Bio

Clement of Alexandria was anciently called “the educator of souls.” He was the first of Christ’s disciples to formulate a theology of lifestyle and shape it into a body of practical doctrine with disciplines for daily activity. Because he lived during a time in which persecutions were declining in North Africa, he and other Church leaders saw a great need for Christians to distinguish themselves from the pagans and those caught up in the worldliness which characterized that region of the Roman Empire. Clement taught Christians to think in terms of “a Christian way of life” and his distinctive theology of lifestyle was such that it aided spiritual striving and intertwined with creation. His writings are important today because they provide timeless guidance for avoiding the consumer mentality which fuels so much of modern ecological degradation.

Contemplation of Nature

The initial step for a soul to come to knowledge of God is contemplation of nature.

Food and Diet

Other men, indeed, live that they may eat, just like unreasoning animals; for them life is only their belly. But as for us, our Educator has given the command that we eat only to live. Eating is not our main occupation, nor is pleasure our chief ambition. Food is permitted us simply because of our stay in this world, which the Word is shaping for immortality by His education. Our food should be plain and ungarnished, suitable to children who are plain and unpretentious, adapted to maintaining life, not self-indulgence.

Excessive variety of food must be avoided, for it gives rise to every kind of bad effect…. Yet there are those who grow dissatisfied with this truth in their restless ostentation, and reject simplicity of diet to engage in a frantic search for expensive menus that must be imported from across the seas. …

It is a natural law that the body is not benefited by excessively rich food: quite the contrary, those who live on simpler foods are stronger and healthier and more alert, as servants are, for example, in comparison with their masters, or farmer-tenants in comparison with their landlords.

Let the meal be plain and restrained, of such sort that it will quicken the spirit. Let it be free of too rich a variety, and let not such a meal be withdrawn from the guidance of the Educator…. If the diet oversteps the limits of self-sufficiency, it harms man by dulling his mind and making his body susceptible to disease. Indeed, the pleasures of a luxurious table inflict untold damage: gluttony, squeamishness, gormandizing, insatiability of appetite, voraciousness.

If a person is wealthy, yet eats without restraint and shows himself insatiable, he disgraces himself in a special way and does wrong on two scores: first he adds to the burden of those who do not have, and he lays bare, before those who do have, his own lack of temperance.

Clement also speaks against the scouring of the world for expensive foods.

Do not for the sake of food destroy the work of God…. We must restrain the belly and keep it under the control of heaven. True food is thanksgiving. He who offers up thanks will not indulge excessively in pleasure. Our examples of virtue will draw out fellow banqueters to virtue.

The Christian way of life is not achieved by self-indulgence. Far from “lust-exciting delicacies” is the table of truth. Even though all things have been created particularly for man, it is not well to make use of all things, nor to use them at all times. Surely the occasion and the time, the manner and the motive, make some difference to one who is educated (by Christ) to what is profitable. It is this goal that provides the strength we need to restrain ourselves from living lives centered around the table. Wealth chooses that sort of life, for its vision is blunted; it is abundance that blinds in the matter of gluttony.

^{~ Christ the Educator, Book II, Chap. 1. Quoted in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. II. Eerdmans, 1994, p. 237-242.}

Household utensils

Food and clothing and dishes, and in a word, all of the items of the household ought to be, as a general rule, in keeping with a Christian way of life, and in conformity with what is simple, fitting, adapted to person, age, occupation and occasion. For we are servants of the one God, and so ought to ensure that our belongings and the equipment needed for them manifest the one noble way of life.

The Lord ate His meal from an inexpensive bowl; made His disciples recline on the ground, upon grass; washed their feet, girding Himself with a linen towel…. He did not seek the gold of kings, but taught us to rest content with what will quench thirst. Beyond question, He confined Himself to the useful, not the ostentatious, good. When He ate and drank at banquets, He did not require metals dug out of the earth, or dishes that tasted of gold or silver.

We must then get rid of our multiplicity of vessels, our silver and gold drinking cups…. In fact we must walk according to reason even if we have a wife and children in our home. A household is not a burden if it has but learned to follow in the lead of the wayfarer who knows self-control.

The wife who loves her husband will be his faithful reflection, both of them wayfarers carrying provisions best suited for a journey toward heaven: frugality, together with a united and determined practice of self-restraint.

^{~ Christ the Educator, Book II, Chapter 3. Quoted in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. II. Eerdmans, 1994, p. 247-248.}

The Use of Possessions

To spend money on foolish desires comes more under the heading of destruction than under expenditure. God has given us the authority to use our possessions, I admit, but only to the extent that it is necessary: He wishes them to be common. It is absurd that one man live in luxury when there are so many who labor in poverty.

He who holds possessions holds them as gifts of God…. and knows that he possesses them for his brother’s sake rather than his own…. Such is the man who is blessed by the Lord and a ready inheritor of the kingdom of God.

^{~ Homily: “Quis Dives Salvatur?” Sections 14-16. Quoted in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. II. Eerdmans, 1994, p. 595.}

Salvation, Self-Sufficiency and Self-Control

Those concerned for their salvation should take this as their first principle, that, although the whole of creation is ours to use, the universe is made for the sake of self-sufficiency, which anyone can acquire by a few things. They who rejoice in the holdings in their storehouses are foolish in their greed. “He that hath earned wages,” scripture reminds us, “puts them into a bag of holes.” Such is the man who gathers and stores up his harvest, for by not sharing his wealth with anyone, he becomes worse off….

To know oneself has always been, so it seems, the greatest of all lessons. For, if anyone knows himself, he will know God; and in knowing God, he will become like Him, not by wearing golden ornaments or by trailing long flowing robes, but by performing good deeds and cultivating an independence of as many things as possible. God alone has no needs, and He rejoices in a particular way when He sees us pure in the adornment of our minds and our bodies clothed with the adornment of the holy garment of self-control.

^{~ Christ the Educator, Book II. Quoted in The Right Church. By Charles Gutenson. Abingdon Press, 2012, p. 106.}

How the Perfect Man Treats the Things of this World

Those people, then, who run down created existence and vilify the body are wrong, and do not consider that the frame of man was formed erect for the contemplation of heaven, and that the organization of the senses tends to knowledge; and that the members and parts are arranged for good, not pleasure.

^{~ The Stromata, Book IV, Chapter 26. Quoted Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 2. Edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight.}

A Christian Manner of Conduct

We must now describe what the man who is called a Christian ought to be during the whole of his life. We must accordingly begin with ourselves and how we ought to regulate ourselves. For whenever anyone has been brought away by the Word of God from external things… he will know that he is not to be earnestly occupied with external things, but about what is proper and peculiar to man — to purge the eye of the soul and to sanctify his flesh.

^{~Paraphrased in The Instructor, Book II.1. In The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol II. Ed. Alexander Roberts. Christian Literature Company, 1885, p. 237.}

A Christian’s Choice of Food

Some men live that they may eat, as the irrational creatures, “whose life is their belly, and nothing else.” But the Instructor (Christ) enjoins us to eat that we may live. For neither is food our business, not is pleasure our aim; but both are on account of our life here, which the Word is training up to immortality. Wherefore there is discrimination to be employed in reference to food. Our food is to be simple, truly plain, as ministering unto life, not to luxury…. Plain fare is conducive to digestion and lightness of body from which come growth and health and strength….

There is no limit to epicurianism among men. For it has driven them to sweetmeats, and honey cakes, and sugar plums; inventing a multitude of deserts, hunting after all manner of dishes. A man like this seems to me to be all jaw and nothing else. “Desire not,” says the scripture, “rich men’s dainties” (Proverbs 23:3) for they belong to a false and base life. But we who seek the heavenly bread must rule the belly….

For excess, which in all things is an evil, is very highly reprehensible in the manner of food.

^{~ Paraphrased in The Instructor, Book II.1. In The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol II. Ed. Alexander Roberts. Christian Literature Company, 1885, p. 237.}

An Inkling of God Comes through His Creatures

We may gain some inkling of what God is if we attempt by means of every sensation to reach the reality of each creature, not giving up until we are alive to what transcends it….

^{~ Miscellanies V, XI (PG 9,112) In The Roots of Christian Mysticism. By Oliver Clement. New City Press, 1995, p. 223.}