losophy of
the Greeks was placed under the protection and guarantee of the Church,
and the whole Hellenic civilisation was thus at the same time
legitimised within Christianity. The Logos is Christ, but the Logos is
at the same time the moral and rational in all stages of development.
The Logos is the teacher, not only in cases where an intelligent
self-restraint, as understood by the ancients, bridles the passions and
instincts and wards off excesses of all sorts; but also, and here of
course the revelation is of a higher kind, wherever love to God alone
determines the whole life and exalts man above everything sensuous and
finite.[673] What Gnostic moralists merely regarded as contrasts
Clement, the Christian and Greek, was able to view as stages; and thus
he succeeded in conceiving the motley society that already represented
the Church of his time as a unity, as the humanity trained by one and
the same Logos, the Pedagogue. His speculation did not drive him out of
the Church; it rather enabled him to understand the multiplicity of
forms she contained and to estimate their relative justification; nay,
it finally led him to include the history of pre-Christian humanity in
the system he regarded as a unity, and to form a theory of universal
history satisfactory to his mind.[674] If we compare this theory with
the rudimentary ideas of a similar kind in Irenaeus, we see clearly the
meagreness and want of freedom, the uncertainty and narrowness, in the
case of the latter. In the Christian faith as he understood it and as
amalgamated by him with Greek culture, Clement found intellectual
freedom and independence, deliverance from all external authority. We
need not here directly discuss what apparatus he used for this end.
Irenaeus again remained entangled in his apparatus, and much as he speaks
of the _novum testamentum libertatis_, his great work little conveys the
impression that its author has really attained intellectual freedom.
Clement was the first to grasp the task of future theology. According to
him this task consists in utilising the historical traditions, through
which we have become what we are, and the Christian communion, which is
imperative upon us as being the only moral and religious one, in order
to attain freedom and independence of our own life by the aid of the
Gospel; and in showing this Gospel to be the highest revelation by the
Logos, who has given evidence of himself whenever man rises above the
lev