (11.1). This is not a new idea in the preface, but a new way of framing and contextualising a concern about not seeking glory as an author, which he has already mentioned twice (6.1–2; 9.2). Each time the theme arises, the imagery and terminology are a little different, building up a picture by heaping the fragments upon one another. His preferred term for describing his own work is ὑπομνήματα, ‘notes’ or ‘reminders’, which is one of the most frequent words in his preface, always as a description of his work. He says that a writer should test himself to see if he is worthy of speaking and leaving ‘notes’ (5.1). ‘He who speaks by means of notes (ὁ δι᾽ ὑπομνημάτων λαλῶν)’ has escaped bribery and slander (6.1), and again ‘he who speaks by notes (ὁ δὲ δι᾽ ὑπομνημάτων λαλῶν) consecrates these to God, crying out in writing, not for the sake of gain, not for vainglory’ (9.2). At the start of the autobiographical passage, he describes his work as not a treatise crafted for show, but μοι ὑπομνήματα ‘my notes’ or ‘notes for me’ (11.1). Later, he declares that the writing of ‘notes’ is frail when compared with the spirit graciously bestowed, to which he was deemed worthy to listen (14.1). When he describes his work as a ‘systematic presentation of chapters’ (κεφαλαίων συστηματικὴν ἔκθεσιν, 14.2), he defines this immediately as ‘a salvific note for remembering’ (μνήμης ὑπόμνημα σωτήριον, 14.2). He kindles his memories with ‘notes’ (14.3), and the notes also make use of philosophy and the rest of preparatory training (15.4). He even incorporated ‘notes’ into his title, which may have been mentioned in the lost first page: αἱ τῶν κατὰ τὴν ἀληθή φιλοσοφίαν γνωστικών ὑπομνημάτων στρωματεῖς.

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While it could have wider application, the term ὑπομνήματα was a typical way of referring to the material one collects or ‘notes down’ for miscellanistic composition, and this is the sense in which Clement must mean it here.56 It carries the nuances of both ‘notes’ and ‘reminders’: ὑπομνήματα are things noted down and things associated with memory work – they contain memories, prod the memory and are there to be remembered. We can compare Pliny, Plutarch and Gellius, who all portrayed themselves noting down the things worth remembering as the basis for their miscellanies.57 The Greek ὑπομνήματα is translated into Latin as ‘commentarii’, by which Gellius describes his work (NA pr. 3). It also featured in the title of one of the best-known miscellanies of the Neronian age, Pamphile of Epidaurus, who published Historika Hypomnêmata in thirty-three books.58 Clement’s emphasis on the term suggests that like other early imperial miscellanists, he is self-consciously a miscellanist, a collector, recorder and spreader of notes. However, the way Clement frames his understanding of ὑπομνήματα in his preface begins to disclose what is distinctive about his selfunderstanding as a Christian miscellanist. His note-writing is a spiritual and ascetic practice, which he articulates in terms of his relation to the Lord, the Word and the Spirit: it is the Lord who entrusts faithful servants with the material for the notes (3.1–2). It is the eucharistic communion of the Word that he humbly venerates by making the notes and leaving them for others (5.1–6.1). The Spirit plays a central role in both teaching and learning: Clement cites both Solomon and Paul to this effect (1.2–2.1; 4.2). He enjoins each and every one of us to pray David’s psalm of penitence, which asks God not only for cleansing from sin, but also for a new spirit, a share in God’s spirit and a strengthening of spirit (8.4). When he compares his notes with the spirit that was graciously bestowed on his teachers, they seem to him frail indeed (14.1), yet their purpose is to quicken that instruction to life through the memory.

56

57

On the meaning of hypomnêmata, see further: Méhat 1966, 106–12; Dawson 1992, 229; Wucherpfennig 2002, 32–34; Popov-Reynolds 2012. Méhat, Dawson and Wucherpfennig draw attention to an alternative nuance of the word, which stems from the grammatical tradition of interpretive exegesis of texts, like our term ‘commentary’. However, this is not the way in which Clement is using it. Méhat (rightly, I think) resists Bousset’s emphasis on course notes. For further critique of this theory, see Nautin 1976, 370–82. 58 Cf. Plut. QC pr. 612de; Plin. NH pr. 17–18; Gell. NA pr. 2. Fitzgerald 2016, 153.

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The affective disposition for composing the notes is humility not pride. As an author he is ‘one who speaks through notes’ (ὁ δι᾽ ὑπομνημάτων λαλῶν, 6.1; 9.2); this oxymoronic circumlocution positions his work on the cusp between orality and writing in a way that keeps in view the secondary character of the ‘notes’, which are meagre relative to the ‘spirit’ of those to whom he listened (14.1). The term ὑπόμνημα allows the emphasis to fall not on the literary form of the ‘systematic presentation of chapters’ (as he calls it), but on the way they are to be used as a note of reminder (14.2). This presents the notes as functional rather than showy. They are motivational (ἀναζωπυρῶν, 14.3), educational (προπαιδεία, 15.3) and formational (τυπωθῆναι, 13.2). This is not just a ‘Christian twist’ to note-making and miscellanism, as if there were no significant theology.59 Clement’s theology of miscellanism is marked by differentiated attentiveness to the Lord, the Word and the Spirit. His asceticism ought not to be read as self-abnegation, nor does he see himself as simply channelling the divine voice. Rather, he presumes a dynamic, relational experience of the ecclesial context for the cultivation of humility, communion of the Logos and cleansing by the Spirit, and he both practises and requires an ascetic commitment to the practical life, which is supported by the reminder-notes. The relationship between this and the Classical miscellanists will be best understood if we look more closely at some of the features that invite comparison. In the rest of this chapter, I will explore three of these in turn, and will show the theological, ecclesial and affective contours of Clement’s Christian construction of the vocation to write miscellanies; the social context for their reception; the myths of the origins of their contents and in the spirituality with which they were to be composed and perused. Vocation to Miscellany-Making (Str. I.i.3–9) Clement does not engage in the flattery of a patron, the way Pliny does for Titus and Athenaeus for Larensis. Clement’s nearest equivalent to a patron is ‘the Lord’ himself. This is not a human acquaintance whom Clement can address on familiar terms: there is no scope for the teasing encomium that Pliny offers Titus, who was his comrade at arms but is also the recipient of incense offerings and milk and salted meal from the peasants worshipping their imperial deity. Nor does Clement have any cause to problematise the experience of social smooth-talk from client to 59

Cf. Holford-Strevens 2003, 38.

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patron, the way Athenaeus does in his description of the marvellous banquet given by a most illustrious patron, Larensis, a veritable Asteropaeus.60 For Clement, ‘the Lord’ is the God whom he knows through the Scriptures, and the goal of his aspiration to theosis.61 The most striking resonance with Pliny’s construction of his relationship to Titus and others is the use of financial imagery. Both Pliny and Clement rely heavily on financial metaphors for locating their authorial activity within an economy of social exchange. But is Clement’s economic structure the same as Pliny’s? Clement draws on the Parable of the Talents (Matt 25:14–30) to understand his authorial responsibilities. The Saviour bestows out of his abundance, according to each person’s capacity to receive. Later, he returns to render account, checking how much a person has made the deposit grow (Str. I.i.3.1–2). Writing, therefore, is a way of ‘lending out the Logos at interest’ so as to make it grow, just as one sows in order to reap (4.1–2). Aware of the risk of bribery and corruption (6.1), he tries to steer clear of greed for gain (6.2; 9.2) through his conscientious mode of writing. He is hoping for ‘payment’ in the form of salvation of souls (6.1). Beyond that, he rejects any desire for payment and seeks to imitate the Lord in freely receiving, and freely giving. He hopes for the only reward that is worth anything – citizenship (πολιτεία) itself (9.3–4). The underlying model of exchange in Clement’s economy figures the author both as a worker in the employment of the Lord and as a lender investing the deposit that was entrusted to him. However, the Lord’s distinctive regulation of this economic system means that the worker must think of his pay only in terms of the salvation of souls and ultimately the attainment of citizenship; in earthly terms, his work is free of charge, as was the Lord’s also (9.2–4). Pliny and Clement, then, both use extensive financial imagery to articulate how their miscellanism constitutes an action within a system of exchange that relates the patron of knowledge to the author, reader and the material at hand. Both engage in miscellanism in order to render a public service, conveying the material that is offered to them by their patron. Pliny does so within an aristocratic economy of borrowing and repayment at interest, with the overall aim of munificence (rather than profit). Clement operates within an economy of labour exchange, tasked by his divine Lord with a sum to invest; and yet it is an economy that is

60

Whitmarsh 2000.

61

On theosis in Clement, see Chapter 9.

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guaranteed by the Lord’s munificence, as one who freely receives and freely gives; it is underwritten by the Lord’s purpose of saving souls and by his promise of citizenship to faithful servants.62

Ecclesial Tradition and Innovation (Str. I.i.5–12) Clement’s relation as author to his readers is ordered within the economy just described. He expresses anxiety for both himself and his readers: will he write with too much personal ambition? And will they read in such a way as to be saved? At worst, there is a risk that the notes may actually be dangerous, as if he were reaching a knife to a child (14.3). His strategies to ensure that his text should remain life-giving for writer and readers alike depend on his aim to contribute within an ecclesial context and tradition.63 Clement expresses his conviction that ‘those who preserve the true tradition of the blessed teaching directly from Peter and James, John and Paul, the holy apostles, son receiving it from father (but few are like their fathers) have come now with God even unto us, to lay down generative and apostolic seeds’ (11.3).64 Scholars have usually regarded Clement’s aim of contributing to ecclesial tradition as different in kind from what the pagans were doing. The crucial factor is that he is perceived as handing down a deposit of faith and dogma, and is for that reason beset with anxiety about writing, lest people misunderstand the systematic philosophy that is buried in his notes. By contrast, the Classical miscellanists are thought to open up a wider conversation without any narrow-minded dogmatism.65 In my view, this misconstrues both Clement and the Classical miscellanists. Clement’s notion of apostolic tradition cannot be reduced to handing down a dogma.66 It is about shaping lives.67 Clement portrays 62

63

64 65 66

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For further financial imagery systematising the interaction between humanity and God, see Havrda 2011, 22, on Protr. xi.115.1; Str. VII.vii.48.1–2. The text should be life-giving for readers, not merely legitimising and authorizing Clement himself as a teacher, cf. Buell 1999, 12–13. On the apostolic tradition: Thomson 2013; 2014, 54–88. Also Osborn 1959, 337–38. See Chapter 2. Buell 1999, 12 also protests that Clement’s writings are ‘not merely articulations of already-determined doctrinal positions’. Her emphasis is on his ‘arguments for a particular vision of Christian identity’; I would see it more in terms of cultivating a variety of experiences of growth in relation to God, defined with a combination of particularity and open-endedness. Thus he depicts the gnostic fashioning and creating himself and setting in order (or ‘adorning’) his hearers (ναὶ μὴν ἑαυτὸν κτίζει καὶ δημιουργεῖ, πρὸς δὲ καὶ τοὺς ἐπαΐοντας αὐτοῦ κοσμεῖ ἐξομοιούμενος θεῷ ὁ γνωστικός, Str. VII.iii.13.3). He uses vocabulary of τυπόω

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it in terms of planting ‘generative seeds’ (προγονικὰ σπέρματα); the adjective ‘generative’ and the notion of a ‘seed’ both suggest that his interest is in the life that grows from the seeds, more than on the external preservation of a particular dogmatic teaching (11.3). This is in keeping with the rest of the preface. For example, Solomon makes a ‘spiritual planting’ (πνευματικὴ φυτεία), and when soul cleaves to soul and spirit to spirit, it brings growth and life (αὔξει ... καὶ ζωογονεῖ, 1.3–2.1). The Saviour’s financial deposit with his servants is there to be invested, like reaping everlasting life from the spirit (3.1–4.2). Impulse and movement (5.3), nourishment and growth (7.1–8.1) are central to imagining good teaching. This is not about passing people a static dogma; rather, it is about creating the kind of collage of notes that will be generative for the people who approach it in faith.68 This is open-ended, but within the constraints of an ecclesial tradition and philosophical integrity. Clement himself hopes to learn along with his hearers, since the real teacher is God (12.3). The miscellanies provide a very particular encounter with that longer tradition. In this moment of encounter through the text, Clement enhances attentiveness to the ‘Lord’ by drawing on the structure of the liturgy to suggest spiritual and ritual practices that should be undertaken by writer and readers alike in approaching the Stromateis. He solicits selfexamination as when one prepares to receive the Eucharist: It is necessary therefore that these both test themselves, the one as to whether he is worthy to speak and to leave behind notes (ὑπομνήματα), the other as to whether he is just in listening and reading. In a similar way, some people, when they are distributing the eucharist as is customary, charge each of the people to receive his own portion (μοῖραν). Conscience is best for accurate choice and rejection, but its foundation is a right life together with proper learning. Following others who have been tested already and succeeded is best for understanding the truth and doing the commandments. ‘So whoever eats the bread and drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will be responsible for the body body and blood of the Lord. Let a person test himself and thus let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup’ (1 Cor 11:27–8). (Str. I.i.5.1–3)

The eucharistic imagery, including the quotation from Scripture, interprets the acts of both writing and reading the notes through familiar

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and μετατυπόω to depict formation through the Lord’s revelation, Str. I.i.13.2; IV. xxiii.149.4. Cf. Gell. NA pr. 17.

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liturgical practices and their accompanying moral and spiritual requirements. Clement develops this structural metaphor for reading by inviting everyone who ‘chooses to feast by faith’ and is therefore ‘steadfast in the reception of divine words’, to join in a ‘eucharistic’ psalm (εὐχαριστῶν ψαλλέτω), taking up the words of the blessed David: Let each of these in thanksgiving (εὐχαριστῶν) sing psalmody after the blessed David, ‘Wash me with hyssop and I shall be clean, cleanse me, and I shall be whiter than snow; You shall make me hear rejoicing and gladness; Bones that have been laid low will rejoice. Turn your face from my sins, and blot out my lawlessness. Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a right spirit (πνεῦμα εὐθές) within my innards. Cast me not from thy face, and take not thy holy spirit (τὸ πνεῦμα σου τὸ ἅγιον) from me. Grant me the joy of your salvation, and strengthen me in my ruling spirit (πνεύματι ἡγεμονικῷ)’. (Str. I.i.8.2–4, quoting LXX Ps 50:9–14)

It is a prayer for cleansing, for God not to hide his face but to create a new spirit in the one who prays. This way of presenting the work only makes sense if readers are also engaged in the liturgical life of the church, for it structures the encounter with the text through the rituals of encountering God in the liturgy.69 From among the miscellanists that we have considered, Plutarch offers an interesting comparison. His programmatic concern about how to remember convivial conversations locates his own work in a tradition of philosophical sympotic literature, where he can even name a succession of predecessors: ‘the greatest of the philosophers ... Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, Speusippus, Epicurus, Prytanis, Hieronymus, and Dio of the Academy’ (612d). Similarly, Clement named those who came before in the apostolic tradition. Plutarch, like Clement, does not interpret this through the lens of dogma but by a principle directed toward their common table fellowship. All of these great philosophers, he says, testify to the principle that one should remember only what is conducive to

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Cf. Osborn 1959, 336; Thomson 2013, 29–30. We cannot know the particular form that liturgy took in Clement’s church, or what role, if any, LXX Ps 50 might have played there.

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friendliness and philosophical benefit. Plutarch calls this τὸ φιλοποιοῦν τῆς τραπέζης (612d). The emphasis is not on a dogma but on the sympotic tradition and its boundaries within which it can be socially constructive. Athenaeus writes a very different kind of sympotic miscellany from Plutarch, but he too offers an interesting comparative take on tradition and miscellanism. His emulation of Plato involves both celebrating and problematising the notion of a chain of tradition. Plato’s Symposium was famously presented as a report of a report of a symposium that happened long ago, while Phaedo reported a conversation at one remove. Athenaeus presents his work initially as a report of the conversation at the banquet: he was present himself, and he tells Timocrates. But it is not expected that this will end the chain of tradition: Timocrates asks because it is the talk of the town, and Athenaeus arranges his account in a way that should help Timocrates remember it, presumably partly with a view to Timocrates repeating it another time. All these miscellanies are innovative and culturally apposite ways to contribute to promoting a way of life within their tradition, whether it is the church where ‘the saviour is always saving and always working, as he sees the father’ (12.3), or the symposium, which stretches back across time to Plato’s day. The function of the tradition is not to ossify the deposit of truth that is communicated, but to construct the literary, social and devotional frame within which innovation is possible. The Spirit plays a central role in how Clement articulates the relation between God and the miscellanistic author or reader within this frame. In the psalmist’s prayer quoted above, a strong emphasis fell on the spirit, thrice repeated. Similarly, Clement looks to Solomon’s example as a teacher who plants the Word in the soul as a ‘spiritual plant’. Only when soul is fitted to soul, spirit to spirit, does the seed grow (1.2–2.1). Paul’s words that ‘one who sows in the spirit will reap from the spirit everlasting life’ assure Clement that the function of proclamation of knowledge can be the same whether it comes by pen or by word of mouth (4.2). Since the very act of miscellany-making is a ‘spiritual’ practice and a ‘communion of the Logos’ (6.1), there is no need to highlight pressure from friends (such as Timocrates in Athenaeus, or Sossius Senecio in Plutarch) as the motivation for writing.70 Rather, it is the very practice of miscellanism that discloses the miscellanist’s vocation through the juxtaposition of scraps, such as Solomon’s example, Jesus’ words in the

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Cf. J. König 2009b.

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parable, Paul’s enjoinders about sowing and reaping and the other ‘notes’ that are stacked on top of each other. The making of the miscellany itself discloses the self-understanding of the miscellany-maker. The Spirit also allows the Christian miscellanist to transcend the oral/ written binary, which troubles many miscellanists because their ‘notes’ aim to cultivate patterns of life, which go beyond the written word and yet also interact with it. Clement studiously avoids indicating in his preface that his ‘notes’ come from bookwork. Unlike Pliny and Gellius, he does not portray himself spending his night hours searching for important facts in piles of books.71 This is remarkable, since he clearly does owe his education and his Stromateis in large part to bookwork. But in the preface to the Stromateis, he wants to position his ‘notes’ on the cusp between oral and literary instruction. Neither, however, does he foster the impression of the oral, conversational origins of what he notes down. The sympotic themes of Athenaeus and Plutarch underscore that they are drawing on oral conversations, even if this is a fiction. Gellius invites us to envisage many of his vignettes as lived experiences, which he is simply noting down ‘as a reminder’. Clement encourages us to anticipate notes from his personal memories of wonderful teachers (Str. I. i.11.1–2, 14.1), but these teachers never feature explicitly in his extant Stromateis. Rather, Clement emphasises that the Spirit, accessible to all Christians everywhere, governs the mode of teaching and learning through miscellanism.

Spirituality and the Miscellanist’s Chaste Passion (Str. I.i.11.1–2) Clement’s narrative autobiography can offer a model for readers in their spiritual practices of miscellanism, just as did the autobiographical vignettes of Plutarch and Gellius, which we studied in earlier parts of this chapter. No matter that he is so vague about who taught him, what he learnt and where: the idea of criss-crossing the Mediterranean in search of education was something that every learned member of the elite could relate to;72 Clement’s trip took him north, south, east and west, which were home to varied traditions of learning. There is something for everyone here, no matter what background they come from. ‘Travel’ was also a

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It is the practice of ‘lucubratio’ described in Ker 2004. On travel and wisdom: Elsner 1997; Montiglio 2000; 2006; O’Sullivan 2006; Pretzler 2007.

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widespread metaphor for travelling through a book;73 Clement’s own ‘notes’ offer something of a journey through criss-crossing these different stopping-points. Like the Classical miscellanists, his work is panMediterranean in scope. However, Clement does wish to underscore the linear progression of his life journey, which finds rest with the bee that lies hidden in Egypt. This is a marked contrast to the Classical counterparts. Pliny and Athenaeus abjure autobiography altogether; Plutarch and Gellius embrace autobiographical vignettes but do all they can to evade a connected, chronological narrative of their careers. They are deliberately a-linear and non-teleological. Clement, on the other hand, cultivates the idea of progress towards a telos. One of the intriguing things about the climax as he describes it, is that it sounds decidedly miscellanistic: ὑστάτῳ δὲ περιτυχὼν (δυνάμει δὲ οὗτος πρῶτος ἦν) ἀνεπαυσάμην, ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ θηράσας λεληθότα. Σικελικὴ τῷ ὄντι ἦν μέλιττα προφητικοῦ τε καὶ ἀποστολικοῦ λειμῶνος τὰ ἄνθη δρεπόμενος ἀκήρατόν τι γνώσεως χρῆμα ταῖς τῶν ἀκροωμένων ἐνεγέννησε ψυχαῖς. When I chanced to encounter the last one – in power he was first – I came to rest, having hunted him out where he was hidden in Egypt. Truly Sicilian was the bee of the prophetic and apostolic meadow; plucking its flowers, he begat a pure resource of knowledge in the souls of those who listened to his lectures. (Str. I.i.11.2)

This brings together three classic images for miscellany-work: the bee, who plucks pollen from different flowers; the meadow, which is variegated with flowers for plucking and the ‘flowers’, which are associated with both the bee and the meadow, as well as with other images for miscellanism such as the ‘garland’, which intertwines ‘flowers’ of poetry.74 Clement’s Mediterranean journey thus has its telos in an image of a bee teaching by miscellanising a scriptural meadow. Why?

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E.g., Höschele 2007. The term ἀνθολογία means literally ‘collection of flowers’, and it appears for a literary work only very late: the Suda is the earliest known occurrence, and the Latin equivalent, florilegium, does not appear at all (Busch 2009, 30 n. 7). However, the metaphor of ‘flowers’ for poems was widespread and is attested as early as Pindar (Ol. 9.48–9). Meleager of Gadera’s collection of epigrams, published in the early first century BC (Cameron 1993, 56 argues for a publication date of ca. 100–90 BC; Busch 2009, 30 places it a little later in around 70 BC), began with a lengthy poem in which he proudly proclaimed himself the one ‘who wrought this garland of minstrels (ὑμνοθετᾶν στέφανον)’ and identified the qualities of different poets with different flowers and branches entwined into the garland (A.P. 4.1). Imitating him, Philip of Cos in the

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Setting aside the attempt to ‘decode’ the passage by discovering the historical referent within Clement’s experience (Pantaenus, the most common answer, is highly plausible), the rest of this chapter will argue that Clement’s intertexuality with the Phaedrus and the Hippolytus frame the miscellanistic bee as a model of miscellanising in a spirituality of chaste love. This take us into knotty issues of Clement’s use of intertexts, but ultimately it gets to the heart of the spirituality and affective relationality of his Christian miscellany-making ideal. Chapter 7 will develop this picture further by showing that intratextuality in Clement’s own work suggests that the primary referent of the bee is Christ himself, who is the model for every Christian miscellanist, both in teaching and in learning. Clement’s portrayal of the miscellanism of the bee is marked by strong verbal connections to both Plato’s Phaedrus and Euripides’ Hippolytus. Previous scholarship has long recognised the significance of the Phaedrus for Clement, both in general and in his autobiographical narrative. However, when its use in the preface is discussed, the issue that scholars are usually concerned with is not miscellanism but the competition between orality and writing, and Clement’s anxious attempt to authorise his written word.75 Scholars have observed the resonances with the passage at the end of the Phaedrus where Socrates and Phaedrus discuss the possibility and proper use of written media (Phdr. 275d–76d), but they have not seen how the myth of the soul is also implicated in Clement’s portrayal of the telos of his life-journey in miscellanising a meadow. Nor has the intertextuality with Euripides’ Hippolytus (already used by Plato in the Phaedrus) been widely discussed, despite Stählin’s pointers in his notes to the GCS edition. I want to draw attention to two aspects of this intertextuality in particular: first, that Clement probably read the myth of the soul in the Phaedrus as promoting miscellanism more actively than Plato might have

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mid-first century AD also published a Garland that he introduced in a similar way, explicitly extending Meleager’s image: Flowers for you I culled (ἄνθεά σοι δρέψας) from Helicon, I cut the first buds to sprout on Pieria of arboreal fame, and harvested the corn-ear of a new writing-column, and wove afresh in my turn a garland like Meleager’s. (A.P. 2.1–3) Imperial miscellanists often drew their titles from a botanical domain of metaphor: Gellius mentions Woods, Honeycombs, Meadows and Nosegays, for example (NA pref. 6–7). Wyrwa 1983, 30–46; Alexander 1990, 221, 237–45; Trapp 1990, 168–70; Buell 1999, 72–74; Itter 2009, 114–21; Le Boulluec 2012, 119–22; Gibbons 2017, 38–44. Wider use of Phdr: Butterworth 1916; Trapp 1990.

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intended, and that he shares this with Plutarch among other early imperial miscellanists. Secondly, that Clement’s interest in reading the Phaedrus and the Hippolytus together is not just because they are both concerned with the problem of the written word, nor just because in his eyes they both promote miscellanism, but also because they evoke the importance of chaste love as the spirituality of miscellanistic practice. Love has been markedly downplayed in the long-running debates about Clement’s authority and his polemical rhetoric of ‘self-identity and self-authorisation’.76 The study of Clement’s Classical intertextuality, however, casts the spotlight on the centrality of this affective disposition in Christian miscellanism. Along with the Spirit, it emerges as central to Clement’s understanding of teaching and learning in miscellanistic mode. I shall begin with a brief outline of the scope of the resonances with Phaedrus and Hippolytus in Str. I.i.11.2, and will then explain more fully the role that they play for Clement. Clement’s description of the bee anthologising the meadow (λειμῶνος) and begetting pure (ἀκήρατον) knowledge in the souls of his listeners takes us to a locus classicus within Plato’s myth of the soul: in the Phaedrus, the climax of the soul’s heavenly journey is when the divine intellect is nourished by mind and pure (ἀκηράτῳ) knowledge, and the soul pastures in the meadow (λειμῶνος) where the plain of truth is, as its wing is nourished there (248c). In the second century, the Phaedrus was one of the best known of all Plato’s dialogues, and the myth of the soul was central to envisaging philosophical formation.77 Michael Trapp echoes Jean Daniélou in commenting that ‘it provided him with the language to re-express in a cultivated manner “the whole of Christian theology, from Man’s Fall to his restoration by grace”’.78 But Clement’s miscellanistic bee is even more densely textured with allusion to the Hippolytus than to the Phaedrus. In Euripides’ play, the first thing that Hippolytus does is dedicate to Artemis a garland woven from a ‘virgin meadow’ (στέφανον ἐξ ἀκηράτου / λειμῶνος, 73–74). He emphasises this phrase with repetition and amplification, adding the vignette of the bee passing through the ‘virgin meadow’ in spring (ἀκήρατον / μέλισσα λειμῶν᾿ ἠρινὴ διέρχεται, 76–77). Only those with untaught, innate chastity may ‘pluck’ there (δρέπεσθαι, 81). The terms ἀκήρατος and λείμων are common to Clement, Phaedrus and Hippolytus; Hippolytus’ repetition of ἀκήρατος λείμων and use of μέλισσα and δρέπεσθαι 76 78

77 Buell 1999, 4. Trapp 1990. Trapp 1990, 154, quoting Daniélou 1973, 121.

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enhance the verbal resonance of his speech with Clement’s image. These are ‘deliberate and obtrusive echoes’.79 The link between the Phaedrus and the Hippolytus probably went back at least to Plato, who composed the Phaedrus a few decades after Euripides’ Hippolytus was first performed.80 Both texts interweave themes of erotic love with the problematisation of the written word. This association between love and the problems of writing is important for Clement too. As we have already observed, his use of the Phaedrus in the context of anxiety about the written word is well-recognised. Clement shares Socrates’ concern that writing cultivates pride but not wisdom, and that the oral context is better because the speaker can adapt his teaching to the soul of the hearer. His mini-autobiography begins with an apologetic description of his ‘notes’ that picks up Socrates’ wording in the Phaedrus: μοί ὑπομνήματα εἰς γῆρας θησαυρίζεται, λἠθης φάρμακον (Str. I.i.11.2) ἑαυτῷ τε ὑπομνήματα θησαυριζόμενος, εἰς τὸ λήθης γῆρας ἐὰν ἵκηται, καὶ παντὶ τῷ ταὐτὸν ἴχνος μετιόντι (Phdr. 276d)

This textual allusion has been widely observed in previous study.81 However, it is one of two passages where Socrates/Plato uses the term ὑπομνήματα in the Phaedrus, and the other has been largely overlooked.82 Whereas Socrates’ words about hypomnêmata for old age legitimate writing, Socrates’ other use of the term hympomnêmata is not about writing at all. It is in a passage in the myth of the soul that is difficult to interpret but that evokes a form of miscellanistic activity as a mode of human understanding, as part of Socrates’ vision of the philosophical significance of recollection: A human being must understand a general conception formed by collecting into a unity by means of reason the many perceptions of the senses (ξυνιέναι κατ’ εἶδος λεγόμενον, ἐκ πολλῶν ἰὸν αἰσθήσεων εἰς ἓν λογισμῷ ξυναιρούμενον); and this is a recollection (ἀνάμνησις) of those things which our soul once beheld, when it journeyed with God and, lifting its vision above the things which we now say exist, rose up into real being. And therefore it is just that the mind of the philosopher only has wings, for he is always, so far as he is able, in communion through memory (μνήμῃ) with those things the communion with which causes God to be divine. Now a man who employs such memories (ὑπομνήμασιν) rightly is always being initiated into perfect mysteries and he alone becomes truly perfect; 79

80

The phrase comes from Trapp 1990, 149, discussing Dio Or. 36.40 and Plato, Phdr. 247c. 81 82 West 1995, 49–50. E.g., Wyrwa 1983, 32. But see Itter 2009, 114 n. 10.

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but since he separates himself from human interests and turns his attention toward the divine, he is rebuked by the vulgar, who consider him mad and do not know that he is inspired. (Plato, Phdr. 249bc, tr. North Fowler, LCL 36, pp.480–83)

The beginning of this passage (249b–c) has been much debated in philosophical scholarship on the Phaedrus; it is hard to tell quite what Plato is getting at.83 The important thing for the present study is that Plato uses Clement’s favourite term for describing his own work (‘hypomnêmata’) in a context that, in the early empire, might sound a lot like philosophical miscellanism of some kind. Furthermore, it belongs in the context of the myth of the soul. The philosopher whose soul grows wings makes good use of hypomnêmata for his initiation into the mysteries, and this is possible because he makes use of memory and recollection for bringing many things into one. Similarly, Clement alludes to the myth of the soul in portraying his hope that through his written words, which are the offspring of his soul (1.2 cf. Phdr. 278a; Sym. 209a–d), readers might find the means to fly to heaven (4.3 cf. Phdr. 248b–e), and that their souls might be nourished and grow by knowledge and understanding, according to their kind (7.2–3 cf. Phdr. 246e). I suggest that Clement draws out what is implicit in the Phaedrus: namely, that experience of the philosophic lover described in the myth of the soul and the experience of good teaching described in the discussion of rhetoric are meant to be understood in relation to each other (249b–c, cf. 277d). Clement, however, shifts the emphasis in two ways. First, Clement’s recontextualisation of the language of Socrates and Hippolytus effects a shift from Classical Athens to Clement’s early imperial literary culture. Where Plato mentioned ὑπομνήματα only twice, and evoked at best a very loose and ambiguous association with some form of miscellanistic meditation, Clement uses it many times in his preface for his own ‘notes’ and draws out their miscellanistic character. His imagery of the bee in the meadow takes on metaliterary resonance, because the bee, flowers and meadow, as well as the act of plucking flowers, were familiar (even hackneyed) metaphors for miscellanistic activity. The intertext from the Hippolytus adds στέφανος, which was 83

It seems in tension with evidence from Aristotle that Plato failed to develop a method of abstraction, so Helmig 2004, 87, argues for a different interpretation of the opening sentence, and translates: ‘For as a human being one has to understand universal/generic names, which coming out of a plurality of sense perceptions, are gathered together into a unity by reasoning; and such understanding is recollection (ἀνάμνησις) of those things which our souls beheld aforetime as they journeyed with their god, looking down upon the things which now we suppose to be, and gazing up to that which truly is.’

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another miscellanistic cliché, as there were many compilatory collections entitled ‘garland’.84 Neither Plato nor Euripides uses the image of the meadow to suggest a particular kind of literary work, let alone a miscellany. Plato was focused on portraying the heavenly locus amoenus; Euripides wanted to bring out the provocative sexuality of Hippolytus’ statement of devotion to chastity. But Clement, writing in the early empire, in a culture of miscellanism, spots the miscellanistic tropes. In the context of his own miscellany-writing, this connotation is important. The imagery evokes his hopes for his own work in generating some pure bit of knowledge in the souls of his readers. This emphasis is supported by the observation that Clement was not the only imperial miscellanist to reread Plato’s ‘meadow’ in the context of contemporary miscellanistic practice. In the preface to the third book of Table Talk, Plutarch revisits the need for friendly conviviality at the symposium: Those who are under no compulsion to cross-question each other or to catch each other out, but merely want friendly entertainment, bring to their meetings such topics of conversation and such talk as conceal the mean parts of the soul; the best and most civilized part renews its courage, going onward, as it were, to its proper meadows (λειμῶνας) and pastures (νομάς) shepherded by literature and learning. (Plutarch, QC 3 pr. 645c; LCL 424, 200–201)

The image of the soul pressing towards ‘meadows’ and ‘pastures’ after a change within itself recalls the myth of the Phaedrus, marked by some of its vocabulary. The meadow where the soul pastures is now attained through philologia – love of learned conversation, especially literary talk. Plutarch uses this to introduce another volume of miscellanies of his own. Like Clement, he is pondering the Phaedrus in the context of the early empire, where ‘meadow’ was a common title for a literary miscellany, and such miscellanies were an important diet for learned friends. Clement’s second development of his Platonic intertext is to eroticise miscellanistic love by pointing beyond the Phaedrus to the Hippolytus and then to chasten the passion through Christian reinterpretation. The resonance with both Phaedrus and Hippolytus accentuates the overtones of sexual activity and procreation in the imagery of the bee deflowering the meadow and begetting knowledge. Erotic passion was a significant theme in both Plato’s and Euripides’ imagery of the meadow and its purity. In Socrates’ myth, the wings of the soul sprouted amidst sweaty desire and physical attachment, though the passionate relationship

84

Barns 1950, 132–34, and above, n. 74.

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between the philosophical lover and his beloved centred on becoming more like the remembered deity (Phdr. 251a–d, 253a). The diet of unmixed knowledge and a heavenly meadow is therefore fitted for the soul of a philosophic lover. In Hippolytus’ description of his garland for Artemis, he uses the imagery of plucking from the virgin meadow where the bee passes in springtime in order to articulate his sexual chastity; the image is provocatively laced with sexual connotations. Clement adapts this emphasis for his preface. He is chiefly interested in the procreative power of the tradition: he depicts his own progeny of written words, and understands teaching as planting and sowing in fertile ground (1.2–2.1). The sexual connotations are more explicit in the miscellanism of the bee, which deflowers the meadow in order to cause knowledge to be conceived in the souls of his listeners (11.2).85 This nuance is developed through the portrayal of the apostolic succession, passing from father to son and depositing generative seeds (11.3). However, the relationship of love in which this procreative activity is contextualised is a chaste one. Clement evokes his admiration for his teachers and the intimacy of personal association, but this is intimate without being erotic. He suggests that the notes are for his own private use in old age, to recall ‘the words and men – blessed and truly wordworthy’, (λόγων τε καὶ ἀνδρῶν μακαρίων καἲ τῷ ὄντι ἀξιολόγων, 11.1).86 Clement is not systematising a theology of teaching here, but playfully evoking the logoi and men who are both worthy of the Logos and worthy of logoi told about them. In a parallel passage, he describes his notes as a mean comparison with ‘the spirit graciously bestowed, which I was deemed worthy to hear’ (14.1) ἡ μὲν οὖν τῶνδέ μοι τῶν ὑπομνημάτων γραφὴ ἀσθενὴς μὲν εὖ οἶδ᾽ὅτι παραβαλλομένη πρὸς τὸ πνεῦμα ἐκεῖνο τὸ κεχαριτωμένον, οὗ κατηξιώθημεν ὑπακοῦσαι, εἰκὼν δ᾽ἂν εἴη ἀναμιμνῄσκουσα τοῦ ἀρχετύπου τὸν θύρσῳ πεπληγότα The writing of these notes of mine is weak, I well know, when compared with that spirit that was graciously bestowed, which I was deemed worthy quietly to listen to, but it would be an image, recalling the archetype to one who was struck with the thyrsus. (Str. I.i.14.1)

Again, the image is of close personal association with the teachers and being struck by the thyrsus resonates with Socrates’ Bacchic imagery for 85

86

Buell 1999, 64 n. 42 compares Plutarch’s portrayal of the perfect husband: τῇ δὲ γυναικὶ πανταχόθεν τὸ χρήσιμον συνάγων ὥσπερ αἱ μέλιτται καὶ φέρων αὐτὸς ἐν σεαυτῷ μεταδίδου καὶ προσδιαλέγου, φίλους αὐτῇ ποιῶν καὶ συνήθεις τῶν λόγων τοὺς ἀρίστους (Conj. praec. 145b). For the puns on logos/Logos: Bartelink 1973.

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philosophical inspiration in the Phaedrus.87 But the way Clement characterises the affective relationship is neither erotic nor frenzied. In fact, his vocabulary takes us to the heart of the gospel narrative of incarnation: τὸ πνεῦμα ἐκεῖνο τὸ κεχαριτωμένον takes up the language of Gabriel’s greeting to Mary in the annunciation, χαῖρε κεχαριτωμένη (Luke 1:28). When asked how she would conceive, Gabriel promised that the ‘Holy Spirit (πνεῦμα ἅγιον) will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you’ (Luke 1:35). It is plausible that Clement was meditating on the annunciation, since the verb χαριτόω is very rare, and the participial form κεχαριτωμένος is rarer still.88 Classical Greek more commonly used a form of χαρίζω, with the participle κεχαρισμένος.89 But the Christians had made the longer form their own when they used it for the annunciation and made that a focal point for their reflection on the incarnation.90 If Clement did recollect the narrative of incarnation when he described his teachers as ‘graced’ (κεχαριτωμένον) with a spirit that his notes can but weakly convey, then that gives a profoundly Christian construction of the experience of intimacy with personal teachers. This is no erotic sexual passion (as evoked in the Phaedrus), nor even an arrogant chastity (as evoked in the Hippolytus), but it is a microcosm of the Christian experience of incarnation, where God in his grace bestows the spirit and deems some worthy quietly to listen.91 This heightens the emphasis on a particular kind of Christian love – not erotic sexual passion, but the experience of incarnation through God’s gracious bestowal of spirit mediated through the bodily forms of Christian teachers.92

conclusion Clement’s self-presentation in the opening of the Stromateis puts paid to the notion that he thinks of himself as a divine mouthpiece, channelling

87 88

89

90

91 92

Plat. Phdr. 253a. The latter is unattested in earlier Classical literature and the annunciation is the only occurrence in the Greek Bible except for once in Sirach (18:17), which is not relevant here. E.g., the Homeric formula κεχαρισμένε θυμῷ (Hom. Il. 5.243, 826, etc.); Eur. Herc. 890 (Βρομίου κεχαρισμένα θύρσωι); Plat. Soph. 218a; Phdr. 273e. Gabriel’s greeting to Mary was quoted in the Protevangelium of James (PJ 22.11), a text that Clement used in his own reflection on the nature of scriptural teaching (PJ 19.3–20.2, cf. Str. VII.xvi.93.7–94.1), as pointed out in Le Boulluec 1997 (SC 428), 285 n. 4. I take ‘quietly’ to be the nuance of the prefix in the verb ὑπακοῦσαι. For the role of the Spirit in learning and teaching in Clement’s preface, see also: pp. 103–104, 107–109, above.

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the Logos directly for his readers. He is self-consciously a miscellanistic author, and his autobiographical passage portrays this in a way that is distinctive among the miscellanists of the time. It should not be treated primarily historically, but nor is it just a rhetorical strategy of selflegitimation in competition with others. Rather, Clement presents himself as model miscellanist (as do the Classical authors), but he interprets this through a Christian theology and spirituality of miscellanism. Theologically, his approach is marked by differentiated contours of relation to the Lord, the Logos and the Spirit. The Spirit is particularly emphasised in his understanding of teaching and learning through miscellanism. Clement is distinguished from Classical miscellanistic authors by attributing his vocation to ‘the Saviour himself’ (Str. I.i.3.1) and by his social and institutional context for traditional teaching and ascetic practice, which is ecclesial. But the most important difference in his autobiographical self-presentation is his emphasis on the teleology of miscellanism. Whereas Gellius and Plutarch had portrayed fragmented vignettes of their lives in order to invite readers into a similarly fragmented experience of the miscellanistic lifestyle, Clement’s narrative of self progresses along a journey that leads to rest in Egypt with a bee anthologising a meadow. In his vision, miscellanism is the textual activity that lies at the goal of a coherent narrative of self. Through Classical intertexts, he interprets this as the activity of chaste love, experienced with such intimacy between teacher and learner that it could even have the annunciation as its pattern. This miscellanistic bee will remain important in subsequent parts of this study, as we get deeper into Clement’s construction of miscellanism. In Chapter 7, we will discover its identity for Clement as primarily the Christ-Logos himself. First, however, I turn to the most distinctive genre-marker of all in ancient miscellanism: the title.

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6 Miscellany Titles and Clement’s Divine Paratexts

Miscellanists’ titles were in some ways unusual among ancient literary works. In other literature, titles often corresponded fairly straightforwardly with the contents of the works to which they were attached: epics were named after the main theme; tragedies after the main character, who was usually a character from myth already known to the audience; comedies originally had more enigmatic titles, such as Aristophanes’ Frogs or Wasps, taken from the animal choruses; but later more descriptive titles were often used. Dialogues, like tragedies, were often named after a principal character, but they were usually about persons unknown to most readers, which made them more enigmatic. Poetry collections often had titles that indicated the genre of poetry – one thinks of Theocritus’ Bucolica.1 But miscellaneous works by their very nature were harder to characterise by a Hauptthema than philosophy, history, tragedy or comedy; correspondingly, their titles were frequently metaphorical. They included titles from the domain of the natural world (Woods, Violets, Meadow(s), Honeycomb, Horn of Plenty, perhaps Garland could also be placed here), art (Tablet), textiles (Robe, Tapestries), or they might relate simply to literary inspiration (Muses). There were also titles that characterised the work or its mode of composition more directly: Hold-all, Impromptu, Chucked-Together. These titles have different emphases, but ubiquitous is the attempt to capture the diversity of the product, while usually pointing at the same time to the unity of the whole and its beauty.2 1 2

Schröder 1999, 9–41. Schröder 1999, 49–50. Cf. Fitzgerald 2016, 152–57, and Chapter 3.

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The predictability of such titles was characteristic of the style of writing: Pliny (pr. 24–25), Gellius (pr. 6–9) and Clement (Str. VI.i.2.1) each present their readers with lists of other people’s titles for miscellanistic works.3 These were not intended to introduce titles that the readers had never heard before, but to evoke those that they had heard many times. Some of the titles that they list are obscure to us, but in other cases, we can trace examples of how they were used and reused: ‘Meadow’ appears on the lists of all three of them, and we know of a Meadow written by Cicero (‘Limon’), by Suetonius (‘Pratum’), and by Pamphilus of Alexandria (Λειμών), using Latin and Greek word-forms respectively. Even where we cannot trace the history of ancient exempla, the titles that they list interact with metaphors that are very widespread tropes for portraying the reading and writing of miscellanies and anthologies – bees plucking pollen and the gathering of flowers describe this kind of reading and writing from early Greece onward.4 The recognisability of this kind of title is underscored by the repetitions between the lists of titles in Pliny, Gellius and Clement. However, Pliny, Gellius and Clement responded rather differently to this predictability when it came to their own titles: Pliny and Gellius present their own as plain by contrast with the fancy names that others choose; they list others’ titles in order to draw out this contrast. And yet, in both cases, this appears to be a rhetorical trick to draw attention to the striking novelty of their own choice: Attic Nights and Natural History were both unprecedented. Clement, on the other hand, lists other people’s titles in order to draw out the similarity of his own work. He picks Stromateis as a title that really is ostentatiously plain. It could have been plucked straight off Gellius’ catalogue of other people’s titles, where it also appears. This chapter interrogates the use of titles among all these miscellanists to show both that they were significant and how. Working with Genette’s concept of title as ‘paratext’, the first part of the chapter shows that extant Classical miscellanists often appear to have given a great deal of thought to their choice of title and its paratextual function, even when they present it rhetorically as plain. Collectively, these close studies encourage us to pay attention to Clement’s title and its function also. The second part of the chapter argues that Clement’s Stromateis has a deliberately boring ring for those engaged in the ancient miscellany-

3

See further Chapter 7.

4

E.g., Barns 1950, 132–33.

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making culture, but Clement’s wit lies in reinterpreting it as a divine paratext for readers of his work. Whereas the Classical miscellanists chose distinctive titles, Clement chooses a well-known title but handles it distinctively through in-text commentary, as well as by its position within a larger literary sequence. I explore Stromateis in the context of the sequence that begins with Protrepticus and Paedagogus and argue that Clement’s in-text commentaries on his titles interpret them in such a way as to place the reader in a progressively closer relation to God. Previous scholars have sometimes affirmed that Clement’s titles name the work of the Logos,5 but there has been little recognition of the way they function in cultivating the reader’s shifting relationship to God through the work. This chapter is rather lengthy because the argument depends on studying each title and its in-text commentaries in turn. However, the topic is important for understanding Clement’s relationship to Classical miscellanism: his title is his most loudly explicit genre marker; it appears to be a deliberate miscellanistic cliché, by which he positioned his work squarely within the culture of Classical miscellany-making. Modern translations often render it in English as Miscellanies, and in French as Mélanges, thus fixing in the mind of modern readers a firm connection between Clement and ‘miscellanism’. They are not wrong. What I hope to show here is that Clement works with this very ordinary name to create an extraordinary instrument in guiding a reader through her changing relationship to God as she progresses through Clement’s project, within its larger literary sequence.

greco-roman miscellany titles as paratexts For modern readers, it was Gérard Genette who above all drew attention to the importance of titles in framing how readers should approach a literary work: in his terminology, titles function as significant ‘paratexts’. Genette coined the term ‘paratext’ in order to describe all those aspects of a text that are not part of the text itself, but that present it to the reader – for example, the title, author name, illustrations and so on. These features come with the text but are not part of the text. They offer a ‘threshold’ of entry from the discourse of the world outside the text to the discourse of the world within it. They are ‘a “vestibule” which offers to 5

Thomson 2013, 27.

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everyone the possibility of entering or of turning back’, writes Genette, and explains that they are (in the words of Philippe Lejeune) ‘the fringe of the printed text which, in reality, controls the whole reading’: This fringe, in effect, always bearer of an authorial commentary either more or less legitimated by the author, constitutes, between the text and what lies outside it, a zone not just of transition, but of transaction; the privileged site of a pragmatics and of a strategy, of an action on the public in the service, well or badly understood and accomplished, of a better reception of the text and a more pertinent reading – more pertinent, naturally, in the eyes of the author and his allies.6

The title and other paratexts thereby become one of the significant ways in which an author can structure the reader’s way into and through his work. A title is always a paratext, but it can function in diverse ways depending on both material features and the choice of words for the title itself. The material character of miscellany titles in the early empire can be inferred from wider evidence of book culture in the period. Nicholas Horsfall has studied the use of titles in Latin literature and found four ways in which they could typically appear: written at the beginning or end of the work, or along the edge of a scroll or on a tag that dangled from the end of a book-roll.7 The titles had a significant practical function: in a library, it would guide a librarian in arranging the volumes, and if there were a label dangling off the scroll then that would also help readers in finding them. The titles also functioned as markers in discourse about books: at Larensis’ banquet, the dinner-guests typically begin their quotations with a formula, ‘in the text that is entitled . . .’.8 The title was thus not only a material paratext – a written label that came into one’s hands ‘alongside the text’ – but also functionally a paratext in conversation about books, where it provided the entry point into a quotation or discussion. It could therefore act as a meaningful ‘threshold’ into the world of the text, and this is reflected in the practice of ancient commentators, who treated elucidation of the title as a core component of criticism. At its simplest, this meant identifying the author and the work;9 but the author had the chance to shape the title artfully

6

7

8

Genette and Maclean 1991, 261. On Genette’s ‘paratexts’, see further: Genette 1997. For the reception of Genette’s category in the study of antiquity: Jansen 2014. It could also be written at the beginning or end of the work or along the outer edge of the roll: Horsfall 1981, 103. 9 Jacob 2000, 93. Schröder 1999, 33.

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according to how he wanted his readers to engage with the work, and some authors in all genres made use of that possibility.10 This section explores what the four miscellanists that we have studied in this book did with this opportunity. They have received varying levels of attention in previous scholarship: Gellius’ witty coinage of Attic Nights has been much discussed, and commentary on Plutarch’s less interesting Sympotica Zêtêmata (Quaestiones Convivales) has been sufficient, but neither Pliny’s Natural History nor Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists has previously received the attention it deserves. I shall comment on all four, drawing out the ways in which they exploit the paratextual potential of their titles and building up a picture of the breadth and characteristics of the Classical culture of miscellanism in this regard.

Plutarch’s συμποτικὰ ζητήματα Plutarch’s choice of title, συμποτικὰ ζητήματα (3 pr. 645c and 4.1, 660d) or προβλήματα (612e, 629e), evokes both the Platonic tradition of sympotic dialogue and the Peripatetic interest in ‘problems’.11 It thus plays with generic cues and philosophical markers and inserts the work at the interface between traditions. However, it is not a colourfully arresting title like Attic Nights or Deipnosophists, and Plutarch does not make it a point of discussion in his preface, as do Pliny and Gellius. It does not draw attention to itself so much as to the sympotic context and the question in hand.

Gellius’ Noctes Atticae More playful is Gellius’ Attic Nights. He, of course, disclaims any particular forethought: he says that ‘Attic Nights’ is chosen just because he happened to be in Attica when he was making his notes by night for this piece of work (pr. 4). But we should not take him too seriously; the pose of casual miscellanism is conventional. Gellius cared too much about these books of his to throw away the chance to make an impression with his title; his adaptation of Pliny’s trope of listing the titles he did not choose shows how much it matters to him. And, as Amiel Vardi observes, 10

11

Cf. Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (Tatum 1972); Horace’s Sermones (Van Rooy 1966, 64–71; Horsfall 1981, 108). Above, p. 34.

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it would have had a very different ring if he had called his books not ‘Attic Nights’ but ‘Milesian Nights’, for example.12 ‘Attic’ recalls the glorious history of Athens. The brevity and evocative character of the phrase open up possible associations without requiring the reader to choose between them, or not straight away. Attic Nights could suggest the Eleusinian mysteries, whose night rituals were renowned across the Mediterranean world. Gellius playfully frames his book as a labour of devotion to the Muses, quoting at the end of his preface the chorus from the Frogs, which bids noninitiates keep away.13 Again, Attic Nights could evoke dinner party conversations in the noble Socratic tradition. Plato’s Symposium had given rise to a tradition of sympotic literature in prose, and many of the miscellanists of the early empire placed their own work in relation to it (Plutarch and Athenaeus were among them). Gellius does in fact describe many learned dinner conversations, although he also deliberately and uniquely varies his notes with many other settings. The kind of nights that Gellius describes in his preface, however, are neither Eleusinian nor sympotic. Rather, he portrays himself as a studious pepaideumenos sitting at his desk, devoting his night hours to the labours of reading, taking notes and arranging his books. James Ker has drawn our attention to the Roman practice of lucubratio, which is what Gellius describes here. Simultaneously private and public, the author’s hours of solitude are turned to good use through literary labour. Readers are invited to participate imaginatively in the solitary author’s creative work of reading and taking notes by night.14 That Gellius’ experience of this kind of work is specifically located in Attica is a feather in his cap. Not many Romans were able to study philosophy in Athens, as he had. Fewer still could do so in addition to learning rhetoric in Rome.15 Gellius’ title, then, offers to the public memoirs from his own experience and glamorises the time when he was able to rub shoulders with the luminaries of his world, such as Herodes Atticus, Calvenus Taurus and his favourite of all, Favorinus, ‘who was his Socrates’.16 The title Attic Nights thus frames the work within particular traditions of Greek literary and cultural, public and private endeavour. As Genette suggested, it operates as a portal or threshold on the entrance to the work, where the author invites the reader to transition into a spiritual space 12 14 16

13 Vardi 1993, 300. Holford-Strevens 2003, 27. 15 Ker 2004, and see Chapter 8. Vardi 1993, 301. Holford-Strevens 1997, 112.

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created through the text and shared with him and his tradition. The title functions as a paratext.

Pliny’s Naturalis Historia Compared with Attic Nights, Pliny’s Naturalis Historia seems at first sight rather prosaic. Gellius had dismissed it in his preface as pretentious, but it looks less pretentious than his own. Modern scholars have sometimes dismissed it as plain and uninformative. Trevor Murphy commented that ‘considering how little use the title is as a programmatic guide on how to read the book, we might just as well translate Naturalis Historia as Inquiry into Everything’.17 However, we should not dismiss Pliny’s choice quite so quickly. To be sure, he writes of it in his preface as if it were nothing special; but we saw in Chapter 4 that his preface is brimming with irony. The fact that he lists a large number of titles that are not like his throws his own choice into high relief. He even subtly parades its difference from Diodorus’ Bibliothêkê, which is the only title he approves. He could have called his own work a ‘library’; his very first words name it libros naturalis historiae, putting ‘books’ first.18 But naturalis historia is his own. Not only does it differ from Diodorus’ Library, but it also differs subtly from its closest known comparanda in the Roman world: Seneca had published a naturales quaestionae, which scholars have often compared with Pliny’s work, and there were others who were writing naturales quaestionae as well.19 But Pliny opts for something all his own. We should therefore give more thought to what makes naturalis historia distinctive. I shall compare it with naturales quaestiones, paying close attention both to the lexical forms and to Pliny’s own interpretive cues. When Seneca wrote his naturales quaestiones, he was trying to recast the Greek field of natural philosophy for a Roman audience. Pliny’s project in some ways had a similar aim, and Aude Doody suggests that they would most likely have been arranged together in an ancient library.20 However, anyone who looked inside these books would have found them rather different. Seneca was more interested in philosophy 17 18 19

20

Murphy 2004a, 33. Cf. Gunderson 2009, 28; Taub 2017, 74. As Morello 2011, 148 notes. Apuleius says that he was writing a work under this title: Apuleius, Apol. 36.8, cited in Gunderson 2009, 29 n. 26. Doody 2009, 17–18.

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than Pliny, but he dealt only with what the Greeks called meteorology, Pliny also discussed astronomy, plants, animals and humans. Seneca barely mentioned Rome and did not praise the Roman Empire effusively; Pliny mentioned Rome hundreds of times and made the Empire central to his account of nature.21 Pliny’s naturalis historia was in fact a genre all of its own, and his title – if only subtly – signals its difference. Firstly, Pliny’s work was a historia, not quaestiones. The Greek term historia had been used before for philosophical enquiry into nature, but it was better known as a genre name for a kind of historiography.22 As Mary Beagon points out, it evoked human affairs as the object of enquiry.23 Here we begin to perceive Pliny’s elegant wit. More than once in his preface he invites us to compare his project with traditional history writing. He will do more for the Roman public than Livy did with his historiae . . . ab origine urbis. Livy was old and seeking a peaceful mind in retirement, but Pliny is writing for the glory of the Roman name in the small hours while engaged in public life (pr. 10). Indeed, he has written a temporum nostrorum historia (History of Our Own Times, pr. 20), but he will not have that published until after his death, as he does not want to win glory from it (pr. 20). His naturalis historia meanwhile will contain neither ‘digressions nor speeches nor dialogues, nor amazing accidents nor varied events’ (pr. 13). These are the things you would expect in history writing. But Pliny takes a more ‘barren substance, the nature of things, that is, life’ (pr. 13). With this emphasis on life, he suggests that it is not just less personally glorious to write natural history than to write political history: it is also a work with a lot more life in it. Whereas a political history was composed by Livy in his retirement and another will be published by Pliny after his death, books of natural history can be a new birth right now at Pliny’s house (pr. 1), composed by adding to his life through wakeful nights in between his days of public service (pr. 18). Life is one of the things that Pliny wants to share, as well as to preserve, under the Roman imperial regime. The contrast between the plural quaestiones and the singlar historia highlights another difference between Pliny’s work and many other miscellanies. The plural was often used in miscellanistic titles to evoke their 21 22

23

Hine 2006, esp. 42–47. On Plato’s ἡ περὶ φύσεως ἱστορία and its successors: Healy 199, 38. On historia as a genre name in imperial Rome: Schröder 1999, 56; Uden 2015, 220. Gell. NA 5.18 discusses the relation between historia and annales. Beagon 1992, 13, ‘the structure of his inquiries is dictated by that of the natural world as viewed by man’. See also her special study of NH 7: Beagon 2005.

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breadth and variety. Pliny himself names ἴα, Μοῦσαι, πανδέκται, ἐγχειρίδια in Greek and Antiquitates, Exempla Artium, Lucubrationes in Latin, all of them in the plural (pr. 24). We could add Attic Nights, Sympotic Questions and Stromateis as the other comparisons that we are especially considering. Pliny’s choice of the singular, Naturalis Historia, draws attention to his vision of writing a single, unified, comprehensive work. He aspires to synoptic vision, much as he supposes that Titus enjoys a synoptic view from his lofty preeminence in the empire. However, he understands this unified view of nature not as static but as a perspective on the reciprocity between the many and the one: it is his task ‘to give nature to all things and all her things to nature’ (pr. 15). This interplay between multiplicity and unity is the aesthetic of miscellanism par excellence. So much for historia. But naturalis should also be considered closely. The adjective naturalis can be rendered ‘belonging to nature’,24 but this does not make it a bland, impersonal placeholder. Trevor Murphy’s version, Inquiry into Everything wipes out Pliny’s reference to nature altogether and at the same time depersonalises the object of his enquiry so that it becomes things rather than Natura. This nuance is also evoked in modern discussions of Pliny’s emphasis on the utility of his work, which underscores the instrumentalisation of nature: Pliny is said to interpret nature in such a way as to make her more ‘user-friendly’;25 or he is said to be concerned to ‘put the natural world at the reader’s disposal’.26 Pliny uses the term ‘nature’ in different senses: he can write of the ‘natures’ of different animals (using the plural), but also of Nature as the deity who organises the whole. Nature has a broad scope and Pliny has special interest in what will benefit human life. However, as the focal point of his enquiry, Nature is far from impersonal or instrumental. According to Pliny, Nature is the only real deity, and the power of nature is the only thing worth studying.27 The cosmic power of Nature and the humility of man dominate the beginning of his enquiry, and his work ends with a prayer to nature.28 In between, he often writes of nature in personal terms, depicting her agency and personal interest in all he observes and portraying his own response in personal, emotive terms.

24 26 28

25 Healy 1999, 39, citing Cic. Part. or. 64. Beagon 2013, 98. 27 Murphy 2004a, 211. NH 2.1–27. On nature in Pliny, see Beagon 1992, esp. ch. 2. ‘Hail, Nature, parent of all things, and in recognition of the fact that I alone of the citizens of Rome have praised you in all your manifestations, look favourably upon me’ (NH 37.205, tr. Beagon 2013, 84 n. 1).

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He observes how she arranges things, ponders her motives and marvels at her wonders.29 Pliny’s ‘natural enquiry’ is thus framed in relational terms. It depicts Pliny’s experience of the human relation to the world that is made and managed by Nature herself. The emphasis on relationality has ethical implications, and Pliny’s adjective naturalis may indicate a mode of study as well as an object of research. For Pliny, there is a moral and existential tension between respect for nature and devotion to luxury.30 His title indicates that his project of enquiry participates in this moral battle. While he provocatively suggests that ‘not books, but treasure-chests’ are needed for the many books he has perused, he seeks to present an enquiry that manifests curiosity and wonder but not luxury. He invites the Roman public to participate in the same spirit of respect for nature. Pliny’s title, Natural History, then may initially seem bland and prosaic. However, it turns out to function as an important paratext for his work. It constructs a non-relationship to a literary tradition of history writing that he wishes to pass up and a contrast with a style of miscellanism that amuses with variety but offers no comprehensive view. In engaging with the content of his work, it orientates readers towards the most important object of devout contemplation in the universe: Natura, and it encourages readers to develop a human relation to nature that receives her benefits with gratitude and respect. The title is not only a label but also a portal of entry into a relation with Nature herself in all her vastness, viewed as a human and a Roman.

Athenaeus’ Δειπνοσοφισταί Athenaeus’ title, Deipnosophists, is witty in a rather different way. The title has been cited in the plural since antiquity, although the Epitomator tells us that the name of the work was ‘Deipnosophist’, using the singular

29

30

E.g., rather than just describe the quarrel between the snake and the elephant, he explains it in terms of Nature arranging a spectacle for her own entertainment (NH 8.12.34); rather than merely recount the lion’s behaviour with his tail and the horse’s with its ears, he observes that nature assigned these features (8.19.49); the distribution of animals is a source of wonder because nature has not only assigned different ones to different countries, but also sometimes refused for them to dwell in the same place in a single region (8.53.225). Wallace-Hadrill 1990.

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form (1.2a).31 The term was most likely Athenaeus’ own invention. It evokes a relation to the tradition of sympotic literature, but it also plays with that tradition in ways that will be further developed within his work. Firstly, Athenaeus’ title highlights the deipnon and not the symposion. For a reader versed in sympotic literature, this is surprising. Sympotic literature usually focused on the symposium as the place where the conversation worth remembering took place. Titles of sympotic writing conventionally highlighted this: Plato’s Symposium was the most famous and was remembered as the origin of the tradition, but other sympotic titles proliferated through the centuries, including Plutarch’s Sympotic Questions, already discussed.32 In the ancient dining ritual that was the Sitz im Leben for this kind of literature, the symposium constituted the drinking phase of a party, after the plates had been cleared away. It was viewed as the arena for cultivating the higher parts of social and intellectual life. Here the bonds of elite friendship and hospitality were forged over wine, while the guests shared in the enjoyment of philosophical debates or the delights of poetry. Convivial harmony and rivalry with one another were meant to blend in this social setting. By contrast, the deipnon, which preceded the drinking, was merely there to satisfy the appetite. It provided the opportunity to allay hunger so that the important part of the occasion could take place. Athenaeus’ title wittily shifts the emphasis onto the meal. That might lead us to expect something coarse or banal; perhaps a ‘cookery book’ as the introduction to the 1927 Loeb edition infelicitously describes his work.33 However, he compounds the word with another that hints at a paradox: the title is not Deipnon but Deipnosophist. The term ‘sophist’ in fact opens up a further layer of jesting ambivalence. Whereas ‘deipnon’ evokes only eating, the term ‘sophist’ suggests someone who talks with professional wit and erudition. However, ‘sophist’ was a slippery word and could bear a range of connotations. It could refer simply to someone who is an expert in something. Larensis’ banquet gathers together experts in medicine, poetry, philosophy, rhetoric, music and law. All of them bring their expertise to bear on the ‘deipnon’ and so

31

32

The plural is usually regarded as original: Schweighauser 1801, 6, 8–9; Maria Luisa Gambato in Canfora et al 2001, 3. It occurs in annotations in the Marcianus Codex. Schweighauer suggests that the singular was cited through confusion between the author and his work; Jacob adds that it may have been attracted by the singular biblos. 33 For an overview: Görgemanns 2001. Gulick 1927 (= LCL 2041), viii.

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become experts of the deipnon as well. In this sense, they are ‘sophists’ by their expertise.34 However, ‘sophist’ had other connotations too. In a work that ostentatiously sets itself up as an emulation of Plato, it could not fail to evoke Plato’s hostility to those whom he called ‘sophists’. They were the people who were not wise but set themselves up as wise and got people to pay them for an education. By the time Athenaeus wrote, ‘sophists’ were also a contemporary phenomenon in a new social setting. The term now had wider application than in Plato’s time; it was often associated with rhetoric (as opposed to philosophy). However, it was both imprecise and often derogatory.35 It seems that Athenaeus is deliberately playing with his readers: he wants to evoke the higher life of the mind as it is celebrated in a tradition of sympotic literature that goes back to Plato, but he also wants to put something new and comic in the spotlight. Therefore, he focuses on the ‘deipnon’ and a class of ‘sophist’ whose wisdom is displayed through their antiquarian expertise in quoting ancient authors. In the fifteen books of his work, he does not use the term ‘deipnosophist’ very often – it appears merely a dozen times. But when he does, it is often programmatic, or highlights the way he is playing with and responding to Plato. It appears in the very opening of the work, where Timocrates asks, ‘Did you take part yourself in that fine gathering of those now called “deipnosophists” (τῶν νῦν ἐπικληθέντων δειπνοσοφιστῶν), which has become the talk of the town, or did you recount it to your friends on the basis of what you learnt from someone else?’ (1.2a). As we have seen before, the question is laden with allusions to Plato, both the Phaedo and the Symposium,36 but the term ‘deipnosophists’ is new, and it is highlighted specifically as a name, much as Athenaeus and the Deipnosophists themselves highlight the titles of the works that they quote throughout the book. Again at the close of the Deipnosophists, the term is repeated in rivalry with Plato: ‘The preceding, my dearest Timocrates, were not the witty remarks of Plato’s young and handsome Socrates, but the earnest conversation pursued by the learned banqueters. For to quote Dionysius Chalcous, “What is finer, as we begin or end, than what we desire the most?”’ (15.702c).37 Also, in the middle of the work, where he points out that they are not publishing novelties but the ‘leftovers of the

34 37

35 Brunt 1994, 38. Brunt 1994. tr. Olson, LCL 519, 216–17.

36

See Chapter 5.

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Deipnosophists’, there is an implicit allusion to the layers of memory involved in the narrative frame of Plato’s Symposium (6.223d). Athenaeus’ emphasis on the deipnosophists is thus directed quite pointedly at the Platonic tradition. But in what spirit? Certainly there is jest and playfulness. That is signalled by the combination of δεῖπνον and σοφιστής, which highlights the comic bathos of the work. But it also pinpoints one of the entertaining paradoxes of the work: these deipnosophists do more talking than eating; the deipnon provides the structure and content of Athenaeus’ narrative and the prompt for the deipnosophists’ conversations, but they rarely actually eat at all. Another invented word – the λογόδειπνον – is used in the Epitome to describe the banquet. It is indeed a ‘feast of words’ or a ‘word-feast’. The cleverness of these deipnosophists is at once brilliant and well adapted to the ideals of contemporary Rome, where the educated valued antiquarian method, booklearning and the chance to inhabit the present through the literature of the past. But it also pokes fun at all that. It is, after all, about the deipnon. And these guests are, after all, sophistai, with all its slippery ambiguities.

Conclusion These miscellanists of the Roman empire, then, all treat their titles as significant paratexts – though some more than others. The titles do much more than just provide a label to identify a work. They can pitch a relationship to a tradition (such as the Platonic tradition of sympotic dialogue), a set of values or a moral stance through which the text should be read (such as Pliny’s concern for the natural quality of enquiry), or they can point up something that the author is proud of in his own past (as Gellius does with his allusion to his scholarly sojourn in Athens, and Athenaeus purports to do with his tales of hobnobbing with the Deipnosophists). They offer a guide to the character of the work, and sometimes also to its structure, whether it is in the form of quaestiones as with Plutarch, or the deipnon, as in Athenaeus. They construct a perspective on the text that singles out something important about it: for example, Naturalis Historia signals the content (natura), the method (historia) and the mood (serious); Noctes Atticae invites the reader into a contemplative space of nocturnal study, deepened by resonance with some of the most illustrious religious and cultural heritage of Athens. Athenaeus also refers in his text to the Deipnosophists eponymous with his title and thus provides in-text commentary on how to respond to the

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title. These arty titular paratexts give us every reason to pay close attention to Clement’s choice of title, even if it seems at first sight more trite.

clement’s titles as divine paratexts: god’s protreptic, god’s pedagogy and the hunt for god by means of stromatic things When we turn from the Classical authors to Clement, an immediate difference is that we have three works by the author to consider, not just one. Clement’s chosen titles for his three major extant works – Protrepticus, Paedagogus and Stromateis – at first appear to have little to do with one another. Stromateis is practically a miscellanistic cliché, while Protrepticus and Paedagogus do not sound miscellanistic at all. Protrepticus and Stromateis were both well-known book titles in antiquity, but in different genres; Paedagogus has no known parallel. If it were not for the preface to Paedagogus I, there may have been far fewer scholars seeking a connection between the three works. And yet, that preface does as much to obfuscate as to enlighten: it evokes a trilogy of Protrepticus, Paedagogus and Didaskalos, but the last of these is not among Clement’s known works, or not by this name. The explicitly miscellanistic title, Stromateis, seems to insert itself where the Didaskalos (or, more miscellanistically, Didaskalika) should be. Perhaps we ought not to be surprised that most discussion of Clement’s titles has focused on the Didaskalos, rather than on the titles that he actually gave known works. The titles that Clement did choose have occasioned only a little scholarly comment, and even that has often been shaped by reflection on the elusive Didaskalos. Annewies van den Hoek suggested that Clement referred to himself as Paedagogus but reserved Didaskalos ‘primarily’ for Christ; thus he chose the humbler part.38 André Méhat proposed that Clement chose Stromateis because he shied away from suggesting that he was a Didaskalos and preferred to present himself as a slave who ‘spreads out’ (from στρώννυμι) the bedspreads (στρώματα) on the dining-couches for the guests at the feast.39 These interpretations emphasise how the title implicates the author, as if it were a name for him rather than for his work. Neither of them takes much account of Clement’s interaction with the title in his language and 38

van den Hoek 1997a, 64.

39

Méhat 1966, 96–98.

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imagery in the body of the text. The idea that Clement was himself the Pedagogue is in tension with most of his imagery within that work, as well as with the very early tradition that remembered him as ‘the Stromatist’. Méhat’s image of the slave at the banquet leans heavily on his understanding of the genre of the Stromateis, which he connects with sympotic miscellanism; Méhat himself acknowledges that it does not work well with Clement’s emphasis on agricultural imagery in describing his work. A different approach is taken by Stuart Thomson, who infers from the opening chapter of the Paedagogus that the titles ‘refer to functions of the divine Logos’. On his reading, the opening chapter of the Paedagogus presents the ‘educational economy of the Logos’ and ‘elides’ it with the book titles of Clement’s trilogy. This places the emphasis on the Logos rather than the author, whose role ‘is figured as the fundamental conduit between the educative role of the Logos in scripture and the ecclesial hierarchy’.40 Thomson’s image of the author as ‘conduit’ comes close to evoking the notion in other scholarship of Clement as ‘mouthpiece’ of the Logos, which we critiqued in Chapter 5. I suggest that Genette’s concept of paratext can structure a more a helpful way of approaching the relation between title, text, reader, author and God. In Genette’s terms, the title as paratext creates as a ‘zone of transaction’ ‘between the text and what lies outside it’. It is located at the portal of entry into the work, where it addresses the reader with the author’s implicit commentary on the proper frame for encountering the text. The relation constituted by the title is primarily a triangular relation between the reader, the text and what lies beyond it. The author constructs and legitimates that relation, but the telos of the title lies in the reader’s reception of the text. In Chapter 5, we saw that Classical miscellanists used their titles paratextually. They could signal a relation to a particular tradition of literature (e.g., sympotic miscellany and Aristotelian problêmata, evoked by Sympotic Questions), or nostalgia for a Hellenic or Roman past that the author sought to evoke and inhabit anew (cf. Attic nights; Deipnosophists) or the deity that transcended the text while also providing its subject matter and ethical orientation (Nature in Natural History). Clement, however, goes much further than the Classical miscellanists in his in-text commentary on his titles. His persistent attention to them in his language, imagery and even explicit exegetical comment indicates his

40

Thomson 2013, 27.

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interest in their paratextual potential. This chapter will argue that he turns them into sites for literary reflection through which he effects a Christianisation of miscellanistic literary culture. I will begin with a brief account of the significance that the titles might have had to readers prior to close acquaintance with Clement’s work. Thereafter, I will follow through his in-text commentary from Protrepticus, all the way to the end of Stromateis VII. One significant point in his Christianisation of the titles is that he uses them to name the divine Logos and so create a productive tension between the word of God and the words of Clement, as Thomson and a few others have observed. But in addition to this, I will argue that his titles frame steps on the reader’s way towards God. This path through Clement’s text is also a path towards God, and the titles show how God accompanies and enables the progression at each stage.

Clement’s Titles: Cultural and Lexical Preliminaries While the paratextual significance of Clement’s titles is drawn out primarily through his in-text commentaries (discussed below), the reader’s encounter with his titles begins before entering the work. What might these titles evoke? We have seen that the Classical miscellanists relied heavily on the evocative and yet often surprising character of their titles in order to jolt the reader’s expectations and create a paratextual ‘zone of transaction’ that both affirms and disrupts the reader’s experience of particular literary and cultural traditions. Clement’s titles – with the exception of the Paedagogus – are on the surface of things much more bland: Protrepticus The title Protrepticus41 is not remarkable in the Greco-Roman world. Protreptic was the description of a style of discourse with a long history in Greek rhetoric. It has typical characteristics, which are found in Clement too: a two-part structure, and the role of pointing beyond itself to a teaching to be explained elsewhere. Its purpose is to ‘exhort’ or ‘turn’ listeners in the direction the rhetor intends. It was especially associated with philosophical conversion. Philosophical protreptic would begin by exposing the false doctrines of the opponents, then offer a glimpse of the

41

Stockhausen 2006, 83–87 shows that the original title was Protrepticus, and pros Hellenas was a later addition.

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truth. All the while, its vocabulary would be borrowed from the opponent and transformed to a new purpose. By choosing this title, Clement locates his work in this pagan philosophical tradition of rhetoric.42 Paedagogus The Paedagogus is by far the most original and interesting of Clement’s titles. Its significance has not been recognised in scholarship, even though a few scholars have noted that it is unique among extant book titles from antiquity.43 By contrast, the other titles that Clement chose were familiar – this goes for Protrepticus and Stromateis, as well as the titles to which he merely alludes – Meadow, Helicon, Honeycomb, Peplos (in the preface to Str. VI) and Didaskalika (in the preface to Paed. I). Of all Clement’s book titles, Paedagogus is the most personal and intimate. Aside from the elusive Didaskalos, it is the only one that designates a person. Clement assumes that his readers are familiar with the social roles of pedagogues, who had been employed since early Greece to help in the education of children. Their role was not constant across time and place, but they remained important in the Roman Empire. One of their principal tasks was to guide a child to school, where the teacher would take over the task of actually conducting class and setting homework. But the pedagogue had a much broader function than this. His role was both moral and instructive. He was there to provide a good example,44 as well as words of reprimand or instruction as appropriate to the child’s needs. He was often a slave, but he served such an important role and was so close to the child and the family that close relationships often developed. There are affectionate inscriptions to pedagogues on tombstones.45 The structure and content of Clement’s Paedagogus reflects this social role of the pedagogue: the first book explains at length who the Pedagogue is, who the children are and what is the method of his Pedagogy; the remaining two books are packed with the instructions that he gives to the ‘children’. At the very end of the third book, his style 42

43

44

45

Jourdan 2010, 33–44; Thomson 2013, 21 n. 12. Aristotle, Galen and Iamblichus are among other philosophical authors of works entitled Protrepticus. van den Hoek 2010, 415. Van den Hoek thinks Clement may have invented Paedagogus to go with Protrepticus; but it seems far more likely to me that he invented it to go with Didaskalos. In his culture, pedagogues led the way to didaskaloi, and Clement himself draws attention to this as the Pedagogue’s role. Thomson 2013, 26–27 makes a similar observation. Cf. Quint. 1.1.4–11, esp. 1.1.5 with 1.1.8 (imitation of nurses and, by implication, pedagogues), and 1.1.9 (a bad pedagogue imbues a child’s character with vices). Yannicoupolos 1985; Laes 2007; 2009; 2011, 113–22.

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becomes increasingly miscellanistic as he anticipates handing over the children to the ‘Didaskalos’. ‘Stromateis of Gnostic Notes according to the True Philosophy’ The title page of Clement’s major miscellany is lost, but Eusebius preserves the full form of the title, The Stromateis of Gnostic Notes according to the True Philosophy (Τίτου Φλαυίου Κλήμεντος τῶν κατὰ τὴν ἀληθῆ φιλοσοφίαν γνωστικῶν ὑπομνημάτων στρωματεῖς, Eus. EH 6.13.1).46 This corresponds to how Clement refers to his own work at the end of the first, third and fifth Stromateis and at the beginning of the sixth, where in each case he too writes of Stromateis of Gnostic Notes according to the True Philosophy.47 He also refers to his work in syncopated forms, as Stromateis or Hypomnêmata or even Gnostic Hypomnêmata. He refers to individual books as Stromateus (e.g., ‘the sixth and seventh Stromateus of our Gnostic Notes according to the True Philosophy, Str. VI.i.1.1). The significance of Stromateis as the key term was perceived in the early church, where Clement came to be known as ‘the Stromatist’.48 Whereas hypomnêmata evokes a method, Stromateis is the name that readers would expect to reflect the content of the work. Stromateis is an unabashedly miscellanistic title, as we have already had occasion to remark, but can now examine more closely: it recalls Greco-Roman miscellanies: Στρωματεῖς appears in Gellius’ list of rejected titles (pr. 7); the Lamprias catalogue of Plutarch’s works mentions among them a book of Στρωματεῖς ἱστορικοὶ καὶ ποιητικοί, which is no longer extant;49 and Caesellius Vindex also composed a Stromateis sive Commentaria lectionum antiquarum in the Hadrianic period, which gave alphabetical order to antiquarian lexicographic material.50 Clement derives Στρωματεῖς from στρωματεύς, but the word is also reminiscent of the verb στρώννυμι or στρωννύω and its cognate nouns στρῶμα and στρωμνή, all of which were common terms in familiar discourse and are used by Clement. Indeed, Latin authors often use the form Stromata in referring to his miscellanies. The verb στρώννυμι means ‘to spread out’, ‘spread smooth’ or ‘spread with’, often in making a bed, or sometimes paving a road. Correspondingly, the noun στρῶμα refers to ‘anything spread out for sitting or lying upon’, such as a mattress, or, in the plural,

46 47 48 49

He calls it a προγραφή, suggesting a title attached to the front of the text. As noted by Stählin, p. 1: Str. 1.182.3; 3.110.3; 5.141.4; 6.1.1. Attested already in Julius Africanus, see Méhat 1966, 98 n. 14. 50 Méhat 1966, 104. See above, p. 28, n. 20. Schmidt 2006.

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coverings for a dinner-couch or bed; it can also refer to horse-trappings or to the pavement.51 Στρωμνή, which appears many times in Clement’s Paedagogos, refers particularly to a bedspread or bed.52 The less common term στρωματεύς was used for a ‘coverlet’ or ‘bedspread’. Στρωματεύς also appears as a synonym for στρωματόδεσμον, which LSJ defines as ‘a leathern or linen sack in which slaves had to tie up the bedclothes’; Phrynichus, an Atticist roughly contemporary with Clement, was sufficiently aware of this usage to note and criticise it for being wrong-headed and new-fangled.53 In the plural, Στρωματεῖς appears as a title of literary miscellanies or, in Athenaeus, as a flat fish with variegated colouring.54 Modern versions of the Stromateis have translated the title in various ways, for example, as ‘Carpets’, ‘Patch-works’, or, most often, ‘Miscellanies’. However, discussions of the title seldom go much beyond brief reflection on the best translation55 and citation of other works known to have carried this title.56 Eusebius, however, spotted its significance for Clement’s own work; his comments drew out the tight connection of the title to Clement’s literary form and content: Now in the Stromateis he has composed a layout (κατάστρωσιν), not only of the divine Scripture, but of the writings of the Greeks as well, if he thought that they also had said anything beneficial. He calls to mind teachings from many sources, unfolding those of the Greeks and barbarians alike, and additionally setting straight the false opinions of the heresiarchs, and he rolls out much history, furnishing us with subject matter of a polymathic education. With all these things, he mingles also the teachings of philosophers, and so he has appropriately made the title of the Stromateis to correspond to the subject-matter itself. (Eus. H.E. 6.13.4–5, my translation)

Eusebius’ language emphasises some typical aspects of miscellaneous composition: a personal selection of what is beneficial; noting things as reminders; providing a work that is characterised by polymathy and paideia; the ‘mingling in’ (καταμίγνυσιν) of things. At the same time, he uses terms that underscore doctrinal debate, furnishing a critical selection and interpretation of teachings of diverse groups and ‘setting straight’ (εὐθύνων) the heresiarchs. He evokes physical book-culture in the 51 52

53

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LSJ s.v. Cl. Paed. II.i.13.1; iii.35.3; viii.64.5, 67.3; III.ii.4.4; x.49.4; Cf. strôma for bed-clothes: Paed. II.ix.77.2, 81.1; Str. V.v.27.8 (quoting Pythagoras). Phrynichus, Ecl. 380: Στρωματεὺς ἀδόκιμον· στρωματόδεσμος ἀρχαῖον καὶ δόκιμον. Cited in LSJ. On these various meanings, see also Méhat 1966, 96–97. 56 Brief discussion in Mondésert 1951 (= SC 30), 6–11. Méhat 1966, 96–98.

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‘unfolding’ or ‘unrolling’ of book-rolls (ἀναπτύσσων . . . ἐξαπλοῖ) and the comment on the correspondence between the form and the content of the Stromateis. Eusebius’ choice of noun to unpack Clement’s title, κατάστρωσις, is a very rare word. The only occurrence that TLG lists prior to this passage is in the Letter of Aristeas: ἑκάστῳ γὰρ στολὰς ἔδωκε τῶν κρατίστων τρεῖς καὶ χρυσίου τάλαντα δύο καὶ κυλίκιον ταλάντου καὶ τρικλίνου πᾶσαν κατάστρωσιν (Let. Ar. 319). The word does not occur again in the extant work of Eusebius. He does use καταστρώννυμι on four occasions, of which two refer to razing cities or houses (Comm. Is. 1.59.38; Vit. Const. 3.1.4.2) and the other two concern laying paving or smoothing the surface of a road (Vit. Const. 3.26.2.6; Comm. Psalm. 23.685.28–30). The fact that he chooses such a rare word to unpack Clement’s title suggests that he reads the title with sensitivity to etymology and lexical form and is looking for a way in which that may articulate the link between content and title. The fact that he does not supply a more familiar word to articulate that link suggests that he found Clement’s title provocative and interesting to think about. Given the way he develops his own account of the work, I have suggested ‘layout’. This suggests both physical spreading out on the page and intellectually laying out the meaning, just as Eusebius stresses both these aspects in the following clauses. It is notable that he privileges ‘divine scripture’ as the class of writing that is first and foremost presented as a κατάστρωσις. This brief account of Clement’s titles confirms that on the face of it there is nothing of obviously Christian interest and perhaps nothing that is particularly unique about them (except perhaps in the case of the Paedagogus). Whereas Pliny, Gellius and Athenaeus all coined titles that slapped the reader with their distinctive brilliance (even if they disclaimed such ambition), Clement’s Protrepticus and Stromateis do quite the opposite. They pass themselves off as the kind of thing a Greek author of this time might compose. Furthermore, as we noted at the start of the chapter, there is no intrinsic connection between the three titles of the works, taken on their own. There is no reason to suppose that a Protrepticus should be followed by a Paedagogus, nor that a Stromateis should be preceded by both. One could infer from this that the titles are not really significant paratexts at all, and/or that the works need not be read together. However, the author’s engagement with the language and imagery of the title within his text shows that quite the opposite is the case as regards their importance. The more the reader becomes acquainted with the

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work, the more he or she must recognise that the title is guiding him or her into a relationship with God in ways that were not apparent on the label of the scroll at all. As for the progression through the works, while the argument for reading the three works together will be strengthened in Chapter 7, and derives even more support when the educational programme is considered in full, the close study of the author’s in-text commentary on his titles shows the intention of moving with the reader along a progress towards God, which happens not only in the transition from one work to another, but also in the way the paratextual significance of the title shifts within each work, as the author models new ways of interacting with it. Clement’s In-Text Commentaries on His Titles Clement’s method of drawing attention to his titles differs in each of his three works. In the Protrepticus, he simply picks up the vocabulary of ‘protreptic’ and integrates it into his discourse, thereby providing an implicit commentary on his title. In the Paedagogus, he writes a whole book of introduction to the Pedagogue and his work, in which he establishes it on an ingeniously conceived scriptural basis. In the Stromateis, the use of the name marks a series of prefaces in which Clement engages in extended reflection on the scattered form of his notes and how and why to engage with them. Not only the transitions between works, but also the development within works, is important for discerning how Clement invites his readers into a changing relationship with God as they progress through his work. Clement’s Commentary on the Protrepticus Clement’s Protrepticus is divided into two parts in accordance with the Classical model of protreptic discourse. After a lengthy preface (Protr. i), he turns to invective against pagan custom. This takes up the first half of his work; then he switches to exhorting his readers towards Christianity. He begins by urging them to attend to the Scriptures, which illumine the way to salvation. He closes with an invitation to join the company that is heading for heaven. Central to the exhortation is the call to the readers to leave behind pagan ‘custom’, which includes myths, rites, statues, literature and philosophy. They need to find their feet in the rival tradition of Christianity. The rhetoric of ‘protreptic’ (προτρεπ-) is used only infrequently, but it marks out Clement’s attempt to help his readers to experience God’s existential hold on them. Its use is concentrated in the preface and in the second, hortatory part of the discourse.

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Prefatory Protreptic: Prophetic Types for Christ within Scripture The imagery in the proem to the Protrepticus is immensely important for articulating the architecture of Clement’s work; Chapter 7 will treat this in more detail, when we find Clement’s summons to leave Mount Helicon and Mount Cithaeron, together with the tragedy of Pentheus, echoed in some of his most deliberate in-text commentary on his other titular paratexts.57 However, important as these opening tableaux are for Clement’s paratextual use of some of his other titles, they do not incorporate the vocabulary of ‘protreptic’, the title of the present work. For emphasis on that, one has to wait until later in the preface, when words in προτρεπ- do occur in a higher frequency than in any other passage in the work.58 Clement uses this vocabulary especially in relation to two figures from salvation history who preceded Christ but who can still be regarded as types for the Christian proclamation today: David and John the Baptist. The image of David’s protreptic is poised between pagan and Christian concepts of truth. David is the lyre-player whom Clement contrasts implicitly with the lyre-player from pagan myth in the prologue, and explicitly with Christ, the lyre-player who takes the human being as his instrument for make music with psalms unto God. David’s protreptic had been when he ‘tried to turn (προὔτρεπεν) people to the truth and tried to turn them away from idols’ (προὔτρεπεν ὡς τὴν ἀλήθειαν, ἀπέτρεπε δὲ εἰδώλων, i.5.4). But Christ is ‘the Lord’’ who ‘has mercy, trains, exhorts (προτρέπει), chastises, saves, guards and promises us the kingdom of heaven as a reward for learning’ (i.6.2). The contrast in tenses points up a significant difference between David and Christ: David’s protreptic was in time (προὔτρεπεν – imperfect tense, which I have interpreted conatively, ‘he tried to turn’); but Christ’s is now and always (προτρέπει – present tense among a list of other present indicatives; it underscores the timelessness of Christ’s protreptic, among his other lordly ways of dealing with human beings). A little later in the preface, Clement mentions a second prophet of protreptic, this time from the gospels: namely, John the Baptist. Clement works hard to uncover ‘protreptic’ in the scriptural account of the Baptist, even though the Scriptures do not use the language. Scripture simply calls John ‘the voice of one crying out in the wilderness’, but Clement three times describes this as the ‘protreptic voice’ or ‘the protreptic voice of the Logos’ (φωνὴ προτρεπτική . . . φωνὴ τοῦ λόγου προτρεπτικὴ ἐν ἐρήμῳ 57 58

See Appendix. Eight times in total in the preface: 5.4; 6.2; 8.1–2 (twice); 9.1–4 (four times).

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βοῶσα . . . φωνὴ προτρέπουσα εἰς κληρονομίαν οὐρανῶν, i.9.1–2). This shows us that Clement’s rhetoric is deliberate: ‘protreptic’ is his own title and paratext, and he wants to frame it here through the lens of the Baptist’s cry. Like David, the Baptist is portrayed as a forerunner of the Logos. His protreptic in the desert (the barren land) parallels the angel’s proclamation of good news to the barren woman, since both of them filled what was barren with divine power (i.9.4–5). Clement then turns to the protreptic that God issues in the present. Using his authorial voice now, and the first person plural, he utters an exclamation that ought to stir his readers to a more personal, emotionally involved response: ‘How outrageous’, he says, ‘that God is always exhorting (προτρέπειν) us to virtue, but we shun the benefit and put off salvation!’ (i.9.1). Clement thus invites his readers to hear the protreptic along with him. His authorial role is to accompany them in listening. The prologue to the Protrepticus thus uses the language of ‘protreptic’ not only to name the Logos, but also to insert the readers into the narrative of salvation that is known through the Scriptures and that is placed in competition with the stories of pagan myths. It is David and John the Baptist, figures from Scripture and from the history of salvation, who first issued the protreptic; but it is Christ and God himself who issue it now. Clement aligns himself with the readers in listening to the protreptic, as his Protrepticus moves forward. The Lord’s Protreptic through Scripture The preface offers more concentrated interaction with the language of the title than any other passage in the discourse. After that, the first half of the work is taken up with a lengthy critique of pagan rites and philosophies. Halfway through, however, Clement begins his exhortation to encourage readers to follow Christ. The vocabulary of ‘protreptic’ returns and highlights the role of Scripture in turning readers towards salvation (Protr. viii.77.1). This is the first time that Clement has used the vocabulary of ‘protreptic’ in explaining the character of a written text. But what matters to him is not the written form as such, but the protreptic of the Lord himself, who is heard through the Scriptures. ‘Nobody would be so amazed at the protreptics (τὰς προτροπάς) of the other holy ones, as at the Lord himself, who loves humanity’ (ix.87.3). Several times in this second half of the discourse, Clement characterises protreptic as the work of God, which is made known through Scripture and persists timelessly: The Lord does not tire of advising, instilling fear, exhorting (προτρέπων), prodding to wakefulness, chastising (ix.84.1)

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See the threat, see the protreptic (τὴν προτροπήν), see the penalty! (ix.84.5) He who is truly father does not cease exhorting (προτρέπων), chastising, educating, loving (x.94.1) Let us obey God who exhorts (προτρεπομένῳ) (xi.115.1)

Clement contextualises this in relation to the expectation of judgement and the choice that God sets before humanity, attested in the Scripture, which amounts to life or death. He wants his readers to recognise that the choice that God sets before them will involve them in a whole way of life, and so he defines piety itself as protreptic: The other counsels and precepts are mean and partial, such as whether to marry, engage in politics or have children. The only general protreptic (προτροπή), clearly directed toward the whole of life, at every moment, in every circumstance, straining for the most important end – viz. life – is piety (θεοσέβεια). (Protr. xi.117.1)

Clement has thus shifted attention within the discourse, since the preface only hinted at the immediate import of the divine summons uttered in a timeless present. It allowed readers to be caught up in the imaginative recollection of great prophets of the past. However, this second half of the discourse turns the spotlight on their situation and their response in the present. The Scriptures mediate the divine proptreptic; Clement excerpts, arranges and frames them. Characteristic of his way of presenting them is to focus the protreptic on a simple choice that is allembracing and easy to comprehend. It is not about particular commands such as marrying or having children but about the general protreptic and orientation towards life, which is piety. It is the will of Christ and that can be explained in a quick summary that puts life in the balance. This simplicity means that the existential character of the protreptic is unmistakeable. Clement’s Own Protreptic Voice Only once does Clement portray himself as the voice of ‘protreptic’, and he immediately aligns that with the will of Christ: So, this protreptic (προτροπή) of truth alone has been compared with the most faithful of friends, abiding until the last breath, a good escort for the whole and perfect spirit of the soul, for those who are setting off for heaven. So why am I exhorting (προτρέπω) you? I am urging you for myself that you be saved. Christ wills this. He graciously grants you life by one ordering principle (λόγος). And who or what is that? Learn it in summary: an order (λόγος) of truth, an order (λόγος) of incorruption, one who begets the human being anew and brings him up to the

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truth, the goad of salvation, who drives out destruction and chases away death, and who built a sanctuary in human beings so that God might be set up as a sacred image in human beings. (Protr. xi.117.3–4)

This is the very last occurrence of the language of ‘protreptic’ in the work. Clement finally chooses the first person to acknowledge his own protreptic voice. But by now readers know that the Protrepticus is fundamentally a presentation of God’s protreptic. Summary The Protrepticus is not a miscellany in the same way as the Stromateis, but the importance of presenting the divine voice by framing and arranging scriptural excerpts participates in miscellanistic form and practice. Like the pagan miscellanists, Clement seeks to orientate his readers towards a vantage point on the discourse from which they may perceive a measure of coherence in the varied prose and an invitation to a particular pattern of cultural activity. However, in the Protrepticus, the focus of orientation is not towards a sympotic tradition of learned conversation, nor edifying encounters in Attica, nor even natural enquiry. It is the divine logos who speaks through the work and offers the choice of life or death. This is the first step on a journey, which Clement evokes at the close of the work with a pile-up of imagery of urgent movement and travel towards a new destination: sailing in a boat, crossing to a new mountain, joining a mystery procession, hurrying, running, taking up the yoke and pulling Christ’s chariot, headed towards heaven.59 In the Paedagogus, he takes up the imagery of ‘guiding’, but now with the ‘Pedagogue’ leading the way. Clement’s Commentary on Paedagogus The novelty of Clement’s title, Paedagogus, partly explains why he takes such interest in it in the body of this work. As soon as the book opens, one chapter after another places the ‘Pedagogue’ at the centre of attention: what does it mean to have a Pedagogue? Who is the Pedagogue and who are the children? What kind of relationship to Christ, and to Clement’s own text, do readers experience when the Pedagogue is speaking?60 By contrast, in the Protrepticus, commentary on the title was relatively 59 60

Protr. xii.118.1–21.1. See Marrou 1960 (= SC 70), 20–21 for an overview of the distribution of this vocabulary in the Paedagogus – unfortunately without quotation, but a list of references gives a sense of the frequency and spread.

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understated: at first there was no mention of the title at all; then the in-text commentary took the form of occasional incorporation of the language of ‘protreptic’ into the argument. But who is the ‘Pedagogue’? We noted above that Annewies van den Hoek thought that answer was chiefly Clement: ‘he depicts himself in more humble terms as a παιδαγωγός (“pedagogue”), and uses διδάσκαλος primarily to label Christ as the teacher par excellence’.61 She acknowledges that ‘pedagogue’ also refers to Christ, but she allows the weight of emphasis to fall on Clement himself as pedagogue. Others have been less nuanced. Robert Grant recounts that Clement ‘as a “pedagogue” wrote lessons in manners and godliness’ (emphasis mine).62 Attila Jakab has a chapter heading, ‘Clément, le pédagogue des riches chrétien(ne)s d’Alexandrie’, which is picked up in the subtitle ‘L’activité “pédagogique” de Clément à Alexandrie,’ though Jakab does not actually address this interpretation in the discussion.63 But is this really where Clement places the emphasis? I want to begin by underscoring that Clement’s Paedagogus is named for the ChristLogos. This is the basis on which we can then consider more closely how he discovers the Pedagogue in Scripture and how he integrates it into the structure of his own multi-volume project. Readers As Children, Christ-Logos As Pedagogue The very first sentence of the Paedagogus constructs the readers as ‘you children’, and thus positions them in relation to the Pedagogue of the title. The readers, then, are the children. As for the Pedagogue, Clement works on constructing the proper relation to him bit by bit in the following chapters. Paed. I.ii repeats the address to readers as children and adds that ‘our Pedagogue, Children, is like his father, God, whose son he is . . .. He is a spotless image for us; we must try to liken our soul to him with all our strength’ (I.ii.4.1–2). Clement thus aligns himself with the children, not with the Pedagogue himself. True to the character of pedagogues in contemporary society, the children are supposed to imitate their Pedagogue as a model, while also anticipating judgement. Paed. I.iii develops the theology of mimesis by grounding it in the creation of human beings by God. The Pedagogue provides not only a model and image, but also illumination and guidance along a road. Paed. I.iv integrates the 61

62

van den Hoek 1997a, 64. Cf. p.66, ‘he refers not to himself, a mere pedagogue, but to the Didaskalos, the Logos itself’. 63 Grant 1986, 181. Jakab 2001, 117, 121.

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Pedagogue into the experience of divine and ecclesial unity: next after ‘one God’ comes ‘one Pedagogue’, and only then ‘one church’ (iv.10.2). In Paed. I.v, the etymology and exegesis of ‘pedagogy’ is constituted as a literary programme: ‘That pedagogy is the training of children is clear from the name. It remains to consider the children, of whom scripture speaks in riddles, then to set the Pedagogue over them. We are the children . . .’ (I.v.12.1). The readers are thus invited to think of themselves not primarily as Clement’s readers but as God’s children along with Clement (cf. I.ii.4.1–2). Paed. I.v–vi elaborates the theme of children, placing them in relation to God the father, Christ the Pedagogue (but also fellow-child) and the mother who is sometimes church, sometimes God, and provides logos-milk from her breasts. These opening chapters clarify from the start that Paedagogus designates the Christ-Logos. Clement and his readers are the children who need to accept his guidance and care within the church. This is quite different from the pagan miscellanies that we looked at, where the titles did not invite the reader into a role to play to the same extent but pointed more to the subject matter and content of the works. Discovering the ‘Pedagogue’ in Scripture In the Protrepticus, we saw that Clement not only regarded Scripture as a form of protreptic but also read the language of ‘protreptic’ into Scripture: David and John the Baptist were both depicted as having issued protreptic themselves. When it comes to the Paedagogus, Clement once again seeks to derive the image from Scripture, and thus to put his own text in a relation to the scriptural pedagogy. On the surface of things, the Pedagogue is not easy to find in Scripture, though children and childhood are prominent, and the rite of baptism marked the entry to Christian life as an embodied experience of becoming recognised as a child of God. This familiar but emotive imagery of Christians as children dominates the opening chapters of the Paedagogus and smooths Clement’s transition to the rather less familiar image of the Pedagogue. Having shown easily how Scripture and ritual describe Christians as children, he can share his more idiosyncratic insight. In a lengthy chapter concerning ‘who the Pedagogue is, and about his pedagogy’ (Paed. I.vii), Clement identifies ‘our Pedagogue’ by name, function, character and divinity: ‘our Pedagogue is the holy God Jesus, the guide of all humanity, he himself, the human-loving god, is Pedagogue’ (55.2). His argument relies heavily on Scripture. However,

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since the ‘Pedagogue’ is not mentioned in any of the Scriptures he cites, his authorial glosses carry the weight of his assertion. For example: πάλιν δὲ ὄταν λέγῃ διὰ τοῦ ἰδίου προσώπου, ἑαυτὸν ὁμολογεῖ παιδαγωγόν
»ἐγὼ κύριος ὁ θεός σου, ὁ ἐξαγωγών σε ἐκ γῆς Αἰγύπτου.« τίς οὖν ἔχει ἐξουσίαν τοῦ ἄγειν εἴσω τε καὶ ἔξω; οὐχὶ ὁ παιδαγωγός; οὗτος »ὤφθη τῷ Ἀβραὰμ καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῷ
ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ θεός σου
εὐαρέστει ἐνώπιόν μου.« τοῦτον δὲ παιδαγωγικώτατα ὑποκατασκευαζει παῖδα πιστόν, »καὶ γίνου« φήσας »ἄμεμπτος . . .« Again, when he speaks by means of his own person, he confesses that he is Pedagogue: “I am the Lord your God, who leads you out of the land of Egypt” (Ex. 20:2). Who has authority to lead in and out? Is it not the Pedagogue?’ He ‘was seen by Abraham and said to him, “I am your God. Be pleasing in my sight!”’ (Gen 17:1), and he prepares him in a very pedagogic manner as a faithful child, saying, ‘and become blameless . . .’ (Gen 17:1) (Paed. I.vii.56.2–3)

In this excerpt, the prominence and confidence of the language of ‘pedagogy’ in Clement’s comments stands in stark contrast to its absence from the texts that he is discussing. He states that ‘he confesses that he is a pedagogue’ (ἑαυτὸν ὁμολογεῖ παιδαγωγόν), but the text he quotes says no such thing. What convinces Clement is not that God says ‘I am the Pedagogue (παιδαγωγός)’, but that he says ‘I am the one who leads you out (ἐξαγωγών) of Egypt.’ Clement infers that the authority to say that must be the authority of the Pedagogue. It happens that there is a lexical association between ‘leading in/out’ (ἐξαγωγών, ἄγειν εἴσω τε καὶ ἔξω) and ‘pedagogue’ (παιδαγωγός) in Greek; it is likely that this influenced Clement’s exegesis, but he does not explicitly comment on it.64 Similarly in what follows, Clement interprets God as speaking ‘very pedagogically’ (παιδαγωγικώτατα), but it is this interpretive frame, rather than the language or imagery in the words that God says, that highlights the theme of ‘pedagogy’ for Clement’s readers. His superlative adverb ensures that they will notice it. Elsewhere in Paed. I, Clement’s approach is similar. When it comes to imagery, he finds the Pedagogue even where we might not expect it. He explains Jesus’ self-designation as ‘the Good Shepherd’ as a metaphor for guiding children as a Pedagogue (I.vii.53.2; cf. ix.84.1). Images such as the ‘helmsman’, which Clement elsewhere uses straightforwardly for Christ or God (e.g. Protr. x.100.4), he now applies particularly to the Pedagogue (Paed. I.vii.54.2–3).

64

Bucur 2014, 63 n. 2.

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Even the rhetorical style and method of Scripture have something pedagogical about them in his eyes. He differentiates between various modes of reproach in Scripture, drawing examples from prophecy (I.ix). But he sees them all as examples of the Lord treating us as children, as it says in Sirach τέκνα σοί ἐστιν; παίδευσον αὐτά (Sir. 7:23; Paed. I.ix.75.2). The language of Ben Sira highlights ‘children’ (τέκνα) and ‘training children’ (παίδευσον); for Clement it is a small step from there to referring generally to the Lord’s instruction as ‘people-loving pedagogy’ (ἡ φιλάνθρωπος παιδαγωγία, Paed. I.ix.75.3). He underscores the Pedagogue’s authority in God’s pedagogy by introducing examples of Scripture’s various rhetorical styles with the formula, ‘the Pedagogue says through (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Moses, etc.)’ (Paed. I.ix.78.1, 81.1, 2, etc.). The fact that Clement finds so much ‘pedagogy’ in Scripture despite so little material to work with shows its importance to him. The text hardly constrains him to think of a ‘pedagogue’. Rather, he must have been captivated by ‘pedagogy’ as a scriptural account of God’s relation with his people. What interests him is much more than the lexical resonances with children and guidance. It is the personal, affective relationship to the Lord who both loves and chastises, as we would with our own children (cf. Paed. I.ix.75.2). Discovering Classical Educational Theory in Scriptural Pedagogy Ironically, the one passage in the Scriptures that explicitly encourages us to think of God’s teaching as ‘pedagogy’ is not obviously of assistance to Clement’s approach. In the letter to the Galatians, Paul describes the law as a pedagogue unto Christ (Gal 3:24–25). Henri Marrou observes that Clement’s celebration of the ‘pedagogue’ as Christ is rather hard to reconcile with Paul, and that Clement has a tough time doing so, indeed barely mitigates the tension.65 The way Clement resolves this tension suggests that his interest in the Pedagogue owes much to educational theory.66 Clement first cites the passage from Paul in his discussion of children: The apostle very clearly explained, saying something like this: ‘Before faith came, we were kept under the guard of law, shut up for the faith that was going to be revealed. So, the law became our pedagogue to Christ, in order that we might be justified from faith. But faith having come, we are no longer under a pedagogue’ (Gal 3:26–28). Do you not hear that we are no longer under that 65 66

Marrou 1960 (= SC 70), 18. Cf. Kovacs 2001 on Clement’s reception of Classical educational theory in the Stromateis.

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law, which was accompanied by fear, but under the rule of deliberate choice, the pedagogue? (Paed. I.vi.30.3–31.1)

The way Marrou hears Paul, it makes no sense to talk about a pedagogue after faith has come. And yet this is what Clement does. For him Paul is ‘very clearly’ saying ‘that we are no longer subject to that law, which was with fear, but subject to ὁ λόγος τῆς προαιρέσεως, the pedagogue’ (I.vi.31.1). Marrou’s reading is probably correct about Paul’s authorial intention. However, from Clement’s perspective, Paul’s imagery makes sense in a different way. Clement distinguishes between different experiences of the Pedagogue and different pedagogical modes of guidance: Moses and the prophets were pedagogy for children who are ‘difficult to rein in’ (ὁ γὰρ νόμος παιδαγωγία παίδων ἐστὶ δυσηνίων); they are taught with fear. But this is just a way of preparing them for a relationship of ready obedience to the true Pedagogue [εἰς] εὐηκοΐαν αὐτοὺς τοῦ ἀληθοῦς παιδαγωγοῦ, τὴν εὐπείθειαν), who is one and the same logos (I.xi.96.3–97.2). In his eyes, Paul is not pointing up a difference in what/whom the people of God obey (law as pedagogue, vs. faith in Christ) but in how they obey: whether the people’s response is grounded in fear (under the pedagogy of the law) or in rational choice (under the pedagogy of the incarnate Son). Clement’s differentiation between modes of obedience corresponds to a distinction that is found in Plutarch: The discourse which I gave on the subject of listening to lectures I have written out and sent to you, my dear Nicander, so that you may know how rightly to listen to the voice of persuasion, now that you are no longer subject to authority, having assumed the garb of a man . . .. You have often heard that to follow God and to obey reason are the same thing, and so I ask you to believe that in persons of good sense the passing from childhood to manhood is not a casting off of control, but a recasting of the controlling agent, since instead of some hired person or slave purchased with money they now take as the divine guide of their life reason, whose followers alone may deservedly be considered free. (Plutarch, On Listening to Lectures, 37b–e; tr. Babbitt, LCL 197, 204–5)

The pedagogue is figured (along with the teacher) as a controlling agent, preparing the child for grown-up life. But adult life is not about casting off the teacher and his teaching so much as transitioning to obeying it in a different way, through the internal teacher of the logos. Clement’s interpretation of Gal 3:24–25, which so perplexed Marrou, structures education in a manner similar to Plutarch: the child is trained with fear at a stage when most intractable, but afterward the child can inhabit the relation of ready obedience to the logos.

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For Clement, however, the logos is not just an interior guide from within the soul but was made known in the incarnate pattern of Christ’s life and teaching. He reads Gal 3:24–25 in light of the divine voice that declared ‘openly’, ‘This is my beloved Son, listen to him’, and underscores the loving family context for this pedagogy: Paul says, ‘The law was given as pedagogue to Christ’ ,so from this it is clear that he is one, alone, true, good, righteous, in image and likeness of the father, the Son Jesus, the Logos of God, our Pedagogue, to whom God entrusted us, as the loving father, putting his children in the hands of a Pedagogue who was part of the family, proclaimed to us openly: ‘This is my beloved Son: listen to him!’ (Paed. I.xi.97.1–2)

R. E. Witt suggests that Clement derived the idea of the Pedagogue from Plato’s Symposium, as Diotima uses the verb παιδαγωγηθῇ to describe how one who has been well ‘guided’ in matters of love will ascend from beholding beautiful things until suddenly he encounters a marvellous vision, which has been the object of all his pains and is beautiful in its nature (210e).67 It not limited by time or space or form, not beautiful in one part but not in another, and while the many beautiful things participate in it, it alone neither comes into being nor perishes. The choice of παιδαγωγηθῇ in Diotima’s speech has twofold significance: on the one hand, it alludes to an earlier speech in the Symposium, where Pausanias, another dinner-guest had spoken of the father handing his son over to a ‘pedagogue’ when he falls in love, so as to ensure that the love matures in the noblest way (183c). But παιδαγωγηθῇ in Diotima’s speech also develops her own sequence of verbs of ‘guiding’, which work with her imagery of initiation into the mysteries of love. This pedagogy in love is a form of mystagogy.68 It is very plausible that Clement’s reading of Plutarch and Plato shaped his interpretation of the divine Pedagogue. However, his image of the Pedagogue is not simply a floating motif that he has borrowed from his Classical reading, nor can it be traced to any particular source. It was a widespread image in Classical philosophies of education and could be used in different ways.69 Its significance to the philosophers reflects the 67 68

69

Witt 1931, 199. On the close link between mystagogy and teaching: Bremmer 2014, 3 n. 16; Sluiter 1999, 191–95; on mystagogy and friendship: Bremmer 2014, 3 n. 18. On paideia and mysteries: Ballard 2017. See further Chapter 10. Other Classical texts that are worth comparing with Clement include: Plato, Tim. 89d (where the logos in the soul is the true pedagogue); Leg. 7.808d–809a (with Jaeger 1961, 133 n. 29). Witt 1931, 199 also notes Sen. Ep. 110.1 (‘deus paedagogus’); Max. Tyr. Or.

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importance of pedagogues in daily life, which shaped how they imagined the possibilities of spiritual and social formation. Clement’s adaptation of the image thus participates in the philosophical and sociological koine of his day, but he develops it in his own way, through a pastiche of scriptural texts. The practice of miscellanism, which encourages the juxtaposition of different texts for the discovery of hidden patterns of coherence, gives him an accepted method for developing the image of the Pedagogue through this pastiche. We might compare the way Irenaeus writes of sticking together scriptural quotations in order to make a mosaic portrait of a king (Iren. adv. haer. 1.10). Clement’s mosaic shows a pedagogue, which is an image that his contemporaries would recognise and that plays into his own programme of guiding Christian children along the way. The Pedagogue Anticipates the Didaskalos Paed. II–III mark a shift in the character of the work. The language of ‘pedagogy’ continues, but Clement’s attention turns increasingly to the relation between the Pedagogue and the Didaskalos yet to come. He differentiates their modes of instruction and associates them with his own literary endeavour. The first and best-known occasion when he draws attention to this difference is in the discussion of garlands at the symposium. Clement’s discourse unravels into an allegorical exegesis of the crown of thorns, which leads him to a ‘mystic’ exposition of the theophany at the burning bush (II.viii.73.5–75.2). Clement pulls himself up short: ‘But I have stepped out of the pedagogic pattern by introducing the didascalic style, so I return again to what lies to hand’ (ἀλλ᾽ ἐξέβην γὰρ τοῦ παιδαγωγικοῦ τύπου τὸ διδασκαλικὸν εἶδος παρεισάγων, αὖθις οὖν ἐπὶ τὸ προκείμενον ἐπάνειμι, II.viii.76.1). This metatextual commentary by the author on his own style alerts the reader to the difference between the pedagogic and the didaskalic modes. It underscores that the progression from one to the other is an intentional part of Clement’s literary sequence, and it whets the reader’s appetite for what is to come. Towards the close of the Paedagogus, Clement draws attention again to the distinction and succession of the roles of Pedagogue and Teacher. He clarifies the function of the Pedagogue in ways that resonate with the role of pedagogues in his society:

7.8 (διδασκάλου διαπαιδαγωγοῦντος τὰς φιλοτιμίας); Plot. Enn. 6.9.4 (λόγος παιδαγωγῶν καὶ πίστιν παρεχόμενος).

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What has to be observed in our private homes, and how our lifestyle must be corrected, the Pedagogue has talked us through sufficiently. As a basis and accompaniment he presents us with the things he likes to discuss with the children until he brings them to the Teacher, in the form of a summary using the scriptures themselves, setting out the bare injunctions, furnishing the equipment for the time of guidance, but entrusting the exegesis of them to the teacher. Indeed, his law means to release people from fear by setting free their capacity of volition for faith.70 Listen (he says), you child trained well by your Pedagogue, to the summary points of salvation. For I will make plain my character, and will prescribe for you these fine commandments, by which you will reach salvation. I am guiding you along the path of salvation. (Paed. III.xii.87.1)

Clement alludes to one of the most important roles of pedagogues in Greco-Roman society: to conduct the child to school, where the teacher would take over the lessons. The pedagogue was not responsible for setting the school tasks, but he was more than just a cheap, impersonal chauffeur who got the child to the right place at the right time. He had a moral and intellectual role in socialising the child. He should set a good example himself and offer precepts and instruction appropriate to helping the child to become receptive to the teacher. He could also help with homework. If he were any good, then the child would form a close emotional bond to him, which would persist throughout his life.71 This is the role that Clement presents for the ‘Pedagogue’. He prepares the Christian children with precepts and guides them on a journey that leads to the teacher. The contrast that Clement evokes here between the Pedagogue and the Didaskalos lies not in which material they teach: they both purvey the Scriptures. Rather, it lies in their mode of teaching: the Pedagogue teaches a few things in summary form, the Didaskalos will provide exegesis. Clement indicates the Pedagogue’s style with a dense string of scriptural quotations. He quotes from across the Old and New Testaments and focuses on instructions. The passage is a tour de force of prosopopeia: Clement addresses his readers in the first person singular, but the ‘I’ is not his own ‘I’ – as it usually is – but the ‘I’ of the Paedagogos. Afterward, Clement sums up the character of the Pedagogue’s instruction and looks ahead to the Didaskalos:

70

71

To hekousion: ‘the voluntary’: cf. Aristotle, NE 3.1. There is much debate about the meaning of this in Aristotelian ethics and psychology, e.g., Heinaman 2009; G. Pearson 2012, 207–9. Laes 2011, 114–22; Yannicopoulos 1985.

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After going all through the divine scriptures, the Pedagogue sets these few things before his children, chosen out of many as a sample. By these, so to speak, vice is totally cut out, and injustice is circumscribed. But countless, how countless, are the commandments that have been written in the holy books, intended for chosen roles – some for elders, others for bishops and deacons, others for widows, concerning whom there might be another occasion to speak. But many things that come in riddles, and many that come in parables, are such that readers can benefit from them. However, it is not my task (says the Pedagogue) to go on teaching these things, but we need a Didaskalos for the exegesis of those holy words. We must go to him. And indeed, it is time for me to cease from pedagogy, and for you to listen to the lectures of the Teacher. He will take you, reared by a fine training, and will fully teach you the oracles. This church here is a teachinghouse (manuscript reading: ‘is for the good/beauty’)72 and the bride groom is the only Teacher, a Good Will of a Good Father, Wisdom legitimately conceived, Sanctification of Gnosis. (Paed. III.xii.97.3)

The role of the Pedagogue and that of the Didaskalos show strong continuity, as well as clear differentiation. Both draw on Scripture; both itemise, select and relay excerpts fitted for their audience. The Pedagogue is simpler and speaks to a simpler group – the children. The Didaskalos, on the other hand, has more abundant precepts to teach, a more diverse audience with particular roles (bishops, deacons, widows), and engages in exegesis where things become riddling and parabolic. With this send-off, capped with a hymn,73 Clement hands us over to – the Stromateis. I shall return in Chapter 7 to the relation between the Stromateis and the Didaskalos.74 At this point, it is enough to observe the continuity between the miscellanistic style of the Pedagogue and the Didaskalos that is anticipated. In these closing chapters of the Paedagogus, Clement treats the Pedagogue as a miscellanist for children: he draws together selections and excerpts from Scripture and arrays them one after another in ‘summary’, before handing over the children to the Teacher for advanced exegesis. The assemblage of precepts is reminiscent of excerpt collections used in a school setting in pagan education. This is important because one of the concerns of modern scholars in identifying the Stromateis with the Didaskalos has been a concern over whether a miscellany can be thought to teach at all. The end of the Paedagogus suggests that it can. Clement’s Pedagogue is training Christian children for learned miscellanism by miscellanistic preparatory exercises. In doing so, he is engaging in typical educational practices of the contemporary Greco-Roman world. It was

72 73

On the textual problem: van den Hoek 1997a, 65 n. 26. 74 On the hymn: van den Hoek 2012. See pp. 196–202.

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because education depended so heavily on miscellanies that miscellanism had such a high profile as a mode of inhabiting social space among the educated elites of the early empire.75 Clement’s Commentary on Stromateis (and Hypomnêmata) Clement’s interaction with the title Stromateis is concentrated in the opening parts of the first, fourth and sixth Stromateis, as well as at the tail end of the seventh. In these places, Clement speaks of his Stromateis by that name and sometimes also alludes to its etymology from strônnymi. Often these passages are cluttered with clichés of miscellanism. This in itself is interesting: unlike the pagan miscellanists, Clement wanted to sound clichéd in his participation in this cultural writing practice. But only up to a point. Clement also uses these passages of commentary on his title in order to Christianise the Classical tradition. In the following detailed analysis, I particularly want to draw attention to how Clement evokes change for the reader as she travels through the work, as the imagery associated with the title is recast at the entry to different books. What begins as searching and cultivating seeds (Str. I, preface), becomes personal transformation and offering of thanksgiving (Str. IV, preface), until God transplants the readers themselves into gnosis (Str. VI, preface), and they in turn transplant the notes in the Stromateis to a place where they display order, fruitfulness and beauty beyond the spoken word (Str. VII, end). The miscellanistic Stromateis thus continue and transcend the reorientation and guidance of the reader towards God, which was begun in the Protrepticus and Paedagogus. Stromateis in Str. I – the Invitation to Hunt for Hidden Seeds of Gnosis There is no mention of the title of the ‘Stromateis’ at the start of the extant preface, and we cannot know whether there was an in-text commentary in the lost incipit. However, after contemplating the task of writing, and setting it in the context of his own life, Clement begins to comment explicitly on the Stromateis themselves. In quick succession, he makes three comments in which he calls this work by its name and discusses its form and mode of teaching: The Stromateis will contain the truth mixed up with the teachings of philosophy, or rather covered and hidden in them, like the edible bit of the nut in its shell. For

75

Cf. Morgan 1998; 2007a; 2011; and Chapter 3.

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it is fitting, I think, that the seeds of truth be preserved for the farmers of the faith. (Str. I.i.18.1) That evil has an evil nature and could never become the farmer of anything good, I shall show throughout all the Stromateis, riddling somehow the work of divine providence and philosophy. (Str. I.i.18.4) For I keep silent because the Stromateis, making a body by much learning, mean skilfully to hide the seeds of gnosis. So just as the lover of the chase seeks, enquires, traces out, runs after with dogs, and captures the wild beast, so too the truth appears with sweetness when sought and when furnished with toil. (Str. I.ii.20.4–21.1)

In the first of these passages, the Stromateis are the subject, and the truth is the direct object. This passage indicates that ‘Stromateis’ involve a work of concealment: they hide ‘the truth’ in Greek philosophy. The second passage, however, balances that by indicating that they involve a work of revelation. Stromateis are not only about covering up, but about consistently showing in a riddling fashion the work of providence and philosophy. The third passage returns to concealment: again, Stromateis have a will of their own and it is to hide seeds of gnosis. This time, Clement does not mention Greek philosophy in particular, but ‘polymathy’ in general, concealing the seeds of gnosis. This emphasis on concealment is framed in terms that draw attention to Clement’s chosen title: by defining the role of the Stromateis with verbs of mixing, covering and hiding, Clement is drawing out the notion of ‘spreading out’ or ‘spreading over’ that the connection with στρώννυμι may suggest. In depicting the Stromateis ‘making a body’ by polymathy, there is an aural jingle between Στρωματεῖς and σωματοποιούμενοι, which artfully underscores that ‘making the body’ that hides the gnosis is the work proper to these Stromateis. In studying the Protrepticus and the Paedagogus, we saw that Clement was eager to give his chosen titles a scriptural warrant by discovering these concepts and echoes of the terminology in Scripture, even when Scripture did not quite use the words. In the Stromateis, there is no such concern for a scriptural warrant for the name of the work. However, the title is a key site where Clement constructs the relation between readers, text, God, the truth that lies in the world and also positions himself in relation to this dynamic. In the first and third passages above, the Stromateis are themselves portrayed as the active subject that ‘will enclose’ (περιέξουσι) the truth and that ‘wish to hide’ (κρύπτειν . . . βούλονται) the seeds of gnosis (I.i.18.1). This is complemented by Clement’s own enigmatic work of revelation, ‘I shall reveal . . . in riddles’ (ἐγὼ δὲ . . . ἐνδείξομαι . . . αἰνισσόμενος) yet ‘I keep

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silent’ (σιωπῶ) because of the will of the Stromateis to hide the seeds (I.i.18.1, ii.20.4). Clement cooperates with the work and with divine providence, and the onus is on his readers to hunt and discover like a devotee of the chase (ζητήσας, ἐρευνήσας, ἀνιχνεύσας, κυνοδρομήσας αἱρεῖ τὸ θηρίον, I.ii.21.1). Later in the first Stromateus, Clement juxtaposes an image of the scattered ‘pattern of the notes’ (ἡ τῶν ὑπομνημάτων ὑποτύπωσις) with the image of Pentheus’ torn body as the truth scattered within the world: But there is truly the pattern (ὑποτύπωσις) of the reminder-notes (ὑπομνημάτων) in everything that contains the truth sown in them as seeds are scattered and chucked about different directions (διασποράδην καὶ διερριμμένως ἐγκατεσπαρμένην), so that they may escape the notice of those who pick up seeds like jackdaws. But when they chance on a good farmer, each of them will germinate and show forth wheat. There being then one truth (for falsehood has countless detours), just as the Bacchants tore in pieces the limbs of Pentheus, so the sects of barbarian and Greek philosophy each boast that it has got hold of the truth as if it had the whole of it. (Str. I.xii.56.3–xiii.7.1)

Replete with allusions to Clement’s chosen title (imagery of scattered sowing of seeds, cf. Stromateis), alternative title (Hypomnêmata) and to the title of his following work (Hypotypôseis), this juxtaposition elides the scattering of truth within the world with the scattering of truth within Clement’s own literary project. Like Pliny’s Natural History, this work is cosmos-shaped, but Clement’s vision of the cosmos is of a world where truth is widely scattered. Rather than ordering an account of it in as much detail as Pliny, he lays the accent on summoning his readers to be good farmers of the seeds of truth that they find within his work, as within the world. Numenius too had used the imagery of Pentheus’ scattered body to articulate how the sects scattered truth within the world; Clement had the wit to engage with that as a literary miscellanist and offer it up to his readers to hunt for.76 The first book of the Stromateis, then, associates the title Stromateis especially with the form of the work, and that in turn presents the reader with a challenge in his or her mode of engagement with the text. Genette had said that the paratext is a ‘zone of transaction’ that authorises what counts as ‘a better reception of the text and a more pertinent reading’. Clement’s engagement with Stromateis as a paratext certainly underscores the need for a particular kind of reading, but he defines this not 76

Num. fr.24.67–73, Boys-Stones 2001, 140–41, 193 n. 26. On Clement’s image, see also: Lilla 1971, 51–58.

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in terms of content, but orientation, purpose and desire. The good reader is a good farmer and a good huntsman-lover, possessed by a passion for the truth that keeps him searching for what ‘lies hidden’ in this artfully scattered, cosmos-shaped text. Stromateis in the Preface to Str. IV – An Ongoing Search and a Harvest Offering The next time Clement writes explicitly about his literary form, with commentary on his title, is at the opening of the fourth Stromateus. This lengthy preface is densely interwoven with miscellanistic clichés, crossreferences to within Clement’s work and allusions beyond that. The name Stromateis is underscored: it is named three times, each time marking a new stage in the unfolding tableaux. The first two times it appears in the longer form, ‘the Stromateis of notes’, and the third time it is personalised, ‘our Stromateis’ (ii.4.3, 6.2, 7.1). The second mention is Clement’s only explicit extended exegesis of his title, ‘thus the Stromateis of notes have their proper title in this way . . .’ (6.2). In addition, the opening of this section strongly evokes the title by portraying ‘the notes’ as ‘spread out’ (τὰ ὑπομνήματα . . . διεστρωμένα), echoing the title itself (4.1). This series of titular allusions marks this as a site for concentrated reflection on what it means for the Stromateis to be stromatic. Unlike in the first Stromateus, this passage offers an extended, continuous reflection on the theme. Also unlike the first Stromateus, this passage is peppered with miscellanistic tropes, as well as allusions and cross-references within Clement’s work.77 Like other miscellanies, Clement describes the Stromateis as ‘spread out’, ‘continually going from one thing to another’.78 He emphasises vocabulary of mixture and variety both in his comments and in the quotations he chooses. He puns on ‘anthology’, portrays mixtures of fruit and foodstuffs and cites poetry about a bee and its honeycomb. All of these motifs are shared with other miscellany literature, and evoke the conventions and expectations of miscellany-writing. At the same time, Clement picks up motifs that he has already associated with his Stromateis. In his autobiographical sketch in the first Stromateus, Clement depicted his own long quest, ending in the discovery of the best teacher who ‘lay hidden’ in Egypt, and the bee who

77

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There were some miscellanistic tropes even in Str. I.i.18–ii.21: vocabulary of mixture (ἀναμεμιγμένην) and polymathy (τῇ πολυμαθίᾳ). However, these were developed with an emphasis on concealment that was quite unlike Classical counterparts. Str. IV.ii.4.1.

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anthologised the meadow and begat knowledge in the souls of his hearers. Here the one who searches in the Stromateis will be able to discover the good that ‘lies hidden’ and the ‘generative power in a little seed’, as the Stromateis anthologise and provide a harvest offering, including the honeycomb of the bee.79 In the first Stromateus, he emphasised the hard work involved in searching and the hope that one would be found to understand, and he used the imagery of the ‘path’ of virtue. Here again he underscores the hard work involved in searching, the hope that Scripture will find one to understand it and the journey along the ‘path’ to truth.80 Clement’s Stromateis are in many ways continuing true to form, and true to the model of his own education. But this is not a simple replay of the self-reflection on the Stromateis that was encountered in the first Stromateus. There are some significant shifts in emphasis. Firstly, whereas the agricultural imagery there focused mostly on sowing and farming, here it focuses mostly on presenting the harvest offering and closes with an invitation to sift the mixture of seeds and choose out the wheat.81 The emphasis on finding ‘much in little seed’ is also new compared with the earlier focus on finding what was hidden. Now Clement wants to underscore the generative power of this seed that is so near to hand, and the abundance it produces at the harvest. That suggests that we have moved to a higher stage in engaging with the Stromateis. The title is the stable paratextual marker, as the reader becomes aware of a change within his or her experience of reading. Secondly, Clement introduces a new image here, to which he will return: that of the golden race.82 He quotes Heraclitus’ words, that those who seek gold will dig much and find little and glosses with the assertion that those who are of the truly golden race, since they are pursuing what is akin to them, will find much in little. This introduces a strongly personal dimension to the search: readers need to be akin to what they are looking for.83 This is developed by the citation of Hesiod’s well-known description of the steep, rough conditions on the climb to virtue.84 Whereas the difficulty in searching in the first Stromateus was associated primarily with the hiddenness of the material, here it is associated with the need for 79 80 81 82 84

Str. IV.ii.5.1–6.3, cf. I.i.11.2. Str. IV.ii.4.2–5.3, cf. I.x.49.1–2 ἀρκεῖ δὲ τῷ γνωστικῷ κἂν εἷς μόνος ἀκροατὴς εὑρεθῇ. Str. IV.vii.6.1–7.4, cf. I.i.1.3–2.1, 7.1–3, 9.1, 15.2, 17.3, 56.3. 83 Str. IV.iv.16.1; V.xiv.98.2–5, 133.6.2–3. Str. IV.ii.4.2. Hes. Op. 289–92, apud Str. IV.ii.5.2. For wider use of this passage see: Folch 2018, 315–16.

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personal investment in scaling the mountain path and becoming one of the ‘men of force’ who enter the kingdom.85 Thirdly, whereas the nut in its shell in the first Stromateus drove a wedge between ‘truth’ and ‘philosophy’,86 that polarisation has slipped out of view at this point. Not only is there no polemic, but the atmosphere is distinctly Greek. Clement quotes Heraclitus, the Pythia, Hesiod, Sophocles and Timocles. He alludes to the myth of the golden race and to the Delphic oracle. Not only that, but the pile-up of poetic quotations at the end brings the reader’s imagination to rest on the idea of dedicating an offering from the harvest; Clement uses religious imagery of προσφορά (‘offering’), σπονδή (‘libation’) and εἰρεσιώνη (a special harvest-wreath that was carried by children for Apollo).87 This is not only devotional, but aesthetic: the beauty of that offering, that wreath, in all its intricacy, is how Clement thinks of the Stromateis and the way they are named ‘like the herbage of the field’.88 Clement seems to invite his readers’ devotional response to be framed through a lens of Greek piety. This may seem a strange place for readers to find themselves after being summoned to leave Helicon and Cithaeron in the Protrepticus, and warned off the outer shell of the philosophic nut in the first Stromateus. Has Clement really Christianised miscellanism? Or is this a way of doing miscellanism as a Greek, through Greek literature, and getting to the heart of Greek devotion? Clement probably wants his readers to perceive the telos of true devotion as one and the same, whether approached through Greek literature and culture or through ‘Hebraic’. He has left behind the oppositional mode of the start of the Protrepticus: readers of that discourse will recall that it was the Pythian dragon who lay dead in the proem, whose lament Eunomos was singing and that they were asked to embrace instead a new, Levitical song.89 Now it turns out that the Pythian priestess is alive and well, but she is busy responding to a slave asking for an oracle. Annewies van den Hoek points out that slaves did not ask for oracles and argues for a Platonic interpretation.90 However, the slave’s question, ‘What must I do to please my master?’ also sounds very much like a Christian asking how to please God. The rich young man had asked a similar question of Jesus in the gospels (Mark 10:17 parr.), and Clement 85 87 88 89

90

86 Mt 11:12 apud Str. IV.ii.5.3, cf. V.iii.16.7; VI.xvii.149.5. Str. I.i.18.1. van den Hoek 2001 (SC 463), 66–67 n. 1. Job 5:25 = 1 Clem 56:14, quoted in Str. IV.ii.6.1. For Clement’s reception of the myth of Apollo slaying the Pythian dragon, see further Halton 1983, 181–83. van den Hoek 1997b.

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wrote a whole homily on it (Quis Dives Salvetur). If we can associate the mountainous imagery here with the summons to swap mountains in the Protrepticus, then the move from Helicon and Cithaeron is also going rather well.91 The readers are now on the ascent, but there is an arduous climb, which Clement describes in Hesiod’s verses. To Clement this sounds much like Jesus’ words that the road is narrow and rough (Matt 7:7, in Str. IV.ii.5.3). This mode of Christianisation is subtle; it recasts Greek myths and texts through a Christian lens. In the two examples just given, the Christian perspective leads towards a reading based in Scripture. However, sometimes the Christianisation is more doctrinal: Clement depicts good readers as the golden race, working hard in their search for gold. From a Classical perspective, this is incongruous because the golden race did not do any labour.92 Clement likes the association because it portrays his theological anthropology, which grounds his epistemology: they will find gold because they are of the same make.93 Thus the writing too will find one to understand it. There may be a pun on ‘the writing’, which could denote either the Stromateis or Scripture, but may be intended to elide the two. Clement is, after all, aiming to help people ultimately beyond the written word, to a personal, transformative relation with the ineffable God. The Christianisation of Classical miscellanism here, then, comes from within the heart of a Hellenised tradition. Clement seeks to write Christian devotion for his readers from within and through this Greek tradition, so that it emerges from that perspective as much as from the Scriptures alone. While there have been a number of shifts of emphasis compared with the first Stromateus, this preface leaves the accent on the tableau of the dedicatory offering, which is set before God as a beautiful, varied unity. However, it is framed by the call to move, dig and shake it up and keep climbing the mountain of virtue until the hidden good appears. Stromateis in the Preface to Str. VI – Readers Are Transplanted into a Spiritual Garden By the time Clement reaches the opening of the sixth Stromateus, he has already built up patterns of imagery around his title. He has shown that the title is not just a label, but that it has significance for how to read the 91 92

On Clement’s use of mountain imagery throughout his project, see further Chapter 10. 93 Reden 2010, 191–92. Str. IV.ii.4.2.

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work and how the work itself expects to be read. He has shown that there are some aspects of this imagery that are constant: agriculture and seeds and farming always matter. But he has also shown that the title can be a point of reflection during progress through the work, accruing new imagery or transforming earlier established images. The opening of the sixth Stromateus provides the third and last minipreface in which he discusses titles. After a reflection on the structure of the work in which he mentions how the hypomnêmata will continue ‘in the character of the Stromateis’ and which topics they will address, the imagery begins (VI.i.2.1–4). As in previous passages where Clement dwells on the Stromateis by name, there is a profusion of miscellanistic tropes and a resurgence of many motifs from earlier commentaries on his own text. The tropes of miscellanism are mostly familiar: the imagery of meadow and flowers, the celebration of variegated beauty and emphasis on mixture, the miscellanist as a lover of learning, the mode of composition as happening according to memory and the ‘notes’ as reminders.94 Clement’s own ways of characterising the Stromateis are also much as before: he uses vocabulary of mixture (ἀναμίξ), scattering (διεσπαρμένοις), the notes as ‘sparks’ (ζώπυρα), intended particularly for the one who is suited to gnosis (τῷ τε εἰς γνῶσιν ἐπιτηδείῳ), the sweaty search (μετὰ ἱδρῶτος ἡ ζήτησις) and the road of the Lord, which is narrow and rough (διὰ στενῆς καὶ τεθλιμμένης τῆς κυριακῆς ὄντως ὁδοῦ). We have seen time and again, however, that Clement uses familiarity and cliché when he wants to move the reader a little further on. The familiar vocabulary and imagery remind us of many constants of Clement’s miscellanism – the varied form, the onus on the reader to work hard, the comparison with the meadow – but the overall shape and significance of this passage is different. No longer is the focus on finding what is hidden in the soil, as the farmer longed for in Str. I, nor is it on dedicating a harvest-wreath before a deity, as in the preface to the fourth Stromateus. Rather, Clement emphasises here that the gnosis, which is the goal of all this labour, is itself a ‘spiritual paradise’ into which readers are being transplanted, into the good land from the old life, and the change in their planting is conducive to fruitfulness. For the Lord is a light and true knowledge into whom they are being transplanted (VI.i.2.4).

94

There is one miscellanistic trope that Clement now introduces for the first time: he adopts the pose of the miscellanist contemplating his work in comparison with other miscellanies with familiar titles and listing the titles of those works that are not his own. Clement’s deployment of this trope deserves more extended attention: see Chapter 7.

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What is different from Clement’s previous uses of agricultural imagery in teaching and learning is, firstly, the emphasis on the reader as the plant who is transplanted, rather than as the farmer who sows and cultivates the seed; secondly, divine agency in transplanting the person (which is implied by passive verbs), rather than the consummation of the person’s own efforts; thirdly, the spatial language to portray translocation to a new life, which is a non-spatial category, as if being planted in the good land involves a move to somewhere that, like God himself, transcends space and place; the portrayal of this as a ‘spiritual paradise’ is enigmatic, and what it means must wait to be seen. None of these ideas is unprecedented in Clement’s work, and some of them were already underscored in the preface to the fourth Stromateus.95 But here the emphasis on the person as both subject and object of transformation is heightened. This Christianisation of miscellanism is defined by something deeper than has previously emerged. It is not just that Clement inserts scriptural phrases and combines them harmoniously with Classical ones. Nor is it just that he is more earnest than Classical counterparts. He is focused on a transformation of the immanent frame, where persons reading his Stromateis and labouring hard along the Lord’s highway can ultimately hope to be transposed to a new ‘space’ or ‘place’. In what sense that conditions their way of inhabiting this world, they will find out more fully in the account of the gnostic that Clement develops in the course of the sixth and seventh Stromateis. This is miscellanism not just as a way of writing or a way of reading, but as an initiation and formation in a new way of life, not without the intervention of God and the spirit. Stromateis at the End of Str. VII – Readers Transplant the Trees of the Text into an Ordered Garden of Knowledge The close of the seventh Stromateus takes up similar imagery, again in explicit description of the Stromateis. Clement describes the Stromateis as similar to a wooded mountainside; readers need to transfer the plants so as to adorn a paradise garden and sacred grove: Now that these points have been accomplished in advance, and the ethical part sketched out in summary, and as we undertook to do, we have sown (ἐγκατασπείραντες) in a scattered and dispersed fashion (σποράδην . . . καὶ 95

Only the golden race could find the gold that was akin to them, and the reader’s quest for truth needed a personal ascent up the steep path of virtue. Personal formation was therefore required to discover the truth.

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διερριμμένως) the sparks (τὰ ζώπυρα) of the teachings of the true gnosis, so that the discovery of the holy traditions should not be easy for an non-initiate who chances upon them, let us pass across to our undertaking. The Stromateis are not like those ornamental paradise-gardens planted in rows to please the eye, but rather like some shady, thickly-grown mountain, planted with cypresses and plane trees, laurel and ivy, together with apple trees and olives and figs. The cultivation of fruit-bearing and fruitless trees is very deliberately mixed together, on account of Scripture/the writing (τῆς γραφῆς) wanting to escape the notice (λανθάνειν) of those who dare to rob and steal the lovely fruits. It is from those that the farmer, by transplanting suckers and relocating trees (μεταμοσχεύσας καὶ μεταφυτεύσας), will adorn a beautiful paradise and a delightful sacred grove. So the Stromateis aim neither at order nor at choice diction, seeing that, deliberately, they do not want to be Greek even in their expression, and they have done the sowing of the doctrines secretly and not according to the truth, making anyone who meets with them hardworking and ingenious. For the baits are many and various, on account of the diversity of the fish. (Str. VII.xviii.111.1–3)

Once again, the Stromateis are mentioned by name, twice in this passage, which offers a self-reflexive discussion of their literary form and how to approach them. Again there are some tropes of miscellanism, in the emphasis on the scattered presentation of material, and the comparison with plantations. And again, there is much that is familiar in the imagery and vocabulary, including sparks to ignite the reader’s quest, trees and the task of transplantation, a paradise, a farmer, a ‘hidden’ writing and a mountain. All of these have been encountered before in Clement’s comments on his own work. But this familiarity can mask differences in emphasis, which disclose how the reader is coming upon a new stage in his or her ascent. In a difficult passage, which has been subject to emendation, Clement asserts: οὔτ᾽ οὖν τῆς τάξεως οὔτε τῆς φράσεως στοχάζονται οἱ στρωματεῖς, ὅπου γε ἐπίτηδες καὶ τὴν λέξιν οὐχ Ἕλληνες εἶναι βούλονται (Str. VII. xviii.111.3). Some editors have added ἡδυσμένην or κεκαλλωπισμένην or ὡραίαν after the negative (οὐχ) in an effort to make sense of the text.96 Thus Hort and Mayor have, ‘seeing that in this kind of composition the Greeks purposely object to over-sweetness of style’, which takes Ἕλληνες as a noun and as the subject of the verb and conjectures the omission of ἡδυσμένην to describe λέξιν. However, Alain le Boulluec offers a convincing interpretation that takes Ἕλληνες as adjectival and requires no emendation. My translation above has followed his: ‘the Stromateis do not aim

96

Hort and Mayor 1902, 194; Le Boulluec 1997 (SC 428), 330 makes no mention of this.

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at order or stylish diction, since they deliberately do not want to be Greek even in their expression’.97 The difference is significant. Le Boulluec argues that Clement’s purpose here is not merely to signal a simple or even unattractive style of prose. Rather, he is promoting an aspect of his programme that has been significant throughout the Stromateis, namely, the invitation to move beyond the outward form of words and language and begin to grasp the intelligible realities (τὰ νοητά). This was also what Clement was getting at in the only passage where he uses the verb ἑλληνίζειν (approximately equivalent to Ἕλληνες εἶναι in VII.xviii.111.3) in his programmatic opening of Str. II: he explained that he did not try to ‘Hellenise’, because true philosophy benefits not the tongue but the mind of the hearers, and those who busy themselves with the expression (λέξεις) miss the things themselves (τὰ πράγματα) (Str. II.i.3.1–2).98 Again at the start of Str. VII he programmtically declared that he was forgoing scriptural phraseology for now, since he wants the Greeks to understand the sense (Str. VII.i.1.3–4). Now at the end of his account of the gnostic and the Scriptures, he is asking his readers to move on beyond the form of the words, and make sense of the underlying realities. This can also explain the shift in the aesthetic that Clement portrays here. The imagery is agricultural, as in earlier parts of his work, and again Clement emphasises the mixed presentation of material in the Stromateis. However, his attitude is changing here. In earlier prefaces, he did not explicitly criticise the aesthetic of variety: the variegated harvest wreaths (Str. IV.ii.6.2–7.3), the meadow blooming with flowers, the paradise garden in which fruit-bearing trees and other kinds were mingled together (Str. VI.i.2.1) all suggested an inviting picture where the variegation of the scene was part of its attraction. Now Clement makes clear that ‘the farmer’ needs to transplant the overgrown woodland on the shady mountain in order to render it into a beautiful paradise garden or sacred grove. The alternatives παράδεισος or ἄλσος hold in balance the language of Scripture and of Greek cult. Eden was a παράδεισος in LXX Genesis, while ἄλσος was the term for a ‘sacred grove’ in Greek cult. Clement does not ask his reader-farmers to adorn either one or the other but to make a leap beyond the words to the intelligible reality. The imagery of transplanting is used in a different way from in the preface to Str. VI, where it 97

98

Le Boulluec 2012, 64: ‘Les Stromates n’ont en vue ni la disposition ordonnée, ni le style, étant donné que, délibérément, ils ne veulent pas être Grecs par l’expression.’ Le Boulluec 2012, 61–76.

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was the readers themselves who were transplanted by divine intervention into the good land and spiritual paradise. Now it is their turn to respond to ‘the writing’ and transplant their own paradise or sacred grove. I suggest that we should read these passages closely together, as the repetitions of words and imagery seem to invite: the personal transformation that is depicted as being transplanted into a spiritual paradise in Str. VI.i.2.4 grounds the reader’s ability to ‘transplant’ the lovely fruits hidden in ‘the writing’ and form a paradise or sacred grove creatively for himself. Whether ‘the writing’ (ἡ γραφή) is Scripture or Clement’s Stromateis is left open; Clement’s desire for now is to focus on the intelligible things, and he has already told us that it is from the Scriptures that his notes draw their life and spirit (ἐκεῖθεν ἀναπνεῖ τε καὶ ζῇ, Str. VII.i.1.4).

Conclusion Like the Classical miscellanists, Clement’s thinks deeply about his titles and uses them creatively. In his case, he uses them in order to direct his readers in a deepening relation to God as they progress through his works. He begins with two preparatory volumes, to which he gives titles that he is eager to find in Scripture, even though that requires some inventive exegesis. He constructs them as ways of figuring the Lord as the one who is addressing and guiding the reader, while he as author oscillates between accompanying his readers and sharing the Lord’s voice. The titles give a sense of progress and direction, ‘turning’ readers ‘towards’ God (προτρέπειν) and then ‘guiding’ them as ‘children’ (παιδαγωγεῖν) towards the Teacher. In the Stromateis, Clement emphasises that the title is a miscellanistic cliché and does not endeavour to discover it in Scripture, but that in itself turns out to have profound significance. His point is that what is strewn (διεστρωμένα) is strewn in the world more widely than in Scripture, and the work has its telos in something that lies beyond the words on the page. As in the Protrepticus and Paedagogus, Clement is focused on cultivating a relation between reader and God that develops as the reader progresses through the text, but in this case the culmination lies in a via negativa.

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7 The Miscellanist’s Trope of Deselecting Titles and Clement’s Conversion of Imagery

The study of Clement’s titles has shown how he uses them paratextually to accompany readers in a changing relation to the Logos, from reorientation (‘protreptic’, turning towards God) and guidance in behaviour (‘pedagogy’, guiding the children), to a search that involves personal transformation and ultimately the experience of translation to a different spiritual place and a different way of doing miscellanism (through the changing relation to the scattered ‘Stromateis’). In this earlier discussion, we passed over Clement’s list of miscellanistic titles that he did not choose, which appears in the preface to the sixth Stromateus. We also passed over his allusion to the Didaskalic Logos, which appears in the preface to the Paedagogus. Both of these passages seem to allude to potential titles that are not the ones that Clement chose. The former has been often observed but rarely discussed; the latter has been often discussed but never resolved. In this chapter, I take a cue from the way Clement interacts with contemporary miscellany-writing to suggest that all these ‘non-titles’ are intended to offer a different kind of paratextual guidance in responding to Clement’s work. Once again, he is found to be taking up a miscellanistic trope and making it into something with profound Christian significance. In Chapters 3 and 6, Pliny’s and Gellius’ lists of other people’s miscellany titles have been mentioned briefly as a signal of generic consciousness and an indication of these authors’ concern for their own chosen titles. Here we revisit this trope of listing deselected titles and examine it in more detail. The first part of the chapter argues that Pliny framed his chosen title in this way not just to situate his own work competitively in relation to others but to define his literary-cultural vision and situate that in rivalry 166 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108918640.007

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with others. Gellius imitated the trope with a similar purpose but a different vision. This interpretation of the trope resonates with contemporary scholarship on the ancient ideology and practices of book collection, where listing or collecting books involved acts of selection and deselection that implicated social and cultural realities. The second part of the chapter moves to Clement’s list of deselected titles. I argue that Clement too used the list in order to transform a cultural vision, but his way of working with it differs in both form and content from the pagan counterparts. Clement tucks away his list of comparable titles late in his work, keeps it much shorter than theirs, and above all, he picks non-titles that cite themes within his own imagery and uses the list to mark those themes for the diligent reader’s renewed attention. Thus, on the face of it, his list appears to position his work less in relation to other books, and more in relation to imagery of his own and its interpretation. On closer inspection, I shall argue, these very threads in imagery are Clement’s means of drawing his readers away from pagan tradition and giving them a Hellenised point of access to the Scriptures. Like the Classical miscellanists, he turns out to use the list of non-titles in cultural competition, but for him the competition is between pagan tradition and Christian tradition, both of which are mediated through books. At the end of the chapter, I will revisit the much-debated problem of the ‘Didaskalos’ (Paed. I.i.) in light of our findings about his treatment of other non-titles in the preface to Str. VI.

classical miscellanists on choosing a title and cataloguing a culture ‘Books, and especially books en masse or the representation of books en masse, have the power to alter the ways in which people live their lives and to signify the vision of a life lived differently.’1 Thus writes Yun Lee Too in her study of The Idea of the Library in the Ancient World. Pliny’s list of books with titles that he did not choose to imitate is a ‘representation of books en masse’, but its rhetorical function in his preface has not been much explored. I want to show in this section that he coined, and Gellius imitated, this trope in order to convey a vision of a literary culture and to situate his own work agonistically in relation to it.

1

Too 2010, 215.

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Pliny the Elder is the first we know to showcase his act of deliberation about his title. It is plausible that he invented this rhetorical device himself as a way of accentuating his originality.2 This appears all the more likely when we see how artfully he develops the trope.3 In the preface to his Natural History, Pliny writes: Inscriptionis apud Graecos mira felicitas: κηρίον inscripsere, quod volebant intellegi favom, alii κέρας Ἀμαλθείας, quod copiae cornu (ut vel lactis gallinacei sperare possis in volumine haustum), iam ἴα, Μοῦσαι, πανδέκται, ἐγχειρίδια, λειμών, πίναξ, σχέδιον4 –inscriptiones propter quas vadimonium deseri possit. at cum intraveris, di deaeque, quam nihil in medio invenies! nostri graviores5 Antiquitatum, Exemplorum Artiumque, facetissimi Lucubrationum, puto quia Bibaculus erat et vocabatur. paulo minus adserit Varro in satiris suis Sesculixe et Flextabula. apud Graecos desiit nugari Diodorus et βιβλιοθήκης historiam suam inscripsit. Apion quidem grammaticus (hic quem Tiberius Caesar cymbalum mundi vocabat, quom propriae famae tympanum potius videri posset) immortalitate donari a se scripsit ad quos aliqua componebat. me non paenitet nullum festiviorem excogitasse titulum. There is a marvellous neatness in the titles given to books among the Greeks. One they entitled Κηρίον, meaning Honeycomb; others called their work Κέρας Ἀμαλθείας, i.e. Horn of Plenty (so that you can hope to find a draught of hen’s milk in the volume), and again Violets, Muses, Hold-alls, Handbooks, Meadow, Tablet, Impromptu – titles that might tempt a man to forfeit his bail. But when you get inside them, good heavens, what a void you will find between the covers! Our authors being more serious use the titles Antiquities, Instances and Systems, the wittiest, Talks by Lamplight, I suppose because the author was a toper – indeed Tippler was his name. Varro makes a rather smaller claim in his Satires A Ulysses-and-a-half and Folding-tablet. Diodorus among the Greeks stopped playing with words and gave his history the title of Library. Indeed the philologist

2

3

4 5

Cf. Vardi 2004, 160 refers to Gellius’ list of alternative authors as a ‘conventional feature of ancient prefaces ironically to draw attention to the uniqueness and ingenuity of his title’. However, the only comparanda he cites are Pliny’s Natural History and Clement’s Str. VI. ii.1. Of these, only Pliny is earlier than Gellius, and Gellius’ preface is largely a reworking of Pliny’s. Stevenson 2004, 125 places the practice in the Roman antiquarian tradition, but the only comparison prior to Pliny is a non-comparison: Varro’s list of fifty two titles of other works of agriculture in the preface to de re rustica has a different function, as Varro is not discussing choice of title, but providing a reading list. Schröder 1999, 50–56 also gives a detailed study of this passage, but with less interest in its rhetorical function in Pliny’s preface. Budé, vol. 1, p. 54, has Σχεδίων, following Sillig. Budé, vol. 1, p.54, prints ‘grossiores’ following codd. Vulg. has ‘crassiores’, Mayhoff ‘graviores’.

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Apion (the person whom Tiberius Caesar used to call ‘the world’s cymbal’, though he might rather have been thought to be a drum, advertising his own renown) wrote that persons to whom he dedicated his compositions received from him the gift of immortality. For myself, I am not ashamed of not having invented any livelier title. (Pliny, NH pr. 24–26; text and tr. Rackham, LCL 330, 14–17)

This is the first of many lists in Pliny’s monumental tome. It is no accident that it follows immediately his promise to give the names of his authorities. It is in fact formally reminiscent of his lists of authorities, both those that are placed at the beginning of each book and those that appear in the course of his prose. However, it has a different purpose. The reason he cites his authorities, he explains, is that it is a kindness and it shows modest integrity. He is rather proud of this practice, as it sets him apart from even ‘the most professedly reliable and modern writers’ who tend to copy verbatim without acknowledgement (pr. 22, tr. Rackham, LCL 330, 15). According to Pliny, this shows a mean spirit, as it is stealing. His own practice of citation by name is more like repaying a loan, and the interest creates capital (pr. 21–23).6 So, he is better than everyone else because he cites his sources by name. Thereupon follows the list of other people’s titles. This is not a list of sources, however, but a list of non-sources – titles that he rejects, both because the titles are showy (‘mira felicitas’, ‘nullum festiviorem’) and because the works they name tend to be grossly disappointing. By listing them in this way, he continues to defend his claim to be better than everyone else: he does not have a predecessor for his title, its tone or the seriousness of its purpose; his aspiration is grander than all the others. Modern studies of miscellanies have been quick to suggest that this list places Pliny in relation to something like a miscellany genre.7 In a way it does: the titles he chooses are typical of the works we call miscellanies, and most are attested elsewhere being used as such. They draw out aspects of the mode and character of such compositions: diversity or unity-in-diversity (Honeycomb); visceral appeal (‘honeycombs’ taste sweet; ‘violets’ look and smell beautiful); abundance (Cornucopia, Hold-Alls); mythical charm (Cornucopia, Muses); nature (Honeycomb, Violets, Meadow), art (Tablet) and occasionality (Impromptu). Pliny’s organisation of these non-predecessors arrays the more pretentious before

6 7

For the financial imagery, see Lao 2011, esp. 37–38. E.g., Schröder 1999, 51; Holford-Strevens 2003, 28.

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the less and allows this to coincide almost precisely with putting Greek before Roman authors. The only exception is the Library of Diodorus, with which the list ends.8 Pliny’s way of describing him seems to encourage closer comparison with his own work, and Diodorus’ title and project do indeed resonate with Pliny’s. Diodorus’ work was a ‘βιβλιοθήκης historia’ in Pliny’s linguistically composite phrase; his own book was a ‘naturalis historia’. Diodorus’ project was a forty-book universal history that sought to bring all important recorded histories into one place for the benefit of readers who could then read what they needed (Diod. 1.3.1–4.5); Pliny’s thirtysix-book9 Natural History seeks to bring all important aspects of nature into one place for the benefit of readers who can select what they need. Both ‘historians’ rely largely on knowledge of books, supplemented by their own travels. By closing his list of titles with Diodorus, Pliny invites a comparison between this ambitious Greek work and his own literary labour. Pliny says that Diodorus ‘desiit nugari’; he, by contrast, had opened his preface by bestowing his Natural History on Titus as ‘nugas ... meas’. As Ruth Morello observes, ‘Pliny’s only real nugae are his playful prefatory thoughts, but even in them he means business.’10 His first list of sources is thus tongue-in-cheek: a list of non-sources that helps make his point that his own work is unique and brilliant, and that asserts his capacity to order and evaluate literary monuments from Greek and Roman culture. The continuation of the passage draws this out: he explains that the nearest thing he has to a predecessor is not a literary author at all but the founders (‘conditores’) of the arts of painting and sculpture (pr. 26–7). There is wittiness to the comparison: there was a strong strand in Roman culture that yielded precedence to the Greeks in the visual arts and sciences, staking Roman self-worth on military, political and moral prowess alone. This was classically articulated by Vergil in the words of Anchises to Aeneas: Others will beat out the breathing bronze more gently, – that I do believe – they will bring vividly alive faces out of marble, plead cases better, and the movements of the sky they will define with a rod and will predict the rising stars: you, Roman, be mindful to rule nations with legal power (imperium),

8

9

For Diodorus’ project in the context of ancient miscellanism and library culture: Jacob 2000, 102–3; Too 2010, 143–69. 10 In Pliny’s counting, see p. 36, n. 40. Morello 2011, 164–65.

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– these will be your arts – and to impose the way of peace, to spare the submissive and to finish off the arrogant in war. (Verg. Aen. 6.847–53)

Pliny seizes the chance to locate his own work of science in the tradition of Greek art. The most famous Greek artists used to inscribe their works with a provisional title such as Worked on by Apelles or Polyclitus, as though art was always a thing in process and not completed. Pliny hints that he too is creating a brand new art form, a masterpiece that people will never be tired of admiring and that it will be as great as (or greater than?) the greatest Greek sculpture. In literature, it has no rivals. Pliny’s discussion of his title, then, establishes his superiority to all others. He sets himself in relation to miscellanists, both Greek and Roman, and in relation to art forms, both literature and visual arts. As literature, he claims to be more profound than the miscellanists and than any of the Greeks. As someone founding a wholly new form of art, which people will keep marvelling at, he is prepared to sign off ‘unfinished’, just like the Greek sculptors.

Gellius’ List of Other Titles Unlike Pliny the Elder, Gellius wanted to compose a truly miscellanistic, occasional work. His preface imitates Pliny’s preface to the Natural History in many respects; one of these is the way he sets his choice of title against a list of possible alternatives: Facta igitur est in his quoque commentariis eadem rerum disparilitas quae fuit in illis annotationibus pristinis, quas breviter 4 et indigeste et incondite ex eruditionibus lectionibusque variis feceramus. Sed quoniam longinquis per hiemem noctibus in agro, sicuti dixi, terrae Atticae commentationes hasce ludere ac facere exorsi sumus, idcirco eas inscripsimus Noctium esse Atticarum, nihil imitati festivitates inscriptionum quas plerique alii utriusque linguae 5 scriptores in id genus libris fecerunt. Nam quia variam et miscellam et quasi confusaneam doctrinam conquisiverant, eo titulos quoque ad eam sententiam 6 exquisitissimos indiderunt. Namque alii Musarum inscripserunt, alii Silvarum, ille Πέπλον, hic Ἀμαλθείας Κέρας, alius Κηρία, partim Λειμῶνας, quidam Lectionis Suae, alius Antiquarum Lectionum atque alius Ἀνθηρῶν 7 et item alius Εὑρημάτων. Sunt etiam qui Λύχνους inscripserint, sunt item qui Στρωματεῖς, sunt adeo qui Πανδέκτας et Ἑλικῶνα et Προβλήματα et Ἐγχερίδια 8 et Παραξιφίδας. Est qui Memoriales titulum fecerit, est qui Πραγματικὰ et Πάρεργα et Διδασκαλικά, est item qui Historiae Naturalis, et Παντοδαπῆς Ἱστορίας, est praeterea qui Pratum, est itidem qui Πάγκαρπον, est qui Τόπων scripserit; sunt item multi qui 9 Coniectanea, neque item non sunt qui indices libris suis fecerint aut Epistularum Moralium aut Epistolicarum Quaestionum aut Confusarum et quaedam alia

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inscripta nimis lepida multasque prorsum concinnitates 10 redolentia. Nos vero, ut captus noster est, incuriose et inmeditate ac prope etiam subrustice ex ipso loco ac tempore hibernarum vigiliarum Atticas Noctes inscripsimus, tantum ceteris omnibus in ipsius quoque inscriptionis laude cedentes, quantum cessimus in cura et elegantia scriptionis. It therefore follows, that in these notes there is the same variety of subject that there was in those former brief jottings which I had made without order or arrangement, as the fruit of instruction or reading in various lines. And since, as I have said, I began to amuse myself by assembling these notes during the long winter nights which I spent on a country-place in the land of Attica, I have therefore given them the title of Attic Nights, making no attempt to imitate the witty captions which many other writers of both languages have devised for works of the kind. For since they had laboriously gathered varied, manifold, and as it were indiscriminate learning, they therefore invented ingenious titles also, to correspond with that idea. Thus some called their books The Muses, others Woods one used the title Athena’s Mantle, another The Horn of Amaltheia, still another Honeycomb, several Meads, one Fruits of my Reading, another Gleanings from Early Writers, another The Nosegay, still another Discoveries. Some have used the name Torches, others Tapestry, others Repertory, others Helicon, Problems, Handbooks and Daggers. One man called his book Memorabilia, one Principia, one Incidentals, another Instructions. Other titles are Natural History, Universal History, The Field, The Fruit-basket, or Topics. Many have termed their notes Miscellanies, some Moral Epistles, Questions in Epistolary Form, or Miscellaneous Queries, and there are some other titles that are exceedingly witty and redolent of extreme refinement. But I, bearing in mind my limitations, gave my work off-hand, without premeditation, and indeed almost in rustic fashion, the caption of Attic Nights, derived merely from the time and place of my winter’s vigils; I thus fall as far short of all other writers in the dignity too even of my title, as I do in care and in elegance of style. (Gellius, NA 1 pr. 3–10; text & tr. Rolfe, LCL 195, xxvi–xxi)

Gellius’ list overlaps with and imitates Pliny, but also rivals and subtly reconfigures his approach.11 In attitudes to ‘festivitas’ in titles, they are alike: they both declare that their own titles do not smack of ‘festivitates’, and are utterly unpretentious. In attitudes to the relationship between Greek and Roman culture, on the other hand, they are very different. Pliny had made a point of treating Greek and Roman non-predecessors separately and distinguishing the Roman as superior to the Greek; Gellius mixes them up. He signals this explicitly by stating that attributing the rejected titles to ‘many others in both languages (utriusque linguae)’; and he signals his implicit re-styling of Pliny’s approach by placing Musae first in his list. Pliny had listed Μοῦσαι as a Greek title (pr. 24), and had 11

Schröder 1999, 57–60.

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associated his own ‘libros Naturalis Historiae’ with the ‘Camenae’ as their novel work (pr. 1). In Gellius, the Greek Μοῦσαι have become the Latin Musae. He does not call his book Musae, but he is happy to present it as a work of devotion to them later in his preface and to quote lines from a Greek chorus to underscore the point. The differentiation between Roman and Greek is far less clear-cut for him than for Pliny. In listing the titles he rejects, he also mixes up Greek and Latin forms. He includes most of the Greek ones that Pliny mentions, though he often puts them in the plural where Pliny had singular (Κηρία, Λειμῶνας, Πανδέκτας, Ἐγχερίδια, but not Ἀμαλθείας Κέρας, ἴα, πίναξ, σχέδιον). However, his Latin titles are all different from those in Pliny’s list. The only Latin title that brings Pliny into the picture is Pliny’s own: Historia Naturalis is tucked between two Greek titles: Διδασκαλικά and Παντοδαπῆς Ἱστορίας. It is a teasingly provocative put-down to the great man, while at the very same moment Gellius is showing his respect by emulating the form of Pliny’s preface. And indeed, by inserting Pliny’s title alongside that of one of his personal friends and revered teachers, Favorinus, he indicates familiar respect. The list of titles caps Pliny’s in its length and breadth: Pliny may have noted facts from 2,000 books, but Gellius can list more non-predecessors for his title than Pliny brings to bear on his! However, Gellius is also positioning himself in relation to the ‘genre’ of miscellanism rather differently from Pliny. Pliny wanted to show not just that his title was different and less pretentious, but that the kind of work he wrote was better. It had more substance than the Greek trivia. Gellius’ swipe is only at titles, not at the form or content of these works. He will discuss those, but separately. In relation to his title, he does want to show that it locates him in the same group of books (‘id genus libris’), which are characterised by the variety and miscellaneity of their presentation of their teaching (pr. 5).

Conclusion The lists of non-titles in Pliny and Gellius are rhetorically significant in several ways. Even if Pliny and Gellius say that their own titles are not very witty, the list underscores that they had the freedom to name their own works, and they exercised it conscientiously. Even if the titles they reject belong to their non-predecessors, their selection of noncomparanda invites comparisons of genre and style of writing. Their knowledge of titles shows their own wide reading and their literary polish. They use their lists of non-predecessors to position themselves

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culturally in relation to Greek and Roman literary heritage. Clement, we shall see in the next section, takes up the trope, but turns it to different purpose.

the titles that clement does not choose and his conversion of imagery: leimon , helicon , kerion , peplos , didaskalika Clement’s List of Non-Titles: More Than Just a Cliché We have seen above that the trope by which an author discusses his choice of title and lists others that he is not choosing is particularly associated with miscellanism. Pliny probably coined it, and he was imitated by Gellius. The titles that they list as not-chosen are all recognisably miscellanistic. Clement adapts this trope in the preface to the sixth Stromateus. He lists four miscellanistic titles that he did not choose: ἐν μὲν οὖν τῷ λειμῶνι τὰ ἄνθη ποικίλως ἀνθοῦντα κἀν τῷ παραδείσῳ ἡ τῶν ἀκροδρύων φυτεία οὐ κατὰ εἶδος ἕκαστον κεχώρισται τῶν ἀλλογενῶν (ἧ καὶ Λειμῶνας τινες καὶ Ἑλικῶνας καὶ Κηρία καὶ Πέπλους συναγωγὰς φιλομαθεῖς ποικίλως ἐξανθισάμενοι συνεγράψαντο)
τοῖς δ᾽ὡς ἔτυχεν ἐπὶ μνήμην ἐλθοῦσι καὶ μήτε τῇ τάξει μήτε τῇ φράσει διακεκαθαρμένοις, διεσπαρμένοις δὲ ἐπίτηδες ἀναμίξ, ἡ τῶν Στρωματέων ἡμῖν ὑποτύπωσις λειμῶνος δίκην πεποίκιλται. So just as in the meadow the flowers blossom in variety and in the paradise garden the planting of the trees that produce fruits on their top branches does not have each of the different species separated according to its kind (the way also some people, picking out blossoms in variety, put together in written form Meadows and Helicons and Honeycombs and Mantles, compilations that delight in learning), the form of our Stromateis has been variegated like a meadow with the things that came by chance to my memory, and that have not been thoroughly purified either by arrangement or by diction, deliberately scattered pell-mell. (Str. VI.i.2.1)

The four alternative titles that Clement lists are all found in Gellius’ preface, and two of them are in Pliny’s as well. This underscores the clichéd nature of Clement’s list. However, Clement treats the trope differently from the Classical comparanda. Whereas Pliny and Gellius list other miscellanists’ titles in their prefaces to the whole of their work so that they can organise the reader’s encounter with the text from the start, Clement’s list is placed much later, in the preface to the sixth Stromateus. Unlike Pliny and Gellius, he does not portray his own authorial act of deliberation about his title. He does not even comment on his choice of Stromateis in this passage, much less does he

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ostentatiously declare it to be plain and unassuming, as they do with theirs. His list of alternative titles is far shorter than Pliny’s or Gellius’, and he is not claiming that his own work is superior, nor trying to display his wide reading of other miscellanies. His comment is on the form of the work, not the title, and he emphasises what he shares with works under these other titles, not how he differs. This is so different from Pliny’s and Gellius’ approach that it suggests that he is citing the trope of listing miscellanistic titles but intends to do something of his own with it. This is confirmed when we look more closely at the choice of non-titles that Clement lists. Each of them interacts with networks of imagery in both the immediate and the wider context of Clement’s work. This part of the chapter will examine them in light of this contextualisation. I argue that Clement uses the list of others’ miscellany titles as a recognisable topos of miscellanism, but he works with it in his own way, to direct readers to threads of imagery that run through his own literary project. Just as the clichéd title, Stromateis, drew his readers into a relation to God through his work, so too the list of non-titles offers a clichéd, Classical point of entry into networks of imagery that draw the reader towards a distinctly Christian contemplative focus and thus interpret miscellanism through a Christian lens. The surprise of novelty is all the more vivid and delightful when the starting point is clichéd: herein lies Clement’s literary skill. I shall begin with Meadows and Honeycombs, which are the most prominent. I will then discuss Helicons more briefly and Peploi/Mantles most briefly of all.

Meadows and Honeycombs: The Invitation to Search for the Bee It is Clement’s treatment of Meadows in the immediate context of Str. VI.i.2 that initially flags up the paratextual importance of the list of non-titles for Clement’s own work. We will most easily see how this functions if we follow the resonances of the imagery where they take us, although the path will lead backwards through Clement’s work. This is not a mistake: Clement intended his readers to come back to these ‘notes’ again and again and search for traces within them.12 The imagery and the titular and non-titular paratexts are the ways in which he as author can flag up some more productive possible paths through the work and connections from one part to another. We begin with the Meadows in Str. VI.i.2. When Clement cites Meadows (Λειμῶνες) in his list of other people’s book titles, he sandwiches 12

See pp. 61–62, above.

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it within an explicit comment on the form of his own Stromateis, which he likens to a ‘meadow’ (λειμῶν): Str. VI.i.2.1 τὰ ἄνθη ἐν μὲν οὖν τῷ λειμῶνι ........... ποικίλως ἀνθοῦντα .............. ... ᾗ καὶ Λειμῶνας τινες ... ποικίλως ἐξανθισάμενοι συνεγράψαντο
... .................... ἡ τῶν Στρωματέων ἡμῖν ὑποτύπωσις λειμῶνος δίκην πεποίκιλται

So just as in the meadow the flowers ........... blossom ............. in variety ... the way some people also, picking out .................. flower-blossoms in variety, put together .......................... ‘Meadows’ in written form ... the form of our Stromateis has been variegated like a meadow

Clement continues the connection with the telos of his own work by writing of ‘our gnosis’ as a ‘spiritual paradise’ into which ‘we’ are being transplanted, into the good land from the old life (VI.i.2.4). In Chapter 5, we saw how closely this is bound into a network of imagery that engages with Clement’s titular paratext, beginning with the agricultural metaphors in the first Stromateus where readers are invited to farm the seeds discovered in this work – continuing with the imagery of harvest offering in the preface to Str. IV and concluding in the extant text with the final chapter of Str. VII, where reader-farmers are invited to transplant trees from the Stromateis for a paradise or grove of delight. This very obvious resonance between the deselected title and the selected literary form dangles an invitation to consider whether the other titles in the list might also have significance for responding to Clement’s work. A little further along in the list of non-titles, we find Honeycombs (Κηρία). This plays into the same network of imagery that the Meadows suggest, but it also extends it and gives it a slightly different focus. In the preface to Str. IV, the form of the Stromateis was explicitly likened to an offering of plucked flowers, described in verses from Sophocles that mention various harvest fruits and conclude with a poetic description of a honeycomb: Str. IV.ii.6.2–3 ᾗ καὶ τὴν ἐπιγραφὴν κυρίαν ἔχουσιν οἱ τῶν ὑπομνημάτων Στρωματεῖς ἀτεχνῶς κατὰ τὴν παλαιὰν ἐκείνην ἀπηνθισμένοι προσφοράν ... ................... τὸ ποικιλώτατον ξανθῆς μελίσσης κηρόπλαστον ὄργανον

As also the Stromateis of notes have their proper title by having plucked ............ flower-blossoms .......................... artlessly in the manner of the harvest-offering of old ... the very variegated wax-formed instrument of the tawny bee

The imagery of Meadow and Honeycomb are brought together here in connection with Clement’s title; in this connection, the vocabulary of

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‘plucking flowers’ (ἀπηνθισμένοι) and ‘variegation’ (ποικιλώτατον) reinforces the resonance with the preface to Str. VI. The term Leimôn is absent; the reader is allowed to make that connection herself. The verses from Sophocles say poetically what Clement says in prose in Str. VI when he likens the form of his work to the Honeycombs; there is even a verbal resonance between Κηρία (the title) and κηρόπλαστον ὄργανον (to portray the form of the work). The connections in imagery, language, focus and purpose between the prefaces to Str. IV and Str. VI are deliberate and unmistakeable. The incorporation of the non-titles in Str. VI into these connections confirms that Meadows and Honeycombs together act as non-titular paratexts. They point to a network of imagery that threads through Clement’s work, and they give it a status that is tantamount to naming the work itself. Having framed the significance of Meadows and Honeycombs in this way, what might a reader discover if she were to follow it up by searching for and gathering together the motifs connected with this imagery throughout Clement’s work? I will answer this question in three parts. First, these non-titles lead the reader to a sequence of programmatically significant bees, which highlight the structure of Clement’s literary paideia across his three works. Second, this network of imagery suggests an identification of the Sicilian bee, whom Clement calls his final teacher. Third, the imagery of bees reorients the reader from Classical to scriptural literary traditions. The Bee and the Structure of Clement’s Literary Paideia Sooner or later, the Meadows and Honeycombs are likely to guide the reader to bees in Clement’s work. The Meadows in the preface of Str. VI led us to the combination of meadow imagery and Honeycombs in the prefaces to Str. VI and IV. In the preface to Str. IV, the author of the honeycomb was named as the ‘tawny bee’, and the honeycomb adorned a harvest offering of plucked flowers that was said to be like the Stromateis. This constellation of imagery recalls the Sicilian bee that gathered flowers from a meadow at the close of Clement’s autobiography, where he described the culmination of his journey with his last teacher: Str. I.i.11.2 Σικελικὴ τῷ ὄντι ἦν μέλιττα προφητικοῦ τε καὶ ἀποστολικοῦ λειμῶνος τὰ ἄνθη ........... δρεπόμενος ἀκήρατόν τι γνώσεως ................ χρῆμα ταῖς τῶν ἀκροωμένων ἐνεγέννησε ψυχαῖς

Truly Sicilian was the bee of the prophetic and apostolic meadow, plucking its flowers, he begat some ............................... pure resource of knowledge in the souls of those who listened to his lectures

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We have already discussed this imagery in some detail in Chapter 5 when considering Clement’s autobiographical narrative, but there we considered only the intertextuality with Classical literature and postponed the intratextuality within Clement’s own work until the present chapter. I want to show here that the intratextuality within Clement’s work is significant: the allusion to the bee cites a network of imagery that threads through Clement’s three works and articulates the structure and development within his paideia. In the preface to the Protrepticus, Clement compares the Lord with a bee: Protr. i.6.2 φιλάνθρωπον ................... τὸ ὄργανον τοῦ θεοῦ. ὁ κύριος ἐλεεῖ, παιδεύει, προτρέπει, νουθετεῖ, ........ σῴζει, φυλάττει, καὶ μισθὸν ἡμῖν τῆς μαθήσεως ἐκ περιουσίας βασιλείαν οὐρανῶν ἐπαγγέλλεται, τοῦτο μόνον ἀπολαύων ἡμῶν ὃ .............................................. σῳζόμεθα ............... κακία μὲν γὰρ τὴν ἀνθρώπων ἐπιβόσκεται φθοράν, ἡ δὲ ἀλήθεια ὥσπερ ἡ μέλιττα, λυμαινομένη τῶν ὄντων οὐδέν, ................... ἐπὶ μόνης τῆς ἀνθρώπων ἀγάλλεται σωτηρίας ...............................................

The instrument of God is a lover of ............ humanity . The Lord has mercy, ............... educates, exhorts, reproaches, saves ........, preserves and out of surplus promises us, as a reward for our learning, the kingdom of heaven, profiting from us in this alone, that ...... we are being saved. For vice feeds on .............................. the destruction of human beings, but truth, like the bee, maltreating none of the things that are, exults in the ................... salvation of human beings alone. ....................................................

The programmatic significance of the passage is signalled by the fact that it appears where Clement first embeds the language of his chosen title, Protrepticus, into his work. It is also Clement’s first explicit introduction to the ‘Lord’ within the work. As we saw in Chapter 6, he explains that David used to try to ‘turn people towards the truth (προὔτρεπεν ὡς τὴν ἀλήθειαν) and tried to turn people away (ἀπέτρεπε) from idols’ with his cithara-playing, but the Lord surpasses him. The Lord plays a better instrument, namely, the human being (Protr. i.5.3). But the Lord is himself the instrument of God (Protr. i.6.1). As such, he is a lover of humanity, and that is how he is like a bee. ‘Truth like the bee’ is the image of the Lord, also exulting in human salvation. In the second book of the Paedagogus, Clement again cites the bee, this time in terms that are very close to Str. I.i.11.2: Paed. II.viii.70.1–2 τοιαύτη δὲ καὶ τῶν στεφάνων ἡ χρῆσις, κωμαστικὴ καὶ πάροινος
ἄπερρε
μή μοι στέφανον ἀμφιθῇς κάρᾳ. ἦρος μὲν γὰρ ὥρᾳ λειμῶσιν ἐνδρόσοις καὶ

Such use of garlands is characteristic of revelry and intoxication. Begone! Do not put a garland on my head!

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The Titles That Clement Does Not Choose μαλακοῖς, ποικίλοις χλοάζουσιν ἄνθεσιν, ἐνδιαιτᾶσθαι καλόν, αὐτοφυεῖ καὶ εἰλικρινεῖ τινι εὐωδίᾳ καθάπερ τὰς μελίττας τρεφομένους
τὸ δὲ πλεκτὸν στέφανον ἐξ ἀκηράτου λειμῶνος κοσμήσαντας οἴκοι περιφέρειν οὐ σωφρόνων
οὐ γὰρ ἁρμόδιον ῥόδων κάλυξιν ἢ ἴοις ἢ κρίνοις ἢ ἄλλοις τισὶ τοιούτοις ἄνθεσι ......... χαίτην πυκάζεσθαι κωμαστικήν, διανθιζομένους ..................... τὴν χλόην.

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For in the springtime, in soft, dewy meadows, among flowers that are lush and varied, it is good to take one’s feast, like the bees that are nourished on a self-generating, pure aroma. But the ‘woven garland from the pure meadow’ is not appropriate for people of decent moderation to wear as adornment. For it is not fitting to use rose cups, violets, lilies or other such flowers to thickly cover a reveller’s mane, while decoupling the foliage from its flowers.

Despite the fact that this passage is placed in the middle of a book rather than at the beginning or end, it is marked out as significant for the structure of Clement’s work. It is here that he chooses to showcase the difference between pedagogical and didascalic modes of speech, by beginning an allegorical exegesis of the crown (‘garland’, στέφανος) of thorns, then drawing back from this ‘didascalic form’ (διδασκαλικλὸν εἶδος).13 His selection of the topic of garlands for this exhibition of the different communicative styles of the Logos may not be accidental. In principle, he could have exhibited a ‘didascalic’ exegesis in any context; but this one is especially relevant to his literary project: the garlands’ association with drunken revelry points back to the bacchic theme of the Protrepticus, where Clement castigated drunken attitudes to salvation and urged the Bacchants to come to a ‘sober mountain’;14 at the same time, ‘garland’ points forward to the Stromateis as it was a common title for miscellanistic works.15 The close connection with the Stromateis is strongly marked by resonance between this passage and Clement’s portrayal of the miscellanistic bee in Str. I.i.11.2. Not only are both passages about bees pasturing in flowery meadows, but they also draw on the same intertext from Euripides’ Hippolytus. Here in Paed. II.viii, part of Hippolytus’ speech is explicitly quoted (πλεκτὸν στέφανον ἐξ ἀκηράτου λειμῶνος, Eur. Hipp. 73–74). The sexual overtones are brought out in both Paed. II.viii.70.1–2 and in Str. I.i.11.2 by the emphasis on ‘purity’ (εἰλικρινεῖ, ἀκηράτου Paed. II.viii.70.1–2, cf. ἀκήρατον, Str. i.11.2) and the imagery of 13 14

15

Paed. II.viii.73.3–76.1. Cf. Protr. i.2.1–3; xi.118.5–19.2, though the only vocabulary in common with this passage is drunkenness (παροιν- Protr. i.2.2, xii.118.5; Paed. II.viii.70.1) Barns 1950, 134–35.

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‘defloration’ (διανθιζομένους τὴν χλόην Paed. II.viii.70.2, cf. τὰ ἄνθη δρεπόμενος, Str. I.i.11.2).16 Clement develops the imagery in such a way as to articulate a staging post for the reader between the Protrepticus and the Stromateis. His concern about garlands turns into a reflection on paradise and God’s farming. He first mentioned paradise in the Protrepticus, where he sought to make his readers conscious that they had the capacity to become sons of God, citizens of heaven and farmers of paradise (Protr. x.92.3). He told the story of the first person who played in Paradise as a child of God but became susceptible to pleasure, was seduced by his desires, and when he became a man he disobeyed the father and became bound by corruption. But through the incarnation, the human being ‘who fell from Paradise’ receives the heavens again (Protr. xi.111.1–3). Paradise returns to view in Paedagogus II.viii, when Clement develops his account of garlands into an ethical and ecclesiological reflection. He explains that we ought to enjoy the beauty of flowers only by looking at them, glorifying the Creator. We should not exploit them in a utilitarian fashion but should take our pleasure as in paradise, truly chastely following Scripture (τρυφᾶν δὲ ἡμῖν, ὡς ἐν παραδείσῳ, προσῆκεν σωφρόνως τῷ ὄντι παρεπομένοις τῇ γραφῇ, Paed. II.viii.71.1). The picture is completed by intertwining procreation and ecclesiology: Στέφανον μὲν γυναικὸς τὸν ἄνδρα ὑποληπτέον, ἀνδρὸς δὲ τὸν γάμον, ἄνθη δὲ τοῦ γάμου τὰ τέκνα ἀμφοῖν, ἃ δὴ τῶν σαρκικῶν λειμώνων ὁ θεῖος δρέπεται γεωργός. «Στέφανος δὲ γερόντων τέκνα τέκνων, δόξα δὲ παισὶν οἱ πατέρες», φησίν
ἡμῖν δὲ [δόξα] ὁ πατὴρ τῶν ὅλων, καὶ τῆς συμπάσης ἐκκλησίας στέφανος ὁ Χριστός. The garland of a woman must be understood as her husband; the husband’s as his marital union, and the flowers of the marital union as the children of both, which the divine farmer plucks from the meadows of the flesh. ‘The garland of the elderly is their children’s children, and fathers are their children’s glory’ he says (Prov. 17:6). But our glory is the father of the universe, and the garland of the whole church is Christ. (Paed. II.viii.71.1–2)

The Stromateis works with very similar imagery. As the divine farmer here ‘plucks’ (δρέπεται) children from ‘meadows’ of the flesh, so the bee in the meadow in Str. I.i.11.2 ‘plucks’ (δρεπόμενος) the flowers from the ‘meadow’. The procreative imagery for the growth of the church is also important for the bee in the meadow in Str. I.i.11.2, where the bee who plucks the meadow begets knowledge in the souls of his hearers, and

16

Cf. Chapter 5.

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Clement continues this thought by portraying the transmission of apostolic tradition as child receiving it from father17 and the continued deposit of ‘generative seeds’ (Str. I.i.11.3). The ‘farmer’ in the Stromateis is often the gnostic (e.g., I.i.18.2; VII.xv.91.5), but it is also an act of divine agricultural work to transplant readers into the good land, which is the Lord and true knowledge (Str. VI.i.2.4). These passages are not just incidental to Clement’s work. They are loci where he reflects on the nature and form of his literary project. They mark significant transitions that correspond to progress through his work. The first bee in the Protrepticus simply portrays the way the Lord loves humanity (φιλάνθρωπον) and urges the readers towards truth and salvation. This is a gentle protreptic in a hostile culture. The second introduces a strong moral critique concerning proper behaviour at the symposium, seeking to chasten or sober up people’s sense of beauty and desire. The Protrepticus had summoned readers away from Dionysiac revelry and drunkenness, now the Paedagogus shows what that should look and feel like at the symposium. There is still beauty and procreation, but it is reimagined through the lens of creation and the ecclesia (τρυφᾶν δὲ ἡμῖν, ὡς ἐν παραδείσῳ, προσῆκεν σωφρόνως τῷ ὄντι παρεπομένοις τῇ γραφῇ, Paed. II. viii.71.1). The Stromateis reconfigures the imagery again: the procreative theme is now explicitly framed as transmission of generative gnosis, and the mode of transmission becomes a central issue. The bee in the meadow is miscellanistic, an anthologist. But the transmission of the seed from father to child is linear, a form of tradition. Clement juxtaposes these images as he invites his readers to encounter his miscellanies from a position within the apostolic tradition.18 These three images thus highlight a literary transition from the protreptic bee, to the pedagogic one, who is a model and offers instruction, and then the miscellanistic one, who stands within the apostolic tradition. But they also mark an affective development, from the Lord’s philanthropia in the Protrepticus, to the reconfiguring of sympotic eroticism as Edenic procreation and then the invitation to a fresh engagement with procreative miscellanism as a reinterpretation of the erotic theme in Phaedrus and Hippolytus. Thirdly, they delineate a shift in the primary content of knowledge, from the truth that desires human salvation, to the

17

18

Str. I.i.11.3, παῖς παρὰ πατρός ἐκδεχόμενος ὀλίγοι δὲ οἱ πατράσιν ὅμοιοι cf. Paed. II.viii.71.1, δόξα δὲ παισὶν οἱ πατέρες. On the significance of apostolic tradition in Clement: Thomson 2013; 2014, 54–88.

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detailed instructions on moral behaviour, and then the seeds of gnosis implanted in the listeners. Who Is the Sicilian Bee with Whom Clement Came to Rest? In Chapter 5, when we examined Clement’s narrative autobiography, we found that the identity of the ‘Sicilian bee’ at the culmination of his journey had been the subject of scholarly debate. Most often it is identified as Pantaenus, but Clement himself did not give an exegesis of the bee but simply offered it as the image of miscellanistic activity at the culmination of his own life story, which was implicitly a pattern for readers to engage with as they entered the miscellany of notes that he set before them. Now that the bee has been found to be so important in a network of imagery that Clement uses to structure a path through his work, the question returns: who is the bee that is ‘truly Sicilian’, anthologising the meadow at the telos of Clement’s own life-travels? In Protr. i.6.2, ‘truth like the bee’ was unambiguously an image of the Lord saving humanity. This was also the very first image of the Lord in the work. In Paed. II.viii, the identity of the bees was not explicit, but the fact that they are nourished by ‘a certain fragrance that springs up of its own accord and is pure’ suggested that they were heavenly creatures. Clement presented them as a model for the readers, while the farmer who plucked the meadow (as the bee does in Str. I.i.11.2) was God, and Christ was the garland of the Church. So, should we still think of the Sicilian bee as Pantaenus? The threads that run through these various strands of imagery seem to suggest that the Sicilian bee is, in the first instance, the Lord, with whom Clement came to rest after discovering him where he had escaped notice, in Egypt. A further clue is Clement’s assertion that he ‘rested’ (ἀνεπαυσάμην) with the Sicilian bee. ‘Rest’ (ἀνάπαυσις) in Clement is not just a prosaic term for settling down at the end of a journey. It is a destination for the gnostic, given by and known only in God.19 Not much later in the first Stromateus, Clement sets out to explain the importance of Greek preparatory education. He says that philosophy is the preparatory training ‘for rest in Christ’ (προπαιδεία τῆς ἐν Χριστῷ ἀναπαύσεως), as it stimulates the mind until people grasp the truth. However, once they discover the true philosophy, they prefer to receive from the truth itself as initiates (Str. I.v.32.4). In his autobiographical reflection, Clement portrayed himself too moving across the Mediterranean from one teacher to another until he rested (ἀνεπαυσάμην) 19

Cf. Paed. I.vi.29.3; Str. VI.xvi.141.4, 7; VII.x.57.1, xi.68.5, xvi.93.3, etc. Lilla 1971, 187–88; Le Boulluec 1985, 386; Behr 2000, 193.

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with the Sicilian bee. The bee miscellanised not just any meadow, but the ‘prophetic and apostolic meadow’ – that is, the Scriptures (Str. I.i.11.2). Clement follows a similar pattern in his work. In the Hypotyposeis, he will eventually cast off the Greek dress of his textuality, and offer a pure diet of Scripture to the souls of his hearers (cf. Str. VII.i.1.1–6). In the first place, then, Clement’s Sicilian bee is best accounted for if we interpret it as an image of the Christ-Logos. But as in the Phaedrus’ account of philosophical love, so in Clement’s experience too, it was through a human being that he came to recognise the Christ-Logos. His relationship with the human teacher, like that with the Lord, was one of chaste love, resonant with the chastity of Hippolytus’ meadow.20 Classical and Scriptural Honeybees for the Gnostic Miscellanist Our discussion has focused on the bees that are cited in close connection with Clement’s miscellanistic titles and named non-titles. Often these programmatic passages in Clement’s work have drawn on Classical intertexts: Euripides’ Hippolytus, a fragment from Sophocles or an allusion to the Phaedrus. In this section, I want to show that Clement draws on Classical tradition to lead the readers into the work in these passages of reflection on his own literary form. But within the body of the work, he offers scriptural texts about bees and honey that point the reader towards a more independent relation to God/Christ. One of the most significant resonances of bees in Classical literary culture was their association with the Muses. Clement does not explicitly mention the Muses in connection with the bees who organise his literary programme, but by alluding to his divine teacher and source of inspiration as a bee, he evokes the tradition of the Muses. Bees were often metonyms for the Muses; both bees and honey were especially associated with inspired poetry and philosophy.21 Vergil in his Georgics wrote little about the Muses but dedicated a whole book to bees and embedded a story about Orpheus within it. It was a careful way of approaching Octavian about the proper relationship between poetry and politics in the new regime.22 Many renowned philosophers and poets were said to have had epiphanies where bees left honey on their lips – Pindar, Hesiod, Sophocles, Plato, Vergil and Lucan were among them; later Ambrose and John Chrysostom joined the litany of wise men of words who were honoured in this way.23

20 22 23

21 See Chapter 5. In Greek, μελος, μελι, μελιττα are closely related. Petridou 2015, 83. Cf. Lovatt 2007, 149. On the Muses in the Georgics, see further Hardie 2002. Petridou 2015, 83.

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Like Vergil, Clement likely gives attention to bees and honey in full awareness of their very close association with the Muses but has his reasons for preferring not to dwell on the personified deities, but rather to cultivate the allusiveness of their metonymic counterparts. Like Vergil, he finds that the bees and their honey evoke the power and sweetness of inspiration in a whole cultural tradition; Vergil wishes to locate himself within that in a politically fraught situation; Clement wants to reinterpret it through a new pattern of theology and a new literary heritage. Like Plato and others who might have had their wisdom granted by bees, Clement is happy to acknowledge the miscellanistic bee at the end of his own journey. For Clement, however, the bee is not a metonymic epiphany of any of the Muses of the old Greek pantheon, but the Christ-Logos himself. Readers who are drawn in through the familiar Classical imagery will find on the inside of his work scriptural incitement to go further. On two occasions in the Stromateis, the bee in Proverbs 6:6–8 becomes Clement’s paradigm for a gnostic reader of his miscellanies. The form of the citation of Proverbs, and the nuances that he brings out, are a little different on each occasion: Str. I.vi.33.5–6 διὸ καί φησιν
«ἴσθι πρὸς τὸν μύρμηκα, ὦ ὀκνηρέ, καὶ γενοῦ ἐκείνου σοφώτερος» ὃς πολλὴν καὶ παντοδαπὴν ἐν τῷ ἀμήτῳ παρατίθεται πρὸς τὴν τοῦ χειμῶνος ἀπειλὴν τὴν τροφήν, «ἢ πορεύθητι πρὸς τὴν μέλισσαν καὶ μάθε ὡς ἐργάτις ἐστί
» καὶ αὐτὴ γὰρ πάντα τὸν λειμῶνα ἐπινεμομένη ἓν κηρίον γεννᾷ. Str. IV.iii.9.1–3 «διελέγετο» γοῦν «Μωυσεῖ», φησίν, «ὁ θεὸς ὡς φίλος φίλῳ.» τὸ μὲν οὖν ἀληθὲς τῷ θεῷ σαφές. αὐτίκα τὴν ἀλήθειαν γεννᾷ, ὁ γνωστικὸς δὲ ἀληθείας ἐρᾷ. «ἴσθι», φησί, «πρὸς τὸν μύρμηκα, ὦ ὀκνηρέ, καὶ μελίττης γενοῦ μαθητής,» ὁ Σολομὼν λέγει


Wherefore he also says, ‘Go to the ant you sluggard and become wiser than he!’ He lays up much varied nourishment at the harvest against the threat of winter. ‘Or, go to the bee and learn how she is a worker!’ For she pastures the whole meadow and begets one honeycomb. He says, ‘God spoke to Moses as friend to friend.’ So the truth is clear to God. He begets the truth, and the gnostic is madly in love with truth. ‘Go’, he says, ‘to the ant, you sluggard, and become a disciple of the bee’, says Solomon.

In the first of these passages, Clement promotes the bee as a model of how to interact with miscellanistic literature.24 The varied text can

24

His description of how the bee ‘by pasturing the whole meadow begets a unified honeycomb’ integrates both Meadow and Honeycomb, which he eventually highlights as non-titles. It also resonates with the preface to the fourth Stromateus, where the

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provide nourishment for the ant and a single unified honeycomb for the bee, if they work at it. The emphasis is on the gnostic gathering and uniting material. In the second passage, the focus is on intimate instruction from God in love. The relation of the gnostic to the bee is envisaged as that of ‘disciple’ to teacher, and the chaste passion by which truth is conceived in the gnostic comes to expression in the language of ‘eros’.25 These images resonate with different aspects of Str. I.i.11.2: the former evokes the bee’s plucking and gathering activity, the latter the bee’s chaste love in begetting pure knowledge in the souls of his hearers. This imagery, however, does not resolve the question of who the bee is. Is it the gnostic, or is it God as teacher of the gnostic? From Clement’s perspective, the answer is probably both: Christ (the divine Logos incarnate) was the gnostic par excellence, and every good human teacher follows and embodies his teaching as best he can. The Protrepticus and the Paedagogus prepare readers for the emphasis in the Stromateis on bees as models and teachers through another thread of scriptural citations. Drawing on Proverbs, Psalms and the Pentateuch, they allude to honey or to milk and honey, which can motivate readers by conveying the sweetness of the promise. Thus, towards the end of the Protrepticus, Clement asks his readers to receive Christ, receive the power of seeing and the light, in order that they might know both God and man, for the Logos that illumines is ‘sweeter than gold or precious jewel, more desirable than honey or honeycomb (μέλι καὶ κηρίον)’ (Ps 18:11 apud Protr. xi.113.2). In the Paedagogus, the chapter on baptism reminds him often of ‘milk and honey’, which were given to the baptisand as part of the rite. ‘Milk and honey’ are promised in the good land, in the rest, and in Jerusalem above (Paed. I.vi.35.1; 36.1; 45.1). The milk is mixed with honey as part of the rite because ‘when the Logos is mixed with love of humanity it heals the passions and purifies sins’. Clement suggests that Homer’s famous description of Nestor’s voice as ‘flowing sweeter than honey’ was spoken of the Logos, who is honey (Paed. I.vi.51.1). In the Stromateis he interprets the promise given to the patriarchs of a land of milk and honey as realised in Jesus, who was going to appear in the flesh, for ‘land’ is the human being, and ‘the good land, flowing with milk and honey’ celebrates the Lord who put in us wisdom and understanding of his secrets (Str. V.x.63.4–5).

25

honeycomb authored by the ‘tawny bee’ becomes an image of the Stromateis presented as a harvest offering. Cf. Str. I.i.11.2, and Chapter 5.

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The bees and honey that are made known in the Scripture thus encourage readers to participate in the gnostic life that is focused on Christ. The prefaces and other programmatic passages challenge Hellenised readers to recognise the bee not as a metonymn for the Muse, but for the ChristLogos who displaces the Muse’s function in Christian reading. Having attained this insight, readers can journey on to find scripturally based imagery in the body of the work, urging them on in miscellany-making like Solomon’s proverbial bee, until they reach the honeyed land. Summary When Clement names Meadows and Honeycombs as titles of works like the Stromateis, he is doing more than just alluding to a miscellanistic trope. He takes that trope and makes it his own by turning these non-titles into significant paratexts for his own work. I have argued that they urge readers to trace out the imagery of bees, which are important to the literary, theological and cultural reception of Clement’s work. First, bees articulate the architecture of Clement’s literary paideia; second, the Sicilian bee holds out the prospect of a personal relation to the ChristLogos; third, other citations and allusions draw the reader into the experience of cultural shift, from Classical to scriptural frames. Were anyone to fear that this interpretation is overly complicated, we should recall that this is just the way sophisticated readers did read in the early imperial period, so far as we can tell. Clement belonged to an immensely learned sector of society, where people relished this sort of sophisticated literary wit. I am not suggesting that readers would necessarily follow through the imagery in precisely the same linear sequence of associations that I have suggested. But these are some of the most significant connections that are there to be made for readers who respond to the invitation to read and read again and to hunt passionately for the truth. Ultimately, these connections defy linear treatment, since they are intended to cultivate the reader’s relation to what lies beyond the page. Helicons: The Summons to Move Mountains Sandwiched between Meadows and Honeycombs in Clement’s list of non-titles is Helicons. Our search prompted by Meadows and Honeycombs took us to a bee that evoked the Muses; it is fitting that when we return to the list of non-titles we discover Helicon, the home of the Muses, in between them. As in the case of the bees, I shall argue that Clement uses the imagery from the pagan tradition to draw people into

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his work then transforms their expectations by transferring the imagery to a parallel scriptural domain. Helicons highlights the theme of ‘mountains’ in Clement’s imagery, but after the Protrepticus, the mountains take the reader deeper into Christian patterns of faith and scriptural narrative. The discussion will be in three parts, considering first how mountains help structure the reader’s engagement with the literary architecture of the work, then how scriptural threads in the mountain imagery shape the reader’s engagement with the work and finally how a programmatic passage on mountains holds out the model of apostolic faith. Mountains As Landmarks in the Literary Structure of Clement’s Paideia The Protrepticus begins by summoning readers away from Helicon and Cithaeron and urging them to move across to Mount Zion. Clement’s model is Hesiod’s portrayal of the Muses moving across from Helicon to Olympus and thus upgrading from a local to a panhellenic role.26 The equivalent in Clement’s project is moving from Hellenic to Christian culture. The summons to transfer from Helicon and Cithaeron to Zion figures the summons to abandon one culture and take up another. It is not just a place that people are to leave behind; indeed, the mountains function not as a physical place at all but a spiritual place that anchors the culture of literature, myth, mystery rites and sympotic practice that Clement wishes his readers to abandon.27 Clement renews his summons to leave Cithaeron and take up residence on Zion, the ‘sober mountain’, towards the end of the Protrepticus. However, with the shift of attention to Dionysiac imagery, Helicon falls away. Mount Helicon is all but absent from the rest of Clement’s work,28 but just as Honeycombs led us also to bees and honey (sometimes with milk), so too Helicons has a wider penumbra of associated imagery that threads through Clement’s work. By raising it to the status of a title of works like Clement’s own in Str. VI.i.2, Clement invites us to follow this thread, beginning with other passages of metaliterary commentary on Clement’s own form. The preface to Str. VI mentions Helicons as a non-title (Vi.i.2), and the ending of Str. VII portrays the Stromateis as an overgrown mountain (VII.xviii.111.1–3). Those two passages not only respond to the mountain imagery from the Protrepticus, but they also enclose 26 27

28

Hes. Theog. 1–115; Nagy 2009. Protr. i.2.1–4; xii.119.1–3. For some of the ways in which mountain imagery structures Clement’s project, see the Appendix. It is also mentioned, but not programmatically or with metaliterary self-reflexive significance, at Str. I.xv.70.3.

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Clement’s study of the gnostic at the end of the extant Stromateis.29 These mountains at the beginning and end of Clement’s extant project signal the shift in mountain mentality from the Hellenic culture at the beginning of the Protrepticus to the anonymous mountain at the end of the Stromateis, where a faithful farmer may transplant the plants in the hope of producing a fruitful and beautiful garden. The readers have not yet arrived at Zion, but the Stromateis give them an entry point for planting a paradise or sacred grove of their own. Scriptural Mountains: Rest, Contemplation and Faith The volume of resonance of the mountains at the beginning and end of the extant project is increased by scriptural threads of mountain imagery that run through Clement’s work. Between the end of the Protrepticus and the beginning of Stromateis VI, there are three recurrent themes in the imagery of mountains, which each draw on a passage or constellation of passages from Scripture and are conducive to forming the gnostic’s aspirations. Firstly, Clement underscores that the holy mountain is the final destination and the place of rest for the gnostic. In the Paedagogus, Clement recalls that the Pedagogue promises through Ezekiel to shepherd his flock to his holy mountain, and he repeats that in his own prayer, ‘Shepherd us to your holy mountain, to the church on high, above the clouds, touching heaven.’30 He also combines God’s promise through Moses to bring Israel into the good land, with his promise through Isaiah to bring them to the holy mountain and make them glad.31 In the description of the true gnostic at the end of the Stromateis, he draws on Davidic psalms to portray the gnostic’s rest on the mountain of God.32 The ‘rest’ on the mountain of the Lord is available only as a result of great effort and is a gift granted to the gnostic. A second set of scriptural allusions is closely related to this: the mountain top is presented as a visionary, contemplative destination for the gnostic, which is primarily though not exclusively associated with Moses’ ascent at Sinai.33 At the start of his discussion of faith in the second 29 31 32 33

30 See Appendix. Paed. I.i.ix.84.2–3, cf. Ezek 34:14, 16. Paed. I.x.91.4, cf. Deut 31:20; Isa 56:7. Ps 15:1 in Str. VI.xiv.108.1; Ps 23:3–6 in Str. VII.x.58.2. ‘Horeb’ is mentioned only once, in a quotation from the LXX (Str. VI.v.41.6). For other mountain-top contemplative, gnostic visions: Str. VII.x.58.2 (Ps 23:3–6, seeking the face of Jacob), where the focus on the face may recall Protr. i.2.1 with xii.119.3. Str. VI. v.132.2–4 (Jesus son of Nave ascended with Caleb to behold Moses buried in the mountains and ravines; according to Clement’s account, Jesus son of Nave ascended higher and saw spiritual things, like the spiritual meaning of Scripture, whereas Caleb saw only the bodily sense.) Some scholars suppose that this story of Jesus son of Nave derives

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Stromateus, where Clement gives his most intimate description of personal encounter with the hidden God, he moves from ostensibly speaking of his own experience to portraying Moses’ prayer, ‘manifest thyself to me’, and his ascent to the darkness where God is.34 Moses’ ascent is also part of his account of scriptural interpretation in Str. V and part of his apologia to the Greeks in Str. VI. In all these passages, his portrayal focuses on the transcendence of God that is encountered in that mountain darkness. God is beyond time and place (Str. II.ii.6.1), ineffable (Str. V.xi.71.5) and omnipotent to orchestrate visions and voices in the sight and hearing of his people, even though he transcends material elements (Str. VI.iii.34.1–3). Finally, a third set of mountain images is more exhortatory for the readers. Clement recurrently refers to faith that ‘moves mountains’. This image is found both in one of Jesus’ parables in Matthew and in Paul’s list of things that are not sufficient without love: 1 Cor 13:12

Matt 17:20

Luke 17:6

καὶ ἐὰν ἔχω προφητείαν καὶ εἰδῶ τὰ μυστήρια πάντα καὶ πᾶσαν τὴν γνῶσιν καὶ ἐὰν ἔχω πᾶσαν τὴν πίστιν ὥστε ὄρη μεθιστάναι, ἀγάπην δὲ μὴ ἔχω, οὐθέν εἰμι

ὁ δὲ λέγει αὐτοῖς
διὰ τὴν ὀλιγοπιστίαν ὑμῶν
ἀμὴν γὰρ λέγω ὑμῖν, ἐὰν ἔχητε πίστιν ὡς κόκκον σινάπεως, ἐρεῖτε τῷ ὄρει τούτῳ
μετάβα ἔνθεν ἐκεῖ, καὶ μεταβήσεται
καὶ οὐδὲν ἀδυνατήσει ὑμῖν He says to them, ‘On account of your little faith! Amen I say to you, if you have faith like a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “Go over there!” and it will go over. Nothing will be impossible for you.’

εἶπεν δὲ ὁ κύριος
εἰ ἔχετε πίστιν ὡς κόκκον σινάπεως, ἐλέγετε ἂν τῇ συκαμίνῳ [ταύτῃ]
ἐκριζώθητι καὶ φυτεύθητι ἐν τῇ θαλάσσῃ
καὶ ὑπήκουσεν ἂν ὑμῖν. The Lord said, ‘If you have faith like a mustard seed, you would say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and be planted in the sea!” and it would obey you.’

And if I have prophecy and know all the mysteries and all gnosis, and if I have all faith so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

34

from part of the original Assumption of Moses, which is no longer extant (van den Hoek 1988, 200; Descourtieux 1999 (= SC 446), 322 n. 3; Charles 1897, 107). The narrative of the Transfiguration in the gospels may also play a role, together with its resonance with Exod 24 (cf. France 2002, 348; France 2007, 648). The doctrine of Scripture as possessed of a ‘body’ that is distinct from its soul or real meaning probably draws on Philo, Con. 78: van den Hoek 1988, 200. Str. II.ii.6.1.

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Clement draws sometimes on Paul, sometimes on Matthew, and then again on both in conjunction with Luke, in order to draw out different nuances. Thus Matthew is uppermost when Clement analyses different kinds of faith and picks out the faith that is a kind of divine power; that is, the faith that moves mountains, as it is the might of truth (Str. II. x.49.1). But when he wants to show that whatever one does is only worthwhile if it is done in love, then he underscores Paul’s words to the Corinthians that faith that moves mountains is nothing without love (Str. IV.xviii.112.3). So far, tracing the threads of the Helicons has followed a similar pattern to Meadows and Honeycombs. First we began with a image from Hellenic culture, which we traced through Clement’s work, along with the wider domain of imagery most closely associated with it. After discovering how this structured the architecture of Clement’s work and the reader’s progress through it, we found that he also collects scriptural passages that are relevant to the motif and develops scattered reflections on those too. In the final part of this discussion of Helicons, I want to show how Clement associates the imagery with an apostolic model of faith, which can serve as an example to himself and his readers. This is similar to the way the bee modelled miscellanism. Apostolic Models of Moving Mountains The preface to the fifth Stromateus garners less attention than the prefaces to Str. IV and VI when considering the architecture of Clement’s work, and yet it is not without programmatic significance. Here he develops the imagery of moving mountains with particular intricacy, drawing on a similar set of scriptures to those just described: ὁποῖοι ἦσαν οἱ ἀπόστολοι, ἐφ’ ὧν τὴν πίστιν ὄρη μετατιθέναι καὶ δένδρα μεταφυτεύειν δύνασθαι εἴρηται. ὅθεν αἰσθόμενοι τοῦ μεγαλείου τῆς δυνάμεως ἠξίουν προστιθέναι αὐτοῖς πίστιν τὴν ὡς «κόκκον σινάπεως» ἐπιδάκνουσαν ὠφελίμως τὴν ψυχὴν καὶ ἐν αὐτῇ αὔξουσαν μεγαλωστί, ὡς ἐπαναπαύεσθαι αὐτῇ τοὺς περὶ τῶν μεταρσίων λόγους. Such were the apostles, of whom it has been said that their faith could move mountains and transplant trees. When they perceived from that the greatness of the power, they thought they deserved an increase in their faith, which, like a mustard-seed, bites into the soul beneficially and grows very large in it, such that discourses (λόγοι) about things on high might rest in it. (Str. V.i.2.3.6–3.1)

This image is bound into a relationship to other prefaces and programmatic passages in the Stromateis. The idea of planting the soul as an image

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of teaching appeared already in the preface to Str. I and is probably grounded in Plato’s Phaedrus.35 The vocabulary that Clement uses for transplanting trees recalls Orpheus transplanting trees and will be picked up in the transplantation in the preface to Str. VI and in the ending of Str. VII. However, Clement’s imagery here makes a distinctive contribution. First, scriptural allusions bring out an emphasis on the interrelationship between faith and the kingdom of God. Clement’s reference to ‘faith to move mountains and transplant trees’ combines Matthew’s and Luke’s version of the same parable of Jesus, about faith ‘as small as a mustard seed’. ‘Increase their faith’ picks up Luke’s version, where the parable is Jesus’ response to the disciples’ petition to increase their faith (Luke 17:5). ‘Like a mustard seed’ resonates with both. The mustard seed, however, becomes the hook to a different scriptural allusion, namely, to Jesus’ parable about the kingdom of God, which is like a mustard seed that, when planted, grows and becomes large, till the birds of heaven rest in its branches.36 Clement interprets this allegorically as planting the mustard seed in the soul so that the περὶ τῶν μεταρσίων λόγοι (discourses to do with things that are above) rest in it. This strange image is a beautiful intervention by Clement in an ancient philosophical discussion about epistemology. In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates had portrayed the soul as an aviary, which gets stocked with birds. Stocking it is one thing, but being able to retrieve the birds when needed is quite another. So it is too with knowledge, according to Socrates (Plato, Theaet. 197c–e). In the second century, Rabbi Yishmael is said to have given another account of holding onto knowledge in the form of birds: the king ensnares a bird and gives it to a servant to look after, so that it does not fly away. Later midrashim urged breaking the wings so as to be sure.37 Clement’s portrayal of the gnostic soul growing a tree for logoi of the upper air to rest in is a beautiful reconfiguration of this imagery for Christian epistemology. The importance of moving mountains is that it underscores how faith grounds this kind of knowledge. The psychological significance of moving mountains will also be picked up in the portrayal of the gnostic in Str. VII, where moving mountains is part of his role, since he fills the place left by the apostles. Clement associates this with the way the gnostic benefits others: for people who are wellsuited, he moves the mountains of neighbours and casts away the 35 36

Phdr. 276b–77a; Wyrwa 1983, 34, 38–39. Matt 13:31–2; Mark 4:31–2; Luke 13:19.

37

Hirshman 2009, 76–79.

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unevenness in their soul, though each of us is our own vineyard and labourer (Str. VII.xii.77.4). Summary By taking the non-title Helicon as an invitation to paratextual guidance in reading Clement’s work, we have found that as before, the imagery highlights a development from the Protrepticus to the Stromateis, and as before, it provides a Hellenised point of access to a scriptural set of imagery that is crucial for understanding Clement’s epistemology and mysticism. The summons to abandon the mountain of Greek religious, literary and musical culture in the Protrepticus gives way to pilgrimage to a holy mountain, which involves a mystical ascent by faith into the darkness where God is. The faith that can move mountains is characteristic of apostles. Clement uses prefaces to highlight the significance of this imagery: Moses’ ascent is mentioned as part of his introduction to the topic of faith in Str. II.ii; Hesiod’s description of the rough road to virtue as ‘steep’ suggests scaling a mountain in the preface to Str. IV; and the apostolic faith to move mountains is underscored in the preface to Str. V. The passages that are less prominently located contribute to the volume of the echo of this theme. Peplos The fourth non-title in Clement’s list is Peploi. The peplos was a woman’s garment; it is very rarely mentioned in Clement’s work. However, by locating it in the list of significant non-titles, Clement is issuing an invitation to consider its paratextual potential by following its thread of imagery and contemplating its significance. A few significant points of reference emerge, where Clement is effecting a transaction or transition from a pagan to a Christian religious culture. In the first Stromateus, Clement associates Orpheus with a hieros logos called the Peplos. He mentions this only casually in a long list of Greek plagiariasts, where he points out that the Peplos attributed to Orpheus was really composed by Pythagoras (Str. I.xxi.131.5). However, in the Protrepticus, he is not above citing an unnamed work by Orpheus concerning the role of peploi in the Athenian mysteries at the Eleusinian cult of Demeter. He quotes a passage from ‘the mystagogue of shamelessness’, in which the goddess is portrayed as pulling back her peploi to show her unmentionable parts underneath, laughing as she receives the ritual cup (Protr. ii.21.1). This makes her peploi central to the act of revelation that Clement finds so abhorrent in Greek mysteries. It also locates peploi

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within the musical and mystical culture associated with Orpheus, which is one of Clement’s most significant foils for Christianity.38 In the Paedagogus, the desire to enjoy dressing immodestly or luxuriously in fine robes is one of the temptations that grown-up Christian ‘children’ face. The Pedagogue warns them off. Peploi are mentioned specifically only twice: once as an example of a vulgar sense of beauty that needs to be remedied by recollection of the first man in Paradise (II.x.111.2–3), and once as the centre of a false notion of revelation, where approaching a finely decked out woman is compared with entering an Egyptian temple, with peploi covering the sanctuary. But inside there is no deity, just a ridiculous image of a beast (III.ii.4.2–3). Clement does not specifically mention peploi on other occasions, but as with the other named non-titles, it is appropriate to consider their broader resonance and likely significance for Clement’s work. The title ‘Stromateis’ also evokes the imagery of woven textiles, and this was a significant domain of imagery for miscellanistic titles: not only was there an ancient deep appreciation of the connection between weaving, textiles and text, such that weaving and textiles were often used in literature as imagery for textuality, but miscellanism was also particularly selfconscious as a literary form that weaves together threads and allows the woven texture of the textuality (cf. ‘textum’ in Latin = weaving) to show through.39 In Classical literature, the reason Peploi was chosen as a title of miscellanistic works was probably not because of Orpheus or Demeter, but because of the most famous peplos of all: the richly embroidered peplos that Athenian women wove for Athene Polias and dedicated at the great festival of the Panathenaeia. The festival took place every year, but a new robe was made only quadrennially, when the festival was expanded with panhellenic elements. This woven and embroidered cloth fired the Greek religious and cultural imagination, for it was ‘a symbol of the ongoing life of the social fabric of Athena’.40 Nagy has suggested that the woven material of the peplos evoked the rhapsodes’ (‘song-sewers’) performance of Homer on the first day of the festival.41 The best known ancient miscellany under the title Peplos was the collection of heroic stories and epitaphs attributed to Aristotle; the heroic subject matter resonated with

38 39

40

Jourdan 2010. For the imagery of ‘textum’: Nagy 1996, 65. For textile imagery in miscellanistic titles, Schröder 1999, 49–50. 41 Rosenstock 1994, 364. Nagy 2002, 70–98.

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the Homeric epics, and like Athena’s mantle, it wove together different heroic paradigms.42 Scholars have deduced from Clement’s work that it was among his sources.43 Cicero used the term peplographia for describing Varro’s biographical handbook about illustrious persons, including their epitaphs.44 We shall return in Chapter 11 to how Plato makes Athena’s peplos the basis for some of his critique of poikilia in the religious and social life of Athens. We shall see there too how Clement responds to the problem of poikilia by engaging with textile imagery, both in the Paedagogus, where the Lord’s ‘poikilic-flowery cloak’ is interpreted as the Scriptures, and in the discussion of scriptural interpretation in Str. V, where Joseph’s poikilic cloak is made into an image for good and bad poikilia. These discussions are important for Clement as part of his Christian reception of the aesthetic of poikilia which marked out miscellanism but which, as Plato showed, also had moral, social and religious dimensions. Peploi, then, is less explicitly prominent in Clement’s work than Meadows or Honeycombs, or even Helicons, but it too points to a typical aspect of miscellanism that Clement wishes to recast for a Christian readership. Like the other named non-titles, it can mark a progression through his work, from the rejection of Orphic mysteries to the critique of a taste for fine robes and the exhortation to a reverence for a particular kind of encounter with the poikilia of scripture. At the same time, it can highlight the transition from the religious cult and culture of Athens to the scriptural culture that Clement celebrates.

Conclusion on Clement’s Named Non-Titles Clement’s adaptation of miscellanistic tropes is not incidental to his work. When Clement cites a miscellanistic cliché, he does it in an obvious way: in this instance, there are four well-known miscellanistic titles, and he adopts the well-known miscellanistic trope of listing them as non-titles. However, he adapts the trope with intent. He flags that his use of this trope is not the same as the Classical miscellanists’, but the ‘very learned people’ who composed under these alternative names were making works that deserve to be compared with his Stromateis, itself a Meadow of sorts. How else is Clement going to market his work, other than by inviting his readers to recognise it as

42 44

43 Gutzwiller 2010. Clark 1977, 5, citing Gabrielsson 1906, 220. Gutzwiller 2010, 224.

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the kind of thing that everybody likes to read anyway? As Holford-Strevens wrote, the genre was ‘popular’ and that is why Clement adopted it with a purpose that gave it ‘a Christian twist’.45 However, Clement’s ‘Christian twist’ combines playfulness with a serious aim. To recast his non-titles as significant paratexts is artful enough to delight a learned, engaged reader; but it is also earnest enough to drive home his purpose of helping readers to grow and change in their relationship to God through the course of his literary programme. The non-titles, as I have emphasised, function as paratexts that complement the titles: they draw together images that span all three extant works and invite the reader to recognise the changes; at the same time, they offer highly Hellenised entry points into what turns out to be a profoundly Christian form of contemplation. Some of the examples considered here are more certain than others: the significance of the Meadows and the Honeycombs is far less subtle than that of the Peploi. However, it is important to keep in mind that Clement’s miscellanism intentionally opens itself up to a diversity of readings. Not that there is no truth, but that the truth can be accessed by different routes through his book. When he offers the non-titles by name, I suggest that he is offering possible routes to that truth, which may nonetheless also be disclosed to other readers in other ways. As Thomson comments, ‘Clement leads us in a circle: the deployment of generic hints is just as much about pressing his readers to consciously ponder the question of generic ordering as an introduction to his larger project of leading us to question the order and disorder of the whole cosmos.’46

debates about the didaskalos The list of non-titles in the preface to Str. VI is a miscellanistic cliché, and we have argued that these non-titles potentially have paratextual significance. However, we have not yet considered the more famous non-title in Clement’s work: the Didaskalos. This has been much more frequently discussed, but without resolution. It is not presented as part of a miscellanistic trope, but having seen the significance Clement can give to named non-titles, it is worth revisiting this old debate and asking whether it can shed light on the Didaskalos too. I shall briefly outline the problem of the Didaskalos, and then suggest how a paratextual reading of this non-title could provide a plausible response. 45

Holford-Strevens 2003, 29, 38.

46

Thomson 2014, 112.

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In the opening chapter of the Paedagogos, Clement mentions the protreptic, pedagogic and didaskalic logos in that sequence. Most scholars have thought that these refer to a sequence of three works: the Protrepticus, Paedagogus and Didaskalos. The difficulty is that the works that are extant are Protrepticus, Paedagogus and Stromateis, without a Didaskalos in sight. For a long time, scholars assumed the Stromateis was the Didaskalos by another name, but Eugène de Faye unseated that assumption in 1898. He argued that it could not possibly be the Didaskalos: it is too messy to teach anything, and it has the wrong title.47 There followed a plethora of suggestions for dividing Clement’s works, trying to discover the Didaskalos somewhere amongst them. To no lasting avail: the debate continues to this day.48 The most important recent contribution to the debate, in my view, is that of Bogdan Bucur. Fleshing out a suggestion by André Méhat that the Didaskalos was fulfilled in part by the Stromateis, and more fully by the Hypotyposeis,49 Bucur brought forth further evidence to defend this and shifted attention to the Hypotyposeis in particular. Bucur points out that not only does Clement speak of a three-step sequence, Protrepticus – Paedagogus – Didaskalos, but he also envisages a threefold progression in education, ethics – physics – epoptics. The latter triad is learnt from the philosophical milieu: Plato envisaged a threefold division ethics, physics, dialectics; Aristotle interpreted it as ethics, physics, theology, and Plutarch distinguished ethics, physics, epoptics. The last of these became common in the empire and is found in Clement too. Bucur argues that the Stromateis only partly fulfil Clement’s project of doctrinal teaching through their method of scattering truths. Something else must have followed, based more closely on Scripture. Bucur proposes that the Hypotyposeis fulfilled this role. They are lost to us, but there are testimonies of their content from antiquity, and fragments of them survive in the Excerpts, Eclogae and Adumbrationes. Both the testimonia and the fragments suggest that the Hypotyposeis were ‘exegetical in method and doctrinal in character’. Furthermore, they expounded more fully issues that were already presented in the Stromateis, for example, the angelic hierarchy and the interior ascent of the gnostic.50 47 48 49 50

de Faye 1906, 87–121. Summaries of the debate in, e.g., Osborn 2005, 5–15; Itter 2009, 15–32. Méhat 1966, 530. Bucur 2009a, quotation at p. 335. On the interior ascent: Bucur 2006.

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To my mind, Bucur does show us that we need to envisage a literary sequence in which Stromateis and Hypotyposeis follow Protrepticus and Paedagogos. However, this does not solve all the problems. Firstly, why are there four works not three? Bucur suggests that the Hypotyposeis are the Didaskalos, but he leaves Stromateis weakly accounted for. Secondly, why are none of these works called the Didaskalos? Bucur submits that Clement’s ‘pedagogical method ... did not make use of a fixed nomenclature for the various stages of instruction’. This emerges in the variety between Protrepticus – Paedagogus – Didaskalos and ethics – physics – epoptics. In any case, ‘eclecticism and fluidity are, after all, characteristic features of Clement’s thought’.51 Therefore, we should not be alarmed that the project of Paed. I.i is fulfilled without the publication of a Didaskalos. This is inadequate. The first chapter of Paed. I writes of three aspects of the logos, of which two correspond to known book titles; Bucur himself thinks this means we should look for a third book, why not also a third book title? The sequence ethics – physics – epoptics is not a different nomenclature for the same thing, but a nomenclature for a different aspect of it. Ethics – physics – epoptics are neither descriptions of the logos nor book titles but stages of an educational curriculum; protrepticus – paedagogus – didaskalos are different modes of operation by the logos, and since the first two correspond to titles, we are invited to envisage the third as a title too. What if we were to be both less concerned with books and more concerned with titles? The activity of the logos does not divide itself between different books in the tidy fashion that is implied by discussions of the ‘literary problem’. The differentiation between works and their assignment to different stages of education is important, but it is balanced by an emphasis on the unity and variety of the logos, which points in the other direction.52 Conversely, the fact that Clement evokes the Didaskalos as a title, but never actually uses it as one, should retain our interest. Perhaps what we have here is not a title, but a non-title, which could be compared with the list of non-titles for the Stromateis that he mentions in Str. VI.i but did not actually choose? There are problems with this connection: the list of non-titles in Str. VI.i is a miscellanistic trope, which Clement is recasting with a Christian

51

Bucur 2009a, quotation at p. 234–35.

52

See further Chapter 11.

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purpose. The way that Clement introduces the didascalic logos is different and does not locate itself within the conventions of miscellany-making. We should probably not expect too close an analogy. Indeed, it is not even quite clear which book title it is that Clement does not use (!). I have been writing as if the title that is evoked were clearly the Didaskalos; this is the title that has appeared most prominently in the scholarly debates. However, Clement writes in Paed. I.i first of the didaskalic logos, and only later of the Didaskalos.53 It is plausible that the title evoked is Didaskalos (working with the personal imagery of the Pedagogue actually chosen) or Didaskalikos (comparable to Protreptikos, describing the Logos), or Didaskalika. The last of these, however, takes us back to the realm of miscellanism, as Gellius includes it in his list of rejected titles. It is the final title that he boots out before Natural History. Stromateis, Leimon, Helicon, Kerion and Peplos are all on his list too, as titles that Gellius vocally deselects for his own work. This alerts us to the cultural location of Clement’s work within miscellanistic habits of reading. Furthermore, the fact that we have seen how Clement developed the imagery of his own list of non-titles so extensively and purposefully suggests a level of self-awareness about the use of named non-titles, which may also shape the way he incorporates the didascalic logos. It would be helpful to see what we learn if we trace the threads of Clement’s language of ‘teaching’ (διδασκ-) through his work in the same way as we have approached the Meadows, Honeycombs, Helicons and Peploi. Searching for the Didaskalos from Protrepticus through to Stromateis The language of ‘teaching’ (διδασκ-) is very common across Clement’s entire literary project. Sometimes it is placed in a way that is particularly significant for the structure and emphasis of the work. Clement describes the epiphany of the ‘Didaskalos’ in the opening chapter of the Protrepticus. The vocabulary of ‘epiphany’ is repeated many times;54 Clement underscores that it is the preexistent creator who appeared, the Logos who was with God. It is he who is the Didaskalos, and ‘when he appeared as Didaskalos, he taught how to live well’ (τὸ εὖ ζῆν ἐδίδαξεν ἐπιφανεὶς ὡς διδάσκαλος, Protr. i.7.3). In the closing chapters of the Protrepticus, Clement again emphasises the Heilsgeschichte involving the appearance of the Logos from heaven as teacher: 53

Paed. I.i.2.1.

54

Protr. i.7.1–4 (nine times).

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Oh mystic wonder! The Lord has leant down, a human being rose up and he who fell from paradise receives a greater prize of obedience – the heavens. So I think, since the Logos himself has come to us from heaven, we should no longer use human teaching (διδασκαλίαν), busying ourselves about Athens and the rest of Greece, and Ionia besides. For if our teacher (διδάσκαλος) is the one who filled all things with holy powers, with creation, salvation and benefaction, with lawgiving, prophecy and teaching (διδασκαλιᾳ), now the teacher (διδάσκαλος) catechises all things, and Athens and Greece have now become wholly subject to the Logos. (Protr. xi.112.1)

The narrative of Christian salvation history, where the Fall is followed by Redemption, underlies this emphasis on receiving the Lord as Didaskalos, and grounds the reconfiguration of the relationship to Greek paideia. Now that the Lord has come down and raised humanity up to heaven, ‘human’ teaching is rejected in favour of divine; Greek wisdom is reorganised around the Logos, who is revealed and manifested in the ‘creation, salvation and benefaction’ of God through Christ; and the Scriptures are to be received, as ‘law-giving, prophecy and teaching’. The activity of the teacher is described as ‘catechesis’, which was becoming a technical term for a stage in Christian formation, prior to baptism.55 The allusion to Scripture as the written form of the Lord’s ‘teaching’ is significant for our search for which books are to be most closely understood as ‘didaskalic’. Earlier in the Protrepticus, there is one passage where Clement suggests that the Scriptures themselves may carry the inscription of God as didaskalos. It is not stated in quite so many words. He begins by describing how piety ‘inscribes God as Didaskalos’: But piety, making the human being like God as much as possible, inscribes God as the appropriate teacher (ἐπιγράφεται διδάσκαλον θεὸν), who is also the only one capable of making a human being worthily in the image of God. (Protr. ix.86.2)

The verb ἐπιγράφεται is translated ‘assigne’ by Mondésert (SC), and ‘designates’ by Wilson (ANF). God is simply assigned or designated as an appropriate teacher. However, epigraphomai carries the nuance of an inscription in written form, for example, by writing an entry in a register, writing a title on a book or writing a signature on one’s work.56

55 56

van den Hoek 1997a, 67–71. LSJ s.v. Cf. Jacob 2000, 93 on Athenaeus’ common phrase for how the guests at banquet ubiquitously cite works by title using the lexical category ἐπιγράφειν / ἐπιγράφεσθαι / ἐπιγραφή / ἐπίγραμμα.

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The hint of the world of book titles is intriguing: where exactly is it that piety ‘writes up’ God as the appropriate teacher? The continuation of the passage shows that Clement is thinking especially of the Scriptures: Knowing that this teaching (ταύτην ... τὴν διδασκαλίαν) is truly divine, the apostle says, ‘But you, Timothy, know sacred letters from babyhood, which are capable of making you wise for salvation through faith in Christ.’ For truly sacred are the letters that make people holy and divine. From these holy letters and syllables the scriptures have been composed as organised works, which the same apostle calls ‘God-breathed, being beneficial for teaching (πρὸς διδασκαλίαν), for reproach, for correction, for education in righteousness, in order that the human being who is of God may be equipped for every good work’. (Protr. ix.87.1–2)

Picking up the vocabulary of teaching, Clement moves from the inscription of God as teacher to the text of Scripture as the truly divine teaching. He draws attention to the written words on the page, right down to their letters and syllables. If God is ‘written up’ as teacher, this is surely the book where his name or role as ‘Teacher’ most belongs. It may not formally be a title, but the ‘inscription’ of God as Teacher belongs closely with the publication of this book as ‘Teaching’. Clement confirms a gradation between the ‘protreptic of the other saints’ and the Lord himself in the next sentence: Who would not be as struck by the protreptic (τὰς προτροπάς) of the rest of the saints as by the Lord himself, who loves humanity? For nothing but this is his sole task: to save the human being. (Protr. ix.86.2–87.3)

The term προτροπαί brings us back to the title of Clement’s own book, Protrepticus, which Clement also writes in the longing for the salvation of human beings. However, that desire is conformed to the desires of the Lord, and it is realised in his aim is to construct listeners who attend first to the Lord himself.57 The Paedagogus has traditionally been the main focus in discussion of the Didaskalos, because of the preface that implies a progression from protreptic to pedagogic and didascalic modes of activity of the logos, and because half way through the second book, Clement parades a pedagogical act of deferring attentiveness to the didaskalic logos until the Paedagogus has been heard.58 Clement emphasises this stepped sequence also at the end of the Paedagogus, as we saw in Chapter 6. The role of the Pedagogue is to guide children to the Teacher and prepare them for his 57 58

Protr. xi.117.3, τί δή σε προτρέπω; σωθῆναι σε ἐπείγομαι. τοῦτο Χριστὸς βούλεται. Paed. II.viii.76.1.

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teaching. The Pedagogue is so named in relation to the Didaskalos who will receive the children afterward and give their pedagogical formation a deeper purpose. This is consistent with the idea that Clement distinguishes between modes of teaching or formation, which progress in stages, and the person who teaches, who is always the same God, or Christ-Logos. This is why he can also speak of ‘pedagogy’ as a kind of teaching (Paed. I. vii.54.1), and can integrate into his conception of teaching the idea that Christians are always children and always learning from the one heavenly teacher who is always teaching (παρὰ τῷ κυρίῳ τῷ διδάσκοντι ἀεί, Paed. I. v.17.3). The sequence of first Pedagogue, then Didaskalos, is balanced by continuity grounded in the theological unity of the teacher. The Stromateis do not bear the title Didaskalos, but they continue to invite the reader to attend to divine teaching. Clement is taking a teaching role in writing the Stromateis at all, but he keeps in mind that he too is being taught. Soon after his autobiographical narrative culminating with the bee anthologising the meadow, he says a little more about his own role in relation to the didaskalos as he writes this book: διδάσκων τις μανθάνει πλεῖον καὶ λέγων συνακροᾶται πολλάκις τοῖς ἐπακούουσιν αὐτοῦ
»εἷς γὰρ ὁ διδάσκαλος« καὶ τοῦ λέγοντος καὶ τοῦ ἀκροωμένου, ὁ ἐπιπηγάζων καὶ τὸν νοῦν καὶ τὸν λόγον In teaching a person learns more, and in speaking is often a fellow-listener along with those listening to him, for ‘The Teacher is one’, both of he who speaks and of he who listens – he is the one who furnishes both the nous (meaning/understanding) and the logos (speech/ordering principle). (Str. I.i.12.3)

As we have seen so often, Clement’s experience as author is structured through his experience of being co-taught with his readers. In the course of the Stromateis, the ‘one’ teacher is portrayed in many different ways. His teaching comes through incarnation,59 providence,60 and written teachings, especially the Scriptures but also other texts, including Greek philosophy and even Clement’s own writing. The gnostic Christian imitates the divine teacher in learning to embody the divine teaching and to exegete it from the written text (Str. VII.iv.1–3). The competition with Greek culture sometimes shapes Clement’s emphasis on teaching: while there are many teachers whom Clement rejects as ‘human’, he emphasises the teaching of the apostles, especially of Paul who is the apostle par excellence.61 One of Paul’s addresses, in particular,

59 61

Str. IV.xviii.113.5; V.i.1.4, 7.3. E.g., Str. III.iv.28.6; IV.xxiii.149.1.

60

Str. V.i.10.2, cf. II.ii.5.2–3.

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was ‘very didaskalic’: namely, his address to the Greeks in Acts, proclaiming to them the One God who made heaven and earth (Str. V.xi.75.4).62 The pervasiveness of the language of ‘teaching’ in Clement’s project should not dull our sensitivity to it. Clement is inviting his readers into a relationship with his work that is that of learner listening to the teacher. The Greco-Roman miscellanists hoped that their work would be ‘useful’ to readers but envisaged no such strong relation to a single teacher who could speak through all the varied systems brought within its scope. A partial exception to this is Pliny, whose reverence for nature inspires his whole work, but Pliny’s relationship to nature is not that of learner to personal teacher, as it is in Clement. The non-title of the Didaskalos draws attention to this aspect of Clement’s literary project. The chosen titles signal the sequential character of the work, and its miscellanism in Stromateis; the named non-title of Didaskalos reminds readers to attend always to the divine Teacher, who was first announced in Protr. i, who teaches through the Pedagogue, and who continues to be the source of instruction for Clement as author and for his readers throughout the Stromateis. As a non-title that never acquires the status of a title, Didaskalos can facilitate the moment of apophatic revelation, where beyond words, there is an encounter with the Teacher.

conclusion Chapter 6 showed that Clement provides commentary on his chosen titles so as to mark out for the readers a changing relation to the divine Logos as they progress through his literary project. This chapter has argued that Clement’s creativity with titular paratexts goes beyond this. On occasion, he explicitly invites the reader to consider his work under a title that he did not choose, but that interacts with leitmotifs of his imagery and its relationship to the contemporary culture of miscellanism. Thus, I have argued that his list of miscellany titles in the opening of Str. VI should be seen as presenting non-titular paratexts that help readers to recognise the significance of particular themes and imagery throughout his literary project. I have proposed that this is also a plausible interpretation of the role of the ‘Didaskalos’, although he presents it in a different way. Together with the titles that Clement does choose, the non-titles help 62

Cf. Str. VI.xviii.163.1–68.3.

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structure the reader’s engagement with Clement’s literary project, and they contribute to the way in which it reorganises their cultural and religious experience. This argument depends on reading the work as a whole, beginning with the Protrepticus, continuing with the Paedagogus, and then the Stromateis. Of these, only the Stromateis has a recognisably miscellanistic title, but the imagery highlighted by the named non-titles stretches across all three extant works in the literary project. These non-titles belong manifestly to the miscellanistic style and by integrating them in metaliterary reflection in earlier parts of the work; thus Clement highlights the character of the whole project as an experiment in miscellanism.

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8 Muses in the Miscellanists’ Frame

In Chapter 7, our study of Clement’s non-titular paratexts and their domains of imagery alerted us to the significance of the Muses in framing his work: the ‘titles’ included Helicons, Honeycombs and Meadows and signalled attention to bees and honey in the wider field of imagery. Helicon was the mountain of the Muses; bees were metonymically associated with them; honey was supposed to be sweet like the Muses.1 In Chapter 6, meanwhile, our study of Clement’s use of his title showed that the term Stromateis often evoked an experience of concealment within his own writing: like the nut in its shell, the seeds in the earth or the disorderly planting of a mountainside, the Stromateis hide the truth. In scholarly discussion, this emphasis on concealment has often been associated with Clement’s rhetoric of mystery initiation.2 It has been compared with ‘esoteric’ topoi in philosophical and religious sects and interpreted as a distinctively Christian aspect of his use of the miscellany genre. In Chapters 8–10, I want to challenge this configuration of motifs and conversation partners: the Muses, the mysteries and Clement’s thematic emphasis on hiddenness have more to do with each other than has been recognised, and this can help us to understand Clement’s engagement with literary miscellanism in the contemporary Classical world. However, the argument needs to be made one step at a time. This chapter will focus on the Muses, the next on hiddenness and the one following on mystery imagery. It will become apparent that these are not three entirely separate themes, but they are closely intertwined. 1 2

Hardie 2002, 192–93; Petridou 2015, 82–83, 218–19, 222. E.g., Lilla 1971, 144–54; Ramelli 2017. See further, Chapter 10.

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Research on Christian reception of the Muses has usually focused on Christian poetry from the fourth to the seventeenth centuries;3 in this chapter, we shall see that the Christianisation of the Muses began not in poetry but in prose; not in the fourth century, but at least as early as the second, and Clement’s literary miscellany is a key witness. I want to show that the Muses were significant to all four of my case studies in Classical miscellanism, and that their role was in part to alert readers to things hidden in the work that may be discovered and sometimes to advise the readers of social behaviours or ascetic practices that would prepare them better to perceive what is hidden, for example, when they acted in a way that was hidden from others, or when they hid the base parts of the soul. I argue that Clement recognised the importance of the Muses in Classical subjectivities of hiddenness and revelation and for that reason took care to recast the Muse tradition in Christian guise from the start of his literary project in Christian formation. This prepares for a closer study in Chapter 9 of Clement’s motif of hiddenness and its relationship to Classical miscellanism.

muses and hiddenness in the classical miscellanists Religious Devotion in the Literary Frame It has not often been remarked in the study of imperial miscellanists that a religious literary frame is very common in these works. I want to begin by establishing that this is the case and that it deserves closer consideration. To take, once again, the examples that have been with us throughout this book: Plutarch despatches the first three books of his Table Talk with

3

Curtius 1939; 1953, 228–46; Dronke 2014; Pollman 2017, 49, 53, 55, 59, 71–73, 194, 216–19, 225–56. Christian reception of the Muses has been discovered in some non-poetic genres as well, though always later than Clement: Augustine took care to mention in his Retractationes that his allusion to the Muses in his De Ordine did not mean that he believed in these deities, and he added that he wished he had not mentioned them (Schanzer 2005, 105–6; Schlapbach 2014). Muse iconography may also be behind the earliest extant illumination of an evangelist in Greek Byzantine gospel manuscripts, which dates to the sixth century: Saint Mark is portrayed with a female figure standing over him as he writes; modern scholars explain it as a portrait of Mark with Divine Wisdom, but the composition is strikingly reminiscent of Classical portrayals of the philosopher and his Muse, which are familiar on many sarcophagi of the third and fourth centuries. On St. Mark in Codex Rossanensis (sixth century): Herbert 1908, 162. On the Classical motif of the Muses on sarcophagi: Borg 2004, 166–71; Hansen 2008. For other possible Muses in Roman art of the intellectuals: Meyer 2009.

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the hope that they should not be totally museless or un-Dionysian (μὴ παντελῶς ἄμουσα μηδ᾽ ἀπροσδιόνυσ᾽ εἶναι, 1.612e). His ninth and last book honours the Muses with an exceptionally bountiful collection of conversations held at an Athenian festival in their honour. Pliny opens his preface with an allusion to the ‘Camenae’, who were often treated as the Roman counterparts to the Greek Muses:4 his first words describe his ‘books of Natural History’ as ‘a novel task for the Camenae of your Quirites’. At the close of the preface, he cites Soranus’ ἐπόπτιδες (‘Lady Initiates of the Mysteries’) as a predecessor in using an index.5 The work as a whole closes with a prayer to Nature.6 Gellius concludes his preface by driving off those who are not zealous for the same Muse and quotes the chorus of Aristophanes’ Frogs to warn away the uninitiated, profane crowd who turn away from the Muses’ play. Pliny and Gellius both list Muses among the titles of other miscellanies that they did not choose, though Pliny mentions it in Greek and Gellius in Latin.7 Gellius also reports Helicon as a Greek title for this kind of work, which evokes one of the traditional homes of the Muses.8 Athenaeus’ preface is lost, but the epitome gives a fulsome description of Larensis, host of the banquet and patron of Athenaeus: Athenaeus highlights Larensis’ public role in Roman religious observances and the special knowledge that he had of ancient religious rites, which he had derived from his own study and book collecting. It is this that prompts Athenaeus to praise him in verses from Antiphanes and Pindar as a man devoted to the Muses and mousikê.9 At the very end of the work, Larensis closes the banqueting by pouring a libation, praying to all the gods and goddesses and singing a paian to Hygieia.10 All four of our case studies in Classical miscellanism thus give a religious frame to their work, and the most consistently prominent deities are the Muses. These allusions to the Muses are fleeting and not much developed (except in the case of Plutarch’s penultimate question in his ninth book). They have not been thematised in the modern wave of study on Classical miscellanism; for example, the index to Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire has an entry for ‘Moses’ but not ‘Muses’; neither the scholarship on miscellanism in general nor that on particular

4 6

7 10

5 See below, pp. 209–11. Plin. NH pr. 1, 33. Plin. NH 37.205, ‘Salve, parens rerum omnium Natura, teque nobis Quiritium solis celebratam esse numeris omnibus tuis fave.’ 8 9 Plin. NH pr. 24; Gell. NA pr. 6. Gell. NA pr. 7. Athen. Deipn. 1.2c–3b. Athen. Deipn. 15.701f–2a.

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miscellanies gives them close attention – with the partial exception of some studies of Plutarch, who gives them unmistakable prominence in the Table Talk.11 It is likely that the neglect of the miscellanists’ Muses arises at least in part because of wider habits of thought in Classical scholarship concerning things religious, which have affected the way the Muse tradition is perceived today. Like so-called Roman antiquarianism,12 the study of the Muses has been shaped by modern attempts to identify an ancient enlightenment, when critical thinking was born in the Classical world.13 In the case of the Muses, early Greece is often treated as the time when primitive belief in the Muses existed in its integrity. The further one gets from that archaic Greek setting, the more the Muses are interpreted by modern scholars as merely conventional tropes.14 Their ‘biography is the history of a fading metaphor’, as one scholar put it.15 However, there are many problems with approaching the tradition of the Muses in this way: firstly, scholars have widely different views about when exactly the secularisation of the Muses took place: some scholars place it before Homer, as if Homer himself already inherited a merely ossified formula;16 others have emphasised the transition from the archaic to the Classical age and associated the desacralisation of the Muses with the advent of writing, or at least of prose writing,17 or with the professionalization of poetry into a technê for which the poet took responsi-

11 13

14

15 17

12 Klotz 2011, 171–78. Momigliano 1990, 54–79; Macrae 2017. For the ‘ancient enlightenment’ narrative in connection with antiquarianism: Moatti 1997; Wallace-Hadrill 1997; 2007; Rüpke 2012. Critique by MacRae 2016, 29, 159 n. 10, and more fully in MacRae 2017. For the ‘secularisation’ narrative in connection with the Muses: see the critique in Spentzou 2002. For the wider problem of Classicists’ quest for the ancient birth of reason, see the critique in Buxton 1999 of Vom Mythos zum Logos (Nestle 1941) and its influence. Rightly observed by Laird 2002, 117–18. For wider discussion of Muses in antiquity, see esp. essays collected in Spentzou and Fowler 2002; P. Murray and Wilson 2004; Christian et al. 2014. Important older discussions include: Curtius 1953, 228–46; Minton 1960; Commager 1962, 2–15; Pucci 1977; 1998; Vernant 1983, 75–105; Barchiesi 1991; Calame 1995; Detienne 1996, 39–52; Small 1997, 72–78. In the twenty-first century, some scholarship has begun to open up a more complex and interesting picture of the Roman tradition of the Muses: see esp. Hardie 2002; 2007; 2016; Borg 2004, 166–71; Sciarrino 2004; Meyer 2009; Robinson 2012; Campbell 2014. Several articles in the Spentzou and Fowler 2002 volume also address Roman literature. 16 Commager 1962, 3; Spentzou 2002, 21. Curtius 1939, 131; Minton 1960, 292. Pérez 1998, 169–70; Laks 2001; Kahn 2003, 144. Similarly, the birth of fiction has been associated with the advent of literacy and the changing role of the Muses: Rösler 1980, 302–8.

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bility18 or with changes in thought patterns from myth to reason;19 others stress the changes that took place in the Hellenistic period, when the Muses were installed as patrons of libraries and largely separated from the performative dimension of mousikê;20 others emphasise the contrast between Greece and Rome and draw all their examples of the fossilisation of the Muse-myth from Latin sources.21 This diversity is disconcerting and underscores the problem with all these accounts: they all depend on distinctly modern, post-Enlightenment views of what counts as ‘secular’ or ‘sacred’; they are frequently triumphalist in tone, celebrating what they call an ‘emancipation from divine power’ when the Muses become a mere trope;22 they all tell a linear narrative from one mode of subjectivity to another and give little account of the synchronic diversity within the Muse myth;23 finally, they tend to privilege particular kinds of evidence – poetry over prose, Greek over Roman, oral over written, literary rather than philosophical, early rather than late.24 In light of this, it is not surprising if scholars pass over the mention of the Muses in imperial authors without pausing to wonder why it is there and whether it is important. The learned Roman miscellanists worked within a culture of grammatikê rather than mousikê, a literature of prose not poetry, an institutional context of the library not the symposium and the social world of Rome rather than Greece. On all counts, it would be likely that scholars would not set much store by their reference to the Muses. A full study of the Muse tradition would be the best way to displace this grand narrative of secularisation of the Muses in antiquity, but it would take us too far afield from the present project. However, I want to show in this chapter that the Roman imperial miscellanists took the Muses seriously and continued to associate them with forms of hiddenness that were crucial to gaining insight and transcending the self for meaningful experience of life. Furthermore, in their self-conscious secondariness, these late authors provide a way of reading the earlier tradition 18 19 21 22

23

Nagy 1989, 23–24; Finkelberg 1998, 161–91. 20 Detienne 1996, discussed in Spentzou 2002, 5–8. Cf. P. Murray 2004, 386. Commager 1962, 2–15. E.g., J. R. Morgan 2000, 93, describes Finkelberg 1998 as a ‘brilliant book’ which ‘charts the sea-change in Greek poetics between Homer and Aristotle, which emancipated the poet from divine inspiration and made his own art the source of his creation’. Spentzou and Fowler 2002 try to refresh the debate by focusing on the Muses’ part in a discourse of power, but in many ways they accept the desacralisation of the Muses as a starting point and seek to complicate and politicise this, rather than to reconceive the sacred aspect of the Muses. See Spentzou 2002, 21–23. 24 Cf. critique in Buxton 1999a. Well portrayed in Spentzou 2002.

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that cultivates attentiveness to the Muses’ role in acquiring wisdom. I will argue that although their emotional registers vary widely, and the authors have diverse social and spiritual intentions with their work, their allusions to the Muses are not just mindless repetitions of a literary convention. Rather, they cite a tradition of the Muses and their province because they seek to establish a spiritual and social relation to that tradition, especially to its more scholarly forms.

Pliny’s Camenae, Varro’s Musae and Soranus’ ἐπόπτιδες Pliny bookends his preface with allusions to the Muses and to Soranus’ Epoptides (‘Lady Initiates of the Mysteries’). These allusions are so fleeting that one could easily pass them by, but this section invites us to pause over them, placing them in the context of the Roman tradition of antiquarian scholarship, including Varro’s Musae (perhaps better known to modern scholars as his Disciplinae). I argue that Pliny evokes Muses and mysteries within the Roman tradition of scholarly research that was exemplified by Varro and Soranus. He intended his own project to inspire similar devotion to the Muses of Rome (the Camenae), through ascetic discipline in the study of countless texts. The way he frames his preface signals the potential for spiritual insight and socially transformative revelation through this work. This is not to say that he ‘believed in’ the Muses as anthropomorphic deities dancing on Helicon, but that he valued a kind of scholarship whose spirituality, theology and purpose could only be properly articulated through the language of this tradition. The Camenae of the Quirites in Pliny’s Prescript Pliny opens his preface with an allusion to the ‘Camenae’, who were often treated as the Roman counterparts to the Greek Muses:25 his first words describe, Libros Naturalis Historiae, novicium Camenis Quiritium tuorum opus, natos apud me proxima fetura. Books of Natural History, a novel work of the Camenae of your Quirites, born at my place, the most recent brood. (Pliny, NH pr. 1)

25

On the identification of the Camenae as Muses, see Skutsch 1944; McDermott 1977, 365; Hardie 2016.

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At the close of the preface, he cites Soranus’ ἐπόπτιδες (‘Lady Initiates of the Mysteries’) as a predecessor in using an index.26 These allusions are so brief that it is not surprising if they have seemed insignificant to many scholars. However, their position, bookending the preface, and their allusiveness, indicate that they are fraught with meaning. They locate Pliny’s ‘books of Natural History’ agonistically within a literary, political, cultural and religious landscape. The Camenae were native, landscape deities local to Rome; they protected a spring just outside the Servian wall at the boundary of the septimontium. Plutarch associated them with the legend of the foundation of Rome by King Numa (Plut. Numa 13), and this association may have been more widespread.27 ‘Quirites’, like ‘Camenae’, recalls the rustic origins of Rome: it originally referred to the Sabine people, but when the Sabines and Romans united, it was taken over for Roman citizens in civic contexts.28 In Pliny’s present day setting, ‘Camenis Quiritium’ thus located the work in relation to the citizens of Rome in their local, Italian landscape. The juxtaposition underlined the self-consciously civic, Roman frame.29 But the Camenae also had a literary role. Pliny wants us to recognise this, for he associates them with his work as a literary ‘opus’: they are the mother of his ‘brood’, and the ones for whom this opus is ‘something new’. The Camenae had been identified with the Greek Muses since the start of the Roman literary tradition. Livius Andronicus (c. 284–c. 204 BC) rendered the opening verse of the Odyssey with ‘Camena’ for ‘Mousa’. Ennius (c. 239–c. 169 BC) in his Annals portrayed an epiphany where the Camenae identified themselves with the Muses (Ann. 487).30 By mentioning the Camenae-Muses at the very start of this epic-length work on nature, Pliny evokes the tradition of epic invocation, which was especially associated with Homer and Vergil in their great cultural and national epics. At one level, then, Pliny’s allusion to the Camenae suggests an attempt to rival in prose the kind of insight that epic poets claimed for their poetic works.31 Several scholars have observed that Vergil is among

26 28 29 30

31

27 Plin. NH pr. 1, 33. Hardie 2016. Lewis and Short s.v. ‘Quiris’. ‘Romani’ was retained for military affairs. Cf. Baldwin 2005, 93. Hardie 2016, 64. The text of Ennius’ verse is lacunose: ‘Musas quas memorant nosce[s] nos esse [Camenas]’; the Camenae are speaking. On the special association between Muses and epic: Laird 2002, 137. Horace AP 136–42 and Quintilian Inst. 10.1.48 treat Homer’s preface as a model of formal style and rhetorical propriety, cf. Commager 1962, 4.

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the authors whom Pliny cites and critiques throughout his work and that he seems to hope to cap Vergil’s poetic achievement through the superior medium of learned prose.32 Vergil followed Homer in invoking the Muses at the start of his epic poem; Homer’s invocations were recognised as a topos of epic poetry even in antiquity.33 Pliny does not formally invoke the Camenae, but he does cite them as the source of his work, and his project is epic in length and aims at a place in national culture that could be comparable in significance to Vergil. His allusion to the Camenae thus intimates that he has a source of insight into hidden things that is superior to Vergil’s, not least in lying closer to the Roman landscape. Closer to Pliny’s heart, however, may be an allusion to Varro, whom he often cites with respect, and who modeled the kind of scholarly activity that underlay Pliny’s own work. Varro had published nine books of Disciplinae, which were nicknamed Musae in antiquity. Which disciplines were included is uncertain; Ritschl discerned grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music, medicine and architecture; Schanzer finds external evidence for most of these.34 There is nothing like ‘naturalis historia’ among these. Varro had dealt with other disciplines, but here is one that is newer still, and that Pliny presents as potentially greater than all. Recent scholarship has argued that Pliny did not intend to innovate within the same genre as Varro’s Disciplinae35 but this should not diminish attention to Pliny’s interaction with Varro in other ways, both in his preface, and in his work as a whole.36 One possible connection between Varro’s project and Pliny’s rhetoric lies in the association of his books with the Muses, and with hiddenness and mysticism. In order to explain this, we need to set Varro and Pliny in the broader context of the history of Roman scholarly culture. Varro’s Musae and the Antiquarian Tradition of Roman Scholarship Varro is remembered today as a pioneer of what modern scholars anachronistically describe as ‘antiquarianism’. The term is infelicitous, since it evokes the antiquaries of the Enlightenment, and this plays into the quest to identify a moment or event in the Classical past when critical rationality (i.e., ‘modern man’) was born, as we saw happening also in the study of the Muses: for some Classicists, this ancient Enlightenment is 32

33 35 36

For wider discussion of Pliny’s competitive emulation of Virgil: Bruère 1956; Howe 1985, 570–72; Doody 2007. 34 See n. 31. Schanzer 2005. Carey 2003, 18; Doody 2009; Koenig and Woolf 2013a, 38–42; Laehn 2013, 85. Howe 1985, 565–69.

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what ‘Roman antiquarianism’ signifies.37 However, this misses the spiritual and religious significance of the Roman scholarly tradition. In the late Republic, many of the Roman elites perceived a crisis in moral authority within the state. Blaming the negligence of the citizens for allowing traditional Roman mores to slip into oblivion, they set about researching long-forgotten customs and laws. Their hope was to restore Rome to her pristine original state, ascertaining the contours of this ideal through careful research into the past.38 Wallace-Hadrill has pointed out that this effectively established a new source of auctoritas within the state: namely, the appeal to tradition, which rested on extensive, detailed research and citation of sources in order to establish the antiquity of a custom or rite.39 ‘Antiquarian’ scholars of antiquity focused on details about any aspect of the past but often had special interests in etymology, institutions, religious rites and observances; they sought out evidence of all kinds – archaeological as well as literary – for establishing the history of the landscape, language and practices of their own society. Such works were distinguished by their preoccupation with detail; quest for origins as explanations; emphasis on etymologies; underlying question-and-answer method, where alternative answers are preserved and systematic ordering of material, often itemised with lemmatised headings.40 Dennis MacRae’s Legible Religion has argued that Varro’s term ‘civil theology’ is better than ‘antiquarianism’ for this mode of scholarship, whose purpose, he argues, was ‘the production of “Roman religion” as a legible object’.41 According to MacRae, it was through these scholarly practices of research and writing that texts acquired a serious place in Roman religion, albeit not the place of ‘holy writ’. The most celebrated Republican antiquarian was M. Terentius Varro, whose scholarship startled even Augustine: he had ‘read so much that we are amazed he had any time left for writing, and yet he wrote so many things that we can hardly believe that anyone could manage to read them all’ (Aug. CD 6.2).42 For modern scholars, Varro is the paradigmatic ‘Roman antiquarian’. It was he who introduced the term Antiquitates in

37 38

39

40 41

See n. 13. Peter 1897, 108–58; Rawson 1985, 233–49; Moatti 1997; Wallace-Hadrill 1997; MacRae 2016; 2017. Wallace-Hadrill 1997, 11–12. Cf. Vessey 2014, 268: ‘Varro’s great coup as an antiquarian was to make traditional Roman ways (the mos maiorum) look so strange as to need interpretation, and then to interpret them over the heads of their reputed guardians.’ Stevenson 2004, 124–25. On the systematic ordering of the material: Rawson 1978. 42 MacRae 2016, 29. tr. D. J. Taylor 1996, 1.

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his diptych, Antiquitates Rerum Humanarum in twenty-four books, and Antiquitates Rerum Divinarum in sixteen more.43 However, Varro was not alone: M. Junius Gracchanus, Aelius Stilo and other little known figures also participated in this form of work; Cicero was a keen admirer, though he did not write antiquarian works himself, so far as we know.44 Cicero’s celebration of Varro’s Antiquitates Rerum Divinarum has been often quoted in modern histories of the period to draw attention to the spiritual significance of such projects: We were sojourning and wandering like foreigners in our own city and your books brought us home in a manner of speaking (quasi domum reduxerunt), so that at last we could recognize (agnoscere) who and where we were. You have revealed (aperuisti) the age of our city and the disposition of the times, the laws of worship and of the priests, the lore of peace and war, the names, kinds, functions and reasons of homes, quarters, places and of all things divine and human. (Cic. Acad. post. 1.9, tr. Murphy 2004b, 134)

Cicero’s language is similar to accounts of mystery initiations, where people wander at first in fear and confusion until the mystagogue guides them to an experience of revelation and illumination through which they perceive their place in the cosmos, which brings new hope.45 Others made the analogy between antiquarian scholarship and the mysteries explicit. L. Cincius wrote a guidebook to the physical monuments of Rome called Mustagogicon; Valerius Soranus wrote an antiquarian work entitled Epoptides (‘Lady Initiates’), mentioned by Pliny at the close of his preface.

43

44 45

But as MacRae 2017, 139 points out, the modern discussion of ‘antiquarianism’ is using the term in a significantly different sense, loading it with greater significance and evoking a wider currency than it had. Clement cites him as Οὐάρρων ὁ συγγραφεύς in an interesting reference that suggests Clement read Latin, even though he mostly draws on Greek sources (Protr. iv.46.4). Stevenson 2004, 119. Cf. Plut. Fr. 158 Sandbach; Bremmer 2014, 1–20; Hardie 2004. Augustine later echoed Cicero’s perception in his own portrayal of Varro’s role, but used a different religious frame: ‘He [Varro] feared that the gods should perish, not by enemy invasion, but by the negligence of citizens, and he claimed that this was the doom from which he was rescuing them, and that it was a more useful service that things should be stored away and preserved in the memory of good men through books of this type, than when Metellus is said to have rescued the sacred objects of the Vestals from burning, or Aeneas to have saved the penates from Troy’ (fr. 2A = Aug. Civ. Dei 6.2.48); quoted in, e.g., WallaceHadrill 1997, 14; 2007, 65–6). Both Cicero’s and Augustine’s comments have become loci classici in modern scholarship, so often quoted that one begins to wonder whether too much is being built on them, particularly as Augustine is viewing Varro through a Ciceronian lens (cf. G. Clark 2007; Vessey 2014, 268). However, the preoccupation with hiddenness and revelation is attested in wider tropes, as discussed here.

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These titles draw attention to the experience of hiddenness and revelation, which is central to the emotional and cognitive power of the research. Varro’s work on the Muses or Disciplines appears to have taken the antiquarian approach to a special degree of systematic intensity. Cicero portrayed Atticus commenting that ‘Varro’s Muses are silent for rather longer than they used to be, but I do not think that he is delaying, but hiding (celare) what he writes.’ Varro protests that it would be injudicious to write what one might want to keep hidden; rather, the thing is that he has a ‘magnum opus’ on his hands (Cic. Acad. 1.1–2). This brief exchange is so allusive that it is hard to be sure of the nuances of Atticus’ ‘celare’ or Varro’s ‘magnum’. But later sources suggest that the work had a sacred character that might need to be treated with this sort of care: Danuta Schanzer has drawn on evidence from Licentius and Augustine to argue that Varro portrayed the education from the disciplines as a kind of mystic ascent, similar to the Platonic ascent to pure knowledge. Licentius writes of the ‘arcanum Varronis iter’, the ‘secret path of Varro’, and Augustine protests so vociferously against the significance of the Muses that he appears nervous of the power they have over his readers or himself.46 Roman Antiquarianism, which we may find dry today, was thus practised not as an idle past-time, but as a quest to enter more deeply into the secrets of reality and to understand better the Romans’ own place in the world. Pliny, though living in a much later period, is clearly moved by Varro’s work47 and participates in a similar culture of knowledge: his ‘Camenae’ at the start are at most but a fleeting allusion to Varro’s Musae, but Pliny presses further the invitation to his readers to enter into a profound and ‘hidden’ relation to his own work. Soranus’ Epoptides The mention of Soranus’ Epoptides at the close of the preface confirms Pliny’s interest in the ‘mysteries’ of antiquarianism in paving the way for his own work. Valerius Soranus was an antiquarian of Varro’s generation. Cicero called him ‘the most learned man to wear a toga’; he was a Latin scholar who was not from Rome, but who distinguished himself in both Greek and Latin literature. Pliny brings him in as a precedent for the use of the technology of an index, as if he had no more significance than that. And yet, by making this the way he closes the preface and leaving it

46

Schanzer 1991; 2005.

47

Howe 1985, 565–69.

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pregnantly unexplained, he invites his readers to contemplate its significance further: hoc ante me fecit in litteris nostris Valerius Soranus in libris quos ἐποπτίδων inscripsit. Valerius Soranus did this before me in our (i.e. national, Roman) literature, in the books that he entitled Epoptides. (Pliny, NH pr. 33)

In this way, Pliny’s preface is bookended by two book titles: his own, ‘libros Naturalis Historiae’ (pr. 1), and the Greek title ‘libris quos ἐποπτίδων inscripsit’ (pr. 33). The penultimate word is ἐποπτίδων, a Greek title for a book that was counted part of ‘our Roman literature’ (‘in litteris nostris’). The Epoptides are not extant, but the title clearly alludes to mystery initiations.48 The epopteia was the visual high point of the initiation rite at Eleusis; this was the moment when the experience of darkness, disorientation, fear and wandering gave way to a vision of sacred things that brought fresh hope and a transformed experience of life. Philosophical curricula often gave the name epoptics to the highest stage of insight; the association of mysteries with antiquarian writing in the late Republic evoked the idea that they too purveyed an experience of mystic insight. By alluding to the epopteia at the very close of the preface, Pliny invites us to anticipate this kind of mystical revelation through his work too. The mention of Valerius Soranus, however, sounds a dramatic note of caution. Though obscure today, Soranus’ name was well-known in antiquity, because he was said to have revealed the secret name of Rome and to have been punished for it. The story is extant in six different versions from antiquity; the reason it was so widely told was probably that it captured the high stakes of antiquarian scholarship, which had captivated so many. Soranus was said to have discovered a secret, hidden name, sacred to the very being of Rome. A discovery like that must be used for the public good, but Soranus had tripped up. He had divulged it in the wrong context, and it had cost him dearly – indeed in some versions it cost him his life.49 As Trevor Murphy observes, whether this story was true or not, it was clearly a powerful story in the Republic and early Empire, hence its frequent retelling. It captured the sense of the great stakes involved in antiquarian scholarship: on the one hand, one was pursuing through

48

Macrae 2016, 40.

49

Murphy 2004b.

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research the very things that mattered most to Rome’s self-understanding and security; on the other, if it went wrong, the risk was death, as in a mystery initiation that fails. Pliny, in publishing his Natural History, was inviting his readers to enter into the mystery that is Natura, which also turns out to have Rome at its centre. But the stakes were high. The story draws attention to the modes of hiddenness, and personal and social investment, that are appropriate in research: research required a whole-life commitment just to discover hidden facts, but there was also an obligation on the scholar to embody the knowledge he acquired in appropriate ways, as befitted the gods and benefited the city of Rome. Pliny narrates his version of the story briefly in the third book of the Natural History. He foregrounds the tension between the hiddenness that needs to be dissolved and that which needs to be preserved: here is a sacred truth that is slipping into oblivion because pious scruple (‘salutari fide abolitum’) prevents mention of the name, but respect for secret rites of the gods (‘arcanis caerimoniarum’) also demands discretion.50 Pliny himself, like his readers, treads a delicate balance in approaching the Natural History also: what should be kept hidden and what revealed? Ostensibly, Pliny cites Soranus simply as a predecessor in the use of the technology of the index. In this era before indexes were a common practical apparatus in a printed work, the index signposted private reading and personal engagement: there is little point having an index if a book is being read publicly to a group who want different things from it.51 The index thus shifts responsibility to the individual for how they read the work and what they do with their discoveries.52 It is up to the reader whether they are going to follow Soranus’ fate, or not. Lucubratio and Solitary Study Pliny has already shown his readers his own model of solitary reading and personal engagement. It is a model that carefully balances public conscience with private time: he worked on his enquiry into Natura by night, taking care not to deduct anything from his hours spent in public business: We pursue this sort of interest in our spare moments, that is at night – lest any of your house should think that the night hours have been given to idleness. The days we devote to you, and we keep our account with sleep in terms of health, content even with this reward alone, that, while we are dallying53 (in Varro’s phrase) with

50 52 53

51 Pliny, NH 3.65, with Murphy 2004b, 129–30. Stevenson 2004, 131–32. Cf. Murphy 2004a, 206–7, 211; 2004b, 135–36. ‘muginamur’, edd. ‘musinamur’, Beaujeu 1950 (Budé), 52. See above, p. 86, n. 19.

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these trifles, we are adding hours to our life – since of a certainty to be alive means to be awake. (Pliny, NH pr. 18; tr. Rackham, LCL 330, 13)

In this passage, Pliny is alluding to the Roman institution of the ‘lucubratio’ (‘working by lamp-light’), which was the time for working by night, when the only light available came from lamps. Again, this image points readers back to the antiquarian tradition: one of the earliest extant Latin authors to mention reading by lamplight is Varro, who wrote, ‘I have lucubrated at the lamp not just of Aristophanes, but also of Cleanthes’ (Ling. 5.9).54 It is thus appropriate that Pliny should cite Varro explicitly at just this point. In the late Republic and early Empire, the lucubratio developed into a significant ideal and practical space with social and moral dimensions. Many writers presented themselves as writing by night, to the point where James Ker could describe the second half of the second century as the time when ‘the image of the night writer comes into its own’. Ker traced the development of the topos in many widely read Roman authors, especially Cicero, Seneca, Quintilian, Pliny and Gellius. He showed how they invite their readers imaginatively to share this liminal space, between night and day, dark and light, private and public. The night, well-used, could be a time for continuing work in public service; illused, it was squandered on licentious pleasures or idleness.55 It could evoke the religious feeling associated with the Romans’ respect for the mores of their humble ancestors; Ker described it as ‘a primal scene of the archaic household, combining various aspects of an idealized Roman self in the figure of the nocturnal laborer: frugality, libertas, religious authority, a collaboration with nature, public service, the foundation of the Republic, a change or assertion of status, a powerful speaking position’.56 The ‘lucubratio’ later became a term for Christian prayer by night.57 In the world of Roman scholarly antiquarianism, this trope of the hidden reader could interact with the trope of the hidden fact. Antiquarian authors frequently portrayed themselves searching laboriously for what was ‘buried’ or ‘covered over’, so that they might ‘bring it to light’, ‘exhume’ or ‘uncover’ it. Duncan MacRae terms this the ‘trope’ of ‘revelation of the obscure or hidden fact’.58 Pliny has already highlighted the drama of where his work is poised – between ignorance and knowledge, darkness and light, things that the Roman world might

54 56

55 Ker 2004, 229 n. 71, citing Braund 1996, 38 on Juv. 1.51. Ker 2004. 57 58 Ker 2004, 227. Ker 2004, 240. MacRae 2016, 40.

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never know if he had not researched them and things that are now available for contemplation through his books. He has trawled 2000 volumes, few of which diligent students have touched before, because the material is so hidden away (‘propter secretum materiae’, pr. 17). Furthermore, he has collected 20,000 facts from the authors that have been investigated and added more facts that earlier authors did not know or that subsequent life experience discovered (pr. 17). It is a work that involves giving light to dark things (‘dare ... obscuris lucem’, pr. 15), and its material is life (‘sterilis materia, rerum natura, hoc est vita, narratur’, pr. 13). Its subject matter accords perfectly with its mode of composition, which arose through the hours added to life in the form of wakefulness (‘pluribus horis vivimus, profecto enim vita vigilia est’, pr. 18). The nocturnal context of the labour is thus intimately connected with its lifegiving properties. This contrasts sharply with the ‘very amusing’ (‘facetissimi’) gesture of giving the title Lucubrationes to the work of someone who liked to spend his nights drinking – one Bibaculus, true to his name (pr. 24).59 In this way, Pliny connects the hidden nocturnal setting with the meaningfulness of his task, as well as its potential to be distorted into mere clandestine activity. For him, this is something on which he spends his life not by chance but in a deeply intentional way, snatching the hours for life from sleep. To write this kind of work is to practise a kind of asceticism in regard to sleep. All this suggests that when Pliny closes the preface with an allusion to Soranus’ Epotides, the apparently throwaway character of the remark should not be taken at face value. It has an important place in defining the reader’s engagement with Pliny’s work – in the first instance, through the index but also beyond the index. As so often in his archly witty preface, Pliny is using irony to announce covertly the deeper mysteries that are to be encountered, before he is ready to meet the reader on an emotional level commensurate with that experience. As soon as he begins book 2, the tone shifts. Now he comes clean about his subject: the universe, for whose firmament he barely has words, is justly held as a ‘numen’, eternal, immeasurable, neither born, nor ever to perish, it is ‘sacer’ (2.1). This is at once a work of nature and nature herself, ‘idemque rerum naturae opus et rerum ipsa natura’ (2.2). No longer is ‘rerum natura’ spoken of as ‘sterilis materia’.

59

Ker 2004, 232–36.

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The sense of the numinous is not evenly sustained through the thirtysix books that follow. Pliny’s long labour spans a range of emotional registers, and he seems to view Nature differently on different nights of his sleepless reading. Sometimes she seems to be inventing playthings for herself (7.2.32; 8.12.34). Sometimes one suspects Pliny is sharing a joke with his readers (7.21.85). Sometimes she appears to be reproving her children (21.24.77–78); often, however, she is provisioning for their care and benefit (8.81.219; 12.1.1). His openness to the mystic potential of encountering nature through his work is recurrent and is one of the ways in which he sustains his own sense of the value of his task (11.1.1–4; 32.1.1). Nature is to him a personal deity, who intends many things for the benefit of humankind. However, contemplation of her various gifts and creations most often issues not in intense marvel so much as in appreciation of the lessons to be learnt among humankind for how to live more wisely in the world.60 If we learn about different kinds of pitch, then we know what to use on the itchscabs of cattle, or the sore teats of the mothers (24.25.41). If we study the properties of the peony, we can find a remedy for the mockery of Fauns while we are at rest (25.10.29). If we observe elephants, they give us a model of intelligence, obedience, memory and affection, as well as ‘virtues rare even in humanity’, namely, ‘honesty, wisdom, justice, religious devotion, and veneration of stars, sun, and moon’ (8.1.1). This kind of observation allows Pliny to turn his account of Nature’s hidden things outwards for a didactic purpose. In his eyes, he should not be the only one who approaches the hiddenness of nature in this way. He criticises those who dig into Nature’s hidden things for the sake of luxury, but not for the sake of wisdom. He criticises those who fail to study nature’s hidden things at all or, worse, who hide what they have learned: how much better than we were the men of old, who spared no effort in their researches and shared it with posterity!61 Pliny thus bookends his preface with Roman-style allusions to the Muses and the mysteries.62 Insight into what is hidden, and the tantalising possibility of revelation, are evoked both by the Camenae and, in a less ambiguous way, by the Epoptides. Pliny, however, will interpret this in

60

61 62

E.g., 8.81.219; 12.1.1; 22.7.15–17, 48.87, 56.117; 24.1.1, 1.4, 73.117; 27.1.1. But cf. 8.35.87 for the darker side of nature, who bestows harm as well as remedies. NH 25.1.1–3, cf. 12.1.1–2; 17.3.30; 18.60.227; 32.1.1. For the association between Muses and mysteries: Hardie 2002 (Georgics) and 2004 (Classical Athens). White 2017, 74–79 collects further sources.

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terms of the study of Nature. The meaningfulness of his writing consists in its participation in, and mediation of, the meaningfulness of Nature herself. This is the mystery that he hopes to mediate to others. Soranus indexed only Lady Initiates; Pliny can boast that he indexes ‘Natural History’ and Life itself.

Gellius’ Mystic Chorus With Gellius, we shift to a different emotional register compared with Pliny. The allusions to Muses and mysteries that we found in Pliny and elsewhere in the antiquarian tradition are elaborated by Gellius into a rhetorical showpiece. If one could easily miss these themes in Pliny’s preface, the same could not be said about Gellius’. The very first title that Gellius rejects for his own work is Musae (pr. 6), but at the end of the preface, the Muses take an important role in preparing his audience for what lies ahead: he warns off those who have not spent their nights keeping watch in scholarly activity nor refined themselves in debates with rival followers of the same Muse. Such people should stay far from these ‘Nights’ (pr. 19). He drives home the point with two citations: a proverb (pr. 20) and then a quotation from the chorus of Aristophanes’ Frogs, where the chorus of mystic initiates warn away all those who know nothing of the ‘rites of the Muses’ (ὄργια Μουσῶν), while inviting ‘You’ to join the mystic choirs, awake the song, and take part in their all-night watches that befit the festival (pr. 21). Gellius calls this Aristophanes’ ‘law for viewing his play’ and declares that he wants to borrow it ‘for people reading these notes’, for he too wants to warn away uninitiated readers who turn away from ‘the play of the Muses’ (‘ludus musicus’, pr. 20). Gellius is integrating several different tropes in these closing chapters of his preface. The imagery is drawn from mystery initiations, where the impure are warned away, but the pure get to join the chorus of song and nocturnal festival. Whereas the Eleusinian initiations were part of the cult of Demeter, and Aristophanes’ Frogs, as a theatre piece, integrated allusion to Dionysiac mysteries, Gellius’ deities are the Muses, who preside over scholarly activity in the antiquarian tradition. Gellius’ notes are far from musical in the archaic or Classical sense: his contrast between Aristophanes’ law ‘fabulae suae spectandae’ and his reapplication of the same law ‘commentariis his legendis’ points up the contrast – in ‘viewing’ Aristophanes’ play, the choral dance would be

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seen, and the ‘ludus musicus’ would be heard in the tuneful song (μολπή) that the initiates call for. The ‘all-night revels’ (παννυχίδας) of that chorus would be festal dancing, whereas those who ‘have kept watch by night’ (‘vigilias vigilarunt’) so as to be admitted to his ‘Noctes’ are those who have entered learned debates with rival followers of the same, scholarly Muse (pr. 19–21). Gellius’ emphasis on the nocturnal setting of this activity alludes to the lucubratio, which Pliny also portrayed as the setting for his work. Gellius has already emphasised this from early in his preface, where he gave a narrative vignette of the nocturnal scene: the time was the ‘long winter nights’, the place was ‘countryside in the land of Attica’ and this setting is memorialised in his title, Attic Nights (pr. 4). In conjunction with the explicit allusions at the end of the preface to the mysteries and their commemoration in Attic theatre, Attic Nights evokes the nocturnal rites at Eleusis. However, Gellius portrays this as a time of scholarly activity: ‘reading, enquiring, writing, taking notes’. We know that Gellius modelled his preface in part on Pliny, and it is therefore interesting that what he picked up from Pliny and chose to develop was the emphasis on the nocturnal character of the lucubratio and its association with the mysteries of the scholarly Muses at the close of the preface just before his own table of contents. However, Gellius has rhetorically elaborated the topos. Whereas Pliny had defined the time of writing primarily in socio-economic terms as the time left over from public duties and only secondarily specified it as ‘nocturnal’ (NH pr. 18), Gellius provides a narrative vignette of the nocturnal scene, insists that the nocturnal aspect is integral also to its social reception and memorialises it in his title. While Pliny merely evoked the importance of mysteries through the casual and learned mention of Soranus’ title at the close of his preface, Gellius develops a full-scale dramatisation of the warning to non-initiates to keep out. While Pliny had only gently pointed to the Camenae as the source of his work, Gellius slaps down Musae as his first deselected title and makes the ‘rites of the Muses’ a description of his own books (pr. 6, 21 cf. 19). Gellius’ emphasis on Muses and mysteries is more brash, but not ultimately as earnest or as ambitious as Pliny’s antiquarian research. Gellius emphasises that his work is pleasurable and playful – ‘ludere ac facere’ is how he describes his activity in composing the Nights (pr. 4); he solicits from his readers a track record of ‘voluptates’ and ‘labores’ in this kind of work, not ‘labores’ alone (pr. 19); he rejects the ‘festivitates’ of other people’s titles, but he chooses to quote ‘homo festivissimus’ to

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introduce the law for who should read his work – Aristophanes, the comic playwright (pr. 4, 20); it is the ‘ludus musicus’ that the readers should embrace, and the celebration of the mystery will be itself a ‘festival’ (τῇδε ... ἑορτῇ, pr. 21). ‘Play’ (‘ludus’) was not a term that Pliny suggested in connection with his project, and his Catullan ‘nugae’ turned out to be the product of Varronian ‘muginamur’ when one read on in his preface (NH pr. 1, 18). Pliny had rejected Lucubrationes as a way to describe his work, because they had been written by an author as drunk as his nickname ‘Bibaculus’ might suggest. Gellius, however, hopes that his ‘lucubratiunculae’ will be favourably received by those with time and pleasure (‘tempus voluptasque’) in such reading (NA pr. 14). Pliny had laboured to collect facts that had been overlooked by others and that were secluded in obscure volumes (NH pr. 17); Gellius hopes that nobody will turn their noses up at reading things that they know already; after all, ‘is there anything in literature that is so out of the way (‘remotum’) that a lot of people do not already know it?’ (NA pr. 15). Gellius’ explicit philosophy of writing miscellanies is thus in some ways different from Pliny’s. He is not seeking anything that might be tantamount to discovering the secret name of Rome. Despite the laboured mystery imagery of the preface, in the Nights themselves, he shows little interest in formal religion, and he is not on the lookout for epiphanic experience of the numinous.63 It is the details of language and grammar that absorb him. And yet, as with Pliny, we should allow for a more earnest intention than the author’s irony and self-deprecation could suggest. Gellius’ preoccupation with language and grammar puts him in a close relationship to the antiquarian tradition of Roman scholarship with which his work has often been compared. Though not an antiquarian himself, he was an assiduous user of antiquarian scholarship, and he shared many of the antiquarians’ interests.64 He portrays himself getting the better of an ignorant grammaticus whom he met in a bookshop, when the grammaticus claimed to be the only person who could interpret Varro’s Saturae. Gellius promptly produced a copy of Varro that he had about his own person, and exposed the grammaticus as a stuck-up fool (NA 13.31).65 It is typical of Gellius to cultivate obscure interests in facts that would be hard for ordinary people to dig out, and in this way he

63 64

65

Stevenson 2004, 147. On Gellius and antiquarianism: Stevenson 1993; 2004; Rust 2009; cf. Johnson 2010, 110–14, 141–46. Johnson 2010, 111, 113, 129–30.

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participates in the scholarly culture of curiositas that seeks to ‘reveal the hidden fact’. It is this, too, which has led to his work being dubbed ‘esoteric’ by some modern scholars.66 The sense of spiritual purpose in this enterprise should not be underestimated: Gellius will devote all the days of his life to his own work of miscellany composition (pr. 23–24). The private labour happens in a nocturnal setting, and for him it evokes, if it does not constitute, a form of mystical devotion to the Muses. His imagery of warning off the uninitiated is drawn from mystery initiations, but whereas he cites Aristophanes’ Frogs, which combined allusions to the Eleusinian and Dionysiac mysteries in honour of Demeter and Dionysus respectively, Gellius’ deities are the Muses, who preside over scholarly activity in the antiquarian tradition. In conjunction with the explicit allusions at the end of the preface to the mysteries and their commemoration in Attic theatre, his title ‘Attic Nights’ evokes the nocturnal rites at Eleusis. However, Gellius portrays this as a time of scholarly activity: ‘reading, enquiring, writing, taking notes’ (pr. 19). Gellius’ spirituality is thus shaped by a tradition of scholarly devotion to the Muses. Like the antiquarians, Gellius poises his work between memory and forgetting, but rather than the Plinian aspiration to salus humana, his hopes are set on a deeper and more joyful experience of social life with the leisured elites. He has jotted down things that deserve to be remembered (‘quid memoratu dignum’) and now has them stowed away like a sort of literary pantry (‘quasi quoddam litterarum penus recondebam’) so that he can easily find things if he finds himself suddenly gripped by forgetfulness (pr. 2). In this way, his work serves as an ‘aid to memory’, by hiding things in a safe, familiar spot for retrieval. The secrets of his literary larder make his life meaningful by facilitating his participation in social conversation and in the society of other miscellany-makers. They enable him to contribute to conversations with a greater depth of learning and expertise than he would otherwise have had at his fingertips. This is the pattern of hidden, nocturnal initiation that his Muses oversee.

Plutarch’s Nine Books, Befitting Nine Muses In Plutarch’s Table Talk, we might expect mention of the Muses for different reasons from those in Pliny and Gellius. Whereas the Muses in

66

Johnson 2010, 110.

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Pliny and Gellius connect their work in the first place to the tradition of Roman antiquarian scholarship, Plutarch’s Table Talk stands within a Platonic tradition of philosophical sympotic literature. The Muses are pertinent, but for different reasons: firstly, mousikê, the province of the Muses defined in the traditional sense of a ‘harmony of poetic word, coordinated physical movement, and musical accompaniment’, was a normal part of the entertainment at a symposium; secondly, Plato had defined philosophy as the highest form of mousikê and set up a sanctuary of the Muses in the Academy.67 In light of these cultural and philosophical traditions, it is no surprise that Plutarch takes an interest in the Muses and mousikê in his Quaestiones Convivales. As with Pliny and Gellius, I shall suggest that reflection on the Muses is intertwined with issues of hiddenness and revelation that bear on the miscellanistic practice of the author, but in Plutarch’s case, this is structured differently from in the antiquarian scholarly tradition. Whereas the miscellanists in the antiquarian tradition anticipate disclosure through reading and study in the mystic solitude of a night spent with one’s books, Plutarch pursues the disclosure of philosophic truth through recollection of sympotic conversation. The antiquarian approach emphasises the hiddenness of the reader in the solitude of nocturnal research, the hiddenness of facts buried in books and the mystic intensity of anticipating revelation. I will argue that Plutarch’s sympotic approach places the emphasis elsewhere: on social and psychological aspects of hiddenness that facilitate the collective pursuit of philosophic truth in a sympotic gathering and that continue to cultivate the friendly spirit of the occasion in choosing what to remember and what to keep hidden in forgetfulness. This section shows how this is emphasised at structurally significant points of Plutarch’s work. Social Hiddenness and the Muses at the Symposium Plutarch’s preface to the Table Talk as a whole is a covering note to the first three books and concludes with a promise to send the rest swiftly ‘if these do not seem totally museless (ἄμουσα) nor un-Dionysian (ἀπροσδιόνυσα)’ (QC 1 pr. 612e). The adjectives ἄμουσα and ἀπροσδιόνυσα refer to the Muses and Dionysus as the deities with special 67

Attested in DL 4.1. Older scholarship suggested that Plato’s Academy was a thiasos dedicated to the Muses, but the weakness of this hypothesis has been repeatedly exposed in more recent scholarship. See the discussion by Dillon 2014. Plato’s Mouseion is probably better understood in the context of wider establishment of Mouseia in the Hellenistic period: Hardie 1997; Robinson 2012.

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interest in the symposia. At this point, the allusion to the deities is fleeting and lacks personification (this is developed in the quaestio that follows) but the context in the first preface already emphasises the spirituality of hiddenness and disclosure, for the preface itself is constituted as a reflection on what one should remember or forget from conversations that occur at symposia – that is, what should be published and what should be kept concealed. Only that which contributes to the ‘friend-making character of the table’ should be preserved (τὸ φιλοποιὸν τῆς τραπέζης, 612d). By implication, this is what counts as fit for the Muses and for Dionysus, in Plutarch’s view. The first quaestio develops this perspective. The question is whether one should philosophise over the cups. Everybody who speaks values philosophy, and seeks to honour Dionysus at the symposium, but they have different ideas about what that means. The first exchange between Ariston and Plutarch calls to mind that some people (not of the present company) think that it is right to imitate the Persians by having mousikê and acting at the symposium, but not stirring up philosophy, because philosophy is not for playing with (συμπαίζειν) and on sympotic occasions people are not in a serious frame of mind (σπουδαστικῶς ἔχοντας). Crato picks up on the tension between παιδία and σπουδή, but defends the importance of philosophical talk among all pleasures and especially when Dionysus the Looser loosens people’s tongues for the best conversation. Philosophy is the ‘art of life’ (τέχνη περὶ βίον), so of course it should have a place in all this (QC 1.1, 612f–13c). Plutarch’s speech is lengthier and more nuanced and gives more attention to the significance of the Muses and Dionysus and their respective spheres. He too perceives the tension between παιδία and σπουδή, but he seeks to reconcile them socially. He urges paying attention to those who make up the company: if they are all the kind of people that one reads about in Plato’s symposia, then it is proper to ‘mix Dionysus with the Muses not less than with the Nymphs, for while it is the Nymphs who make him propitious and gentle to our bodies, the Muses make him smiling and joyful for our souls’ (613d). He is using the deities’ names metonymically: wine (Dionysus) should be mixed with water (Nymphs) for the sake of the body, but philosophical conversation (Muses) for the sake of the soul. However, if they are the kind of folk who just listen to the sensuous aspect of sound – birdsong, cithara-strings or the soundingboard – then one should follow suit and cherish their way of doing things to the extent that it is decorous. In this case, philosophers must practice a hidden art. For it is the ‘pinnacle of quick-witted insight to seem not to

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philosophise while philosophising, and, while playing, to conduct the business of those who are in earnest’ (συνέσεως ἄκρας φιλοσοφοῦντα μὴ δοκεῖν φιλοσοφεῖν καὶ παίζοντα διαπράττεσθαι τὰ τῶν σπουδαζόντων, 614a). Plutarch’s model for his form of expression is Plato’s comment that it is the height of injustice to seem just when one is not; his sentiment, however, is his own (cf. ἐσχάτη γὰρ ἀδικία δοκεῖν δίκαιον εἶναι μὴ ὄντα, Plat. Resp. 361a5). He regards Dionysus above all as the god of ‘sympotic fellowship’ (συμποτικὴ κοινωνία), who is abused if the philosophers at the meal get bogged down in subtle problems and leave the other guests to throw themselves into singing and talking rubbish (QC 614f–15a). Plutarch’s perspective resonates with the argument of Crato in the fourth question in the same book, where he suggests that the best symposiarch is like a musical harmonist, tightening and loosening the dispositions of the guests through the appropriate amount of wine, in order to bring the gathering into a symphonic condition, marked by beauty of form and like-mindedness. The role of the Muses in bringing about social harmony or ὁμόνοια was traditional: they were a chorus of maidens singing in unison; Hesiod described them as ὁμόφρονες (Theog. 60);68 and the Romans consecrated a temple to Hercules Musagetes in the hope of fostering political concord.69 Plutarch’s emphasis on the social concord of the symposium underscores this as a particular style of doing philosophy in a hidden way, when the company is diverse in philosophical acumen and interest. These discussions early in Plutarch’s Quaestiones Convivales give a sense of the importance of mousikê as an image for discerning and trying to effect the social harmony that is required for a philosophical symposium. Unlike Pliny, Plutarch is not showcasing antiquarian methods of finding insight into the nature of things; unlike Gellius, he aims to wrestle with philosophical problems rather than just provide a source of interesting things to quicken the mind to study. His sense of what is hidden that underpins the successful philosophical conversation is social and affective: it is the sympotic koinônia that is maintained when people philosophise in a hidden way, and one possible approach to that may be to practise the role of a symposiarch as if one were a musical harmonist. Plutarch’s understanding of the Muses and music is twofold: as physical

68

69

Cf. Hes. Theog. 80–90 portrays them bringing about political harmony. See further: Barchiesi 1991, 7. On the foundation of the Aedes Herculis Musarum at Rome, and the role of the Muses in the Roman pursuit of concord, see esp. Hardie 2007. Also Hardie 2002; 2016.

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experience at the symposium, mousikê can distract and draw away unphilosophical minds; but the Muses are also a metonym for philosophical talk that educates. Together, these opening sections of the first book of the Quaestiones Convivales prepare the reader for how to engage with the work ahead. In both the preface and the first question, Plutarch uses his own voice to argue that philosophical conversation should not be abandoned, but whereas the preface emphasises opening it up in written form for a contemplative readership, the first question emphasises the hidden mode of practising philosophy in the oral, performative context of the symposium itself. This signals to the reader that the conversations collected together will often be philosophising in a hidden mode; thus as a reader, there is something to search for. In origin, this hiddenness is not a socially exclusive form of esotericism, but almost the opposite: it arises through respect for Dionysiac koinônia, and the need for philosophy to remain friendly and sociable. As a reader, Sossius Senecio can attend to what is hidden and allow himself to be formed by it; were he to go out and participate in further philosophical conversation with others, he ought presumably to observe the same rule of philosophising as a hidden art, mindful of his company. Psychological Hiddenness and the Muses at the Symposium In later prefatory comments, Plutarch develops the idea of hiddenness and ascetic self-restraint as key components of respect for the Muses in cultivating the conditions for sympotic philosophy. In the preface to the third book, he points out that wine makes people talk and exposes the things that would otherwise be hidden. But when people simply want to engage in friendly exchange, then they conduct the conversation as follows: When they come together they bring such discourses as hide (ἀποκρύπτεται) the base parts of the soul but encourage the part that is best and most mousikon (τὸ μουσικώτατον), going onward as if toward its own meadows and pastures, urged by love of rational discourse (ὑπὸ φιλολογίας). (Plut. QC 3 pr. 645c)

Compared with his contribution in QC 1.1, Plutarch here lays greater emphasis on inner, psychological formation, through hiding the base parts of the soul. The imagery of the best part of the soul advancing to its proper pastures draws on the Phaedrus (248b), but it is Plutarch’s innovation to call this part of the soul ‘the most musical’ and to associate its mousikê with the desire for philologia. He does not mean the kind of ‘love of discourse’ that was critiqued in the Phaedrus, but the dialectical,

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philosophic philologia that is modelled in the sympotic conversations that he records. This is the conversation of the miscellanists, cultivated as their special form of mousikê. Again, in the preface to the sixth book, Plutarch recounts that Plato once entertained the general Timotheus at a dinner at the Academy; he feasted his guest μουσικῶς καὶ ἀφελῶς. This ‘Muse-honouring simplicity’ meant that not only did Plato’s guests benefit in body, but also in mind, for they were able to recall the conversation at the cups. In the preface to the eighth book, he cites as a custom the Agrionia, where the women search for Dionysus as if he has run away and then leave off and say that he is hidden among the Muses. After a while, they then quiz each other with riddles. The point is that when drinking, we should have the kind of talk that teaches something, so that the wild and manic element is hidden, benevolently restrained by the Muses. These examples show that Plutarch was persistently interested in the way that the Muses and their associated realm of mousikê could be understood as that which benefits the philosophical formation of the soul through the sympotic encounter in rational discourse. The importance of hiding something in the soul is recurrently emphasised to make the conversation fruitful. The psychological element is pressed furthest in Plutarch’s contribution to the penultimate question of the last book. In its literary context, its location is significant: this last book emphasises the Muses more than any other. It is dedicated to them in a literary act of homage; it is the ninth book, just as they are nine in number; it comprises fifteen conversations as a superabundant gift compared with ten in all the earlier books; the conversations are said to have happened at the Athenian festival of the Muses (QC 9 pr. 736c). We know nothing about this festival other than what Plutarch tells us, but we infer that people honoured the Muses by getting together and talking about problems, which could be the material of miscellanies like Plutarch’s. There were also ritual observances of the Muses, including a libation to the nine sisters, a paean to their leader Apollo and communal singing of Hesiod’s verses about the birth of the Muses (QC 14, 743cd). The penultimate question, which follows these observances, showcases different methods of investigating the Muses in the Hellenistic tradition: rhetoric, antiquarianism, cosmology, Platonic philosophy and myth and educational curricula all play a role.70 Seven

70

On QC 14.14 see P. Murray 2002, 42; Dillon 2014, 6–11.

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different speakers put forward their views about the proper province of the Muses, and/or why they are nine in number. Plutarch, as so often, has the last word. His speech is separated from the previous speakers by a brief silence. His final explanation is etymological and psychological: he suggests that the Muse names contain hidden meanings indicating their roles and that each one is there to order and harmonise a different kind of psychological disturbance. He cites Plato, both for the method of etymological interpretation, and for the psychological assumption that souls are governed by two impulses, towards reason or emotion respectively, and therefore are in need of the divine pedagogy (μεγάλης καὶ θείας ὡς ἀληθῶς παιδαγωγίας) that the Muses provide. He suggests that the Muses bring these impulses into proper order and harmony (QC 9.14, 746b–47a). Thus at the close of the Quaestiones Convivales, the reader is left with a much more developed discussion of the Muses than in any previous book. Whereas the first book emphasised the social pattern of hiddenness, the emphasis has shifted by the end to the ascetic pattern of the personal formation of the reader. Having begun his nine books with a manifesto for hidden philosophising at the drinking party, Plutarch has gently led his readers to the heart of the cult of the Muses and asserted his own claim that the Muses preside over the harmony of the soul. His attentiveness to the formation of the soul within a vibrant intellectual culture and devotional praxis centred on the Muses concludes the frame of Plutarch’s own miscellany-making.

Athenaeus and Larensis’ Devotion to the Muses Athenaeus’ project shares with Pliny and Gellius a debt to the Roman scholarly culture of antiquarianism, but it shares with Plutarch a debt to sympotic literary tradition. These two strands shape his reception of the tradition of the Muses and mousikê. Through his portrayal of Larensis, the host of the banquet, Athenaeus signals that his project is an interpretation of devotion to the Muses within an antiquarian culture of scholarship. Larensis is portrayed as a religious expert whose public office was overseeing the temples and sacrifices for the city of Rome. Like Pliny, Valerius Soranus or Varro, he is distinguished by his studious exploration of things that matter for the Roman people but that are now hidden away in volumes that nobody reads any more. He has a practical understanding of the religious

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ceremonies of Romulus and Numa and scientific knowledge of the laws of the city, and he has found all this out by studying ancient decrees and ordinances and collecting (συναγωγή) laws, which people no longer teach and which have thereby been shrouded in silence (κατασεσιγασμένων, 1.3a). He owns more ancient Greek books than any of the stars of library collecting (συναγωγή) – even Philadelphus, the patron of the Alexandrian library! (1.3a–b). It is for this reason that Athenaeus describes Larensis in verses from Antiphanes and Pindar in order to celebrate his devotion to the Muses and mousikê: ἀεὶ δὲ πρὸς Μούσαισι καὶ λόγοις πάρει, ὅπου [τι] σοφίας ἔργον ἐξετάζεται. ... ἀγλαΐζεται δὲ καὶ μουσικᾶς ἐν ἀώτῳ, οἷα παίζομεν φίλαν ἄνδρες ἀμφὶ θαμὰ τράπεζαν ‘You are always present with the Muses and rational discourses, where any work of insight is examined’ ... ‘He takes delight in the choicest flower of mousikê, such things as we men play with frequently around our own dear table’. (Athen. Deipn. 1.3c)

Larensis’ devotion to the Muses, then, is expressed in his consummate participation in scholarly miscellanism in the service of Rome. The spirituality of this praxis is emphasised by his public religious role and his private study of secrets of religious and civic law. His work shows his devotion to Rome and her preservation through the relations between gods and men. His hospitality to the Deipnosophists develops this in the lighter context of the symposium. The sympotic theme encourages allusion to mousikê because it was a traditional form of sympotic entertainment. Athenaeus exploits this in order to throw into relief the contrast between the performative tradition of music at the symposium and the bookish culture of learning and libraries that he was celebrating for his own day. Already in book 1, Homer is cited as a teacher of sophrosynê, and music is made a point of deliberate contrast between past and present, where in the past it was the bards (aoidai) who had the role of philosophers of the present day (1.14b). There are only two extended discussions of mousikê in the whole fifteen books, and both are marked by slippage between the tradition of musical praxis and the scholarly

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preoccupation with intellectual and bookish approaches to everything, even mousikê. The first of these conversations about mousikê is in book 4: the assembled company is interrupted by the noise of a water organ from the neighbours. Momentarily, it bewitches the guests by its musical harmony. Then Ulpian turns to the musician among them, Alceides, who is Alexandrian, and challenges him that the beguiling beauty of this instrument is in total contrast to the single-pipe that the Alexandrians love. Ostensibly, this is a point for demonstration or judgement by the senses, but just as in the case of food, which the guests talk about more than they consume it, so too in the case of music. Alceides the musician launches into a lengthy, learned discussion of different kinds of instruments, who invented them, how they are to be classified, how they are made and how they work, what they look like, where they feature in literature, which peoples play them and on which occasions. After eleven pages of bookish explanations of such matters, not only concerning the water organ but also many other instruments, Alceides somewhat surprisingly boasts that he will give a demonstration himself on any instrument that Ulpian the word-hunter wants to try him with, and he recounts that his fellow Alexandrian, named Alexander, performed with the triangle in such a way that he sent the Romans into a mousomania (Muse-madness) (4.183d–84b). However, if anyone had wanted to take him up on this offer, they do not have a chance to get a word in, as he carries on speaking, defending the Alexandrians who were teachers of the Greeks and barbarians and recalling Greece’s archaic devotion to mousikê. This demonstration of how learned talk usurps the place of performative aspects of mousikê in this culture is developed with different emphases in the second extended conversation about music, which is recounted in book 14. Again there is an interruption, this time from a harp-singer, Amoebus, who wants to join the company but arrives late (622de). His exchange with the cook is ‘tuneful’ repartee (623c), as the cook quotes poetry at some length to the effect that he should come in, and Amoebus finds the appropriate answer. The guests are delighted with his witty response, as well as with his lyre playing, which he performs after drinking. This prompts Athenaeus to liken his skill to Amoebeus of old, who is mentioned in a book by Aristeas. The experience of the performance makes him feel like he is living in the ancient world about which he reads. It prompts him to recount much further discussion of mousikê. This time, the concern is not technical – as it was in book 4 when

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the Alexandrian musician was speaking – but rather it has more to do with the role of mousikê in personal and social formation. The speaker is Masurius, whom Athenaeus describes as νόμων ἐξηγητής – the primary referent is to his profession as a jurist (an expounder of laws), but the context suggests a pun on the idea that he is an exegete of musical modes (νόμοι). His opening remark affirms the profound and intricate character of music, which introduces a more philosophical concern (14.623e). He details its therapeutic uses in taming tempers, and its national developments, where it has shaped the character and proficiencies of different peoples. The first Arcadians even took it into their whole social organisation, while the Lacedaemonians and others use it in war. Homer shows how it brings social harmony, and all the Greeks and known barbarians use it to exercise and sharpen the intellect (628c). However, today’s music is degenerate compared with antiquity (631e–32b). Therefore he thinks music should be the subject of philosophising. In Athenaeus’ world, both the Muses and mousikê are exclusively scholarly, but that is articulated in learned quotations from periods and cultures where they animated a different kind of life. The contrast between past and present is sharply evoked and receives sustained attention. The Muses are the object of Larensis’ scholarly quotation, poetically expressed; mousikê is the object of scholarly discussion, eruditely elaborated. The Muses and mousikê are both central to this learned literary symposium and also absent from it in any more traditional guise except through memory and contrast. The culture of mousikê has been fully reimagined as a form of grammatikê, but with a strong self-awareness of its relationship to its ancient, performative past.

Summary Our study of these four pagan miscellanists of the early Empire has shown that they all give a place to the Muses, sometimes also to the Muses’ province of mousikê, and that they all give their miscellanies a religious frame. In Pliny, Gellius and Athenaeus, there is a strong connection with the Roman scholarly tradition of antiquarian research, which had emerged in a time of religious and political crisis, and scholars such as Varro and his circle had sought to ‘bring to light’, ‘exhume’ or ‘uncover’ the hidden facts of religious and cultural tradition that could contribute to the stability and security of Rome. Our imperial authors are writing in a different social and political context and in a different emotional register,

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but they too package the fruits of their researches in ways that evoke revelation through inspiration of the Muses at the mysteries (Plin. NH pr. 33; Gell. NA pr. 19–21), or at home (‘apud me’, Plin. NH pr. 1) and in private libraries (Athen. Deipn. 1.3b). In early Greece, the Muses were associated with poetic revelation to the archaic bard; in the early Empire, they are associated with scholarly revelation to the studious, solitary lucubrator. Plutarch positions his work more in relation to the philosophical tradition of the Muses, which began in early Greece and was developed by Plato, who had sought to define philosophy as the highest form of mousikê, and to redefine Calliope as the Muse of philosophy, though she had traditionally been associated with epic poetry (Phdr. 258e–59d). In Plutarch’s Table Talk, the Muses preside over the philosophical enquiry that is a part of the sympotic conversation, and the purpose of its recollection; this is how revelation is anticipated. The Muses are part of religious tradition for these Classical authors, but there are also a number of social and psychological disciplines that these authors embrace in order to prepare themselves to learn from their enquiries. Such embodied practices show that the religious tradition had a vibrant spirituality. The aspects that are best acknowledged in contemporary Classical scholarship are the seclusion of the solitary reader and the nocturnal setting. Johnson, discussing Gellius, observes that ‘reading alone does different duty from reading in the context of the group. This is no modern importation’.71 He highlights how Quintilian too urges people to write without an amaneuensis, so as to be ‘set apart’ (‘secretum’), free from the judging gaze of others (‘liberum arbitris locum’).72 James Ker perceives the ‘strong religious aspect’73 of ‘the evaluative, reciprocal, and spatiotemporal conditions established by the image of the nocturnal writer’.74 Ker differentiates this from Christian spirituality of the lucubratio on grounds that the Romans celebrate self-sufficiency over ‘divine grace’;75 but the emphasis on the Muses in this chapter, and their significance in Christian perception, should make us hesitate before dismissing the role of the deities in pagan spirituality. If they were insignificant, it is unlikely that they would have been so often mentioned or that Christian authors would have taken such trouble to transform or explicitly reject the Muse tradition.76 Conversely, Christian spirituality is not to be parsed as a simple dichotomy between ‘divine grace’ and ‘self-sufficiency’, 71 73 76

72 Johnson 2010, 115. Quint. Inst. 10.3.22, 27, discussed in Johnson 2010, 115–16. 74 75 Ker 2004, 240. Ker 2004, 227. Ker 2004, 240. Curtius 1953, 235, 241.

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particularly in an author such as Clement, whose synergistic account of divine and human interaction is well-known.77 In addition to these modes of spiritual practice, all of our pagan miscellanists manifest some kind of ascetic commitment to miscellanymaking as a mode of life. They draw attention to the fact that the choice to research, meditate upon, perform or compose miscellanies and the material that goes into them is personally formative; it depends on giving time and social space to literary intellectual activity, which could have been given to other things or used in other ways. For Pliny, it is a choice to not sleep; for the Deipnosophists it is often a choice to postpone eating; for Gellius, it is how he builds the horizon of his own life’s labour (NA pr. 22–24); for Plutarch it requires diligence in preserving the friendly spirit of convivial enquiry among the social group and in the recollection of it, by keeping careful check on one’s own psychological impulses and on the tongue. In the discussion above, I have sought to draw out the role of hiddenness in connection with the Muses because this will be important in studying Clement’s motif of hiddenness in Chapter 9. In the rest of this chapter, I want to show that Clement framed his project in Christian paideia in a way that signalled the intention to respond to the Classical tradition of the Muses.

miscellanists’ muses and clement’s musical frame Unlike the Classical miscellanists studied above, Clement makes no mention of the Muses in the frame of his literary project. However, our study of his non-titular paratexts and their domains of imagery in Chapter 7 has already alerted us to the significance of the Muses in framing his work in other ways. They included the ‘titles’ Helicons, Honeycombs and Meadows, as well as signalling attention to bees and honey in the wider field of imagery. We observed that the combination of these images gives prominence to motifs that were traditionally associated with the Muses. Helicon was the mountain of the Muses; bees were metonymically associated with them; honey was supposed to be sweet like the Muses. These associations were widely developed in Classical literature, including in Roman receptions of the Muse tradition.78 In this final section of the present chapter, I develop that observation by looking more closely at

77

E.g., Havrda 2011.

78

Hardie 2002, 192–93; Petridou 2015, 82–83, 218–19, 222.

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some of the other ways in which Clement frames his literary project in tacit competition with the Classical tradition of the Muses. It should be remembered here that he is not only trying to stake a place for his own miscellanies within the tradition of imperial prose writing but is also promoting the inspiration of Scripture against the Muse-inspired epic poems that were at the heart of Classical culture.79 I shall show how the opening of the Protrepticus, in conjunction with other allusions to Muses and mousikê, create a richly textured and subtly agonistic account of the spirituality of hiddenness in the Christian tradition. From the very start of the Protrepticus, the competition with the Muses is signalled for readers learned in Classical literature. Not only does Clement allude to Hesiod’s myth of the Muses moving from Helicon to Olympus, but even before that, his vignette of Eunomos and the cicada recalls Plato’s famous passage about Muses in the Phaedrus. Socrates and Phaedrus reclined in the midday heat and Socrates explained that the cicadas were once men who wasted away listening to music, but now they sing without food and report people’s devotions to the Muses.80 Hesiod and Plato had both intended their Muse-stories agonistically, to stake a claim for their own inspiration and their own work. Hesiod’s myth follows closely on his autobiographical account of how the Muses taught him song while he was shepherding lambs on Helicon. The story of how they moved from Helicon, his homeland, to Olympus, the home of Zeus, staked a claim for his own poetry to become panhellenic, like (or in competition with) Homer’s.81 Plato’s story of the Muses and the cicadas staked a different claim, this time for philosophy. Socrates used the story to explain why they should carry on doing philosophy in the noonday heat, namely, in the hope that the cicadas would listen and report their devotion to the Muses of philosophy, Calliope and Urania. By naming these as the Muses most closely associated with philosophy and having the sweetest music, Plato inserted philosophy into the place that epic traditionally claimed and redefined philosophy as the best form of mousikê.82 In the first part of this chapter, we saw that Pliny too alluded to the Muses agonistically at the start of his encyclopaedic project. His 79 80

81

82

Cf. Curtius 1953, 241. Phdr. 258e–59d. On Clement’s reception of this passage here: Butterworth 1916, 198–99; Lechner 2010, 195. Nagy 2009. My thanks to Jason König for identifying Clement’s allusion and pointing me to Nagy’s discussion. Caverero 2002, 65–66; and esp. P. Murray 2002, 33–45; 2004, 374–75. This is consistent with the way Plato approaches themes of Muses and mousikê more widely in

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Camenae had birthed a novel brood for the Quirites, and he had modelled his index on Soranus’ Epoptides. This Muse-inspired mass of material staked a claim to define Rome afresh through a new form of literature and to cultivate the true Roman. Clement’s allusions to the Muses are also agonistic, and his very silence about the Muses themselves underscores that. In his story, the cicada who helps Eunomos discloses Christ’s role; the move from Helicon is focused on the destination in Zion. Unlike Plato and Hesiod, Clement does not want to redefine the best kind of Muse but to abolish thoughts of the Muses altogether. His imagery of mountains loses sight of Helicon and comes to emphasise Moses’ ascent at Sinai and eventually to concentrate on the mountain that is Clement’s own work.83 His imagery of the bee is about the Lord, the Christ-Logos, and the perfect gnostic; his imagery of honey characterises the Logos as sweet, and honeycombs suggest his own Stromateis.84 In all these cases, Clement is taking imagery traditionally associated with the Muses and displacing that association with a new, Christian image. Something similar happens with Apollo, who was traditionally the leader of the Muse-band: the story of Eunomos and the cicada is located at the festival at Pytho, over the death of the Pythian dragon. Everyone knew that it was Apollo who killed the Pythian dragon and established the festival, but Clement does not mention that. It is Christ whom he portrays as the cosmic lyre-player a little later in the preface, and the ‘many-voiced’ lyre is the human being.85 When Clement does mention the Muses, it is explicitly to debunk them. Late in his catalogue of Greek mysteries at the start of the main accusation in the Protrepticus, he gives a Euhemerist account of the Muses, such that they turn out not to be deities at all but just servant girls of a princess who taught them to make music that would soothe her father’s bad temper and stop him from arguing so much with his wife. The very banality of this explanation stands in sharp tension with the way Clement introduces the story, mentioning the Muses ‘whose genealogy from Zeus and Mnemosyne is given by Alcman, and the rest of the poets and prosewriters deify them and worship them, and already whole cities set up Mouseia as sanctuaries for them’ (Protr. ii.31.1–4). Clement knows full well that these are deities who command considerable influence in learned

83 85

his dialogues, e.g., Crat. 406a; Phd. 60d. P. Murray 2002; 2004, 374–83; Cavarero 2002; Dillon 2014, 1–4. 84 See Chapter 7, pp. 186–92. See Chapter 7, pp. 176–77, 184–86. Protr. i.5.3; Halton 1983.

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literary society. It is in his interests to debunk them, and, while he is about it, casually to forget that it was Hesiod, not Alcman (or Alcander, if we take the manuscript reading), whose genealogy of the Muses is the first and most famous.86 Again, in the Paedagogus, in the crucial chapter on garlands, whose pivotal place in the structure of the work we have already seen,87 the Muses are mentioned only to deny them. Clement explains that the reason that Christians do not wear garlands is more religious than ethical: it is because they have been dedicated to idols. One of his examples is Sappho portraying the Muses with a garland of roses. Christians must not associate the image of God with idols (like the Muses)!88 Despite his reticence about the Muses as such, Clement strikingly frames his project as the proclamation of a new form of mousikê. The clutch of musicians cited at the start offers traditional exempla, often mentioned together in Classical rhetoric – Arion, Amphion and Orpheus.89 Orpheus is portrayed at length as the counterpart of Christ; his song that transplants trees and transforms wild beasts is capped by Christ’s ‘new song’.90 The musical imagery becomes less prominent after the Protrepticus, but its significance is not forgotten. The Paedagogus includes instruction on the proper music for the symposium, and it closes with a hymn to Christ the saviour. The Stromateis not only show the Christian way to realise the aspiration to ‘transplant trees’ like Orpheus in the Protrepticus, but they also portray Christ as the Odysseus-like figure who sailed past the sirens and as the ‘leader of the Muses’ while others are merely like Odysseus’ crew, stopping their ears.91 It continues to celebrate psalms as a proper mode of using music at the symposia of Christians.92 The theme of mousikê, then, frames Clement’s project explicitly, but the Muses themselves are too threatening to mention. Consequently, their memory is overlaid by reinventing their imagery with other associations.93 This assertion of mousikê is very striking in the early Christian setting: we might expect an emphasis on grammatikê rather than on mousikê, since Christians relied so heavily on modes of scriptural exegesis and textual argument. Irenaeus, Clement’s near contemporary, privileges the visual art of precious jewels in his preface to the Adversus Haereses,94 86 89

90 92 93

87 88 Cf. Curtius 1953, 236. Above, p. 174. Paed. II.viii.2–3. Cf. Hor. AP 391–401; Stat. Silv. 2.2.60–61; 3.1.15–16; Paus. 9.17.5; Men. Rhet. 392.19–20. For the significance of these figures in Clement’s proem: Halton 1983; Lechner 2010, 174–75. 91 See esp. Jourdan 2010. Str. VI.xi.88.3–89.1. Paed. II.iv.41.4–44.5; Str. VI.xi.88.1; xiv.113.3; Cosgrove 2006. 94 Cf. Carruthers 1998, 54–57 on the art of forgetting. Iren. Adv. haer. pr. 2.

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but Clement is distinctive in portraying Christianity in musical form. His emphasis on the theatre in the Protrepticus extends the theme, for theatre was itself understood as a form of mousikê in antiquity, and at the time of Plato was associated with the most politically controversial forms of music.95 Clement’s preoccupation with the Muses (if only to overwrite them) and mousikê (if only to redefine it in Christian terms) probably arises because the Muses were traditionally deities of inspiration and insight, and mousikê was perceived as one of the most viscerally compelling, enchanting experiences of insight that humanity could encounter.96 Homer’s song, inspired by the Muses, was the central cultural text in Classical tradition and was interpreted allegorically because it was believed to be so rich in inspired insight. Plato had recast philosophy as the highest form of mousikê. The mysteries became associated with the Muses, and Orpheus, the famous musician whose mother was a Muse, was associated with writings that were allegorically interpreted in the context of the mysteries.97 The library at Alexandria too was a shrine of the Muses. When the miscellanists put the Muses in the frame of their work, they were but the latest in a long tradition, which they were both acknowledging and seeking somehow to improve upon. Clement’s mentions and non-mentions of mousikê and the Muses stake his own claim to a place in this tradition, or rather his claim to displace this tradition, by relocating worshippers from Helicon to Zion and introducing readers to the bee that figures the truth and the divine miscellanist par excellence.

95 96

97

Herington 1985; Lada-Richards 2002; Csapo 2004; Wallace 2009. There has been an explosion of interest in ancient music in recent years, but study of the Muses has not kept pace. On ancient music, see, e.g., Landels 1999; Mathiesen 1999; Kowalzig 2007; Kowalzig and Wilson 2013; Levin 2009; Moore 2012; Wallace 2015; Kramarz 2018; Philips and D’Angour 2018. On Muses and music in fifth century Athens, see essays in P. Murray and Wilson 2004. Hardie 2004.

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9 Clement’s Theology of Hiddenness and the Logic of Christian Miscellanism

By contrast with his wariness towards the Muses, Clement gives prominence to the literary motif of hiddenness. In the Stromateis, he takes many opportunities to stress the hidden character of gnosis: in the first Stromateus, he mainly emphasises what is hidden in his own Stromateis; in the fifth and sixth, he gives an account of scriptural concealment and compares it with concealment in the sacred and philosophical texts of other traditions; in the sixth Stromateus, he also develops a portrait of the gnostic as the only person who is able to understand and explain what is concealed from others. As a result, he has often been described by modern scholars as an ‘esoteric author’.1 Many have interpreted the ‘esoteric tropes’ in close connection with each other in order to explain Clement’s choice of genre: they claim that Clement chose the miscellany genre in order to hide some things from some readers, as suggested by Str. I. They argue that this was a form of scriptural mimesis, for Scripture also conceals truths; Clement, they say, sought to do by miscellanism what Scripture did by literal and figurative layers of meaning (cf. Str. V–VI).2 In the eyes of some scholars, this is also precisely what differentiates Clement’s miscellanies from Classical ones: Johannes Munck compared Aelian, only to pull up

1

2

On Clement’s ‘esotericism’, which overlaps with study of his allegorical exegesis and apophatic doctrine of God: Marsh 1936; Molland 1938, 7–10; Mondésert 1944, 47–62; Fortin 1966; Méhat 1966, 492–99; Lilla 1971, 144–63; Mortley 1973a; 1973b; 1976; Riedweg 1987, 137–41; Kovacs 1997; 2001; Stroumsa 2005, 97–117; Hägg 2006; Itter 2009; Albano 2014; 2016a; 2016b; Ramelli 2017; Steenbuch 2017. Molland 1938, 7–9; Méhat 1966, 492; Kovacs 2001, 25; Itter 2009, 80.

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240 Clement’s Theology of Hiddenness and Christian Miscellanism

short: ‘von einer verborgenen Tendenz wie bei Klemens kann man aber gar nicht reden’.3 However, there is an obvious paradox in claiming both that Clement chose the Classical miscellany genre in order to conceal things and that concealing things is what makes his miscellany different from the Classical genre. In any case, we saw in Chapter 8 that Classical miscellanies do often present their readers with the anticipation that there are hidden insights to be discovered in the work; they give a place to the Muses in their rhetorical frame, as deities who disclose that which is hidden; and they encourage certain practices of asceticism and social seclusion on the part of the reader, in order better to prepare for the reception of hidden things in the work. Gellius’ Nights even uses an ostentatious trope of esotericism at the close of the preface, warning away all those who are not followers of the same Muse. Rather than drawing an immediate distinction between Clement’s esoteric tropes and Classical miscellanies, we should take note of Kendra Eshleman’s observation that esotericism was common to both Classical and Christian sophists in the intellectual culture of the early Roman Empire. She points out widespread tension between yearning for intellectual purity and desire to attract customers, such that many writers used esoteric tropes, while still opening their work to a wide audience.4 In early Christianity, the tension was even more deeply felt, because people were theologically committed to evangelism and the unitary nature of truth, but since salvation was at stake, they were particularly anxious about false prophets and wolves in sheep’s clothing.5 The rhetoric of esotericism thus marks a difficult interface between social realities and doctrinal convictions for both Classical and Christian authors. The present chapter begins with Clement’s esoteric tropes because they have often been a starting point in earlier scholarly discussions. I argue that they function rhetorically, not only to spur readers on to search more deeply in Clement’s work, but more importantly to highlight Clement’s wider imagistic discourse of ‘hiddenness’, by which he draws attention to the divine economy of revelation, which is open to all. Clement invites his readers to, as he puts it, ‘listen in a hidden way’, for ‘to one who listens in a hidden way, what is hidden will be made manifest’ (τῷ κρυπτῶς ἐπαΐοντι τὸ κρυπτὸν φανερωθήσεσθαι, Str. I.i.13.3). This chapter clarifies the theology of hiddenness to which this imagistic language points and shows 3 4

Munck 1933, 76. Also: Pohlenz 1943, 121; Méhat 1966, 285, 521. 5 Eshleman 2012, 24–25. Eshleman 2012, 49–54.

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how all readers are called to participate in miscellanism through ‘listening in a hidden way’. This can be seen as Clement’s Christian counterpart to the Classical theology of revelation by the Muses; Clement’s imagery of ‘hiddenness’ is more abstract than Classical personifications of the Muses and guides readers into a relation to the transcendent God in the Christian philosophical tradition. The systematic emphasis of this chapter prepares for a more rhetorical approach in Chapter 10. Together, these chapters redraw the connections that scholars have made between hiddenness and miscellanism. Far from writing miscellanies in order to hide things from some readers (as no Classical miscellanist would do), Clement wrote miscellanies in order to help his readers enter into the salvific economy of revelation. This project was distinctively Christian, but it also participated in the rhetoric, praxis and some aspects of the ideology of the Classical tradition of miscellanymaking.

the esoteric tropes as invitation to theological interpretation of hiddenness This section will briefly introduce Clement’s so-called esoteric tropes, then critique current emphases in scholarly discussion of them and finally conclude by suggesting that their most significant purpose is rhetorical, to invite readers to engage with Clement’s broader discourse of hiddenness and thereby with his theology of revelation.

What Are Clement’s ‘Esoteric Tropes’? The first Stromateus draws attention to concealment within the Stromateis themselves. Clement explains to his readers that he has ‘selected knowledgeably’ what to include in his Stromateis, omitting those things that he would be guarded even about speaking, for fear that they might cause harm to his readers.6 The ‘tradition’, Clement says, ‘is not common and public’, but rather the wisdom must be hidden in a mystery.7 ‘It is dangerous to exhibit such perfectly pure and limpid teachings regarding the true light before certain porcine and uncultured listeners.’8 The Stromateis contain a scattered and dispersed sowing of the truth in order that it should escape the notice of those who pick up seeds like 6

Str. I.i.14.3.

7

Str. I.xii.55.1.

8

Str. I.xii.55.4, tr. Stroumsa 2005, 36.

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jackdaws.9 The work ahead does not teach openly, but rather tries to ‘speak while escaping notice, declare while remaining hidden, and show while keeping silent’.10 Moving on from this self-reflexive attention to hiddenness in his own work, Clement proceeds in the fifth and sixth Stromateis to underscore concealment within Scripture. ‘The scriptures hide the sense (nous) for many reasons’, he asserts. The first is to make readers more devoted to enquiry and to staying up at night in studying the salvific words; and the second is because it was not appropriate for all to get the sense (noein), lest they do harm when they take the wrong way things spoken salvifically by the holy spirit.11 On many occasions, he underscores that revelation was for the few and not the many;12 or that gnosis does not belong to all.13 What Scripture does with its mysteries is hide them in parables, symbols, aenigmas and other figurative modes of speech.14 Clement points out that many other nations also use enigmatic modes of speech to hide from the many what is not for the many, but the few.15

Do the Esoteric Tropes Indicate That Clement Imitates Scriptural Concealment? Kovacs, Itter and others have pointed out an analogy between concealment in the Stromateis and concealment in the Scriptures and other texts.16 This lies at the heart of their claim that Clement imitated Scripture in his use of concealment. However, the analogy between stromatic and scriptural hiddenness should not be overemphasised. It is not an analogy of literary form: Clement knew full well that his ‘scattered seeds’ in the miscellanistic Stromateis were formally different from the figures of speech that he found in Scripture and other writings. His imagery for the form of the Stromateis emphasises scattering varied texts as seeds or sparks; his discussion of aenigma and other figures of speech in Str. V–VI emphasises the encounter with particular texts (and sometimes events, objects, actions and other phenomena) that riddle

9 11 12 13 14

10 Str. I.xii.56.3. Str. I.i.15.1. See also Str. I.ii.20.4–21.2; IV.ii.4.1–2. Str. VI.xv.126.1. Str. I.i.13.2–3; IV.xv.97.1; V.iii.17.4–5, 18.2–3, x.63.7; VI.vii.61.3, cf. VII.xiv.88.4. Str. I.i.2.2; IV.xv.97.1; V.iii.17.5, x.61.3, 62.1; VII.xvi.104.3, cf. 1 Cor 8:1, 7. 15 16 Str. VI.xv.126.3–4. Str. V.iv.20.3–v.31.5. See n. 2.

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deeper meaning. His account of concealment does not highlight a formal analogy between his miscellanism and symbol, aenigma, etc.17 Nor is the analogy one of revelatory status: Scripture is set apart in Clement’s theology of revelation as the sacred writings of the community; the mysteries were hidden in the Old Covenant (παλαιὰ διαθήκη) until the apostles; by coming in the flesh, Jesus revealed what was hidden in the prophecies, and in person he committed the sacred tradition to the apostles.18 Clement, like his readers, receives Scripture as an exegete and as one who listens so as to be formed by it.19 However, there is a functional analogy between Clement’s work and Scripture in that both aim to bring readers to salvation through recognising Christ and becoming more like him. Thus, the similar expressions of concealment in portraying the Stromateis and the Scriptures do suggest that Clement’s writing cultivates the expectation of revelation, and in this way is similar to Scripture. But this is insufficient to explain either his choice of miscellanism or his wider emphasis on hiddenness.

Is Clement Trying to Keep Some People Out? Many scholars have underscored the social implications of the esoteric motifs to explain why Clement chose the miscellany genre. As one scholar puts it, ‘The idea of concealing truths is the method employed by Clement for the writing of the Stromateis to sort genuine seekers from false.’20 Another articulates Clement’s purpose as the earliest expression of what the Tractarians called the ‘Doctrine of Reserve’, which concerns ‘Reserve in Communicating Religious Knowledge’, and requires that one teaching should take into account the state of those being taught and not reveal mysteries indiscriminately.21 Some scholars discover ‘two Clements’ in the extant works, the Alexandrine philosopher, who emphasised esoteric restriction of knowledge to the few (as in the Stromateis), and the 17

18 20

Thus it is misleading to say that Clement chose the miscellany genre to imitate Scripture’s use of literal and figurative levels of meaning, pace Kovacs 2001, 25; Itter 2009, 80. On symbol, aenigma, and other forms of figurative discourse in Clement: Dawson 1992, 186–234; Dinan 2010; Le Boulluec 2017; Ward 2017b. More generally on aenigma: Struck 2004; 2005. Clement’s deployment of technical terms of symbol, aenigma, metaphor, allegory, parable, etc. in Str. V.i.10.3, iv.22.4; VI.xv.126.3–4, contrasts with his figurative discourse of ‘scattering’, ‘gathering’ and ‘sowing’ in the Stromateis, e.g., Str. I.xii.56.3; IV.ii.4.1, 6.2; VII.xviii.110.4. 19 Str. IV.xxi.134.3–4; V.x.61.1; xii.80.7; VI.xv.127.3–5. Cf. Str. I.i.12.3–13.1. 21 Itter 2009, 80. Marsh 1936, 65.

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244 Clement’s Theology of Hiddenness and Christian Miscellanism

Christian evangelist, who laid it open to all (as in the Protrepticus).22 Völker resisted splitting Clement in two and claimed that the esoteric tropes are ‘rare’ in the Stromateis, implying that they are primarily rhetorical in intention. But, as Lilla points out, this is not actually the case – they are quite prominent, and are especially thematised in the fifth Stromateus.23 I think it is likely that the esoteric tropes do have some social correlate: that is to say, that there are real people who are differentiated from one another by this rhetoric of ‘the many and the few’. The emphasis that Clement places on the esoteric tropes makes it difficult to explain them as purely rhetorical, and in any case, his theology of divine pedagogy emphasises gradual progress towards gnosis; it is therefore inevitable that some will perceive, and others will not, at any given point in time. But keeping people out is surely not his primary purpose. Clement is well aware that his work is being published openly, and he has some realism about the range of people who will encounter it. On the one hand, he is sensitive to the risk that concealment might be perceived as spiteful, and he wants to forefend against this misunderstanding. He says that he omitted some things lovingly and out of concern for his less receptive readers, not because he begrudged them anything, for that would not be right.24 Nor would it be right to think that Jesus caused anyone’s ignorance, though he did prophetically expose it.25 The desire is to bring people in, not keep them out. Conversely, he is aware that the work will fall into the hands not only of readers who are interested in learning from it but also of quibblers and detractors.26 He portrays these people as sophists, who chop logic rather than genuinely seeking the truth27 and who focus on the superficial rhetoric of a work, rather than its deeper meaning.28 These people are hardly even attempting to enter into the mystery. Clement’s rhetoric addresses this breadth of audience. ‘The many and the few’ are vaguely characterised and seldom map onto particular groups of real-life opponents.29 Whereas he names and confronts people like 22 24 26 28 29

23 Marsh 1936, 70. Völker 1952, 311–12; Lilla 1971, 146 n. 3. 25 Str. I.i.14.3, οὔ τί που φθονῶν (οὐ γὰρ θέμις). Cf. Str. I.xii.55.1–56.2. Str. I.i.2.3. 27 Str. I.i.17.2. Str. I.iii.22.1–24.4; viii.39.1–42.4; x.47.2–4. Str. I.xii.56.3, cf. ii.21.2; x.48.1–xi.50.6; Str. VI.xviii.162.2. Cf. Méhat 1966, 328. There is a partial exception in the seventh Stromateus, when Clement lumps together the ‘heretics’ and criticises their methods of reading Scripture in ways that resonate with what he says elsewhere about the ‘many’ to whom revelation is not given. But here Clement explicitly states his hope that they will learn from his

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Basilides, Valentinus and Marcion on specific issues, when it comes to ‘the many and the few’ he distinguishes between the ‘many’ who keep to the things of sense (αἰσθητά) and the ‘few’ who discern noetic things (νοητά),30 the many who demand demonstration of the truth and the few who are satisfied with salvation by faith31 and the many for whom the secrets are not suited and the few who are able to receive them and be formed by them, who love righteousness, and ‘listen in a hidden way to that which is hidden’.32 Those who are excluded are variously described as unworthy (οὐδὲ ἄξιος), untrained (ἀπαιδεύτοι), inexperienced (ἄπειρος), unlearned (ἀμαθής), out of tune (ἐκμελής), out of order (ἄτακτος), attached to matter (ὑλικός), blind (τυφλός), deaf (κωφός), uninitiated (ἀμύητος), indeed museless (ἄμουσος) and profane (βεβήλοι).33 They are people who read carelessly and unskilfully (ἀνέδην ἀπείρως ἐντυγχάνοντες);34 jackdaws who pluck seeds for superficial reasons, not like farmers;35 people who approach the truth irrationally (ἀλόγως) and are unable to receive the ‘depth of gnosis’ (τὸ βάθος τῆς γνώσεως)36 or who wear mortality like cockles and roll up in a ball like hedgehogs in their weakness of will.37 They are confused by the many possible interpretations of Scripture, whereas the gnostic understands the point of it.38 This diversity in characterising the doctrinal, ethical and exegetical boundaries between ‘in’ and ‘out’ cannot be resolved into a single shibboleth for differentiating the many and the few, although some scholars have tried. We cannot tidy it into the epistemological difference between faith and gnosis (pace Lilla); nor resolve it into the distinction between two levels of teaching (pace Osborn and Kovacs).39 Things said about the ‘many and few’ are not clearly directed at anyone in particular. This makes it more likely that they are meant for everyone. The esoteric tropes emphasise that there are distinctions in the economy of revelation and that these matter personally to dedicated readers. The rhetoric of the ‘many and the few’ can encourage readers who want to learn from Clement’s work to search harder within it, so as not to be

30

31 34 38

hypomnêmata and turn to God almighty. They can discover truth within it, if they search aright (Str. VII.xvi.102.2, cf. 102.6). Str. V.vi.33.4–6 (quoting Plato, Theaet. 155e), 35.5; cf. V.x.66.1 (quoting 1 Cor. 3:1–3, contrasting πνευματικοί vs. σαρκικοί). 32 33 Str. V.iii.18.3. Str. I.i.13.2–4. Str. I.xii.55.4; V.iv.19.2; ix.57.1–2. 35 36 37 Str. IV.ii.4.1. Str. I.xii.56.3. Str. V.viii.54.2–3. Str. V.xi.68.1. 39 Str. V.ix.57.1. Lilla 1971, 144–46; Kovacs 2001, 25; Osborn 2005, 176.

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246 Clement’s Theology of Hiddenness and Christian Miscellanism

found among the ‘jackdaws’ but among the good farmers of the faith.40 The jackdaws make him cautious in scattering seeds, but on the other hand, truth is scattered in the world like Pentheus’ limbs, and Clement urges people from all traditions to produce the bits of it that they have.41 The scatteredness of the truth can thus suggest not that only few can find it, but that all have it to hand if only they will produce it.

A Different Approach Clement’s main concern is not with concealment but with revelation. His work aims to teach and guide his readers, if only they engage with it. The esoteric tropes not only spur them on by amplifying the stakes of the quest but also give a clue as to how to seek revelation within the work. The clue, I suggest, lies in how they spotlight the discourse of hiddenness and make it personal to readers, not primarily as a social boundary marker but as a point of entry into the theology of revelation. For example, in the very first extended passage that asserts (twice!) that revelation is for the few and not the many, Clement asserts that what Jesus meant when he said that ‘everything that is hidden will be made manifest’ is that ‘to one who listens in a hidden way, what is hidden will be made manifest’.42 Again, in the fifth Stromateus, he discovers a thoughtful explanation of hiddenness from the Lord himself. Interpreting the parable about the yeast that the woman took and hid (ἐνέκρυψεν) in a dough as a parable about hiddenness (ἐπίκρυψις), he explains that ‘either the tripartite soul is saved by obedience on account of the spiritual power hidden (ἐγκρυβεῖσαν) in it by faith, or the Word’s mighty strength, given to us, tense and powerful, draws towards itself in a hidden way and invisibly (ἐπικεκρυμμένως τε καὶ ἀφανῶς) everyone who receives it and keeps it within himself, and gathers his whole system into unity’.43 In passages such as these, the term ‘hiddenness’ seems to be raised from mere esoteric trope to an image that is good for thinking with. It is the key term that enables Clement to portray – without philosophically analysing – theological relationships between the one who seeks revelation, that which is to be revealed, and the one who reveals it. The esoteric tropes, I suggest, point to a wider theme of ‘hiddenness’, which is key for engaging with the economy of revelation in Clement’s work. 40

Cf. Str. I.xii.56.3.

41

Str. I.xiii.57.6.

42

Str. I.i.13.3.

43

Str. V.xii.80.8–9.

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hiddenness as imagistic theological discourse In her study of Plato’s poetic diction in the Republic, Zacharoula Petraki used terminology of ‘imagistic discourse’ to characterise different literary categories of imagery, which, she argued, worked together to purify the imagination of readers who were immersed in poetic discourse and bring them towards more a more philosophical world-view.44 For example, the Sun was the closest imagistic approximation of transcendent Being and the Good and enabled Plato to work with traditional polarities of Light and Dark to purify readers’ imagination from poetic myths.45 Plato’s imagistic discourse thus played a pedagogical role in developing the readers’ ability to move beyond the realm of doxa to stable epistêmê.46 Without developing the comparison with Plato (that would need another study), I want to show in this chapter and the next that Clement uses imagistic discourse of ‘hiddenness’ to help his readers to engage with the theology of revelation in his work. Unlike ‘esotericism’, the terminology of ‘hiddenness’ derives from Clement’s text.47 ‘Hiddenness’ is not a precise term, but a richly evocative one, which can be developed in sensory, moral or theological frames – or a combination of all of these. The primary vocabulary markers in Greek are κρύπτω and compounds (including ἀποκρύπτω, ἐγκρύπτω, ἐπικρύπτω, κατακρύπτω), and καλύπτω and compounds (including ἀμφικαλύπτω, ἐγκαλύπτω, ἐπικαλύπτω, συγκαλύπτω).48 Additionally, λανθάνω plays a role49 – in Chapter 7, we saw how it draws attention to the connection between the Sicilian bee who escaped notice in Egypt (Str. I.i.11.2), and the hiddenness that is encountered in Clement’s work (Str. IV.ii.5.2; VII. xviii.111.2). These terms of ‘hiddenness’ in Clement appear throughout his literary project, from the Protrepticus onwards, but scholars have rightly observed the prominence of the vocabulary in thematising how Stromateis hide things in Str. I and how Scripture and the gnostic hide things, in Str. V–VI. Clement’s vocabulary of ‘hiddenness’ often quotes or interprets scriptural imagery: such texts as Isa 45:3; Ps 50:8; Matt 13:11, 33, 35; Rom 11:33; 1 Cor 2:6–10; Eph 3:3–5; Col 1:25–27, 2:2–3, are marked by 44 47 48

49

45 46 Petraki 2011, 61. Petraki 2011, 200–14. Petraki 2011, 1–26. Cf. ‘esotericism’ was coined in 1828 for the study of gnosticism: Stroumsa 2005, 1. Combined occurrences in Protr., Paed., Str.: κρύπτω, thirty-seven; ἀποκρύπτω, twentyone; ἐγκρύπτω, five; ἐπικρύπτω, twenty; κατακρύπτω, three; κάλυπτω, fifteen. Adjectives: ἀπόκρυφος, eleven. Nouns: ἐπίκρυψις, eleven. Sixty-five occurrences.

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248 Clement’s Theology of Hiddenness and Christian Miscellanism

language of hiddenness (ἀποκρύπτω, ἀπόκρυφοι, κρύφια), mystery (μυστήριον), depth (βάθος), invisibility (ἀοράτος), obscurity (ἄδηλα, ἀνεξεραύνητα) or the absence of a history of perceptual experience among human beings (ἃ ὀφθαλμὸς οὐκ εἶδεν καὶ οὖς οὐκ ἤκουσεν καὶ ἐπὶ καρδίαν ἀνθρώπου οὐκ ἀνέβη, 1 Cor 2:9; Θεὸν οὐδεὶς ἑώρακεν πώποτε, Jn 1:18). Some of them are quoted recurrently, many times in Clement’s work (1 Cor 2:9 sixteen times, according to Stählin); sometimes Clement lists many such texts together in scriptural catenae on hiddenness (e.g., Str. V.x.60.1–64.6). His oxymoronic resolution of the problem of esotericism, that, ‘to one who listens in a hidden way, what is hidden will be manifested’ also derives from Jesus’ promise that ‘what is hidden will be manifested’.50 Within Clement’s project, his terminology of hiddenness also interacts with other vocabularies and imageries that are important throughout and are only partly influenced by Scripture. Words that indicate response to hiddenness include ‘searching’ (ζητῶ) or the sudden dissolution of hiddenness through ‘revelation’ (ἀποκάλυπτω), ‘manifestation’ (φανερόω), ‘showing’ (δείκνυμι), epiphany (ἐπιφαίνω) or epoptic vision (ἐποπτεύω).51 These terms are all found in Scripture, though some of them had a wider currency in educated discourse of Clement’s day than in scriptural texts, and Clement’s emphasis reflects that social context. For example, ἐποπτεύω and cognates are rare in the Bible but were significant in philosophical and religious discourse of the mysteries.52 I shall suggest that Clement’s theology of hiddenness can be explained in terms of the interplay between five principal modes of hiddenness that appear in his work: (1) Theologically, divine hiddenness is a function of divine transcendence; it is articulated by Clement in close relationship to various modes of revelation by which God is known and by which humanity enters into a relationship with God, in which humans also become more and more like God, ‘practising to be god’, as Clement puts it in Str. VI.xiv.113.3. (2) Anthropologically, Clement is often concerned with the parts of a person that are hidden from view – the psychê, nous, hêgemonikon, logos or pneuma – which are the parts that most 50 51 52

Str. I.i.13.3, paraphrasing then exegeting Matt 10:26. ζητῶ, 178; ἀποκάλυπτω, 41; ἐπιφάνεια, 15, ἐπιφαίνω, 13; ἐποπτεία, 5, ἐποπτεύω, 18. Riedweg 1987, 145. In scripture, ἐποπτεύω occurs only in 1 Pet. 2:12; 3:2. ἐπόπτης occurs with a derivation from ἐφοράω: Riedweg 1987, 23, 145 n. 70.

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put him in touch with the divine. Again, Clement works with both scriptural and philosophical vocabularies. (3) Exegetically, he takes an interest in the ainigmata, symbola and parabola of Scripture and other texts, which riddle hidden meanings. Again, these terms are partly drawn from Scripture (e.g., parabola), but Clement’s emphases in analytic vocabulary (e.g., ainigmata, ainittomai) owe more to wider philosophical and rhetorical discourse. (4) Socially, he portrays situations where people either court attention, putting everything on show before the gaze of others (e.g., Paed. III.ii.5.1–4; iv.27.3–28.1), or, conversely, draw closer to God who is beyond time and place, entering into the darkness where God is or communing silently with God in prayer (Str. II.i.6.1; VII. vii.39.6).53 (5) Cosmically, although the cosmos is manifest, God acts within the world through providence and also created the world by the mystery of his word. To discuss these as different modes of ‘hiddenness’ is not an imposition on Clement’s text, for he himself uses the vocabulary of ‘hiddenness’ in connection with each of them at key points in his work. By making it an analytic term for discussing his theology, I am highlighting and extending a usage that is already his own.54 Metaphorically, Clement engages with these themes by four partly overlapping domains in his imagery of hiddenness and revelation: (1) cult, especially mystery initiations, entering the inner sanctum in temples, and theophanies, especially the narrative of Moses entering into the darkness where God was;55 (2) primordial experience of night and day, dark and light;56 (3) the use of masks and costume to hide or disguise personal appearance and character, especially in the theatre;57 (4) farming, where seeds are hidden in the ground and nuts in their shells.58 53 54 56

57

58

On silence in Clement: Mortley 1973b. 55 Discussed in more detail in ‘Clement’s Theology of Hiddenness’. See Chapter 10. Protr. vi.68.4, 71.3–4, viii.77.2–3; Paed. I.vi (phôtismos/baptism); Str. VI.xvii.149.5; VII. vii.43.7, etc. Itter 2009, 105. E.g., Protr. i.2.1; ii.27.5; iv.58.3; cf. x.110.2; Paed. I.vi.33.3; II.vii.60.2; III.ii.11.2; Str. II. i.3.5; VI.x.80.5. See also the Appendix. Str. I.i.1.3, 7.1, 9.1, 10.2–5, 15.2, 17.4, 18.1, etc.

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250 Clement’s Theology of Hiddenness and Christian Miscellanism

The first three of these are all introduced extensively in the Protrepticus, while the fourth is first developed in the Stromateis. The imagery of mystery initiations is particularly significant, both because of its prominence throughout the project and because it interacts with all the other domains: the high point of initiation in the mysteries involved sudden illumination out of darkness; masks were involved in Dionysiac mysteries, to which Clement sometimes alludes; and the illustrious Eleusinian mysteries were connected with fertility, and thus complement the imagery of farming. Clement’s imagery and language of hiddenness are often emotively charged. Sometimes it is negative, concerned with shady dealings (e.g., the theft of the Greeks)59 or lack of insight (e.g., failing to perceive the face of truth before one’s very eyes).60 At other times, it is positive, highlighting virtuous modes of searching for hidden truth (in Scripture or the Stromateis)61 or experiences of revelation (as when Moses enters into the darkness where God is).62 Hiddenness is thus more than just a lexical item in Clement: it is part of his ‘imagistic discourse’. It roots reflection in categories of sense perception, which are made vivid through imagery. Like most basic physical experiences, hiddenness often structures conceptual metaphors, which allow this language and imagery to function in many other spheres.63 Like Plato, Clement uses literary imagery within his philosophical argument to render it rhetorically vivid before the eyes and playfully to explore possibilities of association that need to be argued out in different modes. It is therefore appropriate to take up this terminology and use it in analysing Clement’s project.

clement’s theology of hiddenness: principles of christian miscellanism The breadth of the category of ‘hiddenness’ that was sketched in the previous section raises the question of how to understand the systematic relationship between different modes of hiddenness in Clement’s theology. I start with the systematic analysis rather than the rhetoric of the ‘imagistic discourse’ of hiddenness, because it is helpful first to grasp the 59 62 63

60 61 Str. II.i.1.1, 2.3; VI.ii.4.3–4. Protr. i.2.1. Str. IV.ii.4.1–7.4. Str. II.ii.6.1. On conceptual metaphors, see Lakoff and Johnson 1980; 2003. There has been extensive critique and revision to the original theory, see, e.g., Gibbs 2011; Ruiz de Mendoza and Hernández 2011.

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underlying pattern in such a complex interplay. This prepares for the rhetorical study of how Clement unfolds a literary training to ‘listen in a hidden way’, which will be the subject of Chapter 10. The term ‘hiddenness’ is capacious, and in trying to pick out the overarching pattern of thought, I will not tease out the different, competing ‘backgrounds’ that Clement’s theology works together. For example, Clement uses varied terminology and frames of reference for discussing the divine principle hidden within humanity (nous, logos, hêgemonikon, pneuma, etc.), but the different backgrounds and systems of thought that each of these implies are not explored here. As a miscellanist, Clement himself tended to juxtapose material from different traditions evocatively and invite contemplation of what they shared, even if they differed in wording. His use of vivid but underdetermined imagery such as ‘hiddenness’ could help his readers to picture what he himself viewed synoptically,64 and help them to make sense of the shape of the system that he was trying to convey. This is the theological telos of imagistic discourse. The account of Clement’s theology of hiddenness and revelation that is sketched below is not very novel as a systematic interpretation of Clement, therefore I have tried to keep it brief and to cite passages by way of example rather than exhaustively. Where it goes beyond previous studies is in showing how the theology of hiddenness and revelation grounds Clement’s logic of Christian miscellanism and hence makes it possible to draw the link between hiddenness and miscellanism with different emphases from previous scholars. In light of the theology of hiddenness that is presented here, we see that Christian miscellanism is the proper way of participating in the divine economy of revelation. Hiddenness is pre-eminently divine hiddenness, and every person is called to miscellanise through an interplay between personal, textual and cosmic aspects of hiddenness. The esoteric tropes signal attention to this wider economy of revelation but do not in themselves give the grounds for Clement’s choice of the miscellanistic genre.

Divine Hiddenness and Humanity in the Divine Image To begin with God: divine hiddenness in Clement is a function of divine transcendence. It is because God is utterly transcendent that he is hidden 64

Clement regards synaisthêsis as a desirable skill acquired by spending time in formation (paideia), and contrasts this with areas of banausic expertise that appeal to particular senses, perfumery to smell, engraving to vision, etc. (Str. I.i.26.3–4).

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from humanity.65 However, it is because human beings have within them a divine principle that they are able to come to perceive God. This is the anthropological aspect of hiddenness. Clement gives the inner divine principle various descriptions, with different nuances: it may be a spark, an effluence, the nous, logos, hêgêmonikon, psychê, pneuma, spiritual senses (the ‘ear of the soul’, ‘the eye of the spirit’) or some combination of these.66 In each case, however, it is characteristically an aspect of the human being that is hidden from view and that can potentially be their organ for coming to know the hidden, transcendent God. In Clement’s terminology, illumination takes place in ‘the hidden part of the human being, the heart’, where the rays of gnosis illumine ‘the hidden, inner human being’.67 Clement differentiates two key moments in God’s creation of the hidden nature of humanity such that they can know and become like God: creation and new creation. At the first creation, God breathed something of his own into humanity (Paed. I.iii.7.1). Creation by God gives humans an initial relationship to God but an unperfected one: Adam was created receptive to virtue but not yet perfect (Str. VI.xii.96.2); humanity was created in the image of God (κατ᾽ εἰκόνα) but must attain the likeness (ὁμοίωσις);68 a conception (ἐννοία) of God was instilled in the human being alone among living creatures at creation.69 At baptism, there is a new creation, when people are born again and at once attain perfection (Paed. I.vi.25.1). Clement’s imagery underscores the moment of transformation and the radical nature of the change: the baptised person is illumined, made son, perfected and so immortalised (Paed. I.vi.26.1). Again, there is a focus on a transformation in the hidden, inner part of the person, which makes possible a relation to the 65

66

67

68

69

E.g., Str. V.xi.71.5, 74.4–5; xii.78.3, 79.1, 81.3–82.3. On divine transcendence in Clement: Mortley 1973a, 5–11; Hägg 2006, 154–78; Steenbuch 2017. E.g., a spark (Protr. vii.74.7), an effluence (Protr. vi.68.2), the nous (Str. V.xiv.94.5; VI. ix.72.2), logos (Paed. III.i.2.1; cf. Str. VI.xvi.136.3); hêgêmonikon (Str. VI. xvi.135.4–36.1; Behr 2000, 137), psychê, pneuma (Str. VI.xvi.134.2, Behr 2000, 138), spiritual senses (the ‘ear of the soul’, ‘the eye of the spirit’, Str. V.i.2.1; Paed. I.vi.28.1; Heath [forthcoming]). On Clement’s anthropology in general: Spanneut 1957, 166–78 (Stoic aspects); Behr 2000, 135–51. ἐν τῷ ἀποκεκρυμμένῳ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου, ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ ... τὸν ἐγκεκρυμμένον ἔνδον ... ἄνθρωπον, Protr. xi.115.4; cf. Str. VI.xviii.163.2 (psychê is invisible). This is one of the interpretations of Gen. 1:26 that Clement works with, cf. Protr. xii.120.4, 122.4; Paed. I.iii.9.1; Str. II.xxii.131.6, with Daniélou 1973, 409. For fuller discussion of Clement’s theology of image and likeness, including other interpretations of the ‘image’ in Clement: Daniélou 1973, 408–15; Behr 2000, 139–43; Edwards 2015. Str. VII.ii.8.2.

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otherwise hidden, transcendent deity: the mist of sin is cleared away, and the ‘eye of the spirit’ is illumined, by which alone people can enjoy epoptic vision of the divine (Paed. I.vi.28.1); illumination as gnosis makes ignorance disappear and implants the ability to see clearly (Paed. I.vi.29.4). However, this transformative moment does not complete humanity’s progress: the baptised Christian still has to learn to inhabit the divine life, becoming ever closer to God. For this, a full programme of gnostic education is essential, and this is what Clement’s oeuvre provides.70 Clement’s account of the divine principle hidden within humanity is thus not just an account about what humanity is ontologically but also about what humanity may become teleologically. In Hellenistic philosophy, especially Middle Platonism, it was commonplace to define the human telos as homoiôsis theôi.71 Clement goes further than most pagans, and certainly than other Christians, in declaring that the human telos is to become divine: he is the first Christian on record to use the technical terminology of deification,72 and he emphasises repeatedly in varied formulations that the perfected human is divine: the gnostic practises to be a god73

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On the tension between immediate ‘perfection’ at baptism and continual progress, see esp. Choufrine 2002. Also: van den Hoek 1998, 214–15; Behr 2000, 152–59. The classic formulation is in Stob. Anth. 2.7.3f, in a passage that has been attributed to Eudorus. The attribution has been questioned: Bonazzi 2007, 366. For discussion of homoiôsis theoi: Merki 1952; Sedley 1999; Erler 2001 (Epicureanism); Baltzly 2004; Tarrant 2007; Annas 2013, 52–71; Torri 2017; 2019; Zovko 2018. Clement quotes the Platonic loci classici on several occasions, often interpreting them with scriptural verses (e.g., Protr. xii.122.4–23.1 (Theaet. 176b; Gen 1:26; Ps 82:6); Str. II.xxii.131.5–33.3 (Theaet. 176b, Leg. 715cd; Lk 14:11 = 18:4), 136.6 (Theaet. 176b; 1 Cor 11:1); V.xiv.94.5–96.2 (Theaet. 176ab, Phdr. 255b, Lys. 214ad, Leg. 716c, Tim 90d; Gen 1:26); VI.xii.97.1 (Theaet. 176b; Wis 2:22, 25). On one occasion, he claims that Plato defined ‘becoming like God as far as possible’ (ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν, Theaet. 176b) as the telos (in fact, he did not do so in those terms, but he was interpreted by later philosophers as having done so: Merki 1952, 2, 46); he asserts that Moses said the same thing in other words in the law, namely, ‘Go after the Lord your God and keep my commandments’, ‘Become merciful and compassionate as your heavenly father is compassionate’ (Str. II.xix.100.3–4; Deut. 13:4, 7–9; Lk 6:36). See Merki 1952, 46–7; Lilla 1971, 108; Russell 2004, 129, 134–35; Havrda 2011, 37–41. θεοποιέω (three times – Protr. ix.87.1; xi.114.4; Str. VI.xv.125.4), θεόω (Str. IV. xxiii.152.1), ἐκθεόω (Paed. I.xii.98.3), θεοποιός (QDS 19), Russell 2004, 122–23. Cf. Sedley 1999, 309–10 on Plato’s more limited ideal of ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν as a goal that ‘falls strictly within the confines of an incarnate life, and governs the way in which that life is to be led. We are urged to achieve assimilation to god, if at all, within our present lifespan’. μελετᾷ εἶναι θεός, Str. VI.xiv.113.3.

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and is a god while walking about in flesh,74 or in scriptural terms, ‘I said ye are gods’.75 In sum, it is the hidden divine principle in humanity – nous, logos, etc. – which enables humanity to realise their telos in becoming divine or acquiring the divine homoiôsis. It is through that hidden divine principle, which is part of humanity, that humanity can hope to become like the hidden divinity and that divinity could become humanity in the incarnation.76

Forming the Human Relation to the Hidden Deity Clement’s project in Christian formation cultivates attention to ways of deepening the relation between hidden human and hidden deity. We saw 74

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ἐν σαρκὶ περιπολῶν θεός, Str. VII.xvi.101.4, imitating an Empedoclean expression, as noted in Russell 2011, 122 n. 15. εἶπα, θεοί ἐστε καὶ υἱοὶ ὑψίστου πάντες, LXX Ps 81:6, in, e.g., Paed. I.vi.26.1, Str. IV. xxiii.149.8. On deification in Clement of Alexandria: Butterworth 1915–1916; Merki 1952, 44–60; Lilla 1971, 106–17; van den Hoek 1998, 213–18 (on the reception of Ps 82:6); Russell 2004, 121–40; Havrda 2011, 35–39. For the sake of brevity, I am glossing over here the obvious paradox in supposing that the human telos is to become something that is apparently not human at all. Clement – like other Platonists – recognises this problem and addresses it: it is ‘impious’, he says, to expect that humanity and the almighty deity have the same aretê (Str. VI.xiv.114.5; VII. xiv.88.5; for the problem in Middle Platonism: Baltzly 2004; Tarrant 2007, 420). His theology offers three ways of framing a solution: (1) In the incarnation, the Son manifested what humanity can be as deity, without compromising the Father’s transcendence: the human telos is perfectly realised in Christ, who was Logos human and divine (Protr. i.7.1; Str. IV.xxi.130.2). He manifested the possibility that humanity might become divine and both taught and displayed what that would look like – not in the shape of his particular body, but in his life (Protr. i.7.1–3, 8.4; Paed. I.iii.8.1–9.4; Str. VI.xvii.151.3). (2) The Logos is cosmic principle as well as incarnate Son, and thus humans are deified by participating fully in the divine ordering of the cosmos. As God creates all things by logos, so the human being who becomes gnostic accomplishes good actions by the logikos part of himself (Str. VI.xvi.136.3), in imitation of the creator (cf. Zovko 2018). Humanity participates in wisdom – the power (dynamis) not the essence (ousia) (Str. VI.xvi.138.4). Similarly, Christ manifests wisdom and logos; indeed, this is how his embodiment of divinity is defined (Protr. i.7.1–3, 8.4; Str. V.iii.16.5; VI.vii.61.1; the association between Christ and sophia resonates with Paul [1 Cor 1:24, 30; Col 1:28], the association with logos with John 1:1). (3) Christ was characterised by perfectly fulfilling the Father’s will, and manifesting perfect obedience to the commandments (Str. III.xii.83.4), so too human perfection consists in fulfilment of the Father’s will and obedience to the gospel (Str. VII.xiv.88.6–7). Corresponding to these diverse expressions of teleology, there are different emphases in Clement’s soteriology. On the one hand, Christ’s incarnate parousia manifested what is possible for humanity (Paed. I.iii.9.1–4). On the other, God’s salvific activity within the human psyche implants the capacity needed to discern wisdom and the human agent is transformed from within (Str. VI. viii.62.4–63.2, xvii.157.1–4; Behr 2000, 166–70; Havrda 2011).

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in Chapter 8 that Classical miscellanists highlight social seclusion and ascetic practices as integral to their way of doing miscellany-making; Clement, for his part, approaches the hiddenness of the gnostic miscellanist through a Christian ethical, theological and social frame that underscores the connection between hidden person and hidden God. Firstly, theologically interpreted virtues put a person in relation to the hidden deity. Clement highlights the Pauline triad, faith, hope and love: these are the virtues with which he begins the stromatic training in Str. II, and he recaps them again at the start of Str. IV and V. They continue to characterise his portrayal of the gnostic in Str. VI.77 Each virtue grounds a relationship to the hidden deity. Faith trusts the transcendent, hidden deity and trusts that he is made manifest in Christ.78 Hope trusts in what is not yet here, not yet seen, but hidden in the future, concealed for those who are limited by temporal existence.79 Love is for the deity who is the object of faith and hope; love detaches people from things of this world and makes them always with the beloved, who transcends time and place (Str. VI.ix.73.1–76.1). It is love that makes the gnostic relation to God stable and unshakeable; the gnostic is enrolled among the ‘friends of God’ and never wavers from contemplating his beloved.80 The aspiring gnostic must become continually more like God in himself, if he is to know God, perceive God or love God well. This reflects a widespread dictum in early and Classical Greek philosophy, which is sometimes referred to as ‘like to like’: the Greek expression is ὅμοιον ὁμοίῳ. Philosophers interpreted the οίον ὁμοίῳ principle in different ways: some emphasised it in theories of perception, that like can only be perceived by like (and this was variously explained). Some emphasised like-to-like in theories of attraction, that like is dear to, or loved by like. When combined with the aspiration of ὁμὁμοίωσις θεῷ, it came to suggest that in order to know or love God, one must become like God.81

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In Str. IV.vii.51.1 he refers to these three as ‘the sacred triad’, constituting the ‘foundation of gnosis characterised by logos’ (ἡ γνῶσις ἡ λογική, ἧς θεμέλιος ἡ ἁγία τριάς, »πίστις, ἐλπίς, ἀγάπη
μείζων δὲ τούτων ἡ ἀγάπη). In Str. V.i.13.4, he portrays ‘the sanctuary of God, established on three foundations, faith, hope, love’ (ὁ νεὼς τοῦ θεοῦ, τρισὶν ἡδρασμένος θεμελίοις, πίστει, ἐλπίδι, ἀγάπῃ). Protr. i.10.3; Str. V.i.1.1–4. On faith in Clement: Osborn 1994; Havrda 2010. Str. II.ix.41.1, xii.53.1, xxii.134.4; IV.vii.46.2; VI.ix.73.4. Str. VI.ix.73.6; cf. Str. IV.iii.9.1–2; VII.xi.68.3. On the role of love: Butterworth 1915–1916, 159. Cf. Plat. Leg. 715cd. Cf. Plat. Leg. 716b–d, Merki 1952, 5–6; Zovko 2018, 97–98.

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In Clement’s theology, where God is fundamentally ‘hidden’, this means that humanity must become ‘hidden’ in corresponding ways.82 Clement often emphasises the likeness between the organ of perception and the divine truth that is perceived, and he focuses on terminology that typically characterises the hidden divine principle in humanity: νοῦς discerns νοητά in Scripture;83 there is an eye of the spirit and an ear of the soul to behold God and to believe what is heard;84 the πνεῦμα searches the deep things of God;85 the good person discerns what is good;86 we discern spiritual things by spiritual things.87 Furthermore, ‘“God is love”, known to those who love him, just as “God is faithful / an object of faith (πιστός)” communicated by teaching to those who are faithful / have faith (πιστοί), and we must be made like him by divine love, in order that we may behold like by like’.88 It is also by becoming like God that people are made ‘friends’ of God.89 Likeness to God thus develops the gnostic’s ability to perceive God and the intimacy of his personal relationship to God. In order to become this kind of gnostic, human beings have to inhabit the body in ways that allow their relationship to the hidden, transcendent deity to develop.90 Here we find the outward, visible manifestation of the 82

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A poignant comparison for the Christian reception of the homoiôsis motif is the story of Symeon the Holy Fool, who went with a man named John to the desert. ‘John saw the monasteries all around the holy Jordan, and said ... to Symeon, “Do you know the ones who dwell in these houses which are before us?” The other said to him, “Who are they?” And John said, “Angels of God.” Symeon said to him in wonder, “Can we see them?” “If we will become like them, yes,” said the other.’ Quoted in Frank 2000, 33. Str. V.iii.16.1. Cf. QDS 5.2–4, Lilla 1971, 137–38. On ‘noetic exegesis’ more broadly: Osborn 1998; Stefaniw 2010. In Clement, this contrasts with the way some people try to make sense of Scripture by inferring things about God by analogies with our fleshly experiences of the passions. He argues that the attribution of passions to the impassible deity is an act of prophetic accommodation to human weakness, salvific in intention (Str. II.xvi.72.2–4). Paed. I.vi.28.1; Str. V.i.2.1; Heath (forthcoming). 86 1 Cor 2:10 apud Str. II.ii.7.3; V.iv.25.5; VI.xviii.166.3. Cf. Str. VI.xiv.112.4. Str. V.iv.19.3. »ἀγάπη δὲ ὁ θεὸς« ὁ τοῖς ἀγαπῶσι γνωστός, ὡς »πιστὸς ὁ θεὸς« ὁ τοῖς πιστοῖς παραδιδόμενος διὰ τῆς μαθήσεως. καὶ χρὴ ἐξοικειοῦσθαι ἡμᾶς αὐτῷ δι᾽ἀγάπης τῆς θείας, ἵνα δὴ τὸ ὅμοιον τῷ ὁμοίῳ θεωρῶμεν, Str. V.ii.13.1–2. Cf. Str. V.iii.17.1, ἀγαπήσας τε ἐντεῦθεν ἐξομοιοῦται τῷ ἠγαπημένῳ. A different, but related, thought appears in Str. VII.x.57.5, φίλον φίλῳ τὸ γινῶσκον τῷ γινωσκομένῳ. Str. VII.xi.68.2, ἥ τε φιλία δι᾽ὁμοιότητος περαίνεται, τῆς κοινότητος ἐν τῷ ἑνὶ κειμένης. Clement also emphasises gnosis and love as the way people become friends of God: Str. VII. iii.19.2, 21.3, x.57.4–5, xi.62.7; xii.79.1. For broader discussion of ‘asceticism’ in Clement: Behr 2000. Clement underscores that humanity is not akin to God by nature, power or essence; rather, the likeness resides only

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inner, hidden relationship to God, for example, in practical and social virtues of doing good, because that is part of obedience to God’s commands and of likeness to Christ.91 The aspiring gnostic is careful with bodily and material things in order not to be attached to them but to maintain his relation to the transcendent God (Str. IV, passim). Apatheia, which has been heavily emphasised in modern scholarship, is one of Clement’s vocabularies to describe this (Str. VI.ix.71.1–2), but ‘separation from the body’ has the purpose of ‘presence to the Lord’ (Str. VI. ix.71.4–78.1; VII.xii.78.4–79.7), friendship with God (Str. IV.iii.9.1; VII. xii.79.1) and beholding him face to face (Str. VII.x.57.1, xi.68.4). The gnostic is thus in affective, interpersonal relation to the hidden God, which in some sense removes him from the material world, such that in practice he lives at the ‘boundary’ between mortal and divine (Str. II.xviii.81.2). At the same time, the gnostic cultivates social hiddenness and some other forms of ascetic discipline that resonate with Classical scholarly miscellanists: he is diligent and eager in study,92 and while there is no developed motif of lucubratio such as the Roman scholars have, Clement does portray the gnostic keeping awake by night to wait for epiphany and to pursue wisdom – he draws on scriptural imagery of the sage keeping awake in pursuit of wisdom and of the virgins with their oil lamps waiting for their returning Lord.93 In Clement’s presentation, the latter vignette prompts a flurry of ‘esoteric tropes’, which underscore that gnosis is among the few and not the many.94 However, the gnostic’s primary mode of social withdrawal to be with God is not physical but spiritual, for it takes place as prayer: the gnostic not only participates regularly in public liturgy (Str. VI.xiv.113.3) but also prays silently and privately in every place; prayer is his unbroken converse (ὁμιλία) with God, such that his relationship with God is not fixed by time or place (Str. VII.vii.35.1–49.8; xii.80.3).95 Both in relation to the social body and in relation to his own

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in being the work of his will, and it is he who summons to sonship those who take up gnosis voluntarily, by ascetic practice and by teaching (Str. II.xvi.75.2). See also: Str. II. xvii.77.3–4. Paed. I.iii.9.4; xii.98.2; xiii.101.2, 103.1; Str. II.xii.55.5; VII.ii.8.6, vii.48.4. Behr 2000, 169. Str. I.ii.21.1; VII.xvi.104.1. Paed. II.ix.79.4–81.5 (Prov. 8:34 et al.); V.iii.17.3 (Matt 25:1–13); VI.xv.120.3 (Wis 6:12–16). Str. V.iii.17.4–18.3. Hägg 2012; Perrone 2012. Plátová 2012 helpfully shows how intercessory prayer is a form of doing good to others, special to the gnostic. Thus, prayer may involve social withdrawal, but it can also be socially motivated and beneficial.

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body, then, the gnostic is marked by his participation in the transcendent divine life, whether through his activity (ἐνέργεια), which participates in divine goodness; his affections, which orient him to the deity that he longs for or his interpersonal communion (ὁμιλία) with God, which keeps him in God’s presence even while in the body. In this sense, the gnostic’s personal hiddenness is structured by his relation to the hidden God and finds its counterpart in hiddenness from society.

Discernment and Hence Miscellanism As the Mode of Gnostic Formation For those living in the present world, the varied modes of relation to the hidden, transcendent God are a basis for discernment and wise selectivity. This is the point at which gnostic formation and formation as a miscellanist manifestly coincide. The gnostic becomes a more hidden person and is therefore able to discern what is like himself – that is, what points to the hidden deity. This is what he finds attractive and therefore chooses, and by exercising this choice, he becomes a better gnostic. This pattern of discernment and selection, however, is itself a kind of miscellanism. Textual practices are simply one area among others in which the gnostic exercises his skills in discernment and selectivity, which are not limited to the sphere of texts, since they are governed by his personal relation to the hidden God. Clement’s treatise on ‘martyrdom’ in Str. IV furnishes a poignant case study in the close connection between becoming ‘hidden’ in relation to the hidden deity and becoming selective in relation to things of this world, which in turn can mean becoming a miscellanist who ‘listens in a hidden way’ for that which is ‘hidden’. The book focuses on death, which (like sexuality) is a limit case scenario for testing a person’s understanding of what defines the meaning and value of embodied life. Clement’s central claim is that true ‘martyrdom’ is to live wholly out of love for God, whether in a good life in the body or by a confessional death.96 He quotes Romans 8:39 as a ‘summary of gnostic martyrdom’: namely, that ‘neither height nor depth nor any other creature’ (Clement inserts here a gloss, interpreting ‘creature’ [κτίσις] as ‘energy’ [ἐνέργεια]) ‘will be able to separate us from the love

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Esp. Str. IV.iv.14.1–3 (death out of love), cf. 15.3 (living martyrdom).

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of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’.97 Thus, the true martyr is in constant inner relation to the hidden, transcendent God, and that relationship is characterised preeminently as love. But alongside love, the central theme in Clement’s account of gnostic martyrdom is choice (προαίρεσις, together with a discourse on τὸ αἱρετόν, αἱρεῖσθαι, ἐκλέγεσθαι, κρίνεσθαι).98 Martyrdom rests on the gnostic’s proairesis, which God foreknew.99 The gnostic martyr chooses prospective pleasure over present pain, chooses to seek first the blessings of God.100 Christ judges the proairesis and trains the soul.101 What matters is not whether one is rich by the bounty one has received but whether one’s proairesis is to do works of charity with the means that one has.102 Only doing good for the sake of love is choiceworthy for a gnostic;103 only the ability to choose (μόνον τὸ προαιρετικόν), and love, are to be prized and preserved.104 The act of choosing, however, is what a miscellanist does. A miscellanist selects texts, and also events or observations, to note down, reorder and contemplate in order that they be instructive and formative. The goal of the miscellanist is the same as the goal of the gnostic – that is what motivates Clement’s own miscellanism and the miscellanism of his readers, which he explicitly encouraged in the preface to this Stromateus. The intellectual act of choosing out texts, and the ethical act of selecting what it is good to do may on the face of it seem rather different, but in Clement’s world of gnostic paideia they are complementary. In the formation of the gnostic, selecting those things that are proper to God is both the mode by which people acquire the gnostic disposition and a core characteristic of how they inhabit it within this world, where not everything equally tends to God.105 It involves the exercise of choice, both ethically, to prefer what is good and tends Godward, and intellectually, to contemplate God where he is to be found. The way the gnostic is 97 98

99 102 105

Str. IV.xiv.96.2. Occurrences in Str. IV (using TLG): προαίρεσις, seven; προαιρέω, three; αἱρετός, seven; αἱρέω, tewnty-two; ἐκλέγω, two; κρίνω, fifteen. 100 101 Str. IV.iv.14.2. Str. IV.v.23.1–vi.26.5. Str. IV.vi.35.1, 36.1. 103 104 Str. IV.vi.38.1. Str. IV.xxii.135.4 Str. IV.xxi.131.1. Cf. Some form of discernment and selectivity as part of formation has strong roots in the Platonic tradition, where it is by picking out what is good and beautiful in this world that philosophers ascend to the contemplative vision of true goodness and beauty (Symp. 209e5–12c2; Resp. VII). Studies of choice in Clement have often focused on issues of free will (Havrda 2011) or the philosophical background to proairesis (Clark 1977, 45–66). I want to draw out the significance of this theme for discernment as the basis for miscellanism.

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equipped and motivated for discernment and selectivity is by his relationship to the hidden deity. Contemplative virtues and practical virtues go hand in hand in this understanding of Christian formation. It is not possible to ‘pursue gnôsis’ with bad deeds;106 people choose to do good because of love,107 or because they have an affinity for noetic things108 or because they discern that it is good to do good.109 That is to say, the choice to do good arises from their stable attraction to that which is good, noetic and divine; this is the ground of their situational responses, to choose some things and to reject others, or to choose to do good irrespective of the particularities of a context.110 As he explains, ‘turning away from perceptible things would not produce affinity with noetic things, but rather affinity for noetic things is a natural turning away from perceptible things for the gnostic, who gnostically chooses the good by selection of good things, marvelling at the creation and sanctifying the creator, and sanctifying his likeness to the divine’.111 This involves textual practice too: the gnostic’s life, and potentially his death, are a testimony to his noetic understanding of the law and the gospel.112 Just as Christ’s embodied parousia exegeted the old covenant, so the exegesis and fulfilment of the law are found in faith in Christ and gnôsis of the gospel.113 As Christ manifested the image and likeness of God, so the energy of the gnostic in doing good becomes good, and he perfects his life in the image and likeness of the Lord.114 As ‘love is the fulfilment of the Law’ according to Paul, and Christ is ‘the parousia of the Lord who loves us’, so ‘our teaching and way of life are loving according to Christ’.115 Although this is not presented as a theology of miscellanism, it is this Christian anthropology that makes sense of the textual practice of miscellanism. Drawing the different parts of Scripture together as a Christian miscellanist aims beyond the production of a new textual miscellany. The miscellanising of Scripture aims to disclose the unity and fulfilment of the texts in a mode of embodied human life that is god-like, and thus a mode of love free from bodily desires. Similar attentiveness to discernment and selectivity in the formation of the gnostic can be found elsewhere in the Stromateis. For example, in Str. 106 109 112 115

107 108 Str. IV.xxi.130.5. Str. IV.xxii.135.4. Str. IV.xxiii.148.1–2; 110 111 Str. IV.xxii.137.1 Str. IV.xxii.137.1; 148.1–2. Str. IV.xxiii.148.1. 113 114 Str. IV.xxiii.147.4–48.1. Str. IV.xxi.134.2–4. Str. IV.xxii.137.1. Str. IV.xviii.113.5, «πλήρωμα οὖν νόμου ἡ ἀγάπη,» καθάπερ ὁ Χριστός, τουτέστιν ἡ παρουσία τοῦ ἀγαπῶντος ἡμᾶς κυρίου, καὶ ἡ κατὰ Χριστὸν ἀγαπητικὴ ἡμῶν διδασκαλία τε καὶ πολιτεία.

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VI, Clement acknowledges that the ‘many’ are afraid of Greek philosophy as children fear scary masks. This is important for whether a gnostic work includes philosophy in his own miscellany-making. Clement says that if people are scared of it, then it is better that such unstable faith is dissolved. The gnostic has to cultivate selectivity, as when one compares different purples by putting them alongside one another, or practises to be a skilful moneychanger, distinguishing false coin from true. So too the gnostic always seeks God’s face, even though he has spoken in many and various ways. He approaches the truth by distinguishing what is common and what is particular, while error and false opinion spring from inability to differentiate.116 The person who is too weak to learn many things chooses what is more important. If a person knows the truth, he comes to know also what is false about it.117 Heresies are given for the ‘approved’, meaning ‘either those who are coming to faith, approaching the Lord’s teaching with more than usual selective ability (ἐκλεκτικώτερον), just as ‘approved moneychangers discern the true coin of the Lord from the counterfeit, or those who are approved in the faith itself, by life and gnosis’.118 A mature person reads Scripture so as to discern and articulate the differences between signs, commands and prophecies and hunt for the connection (ἀκολουθία) of the divine teaching, for Scripture is not ‘a single Myconos’.119 Clement’s Stromateis too require selective ability on the part of the reader, who needs to differentiate wheat from chaff120 and discover the truth hidden beneath Greek philosophy.121 Conversely, when a gnostic teaches others, he exercises discernment in choosing when to speak and when to keep silent, how to speak and whom to address.122 The capacity for discernment is thus central both to the process of becoming a gnostic and to the continued social, contemplative, exegetical, and ethical role of the gnostic while he lives in this world. Socially, he chooses his words and his material in teaching others; contemplatively, he chooses what is important to ponder; exegetically, he tells apart different genres and pursues how the Lord’s teaching fits together; ethically, he chooses what is good to do. His ability to choose these things is not a separate and additional capacity to gnosis, for it is by knowing and being attracted to the hidden God that he is able to differentiate true from false. This gives a theological rationale for why and how the gnostic is trained 116 119 122

Str. VI.x.80.5–82.2. Str. I.xxviii.179.3–4. Str. VI.xv.115.5–16.3.

117 120

118 Str. VI.xviii.162.3–4. Str. VII.xv.90.5. 121 Str. IV.ii.7.4. Str. I.i.18.1.

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as a miscellanist at all: miscellanism depends on the selection and discernment of what is worth choosing from what is not; Clement’s gnostic is a model of this practice in his words, his exegesis, his contemplation and his life. Clement’s attentiveness to personal formation puts the fundamental act of miscellanism on a Christian basis, for the aspiring gnostic must make his selections on the basis of his relationship to and affinity with the hidden, transcendent deity, through Christ. When the hidden, divine character of humanity is most receptive to the hidden, transcendent deity, then people are best able to select what is true, good and of God. In making that selection, they are embodying the divine likeness manifest in Christ.

Economy of Revelation: Divine Hiddenness in the Immanent Frame When scholars speak about miscellanism today, they refer primarily to a textual activity of selecting and excerpting texts, then piecing them together in a new order. However, miscellanists also made selections from non-textual material, such as observations of events, conversations or other topics for reflection that were encountered in the world, as we find, for example, in Gellius’ Nights. Conversely, putting miscellanies to use involved taking them as starting points for the reader’s contemplation or conduct in the world.123 If we are to understand the theology of miscellanistic praxis in Clement, we need to consider not only the details of his textual praxis (more on that in Chapter 10) but also the wider economy of revelation within which the gnostic exercises discernment. Clement conveys a threefold pattern of disclosure in the economy of revelation: in the world (pronoia, logos, sophia, dynamis, energeia), in texts (primarily Scripture, secondarily also some Classical literature, especially philosophy and the Stromateis), and in human beings (primarily Christ, secondarily the gnostic).124 This corresponds to what I have called cosmic, exegetical and anthropological modes of hiddenness, all of which are immanent modes by which the hidden, transcendent God is revealed. In the world there is ‘cosmic hiddenness’: divine logos, sophia or pronoia governs the ordering of things and what goes on in the world. In these cases, God is hidden from the physical senses. The divine ordering

123 124

J. König 2007, 44. Cf. Str. I.i.4.3; III.xi.71.1–2; IV.vi.32.1; VII.xi.66.4. For the tripartite structure of revelation, see, e.g., Str. V.i.5.4–8.1.

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of things is perceived as energeia, dynamis, pronoia, logos or sophia but has no physical body and no fixed place. God is manifest in creation and through what happens in the world but not in himself. Each of these terms for the hidden activity and ordering principle of God has a slightly different scope, background and nuance.125 For the present argument, the most important thing is that they each articulate revelation of the hidden deity without physical form but in activity, order and power (cf. Str. VI.xvi.148.2, ἐπείπερ ἡ θεία δύναμις ἐπικεκρυμμένως πάντα ἐνεργεῖν πέφυκεν). Texts delimit the scope for ‘exegetical hiddenness’. Scripture is the preeminent source of revelation,126 but there is some revelation through Classical literature127 and through Clement’s own Stromateis. Here, the experience of hiddenness comes in different ways: Scripture is composed in riddles (αἰνίγματα); they hide the sense with parables (παραβολαί) and other figures.128 Sometimes the focus is on the allegorical significance of a particular portion of text (e.g., Str. V.vi.32.1–40.4, on the exegesis of the Tabernacle);129 at others, it is on the fulfilment of the law and the

125

126

127 128

129

For dynamis: Runia 2004. For energeia: Bradshaw 2006. On the distinction between dynamis, energeia and ousia in Clement: Hägg 2006, ch. 8. Logos straddles a Greek philosophical discourse and a Christian discourse of words/Word and of ‘Word become human’ (which appears to be Clement’s paraphrase of John 1:14). Logos as ordering principle of the cosmos is thus intimately bound up with other modes of revelation, and Clement plays with the ambiguities of the terminology (Bartelink 1973). Sophia, ‘wisdom’, is more deeply rooted in the ‘wisdom’ tradition of Scripture in Clement’s usage; when focusing on issues of revelation, he uses it especially in connection with Proverbs (Str. II.ii.4.1–4; VI.xvi.138.4), Wisdom (Str. II.ii.5.2), 1 Cor (Str. V.xii.80.4), and Col (Str. V.xii.80.5). But, he also gives definitions of sophia drawn from the philosophical schools of his day (Str. VI.xvii.160.2); and it has a Christological definition (Str. VI.vii.61.1). Pronoia has a Stoic background and underscores fatherly or shepherdly care of God; it is used not just for the ordering of the cosmos in general but for intervention in particular ways, such as through the giving of Scripture or of the Son or of philosophy. It is by providence that the prophecies came to pass (Str. VI.xv.128.3), and the Son is the ‘secret token of divine providence’ (τὸ ἀπόρρητον τῆς μεγάλης προνοίας ἅγιον γνώρισμα, Str. V.i.7.8). Philosophy too is a gift of providence (see further Chapter 10). Clement treats belief in pronoia as fundamental; if people disbelieve in pronoia, then they are godless (atheos) and it is a sin (Str. V.i.6.1). On providence in Clement, see further: Bergian 2012. Str. V.i.5.4, ὁ θεός ἐστιν ὁ λέγων καὶ περὶ ἑνὸς ἑκάστου ὧν ἐπιζητῶ παριστὰς ἐγγράφως, ‘God is the one who speaks and stands by in writing to help with each thing that I enquire about.’ E.g., Str. IV.xxii.142.23, xxv.162.3–4, xxvi.171.3–72.1. Str. VI.xv.126.4, μεταφορικῇ κέχρηται τῇ γραφῇ; Str. VI.xv.127.4, ἐσχημάτισε τὰ σημαινόμενα. Kovacs 1997 (Tabernacle); Edwards 2015 (Decalogue).

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264 Clement’s Theology of Hiddenness and Christian Miscellanism

prophets or the consonance of law, prophets, gospel and apostles taken together as a unity.130 In both cases, what Scripture discloses is Christological in focus: the riddles of prophecy are disclosed in the person of Christ131 and in all that happened to him and through him.132 Clement is attentive to the intention and hence the tone of hiddenness: scriptural locution ‘hides the truth in many ways’ not for embellishment but that light should shine only for those initiated for gnosis, who seek the truth by love.133 In Classical texts, again there is an inkling of truth in parts, but the way this is theorised may focus on providence (that God providentially gave philosophy to the Greeks),134 or on a more underhanded act of stealth (that the Greeks stole the barbarians’ wisdom).135 The Stromateis, as we have seen extensively, ‘conceal’ the truth with much learning, ready to be discovered by those who are passionately devoted to the search. In persons there is ‘anthropological hiddenness’. It is Christ who embodies the logos, and the gnostic becomes like him. The notion of ‘hiddenness’ is different here: Christ is, on the one hand, the manifestation of the riddles of Scriptures, the epiphany.136 He makes manifest what it looks like when a human being is not only κατ᾽ εἰκόνα but also καθ᾽ ὁμοίωσιν.137 On the other hand, it was hidden from people who he was: ‘a god showing the power in the flesh, counted as human, but hidden as to who he was’.138 Christ is the fullest presentation of God to the senses and to the knowledge of humanity, but paradoxically, this is because he embodies and enacts that which is divine (logos, dynamis, energeia, sophia, etc.), which transcends sense perception and human understanding. He demonstrates what is possible for humanity by way of obedience to the commandments, but he is also iconic in the sense of providing a focus for contemplation of the divine likeness into which humanity is also growing.139 This very brief account of the shape of the economy of revelation in Clement’s work helps us to recognise that Clement’s esoteric tropes are 130 131 132

133 135 137 139

Str. VI.xi.88.5. Cf. Str. III.ii.8.5, x.70.2, xi.75.3. Protr. i.7.6, 10.1–3; Str. IV.xxi.134.2–4; V.i.3.3. Str. VI.xv.127.1–28.3; cf. VI.xviii.166.5–67.1. For discussion of this doctrine in Str. V, see Ward 2017b, 555, who clarifies that ‘in reality scripture only holds two “mysteries.” First, there are those enigmatic references that find their ultimate fulfilment in Christ . . . The second set of mysteries found in scripture are those which prefigure the higher knowledge found through Christ’. 134 Str. VI.xv.129.4, cf. 127.4. Str. I.i.18.4; VI.xvii.153.1, 159.9. 136 Str. II.i.1.1, 2.2; VI.ii.4.3. Protr. i.7.3, 10.1; Str. IV.xxi.134.2–4; V.i.3.3. 138 Paed. I.iii.9.1; Str. VI.xvi.136.3. Str. VI.xvi.140.3; cf. VII.ii.8.5. Str. VII.ii.8.6, iii.13.1–2, 16.5–6.

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only one part of a much broader discourse of ‘hiddenness’ and that miscellanistic readers are invited to engage with the whole economy.

Miscellanism As the Mode of Engaging with the Economy of Revelation The threefold pattern of manifestation of God outlined above gives shape to Clement’s theological rationale for miscellanism. Firstly, it explains where people should search for gnosis or things that lead to gnosis. Clement’s theology of divine revelation within the world underscores that knowledge may be discerned not only in the Christian Scriptures and tradition, but also elsewhere: he highlights specifically, as potential points of controversy, the usefulness of philosophy and of the liberal arts.140 Greek literature and philosophy show the truth; no matter whether this arises from human theft or divine providence, Clement affirms that the proper mode of engaging with them is to discern what is of God and select that for one’s own use and that of others.141 Secondly, the economy of textual revelation gives grounds for prioritising among texts. Clement supposes that philosophy is but a preparation for what is to come and that people can experience a kind of epiphany when they turn from pagan texts and traditions to Scriptures, when faith shines in the hidden person in their heart and their soul is illumined.142 As sunlight when passed through glass is wrought into fire, so philosophy takes a spark of fire from divine Scripture and is manifested in a few people.143 The miscellany that he composes in the Stromateis deliberately draws from pagan texts in order to benefit his hearers, but the ultimate teacher in his own experience is the bee hidden in Egypt, who plucks only from the prophetic and apostolic meadow.144 Thirdly, the ordering principle and purpose of miscellanism is disclosed through Christ. It is Christ in whom the riddles of Scripture are resolved, for when he became human and took flesh, he made visible the deity who is transcendent. He showed humanity what the likeness of God looks like and fulfilled what was promised in the prophets.145 Christ ought to become the contemplative focus of miscellanism, as the one in whom unity and coherence is found in all that is sought, discerned and collected

140 141 143

Str. I.v.30.1–32.3. See further Chapter 10, pp. 311–15. 142 Str. I.v.32.1; II.ii.4.1; VI.xi.89.2. See Chapter 10, pp. 286–89, 313–14. 144 145 Str. VI.xvii.149.2. Str. I.i.11.2. Str. VI.xv.122.1.

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266 Clement’s Theology of Hiddenness and Christian Miscellanism

by miscellany-makers.146 Christ’s face is the one that people are called to seek, it is the true face behind the masks of Greek philosophy, and it is he who is eschatologically seen ‘face to face’ and no longer through mirrors.147 Christ is the personal presentation to humanity of God,148 and in him people can contemplate the unity of their faith through love.149 In this self-involving contemplation, they also properly become more Christ-like.150 The basis for miscellanism as part of the salvific economy thus depends on the interplay between different modes of hiddenness: it is by cultivating personal hiddenness (anthropological hiddenness) through ethical, ascetic and social practices (social hiddenness) that a person discerns the hidden deity (theological hiddenness) presented in hidden ways through text (exegetical hiddenness) and world (cosmic hiddenness). The unity of this kind of miscellanism is found in the person of Christ, through whom the hidden transcendent deity is also contemplated. This has teleological significance for the gnostic, because the the human telos is both contemplation of God and becoming like God in order to be able to contemplate. Clement’s literary project is intended to shape readers who are able to grow into this relation to the hidden God.

a theological interpretation of ‘hidden listening to the hidden’ (str. i.i.13.1–4): clement’s programme and the limits of esotericism At the start of the chapter, we saw that Clement invites his readers to place themselves among those who ‘listen in a hidden way’. It may be helpful to return to this passage now, in order to draw together the threads of what has been a rather complex discussion and give an example of how it all comes together in practice. In his first extended ‘esoteric passage’, in the introduction to the Stromateis, Clement twice underscores that revelation is ‘not for the

146 147

148 149 150

Cf. Str. Str. IV.xxv.157.2–3; VI.xvii.79.9; VII.xii.76.5–77.2. Mortley 1976; and see the Appendix. The significance of Christ’s face emerges by reading together such passages as Protr. i.2.1; Str. II.i.3.5;. V.vi.40.1; VI.x.80.5 with 81.6; VII.x.58.4–5, xi.68.3–4. Str. V.vi.33.6–34.1. Eph 4:13, in Str. I.v.18.3; IV.xxi.132.1; VI.ix.73.3–4; xv.122.2. Str. VI.xiv.114.6–15.1.

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many, but for the few’. In this context, he draws attention to his own gloss on Jesus’ words that ‘everything that is hidden will be made manifest’. In his interpretation, this means that ‘for one who listens in a hidden way, that which is hidden will be made manifest’ (τῷ κρυπτῶς ἐπαΐοντι τὸ κρυπτὸν φανερωθήσεσθαι, Str. I.i.13.3) This is imagistic discourse of hiddenness: Clement’s phrase is poetically and imagistically powerful, but it does not make immediate theological sense. The polyptoton, τῷ κρυπτῶς ἐπαΐοντι τὸ κρυπτὸν φανερωθήσεσθαι underscores the likeness between the disciple and what is manifested to him, as ‘hidden’ in complementary ways. But what can this mean? At an imagistic level, the passage is suggestive but requires explanation: how can hiddenness as a mode of listening be similar to the hiddenness of what is to be revealed? Is hidden listening a matter of social seclusion, or is it a deeper relationship between the listener and the divine hiddenness, and are the two interdependent? What would such a relationship to the hidden deity consist in, and how would it be possible? Is τὸ κρυπτόν, which is to be revealed, a divine truth, or is it the deity himself? Even if the listener and that to which he listens share complementary modes of hiddenness, how does that bring about manifestation? What does ‘manifestation’ comprise in this context? The imagistic discourse of hiddenness raises these questions, but they require a theological resolution. Now that we have explored the systematic relationship between the various modes of hiddenness that we discovered in Clement – theological, anthropological, exegetical, social and cosmic – we can begin to answer these questions. The hiddenness of the mode of listening and the hiddenness of what is to be revealed are similar in so far as they both point to the hiddenness of God, the one anthropologically, the other theologically. The hiddenness of the mode of listening on the part of humanity may be cultivated in part through social seclusion, but it also arises as a deeper relationship with God through ascetic practice and formation of intellectual and affective virtues. This kind of relationship of ‘listening in a hidden way’ consists in growth in love and knowledge of God. In this world, ‘listening in a hidden way’ is practised and cultivated through miscellanism, in the sense of selection of that which builds up the relation with God. This includes exegetical discernment of what is hidden in texts and perceiving other ways in which divine providence or wisdom reveal God providentially in the world (cosmic hiddenness). This miscellanistic praxis of selecting and reordering discoveries for personal benefit always has its contemplative focus in God through Christ, into whose

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268 Clement’s Theology of Hiddenness and Christian Miscellanism

likeness the human being is growing. This is the ‘manifestation’ that comes about through hidden listening. Christ manifests the riddles of the Scriptures by his parousia that enfleshes what Old and New covenants were talking about. He also manifests the divine principle of wisdom that gives order to the cosmos, whether it be called logos or sophia; he is a ‘secret token of divine providence (προνοίας)’.151 The notion that complementary modes of hiddenness bring about manifestation is grounded in the ancient dictum of ‘like-to-like’ (ὁμοίον ὁμοίῳ), interpreted through a Christian lens. ‘Esotericism’ as a social phenomenon of hiding meanings from some readers has a place within this economy of revelation and hiddenness, but it is not among the organising principles of either miscellanism or soteriology. The idea that the gnostic is at the pinnacle of a progressive formation to ‘listen in a hidden way’ to the hidden deity has as its logical consequence that others are currently not able to ‘listen in a hidden way’, or at least not as well as the gnostic can, since they have not yet progressed far enough to reach the pinnacle of perfection. A gnostic does not hide things from others but rather is skilled in knowing how to use the logos, and when, and to whom and when to be silent (Str. VI. xv.115.5–16.3). The notion that there is a proper time and manner is simply a confession that the divine economy of revelation operates within the temporal and spatial constraints of the immanent frame. Where appropriate, the gnostic ‘proclaims from the rooftops’ that which he has ‘heard in the ear’, that is, ‘in a hidden way, in a mystery’, so as to bring clarity for others. When Clement uses a rhetoric of social exclusion, it may critique those who are not even trying, who engage in enquiry only for strife and dispute and not out of love of the hidden God. Such people are not even beginning to listen ‘in a hidden way’ but are only engaging in dispute with other human beings. At other times, the rhetoric of social exclusion is an celebration of the gnostic’s unique illumination. By talking it up, Clement encourages those who are still struggling to discipline their studies so as to approach this illumination too.

conclusion: hiddenness and the muses Clement’s motif of concealment has often led scholars to describe him as an ‘esoteric author’, who chose the miscellany genre in order to hide some 151

Str. V.i.7.8.

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things from some people, in imitation of scriptural concealment by aenigma. This chapter has begun to respond, by arguing that Clement’s esoteric tropes draw attention to the theme of hiddenness, which is a widespread imagistic discourse in his work. Five major modes of hiddenness were discerned in Clement’s theology: theological, anthropological, exegetical, social and cosmic; in practice, all of these are grounded in the hiddenness of God. God is transcendent, but is revealed in hidden ways in persons, texts and in the world for those who seclude themselves from the social gaze and direct their contemplation to God through Christ. Clement invites all people to participate in the divine economy of revelation with the selective discernment that is made possible by a gnostic relationship to the hidden God. ‘Hiddenness’ is an imagistic discourse, and an impersonal one, grounded as it is in primary sense perception. However, Clement constructs it through Christian theology. In conclusion, it may be well to reflect on how this theology compares with theologies of the Muses and revelation in the Classical tradition. Like Wisdom in biblical tradition, the Muses were female deities who were often regarded as disclosing and praising the ordered harmony of the cosmos.152 Like Scripture, the poetry of Homer and Hesiod was held to have been inspired, and the Muses were credited with its inspiration. There was nothing comparable to Christ’s incarnation in the Muse tradition, but there were many holy men and philosophers who were closely associated with the Muses – Orpheus was child of a Muse; Pythagoras and Socrates associated themselves with the Muses; in Roman poetry, the idea of speaking of the contemporary human who had most power over one’s poetry was well established – love poets called their girlfriends their Muse, and others wrote of the emperor as their Muse;153 muses depicted in art could be interpreted as women known to the viewer, and yet the philosopher and his muse in art still functioned as a portrayal of the viewer’s self-ideal.154 Better than any other deities, the Muses could thus focus reflection within the Classical tradition about the interrelationship between divine wisdom in the world, in texts and in embodied persons – that is, in the terminology of this chapter, theological, cosmic, exegetical and anthropological modes of

152

153 154

Hardie 2000, on Pindar’s first hymn, including its resonance with Philo, Plant. 127–29. On the significance of Pindar’s hymn in the portrayal of the Muses in the Roman period, see also Barchiesi 1991. E.g., Prop. 2.1.3–4; Quint. 4 pr. 4; Commager 1962, 5–6. Borg 2006, 166–71; Hansen 2008; Meyer 2009.

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270 Clement’s Theology of Hiddenness and Christian Miscellanism

hiddenness. Clement’s theology of hiddenness reinterprets these connections within a Christian frame, where most attention is given to Christ as the embodiment of the Logos, who discloses the transcendent deity. Clement’s call to ‘listen in a hidden way’ to ‘that which is hidden’ also resonates with modes of life that we discovered in the Classical miscellanists, where certain practices of ‘hiddenness’ on the part of the miscellanist prepare him to discover hidden things: the Classical miscellanist secludes himself, either as a scholar alone with his books, often by night, in private space and private time, or else as a philosophical symposiast, philosophising in a hidden way as he contributes to the convivial harmonies of the gathering. This self-seclusion attunes the miscellanist for insight into that which is hidden, whether it is disclosed through books, excerpts and notes or through philosophical conversation. Clement goes much further by articulating the idea as if it were a principle of revelation that ‘for one who listens in a hidden way, what is hidden will be made manifest’.

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10 Mystery Initiation and Clement’s Literary Paideia The Making of a Christian Miscellanist

Chapter 9 gave the first part of a response to the way in which scholarship has often drawn the connections between Clement’s ‘esoteric tropes’ in the Stromateis, his theme of concealment and his choice of the miscellany genre; this chapter continues the argument, building on what was set forth there but shifting now from a systematic to a rhetorical frame. Absent from the systematic discussion was any close engagement with Clement’s rhetoric of hiddenness or rhetorical culture of miscellanism, either Christian or Classical. In this chapter, I want to show how Clement constructs a literary project to discipline all his readers to ‘listen in a hidden way’ such that ‘what is hidden’ may be ‘made manifest’ to them. I shall argue that mystery imagery structures and binds together his literary paideia, which trains a person not only as a gnostic contemplative, but also as a Christian rhetor, with aptitude for participating as a Christian in various interlocking cultures of miscellany-making. As in Chapter 9, the argument here too is directed against the idea that Clement chose to miscellanise in order to hide some things from some readers, and that his theme of ‘hiddenness’ marks his esoteric intention to ward off the uninitiated crowd. That position often interweaves three claims that are disputed in this chapter: first, that Clement’s mystery imagery is full of mystique and should be placed solely in a religious and philosophical frame; second, that the theme of concealment is limited to the Stromateis, absent from the Paedagogus and in tension with the Protrepticus, which takes an evangelistic approach to spreading the truth; third, that the connection between mysteries and concealment in the Stromateis explains why Clement chose to miscellanise, namely, to conceal some things from some readers. 271 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108918640.010

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Mystery Initiation and Clement’s Literary Paideia

Against this, I argue in the first part of the chapter that Clement’s mystery imagery connects his theme of hiddenness not only with religion and philosophy but also with grammatical and rhetorical paideia. His intention is not to keep people out of the mysteries but to draw them into the mystagogical curriculum that is open to all. The goal is to become a gnostic, who not only contemplates perfectly but also teaches perfectly, as a Christian miscellanist. Subsequent parts of the chapter show how Clement’s pedagogical project constitutes such a mystagogical curriculum. I argue that the Protrepticus, Paedagogus, and Stromateis gradually draw people deeper into the ‘mystery’ by training them in hidden listening and that this is both a Christian initiation in philosophical theoria and a grammatical training in the arts of working with texts, as a Christian miscellanist. Mystery imagery marks both continuity and development across the three works. The last part of the chapter addresses why Clement miscellanised and seeks to answer that question without resorting to the notion that he miscellanised in order to hide some things from some people. By examining parts of the Stromateis where he is wrestling with opponents who miscellanise in different ways from him, or who come up with objectionable doctrines through their uses of texts, he is prompted to begin to articulate some principles of miscellanism. These doctrinal, rhetorical and exegetical rules for working with texts complement the theological and ethical programme of learning to listen in a hidden way. Far from choosing the miscellany genre to keep people out, Clement clashes with others about how best to do miscellanism so as to keep as many as possible within the ecclesial fold of gnostic truth, where he and they may enter more deeply into the true divine mystery.

clement’s imagery in cultural context: the mystery motif and the rhetoric of paideia Clement’s claim that ‘for one who listens in a hidden way, what is hidden will be manifested’, which was highlighted in Chapter 9, is not isolated in his project. Although the wording κρυπτῶς ἐπαΐειν does not recur, imagery of hidden listening appears at other key points in the work,1 and there are scattered motifs that resonate with it, such as nous listening to nous,2 or

1 2

Str. I.i.1.3–2.1, xii.55.1–2; V.i.2.1; VI.xv.115.1, xvi.124.5–6. Str. VII.vii.43.4; cf. VII.xi.60.2–3.

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the ear as an organ of perception in faith.3 ‘Hiddenness’, however, remains a capacious category. It lies on the border between imagistic and abstract analytic language, since it is rooted in biologically normative sense perception and the basic polarity between hidden/revealed or seen/ not seen. This differentiates it from the imagistic domain of ‘mysteries’, with which Clement often associates it. Compared with hiddenness, mystery imagery is grounded in cultural rather than basic biological experience. Mystery initiations were a ritual practice that took place in time; they were a cultural phenomenon with a richly textured religious, literary and intellectual tradition. This section underscores the link between hiddenness and mysteries in Clement then interrogates the scope and purpose of the mystery motif by locating it in its cultural context. I argue that Clement presents his work as a mystagogical curriculum in a world where not only philosophy, but also the more text-based arts of reading, writing and rhetoric, were widely portrayed as a ‘mystery’ into which people could be initiated through hard work.

Hidden Listening and Mystery Motifs in Clement The ‘mystic’ aspect of ‘listening in a hidden way’ is evident already in the preface to the first Stromateus, when Clement explains that, ‘for the one who listens in a hidden way, what is hidden will be made manifest’. The context for this saying is Clement’s account of teaching and learning, in which he explains that the Lord granted participation in the ‘divine mysteries and the famous holy light’ to those able to contain it, and that ‘the mysteries are transmitted mystically (μυστήρια μυστικῶς παραδίδοται), in order that they might be on the lips of one speaking and one spoken to, or rather, not in the voice, but in the understanding’.4 Similarly, in portraying the gnostic, Clement quotes the scriptural phrase, ‘What you hear in the ear’, and explains, ‘obviously that means in a hidden way (ἐπικεκρυμμένως) and in a mystery (ἐν μυστηρίῳ), for such things are allegorically said to be in the ear’.5 Thus, the notion of ‘listening in a hidden way’ suggests to him the notion of listening in a mystery.6 Nor is it surprising that Clement connects hiddenness and mystery: Paul, ‘the 3

4 6

Str. I.i.15.2, ix.45.1; II.v.23.3–vi.25.3; VII.xiv.88.4. By contrast, heretics ‘hear in a twisted way’ what is fundamentally a good doctrine, Str. III.iv.29.1 (διεστραμμἐνως ἀκηκοότες). 5 Str. I.i.13.1–4. Str. VI.xvi.124.5. See also: Str. I.i.20.4–21.2 (where τὸν ἀπόρρητον ... λόγον ἐξορχήσασθαι is mystery terminology for ‘dancing out the secret logos’); xii.55.1–2.

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divine apostle’,7 had written of ‘wisdom hidden in a mystery’ in 1 Cor 2:7, which Clement often quotes;8 and ‘mysteries’ were in any case a widespread way of figuring the experience of hiddenness and revelation in contemporary Classical culture. Given the close connection between ‘hiddenness’ and ‘mystery’ in Clement’s work, scholarly debate has rightly taken them together. Like Clement’s imagistic discourse of ‘hiddenness’, his imagery of ‘mystery’ has often been discussed as an ‘esoteric trope’ that is influenced by scriptural, philosophical, Philonic and gnostic uses of mystery language.9 It has been connected with his stromatic ‘method’, as a way of imitating scriptural aenigma, in order to reproduce the ‘mysterious character of the Bible’.10 Debate has often been about whether there is any continuity between the openly declared mysteries of the Protrepticus and the esoterically restricted mysteries of the Stromateis: what exactly the mysteries of the latter comprise, whether they are actually communicated by Clement’s work and which authors to compare with his motifs of mystery and concealment – the influence of Scripture, especially Paul, and of Greek philosophy, Philo and the Gnostics, have been explored. Threading through these scholarly discussions is an assumption about the mystique of mystery imagery: that it gives the Stromateis a serious, ‘mysterious’ character like ‘the Bible’; that it is ‘esoteric’ and marks a secret that is hidden in the Stromateis or that it is compared with textual presentations of philosophical ascent and religious awe. This is not wrong. Clement’s project is designed to bring people into the presence of God by making them more Christ-like and more able to contemplate the Father through the Son. This is a project that is rightly attended by religious awe and that depends on philosophical ascent from earthly, sensual things to the loving converse with the father, nous to nous.11 Clement does also refer on many occasions to a ‘tradition’ (παράδοσις) or ‘unwritten teaching’ (τὰ ἄγραφα, λόγος ἄγραφος, etc.), which was handed down from the Lord to the apostles.12 However, to emphasise only this aspect of the mystery imagery is lopsided. As Eshleman said, intellectuals of this time frequently used esoteric 7 8

9 10 11 12

E.g., ὁ θεσπέσιος ἀπόστολος, Str. V.x.60.1. Str. V.iv.25.2; x.60.3; 66.1; xii.80.4. For the connection between hiddenness and mystery elsewhere in Clement: Str. I.xii.55.1, xviii.178.2–79.1; VII.i.4.3. Lilla 1971, 146–54; Riedweg 1987, 123–47; Ramelli 2017; Ward 2017b. Fortin 1966, 44–47 (quotation at p. 47). Cf. Stroumsa 2005, 111–17. Str. VII.vii.43.3–4; Hägg 2012. Str. VI.xv.131.5, cf. Str. I.i.7.1; V.x.62.1; VI.vii.61.3.

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tropes but still wanted to attract customers; this was true of pagans, and even more true of Christians, who wrestled with the desire for doctrinal purity, on the one hand, and the theological commitment to unitary truth accessible to all, on the other.13 Differentiating sharply between the Clement of the Protrepticus who tells everyone the Christian mysteries, and the Clement of the Stromateis who keeps them secret, is not inevitable. The contrast in self-presentation resonates with wider tensions in early Christian rhetoric and social relationships. It is better explained in terms of Clement’s pedagogical intention of guiding readers from bare faith in what is simply stated (in the Protrepticus) to deeper gnosis that sees beyond the letter (as is gradually cultivated in the Stromateis). This also supplies the context in which to interpret Clement’s allusions to a ‘tradition’ and ‘unwritten teaching’: rather than assuming that this is something that Clement conceals, we can look more closely at how he makes it accessible to all ‘those who listen in a hidden way’ and ‘in a mystery’. The next two sections seek to open up the wider cultural discourse that informed Clement’s mystery imagery. First, I shall sketch the ritual basis for the mystery paradigm in order to dispel some of the vagueness that sometimes attends scholarly allusions to ‘mystery tropes’ and to convey the imaginative context in relation to which mystery imagery operates. Secondly, I shall outline the reception of the mystery paradigm, including philosophical and religious mystagogy, but also pointing to a wider rhetorical and bookish culture of paideia that is pertinent to Clement’s work.

The Mystery Paradigm and Its Ritual Basis By the early empire, the rhetorical topos of mystery initiations belonged to the cultural koine of the Greco-Roman world. Whether or not a person had been initiated, typical features of mystery rites would likely be familiar, together with their paradigmatic character, which could structure thought about many different kinds of ‘initiations’. The classic paradigm was based on the Eleusinian mysteries, which were the most renowned; these were ‘The Mysteries’ (τὰ μυστήρια) from which others derived that name. Other terms, such as τελετή and ὄργια were also used.14 Orphic and Bacchic mysteries were also popular and 13

See above, p. 240.

14

Burkert 1987a, 8–9; Bremmer 2014, vii–viii.

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well-known; often they were associated with each other and sometimes with the Eleusinian rites as well.15 Clement knew of other mystery traditions, but these three were the most important to him.16 Iniation typically involved an act of teaching and learning in a highly orchestrated sacred context. The initiand thereby became ‘blessed’, and had to keep the secrets (τὰ ἀπόρρητα, ἄρρητα) that had been disclosed.17 At Eleusis, the ritual began with a torchlit procession to the sanctuary outside the city bounds. Following purification, dancing and music, there were Lesser Mysteries and, for some, Greater Mysteries as well on the following night. Initiands were led blindfolded into a sanctuary by the μυσταγωγός and subjected to a terrifying experience, which may have involved visual effects of masks, confusing noises and riddling speech (αἰνίγματα). The high point of initiation involved both spoken and performed revelation (λεγόμενα καὶ δρώμενα). There was a sudden illumination of light from darkness. The ἱερὸς λόγος of the cult was disclosed, perhaps in a ritual drama (Clement mentions a δρᾶμα μυστικόν at Eleusis);18 and the sacred objects of the cult (τὰ ἱερά) were displayed by the ἱεροφάντης. The vision at the climax of the mysteries was described as epopteia, and the contemplative viewing of the spectacle was called theôria. People experienced initiation as ‘rebirth’; they were filled with ‘joy’ and were ‘blessed’. In the early history of the Eleusinian cult, only this-worldly salvation was hoped for; later, hopes of salvation were extended or transferred to the afterlife.19 In Clement’s use of imagery, Orphic and Dionysiac mysteries might supplement or displace aspects of this paradigm through features specially associated with their cults. Euripides’ Bacchae, with which Clement often interacts, incorporates elements of a hieros logos of the cult; Clement’s interest in masks and mirrors obscuring face-to-face vision evokes the significance of these implements in Dionysiac rituals.20 Orpheus, the great musician, meanwhile, was composer of myths par excellence. The 15 17

18 19

20

16 Bremmer 2014, 55–80. See esp. Jourdan 2006, 2010. Seaford 1981b, 253–54. For other attempts to pick out what generally characterised mystery initiations and paradigms: Burkert 1987a; 1987b, 276–304; Bremmer 2014, xii; Petridou 2013, 316 (the latter focusing on visual elements of epiphany). See also Plut. fr. 158 Sandbach, which compares the soul’s experience at death to mystery initiation and gives a sense of how such rites might be understood. Protr. ii.12.2. On the Eleusinian mysteries: Clinton 2004 (epiphany); Petridou 2013 (ritual framing); Bremmer 2014, 1–20 (reconstruction of the initiation ritual). Masks: Seaford 1981a; R. Taylor 2008, 126–35. Mirrors: Mortley 1976; Seaford 1984; Taylor 2008, 90–136. Other motifs of face-to-face vision: C. G. Brown 1991.

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significance of sacred texts and poems in Orphism has often led to comparisons with Christianity.21 Clement gives priority to Dionysus and Orpheus in his protreptic, treating Dionysus as patron of all pagan mystery rites (even the Eleusinian)22 and Orpheus as their founder, their enchanting musician and poet par excellence.23 These basic features of mystic rites, together with their characteristic terminology, often patterned the ways in which Greeks and Romans wrote about hiddenness and revelation or teaching and learning. Clement’s mystery imagery participated creatively in this wider discourse.

Mystery Topoi from Philosophy to Rhetoric and Scholarly Miscellanism Just as ritual initiation centred on a transformative experience of teaching and learning, so too the mystery paradigm shaped thinking about other modes of teaching and learning.24 Plato used it to articulate the philosopher’s pilgrimage to behold the ‘spectacle’ (θεωρία) of truth;25 Seneca differentiates between ‘precepts’ (‘praecepta’) that are open to all, and ‘dogmas’ (‘decreta’) that are reserved for initiates, as in religious rites;26 Plutarch’s esoteric tropes suggest that mystery cults actually contain a deposit of ancient wisdom in their hieroi logoi, which philosophy penetrates more clearly;27 Roman scholars such as L. Cincius and Valerius Soranus used mystery imagery in entitling their antiquarian studies of Rome and her monuments;28 Philo’s mystery imagery often referred to exegetical endeavour to reach a deeper understanding of the Scriptures;29 Paul contrasted the mysterious wisdom of the cross, which is folly in the sight of the world, with the wisdom of the sophists.30 With the exception of the antiquarian tradition, this breadth of background has been well recognised in the study of Clement’s mystery motifs. As in Plato, the philosophical mystery culminated in theoria, although in

21 23

24

25 26 28 30

22 Herrero de Jáuregui 2010. Jourdan 2006. Jourdan 2010, 164, 171–466. Orpheus’ mother was said to be a Muse; on his connection with mysteries in Classical Athens: Hardie 2004. For the transformation of mystery terminology in ancient philosophy in general: Casadesús 2016. Nightingale 2004. See also Riedweg 1987, 1–69. 27 Sen. Ep. 95.64, quoted in Havrda 2019, 129. van Nuffelen 2007. 29 Macrae 2016, 34, and Chapter 8. Riedweg 1987, 70–115; Deutsch 2008. 1 Cor 2, 4, discussed in Ballard 2017, 258–66; White 2017, 71–9.

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Clement’s case, the vision is of Christ, through whom the Father is also seen.31 As in Seneca, precepts and dogmas belong to different parts of the educational project, which Clement presents as the Paedagogus and the Stromateis respectively, and the latter attract esoteric tropes of the mysteries.32 Like Plutarch and the Roman antiquarians, he believed in the secret wisdom hidden in ancient things, but for him, it was not Greek myths, but scriptural prophecies, that could disclose the highest wisdom.33 As for Philo, mystery thus became especially closely associated with textuality; Philo was not only his most significant predecessor in depicting scriptural hermeneutics in the language of mysteries but also in emphasising the need for ‘pure ears’ with which to attend to them.34 Paul was particularly important for Clement’s language of mystery: the words of 1 Cor 2 often flow from his pen, and his close connection between ‘hiddenness’ and ‘mysteries’ may be shaped by Paul’s phrase, ‘wisdom hidden in a mystery’ (λαλοῦμεν θεοῦ σοφίαν ἐν μυστηρίῳ τὴν ἀποκεκρυμμένην, 1 Cor 2:7). Like Paul, Clement drew attention above all to the mystery of Christ, although he did also mention other mysteries, such as the divine act of creation (Str. III.xvii.102.2). The process by which philosophical insight was acquired could also be figured in the language of mysteries. In Middle Platonism, a tripartite division of philosophy into ethics – physics – epoptics was known, and the highest stage of that resonates with the ‘epopteia’ of the pagan mysteries. Clement takes over this scheme in depicting the ordering of Mosaic philosophy and of his own account of Christian philosophy.35 Contemporary Middle Platonists also mapped three stages of philosophical formation in terms of three stages of mystery initiation, namely, purification – Lesser Mysteries – Greater Mysteries. Again, Clement imitates this in portraying advancement towards the higher stages of Christian vision of God.36 This philosophical background to Clement’s mystery topoi has been well addressed in scholarship, and it tends to focus attention on the heightened emotion and intensity of anticipating encounter with God. However, there was a further dimension to mystery imagery in this period, which suggested a less intense emotional register, a more accessible process of learning and a different balance of attention in formation.

31 33 34 35

32 Str. VII.ii.10.3–11.1, iii.13.1–3, 16.6. Havrda 2019, 128–31. Str. II.ii, with Havrda 2019. Cher. 48; Cong. 143; Gig. 1.54; Mos. 2.114; Pot. 173; SL 4.59. 36 Bucur 2009, 18–21; Havrda (forthcoming). Riedweg 1987, 122–30.

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Far from being unique to philosophical and religious sects with rigorous social and intellectual barriers, mystery imagery was common currency in writings on any kind of grammatical, literary or rhetorical education. In his classic study, Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity, Robert A. Kaster describes how ‘literary culture’ was often portrayed as a ‘mystery, of the Muses or the ancients; its acquisition was an initiation, by which “things not spoken” were revealed’.37 Quintilian used the imagery in conveying the stages of a child’s education in grammar (Inst. 1.4.6), the social experience of education (1.2.20), his own role as mystagogue in the teaching of rhetoric (5.14.27) and others’ presentation of the rules of rhetoric as mysteries (5.13.60).38 Diodorus Siculus derived Μούσαι from μυεῖν and explained that initiation means ‘teaching what is good and beneficial and unknown to the uneducated’ (DS 4.74).39 An epigram in the Palatine Anthology gave the perspective of a pen (calamos): ‘I was a reed, a useless plant, bearing neither figs, nor apples, nor grapes. But a man initiated me into the mysteries of Helicon, fashioning thin lips for me and excavating in me a narrow channel. Ever since, when I drink black liquor, I become inspired, and utter all manner of words with this voiceless mouth of mine’ (A.P. 9.162).40 Lucian mercilessly parodied the topos in his essay On the Teacher of Rhetoric, in which the unscrupulous speaker gives advice to a green youth on how to approach Rhetoric so as not to be turned away as ‘uninitiated and a spy on her secrets’ (Rhet. Praec. 16). The speaker encourages the youth with a comparison with Hesiod and the Muses: ‘Hesiod received a few leaves from Helicon and immediately became a poet from being a shepherd and sang the races of gods and heroes, possessed by the Muse; is it impossible then to be made an orator quickly, which is much beneath poetic grandeur in style, if a person could find the quickest route?’ (Rhet. Praec. 4).41 In scholarly discussion, Gellius’ imagery of the mysteries of the Muses at the close of his preface has often been cited as an example of how the seemingly esoteric motif of mystery initiation could become a rhetorical commonplace. Eshleman calls Gellius ‘no one’s idea of an occult writer’, but ‘even [he] ... adopts this pose’.42 Kaster, who also cites Gellius, finds

37 39

40 41

38 Kaster 1988, 16. Cf. [Plut.] lib. ed. 10e–f. Ballard 2017, 244–48. Cited in White 2017, 76. For the association between Mousa and mystês as early as the fifth century BC, see Hardie 2004. Quoted in Cribiore 2001, 157. 42 See also Lucian, Merc., discussed in Eshleman 2012, 80. Eshleman 2012, 25 n. 10.

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the metaphor infelicitous: ‘The metaphor well conveys the sense of distinction shared by an elect. But insofar as initiation in a mystery implies a transfiguring revelation, a passive, experience, an irreversible change, the recurrent cast of thought does little to convey the reality of literary education.’43 It is presumably this lack of numinosity that has kept scholars in the past from comparing Clement’s mystery imagery with the rhetorical tradition and led them to focus on philosophical and religious comparanda. But if so, then there is a risk of missing important characteristics of Clement’s project. Clement does anticipate an awesome vision of God and prepare his readers to receive it. But he also frames a project in Christian formation that accompanies people all the way from where they are like babies suckling at their mother’s breasts to the point where they are ready for solid food.44 Like Quintilian, Clement starts at the very beginning. He moves from the ‘Paedagogus’ to the ‘Didaskalos’, and this terminology resonates more with the ordinary upbringing of school children than with the advanced philosophical curriculum. Furthermore, the goal of Clement’s paideia is to become like the gnostic whom he portrays, and the gnostic is skilled not only in contemplative and practical virtue (as are the philosophers) but also in a certain art of Christian rhetoric. Quintilian’s ideal orator was a vir bonus dicendi peritus; the philosophical depth and moral goodness of the speaker was important to him, just as it is to Clement.45 But like Quintilian’s orator, Clement’s gnostic has a role in public speaking. He is himself a teacher, for whom the ‘mysteries’ are luminously clear. He can explain them to his listeners, but he knows when to speak and when to keep silent, and he knows what to say to different people at different times.46 His speech is open and trustworthy; he talks in a plain style that suits the moment and the audience; if he deceives it is not from self-interest or fear, but only out of love, for the other’s salvation. That is to say, he does not engage in self-seeking sophistry nor in the elaborate arts of Hellenistic rhetoric.47 This gnostic is himself a miscellanist, selecting from philosophy and from the Scriptures what needs to be said to others on each occasion.48 The prominence of mystery imagery in this rhetorical culture of paideia encourages us to reassess its role in structuring Clement’s project in

43 44 45 48

Kaster 1988, 157. Penniman 2017, 91–106. For the babies at the breast, see Protr. x.89.1; Paed. I.vi.42.1. 46 47 Walzer 2003. Str. VI.xv.115.5–16.3. Str. VII.vii.44.8–45.1, ix.53.1–54.1. Str. VI.xi.89.2–3.

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Christian formation. Rather than focusing on a training in Christian contemplative philosophy in the Stromateis, we can approach the three works as consecutive steps in a curriculum that trains Christians from their earliest inklings of faith to become contemplatives who are also skilled in the rhetorical arts, not least in miscellany-making. Furthermore, a rhetorical focus can encourage us to be attentive to Clement’s own rhetorical creativity with this imagery. All too often, scholarly attention to ‘backgrounds’ has lost sight of Clement’s own rhetoric in framing and developing his project. Mystery topoi were common currency in this period; they were a tool for thinking with and Clement was a profound thinker in his own right. The rest of this chapter will show how he worked creatively with this imagery to compose a mystagogical curriculum in hidden listening, where the miscellanism became important at the higher stages.

protrepticus : the face behind the actor’s mask This section will chart the role that hiddenness plays in Clement’s protreptic and how he develops a structural link between hiddenness and miscellanism. I will argue that hiddenness for him is not ‘esoteric’ in the sense of excluding a certain group of people from the possibility of knowledge. In fact, it underpins Clement’s rationale for excluding no one from the possibility of knowledge, even while acknowledging that some have attained fuller insight than others. The discourse of hiddenness in this book gives prominence to mystery topoi but also exceeds them: recalling the categories of hiddenness introduced in Chapter 9, we could say that Clement begins with theological hiddenness as experienced by estranged humanity, then he parades a form of exegetical hiddenness that turns out not to open onto revelation and finally he turns to anthropological hiddenness, to discover the divine effluence within the human soul, by which the divine hiddenness in texts may also be discovered. This opens up the way for humanity to be restored into a relation with the hidden God through renewed encounter with texts, preeminently the Scriptures.

Hiddenness and the Pagan Mysteries After the opening vignette of Eunomos and the cicada making tuneful music over the dead dragon at Pytho, Clement opens his appeal to his

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readers by charging them with disbelief. The image of the face plastered over engages several different aspects of hiddenness: How is it that you have believed empty myths, supposing that animals are bewitched by music? But the gleaming face of truth alone, it seems, appears to you to be plastered over (ἐπίπλαστον) and has fallen under eyes of disbelief? (Protr. i.2.1)

The Greeks cannot see the gleaming face of truth: to them it is hidden, or in Clement’s language, ἐπίπλαστον. The term suggests a false front.49 This is all that the Greeks see when they contemplate Christ. The language is sensory, in that they cannot see beneath the plaster to the radiance. It is cognitive, in that they are deceived by the illusory outward appearance and disbelieve. It is also personal, for of all things, it is the face-to-face encounter that they lack, which is to say, the most vivid form of I-Thou relationship. By placing this so prominently at the opening of the book, Clement underscores the need for revelation. This pagan experience of hiddenness is not mystical: it is not partial awareness that God is seen in Christ nor awareness that God is partially seen in Christ. Instead, it is unfaith, disbelieving what is before one’s very eyes. By contrast, later in the preface, Clement affirms the epiphany that was made known in the incarnation. The new song, the Saviour, the Logos, Teacher, Creator appeared epiphanically in Jesus Christ – ἐπιφάνεια and cognates are used six times in quick succession (i.7.2–3). In this celebration of Jesus there is no mistaking the experience of revelation. This is the opposite pole from the ‘plastered face’ of the opening. Here nothing is hidden. The preface closes, however, on a more in-between note. A vignette of expectancy moves closer to the experience of mysticism, which will be deepened later in Clement’s literary project: John, the herald of the Logos, thus summons us to get ready for the coming presence of a god – Christ. This was also what the silence of Zechariah riddled (ᾐνίσσετο) while awaiting a fruit – the forerunner of Christ: namely that the light of truth, the Logos, when he became gospel, would unbind the mystic silence of the prophetic aenigmas (αἰνιγμάτων). But as for you – if you long to see God as he truly is, take part in purifications that are proper to God! Not laurel-leaves and fillets variegated with wool and purple, but righteousness is what you should fasten onto yourself, and the foliage of self-mastery is what you should deck yourself with, and then occupy yourself with Christ! ‘For I am the Door,’ he says somewhere. People who wish to

49

Cf. Jos. BJ 1.627.4; 4.247.3; Lucian, Nigr. 17.8; Icar. 22.7.20.

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understand (νοῆσαι) God must learn that fully, so that he may open the thronging gates of heaven for us, for the gates of the Logos (λόγου) are characterised by logos (λογικαί), opening to the key of faith. “Nobody has known God, except the Son and the one to whom the Son reveals (ἀποκαλύψη) him.” I am quite sure that the one who later opens the Door that has long been shut reveals (ἀποκαλύπτει) what is inside and shows (δείκνυσιν) what it was not possible to know before, except for those who have passed through Christ, through whom alone God is beheld in epoptic vision (ἐποπτεύεται). (Protr. i.10.1–3)

The imagery is drawn from the pagan mysteries, with the mystic silence (τὴν μυστικὴν ... σιωπήν); the expectation of illumination by a light (τὸ φῶς); the need for purifications (καθαρσίων); the doors that are kept closed to worshippers before the ritual opening, when what is on the inside is ‘shown’ (δείκνυσιν) and God is ‘seen’ (ἐποπτεύεται). Here, however, the motifs from the pagan topos of mysteries are given Christian context and meaning. Zechariah’s silence riddles the mystic silence of the prophetic aenigmas, and the Baptist’s advent riddled the resolution of those prophecies. The illumination sought is the light of truth, the Logos, which comes as the fruit of Christ, when Logos becomes Gospel. The door that is opened for the vision of God is Christ himself. The mood and atmosphere of this experience of hiddenness is very different from the opening of the book. The pagan experience of hiddenness was constituted by illusion. By contrast, here there is a mystical experience, characterised by a focused silence, centred on waiting for the presence of God. It is a deep longing for a vision of God as he truly is, and it requires participation in purifications that are appropriate to God. For Clement, that means putting off the trappings of pagan rites and occupying oneself with Christ through moral virtues of righteousness and self-control. The cultural exchange here is complex, for ritual, narrative and moral arguments intertwine. The mysteries are best known in Greco-Roman culture, but the scriptural story of Zechariah, John the Baptist and Christ is Christian. Clement’s emphasis on righteousness and self-control is entirely at home in Greek philosophy, and indeed ‘self-control’ (ἐγκρατεία) is a technical term in several Greek philosophic systems but is little used in the Greek Bible.50 ‘Righteousness’ (δικαιοσύνη) is more significant in the Septuagint, but is also important in Classical philosophy. Clement is summoning his readers to a shift in social and ritual practice of religion and to a personal and cultural appropriation of the Christian 50

In the Greek Scriptures, the noun appears only in 4 Macc 5:34; Acts 24:25; Gal 5:23.

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Scriptures and myth. However, he aligns this with a moral shift, for he treats religious purification (‘purifications that are proper to God’) as abandonment of pagan mysteries (‘not laurel-leaves and fillets variegated with wool and purple ...’) and equates this with morality (‘... but righteousness ... and the foliage of self-mastery’, 10.2). This kind of Christian reorientation of Classical moral discourse and cultural imagery constitutes a significant part of Clement’s protreptic. It makes sense in his system because he assumes that the logos or nous that underlies the moral order is disclosed in Classical philosophy but is theologically best perceived within a Christian frame, and this can become apparent by reimagining familiar cultural traditions in Christian forms.51 Clement argues that the encounter with Christ opens onto a noetic revelation of God: in metaphorical terms, Christ is the door and opens up the gates of heaven; interpreted, the gates are characterised by logos (λογικαὶ γὰρ αἱ τοῦ λόγου πύλαι), and they are opened by the key of faith (πίστεως ... κλειδί) for those who wish to know God noetically (νοῆσαι ... τὸν θεόν). The imagery of revelation, consisting in opening a closed door, is complemented by the language of revelation, first in quoting Jesus’ words from the gospel of Matthew (‘no one has known God, except the Son and he to whom the Son reveals him’, Matt 11:27) then in Clement’s own comments (ἀποκαλύπτει τἄνδον καὶ δείκνυσιν). The last word of the preface is ἐποπτεύεται, which points forward to the summit of philosophical education in an epoptic vision of God, which is available for those who come through Christ.52 For the moment, however, for Clement’s readers, as for Zechariah, this is still only anticipated and longed for. God is hidden, even as the possibility of knowing him through revelation is held out. The rhetoric of anticipation of epoptic vision at the close of the preface recalls Pliny, who ended his preface with an allusion to Soranus’ books, ‘which he entitled Epoptides’.

Not in Books about Mysteries (Protr. ii–iii) The rest of the Protrepticus develops in more depth the movement from critique of pagan religion (Protr. ii–vi), to a glimpse and foretaste of what is available through Christ (Protr. vii–xii). In style, content and approach, Clement establishes himself as not just a Christian mystic and philosopher (though he is both of those) but also as a Christian miscellanist. 51

Cf. Nasrallah 2010, 272–76.

52

Bucur 2009, 18–28.

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Clement begins with a tour of the Greek mysteries. As he surveys the cult sites, there is plenty of revelation, but it is revelation in the sense of exposé.53 The silence of the springs of Castalia and Colophon has a rather different ring from the silence of Zechariah that came just before; these are not places hushed in anticipation of the awe-inspiring presence of the deity but places that have fallen silent in death and decay (ii.11.1). When it comes to the Eleusinian mysteries, there are all the trappings of a cult that has something special to hide, with boxes that hide supposedly sacred items, and nocturnal devotions by torchlight, but these are ‘mysteries that are no mysteries’ (μυστήρια ἀνιερωστί ii.22.3, tr. Wilson, ANF). In a passage that has led rather too many readers from antiquity to today to infer that Clement was himself initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries before he converted to Christianity, he professes to reveal the secrets: Such also are the mystic baskets. For it is necessary to lay bare (ἀπογυμνῶσαι) their holy things and to declare their guarded secrets (τὰ ἄρρητα). Are not these things sesame sweets, pointy cakes, cake balls, round cakes with much embossing, grains of salt, and a snake, the rite of Dionysus Bassarus? (Protr. ii.22.4)

Eusebius cites this and Clement’s other comments on the mysteries as evidence that he was himself initiated, and the claim has been often repeated.54 Of course the passage shows nothing of the kind.55 Clement is crafting a ‘revelation’ that is intended to debunk the Greek mysteries by showing that what is hidden is nothing worth seeing and by suggesting that Greek rites are travesties of Christian ones – the various types of cereal cakes are a bit like Eucharistic bread, which is significant imagery in Clement’s later writing56 but they are only Greek bakery; the dragon recalls the serpent in Eden; Dionysus is the counterpart of Christ. The more Clement emphasises concealment through the trappings of mystic devotion, the more he accentuates the bathos in laying it bare. Then he turns the motif of concealment on its head and suggests that the Greek rites should be hidden: the torches by night make them too visible, they ought to be veiled not out of respect but out of shame! (ii.21.2–23.2). Clement profiles his own role as a Christian literary miscellanist through his language of revelation. He often uses terms of disclosing, 53 54 55

56

So too Penniman 2017, 93–94. Eus. PH 2.2.64; Mondésert 1949 (= SC 2), 33; Méhat 1966, 43. Völker 1952, 311 n. 1; Riedweg 1987, 120–122. Much more nuanced is Friesen 2015, 126, who regards it as ‘not improbable that he had some direct experience with [the mysteries (Dionysiac and others) that he describes]’. Str. I.i.5.1–3, x.46.1.

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uncovering and revealing truths, but the revelations smack of the discoveries he has made in the library through his learned researches. He ‘must by no means conceal’ his reflections on Euhemerus of Agrigentum, Nicanor of Cyprus, Diagoras, Hippo of Melos, the Cyrenian named Theodorus and others (οὐ γὰρ οὐδαμῶς ἀποκρυπτέον, ii.24.1). The fact that book learning can help discover truth, and uncover untruth, is important for Clement’s project as a whole. It is not a false or debased alternative to mystic revelation but will go hand in hand with true enquiry into God. Clement is setting an example in showing how learned researches can provide revelation that helps uncover the truth – even when that begins by opening up untruth. The Greeks might have thought that the gleaming face of truth was plastered over, but Clement quotes the words of the Sibyl and truth itself to strip away the masks of a whole crowd of deities (ii.27.5).57 The practices of research that he models here are similar to the ones he will expect his readers to take up for themselves when it comes to their pursuit of the truth in the Stromateis: they depend on library work, excerption, note-taking and ordering of diverse material in honest pursuit of the truth.58

Inner Illumination of Faith (Protr. vi–xii) As the critique of pagan religion develops, a new note enters, which provides a possibility of transition to Christian revelation. Every human being, Clement points out, has an inkling of truth. Philosophy itself, even while treating some demons as divine, dreams about truth (v.64.1). In absolutely all people, especially those who spend their time in intellectual discussion (λόγοι), there is a certain divine effluence, through which, however reluctantly, they confess that God is one (vi.68.2). This opens up the possibility of revelation from within. The revealer is the healthy logos, the sun of the soul and revelation is experienced deep within. However, this inner revelation is preceded by darkness deep within the soul. In that darkness, it is impossible to see God (vi.68.4).59

57 58

59

Further examples: Protr. ii.25.3; ii.37.3; v.65.1. Irrespective of whether Clement derived this material from a pre-existing excerpt collection, as has often been claimed, but not proved: e.g., Riedweg 1987, 120, with n. 21. ‘For the sun would never show the true God, but the healthy logos, who is sun of the soul. Through him alone its eye is illumined, when he has arisen within in the depths of the mind.’ (Protr. vi.68.4).

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Clement underscores the importance of the soul as a hidden site of religious experience and engagement in the world, whether for good or bad. He draws on an allegorical interpretation of Deut 25:13–15 to develop this idea: That genuine holy man, Moses, says, ‘There shall not be in your bag different standard weights, great or small, nor shall there be in your house a measure great or small, but you will have a weight that is true and just,’ deeming the weight and measure and number of the whole to be God. For the unjust and imbalanced idols are hid (κατακέκρυπται) at home in the bag and, so to speak, in the polluted soul. But the only just measure is the only true God, always evenly-balanced, continuing self-same, who measures all things, and weighs them as in a balance. (Protr. vi.69.2–3)

The image of a ‘deity within’ or deus internus is a Hellenistic topos, and here it provides a way of interpreting the hidden sense of the text of Moses, the ‘real saint’.60 It enables Clement to articulate the relationship between what is hidden within the soul and a person’s relationship to God and to the world. If the deity hidden in the soul is an idol, then the person’s relationship to the world will also be off balance, and the ‘hiddenness’ within the soul takes on a clandestine aspect. But the way human beings are made is such that the divine is in the soul, and there can be revelation there through the logos, so that the eye of the soul is illumined (vi.68.4–5). Having begun with imagery of mysteries and the theatre and moved from there to underscore the anthropological principle of the logos within, Clement proceeds to the experience of revelation in texts. Because the pagans too have a spark of the divine word hidden within them, they do reveal truth in their writings, which shows that it is not hidden (vii.74.5).61 Sometimes pagans reveal truth in a riddling way,62 sometimes more openly63 or even on the theatrical stage.64

60 61

62 63

64

On the Hellenistic topos: Hausleiter 1957. ‘For if the Greeks received certain sparks of the divine logos and spoke a few bits of the truth, they testify that its power is not hidden (οὐκ ἀποκεκρυμμένην), and they convict themselves as weak, since they did not reach the goal.’ (vii.74.5). ‘Xenophon the Athenian riddles (αἰνίττεται) ...’ (vi.71.3). ‘Cleanthes shows (ἐνδείκνυται) true theology. He did not hide (ἀπεκρύψατο) what insight he had about God’ (vi.72.1). ‘Already they strip truth naked even on stage (καὶ ἐπὶ σκηνῆς)’ (vv.73.3); ‘he has already introduced truth on the stage (ἐπὶ τῆς σκηνῆς) for spectators (τοῖς θεαταῖς)’ (vii.74.2).

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When Clement turns to Scripture, the imagery of illumination is more boldly expressed. The sun shines in the darkness; the prophets ‘show’ God.65 However, the anthropological principle that grounds revelation through Scripture is no different from that which grounds the revelation through pagan texts: it depends on illumination in the hidden part of the inner person: It is truth which has cried out, ‘Out of darkness, light will shine!’ Let it shine in the hidden part of the person (ἐν τῷ ἀποκεκρυμμένῳ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου), in the heart, the light, and let the beams of gnosis shine on the hidden person within (τὸν ἐγκεκρυμμένον ἔνδον ... ἄνθρωπον), illumining him and making him radiant, the disciple of the light. (Protr. xi.115.3–4)

Nor is there any difference in the light itself, which is common to all: ‘noone is a Cimmerian in logos’ (ix.88.2). The invitation is universal, to put off the darkness of ignorance and experience the epoptic vision of God, singing a hymn to the light, which has shone more purely than the sun on those shut up in the shadow of death (xi.114.1). The shared experience of logos and illumination affirms the beginning of engagement with Christian truth. It is this affirmation of universal illumination through the logos that also leads Clement beyond the miscellanistic project of gathering from varied sources of illumination and draws him on in pursuit of underlying unity. However, at the present moment, this cosmopolitan project is far from complete. The Protrepticus is but the preparation for further revelation, and it is important to Clement to emphasise that there is more to come, which remains hidden for now. The initiation in the Christian mysteries is not yet perfected. Readers are summoned to join the ship bound for the harbours of the heavens.66 They are on their way, but they have not arrived. They look forward there to the vision of God in the holy mysteries and will enjoy the things hidden in heaven. Those hidden things are described in Paul’s words as that which ‘ear has not heard, nor did they enter anyone’s heart’ (xii.118.4, cf. 1 Cor 2:9). They are as yet unknown. The future tense characterises Clement’s call to the abandonment of pagan culture: he takes readers back to the Bacchic scenes with which his book began and summons them again away from the rites of Dionysus, the mountain of Cithaeron and the chorus of maenads. He promises to show the logos and the mysteries of the logos (xii.119.1). No longer will the face of truth be plastered over, as it was in his first apostrophe to his 65

viii.77.3, 78.1, 79.1.

66

xii.118.1–4.

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readers in the preface. Instead, he addresses Tiresias and proclaims, ‘you will see! Christ gleams more radiantly than the sun, through whom the eyes of the blind see again. Night will flee from you, fire will be frightened, death, will have gone away. You will see the heavens, aged sir, you who do not see Thebes’ (xii.119.1–3). The holy mysteries to which Clement invites his readers are depicted in opposition to those Bacchic devotions. They anticipate the vision of God, they emphasise the unity of God, logos and Jesus, and they begin with an anointing of faith, through which destruction is cast off and Clement will show the form of righteousness properly, by which people can ascend to God (xii.120.1–5). The final mention of ‘hiddenness’ in the book is an affirmation that the prophet does not hide (οὐκ ἀποκρύπτεται) the grace, quoting ‘I said you are gods and sons of the most high’ (xii.123.1, quoting LXX Ps 81:6).67

Summary The Protrepticus is written as if directed towards a pagan audience, and this has consequences for its treatment of the theme of hiddenness. The emphasis is on revelation from the condition in which people simply do not perceive God remotely as he is (i.2.1). It involves exposing where God is not and at the same time opening up readers’ own awareness of where God is. Clement depends for that on a hidden logos in each of his readers and in traces of it in the texts they read. But he begins to draw them away from those texts to the places where God is more fully revealed, namely, in the Scriptures. At the same time, he presents that revelation opening onto a journey and a mystic rite, where participants now know to desire a fuller communion with God. The Protrepticus introduces the fundamental structure of the relationship between hiddenness and miscellanism in Clement’s project. Tropes of hiddenness, such as imagery of mysteries and imagery of the logos/nous within, highlight his rationale both for practising miscellanism and for going beyond the selection and arrangement of texts to strive for a unifying system. It is because of the hidden nous/logos within the person, the world and the text, that the truth can be found everywhere, even in paganism. That makes miscellanism worthwhile, for all different texts and traditions can disclose truth. Miscellanism – the selection of truth 67

On Clement’s use of Ps. 82:6, see above, p. 254, n. 75.

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wherever it is found in texts of all kinds – is therefore the best way of life in a complicated cultural world. However, the hidden principle also points beyond this style of miscellanistic project. There is just one and the same hidden principle – logos or nous – in all things, therefore ultimately variety is overcome in the unity of truth, for which Clement and his readers ought to strive.

paedagogus : inward formation and social life In the Paedagogus, the centre of attention shifts from drawing the Greeks away from the lure of pagan rites and texts to the creation and early training of the new Christians. ‘Hiddenness’ in the Paedagogus is a concern primarily in the context of inward formation, and its outward manifestation in social life. In the first book, Clement’s approach to hiddenness is anthropological: he draws attention to the relationship between incarnation, creation and new creation in baptism. Each one of these is structured through an inwardness by which humanity can imitate and apprehend God and experience a relation to him in love. In books II– III, Clement’s attention turns to patterns of social life. He amplifies the moral dimension of hiddenness by highlighting the difference between a divine vantage point, where everything is exposed, and a human perspective, where the play of surfaces and passions cultivates delusion. He tries to reorientate his readers to search only for the hidden God, and to cultivate love rather than lust in their most hidden places. These books contribute to Clement’s miscellanistic aims by the creation and formation of Christian ‘children’, who will be expected to engage in miscellanism when the Didaskalos takes over their teaching, after the Paedagogus has had his say. The Stromateis make abundantly clear that the ability to perceive the hidden God, and correspondingly to engage in miscellanism transformatively, is integrally related to the inner formation of the miscellanist. The Paedagogus contributes a crucial step in this project: the preface closes by dwelling on the preparatory character of the work: ‘just as those who are sick in body need a doctor, so those feeble in soul need a pedagogue, to heal our passions, and then to lead us to the teacher, turning the soul out pure in readiness for gnosis, able to compass the revelation of the logos’ (Paed. I.i.3.3). That revelation is yet to come; the purpose of this instruction is to purify (καθαρὰν ... εὐτρεπίζων) the soul to receive it. In the Stromateis, when introducing the Great Mysteries, Clement, recalls that purificatory rites (τὰ καθάρσια) begin the

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mysteries among the Greeks (Str. V.xi.70.7). The Paedagogus begins that purificatory process in Clement’s project. Mystery imagery is more muted here than in the Protrepticus, but we will discover that it does continue to shape Clement’s programme of education, especially in connection with Christ’s relation to his church and in the preparation for the Didaskalos.

Humanity’s Inner Formation and God’s Outward Manifestation (Paed. I) In the first book of the Paedagogus, Clement grounds the divine pedagogy in three ways that negotiate the boundary between hiddenness and revelation: likeness, creation and baptism. Mystery rites are evoked at climactic moments in the relationship between Christ and the church – in the incarnation to guide blind humanity wandering in darkness towards salvation (Paed. I.iii.9.2–4), in Christ’s epoptic gaze at the church through the window of his flesh (v.22.3) and in the baptisand’s illumination at baptism, to be granted ‘eyes of the spirit’ capable of epoptic vision of the divine (vi.28.1). I shall introduce each of these in turn, showing how they develop Clement’s account of anthropological hiddenness in relation to the hidden God, through his Image, the Son. The preface had closed with a promise for purification to fit the soul for revelation; immediately afterward, the Pedagogue is introduced as the perfect image of the father, and Christian children are told to try to make their souls like him by sinning as little as possible (Paed. I.ii.4.1–2). The language of ‘image’ (εἰκών) and ‘form’ (σχήμα) evokes contemplation of the exterior, but it is interpreted with emphasis on the practice of the virtues. This at once focuses attention on likeness in non-physical ways. The Son is a deity undefiled in human form, a minister of the father’s will, in the father, at the right hand of the father, who also had the form of God (ii.4.1). The ‘form’ (σχήμα) is both human and divine and is manifest primarily in sinlessness and likeness to the father (ii.4.1). It is that moral axis of sinlessness according to which he seeks to bring humans to perfection through ordering both their soul and body (ii.5.5–6). The perfect image is both manifested outwardly and perfected inwardly. This account of imitatio Christi could sound coolly moralistic, were it not grounded soon afterward in a doctrine of love, whereby it emerges that the relationship of love between humans, the Logos and God is an interplay of hiddenness and manifestation: God, being good, loves what is good, and humanity has the ‘love-charm’ on the inside (ἔνδον), which is

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what God himself breathed in (iii.7.3). When they were wandering in deep darkness (iii.9.2), he showed his love by sending the Logos from his womb (iii.8.2), who, by becoming flesh ‘very clearly’, ‘displayed’ the same virtue, practical and contemplative (ἐναργῶς σὰρξ γενόμενος ... ἐπιδεικνύς, 9.4). Humanity ought to love him back, obeying and imitating him; in doing so, they are loving the transcendent deity who loved them first (iii.8.2, 9.1). In this quick-paced portrayal of incarnation, the structure and imagery of Christ’s relation to humanity evokes mystery initiations, where the mystagogue acts as a guide for those who are blind and wandering in darkness and at the climactic moment of illumination shows the mysteries to them as a spectacle to contemplate (iii.9.2–4). As Clement moves into his account of the Pedagogue’s work, he underscores that the recipients of revelation are children – the new people, the young people, with new minds, who learn new good things (v.20.3). In an intimate vignette, he imagines the royal Christ ‘peering through the window’ (the phrase resonates with both the words that Genesis uses to describe Abimelek peering at Isaac caressing his wife and with phrases from the love-chase in the Song of Songs)68 so that he entertains the vision (ἐποπτεύει) of his own church, only showing (ἐπιδεικνύς) his face, which is missing for his church who is perfected by her royal head. The window through which he manifested himself (ἐδείκνυτο, πεφανέρωται) was the flesh (v.22.3–23.1). The language of epopteia and display evokes the mysteries, but here the focus is not on the worshippers beholding what is revealed but on Christ’s epoptic vision of the church. It is loving and intimate and precedes his account of their imitation of his example (ὑπογραφή) in baptism (vi.26.1). Baptism is experienced as rebirth (vi.27.3, 32.4), as the acquisition of faith (vi.28.5–29.3) and gnosis (vi.29.4). The terms are cognitive (ignorance, faith, gnosis), moral (sins), and perceptual (eyes of the spirit). But they also pick up the intimate moment of vision evoked by Christ peering through his fleshly window. At baptism, the holy spirit rubs away sin like mist from the eyes and the newly baptised in turn gains the capacity for epoptic vision of the divine (τὸ θεῖον ἐποπτεύομεν, vi.28.1), thus potentially responding to Christ’s prior epoptic vision of them, his church (ἐποπτεύει, 68

«διακύψας τῆς θυρίδος», ὥς φησιν ἡ γραφή, Paed. I.v.22.3, cf. Gen 26:8, παρα .......κύψας δὲ Αβιμελεχ ὁ βασιλεὺς Γεραρων διὰ τῆς θυρίδος εἶδεν τὸν Ισαακ παίζοντα μετὰ Ρεβεκκας τῆς γυναικὸς αὐτου, but cf. Cant 2:9, ἰδοὺ οὗτος ἕστηκεν ὀπίσω τοῦ τοίχου ἡμῶν παρα .......κύπτων διὰ τῶν θυρίδων ἐκ δικτύων. Stählin cites Gen 26:8 but gives no references to . .κύπτων διὰ τῶν ................. Cant. in his Register. However, an allusion to Cant is not implausible: Clement takes seriously the notion that Christ’s bride is the church: Str. III.vi.49.3; xii.80.2, 84.2.

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v.22.3). The principal frame for engaging with hiddenness for Clement is still the mysteries. Mystery initiations too involve a rite by which the blind initiates become able to see; the illumination out of darkness follows their preparation, and their vision is an ‘epopteia’, as Clement describes the vision of God (vi.28.1). With scriptural quotations, Clement looks forward to the possibility of further mystical encounter with the God who is now hidden: ‘We see through a glass darkly now, but then face to face’; ‘what eye has not seen nor has it entered the mind of a human being’; ‘what ear has never heard’ (vi.36.6–37.1, cf. 1 Cor 2:9; 13:12). For the moment, however, the children are left with the more mundane task of responding to the illumination that shows up their sins. A little later in Paed. I, Clement returns to the notion of a mirror, but it is not the mystical mirror that mediates a vision of God but the moral mirror that shows an ugly person what he is like (ix.88.1).69 So too the good and righteous God shines his sunlight and sends his son, and compels people towards repentance (ix.88.1–2). This prepares the reader for the remaining books of the Pedagogue’s instruction, where the people are portrayed as adults, but what is needed is healing of the passions.

Social Conduct and the Passionate Play of False Surfaces (Paed. II–III) In the instructions in Paed. II–III, hiddenness is not prominent language, but when the theme does emerge, it is usually closely tied to issues of social conduct. There are interlocking social, psychological and devotional dimensions. In social experience, possibilities of hiding things arise at the boundaries between public and private life or between inner and outer person. These can be played upon in different ways: some people try to cloak the behaviours that they wish to hide in darkness, thinking to escape the notice of God.70 But Clement points out that this is not possible either externally or internally. The Lord’s eyes are countless times brighter than the sun and see all the ways of men and understand their hidden parts. Furthermore, each person has within him rational thoughts (λογισμοί), which are lamps that never rest (II.x.99.3–6). Conversely, there are many who have no sense of shame about hiding that which should not be seen, but rather parade themselves as if they were on a stage, cultivating an outward show of beauty. The theatrical 69

Cf. Taylor 2008.

70

Paed. II.x.99.3–6.

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imagery recalls the Protrepticus, but it is now transposed from the religious to the social sphere (II.iv.40.2, vii.60.2; III.ii.11.2). Again, Clement is critical, because these people are missing the beauty of the heart, which is what God sees (III.ii.10.3, 12.2–3). He points out how such people can play upon the limited vision of human beings for licentious reasons: he depicts the experience of being lured to come closer to a prettily made-up woman, expecting something like a mystic revelation, but all that is on the inside is a lewd beast (III. ii.4.1–5.4). This is mystic hiddenness and revelation gone very wrong. In the Protrepticus, mystic revelation went wrong because of false religion and the failure of the Greeks to discern the divine in the texts of their own tradition; this time the problem lies in the passions. However, the imagery of the false image in the temple also reminds readers that human beings themselves have an image of God within them, and the proper cultivation of the inner person is a cultivation of true beauty, however concealed from the outside world (cf. III.xi.64.1–3). Again, in the streets, some people are carried in litters, but it is not on account of a disposition of dignity and reverence but precisely because they are coy. They peer through their veils frequently and bend forward, and it is disgraceful (III.iv.27.3–28.1). This is a very different role for a veil from what we find in temples where it conceals God himself and accentuates the experience of his grandeur (cf. Str. V.vi.32.1–40.4). When Clement comes to deliver his positive teaching on the Christian life at the close of Paed. III, there are similar issues around concealment in building personal integrity before God and society. Clement thinks that people of both genders should always dress decently when they go to church, pure in body and heart, fit to pray to God. The woman should be fully covered; far from providing an instrument of allurement, such attire will preserve her modesty before the public gaze, and it is the will of the logos for her to pray covered (III.xi.79.3–5). This is set against the duplicity of people who act piously in church but as soon as they leave they put off all that and adapt themselves to the crowd: they are convicted, when they lay aside the affected stage play of solemnity, being the way they secretly were (μᾶλλον δὲ ἐλέγχονται, τὴν ἐπίπλαστον ἀποθέμενοι τῆς σεμνότητος ὑπόκρισιν, οἷοι ὄντες ἐλελήθεσαν, III.xi.80.3). Clement uses the term ἐπίπλαστον for their affectation; it is the same adjective that he used at the start of the Protrepticus for the way the Greeks doubt and pejoratively dismiss the ‘radiant face of truth’ (Protr. I.i.2.1). Christ’s own face may indeed be true, but Christians can always put on a discreditable mask over their own secret impiety.

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The overarching theme throughout these books is social conduct, and Clement’s critique is directed against those who seek to hide their behaviour from their neighbours while remaining exposed before God. He constructs his account of the false character of their hiddenness through interlocking themes: theatre, mysteries, beauty, love and searching. Each of these is potentially warped and falsified through wrong experiences of hiddenness: these people’s theatricality offers a false front and empty show; their mysteries hide idols and show nothing but baseness; their beauty is superficial, not radiant from within; their play of surfaces is driven by lust rather than real love, which is cultivated in secret through prayer in the inner chamber (Paed. III.xi.82.3); their search is for gratifying the desires of this world for food, riches and sex, rather than searching first for the (still hidden!) kingdom of God (Paed. II.x.103.5, cf. xii.120.2).

Envoi: Paedagogus Leading towards Deeper Mystery For the most part, the Pedagogue’s instructions are dedicated simply to training people to setting right their domestic way of life: they are properly ‘close to home’. However, there are also a few intimations of deeper mysteries, which both develop what was begun in the Protrepticus and pave the way for what is yet to come by way of hiddenness and disclosure in the Stromateis. Firstly, the very title Paedagogos straddles the domestic present and the anticipation of a mystical didascalia. The role of a ‘pedagogue’ in daily life was mundane.71 However, ‘pedagogue’ was sometimes a way of referring to a mystagogue in mystery initiations. Clement would have been familiar with Plato’s use of the language of ‘pedagogy’ in the Symposium, where Diotima describes it as part of initiation into the mysteries of eros (210e2). In the Protrepticus, Clement had highlighted a gruesome role for children in pagan mysteries: the myth of Dionysus being torn to pieces as a child, boiled and eaten was introduced in Protr. iv as a foil to Christianity, where people eat the Eucharist and are reborn through baptism as children with new life. Children are indeed known to have been initiated into Dionysiac mysteries, and Dionysiac scenes were portrayed – poignantly – on children’s sarcophagi.72 But towards the end of the Protrepticus, Clement offers a benign image of suckling children, 71

See Chapter 6.

72

Huskinson 1996, 30–35.

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deliberately contrasting the Christian child with the gruesome Dionysian fate. It is this gentle image of childhood that he picks up in the Paedagogus, and the moment of baptism when a person is reborn as Christian is portrayed in mystery imagery as illumination and acquisition of sight for epoptic vision of God (I.vi.28.1). The Protrepticus had drawn attention to the importance of Scripture, but Clement is not yet ready to offer much explicit engagement with allegorical or symbolic interpretation. He does once draw attention to how the Pedagogue keeps spiritual reasons hidden but manifests carnal ones when he provides instructions in the law about a life of frugality and self-restraint in not eating certain kinds of animals. This is a training in simplicity that leaves full understanding for later (III.i.17.1). He also, as we have seen, performs the beginnings of what he calls a didascalic exegesis when he comments on Christ’s crown of thorns. This tantalises the readers with a consideration of Moses’ theophany at the burning bush (II.viii.75.1–2). Moses’ theophanies will become very much more important in Stromateis, where the Sinai theophany is the focus for Clement in re-envisioning the pagan experience of mysteries in a Christian context and defending Christian transcendence through hiddenness in texts. The didascalic mode to come is thus anticipated not merely in the sense of allegorical exegesis of Scriptures, but in so far as Clement is approaching a Mosaic theophany. The two are probably closely related for Clement: Moses’ theophanic encounter on Sinai is mediated through scriptural texts.73 In the final chapter of Paed. III, Clement glances back to what has been accomplished in the discourse: ‘what must be kept at home and how life must be set back upright, the Pedagogue has sufficiently talked us through’ (III.xii.87.1). Now at last he points forward to the kind of revelation to which such obedience can lead: Child, follow the good path, which I shall exegete for you, yield to me ears that are capable of hearing, ‘and I shall give you treasures dark, hidden, unseen’ by the gentiles, but seen by us. ‘The treasures of wisdom are unfailing,’ of which the apostle says in wonder, ‘O depth of wealth and wisdom.’ Treasures from One God are supplied in great number, some of them through the law, others revealed through the prophets, others by the divine mouth, another singing by the heptad of the spirit. But the Lord, being one, is the same Pedagogue through all these. (Paed. III.xii.87.3–4)

73

Cf. Bucur 2014.

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There are several features of this passage that are characteristic of how Clement frames anticipation of entering into the mystery of God, which will recur when he broaches that mystery more fully in Str. V: the explicit accent on the ears that can hear, inviting the reader to a heightened experience of spiritual ‘listening’; the scriptural quotations framing divine treasures as dark, hidden, unseen and deep, emphasising all that withdraws from the reach of human perception, both visual and spatial; the invitation into the Scriptures, in all its parts, and the trust in the divine speech and spirit.74 However, to actually enter into those mysteries more deeply, readers must turn to the Stromateis.

deeper into mystery in the stromateis The Stromateis shift attention away from the places where God is not to be found – in pagan religious culture, as depicted in the Protrepticus, or in the life of luxury and loose morals, as depicted in the Paedagogus. Now we have the chance to consider how Clement frames the higher stages of formation in relation to the hidden God. An outline of this theme has already emerged in Chapter 6 through our study of Clement’s interaction with his title, Stromateis. We saw that Clement makes much of the theme of concealment precisely in relation to the experience of encountering his own work in the Stromateis, and the approach that the reader needs to take in order to engage with it effectively. I argued that Clement’s commentary on his title acts as a paratextual guide for the reader in her changing experience of concealment. These in-text commentaries on the Stromateis retain attention to hiddenness, but this involves not only hidden meanings within a text but also the maturing relationship to the hidden God beyond the text. The named non-titles, Meadows and Honeycombs, also draw attention to a web of imagery that made hiddenness (λανθάνειν) a point of connection between the Sicilian bee who escaped notice in Egypt (Str. I.i.11.2) and the hiddenness that is encountered in Clement’s work.75 The hidden bee was himself a miscellanist, most likely an image of the Christ-Logos, anthologising the prophetic and apostolic meadow and serving as a model for Clement and his readers. Hiddenness was thus written into Clement’s perception of

74 75

Cf. Str. V.i.2.1 (ears of the soul); x.60.2–61.1, with Ward 2017b. The ‘good’ that escapes notice in Clement’s own work (Str. IV.ii.5.2) and the ‘writing’ (Scripture or the Stromateis) that wants to hide itself (Str. VII.xviii.111.2).

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miscellanism because the Christ-Logos was a hidden miscellanist of the Scriptures. Here I want to develop this account with closer attention to how the Stromateis are placed within the larger curriculum in listening in a hidden way, and how through this Clement participates in a wider rhetorical culture of miscellany-making. This continues the argument of earlier sections but also introduces fresh issues, as Clement’s esoteric tropes in the Stromateis have been much discussed in scholarship, and it will be important to respond to that here. This part of the argument is challenging to set out, firstly, because the material in the Stromateis is so extensive and so highly wrought that it invites and even requires close exegesis, and yet were we to engage in close exegesis at every step, the clarity of a synoptic overview would be lost, and the chapter would become overburdened. In order to keep the argument as streamlined as possible, I will separate three strands that have hitherto been intertwined in this chapter: first, I shall show that the Stromateis continue the curriculum in ‘listening in a hidden way’ that was begun in the Protrepticus and Paedagogus. Then I will argue that the mystery imagery in the Stromateis picks up the mystery topoi from those earlier parts of the project and develops it for this next stage in this programme of Christian formation. Finally, I will show how and why Clement both teaches and models miscellanism at this stage of the curriculum.

Continuing the Christian Curriculum in ‘Listening in a Hidden Way’ Earlier parts of this chapter argued that the Protrepticus and Paedagogus begin a training to cultivate the reader’s ability to ‘listen in a hidden way’. The Protrepticus illumines the soul through the Logos and turns it to Scripture and to Christ; the Paedagogus deflects attention from the social gaze and refocuses readers on the inner relation to the hidden deity. The Stromateis, I want to show, continue this curriculum. Some scholars have disputed this on grounds that the Stromateis take an esoteric stance that differs from the Protrepticus;76 I shall postpone discussion of the esoteric tropes for now, in order to begin with a broader perspective on the theological curriculum in hiddenness in the Stromateis. I shall argue that it is consistent with the theology of hiddenness in Protrepticus and Paedagogus and continues to form readers in hidden listening through 76

Marsh 1936, 70; Lilla 1971, 146 n. 3.

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personal, social and exegetical practices that make them more receptive to the hidden deity. I am keeping this discussion brief in order to convey a sense of the shape of the curriculum in the Stromateis as a whole. The first Stromateus thematises issues of teaching and learning. Clement begins with contrasting imagery of hiddenness: productive teaching is hiding a seed in the soul of a learner where it can grow into something, as evoked by Solomon’s instruction to his son; unfaithful teaching is hiding a coin rather than investing it to make it grow, like the faithless steward in Matthew’s parable. In choosing to sow seeds in the Stromateis, Clement seeks to conform to the productive model of hiding insight – not in a written text only but in the souls of learners.77 Much of this first Stromateus argues against two sets of potential detractors: those who think that philosophy should not be included in the Christian curriculum and those who are ‘sophists’ – that is, mere quibblers, vainglorious logic-choppers, who ask the wrong questions and are concerned more with rhetorical style than with simple truth.78 In both cases, Clement’s response emphasises a formation in hiddenness: philosophy exercises the nous to be receptive to noetic things and turns attention away from sensible things;79 this kind of philosophical acuity can be one method of counteracting sophistry;80 Clement also uses liturgical imagery to convey the focus on the hidden, divine logos that is needed for true learning.81 The second Stromateus moves away from the self-reflexivity of the first and begins the remaining programme of gnostic formation. Wisdom is Clement’s theme here, and he emphasises at the very start that it takes a person beyond time and place to the encounter such as Moses had in the darkness where God is.82 Thus through wisdom, a person can reach the hidden God. This same wisdom equips people to engage with hiddenness in texts, including parables, dark words, sayings of the wise and aenigmas.83 The training in this wisdom comprises the cultivation of virtues that put the soul in touch with the unseen deity: Clement begins with faith, hope and love and portrays faith in particular as the means by which what is visible, audible and graspable is perceived with ‘new eye, new hearing, new heart’.84 These are the virtues of the ‘real person, the

77 78 79 81 83

Str. I.i.1.2–3.4. E.g., Str. I.i.17.2; ii.21.2; iii.22.1–24.4; viii.39.1–42.4; x.47.2–xi.50.6; xii.56.3. 80 Str. I.v.32.4–vi.33.1; Havrda (forthcoming). Str. I.ix.44.2–45.6. 82 Str. I.x.46.1. Str. II.ii.4.1–6.1. On this passage, see Havrda 2019, 132–37. 84 Str. II.ii.7.2–3. Str. II.iv.15.3.

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spiritual one’, by which he both loves those who share in the same spirit85 and ascends to gnosis, desiring the Creator.86 Later in this Stromateus, Clement also discusses the sense in which humanity is ‘like’ God, and the vast difference between them. He criticises those who interpret the Scriptures in a carnal way, and emphasises that the language of Scripture accommodates to the embodied human being. However, it is only in being the work of his will that a person is fitted for him, and he calls to sonship the one who is willing in discipline and teaching.87 The really devout person can attain to the boundary between immortal and mortal natures, with some needs on account of his embodiment, but only a few on account of his rational self-restraint (λογικὸς ἐγκράτεια).88 The third and fourth Stromateis develop attention to embodied life, focusing on sexuality and death respectively – the two principal limit case scenarios in use of the body. Clement does not use extensive vocabulary of ‘hiddenness’ in these books, but in each he portrays the gnostic ideal as attachment by love to the transcendent God, which thus relativises the draw of the body’s desires. God grants the grace to be free from those desires completely and thus attain apatheia, which is experienced not merely as an absence of desire but as presence with the transcendent Lord by faith, hope and especially by love. This is manifested in a pattern of embodied life that is neither indulgent of the body nor ostentatiously self-denying, but rather gives outward form to the person’s loving presence to the transcendent God and thus manifests the likeness of God. After this embodied formation in personal ‘hiddenness’ that puts a person in relation to the transcendent deity, Clement moves in the fifth Stromateus to the hiddenness of God in the world, especially in Scripture and in the incarnation, both of which are manifestations of providence.89 The incarnation undid the riddles of Scripture both by who Jesus was and by what he taught. In his person, he was himself the secret token of providence, the teacher who came to aid those weak of soul, who needed to be pure in heart to behold God face to face.90 He presented the face of God to the senses.91 In his teaching, he explained the Scriptures, of which he himself was the supreme fulfilment, such that people could be perfected by attaining to knowledge of the mystery of God in him.92 Clement

85 89 91 92

86 87 88 Str. II.ix.42.1. Str. II.xi.51.1. Str. II.xvi.75.2. Str. II.xviii.81.2. 90 Str. V.i.6.2, 7.8. Str. V.i.7.6–8. Str. V.vi.33.6–34.1. Cf. Paed. I.vii.57.2, Exc. 10.6, discussed in Bucur 2014, 68. Str. V.x.61.1–4. On Jesus explaining scriptural mysteries, see also, Str. I.vii.37.2. On Christ as the supreme fulfilment of Scripture, see also Str. IV.xxi.130.4, 134.3.

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juxtaposes textual concealment in various traditions, both scriptural and others, before offering his most extended discussion of encounter with the transcendent, hidden deity.93 The sixth and seventh Stromateis develop both the textual and the personal aspects of encounter with the hidden deity. The sixth portrays the gnostic not only as apathês but also as alone able to discern hidden meanings in texts.94 Scripture’s characteristic use of hiddenness is explored, and the Ten Commandments are explained as an example of exegesis of such portions of Scripture.95 The seventh Stromateus portrays the gnostic as one who beholds the hidden God through the Son. The Teacher educates this gnostic ‘through mysteries’, and he is able to exegete the hidden things for others,96 but for his own part, he withdraws from symposia and social life97 and remains in constant converse with God through prayer. This distinctive portrayal of gnostic’s constant prayer, not as petition but as converse (ὁμιλία), indicates that the gnostic is, above all, able to ‘listen in a hidden way’.98 The Stromateis thus develop the account of formation in listening in a hidden way that was begun in the Protrepticus and the Paedagogus. Clement’s theology of hiddenness remains constant, and the Stromateis supply further tools and contexts for personal and social hiddenness, culminating in a fuller account of gnostic encounter with the hidden God through Scriptures.

Mystery Imagery and Esoteric Tropes Clement’s curriculum in ‘listening in a hidden way’ in the Stromateis is recurrently marked by imagery of mysteries, together with other imagery that extends this domain and puts it in relation to a scriptural tradition, especially the Old Testament theophanies and the exegesis of the Tabernacle. This section seeks to show first that the mystery imagery in the Stromateis is in continuity with what went before, and secondly, that it marks stages in a curriculum, but this is not a purely philosophical curriculum but also a training in rhetoric and miscellanism. Clement’s mystery imagery thus opens up questions not just about the philosophical content of the mysteries but also about the rhetorical and textual practices of those who are initiated.

93 95 97

94 Str. V.xi.70.7–xii.82.4. Str. VI.xv.115.5–16.2. 96 Str. VI.xv.126.1–xvi.148.6; Edwards 2015. Str. VII.i.4.3, ii.6.1. 98 Str. VII.vii.36.4. Str. VII.vii.35.1–49.8.

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One Clement Not Two: Continuities in the Mystery Imagery across Protrepticus, Paedagogus and Stromateis Firstly, let us consider the relationship of the Stromatic mysteries to earlier parts of the project. Some scholars call attention to the contrast with the close of the Protrepticus, where Clement seemed not only to promise to reveal, but also to reveal, the Christian mysteries to his readers. In that part of the Protrepticus, he outlines an account of the incarnation and the whole story of redemption and designates these ‘mysteries’.99 The Bacchic imagery with which he began the Protrepticus reappears, and Clement invites readers not only to move from Cithaeron to Zion but to ‘behold my God and be initiated in those illustrious mysteries, and profit from the secrets in heaven’.100 He announces an account of the ‘Logos and the mysteries of the Logos’ presented in the imagery of his readers (κατὰ τὴν σὴν διηγούμενος εἰκόνα), which is the imagery drawn from the Bacchae.101 He portrays himself as torchbearer and holy initiate in beholding the heavens and God and Christ as hieorphant who seals the mystic initiate and leads them by light and presents to the Father the one who has believed. These, Clement declares, are ‘the Bacchic rites of my mysteries’.102 In the Stromateis, the vocabulary of mystery initiation is usually far less pictorially vivid, is articulated in more reticent, less ebullient language and often includes an esoteric motif of revelation for the few rather than the many. H. G. Marsh and others are thus right that the mystery imagery of the Protrepticus is different from that of the Stromateis. However, it does not follow from this that there are ‘two Clements’ or that the Protrepticus and the Stromateis were two radically different projects, for totally different audiences. On the contrary, continuities in the imagery underscore that the Stromateis are presenting a different viewpoint on the same mysteries, which can be understood as a higher stage in the mystery initiation. For example, the Protrepticus had highlighted Bacchic imagery; in the Stromateis, the rending apart of Pentheus’ body asserts continuity of theme but difference in dialogue partners and in approach. The image resonates with contemporary pagan philosophers’ use of the topos and conveys a method of philosophical eclecticism focused on recovering the

99 102

Protr. xi.111.2–3. Protr. xii.120.1.

100

Protr. xii.118.4.

101

Protr. xii.119.1.

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archaic, human-shaped unity through rediscovering the scattered fragments.103 Or again, towards the end of Str. IV, Clement portrays ‘the saviour leading us as mystagogue after the manner of the tragedy’.104 The ‘tragedy’ in question is the Bacchae, and Clement now quotes dialogue from Pentheus’ encounter with Dionysus about viewing the rites.105 The chosen quotations underscore an esoteric approach to divulging the mysteries: Dionysus was reluctant to share the bacchic mysteries with those who are not bacchants or letting them hear if they practise impiety. Clement’s gloss on the passage conveys that the mysteries can only be apprehended through sensitivity to the transcendence of God and the teaching role of the Son.106 Again in Str. V, Christ himself in the incarnation is ‘both teacher and chorus-leader; the secret, holy token of great providence’.107 The imagery evokes the invitation to join the Christian chorus in the Protrepticus and resonates with the vocabulary of secrecy in pagan mystery cults.108 But now the imagery focuses attention on the incarnation as a dispensation within salvation history, since only at the ‘last perfection’ can the pure in heart attain to a vision of God, and through weakness of soul we needed a divine teacher. Or again, in introducing a comparative account of figurative textuality, Christ is presented as the only one who can put sight in the soul that longs for vision, but there is a large crowd of people who are blind and deaf and lack understanding, who should ‘keep away from the divine chorus, like those uninitiated in the rites, or museless in the dances, not yet pure or worthy of holy truth, but discordant, disordered, materialistic’.109 The summons is to discern spiritual things by spiritual things, thus shifting the mode of learning and insight to a later stage in formation compared with the Protrepticus and Paedagogus. The imagery of the Stromateis is thus in continuity with the Protrepticus, but it signals a stage in the initiation when deeper insight is needed into the transcendence of God and how he is made known

103

104 106

107 108

Str. I.xiii.57.6, cf. Num. fr.24.67–73, Boys-Stones 2001, 140–41, 193 n. 26; Lilla 1971, 51–58. 105 Str. IV.xxv.162.3. Str. IV.xxv.162.3–4, Eur. Bacch. 470–72, 474, 476. Str. IV.xxv.162.5. Discussion in Friesen 2015, 128–32, who emphasises the way the passage has been transformed in light of ascetic ideals. Str. V.i.7.8, διδάσκαλός τε καὶ χορηγός, τὸ ἀπόρρητον τῆς μεγάλης προνοίας ἅγιον γνώρισμα. 109 Cf. Protr. i.2.3, xii.119.1–2. Str. V.iv.19.2.

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through the Son. The difference is partly explained by the more philosophical character of the Stromateis.

Mysteries and the Philosophical Curriculum Many scholars rightly observe that Clement echoes Hellenistic philosophical topoi in underscoring that gnosis is attained by stages as in a mystery initiation, and the highest stages involve contemplation of the transcendent.110 Clement differentiates Lesser and Greater Mysteries at the opening of Str. I, though the way he parses this, Greek philosophy is the Lesser Mystery, prior to Christian doctrine found in the Scriptures.111 At the end of that Stromateus, he mentions the division of Mosaic philosophy into four parts, of which the fourth is theological, and he cites epopteia as the Platonic equivalent.112 Havrda argues that the start of Str. II picks up the same scheme of philosophical curriculum, culminating here in Moses’ theophany, rather than in pagan imagery of mystic epopteia.113 Again, in the opening of Str. IV, the philosophical scheme of ethics – physics – epoptics is portrayed with imagery of Lesser and Greater Mysteries.114 Finally, when Clement is about to launch into his account of the transcendence of God in Str. V, he prefaces it by citing the tripartite form of the mysteries as an image of tripartite philosophical initiation, with purifications followed by Lesser and Greater Mysteries. This opens onto his account of the transcendence of God, viewed through the lens of scriptural theophanies.115 The imagery constructs continuity between earlier parts of the work and this stage in the philosophical curriculum. The Protrepticus had portrayed readers at the door, waiting for the Son to reveal the Father to those whom he should choose. The Pedagogue had listed theophanies to the patriarchs but only as part of the preliminary education, such as other Christian teachers of the time promulgated, which asserted that Jesus was already manifested as an angel in these events.116 In the midst of instructions about garlands, a brief account of Moses’ theophany at the burning bush was quickly cut short to await the proper time for the 110 112 114 115 116

111 Bucur 2006, 2009, 18–21. Str. I.i.15.3. Str. I.xxviii.176.1–2; Havrda (forthcoming). Str. IV.i.3.1–4; Havrda (forthcoming). Str. V.xi.70.7–71.1; Riedweg 1987, 123–30. Paed. I.vii.56.1–61.3; Bucur 2014, 62–66.

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Havrda 2019.

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‘didascalic style’.117 The opening of Paed. III sent up in mockery men who are lured into the passages of the Egyptian shrine, which is his image for a gaudily decked out woman, who conceals no mysteries other than the beast within.118 The philosophical and theophanic imagery of the Stromateis seem to pick this up. Moses’ theophany on Sinai becomes the paradigmatic encounter with the transcendent God, beyond space and place.119 The shrine that Clement has in view now is no longer the seductress but the Tabernacle itself.120 Here Christ presents the face of the Father to the senses but also passes beyond the veil to the noetic world.121 Like Platonic philosophy, then, Clement’s mystery imagery in the Stromateis underscores ascent from the physical to the noetic realm. Like Platonic epoptics, it has a contemplative telos in theôria, although in Clement’s case, this is fulfilled in the spectacle of the Father through the Son. However, if we focus only on the philosophical aspect of Clement’s mystagogical curriculum, we risk overlooking the significance of rhetoric and the textual practices of miscellanism.

Mystery and the Curriculum for Working with Texts At the start of this chapter, I drew attention to the prominence of mystery imagery in portraying paideia of all kinds in the early Roman empire, including the training of a child in the basics of grammar all the way through to the expertise of an orator. This was not necessarily in conflict with philosophical formation: in Quintilian’s idealising account, the orator was supposed to become not just good with words, but a good man – ‘vir bonus dicendi peritus’.122 We saw that the bookish Varro had also portrayed the disciplines as a mystic initiation, and some miscellanists, including Pliny and Gellius, had prefaced their compilatory works with anticipation of revelation, as at the mysteries.123 Clement too, I suggest, is presenting a mystagogical curriculum that develops skills in ‘listening in a hidden way’ in order that people should understand Scripture better and attain the skills of Christian rhetoric and miscellany-making that enable them to teach others also.

117 120 123

Paed. II.viii.76.1. Str. V.vi.32.1–40.4. See Chapter 8.

118

119 Paed. III.ii.4.1–5.4. Str. II.ii.6.1; V.xii.78.3. 122 Str. V.vi.33.4–34.7, 40.1. Walzer 2003.

121

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Thus, the passages of mystery imagery that resonate with the philosophical curriculum are contextualised within Clement’s work in such a way that they highlight the summons to miscellanistic labours and rhetorical or textual skills. The first announcement of ‘pre-Mysteries’ before the Mysteries introduces the Stromateis themselves, where gnostic farmers can pick out the seeds of truth, and where Clement alongside his readers listens to the One Teacher, who makes nous and logos gush forth and grants participation in the divine mysteries to those who are able to receive them.124 When Clement differentiates four parts of Mosaic philosophy, culminating in what Plato would call ‘epoptics’, the philosophical trajectory of dialectic leads him straight back to the mystery of Christ disclosed in Scripture and the need for a rhetorical training to differentiate between scriptural forms of speech (symbol, command, prophecy) and recognise the akolouthia of the text.125 The opening of the second Stromateus highlights a rhetorical programme as much as a philosophical one. In the preface, Clement abjures Hellenising rhetoric, and piles up images of miscellanism – plucking out a rose, sifting fodder and ultimately hoping for a revelation of the face behind the mask. He invites the Jews to ‘listen quietly’ (ἠρέμα ἐπαΐων), echoing the call to his own readers to ‘listen in a hidden way’ (κρύπτως ἐπαΐοντι) and modelling the loving disposition that is needed in the social context of reading and response.126 ‘Wisdom’, as enjoined by Proverbs, is interpreted as miscellanism: when Proverbs enjoins readers to follow the path of Wisdom, Clement explains that ‘He wants by this to show that deeds must follow the logos, and to make clear that we must be able to pick out what is useful from all paideia.’127 The act of ‘picking out what is useful’ is key to miscellanism; for Clement this is a divine command concerning the intellectual life, parallel to the ethical command for the practical life. He follows it with his own selection of quotations and brief interpretations, drawing from Proverbs and Wisdom and culminating with the scriptural declaration, ‘All that is hidden (κρυπτά) and manifest (ἐμφανῆ) I know, for the craftsman of all taught me – wisdom.’ This catena models a miscellanistic praxis that leads to the Mosaic model of entering into the darkness where God is. Such a person is not only a fine miscellanist but also, Clement underscores, has the ability to see through riddles and aenigmas.128

124 127

125 Str. I.i.12.3, 15.2. Str. I.xxviii.176.1–79.4. 128 Str. II.ii.4.1. Str. II.ii.4.1–7.3.

126

Str. II.i.2.1.

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When the fourth Stromateus opens with mystery imagery for different stages of the curriculum, this is immediately followed with a cluster of images that draw readers back into the challenge of engaging with Clement’s own miscellany.129 The high concentration of mystery vocabulary in the fifth Stromateus is cultivated through Clement’s own miscellanistic praxis of linking together quotations, which in this case bear closely on the prominence of mysteries. The argument, meanwhile, celebrates the textual skills of engaging with the hidden meanings of Scripture (and other texts). Str. VI attributes to the gnostic a mystic hexis (condition, state) able to understand the mysteries of Scripture and explain them to others.130 The seventh Stromateus develops this imagery by showing the gnostic taught by mysteries as the preparation for Clement’s own debate with heretics about the proper mode of miscellanism, whose ecclesial character he emphasises.131 This mystagogical curriculum is thus not just a philosophical curriculum but also a rhetorical one, which trains readers through miscellanism in the skills that make them good workers with texts and miscellanistic teachers themselves. Furthermore, this was signalled as early as the Protrepticus: we saw that the Protrepticus had opened with a tour de force of the wrong kind of scholarly miscellanism, which searches in books about pagan mysteries for revelation that turns out only to expose the indecencies of these cults. The Stromateis shifts attention to the proper object of miscellanism in Greek philosophical, but especially scriptural, texts, and draws out the imagery of mysteries, and the associated topos of theophany, to invite readers into a different mode of miscellanistic praxis, which can lead the ‘gnostic farmer’ beyond the text to the encounter with God through Christ.

A Case Study: The Progression of Mystery Imagery The progression in modes of handling the mystery across the three works can be seen if we juxtapose excerpts that purport to unveil the mysteries. I shall quote three extracts in full, which together crystallise the different aspects of mystery imagery that have been discussed in this chapter. Consider the following: The Lord willed again to free humanity from bonds and put on flesh (this is a divine mystery!), subdued the snake, and enslaved the tyrant, death, and, mirabile 129

Str. IV.i.3.1–4.

130

Str. VI.ix.78.4.

131

Str. VII.i.4.3, ii.6.1.

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dictu, that human being who had been seduced by pleasure and bound to destruction, he displayed with hands spread out, set free. Oh mystic marvel! The Lord has leaned down, the human being rose up, and the one who fell from paradise receives a greater prize of obedience, the heavens. (Protr. xi.111.2–3) Heraclitus rightly said, ‘human beings are gods, gods human beings, for the logos is the same.’ A manifest mystery! God in human, and human God, and the mediator accomplishes will of the Father, for the mediator is the logos common to both: God’s son, humanity’s saviour; His servant, our Pedagogue. (Paed. III.i.2.1) 60 (1) And again, ‘By God’s charge given to me in his household economy,’ he says, ‘to fulfil the word of God for you, the mystery hidden from the ages and from the generations, which now has been manifested to his holy ones, for whom God willed to make known the wealth of glory of this mystery among the gentiles.’ (Col 1:25–27), 61 (1) so that other mysteries hidden until the apostles and handed down by them as they received from the Lord (‘hidden’, that is, in the old covenant), were the things which ‘now were manifested to the holy ones,’ and in another way they were, ‘the riches of the glory of the mystery among the gentiles,’ which is faith and hope in Christ, whom he elsewhere called a ‘foundation’ (1 Cor 3:10). (2) And again, striving to realise the aspiration to manifest the gnosis, he writes something like this, ‘Reproaching every human being (πάντα ἄνθρωπον) in all wisdom, in order that we might present every human being (πάντα ἄνθρωπον) as perfect in Christ’. (3) That is not ‘every human being’ (πάντα ἄνθρωπον) in a simple way, since none would have been unbelieving, nor would ‘every’ (πάντα) believer have been ‘perfect in Christ’, but he means ‘every human being’ (πάντα ἄνθρωπον) in the sense of ‘the whole human being’ (ὅλον τὸν ἄνθρωπον), sanctified in body and soul, since ‘gnosis is not in all’ therefore (4) he adds openly, ‘knit together in love, and tending toward all wealth of fulfilment of insight, for knowledge of the mystery of God in Christ, in whom all treasures of wisdom and gnosis are hidden’ (Col 2:2–3). ‘Persist in prayer, keeping awake therein in thanksgiving’ (Col 4:2). (5) ‘Thanksgiving’ is not just for the soul and spiritual goods, but also for the body and bodily goods. 62 (1) And he reveals still more clearly that gnosis is not in all, adding, ‘Praying also for us, that God may open a door for us to speak the mystery of Christ, on account of which I have been bound, that I might make it manifest as I ought to speak.’ For some things were handed down unwritten. (2) Likewise to the Hebrews he says, ‘For indeed, you ought to be teachers on account of the length of time,’ as they had grown hoary with age in the old covenant, ‘Again you need us to teach you the basics of the first principle of the oracles of God, and you have come to need milk not solid food. (3) For everyone who partakes of milk is inexperienced in the logos of righteousness, for he is a babe,’ as he has believed the first lessons, (4) ‘But the perfect have solid food, those whose organs of sense perception are exercised for discernment of good and bad. So let go of the word of Christ as first principle, and let us head for perfection.’ (Str. V.ix.60.3–62.4)

This lengthy passage in Str. V captures the ‘esoteric’ aspect of the Stromateis that is so often regarded as setting it apart: in the Str. V

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passage, Clement affirms not just in passing, but with emphatic and laboured exegesis, that ‘gnosis is not in all’ (the phrase comes from Paul)132 and draws a distinction between simple believers and ‘the perfect’. He mentions an unwritten tradition and the hiddenness of the mysteries under the Old Covenant. But how different is this really from the passages in the earlier works? Or, in what does the difference consist? The Protrepticus makes the incarnation the ‘divine mystery’ and presents it as integral to human salvation. The Paedagogus also makes the incarnation the ‘mystery’ and presents it as integral to human salvation. The Stromateis makes faith and hope in Christ the ‘foundation’ of the mystery and marks out a further stage of ‘perfection in Christ’ through ‘knowledge of the mystery of God in Christ’. In content and focus, the mystery is thus consistent; it is always Christological and always concerned with human salvation. The notion of ‘perfection’ in the Stromateis emphasises sanctification of both body and soul but so too did the larger passage in Paed. III.i from which the excerpt above is taken: the preface to Paed. III concluded by summing up that Christ ‘displayed not the beauty of the flesh that makes an appearance, but the true beauty of soul and body, the former by doing good, the latter by immortality of the flesh’.133 However, the three passages each have different emphases, imageries, intertextualities and literary forms according to their place within the larger project. The passage from the Protrepticus uses imagery of the Christian myth of paradise and the serpent, which recasts the serpent imagery that has threaded through the work as a whole134 and frames it within the Christian mystery of salvation. It highlights seduction by pleasure and the bonds of the devil as the barriers to salvation, both of which are key themes in this work. The Paedagogus passage abandons mythical narrative and identifies the role of the incarnate logos as ‘our Pedagogue’. Heraclitus’ gnomic saying opens onto a meditation on the incarnation drawing on Paul and Isaiah and focusing thematically on beauty and immortality, again in keeping with the concerns of this stage of the project.135 The passage from the Stromateis uses a different literary form again: now the contemplative mode is more thoroughly exegetical. It depends on linking and interpreting scriptural passages and highlights an economy of revelation where the Old Covenant kept the mysteries hidden until Christ handed them down to the apostles. The thematic focus is on 132 134

1 Cor 8:7 cf. Str. I.i.2.2; V.x.61.3, 62.1; VII.xvi.104.2. Protr. i.1.2, 4.3, 7.5; ii.12.2, 16.1–3, 22.3–4, 34.1, etc.

133 135

Paed. III.i.3.3. Paed. III.i.2.1–3.3.

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faith and gnosis, which again is in keeping with this stage in the project. That gnosis is not in all is not used to shut anyone out but to encourage everyone to persist in prayer and thanksgiving, as for the soul, so for the body, and to move on from milk to solid food. The qualitative difference in the experience of ‘mysteries’ in the Stromateis appears to be twofold: firstly, whereas earlier stages of formation emphasised the foundational knowledge of Christ as the saviour from death and sin, the Stromateis build on this foundation and invite readers to engage more deeply with intimate ‘knowledge of God in Christ.’136 This takes them through contemplation of the incarnate Son to the transcendent Father but only if they are formed for it by personally involving prayer and thanksgiving, with well-trained organs of spiritual perception to differentiate good from bad in ethical discernment. Secondly, this passage from the Stromateis signals that mysteries are brought into focus through detailed attention to scriptural texts. In part, this depends on close exegesis of particular texts and the faith that Christ made known what was hidden in the Old Covenant. But it also involves the miscellanistic activity of piecing together different texts from Scripture in a way that makes sense for the current moment of teaching. Compared with earlier stages in the project, the Stromateis are both philosophically and rhetorically more advanced in how they approach listening in a hidden way to the Christian mystery. Philosophically, they invite people further beyond the letter to the divine logos. Rhetorically, they draw people into Christian miscellanistic practice as learners, teachers and exegetes of Scripture. The connection between mystery, hiddenness and miscellanism is found here. I have tried to show that the Stromateis structure a mystagogical curriculum that is at once philosophical and rhetorical, training readers in textual practices of excerption, selection and ordering of material unto the telos and scopos of Christ. This differs from the scholarly notion that Clement chose the miscellany form in order to hide some things from some readers in imitation of Scripture hiding things by aenigma. Rather, Clement, like his readers, is listening to the One Teacher who makes nous and logos gush forth and is providing a training in how to listen in a hidden way, such that the One Teacher will grant participation in the divine mysteries.

136

Ward 2017b.

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why did clement miscellanise? Why then did Clement miscellanise? This is the burning question that has kept coming back through the encounter with scholarly discussions of Clement’s motif of hiddenness: many claim that he miscellanised in order to hide things, and some assert also that he did so in imitation of Scripture. In this final section of this chapter, I want to approach the discussion in a different way. A basic but important answer to why Clement miscellanised is simply that miscellanies were the kind of thing that people wrote in this period. As we have seen throughout this book, miscellany-making was widespread in early imperial culture, so it is no surprise that Clement practised miscellanism in some form. A more detailed answer can be discovered not only through his esoteric tropes (which most scholars have focused on) but also through other ways in which he shows his attitudes to and assumptions about miscellanism, including how he portrays the ideal misellanist, how he trains the necessary characteristics and skills for miscellany-reading, how he himself practises miscellanism and the debates that he evokes with others about how to miscellanise. I shall focus on three issues that exercise him in debates about how and why to miscellanise: the use of philosophy (which is prominent in Str. I and VI), sexuality in the Christian politeia (Str. III) and the textual practices of ‘heretics’ (Str. VII).137

Making Use of Philosophy and the Enkyklios Paideia (Str. I and VI) The incorporation of philosophy is central to Clement’s concept of his stromatic project and is one of the most obvious features that differentiates this part of the project from the Scriptures. Whereas the miscellanistic bee that Clement found hidden in Egypt taught by anthologising prophetic and apostolic meadows, Clement’s Stromateis teach by anthologising philosophy as well. This is a deliberate difference from Scripture, and Clement takes up much space in defending this decision against critics (esp. Str. I and parts of Str. VI). There is evidently

137

Le Boulluec 1985, chs. 4–5 discusses these parts of Clement at greater length in order to understand Clement’s notion of ‘heresy’. My discussion overlaps with his, but has a different focus.

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a debate among Christians about whether this mode of miscellanism is appropriate at all.138 From what Clement says, we can glean something of the viewpoints that he is arguing against. He knows of people who argue that one should only use what is necessary and conducive to faith and should thus pass over philosophy as something external, superfluous, distracting and potentially even deceptive in pulling people away from the faith.139 Some claim that philosophy was invented by someone evil to harm humanity.140 Many are afraid of it, as children fear masks.141 Some back up their arguments from Scripture and from the examples of the prophets and apostles. They interpret the seductive ‘slut’ and ‘prostitute’ of Proverbs 5 as an allusion to Greek paideia;142 and they point out that the prophets and apostles knew not these sophisticated arts.143 Clement’s attitude resonates in part with the values that are characteristic of the learned culture of miscellany-making that we find among pagans too. He celebrates ‘polymathy’144 and characterises philosophy’s critics as unlearned boors.145 He favours the ‘ampler path’ to faith and the ‘abundance’ of learning that supplies it.146 These terms are evocative of the values of the culture of paideia in the pagan world too. Larensis’ guests delighted in abundance of learning as in the abundance of the feast set before them; they routinely chose the ‘ampler path’ in their conversations to such an extent that they seemed hardly to get to eating at all. Even as he seems to chime with this general culture, however, Clement gives it a Christian inflection. The abundance that he celebrates is not simple περιουσία, but χρηστομαθίας περιουσία – the pun on Χριστός – χρηστός glistens with wit that would appeal to any educated person in this society, but the content of the pun is distinctively Christian.147 Similarly, Clement favours a form of training that cultivates the ability to ‘select’ what is finest from philosophy and other preparatory education.148 Readers should learn to ‘pluck out’ what is useful, and they will do this best if they approach it with ‘experience’, like the ‘very wise’ Odysseus.149 This practical wisdom about selectivity as the basis for good miscellanism resonates with the values of pagan miscellanists, who highlighted their selectivity in what they chose to include in their compilations.

138 139 141 144 148

Hinted at already in Str. I.i.15.3. For further discussion, see Havrda (forthcoming). 140 Str. I.i.18.2, 20.2, x.44.4. Str. I.i.18.3, 20.1. 142 143 Str. VI.x.80.5, xviii.162.3–5. Str. I.v.29.6. Str. I.ix.45.1. 145 146 147 Str. I.ii.20.4. Str. I.ix.43.1–44.1. Str. I.ii.20.2. Str. I.i.16.2. 149 Str. I.i.15.3; vii.37.6. Str. I.ix.43.4.

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Plutarch chose out only what was worth remembering, which would help form people unto wisdom; Gellius chose what would be useful, including those things that would simply give people a wider experience of literary and intellectual culture, which may come in handy.150 Again, Clement’s concern for selectivity is ordered to the Christian goal, and this is what gives him a sense of security about the value of philosophy as conducive to reaching the telos rather than a distraction from it. Many of Clement’s arguments for philosophising are deeply rooted in the theology of revelation or in Scripture itself. Countering those who claim that philosophy had an evil inventor and was made for harm, he argues vigorously for its status as a gift of providence. His basic line is that it does good, therefore it must come from God.151 He is careful not to overstate this claim, either doctrinally or in his account of the ethics of using philosophy. God is the cause of all that is good, but of some in a more primary way, as with the Old and New Covenants, others by entailment, as in philosophy.152 Philosophic perception (ἡ κατὰ φιλοσοφίαν αἰσθήσις) is inferior to devotion and divine perception (θεοσέβεια καὶ αἴσθησις θεία), though there is help to hand for those justified by philosophy, and they can attain devout perception (ἡ εἰς θεοσέβειαν συναίσθησις).153 He underscores that he does not mean all philosophy, or any particular school, such as the Stoic, Platonic, Epicurean or Aristotelian, but whatever was well said in any of them, whatever teaches righteousness with devout knowledge. That eclectic whole he calls ‘philosophy’.154 In particular, he rejects the impious use of philosophy that does away with the doctrine of providence.155 The philosophy that he upholds is ἡ κατὰ τὴν θείαν παράδοσιν φιλοσοφία, which establishes providence securely, without which the dispensation about the Saviour appears to be only a myth. By contrast, he defines the teaching that follows Christ in relation to key doctrines: the divinity of the Creator, the particularity of Providence, the capacity of the elements to change and come into being and living life so as to become like God as far as in us lies.156 He is careful to relegate philosophy through his imagery: it offers premysteries preparatory to the Great Mysteries;157 it is like a relish mingled with athlete’s food;158 you can use worldly paideia but must not dally

150 152 154 155 158

151 Plut. QC 1 pr. 612c–e; Gell. NA pr. 11–18. Str. I.i.18.4. 153 Str. I.v.28.2; V.xiii.87.1–2; VI.x.83.1, xv.117.1. Str. I.iv.27.2–3. Str. I.vii.37.6; cf. Str. I.i.7.3 (like a nut in its shell, philosophy is not all edible). 156 157 Str. I.xi.52.1, cf. Str. V.i.6.1. Str. I.xi.52.3. Str. I.i.15.3. Str. I.i.16.1.

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with it, for it is a preparatory training given to each generation at the appropriate time;159 people who handle the logos in a boorish manner are like those who have been seduced by Sirens and cannot make their homecoming.160 The providential function of philosophy that Clement discerns is a preparatory one: it trained the Greeks to righteousness before the parousia of the Lord; it guided them as their Pedagogue, just as the Law guided the Hebrews to Christ.161 Consequently, it continues to be useful now when trying to present the logos in a manner that is familiar to people, as they will be most likely to be converted by this.162 Certainly, it is not perfection in itself, but it is not a person who has aretê who needs a way to aretê nor is it a healthy person who needs recovery. Thus too, philosophy is good for watering the Greek ground to receive the spiritual seed and cultivate it.163 When portraying the ideal gnostic in Str. VI, Clement has him anthologising from philosophy, choosing out what is most relevant and helpful for his listeners.164 He is somewhat ruthless about those who are shaken from their faith by such things: if their faith is that weak, then he thinks they ought to be challenged!165 Some of the arguments in favour of philosophy are not dependent on different revelation to Greeks and Hebrews but focus more on the benefits of philosophy in and of itself. In part, this focuses on awakening receptivity to what is transcendent: philosophy exercises the nous, wakes up understanding, begets acuity on account of true philosophy, which mystics possess when they receive (rather than discover) it from the truth itself.166 But this is also parsed as the basis of discernment, which is in turn the basis of miscellanism: people learn to distinguish what is noetic, to differentiate amphibole and homonomy, to discern what is meant synonymously in the different covenants and to choose one purple by another as skilful moneychangers.167 In a world where people teach very different things, people need to be trained to differentiate sophistry from philosophy, as embellishment from exercise, cuisine from medicine, rhetoric from dialectic and other sects of barbarian philosophy from the truth itself.168 A comparative method can also be useful in courting truth by juxtaposition, which bears fruit through gnosis.169

159 161 164 166 168

160 Str. I.i.29.9. Str. VI.xi.89.1; cf. Str. VI.viii.62.1–3. 162 163 Str. I.v.28.1, 3. Cf. Str. I.ii.20.2. Str. I.i.16.2. Str. I.i.17.3–4. 165 Str. VI.xi.89.2. Str. VI.x.81.1–2. 167 Str. I.v.32.4–vi.33.1. Havrda (forthcoming). Str. I.ix.44.3; VI.x.81.1–2. 169 Str. I.ix.44.2. Cf. Str. I.ii.19.1–2. Str. I.ii.20.3.

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Answering those who adduce Scriptures and saints to claim that philosophy is bad, Clement criticises their interpretation of the seductress of Proverbs: he points out that taken in context, the seductress is clearly pleasure, not philosophy. For his part, he has Scriptures and saints that underscore the importance of philosophy. He presents his own version of Philo’s allegory of Hagar and Sarah, which makes Hagar the encyclic disciplines who are handmaid to wisdom, their mistress.170 He echoes Hebrews 1:1 and other scriptural passages that portray divine wisdom as variegated (poikilic, polytropic), suggesting that this means that it includes philosophy.171 If the prophets and apostles were not skilled in these arts, that is no reason for us to abjure them: we do not have the minds of the prophets and apostles who were gifted with the holy spirit to understand spiritual things. We need philosophy and dialectic. The Lord himself at his Temptation showed his skill in double-talk (ἀμφιβολία) in arguing with the Devil.172 The use of philosophy is crucial to Clement’s own mode of miscellanism and also to the miscellanism that he teaches, for the gnostic is one who anthologises philosophy for his listeners. These arguments for including it show that Clement was operating in a culture where people were debating its usefulness. He argues that it was by providence that God ordained that philosophy be given for the good, especially for the Greeks, to bring them to Christ. If he is imitating anything in making miscellanies, then it is not Scripture173 but providence. And yet, his inclusion of philosophy is not simply an imitation of providence; rather, it is a reception of providence. It is because God has providentially granted philosophy as a gift to the Greeks that Clement and others are in a situation where philosophy is needed to teach people from Greek backgrounds. Furthermore, it is because philosophy is providentially beneficial that all people can learn from it. At the heart of Clement’s argument in favour of philosophy lies a commitment to miscellanism as a mode of learning and teaching. Philosophy belongs in Christian miscellanies because people can learn by polymathy; by juxtaposition of different texts, which makes truth appear more vividly and by the comparison of what appears similar, in order better to differentiate true from false. This Christianises the Classical tradition of education through polymathic miscellanism.

170 173

171 Str. I.v.30.1–32.3. Str. I.v.29.6, vii.38.6. Pace Itter and others, see n. 2.

172

Str. I.ix.44.2–45.6.

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Mystery Initiation and Clement’s Literary Paideia Arguing against Heretics about the Christian Politeia (Str. III)

Whereas philosophy was chiefly important in teaching educated, Hellenising outsiders, sexuality is an issue in debate with insiders. In Str. III, we get a sense of the significance of sexuality and how it leads to intense exegetical and miscellanistic activity, as various Christian teachers argue their case from Scripture and sometimes other texts. The concerns that are raised affect people’s relation to their bodies, their families and the kinds of communities that they can form: these are emotive, personally involving topics. Correspondingly, in this Stromateus more than others, we find the beginnings of attempts to articulate criteria for judging one textual argument against another. This is a different kind of issue from whether or not to use philosophy in one’s miscellanistic teaching activity; in this context, Clement assumes that the use of philosophy is valid and even argues against a rival who, he thinks, has gone astray in his Christian doctrine because he has misinterpreted Plato.174 Nor is the use of miscellanism in this book a form of scriptural mimesis, or an attempt to hide doctrines in the way that Scripture did. Rather, Clement has many and varied particular opponents, who are also engaging in miscellanism and exegesis (the two belong closely together) and coming up with very different visions of the Christian politeia from his own. It is imperative that his miscellanising responds to their arguments, both in content and method. Thus we see how his miscellanism emerges and develops in the context of inner Christian debate. The dialogues that Clement evokes often suggest rather extreme doctrines on the part of Clement’s opponents. At one point, he finds himself arguing against teachers who interpret Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount/Plain, ‘Give to everyone who asks you’, as if it referred to women who should give themselves as sex-objects to anyone in church who asks it of them.175 At another, his ascetic opponents boast that they have understood the gospel more noetically than anyone else when they imitate Jesus’ example of celibacy as their gnostic ideal.176 These issues are splitting communities, and Clement alludes to this by quoting from 1 John, ‘And now many antichrists have come, whence we know that it is the last hour. They have gone out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have stayed among us.’177

174 177

Str. III.i.10.2, cf. ii.19.1–21.2. 1 John 2:18–19 in Str. III.vi.45.2.

175

Str. III.iv.27.3–5; vi.54.1.

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176

Str. III.vi.49.1.

Why Did Clement Miscellanise?

317

The significance of miscellanism in these debates emerges at structurally significant points in Str. III. The third Stromateus is structured in three main parts,178 and authorial comments on miscellanism appear at each of the major transitional points. Thus there is no real preface, but rather, Clement launches straight into debates with a litany of particular groups of opponents, beginning with the followers of Valentinus, Basilides, Carpocrates, Epiphanes and Marcion (III.i.1.1–iv.39.3). He concludes this first part of the book with a criticism of his opponents’ miscellanism: Ἀναλέγονται δὲ καὶ οὗτοι ἔκ τινων προφητικῶν περικοπῶν λέξεις ἀπανθισάμενοι καὶ συγκαττύσαντες κακῶς κατ’ ἀλληγορίαν εἰρημένας ἐξ εὐθείας λαβόντες. They gather together phrases from certain prophetic pericopes, making an anthology and stitching them together badly, taking allegorically things that were said in plain sense. (Str. III.iv.38.1)

The terms ἀναλέγονται ... ἀπανθισάμενοι καὶ συγκαττύσαντες indicate miscellanistic activity of selecting, gathering and ordering material by stitching it together. Clement’s criticism that this is ‘badly’ done highlights issues of exegetical method (λέξεις ... κατ’ ἀλληγορίαν ... λαβόντες). In the second part of the book (Str. III.v.40.1-x.70.4), Clement simplifies his opponents into two categories who are differentiated on the basis of their main line in doctrine and ethics. On the one hand, there are those who teach people to live as if things were morally indifferent (ἀδιαφόρως ζῆν); on the other, there are those who proclaim excessive self-control on account of their impiety and fondness for making enemies (τὸ ὑπέρτονον ᾄδουσαι ἐγκράτειαν διὰ δυσσεβείας καὶ φιλαπεχθημοσύνης καταγγέλλουσι, Str. III.v.40.2). Again, when he is drawing together the threads of his argument, he alludes critically to his opponents’ selections and interpretations of verses: Ἐπεὶ δὲ οἱ τὴν ἀδιαφορίαν εἰσάγοντες βιαζόμενοί τινας ὀλίγας γραφὰς συνηγορεῖν αὑτῶν τῇ ἡδυπαθείᾳ οἴονται, ἀτὰρ δὴ κἀκείνην «ἁμαρτία γὰρ ὑμῶν οὐ κυριεύσει
οὐ γάρ ἐστε ὑπὸ νόμον, ἀλλ’ ὑπὸ χάριν» (καί τινας ἄλλας τοιαύτας, ὧν ἐπὶ τοιούτοις μεμνῆσθαι οὐκ εὔλογον
οὐ γὰρ ἐπισκευάζω ναῦν πειρατικήν). Since those who introduce moral indifference by forcing a few scriptures think that they have found support for their own pleasureable indulgences – but take that passage, ‘For sin will not lord it over you, for you are not under Law, but

178

Any structural analysis is controversial. For a different outline from mine: Méhat 1966, 277–78, who organises it according to Clement’s opponents, without attention to his metaliterary comments about miscellany-making.

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under Grace’ (and some others like this, which it is not reasonable to mention on top of these, for I am not equipping a pirate ship!). (Str. III.viii.61.1)

As in the earlier passage, miscellanism (gathering together quotations: ἀτὰρ δὴ κἀκείνην ... καί τινας ἄλλας τοιαύτας) and interpretation (βιαζόμενοί τινας ὀλίγας γραφάς) belong closely together. Clement’s interlocutors are evidently collecting verses that they suppose will support their views. He parades his deliberate refusal to repeat his rivals’ selections in full, for he is ‘not equipping a pirate ship’; the imagery recalls Clement’s polemic against the Greeks for pirating barbarian wisdom.179 In the final part of the book (Str. III.xi.71.1-xviii.110.3), he presents his own work as a general handbook that collects passages from which others can select material according to their need to respond to particular heresies at particular times: τούτων ὧδε ἐπιδεδειγμένων φέρε, ὁπόσαι τούτοις τοῖς κατὰ τὰς αἱρέσεις σοφισταῖς ἐναντιοῦνται γραφαί, ἤδη παραθώμεθα, τὸν κανόνα τῆς κατὰ λόγον τηρουμένης ἐγκρατείας μηνύοντες. ἑκάστῃ δὲ τῶν αἱρέσεων τὴν οίκείως ἐνισταμένην γραφὴν ὁ συνίων ἐπιλεγόμενος κατὰ καιρὸν χρήσεται πρὸς κατάλυσιν τῶν παρὰ τὰς ἐντολὰς δογματιζόντων. Let’s present now all the scriptures (ὁπόσαι ... γραφαί ... παραθώμεθα) that oppose the sophists who go by the heresies, revealing the rule (κανόνα) of self-control when it is kept according to logos. For each of the heresies, the person who understands will choose out (ὁ συνίων ἐπιλεγόμενος κατὰ καιρόν) the scripture that is proper to it, and will use it for breaking up those who make dogmas that overstep the commandments. (Str. III.xi.71.1–2)

The language portrays miscellanising activity: Clement will collect and set forth the relevant Scriptures (ὁπόσαι ... γραφαί ... παραθώμεθα), but he is still leaving the initiative to the reader to choose the appropriate ones (ἐπιλεγόμενος) in each case (κατὰ καιρόν) – and here, he suggests, much depends on the person of the miscellanist. It is ‘the one who understands’ (ὁ συνίων) who can do this. Once again, interpretive understanding and miscellanism belong hand in hand. In the context of these debates about the use of texts to teach a blessed form of embodied life, it becomes imperative to articulate reasons for why one interpretation is better than another. Clement does not do this systematically, but certain concerns recur so many times in the book that it becomes evident that they function as principles in his own implicit theory of miscellanism.

179

Cf. Str. II.i.1.1, 2.3.

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In the interpretion of particular passages, Clement frequently criticises other teachers for reading passages out of context. This is a problem that is likely to arise in a culture where miscellanism and ‘stitching together’ verses is an acceptable mode of argument, for such a practice depends on the excerption of texts from their literary context. If that context is also forgotten, then the texts can become open to any kind of construction. Clement points out, for example, that Jesus’ teaching ‘Give to one who asks you’, is followed by, ‘and do not turn away one who wishes to borrow’. As he observes, this teaches koinônia, not lechery, as his opponents claim.180 Or again, in the critique of rival miscellanists quoted above, he responds to their citation of the apostle’s phrase, ‘Sin shall not lord it over you, for you are not under the law, but under grace’ by pointing out the literary context (αὐτὸς γὰρ ὁ γενναῖος ἀπόστολος τῇ προειρημένῃ λέξει ἀπολύσεται τὸ ἔγκλημα), which clarifies that ‘we are not under law, but under grace’ therefore we ought not to sin.181 Similarly, it is needful in interpreting Scripture to pay attention to the scopos or telos of the text. Clement comments on the telos of the law at the beginning of the second section of his book where he prepares to critique the first of two main categories of heretics: The law is spoken in advance to lead us out of luxury and all disorder, and this is its telos: to bring us from unrighteousness to righteousness, in choosing marriages of chaste love, child-bearing, and civilisation (πολιτεία). (Str. III.vi.46.1)

The law thus has an ethical or political telos, and interpretation should be in accordance with it. Thus the commandments reveal a blessed life, and, conversely, a person’s manner of life shows up whether they know the commandments; Scripture always points beyond itself, and the proof of the interpretation lies in the human behaviours and societies that it forms.182 Correspondingly, Clement frequently critiques the type of community that arises through his opponents’ patterns of exegesis: theirs is a falsely named agapê;183 their interpretation of koinônia leads to brothels, and their fellowship is with pigs.184 He affirms the mystery of Christ and his church as bride.185 This controls the social orientation of his miscellany-making.

180 181

182 185

Str. III.vi.54.1. Str. III.viii.61.2, cf. Rom 6:14–15. Further context-based arguments: Str. III.iv.38.4; vi.50.1–3; ix.66.1; xi.76.4. 183 184 Str. III.v.42.4–44.5, cf. iv.36.3. Str. III.ii.10.1. Str. III.iv.28.1. Str. III.vi.49.3; xii.80.2, 84.2, cf. n. 68.

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Furthermore, Clement underscores that there is a proper disposition with which to miscellanise: namely, gratitude towards the Creator186 and not pride in one’s own status.187 Similarly in ethics, only those who restrain their desires out of a disposition of love for the Lord are praised, as they welcome the good for its own sake and sanctify the body as the temple of the Spirit.188 Good interpretation of Scripture, like good conduct, is a form of prayer, for it depends on a spirit of thanksgiving to God;189 Clement affirms that the reason that we have received the Spirit is that we might know him to whom we pray, the Father who ‘trains us for salvation and takes away our fear’.190 The Marcionites are criticised because they interpret things with thanklessness towards the demiurge.191 Clement collects examples of ‘ancients’ who partook of creation in a thankful way in order to argue against ascetic rivals.192 A proper disposition towards God, however, depends on right doctrines, especially the doctrine of God as good Creator, which guarantees the sanctity of birth and marriage,193 and doctrines of anthropology, which recognise both the potential and the limitations of the human frame.194 Personally involving knowledge of the good God matters more to Clement than whether it is Scripture or some other text that is being interpreted: for example, Clement may disagree about a particular wording of Scripture, but he also pronounces on the proper way to interpret it if the alternative wording had been correct;195 he contests the interpretation of a saying of one ‘Nicolaus’ not by arguing that the saying was not scriptural but by disputing the interpretation of it and its context within his own life;196 when opponents use books that are not mainstream, such as the Gospel of the Egyptians rather than the ‘four gospels’, he points this out but still thinks it is worth offering a rival interpretation of the same text.197 Only when there is no possibility of a good reading does he dismiss a work entirely as a ‘mother of licentiousness’, whose authors falsify God out on account of promiscuity.198 While Clement readily discusses other texts when rival teachers bring them up, the doctrine of textual revelation to which he most often returns 186

187 189 191 193 195 198

Gratitude to God is a prominent theme in Str. III, often but not always focusing on gratitude for creation: vi.52.1, xii.85.1–2, 86.1, 88.2, xiv.95.3, xviii.105.1. 188 Str. III.iv.30.1, 34.1–4; vi.48.1–49.2. Str. III.vii.59.4. 190 cf. Str. I.i.8.3–4. See Chapter 5. Str. III.xi.78.5. 192 Str. III.iii.22.1; cf. ix.63.1. Str. III.vi.52.1. 194 Str. III.xii.85.1–86.1; xiv.94.1–2; xvii.102.1–3.3. Str. III.iv.30.1; vi.48.1–49.2. 196 197 Str. III.iv.38.3. Str. III.iv.25.5–26.3. Str. III.xiii.93.1–3; cf. ix.63.1–67.2. Str. III.iv.29.1.

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is the unity of Scripture. The law, the prophets and the gospel all said the same thing, for they all had the same God.199 This is important for Clement in clarifying the parameters within which diverse texts can be assembled for Christian training. Just as pagans interpreted Homerum ex Homero,200 so too Clement supposes that the lawgiver and the evangelist say the same thing, and Scripture cannot fight against itself.201 Within his concept of the Godhead, however, the Father is distinguished from the Son, and so the study of the unity of the covenants is not a simple study of the βίος, ἔργα and τρόπος τῆς ψυχῆς of the author of both202 but rather a study of the obedience of the Son to the Father. If the Father commands something, the Son will obey it.203 To disobey some of the commands is like disobeying all of the commands, impiously opposing the Creator.204 Nonetheless, in some contexts, Clement acknowledges differences between the teaching of the Old and New Covenants. It is by providence that some parts of the law are no longer in use, such as the washings after sexual intercourse that Moses required, which are now subsumed in the one washing of baptism,205 which the law prophesied.206 Moses, he explains, had been trying to usher people bit by bit towards self-control before they heard the words of the apostle.207 Regarding Paul’s teaching on celibacy, he affirms that a person who marries does not sin on account of the law but does not fulfil the more intense perfection of the way of life in the gospel.208 Many of Clement’s arguments against his opponents involve a dispute about some aspect of the close reading of texts. His rivals interpret literally what was intended allegorically.209 They misidentify the referents of phrases such as ‘children of the age to come’210 or ‘come out from among them and be separate’,211 or the ‘old man’ and the ‘new’.212 They take up catchwords of Scripture, such as koinônia and eleutheria, and twist their meanings: koinônia is good if it is about sharing money, food and clothing but if it is about sex, then that is different!213 Similarly, ‘freedom’ as liberation from the passions is one thing; as slavery to

199 200

201 203 205 209 212

Str. III.ii.8.4; x.70.3; xi.76.1; xii.82.2; 83.3, 86.1. Mansfeld 1994, 204–5 for the ancient principle that exegesis should be informed by knowledge of the writings, acts, words, character and bios of the author, as attested by Cicero, Galen, Porphyry and others. 202 Str. III.xii.83.4. Cf. Mansfeld 1994, 177–79. 204 Str. III.xii.83.3. Cf. Str. III.vi.46.2; x.70.1–3. Str. III.iv.36.5–37.5. 206 207 208 Str. III.xii.82.6. Str. III.xii.83.1. Str. III.xi.78.1. Str. III.xii.82.4. 210 211 Str. III.iv.38.1. Str. III.xii.87.1–88.1. Str. III.x.73.2–4. 213 Str. III.xiv.95.1, on Eph 4:24. Str. III.iv.28.1.

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pleasure, it is quite another.214 Some of them interpolate,215 punctuate,216 miss out a definite article217 or use a tone of voice when they read218 so as to twist the sense to their own desires or to attribute to the devil or the demiurge what Scripture attributes to God (such as creation, birth and marriage).219 Sometimes, they miscategorise the form of rhetorical discourse of a particular passage, as when they take a statement as a command: they interpret ‘they resisted God and were saved’ as an expression of divine will that people resist the creator (demiurge), whom they call the ‘shameless God’.220 The third Stromateus thus manifests intense debate among Christian teachers about texts and the interpretations of texts. Miscellanism, in the sense of excerpting and stringing together quotations, is part of the method of argument both for Clement and for his opponents. The motivation for miscellanism is not to hide things in imitation of Scripture; rather, it is a rhetorically powerful way of building a case. Piling up quotations from authoritative books and stringing them together can seem to carry weight. However, what emerges in this book is that all the teachers are using this approach, hence the simple act of amassing quotations cannot win an argument on its own. Instead, significance attaches to emergent hermeneutical criteria where both the exegesis of particular passages and their relationship to each other and to God are judged. Clement draws attention to the significance of textual, doctrinal and also ethical and prayerful principles of exegesis. The gnostic miscellanist is a rhetor but also a philosopher and a good person with a spirit of gratitude towards God.

The Skopos and the Ecclesial Mysteries in Christian Miscellanism (Str. VII) The seventh Stromateus is more explicit than anywhere else that Clement sees scriptural miscellanism as distinctively Christian mode of argument, for he juxtaposes it with another kind of argument for the Greeks. Thus, the lengthy first part of the book is given over to a portrayal of the gnostic, the perfect Christian. Here Clement does not miscellanise, and deliberately so: he introduces the book by saying that this demonstration that the Christian is perfect is not presented by piecing together scriptural

214 218

Str. III.v.44.4. Str. III.iv.39.2.

215 219

216 217 Str. III.iv.38.2. Str. III.iv.39.2. Str. III.xii.81.6. 220 Str. III.iv.38.2–39.2, xii.81.6. Str. III.iv.38.2.

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texts, but rather he focuses simply on the nous and postpones the lexis (the wording of Scripture) for later. He gives two reasons for this: he is writing this part to argue against the ‘Greeks’, who do not necessarily yet have ‘faith’ (pistis). He sees them as philosophers, whose prior training prepares them to follow the logoi but not the lexeis of Scripture. Furthermore, the presentation of the passages from Scripture would break up his account, and he wants to keep the continuity of his focus. It does not replace a version that comes through scriptural miscellany and exegesis, but it precedes the miscellanistic account.221 His portrayal of the gnostic for the Greeks does not draw attention to the gnostic as a practising miscellanist, though he is able to discern good and bad and select what points to God.222 But it does give a rich impression of the hidden character of the gnostic’s relation to the transcendent deity: he is permanently engaged in contemplation (theôria), having been translated to another sphere, feasting with loving soul on the endless vision.223 He is also engaged in constant converse with God (homilia), which is his unceasing prayer.224 The gnostic is portrayed as in some sense beyond time and place, and beyond affect, because he is united to the transcendent God in love and thus but ‘tiptoes on the earth’.225 In relation to his fellow human beings, his godlike charity, teaching office and self-sacrificial love are Christ-like, and he presents to others by his life an icon by which they too may contemplate the image of God.226 However, his social persona is also marked by hiddenness and seclusion: he ‘escapes the notice’ of people because he is always in converse with God and keeps away from many social gatherings of those who are not like-minded.227 Although he is not portrayed as a miscellanist, excerpting and collecting texts for himself or others to ponder, he is portrayed as one whom God teaches by ‘mysteries’228 and who is able to disclose the hidden things of Scripture to others.229 He has a rhetorical style, and it is the plain style that is transparent to the truth, not elaborate Hellenising rhetoric, nor any form of self-interested deception (though he does practise ‘medicinal’ deception for the benefit of his hearers).230

221 223 224 225 226 228 230

Str. Str. Str. Str. Str. Str. Str.

222 VII.i.1.1–2.3, cf. xiv.84.2. Str. VII.xv.90.5, cf. 91.7–8. VII.iii.13.1–4. Cf. Str. VII.vii.44.6, 46.4, x.57.1–3. VII.iii.13.2–3; vii.35.1–49.8; xii.73.1. VII.vii.35.3–5, 40.1, cf. Paed. I.v.16.3. 227 VII.iii.13.2–3, 16.1–6; ix.52.1–3; xi.64.6–7. Str. VII.vii.36.4. 229 VII.ii.6.1. Cf. Str. VII.vii.45.1. Str. VII.i.4.2. VII.vii.44.8–45.1, ix.53.1–54.1.

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This account of the Christian gnostic (or sage) precedes Clement’s discussion of heresies and alternative practices of textual miscellanism in the second part of the book, and it makes a powerful statement of Clement’s own perspective on the scopos of Scripture. In concluding his account of the gnostic, Clement again draws attention to his own refusal to present a scriptural miscellany on gnostic perfection: ‘many other scriptural testimonies come to mind to set out, but it is better I think to pass over such striving for honour, on account of the length of the logos, turning it to those willing to work out laboriously the teachings according to a selection of the scriptures’.231 Nonetheless, he says he will offer one testimony briefly, so that the topic may be marked. Yet in practice, again he declines to quote, citing the specious reason that the passage is too long. In a passage replete with technical vocabulary of rhetorical criticism, he declares that he will briefly summarise (διὰ βραχυτάτων ἐξ ἐπιδρομῆς) using apostolic wording as suits the moment (ταῖς ἐπικαίροις τῶν ἀποστολικῶν συγχρώμενοι λέξεσι) and paraphrasing (μεταφράζοντες τὴν ῥῆσιν) so as to present the intention (διάνοια) of what the apostle said about the gnostic’s perfection.232 This is an intriguing procedure: Clement evidently wants to draw attention to his deliberate choice to give the sense and not the wording; he wants to underscore that he is drawing on established rhetorical practices in paraphrasing, while deliberately rejecting the production of a scriptural miscellany and that his purpose remains to focus on the intention of Scripture, such that others can develop what he has begun. Having framed the first part of the book with these comments on miscellanism, Clement turns explicitly in the second part to issues of miscellanism and exegesis.233 He first responds to Greeks’ and Jews’ objection that there are many different groups claiming to be Christian, therefore Christianity cannot be true.234 Clement’s response emphasises the need for discernment, which is the same skill as is needed in miscellanism.235 After that, he takes issue with heretics who have different readings of Scripture from his own. The heretics, unlike the Greek philosophers whom he was addressing in the first part of the book, are scriptural miscellanists. They spend their time ‘selecting’ (ἐκλεγόμενοι) things spoken and ‘anthologising’ (ἀπανθιζόμενοι) passages that are ‘scattered’ (σποράδην).236 But although they possess some fragments of truth, they 231 233 235

232 Str. VII.xiv.84.2. Str. VII.xiv.84.4. Sedlak 2013, 437–41 summarises Clement’s argument well. 236 Str. VII.xv.90.5. Str. VII.xvi.96.2, cf. Str. III.iv.38.1.

234

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Str. VII.xv.89.1.

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have ‘buried them with human skills of their own invention’. Their purpose is ‘harming humanity’, and they are puffed up with pride that they are leaders of what Clement regards as a school (διατριβή) rather than a church (ἐκκλησία).237 In critiquing the heretics, we find Clement at his most pointedly systematic about good and bad Christian miscellanism. The heretics, on his account, focus only on the words (lexis), not on the scopos.238 They pluck out passages from the Scriptures, but it is the words that they hold onto while altering what is meant, neither understanding what is said, nor even using the natural sense when they quote extracts.239 They read superficially and do not penetrate to the depth of things.240 Clement’s account of the gnostic in the first part of the book, when he presented it to the Greeks, deliberately did the opposite: he focused on the scopos and the intention and not on the words. This was his starting point, prior to any scriptural miscellany. Clement’s account of what the heretics are getting wrong has many resonances with the theology of hiddenness we discussed before: anthropologically, their eye of the soul is clouded, so they cannot see properly;241 they are empty like almonds, lacking divine purposes and traditions of Christ;242 they become beasts instead of human beings, like those changed by Circe’s drugs.243 Teleologically, they have missed the goal of becoming like Christ, and so becoming a god walking about on earth.244 They have missed all the virtues of Christian formation that should put people in touch with the hidden deity, including intellectual virtues, for they excerpt from Scripture and twist things said ambiguously to their own opinions245 and when challenged, sometimes scorn the akolouthia of their own teaching;246 also affective virtues of hope and love, for they choose out Scriptures for their pleasures, rather than providing proofs for them.247 Socially, they vie for the public eye, they are vain and puffed up, hence also disputatious, they love the first seat at tables, they lack the inner hiddenness that drives the gnostic to social seclusion and humility before God.248 Conversely, they sit lightly towards the ‘public scriptures’ of the church, for they prefer to maintain their own

237 240 243 245 246 248

Str. Str. Str. Str. Str. Str.

238 239 VII.xv.92.7. Str. VII.96.2. Str. VII.xv.96.3. 241 242 VII.xvi.97.4. Str. VII.xvi.99.1. Str. VII.xvi.99.5. 244 VII.xvi.95.1. Str. VII.xvi.95.2; 101.4. VII.96.2, ἐκλεγόμενοι τὰ ἀμφιβόλως εἰρημένα εἰς τὰς ἰδίας μετάγουσι δόξας. 247 VII.xvi.97.2–3. Str. VII.xvi.103.4–5, cf. xvi.94.4; cf. 98.2–4. VII.xvi.93.3; 96.5–6; 98.1–2; 105.1.

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doctrines rather than keep within the bounds of common faith.249 Clement’s critique of them is in the last analysis ecclesiological: he sees them as initiating people into alternative mysteries, which are not the mysteries of the church.250 They are shutting out prophecies from the church like children shutting out a pedagogue.251 The church, meanwhile, works with the Scriptures and interprets according to the mysteries of ecclesial gnosis and the tradition of the Lord.252 Clement’s account of miscellanism resonates with what we have portrayed elsewhere. There are textual practices that he previously associated with scriptural miscellanism – drawing from the whole of Scripture,253 judging Scripture by Scripture254 and confirming the akolouthia of the covenants.255 The Lord is the first principle of teaching and is the guide by means of prophets, gospel and blessed apostles, by many and various ways, from the beginning to the end (telos) of gnosis.256 It is important to accept the prophecies that are accepted by the church and then to follow the Lord where he leads by the god-breathed Scriptures.257 When people are drawn away by contradictory dogmas, they must get rid of these and must go to those who bring doctrinal peace, who, by divine Scriptures, can cast a spell on the noise of the inexperienced, clarifying the truth by the akolouthia of the covenants.258 Philosophical training is also needful in practising the exegesis of texts, but it is only well practised when it goes hand in hand with piety towards God. The heretics want to be thought philosophers but not to be so; they have no necessary first principles but are moved by human opinions, then they try to make the telos follow by necessity, and keep wrestling with those who are attempting true philosophy.259 They stitch together many lying inventions to make it seem that neglect of Scriptures is reasonable, but this is not a devout use of reason. Rather they show themselves impious in not liking the divine commands, that is, the Holy Spirit. They are empty of the purposes of God and the traditions of Christ.260 Truth is discovered by looking towards what is perfectly suitable and fitting for the Lord and the almighty God.261 The gnostic is characterised as the sage who alone has grown old in the Scriptures themselves. 249

250 253 256 259

Str. VII.xvi.97.3; cf. 96.5 (they do not accept some of the prophecies); 97.2 (they scorn prophecy itself ); 98.2 (they disbelieve Scripture); 99.2 (they shut out prophecies from the church, like children shutting out a pedagogue). 251 252 Str. VII.xvii.106.1–2. Str. VII.xvi.99.2. Str. VII.xvi.97.4; xvii.105.2. 254 255 Str. VII.xvi.96.2. Cf. 103.4–5. Str. VII.xvi.96.4. Str. VII.xvi.100.5. 257 258 Str. VII.xvi.95.3. Str. VII.xvi.101.4–5. Str. VII.xvi.100.5. 260 261 Str. VII.xvi.98.2. Str. VII.xvi.99.3–5. Str. VII.xvi.96.4.

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He preserves apostolic and ecclesial rectitude in teaching; he lives uprightly according to the gospel and has the Lord’s help in searching to discover proofs from the law and the prophets.262 The seventh Stromateus is Clement’s most programmatic statement about scriptural miscellanism in dialogue with those who see things differently from himself. The intention was not to hide things from his readers but to present things in the way that would most help them to move towards the truth as Clement perceived it. For the Greeks, this meant presenting the nous without the lexis of Scripture; for the heretics, it entailed an argument about proper modes of miscellany-making. That Clement wants his heretical opponents to learn from his work he states explicitly: ‘Would that these heretics would learn from these notes of mine, and be chastened and turn to the almighty God!’ (Str. VII. xvi.102.2). If they do not, then they are ‘like deaf snakes’ who refuse to ‘listen to the song’ that is newly told but in itself very ancient.263 The imagery recalls Clement’s imagery in the Protrepticus, where he also sought to bring people to listen to the new song and turn away from the evil serpents of death. Clement’s aim in writing his hypomnêmata is to further this project of conversion, not to shut out some people. Nonetheless, at the conclusion of the seventh Stromateus, he does sum up his work by declaring that he has hidden things by scattering them: In a scattered way, as I promised, and tossed about, I have sown the sparks of the doctrines of the gnosis of truth, in order that the discovery of the sacred traditions should not be easy for one of the uninitiates who chances upon it. (Str. VII.xviii.110.4)

But this brief declaration at the very end of the book should not be treated as a hermeneutical key to Clement’s miscellany-making as a whole. It has rhetorical power for Clement’s intended readers in that it underscores that there is something to be found by searching diligently in Clement’s work and reminds them of what is at stake. The structure and content of the book as a whole, as outlined above, give a different commentary on Clement’s use of miscellanism: he was operating in a culture of scriptural miscellanists, where piecing together scriptural citations was idealised as the primary form of Christian discourse by contrast with Greek philosophy. Nonetheless, there had to be rules and boundaries on the ‘ecclesial mysteries’, and Clement sought to tease them out and win over his opponents. 262

Str. VII.xvi.104.1.

263

Str. VII.xvi.102.3.

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conclusion This chapter concludes a lengthy argument that has spanned the last three chapters, in which I have sought to reconfigure our understanding of Muses, mysteries and hiddenness in Clement’s project. I have argued against the notion that we can differentiate Clement’s work from Classical miscellanies on grounds of his verborgene Tendenz, such that he had something to hide and they were only collecting titbits for conversational repartee. On the contrary, in Chapter 8, I showed that all our miscellanists encouraged anticipation of some kind of revelation. Clement adapted the imagery of the Muses and of the mysteries and extended the sensually based discourse of hiddenness to give shape to his theology of revelation, which grounds his miscellanism. The trope of hiding things from some people is not what makes Clement’s miscellanism distinctively Christian. On the contrary, as Eshleman pointed out, many pagans used esoteric tropes in presenting their work, not only in philosophical and religious texts, but also in presenting the basic steps of learning the skills of grammar and rhetoric and in packaging miscellanies for the general reader. For his part, Clement is committed to both a theology and a pedagogy of inclusiveness to train all readers to listen in a hidden way. His esoteric tropes involve them personally in the economy of hiddenness and revelation in which his own miscellanies participate; the tropes spur on engaged readers and resource them for arguing against those who miss the point. The present chapter has shown that Clement offers not only a distinctive theological rationale for miscellanism but also a distinctive rhetorical programme in training a Christian miscellanist to work with texts. He is engaged in debates about textual priorities that are characteristically Christian issues, such as the relationship between philosophy and Scripture, or between the law, prophets and gospel or between Scripture and books that are not accepted by the church. To train a good scriptural miscellanist, Clement necessarily offers a mystagogy, which forms his readers in both philosophical and rhetorical skills. Their miscellanism will ultimately be judged by their sensitivity to the nous or telos of Scripture; this depends on their doctrine of God but also on their own ethical behaviour, which conditions their possibility of knowing God and on their prayerfulness and application, for only in love and gratitude towards the Creator, and in the labour of gathering passages from Scripture, is it possible truly to miscellanise well, learning the mysteries from God himself.

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11 Poikilia Theological Interpretation of a Miscellanistic Aesthetic

If the variegated presentation of Clement’s work was not a deliberate ploy to hide some things from some readers, then what role did it play for him? To say that it is characteristic of the miscellany genre is true, but it does not go far enough. We have seen throughout this book that Clement takes up typical features of Classical miscellanism and reinterprets them for his programme of Christian formation. In this chapter, I want to show that this is also true for his reception of the aesthetic of variety. The notion that Clement’s use of variety might be aesthetically attractive jars with modern reactions to Clement, such as we explored in the early chapters of this book. Modern readers have generally found it distracting, messy and incompetent. By contrast, in antiquity, not only was variety satisfying to the literary tastes of the pepaideumenoi, but it was artfully cultivated for significant purposes.1 Some miscellanists drew attention to the deep connection between their literary aesthetic of variety and the variety of their subject matter itself. For example, Plutarch’s first question closes with a recollection of the ‘varied (ποικίλον) and much-bending character of the circuitous route’ of the scolion (QC 1.1, 615c). As Klotz suggested, this is evocative of the circuitous route of the dinner party discussions themselves.2 Another question focuses on whether one should use flowery garlands over the cups. The garlands are described as ‘opening up a ποικιλία with inimitable colours and tinctures’ (QC 3.1, 646d), and then the speech itself is also described as poikilic and flowery, like a garland (QC 3.2, 648b). In this

1

See Chapters 2 and 3.

2

Klotz 2011, 164–65.

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way, Plutarch shows himself alert to relationships between poikilia of rhetorical form and poikilia of subject matter: both may be flowery, both may be garlands at dinner. Sometimes, ethical issues of ‘variety’ formed a serious topic for reflection. Plutarch gives earnest attention to the right mix of elements to achieve proper conviviality at the symposium. Pliny underscores the variety of nature as a source of both wonder and moralising critique. It is because nature is so rich and varied that it is worth writing about; but it is also because nature is so rich and varied that she supplies Rome with the material of luxury that corrupts Roman mores. Athenaeus exaggerates the extravagance of the banquet to evoke what happens when abundance becomes too much; his comic heroes save themselves from gluttony in diet by insatiably citing from literature to the point where this itself becomes ridiculous, even as it parades marvellous learning. In the miscellanists, then, variety was self-conscious. These authors were attentive to the relationship between literary form and subject matter and sensitive to the problems of variety when it is not treated in the right way. The intention of miscellanism was not so much variety for its own sake but ‘variety with a programmatic purpose’.3 Authors sought out ways by which a lived experience of heterogeneity might attain integrity through being properly constituted as a whole. For Gellius, this meant that the work was situational, as Teresa Morgan suggests.4 It could offer useful guidance, examples or stories to bring out on appropriate occasions. Its significance was to help constitute the life of the miscellanist as a more rounded individual. For Plutarch, the proper unity was recognised through an ideal of sympotic harmony. For Pliny, it lay in the encyclopedic presentation of knowledge. Athenaeus framed it within a banquet. So how did Clement practise miscellanistic variety as a Christian? My argument in this chapter is built on the observation that Clement privileges a particular vocabulary of variety in the programmatic passages that portray his literary form and that this coincides with the terminology that was most significant in ethical and philosophical reflection of issues of variety in wider Classical tradition. Thus, when Clement deploys technical aesthetic language of variety, the term that he highlights is ποικίλος and cognates. This emerges in his two most sustained reflections on the literary form and title of his work, in the prefaces to Str. IV and Str. VI.

3

Bjornlie 2015, 294.

4

Morgan 2004.

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In the fourth Stromateus, he turns his readers’ attention to the composition of his work with the words: On account of those who read with neither restraint nor experience, let our notes be, as we have often said, scattered poikilicly (ποικίλως), as I suppose the name itself says, going from one thing over to another, and telling a something different by the sequence of what is told (λόγοι), as they show something else. (Str. IV.ii.4.1)

Here, ποικίλως characterises the reader’s experience of the Stromateis. It is integrally related to their quality of being διεστρωμένα (‘scattered’). Shortly after this, a sensory image draws out the poikilic quality of the Stromateis: Clement compares them with an ancient dedicatory offering, as described by Sophocles. The crowning feature of the offering is: the very poikilic (ποικιλώτατον), wax-moulded instrument of yellow honey. (Str. IV.ii.6.2)

The description combines delight in the poikilic of the work with sensitivity to its beautiful, natural unity, which makes it both tasty and functional. Chapter 7 pointed out how this description of a ‘honeycomb’ evokes one of Clement’s ‘non-titles’. The dedication of Clement’s Honeycomb, however, is not to the pagan deities but to the Christian God. The opening of the sixth Stromateus picks up the language of poikilia for Clement’s work and for its relationship to other miscellanies: So just as in the meadow the flowers blossom in variety (ποικίλως) and in the paradise garden the planting of the trees that produce fruits on their top branches does not have each of the different species separated according to its kind (the way also some people, picking out blossoms in variety (ποικίλως), put together in written form Meadows and Helicons and Honeycombs and Peploi, compilations that delight in learning), the form of our Stromateis has been variegated (πεποίκιλται) like a meadow with the things that came by chance to my memory, and that have not been thoroughly purified either by arrangement or by diction, deliberately scattered pell-mell. (Str. VI.i.2.1)

The Stromateis are like a meadow where the flowers bloom poikilicly, just as lovers of learning have composed Meadows, Helicons, Honeycombs, Peploi, decking their collections poikilicly with flowers. The language of poikilia is thus prominent in the way Clement articulates the experience of encountering his Stromateis. He invites us to regard it as constitutive of the reader’s experience of the work, and as a point for comparison with other miscellanies, particularly in their aesthetic of

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variety. This is the starting point for exploring how this terminology in particular was significant for Clement’s wider purpose. Other miscellanists also use the language of poikilia, but there is a wider range in the vocabulary of miscellanistic variety. Aelian wrote a Ποικίλη Ἱστορία, from which the German term ‘Buntschriftstellerei’ was coined; but Pamphile wrote Σύμμικτα Ἱστορικὰ Ὑπομνήματα; Favorinus published Παντοδαπή Ἱστορία; Antoninus Liberalis composed Μεταμορφώσεων Συναγωγή. In this chapter, I want to show that when Clement chooses to highlight ποικιλία in connection with his miscellanistic writing, he is choosing a term that had far more cultural traction and aesthetic power than compounds of μείγνυμι and κεράννυμι or adjectives of abundant variety such as πολυειδής and παντοδαπής. The first part of the chapter will show that the semantic range of poikilia in wider Greek literature is much broader than has been appreciated and that it spans not only aesthetic and ethical reflection but also theological and educational engagement with the problems and possibilities of variety. The second part of the chapter will show how it became a key term for ethical and theological reflection in two authors that particularly influenced Clement, namely, Plato and Philo. The third part of the chapter will argue that Clement’s three works organise a pattern of Christian formation that cultivates ethical simplicity with a view ultimately to discerning God’s poikilic wisdom and even in the poikilia of Clement’s own text.

semantic range of poikilia Which single adjective could describe the skin of a leopard, the character of a fox, the effect of light in a field of flowers, the knot that Circe tied for Odysseus, the magic girdle with which Aphrodite seduced Zeus, the wily nature of Prometheus, a multi-coloured picture, a woven tapestry, a hymn, a lyre, a lie, a stratagem, pleasure, temptation, a democratic state, Joseph’s tunic and God’s wisdom in the world? The answer is, of course, ποικίλον. This riddle gives us an initial sense of the breadth of semantic range of ποικιλία. The adjective ποικίλος is attested from the archaic period, where it is significant in aesthetic and sometimes ethical judgement. The adjective is frequent in Homer, the lyric poets and Pindar. The verb ποικίλλειν is used by some pre-Socratic philosophers in their discussions of cosmology. From Euripides’ time onwards, the noun ποικιλία is also attested. The

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great tragedians as well as comic playwrights of the Athenian democracy used this language in their dramatisations of stories that responded to contemporary political life. The term ποικιλία is patient of both sense-perceptual and more abstract application. The sensual and aesthetic use highlights sensual intricacy, mottledness, colourful diversity, shimmering and variegation. The ethical, epistemological or ontological use is concerned with practical or conceptual multiplicity, variability and changeability. The term often implies a value judgement and works on the emotions, but this can be positive or negative: intricacy can be beautiful and delightful; but it can be deceitful or fickle, while the variegation may be felt unpleasant or pleasant but in a corrupting way. These different uses of ποικιλία operate closely together, and there is fluid exchange between them. The flexibility of ποικιλ- language and its breadth of usage were significant for the role it came to play in discourse about spiritual formation, not only in Clement, but also in those who influenced him. Poikilia not only evokes the powerful attractiveness of aesthetic delight but also an area of moral, epistemological and theological complexity. This complexity keeps it out of technical abstract discourse about ‘the many and the one’, but makes it significant in any attempt to design an education that is culturally sensitive to the experience of human beings in the world. We might compare what Detienne and Vernant wrote of the difficulty and the interest in studying a term like mêtis – ‘although mêtis operates within so vast a domain, although it holds such an important position within the Greek system of values, it is never made manifest for what it is, it is never clearly revealed in a theoretical work that aims to define it. It always appears more or less below the surface, immersed as it were in practical operations which, even when they use it, show no concern to make its nature explicit or to justify its procedures’.5 Like mêtis, the Greek term poikilia was not explicitly theorised by the ancient Greek thinkers who defined the terms that they wanted to promote as significant for human life; but it is a more interesting site for ancient reflection on values precisely because its powerful ambiguities surfaced recurrently in defiance of ancient theorisations of cognition. Modern scholars have often recognised the importance of ποικιλία in Greek culture and of its non-identical counterpart, varietas, in Latin, when they have been studying something else. But there have been very

5

Detienne and Vernant 1978, 3.

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few studies dedicated to the semantics of either term. Fitzgerald published the first monograph on varietas in 2016, while the only systematic study of ποικιλία that I know of is Adeline Grand-Clément’s article in the Blackwell Companion to Ancient Aesthetics (2015), which focuses on the aesthetics of the archaic period. The only book devoted to poikilia was published six years earlier (Berardi et al 2009). It is an edited collection that contains several significant detailed studies but overall contributes less to a coherent vision of poikilia in antiquity than GrandClément’s piece. To my knowledge, there is no study that spans both Greco-Roman and Jewish material up to Clement’s time.6 The present chapter therefore offers a sketch of the semantic range of ποικιλ- terminology, which provides a basis for closer study of the authors who most influenced Clement and then finally of Clement himself. I shall argue that there are four principal areas in which ποικιλ- terminology was important: aesthetic, ethical, theological and educational contexts. The discussion will be divided into four parts, taking each of these in turn. In my own writing, I shall use an anglicised set of terms based on the Greek in order to allow the breadth of resonance of the Greek to emerge. Thus I shall not refrain from describing things as poikilic or as done poikilicly where this helps to articulate in English what is described in these Greek terms.

Aesthetic Poikilia Poikilia is fundamentally an aesthetic category, and in its most basic form, it describes sensual experience. It does not do this in quite the way that we approach sense perceptibles. There was no articulate theory of a division between five different senses until Aristotle and no separate word for colour as a property of surface until chrôma took this meaning in the fifth century BC. Although poikilia is often translated with an emphasis on ‘polychromy’, this meaning is too flat and too late. It is often associated with light effects and with the intricate diversity of impressions made on various senses in combination. Particularly in the archaic period, it is best to interpret poikilia as describing a transsensual experience of intricate diversity connected in unity.7 6

7

For archaic Greece, see B. H. Fowler 1984; for the medieval period, see also Carruthers 2009. See LeVen 2013 (with special emphasis on the relationship between aural and visual poikilia).

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There are some types of objects that are particularly often described as ποικίλος: weaving, flowers, birds’ feathers and toreutics are among the most frequent. Homer describes Athena’s woven garment as πέπλος ποικίλος, which was one of the most significant items of cult ritual (Hom. Il. 5.734; 8.385). Sophocles uses ποικίλος for the web that Procne wove (fr. 586); Herodotus for the beautiful web that Amestris wove for Xerxes, ‘worthy of a goddess’ (Hist. 9.109.3). Aristophanes jokes and puns about birds that are poikilic.8 Jewish writing in Greek takes up the adjective in the same way: Joseph’s cloak is poikilic in the Septuagint,9 the plumage of the feathers is poikilic in Ezekiel Tragicus,10 the ornamentation of the Tabernacle furniture in goldwork and jewels is poikilic in the Letter of Aristeas.11 Aesthetic poikilia is always sensually attractive, but sensual attraction can have a range of moral and ethical nuances. It can be simply delightful or symbolic of the harmony of a well-ordered social or even cosmic body (as in the weaving and dedication of Athena’s mantle [πέπλος], which was a ritual symbolic act for the city of Athens). However, it can also be dangerously powerful (as in the case of Aphrodite’s girdle, with which she seduces Zeus). It can threaten through incongruity or inappropriateness (as when the aged, blind prophet Teiresias shows up in a fawnskin in Euripides’ Bacchae – Pentheus is not unjustified in thinking the city has run amok with this new religion). These examples suggest that one of the frightening things about the attractiveness of poikilia is that it is in itself amoral – it has power, but it acquires its ethical value from the context in which it is appears.

Ethical Poikilia – Including Characterisation, Psychology, Epistemology and Thought Poikilia can articulate a way of thinking, talking or being. This ethical use of poikilia depends on the same notion of intricate, shimmering multiplicity that is found in the aesthetic sphere but employs it to conceptualise psychological phenomena that shape character, speech and action. With this shift goes a shift in the predominant type of value judgement associated with the word. Whereas a shield or garment that is poikilic may be utterly beautiful precisely because of its poikilia, a person whose thoughts

8 10

9 Ar. Av. 739, 761, 777, 1411, 1415. LXX Gen 37.3, 23, 32. 11 Ezek. Trag. 257. Let. Ar. 74, 78.

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or behaviour is poikilic is more often unreliable, shifty, devious or deceitful. This is the way Clytemnestra treated Agamemnon when she lured him to his doom. It is way the fox or the sophist is characterised, and the reason they are both respected and despised. It often goes with a language of ‘lies’ or deceit. Sometimes, however, the personal trait of poikilia may also inspire respect, even if combined with a degree of wariness or fear. It may be a sign of mêtis – that cunning intelligence, which, as Detienne and Vernant showed, remained outside the halls of philosophy yet was highly prized by the Greeks as practical canniness for engaging in the world. Odysseus was the exemplar par excellence; Homer called him ποικιλομήτης (e.g., Hom. Il. 11.482; Od. 3.163; 13.293). Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods for mankind, was also described as ποικίλος and ποικιλόβουλος (Hes. Theog. 521; Op. 203). That quality of intricate multiplicity in his character enabled him to trick the gods but also to benefit mankind.12 One collection of poetry makes a virtue of a ποικίλον ἦθος. That is the poetry attributed to ‘Theognis’, who is celebrated as ‘beautiful’ on a sixth century drinking cup. The poems grouped together under this name may not be by the same poet, but they represent contributions to a genre of sympotic poetry that flourished in the archaic period and the most quoted poet on extant vases of the period is Theognis. The poems give advice to a certain ‘Kyrnos’ about how to conduct himself at banquets. Theognis emphasises the importance of acquiring a poikilic character: My heart, to all your friends keep turning about your poikilic character (ποικίλον ἦθος), properly mixing your temperament to the like of each. Have the temperament of a tangled cuttlefish, who always looks like whatever rock he has just clung to. Now be like this; then, at another time, become someone else in your colouring. (Theognis, Eleg. 1.213–18; tr. Neer 2002, 15–16)13

For Theognis, it is valuable to be like an octopus at the drinking party: this is the quality that enables a youth to fit in with his drinking companions and to learn from them by imitation. As Gentili explains, this adaptability of character is what constitutes the nobleman’s sophia; without it, he becomes maladroit (ἄτροπος).14 Subsequent authors did not always follow Theognis on the social and educational value of poikilia; Plato in particular argues just the opposite – 12

13 14

Detienne and Vernant 1978, esp. 18–21, 35–36. For the poikilia of the coat of a leopard and for poetry itself in the Physiologus: Cox Miller 1983, 442–43. Cf. Theognis, Eleg. 1.1071–74, Hawhee 2013, 149. Neer 2002, 14–17; see also: Hawhee 2002, 153; 2013, 149.

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his approach, in the Republic, will be considered later. But it is important that poikilia could bear this range of nuances. Theological Poikilia One aspect of poikilia that has been underemphasised in the scholarly discussion is the theological significance of poikilia in Greek religion. Poikilia is sensually attractive in a way that exerts an uncanny power to move those who encounter it. This could readily suggest the presence and power of the gods. Aphrodite is closely associated with things poikilic, because she is the goddess of allure and of fertility. In the Iliad, her girdle, which Hera takes to seduce Zeus, is poikilic (Il. 14.215, 220); in Sappho, she is addressed as ποικιλόθρονος.15 But even without mythical narrative and personification, the work of divine power may be experienced through perception of poikilic beauty. Pindar draws the connection in his depiction of spring: Now after wintry darkness over months, the earth has flowered forth dappled things (ποικίλα) as with roses red, by the plans of the deities. (Pind. Isthm. 3/4.36–37)

In these examples, the divine presence or power are experienced through the aesthetic appreciation of poikilia. Human attempts to show reverence for the gods responded to this. In general, deities are expected to like to receive things that participate in their own expressions of power. Things that are poikilic are felt to be suitable for honouring the gods. Agamemnon highlights this term when he expresses his fear of hubris if he steps on the poikilic beauties of garments spread before him: he feels such poikilic beauty is fit only for the gods: One ought to honour the gods with these things, but that a mortal should walk on poiklic (ποικίλοις) beauties for me is not at all devoid of anxiety. (Aesch. Ag. 922–24, cf. 936)

Similarly, though without the tragic consequences, at the end of Aristophanes’ Plutus, the Old Woman is dressed in a poikilic garment and this is highlighted as suitable attire for taking an offering to the gods (Ar. Plut. 1199). Jewish writing in Greek embraces this religious aesthetic. In the Septuagint, the adjective ποικίλος describes the Temple and its

15

It is debated whether this means that her throne or her robe was poikilic: see Scheid and Svenbro 1996, 53–82 for discussion.

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fittings, as well as the high priest’s garments and the skills of the craftsmen required who contribute to making these things (LXX Exod 26–37 (11 times); 1 Chr 29:2; Sir 45:10). The Letter of Aristeas develops this in a way that accentuates the coincidence of the Greek and Jewish aesthetic. The Greek king supervises (and partly designs) the construction of a new Table of the Presence and Tabernacle vessels for the Jerusalem temple. Poikilia features prominently in the aesthetic experience, which stirs wonder in both him and other spectators. The cultic significance of these gifts suggests that this sense of wonder should be interpreted as a sense of awe at the divine presence, particularly in a text that is concerned to underscore the harmony between Greek and Jewish religion.16 The ordered harmony, beauty and diversity of the cosmos itself also invited theological expression and discussion. From the archaic period onwards, there are cosmologies that attribute to the gods a creative act that constitutes poikilia within the universe.17 The earliest extant is a fragment of Pherecydes, where Zeus makes a woven cloth (φᾶρος) and presents it to his bride Cthonia. On it, he poikillies (ποικ[ίλλει]) Earth and Ocean and the habitations of Ocean. The choice of verb suggests the surface of the world, which is perhaps what the robe becomes.18 Empedocles portrays the generation of the sense-perceptible world through Love and Strife with an analogy with how painters put together different colours in adorning votive offerings.19 Similarly, poikilia may characterise the divinely protected political order. Athena’s mantle (πέπλος) is described as ποικίλος by Homer (Il. 5.735; 8.386); Euripides uses ποικίλλειν to describe the weaving of scenes from the Titanomachy on it (IT 223–25), and Plato’s comparison of the democratic state to a ἱμάτιον ποικίλον evokes the peplos of Athena: this is important because the weaving and dedication of the mantle was the central annual act of city cult in ancient Athens. The poikilic peplos symbolises and helps to establish the ordered harmony of the city-state. The city laws themselves, or at least the painted wood on which they are written, may itself be regarded as an

16 18

19

17 Let. Ar. 54, 74, 78, with Heath 2013. Grand-Clément 2009. Pherecydes, fr. B 2, 13–21 Diels-Kranz. On this passage: Kirk, Raven and Schofield 1983, 60–63; Schibli 1990, 50–77 Scheid and Svenbro 1996, 63–65; Grand-Clément 2009. The reading poikillei depends on a quotation in Clement of Alexandria, Str. VI.ii.9.4. This is the earliest known reference to separate colours in Greek philosophy; see Ierodiakonou 2005

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image of the harmony and legal regulation of the city-state (Diod. 9.27.4, quoting Pittacus).20 Jewish authors took up this theological valence of poikilia as well. This is most obvious in Philo, who uses the language of poikilia to describe God’s original creation (Opif. 1.45, cf. 41), as well as the laws by which the order of the cosmos is established or articulated. However, there are other occasions when the Greek religious aesthetic of cosmic poikilia may be at play. The Greek translator of Job introduces poikilia unexpectedly into his version of God’s speech about cosmology. The translation is in general marked by interpretive freedom and relatively elegant Greek, but the version of Job 38:36 is still surprising. The Hebrew reads, ‘Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts? or who hath given understanding to the heart?’21 The Greek, however, introduces women’s weaving and poikilic knowledge: ‘Who has given to women skill in weaving or knowledge of embroidery?’ (τίς δὲ ἔδωκεν γυναιξὶν ὑφάσματος σοφίαν ἢ ποικιλτικὴν ἐπιστήμην).22 The Greek version, admittedly, does not portray a divine weaver of the cosmos itself, such as is found in the texts cited above from Greek tradition. However, the literary context focuses on God’s power over the cosmos, and here the gift of weaving and poikilic knowledge is seen as part of that. This is the wisdom that is responsive to the divine ordering of the cosmos, just as in ancient Athens it is the women’s weaving of the sacred mantle that responds to Athena, who is goddess of wisdom and weaving and who protects the city-state. The close association between the Temple and the cosmos in Jewish thought also means that the poikilia of the Tabernacle (in the LXX and elsewhere) may evoke the poikilia of the cosmos. This analogy is pursued by Philo (see pp. 349–50). The depiction of the act of creation of the Tabernacle furniture in the Letter of Aristeas may recall Greek accounts of the creation of divine artefacts that symbolised the cosmos, such as Hephaistus’ creation of the shield of Achilles in Iliad 18, or Zeus’ woven web in Pherecydes or the painting imagery for the constructive work of Love and Strife in Empedocles. Poikilia characterised another aspect of experience of the divine in addition to the awe or allure felt in response to great beauty: poikilia

20

21 22

Grand-Clément 2015, 415 (from whom the references to Euripides’ Iphegenaia at Tauris and Pittacus in Diodorus are also taken); Rosenstock 1994 (on Plato); Scheid and Svenbro 1996, 9–50 (on political weaving in Greece and Rome). ‫שְכִוי ִביָֽנה‬ ֶּׂ֣ ‫תן ַל‬ ַ֖ ‫שת ַּבֻּט֣חֹות ָחְכָ֑מה ֤אֹו ִֽמי־ָנ‬ ָׁ֭ ‫ִמי־‬. This is a very curious Greek rendering of the Hebrew.

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could also emphasise the multiplicity and inscrutability of the gods. This could be baffling, and sometimes it could be dangerous. Religious interpretations of the poikilia of the gods in this sense sometimes emphasise poikilia as a quality of divine utterance in oracles or other communications. For example, Herodotus refers to prophets who prophesy ‘nothing more poikilic’ (Hist. 7.111.9). Aristophanes depicts a scene where an oracle is reported to have riddled poikilicly and wisely (Eq. 195–96). Gods are not simple but manifold, and while that may contribute to their power to charm or seduce, it may also be uncanny or difficult. A fragment of Euripides observes of Aphrodite: ‘Aphrodite has many poikilic things in her. For she most of all gives both delight and pain to mortals. May I chance upon her when she is kindly!’ (Eur. fr. 26.1–3). In the Philebus, Socrates allows that Aphrodite is Hedone but immediately qualifies this. That is just the name that is dear to her, whereas in reality she is poikilon, not haplos, ¯ one thing, but takes on all kinds of shapes and ones that are unlike one another (Plato, Phlb. 12c4). In Euripides’ Helen, Menelaus explains to a servant that the gods had deceived them into fighting the Trojan War over a phantom-Helen, all thanks to Hera’s intervention and the strife of the three goddesses; the servant reacts with a somewhat understated observation, ‘Daughter, God is a poikilon thing, difficult to make out from signs’ (ὁ θεὸς ὡς ἔφυ τι ποικίλον / καὶ δυστέκμαρτον, Eur. Hel. 711–12).23 Perhaps even more than Aphrodite, Dionysus was a deity characterised by inscrutable transformative power. He and his cortège are often portrayed in art with the animals whose appearance and/or character are most associated with poikilia – in early Greek art they are shown with fawns, leopards and snakes; they handle snakes, rip fawns apart, hold the tail of a leopard or wear the dappled hides of fawns or leopards as clothing.24 In a fragment of a comic play by Cratinus, the telltale Dionysiac gear is summed up briefly as ‘thyrsus, saffron-colour, poikilic, drinking-cup’ (Kock 1 fr. 38). These outwardly recognisable attributes signal a much deeper poikilia that runs through Dionysiac cult. The cult is

23

24

It is notable that the servant uses the masculine singular ὁ θεός, though Menelaus had talked about Hera and the ‘three goddesses’. For an interesting exploration of the relationship between Euripides’ Helen and the Septuagint of the Pentateuch: Dafni 2015. There is, however, some tension between the portrayal in art and the literary record. See: McNalley 1978; Bremmer 1984; Isler-Kerényi 2015.

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characterised by strange, empowering or frightening transformation, like the multiple personalities that come through wine. It is dangerous, unpredictable and uncanny, close to nature and disruptive of traditional polis life but also potentially beautiful and necessary. Euripides’ Bacchae explores its many-sidedness. His use of the language of poikilia is infrequent but significant. At the start of the play, Pentheus declares that the world has been turned upside down, and one of the early sights that confirms his fears is the elderly Tiresias dressed ‘in poikilic hides of fawns’ (Bacch. 249). To the audience, the spectacle of Tiresias and Cadmus dressed this way in the opening scenes is ridiculous and mildly comical. However, in the course of the drama it turns sinister. As Dionysus increasingly takes control of Pentheus’ mind, the chorus express their foreboding: ‘[the gods] hide poikilicly the lingering tread of time and hunt the impious man’ (Bacch. 888–90). When the messenger reports his tragic death, he describes the scene that they came upon in the mountains, where the women worshippers were ‘like foals who had escaped from their poikilic yokes’ (Bacch. 1056). There is an uneasy tension in this scene between celebration of the beauty and freedom of this worship in its natural setting and fear at the unrestrained power that will soon manifest itself in the cruel and very unnatural murder of Pentheus. The image of fawns who have left their poiklic (‘dappled’) yokes captures both sides: the seeming innocence and beauty and the absence of an apparatus of restraint or symbol of civilizing control.25 Aphrodite and Dionysus draw out the tension and power of the experience of poikilia, which could be transformative and attractive but also dangerous and destructive. Plato (discussed on pp. 345–47) would contribute to the association between poikilia and deity by pulling in a different direction: he emphasised the unity and simplicity (ἁπλότης) of the Good, to which all people should convert the rational part of their soul.

Literary, Rhetorical and Educational Poikilia From very early on, both the primary senses of poikilia come to be associated with verbal composition. Poikilia’s close association with weaving and with thought facilitated this, since in ancient thought the use of words lies close to both of these. Weaving was a powerful

25

Dionysiac poikilia was thematised and developed by Nonnus for comparison with Christ: Shorrock 2011, 73.

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metaphor, not only for social relations (as in the state) or cosmic order (as in the motif of the divine weaver), but also for poetry. Pindar depicts ‘weaving a poikilic hymn’ (πλέκων / ποικίλον ὕμνον, Pind. Ol. 6.86–87). With the rise of travelling sophists in the fifth century, seeking to educate the young for a fee, a number of sources comment on the poikilia of sophistic speech. Often this carries a negative nuance, which suggests the shifty character of the counsels that underlie the enchanting sophistic rhetoric. Hippias is said to have ‘bewitched Greece with words that were poikilic and well-thought out’ (DK fr.2.15, apud Plato). Isocrates characterises the diction of an elaborate and well thought out style of rhetoric as ‘rather poetical and poikilic’ (Antidosis 15.47.1). Aristophanes draws attention to poikilia in democratic debate, which he mocks relentlessly. In Thesmophoriazeusai, the chorus praise the arguments of the woman who thinks that Euripides should be topped for his insults against women: ‘I have never before heard a woman more intricately woven (πολυπλοκωτέρας) than this, or one who speaks more cleverly (δεινότερον) than she! ... she found poikilic words (ποικίλους λόγους)’ (Ar. Thesm. 439). In Knights, the chorus egg on the Sausage-seller against Cleon by celebrating how the guy who would stop at nothing (ὁ πανοῦργος) has found another ‘equipped with much greater unscrupulousness (πανουργίαις) and with poikilic tricks (δόλοισι ποικίλοις) and wheedling words’ to attack Cleon and entangle him in arguments (Eq. 684–86); ‘it is difficult to beat him for he is poikilic and pulls himself out of the worst corners’ (758–59, tr. O’Neill). By contrast, Plato’s Socrates repeatedly denies that he intends to say anything poikilic.26 The sophists’ poikilic speech corresponds to the shiftiness of their characters, while Socrates’ professed lack of poikilia may suggest his attempt to espouse the simplicity and purity of the Good, as Plato portrays it. There is, however, a certain irony in Socrates’ repeated insistence that he says nothing poikilic: he may not deliberately give his words a makeover with polychromy and light effects, as the sophists do, but he does baffle his interlocutors repeatedly, drawing them into states of aporia through questions they find riddling. Cicero characterises him as a man of ‘multiplex ratio disputandi rerumque varietas et ingenii magnitudo’ (Tusc. 5.4.11).

26

οὐδὲν ποικίλον, Plato, Crat. 393d6; Phileb. 53e4; Men. 75e5; Gorg. 491d10, cf. Phdr. 236b7.

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Conclusion Poikilia was the major term for reflection on issues of variety in Greek literature. As a descriptive adjective, ποικίλος had two principal areas of application: to sensual aesthetic objects or to ethical character. It usually implied an emotional response and/or value judgement, but this could be positive or negative – or a mixture of the two. Positively, ποικιλία was beautiful; negatively, it was seductive, deceptive or unreliable. While all sorts of different objects could be described as poikilic, there were some that were particularly frequently described in this way: among physical objects, weaving, flowers and metalwork and certain animals, such as snakes, birds, leopards and fawns. In the abstract, it was associated with guileful characters – who may, however, be admired for their sassy, practical know-how – Odysseus, Prometheus and Theognis’ ideal drinking guest. But if poikilia was primarily an aesthetic term for describing responses to sense-perceptible or ethical phenomena, it also got taken up in ways that bear closely on our question of Clement’s literary programme in religious education. This chapter has argued that it was an important term in religious aesthetics in Greek tradition, both for the character of some deities, such as Aphrodite and Dionysus, and for responses to the ordered beauty of the cosmos. We saw that Jewish literature took it up in similar ways but applied it in areas that were special to their religious experience, especially in the Temple cult and in scriptural stories. In the next section, I want to look more closely at how authors whom Clement read closely used it in their own reflections on the significance of poikilia in philosophy, ethics and aesthetics.

poikilia in some of clement’s favourite authors: plato, philo and the scriptures We have seen that poikilia was a central term in reflection on issues of variety in Greek tradition. It enabled ancient Greeks to think about aesthetic, ethical, theological and educational aspects of experiences of multiplicity without sharply separating these into different spheres. However, by focusing on the principal areas of application in the tradition and treating the tradition as a whole, we failed to take account of shifts and variations across time, culture and in different authors. Poikilia was always associated with some paradigmatically poikilic objects, but over time, technologies change, so a wider range of material

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objects becomes available for this description. For example, embroidery is added to weaving, and painters adopt more colours. Social structures change, so a wider range of patterns of social organisation is metaphorically described in this way, for example, democracy, which only developed in the fifth century. Cultural contacts develop, so some artefacts from other cultures are encountered and become typical examples of poikilia, such as Roman mosaics or veined marble. Conversely, when people from other language groups learn Greek, they adapt the language and aesthetic of poikilia in their own cultural context, as in the case of Jewish poikilia. The developments in the use of poikilia that are most important for Clement are twofold. Firstly, the growing prominence of learned literary miscellanism in the early empire promoted an aesthetic of variety as something attractive and worthwhile to embrace. Poikilia was not the only terminology that was used to highlight miscellanistic variety, but it was among the most prominent terms. These authors draw attention to the delight with which they expect poikilic variety to be met among their readers.27 And yet, the history of the term poikilia shows that it evokes a much larger conversation about issues of multiplicity and variegation. One strand of development in this wider tradition of reflection on poikilia mattered greatly for Clement: it began with Plato, but did not end there. Scholars of Classical poikilia have drawn attention to Plato’s significance as a key voice in critiquing poikilia. Less well recognised are the voices of Jewish and Christian tradition, which were partly shaped by Plato, partly by the Greek Scriptures. This part of the chapter will argue that we can discern a strand of reflection on poikilia that Clement received from Plato, Philo and the Scriptures. Plato was very critical of poikilia, while Philo’s account was more nuanced, partly because he was guided by Scripture, and partly because he inhabited an educational system where the enkyklios paideia was well-respected. These authors were both important to Clement, but the New Testament gave him a further literary lens to frame his reflection on ποικιλία and the issues it opens up. I will draw attention here also to the New Testament usage of πολύτροπος, which was relatively insignificant in the reflection on poikilia before Clement and became important to him through his contemplation of education within a Christian Platonic tradition. 27

In addition to those discussed above, see the fragment of Pamphila preserved in Photius Bibl. Cod. 175, Bekker p. 119b, ll. 27–33; and Aelian, NA epilogue.

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Plato and the Problem of Poikilia in Educating a Just City-State Ποικιλ- terms appear eighty-six times in Plato’s extant oeuvre.28 Not all of these warrant special attention,29 but thematic emphases emerge: Plato’s most recurrent use across his works is to characterise a style of speech that he associates with sophistry or complexity and from which Socrates’ use of language is distinguished.30 The most important extended engagement with poikilia is in the Republic. In Plato’s programme of education for the just city, poikilia characterises the luxurious lifestyle that a just city must abjure: it is the ‘city of pigs’ that needs the long list of luxuries (Resp. II.372c–d, 373a); in the just state, gigantomachies will not be spun out in myths and embroidered (ποικιλτέον, 378c4); music will not be poikilic (399e9);31 weaving, embroidery (ποικιλία) and building houses will be supervised so as to be gracefully performed (III.401a2); the poikilic style of cuisine characteristic of Syracuse and Sicily is rejected (III.404d1); poikilia is deemed to cause incontinence and thence disease (III.404e3). In general, the world of becoming and change, of diversity and lack of simplicity, will be overcome by moving to simplicity and the good. Plato’s principal image for this is the sun, its simplicity and light.32 As the programme of education unfolds, poikilia appears only once in constructing a good education for a philosopher. The sky is ornamented poikilicly, and Socrates is critical of the way astronomy is practised, when people behold the heavens and say that they are contemplating with the eyes of understanding. The problem is when they think that what they can 28

29

30

31

32

My source is a TLG search, including compound forms. ποικιλ- language is not found in the Parmenides, the dialogue that became a locus classicus for the problem of the ‘many and the one’. Sometimes the term is simply not heavily weighted: Leg. 857b7, 863a6, 927e3. Plato’s range of use is consistent with patterns in wider Greek discourse, already discussed: he uses it cosmologically (Tim. 39d2, 40a7, 50d5, 57c–d, 61c4; Phd. 110b7, d2–3); for sensual pleasures and experiences (Phd. 110d2; Phlb. 12c4; Ti. 67c5). Sometimes it seems to mean ‘embroidery’ (Euthphr. 6c3; Ion 535d2; Resp. II.373a7, III.378c4, 401a2). Cra. 394a5, 8; 417e6; Tht. 146d4; Phlb. 53e4; Phdr. 236b7; Grg. 491d10; Men. 75e5; Menex. 235a2; Leg. 863e6. Cf. Phdr. 277c2. For the close association between poikilia and theatre music, which moderns call ‘New Music’, see Wallace 2009. On the politics of the New Music, the classic study is Csapo 2004. See also Wallace 2004; 2015 (on Damon of Oa); Barker 2004 (on Aristophanes’ Birds). Petraki 2011 argues that Plato’s own use of language is significant in effecting the readers’ transition from poikilia to haplotês, and the many other binaries that he associates with that: becoming to being (γίγνεσθαι vs. εἶναι), falsehood to truth (ψεῦδος/ἀπάτη vs. ἀλήθεια) and mixture to purity (μίξις / κρᾶσις vs. καθαρότης).

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see with the eyes of the body discloses the real truth about things. The truth, he points out, is much better, and quite other, than that which can be perceived with the body. However, he does not do away with poikilia. He discerns the possibility of contemplating the poikilic patterns of the heavens and using them as ‘artists’ models’ like Daedalus’, in order to transition to the realm of understanding (Resp. VII.529c7–8). The discussion of astronomy engages with poikilia, but hardly thematises it. In the critique of the democratic state, however, it becomes a major term of social and ethical analysis. Socrates draws an analogy between the democratic state and a poikilic himation:33 ὥσπερ ἱμάτιον ποικίλον πᾶσιν ἄνθεσι πεποικιλμένον, οὕτω καὶ αὔτη πᾶσιν ἤθεσιν πεποικιλμένη καλλίστη ἂν φαίνοιτο. καὶ ἴσως μέν, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, καὶ ταύτην, ὥσπερ οἱ παῖδες τε καὶ αἱ γυναῖκες τὰ ποικίλα θεώμενοι, καλλίστην ἂν πολλοὶ κρίνειαν. It looks as though this is the finest or most beautiful of the constitutions, for, like a coat embroidered with every kind of ornament, this city, embroidered with every kind of character type, would seem to be the most beautiful. And many people would probably judge it to be so, as women and children do when they see something multicoloured. (Plato, Resp. VIII.557c5–9, tr. Grube, rev. Reeve, pp. 227–28)

The democratic soul is similar: καὶ παντοδαπόν τε καὶ πλείστων ἠθῶν μεστόν, καὶ τὸν καλόν τε καὶ ποικίλον, ὥσπερ ἐκείνην τὴν πόλιν, τοῦτον τὸν ἄνδρα εἶναι
ὃν πολλοὶ ἂν καὶ πολλαὶ ζηλώσειαν τοῦ βίου, παραδείγματα πολιτειῶν τε καὶ τρόπων πλεῖστα ἐν αὐτῷ ἔχοντα. He is a complex man, full of all sorts of characters, fine and multicoloured, just like the democratic city, and that many men and women might envy his life, since it contains the most models and constitutions and ways of living. (Plato, Resp. VIII.561e2–7, tr. Grube, rev. Reeve, p. 232)

This imagery was often repeated in later literature; Jews and Christians observed its resonance with Joseph’s ‘coat of many colours’, described as a χιτὼν ποικίλος in Greek Genesis. Plato continues the critique of poikilia in his concluding discussion of art. Poikilic characters are easy to imitate, whereas a sensible, peaceful character that is always full of integrity is difficult to imitate and difficult to understand. Correspondingly, poets imitate the poikilic soul, comprehend it better, and portray it to make sense to the crowds. And yet, the soul in its truest form is not poikilic at all. The poets therefore form people in the wrong ways, and must be banished from the just republic along 33

For political and historical readings of this passage, see Rosenstock 1994; Villacèque 2010.

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with artists who draw people away from simplicity and truth to the world of multiplicity and becoming (Resp. X.604e–5b; 611b). Plato’s programme of education in the Republic, then, consistently perceives poikilia as problematic. For the most part, he resists it and wishes to be rid of it entirely. The only positive account of it is to affirm the potential of the poikilic skies to act as a model for contemplating what lies beyond, but even this is open to abuse, as Socrates points out. The poikilia of the heavens themselves is likely to entrap people in the multiform world of becoming.

Philo Philo’s extensive oeuvre uses the language of poikilia in ways that show how his religious devotion is structured by both Greek (especially Platonic) and scriptural tradition. Some of his poikilic passages need not be discussed further than to say that they show a similar range of nuance to poikilia as is found in Greek literature in general. Thus there are many passages where poikilia suggests the sensual attractiveness of luxury items, including robes (Somn. 2.53), furniture (Somn. 2.57), food (Cnt. 53; Vir. 149; Somn. 2.48; Ebr. 217, 219; cf. 215), music (Post. 104), and jewels (Prob. 66). Elsewhere, poikilia also indicates a crafty character (Prob. 155; cf. Gai. 36). Overall, however, Philo’s engagement with the aesthetic of poikilia wrestles with its implications from a Jewish perspective shaped by the Greek tradition. His thought is often organised exegetically: he gives special attention to poikilia either where the word is used in the scriptural text, or where something in the Scriptures reminds him of the term because of its most frequent associations in Greek literature. Thus, Philo reflects extensively on the poikilia of Jacob’s sheep, Joseph’s coat, the Temple furnishings and the High Priest’s robes. These are positive associations in the scriptural text, and they lead Philo to give a more favourable account of poikilia than Plato did. However, Philo is also reminded of negative nuances of poikilia when he reads about snakes in Scripture or when he ponders the language or role of pleasure, even when these things are not described as poikilic in the text. The following discussion of Philo’s use of poikilia fleshes out these claims. I begin with the negative associations, which amplify Plato’s own hostility to poikilia and somewhat shift the emphasis to an intensified focus on pleasure. Then I show that Philo gives cautious approval to some

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aspects of poikilia in connection with Scriptures and education. In doing so, he even evokes the possibility of supporting miscellanism, though he never describes his own work as poikilic. That would wait for Clement. Snakes and Women: The Bad Poikilia of Pleasure We have seen that in Greek aesthetic tradition, poikilia was often associated with snakes, because they shimmer with multiplicity,34 and with women, not only because of their weaving and its symbolism of wiliness, but also because they are perceived as emotionally volatile.35 This was important to Plato, who was in turn important for Philo. These two emphases in Greek tradition come together in Philo’s reading of Genesis, where the snake and the woman together are the source of deceptive pleasure that leads away from God. Greek Genesis does not use the language of poikilia in Eden, but for Philo the mention of the serpent is enough to evoke it, and it constitutes the organising principle of his explanation for why pleasure is allegorised as a serpent: This is why pleasure is likened to a serpent: it is because it is intricate and poikilic (πολύπλοκος ... καὶ ποικίλη) like the movement of a serpent, so it is too with pleasure. It twists itself (εἱλεῖται) in five ways at the start, for pleasures are contrived through sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. (Philo, Leg. 2.74)

It is this deceptive, irrational poikilia that connects the serpent with women, for the most intense pleasures are sexual intercourse (Leg. 2.74). Philo continues his exegesis of the snake with an account of the poikilia of many other pleasures – sights of pictures and statues, plants and animals, music and theatre and the pleasures of the belly (Leg. 2.75–76, cf. Opif. 165). Elsewhere, however, it is the woman who is the allegory of deceptive pleasure, and her poikilia stands out: Philo interprets Moses’ words about ‘two wives’ (Deut 21.15–17, quoted in Sacr. 19) as a reference to Virtue and Pleasure, the two wives of everyman. Pleasure comes like a courtesan, her hair is done up with elaborate poikilia (Sacr. 21), and she promises chromatic poikilia (χρωμάτων ποικιλία could refer to sights or sounds, perhaps most likely both, Sacr. 23). The other wife, Virtue, looks on in alarm lest the mind be made captive to the spectacle ‘poikilicly crafted to deceive’ (Sacr. 26). The serpent and the woman are thus independent allegories of the vicious character of pleasure, and one of the things that 34

35

Grand-Clément 2015, 417 n. 3 cites Sancassano 1997, 188–96, ‘on the close relationship between snakes and poikilia’. Rosenstock 1994.

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unites them in this is their poikilia. In Eden, poikilic pleasure is the key to the cooperation between the woman and the serpent: Philo observes that when Adam asked Eve, ‘Why have you done this?’, he was giving her the opportunity to defend herself, rather than prejudging the issue. But she admitted to having stumbled ‘from the deceit of serpent-like, poikilic pleasure’ (Leg. 3.66). Scriptures and Education: The Good Poikilia of Wisdom As in Greek religion, however, poikilia was not only a seduction away from God for Philo; it also played a significant role in the sacred life of cult and law obedience, and it characterised true wisdom. In fact, the remedy for pleasure was an alternative serpent: Philo interprets God’s command to Moses to make a serpent and set it up on a standard (Num 21:8) as a reference to sôphrosynê. With this temperate serpent, God opposes ‘a poikilic virtue to a poikilic passion’ (ποικίλῳ πάθει ποικίλη ἀρετή, Leg 2.79). Philo sometimes treads a fine line between distancing cult from pejorative poikilia and enriching it with the kind that is truly beautiful and justly admired. His account of the written law goes both ways. He claims that God’s commandments are not heavy or ποικίλον or difficult but ἁπλοῦν and easy (SL 1.299). The translation of the laws is not poikilic: ‘just as the things shown in geometry and dialectic do not admit of poikilia of interpretation, but the one laid down from the beginning is unchangeable, so too I think these people [the translators] found words corresponding to the things’ (Mos. 2.39). Plato had recurrently accused the sophists of poikilic language, which deceived people and made it hard to communicate the truth. Philo’s reluctance to characterise the Torah as poikilic in its communicative or didactic power shows similar wariness of poikilic speech. However, his admiration for the beauty of the laws occasionally leads Philo to describe them as poikilic: they contain images (ἀγάλματα) ‘woven and embroidered’ (συνύφανται καὶ πεποίκιλται) into them, which encourage us to provide for those in need of resources (SL 4.76). He could hardly reject the language of poikilia entirely in any case, as the Greek Torah embraces it at significant moments: there is a dense usage of ποικιλ- terms in characterising the Temple and the High Priest’s robes, and Philo responds to this by contemplating the cosmos through these cultic objects (SL 1.84, 88, 95; Mos. 2.84, 110, 143; Somn. 1.214–19). Philo, like Plato, is concerned to reveal an education that moves people away from the world of change to the one, stable, existent, pure God.

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The role of poikilia is most evident in this educational process in his discussion of Jacob’s dream about the different kinds of sheep: pure white, specked, and ashy-sprinkled (διαλεύκων, ποικίλων, σποδοειδῶν ῥαντῶν, Somn. 1.200). Philo interprets these sheep as the offspring of the soul, and in this context his interpretation of poikilia emphasises harmony in diversity: He wants them to be poikilic (ποικίλα), not like impure leprosy which is polymorphic and polytropic (πολυμόρφου καὶ πολυτρόπου), destined to suffer an unstable, ill-grounded life on account of insecure judgement, but carved out with letters and imprinted with seals that are different, but all of them proved genuine, whose individual characteristics will produce musical harmony when mixed together (ἀναμιχθεῖσαι μουσικὴν συμφωνίαν). (Philo, Somn. 1.202)

At this point, Philo rejects the negative interpretation of poikilia. Though aware that some people are suspicious of it (and despite treating it with suspicion himself in other parts of his oeuvre), here he interprets it closely with the ordering of the cosmos. Marvelling at the cosmos leads to marvelling at the creator. The ‘lover of wisdom’ shares in this art of tapestry, ‘for having taken up this same art, in that he sees fit, when he finds a multitude of different things, to bring them together out of difference into oneness and to weave them together’.36 Philo then lists different branches of education that are woven together by the lover of wisdom – grammar, both basic and advanced; maths and geometry, music, rhetoric and philosophy. ‘From these combined he frames a single work, gay and bright to a degree blending wide learning with readiness to learn more.’37 The thought leads him to the poikilic art (ποικιλτικὴ τέχνη) in furnishing the Tabernacle, the hierophantic role of the wise embroiderer (ποικιλτής) and the beautiful embroidered work (ποίκιλμα) of God, namely, the cosmos, perfected by complete wisdom. Therefore, he suggests that we must accept poikilia as a tool for knowledge (ὡς ἐργαλεῖον τῆς ἐπιστήμης ἀποδεχασθαι ποικιλτικήν), with an image on both heaven and earth, and all forms of poikilic logoi come from it (Somn. 1.207). Philo is evidently much more keen than Plato was to give an account of poikilia as useful for knowledge. He frames this both as respect for the enkyklios paideia and as reverence for the variegation of the cosmos perceived through the Tabernacle. It is thus grounded at once in his contemporary educational culture and in his reading of Scripture and Plato. Plato too would have endorsed educational ascent through the

36

Philo, Somn. 1.205, tr. Colson and Whitaker, LCL 275, 407.

37

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Ibid.

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variegated spectacle of the heavens, though it is the Jewish tradition that associates this with the Temple furnishings and the culture of the first century that embodies it through the encyclia.38 However, Philo does not embrace poikilic education in any simple way. Recalling the poikilic coat as an image of democracy in Plato’s Republic, Philo suggests that the wise man is differently dressed depending on whether he is appearing before God or before men. Before God he wears only ‘the unpoikilic robe of truth’ (τὴν ἀποίκιλον ἀληθεῖας ... στολήν), but as a citizen he must wear a ‘very poikilic’ robe: ‘very variegated and very marvelous to behold ... for life is many-sided, and needs that the master who is in control at the helm should be wise with a wisdom of manifold variety’ (ποικιλωτάτην δὲ καὶ ὀφθἠναι θαυμασιωτάτην ... πολύτροπος γὰρ ὢν ὁ βίος ποικιλωτάτου δεῖται τὴν σοφίαν τοῦ πηδαλιουχήσοντος κυβερνήτου, Ebr. 86, tr. Colson and Whitaker; LCL 247, 363). Philo contrasts the High priest who has all three seals – pure white, variegated and ashy-sprinkled – with Joseph, who just had a poikilic coat. Philo contemplates Joseph with some alarm because he is only familiar with the ‘totally poikilic woven garment of statecraft, which has had a teeny-tiny bit of truth mingled in’ (τὸ τῆς πολιτείας ἐπαμπισχόμενος ὕφασμα παμποίκιλον, ᾧ βραχύτατον μέρος ἀληθείας ἐγκαταμέμικται, Somn. 1.220), more reminiscent of the deceits of Egyptian sophists. Philo urges us to cast off this tunic and take on instead the sacred one inwoven with the varied embroidery of virtues (ἀποδυσάμενοι δὴ τὸν ἀνθηρὸν τοῦτον χιτῶνα τὸν ἱερὸν ἐνδυώμενα ἀρετῶν ποικίλμασιν ἐνυφασμένον, Somn. 1.225). Philo is the first extant Jewish author to work out in such detail a scriptural and Platonic response to the aesthetic of poikilia and its role in education. The emphasis in his oeuvre as a whole is on the negative aspect of poikilia, especially its association with seductive pleasure, as found in the Garden of Eden through the machinations of the snake and the woman. Similarly deceitful poikilia is everywhere in the world around him, and his comments on items of luxury often suggest things that one might meet in first-century Alexandria. However, he does also find a place for another side to poikilia. It characterises the divine weaving of the cosmos, and the wise man imitates this in weaving together knowledge. Explicitly mentioning the different branches of knowledge in the enkyklios paideia, Philo makes this relevant to people educated in his own day. 38

For Philo’s attitude to the encyclia and Greek education, see: Colson 1917; Mendelson 1982.

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In Philo’s work too, the craft of weaving together different bits of knowledge in a poikilic fashion is what makes his biblical interpretations so seductive, as well as so learned. Clement had read Philo closely39 and may well have found encouragement to develop his own craft of poikilic writing in relation to other miscellaneous work of the period. New Testament: God’s Poikilic Wisdom Philo showed us a Jewish reading of the use of poikilia in the Septuagint, but Clement had additional Greek Scriptures on which to draw. In the New Testament, the language of poikilia occurs in both gospels and letters, but it is usually an unremarkable word for ‘various’ or ‘diverse’, and is not thematised. It is usually used with things that have negative affect: diseases (νόσοι, Matt 4:24 / Mark 1:34; Luke 4:40), desires (ἐπιθυμίαι, 2 Tim 3:6; as in Plato and 4 Macc, there is a special connection with the feminine here); pleasures (ἡδοναί, Tit 3:3), teachings to be avoided (διδαχαι, Heb 13:9) and temptations (πειρασμοί, Jas 1:2; 1 Pet 1:6). Thrice, however, it appears in ways that characterise God’s wise and gracious work in this world: Eph 3:9–10 καὶ φωτίσαι [πάντας] τίς ἡ οἰκονομία τοῦ μυστηρίου τοῦ ἀποκεκρυμμένου ἀπὸ τῶν αἰώνων ἐν τῷ θεῷ τῷ τὰ πάντα κτίσαντι, ἵνα γνωρισθῇ νῦν ταῖς ἀρχαῖς καὶ ταῖς ἐξουσίαις ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις διὰ τῆς ἐκκλησίας ἡ πολυποίκιλος σοφία τοῦ θεοῦ. and to illumine all people about the economy of the mystery hidden from the ages in God who created all things, in order that the very poikilic wisdom of God might be known now to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places through the church. Heb 2:4 συνεπιμαρτυροῦντος τοῦ θεοῦ σημείοις τε καὶ τέρασιν καὶ ποικίλαις δυνάμεσιν καὶ πνεύματος ἁγίου μερισμοῖς κατὰ τὴν αὐτοῦ θέλησιν. with God bearing witness together with signs and wonders and varied/poikilic miracles and distributions of the holy spirit according to his will. 1 Pet 4:9–10 9 φιλόξενοι εἰς ἀλλήλους ἄνευ γογγυσμοῦ, 10 ἕκαστος καθὼς ἔλαβεν χάρισμα εἰς ἑαυτοὺς αὐτὸ διακονοῦντες ὡς καλοὶ οἰκονόμοι ποικίλης χάριτος θεοῦ. hospitable towards one another without grumbling, as each person received a charism for themselves, ministering it as good household managers of God’s poikilic/varied grace (ποικίλης χάριτος θεοῦ). 39

On Clement’s use of Philo: van den Hoek 1988; Osborn 1998.

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From Clement’s perspective, these passages were written by two great apostles, Paul and Peter. They encourage the discernment of a truly beautiful and divine poikilia in the ordered economy of the world through grace and wisdom, though this beautiful patterning may lie hidden in a mystery (Eph 3:9). This positive use of poikilia has the potential to counterbalance some of the negative associations of the Platonic tradition and their reception in Philo.

A Note on Polytropos: The Importance of Hebrews 1:1 This chapter focuses on poikilia because it is the most significant nonmetaphorical term in Clement’s presentation of his own miscellanistic aesthetic, and it indexes a significant and wide-ranging reflection on variety in Greek literature and culture. However, before concluding this ‘background’ study to Clement’s own programme of education in a variegated world, it is necessary to draw attention to one other term that will be important for him: πολύτροπος. Polytropos etymologically suggests ‘much-turning’ or ‘much-turned’ (cf. τρέπω), hence ‘versatile’, ‘shifty’, ‘wily’ but also simply ‘various’.40 Like ποικίλος, however, it pointed to an ethically and socially complex characteristic, and the Greeks’ sensitivity to that is reflected in the ways it was used. It is not common in Greek literature, but it does appear in one significant connection: Homer twice describes Odysseus as polytropos. The first time is in the very first verse of the Odyssey: ‘Tell me Muse of the polytropos man’ (ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, Od. 1.1). The epithet is later taken up on Circe’s lips as she expresses her frustration that Odysseus did not succumb to her potions: ‘Indeed, you, Odysseus, are polytropos!’ (ἦ σύ γ’ Ὀδυσσεύς ἐσσι πολύτροπος, Od. 10.330). Plato repeated the term in portraying Socrates’ dialogue with Hippias about the character of Homeric heroes; however, Hippias’ instinct is to associate it with lying and falsehood (Plat. Hipp. mai. 364c6–69e5). Antisthenes wrestled with it, since it suggested both evil and wisdom (fr. 51.15, 28). However, readers of Homer increasingly came to respect Odysseus as a figure for the wise man, and for Maximus, as later for Porphyry, Odysseus was wise because he was polytropos (Maximus, Diss.

40

LSJ s.v.

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22.5.18; Porphyry, Quaest. Hom. Od. ad Od. 1.1 10, 20).41 This Neoplatonic reception of Odysseus was important for later Christians, as the Odysseus-Christ typology developed.42 Clement sometimes evokes a comparison between Odysseus and Christ,43 but he more often treats Odysseus and his companions as exempla for Christians.44 For Christ himself, figures like David and Orpheus are more significant types in the Protrepticus.45 It is not Odysseus, then, that connects polytropy to the Christian tradition. Far more important to him for his language of versatility is Hebrews 1:1–2: Πολυμερῶς καὶ πολυτρόπως πάλαι ὁ θεὸς λαλήσας τοῖς πατράσιν ἐν τοῖς προφήταις 2 ἐπ᾽ ἐσχάτου τῶν ἡμερῶν τούτων ἐλάλησεν ἡμῖν ἐν υἱῷ. In manifold, much-turning ways in times of old, God spoke to the fathers by the prophets; in the last of these days he spoke to us by his Son. (Heb 1:1–2)

This verse stands out in the Scriptures since neither πολυμερῶς nor πολυτρόπως occurs elsewhere in Scripture, apart from a few occurrences in the apocrypha.46 The first verse of Hebrews is a scriptural text that Philo did not share with Clement, and it offers Clement a description of God’s work in the world that complements the language of ποικιλία that is found elsewhere. The semantic range of πολύτροπος overlaps with that of ποικίλος, and its usage in Hebrews is in harmony with Ephesians’ account of divine wisdom as πολυποίκιλος. Hebrews 1:1 thus provides Clement with a scriptural resource to draw out and authorise one aspect of poikilia: namely, its assertion of the varied character of divine wisdom or speech operative in the world. Conclusion Plato and Philo, who both influenced Clement greatly, used ποικιλ- terms in their own attempts to construct a way of educating people away from the disorderly if delightful multiplicity of this world and of turning people towards the sacred unity of God. Their approaches were different: Plato 41

42

43 45 46

On the reception of Odysseus in the philosophical tradition: Lamberton 1986; Agosti 1997. On Christian reception of Odysseus: H. Rahner 1963, 328–86; Agosti 1997; Markschies 2005, 71–81. 44 E.g., Protr. xii.118.4. E.g., Protr. xii.118.1–3; Paed. II.ix.78.2; Str. VI.xi.89.1. Markschies 2005. πολυμερές in Wis 7:22, and forms of πολύτροπος in 4 Macc 1:25; 3:21; 14:11.

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denigrated poikilia more thoroughly; Philo integrated Platonic motifs into his interpretation of the Pentateuch and showed influence from both sources. What emerged in his work was sensitivity to the poikilia that characterises divine wisdom in the cosmic order and in its portrayal in the temple cult but also awareness of the beguiling aspect of poikilia as an aesthetic prized among luxury-lovers. Distinctively Christian Scriptures that Philo did not use suggest a positive approach to poikilia as descriptive of God’s ways in the world. The rest of this chapter will show how Clement received this tradition of reflection on poikilia in his own poikilic miscellany project.

clement’s christianisation of poikilia The close study of ποικιλία in earlier parts of this chapter was prompted by the fact that Clement uses this language to describe the literary aesthetic of his most miscellanistic work, the Stromateis. And yet, the study has opened up a much broader resonance of poikilia in Greek tradition, as a term of ethical, theological, philosophical and educational significance. In this section, I want to show that Clement integrates this broader discourse of poikilia into his project in Christian formation, in which the miscellanies minister to a relatively advanced stage. Earlier scholarship on Clement’s attitude to multiciplity has usually focused on the philosophical problem of the ‘one and the many’, which was prominent in Platonic philosophical discourse. Poikilia shifts the emphasis to a non-technical, undertheorised vocabulary that Plato nonetheless took an interest in. I will start by showing how the focus on poikilia complements scholarly study of ‘the one and the many’ in Clement. Then I will study the use of ποικιλ- language in each of Clement’s three extant works in turn. I shall argue that Clement builds on, but also transforms, Plato’s and Philo’s attitudes to education. His three works initiate readers gradually into a way of experiencing divine unity in multiplicity where poikilia becomes increasingly significant, but its significance changes, according to the stage of the reader’s development.

‘The One and the Many’ and ‘Poikilia’ In his ‘youthful study’ of The Philosophy of Clement of Alexandria (first edition, 1957), Eric Osborn was convinced that the ‘one and the many’

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was the central philosophical question for Clement. He situated this in the context of later Platonism, which he showed to be dominated by reflection on this theme.47 Osborn’s later work, Clement of Alexandria (2005), distilled three principal problems in Clement’s thought:48 (1) How does one move from the kerygma and Scripture to propositions about God? (2) How can one God be father and son? (3) How can faith be the way to salvation, opening the way to richer knowledge but never losing its initial simplicity and dominant sufficiency? He shows that through reflection on these questions, interpreting Scripture with the help of Plato, Clement develops a doctrine of divine reciprocity structured through three overlapping ellipses, focused around the points of: (1) father and son, (2) God and human person, (3) human and human in godlike forgiveness. In the reciprocal relation between father and son, the father is unity and the son is unity as totality. In the reciprocal relation between God and human person, humanity is drawn into relation to God through free choice and divine love. The interpersonal reciprocity between human and human depends on the others. Christ laid down his life and asked that people should imitate this for each other. Thereby, his ‘reciprocal compact’ allows love to flow out from one human to another.49 Osborn shows brilliantly how this understanding emerges from Clement’s work and how Clement derived it from meditation on Scripture (especially John) and philosophy (especially Plato). His philosophical analysis shows the logical coherence of Clement’s thought and forms the context for studying Clement’s poikilia. The challenge of poikilia overlaps with the challenge of ‘the one and the many’. Firstly, poikilia depends partly on a concept of the one and the many to make sense. It suggests interconnected unity and betokens one of the ways of perceiving multiplicity. Like multiplicity, its antithesis can be found in simple unity.

47

48

Osborn 2005, xiii places this in the context of his own life: ‘In 1942 I sailed as a teenaged soldier to war in New Guinea. In my pack were two books – a bible and Plato’s Republic. Six years later I discovered Clement of Alexandria, who used Plato’s logic to explain the bible.’ 49 Quoted from Osborn 2005, xiii. Osborn 2005, 107–108, and Part II passim.

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However, the Greek term poikilia encourages a different kind of reflection from ‘the one and the many’. Poikilia is primarily nonphilosophical language; its significance is more experiential and perceptual than conceptual. As we saw in earlier parts of this chapter, it is in the first instance aesthetic and sensual, where it suggests pleasing variety. This was central to its association with literary miscellanism in the Roman Empire and to Clement’s application of ποικιλ- terminology to his own Stromateis. In Classical tradition, the deities most associated with poikilia were Aphrodite and Dionysus, who were both powerfully attractive but dangerous and frightening divinities. In Philo’s reception of poikilia, it was still associated with the beauty of the cosmos perceived through the tabernacle furnishings but also with the deceptive attractiveness of the serpent in Eden. The terminology of poikilia thus suggests something that works powerfully on the emotions, whether for good or bad. This suggests a route to responding to Eric Osborn’s and David Runia’s perplexity at the affective gap between the philosophical discourse and the emotive power of Clement’s doctrine of divine Oneness. ‘It is difficult for us’, Osborn suggested in 1957, ‘to rouse any feelings whatever toward “one thing as all things”’; but he points out that Clement’s prayer at the end of the Paedagogus certainly suggests that he felt something: Great that we may sing a thankful song of praise to the one Father and Son, Son and Father, the Son who is instructor and teacher, together with the Holy Spirit. All things to the One, in whom all things are, through whom all things are one, through whom eternity exists, whose members we all are, to whom belong glory and the ages of eternity! All things to the Good, all things to the Wise, all things to the Just! To him be the glory both now and for evermore. Amen.50

David Runia repeated Osborn’s perplexity more than fifty years later, without offering a solution.51 The study of poikilia engages with the broader experiential context for Clement’s theology of ‘the one and the many’. Poikilia is far more emotive and with that more dangerous and more psychologically and socially complicated. In turning to the literary programme in Christian formation, I shall show how it emerges as a significant term rather late in Clement’s work, after he has already shaped his readers’ receptiveness to God through a broader rhetoric of variety.

50

Paed. III.xii.115.2, as quoted in Osborn 1957, 44.

51

Runia 2010, 187 n. 31.

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Protrepticus: Black-and-White Salvation and the Polyphonic Saviour The Protrepticus is the first stage in Clement’s programme, and Clement is aiming for a clear message. Poikilia, with its intimation of complexity and variegation, is seldom mentioned. The dominant theme in the imagery is simpler than poikilia: it is a contrast between darkness and light. Clement wants to turn Greeks from paganism to Christianity, and he uses imagery of illumination to suggest the experience of this transition. He does not complicate matters by mentioning the beauty of dappled radiance, nor the awe-inspiring shiftiness of Dionysus, who is otherwise prominent in the work. Dionysus’ power was widely associated with poikilia, but Clement prefers not to evoke the characteristic potency of the god. Only three times are ποικιλ- terms used, and only in passing, for external features of pagan cult – fillets worn in the rites (Protr. i.10.2), women’s feasts in the cities (ii.17.1) and the materials of Bryaxis’ statue (iv.48.5). However, there are a few passages where, even at this stage, Clement does indicate the variegation of divine operation in the cosmos through Christ. The interpretation of Christian salvation as a form of music, a ‘new song’, requires sensitivity to harmony of diverse parts. We saw that music is one of the areas where the vocabulary of poikilia was often used, particularly in characterising the fluid tones of the ‘new music’ of the fifth century that was condemned by Plato. Clement does not characterise the ‘new song’ as poikilic, but he does emphasise that its harmony involves the polyphonic character of the saviour in his tuneful playing of the human instrument: ‘he performs psalms for God with the many-voiced instrument and sings to him by the human instrument’ (i.5.3). The Lord himself wrought the human being as a beautiful, breathing instrument in his own image, harmonious, tuneful and holy (i.5.4). The work of the Logos, meanwhile, is characterised as multifarious through the use of lists,52 and the Saviour is characterised as πολύφωνος (‘many-voiced’) and πολύτροπος (‘versatile’) in his approach to saving human beings.53 This is the first time that Clement uses πολύτροπος and the only time that he applies it directly to Christ. In no way does this

52

53

‘to open the eyes of the blind and to unstop the ears of the deaf, and to lead the lame and the straying into righteousness, to show God to fools, to stop destruction, to conquer death, to reconcile disobedient sons to the father .... The Lord pities, educates, encourages, chastises, saves, guards and promises a reward ....’ (Protr. i.6.1–2). πολύφωνός γε ὁ σωτὴρ καὶ πολύτροπος εἰς ἀνθρώπων σωτηρίαν (Protr. i.8.3). Kovacs 2017, 283–85 suggests that πολύφωνος refers to the diverse voices in Scripture, and is in this way connected with πολύτροπος through Heb 1:1.

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multifarious activity diminish the uniqueness or oneness of the saviour, and the preface to the Protrepticus closes with anticipation of the vision of God through Christ alone.54 The Protrepticus thus introduces readers to a tension between the unique simplicity of the Logos, through whom the vision of God is possible, and the multiplicity of his modes of saving, by which his salvation is experienced as a polyphonic harmony in this world. The most basic transition of this book, however, is from darkness to light. It is in the Paedagogus that more complex issues of poikilia as an aesthetic with ethical and theological implications become a subject of significant concern.

Paedagogus I: Childish Simplicity and Divine Oneness The first book of the Paedagogus prepares readers to receive the practical ethical instructions that are coming in the next two books. It seeks to construct them as children who will be receptive to divine revelation. This involves establishing their relationship to God and to the Logos. The themes of unity and multiplicity play an important role, but in the first book, ποικιλία is still not a prominent term. Clement is at that stage working with a less multivalent vocabulary of unity and multiplicity in order to underscore their tight connection in soteriology, theology and rhetoric. The importance of unity is suggested by repeated use of ἁπλότης, εἷς, μόνος, sometimes μονότροπος and by related themes of purification (καθαρίζειν), sharing in common (κοινωνία) and perfecting (τελείωσις). Multiplicity is expressed in other terms, such as πολλαχῶς, sometimes πολυτρόπως, and is drawn out rhetorically through the use of lists. In theology, Clement underscores the unity of God, both as creator and as Christ. His nouns and adjectives of the ‘one’ (εἷς) and ‘only’ (μόνος) are the most frequent and prominent descriptions of God, Christ (the one and only logos, pedagogue, saviour, shepherd, man, etc.) or the central gifts of salvation: church, baptism and faith. The unity of God has specially human-facing aspects: ‘though he made the rest just by giving commands, the human being he made by hand and breathed something of his own into him’.55 This makes the human stand out in creation. Reciprocally, humanity is onefold before God: 54

Protr. i.10.3.

55

Paed. I.iii.7.1.

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Εἰ γὰρ ἀμφοῖν ὁ θεὸς εἷς, εἷς δὲ καὶ ὁ παιδαγωγὸς ἀμφοῖν. Μία ἐκκλησία, μία σωφροσύνη, αἰδὼς μία, ἡ τροφὴ κοινή, γάμος συζύγιος, ἀναπνοή, ὄψις, ἀκοή, γνῶσις, ἐλπίς, ὑπακοή, ἀγάπη, ὅμοια πάντα
ὧν δὲ κοινὸς μὲν ὁ βίος, κοινὴ δὲ ἡ χάρις, κοινὴ δὲ καὶ ἡ σωτηρία, κοινὴ τούτων καὶ ἡ ἀρετὴ καὶ ἡ ἀγωγή. «Ἐν γὰρ τῷ αἰῶνι τούτῳ», φησίν, «γαμοῦσι καὶ γαμίσκονται», ἐν ᾧ δὴ μόνῳ τὸ θῆλυ τοῦ ἄρρενος διακρίνεται, «ἐν ἐκείνῳ δὲ οὐκέτι», ἔνθα τοῦ κοινωνικοῦ καὶ ἁγίου τούτου βίου τοῦ ἐκ συζυγίας τὰ ἔπαθλα οὐκ ἄρρενι καὶ θηλείᾳ, ἀνθρώπῳ δὲ ἀπόκειται ἐπιθυμίας διχαζούσης αὐτὸν κεχωρισμένῳ. Κοινὸν οὖν καὶ τοὔνομα ἀνδράσιν καὶ γυναιξὶν ὁ ἄνθρωπος If the God of both is one, and one also the Pedagogue of both, one church, one practical virtue of moderation, one sense of shame, a common nourishment, marriage that shares the yoke, breath, sight, hearing, knowledge, hope, obedience, love – all such things; and their life is common, the grace is common, the salvation too is common; their excellence and training is common. ‘In this age,’ he says, ‘they marry and are given in marriage’, in which alone the female is differentiated from the male, ‘but in that age, no longer,’ when this common, holy life of conjugality has rewards, not for male and female, but for the human being, when the desire that divides him has been separated. The name ‘human being’ is common to man and woman. (Paed. I.iv.10.2–11.1)

This passage emphasises the unity of humanity by building on theological and soteriological convictions: God is one, and so is the Pedagogue; from God, Clement moves to ‘the church’, who is also one; and from there to all the things that distinguish the Christian life: ethical virtues (σωφροσύνη, αἰδώς); the stuff of life (τροφή, γάμος, ἀναπνοή), perception (ὄψις, ἀκοή) and knowledge (γνῶσις); finally, relational, spiritual virtues that respond to God (ἐλπίς, ὑπακοή, ἀγάπη). The humans have a shared ‘excellence’ (ἀρετή) and training (ἀγωγή). This names the aim of the Paedagogos itself, which provides the ‘training’ (ἀγωγή) for children in Christ. The ‘excellence’ of human beings is the ἀρετή that distinguishes them from everything else in creation and what makes them the best possible version of a human being if they have it in perfection. It is the virtue proper to humans that fits them to their proper place in the created order. This is the character of human unity and is the goal of Clement’s project in Christian formation. Clement develops the imagery of children in a way that promotes the characteristic of ‘simplicity’:56 he uses the language of ἁπλότης and ἀφέλεια many times in describing these children. He takes it for granted that simplicity is a natural attribute of children, but he develops it in ways that underscore how it characterises Christian children in a special way. He treats ἁπλότης as a characteristic especially of mind (διάνοια, Paed. I.

56

Cf. Eshleman 2012, 105–7 on simplicity (ἁπλότης) – in Irenaeus, Clement and the Valentinians.

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v.14.1; γνώμη, v.19.3) or soul (ψυχή, v.14.4). He associates it with tenderness characteristic of children: the assonance between ἁπλότης (‘oneness’) and ἁπαλότης (‘tenderness’) is made to suggest that they belong together (v.14.1, 19.3); there is a similar significant assonance between νήπιος (child) and ἤπιος (gentle) (v.19.1–3, 20.1–2; cf. 1 Thess 2:7). Whereas others regard the childish simplicity of Christians as foolish, Clement defends it ethically, soteriologically and epistemically: he interprets it with emphasis on the ethical virtues of innocence (ἀκακία, v.14.2) and integrity (ἄδολος, ἀνυπόκριτος, ἁπλότητος καὶ ἀληθειάς ὑπόστασις, v.19.3). It arises through the newness of a child, and Christians are a new people and a new race (λαὸν νέον καὶ λαὸν καινόν, v.14.5; ἁπλοῦν τοῦτον καὶ νήπιον λαόν, v.15.3; cf. v.20.2–21.1). Their prospect of immortality is grounded in part in their simplicity (v.15.2). Above all, however, Christians are defined as children by the simplicity of orientation to God alone: παῖδες οὖν εἰκότως οἱ θεὸν μόνον ἐγνωκότες πατέρα ἀφελεῖς καὶ νήπιοι καὶ ἀκέραιοι, οἱ κεράτων μονοκερώτων ἐρασταί. τοῖς γοῦν προβεβηκόσιν ἐν τῷ λόγῳ ταύτην ἐπεκήρυξεν τὴν φωνήν, ἀφροντιστεῖν κελεύων τῶν τῇδε πραγμάτων καὶ μόνῳ προσέχειν τῷ πατρὶ παραινῶν μιμουμένους τὰ παιδία. Children then are properly those who have known God alone, simple and childish and with no admixture of guile, the lovers of the horns of unicorns. To those who have advanced far in the Logos he has proclaimed this message, commanding them to pay no heed to affairs here, and to attend to the father alone, imitating children. (Paed. I.v.17.2)

The simplicity of Christian children is a relational virtue, orientating them to the one God.57 In Clement’s theology, there is no contradiction between this simplicity of relation to the father alone and simplicity of relation to Christ alone.58 Indeed, the simplicity of orientation to God requires the simplicity of orientation to Christ. The opening chapters of Paed. I underscore the unity of the work of the Pedagogue or Logos in bringing humanity to the one God: ‘this Logos, being one and the same, snatches the human being away from the custom that was his nursemaid and characteristic of worldliness, and guides him as Pedagogue to the onefold (μονοτρόπην) salvation consisting in faith in God’.59 As Logos he is described as πατρικός – the adjective suggests that he not only belongs to the father, but is also characterised as like the father; it is this ‘paternal logos’ who is

57 58

Cf. Paed. I.v.15.1, ἀφελεῖς δὲ καὶ πρὸς αὐτὸν μόνον τὸν πατέρα σκιρτητικούς. 59 Paed. I.v.18.3, cf. Eph 4:13. Paed. I.i.1.2

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‘alone (μόνος) doctor of human infirmities’;60 he is the ‘teacher of the only (μόνου) teacher’.61 Conversely, God’s care for human beings is also characterised by singleness. Just as parents love their own children, so too God ‘the father of all welcomes those who have fled to him and after begetting them anew with the spirit for sonship, he knows the gentle ones and loves these alone (φιλεῖ τούτους μόνους) and helps them, and fights on their behalf, and on account of this bestows the name child’.62 Similarly, the gaze between Christ and the church is reciprocal, one-to-one: ‘he sees his own church, showing only his own face’.63 The instruments of salvation within the church are also characterised by oneness or unity. Clement gives special emphasis to the sufficiency of baptism ‘alone’ for the perfection and sanctification of the newborn Christian.64 Baptism enacts regeneration by the Holy Spirit, whose role in salvation is also unique: ‘clearing away the sins that cast shadows, like a mist, by the spirit of God, we have the eye of the spirit free, unimpeded and luminous, by which alone we see the divine, when the Holy Spirit flows in on us from heaven’ (Paed. I.vi.28.1). There may be an apologetic edge to this: Clement is defending his interpretation of salvation against those who differentiate between different groups of Christians with different degrees of spiritual insight. Clement places strong emphasis on the unity of all that pertains to salvation, both the gifts that come from God and the church that they constitute. This corresponds to his belief in the unity of God, of humanity and of the relation between them. People are healed and their sins forgiven by ‘one paionian remedy, baptism of the logos’;65 there is ‘one grace’ of illumination,66 ‘one catholic salvation of humanity, faith’.67 Thanks to these onefold divine gifts, they are ‘one in Christ Jesus’.68 ‘We were all baptised by one spirit into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slave or free, and we were all given one drink to drink’.69 The role of the Holy Spirit in effecting this transformation extends the way human relationship to God is conceived in Clement, beyond the emphasis on father, logos and church: just as God breathed something of his own into humanity at creation,70 so at regeneration he

60 63 64 65 68 70

61 62 Paed. I.ii.6.1, cf. Paed. I.ii.4.1–2 Paed. I.vi.25.2. Paed. I.v.21.1. Paed. I.v.22.3. Paed. I.vi.25.3. On this theology of baptism and perfection, see Chourfrine 2002. 66 67 Paed. I.vi.29.5. Paed. I.vi.30.1. Paed. I.vi.30.2. 69 Paed. I.vi.31.1, quoting Gal 3:28. Paed. I.vi.31.2, quoting 1 Cor 12:13. Paed. I.iii.7.1.

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makes humanity his children with new breath and cleansing by the Holy Spirit.71 Clement goes to great lengths to underscore the unity of God and of the gifts that enable and constitute salvation through his imagery for the nourishment of Christian children. His extensive development of this imagery is one of the most prominent literary features of Paed. I. He provides elaborate arguments, grounded primarily in the science of his day, to show that the various images that Scripture emphasises for the nourishment of Christians are really all the same substance.72 However, his argument for unity is not reductive: he is not trying to reduce all aspects of salvation to a single phenomenon and thereby bleed out the impression of diversity. Rather, he is establishing interconnected unity within the diversity of divine gifts of salvation. Strategies for emphasising sameness go hand in hand with emphasis on diversity. The different foods that Scripture mentions include milk, solid food (βρῶμα), blood, flesh, bread, manna and honey. Clement gives most attention to milk, which is the drink for children, thereby contributing to his construction of Christian readers as children at this stage. He wants to distinguish between different stages of maturity, while affirming a fundamental unity among all believers, by contrast with some of his contemporary Christians, who differentiated more sharply between Christians at different stages.73 Whereas others interpreted milk as first lessons and solid food as spiritual gnosis, he underscores that milk and solid food both come from blood – an argument that he defends through a medical account of the production of breast milk. Clement’s understanding of the symbolism of the various foods is not stable: distinctions are diversely drawn between milk as gospel, food as faith and flesh as faith, blood as hope. He also countenances mixtures: flesh and blood, milk and water, milk and honey or transformations in substance: blood to milk, milk to butter, milk to cheese. While ‘mixture’ (krasis, mixis) in Greek thought sometimes has a negative connotation74 and contrasts with notions such as poikilia of the beauty of interconnected diversity, Clement’s culinary reflections on mixing milk with other scriptural dainties emphasise at once the fundamental unity (milk is a constant feature) and the marvellous diversity (baptism, sweetness) that is experienced in the salvation of the Logos. 71 72 73

Paed. I.v.21.1; vi.31.2. For the ancient scientific basis of this imagery see: Chalmers 2014; LaValle 2015. 74 van de Bunt 1981; Penniman 2017, 96. Bercoulaki 2015, 224.

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The contemplation of unity in diversity is further developed by the imagery of the family: milk is drawn from the breasts of the mother and is of the same substance as the mother herself. The idea of mother is closely connected with both father and child and child again with that of Pedagogue. In this way, the central metaphors of the Christian economy come together, though again Clement’s exegesis of the symbolism is a little unstable: God is father; the church is mother; the milk is the blood of the Logos; the children are Christians. However, Clement can also speak of the Logos as ‘all to the child, both father and mother, tutor and nurse’, who feeds them with his own blood. Again, the strong emphasis is on unity, while the imagery encourages differentiation of roles. This unity in diversity is not the conclusion of abstract reasoning, so much as a phenomenon to be marvelled at: Ὤ θαύματος μυστικοῦ
εἷς μὲν ὁ τῶν ὅλων πατήρ, εἷς δὲ καὶ ὁ τῶν ὅλων λόγος, καὶ τὸ πνεῦμα τὸ ἅγιον ἓν καὶ τὸ αὐτὸ πανταχοῦ, μία δὲ μόνη γίνεται μήτηρ παρθένος
ἐκκλησίαν ἐμοὶ φίλον αὐτὴν καλεῖν. γάλα οὐκ ἔσχεν ἡ μήτηρ αὕτη μόνη, ὅτι μόνη μὴ γέγονεν γυνή, παρθένος δὲ ἅμα καὶ μήτηρ ἐστίν, ἀκήρατος μὲν ὡς παρθένος, ἀγαπητικὴ δὲ ὡς μήτηρ, καὶ τὰ αὑτῆς παιδία προσκαλουμένη ἁγίῳ τιθηνεῖται γάλακτι, τῷ βρεφώδει λόγῳ. O mystic marvel! One is the Father of all, one also the Logos of all, and the holy spirit is one and the same everywhere, one alone becomes mother as a virgin; it is dear to me to call her church, this mother alone did not have milk, because she alone had not become a wife, but is virgin and mother at once, pure as virgin, loved as mother, and she calls and nurses her own children with holy milk, the logos formula for babies. (Paed. I.vi.42.1)

The focus of imagery on family and nourishment appeals to affective and visceral responses in the readers: the bond that interconnects all things is not to be fully understood through the empiricism of anatomical analysis but through the experiential pleasure in the love that binds mother, father and children, and, in a different way, the pleasant satisfaction that the children receive in being nourished. Clement provides some other images too in Paed. I for the interconnection in diversity in the economy of salvation, but none gives as much elaboration on the interconnection between personal relationships (mother, father, child, nurse, pedagogue) and nourishment through the substance of teaching or the Logos, which comes from blood and makes children too grow in the flesh.75

75

See further the excellent discussion in Penniman 2017, 95–100.

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Later chapters shift attention to the work of the Logos in training Christian children, particularly the examples provided in the Old Testament and the different modes of speech that the Logos adopts in both Old and New Testaments. In this context, the concept of unity in diversity shifts: the emphasis is on the unity of divine purpose. Above all, Clement wants to insist that God is always good and always intends good for his children. There is an apologetic purpose here too: Clement is contesting interpretations of the Scriptures that differentiate between the God of the Old and New Testaments, or between the justice and goodness of God, between his rebukes and his expressions of generosity.76 Clement’s rhetoric underscores unity in this diversity in three ways. Firstly, his imagery highlights that the Logos is a single agent, working in different ways with different souls or with the same souls in different conditions, according to their needs. He is the Pedagogue, who treats children differently according to their current behaviour and needs; he is the Doctor, who uses different medicines and treatments according to the illnesses that people present; he is the General, whose commands are responsive to the conduct of different troops. Secondly, Clement differentiates between different kinds of rhetoric that the Logos uses: the diversity is found in the mode of speech, addressed to different souls but not in the person of the Logos, his intention or his relation of benefaction towards Christian children. Thirdly, Clement also enumerates different examples of figures from the Old Testament who have responded to God’s call; in his account, it was the same Logos who called Abraham, Jacob and other patriarchal figures. The opening book of the Paedagogus, then, provides a rich introduction to issues of simplicity and variety in Christian education. The language of poikilia is not prominent, but this book frames the interconnected experience of reciprocity within the godhead and between God and the church. In Paedagogus II–III, we turn more extensively to the relationship between human beings.

Paedagogus II–III: Ethical Poikilia in Reading and Social Behaviour In the books of instruction, Paed. II–III, the vocabulary of ποικιλία is far more prominent. Ιn conjunction with words like πολυειδής, it characterises the seductive aesthetic of all that Clement hopes that simple Christian 76

Cf. Osborn 1957, 65–109.

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children will avoid. He pits it against the disposition of ‘moderation’ (σωφροσύνη), ‘purity’, ‘simplicity’ (εὔκολος, εὐτελής), and ‘unfussiness’ (ἀπεριεργία). The opening of Paed. II renews the call to ‘cleanse’ the eye of the soul and sanctify the flesh.77 Clement promotes simple, unfussy food, corresponding to truth, as suitable for simple and unfussy children, appropriate for living not for luxuriating.78 Multiplying different kinds of food is to be rejected, as it works varied forms of harm.79 Antiphanes the doctor identified this multiplicity of viands as a cause of diseases, when people’s empty opinion is poikilic and they execrate moderation in feasting.80 Let the feast, Clement pleads, be unmixed with poikilic qualities.81 The poikilic drugs of Carian music are corrupting,82 instead Christians use ‘one instrument, the peaceful logos alone, with which we honour God’,83 and ancient symposia are remembered for their paeans that ‘all sang in common with one voice’.84 Luxurious households use gold-embroidered (χρυσοποικίλτους) coverings, too soft for sleeping on.85 The lewd hyena has a poikilic nature,86 and Moses warns against feeding on such animals. Love of finery is characterised by poikilia of colours as well as by adornment with dyed wool, precious stones, wrought gold and other such things, all of them deceptive and drawing people into deceit.87 Indeed, poikilia distinguishes overly elaborate clothing just as much as overly elaborate food.88 People are attracted by gleaming stones and colours and variegated glass and suchlike, as children drawn towards a fire, not realising how it burns.89 However, Clement begins to introduce his readers to a Christian affirmation of poikilia. It can characterise something whose beauty he wishes to affirm. There are two notable instances of this, and both involve Christian symbolism. Firstly, the kings of the Jews, he observes, used a poikilic garland (ποικίλῳ χρώμενοι στεφάνῳ), and were anointed (χριστοί), so, he puns, they were inadvertently adorning their head with the Lord (Χριστός).90 Secondly, he uses the imagery of the poikilic flowers of the meadow. We have already discussed the significance of this passage in the network of imagery associated with Clement’s non-titular paratexts;91

77 81 84 88 91

78 79 80 Paed. II.i.1.2. Paed. II.i.2.1. Paed. II.i.2.2. Paed. II.i.2.3. 82 83 Paed. II.i.7.3, cf. x.103.2. Paed. II.iv.41.3. Paed. II.iv.42.3. 85 86 87 Paed. II.iv.44.3. Paed. II.ix.77.1. Paed. II.x.87.1. Paed. II.x.104.1. 89 90 Paed. II.x.109.1, twice. Paed. II.xii.118.1. Paed. II.viii.63.4. See Chapter 7.

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but it is also important preparation for the development of poikilia in the Stromateis: ἦρος μὲν γὰρ ὥρᾳ λειμῶσιν ἐνδρόσοις καὶ μαλακοῖς, ποικίλοις χλοάζουσιν ἄνθεσιν, ἐνδιαιτᾶσθαι καλόν, αὐτοφυεῖ καὶ εἰλικρινεῖ τινι εὐωδίᾳ καθάπερ τὰς μελίττας τρεφομένους
τὸ δὲ πλεκτὸν στέφανον ἐξ ἀκηράτου λειμῶνος κοσμήσαντας οἴκοι περιφέρειν οὐ σωφρόνων. It is good to spend time in soft and dewy meadows in spring where the poikilic flowers are lush, like bees nurtured spontaneously with a pure fragrance, but adorning oneself at home with ‘a garland woven from a pure meadow’ is not the part of temperate people. (Paed. II.viii.70.1–2)

Unlike his interpretation of the ‘anointed’ (χριστοί) kings as Christadorned, Clement offers no explicit Christian explanation of the symbolism of the flowers, bees and meadow. However, we saw in Chapter 7 that he integrates this imagery into his presentation of the work of Christ – in the world, in the Scriptures and in his own written text. If his readers have read the Protrepticus and earlier parts of the Paedagogus, then they will know already that the bee is associated with the varied salvific activity of the Lord92 and that Clement regards honey as an image of the logos and believes that scriptural prophecy ‘often’ refers to it as ‘sweeter than honey’.93 In Greco-Roman culture, meadows, flowers, garlands and bees are widely associated with miscellanism, and in the Stromateis, Clement will develop this association in connection with his own work and with the Scriptures. Clement’s imagery here, then, shapes an ethics of encountering the poikilic aesthetic that will be important for readers of his Stromateis. Lingering in the meadows like bees, nourished on the pure fragrance, is good; but violating the meadow with a garland woven at home for private intemperance is not the way to encounter poikilic beauty.94 The need for an ethics of reading poikilia becomes explicit towards the end of Paed. II, where Clement addresses the way luxury lovers read scriptural passages to inform (or defend!) their dress-sense. ‘The Lord wore a cloak that went to the ground (ποδήρης), so why shouldn’t we?’ they think.95 In framing his response, Clement introduces the description

92 94 95

93 Protr. i.6.2. Protr. xi.113.2; Paed. I.vi.51.1. Cf. Str. I.i.11.2. For fuller discussion, see Chapter 7. Marrou 1991 (= SC 108), 214 n. 3, suggests they are referring to Rev 1:3, though comments that it is odd that Clement does not underscore the priestly character of this dress.

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of the cloak as ‘poikilic with flowers’ (ποικιλανθής). The term is not in the Greek Bible; he may be thinking of the description of the High Priest’s robes, or of Joseph’s cloak. At any rate, he deflects attention from the Lord’s fashion statement to the sapiental character of the Scriptures: ‘that poikilic-flowery (ποικιλανθής) cloak reveals the flowers of wisdom, the poikilic (ποικίλας), unfading scriptures, the oracles of the Lord flashing with rays of truth. Through David the spirit decked the Lord in another such garment, singing a psalm something like this: “I shall put on grateful confession and beauty, donning light like a garment”’ (Ps 103:1–2).96 It is interesting that what Clement was responding to did not require him to introduce either the term poikilia or the allusion to flowers, or indeed the reference to Scripture: his imagined interlocutors had referred only to the full-length robe (ποδήρης), and his topic at this point is clothes that are too long. This suggests that he is drawing on a pattern of imagery that is more deeply significant to him than the present instance: the poikilic, flowery aesthetic is deeply associated with Scripture, in his eyes. This is supported by the emphasis in the Stromateis on the poikilic and flowery aesthetic, which he associates with his own miscellanies as well as with the Scriptures from which he was taught.97 Clement has thus shifted the emphasis from poikilia in the luxurious life that he abhors to the poikilic beauty that he finds vivid in Christian reading of the Scriptures. He has also indicated the need for the reader to develop an ethical disposition that can respond appropriately to poikilia – lingering in the meadow rather than violating it for intemperate garlands, revering the luminous scriptures rather than dressing up in long robes. In Paedagogus III, there is less vocabulary of poikilia, but when it does occur, it is prominent in Clement’s psychological account of bad character. The book opens with an analysis of the human psyche. The epithymetic, emotional part of the psyche is ‘many-shaped ... more poikilic than Proteus the demon of the sea, changing one way at one moment, another at another’.98 By contrast, that human being with whom the Logos dwells, ‘does not do poikilia, does not mould forms, it has the shape of the Logos, it is made like God’.99 In this way, the critique of the outward 96 97

98

99

Paed. II.x.113.3–4. E.g., Str. I.i.11.2; VI.ii.2.1; see discussion in Chapter 7 on Meadows as a non-titular paratext. πολύμορφον δὲ τὸ ἐπιθυμητικὸν ... ὑπὲρ τὸν Πρωτέα τὸν θαλάττιον δαίμονα ποικίλον, ἄλλοτε ἄλλως μετασχηματιζόμενον, Paed. III.i.1.2. οὐ ποικίλλεται, οὐ πλάττεται, μορφὴν ἔχει τὴν τοῦ λόγου, ἐξομοιοῦται τῷ θεῷ, Paed. III.i.1.5.

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aesthetic of poikilia acquires a psychological dimension: people who are attracted by poikilic luxury are also the ones dominated by the poikilic part of the soul, which is emotional, monstrous, lustful and the counterpart to the logos that is being made like God.100 The psychological analysis of poikilia and related terms is further developed at the close of the book. Clement begins his lengthy summary of the best life with an allusion to Plato’s image of a charioteer trying to control his horses. Clement’s charioteer is the Pedagogue himself; one horse is human, the other lacks logos, acting like a wild animal about pleasures, reprehensible desires, gems, gold, poikilic clothing (ἐσθῆτα ποικίλην) and other kinds of luxury. The Pedagogue instead grants it to Christians to use ‘simple clothing’ (ἐσθῆτι ... τῇ λιτῇ), white in colour, in order that they should not be adapted for a variegating art (τέχνῃ ποικιλλομένῃ) but for nature as it is begotten and should reject what is deceitful and welcome the one-way, one-face of the truth (μονότροπον καὶ μονοπρόσωπον).101 He unpacks this with an allusion to the law about leprosy, ‘what is poikilic and has many spots is rejected as unholy, like the poikilic scales of a snake. The one who is no longer made flowery with a variety (ποικιλία) of colours, but is wholly white from head to toe Moses wants to be pure, in order that, by crossing over from the body, laying aside the variegated (ποικίλον), stop-at-nothing passion of the mind, we may love the unvariegated (ἀποικίλτον), unequivocal, one-type (ἁπλοῦν) colour of the truth’.102 This passage leans heavily on Philo, Plant. 110–11. Clement shares Philo’s attitude to poikilia as a dangerous aesthetic and orientation to deceptive arts that are in tension with the oneness of the truth. However, Clement’s theology has placed the Pedagogue, the Christ-logos, in control of the human psyche, giving the commands and taking the steering role that bring people round to the truth. What is missing here is any account of how there might be a form of psychological poikilia that responds to the poikilic character of the Scriptures, to which Clement has already alluded. It is as if the only kind of psychological poikilia that Clement can envisage is the bad kind that delights in luxury. At the close of the book he will repeat that the Pedagogue delivers people by ‘poikilic, saving commandments’;103 however, this is understood in the context of complex divine unity: ‘many treasures are supplied by one God, some are revealed through the law, 100 101

Cf. Plato, Resp. VIII.561e2–7 and Philo, Somn. 1.202, discussed above. 102 103 Paed. III.xi.53.4. Paed. III.xi.54.1. Paed. III.xii.88.3.

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others through the prophets, some by the mouth of God, but another making music by the heptad of the spirit, and the Lord, being one is the same Pedagogue through all these’.104 The Paedagogus thus leaves readers with an encounter with the ambiguity of the ethics and aesthetics of poikilia. For the most part, Clement emphasises the importance of simplicity and condemns indulgence in poikilic luxuries. But he does begin to suggest that poikilia can be Christian, where there are symbols, practices and an encounter with the Scriptures that point to Christ. The Stromateis will build on this.

Stromateis: A Poikilic Education for the Gnostic The treatment of poikilia in the Stromateis is distinguished not so much by the density of this vocabulary (which is in fact not very frequent, especially not before Str. IV) as by Clement’s boldness in associating it prominently and explicitly with the character of his own miscellanies. This is something that neither Plato nor Philo risked, but it makes more sense in a culture where miscellany-making is widespread, and where Hebrews and Ephesians affirm the variegated character of divine wisdom and prophesy in the world. In the first and at the opening of the second Stromateis, Clement engages extensively with issues of encountering unity and variety but without emphasising the language of poikilia. His emphasis is on transcending variety to find unity. The portrayal of the bee plucking from the prophetic and apostolic meadows shares imagery and vocabulary with Paed. II.viii.70.1–2, where the meadows were poikilicly flowery. In Str. I. i.11.2, however, they are not described as poikilic, and the bee is intent on begetting an ‘unmixed bit of gnosis’ in the souls of his listeners. In juxtaposing Greek and ‘barbarian’ traditions, Clement’s emphasis is on getting beyond Greek wisdom. ‘One’ is to be selected or discovered among many: the one pearl out of many small pearls, the beautiful fish in the large catch.105 What is sought is to be found hidden by Greek philosophy or simply by much learning.106 Diverse pieces are to be put together into one, like the scattered body of Pentheus.107 In all these ways, Clement looks beyond the experience of interconnected variety or poikilic

104 107

Paed. III.xii.87.4. Str. I.xiii.57.1–6.

105

Str. I.i.16.3.

106

Str. I.i.18.1, 20.4.

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beauty and craves a unity that is to be picked out, discovered or put together by the inspired seeker after God. Even when he recognises that the paths for righteousness are ‘many and various’ (πολλαί τε καὶ ποικίλαι), Clement emphasises that they are resolved into the unity of the one path and one gate, belonging to the Lord.108 He quotes Ephesians 3:10–11, one of the key New Testament texts that describes God’s wisdom as polypoikilic.109 However, he glosses it by affirming that the divine economy draws all things together to ‘the good’. At the opening of Str. II, he underscores the poikilic paths of wisdom (αἱ δὲ ὁδοὶ σοφίας ποικίλαι); however, they go straight to the path of truth, and the path is faith. The ‘many’ are resolved into the ‘one’; there is no rest in interconnected variety.110 In these early parts of the Stromateis, then, poikilia is a part of how Clement understands the encounter with God through variety in this world, but it is not the most significant term. It characterises divine wisdom in God’s salvific economy within the world, but all things are expected to be resolved into unity, either at a later date when the one gate or one path is reached, or in the present in the integration of different pursuits of learning into a unity. Christ is never himself described as poikilic: rather, it is the ways of God’s wisdom that are many, and Christ is the entry point of unity, the Lord’s path and gate where all things come together. An important development, however, is the new emphasis on the characteristics of the learner that are suited to encountering this variety. These strongly evoke the character traits that were celebrated in the imperial culture of miscellany production. Clement praises ‘polymathy’111 and underscores the need for a breadth and range of experience: just as a farmer or doctor is best who has grasped varied subjects, so too is the person best at learning who refers all things to the truth, plucking what is useful from geometry, music, grammar, philosophy and keeping the faith.112 Clement characterises this good learner with Homeric language alluding to Odysseus: ‘He has seen the towns of many people’; collecting examples from things Greek and Barbarian he is widely experienced, ‘truly πολύμητις’ and ‘πολύιδρις.’113 Odysseus’ voyage was recalled already in Protr. xii.118.1–4, and he was a popular figure who exemplified cunning intelligence in Greco-Roman culture. It is interesting that he cites Odysseus as the exemplar of canniness in encountering multiplicity 108 112

Str. I.vii.38.6. Str. I.ix.43.3.

109 113

110 111 Str. I.xvii.85.5. Str. II.ii.4.2. Str. I.xviii.93.1–2. Str. I.ix.44.1–2, with Hom. Od. 1.311; 15.459, etc.

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in the world. Christ is not characterised in this way. The adjective πολύτροπος, which Homer associated with Odysseus, is not applied to Christ but is used rather in connection with God’s wisdom and salvific activity in the world, as in Hebrews 1:1. In this way, it supports and develops Clement’s rhetoric of poikilia with an apostolic resonance.114 In later books, Clement again condemns the fickle poikilic disposition that is too attached to matter.115 His exegesis of Joseph’s poikilic cloak points up the contrast between different kinds of poikilia, good and bad.116 The Septuagint uses the adjective ποικίλος to describe it,117 and Clement provides two alternative explanations. In the first, poikilia is understood favourably: a serious person has poikilic gnosis coming from his polymathy; if the brothers strip him of this gnosis-cloak and throw him into the pit then he seems just like everyone else. Poikilia is a good thing and characterises the best possible kind of gnosis. But the alternative explanation goes the other way: the poikilic coat is desire, which leads people into a yawning pit. This exegesis points up the ambivalence that Clement and others experienced in relation to poikilia: it could save or destroy, depending on whether it is a description of gnosis or of desire. Paed. III had underscored the negative character of poikilia as emotive, though it had already hinted that there are occasions when wisdom itself is poikilic. Now Clement gives more space to the good kind of poikilia, characterising the wise man. Similarly, in his account of education in Str. VI.xi, Clement rejects the kind of music that draws souls into the experience of poikilia; that is too emotional, too close to bacchic madness.118 However, very shortly after rejecting this kind of poikilia, he underscores that the soul needs to be worked upon poikilicly if it is to be best prepared for salvation.119 Again, his image for this is a robe that is at first but a fleece, but comes to be woven, and he quotes Psalm 45 in its depiction of the queen’s garments variegated with gold.120 Poikilia thus captures the contrast between the variegation of emotion and that of wisdom. It characterises the soul that is receptive to God through a poikilic training,121 as well as the soul that is unstable and volatile.

114

115 117 120

Str. I.iv.27.1; v.29.4–5; vii.38.6. On the significance of Heb 1:1, see also Kovacs 2017, 283–85. 116 Str. IV.xxii.139.5. Str. V.viii.53.2–54.4. 118 119 Gen 37:23, quoted in Str. V.viii.53.2. Str. VI.xi.90.2. Str. VI.xi.91.2. 121 Str. VI.xi.92.1, twice. Cf. also Str. VII.xii.71.1.

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Notwithstanding the ambivalence of these accounts of anthropological poikilia, Clement shows far more appreciation for poikilic characters than Plato or even Philo. His delight in the poikilic aesthetic of the Stromateis is more pronounced: as we have seen, he envisages his readers encountering them poikilicly in the preface to Str. IV, and he imagines them as a collection of flowers like Sophocles’ offering, which is rounded off with a ‘most poikilic’ honeycomb.122 Like God’s poikilic wisdom, his own poikilic work is responsive to the needs of human beings, and has a strongly educational function. Two images in Str. VII underscore the educational aspect of poikilia: But as far as in us lies, our soul must be very extensively poikilicly exercised beforehand (προγυμναστέον ποικίλως), in order that it should become effective for the reception of gnosis. Do you not see how wax is softened and copper purified, so as to receive the stamp that is going onto it? (Str. VII.xii.71.1–2)

The image of the wax being moulded is a classic image of education.123 The various ways it needs to be prepared are how Clement softens it in his Stromateis. This image emphasises variety as a feature of the training itself. At the close of Str. VII, Clement emphasises instead variety as a feature of the souls that need to be trained: πολλὰ γὰρ τὰ δελέατα καὶ ποικίλα διὰ τὰς τῶν ἰχθύων διαφοράς. Many and poikilic are the baits on account of the differences in the fish. (Str. VII. xviii.111.3)

This has a slightly different nuance: it is not so much that each soul must be worked in various ways, but that souls themselves are diverse, so various ways of training them are needed. This celebration of poikilia in Clement’s own text is striking when we recall that Plato fiercely resisted poikilia in speech and that Philo echoed him. For Plato, poikilic speech was characteristic of the sophists and of unstable people who had no grasp on the real good. He rejected it. Philo was less emphatic, but he too roundly dismissed any notion that the Scripture might be written poikilicly or that its translation may be characterised by poikilia. He understood that those terms would suggest that the Scripture is deceptive or untrue. Clement is writing in a different cultural world and with some different sources of scriptural inspiration. His celebration of poikilia as a characteristic of divine wisdom is encouraged by his reading of Hebrews 1:1: the 122

Str. IV.ii.4.1, 5.3.

123

E.g., Plut. Lib. Ed. 3f; Carruthers 2008, 18, 24–25.

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unique expression πολυμερῶς καὶ πολυτρόπως highlights one aspect of poikilia’s semantic range and associates it with divine speech from of old, now continuing through God’s Son. Echoing that verse, Clement asserts that the golden lamp is a sign of Christ in giving light πολυμερῶς καὶ πολυτρόπως to those who believe in him;124 it is πολυμερῶς καὶ πολυτρόπως that the teacher of all created things has given training and continues to bring to perfection;125 the gnostic soul is sanctified πολυτρόπως;126 salvation is one inexchangeable gift from one God through one Lord and it benefits πολυτρόπως;127 prophecy hides the truth πολυτρόπως,128 but the Lord guides people to the end (telos) of gnosis from the beginning πολυμερῶς καὶ πολυτρόπως.129 Unlike ποικίλος, the term πολύτροπος was not common before Clement. It is a less complicated term than ποικίλος, and Clement uses it in a far more consistent way. Corresponding to its use in Hebrews 1:1 (but not to its use in Od. 1:1) he uses it to underscore that divine wisdom works in many ways, and thus to draw out this aspect of his use of poikilia and to emphasise its scriptural mandate. Clement’s use of poikilia in the prefaces to Str. IV and VI speaks to a wider world of Greco-Roman culture and professes a shared aesthetic. Polytropos, however, provides a scriptural warrant that interprets and authorises his poikilic style through the divine action of God. The harmony between the wider culture of miscellany writing and the formation of Christians is enhanced through the suggestion of interplay between text, person and divine wisdom: the poikilia of divine wisdom responds to the poikilia of souls; the poikilia of the text responds to the poikilia of divine wisdom; the skills of the reader respond to the poikilia of the text.

conclusion Clement’s rhetoric of poikilia shares many themes and some scriptural texts with Philo but also shifts the emphasis and introduces some entirely new applications. Above all, Clement underscores that God’s saving activity is poikilic and so are his own Stromateis. In describing the Stromateis as poikilic, Clement invites his readers to experience God’s poikilic wisdom through his own text. This is extremely bold compared with Philo or Socrates. Socrates repeatedly asserted that he was saying

124 127

Str. V.vi.35.1. Str. VI.xiii.106.4.

125

126 Str. VI.vii.58.2. Str. VI.vii.60.1. 129 Str. VI.xv.129.4. Str. VII.xvi.95.3.

128

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‘nothing poikilic’ (οὐδὲν ποικίλον). Philo allowed that the commandments were poikilic but he gave more attention to insisting that their language and translation were not. He did not describe his own work as poikilic or suggest that poikilia was a way of participating in the divine work. Clement does, and this is partly because he inhabits a culture of miscellanism, which encourages him to interpret poikilia as a good aesthetic and indeed a divine aesthetic. Hebrews 1:1, despite using a different terminology, mandates the idea that God himself speaks in a miscellanistic way, and Clement associates this with the poikilia of divine wisdom, in which his own work participates. The variety that is a hallmark of miscellanism is deepened in Clement into a way of encountering and experiencing the immanent relation of God to the world, which is poikilic (and polytropic) for educational and salvific purposes. It is poikilic in part because it responds to the diversity of souls, in part because each soul needs diverse ways of being prepared for reception of God, because Clement has great faith in experience as a necessary and significant part of training. But it is also poikilic because poikilia is beautiful and majestic, and in emphasising the poikilic character of divine wisdom, Clement at times can convey the majesty of God. However, Clement shares other philosophers’ wariness of poikilia that is immoral; he recognises the attractiveness of a kind of poikilia that is deceptive, pleasing and draws people into luxury of external goods (external poikilia) and into emotional volatility of the soul (internal poikilia). Like the miscellanists, he uses the miscellany form to seek to negotiate a proper balance between holistic integrity and heterogeneity. The structure of his three-step literary programme seeks to help his readers to get beyond the problematic poikilia of this world to the unity and transcendence of God. The poikilia of his text, like the stars in Plato’s heaven, is ultimately a part of the present order, which will be overcome when God’s poikilic activity finally brings all things to perfection.

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12 Conclusion

In the early twenty-first century, following thirty years of excellent Classical scholarship on the lengthy, learned prose literature of the early Roman Empire, it is much easier than it used to be to see Clement of Alexandria as one among the early imperial miscellanists, a Christian among the Classical authors. By studying Clement alongside Plutarch, Pliny, Gellius and Athenaeus, it has been possible to see that they were working within a shared literary culture, but each one of them was developing it in a unique way. Clement was different from the others but not so different that he ought to be studied apart. In literary form, and in social and pedagogical purpose, each ancient author practised his own kind of miscellany-making. For Clement, this was underwritten by his Christian theology and spirituality. In these concluding remarks, I shall draw together the findings from the present study and suggest their significance. In my view, they signal the need for a fuller integration of literary, social, cultural and theological aspects in the study of antiquity at the foundation of Eastern Orthodox and Western culture. From a literary perspective, we found that Clement signals a relation to Classical miscellanism by highlighting a number of its tropes in prefaces and other paratextually significant parts of his work. These included the author’s self-presentation as a miscellanist (Chapter 5); the generically significant choice of title, and list of titles not chosen (Chapters 6 and 7); the inspiration of the Muses (Chapter 8); the invitation to search for mysteries hidden in books (Chapters 9 and 10); and the variegated character of the work itself (Chapter 11). By these topics, Clement engages his readers in a new experience of Classical miscellanism as a 376 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108918640.012

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mode of Christian formation, for in his hands each of them turns out to frame the reader’s relation to God. Clement presents himself as a miscellanistic author and defines this as a pattern of note-making that is responsive to the Lord’s commission and receptive to the Spirit (Chapter 5). He highlights the clichéd nature of his miscellanistic title, the Stromateis, and compares it with works with other clichéd titles: Meadows, Helicons, Honeycombs, Peploi. But he builds this into a longer project where titles and imagery guide the reader through the progressive stages of a changing relation to God. The primary voice of protreptic is God’s; God is the main pedagogical guide; and it is God who is later encountered through and beyond the stromatically arrayed mass of notes. Imagery of bees making honeycombs in meadows, and of people leaving Helicon and ascending to the mountain where God is, are not just ornamental resonances with the deselected titles, much less do they point to the Muses who inhabited Helicon and appeared metonymically as bees in Classical tradition. Rather, they direct readers into a deepening relation to the Christian God (Chapters 6 and 7). The motif of hiddenness resonates with Roman scholars’ quest to discover things hidden in books, but directs attention to the transcendent God and involves the reader in a personally transformative search to encounter him face to face (Chapters 8–10). Literary poikilia is not cultivated just because it is more charming than a systematic presentation. On the contrary, the readers who have been purified of ethical poikilia are drawn into a deeper wonder at the marvellous poikilia of the One God’s wisdom and work in the world, and invited to create an ordered composition of their own (Chapter 11). Compared with the Classical miscellanists that we have studied, the most distinctive formal innovation on Clement’s part is to situate his miscellanies as the third in a sequence of works that form steps in a project of paideia. The Protrepticus and the Paedagogus are core to the literary architecture that supports Clement’s new miscellanism: they convey the stages of personal formation in relation to God that are necessary for the aspiring Christian miscellanist, and they communicate some of the literary motifs in imagery and vocabulary that enable readers to enter more deeply into the miscellanistic Stromateis. The multipart project takes seriously that miscellany-making is a way of life and is practised differently depending on which texts a person values, which social practices they engage in, and what their personal aspirations are. Through the Protrepticus and the Paedagogus, Clement emphasises the importance of transitioning from pagan to Christian culture and literature, and prepares his readers for a more intimate relation to the divine

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Logos, and to the Scriptures, which can be cultivated through miscellanymaking, beginning with the Stromateis. The Classical miscellanists whom we have studied alongside Clement are engaged in parallel, but more traditionally Roman or Hellenistic, projects of reinventing the literary forms associated with miscellanistic activity. Again, this had literary, social and spiritual import. Gellius’ recasting of motifs from Pliny’s preface is one of the most vivid examples of a miscellanist reworking an earlier literary model, but Athenaeus and Plutarch were also creative in their modes of inhabiting the sympotic literary tradition through learned imperial miscellanism. Clement’s miscellanistic ambition included social and cultural transformation, as he sought to Christianise Hellenic culture. But this is comparable with the Roman miscellanists, who often sought to Romanise Greek culture. Pliny’s nature-shaped view from Rome or Gellius’ Roman collection of bilingual excerpts and anecdotes are cultural and spiritual projects, only with Roman and Greek as the competing traditions, rather than Christian and Hellenic. Clement’s miscellany-making had the pedagogical goal of forming his readers to be more godlike; it was a more Platonising aspiration than our other miscellanists had, but they too wrote their works to be ‘useful’ and formative for individual readers, whether to cultivate their social versatility (like Gellius) or to develop their philosophical reflection (like Plutarch) or their reverence for Natura (like Pliny). The spirituality of Classical miscellany-making emerges from this comparison as deeper than has often been acknowledged. Our study of hiddenness showed that the roots of some imperial miscellanistic practice lay in Republican aspirations to discover the deeper secrets of Roman mores through assiduous research. We saw that even in the Empire, pagan miscellanists cultivated a kind of solitude and asceticism in the way they practised miscellany-making, and they routinely cited the Muses to recollect the spiritual significance of this tradition. When Clement transformed this through his Christian interpretation, he was not introducing a brand new sensitivity to the transcendent or numinous that was wholly absent to begin with, but rather recasting it through the Christian tradition of theology and in a different set of emotional registers. When Eugène de Faye, Johannes Munck, Werner Völker, Claude Mondésert and André Méhat were studying Clement in the early and mid-twentieth century, this kind of comparison between Clement and the Classical miscellanists was simply unthinkable, not least because the Classical scholarship on which it is built only took off in the late twentieth century. But there were also other reasons for avoiding this kind of

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intersection between Classical and Christian literary culture, which had more to do with a history of conflict between disciplines. One of the ways of resolving those tensions has been to move away from ‘Patristics’ and its concern with the doctrines of exclusively Christian authors and develop a more vigorous discipline of ‘Early Christian Studies’, in which both Classicists and Theologians can operate. In some ways, the present work is a contribution to exactly that. It has shown that there was a shared literary cultural practice, which Classical and Christian authors each inhabited. But ‘Early Christian Studies’ traditionally downplays theology or spirituality, whereas I have tried to show that theology and spirituality are crucial to how Clement and his contemporaries inhabit social space through miscellanistic practice. I have tried to disperse some of the myths in some parts of Classical scholarship concerning the way this works for a Christian author. ‘Theology’ is not just ‘the injunction always to care an iota’.1 The Christian writer is not just acting as ‘the mouthpiece of the divine Logos’, but often standing alongside his readers in the quiet enquiry into what is hidden from them, personally as well as intellectually.2 The invitation into scriptural miscellany-making is personally involving and requires a process of formation, and it is precisely because the Bible does not simply ‘censor or harmonise’ conflicting opinions that miscellanism remains the most significant but still contested way of engaging with it.3 None of this will be news to those who have specialised in Christian authors to any degree – and I include in that the many Classicists who have sought to close the gap in recent decades.4 A more significant and interesting avenue to interdisciplinary discussion points through the history of reception.5 Clement soon came to be known as the ‘Stromatist’, thus remembered for his distinction in miscellany-making. Nobody wrote a miscellany project quite like his, but he opened the way for the appropriation of Classical forms for Christian literary and devotional practice. Origen wrote a Stromateis (‘Patchworks’, ‘Carpets’), which is lost to us; Julius Africanus’ Cesti (‘Embroideries’) emulates the title and variegated aesthetic;6 Evagrius, a keen reader of Clement’s ‘systematic layout of kephalaia’ (as Clement described the Stromateis) developed a simplified model of Kephalaia as a

1 4 5 6

2 3 Cf. Goldhill 1999, 77. Cf. J. König 2012, 145. Cf. Morales 2009, 5–6. E.g., of those discussed in this volume, Teresa Morgan, Jason König, Andreas Kramarz. On the reception of Clement in general: Knauber 1970; Wagner 1971; Bucur 2015. Wallraff et al. 2012, xviii, xxii, xxvi.

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Christian literary form.7 The image of the miscellanistic bee, which Clement took over from Classical tradition, was used by many later Christians; Athanasius used it for depicting how the illiterate Antony zealously sought out saintly people to listen to, whenever he heard of them, like a wise bee;8 Basil the Great made it an image for the discernment required in reading pagan authors selectively.9 The visual culture of Christianity developed a poikilic aesthetic in some Christian art, such as in mosaics, monastic architecture and manuscript illuminations;10 the socalled carpet pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels invite readers into a prayerful, contemplative relation to the text through viewing this intricate, patterned work.11 The institutional context of the library, and its close relation to the symposium and its literary tradition, were fundamental to Clement’s impact. This is the social and spiritual space that he inhabited and transformed. In the Christian context, libraries acquired Christian works in competition with Classical ones; the institution of the ecclesia displaced the symposium as the primary context for miscellanising; and the One God, the incarnate/discarnate Logos and the Spirit displaced the Muses and other Greek deities as the source of inspiration and authority for scholars labouring among their books, and praying their unceasing prayers. Through this transformation of institutional, social and spiritual experience, the Christianisation of miscellanism became personally and socially involving. Clement was important both to the major scholars of the next generations (such as Origen and Eusebius)12 and to the ascetics of the desert (such as Evagrius).13 His mode of miscellanism did not sharply differentiate between scholarship and prayer, as it was focused on personal formation in relation to God, through texts. Earlier generations of scholars cherished Clement for his engagement with the Classical tradition: Bigg called him a ‘Missionary’;14 Tollinton thought he modelled ‘Christian liberalism’;15 Harnack described him as the ‘the only devoutly Christian and truly open-minded theologian in the

7 8

9 10

11 14 15

Cf. Wallraff 2012, xxii; Ivánka 1954. Athanasius, Vit. Ant. 3.17, Κἀκεῖθεν εἴ πού τινα σπουδαῖον ἤκουεν, προερχόμενος ἐζήτει τοῦτον ὡς ἡ σοφὴ μέλισσα. Basil, ad adulesc. 7–8. See further: Barns 1950, 133–34. On the Christian verbal and visual aesthetic of poikilia: M. Roberts 1989; Carruthers 2009; Pentcheva 2011. 12 13 Carruthers 1998, 169; Farr 2017, 134. Corke-Webster 2019. Bucur 2015. Bigg 1913, 75 (lectures originally delivered in 1886). Cf. Hort and Mayor 1902, xxiv. Tollinton 1914, entitled Clement of Alexandria: A Study in Christian Liberalism.

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early Church’;16 Hugo Rahner made him central in his study of what he called ‘Christian humanism’.17 In light of our closer study of Clement’s miscellany-making, made possible by modern Classical research, it is possible to be a little slower in reaching for labels of this kind, which were coined for other contexts. But nor do we need to go to the opposite extreme and reduce Clement’s intentions to establishing his authority amidst the wranglings of rival educators in Alexandria.18 Rather, we can perceive that miscellany-making was a spiritually significant way of inhabiting social space in the early empire, and that learned men often cultivated it with a view to building a relation to an idealised world, whether it was to a vision of the past (Athenaeus, Gellius) or an ordered relation to the cosmos (Pliny, Plutarch). Often they did use it to negotiate social and cultural tensions, especially in the relation between Greek and Roman traditions. Clement’s miscellanism is a way of inhabiting social space through literary activity that allows him to participate in this dialogue. Like the Classical authors, he seeks meaning through traditions and texts, and negotiates ideals and social relationships through the scholarly labour of reading, excerpting, and composition. However, his spirituality is Christian, his theology of miscellanism is ordered by faith in God, the Logos discarnate/incarnate and the Spirit. This is not adequately described by anachronistic and culturally inauthentic labels such as a ‘liberal’, ‘missionary’, or ‘humanist’. Rather, there is literary sophistication to his theological and spiritual mode of doing miscellanism, which is disclosed only through closer study, more informed about the literary culture of the day. Clement reinterprets Classical tropes of miscellanism, which entice his readers by holding out something familiar from GrecoRoman culture, only to recast it wittily and cleverly as utterly Christian. Within his larger project in formation, Clement’s Stromateis draw his readers ever closer to the hidden, living God, and the poikilic beauty wrought by their Creator. Both the Classicism of Christianity and the theology of Classicism are made new through this sparklingly novel interpretation of the miscellany tradition.

16

17 18

This is Osborn’s English paraphrase of a comment by Harnack in an essay of 1918, ‘Clemens Alexandrinus ist der einzige christlich fromme und wahrhaft freisinnige Theologe, den die alte Kirche besessen hat.’ (Osborn 2007, 372 n. 4). Rahner 1963, xv and passim (first published in German in 1957). Cf. Buell 1999; Emmett 2001.

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Appendix The Literary Sequence of Protrepticus, Paedagogus, Stromateis (and Hypotyposeis)

It is central to the method of this book that the Protrepticus, Paedagogus and Stromateis form consecutive steps in a literary sequence. This Appendix defends that methodological starting point. The argument that the three extant works are intended to be read consecutively is not new but has sometimes been disputed, most recently by Marco Rizzi in an article published in 2011.1 Even when accepted, it has rarely been followed through in the way scholars approach these works. Most scholars select just one work as the focus of their study, rather than viewing each work as part of a linear progression within a longer whole. Even the outstanding DPhils that have situated Clement within the rhetoric of the Second Sophistic do not treat the three as parts of a whole. Laurence Emmett’s otherwise masterful study of ‘the divine rhetor’ examines the three works in reverse sequence, beginning with Stromateis and ending with Protrepticus. Stuart Rowley Thomson focuses on the Stromateis alone. My own conviction that the three works must be read together stems from close reading of the text. Initial pointers to this approach come from interconnections between prefaces and endings of individual books. Beginnings and endings are traditionally sites where a literary work receives programmatic shaping and where different books are put in relation to one another. Clement exploits their potential for preserving order across the length and breadth of his work. Some of the significance of prefaces to the architecture of his work has been well recognised in earlier scholarship: especially the role within the Stromateis of prefaces to 1

For previous history of debate: Osborn 2005, 5–15; Bucur 2009a; Itter 2009, 15–32.

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Str. I (where the very beginning is lost), II, IV and VI and the much debated value of the preface to Paed I to characterising a multi-volume set of works.2 However, the focus on these passages can work against perception of the multi-volume character of Clement’s work. If the principal internal cross-references are all in the Stromateis, and the only other plausible piece of self-reflective metaliterary commentary is very controversial, then why not take Stromateis as a standalone? This indeed is the way Marco Rizzi argues: in his eyes, if Clement had intended Protrepticus, Paedagogus and Stromateis as a literary sequence, then he would have announced it at the start of the Protrepticus rather than waiting till the Paedagogus. The passage in Paed. I.i appears to him too ambiguous to guarantee such a project. The internal cross-references are all in the Stromateis, and he finds that none of them suggests a multivolume work. Furthermore, he adds, neither Eusebius nor Jerome seem to know the alleged multi-volume project.3 The notices about Clement in Eusebius and Jerome give us an indication of Clement’s later reception but not necessarily of his intention or of the way he was initially read. They list Stromateis first, then Hypotyposeis, followed by Protrepticus and Paedagogus. Thus, they group these works together, even though they do not draw out a sequential ordering. The sequence that they work with follows the principle of starting with the most famous or most important: Clement became renowned as ‘the Stromatist’ within a couple of decades of his death, so it is not surprising that Eusebius and Jerome both list the Stromateis first among his known works. The Hypotyposeis is lost to us, but it was a project similar in scale and scope, which may well have been intended to follow the Stromateis and complete it. Thus, while neither Eusebius nor Jerome attests the sequence Protrepticus, Paedagogus, Stromateis, they do not prohibit us from understanding that as Clement’s intended compositional structure. In the rest of this Appendix, I want to point out some of the signals to a much closer interrelationship between the works than has been recognised. This is not an exhaustive presentation of the evidence. Rather, I offer three case studies of how Clement incorporates cross-references that seem intended to bind Protrepticus, Paedagogus and Stromateis together in sequence. My purpose is to show that it is worthwhile to

2

Méhat 1966, 71–71.

3

Rizzi 2011, 156.

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accept the sequential reading as a plausible starting point when approaching Clement’s literary project. The close relationship between the preface to Str. VI and the end of Str. VII is well recognised. However, the integration of the preface of the Protrepticus into this structure of internal cross-reference has escaped notice. Rizzi’s first argument against the sequential reading of Protrepticus, Paedagogus, Stromateis is that if Clement had intended this sequence, he would not have waited until the preface of the second work to announce it. While the web of allusions suggested by Table 1 does not amount to a programmatic statement of metaliterary self-reflection, it does diminish the force of Rizzi’s argument. There are strong signs that the leitmotifs of imagery that bind the opening of the Protrepticus into this structure are not merely accidental but deliberately wrought. Firstly, the vocabulary that Clement uses to describe the deeds of Arion and Orpheus at the opening of the Protrepticus is decidedly unexpected. Arion is described as ‘the one who baited a fish’ (ὃ μὲν ἰχθὺν δελεάσας). This is an odd description of a musician renowned for charming a dolphin with his song and lyre. Herodotus’ classic version of the tale calls the animal a ‘dolphin’ (δελφίς) rather than a ‘fish’ (ἰχθύς) and does not use δελεάζω, which is the proper term for ‘catching by bait’ – something which, of course, one does not do to dolphins (Herodotus, Hist. 1.23–24). The description of Orpheus is equally strange. He is depicted as one who not only ‘tamed wild animals with just a song’ but also as one who ‘transplanted the trees, namely the ash-trees, by his music’ (καὶ δὴ τὰ δένδρα, τὰς φηγούς, μετεφύτευε τῇ μουσικῇ). ‘Transplant’ (μετεφύτευε) is an odd term to connect with someone who made the ash trees descend from the mountains by the charm of his music. The very strangeness of the language suggests that there is an artful purpose to this verbal play. Only when set in relation to the parallel passages in the Stromateis does this artistry make sense. At the close of Stromateis VII, Clement portrays the Stromateis themselves as dangling many and varied ‘baits’ (δελέατα) on account of the diversity in fish (ἰχθύων). The vocabulary coincides with the allusion to Arion in the opening of the Protrepticus, but the recontextualisation in the Stromateis creates an allusion to the gospel narratives of Jesus calling his disciples and promising to make them ‘fishers of men’ (ἁλιεῖς ἀνθρώπων, Mark 1:17 // Matt 4:19, cf. Luke 5:11). Clement’s work seeks to embody that promise. Similarly, the opening of Str. VI and the close of Str. VII both take up imagery of transplantation, and each of them has distinct verbal links to

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Table 1 Comparison of motif, theme, topic and vocabulary across the prefaces to Protrepticus and Stromateis VI and the close of Stromateis VII Motifs, themes, topics

Protr. preface

Str. VI preface

Str. VII end

Shared vocabulary

baiting a fish

1.1

–

111.3

planting transplanting

– 1.1

2.4 2.4

111.1 111.2

trees, plants

1.1

2.1, 4

111.1–2

mixed vs. orderly arrangement of plants variety mountain

–

2.1

111.1–2

δελεάζω, δέλεαρ ἰχθύς καταφυτεύω μεταφυτεύω (Protr. and Str. VII) μεταμοσχεύω (Str. VI and Str. VII) δένδρα (Protr. and Str. VII, with further specification by species) φυτεία (Str. VI and Str. VII, with further specification by fruits) ἀναμίξ, ἀναμεμιγμένης

– 2.1–4

2.1–4 (2.1)

111.3 111.1

garden sparks hard work Greek vs. Christian explicit metaliterary comment knowledge

– – – 2.1–4

2.14 2.2 2.2 2.1

111.1 110.4 111.3 111.1–3

ποικίλος ὄρος (Protr. and Str. VII) Ἑλικών (Protr. and Str. VI) παράδεισος ζώπυρα πόνος, cf. φιλοπόνος –

–

2.1–4

110.4–11.3

–

2.3

2.2–4

110.4

truth

2.4

2.4

illumination

2.3

2.4

110.4; 111.3 –

γνῶσις (Str. VI and Str. VII), cf. σύνεσις (Protr. i.2.3) ἀληθής, ἀληθινός, ἀλήθεια φῶς

the start of the Protrepticus as well as additional verbal connections to each other. Again, there is a shift to more explicit metaliterary reflection and Christian reference in moving from Protrepticus to Stromateis: where the Protrepticus alluded to Orpheus transplanting trees, the Stromateis

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envisages Christian readers being transplanted into their saviour (Str. VI. i.2.4) and the farmer transplanting the mingled herbage of the text into a more beautiful paradise-garden and sacred grove (Str. VII.xviii.111.2). Whereas the Protrepticus drew on figures of Greek myth, Stromateis evokes the ‘paradise-garden’ (παράδεισος) of Genesis. Where Protrepticus invited Greek readers to move away from Helicon and Cithaeron to Zion; Stromateis shifts the mountain imagery to the form of Clement’s own work. Str. VI lists Helicons among other titles of learned Greek miscellanies; and Str. VII depicts the Stromateis as a mountain densely planted with trees that bear fruit and those that do not, all mixed together, from which the farmer must perform his work of transplantation in order to adorn a beautiful garden and grove.4 The continuity in the imagery between the opening of the Protrepticus and the bookends of Str. VI–VII thus signals a connection between these works. Clement constructs this to highlight the shift from immersion in Greek myth to overtly metaliterary self-reflection and Christian reading culture in the Stromateis. However, the difference between Protrepticus and Stromateis in these matters is one of stylistic emphasis: Protrepticus also includes metaliterary comment and Christian reference but veils it more thoroughly in allusions to Greek myth. For example, Arion and Orpheus turn out to be pagan counterparts to Christ; the emphasis on Greek myth is a foil for Christian reading culture. Clement expresses discomfort that the myths are made the subject of tragedies but finds that his readers not only have bad things written and codified in the form of dramas, and the actors of the dramas have become spectacles that warm their hearts with delight (Protr. i.2.2). He summons them to confine on Helicon and Cithaeron both the dramas and the poets who present them at the festival. What he is suggesting is not just a physical blockade but closing off a literary culture. The idea of moving from Helicon and Cithaeron to Zion is modelled on Hesiod’s well-known myth of relocating the Muses from Helicon to Olympus and so founding a new, panhellenic (i.e., universal, from an early Greek perspective) literary culture.5 By the end of Clement’s description of moving away from the mountains he shows himself to be resting in the words of a new text, for he quotes the ‘heavenly logos’ (Isa 2:3) and cites ‘the Levitical song’ (Protr. i.2.3–4). We might wonder whether it is plausible that Clement could have shaped his work with cross-references across such vast expanses of text. 4 5

See further Chapter 7. Nagy 2009, 23, with warm thanks to Jason König for this observation and this reference.

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However, this objection should not deter us. In terms of working method, Clement likely began with excerpts and notes of his own, such as are found in Stromateis VIII.6 He probably went back later to arrange and shape his material. The sort of cross-references that are highlighted here could have been worked up in late stages of refining his work. We should not lose sight of Clement’s deliberate display of his own authorial control over his material at the opening of the Protrepticus. The first sentence, laden as it is with mythical allusion, could only be deciphered by a learned, literary minded readership – the sort of reader cultivated by scholars of the Alexandrian library since Hellenistic times. He then drops the thread of these myths, only to pick it up a page or two later after extended intervening narratives. This signal of his own authorial control is important if Clement intends to pick up that allusion yet again at much greater distance from its original appearance – that is, late in the Stromateis. This initial example of cross-referencing from Protrepticus to Stromateis thus suggests a high degree of artful literary play. The relation between the works is sequential, as there is a transition to more explicitly self-reflexive metaliterary commentary, and a more overtly Christian reading context. However, both works are concerned to effect for the readers a transition to deeper understanding and knowledge, through Christian re-contextualisation in their reading. The next two examples of Clement’s cross-reference between works follow similar patterns of sequencing. The preface to the Protrepticus introduces the theme of the Greeks’ disbelief by charging them with putting their faith in empty myths, while ‘truth’s gleaming face alone, it seems, strikes you as plastered over and has fallen under eyes that have no faith’ (Protr. i.2.1). The preface to the second Stromateus culminates in an appeal to any who longs to have the truth disclosed among many Greek plausibilities, ‘like the true face under the bogey-masks’; such a person will hunt it out with much ado (Str. II. i.3.5). In Protrepticus, this imagery of beholding ‘truth’s gleaming face’ seems to receive definition at the end of the preface. Just before Clement begins a critique of pagan mysteries, he portrays a Christian version of the mysteries, where the assembled worshippers decked in their virtueequivalents of laurels and fillets anticipate an epoptic vision of God through Christ, who is the ‘door’ through whom alone God is revealed

6

Havrda 2016, 56–73.

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(Protr. i.10.1–3). The term ‘face’ is not repeated, but the imagery of an epoptic vision in mystic rites offers a potential context for meaningful face-to-face encounter, since mystery initiations could involve an intense emotional encounter with a masked face.7 Christ is clearly the focus through whom God is seen in the epopteia. In Str. II.i, the hunt for the true face under the gorgon-masks is followed at once by allusion to Hermas’ vision where ‘the power’ appeared and told him that whatever can be revealed to him will be revealed (Str. II.i.3.5; Herm. Vis. 3.3.4). Just as the Protrepticus emphasised visionary revelation, with scriptural language of ἀποκαλυπτ-, as a way of defining the face of truth that is to be beheld, so too the preface to Str. II emphasises visionary revelation, with Hermas’ language of ἀποκαλυπτ-, in developing the thought of the true face beneath the masks. There is a larger thematic connection between the opening of Protrepticus and Str. II, since both are preoccupied with the issue of faith. Protrepticus introduces this first through the contrast between faith in myths and lack of faith in the face of truth; Str. II will unfold the powerful Hermetic revelation through a more philosophical string of thoughts and excerpts on faith (see Table 2). Imagery is one of the most significant ways in which Clement integrates and organises material within and across his works (see Table 3). This was already hinted at in the previous two case studies, which relied heavily on connections in imagery. To provide a full-scale study of Clement’s structural use of imagery would take us too far away from the purpose of the present book. However, there are two areas where it plays such a prominent structuring role that this ought to be highlighted here. Firstly, the imagery of children is central to the Paedagogus. Right at the beginning of the first book, Clement addresses readers as ‘ye children’ (ὦ παῖδες ὑμεῖς). He repeats and develops the imagery of the Christian readers as children (παῖδες) and the ‘child-minder’ (παιδάγωγος) as their instructor throughout the first book. In Paed. II–III, the imagery continues but is muted by the content of the Pedagogue’s instructions, which focus on correcting very adult misdemeanours in their luxurious sympotic lifestyle. The emphasis on ‘children’ is so characteristic of the relationship between readers, text, God and wider Christian community in the 7

Seaford 1984; cf. C. G. Brown 1991. Clement’s emphasis on the ‘face’ also develops a theme of theological and mystical significance in Second Temple Jewish literature: Bucur 2006, 255.

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Table 2 Comparison of the visual focus of revelation as depicted at the beginning and end of the prooimion to the Protrepticus and at the end of the prooimion to Stromateis II Protr. prooimion, beginning (Protr. i.2.1) visual focus revelation truth, belief Greek vs. Christian textual comparison

gleaming face of truth appears as under mask – face of truth, eyes of faith/unfaith Greek myth vs. face of truth

389

Πῇ δὴ οὖν μύθοις κενοῖς πεπιστεύκατε, θέλγεσθαι μουσικῇ τὰ ζῷα ὑπολαμβάνοντες; Ἀληθείας δὲ ὑμῖν τὸ πρόσωπον τὸ φαιδρὸν μόνον, ὡς ἔοικεν, ἐπίπλαστον εἶναι δοκεῖ καὶ τοῖς ἀπιστίας ὑποπέπτωκεν ὀφθαλμοῖς.

Protr. prooimion, end (Protr. i.10.2–3)

Str. II prooimion, end (Str. II.i.3.5)

Christ through whom God is seen

search for true face beneath the masks

revelation through Christ in mystery rites key of faith, truly see God Greek rites vs. Christ the door

revelation to Hermas in vision truth, true face Greek plausibilities vs. (Christian) truth

Σὺ δὲ εἰ ποθεῖς ἰδεῖν ὡς ἀληθῶς τὸν θεόν, καθαρσίων μεταλάμβανε θεοπρεπῶν, οὐ δάφνης πετάλων καὶ ταινιῶν τινων ἐρίῳ καὶ πορφύρᾳ πεποικιλμένων, δικαιοσύνην δὲ ἀναδησάμενος καὶ τῆς ἐγκρατείας τὰ πέταλα περιθέμενος πολυπραγμόνει Χριστόν
«ἐγὼ γάρ εἰμι ἡ θύρα», φησί που
ἣν ἐκμαθεῖν δεῖ νοῆσαι θελήσασι τὸν θεόν, ὅπως ἡμῖν ἀθρόας τῶν οὐρανῶν ἀναπετάσῃ πύλας
λογικαὶ γὰρ αἱ τοῦ λόγου πύλαι, πίστεως ἀνοιγνύμεναι κλειδί
«θεὸν οὐδεὶς ἔγνω, εἰ μὴ ὁ υἱὸς καὶ ᾧ ἂν ὁ υἱὸς ἀποκαλύψῃ.» Θύραν δὲ εὖ οἶδ’ ὅτι τὴν ἀποκεκλεισμένην τέως ὁ ἀνοιγνὺς ὕστερον ἀποκαλύπτει τἄνδον καὶ δείκνυσιν ἃ μηδὲ γνῶναι οἷόν τε ἦν πρότερον, εἰ μὴ διὰ Χριστοῦ πεπορευμένοις, δι’ οὗ μόνου θεὸς ἐποπτεύεται.

εἴ τις οὖν τοῦ ὁμοίου θεωρητικὸς ἐν πολλοῖς τοῖς πιθανοῖς τε καὶ Ἑλληνικοῖς τὸ ἀληθὲς διαλεληθέναι † ποθεῖ, καθάπερ ὑπὸ τοῖς μορμολυκείοις τὸ πρόσωπον τὸ ἀληθινόν, πολυπραγμονήσας ........................... θηράσεται. φησὶ γὰρ ἐν τῷ ὁράματι τῷ Ἑρμᾷ ἡ δύναμις ἡ φανεῖσα
«ὃ ἐὰν ἐνδέχηταί σοι ἀποκαλυφθῆναι, ἀποκαλυφθήσεται.»

Table 3 Links across volumes through leitmotifs of imagery

390

children new birth suckling pedagogues divine parent nourishment

Protr. end (ix–xii)

Paed. I (passim, esp. I.vi)

Paed. II–III

Str. (passim, esp. I.i.5)

ix.82.1–x. 82.4; 88.2 89.1–2 88.1; 89.1; 95.1 82.2, et al. –

passim, esp. I.vi I.vi 42.1 passim – milk for children, associated with baptism (I.vi.34.3–52.3)

– – – – – wine and rich food at the agape (passim, esp. Paed. II)

– – – – – Eucharistic meal, associated with adult communion (I.i.5.3)

Appendix

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Paedagogus that it stands out when Clement uses it elsewhere. In fact, the closing chapters of the Protrepticus already begin to construct the paradigm of a reading culture centred on the idea of readers as newborn children. After advocating a transition from pagan culture to the Scriptures in Protr. ii–viii, Clement begins to summon his readers to ‘new birth’ (Protr. ix.82.4; 88.2) and recognition of God as their ‘father’ (Protr. ix.82.2). Appropriately for the Protrepticus, Clement initially celebrates the divine father not in the words of Scripture but in the words of Homer, where the guilty Helen remembers Hector as ‘like a father, always gentle’ (Il. 24.770). Clement’s development of the imagery of readers as children, however, seems designed to resonate with the celebration of baptism in Paed. I.vi. He makes fun of those who dally in their ancestral customs, as if they were still babes suckling milk and spitting on the breasts of their ancestors (Protr. x.89.1). He points out that they have amended those babyish ways even if they did not have good pedagogues, so they should search for their real father (Protr. x.89.1–2). In celebrating baptism in Paed. I.vi, he portrays Christians as babies suckling at the breasts of the virgin-mother, who nurses them with logos-mush for babies (Paed. I.vi.42.1). The Logos is all things to them, father and mother and pedagogue and nurse (Paed. I. vi.42.3). The focus on breasts, milk, suckling and the relationship to father, mother, pedagogue and nurse is common to both passages, but there is a transition from the ancestral breast and messy feeding, to the right place to suckle in the lap of the church. These closing chapters of the Protrepticus further underscore their anticipation of the Paedagogus by incorporating the language of ‘pedagogy’. It is a term that is central to the Paedagogus, and the Protrepticus affirms not only the rejection of the bad pedagogues of old but also the promise of true pedagogy by Scripture (Protr. ix.88.1) and the Lord (x.95.1). The exhortative part of the Protrepticus thus seems to point forward to the Paedagogus, where Christian readers are put in relation to God, Christ and church through the adoptive persona of the ‘child’, reborn in baptism. The relation between the Paedagogus and the Stromateis, meanwhile, is picked out most prominently through a transition in the imagery of nourishment.8 Nourishment is one of the central ways in which both 8

Cf. Buell 1999, 11 observes that Clement ‘clusters procreative and kinship metaphors near the opening of the Paedagogos and Stromateis’.

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Paedagogus and Stromateis indicate the growth of the reader in insight and understanding. However, there is a marked transition from the emphasis on milk in Paed. I.vi to the distribution of the bread and wine at the start of Str. I.9 In both cases, these images allude to rites of the church, but they highlight different stages of a Christian’s initiation and growth in the faith. The first book of the Paedagogus focuses on the Christian babies and the properties of the milk that they receive at baptism, though not without allusion to the blood of the Eucharist, which is of the same substance as the milk. The second and third books continue to envisage the readers as ‘children’ under the tutelage of the paedagogos, but they are spiritual children. Their embodied lives are lived out in the adult world of symposia, and the Pedagogue is instructing them on how to inhabit that world in Christian love, so that their meal too should be an ‘agape.’10 There is already allusion to the Eucharist at this point, but it remains focused on the ‘pedagogy’ of the vineous cluster of prophetic grapes (ἡ ἄμπελος ἡ ἁγια τὸν βότρυν ἐβλάστησεν τὸν προφητικόν. τοῦτο σημεῖον τοῖς εἰς ἀνάπαυσιν ἐκ τῆς πλάνης πεπαιδαγωγημένοις, Paed. II. ii.19.3) and directs attention to the relationship between body and soul in travelling towards future salvific rest. This is in keeping with the Pedagogus’ programme.11 The Stromateis takes a further step in relation to the liturgy. It opens by inviting readers to an adult self-examination as they would prior to reception of the bread and wine at the Eucharist. This is a way of approaching the liturgy that is characteristic of a mature Christian life. However, the referent is not liturgical but literary: it is a self-examination that should precede reading or writing the work ahead. These three examples of Clement’s use of imagery and motif across different works suggest that it is at least a plausible starting point that Clement did intend the Protrepticus, Paedagogus and Stromateis to be read in a literary sequence. The Hypotyposeis are lost to us, but I accept Bogdan Bucur’s argument that they probably constituted a fourth volume in this multi-volume project. Eusebius suggests that they were simpler in

9

10 11

See further: Bucur 2015, 11–12. af Hällström 2017 emphasises Paed. I.vi as a source for Clement’s understanding of the Eucharist and does not discuss Str. I.i.5.1–3; his work is helpful in drawing attention to the significance of allusion to the Eucharist in Paedagogus, but by omitting the reference in Stromateis, I think he misses an important element of how imagery marks the progression through Clement’s works. Cf. Paed. II.i.4.3–7.2. On the agape: Méhat 1978, 106–7. Paed. II.ii.19.1–20.2. Méhat 1978, 113–22 discusses this passage with an interest in the doctrine of the Eucharist but without close attention to the metaliterary commentary on Clement’s own work.

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style than the Stromateis and contained expositions of the Scriptures and traditions of the church. Bucur argues that the extant fragments that are often discussed separately as Excerpta ex Theodoto, Eclogae propheticae and Adumbrationes, initially all belonged to this work.12 The Hypotyposeis are not taken into account very much in the present book, as the focus is on those works that are most extensively extant. However, it is worth bearing in mind that the shape of the project is likely to have been not a trilogy (as was often thought in the past) but a series of four volumes.

12

Bucur 2006; 2009a; 2009b, xxi–29. On the end of the Stromateis and the Hypotyposeis, see also Nautin 1976.

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select bibliography of ancient sources For the principal comparative miscellanists – Athenaeus, Gellius, Pliny and Plutarch – texts have primarily been drawn from LCL, with consultation of critical editions where significant text critical problems arise (as noted in the footnotes). Numerical superscripts refer to editions (i.e., 19362 cites the second edition, published in 1936).Translations of longer passages have often been drawn from LCL, as documented in the chapters. For Clement, texts are drawn primarily from GCS, with some consultation of other critical texts listed below. Translations have been my own unless otherwise stated.

Athenaeus Deipnosophists, ed. tr. Charles Burton Gulick, LCL 204, 208, 224, 235, 274, 327, 345, 519. Cambridge, MA, 1927–1941. Deipnosophists, ed. tr. S. Douglas Olson, LCL 204, 208, 224, 235, 274, 327, 345, 519. Cambridge, MA, 2007–2012. Canfora, Luciano (ed.), 2001, Ateneo, i Deipnosopfisti. Vol. 1, Libri I–V. Rome, Salerno. Schweighäuser, Ioannes (ed.), 1801–1807, Athenaei Naucratitae Deipnosophistarum libri quindecim. Argentorati.

Clement of Alexandria Clemens Alexandrinus, I. Protrepticus und Paedagogus, ed. Otto Stählin, GCS 12. Leipzig, 19362. Clemens Alexandrinus, II. Stromata Buch I–VI, ed. Otto Stählin, rev. Ludwig Früchtel, suppl. Ursula Treu, GCS 15. Berlin, 19854.

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Clemens Alexandrinus, III. Stromata VII und VIII: Excerpta ex Theodoto, Eclogae propheticae, Quis dives salvetur, Fragmente, ed. Otto Stählin, rev. Ludwig Früchtel and Ursula Treu, GCS 17. Berlin, 19702. Clemens Alexandrinus, IV. Register, ed. Otto Stählin, rev. Ursula Treu, GCS 39. Leipzig, 19802. Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies Book VII, the Greek Text, with Introduction, Translation, Notes, Dissertations and Indices, ed. Fenton John Anthony Hort and Joseph B. Mayor. London, 1902. Clementis Alexandrini, Paedagogus, ed. M. Marcovich (†), asst. J. C. M. van Winden, VigChrSuppl 61. Leiden, 2002. Clementis Alexandrini, Protrepticus, ed. M. Marcovich, VigChrSuppl 34. Leiden, 1995. Le Pédagogue, Livre I, ed. Henri-Irénée Marrou, tr. Marguerite Harl, SC 70. Paris, 1960. Le Pédagogue, Livre II, tr. Claude Mondésert, ann. Henri-Irénée Marrou, SC 108. Paris, 19912. Le Pédagogue, Livre III, tr. Claude Mondésert and Chantal Matray, ann. HenriIrénée Marrou, SC 158. Paris, 1970. Le Protreptique, ed. Claude Mondésert, SC 2. Paris. First ed. 1941 (trans. only). Second ed. rev. in collab. with André Plassart, 1949 (text and trans.). Les Stromates. Stromate I, ed. Claude Mondésert, tr. ann. Marcel Caster, SC 30. Paris, 1951. Les Stromates. Stromate II, ed. tr. Claude Mondésert, ann. Pierre-Thomas Camelot, SC 38. Paris, 1954. Les Stromates. Stromate IV, ed. Annewies van den Hoek, tr. Claude Mondésert, SC 463. Paris, 2001. Les Stromates. Stromate V. Tome I, ed. Alain Le Boulluec, tr. Pierre Voulet, SC 278. Paris, 19781, rev. repr. 2006. Les Stromates. Stromate V. Tome II, ed. Alain Le Boulluec, SC 279. Paris, 19811, rev. repr. 2009. Les Stromates. Stromate VI, ed. Patrick Descourtieux, SC 446. Paris, 1999. Les Stromates. Stromate VII, ed. tr. Alain Le Boulluec, SC 428. Paris, 1997. Titus Flavius Klemens von Alexandria: Die Teppiche, ed. Franz Overbeck. Basel, 1936. Oulton, J. E. L., Chadwick, H., Alexandrian Christianity, Library of Christian Classics. Philadelphia, 1954. Roberts, A., Donaldson, J., Cox, A. C., Ante-Nicene Fathers: The Writings of the Fathers down to AD 325. Fathers of the Second Century. Hermas, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus, Clement of Alexandria, ANF, vol. 2, ed. A. Roberts, J. Donaldson and A. C. Cox. Peabody, 1999.

Euripides Diggle, J. (ed.), Euripidis fabulae, vol. 1, OCT. Oxford, 1984.

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Galen: Selected Works, ed. P. N. Singer. Oxford, 1997. Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, vol. XIX, ed. C. G. Kühn. Hildesheim, 1965.

Gellius Attic Nights, ed. tr. J. C. Rolfe, LCL 195, 200, 212. Cambridge, MA, 1927–1952.

Pherecydes Diels, H., Kranz, W. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, vol. 1, 6th ed, Berlin, 1951: 47–51.

Philo On the Creation. Allegorical Interpretation of Genesis 2 and 3, tr. F. H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker, LCL 226. Cambridge, MA, 1929. On Flight and Finding. On the Change of Names. On Dreams, tr. F. H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker, LCL 275. Cambridge, MA, 1934.

Plato Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus, tr. Harold North Fowler, LCL 36. Cambridge, MA, 1914. Platonis Opera, vols. 1–4, ed. J. Burnet, OCT. Oxford, 1900–1907. Plato’s Republic, tr. G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis, 1992.

Pliny the Elder Histoirenaturelle. Livre I, ed. tr. Jean Beaujeau, intr. Alfred Ernout, Budé. Paris, 1950. Histoirenaturelle. Livre II, ed. tr. Jean Beaujeau, Budé. Paris, 1950. Natural History, Books 1–2, 3–7, 8–11, 12–16, 17–19, tr. H. Rackham, LCL 330, 352–53, 370–71. Cambridge, MA, 1938–1950. Natural History, Books 20–23, tr. W. H. S. Jones, LCL 392. Cambridge, MA, 1951. Natural History, Books 24–27, tr. W. H. S. Jones and A. C. Andrews, LCL 393. Cambridge, MA, 1956. Natural History, Books 28–32, tr. W. H. S. Jones, LCL 418. Cambridge, MA, 1963.

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Plutarch The Education of Children. How the Young Man Should Study Poetry. On Listening to Lectures. How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend. How a Man May Become Aware of His Progress in Virtue, tr. Frank Cole Babbitt, LCL 197 (Mor. I). Cambridge, MA, 1927. Table-Talk, Books 1–6, tr. P. A. Clement and H. B. Hoffleit, LCL 424 (Mor. VIII). Cambridge, MA, 1969. Table-Talk, Books 7–9. Dialogue on Love, tr. Edwin L. Minar, F. H. Sandbach and W. C. Helmbold, LCL 425 (Mor. IX). Cambridge, MA, 1961. Fragments, tr. F. H. Sandbach, LCL 429 (Mor. XV). Cambridge, MA, 1969.

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Index

aenigma 242–43, see also allegory; esotericism; hiddenness aesthetics and miscellany titles 120 and ethics 180 and politics 89 and theology 180 false beauty 293–95 Hellenistic 21, 159, 164 order 164 unity and multiplicity 128 variety 164, 329–32, 344 see also poikilia Alexandria 44, 57–60, see also library allegory crown of thorns 151, 179, 296 ears 273 ‘esotericism’ 239 Hagar and Sarah 315 heretics 317, 321 Homer 238 mustard seed 191 Orpheus 238 serpent 348 weights 287 woman 348 see also aenigma; esotericism; hiddenness antiquarianism, Roman 70, 73, 211–16 Athenaeus 47, 87–88, 131, 229–32 Caesellius Vindex’s Stromateis 28, 137 critical perspectives 207, 211–16, Gellius 48, 68, 222–23 mystery 211–15, 277–78, 284–86

Pliny 87, 167, 209–20 see also hiddenness, facts; lucubratio apatheia 257, 300–1 asceticism, Clement’s 254–58 chaste passion 112–18, 183 gnostic 254–58, 267 heretics 316, 320 miscellanistic vocation 98, 103 reception history 12, 380 spirituality 103, see also Spirit see also asceticism, Roman miscellanists asceticism, Roman miscellanists 205, 209, 234, 240 life commitment 223 sleep 218 self-restraint 227–29 spirituality 378 Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 43–48, 87–91, 129–32, 229–32 authors, of miscellanies agonistic 65–68, 84–87, 93, 126–32, 167, 210, 234–38, and passim ascetic, see asceticism authoritative 83–87, 93, 95, 97, 113, 155–56 autobiography 93, 96, 98–101, 110–18 companions in listening/reading/learning 62, 79, 97, 108–9, 142, 145–46, 201, 220, see also reading practices, accompaniment ethos 86–87, 91–94, 97–98 exemplary miscellanists 93–95, 98, 110–19

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Index innovative 37, 84–87, 89 relations to patrons 83–87, 89, 104–6 self-consciously secondary 89 Bacchic imagery Gellius 220, 223 Protrepticus 179, 181, 187, 288–89, 302–3 Stromateis 117, 156, 302–3, 370, 372 see also Dionysus; Euripides, Bacchae baptism catechesis 52, 60–62, 199 children 50–51, 78, 146, 295–96, 391 ethical formation 321 John the Baptist 141–42, 282–84 milk and honey 77, 185, 392 mystery 290–93, 295–96 new creation 252–53 unity 359, 362–65 vision 292–93 beauty, see aesthetics bees, 111–19, 157–58, 177–86, 234, 377 Christ 185–86, 297 Clement’s literary architecture 177–82 gnostic 185–86 honeycombs 157–58, 176–77, 184–86 miscellanistic trope 26–27, 78, 101, 121 model miscellanist 184, 297 Muses 80, 183–86, 234 nourishment 27, 179, 367 protreptic 178–82 pedagogic 178–82 Proverbs 184 scriptural miscellanist 74, 99 Sicilian 99–101, 111–19, 177, 180, 182–83, 247, 297 stromatic 157–58 Camenae, see Muses Christ, see bees; Dionysus Clement of Alexandria, four-part literary project audience 60–62 purpose 49–52 structure 4–5, 49–53, 382–93 ordering devices 50–53, 181–82, 382–93 concealment, see esotericism; hiddenness curriculum Clement 4–5, 51–52, 272–310 early Christian 52

425 educational theory 148–51 philosophical 51, 197–98, 215, 304–5 rhetorical 279–81, 305–7 Origen 52 Varro, Disciplinae 214 see also mysteries

deification, see homoiôsis theoi; gnostic Dionysus Agrionia 228 and Christ 285, 295–96, 341 child 295 Euripides, Bacchae 303 mysteries 220, 223, 250, 275–77, 285, 295 poikilia 340–41, 357–58 symposium 35, 206, 224–27 see also Bacchic imagery Didaskalos 10, 133, 136, 151–54, 195–202 see also Clement of Alexandria, four-part literary project education 78–79, see also curriculum; enkyklios paideia; Paedagogus; Didaskalos excerpt-collections 153–54 grammatikê 279–81 miscellanism 78–79, 153–54 theory of 148–51 see also curriculum, enkyklios paideia; Paedagogus; Didaskalos, enigma, see aenigma encyclopedia 25, 65, 73–74 Pliny 32, 37, 70, 85, 91, 330 Athenaeus 47, 70, 91 enkyklios paideia Clement’s audience 59, 63 imperial miscellanism 25–26 Philo 344, 351 Pliny 85 Stromateis 15, 60–62, 311–15 esotericism and miscellanism 239–41, 271–72, 328 mystery 241–46, 272–75, 307–10 scripture 242–43, 272–75 social exclusivity 243–46, 281, 307–10 tropes 241–42, 272–75 Euripides, Hippolytus 112–18, 179–83 Euripides, Bacchae, see Bacchic imagery; Dionysus

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Index

Fitzgerald, William, 24, 27–31, 334 friendship dedicatee 33–34, 44, 83–87, 90–91 literary circle 64–68, 70, 72, 97, 109, 171 protreptic 143 sympotic 35, 92–94, 108–9, 116, 130, 224–29 value 43 with God 255–57 Gellius, Attic Nights, 41–43, 94–96, 124–26, 171–73, 220–23 gnostic ascetic 254–58, 322–27 bee 184–85, 236 Clement’s literary project 50–52, 60–62, 75, 79, 137, 299–301 contemplative 188, 266 deification 252–58, 264, 266 discerning 258–62 exegete 239, 245, 305–7, 322–27 hidden listening 299–301 hides things 247, 268 imitator 184–85, 201 interior ascent 196 liturgically engaged 77–78 miscellanist 184–85, 258–62, 314–15, 322–27 perfected 268, 322–27 rest 188 rhetorically skilful 280 soul 191, 374 teacher 268 heretics 58–59, 244, 316–27 hiddenness and esotericism 246 and miscellanism 258–62, 265–66, 284–86, 289–90 anthropological 248, 251–56, 264, 286–88, 291–93 cosmic 249, 262–63 disbelief 282 discourse 247–50, 266–68 facts 212, 215–17, 223–29 exegetical 249, 263–64, 284–88, 311–27 false front 282, 293–95 imagery 249–50 mystic 220–23, 249–50, 272–75, 282–89, 292–93 prayerful 257, 323 psychological 227–29 scripture 247–48

social 220–27, 249, 257, 290, 293–95 textual, see exegetical theological 248, 251–56 typology 248–49, 281 see also antiquarianism; asceticism; esotericism; lucubratio; mysteries homoiôsis theôi 251–56 Hypotypôseis 156, 183, 196–97, 383, 392 library 72–75 Alexandrian 72–74 encyclopedism 73–74 human library 73–75 ideology 72–75 Roman 72–73 Scripture 74–75 liturgy and Christian life 63, 77–78, 257 and Clement’s literary architecture 50–51, 77–78, 391–92 and reader’s encounter with Stromateis 107–8, 299 see also baptism love ascetic 320 conjugal 319 contemplative 266, 300, 308, 323, 350 ecclesiology 292 discerning 258–60, 264 homoiôsis 255–56, 291–92, 323 licentious 293–95 misdirected 293–95, 325 pedagogic 148, 150, philanthrôpos 178, 181, 185, 199 philologos 227 procreation 180–82 rhetorical method 280 stromatic 155, 157, 161, 184–85, 328, 331 theological virtues 189–90, 255, 299, 325 unity 356, 360, 362–64, 369 see also apatheia; asceticism, chaste passion; friendship lucubratio 110, 125, 216–18, 220–23, 233, 257 meadows, 111–19, 175–82 Méhat, André 10–12, 24 memory aid 71–72, 90, 103, 223 individual 40 social 40, 73 memory work 71–72, 93–94

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Index miscellany making 174, 331 philosopher 114–15 mimesis and poikilia 346, 351 of contemporary miscellanies 32, 41–43, 46–48, 65–69, 167 of the Logos 15 of the Lord 104–6, 201, 356 of nature 38 of the Pedagogue 136, 145, 152 of Plato 46, 88, 92, 125, 129–32, 228 of scripture 239, 242–43, 316 of the symposium 45 and tradition 92, 106–10, 134 see also authors, of miscellanies; bees; gnostic; homoiôsis theôi miscellanistic tropes 16, 27–31, 116, 157, 161, 163, 166, 186, 194–95, 197–98, 329 miscellanies, techniques of compositional order Athenaeus 45–46 books, number and sequence 35–37 books, internal structuring devices 35, 46, 50 catalogues 28, 46, 169, 171–73 classifications 39 enunciative levels of discourse 35, 45–46, 90, 93 Gellius 43 imagery 50–51 index 39, 85, 87, 216 Pliny 37–38 Plutarch, Quaestiones Convivales 35 table of contents 37, 41, 43, 50 see also Clement of Alexandria, four-part literary project; curriculum miscellanies, engagement with systems of world-order cosmic 35, 38, 128–29, 156 cultural 44 social 29, 95–96 political 35–36, 39, 44, 83–87 philosophical 36, 92 relativity of systems 39 theological 79–80 miscellanies, techniques of unity author 38, 43, 92 characters 43, 46 ethos 43, 87 imaginative space 43 interests 43

427

Gellius 43 Plutarch, Quaestiones Convivales 35–36 reader 36 telos 35 theme 38 miscellanies, techniques of compositional variety Athenaeus 44–45 arrangement 34, 43 authorial role 35, 42 characters 34 citations 34, 45, 53 Gellius 42 generic hybridity 34 narrative distances 34 Pliny 38–41 Plutarch, Quaestiones Convivales 34–35 scene 35 subject matter 34–35, 42, 44–45 temporal sequence 35 tone 34, 42 transitions 34, 53 see also authors, of miscellanies Morgan, Teresa 24–26, 31, 53–54 Moses commands 149, 253, 321, 369 exegesis 184–85, 287–88, 348 leadership 188–89 theophany 184–85, 188–89, 192, 249–50, 299, 304–5 mountains 186–92, see also Bacchic imagery; Moses Muses 79–80, 125, 183–87, 204–38, 269–70 mysteries baptism 295–96 Clement’s own experience 285 cult 275–77 curricula 52, 192 epopteia 215, 276, 278, 292–93, 304, 388 Gellius 125, 220–23 Muses 236, 238 philosophy 114–15, 150, 277–78 Paedagogus 292–97 Pliny 209–20 Protrepticus 282–89 rhetoric 279–81 scripture 296–97 Stromateis 191, 296–310 topoi 248–50, 277–81 see also allegory; antiquarianism, Roman; esotericism; hiddenness

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428

Index

note-taking and orality 70, 104, 110, 112–18 Clement’s hypomnêmata 16, 49, 70–71, 102–3, 137, 156–57, 161, 245 Gellius’ commentarii 42, 49, 94, 103, 171, 220 Pamphile of Epidaurus’ Historika Hypomnêmata 49, 65, 103, 332 practices 69–71 Socratic hypomnêmata 114–16 One and Many 355–57 orality, see note-taking, and orality Orpheus 80, 183, 191–93, 237–38, 269, 276–77, 384–86 Overbeck, Franz 19–21 Paedagogus 60–62, 136–37, 144–54, 178–82, 290–97, 359–70 peplos 192–94, 335, 345–47 Plato, Phaedrus, 100, 112–18, 181, 183, 191, 227, 235–36 Plato, Republic 51, 247, 345–47, 351 Plato, Symposium 34, 46, 88, 109, 125, 130–32, 150, 295 Plato, Theaetetus 191 Pliny, Natural History 36–41, 83–87, 126–29, 156, 167, 209–20 Plutarch, Quaestiones Convivales (Table Talk) 33–36, 91–94, 116, 124, 223–29 poikilia aesthetic 329–35, 343, 380 diachronic developments 343–44 ethical 335–37 Jewish Hellenistic 337–39 Philo 347–52 Plato 345–47 Paedagogus 359–70 Protrepticus 358–59 rhetorical 341–42 scriptural 352–54, 366–68, 373–75 Stromateis 370–74 theological 337–41 see also polytropos polytropos 353–54 prayer, see hiddenness; liturgy Protrepticus 135–36, 140–44, 178–82, 187, 281–90, 358–59 reading practices accompaniment 63 browsing 24, 53 excerpting 30, 53, 87 participatory reading 81, 90, 94

gathering 65, 85 life-forming 36, 49–52 re-ordering 30, 164–65 re-reading 62, 175 responsive miscellany-making 65–69, 81 searching 30, 69, 154–57 selecting 67, 69, 87, 90 sequential reading 54 wide reading 66 see also authors, of miscellanies Rohde, Erwin 19–20 Scripture and philosophy 311–15 and poikilia 352–54, 366–68, 373–75 didascalic 151–54, 199–200 exegetical methods 151–54 hermeneutics 316–27 pedagogical 146–54 protreptic 142–43 see also bees; esotericism; hiddenness; library; mimesis; mysteries; Stromateis seeds didactic imagery 78–79 generative 99, 106–7, 117, 181 hidden 154–57, 249, 299 miscellanistic trope 16, 29–30 mustard seeds 190–91 stromatic 154–58, 161, 242, 299 and reading practices 62, 69, 77, 154–58 and philosophy 314 and spirit 109 Spirit and miscellanism 103, 107–10, 117–18 baptism 292–93, 362–64 insight 315, 320, 326 spiritual senses 252–56, 292–93, 297, 310 transplantation 161–62, 164–65, 190–91 see also asceticism, Clement’s; asceticism, Roman miscellanists’; seeds; Stromateis 137–40, 154–65, 174–95 Caesellius Vindex’s Stromateis 137 Plutarch’s Stromateis 137 and scripture 160, 165, 311–27 symposium 75–78, see also Athenaeus, Deipnosophists; Plutarch, Quaestiones Convivales Thomson, Stuart 2, 16–18, 101, 134–35, 382 Varro 47, 85–86, 167, 194–95, 211–14, 217, 222, 232 Vergil 85, 169, 183–84

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