Antoine Paris: From Wittgenstein to Clement and from Clement to Wittgenstein. A few methodological leads for a literary comparison including Patristic literature.

Comparing Patristic texts with literature from other periods or areas is often seen as at best superfluous and at worst a risk of distorting them. We would like to offer epistemological grounds which make such a comparative effort necessary and a methodological framework which should lead, through such a comparing endeavour, to sure and fruitful interpretations.Comparing Patristic literature with very different texts, with respect to time of composition, genre or form, seems to us a sure way to understand the literary nature of those texts, that is to say the Patristic texts as texts, beyond their formal specificities and doctrinal contents. If one would try to grap such a literary nature while studying those works only in their context of creation, one’s research would surely be erroneous.The horizon of such a research would be a common model to the compared texts. Starting from an hypothesis and from intuitions concerning the meaningful common points between the texts in comparison, the researcher would progress following a sequence of inductions and deductions. By doing so he would, in a parallel manner, building this model and interpreting the compared texts.We would provide an example by comparing the beginning of the Stromata by Clement of Alexandria and some passages from the Logico-philosophius Tractatus by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Beyond their apparent differences, we assume that both texts share a same literary functioning: they, at the same, say and show and provide the readers sure information as much as they unsettle them.