Making Christians: Clement of Alexandria and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy 9780691221526

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MAKING CHRISTIANS

MAKING CHRISTIANS: CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA AND THE RHETORIC OF LEGITIMACY

DENISE KIMBER BUELL

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1999 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Library ofComgress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Buell, Denise Kimber, 1965Making Christians : Clement of Alexandria and the rhetoric of legitimacy / Denise Kimber Buell. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-05980-2 (alk. paper) 1. Clement, of Alexandria, Saint, ca. 150-ca. 215. 2. Apologetics—History—Early church, ca. 30-600. 3. Human reproduction—Religious aspects—Christianity—History of doctrines— Early church, ca. 30-600. 4. Kinship—Religious aspects— Christianity—History of doctrines—Early church, ca. 30-600. I. Title. BR65.C66B84

1999 270.1—dc21 98-34873

This book has been composed in Galliard The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) {Permanence of Paper) http://pupress.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my grandparents

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ABBREVIATIONS

xi

xiii

INTRODUCTION Origin Stories as Authorizing Discourse

3

Historiography and the Quest for Origins 5 Locating Clement 10 Reading Practices and Metaphor Analysis 14 The Symbolic Stakes of Procreation 15 Format of the Study 19 CHAPTER ONE Tracing Procreation: The Origins of Origin Stories

21

Clement's Appeal to a Variety of Procreative Etiologies: Three Examples 22 What Is Not Found There 27 Conclusion 31 CHAPTER TWO The Social Force of Metaphors for Procreation

32

Like a Farmer Sowing Seeds 34 Conclusion 46 CHAPTER THREE Sowing Knowledge: Procreation and Pedagogy

50

Teachers and Learners: Fathers and Sons 51 Philosophical Precedents 54 Learners as Sons Not Mothers 60 The Absent Mother 62 Engendering the Learner 63 Conclusion 68 CHAPTER FOUR Defending Teaching Methods with Procreative Language Suspicion of Texts 71 Planters and Waterers 75 Conclusion 77

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER FIVE

"Few Are Like Their Fathers": The Rhetoric of Genealogy and Intra-Christian Polemic 79 Producing Children, Pronouncing Dogma 81 "Few Are Like Their Fathers": The Rhetoric of Sonship 83 "False" Fathers 86 Loyalty to Other Superhuman Beings 89 Conclusion 92 CHAPTER SIX

Allegiance to the "True Father": Kinship Metaphors as Border Discourse 95 Marking Internal and External Boundaries 97 Loyalty to Fathers According to the Flesh 98 Allegiance on Trial 100 Conclusion: A Note on Ethnicity and the Rhetoric of Kinship 104 CHAPTER SEVEN

A Rhetoric of Christian Unity: Christians as Children of the Father of All 107 Audience of and Occasion for the Paidagogos 108 Children and Infants 109 Conclusion 117 CHAPTER EIGHT

Paideia and the Paidagogos 119 Rhetorical Strategies of Paideia 121 Conclusion: The Implications of Paideia 129 CHAPTER NINE

Perfect Children: Drinking the Logos-Milk of Christ 131 Perfect Rebirth 132 The First Interpretation: Milk as Food for the Perfect 136 The Second Interpretation: Drinking vs. Suckling 139 Transition (Paid 1.37.3) 141 The Third Interpretation: Blood, Milk, and Soul 142 Excursus: Is This Passage Referring to the Eucharist? 145 Conclusion: Why 1 Corinthians 3:2? 146 CHAPTER TEN

"The Milk of the Father": "Only Those Who Suckle This Breast Are Truly Blessed" 149 Blood: The Essence of Milk, Food, and Flesh 151

CONTENTS

The Fourth Interpretation of 1 Cor 3:2 152 Etiologies of Lactation: Blood as the ousia of Milk 154 A Mystical Interpretation of the Logos 159 A "More Common Interpretation" of the Logos 163 Digestion: The Transformation of Food into Blood 165 The Equivalence of Liquid and Solid Foods 167 The Multivalent Logos 169 Etiologies of Procreation 171 Conclusion: Divine Maternity? 177 CONCLUSION

Reflections on the Future of Origin Stories 180 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

185

INDEX OF ANCIENT PASSAGES CITED GENERAL INDEX

215

205

IX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I

N A WORK about the implications of constructing lineages and origin stories, it is fitting to thank those who helped me to bring it into being. This book began as a dissertation, and many friends, colleagues, and mentors contributed to its former and present forms. I am especially grateful to my advisor Bernadette J. Brooten, Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenza, Annewies van den Hoek, and Carol Delaney, for their ongoing interest in and support for the project. Krister Stendahl and Everett Mendelsohn gave generously of their time as well. Challenges and encouragement from the Harvard New Testament Dissertation Seminar and the Brandeis Seminar for Early Judaism and Christianity helped to shape the study in its early stages. I especially thank my friends and colleagues from Harvard and Miami Universities Susanne Mrozik, Shelly Matthews, Cynthia Kittredge, Ruth Clements, Ellen Aitken, Linda Roach, Denise McCoskey, and Lisa Vollendorf. In helping to transform this manuscript from its life as a dissertation into its present form, a Summer Research Grant from Miami University's Committee on Faculty Research allowed me to begin revising with fewer fiscal concerns. Deborah Malmud at Princeton University Press has been marvelously candid and encouraging throughout the publishing process. Thoughtful and constructive feedback from Elizabeth Castelli and Karen King improved this book significantly. My dear friend Melanie JohnsonDeBaufre deserves special thanks, having labored through the whole manuscript in its penultimate form. For their unflagging support, humor, and love, I thank Peter Harrison, Steve Fein, Eric Johnson-DeBaufre, little Grace Johnson-DeBaufre, and especially my parents, Kim and Larry Buell. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Chapter Five appeared in an earlier form in Harvard Theological Review (Copyright 1997 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission). I thank the editors for their permission to reprint this material.

ABBREVIATIONS

AAR/SBL Adv. Haer. ANRW Apol. Auth. Teach. BG Dial. Sav. Eel. Exc. Theod. Gen. An. Gos. Phil. Gyn. HDR HeyJ Hist. Anim. Hist. Eccl. HTR Hyp. Arch. Interp. Know. JAAR JECS JTS LXX NHC Paid. Pan. Prot. PW Quis RAC

American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature Irenaeus, Against Heresies Aufstieg und Niedergang der rbmischen Welt (Aristides, Justin Martyr) Apology Authoritative Teaching Berlin Gnostic Codex Dialogue of the Savior (Clement of Alexandria) Eclogues of the Prophets (Clement of Alexandria) Excerpts ofTheodotos (Aristotle) On the Generation of Animals Gospel of Philip (Soranos) Gynaikeia Harvard Dissertations in Religion Heythorp Journal (Aristotle) Historia Animalium (Eusebius) Ecclesiastical History Harvard Theological Review Hypostasis of the Archons The Interpretation of Knowledge Journal of the American Academy of Religion Journal of Early Christian Studies Journal of Theological Studies Septuagint, Greek version of Jewish Scriptures Nag Hammadi Codex (Clement of Alexandria) Paidagogos (Epiphanius) Panarion (Clement of Alexandria) Protreptikos Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopddie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (Clement of Alexandria) Who Is the Rich Man Who Is Being Saved? Reallexikon fur Antike und Christentum

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ABBREVIATIONS

Ref. RSV 2 Apoc. Jas. Strom. TAPA Teach. Silv. USQR VC

(Hippolytus) Refutation of All Heresies Bible, Revised Standard Version Second Apocalpyse of James (Clement of Alexandria) Stromateis Transactions of the American Philological Association Teachings of Silvanus Union Seminary Quarterly Review Vigiliae christianae

MAKING CHRISTIANS

Introduction ORIGIN STORIES AS AUTHORIZING DISCOURSE

H

OW DID second-century Christians vie with each other in seeking to produce an authoritative discourse of Christian identity?1 What difference might it make if we give closer attention to this discursive process? Procreation and kinship are "natural symbols"2 for both early Christians and for scholars who study early Christianity. Historically and culturally specific notions of procreation and kinship provide a vocabulary of power that some early Christians deployed in this struggle with each other over claims to represent the truth of Christian interpretation, practices, and doctrine. In the study of early Christian history, little attention has been paid to how ancient assumptions about kinship and procreation make a difference in early Christians' articulation of their origins and identities as Christians. The symbolic functions of procreative and kinship language have frequently been ignored or reinscribed into historiography of early Christianity. Thus, I seek to make visible the rhetorical functions and implications of these natural symbols both for how we read early Christian texts and for how we reconstruct early Christian history. Notions of procreation and kinship are not only, not even primarily, about sex and/or gender, although they contain within them cultural assumptions about these. In cultural contexts in which procreation is held to be a natural and valued process, so too the power relations inscribed by procreation are held to be natural and valued. Thus metaphors of procreation and kinship can serve as a means for "naturalizing power"—for mak-

1 Averil Cameron has rightly noted that "the second century, in particular, was a battleground for the struggle of Christians to control their own discourse and define their faith" (Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991] 21). While Cameron focuses upon how various Christians competed to define Christianity in relation to non-Christians, I focus on intra-Christian facets of this competition. 2 The anthropologist Mary Douglas developed this term to refer to cultural symbols based in cultural assumptions about processes or parts of human bodies. The two most influential of her works on the notion of a "natural symbol" in relation to human bodies are Purity and Danger: An analysis of the concepts ofpollution and taboo (1966; reprinted, London: Routledge, 1991); and Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (1970; reprinted, New York: Random House, 1982).

4

INTRODUCTION

ing power differentials appear "natural, inevitable, and god-given."3 Using procreative and kinship metaphors, some early Christians construe as "natural" or essential similarities and differences among early Christians, between Christians and non-Christians, and between divine and human. In the late second century c.E., the future of Christianity as a movement remained uncertain; Christians would have to wait for more than a century before receiving official imperial toleration. Even more important for this study, late-second-century Christianity was not a monolithic entity with a unified set of institutions, practices, and beliefs. As the roughly contemporaneous writings of Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Hippolytus, and the author of the Tripartite Tractate reveal, not all early Christians tolerated each other. I do not assume, therefore, the inevitable persistence or normativity of any late-second or early-third-century c.E. Christian perspectives and practices. Thus I ask how a Christian author justifies his/her vision for Christianity without assuming that s/he is necessarily in the right while his/her Christian rivals are in the wrong or vice versa. This stance permits me to see points of similarity between opposing groups. I have restricted the geographical and historical scope of this study to late-second-century Alexandria. The opacity of Christianity's development in Alexandria continues to intrigue scholars despite a relative abundance of early literary evidence. Was earliest Egyptian Christianity predominantly "heretical" as Walter Bauer provocatively argued? How ought we to interpret Eusebius's fourth-century account of the earliest centuries of Christian activity in and around Alexandria? What impact do the texts discovered at Nag Hammadi have upon our understanding of early Egyptian Christianity? While I do not assume that my conclusions neatly apply to the development of Christianity in all other regions of the Mediterranean world, the metaphoric constructions examined here do appear in literary sources of non-Alexandrian provenances. I develop my argument largely through an examination of the extensive extant writings of the late-second-century Christian author Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150—210 C.E.). This corpus offers a particularly generous range of contexts for supporting and nuancing my claim that procreative and kinship metaphors function polemically in early Christian discourses of self-identity and self-authorization. Cultural assumptions about procreation and kinship play an important role for Clement in defining which Christians have the proper authority to teach, and which kinds of knowledge are authentic. 3

Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney, "Naturalizing Power," in Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, ed. Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney (New York and London: Routledge, 1995) 1.

ORIGIN STORIES AS DISCOURSE

b

HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE QUEST FOR O R I G I N S

This study contributes to a growing body of scholarship that insists upon increased attention not only to the range of ways in which early Christians struggled to define themselves, but also to how and under what conditions scholars adopt as authoritative certain accounts of these struggles and their participants.4 Historical narrative, as Karen King notes, functions like a myth of origins in that "it authorizes particular constructions of power and reality (the nature of humanity and the world), places the reader at a particular place in the story, distinguishes truth from falsehood by telling the way things really were—and thus really are."5 At the same time, historical narrative also places the history writer "at a particular place in the story," by locating her as the authorized storyteller. How do historians establish their voices as authoritative? Often by constructing their arguments beneath the scaffolding of intellectual genealogies.6 As Keith Hopkins wryly notes, "foot-notes acknowledge and reinforce academic kinship ties; perhaps that is their principal function."7 This metaphoric description of citation defines the transmission of knowledge as a biological and political process whereby a teacher or intellectual movement transmits to a student both an essence (the content of or the approach to knowledge) and a right to lay claim to that essence. While the new life produced or represented by the student must be recognized by its 4 Ron Cameron has recently articulated a similar challenge for the interpretation of biblical texts: "We desperately need a critical review of the relationship of the conventional picture of Christian origins (traditionally accepted as authoritative history) to the myths of Christian origins that the biblical texts provide" ("Alternate Beginnings—Different Ends: Eusebius, Thomas, and the Construction of Christian Origins," in Religious Propaganda, and Missionary Competition in the New Testament World: Essays Honoring Dieter Georgi, ed. Lukas Bormann, Kelly Del Tredici, Angela Standhartinger [Leiden: Brill, 1994] 517). 5 Karen L. King, "Mackinations on Myth and Origins," in Reimagining Christian Origins: A Colloquium Honoring Burton L. Mack, ed. Elizabeth A. Castelli and Hal Taussig (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996) 158-59. 6 Donna Haraway has shown this to be the case for both feminist and nonfeminist writers within the biological sciences; see Haraway, "In the Beginning Was the Word: The Genesis of Biological Theory," Signs6 [1981]: 4 6 9 - 8 1 . Reprinted in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1981; rpt. New York: Routledge, 1991) 71-80. 7 Keith Hopkins, "Seven Missing Papers," in Parente et Strategies Familiales dans I'Antiquite Romaine. Actes de la table ronde des 2—4 octobre 1986 (Paris, Maison de sciences de l'homme), ed. Jean Andreau and Hinnerk Bruhns (Collection de l'Ecole Francaise de Rome 129; Palais Farnese: l'Ecole Francaise de Rome, 1990) 624. I am interested here in the rhetorical function of footnotes, not their historical origins as described by Anthony Grafton, The Footnote* *a curious history (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

6

INTRODUCTION

progenitor as an authentic offspring, the offspring participates in this process by positioning her or himself as legitimate, through careful citation of and allusion to her or his alleged intellectual heritage. This current practice may explain why the intellectual and spiritual genealogies in ancient sources do not receive sufficient analytical scrutiny. Procreative andfilialmetaphors have become so fully naturalized in scholarly discourse that we often do not pause to evaluate their presuppositions and consequences. The very collection of primary texts under the heading "church fathers," for example, perpetuates the reconstruction of early Christian history as a battle between an infinite variety of so-called heretics and a limited number of threatened but ultimately intact orthodox patrilineages, whose origins can be traced, from son to father, to disciples or apostles of Jesus. The use of the genealogical metaphors within the field of "patristics" helps to make this progression appear linear. If these metaphors remain invisible, it is extremely difficult to inquire into their ramifications. A. Cleveland Coxe's introduction to the Ante-Nicene Fathers series translation of Gregory Thaumaturgus's writings provides an apt example of how such metaphors have become integral to the disciplinary vocabulary of patristics: "It is delightful to trace the hand of God from generation to generation, as from father to son, interposing for the perpetuity of the faith. We have already observed [in previous volumes] the continuity of the great Alexandrian school; how it arose, and how Pantaenus begat Clement, and Clement begat Origen. So Origen begat Gregory, and so the Lord has provided for the spiritual generation of the Church's teachers, age after age, from the beginning" (my emphasis).8 While Coxe should not be criticized for his use of procreative metaphors per se, he and other modern scholars who perpetuate such lineages may uncritically reinscribe the perspectives of certain early Christians at the expense of others or may reinscribe certain assumptions about the character and development of Christianity in general. Thus it is necessary to examine the rhetorical function of kinship language in early Christian writings. A good example of this language appears in the first extant account of early Christian history, by Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. 260—339 c.E.). Eusebius quotes a portion of a letter attributed to Clement's near contemporary Alexander of Jerusalem: "For this also 8

A. Cleveland Coxe, "Introductory Note to Gregory Thaumaturgus," in Ante-Nicene Fathers. Volume 6. Gregory Thaumaturgus, Dionysius the Great, Julius Africcmus, Anatolius and Minor Writers, Methodius, Arnobius, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (1886; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994) 3. Although Coxe wrote at the end of the nineteenth century, this collection has been reprinted multiple times, most recently in the 1990s, and continues to be the most widely consulted collection of patristic texts in English translation.

ORIGIN STORIES AS DISCOURSE

7

proved to be the will of God . . . that the friendship that comes to us from our ancestors [prqtjonoi] should remain unshaken . . . For we know as fathers [pateres] those blessed ones who went before us, with whom we shall be before long: Pantaenus, truly blessed and my master, and the holy Clement, who was my master and profited me, and all others like him. Through these I came to know you, who are the best in all things, and my master and brother" (Alexander of Jerusalem, preserved in Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 6.14.8-9). This letter, purportedly addressed to Origen, links Pantaenus, Clement, and Origen (as well as Alexander) in a successive chain of teachers and students (Alexander and Origen being of the same generation). Note how the letter depicts the relationships among these Christian men using kinship language. Kinship and authority are clearly linked: ancestors and fathers are also described as masters; the addressee's relation to the writer appears to be one of a similar generation (as suggested by the appeal to friendship and brotherhood), although perhaps not of equivalent status (as implied by the epithet of master for the addressee). Most importantly, however, Eusebius uses this letter fragment as ancient evidence of an unbroken lineage, which becomes part of his larger narrative. As the quotation above from Coxe demonstrates, modern historians of Christianity often accept Eusebius's claims. Attention to the symbolic use of procreative and kinship imagery in ancient sources requires that we reflect critically upon the consequences of perpetuating pedagogical and methodological practices that value the production and maintenance of intellectual patrilines.9 Since "how we imagine the past is part of our discourse about the meaning of the present,"10 9 In a modern context, Schiissler Fiorenza notes the complicity of institutional procedures with the construction and perpetuation of particular intellectual lineages that have tended to marginalize if not exclude others: "Students being tested on their knowledge of biblical interpretation, for instance, will be certified if they know the 'whitemale' Euro-American tradition of biblical interpretation. Their knowledge of African-American or feminist biblical interpretation does not count. Conversely, students who have no knowledge of either African-American, Hispanic, or feminist biblical interpretation will be certified as competent" {But She Said: Feminist Practices ofBiblical Interpretation [Boston: Beacon, 1992] 189). Her remark underscores the interconnection between the educational process, the establishment or perpetuation of particular forms of knowledge, and the authorization of individuals. Traditional academic training reinforces a genealogical view of the transmission and production of knowledge, through such pedagogical practices as lectures in which students passively receive the seeds of knowledge from the master-teacher. In addition, curricular requirements reinforce the legitimacy of certain intellectual lineages to the exclusion of others. It is not surprising, then, that advocates of feminist and other perspectives traditionally excluded or marginalized from the academic mainstream have sought to expose and change the ways in which not only curricula but also classroom pedagogy participate in determining what constitutes valid knowledge and practices (see But She Said, 168-94; and bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom [New York: Roudedge, 1994]). 10

King, "Mackinations on Myth and Origins," 166.

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INTRODUCTION

historians of early Christianity can contribute to this reflection by exposing how early Christian adaptations of this authorizing practice of producing and reproducing authoritative lineages should be viewed as strategies for claiming the legitimacy of particular Christian perspectives and practices rather than as objective accounts of a given historical situation.11 Specifically, attention to the authorizing function of genealogical metaphors helps to reevaluate scholarship on early Christian history that has been constructed around the poles of heresy and orthodoxy, and that depicts orthodoxy as the legitimate heir to some true essence of Christianity.12 According to this construct it is extremely difficult to take seriously the contested moments within a tradition without seeing the ensuing formation as predetermined. Within historical-critical scholarship on the history of early Christianity, this heresy-orthodoxy model has been modified in significant ways,13 but the larger framework has remained intact. For example, Karen King has recently called attention to how the construct "heresy" continues to operate, even if indirectly, as a category for reconstructions of early Christian history, particularly in relation to Gnosticism.14 A metonymic operation, heresy is constituted as "other" in relation to the "self" that is orthodoxy or orthopraxy.15 As King notes, "Its power relations arefirmlyembedded in struggles over who gets to say what 'truth' is, and has its Sitz im Leben 11

Schiissler Fiorenza describes this as the difference between the "textually inscribed rhetorical situation, on the one hand, and the possible historical situation on the other" ("The Rhetoricity of Historical Knowledge: Pauline Discourse and Its Contextualizations," in Religious Propaganda and Missionary Competition, ed. Bormann, Del Tredici, Standhartinger, 447, emphasis in original). 12 Although he does not frame it in this way, Robert L. Wilken makes a similar point in his Myth of Christian Beginnings: History's Impact on Belief (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971) esp. 22-26. 13 Most notably by the work of Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, ed. Robert Kraft and Gerhard Krodel, trans, by a team from the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971); see also Alain Le Boulluec, La Notion d'heresie dans la litterature grecque Ile-IIIe siecles, 2 vols. (Paris: Etudes Augustinennes, 1985); Helmut Koester, 'TNOMAI AIAOOPAI: The Origin and Nature of Diversification in the History of Early Christianity," HTR 58 (1965): 279-318. 14 Karen L. King, "Is There Such a Thing as Gnosticism?" paper presented at the AAR/SBL Annual Meetings (Washington, DC, Nov. 1993). See also Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking "Gnosticism": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Williams and King both argue against the usefulness of the category "Gnosticism," but their arguments are complementary rather than identical. 15 That is, even studies that note that the application of "orthodoxy" to second-century c.E. Christian thought is anachronistic, generally preserve a binary analytical model by substituting "orthopraxy" for orthodoxy. See, e.g., Frederik Wisse, "The Use of Early Christian Literature as Evidence for Inner Diversity and Conflict," in Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism, and Early Christianity, ed. Charles W. Hedrick and Robert Hodgson, Jr. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1986) 177-90.

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16

in early Christian processes of self-definition and identity formation." By shifting the focus away from the categories of heretical and orthodox, and by reconstructing the assumptions and images central to the truth claims forwarded by all early Christians, historians open up the possibility for alternative understandings of Christian history; attention to the role of procreative language in self-defining and self-authorizing strategies comprises one facet of this task. So what does it add to our knowledge of early Christian history to see that kinship language played a significant role in strategies of authorization and contestation of Christian perspectives? Most importantly, arguments from symbolic patrilines valorize sameness and conformity over diversity.17 Legitimacy is measured according to one's ability to approximate one's spiritual forefathers. This strategy equates unity with homogeneity. This type of argumentation has vastly different consequences according to the relative cultural, social, or political power of its proponents. If one has no social power, attempts to secure a "legitimate lineage" that depends upon conformity can provide a base from which to gain strength and visibility. On the other hand, if one already has power, patrilines can be invoked to reinforce this power, both by incorporation and exclusion. It is a method that reinforces its own naturalness by constantly asking for investigation into origins, but presumes that those origins are unilateral and monogenetic (deriving from one single source). By attending to how early Christians constructed Christianity for themselves, we may be better able to reconstruct Christian history without simply reduplicating the views inscribed in those texts traditionally considered normative. The implications of this historiographic enterprise have been succinctly articulated by Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenza: "Our search for history and roots is neither antiquarian nor nostalgic: it is political. It is political because our understanding of the present shapes our reconstructions of 16 King, "Is There Such a Thing as Gnosticism?" 9. Despite scholarly rejection of the validity of such theological distinctions as heresy and orthodoxy, Gnosticism continues to be denned metonymically in relation to Christianity, thereby perpetuating an inclination to frame Gnosticism as some "pure" Christianity's historical "other," if not its inferior (see King, "Gnosticism?" 11). King identifies two other constructions that have also shaped the contemporary study of Gnosticism, "syncretism" and "Orientalism." I have highlighted heresy here because it is the most visibly pervasive of these categories in the study of Clement's writings and his context; it has further interest as a category that Clement himself employs. For a further discussion of how Orientalism has shaped the construction of the field of gnostic studies, see Karen L. King, "Translating History: Refraining Gnosticism in Postmodernity," in Tradition und Translation: Zum Problem der interkulturellen tJbersetzbarkeit religi'dser Phanomene: Festschriftfur Carsten Colpe zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Christoph Elsas et al. (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1994) 264-77. 17 See discussion of Elizabeth Castelli's work below, pp. 13-14. I am indebted to her arguments about the function of mimesis for this formulation.

10

INTRODUCTION

the past, while our reconstructions of the past shape present and future reality."18 These political implications apply not only to contemporary historians but also to how Clement and his Christian contemporaries sought to authorize their speaking positions and perspectives in relation to other Christians and to those holding the reins of power across the Roman Empire.

LOCATING CLEMENT

Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-215 C.E.) lived and taught in Alexandria during the last two decades of the second century c.E.19 The little personal information about Titus Flavius Clemens, his full Roman name, that has survived appears chiefly in two sources: within Clement's own writings, and within the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea, a Christian author of the early fourth century C.E. 20 While Alexandria may not have been Clement's native city,21 there is a strong Alexandrian flavor to the sources from which he draws,22 the allegorical method that he favors,23 and the middle platonic timbre of his philosophical presuppositions.24 Eusebius lists ten works by Clement,25 five of which have survived: 18

Schiissler Fiorenza, But She Said, 101. Clement reportedly left Alexandria ca. 202-203 c.E. during a period of persecutions of Christians; it remains a matter of uncertainty where he spent his final years. See the discussion in Andre Mehat, Etude sur les "Stromates" de Clement d'Alexandrie (Patristica Sorbonensia 7; Paris: Seuil, 1966) 4 7 - 4 9 . 20 Clement's near contemporaries, Julius Africanus and Alexander of Jerusalem, also mention Clement in passing. 21 Apart from Alexandria, the other city traditionally known as Clement's birthplace is Athens (Epiphanius, Pan. 32.6.1). As Annewies van den Hoek notes, Clement's epithet first appears in Eusebius and was likely coined "to distinguish him from his namesake who was active in Rome a century earlier and is known as Clemens Romanus" ("How Alexandrian Was Clement of Alexandria? Reflections on Clement and his Alexandrian Background," HeyJ 31 [1990] 179). Clement's only mention of his whereabouts prior to this time period occurs within the classical topos of education acquired through extensive travels and encounters with numerous sages (Strom. 1.11.2). This passage implies that Clement had likely received a formal education, but not where and under what circumstances this education took place. 22 Van den Hoek, "How Alexandrian," 179-94, esp. 1 8 3 - 9 1 . 23 David Dawson, Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) 1 7 - 2 1 ; 183-234. 24 Robert M. Berchman, From Philo to Origen: Middle Platonism in Transition (Brown Judaic Studies 69; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984) 9 - 1 1 ; 5 5 - 8 1 . 25 Works that have either not survived or of which only small fragments have been preserved that Eusebius attributes to Clement are: 1) an eight-volume work of scripture commentary known as the Hypotyposeis, 2) a treatise known as On the Pascha, 3) a discourse entitled On Fasting, 4) a discourse entitled On Slander, and 5) a work known as the Ecclesiastical Canon or Against the Judaizers (Hist. Eccl. 6.13.2-3). In addition, Clement refers 19

ORIGIN STORIES AS DISCOURSE

11

1) an eight-part work known as the Stromateis26 (or Miscellanies); 2) the Protreptikos pros Hellenas (or Exhortation to the Greeks); 3) a three-part work known as the Paidagogos (or the Tutor); 4) a homiletic address on Mark 10:17-31 known as Tis ho Soizomenos Plousios (Who Is the Rich Man Who Is Being Saved?) and 5) a brief discourse entitled the Protreptikos eis Hupomonen e Pros tous neosti Bebaptismenous (Exhortation to Endurance or To the Recently Baptized).27 In addition to these writings mentioned by Eusebius, two extant notebooks of material and one letter are attributed to him: 1) a notebook of quotations and comments on the teachings of the Valentinian Christian Theodotos, known as the Ek ton Theodotou . . . Epitomai (Excerpts of Theodotos); 2) a notebook of comments on biblical prophetic writings known as the Ek ton Propheton Eklogai (Eclogues of the Prophets); and 3) a letter possibly containing a variant for the Gospel of Mark. 28 Of all these writings, the Protreptikos, Paidagogos, and Stromateis have conventionally been regarded as a trilogy, although only the first two are clearly connected. 29 1 have observed that Clement clusters procreative and kinship metaphors near the opening of the Paidagogos and Stromateis; in diese contexts, the metaphors help to establish the tone of the works. In addition, metaphors of kinship loom large in the arguments near the end of the seventh book of the Stromateis, where Clement distinguishes between what he deems "true" and "false" Christianity. to at least two works of his own that have not survived: On Resurrection (Paid. 1.47.1) and On Continence {Paid. 2.94.1). 26 Eusebius gives the full title of this work as Stromateis of Gnostic Memoirs according to the True Philosophy (Hist. £ « / . 6.13.1). Although Eusebius describes the Stromateis as a work in eight books (Hist. Eccl. 6.13.1), the extant eighth book differs significantly from the first seven in length and style (the eighth book is briefer and not clearly linked to the previous portions of the Stromateis). 27 According to G. W. Butterworth (Clement of Alexandria, The Exhortation to the Greeks, The Rich Man's Salvation, and the fragment of an address entitled To the Newly Baptized [Loeb Classical Library; NY: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1919] 368), J. Armitage Robinson first "conjectured that it might be part of a work mentioned by Eusebius" (Hist. Eccl. 6.13). This fragment nowhere refers to baptism directly. 28 See Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and the Secret Gospel of Mark (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). 29 Andre Mehat (Etude) notes that the editio princeps of 1550 organized the Protreptikos, Paidagogos, and Stromateis as a trilogy on the basis of comments that Clement makes in the first book of the Paidagogos. This organization remained uncontested until 1898 when E. de Faye argued that the "didaskalos" to which Clement refers in the first book of the Paidagogos, ostensibly the third work in the trilogy, does not correspond to the Stromateis as previously assumed. Others, such as Pohlenz and Quatember, modified this argument by arguing that this passage of the Paidagogos does not refer to written works at all but to three phases of education (Mehat, Etude sur les "Stromates," 71). Mehat argues for a revised understanding of the initial trilogy hypothesis (50, 71-95).

12

INTRODUCTION

Clement is a particularly interesting figure for discussion because, according to the traditional binary categories of orthodox and heretical, he occupies a position that has been a matter of debate. He has been perceived as somewhat dubious in his "orthodoxy" (i.e., quasi-gnostic, never sainted) but nonetheless within the fold (largely thanks to Eusebius).30 Eusebius portrays Clement as a company man who (after Pantaenus and before Origen) headed a catechetical school that was the official teaching arm of the bishop-supervised church in Alexandria (Hist. Eccl. 6.6.1). Eusebius's depiction of Clement, however, cannot be taken at face value. The catechetical school remains an unprovable hypothesis, unnecessary for understanding Clement's location and views.31 Clement's almost total silence on ecclesial organization makes more plausible a reconstruction of his role in Alexandria as that of one Christian teacher among many.32 This hypothesis requires reading Clement not with a presumption of institutional support (or even tension, such as Origen faced a generation later with bishop Demetrius of Alexandria), but rather as one who must persuade his students and would-be students that his understanding of Christianity is the best. Regardless of whether or not Clement speaks with institutional backing, it is crucial to interpret his writings as arguments for a particular vision of Christian identity, not merely articulations of alreadydetermined doctrinal positions. As is true of all Christian writers, Clement employs language that naturalizes and authorizes his own speaking position, while also differentiating him from his competitors. Specifically, he asserts himself as a rightful heir to a tradition of knowledge and interpretation that he depicts as having emerged from a single source. Clement draws from existing Christian metaphors for the relationship between God and Christ to speak about the initial transmission of true knowledge from the divine to human realms: the Logos (Christ) is the first heir to this true knowledge, as the son of the 30

Salvatore R. C. Lilla offers a portrait of Clement as a Christian on the margins; see his Clement of Alexandria: A Study in Christian Platonism and Gnosticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). Birger Pearson's view, however, is more representative among scholars; despite Clement's "willingness to see aspects of truth in the most unlikely places . . . in the final analysis, Clement's loyalties are clear" (Gnosticism, Judaism, and Egyptian Christianity [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990] 212). 31 Gustave Bardy, "Aux origines de l'ecole d'Alexandrie," Recherches de science religieuse 27 (1937): 6 5 - 9 0 ; Alain le Boulluec, "L'£cole d'Alexandrie. De quelques aventures d'un concept historiographique," in AAEHANAPINA: Hellenisme, judaisme et christianisme a Alexandria. Melanges offerts trn P. Claude Mondesert (Paris: Cerf, 1987) 4 0 3 - 1 7 ; Annewies van den Hoek, "How Alexandrian," 179-82; idem, "The 'Catechetical' School of Early Christian Alexandria and Its Philonic Heritage," HTR 90 (1997): 5 9 - 8 7 ; David Dawson, Allegorical Readers, 2 1 9 - 2 2 . 32 I agree with David Dawson that this is the appropriate way in which to characterize Clement's relationship to Christianity (Allegorical Readers, 2 1 9 - 2 2 ) .

ORIGIN STORIES AS DISCOURSE

13

source of this knowledge, God as Father. He construes this ultimate source, God, as the Father of all; any claim to legitimacy entails a claim to unilateral descent through "fathers" who have passed on the essence of the original Father. 33 Clement's depiction of the transmission of knowledge in terms of fathering needs to be understood in relation to the concept of mimesis, or imitation, as the ideal form for the educative process. In a study of Paul's letters preserved in the New Testament, Elizabeth Castelli has convincingly argued that "the notion of mimesis . . . in Paul's letters. . . . articulates and rationalizes as true and natural a particular set of power relations within the social formation of early Christian communities." 34 She demonstrates that Paul's use of the notion of mimesis, or imitation, partakes of and exploits the full range of first-century associations with the concept, which she summarizes as follows: (1) Mimesis is always articulated as a hierarchical relationship, whereby the "copy" is but a derivation of the "model" and cannot aspire to the privileged status of the "model." (2) Mimesis presupposes a valorization of sameness over against difference. . . . (3) The notion of the authority of the model plays a fundamental role in the mimetic relationship.35 Without collapsing procreation and mimesis together, I wish to underscore the connection between procreative and imitative language that Castelli leaves rather undeveloped. She notes a number of instances in Greco-Roman sources and Paul's writings in which procreative activity is used to illustrate the principle of imitation, as well as those in which the father/son relation is offered as the natural context for mimesis; nonetheless, she does not link the use of mimesis as a strategy of power with the use of procreative and kinship metaphors as primary means for naturalizing the power relations implied in the practice of mimesis. As Castelli has shown to be the case for Paul's use of mimetic language, so I argue that Clement employs procreative and kinship language precisely in contexts in 33 This metaphor of divine filiation is found already in the Gospel of John. Clement understands the transmission of this knowledge in its most perfect and complete form to have come through the Logos (or Christ), whose proximity to the source (God) is metaphorized by describing Christ as the son of God the father. This metaphorical father-son relationship becomes fully naturalized in debates about Jesus' genealogy and the manner of his birth. Clement does not engage in this debate directly; he asserts the miraculous character of Jesus' birth, employing it as a concept in debating with other Christians about their views on the interpretation of scripture. H e compares scripture with the Virgin Mary, and likens those who do not believe in the virgin birth with those who reject particular scriptural texts or particular interpretations of scripture as "barren" (Strom. 6.126.1-132.5; 7.93.7-94.3). 34 Elizabeth A. Castelli, Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power (Louisville, KY: Westminst e r / J o h n Knox, 1991) 15. 35 Castelli, Imitating Paul, 16.

14

INTRODUCTION

which issues of Christian identity and authority are at stake. Like mimesis, procreative and kinship language privileges sameness over difference and naturalizes a hierarchy of power relations among Christians.

READING PRACTICES AND M E T A P H O R ANALYSIS

The approach that I adopt in this study has emerged within a number of disciplines under the rubric of cultural criticism, cultural anthropology, and "rhetoric of inquiry" (especially within the history of science). I assume that language is constitutive rather than merely reflective of reality; I seek to highlight the means by which a cultural formation—whether text, society, or scientific theory—constructs "the real" and persuades those who participate in it (as readers, members, or practitioners) that it is real. The notion of fixed, timeless truth and meaning has no place in this approach, except as an indicator of either the widespread assent to a particular reading of a text, symbol, or theory, or as a strategy of power wielded by those seeking tofixparticular readings. This study assumes that metaphors are meaningful constructs, produced by the interaction between reader/hearer and text, rather than the mere substitution of a nonliteral concept for its literal counterpart36 or pleasing ornamentation and illustration. While metaphors may be crassly defined as evocative figures of comparisons, I am particularly interested in how they function in discourse as a means for an author to organize and delimit arguments.37 For example, metaphorical arguments based in notions of procreation can serve to direct one's attention away from factors other than gender and parent-child relations. Such power differences as those produced by slavery, economic means, place of residence, and cultic observances become masked orflattenedwhen all differences and similarities are metaphorically explained using procreative language. In order to analyze the rhetorical function of any metaphor, it is crucial to consider its broader context; two apparently similar metaphors may not serve identical functions in different narrative frames. In contexts in which Clement's inscribed audiences are sympathetic to his positions, Clement develops the metaphor "Christians are children of God" with a positive, unifying rhetorical force, whereas in contexts in which he seeks to discredit certain Christians Clement can apply the same metaphor to divisive ends. 36 The "literal" meaning of a concept, however, need not be understood as an "inherent quality of a literary text," as David Dawson has noted, but rather "stems from a community's generally unselfconscious decision to adopt and promote a certain kind of meaning" {Allegorical Readers, 7 - 8 ) . 37 See Max Black, Models and Metaphors. Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962) 39-40, 41.

ORIGIN STORIES AS DISCOURSE

15

While Clement draws upon culturally available symbols and metaphors, it would be a mistake to view him as trapped within a linguistic prison. One's cultural and historical context constrains one's language and thought; nevertheless, one may resist, manipulate, or intentionally exploit the received or "literal" meaning of a text or concept.38 Especially in Chapter Seven, we see how Clement attempts to reconfigure the notion of "children" in his Paidaffdjjos. Clement guides his readers through some of the characteristics associated with children, emphasizing those that he accepts and those that he rejects.

T H E SYMBOLIC STAKES OF PROCREATION

In both current and ancient sources, cultural assumptions about procreation and kinship play a central role in cultural identity formation, whether one's own or another's; the questions "where do I/you come from?" and "of what do I/you consist?" are often collapsed. This is vividly apparent in some early Christian sources that exhort their readers to discover "their root,"39 and that equate knowing one's origins with knowing one's true nature and identity.40 Today procreation frequently serves as the ultimate marker for one's natural origins while kinship functions as an index for marking one's relation to other like beings and nonrelation to unlike beings. In late-twentieth-century American public discourse, some traits are commonly held to be transmitted through procreation in continuity with one's parents (e.g., race and ethnicity, when both parents apparently share these identities), while other factors are seen to be established by the very process of procreation (e.g., sex; race and ethnicity, when the parents apparently partake of different identities). The most biologically reductionistic form of this thinking is theorized as sociobiology, which offers a version of identity determinism: you are your genes, and the distinction between how and who you are is rendered meaningless. While not everyone agrees that identity categories are natural or determined by blood or genes, this 38 Black notes that "the writer can establish a novel pattern of implications for the literal uses of key expressions, prior to using them as vehicles for his metaphors," such as by explicitly arguing for a particular intended meaning of a concept in the broader context of any metaphorical uses of that concept (Models and Metaphors, 43). 39 E.g., Hyp. Arch. 97.13-15; Dial. Sav. 134.1-24; Auth. Teach. 22.26-34. 40 E.g., Teach. Silv., 92.10-14. Clement's notes from the teachings of his rival Theodotos contain this view, linking this knowledge with baptism: "Until baptism, they [Theodotos and followers, viewed as part of a Christian school of Valentinus] say, Fate is real, but after it the astrologers are no longer right. But it is not only the washing that is liberating, but the knowledge of who we were, and what we have become, where we were or where we were placed, whither we hasten, from what we are redeemed, what birth is, and what rebirth" {fixe. Theod. 78.1-2).

16

INTRODUCTION

possibility is taken seriously within contemporary Western thought and debates about identity.41 Further, assumptions about procreation and kinship greatly influence where one stands in debates about sameness and difference, made manifest in the political arena by the contrast between coalition "rainbow" politics vs. "identity" politics. For example, perceived roles in procreation have been used to argue for allegedly natural differences between females and males, including physiological composition and social roles as well as the naturalness of hetero-erotic identification; perceived notions of kinship have been used to argue for allegiances and to explain divisions among peoples. I assume, following the work of cultural anthropologists such as Carol Delaney,42 David Schneider,43 and Emily Martin,44 that notions of procreation and kinship are culturally constructed and contingent. It is not a question of knowing or learning the right explanation for how procreation 41

For example, the recent publication, The Bell Curve (Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life [New York: Free Press, 1994]), has sparked considerable controversy over the possibility of correlating racial groups with I.Q. averages (e.g., The Bell Curve Debate: History, Documents, Opinions, ed. Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glaubenberg [New York: Times Books, 1995]; The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America, ed. Steven Fraser [New York: Basic Books, 1995]). The Bell Curve takes for granted that both race and (some aspects of) intelligence in this study are natural, connate characteristics whose relation to each other can be meaningfully compared. A second type of example emerges from current debates about sexual orientation; while there is no absolute consensus, some interlocutors in this debate assert that one's sexual preference is inherendy determined, or "hardwired" (e.g., Dean H. Hamer and Peter Copeland, The Science of Desire: The Search for the Gay Gene and the Biology of Behavior [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994]). Regardless of one's views about these topics, arguments from origins (in this case procreative origins) play a significant role in public debates about a range of controversial social and political issues. 42 Delaney, "The Meaning of Paternity and the Virgin Birth Debate," Man 21 (1986): 494-513; idem, The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); idem, "Father State, Motherland, and the Birth of Modern Turkey," in Naturalizing Power, 177-99. 43 Schneider, "What is Kinship All About?" in Kinship Studies in the Morgan Centennial Tear, ed. P. Reining (Washington D.C.: Anthropological Society of Washington, 1972) 3 2 63; idem, American Kinship: A Cultural Account, 2d ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980); idem, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1984). 44 Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston: Beacon, 1987); idem, "Science and Women's Bodies: Forms of Anthropological Knowledge," in Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, ed. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sally Shuttleworth (New York and London: Roudedge, 1990) 69-82; idem, "The Ideology of Reproduction: The Reproduction of Ideology," in Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture, ed. Faye Ginsburg and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (Boston: Beacon, 1990) 300—314; idem, "The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles," Signs 16 (1991): 4 8 5 - 5 0 1 .

ORIGIN STORIES AS DISCOURSE

17

occurs45 or what constitutes kinship but rather a matter of discerning what is at stake in a given understanding of these concepts. Procreation does not concern simply the mechanics of reproduction but a range of interlocking questions that have consistently been considered of the greatest importance to philosophical and theological speculation. These questions include a broad-ranging scope of issues, which Carol Delaney has framed well: How does life come into being? Of what is it composed? Who or what are its agents? What is a person? How are persons related to one another, to the nonhuman world, to the cosmos?46 As these questions reveal, procreation and kinship can be viewed as two sides of the same coin. Broadly defined, notions of procreation constitute a key part of the fabric for some cultures' worldviews, as Delaney has convincingly shown to be the case in Islamic village society in Turkey.47 The assumption that notions of procreation are culturally specific allows one to ask questions about their function within a given cultural or historical context without assuming that the answers produced within one context are universally true. [T]he ways in which kinship systems organize people into supposedly natural categories generally reinforce social a n d political hierarchies . . . M e n a n d w o m e n , y o u n g and old, native and non-native—all of these categories of inequality and many m o r e have often been r o o t e d in t h e 'natural' relations of kinship. . . . M e t a p h o r s and relationships derived from kinship systems spill over into other cultural and social realms, and are used t o legitimize and "naturalize" (that is, attribute t o nature) inequalities in o t h e r spheres. 4 8 45

One need not know in detail a medical account of procreation in order to hold a view about how procreation occurs (a so-called folk theory of procreation), nor does one need to know a medical theory of procreation in order to make or understand metaphors of and for procreation. See Chapter One for further discussion of this claim. On the other hand, every medical theory of procreation is formulated and gains its meaning with reference to a cultural context. A theory of procreation may challenge, reinforce, or revise prevailing cultural assumptions, but it must do so with reference to the assumptions and symbols of that broader culture in order to be intelligible and persuasive. For discussions of how this perspective affects the interpretation of ancient texts pertaining to procreation, see Helen King, "Making a Man: Becoming Human in Early Greek Medicine," in The Human Embryo: Aristotle and the Arabic and European Traditions, ed. Gordon R. Dunstan (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1990) 10-19, esp. 12; and Iain Lonie, The Hippocratic Treatises "On Generation," "On the Nature of the Child," "Diseases IV" (Ars Medica. Texte und Untersuchungen zur Quellenkunde der Alten Medizin II. Abteilung Griechisch-lateinische Medizin Volume 7; Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1981) 77-86. 46 Delaney, The Seed and the Soil, 3. 47 Ibid., 3-4. 48 Mary Jo Maynes, Ann Waltner, Birgitte Soland, and Ulrike Strasser, "Introduction: Toward a Comparative History of Gender, Kinship, and Power," in Gender, Kinship, Power: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary History, ed. Mary Jo Maynes, Ann Waltner, Birgitte Soland, and Ulrike Strasser (New York: Routledge, 1996) 4. See also Delaney, who aptly

18

INTRODUCTION

As this statement about the functions of kinship systems suggests, attention to procreative and kinship metaphors matters because it can help to reveal which symbols and assumptions hold a cultural system together. For example, to speak metaphorically about a culture's cosmology using procreative language is to put into play on a cosmological scale cultural assumptions about gender, parenting, and the distribution of power that are already contained in cultural assumptions about procreation. How these cultural assumptions come into play (i.e., which are central, which are incidental) is not rigidly fixed, but is rather dynamically constrained and produced within the interaction of hearer/reader and text (whether written or oral). Once naturalized on a cosmic scale, assumptions about parental authority, for example, can be mobilized in turn to justify and reify the very cultural assumptions, practices, and social arrangements that enabled the success of the initial metaphor. While the analogy between procreation and creation in early Christian sources has received some attention, particularly in the elaborate cosmological narratives produced by or attributed to those conventionally labeled "Gnostics," the implications and complexities of such an analogy have only begun to be explored.49 This study suggests that ancient assumptions about procreation play a role not only in how early Christians imagined and constructed their visions of cosmological origins, but also in how they imagined and constructed their relations with each other as Christians. For Clement of Alexandria, kinship and procreative imagery provide a framework within which he can argue for Christianity as an essential unity, originating in one source (the father of all); it thus offers Clement both a means to tackle problems he perceives within the transmission of Christianity (especially its diverse forms) and a means to position himself as a "legitimate son" in the symbolic patrilineages of early Christian teachings while excluding other Christians as "illegitimate." Clement draws upon kinship metaphors particularly in those contexts in which authority and the transmission of authority are at stake. By reconstructing the assumptions and metaphorical constructs central to the truth claims forwarded by early Christians such as Clement, we find that insistence upon the linear progression of Christian authority is a strategy employed by Clement. Attention to this strategy aids in reconstructing early remarks, "because family and kinship relations are felt to be natural, the imagery of the family used in other contexts helps to naturalize them as well" ("Father State," 177). 49 See Richard Smith, "Sex Education in Gnostic Schools," and Elizabeth Castelli, "Response to 'Sex Education in Gnostic Schools' by Richard Smith," in Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism, ed. Karen L. King (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988) 345-60 and 361—66; and Jorunn J. Buckley and Deirdre J. Good, "Sacramental Language and Verbs of Generating, Creating, and Begetting in the Gospel of Philip," JECS 5 (1997): 1-19.

ORIGIN STORIES AS DISCOURSE

19

Christian history without recourse to the problematic dichotomy of heresy and orthodoxy.

FORMAT OF THE STUDY

The first two chapters treat Clement's assumptions about procreation by placing them within the context of the primary metaphorical construct that he employs to speak about procreation: that procreation is the sowing of human (male) seed into human (female) soil. I argue against the prevailing assumption that metaphors and models for procreation necessarily originate in literature generally classified as scientific or biological. In fact, Clement's preferred metaphor pervades a wide range of literature, including philosophical, comedic, and dream interpretive writings as well as medical. Through an examination of his discussion of procreation, I contend that a seed/soil model for procreation allows Clement to naturalize the power of the father over children and to depict paternity as the provision of essential identity and maternity as the provision of material substance and nourishment. Chapters Three and Four explore how Clement uses procreative and kinship metaphors to model the relationship between Christian teachers and students and to authorize himself as a teacher and author. I focus upon those contexts in which Clement explicitly deploys the seed/soil model as a metaphor for education and writing. He appeals to this model when he seeks to portray the transmission of authority and knowledge as a linear process. Chapter Five addresses the polemical implications of Clement's construction of an analogy between the production (as well as the transmission and acquisition) of knowledge and the production of life. Clement produces intellectual genealogies to authorize his own position as a teacher and leader, particularly at the outset of his multivolume work the Stromateis. He uses metaphors of filiation in the third and seventh books of this work to organize and manage dissent and difference among Christians.50 Chapter Six focuses on how Clement uses procreative and kinship metaphors to construct and define the boundaries of Christian existence and the content of the concept "Christian." While this chapter highlights the boundary-setting function of this language, Chapters Seven, Nine, and Ten examine the metaphorical framework for his elaboration of Christian 50

Virginia Burrus has addressed some facets of the continued vitality of this tradition, "Fecund Fathers: Heresy, the Grotesque, and Male Generativity in Gregory of Nyssa's Contra Eunomium I" (presented at the North American Patristics Society, Chicago, May 1994).

20

INTRODUCTION

norms. Chapter Seven specifically addresses how Clement uses the father and child relationship to emphasize the commonality of all Christians with each other and the divine. In rhetorical contexts in which Clement exhorts his readers to imagine themselves as children in relation to the divine, this metaphorical relationship permits him to naturalize radical power differences between divine and human realms while stressing their intimate connection. Chapter Eight pauses to explore Clement's adaptation ofpaideia to portray the process of becoming a Christian. This chapter sets the stage for the last pair of chapters, Nine and Ten, which consider an extended portion of Clement's Paidagogos in which maternal metaphors predominate. Clement develops metaphors in this context that allow him to assert the essential sameness of all Christians, while simultaneously reinforcing his own authority over against other Christian teachers.

Chapter One TRACING PROCREATION THE ORIGINS OF ORIGIN STORIES

I

T IS EASY to assume that a study of procreative metaphors necessarily entails an exhaustive study of ancient scientific theories of procreation. But do ideas about procreation (including metaphors) begin in the realm of science and only subsequently spill over into other realms? Is there a meaningful domain "science" distinct from other domains such as "religion" in the ancient Mediterranean world?1 Attempts to trace understandings of procreation in early Christian writings back to "scientific" theories of procreation not only leave these questions unasked, but they may imply that theories of procreation do not themselves depend upon particular metaphoric constructs. Feminist interpretations of both ancient and modern theories of procreation2 as well as other critical work on the role of models and metaphors within the sciences3 agree in insisting upon the cultural situatedness of all scientific theory. Instead of privileging "science" as the source of reflection on procreation, I follow these scholars in viewing science as a cultural practice, which in turn calls into question the distinction between "science" and other cultural practices, especially "religion." In the introduction, I argue that appeals to origins constitute a primary way in which historians and second-century Christians such as Clement of Alexandria authorize their constructions and reconstructions of early Christian history and identity. But that does not mean that Clement or his Christian contemporaries are dependent upon any full-blown theory of procreation for the metaphors through which an appeal to Christian origins proceeds. Most discussions of ancient Mediterranean theories of pro1 Modern disciplinary divisions obfuscate not only the interconnections of cultural symbols and assumptions in modern American society but organize ancient cultures into deceptively neat but anachronistic categories. For a recent argument about the anachronistic character of the category of science for the ancient Mediterranean world, see Roger French, Ancient Natural History: Histories of Nature (London and New York: Routledge Press, 1994) ix-xxii, 1-5. 2 See the bibliography for the works by Lesley Dean-Jones, Carol Delaney, Ann Ellis Hanson, Evelyn Fox Keller, Helen King, Lynda Lange, Emily Martin, Nancy Leys Stepan, and Nancy Tuana. 3 See the bibliography for the works by Max Black, G.E.R. Lloyd, Herbert Simons (ed.), and Thomas Kuhn.

22

CHAPTER ONE

creation focus on the writings of the Hippokratics, Aristotle, and later, the writings of Soranos and Galen.4 This trend in scholarship implies that their theories form the basis for all ancient speculation on procreation and kinship (metaphorical or not) and thus offer the best sources for understanding the use of procreative metaphors in other ancient Greek texts. "Medical" sources, however, are insufficient for explaining how Clement understands and deploys notions of procreation and kinship for two primary reasons. First, Clement is not consistent in his use of notions of procreation and kinship; specific rhetorical situations call for different types of appeals to procreation and kinship. Second, Clement's preferred metaphor for procreation, that of sowing seed into afield,does not occur in the two major sources for medical theorizing in the ancient Mediterranean world, the Hippokratic and Aristotelian works, but does appear in many other sources.

CLEMENT'S APPEAL TO A VARIETY OF PROCREATIVE ETIOLOGIES:

TkREE

EXAMPLES

Clement's statements about procreation reveal more about his rhetorical aims in a given context than they do about his knowledge of or adherence to particular models or theories of procreation. While Clement favors agricultural metaphors for procreation most broadly, he does not maintain a thoroughgoing consistency in his allusions to or discussions of procreation. In the first book of his three-part work the Paida0d£os, Clement develops an extended theological argument about the relationship between baptism and Christian identity in which he offers a condensed account of procreation as one facet of his larger argument: "[T]he formation of the conceived matter occurs when the seed [sperma] has mingled with the pure residue [of the menses]. The power that is in [the seed], which coagulates the nature of the blood in the way that rennet curdles milk, acts upon the essence [ousia] of the formation. For the [proper] mixture [krasis] thrives, but an excess is perilous, leading to sterility. So the seed is torn away when the earth itself is flooded by excessive rain, and it is dried up due to lack of moisture, but the seed is established and grows when there is a viscous humor" (Paid. 1.48.1-2).5 In his brief analysis of this 4

E.g., see the bibliography for the works by Jan Blayney, Michael Boylan, Danielle Gourevitch, Ann Ellis Hanson, Erna Lesky, Anthony Preus, and Oswei Temkin. 5 Km 8f| Kdi f\ Sia(x6p4>com(; xoC GvWrifyQtvTOt; xa> TT|t; eni \if\va KaSapaeax; UTIOKaBapcp 7i£pixxcb|i(m Kipvancvou xoo onep\iaxo.ey8V 7tp£crpUTTiEaKovxoC, KIVEVV 7ip6q auvouaiav xr]v yuvaiKa, KaxaP>.r|0svxoc. 8E XOO cr7t£puaxoc, an; EUIEIV E^OIKeiouaGai xo sv xq> croepixaxi Jtvs6|ia Kai ooxax; avk\a\ifiav£aQai xrj nXaaei. [corruption] Hapxupiov cbvouaasv Ttaaiv. Kai OTrnviKa av suayysWl^covxai oi ayysXoi xd^ ax£ipaaaiv, dyovcflv (TTCEipovTEC,. . . Affairs of the Heart20). The Loeb Classical Library translation even more strongly highlights the traditional character of this imagery: "sowing their seed, to quote the proverb, on barren rocks" (Lucian, Works, trans. M. D. MacLeod, vol. 8 [Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967] 179).

METAPHORS FOR PROCREATION

43

sense of the Platonic saying by tying it to a biblical passage: "Thus, it is most clear that the saying was transmitted through Moses [quoting Lev 18:22]: 'Do not lie with a male as with a woman, for it is an abomination'" (Paid. 2.91.1).42 This joining of Platonic and biblical imagery provides an added authority to the analogy between agricultural production and procreation; a reader may infer that this analogy aptly and accurately conveys the force of Moses' teaching.43 Moreover, Clement uses this imagery to restrict a range of hetero-erotic practices as well. By identifying fields with wives, he not only suggests that women are likefieldsin their role in procreation, but that wives share with fields the characteristic of being the property of a man.44 To make this point, Clement interweaves a citation from Plato with a Levitical injunction against adultery: "And 'abstain from working in every female field' 42 "Kai |i£Topsiv Kai TO TIKTEIV TTJ yuvaiKi TipoaeTvai 4>auEV, Ka66 9f|XEia Tuyxdvsi, ou tca6d av&pomoc,- el 8E (XT]8EV f|v TO 8id4>opov dvSpoc, Kai yuvaucoc,, Td auxa av EKaxspov aVkcbv ESpa TE Kai srcaaxfiv. T| HEV TOIVUV TOUTOV ECTTI, Tlv, TauTTj EJII xr|v auTfiv dc|)i^ETai dp£TT|v f| 8E 8idopov, KOTO TT|V TO(3 acb^aTOi; a, Eni xdc; Kvr\G£ic, Kai Tt|V oiKOUpiav (Strom. 4.59.4-60.1). For a brief discussion of this passage, see Annewies van den Hoek, "Clement of Alexandria on Martyrdom," in Studia Patristica XXVI. Papers presented at the Eleventh International Conference on Patristic Studies held, in Oxford 1991. Liturgica, Second Century, Alexandria before Nicaea, Athanasius and the Arian Controversy, ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone (Leuven: Peeters, 1993) 335-39. 55 See Soranos, Gyn. 3.5.1, for a striking parallel with this passage. 56 In two other contexts, Clement indicates that his contemporaries also know the view that female differs from male as receptive to penetrative. Clement quotes from an ascetic

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49

As we see in Chapter Ten below, in at least one extended rhetorical context Clement places a high value on the nurturant qualities assumed to be constitutive of maternity in the seed/soil modelforprocreation. First, however, we explore the ramifications of this model when it is assumed within procreative metaphors for education. It is precisely this asymmetrical seed and soil modelforprocreation that allows Clement to depict the transmission of knowledge and authority as a unilateral process, naturalized as patrilineal. Christian, Julius Cassian: "In his book On Self-Control or On Castration, [Julius Cassian] literally says, 'No one should say that because we have the parts of the body that we do, with the female shaped one way and the male another, one for receiving, the other for inseminating, sexual intercourse has God's approval'" (sv yoov xa> Ilepi EyKpaxsiac, fj nepi 8uvouXiac, Kaxd Xk£,i\ (j>r|criv "Kai uriSsic, Xzysxw oxi, enei8f| xoiauxa uopia ECTX°UEV cbc, xf|v UEV 0r|>.£iav ouxooc, ecTxtiuaxicrSai, xov 8E appsva ouxcoc,, xfiv uev 7tp6g xo SsxEcrGai, xov 8s Jipo; xo evCT7i£ipsiv,CTuyKExcbpTytaixo xf\q b\i.\Xmo, 7tapd 6eoO") {Strom. 3.91.1). Apparentiy this is exactly how some contemporaries of Clement's reasoned, as his explanation of their position reveals: "However, there are those who value marriage, saying, 'Nature has made us equipped for marriage,' as if clear from the organization of the male and female bodies, and they continually blare at us, 'Be fruitful and multiply' [Gen 1:28]" (jtX,i|v o! y&uov SoKiudi^ovxei; "f| 4>ucnUCTIK6V eyK£Kpaa9ai A,eyei xfjc, xoC o u o i o u yeveaecoc,, Kai xoTi; UEV avOpdmoic, dvGpamcov uovov, xcp 8 E craooSalq) xoC jiapcmXr|criou. dSuvaxov 8' ECTXI XOOXO 7ioif|8aTov uf| E/ovxa TEA.E(OUC, xdq apExdc,, Ka9' ac; TtaiSEoaEi xoui; Ttpocnovxac, VEOUC, Kai, &>c, EV ©savcf|xcp 4>T|ai, YEVVTICTEI Kai dvGpamoui; &7toxe^£a£r KUEIV y a p xoui; UEV Kaxd acoua, xoug 8 E Kaxd yuxTIv, £7tsi Kai Ttapd xoig PapPdpoic; 4>IXO(T64>OK; XO Kaxrixnaai T E K a i coxicrai avayEvvfiaai ^Eysxai, Kai "byw 6uax£po s/ovxi 8 S Ttpoaxs9f|aExai." enayykXXEzai 5E OUX GXJXE spurivEucrai xd omopprixa iKavax;, noXXov ye Kai 5eT, novov 8E XO urcouvriaai, EIXE OTIOXE sKtaiGoineGa EIXE ojtcoi; ur|8' £KXav9ava)us9a (Strom. 1.14.1-2). 20 aXX' Ecrxi xro ovxi T) X&V raonvrm&xoov UTIOXUJIOOCJK; ocra 8ia0jropa5r|v Kai 8isppi|iusvox; EYKaxecT7tapn£VT|v EXOUCTI xrjv dA,T|9eiav, oiuaq av taxGoi xouc; 8IKT|V KOXOI&V crasp;. EJidv 8E dya9oO XU/TI yscopyoO, EK(|>uc7£xai Etcaaxov auxrov Kai xov Tiupov dva(Strom. 1.56.3). At several other transitional points in the Stromateis—notably the opening of books four and six—Clement restates this description of the work as a field in which the seeds of truth have been deliberately dispersed (Strom. 4.6.1-7.4; 6.2.1-2.4; see also Strom. 7.111.1-3). 21 See Strom. 6.67.1-2. 22 Clement considers Pauline not only those letters considered by modern scholars to have been written by Paul, but also the deutero-Paulines, the Pastorals, as well as Hebrews.

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Strom. 1.3.3). In the central portion of the first book of the Stromateis (Strom. 1.4.1-1.9.4), Clement interprets Pauline material to develop an argument for the equal validity of both speaking and writing as means to accomplish this goal. Adducing Paul's letter to the Galatians, Clement likens both speaker and writer to farmers: "If two people preach the word, one in writing [jjraphe], one orally [phone], should we not receive them both, since they have put faith in action through their love?. . . . True knowledge is somehow angelic, whether it operates through the hand or through the tongue, being useful 'because the one who sows into the spirit from the spirit shall harvest eternal life . . .'" (Gal 6:8; Strom. 1.4.1, 2). 23 Clement aligns writing with speaking as two forms of spiritual planting, a point he makes explicit slightly later: "The farming is of two kinds: one unwritten \agraphos\, the other written [enjjfraphos]. But whichever method the Lord's worker uses to sow the good grain, to help the stalks to grow, and to reap the harvest, he will clearly be seen as God's true farmer" (Strom. 1.7.1).24 In this passage Clement compares the grain sown and harvested by Christian teachers with instruction that leads to salvation. Clement combines this interpretation with a passage from 1 Corinthians to support further the comparable worth of writing and speaking: " 'He who plants and he who waters'—being servants of the one who grants growth—'are one' with respect to their service, 'and each will receive his appropriate wages in the light of his own labor. We are fellow workers with God. You are God's field. You are God's building.' So the apostle puts it" (1 Cor 3:8-9; Strom. 1.7.4).25 Whereas Paul associates planting and watering with two different teachers, himself and Apollos,26 Clement links these two activities to two different modes of teaching, that is, writing and speaking. Without specifying which sort of teacher engages in which type 23 si xoivuv Sn4>™ Knpuxxoum xov ^.oyov, o UEV xf| 7pa4>f|, o 8 E xf| 4>oc;. oTioxEpax; 8' Sv 6 xoC Kupiou hpydn\c, OTiEipr] xovx; EuysvEi^ Ttupoui; Kai xoui; CTtaxu? au^f|ar| XE Kai 6EPICTTI, 8EIOavr|0£xai ysoipyog (Strom. 1.7.1). 25 "6 .rm/Exai Kaxd xov iSiov KOTIOV. GEOO yap eop.ev auvspyoi' GEOO ystopyiov, BEOO OIKOSO^TI s a x s , " Kaxd xov dTiocruoXov (Strom. 1.7.4). 26 In 1 Corinthians, Paul compares himself to a planter, and the Christian teacher Apollos to a waterer, each of whom works in God's field, which Paul identifies collectively as his Corinthian audience: "I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. . . . H e who plants and he who waters are equal, and each shall receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God's fellow workers; you are God's field . . . " (1 Cor 3:6, 8 - 9 ) .

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of activity,27 Clement has now secured one authoritative text, Paul's, to argue that both forms of teaching transmit the same truth from the same source (God). By invoking the authority of Paul's formulation, Clement bolsters his defense against those who view writing as foolish {Strom. 1.2.2) or dangerous {Strom. 1.14.3). In addition, this Corinthian passage clinches Clement's unsupported prior claim that writing, as well as speaking, fulfills Paul's exhortation to pass on tradition (2 Tim 2:2; Strom. 1.3.3).

CONCLUSION

Osborn identifies four facets to Clement's argument in favor of teaching through writing: 1) that wisdom must be shared; 2) that writing proclaims the Word; 3) that writing hands on tradition; and 4) that writing combats heresy.28 Osborn situates his analysis of Clement's defense of writing within what he calls the "prejudice against writing" in the "Church of the second century," in contrast to second-century "heretics" who "by their clever writing confuse and mislead their readers."29 This framework elides the source of Clement's defensiveness toward writing with the motivating cause for his own writing despite a "prejudice against writing." Further, Osborn assumes that a notion of "the Church" can be taken as a given for the late second century (in contrast to some "others," labeled as "heretics"). These problems can be avoided by resituating Clement's defense of writing in a broader context. First, Clement does not respond to but rather contributes to the construction of such categories as heretical and orthodox precisely by asserting his right to pass on Christian tradition (in whatever form) over and against Christian "others." Second, Clement's defense of writing should 27 Slightly later Clement describes the role of an orator: "[The orator] distinguishes the one who is capable of hearing from the rest. He keeps an eye on their words and ways, their character and life, their emotions and attitudes, their look and voice, the parting of the ways, the rock, the well-trodden path, the ground that bears fruit, the countryside that is thick with trees, the land which is fertile, excellent, praised, the soil which is capable of multiplying the seed" (SiaKpivei xcbv aXkcav xov oiov xe SKOUEIV, EJtixr|pa>v TOOK; Xoyow;, xou6pov yf|v, xfiv u^ouavouaav xo>Pav> Tf|v Euopov Kai KaXrjv Kai yEcopyouuEvnv, xi|v rco?iU7i>.aaidaai xov ajropov SuvauEvnv) (Strom. 1.9.1). As the context makes clear, the capacity to hear is equated with fertility. Nicholas Constas has explored this motif in later Christian traditions about Mary, "The Conceptio per Aurem in Late Antiquity: Observations on Eve, the Serpent, and Mary's Ear," paper presented at the annual meeting of the North American Patristics Society, Chicago, May 1996. 28 Osborn, "Teaching and Writing," 3 3 5 - 4 3 . 29 Ibid., 335, 339.

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be interpreted not merely within a Christian prejudice against writing but a philosophical one that Plato argues and that later Platonists perpetuate, even as they revise the critique. In this rhetorical context we see that procreative metaphors do not constitute the backbone of Clement's defense of writing but allow him to revise Platonic challenges to writing. For example, the image of a writing needing special assistance in order to communicate its import effectively to readers (e.g., Strom. 1.14.4) evokes a cultural association with children as helpless, more clearly conveyed in Plato's criticism that a writing "always needs its father to help it" (Phaedrus 275e). Clement concedes this risk but counters it. By claiming that his text should be understood more as seeds that await the farmer discerning enough to take and plant them in future fields {Strom. 1.56.3), Clement mobilizes agriculturally based images to bolster both his claim that the Stromateis is a notebook of reminders rather than a fully elaborated treatise and his claim to be a "farmer of faith," who rightfully received from his teachers the true "wheat" seeds, "the seeds of their apostolic progenitors" (Strom. 1.11.3). Ultimately, Clement is not wholly consistent in his depiction of his own writing—he construes it variously as his offspring, notebook, memoryaid—but all of these contribute to Clement's overall goal: to demonstrate his reliability as a transmitter of Christian truth. Procreative imagery offers one way to convey this impression. As Chapter Five shows, two interlocking ways in which Clement criticizes other Christians later in the Stromateis are to assert that they get their ideas from sources that do not contain the truth or that they use sources that contain the truth, but misinterpret them, thereby distorting the truth (e.g., Strom. 3.29.1-3). For this line of argument, procreative and filial metaphors are of central importance.

Chapter Five "FEW ARE LIKE THEIR FATHERS" THE RHETORIC OF GENEALOGY AND INTRA-CHRISTIAN POLEMIC For the Lord's true elect do not pronounce dogmas or produce children to be under a curse like the heretics. (Strom. 3.98.5)

E

ARLY CHRISTIANS intensely debate how to understand the relationships between divine and human, among aspects of the divine, / and among humans—particularly the relationships between Christians and Jews, Christians and other non-Christians, and among varieties of Christians.1 I assume that no early Christian source offers us an unbiased or true account of these complexities. By resisting such labels as heretical and orthodox, we can examine how early Christians use metaphors to sculpt and constrain intra-Christian arguments and consider the complexity of early Christianity in its diverse richness as a field of possibilities rather than as a primitive undifferentiated stage in an inevitable evolutionary process.2 That is, it is more helpful to privilege an investigation of the rhetorical strategies whereby Alexandrian Christians struggled to portray themselves as the most authentic representatives of Christian truth than to assume that some of these Christians were, essentially, heretical or orthodox. Further, it is in the use of kinship and procreative language that we find the primary basis for arguments for authenticity and inauthentidty. Regardless of an early Christian's place within the field of possible forms of Christian 1 An earlier version of the argument in this chapter has been published as Denise Kimber Buell, "Producing Descent/Dissent: Clement of Alexandria's Use of Filial Metaphors as Intra-Christian Polemic," HTR 90 (1997): 89-104. Copyright 1997 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission. 2 I owe this last felicitous turn of phrase to Allen Callahan. Ifindit particularly appropriate for a study of procreative language, given Darwin's own use of procreative imagery in the formulation of his theory of evolution (see, for example, John Angus Campbell, "Scientific Discovery and Rhetorical Invention: The Path to Darwin's Origin," in The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry, ed. Herbert W. Simons [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990] 58-90).

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practice, worship, and teaching, kinship imagery often serves to authorize one's position over against others. I do not mean to claim that the terms heretic and orthodox were not bandied about at this time, but rather that the overarching framework whereby these categories were constructed was one of kinship and genealogy. This framework itself is not a fixed one, but rather a naturalizing mode of discourse that can be used to define and draw boundaries between various types of "insiders" and "outsiders." That is, orthodoxy and heresy are the flexible by-products of the rhetoric of kinship and procreation, not the reverse. Scholars who do not recognize this will continue to reinscribe selectively the categories of heretical and orthodox despite any concessions that these categories are polemical as well as anachronistic for the second century. Birger Pearson's study of "anti-heretical warnings" in Nag Hammadi texts offers a good illustration of my point. Pearson notes that some of the texts traditionally labeled as Gnostic (and hence, "heretical") employ rhetorical strategies of condemnation and exclusion directed against other Christians.3 Pearson concludes that "some Gnostics were very serious in their attempts to define and safeguard the truth. Though their versions of the truth were not the same as that of the catholic church fathers, we now see that their methods were not so different."4 While I certainly agree with Pearson that there were many Christians who offered different versions of what constituted truth in Christian practices and beliefs, he maintains a dichotomizing construct of "catholic" v. "gnostic" that reinscribes rather than challenges traditional views about the emergence of Christian discourse. The issue is not who can call whom heretical, but rather, whether the recognition of the pervasiveness of this boundary-drawing gesture exposes as contentless and thus untenable historical reconstructions of Christianity that employ "heretical" and "orthodox," or even their masked analogues "gnostic" and "catholic." Clement uses procreative metaphors not only to describe relations among Christian teachers and students and to authorize his own position as a Christian author, but also to distinguish "true" from "false" Christians. In particular, Clement mobilizes procreative and kinship metaphors in his Stromateis to organize and manage dissent and difference among Christians, most notably in books three and seven. In these contexts, Clement produces "false" and "true" genealogies of Christian teachings; this rhetorical strategy functions to define his particular vision for Christianity as its true form while making other forms of Christian thought and 3

Birger A. Pearson, Gnosticism, Judaism, and Egyptian Christianity, Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990)192. 4 ibid., 193; emphasis in original.

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practice appear fragmented and illegitimate. The linearity of the process implied in the model offers him a means to tackle problems he perceives within the transmission of Christianity—particularly contrasting claims to authoritative interpretation of scripture and the practices inferred from these interpretations. While he authorizes his own position as a Christian teacher by constructing a spiritual genealogy, he also employs genealogical categories either to delegitimize other Christian and non-Christian perspectives (and practices) or to assimilate them into his own.

PRODUCING CHILDREN, PRONOUNCING DOGMA

The third book of the Stromateis consists of an extended discussion of Christian perspectives on marriage and sexual practices. I suggest that at least portions of it function simultaneously on a metaphorical level. Throughout this work, Clement portrays himself as the moderate, between extreme poles of "aberrant" Christian (and non-Christian) sexual mores. As Jean-Paul Broudehoux has noted, Clement consistently supports both marriage—which he elides with procreation—and celibacy as viable Christian practices.5 In the latter portion of the third book of the Strdmateis Clement writes: "For to the one who produces children according to the Logos, who nurtures and educates them in the Lord just as to the one who begets through catechesis in the truth, there are wages for that one as also for the elect seed" {Strom. 3.98.4, my emphasis).6 This passage, which makes analogous the processes of human procreation and of spiritual education, occurs within a context of comparisons between marriage and celibacy. Clement leads his reader to equate the educator with the celibate person (eunouchos) by the immediate context. For example, in a passage preceding the above statement, Clement asserts: Again the Lord says, "the married person should not break it off and the unmarried person should not marry,"7 in other words, an unmarried person who has publicly promised celibacy (eunouchias) should remain unmarried. To both kinds [married and unmarried], the same Lord gives corresponding promises through the prophet Isaiah, saying: "the eunuch should not say 'I am a barren tree.' The Lord says to eunuchs, 'if you keep my sabbath and do everything 5

Jean-Paul Broudehoux, Muriate et famille chez Clement d'Alexandrie (Paris: Beauchesne et Ses Fils, 1970) 99-113.

6 xw ydp Katd Xbyov xeKVO7roiT|aa(isvcp Kai &va9peya|i8vq> Kai TtaiSeuaavxi EV Kupicp KaSdrtsp Kai xcp 8id xfj? akr\%o\Sc, Kazryir\az(ac, y£vvr|aavxi KeTxai xiq (iiaQo^ raarcep Kai xcp EK^EKXCOCTTtEpnaxi{Strom. 3.98.4). 7 This saying is an ctgraphon.

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which I have commanded, I shall give you a place better than sons and daughters." [Is 56:3-5] Celibacy alone is not righteous, nor indeed the sabbath of the celibate, without doing the commandments. To the married persons he adds and says, "My elect will not labor in vain nor produce children under a curse, because [their] seed is blessed by the Lord" (Is 65:23; Strom. 3.97.4-98.3, my emphasis).8 Clement adapts Isaiah 56:3-5 to offer a positive interpretation for celibacy, although he emphasizes that celibacy alone does not guarantee divine approval, indicating that he wishes to distance his position from others who uphold the virtues of sexual abstinence. Clement's juxtaposition of Is 56:3-5 with 65:23 indicates a strategy of offering a scriptural proof for two practices that he considers acceptable for a Christian. In this context Clement describes the procreation and education of one's children as a two-stage process for married persons: 1) producing children according to the Logos, 2) nurturing and educating them in the Lord. In contrast the celibate person, figured as spiritual educator, accomplishes both steps simultaneously, begetting through instruction. Instead of contrasting celibacy starkly with marriage and procreation, Clement allies them by depicting the results of celibacy in terms of procreation. Now that he has constructed celibacy as a potentially fertile state, Clement can use his metaphorical equation of Christian teaching with procreation to attack his opponents: "Other people (allot) view the production of children as 'a curse' and do not understand that scripture is speaking against them. For the Lord's true elect do not pronounce dogmas or produce children to be under a curse like the heretics'" (Strom. 3.98.5, my emphasis). 9 By linking Christian teaching with procreation, Clement not only associates heresy with the view that procreation is a curse but also implies that any "children" produced by "heretics" are cursed. Clement manipulates Is 65:23 to suggest that some kinds of procreation are in fact cursed—those spiritual or physical forms of procreation that produce illegitimate children, including false doctrine. The "elect" represent Clem8

7cd^.iv 6 KupioT|aiv "6 yiinafiv. oi ydp xai ovxi xoO Kupiou EKXEKXOV OU 8oynaxi^oi)0iv OU8E XEKvoTtoioucnv xd Eiq Kaxdpav aonsp ai aipsoEig (Strom. 3.98.5).

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ent and his followers, in contrast to the "heretics" who produce cursed descendants—their doctrines as well as their adherents. By this move, Clement encourages his readers to recast the foregoing discussion of the entire third book (and the end of the second book) of the Stromateis metaphorically in terms of the legitimacy of truth claims among Christian groups. While practices are of central concern to Clement, 10 it is nonetheless important to note that questions of practice for Clement are also questions of Christian truth; further, he engages questions of truth not only through disputes over proper Christian practices but also in symbolic terms drawn especially from practices associated with procreation and filial relations.

"FEW ARE LIKE THEIR FATHERS": THE RHETORIC OF SONSHIP What if we turn our attention to texts in which sexual practices are not at issue? Kinship and procreative language still function to define membership and authenticity in Christianity. For Clement, Christian identity can be plotted along genealogical lines: true Christians are the heirs to knowledge that must be traceable to a single source, the Logos. Any assertion of legitimacy as a Christian entails two claims: 1) to unilateral descent through "fathers" (small/) who have passed on the essence of the original Father and 2) to faithful cultivation and preservation of this essence. In this second claim, three concepts converge: procreation, paideia, and mimesis. Procreation is understood as a mimetic process, as is paideia; paideia and mimesis can both be depicted using procreative metaphors. Clement and his contemporaries expected that knowledge and education would and should transform the learner into the likeness of the teacher. Clement provides a detailed example of this notion that you become what you study, or specifically that you become like your teacher: "Just as one who attaches himself to Isomachus, [Isomachus] will make a farmer, [a long list of other examples ensues] . . . so the one who obeys the Lord and follows the prophecy given through him, is fully perfected after the likeness (kat' eikona) of his teacher, a god moving about in the flesh" {Strom. 7.101.4).n Using kinship and agricultural metaphors to communicate his claim, Clement positions himself as a rightful heir to Christian tradition. Let us look again at a passage we considered briefly in the previous chapter: "But 10

van den Hoek, "How Alexandrian Was Clement," HeyJ 31 (1990): 179-94. 188. aq 8E lav TtpocTcrxT) nq 'Icro|idxcp, yecopyov auxov Jioif|crei. . . . ouxcoi; 6 x& Kupicp 7i£i86nevo heresie, 2: 264). 29

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makes the former charge explicitly in the Paidagogos: "But if we as infants protect ourselves from the winds that blow us into the swell of heresy and refuse to listen to those who set up other fathers for us, then we are made perfect [or mature] by accepting Christ as our head and becoming ourselves the church" (Paid. 1.18.4).32 The possible identity of such "other fathers," while not spelled out here, clearly refers to forms of Christian teaching and practices with which Clement disagrees, as the reference to heresy indicates. Human fathers are not at issue in this passage; rather, allegiance to God as the true father concerns the knowledge and observance of one's role in the cosmic order of things.33 In the next set of passages to be considered, Clement condemns other Christians either by affiliating them with a superhuman father who is not God or by ridiculing their concept of God. This strategy is closely related to Clement's attribution of false or illegitimate lineages of knowledge to competing groups of Christians. Drawing upon John 8:44, Clement decries false prophecy in terms of paternity and lineage: "False prophets" like the devil, "have committed theft" (Strom. 1.84.7-85.1);34 "for the Lord says, 'You are from your father the devil and wish to do the desires of your father. . . . When he speaks a lie, he speaks about himself since he is falseness and the father of falseness"' (Strom. 1.85.2).35 In this context, false prophets are those whose father or source is the devil rather than God. In the second book of the Stromateis, Clement launches a critique of all his Christian opponents, using views of the relationship between human and divine as the basis for his critique: "God has no natural attitude towards us, as the founders of the heresies like to think. . . . But God is naturally 'rich in mercy' and out of his goodness cares for us although we 8 E o i vr|7iioi xoi>q 7tapa4>uci(BVTaq eiq 4>uffiv aipeaecov avEuouc, Kai uf| KaxaniatsuovxEi; T O I ; aX^ouc, f]uiv VOUOGETOGCTI raiTEpac,, TE^EIOUUESOI TOTE, OTE SCTUEV SKKXnCjia TT|V K£(xXr|V, TOV XpiCJTOV, uaiKf|v aximv,

mq oi xa>v aipEcrecov Kxiaxai

GEXOUCTIV. . . . aXXa yap (J>UCTEI "Tt^-oucnoc, &V 6 8E6C EV E^ECO" 5id xf|v aoxoC dya06xT]xa

Kf|8sxai f||iIJCTEI XEKVCOV (Strom. 2.74.1, 4). 37 a>Aoi XIVEC., oCc, Kcri XvxvcdKxac. Ka^oO|iev, Xeyonaiv oxi 6 nev GEOC. 6 xcov oXmv Jtaxf|p rincbv ECTXI cj>ucrei, Kai 7idv9' o a a TIEJIOITIKEV dyaGd ECTTIV eic, 8E TIC. TO>V U7t' autoC yEyovoxcov sTtEcraEipsv xd t ^ d v i a xf)v xmv KOKCOV 4>6atv ysvvf|aa.T|9UVECT0E" u|ia Kxrindxoov 7iai5iKrj npocrnyopia xurncravxei; jtcuSeiav Kai TtaiSayrayiav KEKXTIKOHEV) (Paid. 1.16.1). 13 Having condemned the supposition that infants (nepioi) are stupid (aperonoi) as itself childish or foolish (neputios), Clement asserts that they are rather "newly gentle" (neepioi), "like a soft-hearted one [hapaloperbn] is gentle [epios], having just now become gentle and mild [praos] in character [tropos]" (Paid. 1.19.1). Slightly later in this section, Clement makes another etymological point, with reference to the first syllable of the word nepios, ne-, insisting that it does not have the negative semantic value, "as the children of the grammarians think" (Paid. 1.20.1). 14 "I shall touch briefly on another [example] more important to the pleading of my case than the previous [examples]: the Lord himself is called [onomazein] 'child' [paidion]" (Paid. 1.24.1).

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whom Scripture refers do not crawl on the ground like serpents but are more like angels, whose feet barely touch the ground (1.16.3). 15 In discussing the term nepios, "infant," Clement provides an extensive litany of characteristics that the reader should associate with infancy. Having argued for an etymology of nepioszs a compound of the prefix ne-, for "new," with the adjective epios, for "gentle," Clement offers Paul's words as a scriptural proof: "This [etymology] iswhatthe blessed Paul most wisely intimated [huposemainein] when he said, 'Although we were able to be severe, as apostles of Christ, we became gentle [ epios] among you, like a nurse [ trophos] would care for her own children [tekna].' Thus, the infant [nepios] is gentle [ epios] and by this is most delicate [ atalos], tender [ hapalos], simple [ haplos], guileless [adolos], unhypocritical [anupokritos], fair [ithus tengnomen], and straight [orthos]. Simplicity [haplotes] is the underlying reality [hupostasis] of truth" (Paid. 1.19.2-3). 16 Clement's interpretation of 1 Thess 2:7 is intriguing. He interprets epios in light of the concept of childhood although in this verse epios properly qualifies the behavior of the apostles (who are here depicted as nurses in contrast to the Thessalonian "children"). 17 Clement recognizes that the term child would ordinarily be understood in opposition to the category "man," as in adult male (aner). He does not explicitly dismantle this opposition; rather he gives an example from women's lives that appears not to contain this opposition: "Are you amazed to hear that the Lord considers children those whom the gentiles consider men? You seem to me to not know Greek well, since one can say in Greek that beautiful, attractive, and free young women are still called 'girls' [paidiskai] and female slaves who are themselves young women are called 'little girls' [paidiskaria]. . . ." (Paid. 1.14.1). 18 Notably, Clement 15 xfjv £v Ttaicriv anX6xr[za zlq e^o|xoicotTiv jrapaKaxaxiSEHEvoc, f|uiv (Paid. 1.12.4). In insisting that the children of Scripture are more like angels than serpents, Clement writes: OUKfip'EXI Ku^.i6|is6a oi vf|7tioi X a H a i OUSE epjio|xsv ox; TO TtpooGsv £7ti yf|£I>.EI xouiouc uovouc. Kai PonGEi Kai {mep\ia%£i Kai Sid touxo ovo^d^st TtaiSiov (Paid. 1.21.1-2). 31 For example, he mentions the behavior of various kinds of female birds (kingfisher, partridge, hen), sea-dog, female bear, and human mothers. A notable exception is Plutarch's example of the protective behavior of a male lion (On Affection for Offspring ¥)^cC), which is interesting in light of Clement's use of a lion in his own list. In his Protreptikos, however, Clement does enlist some examples of protective maternal behavior among animals and then compares it to the God the Father's attitude toward humans (Prot. 91.3).

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Finally, it is worth noting Clement's mention of the concept of adoption in this passage. The promise of adoption reveals that be(com)ing a child to God entails not only the receipt of God's affection and protection, but also the ability to inherit as sons, the ability to claim legitimate status within a divinely authorized bloodline (see discussion of Paid. 1.50.1 in Chapter Ten).

CONCLUSION

Clement favors a positive valuation of infants and children in chapter five, consistently exhorting his readers to imagine themselves as children in relation to God. This metaphoric relation permits Clement not only to speak about radical power differences between divine and human realms, but also provides a model whereby he can depict how divine and human realms are connected at all. Clement's emphasis upon infancy and childhood as a Christian's status relative to God has consequences for how he can speak about relations among Christians as well. In the portion of the Paidagqgos examined in this chapter, Clement's focus on human-divine relations partially masks his own self-positioning as father to his readers.32 God's fatherhood and the fatherhood ascribed to human teachers do not pose a contradiction for Clement. One consequence of his use of developmental language in the Pai&agogos is the reinforcement of power differences among Christians: catechumens and newer Christians are cast in the role of infants whereas Christian teachers such as Clement star as the adults. By classifying newly converted Christians as children, Clement appeals to a broad cultural norm that mandates obedience for children in relation to adults, especially parents. The model of parent-child relations lends an air of naturalness to hierarchical relations among Christians even while it insists upon the essential similarity in substance among all Christians. As we see in Chapter Ten, Clementfindsmetaphors drawn from notions of maternity and digestion especially well suited to supporting this position. The analogy between human development and Christian development allows Clement to account for differences among Christians; as Camelot aptly notes, "There is no more man or woman [after baptism], but there are still children and adults."33 By combining this model for human differ32 Throughout the Paidagogos, Clement rhetorically positions himself as father in relation to his audience (e.g., 1.1.1; 4 . 1 : "d paides humeis"). 33 Camelot, Foi et Gnose (Paris: Vrin, 1945) 4 6 .

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ence with the analogy between parent-child relations and divine-human relations (that all Christians are children in relation to God), Clement can argue that Christians are all essentially the same type of being, although they may differ from each other in their respective states of spiritual development.

Chapter Eight PAIDEIA AND THE PAIDAGOGOS The Paidagojjos . . . [presents] childhood training and nourishment, which is the way of life that assists in increasing faith through catechesis and, for those who have been registered as men, prepares the virtuous soul in advance for the reception of gnostic knowledge. (Strom. 6.1.3)

C

LEMENT DEPICTS the process of becoming a Christian as analogous with conception, birth, and life development of a well-born free man. "Education" is coterminous with life development; one's educator and the content of one's education changes over time (from mother/nurse to paidajjqgos to didaskalos) as one grows and matures (see Paid. 1.3.3).1 As Peter Brown notes, to depict an individual's life as a Christian as analogous to the life development of a free man, "condense[s] a whole moral and social program."2 While second-century Christians had no comprehensive and universally agreed-upon model for Christian identity, they did have non-Christian cultural models available to them. The moral and social program that Clement's readers would have associated with the infants and children is paideia—the moral, physical, and intellectual training that all well-born males with adequate financial means in the Greco-Roman world received.3 1

Clement uses a slightly different schema at the opening of the Paidagogos; see Paid. 1.3.3: persuasion, education, teaching (TtpoxpETCEiv, 7tai8aY(Byeiv, EKSISCKTKEW). In this context Clement contrasts health with education: the non-Christian is viewed as pathological, in need of healing, before s/he can receive knowledge. The image of newly converted Christians as infants that Clement expounds beginning in Paid. 1.12.1, however, replaces pathological imagery: rebirth is highlighted rather than the curing of prior illness. Clement's notion of progressive stages of education has been seized upon as a means of establishing the relation among Clement's works, particularly the significance and location of the Strbmateis. Because Clement distinguishes between phases of spiritual education, analogous with phases of Greek education, some have argued that the Stromateis completes a trilogy that the Protreptikos and the Paidagogos begin, while others insist that this hypothesis is unfounded. Marrou, however, suspends this question as not directly relevant to a study of the Paidagogos (Le Pedagogue, bk. 9). 2 Brown, Body and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) 128. 3 See Henri-Irenee Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. George Lamb (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); and Robert A. Raster, The Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Uni-

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The success of this system appears to be in question, however, in the second century. Maud Gleason suggests that the spate of deportment manuals published in the second century implies a crisis among the elite, indicating that even the well-born could not be assured that they would automatically learn/know how to act anymore.4 This trend towards publicizing cultural norms supplies the broadest context for interpreting Clement's three-part work the Paidagqgos. Christian authors seeking to persuade Greek and Roman contemporaries of the merits of their respective Christian visions would also have dealt in this intellectual coinage. At a time when Christian norms were far from fixed, it was necessary to make competing views public—the trope of paideia offered one vehicle for articulating such norms. Clement draws upon and reshuffles the cultural norms ofpaideiato create a specifically Christian paideia.5 He not only presents Christianity as consistent with traditional paideia but positions Christianity as its pinnacle— above the expected summit of philosophy. His title for this work, the Paidagogos, locates it symbolically within a framework ofpaideia. One learns as a "child" from the divine Paidagogos6—the Logos. As the following passage indicates, Clement shapes his Paidagogos explicitly around the analogy between the process of Christian self-formation and childhood development: "The Paidagojjos, which we divided into three books, has presented childhood training and nourishment, which is the way of life that assists in increasing faith through catechesis and, for those who have been registered as men, prepares the virtuous7 soul in advance for the reception of gnostic knowledge" (Strom. 6.1.3).8 Especially in chapters five and six of the first versity of California Press, 1988) 15-31. That is, when Clement talks about the development of a child into an adult, he does not have in mind a set of experiences shared by all individuals; rather, he has in mind those stages of development and training generally earmarked for freeborn males although he claims that they apply metaphorically to all Christians. 4 Maud Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) xxv. 5 See also Marrou, Le Pedagogue, Book 1, 14-34; Brown, The Body and Society, 122-39; Gleason, Making Men, 6 4 - 6 5 , 68-72; and Harry O. Maier, "Clement of Alexandria and the Care of the Self," JAAR 62 (1994): 719-45. 6 The paidagogos, traditionally but not always a male slave, served as the child's tutor in early moral development. For an extensive bibliography on this topic, see Annewies van den Hoek, "The 'Catechetical' School of Early Christian Alexandria and Its Philonic Heritage," HTR90 (1997): 64n.23. 7 Liddell and Scott note that this adjective is also used as a modifier for earth (ge), in which case it can be translated "productive" (see svdpsxoc,, in Liddell, Scott, Jones, et al., eds., A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed). 8 fyQaoaq 8s 6 110180703765 T|uTv EV xpicri Sioupouusvoc, pip^.015 xf|v EK TiaiScov aycoyriv XE Kai xpoc)>f|v jtapEcrrnaEV, xouxsaxiv EK K(XXT|XT|CT£COC, auvauijouaav Tfj JIICTXEI 7io>.ixEiav Kai jipo7iapao"K£ud£ourjav xoic, sic, SvSpac, E77pa4>O|J.svoic, svdpsxov xrjv V|/UXT|V sic, E7ttcjxr||ir|c, 7va>axiKfjg raxpaSoxiiv (Strom. 6.1.3).

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book of his Paidagogos, Clement expounds for his readers the link between the theological teaching they are receiving from him and the character of their transformation and development into Christians. Since second-century Christians were clearly vying with one another over whose public display of Christianity would predominate, it is not surprising to find some Christians adapting aspects oi paideia for promoting the respectability of Christianity in general and the persuasiveness of their favored form of Christian practice in particular.9 A Christian (such as Clement) who had himself10 acquired classical paideia might reasonably draw upon its credentializing status in such competition and defend his particular form of Christian thought and practice using rhetorical strategies offered by non-Christian authors speaking about paideia. RHETORICAL STRATEGIES OF

PAIDEIA

Since paideia was a moral and social program that began at birth, if not earlier,11 it is not surprising that procreative, alimentary, and developmental metaphors are frequently used to describe this educative process. Shaping Bodies and Minds Paideia entails rigorous practices enacted upon well-born male bodies from birth, beginning with swaddling and massage in order to ensure "the infant's physical development along appropriately 'natural' lines."12 9 Peter Brown and Werner Jaeger have argued for the importance of classical paideia for the articulation and success of Christianity. See Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); and Werner Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961). 10 I intentionally employ dus pronoun in its noninclusive sense; not all Christians would have had access to classical paideia. On the other hand, a Christian, male or female, slave or free, might have drawn upon cultural commonplaces pertaining to paideia in their depiction of norms of Christian training and conduct. 11 Clement's near contemporary Pseudo-Plutarch, in the treatise On the Education ofFree Children, asserts that paideia actually begins before birth, with a man's selection of an appropriate woman with whom to have children. Pseudo-Plutarch writes: "Let us consider what may be said of the education of free-born children. . . . It is perhaps better to begin with their parentage first; and I should advise those desirous of becoming fathers of notable offspring to abstain from random cohabitation with women. I mean such women as courtesans and concubines. For those who are not well-born, whether on the father's or the mother's side, have an indelible disgrace in their low birth, which accompanies them throughout their lives, and offers to anyone desiring to use it a ready subject of reproach and insult" (On the Education of Children 1A—B). 12 Gleason, Making Men, 70. See also Soranos, Gyn. 2.14-15 [83-84]; 30-35 [ 9 9 104].

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Pseudo-Plutarch offers a striking description of this process, linking the physical molding of the body to the intellectual molding of the mind: For just as it is necessary, immediately after birth, to begin to mold the limbs of the children's bodies [i.e., through massage and swaddling] in order that these may grow straight and without deformity, so, in the same fashion, it is fitting from the beginning to regulate the characters [ethe] of children. For youth [neotes] is impressionable [euplastos] and pliant [hugros; or liquid], and while such minds [psuchai] are still tender [haplai] lessons [mathemata] are deeply infused into them; but anything which has become hard [skleron] is softened with difficulty. For just as seals leave their impression in soft wax, so are lessons impressed upon the minds of children while they are young.13 (On the Education of Children 3E) Clement also shares and makes use of this perception that infants are malleable and employs this metaphor in the first book of the Stromateis.14 The right kind of teachings, like proper swaddling, will cause the soul to develop properly. This emphasis on molding bodies helps to explain the importance of physiognomy as a practice of deciphering the relative success that a man had in achieving the cultural norm of masculinity.15 The practice of judging the interior state from the exterior was not restricted to the well born, however; as Gleason puts it, in the face-to-face society of the Mediterranean world, "everyone who had to choose a son-in-law or a traveling companion, deposit valuables, buy slaves, or make a business loan became perforce an amateur physiognomist: he made risky inferences from human surfaces to human depths." 16 In books two and three of the Paidagogos, Clement presents his own detailed version of proper Christian practices (see especially Paid. 3.15-25; 53-56; 60-74) and emphasizes that detailed guidelines for bodily deportment contribute to the health and character of the soul (e.g., Paid. 1.1.4). 17 13 Translation adapted from Frank Cole Babbitt, in Plutarch, Moralia, vol. 1 (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927). 14 Strom. 1.26.3-4; 31.5. The latter example belongs within Clement's extended adaptation of the Hagar and Sarah motif from Philo's De congressu. See van den Hoek, Clement of Alexandria and His Use ofPhilo (Leiden: Brill, 1988) 2 3 - 6 8 . Strom. 1.31.5, however, does not derive from De congressu; van den Hoek has noted its similarities with both De somnis 1.167 and possibly De Abrahamo 52 (neither include this seal imagery). 15 Gleason, Making Men, 5 5 - 8 1 ; an earlier version of her argument is published as "The Semiotics of Gender: Physiognomy and Self-Fashioning in the Second Century c.E.," in Before Sexuality. The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, ed. David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin, 389-415 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Gleason rightly notes that "'masculine' and 'feminine' (dpasviKOV and 9T|XUKOV) function as physiognomical categories for both male and female subjects" (391); "gender is independent of anatomical sex" (390). 16 Gleason, Making Men, 55. 17 Scholars of late antiquity have mined these books for glimpses of Christian daily life and practices in late-second-century Alexandria. The most comprehensive study of this kind re-

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Nursing as Character Formation Just as the regulation and manipulation of infant male bodies comprised one facet of social formation, so too did breast feeding.18 According to Clement, the first lessons of a Christian, as for a child, are transmitted through milk, whereby the "fluid" and tender soul of the child begins to take shape and harden (Paid. 1.38.3). The nourishment taken in at the breast, whether provided by a wet nurse or the mother, frequently serves as a metonym for all aspects of early childhood rearing. Clement's near contemporaries offer quite different views about who should nurse a child, but there seems to have been widespread agreement that breast milk transmits more than physical sustenance. According to a speech preserved by Aulus Gellius, the early-secondcentury philosopher Favorinus argues strenuously for wellborn women to nurse their own infants, instead of handing them over to a wet nurse. At the center of his case is the claim that milk, like male seed, conveys the essential character of its provider: "there is no doubt that in forming character, the disposition of the nurse and the quality of the milk play a great part; for the milk, although imbued from the beginning with the material of the father's seed, forms the infant offspring from the body and mind of the mother as well" (Attic Nights 12.1.20). A woman who does not nurse her own child risks not only having her child become servile, foreign, barbarous, dishonest, ugly, unchaste, and drunken (all characteristics that Favorinus thinks a wet nurse is likely to have, Attic Nights 12.1.17), but she also risks severing or at least reducing the bonds between parent and child, since a child's "feelings of affection, fondness and intimacy are centered wholly in the one by whom it is nursed" (Attic Nights 12.1.23). By contrast, while Favorinus's contemporary, the physician Soranos, shares the view that character is transmitted through the milk, Soranos redirects its implications, by encouraging Romans to hire Greek wet nurses (Gyn. 2.19.15; 2.44.1-2). 1 9 The following passage suggests, however, that Soranos does not unequivocally support wet-nursing, rather that he views it as better for the health of the mother in some cases: But if anything prevents [breast-feeding], one must choose the best nurse, lest the mother grow prematurely old, having spent herself through daily suckling. For just as is exhausted by producing crops after sowing and mains that of Gussen, Het Leven in Alexandria (Leiden: Van Gorcum, 1955). More specific studies include Brooten, Love between Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 320-38; Gleason, "The Semiotics of Gender," 389-415; esp. 399-404; and Roy Ward, "Women and the Roman Baths," HTR 85 (1992): 125-47. 18 For a diachronic, cross-cultural survey, see Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Breast (NY: Knopf, 1997). I refer readers especially to chapters one ("The Sacred Breast") and seven ("The Medical Breast"). 19 See also Gleason, Making Men, 142 and n. 44.

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therefore becomes barren of more, the same happens with the woman who nurses the infant; she either grows prematurely old having fed one child, or the expenditure for the nourishment necessarily makes her own body quite emaciated. Consequently, the mother will fare better with a view to her own recovery and to further childbearing, if she is relieved of having her breasts distended too. For as vegetables are sown by gardeners into one soil to sprout and are transplanted into different soil for quick development, lest one soil suffer by both, in the same way the newborn, too, is apt to become more vigorous if borne by one woman but fed by another, in case the mother, by some affliction, is hindered from supplying the food. (Gyn. 2.18[87].5-6; my emphasis) Drawing on a common association between women's bodies and the earth, Soranos highlights the negative consequences of exploiting natural resources by comparing repeated pregnancies and some instances of breastfeeding with soil depletion and degradation from overuse. While not commenting on the transmission of character, the image of nutrients being taken up through the roots of the seedlings is consistent with a view of breast feeding as providing physical as well as intellectual and moral nourishment. Clement adapts the view of breast milk as character-forming nourishment in the FaiAagogos in order to portray the effect of the Logos on the "newborn" Christian: If we have been reborn to Christ, then the one who gives us this new birth nurses [ektrephein] us with his own milk—the Logos; every parent [tojjennesati] provides appropriate nourishment immediately to [its] offspring [jjennomenos]. Just as there is rebirth, so too is there also spiritual nourishment for humans. Therefore, by all this, we are adapted [prosokeiomai] to Christ: into relation [eis suggenncin\ through his blood through which we are redeemed, into sympathy through the Logos's rearing [anatrophe], and into incorruptibility through his guidance [qgoge]: "Among mortals, rearing [trephein] children often produces more love than begetting [phuein] children."20 {Paid. 1.49.3-4) This passage condenses together a number of ideas: first, that a parent, specifically a mother here, as the image of nursing implies, nourishes its own offspring—a view that was not universally held, as the examples from Favorinus and Soranos indicate. Clement's quotation from Biotos's Medea at the end of this passage may indicate an acknowledgment of Favorinus's position that children become attached to those who nurse them {Attic Nights 12.1.23). Clement's asssertion of the provision of nourishment to a newborn as a truism, however, serves his second main idea in this passage: that breast milk is a form of education—it is the first means of rearing a child—a view that Clement's contemporaries share. Finally, the consequence of birth, nourishment, and rearing is the production of a child who 20

See Chapter Ten for further analysis of this passage and its context.

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is like its parent, as indicated by the statement that Christians become like Christ through these processes. Lactation as Salvation In the Mediterranean world before and during the emergence of Christianity, a (divine) mother nursing her child serves as a pervasive metaphor for the experience of salvation.21 In her studies of the soteriological function of this metaphor, Gail Paterson Corrington offers Clement's text as an illustration of its widespread adaptation.22 For Clement and others, nursing can symbolize the transmission of healing, knowledge, and salvation. Drawing upon the work of V. Tran Tarn Tinh, Corrington notes that, in Egypt, "the belief that milk from the divine breast gives life, longevity, salvation, and divinity is one which exists 'in the mentality of populations of the Delta from earliest antiquity, and manifests itself in the official imagery of the Pharaohs.'"23 Within Judaism, the figure of Hokmah or Sophia shares some of the attributes of these deities in her capacity as instructor (e.g., Prov 6:20 and 8:35; Wisdom of Solomon 8:2-9), 24 although rarely as the purveyor of divine milk (but see Philo, The Worse Attacks the Better 116).25 While medieval Christian art and literature would develop a comparable iconography for Mary the mother of Jesus, early Christian art and literature does not; rather, Corrington notes that 21 Gail Paterson Corrington, "The Milk of Salvation: Redemption by the Mother in Late Antiquity and Early Christianity," HTR 82:4 (1989) 397. Corrington addresses the issue of dating on pp 3 9 8 - 4 0 3 . Although this imagery is known in Pharaonic Egypt from as early as 2000 B.C.E. (see V. Tran Tam Tinh, Isis Lactans: Corpus des monuments greco-romains d'Isis allaitant Harpocrau [EPRO 37; Leiden: Brill, 1971]), and in seventh-century B.C.E. preClassical period Greece (see Theodora Hadzisteliou Price, Kourotrophos: Cults and Representations of Greek Nursing Deities [Studies of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society 8; Leiden: Brill, 1978]), as well as other Mediterranean and Near Eastern contexts (see ibid., 6-8, for Hittite, Phrygian, Lycian, Cappadocian, and Minoan examples), during the first through fourth centuries c.E. there was a veritable explosion of reliefs, amulets, terra cotta lamps, and figurines that depict the goddess Isis nursing. Thus, early Christians such as Clement would likely have been familiar with this imagery, at least in association with Isis. 22 Corrington, "Milk of Salvation," 393-420; see 4 1 2 - 1 3 ; idem, "Nursing Fathers: Knowledge, Salvation, and Ascetic Piety," paper presented at the AAR/SBL Annual Meetings, San Francisco, Nov 1992. 23 Corrington, "Milk of Salvation," 398; citation of Tran Tam Tinh, Isis Lactans, 1. 24 Corrington, "Milk of Salvation," 405. 25 For an interesting early Christian example of this, see the Concept of Our Great Power, in which the narrator speaks of what is necessary to gain knowledge of the Great Power: "He will receive (me) and he will know me. He will drink from the milk of the mother, in fact" (Great Power 40.28-30; see 40.24-32; trans. Frederik Wisse, ed. Douglas M. Parrott, in Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. James M. Robinson [San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977] 286).

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"the metaphor of nursing . . . is appropriated to describe the saving activities of the male savior-deity."26 Corrington locates Clement's use of this nursing imagery within the broader context of its close association with Mediterranean deities in antiquity such as Isis, Hera, 27 and Artemis: "Clement, living as he did in Egypt and especially in that most cosmopolitan of cities in Egypt, Alexandria, could hardly have avoided seeing the numerous representations of the goddess Isis imparting life-giving milk to her son, Horus." 2 8 Although Corrington does not give any specific examples to support her claim at this point, Tran Tam Tinh's extensive catalogue of Isis lactans imagery from the Greco-Roman world includes at least one coin that Clement is likely to have seen: a bronze coin found in Alexandria, minted during the twentyeighth year of Commodus's reign (187/188), which depicts Isis on its reverse, seated on a throne, offering her left breast to Harpokrates. 29

26 Corrington, "Milk of Salvation," 412. An early Christian example of this appears in the Odes of Solomon. Although the precise dating of the Odes of Solomon remains a matter of some debate, this early Syrian Christian collection of hymns most likely predates Clement, whether or not he knew any of the odes. The nineteenth ode shares some striking features with Clement's use of lactation imagery for the divine. Van den Hoek also notes this parallel ("Milk and Honey," in Fides Sacramenti Sacramentum Fidei, ed. H . J. Auf der Maur, L. Bakker, A. v. d. Bunt, and J. Waldram [Assen: Van Gorcum, 1981] 31). The beginning of the ode is as follows: "A cup of milk was offered to m e , / And I drank it in the sweetness of the Lord's kindness./ The Son is the c u p , / And the Father is he who was milk;/ And the Holy Spirit is she who milked h i m ; / Because his breasts were full,/ And it was undesirable that his milk should be ineffectually released./ The Holy Spirit opened her bosom,/ And mixed the milk of the two breasts of the Father./ Then she gave the mixture to the generation without their knowing,/ And those who have received (it) are in the perfection of the right hand . . . " (Odes Sol. 19.1-5, trans. James H. Charlesworth, in The Odes of Solomon: The Syriac Texts, trans, and ed. with notes by James H . Charlesworth [Society of Biblical Literature Texts and Translations 13; Pseudepigrapha 7; Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977]). This imagery also appears as a motif in medieval Christian art; see Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982). 27 Yalom offers the example of a myth about Herakles being put at Hera's breast to suckle in the hopes that he might ingest immortality through her milk {History of the Breast, 20-21). 28 Corrington, "Nursing Fathers," 10. 29 Tran Tam Tinh, Isis Lactans, A-120; p. 141 (andfig.120). Tran Tam Tinh documents a number of other pieces of Alexandrian numismatic evidence that date from the Antonine period in the second century c.E. (A-84-A-21,fig.107-21; D-6-7) (35-36; 132-41). He also catalogues a considerable number of terra cotta lamps of the first or second century c.E. from Alexandria (A-43 [p. 85], A-44 [p. 86], A-50 [p. 90], A-62 [p. 97], B - l - 9 [pp. 16670], B-19 [p. 175] ), and one dated to the second or third century c.E. (A-78 [p. 105]). I have only cited here those materials whose provenance is clearly linked to Alexandria; Tran Tam Tinh's catalogue includes many items—including statuary and gems—whose provenance is either listed broadly as "from Egypt" or remains unknown.

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Within the context of a discussion of salvation and/or education, the effectiveness of a metaphor of nursing depends upon the assumption that what is transmitted in the milk is part of the essence of the nurse. This is true whether or not the nurse is the birth mother. In her catalogue of types of Greek nursing deities, Theodora Price includes one striking example, not mentioned by Corrington, of a statue that Clement may well have seen that provides a kind of prototype for the appropriation of nursing imagery to a masculine figure. Pliny, in his Natural History, mentions two sculptors of the fifth century B.C.E. named Kephisodotos, one of whom was known for a work depicting "Hermes nursing father Liber in infancy" (Mercurius Liberum patrem in infantia nutriens; Natural History 34.87). Price notes that Roman copies of this type are known in Italy and Alexandria.30 Thus, in developing this metaphor of nursing to depict the activity of the divine toward Christians, Clement resonates with traditions known to virtually anyone in his audience, whether through religious iconography, literature, or discussions of paideia. From Milk to Meat: Alimentation and Stages of Social Development Among Clement's contemporaries and predecessors, developmental distinctions—especially between children and adults—often serve as a means of contrasting levels of intellectual or spiritual achievement. Metaphors of ingestion frequently highlight these differences. Philo, for example, compares the education ofthe soul to that ofa child progressing from infancy (when the soul is "nursed" in the basic subjects31) to maturity (or "perfection," when the soul eats the meat ofphilosophical studies).32 The education 30

Price, Kourotrophos, 70. Philo calls this portion of education the enkuklia (or "cycle of studies"), which refers to the Hellenistic ideal of a general education (eyKOK^ioc, rcaiSsia). Marrou notes that this term did not entail a specific content but had two general connotations, "one, the general culture of the educated gentleman, with no particular reference to teaching but including all the different stages, 'prep, school, public school and university,' and, of course, home background; and the other the basic learning, the 'propaedeutic' (jipoTraiSeuuaia) that prepared the mind for more advanced stages of education and culture; in other words, the ideal secondary education. This latter was particularly the philosophers' idea of it" (A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. G. Lamb [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956] 177; on this concept in general, see 1 7 6 - 7 7 , 223). Philo's remarks belong in this latter category. Kaster has argued that Marrou's discussion of the sharp distinction between educational stages is itself overly determined by philosophical ideals, which masks considerable diversity in practices across the Greco-Roman world in late antiquity; see Kaster, "Notes on 'Primary' and 'Secondary' Schools in Late Antiquity," TAPA 113 (1983): 3 2 3 - 4 6 . 32 "[souls] which are still naked, just like those of mere infants [vr|7tioi], must be nursed [Ti0TivoKO|ar|TEOv], first being instilled with soft nourishment—the basic subjects [syKUK?aa], instead of milk . . . " (Every Good Man Is Free, 160); "And do you not also see 31

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of the soul is thus understood as analogous with pa-ideia, requiring careful grooming and proper nourishment. Philo writes: "But seeing that for babes [ nepioi] milk is food, but for grown men [ teleioi] wheat bread, there must also be milk-like foods for the soul in its childhood, which are the preliminary stages of school learning, and perfect [tekia-i] foods for [grown] men [andres], which are the instructions leading through prudence and temperance and every virtue" (On Agriculture 9).2Z Infants and children thus contrast with men, milk and simple food with meat, and school subjects with virtues or philosophy. The soul is analogous with the person, whereas the food is analogous with the instruction. Clement also employs these analogies in his writings, often in conjunction with a citation or paraphrasing of Heb 5:12-14 and 1 Cor 3:2.34 For example, in the first book of the Stromateis, he writes: "So the philosophers too are children, if they have not been brought to maturity by Christ. . . . 'Solid food is for grownups, for those who have their faculties trained and conditioned to distinguish good from evil. Everyone who takes milk is inexperienced in the word of righteousness' [Heb. 5:14; 13]" (Strom. 1.53.2-3).35 In this passage, Clement appears to distinguish between non-Christian philosophers and Christians, but he also uses this distinction in intra-Christian contexts. For example, in the fifth book of the Stromateis, at the beginning of a discussion of Paul's use of symbolic language, Clement writes: "And furthermore, the apostle, in distinguishthat even our body does not use solid [Ttrjyvuui] and costly nourishment before it uses the simple and milky [yaXaKxcbSricJ [kind]? In the same way, consider that childish [ronSiKocJ nourishment prepared for the soul is the school subjects and their accompanying ideas, while the virtues are the more mature [xE^eioxspoi;] foods for those who are really men [dvrjp]" (On the Preliminary Studies, 19). 33 SJIEI 8E VT|JIIOII; UEV £cm y a ^ a xpoc|>f|, xzXzioxc, 8e xd EK iiupcov nk\i\i.a.xa, Kai Y D X ^ yaX,aKXpoo"uvr|r|yr|c>Eic; (On Agriculture, 9). 34 In addition to interpreting these texts, Clement also introduces this distinction in his discussion of a passage from the tragedian Thespis, about different kinds of drink offerings as follows: " H e means indirectly by this, I believe, the first nourishment of the soul by means of the 24 letters (the alphabet), nourishment comparable to milk; after this he mentions milk that has already curdled (rcETrriyoc,), that is, solid food. Andfinally,he teaches 'the ardent wine,' the blood of the vine of the Logos, the joy of education that perfects. ' 2 ' is the active Logos who since the first catechesis, inflames and illuminates the human until his growth into a man, 'until the measure of adult size'" (Strom. 5.48.8-9). 35 Clement cites H e b 5:12-14 on three occasions, each in the Stromateis: 1) Strom. 1.53.1-3: in this context Clement draws upon Hebrews, Galatians, Philippians, and 1 Thessalonians to make a contrast between childhood and maturity in spiritual education; 2) Strom. 5.62.2-4: Clement cites Hebrews 5:12, 14-6:1 to distinguish between levels of Christian instruction; milk is linked clearly with children and food with adult teachings; 3) Strom. 6.62.2.

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ing the common faith from gnostic perfection, sometimes calls it 'foundation,' sometimes 'milk,' for which he writes: 'brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as pneumatics but as fleshly ones, since you were infants in Christ. I gave you milk to drink, not food; since you were not yet able for it. But you are still not capable now'" (Strom. 5.26.1 ). 36 In sharp contrast to his treatment of 1 Cor 3:2 in the Paidagogos, Clement uses this Pauline passage to outline a distinction among stages of Christian development as Philo does for Judaism. In the context of the Paidagogos, he recasts the milk/solid food contrast, highlighting instead similarities between the elements of the pair. By emphasizing the essential similarity of milk and solid food, Clement implicitly argues for the essential similarity between those who nurse and those who eat solid food. As I argue in Chapters Nine and Ten, Clement constructs an alternative reading of 1 Cor 3:2, supported by extensive physiological analogies, in order to construct a rhetoric of Christian unity. By emphasizing that blood is the fundamental essence of milk as well as flesh, Clement argues that one essence has a multiplicity of forms. He applies this insight both to the Logos or Christ (and indirectly to God) and to Christians and the instruction/nourishment/salvation that they receive. CONCLUSION: T H E IMPLICATIONS OF

PAIDEIA

Paideia functions as a means of producing and ensuring social relations of dominance and subordination on two levels: 1) between those with access to paideia and those without access; and 2) among those who participated in paideia.37 For Clement, then, to develop a manual of Christian paideia can offer a means to delineate the difference between Christian and nonChristian as well as a standard by which he can measure other Christians. 36 In addition to his extended interpretation of 1 Cor 3:2 in book one, chapter six of the Paidagogos (discussed in Chapters Nine and Ten), Clement cites 1 Cor 3:2 three times in the Stromateis: 1) Strom. 1.179.2: near the end of the first book of the Stromateis, Clement employs the child/mature split in discussing scriptural interpretation. H e classifies interpretation into four types but states that only "fully mature men" can make and apply these distinctions. Others must interpret, " ' I n accordance with this you are able,' [Paul] said, knowing that some have only taken milk, no solid food yet, and perhaps not milk in its pure state" (see also 179.1-4); 2) Strom. 5.26.1-2 (cited above): Clement invokes milk/solid food four times during the fifth book of the Stromateis. In Strom. 5.26.1-2, the passage continues: "'. . . since you are still fleshly. For while there is jealousy and discord among you are you not still fleshly, living as mere humans?' [1 Cor 3:2-3]. It is the choice made by sinners among humans [to remain fleshly ones], but those who abstain from [sin] think about divine things and share in gnostic food"; 3) Strom. 5.66.2: Clement interprets milk as catechesis and solid food as the highest/esoteric contemplation (see Strom. 5.66.1-5). 37 See Gleason, Making Men, xxi.

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In addition to observing the ways in which procreative and other naturalizing imagery (such as breast feeding) is embedded into the primary ancient discourse of education, it is also important to note the ways in which a rhetoric built on notions of paideia obscures from view a number of aspects of early Christians' experiences. When Clement talks about the development of a child into an adult, he does not have in mind a set of experiences shared by all individuals; rather, he has in mind those stages of development and training generally earmarked for free-born males although he claims that they apply metaphorically to all Christians. Clement differs from his contemporaries, however, by insisting that the same moral instructor (paidagqgos) trains both women and men (Paid. 1.10.1-11.2).38 Clement explicitly groups both male and female together under the heading of children (paidaria) who share the Logos as their paidagbgos.39 The lived experiences of free-born males cannot be assumed to have corresponded exactly to the cultural ideals concerning their proper formation into men; so too, we must refrain from imagining that all of Clement's audience were able or interested in attaining the ideals he expounds. This is significant because the use of naturalizing imagery in paideia discourse and Clement's adaptation of it makes it easy to forget two things: 1) that well-born, wealthy free men become the standard for Christian existence; 2) that the membership of Christianity and the lived experiences of Christianity exceeded the boundaries of this system. Clement's assertion that his manual for Christian living applies to women recognizes this constraint in a limited way, but his remarks throughout the Paidagogos remain applicable primarily to Christians of somefinancialmeans. Clement's admonishments to married male Christians not to kiss their wives in front of their slaves (Paid. 3.84.1), his cautions about not becoming obsessed by jewels or other luxurious items (Paid. 2.118.1-129.4; and 3.34.1-36.3), and his tips for how to behave at banquets (Paid. 2.40.144.5), for example, would not apply to any enslaved and/or poor Christians in Alexandria. 38 Contrast Pseudo-Plutarch's On the Education of Free Children, in which it is made explicit that the description is intended for free-born, eleutberoi, male children; the educational model, however, is very similar to Clement's. 39 In other words, Clement's attention is upon human/divine relations rather than intrahuman relations.

Chapter Nine PERFECT CHILDREN DRINKING THE LOGOS-MILK OF CHRIST Just as nurses nourish newborn children with milk, so also have I instilled in you spiritual nourishment with the Logos-milk of Christ (Paid. 1.35.3)

T

HE NEXT TWO CHAPTERS examine in detail an extended portion of the first of the three books of Clement's Paidatjqgos. The close textual analysis provides an opportunity to see how Clement's allegorical use of procreative imagery works to construct a rhetoric of Christian unity and identity. When examining the uses and functions of kinship and procreative imagery in these texts, I argue that here too, both intra-Christian and broader Greco-Roman cultural factors illuminate Clement's discourse about Christian formation and development. Chapter six of the first book of the Paidngogos has received attention primarily from those interested in Clement's location in the history of the development of Christian rituals and sacramental theology 1 and Clement's knowledge of ancient biology.2 Despite the value of these studies, my goal differs from them in its attempt to analyze the rhetorical implications of Clement's use of kinship and procreative language in his arguments about Christian salvation and identity. Clement establishes his argument for identifying Christians as God's children in the fifth chapter of book one of the Paidagogos. In the first portion of chapter six, he asserts that baptism renders all Christians

1 Van den Hoek, "Milk and Honey," in Fides Sacramenti Sacramentum Fidei, ed. H. J. Auf der Maur, L. Bakker, A. v.d. Bunt, J. Waldram (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1981) 27-39; and A.H.C. van Eijk, "The Gospel of Philip and Clement of Alexandria: Gnostic and Ecclesiastical Theology on the Resurrection and the Eucharist" VC 25 (1971): 94-120. 2 Michel Spanneut, Le Stoicisme des pens, (Paris: Seuil, 1957) 191-203. Laura Rizzerio ("Le Probleme des parties de l'ame," Nouvelk Revue Theologique 111 [1989]: 394-98) summarizes Spanneut's analysis of this passage. See also the brief treatment of Paid. 1.38.3, 39.2 and 49.1 in Franz Riische, Blut, Leben und Seek. Ihr Verhdltnis naeb Auffassungder griechischen und hellenistiscben Antike, der Bibel und der alten Alexandrinischen Theologen. Eine Vorarbeit zur Religionsgeschicbte des Opfers (Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des Altertums. Supplement 5; 1930; reprinted, New York and London: Johnson Reprint, 1968) 402-4.

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soteriologically equal. He summarizes the first half of chapter six with the statement, "There is a childhood in Christ, which is maturity [or, perfection]" (Paid. 1.34.2).3 For Clement's readers this statement contains both a pun and a paradox, since the term for perfection, teleosis, can mean either perfection or maturity (a coming to completion). In the second half of chapter six, Clement offers a proof for the paradox of a perfect infancy by means of an extended exegesis of 1 Cor 3:2: "I gave you milk to drink, like babes in Christ, not solid food; for you were not capable of it, nor are you capable yet." Clement interprets this Pauline passage to support his assertion that Christian infancy is both necessary and perfect. In so doing, he redefines perfection as rebirth, a transformation that results from faith and the casting off of sinful ways. Clement closes chapter six with this claim, "clearly . . . perfection [teleidsis] [is] the separation from sins and rebirth into faith in one perfect being" (Paid. 1.52.3).4 Clement offers four interpretations of 1 Cor 3:2 ("I gave you milk to drink, as infants in Christ, not solid food,foryou were not yet capable of it, neither are you able to now"), each of which builds toward his identification of blood with milk, and his equation of both blood and milk with the Logos. In each interpretation he focuses on certain elements of the verse, re-presenting the Pauline text as he goes. In this chapter I examine Clement's first three interpretations of 1 Cor 3:2, closing with a discussion of why I think this verse may have been of particular rhetorical import to Clement. In Chapter Ten, I unpack his complex and extended fourth interpretation of this verse.

PERFECT REBIRTH

Having introduced and defined the metaphor that all Christians are children in the fifth chapter of book one of the Pctidagogos (see discussion in Chapter Seven above), Clement turns in his sixth chapter to the matter of potential differences among Christians, particularly with regard to their level of spiritual advancement. If all Christians are children in relation to God, what about in relation to one another? His response aims at minimizing differences and stressing unity. He opens on a defensive note: "We are children and little ones, but certainly not because the learning we acquire is puerile or rudimentary, as those puffed up in knowledge falsely charge. On the contrary, when we were reborn, we immediately received the perfection for which we strive. For we were enlightened, that is, we 3 4

f| 8 E EV XptCTxfi) VTi7iioTric; Ttkzimaic, s c m v (Paid. 1.34.2). TEXEIGXTIV STI^OVOTI . . . TO &7toTETdx9ai talc; dixapxian; Kai zlc, Ttiaxiv TOU &vayEY£vvf|(y9ai (Paid. 1.52.3).

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came to the knowledge of God. Certainly, the one who possesses knowledge of the perfect Being is not imperfect" (Paid. 1.25.1).5 This passage lays out some of the chapter's major issues: the relation between learning (mathesis) and knowledge (gnbsis and epignosis), and between perfection (teleion) and rebirth (ttnagennesis). Clement positions himself in contrast to unnamed opponents "puffed up in knowledge" who distinguish between levels of learning and designate as children those who receive or have access to a lower level of spiritual instruction.6 While Clement insists that the rebirth of baptism brings perfection,7 he also seeks to distinguish this perfection from maturity. His attempt to maintain that baptism is perfect and yet does not confer maturity in and of itself is complicated by the fact that the same term, teleios, can denote both perfection and maturity. Clement combats two positions: first, that baptism does not confer perfection and hence can rightly be associated with infancy or childhood in distinct contrast with the perfect knowledge of adulthood into which one must grow; and second, that baptism brings perfection and maturity simultaneously. The former view clearly divides Christian existence into developmental levels, while the latter view renders nonsensical a category of "Christian childhood" and affirms the spiritual equality of all Christians (by implicitly marking pre-Christian existence as childhood in contrast to the adulthood of Christian existence). Clement's position is closest to the first (that there are developmental distinctions among Christians), but it also receives his strongest criticism as he modifies it. He treads afineline between asserting the unity of all Christians (as offered by the second position), while still wanting to differentiate among Christians in some contexts. 5

ou yap TCCUSEC, TIUEIC, KOU vr|7iioi 7ipo8£au£v, ou EVEKEV EOTIEUSOUEV. £4>G>Ticf9r|UEV yap' TO 8E EOTIV Emyvinvai TOV OEOV. OUKOUV &TEXT|, ak\' oi jidvTEc; OOTOSEUEVOI xaq crapKiK&t; E7u8uuia T| xdpt? EVC, TOUC; aicova^, duf|v (Paid. 1.27.2-3).

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To call baptism imperfect is thus to critique the power of the divine. Clement strongly links the baptismal experience to faith; faith is the key to salvation for all. Prebaptismal teaching leads to faith, which is instantiated through baptism as a total transformation of one's being.14 The significance of faith for Clement is its unifying and universal character: "Faith is the one universal means of human salvation" (1.30.2). He expresses this unity following Paul, "You are all the sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus" (Gal 3:26; Paid. 1.31.1).15 For Clement, this bears particularly on claims of inherently different statuses among Christians. Whereas elsewhere he stresses the need for all to be adopted by God to receive their inheritance of attaining to the "likeness" of God,16 in this chapter Clement emphasizes that all Christians equally become God's children through the unifying experience of baptism. By joining Christ's body, baptized Christians partake of his sonship; by imitating Christ's sonship, Christians become sons. Clement compares the prebaptismal state with both adulthood and childhood; he concludes the first portion of chapter six by summarizing the consequences of baptism in the imagery with which he began the chapter: "It is fitting, then, that infants are children of God who have cast away the old man and taken off the cloak of evil, and put on the incorruptibility of Christ so that we might guard the human without blemish as a new holy people, having been reborn, and that we might be infants, as a nursling (brephos) of God who has been purified of porneia and wickedness" (Paid. 1.32.4).17 The evocative image of a nursling anticipates his impending rumination on Christians as nursing infants. It also reinforces a positive view of childhood as characterized by purity and innocence. 14

Some early Christians, however, indicate a concern that the act of baptism alone does not guarantee this transformation—one's intention also matters (see, e.g., Exc. Theod. 8 2 83; Gos. Phil. 64.22-30). This is comparable to Clement's assertion that "few are like their fathers," because not all children attain the ideal of resembling their fathers (see Chapter Five). 15 "TidvxEC, ydp moi ECTXE 8id JUCTTECOI; 0EOU EV Xpurnn 'I^crou" [Gal 3:26] (Paid. 1.31.1). 16 See especially Strom. 2.75.2; 2.97.1; 2.131.6; and 2.134.2. Clement does mention adoption (buiothesia) briefly in this chapter, Paid. 1.26.1 and 33.4 (see also Paid. 1.21.2). The practice of adoption was widespread in the Roman Empire, as a means of producing lines of inheritance in particular. See Mireilie Corbier, "Divorce and Adoption as Roman Familial Strategies," in Marriage, Divorce, and Children in Ancient Rome, ed. Beryl Rawson (Canberra: Humanities Research Centre; Oxford: Clarendon, 1991) 4 7 - 7 8 . For Pauline adaptation of this concept, see James M. Scott, Adoption as Sons of God: An Exegetical Investigation into the Background of YIO0ESIA in the Pauline Corpus (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2, vol. 48; Tubingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1992). 17 Spa EIKOTCOC, oi TIOUSEC, XOC 0EOU OI xov uxv jiaX.aiov djio0£HEvoi av0po> nov Kai xv\c, Kaiciac, EKSuaduEvoi xov xit&va, EJievSuadusvoi SE xf|v d()>0apaiav xou XptaxoC, i'va Kaivot yevonsvoi,"ha.bc,ayioc,, dvay£WT|0£vx£.d£;a)UEV xov av0pco7iov Kai vr|juoi d>|i£v ax; Pp£o8s naq TO prnxov "ydXa u^iai; ETtoxiaa EV Xpiaxcp" xai 8iaCTxriaavTei; bXiyov ETtaydyeonsv "dx; vnjuouc,," iva Kaxd 8iaatoX,f|v xf\$ dvayvcbasax; TOiauxr|v djio88^6nE6a Stdvoiav Kaxf|XT|\mc, EV Xpiatcp anXf] xai d^.r|0£T Kai auxo4>im xpo4>fj xfj jtv£unaxiKT|- xoiauxr| yap f\ xoC ydXaKxoT|atv, xf|v yvSaiv upiv evexea, Xeyav, xr\v EK KaxrixTJaECOc; avaxp£ouaav EII; ijcof|v diSiov. aXka Kai xo "oioxiaa" pfjjj.a tsXeiat; nexaXr\^iE(oc, aunPoXov ECTXIV. TIIVEIV \IEV ydp oi XE^EIOI ^.Eyovxca, Qr\Xat^siv 8s oi vr|jrioi. "xo aijxd nou," ydp c(>T|aiv 6 Kupio^, "d^.n8fn; ECJXI 7t6cn.a" sirabv "Ercoxiaa" xr|v EV A,6ycp ydXaKxi xsXeiav supocn3vTiv, xf|v yvmcnv xfj^ d^T|0£ia(;, r|vt!;axo; (Paid. 1.36.4-5).

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("I fed you with milk . . . not solid food, for you were not yet capable of it").

At the close of this second interpretation of 1 Cor 3:2, Clement raises the topic of solid food. Having presented the recipients of Paul's words as Christians who have been "perfected" through baptism, but who are still properly called infants and who drink milk, Clement interprets one's relative ability to eat solid food in light of another Pauline image, the ability to see divine realities "face to face" (1 Cor 13:12), an ability that Clement links with the acquisition of total control over the things of theflesh{Paid. 1.36.5-6). Those who are infants have not yet gained this control. Thus, Clement does acknowledge that newly baptized Christians may differ from other Christians, but he downplays differences among Christians with the stress on the "not yet," which contains the promise of a "someday." This second interpretation ends on a distinctly polemical note, as Clement refers explicitly to positions he wishes to refute—notably, that "the promise" of being able to see and know the divine face-to-face is reserved for a post-carnal state. Clearly, the implication of Paul's writings are under debate in Alexandria.29

TRANSITION {PAID.

1.37.3)

Clement insists upon the reasonableness of understanding Paul's words in 1 Cor 3:2, particularly the "the milk of infants" {to gala ton nepidn), in broader allegorical terms: "if the leaders of the churches are shepherds, according to the image [eikdn] of the good shepherd, and we are the sheep, doesn't [Paul] protect the allegory when he calls the Lord the milk of the flock?" {Paid. 1.37.3).30 With his mention of prominent people in the ekklesiai, Clement both reminds his readers that the control of interpretation concerns questions of authority and reinforces the notion that "the Lord" is milk. Two issues require further consideration: First, this passage has been taken as evidence that Clement was a layperson, since he rhetorically positions himself on the "sheep" side of the equation. This transparent reading 29

Pagels notes that this passage from 1 Corinthians was a favorite source for interpretation for those Christians labeled "Gnostic" (The Gnostic Paul, [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975] 80); Clement was at least familiar with the interpretation of this passage offered in the Exc. Theod. (15.1-16 and 27.3-6). In this context of the Paiiagogos, Clement challenges his unnamed opponents by ridiculing the position that they could claim knowledge that they themselves claim is accessible only to those "after the departure from this place," as well as through another scriptural juxtaposition (Jer 9:23-24 with 1 Thess 4:9). 30

si TS TTOUIEVEI; [EO]UEV O! XCOV EKKXTIOTCBV Tipor|you|iEvoi Kax' siKova xoC dyaGou

JIOIUEVOC;, i d 5E rcpopaxa T|UEI|j.a as niaxxc, and yvwaic,; and this interpretation seems to be more in line with the whole of his theology than the one he gives in Ped. l,25ff., which is largely influenced by his polemic purpose" (109). Van Eijk's method of interpreting one passage in light of another in order to rule out one of two conflicting readings does not adequately account for the distinct contexts of each passage, resulting in a reductionistic harmonization of Clement's thought. 37 Tf|v xoidvSe xpor|v d>Aa%60i [8e] Kai 6 Kupio^ sv xip raid 'Icodvvnv suayyeMco sxspcoi; s^nvsyKEV 8id aunpotaov "()>dyECT9e |xou xdq odpicai;" Ewrov "Kai TUSCTOE UOU TO alna," evapyEi; -rife Ttioxeooc, Kai xf\q EiiayysXiaq xo itoxiuov dW.r|yopUCTIKT| TpsroJuEVOv JIE(|/EI, Kur|CTdcrr|i; xf\.oiouuEvov 0EpnoO TtoSeivr) CTKeud^exai xcp vr|7iicp xpoii (Paid. 1.39.3). 16 Fred Rosner notes that this was a matter of debate among rabbis. Attributed to R. Meir is the opinion that menstrual blood is what is transformed into milk (Bekhorot 6b; Niddah 9a), whereas other sages argued that "breast milk is formed direcdy from blood." (Bekhorot 20b) See Fred Rosner, Medicine in the Bible and the Talmud: Selections from Classical Jewish Sources, rev. and enl. (The Library of Jewish Law and Ethics 5. Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1995)119.

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change into pus in an ulcerated sore"17 (Paid. 1.39.4).18 Without attempting to adjudicate among these various explanations, Clement underscores the point that he is trying to make by using them, in either case, whether blood conveyed from the mother's body to the embryo through the umbilical cord or katamenion, "what is changing is blood" (1.39.3).19 Addressing the issue of the difference in appearance between blood and milk, he stresses that, upon changing color "the underlying pure essence of blood remains;" "blood is still the essence [of milk]" (1.39.5);20 "[blood] undergoes a change in quality, not in essence" (1.40.1).21 This cluster of affirmative statements encapsulates the primary function of lactation imagery thus far in Clement's argument. Clement now brings the reader out of the realm of embryology and lactation, indicating the applicability of physiology for his argument: "And indeed one cannot find something more nourishing [trophimoteros], sweeter [jjlukuteros], or whiter [kukoteros] than milk. Spiritual nourishment is like this in all ways, sweet because it is granted through grace, nourishing like life, white like the day of Christ; so too, the blood of the Logos has been shown to be like milk" (Paid. 1.40.2).22 In this passage he employs metaphorically the associations that he has evoked about the production of breast milk. Clement's emphasis upon blood as underlying ousia allows him to connect causally Jesus' suffering and death with Christian teaching (a point that Clement makes explicit below in 1.49.4). Indeed, as we shall see below, he will also interpret the passion in terms of childbirth (Jesus giving birth to a new people; 1.42.2). 17 This last analogy appears in Aristotle's writings, attributed to Empedokles; Aristotle vociferously resists this comparison. Aristotle writes: "It is clear that milk is possessed of the same nature (phusis) as the secretion out of which each animal is formed, as has been stated already. The material (hull) which supplies nourishment and the material out of which nature forms and fashions the animal are one and the same. And this material, in the case of blooded animals, is the bloodlike liquid; for milk is concocted [pepephthai], not decomposed [diephtharesthai] blood. As for Empedokles, either he was mistaken or else his metaphor was a bad one when he wrote about milk, 'On the tenth day of the eighth month, a white pus is formed.' No, putrefaction and concoction are opposites, and pus is a putrefaction, whereas milk is to be classed as something concocted" {Gen. An. 4.777a4-13). 18 endv ouv Kcrrci TOUC, TOKOUC, dnoKonfiv A,dprj TO dyyslov, 8i' ou jtpoc, TO suppoov TO aiua E(J>spsTO, uuaic, usv yivExai TOC Ttopou, TT|V 8E 6pur|v sxci TOUC, uaaxoix; TO aiua Xaupdvsi Kai nokVi\q xx\c, STtwfcopac; ysvouEvric, SiaxsivovTai Kai usTapdM-si TO aiua sic, yd>.a, dvcdoycoc, xf| eni Trjc; E^KGXTECOC, SIC, TTUOV TOU at'uaToc, UETaPoWj (Paid. 1.39.4). 19 . . . aiua TO uExaPdX^ov s a r i (Paid. 1.39.3). 20 u£vouar|c, ETI Tf|c, UTIOKEIUEVTIC, aKEpaiou TOU afuaToc; ouoiac, . . . nkr\\ aXka aiua EXEi TT|V ouaiav (Paid. 1.39.5). 21 Tidaxsi 8E TT)V u£TaPoXf|v KOTO itoiornTa, ou KOT' oucriav (Paid. 1.40.1). 22 duE^.£i yoOv ou Tpo()>iud>T£pov aW-o TI OU5E uf|v y^uKutspov aXV OU8E XEUKOTEPOV supoic, av ydXaKToc,. OTVTTJ 8 E EOIKEV TOUTCO r| 7tvsuuaTiKf| TpO()>r|, y^uKsta UEV 8id TT|V xdpiv uTidpxoucra, Tp64>iuof| 8E r| KaxaXXi^koq aoxn Kai Jtpoa4>opoc, VEOTtayEi Kai VEOC^UET 7tai5icp npdc, xoC 0EOO xou xpo4>Eco£p£i EvSsii;iucnv; (Paid. 1.44.1). 43 (moSeSEiKTai 5s r|uTv uiKpcp rcpoaGsv TO aiua eiq yaka Talc; KUOUCJOUC; Kaxd UExaPoXi\v, ou Kax' ouaiav xwpsiv (Paid. 1.44.3). 44 f| yap xoi TpoT|. . . . ev|/onsvT| Kai TiETtxousvn, eic, xaq 4>X£.fiac, e^aiuaxouuEvri EKXcopsi (Paid. 1.44.2). This vague statement roughly accords with both Aristotelian and Galenic thought. See Boylan, "The Digestive and 'Circulatory' System in Aristotle's Biology,"

89-118.

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becomes blood, and that blood becomes milk, Clement proceeds to the following theorem: "If the digestion \katergasia\ of nourishment becomes blood, and blood becomes milk, then blood is the preparation [paraskeue] for milk, like seed [sperma] for a human and a grape-stone for a grapevine" (Paid. 1.45.1).45 This statement affords Clement many interpretive possibilities. Overall, it offers a basis from which to argue that the blood of the Logos—whether referring to Christians' "birth" or metonymically recalling Jesus' suffering and death—necessarily precedes the teachings as well as the infants who receive this teaching. It also underscores the ontological similarity of nourishment, blood, and milk. Clement's selected analogies between the roles of blood, seed, and grapestone signify in multiple ways. First, Clement and his contemporaries posit that a human develops from a seed46; procreation and milk production are interconnected processes—without procreation, there would be no milk production (Clement states that the production of milk indicates that conception has occurred; 1.41.3). Second, the mention of human seed here anticipates Clement's discussion of it slightly later, as yet another product of blood. Third, the horticultural example reinforces a conceptualization of procreation in terms of the asymmetrical components of seed and soil. And finally, the specificity of the horticultural example from a grapevine anticipates Clement's discussion of wine as another allegorical designation for the Logos. Clement does not immediately exploit all of these possibilities. Drawing upon an association by now familiar to his readers, he first compares the milk that newborns suckle with the hope of final rest that reborn Christians receive: "It is with milk, that true [kuriake] nourishment, then, that we are nursed [tithenoumetba] immediately upon being born; immediately upon being reborn, we are honored [tetimemetha]47 with the hope of rest, which is the promise of the heavenly Jerusalem, in which it is recorded that 45 ei xoivuv f| UEV Kaxspyaaia xf\c, xpoc()f|q 8i;aiuaxoGxai, t o 8e 7iapa.aKxoT|v (Paid. 1.45.3). 56 TtapaTtX-ncrirac, yd^-aKxi (Paid. 1.45.4).

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Christians' nourishment with a nice manipulation ofthe subjects and objects of nourishment: "Thus for Christ, nourishment was the fulfillment of the paternal will, whereas for us infants who suck \amel0ein\S7 the Logos of heaven, Christ himself is the nourishment. Therefore to seek [zetesai] is called 'masteusai' because the paternal nipples [thelai]58 of love [philanthropia] supply milk to infants who seek [zetein] the Logos" (Paid. 1.46.1, my emphasis). 59 Clement not only draws upon the imagery of nursing here but links nursing and the pursuit of truth by positing an etymological connection between "breast" (mastos) and a verb meaning "to seek" (masteueiri). This etymology, not unique to Clement, 60 once again underscores the intended educational and salvific connotations of nursing. This striking image leaves no doubt for the reader that God's masculinity remains intact, that Christians do not nurse from a mother per se. As Clement has already insisted, it is the father's breasts and the Logos-milk that they contain that provide the true spiritual nourishment, in contrast to the material nourishment that women can offer (Paid. 1.43.4).

THE MULTWALENT LOGOS {PAID.

1.46.2-47.4)

[T]he Logos is allegorized in many ways: food, flesh, nourishment, bread, blood, milk. [W]ho should find it strange if we allegorize the blood of the Lord as milk? (Paid. 1.47.2) In an apparent digression Clement now touches upon additional metaphors for the Logos—in this case, bread and wine. Promising a more detailed discussion of the mystical interpretation of bread in another treatise, 61 Clement restricts himself to the assertion that bread indicates the resurrected flesh, and that wine is the blood that hydrates this flesh (Paid. 1.46.2-47.1). 62 It is interesting to note that in this brief section that 57

The use of this verb is interesting here; since it generally occurs in contexts of milking animals, it might connote for Clement's reader the association between Christians and lambs from chapter five (Paid. 1.14.2), or his reference to Christ as the milk of the flock earlier in chapter six (1.37.3). 58 It is quite surprising that, in the midst of his etymology, Clement chooses not to employ the term that proves the connection, i.e., uacrco^, but instead opts for 9r|Xf|. 59 OUTCOI; Xpiatcp UEV T) xpoc))f| xf\vauic,, 9pou(k>0cra TOO ai'uaxo; xf|v 4>uaiv, ov xpoitov r| rcuxia auvio~cr|(Ti xo ya>.a, oucriav Epyd^sxai nop4>c&o"£(oc/ EUGCAET yap r\ Kpaaii;, otyaXzpa. 8E r| aKpoxTji; sic, dtEKviav. Kai yap auxfji; fj5r| xr\q yf| yaXaKTi]; and just as none of the cheesemakers tries to mold it before it has become moderately firm, so nature does not try to mold the animal either" (On Semen 2.5.29-30; trans. De Lacy). 79 Spanneut notes that the mention of pneuma here is consonant with Stoic ideas, which are the focus of Spanneut's study, but concedes that the notion that pneuma plays a major role in procreation is not unique to Stoicism (he Stoicisme des feres de Veglise, 194, 197). 80 Kori 8rj Kdi TO KCIT& yacrrpoi; TO UEV jip&Tov uypoC scm auaTaaic, ya^aKTO£i8f|i;, gTieiTa E^aiuaTOOulvri aapKoOxai rj CRxxuacni; auTq, rcr|yvuu£VT| 8e ev xr| uaxepa UJIO TOU 4>ucnKoC tcai Gspuou jrv£U|iaToc,, u4>' ou 8iaTt^.dTTSTai TO euPpuov, ^cooyovevuai. hXkh Kai CI xrjv djtoKuriaiv at>6ic, £KTP£4>STCU TO TtaiSiov aiuaxi xra am&- (Paid. 1.49.1-2).

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homologies between blood and milk. If blood is also the essence of male seed, then the reader is forced to ask where the father has been in the foregoing discussion. Clement keeps his readers in suspense for a few more lines. He first cites the frame for the entire discussion, 1 Cor 3:2, locating it again by means of 1 Cor 3:2: For the flow of milk has the nature [pbusis] of blood,81 and milk is the fountain of nourishment by which a woman makes clear that she really has given birth and is a mother, and by it she receives also a charm of goodwill. Because of this, the holy spirit says mystically "I have given you milk to drink," through the apostle, using the voice of the Lord. If we have been reborn to [eis] Christ, then the one who gives us this new birth [ho anajjennesas] nurses [ektrepbein] us with his own milk—the Logos; every parent [to gennlsan\ provides appropriate nourishment immediately to [its] offspring [gmndmmos\. Just as there is rebirth [anagennesis], so too is there also spiritual nourishment for humans.82 (Paid. 1.49.2-3) In this passage, with striking reminiscences of Plato's Menexenus,H3 Clement sets up the expectation that the one who gives rebirth is comparable to a mother, and that the proof of this divine motherhood ought to lie in her provision of divine milk from herself. As we saw above, one way in which Clement distinguishes the divine process from his description of human maternity and lactation is by maintaining God's paternity while attributing certain maternal features—such as breasts—to God. Alternatively, Clement can also attribute a truncated kind of maternity to the church, whose breasts lack milk (1.42.1-2). The only figure to whom Clement ascribes divine maternity in a manner that closely resembles his description of human maternity is the Logos (1.42.2). Notably, Clement nowhere compares the Logos with semen, which would associate the Logos with paternity. 81 82

Aristotle, Gen. An. 2.739b25-27; 4.776al5-777a 22. aijiaToc, yap 4>I3f|9£yyo|i£voii; "Tiaxpoi; 8' E^ dya0olo Kai ai'uaxoi; s u x o u a i sivai" (Paid. 1.49.450.1).

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With this passage, Clement has shifted the initial terms of 1 Cor 3:2. Instead of distinguishing between milk and solid food, Clement distinguishes between blood and milk. Blood in this passage simultaneously recalls the blood of the passion and the blood of childbirth: the Lord's blood makes possible the relation between the divine and Christians, an association that Clement has already made earlier (Paid. 1.42.2-3; see also 1.47.4). Milk, as Clement has stressed throughout the second half of chapter six, recalls the Lord's teachings and one's upbringing as a Christian. By concluding the section with this Homeric citation (Iliad 14.113), Clement puts a final twist on the parental imagery—the reader is left with a statement about paternal bloodlines that stands in contrast with almost all of the foregoing imagery. Despite the abundance of maternal and lactation imagery throughout the chapter, Clement concludes this discourse by placing one's paternal origins at the center.

CONCLUSION: D I V I N E MATERNITY?

In a religious and historical context in which the catch-phrase "becoming male" is linked with spiritual advancement,87 what are we to make of Clement's assertion that God "became female"?88 Or that the Lord himself bore Christians "through the pangs of his flesh" and "swaddled [them] with his precious blood"?89 Or that Christians suckle "paternal nipples," in order to receive salvific knowledge?90 87 E.g., Strom. 6.100.1-3; Exc. Theod. 21.3; Gospel of'Thomas, logion 114; Gospel of Mary (P.Oxy. 12; BG 9.19-20); Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas 10.7; see Kersten Aspergren, The Male Woman: A Feminine Ideal in the Early Church, ed. Rene Kieffer (Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis; Uppsala Women's Studies A; Women's Studies in Religion 4; Uppsala: Gotab, 1990); Elizabeth A. Castelli, ' " I Will Make Mary Male': Pieties of the Body and Gender Transformation of Christian Women in Late Antiquity," in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (NY: Routledge, 1991) 2 9 49; and Margaret Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the

Christian West (Boston: Beacon, 1989) 53-77, 206-10. In some contexts, this trope likely applies to both men and women (see Karen L. King, "The Gospel of Mary Magdalene," in Searching the Scriptures, Volume Two: A Feminist Commentary, ed. Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenza [NY: Crossroad, 1994] 611; Deirdre J. Good, "Gender and Generation: Observations on Coptic Terminology, with Particular Attention to Valentinian Texts," in Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism, ed. Karen L. King [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988] 39; and Michael A. Williams, "Variety in Gnostic Perspectives on Gender," in Images of the Feminine, 19). Finally, Verna Harrison has looked at the converse of this imagery; see her "Feminine Man in Late Antique Ascetic Piety," USQR 48 (1994): 4 9 - 7 1 . 88 Quis 37.2. See C. Nardi, "II seme eletto e la maternita di Dio nel Quis divessalvetur di Clemente Alessandrino," Prometheus 11 (1985): 2 7 1 - 8 6 . 89 Paid. 1.42.2. 90 Paid. 1.46.1; see also 1.42.1-2 and 1.43.4.

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In the Paidagogos, Clement does not speak of the divine becoming female but does appropriate characteristics of maternity to depict the actions of the divine and the relationship between divine and humans. The closest that Clement comes to identifying God fully as a mother is in his homiletic piece on Mark 10:17-31, Who Is the Rich Man Who Is Being Saved). Clement writes, "For God Godself is love, and became visible to us because of love. The ineffable part of God is father, while the part which has sympathy toward us is mother. Since he loved, the father became feminine (tbelunein; pass.), a great sign of this being that he bore from himself" (Quis 37.2),91 referring to God's preincarnational production of a "son." In this passage Clement's language recalls that of other early Christian texts that speak of the Godhead as comprised of Father, Mother, Son.92 Although Clement goes so far as to say that one aspect of God is a mother, his remark that the father became feminine to bring forth an offspring makes clear that God's fatherhood is God's prior and "normal" state. In addition, God remains a unified concept. Even though childbearing in this context seems to entail the necessity of maternal qualities, Clement attributes these as internal to God; this God does not require a separate partner. In the Paidagogos, analogies between motherhood and divine action contribute to Clement's arguments; women's bodies and experiences, however, are portrayed as the material and inferior analogical referent to spiritual truths.93 For example, Clement claims that the father's breasts and the Logos-milk they contain provide the true spiritual nourishment, in contrast to the material nourishment that women can offer (Paid. 1.43.4); we found this contrast spelled out in a comparison of manna with breast milk as well: "But while women who have conceived and become mothers produce milk, the Lord Christ—the fruit of the virgin—did not bless women's breasts or judge them to be nourishers; rather, since the loving and kind Father rained down the Logos, he has become the spiritual nourishment of the self-controlled" (Paid. 1.41.3). Clement transposes the key characteristics of a mother—conception, parturition, and lactation94—to the divine realm; these maternal characteristics are then 91 ecrxi Se teat auxoc, 6 Qzoq &y&7rr| Kai 5i' ayarcriv f|uiv 89E&6T|. Kai TO UEV appr|xov auxou jraxf|p, xo §8 elq r|uac, avpnaQkt; yeyove uf|xr|p. ayarcriaac, 6 Jiaxf)p E0r|W>v0T|, Kai xouxou (isya ar\\ieiov ov aoxd