Amid a most welcome recent flurry of studies devoted to the figure and writings of Clement of Alexandria, Doru Costache provides an intriguing contribution through a focus on what he terms a “science-engaged theology” (p.1). This lens, Costache contends, allows a reconsideration of Clement’s philosophically saturated ancient faith. Through five extensive chapters, Costache identifies and interrogates a method of “nature contemplation” (p.1) that, he argues, enables the Clementine gnostic to rightly engage both the world and spiritual matters within a broader conception of Christ, Clement’s divine Logos.
Costache’s study is a valuable contribution, and his dedication to a close reading of the breadth of Clement’s oeuvre ensures moments of insightful reflection throughout. Working through Nature Contemplation in Clement of Alexandria, however, this reviewer was struck that the title represents something of a misnomer. While the method of ‘nature contemplation’ comes to the fore in the latter chapters, Costache’s central idea of Clement’s disciples—whether real or simply idealised—as what he terms “holy gnostics” (p.33) is perhaps his more significant contribution. It is this idea, and the reconsideration of Clement’s intended pedagogical product this brings about, that dominates the work, over and above the discussion of Clement’s nature contemplation.
A brief overview of the volume will demonstrate this perceived tension between the focus of the study and the framing of its title. After a prologue that proposes an exercise in science-engaged theology as a result of a Clementine epistemology that is described as something of an interdisciplinary method, Costache dedicates the first few chapters to contextualising his analysis. Chapter One (‘Paideia, Theological Anthropology and the Curriculum’) explores Clement’s efforts to Christianise the classical paideia of his educated contemporaries. Costache frames Clement’s intellectual project as a quest towards greater insight and identifies the locus of that insight as within Clement’s Christ, his divine Logos. In establishing the parameters of the study as a whole this opening chapter offers a helpful demonstration of Costache’s approach. The paucity of supporting Classical material within this construction of paideia, however, was a minor source of frustration for this reviewer. (Xenophon contributes the sole non-Clementine work cited in this discussion, and the reader is left without a sense of the contemporary pedagogical cultures Clement himself participated in.) Despite falling short of locating Clement within the broader cultural and intellectual landscape assumed throughout the study, this opening chapter ought to be commended for its insight into Clement’s writings, and Costache draws widely on Clement’s oeuvre to support a persuasive presentation of Clement as an author who Christianises popular Classical norms and ideas.
Chapter 2 (‘Elements of the Method’) reinforces the contextualising efforts of Chapter 1. Costache dedicates this second chapter to exploring a portrait of Clement’s gnostic—the informed, educated believer Clement desires to form through his intellectual Christian project. The chapter provides an entertaining tour of the relationship between faith and reason articulated through Clement’s engagement with various ancient disciplines (identified as virtue, ‘curricular disciplines’ and philosophy.) As well as fleshing out something of Clement’s vision for his educational model, the chapter serves the following chapter well by establishing a received sketch of the gnostic disciples of this second-century Christian intellectual.
Building on this platform, then, Chapter 3 (‘Enter the Holy Gnostics’) is able to introduce a fresh answer to this question of Clement’s students/followers. Though Costache finds no explicit basis for this new title in Clement’s oeuvre, he suggests Clement invites such a view of his followers and thus provides a brief tour of key passages where these gnostics are described as holy or set-apart in their instruction and spiritual maturation (p.68). This new category of the “holy gnostics” will shape the rest of the study and offers a helpful point of reflection for the reader. This designation allows Costache to reconsider Clement’s relationship with the local ecclesial context, as well as the spiritual dimensions of his Christian philosophy, and this in turn generates several insightful reflections. In the final balance, however, Costache is somewhat hindered by a desire to show that Clement’s plan for a class of “holy gnostics” avoids the elitist trappings of contemporary radical gnostic groups. Costache argues that there is no strain of elitism here—yet repeatedly employs language that sets Clement’s followers apart as an intellectually elite group. After all, the addition of the descriptor ‘holy’ implies a fundamentally set-apart nature. This issue flares up on several occasions in subsequent chapters, and the tension remains unresolved. Nonetheless, setting aside this distraction of the question of elitism, the idea of the “holy gnostics” provides Costache’s most important challenge to pre-existing scholarly understandings. By classing Clement’s followers as “holy gnostics”, Costache is able to wrestle with a number of specific issues that have long dogged the study of this corpus. These themes (ecclesial connections, Clement’s doctrine of deification, and Clement’s ethics, to name a few) resurface throughout the study and Costache’s “holy gnostics” invite a fresh perspective on these often-divisive areas.
It is only in Chapter 4 (‘The Gnostic Contemplation of the Cosmos’) that the book turns in earnest to consider this idea of nature contemplation and employ the science-engaged theology promised from the prologue. The chapter considers how the “holy gnostics” ought to approach both physical reality and spiritual growth, and in doing so, develop “genuine cosmological interests” (p.95). As Costache suggests, for Clement the idea is that the informed believer ought to “peer into the invisible through and beyond the visible” (p.96). Clement’s perspective is, rightly, presented as a fundamentally cosmological one. The chapter complements the introduction of the holy gnostic in Chapter 3 and works through the implications of Costache’s method with reasonable success. This fourth chapter pairs well with the final substantive contribution of the book in Chapter 5 (‘Performing Nature Contemplation’). Here the focus of Costache’s science-engaged theology broadens beyond cosmological questions, and applies a threefold method of description, interpretation and vision that Costache identifies as lying scattered among Clement’s extant works. As Costache concludes (p.157), “Clement proposes a rigorous, structured approach to the contemplation of nature that proves his genuine interest in the cosmos, which interest, in turn, is motivated theoretically and practically.” Through a number of examples Costache demonstrates Clement’s genuine interest, and the theological and practical implications of his approach. This final significant chapter represents the crux of Costache’s engagement with natural material (previously limited primarily to the cosmos as a concept) and adds further weight to the sketch of the “holy gnostics” established in Chapter 3 as heavyweight intellectuals, critiquing the breadth of the human experience within an epistemological framework ordered by the divine Logos of Christ.
The book ends with a brief epilogue where Costache reflects on his ‘Learnings’, before a bibliography and indices of both names and topics. Overall, this is a welcome contribution to the ever-growing field of Clementine studies. Costache provides not only a fresh methodological approach in his ‘science-engaged theology’ but a credible reimagination of Clement’s pupils as this breed of “holy gnostics”. This category shift is of greater import to Clementine studies than Clement’s nature contemplation, and feeds into live discussions around Clement’s students and the context and nature of his teaching. It is this, I think, that will be most beneficial for readers interested in the place of Clement and Christian intellectuals more widely in the ancient pedagogical and spiritual landscape.
Despite the occasional loss of focus, Costache writes in an enjoyable style. His subject—Clement—is known for embedding in his writings the fruit of all manner of literary creativity, with a number of examples of wordplay or humour. Costache’s desire to take the reader “through the rabbit hole—to experience Clement’s Wonderland” (p.7) or to consider the “chicken-and-egg” (p.12) of Clement’s philosophical good life represents a playful engagement with the form and style of his subject that ought to be further commended. Such levity and informality, however, can occasionally hamper Costache’s argumentation. While errors such as ‘crumbles’ for ‘crumbs’ (p.32) and an inconsistency in the Greek or English titles for Clement’s works ( ‘Exhortation’, ‘The Educator’ and ‘Stromateis’ are used interchangeably) are minor editorial matters, a few more consequential errors emerge from this more informal language. This more relaxed style leads to occasional loose statements such as the definition of Clement as a “late antique thinker” (p.18), or as “the ideal Christian philosopher, and a traditional one at that” (p.102). As a number of recent studies have demonstrated (e.g. Heath 2020, and Ward 2022—to name but two important works missing from the bibliography) Clement emerges as the product of a number of second-century intellectual cultures, and cannot be seriously considered as either a traditional Christian philosopher (a phrase unexplained by the author) or a late antique thinker (even if one were to take a generous early start-point for a sense of late antiquity).[1]
Despite these minor issues, and the more consequential burying the lede regarding the introduction of the “holy gnostics”, Nature Contemplation in Clement of Alexandria is an intriguing contribution to the ongoing revival of interest in this late second-century figure. Costache’s discussion of Clement’s Christianisation of Classical material speaks into the importance of this ancient figure for both modern theologians and classicists, while his description of the “holy gnostic” represents a fresh perspective on Clement and his students, one that invites further reflection. Scholars with an interest in Clement himself, or in the place of Christians within the intellectual cultures of antiquity, will benefit from this study and the ancient material it points its readers towards. For once one journeys through the rabbit-hole and into the wonderland of Clement’s oeuvre, one rarely emerges unchanged.
Notes
[1] Heath, J.M.F. Clement of Alexandria and the Shaping of Christian Literary Practice: Miscellany and the Transformation of Greco-Roman Writing (Cambridge: CUP 2020); Ward, H.C. Clement and scriptural exegesis: the making of a commentarial theologian (Oxford: OUP 2022).