Emily Cain: Perfected Perception: Knowledge of God in Clement of Alexandria

In Paedagogus1.6.28, Clement describes baptism through the metaphor of a cataract surgery that enables the recipient to see and to know God. In this paper, I argue that this deceptively simple metaphor offers us a key insight into Clement’s understanding of knowledge of God by describing an Epicurean process of vision and knowledge that is ultimately transformed into a Platonic one through this baptism. Epicurean sensory perception understood objects to emit tiny films that entered the eye of the bodyor the eye of the mind, with repeated contact leading to concept formation, and Clement begins with this same depiction to describe how the eye of the soul could see God. Just as Epicurus posited that the gods emitted divine dianoetic εἴδωλα that enter a person’s mind and grant her an idea of the gods, so also Clement suggests that God emits divine effluence(ἀπόρροια), and these incorporeal contacts of the intellect grant each person a seed of the truth. The full truth, however, is blocked by a cataract, and full knowledge is only available to the baptized Christian who has had the cataract removed through baptism and then gains Platonic vision through deified light-bearing(φωσφόρα) eyes. Thus, Clement engages the medical metaphor of cataract surgery in order to describe a transformation in the process of knowledge, moving from Epicurean to Platonic vision and knowledge of the divine.