Clement of Alexandria (Part 2)

Transcript (PDF)

Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 37 of 54

Clement of Alexandria (Part 2)
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, August 21, 1985

Transcript:

Let's see what we can do. If I wander around, it's because I have a mic that allows us to record. If my voice strays, it's because I'm talking about something skirting mysticism. And I may have an epiphany up here, in which case, you have to indulge me and let me see what I can see. Good Alexandrians would do that. I should probably preface this by saying that I've been lecturing on archaic Alexandria for the last ten months on Tuesday nights, and we talked about Clement last night. So there are probably some simple elements that I'll be leaving out, simply because I have the intuitive sense that I've set it, not being cognizant enough to realize that I haven't said it to you. So if there are some simple elements that you know about Clement that are not mentioned, it's because of this. The Tuesday night series has made it clear that almost none of the traditional figures in the history of the Western tradition are understood. We have gone into them enough to realize that we have a cardboard image of what happened, and consequently we have a very shallow understanding of where we are today. The contention on the Tuesday night series, which has been borne out many times over by our experience, is that the elements in our unconscious today are not ambiguous, but are in fact very exact, and that these archaic type images that inhabit us today were actually constellated about 2000 years ago.

That they had existed in other forms, in other constellations in previous times, but that they were refashioned again, and they have not been refashioned since. So that the largest strategic context of our consciousness is totally unknown to us, and to expect that we can adjust ourselves to reality on the basis of the junkyard lives that we are forced to live, puts it into the ridiculous. So we have spent about ten months on Tuesday nights at the Whirling Rainbow Institute on Hyperion to try and unravel a little bit of our own background. This particular series on Wednesday night is augmentative. Towards that end. Ostensibly, Doctor Heller is writing a book which may or may not bear the title The Third Testament. It seems now that he will probably opt for a title like Agnostic Reality. And this lecture series was planned about six months ago between the two of us to try and help him, primarily to get straight in his own mind, the receptive level of intelligent human beings like ourselves to some of these themes, some of these ideas. And he's been much encouraged by what has come about. So I will try and tailor this lecture tonight towards his purposes, and to assume that if you get insights that you will pick up cassettes and tapes of the Tuesday night series and see what's been going on there in the larger strategic issues. Clement was born about 150 AD and apparently must have died somewhere around 213.

We lose track of him, and we established last night that, contrary to popular scholarly belief that Clement was born in Athens, we established that he is in fact an Alexandrian. He is an Alexandrian, not by adoption, but by temperament, by attitude. He loves the complex. He loves the synchronistic. He loves the wide open, speculative spaces that come gradually to a conclusion, and that all of his conclusions line up so that one has a vision of reality from the alignment of one's conclusions, so that for Clement. Logic is not a dry, formal operation. To get clear how to think about mundane things, or how to think about thinking in some ironical way, but that the logic for Clement of Alexandria is to ordinate one's entire life experience so that it lines up into a thread of continuity, and that this thread of continuity he will give the name faith. In Greek pistis, and that pistis will be the royal road to redemption, that because of the complex world, because it contains so many diverse elements and traditions, not only temptations to go astray, but contrary parallel traditions which one could follow quite adequately for whole lifetimes, so that in order to establish one's faith, one's pistius one's central thread of coordination towards salvation, one must organize one's life. And that this organization is a double motion. It is a purification which is a progressive withdrawal from the material world, and it is a coordination so that one organizes one's views into an alignment.

This is a double motion purification and the ordination. In fact, for Clement in Alexandria, the most important thing that we can do is to clarify our minds, because it is our minds that receive all of these contrary or parallel traditions, and we find ourselves trying to do 2 or 3 things at once, or trying to believe in 2 or 3 different ways at once. And we do not have a coordinated mind. And so in order to order the mind, we must be educated. But this education is compromised, says Clement. It's compromised all the time because we are using, he says, ostensibly the Greek language. We're using a Greek tradition, a Greek intellectual tradition, a Greek culture, and that this Greek culture is completely misunderstood. So that Clement would like us to begin our process of purification and ordination by clarifying the very largest strategic sense of where we are in terms of the history of the world. He says that in his book, The Exhortation to the Greeks. That it would be almost an impossible, monstrous task to argue against all of the Greek thinkers one by one, but that the core of the Greek mind and at the core of the Greek language, and at the radial axis of Greek culture, is the phenomenon of Greek mythology, and that the Greek mythological images which control the Greek religious sense are what are primarily at fault.

That believing in ridiculous, silly half gods have so distorted man's perception that he is unable to think clearly about religious issues. In fact, Clement goes to great lengths to take up where Philo of Alexandria, a hundred years before him, had left off, and progressively show that Greek philosophy and Greek historiography, and in fact Greek art and Greek literature, owe everything that they have their primal themes, their basic, um, argumentative forms, their artistic insights and revelations. All of this is owed to the Jewish tradition that primal among philosophers in terms of dating back in history was Moses. And that if one dates back to Moses. And of course, Philo goes into this to a great extent, one realizes that all of the Greeks, including Homer, including Plato, etc., etc., have borrowed from the Hebrew tradition, borrowed heavily. So that the Greek tradition is largely a second hand reportage of the primary experience which the Hebrew people had. So that one should go back to the Old Testament, back to Hebrew Scripture for the basic experience matrix upon which Greek philosophy especially was a commentary. And when we do this, Clement says, the first thing that happens to us is that our own depth of experience deepens. And the Greek mythological images begin to lose their veracity. They become very pale. They become ridiculous and silly before our eyes, and we become embarrassed to even talk about them.

And when we see statues of him, of Zeus, or we see statues of Aphrodite, we realize that these are third hand imitations derived from Greek thought, which is a second hand derivation from the primal Jewish experience. But Philo stopped with Moses and all of his arguments of showing the allegorical interpretation of Scripture to be a secret key, to go back to recover the primordial experience below and above the philosophic mind which was sandwiched in by the Greek experience. Clement goes even further. He says that even Moses was still in the human tradition, still a historical person. He even says, suppose that there are cultures which were there before Moses came along, the Egyptians. Or he points out that in his time some people said that the Arcadians were as old as the moon. He says this is still within human history, and that what Clement is talking about is that underneath the Old Testament experience is a another thread of meaning, even deeper than that of the mosaic tradition, even deeper than that, and more primordial than that of the Old Testament. He says that this is the figure of Christ because Christ is an eternal figure and was there before the world began, long before any man began. And so Clement amplifies Philo's technique of allegorizing the Old Testament, to develop the true matrix of transformative experience. Setting aside Greek philosophy is a second hand bickering, a sort of a bad habit of mumbling.

But Clement goes even beyond this and saying that there is an eternal element to cosmic experience which predates the Old Testament. And that this is going to be his focus and his main concern. He says, in fact, that his description of Jesus is that of a door, a doorway that the world has become completely trapped by a labyrinth of demonic speculations, mental images, emotional expectations of almost what we would call today a hypnotic phantasmal events. And that in order to combat this whole morass which surrounds the world, one would not live long enough. But fortunately, because this situation was foreseen, a doorway has been brought into the world which allows us to escape through that doorway. And this is Jesus. This is Jesus as the Christ, and that in fact, piestus then, or faith is a single unifying way towards the doorway of liberation that Jesus presents in himself, but that the path of faith of pistis is so precarious in this world. It is subject to ironies and is subject to paradoxes. It is subject to ridicule, it's subject to ignorance and a colossal hierarchical confusion. Therefore, before we can have pistis, we must have something else. We must have. Of gnosis. We must have the organization and the ordering of our minds into knowing, and that while pistis is single. Gnosis is multiple, but the multiplicity in gnosis is brought to a focus.

So that I've put on the board here a diagram that pistis is like a single vector, that it has only one direction, only one object to which it goes. The threshold of liberation, the doorway through this world into reality, and the preparation for having the courage spiritually to take that path, to fortify ourselves so that faith can take us that way directly. We must first have gnosis, and that this is a very big problem, because knowing usually has for itself a profane, referential knowing the world. And when we try to know the world, the multiplicity becomes overwhelming and stymieing. There is no end to trying to know the world. And if we try to know the world in terms of the complex overlay which the mind has projected out upon it, this just raises it to an impossible exponential. There is no way to have a shape of knowledge, to have an experience of gnosis when the world is the referent, so that we have to reverse that process. And the reversing of that process is what the Greeks called metanoia. The metanoia is to stop throwing your understanding, casting it out into the world, and begin throwing it inside internally so that wherever you begin from, whatever experiential matrix or sequence one is working from, the reference are always coming within. And in this process, something else happens. A sense of inner presence begins to form itself.

One realizes that there is a focusing going on in oneself, and as this focusing gains in awareness, we come to a realization, a gnosis about the very nature of learning about the very nature of language. And here we have to mention that Clement was basically a teacher, that he was the head of the Great Catechetical School in Alexandria for more than 20 years, and that the Catechetical School was the great school, almost what we would call a university today, preparing people for Christianity, but that the preparation for Christianity was not to teach them a litany, not to inculcate in them a doctrine, but to prepare them in this Gnostic way for interiorize using all of the focuses, all of the vectors of knowing, so that one would have an internal experience of coherence. This was the object in view. Gnosis, of course, in this sense is becomes esoteric. In fact, its tendency is increasingly upon the experience of it to be esoteric in terms of a contrast to the exoteric world, the worldliness the materiality becomes, in contrast to one's inner sharpness, a very stodgy, deathlike landscape, and more and more one withdraws from involving oneself in this kind of a death landscape, and as one's inner focus attenuates, energizes, one begins to see that there is an inner landscape, an inner hierarchy. And for Clement, this hierarchy is in fact a seven part hierarchy with an eighth level overall.

And these eight together were called the ogdoad. For Clement, the interior person, the person who comes into being through gnosis and who is able then to take the path of pistis, cannot take that path as long as we are in the physical body here. But that after death, at the moment of death, the soul begins its journey upward. There is this heaven bound ness of the soul and those who are caught in the world, who have lived their lives according to the world, remain here and remain in this, uh, demonic nightmare. Those who have purified themselves somewhat rise to further and further levels. And if one has achieved real gnosis so that this inner focus is exactly coordinate with the doorway of Christ, then one rises through all of the seven levels into the eighth level, and there one comes, as Clement says, face to face with God, with the divine. And at this point, at this moment, there is a complete harmonia. There is not an absorption of the individual by the Godhead, but there is the eternal harmonia, which is achieved. Now we can see that this is a very, very difficult path, and in fact it tends to become doctrinaire if taken in this kind of a blackboard sense. Those who are able to take this path were the pneumatici, the spiritual, and they are spiritually elect because they have achieved this inner gnosis and are able to take the thread of pistis all the way to salvation.

Now, the problem was complicated in Clement's time because of the nature of the Christian church in Alexandria at this time. The city was huge. It was about a million and a half people. It was divided into 12 different districts. Some of the districts went quite far out of town, rather suburban like. Each of these 12 districts had Christian, uh, communities, congregations, and they would elect among themselves someone who would represent them. Now, this representative later on became, uh, the foundation for the priesthood. But at this time, in the second century AD in Alexandria, this individual is called a presbyter. And the presbyters were just the representative of the people. It was very democratic. Any male member of the Christian community had the same authority as any other male member. The fact that so and so was a presbyter in the community was only a temporary delegation to him of representation so that he could go to meetings or he could, uh, sit in on councils. But it did not give him authority. Now, as the presbyter was chosen from the Christian community, a single individual called a bishop was chosen from the council of the presbyters. He was also not an increase in authority at this time. He was one among many, and simply was the spokesman or the, uh, person to whom one took, uh, these issues. And that could change if the presbyters changed and the presbyters could change if the community changed, so that there was, in this sense, a complete democracy of the spirit in the Christian community in Alexandria.

Now, one of the reasons that this was so attenuated at this time was that Alexandria never had Christian persecutions. The first Christian persecutions were about 202 AD, near the end of Clement's life, and he left Alexandria at that time, as many did. The second reason, along with the lack of persecutions, which of course left the community to grow naturally instead of having to comport itself in reaction to intolerable tyrannical conditions. But the second reason was that Alexandria was always a cosmopolitan royal city. It never was a little peasant village that grew up slow phase by phase into a city. It was, from the very beginning, the royal center of an ecumenical world vision. It was that for Alexander the Great it was that for Ptolemy the first, uh, Soter, it was that for everybody on down the line. And when the Roman conquest of Egypt and Alexandria happened. In 31 BC. It did not become a Roman province subject to the Roman Senate. It became the personal possession of Augustus Caesar, and Egypt and Alexandria were always the personal possessions of the emperor, so that the rule in Alexandria was always royal, markedly different from any other place in the Empire, and because Egypt at this time was the food producing center of the Roman Empire, they had a lot of leverage.

Leave these people alone. They're feeding us. Was the popular understanding. And to go with these two reasons, the lack of tyrannical pressure, the fact that Egypt and Alexandria were of a special royal kind of a possession. The third factor is that Alexandria was always ecumenical in its religious outlook. The city always had huge populations of Jews. It always had huge populations of Greeks, huge populations of Egyptians, and huge populations of people from all over the world. Alexandria sent emissaries to the Second Buddhist Council 300 BC. There were always individuals from India. There were always individuals from Africa, from all over the known world who were welcomed there to practice their faith there. Now, the most important group in Alexandria were the Jews. And you have to understand that at this time Judaism had a very, uh, particular nature, which has only become visible again in our time. Alexandria was the only place in the classical world that had a large free, i.e. Jewish population. Free in the sense that they were free to practice their religion, and their religion was not so much based in the synagogue or in the doctrine, but was based in the home and in the community. And the health of the Jewish tradition is measured by its viability in the homes of the people and in the health of the community. And when the Jewish community is healthy, those communal structures reach out and beautify and make healthy the larger polis or the larger urban, uh, situation.

The parallel in our time would be, I suppose, in the late 19th century, early 20th century in Europe would be Vienna. Vienna profited by having a large intellectual, uh, Jewish population rather free to practice their religion. And this country, New York City and Los Angeles, would be benefactors of this. Alexandria was the only place in the world that had this, so that the huge cosmopolitan population were not single minded, and they were communally informed, and they valued home based traditions. And even though the Alexandrian would love to argue and probably would argue with you all day about any issue that you wanted, you were free to argue that, and you were free to hold any viewpoint which you would like to defend. This international situation in Alexandria tempered the Christianity so that the Christian community in Alexandria also had this kind of a tone to it. In fact, it was the openness and the effective openness of the growing Christian community in Alexandria that posed a problem for the Roman emperor Severus. He didn't start persecution against the Christians in Alexandria because of their beliefs. They had been there now for 200 years. The church in Alexandria had been founded by Mark, who had been the secretary of Peter, who had been the author of the gospel of Mark and the Secret Gospel of Mark that we know of now, and that church had always enjoyed this kind of a cosmopolitan of family based democracy, of the spirit, where it's a church hierarchy, was completely open and permeable to individuals of talent.

It was in this context that Clement and his genius wakened up the fear of the Roman political state for the Christian community becoming. A possible competition to social organization. The persecution of the Jews in Alexandria in Philo's time was likewise a political persecution and not a religious persecution, and Philo and his brother and his nephew went to Rome and made the deputation to the mad Caligula, and showed conclusively that there was no political competition with the Jewish community and the Roman state, that they were perfectly capable of supporting the Roman Empire and capable of supporting the idea of an Egyptian province, and so on and so forth. And so in 40 AD, when Philo returned to Alexandria, there was no persecution. It was only later on the perception that the growing power of the ideas of the Jewish community were becoming a political competition in the Eastern Mediterranean to Roman power. This is why the temple was destroyed. This is why the Jewish religion was almost completely decimated in 70 AD. The very same reason led to the persecution and decimation of the Christian community 130 years later. And the man responsible for this in large extent was Clement. Because Clement had realized that while you can train in a school and even a very good school, only maybe ten, 20, 50 people in a year or two years, maybe you can train 300 people in a lifetime.

This is not very much, but if you could get a hold of the mentality of the Greek world and show by written documents and by experiential, um procedures how to effect a metanoia, a change in thousands or tens of thousands of individuals, then Christianity would grow not arithmetically, but exponentially. And this is exactly what happened. Clement found exactly the right combination, and by 200 A.D., the Christian community in Alexandria was definitely a threat to the political state. Now, you have to realize here, and this is a very complex issue, that the state is a creation politically, largely of a theological perspective, and that as long as the state has a theological perspective, it is safe in human conception. But that religious experience penetrates through a theological conception and in penetrating through that theological conception, the state also disappears as a point of intense concern or even of relevance, because when one has a Gnostic disposition, one cares less and less for the order of this world. It is all a sham. It is all a junkyard. None of it is real. All of it is arbitrary. And not only that, you can prove it and not only prove it, one knows it. And so the Gnostic viewpoint becomes a very powerful realization for a libertarian outlook.

And in fact, we have one of the works of Clement, which was discovered very, very recently, an exhortation to endurance. It's called and sub entitled to the newly baptized. And here is the character of the Christian individual around 200 A.D. in this great, tolerant, ecumenical city of Alexandria, which was spreading and spreading by leaps and bounds throughout the eastern part of the Roman Empire. These are the precepts of Clement. Cultivate quietness in 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 ready to prey on them. I don't know if you're responding, but some of these things in this list I have to put myself down with here. Not gluttony, but, uh. For the mind seated on high on a quiet throne, looking intently towards God must control the passions. By no means be swept away by temper and bursts of anger, nor be sluggish in speaking, nor all nervousness in movement. Now, the only reason that he can say all this, of course, is that these were the characteristics of the world at that time in general. It even looks like our world today. The Christian was beginning to stand out by virtue of his self control.

He was no longer haunted. He was no longer an individual who was subject to the fearfulness of external authority. He was becoming like the spring wind, going in natural motions, and it became apparent to people who would see them that this was indeed a new way. This was a different way. And they would ask them, how do you get this way? You don't seem to be too worried about the prefect. You seem to be doing all right, even though you're doing the same kind of work that I'm doing. Living a better life, quieter inside, speaking well, and on top of that, seeming to have a sense of presence within charisma. Charismatic. This is what the Roman state feared. It feared a spread of this type of individuals over which they had no handle. He writes in here. Guard against all the signs of arrogance, a haughty bearing, a lofty head, a dainty and high treading footstep. Let your speech be gentle towards those you meet. And your greetings kind. Be modest towards women, and let your glance be turned to the ground. Be thoughtful in your talk and give back a useful answer. Adapting the utterance to the hearers need. Loud enough so that it can be heard, but not so loud that others hear it. Take care never to speak when you have not weighed and pondered beforehand, nor interject your own words on the spur of the moment and in the midst of another's.

For you must listen and converse, and turns with set times for speech and for silence. Learn gladly. Teach ungrudgingly. Now, this is not just good advice, but this has its esoteric side. In the gnosis for language, speech was the most arcane of all of the inner structures because for Clement he describes us as the images of the thoughts of God. When God speaks and God's thoughts spoken out, create in the universe images which we are, and that in fact, at the core of our image, blossoming is a potential which was always there from the beginning and even before the beginning, that we were in fact always seeds within the cosmic Christ, even before the world was created. And so that the Word of God when it is spoken, and when it is received by a Gnostic interior, which is focused and present and able to receive it, has the awakening of the eternal seed within, and we blossom out and form out into this radiant image of the divine which we were before the world began. And this is where Clement then really brings in the contrast between Greek thought or Roman thought, or any kind of thought, and the Christian gnosis that all of those are picayune compared to the cosmic dimensions, the ultimate eternal truths and verities of the Christian message that we are, in fact, in a very real way.

Um. Through the word awakened to our real nature in this way. Clement sometimes speaks of words as children of the soul. That words can be planted within, and that they will germinate and they will grow. And that this is why the good news. Spoken in certain ways, has an esoteric reverberation within, and that the right thing said in the right way penetrate through to us, to our inner core. And when we are aware of this, we then attenuate ourselves to this pattern. And once we have perceived it once or twice, we awaken to the fact that this is the way in which we learn spiritually, so that we then begin to organize ourselves so that all of our experience begins to come in this way and penetrate through. And this then facilitates the gnosis. And as this happens, as the gnosis begins to really take hold, we realize that we are restructuring our very being by the Word of God. This esoteric transformation takes us out of the material realm. We are still living in this world, but we are not of this world. And increasingly faith or pistis becomes for us a reality, not a synthesizing reality, but the single one reality. It's the thread. It's the umbilical cord. Nomadically back to our origin, back to the heavenly self, which we really are, and the way in which we are able to move up that corridor of light within the interior of the soul's structure is because we are being called to by the Christos, that the helping hand of the word is there to draw us up and help us along the way, so that there is this uniting ascent towards an unseen object, the unknown God, and that this is unknown and unseen, because it has no referent in the material sense that it is the only objectively real goal of pistius, so that only faith can detect it.

It's as if the eyes cannot see it, the ears cannot hear it, none of the senses can detect it. But the sense of faith detects God as the only object that's there. This raises gnosis, then, to its cosmic level that what we have known before were insights about ourselves, and that the culmination of all these insights about ourselves was the realization that we have this structure, we have this eternal capacity. And now that we're aware of this, we realize that this has come from somewhere. And following back the core of pistis, we are able to return home at the point of death to leave behind this world, this body, this realm. And here Clement is developing from the structure which I don't have time to go into. Tonight was developed by the stoic cosmology in the second and first centuries BC. Clemmett says that if we are limiting our minds to logic all the time, we are never understanding the most primordial elements, for logic is incapable of demonstrating its first principles.

But that Pista's faith.

Is the only coherent human experience which can recover its first principle. And this is why faith is active, because it recovers its own basis for being its own first principle, which is coextensive with the cause of the universe. Thus, man becomes a cosmic phenomenon in true faith and true pistas. He in fact then makes a a distinction. He says that we have in the human world always the problem of choice, and that this bothers us when we are told that there is a determined structure to the world, to reality, but that this need not bother us when we realize that the unswerving choice, the only unswerving choice in human experience, is the choice that faith makes to recover its own first principles. He wrote. That we must think of sanctity. As the perfect pureness of mind. And that deeds and thoughts and words too, in the very last degree must be sinless and dreamless. And that this purification is the difficulty for us in practicing, because we constantly are trying to understand in terms of worldliness, in terms of material analogies, and that, in fact, the analogous proceedings of the mind throw us back into the polarities of the material world. And these polarities of the material world are irresolvable, because as polarities they only create a further tension in their dynamic.

They do not reconcile themselves, so that in a way there is a cosmological physics involved in gnosis of reversing the polarity of the mind, so that instead of experiencing a tension which creates meaning, one experiences resolution which delivers meaning. And whereas the tension of the polarized world always gives us different meanings depending on what we're trying to understand and what we're looking at, the reversing of the polarity gives us a single, resonant, reoccurring, eternal meaningfulness. And it is that intellectual awareness which is the substrate of our gnosis, of our understanding. So that faith or pistis is not a blind faith at all, but is a extremely accurately informed precision, intellectual understanding. So that when one rises to the divine, one understands that God is reasonable to the nth degree, that the universe was intelligible to the nth degree. And Clement then makes it apparent that the Christian community, in order to achieve this cosmic vision, must have this free structure. It must have the community aspect that it cannot be subject to an external hierarchical structure. If it is, then the material world, with its analogies with its polarities, dominates faith. So that faith ceases to be based upon gnosis, and is based more and more upon doctrine and doctrine is a possession of the empire building exterior world.

This, of course, was dynamite.

There is no hierarchical power structure that can brook this kind of statement, because it undercuts their very rationale for being. You cannot have a church. You cannot have a state. You cannot have any kind of a political or theological structure. When you have individuals who are achieving a Gnostic vision, they are free. They are progressively liberated. There are no handles to hold them. And when they recover in themselves individually by the thousands and tens of thousands, this unified, eternal experience of faith leading toward the One Godhead. There is no more division of humanity. There is no more dividing up of people into various traditions, various nationalities, various religions, various governments. Man becomes finally capable of the ecumenical, not the ecumenical as made by card folding of empire builders to consolidate their hold on larger and larger areas of the world, but the ecumenical of a single vision shared by anyone who can transform himself to the point of depolarizing his mind, of experiencing pistius in its pristineness, and of participating in this universal community. The. Words that Clement so often uses in here. That we must consider the word. The word. Then he says, we are the rational images formed by God's Word or reason. And we date from the beginning on account of our connection with them, because the word was in the beginning. Well, the word was from the first, and he was and is the divine beginning of all things. But because he took a name, the name consecrated of old and worthy of power, the Christ, I have called him a new song.

The word, then, that is the Christ is the cause, both of our being long ago. For he was in God and of our well-being. This word, who alone is both God and man, the cause of all our good, appeared. But lately in his own person, to men from whom learning how to live rightly on earth, we are brought on our way to eternal life. For in the words of that inspired Apostle of the Lord, the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, instructing us to the intent that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly and righteously, and godly in this present world, looking for the blessed hope and appearing of the glory of the great God and our Savior, Jesus Christ. This is a new song, namely, the manifestation which has but now shine forth among us of him who was in the beginning the pre-existent word. This was the message that over and over again was to be repeated after Clement of Alexandria. He was the one who pioneered the way in which to deflate the Greek mind, which had puffed itself up into an almost impossible arrogance. In Clement's understanding of appropriating for itself a world order based upon man's human intelligence, a world state based upon man's gods in his own image, and that this was an inverted order exactly, and was the best that could have been produced by the ignorance of man's own arrogant mind, and the fact that it was a world completely haunted.

And I use that turm, and not in any kind of a mysterious way. The great Roman historian Livy, writing about 50 years BC, wrote we can no longer stand the way we live, and we cannot stand. The techniques that are necessary to correct it. We are condemned to the limbo of our own lives. By 50 A.D., this had become an epidemic. Uh, review for yourself the daily conditions in Rome in 65 A.D., and you can see a world gone mad completely by 200 A.D.. The recovery of Rome by Trajan and Hadrian and Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius had only served to repress these emotional and spiritual elements. And when they broke out again in the third century AD, they completely fractured the structure of the ancient world. By the end of the third century AD, in the Roman world, to find a sane person that you could talk to was the rarest of all occasions. Porphyry, in his Life of Plotinus, remarked, when one of the ancient Egyptian mages mages came to Rome to conjure up Plotinus guardian spirit, they went around to find some sacred ground in which to do this conjuring, and then the whole city of Rome. They could only find one building that was still consecrated ground the temple of the Vestal Virgin, a city of 2 million people, and had one building that was still spiritually intact.

That's amazing. That's the world that it was in. It was this world that Clement talked about, not the world of Plato, which is already in a spiritual crisis, but the world some 500 years later, which had become glacially crazy and was structurally beyond repair. And so Clement did a world shattering task. He is the one that provided the intellectual method, the educational procedure, the intellectual rationale, and the spiritual strategy for reversing that whole world order, for Interiorized experience and bringing it to a still presence of gnosis, and then committing those people in the democratic community of the spirit who had achieved some measure of that. The unifying path without synthesis, the universal eternal path of true faith. And this is what made Christianity by the end of the third century, the religion of the Roman Empire. Whereas in the beginning of the third century it was still the province of small religious communities, probably the church in Alexandria. In Clement's time never numbered more than maybe 10,000 people. 100 years later, at the close of that century, the population was in the million is because of Clement and his successor, Origen, who then brought this into ever finer focus that Alexandria actually created the large Christian community. It's a historical paradox that the Roman church districts took umbrage at the Alexandrian.

Success, and did.

Everything they could to throw out Clement and Origen and make a church structure based on the old Roman Empire. And this was done at the beginning of the fourth century AD, so it seems rather curious and ironical and yet understandable why we are so ignorant today about the real reasons of why. In the third century AD, a few real Christian geniuses pulled the trigger on the whole civilization. They punctured with the needle of Gnostic insight, the whole inflated, arrogant structure of the Greek and Roman mind. This is why it won out.

We better go home.

We talk any more, we'll be arrested.

END OF RECORDING