Clement of Alexandria on the Inferiority of the Son By Alvan Lamson 1865
We give an extract from Bishop Kaye's "Account of the Writings and Opinions of Clement"; which furnishes a good specimen of Clement's general style of argument, and further contains his views of the Son, Logos, or Word. The passage occurs near the commencement of the "Hortatory Address." Clement introduces it, fancifully enough, as was his way, by an allusion to the fabled power of music among the Greeks, who taught that Amphion raised the walls of Thebes by the sound of his lyre, and that Orpheus tamed savage beasts and charmed trees and mountains by the sweetness of his song. The Christian musician, or Christ, he says, had performed greater things than these; for he had "tamed men, the most savage of beasts"; instead of "leading men to idols, stocks, and stones," he had "converted stones and beasts into men."
"He who sprang from David, yet was before David, the Word of God, disdaining inanimate instruments, the harp and lyre, adapts this world, and the little world man, both his soul and body, to the Holy Spirit, and thus celebrates God. What, then, does the instrument, the Word of God the Lord, the New Song, mean? To open the eyes of the blind and the ears of the deaf; to guide the lame and the wanderer to righteousness; to show God to foolish man; to put an end to corruption; to overcome death; to reconcile disobedient children to their Father. The instrument of God loves man. The Lord pities, disciplines, exhorts, admonishes, saves, guards, and, of his abundance, promises the kingdom of heaven as the reward of learning from him; requiring nothing from us but that we shall be saved. Think not, however, that the Song of Salvation is new. We existed before the foundation of the world, existing first in God himself, inasmuch as we were destined to exist; we were the rational creatures of the Reason (or Word) of God; we were in the beginning through the Word, because the Word was in the beginning. The Word was from the beginning, and therefore was and is the divine beginning of all things; but now that he has taken the name which of old was sanctified, the Christ, he is called by me a New Song. This Word, the Christ, was from the beginning the cause both of our being (for he was in God) and of our well-being. Now he has appeared to men, being alone both God and man, the Author to us of all good; by whom, being instructed how to live well, we are speeded onwards to eternal life. This is the New Song, — the manifestation, now shining forth in us, of the Word, who was in the beginning and before the beginning. The preexistent Saviour has appeared nigh unto us; he who exists in the Self-existent has appeared; the Word, who was with God, has appeared as our Teacher; the Word, by whom all things were made, who in the beginning, when he formed us, gave us life as our Maker, appearing as our Teacher, has taught us to live well, in order that hereafter he may, as God, give us life eternal. He has appeared to assist us against the serpent who enslaves men, binding them to stocks and statues and idols by the wretched bond of superstition. He offered salvation to the Israelites of old by signs and wonders in Egypt and the desert, at the burning bush, and in the cloud which followed the Hebrews like a servant-maid. He spoke to them by Moses and Isaiah and the whole prophetic choir; but he speaks to us directly by himself. He is made man, that we may learn from man how man may become God. Is it not, then, strange that God should invite us to virtue, and that we should slight the benefit, and put aside the proffered salvation?" — pp. 11-14. [Some Account of the Writings and Opinions of Clement of Alexandria. By John, Bishop of Lincoln. London, 1835. 8vo.]
Those who will be at the pains carefully to analyze this passage will perceive, that, though Clement believed the Son to have existed before the world, and does not hesitate to bestow on him the title God, he is far from ascribing to him supreme, underived divinity. The phrases "in the beginning" and "before the world was," and others of similar import, which Clement, in common with most of the early Fathers, applies to him, by no means implied their belief that he had a personal existence from eternity. This is evident from the fact, that, in the passage above quoted, the very same expressions are applied by him to the human race. "We," says Clement, "existed before the foundation of the world; existing first in God himself, inasmuch as we were destined to exist."
The Fathers ascribed to the Son a sort of metaphysical or potential existence in the Father; that is, they supposed that he existed in him from all eternity as an attribute,—his logos, reason, or wisdom; that, before the formation of the world, this attribute acquired by a voluntary act of the Father a distinct personal subsistence, and became his instrument in the creation. The germ of this doctrine will be found in the passage above given.
That the Logos was originally regarded by Clement, in common with the other Fathers, as the reason or wisdom of God, is undoubted. Like other attributes or qualities, it was sometimes represented figuratively as speaking and acting. By a transition not very difficult in an age accustomed to speculations of the subtilest nature, if intelligible at all, it came at length to be viewed as a real being or person, having a distinct personal subsistence. Still the former modes of expression were not for a long time wholly laid aside. Traces of the old doctrine are visible among the Fathers of Clement's time. Clement himself sometimes speaks of the Logos as an attribute. He calls the Son expressly "a certain energy or operation of the Father." [Stromata, lib. vii. c. 2, p. 833, ed. Potter.] And, again, he speaks of the Logos of the Father of the universe as "the wisdom and goodness of God most manifest," or most fully manifested. [Stromata, lib. v. c. 1, p. 646.]
None of the Platonizing Fathers before Origen have acknowledged the inferiority of the Son in more explicit terms than Clement. Photius, writing in the ninth century, besides charging him, as already said, with making the Son a "creature" (Cod. 109), says that he used other "impious words full of blasphemy," in a work which has since perished. Rufinus, too, accuses him of calling the "Son of God a creature." [Jerome, Apol. adv. Rufin., lib. ii.]
We might quote numerous passages from Clement in which the inferiority of the Son is distinctly asserted. Thus, after observing that "the most excellent thing on earth is a most pious man, and the most excellent thing in heaven an angel," he adds, "But the most perfect, and most holy, and most commanding, and most regal, and by far the most beneficent nature, is that of the Son, which is next to the only omnipotent Father." He "obeys the will of the good and omnipotent Father"; "rules all things by the will of the Father"; "he is constituted the cause of all good by the will of the omnipotent Father." [Stromata, lib. vii. c. 2, pp. 831-833.]—"If thou wilt be initiated," that is, become a Christian, "thou shalt join in the dance around the uncreated and imperishable and only true God, the Word (Logos, Son) of God hymning with us." [Cohort., c. 12, p. 92.] We are astonished that any one can read Clement with ordinary attention, and imagine for a single moment that he regarded the Son as numerically identical — one — with the Father. His dependent and inferior nature, as it seems to us, is everywhere recognized. Clement believed God and the Son to be numerically distinct; in other words, two beings, — the one supreme, the other subordinate, the "first-created of God," first-born of all created intelligences, and with them, as their elder brother, hymning hallelujahs around the throne of the one Infinite Father.
He calls the Son, or Logos, the "image of God," as man is the "image of man"; again, his "hand," or instrument. He describes God as the "original and sole Author of eternal life; which the Son," he says, "receiving of God, gives to us." He makes the great requisite of eternal life to be, to "know God, eternal, giver of eternal blessings, and first and supreme and one and good; and then the greatness of the Saviour after him"; [Quis Dives salvetur, cc. 6-8, p. 939.] according to the declaration of Jesus, 'This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.'"
Clement's views of the Logos had nothing marked or peculiar in them by which he was distinguished from those who went before; if we except, possibly, the very slight difference mentioned in the note below, — too insignificant almost for notice. Those of the present day who talk of the eternal generation of the Son cannot allege, as authority, the Church or the Fathers of the first three centuries. They are all on the other side; (1) Origen, possibly, excepted.
The antiquity of the Son, or Logos, was a topic to which Clement and the Fathers often adverted; and it should be observed that they had a particular motive for this. One great obstacle to the reception of Christianity, and one to the consideration of which Clement allots no small space, was custom, prescription. Christianity, it was urged, was new; a thing of yesterday; an institution which had suddenly risen up, and ventured boldly to attack the time-hallowed religions and philosophy of the old world. To forsake these in its favor, it was represented, would be great impiety. This argument the early apologists for Christianity met, partly by dwelling on the superior antiquity of Moses, from whom, as they erroneously contended, Plato and the Grecian sages had borrowed the most valuable of their philosophical opinions; (2) and partly by insisting that these sages derived gleams, of truth immediately from the same divine Logos, or reason, which had inspired the Jewish prophets, and which had now given to the world the clearer light of Christianity. This Logos, they asserted, was of old, "in the beginning," before time was, with the Father; that Christianity, therefore, far from being, as was represented, the growth of yesterday, dated far back in the ages, before the birth of the oldest of the sages, or the existence even of the world they inhabited. The wise men of Greece, they said, partook from the same fountain, but only "shallow draughts." The Word, Clement denominates, figuratively, the Sun of the Soul. "From this divine fountain of light," says he, "some rays had flowed even to the Greeks, who had thereby been able to discover faint traces of the truth. But," he adds, "the Word himself has now appeared in the form of man to be our teacher." [Cohort, ad Gent., c. 7, p. 64.]
Clement attributes a sort of inspiration to Plato and the philosophers. In so doing, he is not singular. Most of the early Fathers of the church do the same. Indeed, the attempt to say or do anything without the inspiration of the Logos, or Word of truth, they maintained, was as idle as to think of walking without feet: a figure which Clement uses. The motive in all these representations, as we have said, was to prove the superior claims of Christianity, and especially its claim to antiquity, in refutation of the argument of the philosophers, overwhelming, as it appeared, to the adherents of Paganism, that it was the mushroom growth of a day, as novel as it was arrogant and exclusive.
For this purpose, as we have stated, a twofold argument was employed: first, that the few scattered rays of truth, which might be gathered from the writings of the Grecian sages, were derived from the same fountain as Christianity, in which the full light beamed; and, secondly, that the Logos, or divine reason, from which this light emanated, was more ancient than the worlds, being, in the beginning, with God. How, then, could Christianity be described as recent, while the religions and philosophy it was designed to supplant numbered centuries? If there was a little subtilty in this reasoning, it was at least suited to the genius of the age, and especially to the speculative Grecian mind. Such were the weapons Clement wielded; such the defences of Christianity growing out of the demands of the times.
(1) Neander (History of Christian Dogmas, p. 144, Bohn) says, that "in Clement we first meet with the attempt to set aside the idea of time in its application to the transition of the Logos into reality." Justin and others believed that this transition took place when God was about to proceed to the work of creation. But the idea of any specific time could be excluded, without the supposition that the transition, called the generation of the Son, took place from eternity. This neither Clement, nor the Fathers generally, believed. They could say, that he was begotten without reference to time, or before time, or the measure of time; but this was very different from referring the event to eternity, which they never thought of doing. This distinction Neander himself recognizes. Arius, who believed that the Son was created out of nothing, discarded the idea of time as connected with the event. Some of the Fathers taught that the Son was begotten when the world lay in chaos. How they would have expressed themselves had they been acquainted with the modern science of geology, it is impossible to say.
(2) This is often distinctly asserted. Thus Clement, after quoting a sentiment from Plato, proceeds: "Whence, O Plato! did you learn this truth? Whence that exhaustless affluence of words with which you inculcate the reverence due to the Divinity? I know your masters, though you would conceal them. You learned geometry of the Egyptians; astronomy, of the Babylonians; from the Thracians you received the healing song; Assyrians taught you many things: but laws (as many as are agreeable to truth), and the opinions you entertain concerning God, you owe to the Hebrews " (Cohort., c. 6, p. 60). These plagiarisms of the Greek philosophers are a favorite topic with Clement in the "Stromata."
We give an extract from Bishop Kaye's "Account of the Writings and Opinions of Clement"; which furnishes a good specimen of Clement's general style of argument, and further contains his views of the Son, Logos, or Word. The passage occurs near the commencement of the "Hortatory Address." Clement introduces it, fancifully enough, as was his way, by an allusion to the fabled power of music among the Greeks, who taught that Amphion raised the walls of Thebes by the sound of his lyre, and that Orpheus tamed savage beasts and charmed trees and mountains by the sweetness of his song. The Christian musician, or Christ, he says, had performed greater things than these; for he had "tamed men, the most savage of beasts"; instead of "leading men to idols, stocks, and stones," he had "converted stones and beasts into men."
"He who sprang from David, yet was before David, the Word of God, disdaining inanimate instruments, the harp and lyre, adapts this world, and the little world man, both his soul and body, to the Holy Spirit, and thus celebrates God. What, then, does the instrument, the Word of God the Lord, the New Song, mean? To open the eyes of the blind and the ears of the deaf; to guide the lame and the wanderer to righteousness; to show God to foolish man; to put an end to corruption; to overcome death; to reconcile disobedient children to their Father. The instrument of God loves man. The Lord pities, disciplines, exhorts, admonishes, saves, guards, and, of his abundance, promises the kingdom of heaven as the reward of learning from him; requiring nothing from us but that we shall be saved. Think not, however, that the Song of Salvation is new. We existed before the foundation of the world, existing first in God himself, inasmuch as we were destined to exist; we were the rational creatures of the Reason (or Word) of God; we were in the beginning through the Word, because the Word was in the beginning. The Word was from the beginning, and therefore was and is the divine beginning of all things; but now that he has taken the name which of old was sanctified, the Christ, he is called by me a New Song. This Word, the Christ, was from the beginning the cause both of our being (for he was in God) and of our well-being. Now he has appeared to men, being alone both God and man, the Author to us of all good; by whom, being instructed how to live well, we are speeded onwards to eternal life. This is the New Song, — the manifestation, now shining forth in us, of the Word, who was in the beginning and before the beginning. The preexistent Saviour has appeared nigh unto us; he who exists in the Self-existent has appeared; the Word, who was with God, has appeared as our Teacher; the Word, by whom all things were made, who in the beginning, when he formed us, gave us life as our Maker, appearing as our Teacher, has taught us to live well, in order that hereafter he may, as God, give us life eternal. He has appeared to assist us against the serpent who enslaves men, binding them to stocks and statues and idols by the wretched bond of superstition. He offered salvation to the Israelites of old by signs and wonders in Egypt and the desert, at the burning bush, and in the cloud which followed the Hebrews like a servant-maid. He spoke to them by Moses and Isaiah and the whole prophetic choir; but he speaks to us directly by himself. He is made man, that we may learn from man how man may become God. Is it not, then, strange that God should invite us to virtue, and that we should slight the benefit, and put aside the proffered salvation?" — pp. 11-14. [Some Account of the Writings and Opinions of Clement of Alexandria. By John, Bishop of Lincoln. London, 1835. 8vo.]
Those who will be at the pains carefully to analyze this passage will perceive, that, though Clement believed the Son to have existed before the world, and does not hesitate to bestow on him the title God, he is far from ascribing to him supreme, underived divinity. The phrases "in the beginning" and "before the world was," and others of similar import, which Clement, in common with most of the early Fathers, applies to him, by no means implied their belief that he had a personal existence from eternity. This is evident from the fact, that, in the passage above quoted, the very same expressions are applied by him to the human race. "We," says Clement, "existed before the foundation of the world; existing first in God himself, inasmuch as we were destined to exist."
The Fathers ascribed to the Son a sort of metaphysical or potential existence in the Father; that is, they supposed that he existed in him from all eternity as an attribute,—his logos, reason, or wisdom; that, before the formation of the world, this attribute acquired by a voluntary act of the Father a distinct personal subsistence, and became his instrument in the creation. The germ of this doctrine will be found in the passage above given.
That the Logos was originally regarded by Clement, in common with the other Fathers, as the reason or wisdom of God, is undoubted. Like other attributes or qualities, it was sometimes represented figuratively as speaking and acting. By a transition not very difficult in an age accustomed to speculations of the subtilest nature, if intelligible at all, it came at length to be viewed as a real being or person, having a distinct personal subsistence. Still the former modes of expression were not for a long time wholly laid aside. Traces of the old doctrine are visible among the Fathers of Clement's time. Clement himself sometimes speaks of the Logos as an attribute. He calls the Son expressly "a certain energy or operation of the Father." [Stromata, lib. vii. c. 2, p. 833, ed. Potter.] And, again, he speaks of the Logos of the Father of the universe as "the wisdom and goodness of God most manifest," or most fully manifested. [Stromata, lib. v. c. 1, p. 646.]
None of the Platonizing Fathers before Origen have acknowledged the inferiority of the Son in more explicit terms than Clement. Photius, writing in the ninth century, besides charging him, as already said, with making the Son a "creature" (Cod. 109), says that he used other "impious words full of blasphemy," in a work which has since perished. Rufinus, too, accuses him of calling the "Son of God a creature." [Jerome, Apol. adv. Rufin., lib. ii.]
We might quote numerous passages from Clement in which the inferiority of the Son is distinctly asserted. Thus, after observing that "the most excellent thing on earth is a most pious man, and the most excellent thing in heaven an angel," he adds, "But the most perfect, and most holy, and most commanding, and most regal, and by far the most beneficent nature, is that of the Son, which is next to the only omnipotent Father." He "obeys the will of the good and omnipotent Father"; "rules all things by the will of the Father"; "he is constituted the cause of all good by the will of the omnipotent Father." [Stromata, lib. vii. c. 2, pp. 831-833.]—"If thou wilt be initiated," that is, become a Christian, "thou shalt join in the dance around the uncreated and imperishable and only true God, the Word (Logos, Son) of God hymning with us." [Cohort., c. 12, p. 92.] We are astonished that any one can read Clement with ordinary attention, and imagine for a single moment that he regarded the Son as numerically identical — one — with the Father. His dependent and inferior nature, as it seems to us, is everywhere recognized. Clement believed God and the Son to be numerically distinct; in other words, two beings, — the one supreme, the other subordinate, the "first-created of God," first-born of all created intelligences, and with them, as their elder brother, hymning hallelujahs around the throne of the one Infinite Father.
He calls the Son, or Logos, the "image of God," as man is the "image of man"; again, his "hand," or instrument. He describes God as the "original and sole Author of eternal life; which the Son," he says, "receiving of God, gives to us." He makes the great requisite of eternal life to be, to "know God, eternal, giver of eternal blessings, and first and supreme and one and good; and then the greatness of the Saviour after him"; [Quis Dives salvetur, cc. 6-8, p. 939.] according to the declaration of Jesus, 'This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.'"
Clement's views of the Logos had nothing marked or peculiar in them by which he was distinguished from those who went before; if we except, possibly, the very slight difference mentioned in the note below, — too insignificant almost for notice. Those of the present day who talk of the eternal generation of the Son cannot allege, as authority, the Church or the Fathers of the first three centuries. They are all on the other side; (1) Origen, possibly, excepted.
The antiquity of the Son, or Logos, was a topic to which Clement and the Fathers often adverted; and it should be observed that they had a particular motive for this. One great obstacle to the reception of Christianity, and one to the consideration of which Clement allots no small space, was custom, prescription. Christianity, it was urged, was new; a thing of yesterday; an institution which had suddenly risen up, and ventured boldly to attack the time-hallowed religions and philosophy of the old world. To forsake these in its favor, it was represented, would be great impiety. This argument the early apologists for Christianity met, partly by dwelling on the superior antiquity of Moses, from whom, as they erroneously contended, Plato and the Grecian sages had borrowed the most valuable of their philosophical opinions; (2) and partly by insisting that these sages derived gleams, of truth immediately from the same divine Logos, or reason, which had inspired the Jewish prophets, and which had now given to the world the clearer light of Christianity. This Logos, they asserted, was of old, "in the beginning," before time was, with the Father; that Christianity, therefore, far from being, as was represented, the growth of yesterday, dated far back in the ages, before the birth of the oldest of the sages, or the existence even of the world they inhabited. The wise men of Greece, they said, partook from the same fountain, but only "shallow draughts." The Word, Clement denominates, figuratively, the Sun of the Soul. "From this divine fountain of light," says he, "some rays had flowed even to the Greeks, who had thereby been able to discover faint traces of the truth. But," he adds, "the Word himself has now appeared in the form of man to be our teacher." [Cohort, ad Gent., c. 7, p. 64.]
Clement attributes a sort of inspiration to Plato and the philosophers. In so doing, he is not singular. Most of the early Fathers of the church do the same. Indeed, the attempt to say or do anything without the inspiration of the Logos, or Word of truth, they maintained, was as idle as to think of walking without feet: a figure which Clement uses. The motive in all these representations, as we have said, was to prove the superior claims of Christianity, and especially its claim to antiquity, in refutation of the argument of the philosophers, overwhelming, as it appeared, to the adherents of Paganism, that it was the mushroom growth of a day, as novel as it was arrogant and exclusive.
For this purpose, as we have stated, a twofold argument was employed: first, that the few scattered rays of truth, which might be gathered from the writings of the Grecian sages, were derived from the same fountain as Christianity, in which the full light beamed; and, secondly, that the Logos, or divine reason, from which this light emanated, was more ancient than the worlds, being, in the beginning, with God. How, then, could Christianity be described as recent, while the religions and philosophy it was designed to supplant numbered centuries? If there was a little subtilty in this reasoning, it was at least suited to the genius of the age, and especially to the speculative Grecian mind. Such were the weapons Clement wielded; such the defences of Christianity growing out of the demands of the times.
(1) Neander (History of Christian Dogmas, p. 144, Bohn) says, that "in Clement we first meet with the attempt to set aside the idea of time in its application to the transition of the Logos into reality." Justin and others believed that this transition took place when God was about to proceed to the work of creation. But the idea of any specific time could be excluded, without the supposition that the transition, called the generation of the Son, took place from eternity. This neither Clement, nor the Fathers generally, believed. They could say, that he was begotten without reference to time, or before time, or the measure of time; but this was very different from referring the event to eternity, which they never thought of doing. This distinction Neander himself recognizes. Arius, who believed that the Son was created out of nothing, discarded the idea of time as connected with the event. Some of the Fathers taught that the Son was begotten when the world lay in chaos. How they would have expressed themselves had they been acquainted with the modern science of geology, it is impossible to say.
(2) This is often distinctly asserted. Thus Clement, after quoting a sentiment from Plato, proceeds: "Whence, O Plato! did you learn this truth? Whence that exhaustless affluence of words with which you inculcate the reverence due to the Divinity? I know your masters, though you would conceal them. You learned geometry of the Egyptians; astronomy, of the Babylonians; from the Thracians you received the healing song; Assyrians taught you many things: but laws (as many as are agreeable to truth), and the opinions you entertain concerning God, you owe to the Hebrews " (Cohort., c. 6, p. 60). These plagiarisms of the Greek philosophers are a favorite topic with Clement in the "Stromata."
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