Matyáš Havrda: The order of education and knowledge in Clement of Alexandria

In his Pedagogue and the Stromateis, Clement outlines the order of education and knowledge within the tradition of the church. Two basic levels of education may be distinguished – one of practical instruction, whose goal is temperance (sōphrosunē), and one of theoretical instruction, divided into ethics, physics, and theology. Within the realm of (theoretical) ethics, dealing mainly with virtues and the goal of life, topics are also arranged in a particular order, corresponding to the order of progress from rational obedience to knowledge. Neither Clement’s physics nor theology has been preserved; but they may be partly reconstructed on the basis of various adumbrations in the Stromateis and other texts. Physics, based on the notion of divine economy, appears to follow the chronological order from the creation of the world to the “end without end”. In a sense, theology permeates the process of education from the beginning – it is encapsulated already in the confession formula –, but it seems to be presented in an ascending order of clarity. We shall explore this complex structure of education and knowledge in Clement’s œuvre, with a particular focus on the question of whether and to what extent it follows contemporary models of Greek education and philosophy.