Clement of Alexandria

(ca. 150 - OK. 220)
Titus Flavius Clemens was born in a pagan family, possibly in Athens, and very early converted to Christianity. After long wanderings settled in Alexandria, where he taught in a so-called. Alexandria kateheticheskoy school. In an era of Clement and Origen, this city became a center of Christian philosophical thought. Clement left Alexandria during the persecution of Christians under the reign of the North (202-203), and his subsequent life and travels almost nothing is known. Pope Clement VIII ruled his name from the church calendar because of doubts about the orthodoxy of some of his writings
. Exceptional erudition Clement and his familiarity with a wide range of pagan and Christian sources are reflected in the principal of his surviving works - Protreptic, . or exhortations to the Greeks, . Brief explanation (Hypotyposeis), . Stromatah ( 'patchwork quilt'), . Educators and homilite What a rich man shall be saved? As incomplete and unsystematic mapping brilliant lectures, . had read in Clement of Alexandria, . these works - even if marked by an excessive predilection for philosophical allegory, and a number of doctrinal errors - can understand the main purpose of Clement: a rational understanding of the mysteries of the Christian faith to bring people to the true 'gnosis', . ie,
. to such a state of spiritual perfection, which we called the Word of God and in which man, freed from passion, love for God is already on the ground lay the foundation heavenly bliss.