Clement of Alexandria (Part 1)

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Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 36 of 54

Clement of Alexandria (Part 1)
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, August 20, 1985

Transcript:

This is the lecture that was delivered by Roger Weir at the Whirling Rainbow School on Tuesday, August the 20th, 1985. By Clement of Alexandria.

Part one. Part one. Maybe I could be a more successful lecturer if I made those strange sounds that Bruce Lee used to make, right? He lectured well. Yeah. Where are we? We're jumping ahead 100 years. The reason we're jumping ahead 100 years and we're just doing it temporarily is mundane rather than esoteric. I have to lecture tomorrow night for Stefan Heller, who is out of town, and I'm doubling up a little bit. I'm going to make this lecture and tomorrow night's lecture. Um, parallels. So the lecture is on Clement of Alexandria. So we're leaping 100 years ahead from Philo. Clement was born around 150 and was reported as dead around 213. So he lived at the close of the second century, in the beginning of the third century A.D.. He is called of Alexandria, and many people think he was born in Athens. His name is a Roman name and his name is Titus Flavius Clemens. And in fact, the Flavius middle name indicates that he was descended from or associated in some way with the Flavian dynasty, who supported several emperors late in the first century A.D. the first of them was named Vespasian and then Vespasian's son Titus, and it was Titus who sacked Jerusalem and who brought to Rome many of the sacred articles from the Temple in Jerusalem. Conspicuous among them the Great Menorah and the Arch of Titus in Rome, which commemorates that sacrilege. Their own Romans saw it as a triumph. Uh still illustrates the troops carrying all the sacred materials from the temple, so that Clemens name, Titus Flavius Clemens, harks back to that family.

And in fact, there was a Titus, Flavius Clemens, who may well have been the grandfather of Clement of Alexandria, who was discovered to not believe in the gods of the state, and who was killed by the Romans because he was very high up in the Roman hierarchy, and his wife, named Domitilla, was exiled to a small island off the coast of Italy. Um, that part of the coast of Italy which is called Campania, north of classical Capua, about 50 or 60 miles, and the island is about 40 miles off the coast, not quite out as far as, uh, Sardinia, but in that direction. Minturno is the modern Italian city that is opposite on the coast. Apparently, if we read it right, Clemens of Alexandria was descended from the royal Flavian family in Rome, and that his grandfather, whose namesake he bore, was put to death for being a non-believer in the gods of the state. And because the Roman state religion was extremely tolerant, you could believe in any collection of gods you wanted. The only people who would fit an atheistic description would have been Christians. So that it's very likely that the grandparent generation of Clement of Alexandria were converted to Christianity, and that would have been towards the close of the first century, the opening of the second century AD. We don't know what happened to the generation in between.

It is supposed by some that he was born in Athens because he has such a wonderful Greek education. But the fact is, is that when one reads Clement as a Greek, that is when one puts on a Greek mind and reads Clemens, he's not Athenian at all. He's Alexandrian. The tell tale sign is that he does not see in a Homeric way, and almost all of the Athenians had a very characteristic, um, view. They still do, which is Homeric. They are able to um see in an identic fashion. That is, they are able to objectify what they see. And, um, this was called by Nikos Kazantzakis the Cretan Glance. One is able to see only what one is looking at and get rid of anything extraneous. This penetrating, uh, perceptual sabering of vision is Homeric. And Clements does not have this. In fact, Clement has all the telltale marks of an Alexandrian intellectual. He constantly quotes and Alexandrians were always quoting. I think someone at one time counted over 300 names in Clement of Alexandria. Who? Whom he quotes from that we know nothing of, to say nothing of the hundreds of individuals that we know, which indicates that he was either an enormously well-read individual, or that he was raised in the Alexandrian school system. And the Alexandrian school system always emphasized textbooks, which were compendia collections of selections from classical authors, and because they treated subjects thematically, often you might have 40 or 50 quotations about about death, or about marriage or about Zeus.

And Clement has this kind of personality. So I rather think that he was born in Alexandria and came from Alexandria, but moved around and studied in Athens. It's often pointed out that his descriptions of Athens are very painstaking. He knew the geography as one who had lived there, and I should rather think that he had studied there. At any rate, he mentions himself that he had found only six teachers who were able to enlighten him, and that the sixth teacher, the last of this line, was the head of a school in Alexandria, and his name was Pentheus p a n t e uh us. And Pentheus was the head of a school that prepared people to enter into the Christian church. It was called the Catechetical School from catechism. You would learn certain catechetical elements, and even though there were other catechetical schools in the Roman Empire, there was one at Antioch. There was one in Edessa, of all places up in the Crimea, and I think 1 or 2 others in small places. The one in Alexandria was outstanding. It was outstanding because in the second century AD most Christians were ignorant. That is, they were unlearned. They were simple people. And the emphasis about Christianity was one laid upon being a good person, a simple, uncomplicated person who was not enmeshed in the nightmare of the Roman world gone wild. But in Alexandria, distinct from all other places, the Christian community was extraordinarily intellectual and sharp.

The reason for this is that the Christian Church in Alexandria was founded by Saint Mark. And Mark is always viewed symbolically as the lion of the church. Now Mark, as we saw, was at one time associated with Paul and could not stand. Paul in fact refused to go on with him any longer and left Paul's entourage, and later on refused to have anything further to do with Paul. Mark became the secretary for Saint Peter. And in fact, if you look in the New Testament, the first letter of Peter closes with sending greetings to the people that he is writing to, to the Christian churches, and he extends the greetings that would come not only from himself, but from his son Mark. So that Mark had become a very close disciple. Of the original Apostle Peter, Simon Peter. Now remember that Paul was not an original disciple and neither was Mark. So we're speaking now of the second generation, and we're speaking about a split that occurred in the second generation within 5 to 6 years after the death of Jesus. Already there was this bifurcation. Mark was with Peter when he was martyred in Rome. And seeing that the external church, even under the hands of the kindly old Peter, was constantly threatened by the madness of the Roman world. Mark collected what notes he had taken because he was a very literate individual, and he collected what writings Peter had left and secretly got out of Rome, because it was dangerous.

At that time, and by ship made his way across to Alexandria, and there founded the Christian church in Alexandria. Not only did he found the Christian church, but he founded two directions that do not appear elsewhere in the Christian world at this time. One is the emphasis that there is an inner Christianity which is transformative, that it is not all just niceties. It is not all simply being a good person. It is also coming to terms with a certain energizing of the spirit within oneself. And that when this pneuma, when this spiritual sense is energized, the first thing that fights it is the psyche. Man's mind, not his body. The spiritual person's problem is never somatic or Hellenic. The spiritual person's problem is the psyche, the mind, because the mind sees the energizing of the spirit as a direct threat, a competition, if you like, from within and senses that this is going to break up the game. This is going to steal the show. So Mark's Christianity in Alexandria stressed the need for intellectual preparation, to train the mind so that it would not balk at this transformative, energizing. And the training of the mind was not to train it in new things so much, but to order it because the ordered mind, when it comes down to its eternal structuring, regardless of what content it has, is able to take the radiation.

And I'm not speaking now about radiation of like electromagnetic energy, but the light radiation of the energized spirit so that the person becomes very much like the illustration that William Blake drew one time called Glad Day, where the figure is out like this in a dancing leap, and all the colors of the rainbow are coming out of the aura of the whole body. This kind of a thing. The Catechetical School in Alexandria was that entity that was passed down and became 100 years after Mark, the place that Clement found himself. And Clement eventually became the head of the Catechetical School and for more than 20 years developed the Catechetical School so that it prepared people for transformation. In fact, it is from a letter of Clement of Alexandria of Alexandria that we know of the fragment that was found in 1958 by Morton Smith of the Secret Gospel of Mark. And we've talked about that in several of the lectures here. Now, the difficulty with Clement, he realized that you can train one or 2 or 10 or maybe even 20 individuals. It takes a long time to train somebody. But the problem was, is that you have tens of millions of pagans whose minds are becoming increasingly haunted by neurotic intrusions and psychotic extrusions, and there had to be some way to train thousands if. Not tens of thousands of people, or there had to be, in fact, some way to change the mix of the whole classical world.

The key to this was the classical pagan mind, and the classical pagan mind had been trained along certain lines which had originally in Homer been very clear, very excellent. And by Plato's time they had become metaphorical and quite complex. And 500 years later, in Clement's time, they had become a plateful of spaghetti in the mind. There was no clarity whatsoever, and the subject was Greek mythology. What got in the way in the second century, towards the end of the spread of Christianity, was that the classical trained mind was a plate of spaghetti, of phoney and pseudo um, allegorical Greek mythology. And so Clement took it upon himself to pull the plug on this entire mentality, and I must say that he was successful beyond his wildest dreams. Clement of Alexandria, more than any other individual in the early church, is the one who lanced the bubble of the classical pagan mind. It was never to recover. There were other polemical individuals who were extremely agile mentally, who set up a structures. His own student, Origen, was a much more sophisticated theologian, developed a Christianity to a much higher level of doctrinal understanding. But it was Clement of Alexandria who pierced first and popped the bubble of the Greek mythological background to the pagan mind, and the document in which he does that still exists, still comes down to us, and it is called the exhortation to the Greeks, and the exhortation to the Greeks is rather a very large development over the letters of Paul.

The Pauline epistles are to the various churches the Corinthians, the Romans, the Ephesians, the, the Hebrews, and so forth, various peoples. Clement's exhortation to the Greeks is like an open public letter, but he's talking about the Greeks as anyone who has a Greek mentality. And this meant almost all of the classical world east of the Adriatic Sea. In Clement we find, as we said before, five, six, 700 quotations from Greek literature. We find four, maybe five from Roman literature. He almost totally ignores the Roman mind. He ignores the Latin language. And the reason that he does this is that he is a very cagey fighter. He realizes that he cannot take on this tremendous complication, which the Roman overlay over the Greek substrate had produced, that in fact, it was the Roman overlay over the Greek substrate that had produced this polarity, this polarizing, this crisis of consciousness, which the Roman Empire suffered in the first century A.D. they somewhat recovered. They somewhat recovered around 9596 A.D. the man who brought the peace eventually was named Trajan and Trajan. Just through sheer power, magnificence generally, um, having a great staff with him put the Roman Empire back together and left it to a very fine individual named Hadrian, who, who constantly traveled throughout the Roman Empire during his lifetime, almost never was in Rome. Constantly refurbishing everything, traveled as far as Scotland and Ireland, and traveled just everywhere in the Roman Empire.

And he left it to a man who was extremely conscientious. In fact, he was named Antoninus Pius. Pius, and he left the empire to his successor, a very great man named Marcus Aurelius, so that Rome had had four great emperors in a row, and it seemed that Rome had been put back together. This was called the age of the Antonines, and many. Classical scholars say if they could live at any period in human history, they would live in Rome in the age of the antonines. It was lavish. It was secure. It was well run. But it was haunted. And no one ever brings this up. I saw a statue one time of a Roman general, and he looked extraordinarily beautiful in this old patinated bronze. Strong features the hair down in Roman style, and they look just magnificent until you got close to the statue. And when you got close to it, set in this strong, dominant face where pathetic eyes and they seem to just collapse. And one could see that this is what happened to the personalities, that they fell inward and they fell off this magnificent power perch of the ego, which the Roman mind over a Greek substrate had made. But because it was glued together, when the conditions were not right, it came unglued. And when it came unglued, they collapsed and fell into the abyss of their own misunderstanding. This happened in Clement's lifetime, because Marcus Aurelius, wise as he was left the empire to a brute, a murderer named Commodus, and things went downhill from there.

In fact, in 202 AD, the emperor named Severus as in severe um realized that Alexandria was a hotbed of transformation and went for Clement's life, settled to exile him, and to temporarily disrupt the whole church community through persecutions. There had not been any Christian persecutions in Alexandria until 202 A.D. there was no throwing Christians to the lions in Alexandria. There was no midnight meetings in the catacombs in Alexandria. The Christian community was wealthy. It was intellectual. It was international. It was well trained. And it was effective because Christianity was spreading out from Alexandria and people were realizing it isn't the simpletons who are Christians, it's people who are living a simple life. But that is not being a simpleton. And so Christianity was becoming a very viable force from Alexandria. And Clement was at the head of this because he had managed to finally produce, in the exhortation to the Greeks, the sense that the classical Greek mind was ridiculous, not to argue against it, not to bring up subtle arguments, to argue against Plato or Aristotle, or to show that the stoic cosmologies or the Epicurean cosmologies were wrong, but to go for the juggler to take Greek mythology and show that the Greek mysteries and the Greek mythological tradition was silly, that how could grown people believe in such garbage? And so the exhortation to the Greeks is one of the most important documents in world history, and it shows us.

And we'll take a little look at it now. It shows us what happens when the emotional substrate of a cosmology is fractured. That's all you have to do. It's just fracture it. You don't have to break it. You don't have to explode it. You just fracture it. Because the weight of the worldview which rests upon that eventually in its own dynamic, crumbles. Through that fraction. We know because we are facing that very same mentality in our own time. He writes in the beginning, in the exhortation to the Greeks. He says. In my opinion, therefore, our Thracian Orpheus and that of Thebes and Mamilian too are not worthy of the name of man, since they were deceivers under cover of music. They have outraged human life, being influenced by demons, though some artful through some artful sorcery to compass man's ruin by commemorating deeds of violence and their religious rites, and by bringing stories of sorrow into worship. They were the first to lead men by the hand to idolatry. Yes, and with stocks and stones, that is to say, statues and pictures, to build up the stupidity of custom by their chants and enchantments they have held captive in the lowest slavery, that truly noble freedom which belongs to those who are citizens under heaven. And now we see the first indication of the scale with which Clement is going to work, and the standpoint from which he is going to make the classical Greek mind look ridiculous in terms of its mythology.

He will develop the thesis that the gods of Greek mythology were, in fact human beings, and that only through long custom. And he's willing to say that maybe this was a thousand years. Maybe it was even longer. Maybe it's 2000 years, whatever you like. 10,000 years, 20,000 years. Clement will speak in this sort of a way, but he will say, I am speaking from a standpoint which is eternal, which dwarfs time, which dwarfs human custom. It dwarfs it to the vanishing point, because he will make the point that we as Christians recognize that we have existed in our sole sense from the beginning, that we were seeds in that being who was there from eternity. Jesus Christ, not that our souls were there before time began, before the world was created, but that Jesus was there and that we were all seeds within him. And Clement will develop the theme saying, this is why Jesus is a door. He is the doorway for us, recognizing our seed, intuition of our cosmic nature to bring ourselves to that doorway. And we discover then that that is actually the gateway to heaven, that literally through the, um, uh, adverb here is a dynamic and descriptive that through Jesus Christ we enter into the kingdom of God. We enter into heaven. He is the doorway. And that this is so because we are returning to our actual condition, which is real, that all of the fantasies, no matter how long they were established by custom, that we have as human beings, that we have as Greeks, as Clement would say, is only obfuscation, it's only worldliness.

So he'll take this kind of a contrast and progressively go through Greek mythology and show that this is silly to any longer, to hope for anything more than simply entertainment or even pure entertainment, which one eventually will just throw down from this kind of a classical Greek mind? Notice now this is quite a different approach from that of Philo 100 years before. Philo is saying that the classical Greek mind and its power was powerful and insightful, because it was based upon a Hebraic origin in Moses, and that because of Moses, who lived many hundreds of years before any of the classical Greeks, that all the classical Greek, Homer, Plato, and so forth had learned from Hebrew wisdom which had come down through Moses. Clement of Alexandria, not mentioning Moses in this kind of a context at all. He's Christian and. Philo is Jewish, puts Jesus in his place, and raises Jesus then to not simply an early man, an early perfect man, but as a cosmological figure. So he writes here, for he says that Orpheus is is silly and these are just enchantments. He says, far different is my minstrel, for he has come to bring a speedy end to this bitter slavery of the demons that lord it over us. And by leading us back to the mild and kindly yoke of piety.

He calls once again to heaven those who have been cast down to earth. Notice the language. We have been cast down to earth. We have fallen. We have literally. We have religiously fallen to earth, where we are kept on earth by a demonic overlay. In this demonic overlay. We don't have to fight against that demonic overlay, because we have a portal in that demonic overlay which we can escape through Jesus. This is how Clement is thinking. And as you can see, this is strategically very, very, very powerful approach. Only an Alexandrian would have come up with this in the classical world. He, at least, is the only one who ever tamed the most intractable of all wild beasts. Man. For he tamed birds, that is, flighty men, reptiles, that is, crafty men, lions, that is, passionate men, swine that is pleasure loving men, Wolves, that is rapacious men, men without understanding or stocks and stones. Indeed, a man steeped in ignorance is even more senseless than stones. As our witness. Let the prophetic voice share in the song of truth come forward, speaking words of pity for those who waste away their lives in ignorance and folly. For God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. This is a quotation from Saint Matthew and God, in compassion for the great dullness and hardness of those whose hearts are petrified against the truth, and did raise up out of those stones.

That is, the Gentiles who trust in stones, a seed of piety sensitive to virtue. What is happening here is that climate says that the onus upon human beings is to realize that this whole salvation structure is now cosmologically in place and working, and the only thing that he has to do is believe. He puts the whole onus upon man, but that man's belief is contingent upon his waking up out of his ignorance, so that Clement says, the fundamental quality that man lacks is gnosis. He does not know that he is baffled if he understands, if he has the knowledge, the gnosis, that he is baffled, then he will stop living according to that life and look for a way out. And he will try individually to find a way out for himself. And with really good training, we can speed up that process of questing so that instead of taking a lifetime, it might take a couple of years, it might take five years, it might take ten years. Eventually he will discover that if you're trying to find a way out individually, there's no way out that the complications are so labyrinthine and they reach down into the individual in a sociological way, in a political way, in an individual way, a family way that eventually the person will have the ultimate gnosis of realizing that there needs to be a way out of the morass that was there before the morass came into being, that that's the only solution, the only resolution to the demonic complication of the world.

And this is where Clement will say, in fact, this is just the case. And gnosis then leads to transformation within the individual, a transformation to the point to where his belief is certain and founded because he can then experientially take himself. Through that doorway to liberation. But all of the teeth of the world are geared to swallow him up and keep him here, so that he has to prepare himself to slide easily through the ensnarement of the world, so that he will not be caught by his own desire for various things in the world. And the description that Clement has of this process, I'm going to skip over here to his short exhortation to endurance. Endurance. And it's entitled to the newly baptized. And he's going to portray here the character of the person who is prepared himself through transformation, in how he then comports himself in the world so as not to be ensnared by the demonic overlay. Cultivate quietness and word. Quietness indeed, likewise in speech and gait. Avoid impetuous eagerness, for then the mind will remain steady, and will not be agitated by your eagerness, and so become weak and of narrow discernment, and see darkly. Nor will it be worsted by gluttony, worsted by boiling rage, worsted by the other passions, lying a ready prey to them. For the mind seated on high on a quiet throne, looking intently toward God.

Must control the passions by no means be swept away by temper and bursts of anger, nor be sluggish in speaking. What he's saying here is that, uh, um, the human condition is caught in a swing, a seesaw pendulum swing. It's it's not a pendulum swing between, uh, tension and relaxation so much, but between hypertension and sluggishness. And so we are constantly taken outside of our capacities to do anything about it. We're constantly thrown into extremes which do not have their root in our capacity to control. And so no wonder we have no capacity to affect our lives, that we have to limit the range and the spread of our capacities to ourselves first. Then we stop, um, dancing to these other tunes, these other strings, which are transpersonal. Notice how Clem is extremely agile strategically. He's not interested in developing doctrine. He is not a theologian. He is not a systematic, uh, philosopher at all. He is like a general who is looking upon this battle with evil as a war, which he wants to win. And the war is to bring the troops home. All right. So we are not to have bursts of anger, nor be sluggish in speaking, nor all nervousness in movement, so that your quietness may be adorned by good proportion, and your bearing may appear something divine and sacred. Guard against the signs of arrogance. And what are the three signs of arrogance? A haughty bearing, a lofty head, a dainty and high treading footstep.

Now these kinds of characteristics are definitely, uh, Pythagorean, this kind of motion comportment. He's not talking about arrogance philosophically now. He's talking about a kinetic appraisal of ourselves, which can be made by the individual spontaneously at any time that he's moving around. It's a form of yoga. Let your speech be gentle towards those you meet and your greetings kind. Be modest toward women, and let your glance be turned to the ground. Be thoughtful in all your talk and give back a useful answer. Adapting the utterance to the hearers need just loud, so that it may be distinctly audible, neither escaping the ears of the company by reason of feebleness, nor going to excess with too much noise. Take care never to speak when you have not weighed and pondered beforehand, nor interject your own words and the spur of the moment in the midst of another's. For you must listen and converse in turn, with set times for speech and for silence. Learn. Gladly teach Ungrudgingly. The emphasis here is upon movement, upon bodily movement and comportment, and upon speech about the way that we talk. The speech is the movement of the mind, and our physical movements are the movements of the body to bring those into sync, then order the personality so that the spirit, when it is energized, has an expressive form which it can irradiate. If it does not have an ordered expressive form, we'll argue Clement exceedingly fine.

If we do not have an ordered mind, if we do not have an ordered body, an ordered social community of gentleness and reciprocality, then when the spirit is energized instead of shining forth, it simply is distracted from all these labyrinthian complications and produces an explosion which dizzies the person. One goes off into a equivalent of madness, keyed in by the metaphysical, supernatural light of the spirit, which is energized in a body, and the mind which is not prepared to receive it. This is exactly the apocalyptic vision underlying the revelation, according to John, which is not by John, which is not even as has been found out in our time, not even a Christian doctrine document, but belongs to, um, a Judaism. Actually, it belongs to that development in the early second century AD that showed that most of the esoteric traditions were facing the problem, that people were becoming energized, were starting to transform themselves, but had not prepared themselves. And so they were experiencing a kind of a psychic vertigo, a kind of a physical, um, wildness and then dullness, because they were simply not prepared. Um. So he says here in your speech, be articulate, listen and speak in a balance so that silence and words are interpenetrate and make everything articulate. Give useful knowledge. Be first to practice wisdom and virtue. Do not wrangle with your friends, nor mock at them and play the buffoon. Firmly renounce falsehood, guile and insolence. Endure in silence. As a gentle and high minded man.

The arrogant and the insolent. Let everything you do be done for God, and deeds and words, deeds what you do, and words, so that one organizes oneself on the basis that you're not going to adjust the ordered structure of mind and body to yourself, but you're adjusting the ordered structure of mind and body to the divine. And when this happens, one then is able slowly to see that invisibly there was a key that oneself is the key to the door that the Messiah has provided. Because when your ordered mind and body around a vision of the divine, the divine calls out directly to you. And there's like a one way line established down to you called grace and a return line established up called Faith, and that the meeting of that is going to that threshold, going through that door. I'm condensing, um, many hundreds of years of thought here into just a few phrases. But Clement is the root of all this. This is an extraordinary thing. But in order to prepare this in a positive way, he has to completely discredit the Greek mind. The Greek mythological basis of the classical mind. And so he goes on in the exhortation to the Greeks to do this. He says, people talk about old traditions, about how some people say that the Arcadians were older than the moon, or again, the Egyptians, by those who dream that this land first brought to light both gods and men.

Still, not one of the nations existed before this world, but we were before the foundation of the world. We who, because we were destined to be in him, were begotten beforehand by God. We are the rational images formed by God's Word or reason. We are rational images formed by God's Word, and we date from the beginning on account of our connection with him. Because the word was in the beginning, which is from John. Well, because the go ahead. We'll wait for it. I don't mind machines. Well, because the word was from the first. He was and is the divine beginning of all things. But because he lately took a name, the name consecrated of old and worthy of power, the Christ, I have called him a new song. Now, Clement here goes into a whole, um, allegorical development of a of a song because words, language raised up to rhythm, become musical. And he will say there are many musical forms known to the Greek mind. He says there are Lydian scales, there are Phrygian scales, there are Dorian scales. There are many combinations of them, he says. All of these scales are dwarfed by the fact that there is an eternal mode, an eternal scale based upon the ogdoad, and that when that chord is sounded, the word displays itself simultaneously throughout all space and time, and that to acclimate oneself to that. The puniness of human systems becomes silly. So he's using this kind of a reasoning, this kind of a logic, this kind of a development.

He writes here. If you long to see God truly take part in purification, meet for him not of laurel leaves or meat embellished with wool and purple, but crown yourself with righteousness. Let your wreath be woven from the leaves of self control and seek diligently. I am the door, he says, somewhere which is from Saint John ten nine, which we who wish to perceive God must search out in order that he may throw open wide for us the gates of heaven, for the gates of the world are the gates of reason opened by the key of faith. You see how Clement uses this language now, this is the first time that this kind of language is used. This language will be used for the next 1516 hundred years. This kind of an understanding. But the difficulty is that Clement in Alexandria puts the whole, um, onus upon man's gnosis, man's intuition, and progressively, as the third century goes along, this will come under increasing suspicion by those who are handling a power structure that's coming into being. For the simple old reason that when somebody is capable of their own individual gnosis, they don't have any handles on them to be manipulated by some hierarchical structure. And when a church becomes a state, they want control. And this will become a very, very big problem. In the late third century and in the late third century, Clement of Alexandria will increasingly become persona non grata in the Christian church.

The man who does this fantastic job will be let go. We have come a long way. We really don't need to be reminded about him. He was nice but old fashioned. And now we have new things. And by the time that Eusebius is in charge of the great Christian confabs under Constantine, this whole approach to Christianity will be junked, because the faith which man will have in Christianity will be seen not as dependent upon his gnosis, but as something which is dispensed by the hierarchy of the church. And to put it in simple words, if they don't like you, you don't get it. And the Roman Empire will take a new disguise. Already in Alexandria in Clement's time, this tendency was happening because when we read Clement and we go back and we open ourselves up into how did this then work? How did this whole structure work in daily life? We were surprised to find out that the Christian church in Alexandria in his time was extraordinarily democratic. Every man was equal to every other man in the church. There was no superiority whatsoever. The 12 districts of Alexandria each chose from among the population a presbyter who represented that district, and it would change from time to time. And those 12 presbyters would be a committee who would choose from among them one who would be the bishop. And there was almost no differentiation whatsoever in terms of church, uh, hierarchy between the bishop and the lay person.

There's almost no difference whatsoever. It was in Clement's time, towards the end of his life that this change came about, because with the development of numbers in Christianity, in Alexandria, the development of vast numbers of people. We're speaking now of maybe a community of 20, 30, 40,000 people in a city of about a million and a half. Under pressure from the political powers from without the Roman Empire, it became more and more convenient to keep the same presbyters. And in fact, because they were around to call them priests, and that the power of decision making for the Christian community was no longer in the community, but increasingly resided in the priesthood, and in order to control and structure the priesthood, then one made the bishop a stronger position. And by the end of Clement's life, the bishop and the priesthood were taking control of the Christian church. And instead of a Christian community, you had a Christian church structure. The fact that this Christian church power structure was coming into being and was perceived as a very real political threat on the horizon by the Roman administration. That is why they were persecuted in Alexandria. It wasn't because of religious reasons. Alexandria had had a thousand religions from its origin. There was no theological persecution. There was no doctrinal reason to do this. It was that the Christian church in Alexandria was becoming a very effective social movement, a political structure.

And it was beginning to spread throughout the Greek speaking world. And they weren't paying any attention to Rome or Roman things. And the tough guys in Rome said, we can't have this. We're going to be out of all this territory. But especially in Egypt, because it's the source of food for the Roman Empire. And we're not going to let them take our breadbasket away from us. They're going to have to go. And that persecution exacerbated the nascent situation, and lay people, under understandable duress no longer wanted to take public responsibility. Let Joe do it. And Joe would say, If I'm going to do it, then I've got to have power to make decision on my own with my confreres. And we'll let you know what we decide. And this is what happened at the beginning of the third century AD in Alexandria. And Clement was there, but didn't really see it long enough to do anything about it. The man who saw it was his successor at the Catechetical School in Alexandria. Origin. The origin lived into 254 AD when they got a hold of Origen, they castrated him and made him persona non grata in the church. Because he will take Clement's whole approach and say before it gets out of hand, we've got to organize Christianity so that it remains a cosmic community and does not become a mirror image of the persecutors. The well known complex, those who are captured, those who are prisoners under violence and duress, eventually take on the characteristics of their captors.

This is what happened to the Christian church. It became Roman increasingly, until in Constantine's time, even though he wasn't a Christian, he saw no reason why. You can't call it a Christian empire. It's the same difference. That was 313 AD, so you can see how quickly this moves. A hundred years after Clement died, this whole thing has already accomplished. So we're going to have to take our time. And it seems like we're moving very slowly. I know to some of you, but the reason we're moving very slowly is we want to see this whole spring in the first century AD, because when the trigger is pulled, it moves so quickly that unless you see the choreography of what has been set up, there's no understanding of what happened. It's a complete blur. And I must say, it's been a blur to everyone ever since. And the reason that it's been a blur is no one has, in our yoga of civilization, meditated long enough on the whole movement to see it clearly, how this happens. And when you do, it's not much of a mystery. It seems like today's, uh, headlines. It's the same old song. If there's any moral in it is that we have to be responsible for our own diligence. Well, let's take a break until next week, and then we'll we'll come back and do some more on Philo for a while. We'll come back to Clement a couple more weeks.

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