THE specifically Christian doctrine of prayer first assumes something like systematic consistency in the writings of Clement of Alexandria. Clement lived through the last half of the second century and for some few years on into the third. He was a scholar, pledged to the practical solitude in the midst of human affairs which is at all times the scholar's lot, and therefore had little influence upon the life of his time. Yet he has left a permanent impress upon the history of Christianity, and that by virtue of the very qualities and circumstances which deprived him of any considerable influence upon his own age. Such influence as he did wield immediately and locally was the result of his work as a teacher at the famous Catechetical School of Alexandria. Thither, after some years of study at Athens, he came somewhere about his thirtieth year, and found his honoured and beloved master Pantænus in charge of the school. For twenty years, as Pantænus' colleague and successor, he taught at Alexandria till driven into exile by the persecution under the Emperor Severus in the year 202. [13] The remaining ten or twelve years of his life he seems to have spent mainly m Syria and Asia Minor, and in the opinion of many of the most competent authorities, it was during those years that a great, if not the greater, part of his literary work was accomplished. Clement's life, then, throughout was that of a scholar. But the life of the scholar, and especially of the Christian scholar, was not in those days so self-contained and apart that it could not, if occasion arose, address itself successfully to the satisfaction of the intellectual or spiritual needs of the ordinary man. And it would seem, from a letter written by one of Clement's pupils, Alexander, who was bishop of one of the Churches of Cappadocia, to the Church of Antioch , as if Clement after his departure from Alexandria may have spent some of his time and of his own rich spiritual resources in comforting and confirming the Churches which he visited. It does not, at least, seem an unwarrantable inference from Alexander's words: "I am sending this by the hand of Clement, the blessed elder, a man whose worth has been put to the proof. In the providence and oversight of God he has visited us here and established and increased the Church of the Lord."

      But it was in the intellectual atmosphere of Alexandria and surrounded by the rising Neoplatonism that the religious life of Clement was formed. And so it was inevitable that he should come to attribute to knowledge a preponderating--it may be admitted at once an unduly [14] preponderating--part in the formation of the religious life. But, whether for good or for evil, he left Christian theology the permanent impress of his intellectualism. The more immediate influence upon S. Thomas and the Schoolmen may have been the specific type of intellectualism derived from the study of Aristotle. But it was the definitely intellectual bent given to Christian theology by Clement that forced the Schoolmen to seek fresh sources of inspiration for perfecting its intellectual character. Now, if we are to do justice to a religious attitude which is very unlike our own, we must try not merely to appraise its results, but to understand its motives. And these latter are to be sought in the Platonic conception, perhaps I ought to say more generally the specifically Hellenic conception, of man's spiritual nature. To the Greek the mind was the only element in man's complex nature which was capable of apprehending or getting into any kind of living touch with the Divine Nature. The will and the affections were, for the Greek, subject to unceasing perturbation from the constant and varied assaults of foes without and within, of what Christians called the world, the flesh, and the devil. It was the heart of man that was deceitful above all things. All that we mean by the heart was the predestined victim of illusion. By the necessities of its own nature it took evil for its good and rejected good as its evil. And so it was the natural theatre of all the malign and multiform activity of evil spirits. Through [15] his mind alone could man become relatively free from this nightmare of illusion. For the mind was at least capable of disengaging itself from the tangle of passion. By its own nature, indeed, it stood outside that tangle. It naturally sought to know things as they were, to recognise good as good and evil as evil. Its quest of truth was essentially a moral quest. And not only had it a moralising effect, but it was the only ultimately moralising power. Knowledge when achieved, though of course its achievement was the most difficult thing in the world, was righteousness, and all wrongdoing was essentially ignorance.

      Now, to this general conception of man's nature it is only necessary to apply the specifically Christian idea of grace in order to understand the heritage of Christian doctrine which Clement left to the Christian world. Since for Christianity the assistance of Divine grace is indispensable to all spiritual renewal and growth, it follows that that assistance is given to, and is primarily received by, the intellect. Only that part of man's nature which is naturally free from the disturbance of passion and the wiles of the enemy is capable of being divinely assisted towards perfection and of reducing the refractory seat of the passions beneath its sway. The perfect man, therefore, the perfected Christian, is the man who has attained to the perfect Divine Knowledge, or rather--for even Clement would not claim for the Christian still in this world of illusion a knowledge which was absolutely imperfectible--to the highest [16] degree of Divine Knowledge to which man here can attain. This man is Clement's Gnostic.

      To complete this outline of the Clementine theology, it is necessary to add that it did not for a moment forget, much less deny, the primacy of love as a constituent of Christian perfection. Only, love was the ultimate and necessary result of the perfected knowledge, not the necessarily wayward impulse (so, at least, it would have seemed to Clement) of the affections. We can love only what we know, would have been his contention, and the perfected knowledge involves, or rather is already, perfect love. Clement would not, probably, have denied that once the mind has entered seriously upon its quest of knowledge, it may be aided by the degree of love for its object which that quest has already generated. Here, as everywhere, there is action and reaction between aim and result in the process of growth. The aim is already in some degree an anticipation of the result, and is, in turn, stimulated to further and fuller activity by the measure of the result already achieved. But, further, Clement could not, as a Christian theologian, have overlooked this reflex action of love upon knowledge. For the very essence of Divine grace, by which knowledge was ex hypothesi assisted towards its perfection, was a communication of the Divine love to the mind of man. But all this must not blind us to the fact that, for Clement, love was the corollary and complement of the perfect knowledge. Divine love helped us to know God [17] perfectly in order that we might so be able to love Him perfectly in return.

      Now, at the risk of becoming monotonous, I would insist again that this conception, so alien to all our present-day ways of thinking of religion, left a profound impress on all later theology, and that it is impossible to appreciate the strength and weakness of orthodox Christian theology without remembering that fact. Let me try to indicate some of the gains and losses for religion which seem to be involved in it. We need not subscribe either to the moral primacy of the intellect which Clement asserts or to his corresponding depreciation of the will and affections in order to recognise a certain austere rectitude, detachment, permanence about the affirmations of the intellect which are altogether lacking to the firmest attachments of the affections or to the most strenuous and sustained aspirations of the will. In other words, things are what they are, whatever may be our affective attitude towards them. They are what they are whether we like it or not. And the recognition of that necessity has, or at least is capable of having, a bracing, chastening, finely disciplinary effect not only upon the mind itself, but upon the whole moral nature. But it is not only the act of obeisance before the ascertained truth that has this moral tonifying power. It is especially the quest of a truth which is, and will always remain, independent of our wills and desires. To seek for such a truth under the hard conditions imposed [18] by its very nature, to seek it as we must in spite of its consequences to and for ourselves, is, and will always remain, one of the highest and most effective disciplines of the human spirit. Humility, faithfulness, self-suppression, or rather the high conquest of self, are among the virtues which it promises and secures.

      But there is another side to the shield. We may persuade ourselves that we have reached the truth when we have not reached it in fact. And we may the more easily persuade ourselves that this is so, the more remote and majestic the truth is. In physical science, for instance, there is practically no danger of this kind. But with regard to the truths of religion the danger is constant and pressing. The intellect becomes wearied by its own disappointing effort, and is tempted to assert as the final truth the stage at which its relaxed nerve has finally abandoned the effort to know. That is the history of much Christian dogma. Christian theology, with its traditional intellectual temper was pledged to seek the truth-value of the various objects of its faith and for many centuries nobly fulfilled the pledge. But there came a moment--that moment varied for the different doctrines involved, and for some doctrines it is not yet come--when the further effort to know was abandoned. And then intellectualism in its own defence was almost forced into the illusion that it had achieved the final truth in that particular field of doctrine. At such a point a [19] non-intellectualist theology could have admitted its failure to approach more nearly to the mystery. It could have afforded to proclaim the bankruptcy of the purely intellectual method. A purely intellectual theology could not afford to do so. It had no resource but to believe, and to enforce the belief, that the truth which it had there reached was final. Hence, for instance, the Christology of the sixth century, which represents the last exhausted effort of Christian thought to deal with the nature of our Lord's Person, assumed the character of an imperfectible knowledge of that great mystery.

      There are thus grave deductions to be made from the value of a purely intellectualist theology, whether as moral discipline or as intellectual possibility. We no longer regard it as possible to sound with a mere intellectual plummet the deep mysteries of God, and the more thoughtful among us, I think, no longer regard as a moral discipline the mere gesture of assent to definitions which we admit cannot adequately define their object. Are we to say, then, that the intellectual method to which Clement definitely committed Christian theology has at last revealed its bankruptcy? Personally, I am by no means prepared to say so. What I would say, rather, is that the knowledge which Clement proclaimed as the way of perfection, the mode of ascent to God, did, at some not very definable moment of Christian history, break off into two ways. In Clement's conception of knowledge there was a [20] distinctly mystical element. It would be difficult, I think, for the closest student of Christian history to say exactly at what moment or owing to what exact causes mysticism assumed a life of its own. For certain of the greatest minds of Christendom, indeed, the separation has never been effected. But it is, at least, true for general Christian thought that the action of the intellect became less and less mystical, and what was called the mystical experience less and less controlled and guided by the intellect. And it is of this hard intellectualism, evacuated of all mystical content and divorced from all mystical method, and of it alone, that a state of bankruptcy may be unhesitatingly declared. The case is quite different with Clement's intellectualism. It is in his conception of prayer that we can most adequately feel the difference and put it to the test. For Clement, as for S. Augustine, for S. John of Damascus and for S. Thomas, prayer was "ascensio mentis in Deum"--the ascent of the mind to God. The constant use of the word "mind" is significant. But, remember, its significance is determined by the conception which I have already repeatedly insisted on--the conception of the mind as the directive element of the human spirit through its naturally greater freedom from all the disturbance of the passions. None of these great masters of the human spirit thought of the activity of mind apart from its power to uplift the whole spirit out of the tumult of passion. That was for them [21] its characteristic activity. The mind was never for them the soulless instrument of mere discursive reasoning, of the naked logical or dialectical process. The mind, indeed, sought truth, the essential nature of reality, because it was supremely its function and its nature to seek it, but in seeking it successfully it carried of necessity the whole nature with it. Therefore the ascent of the mind towards God was necessarily the ascent of the whole nature towards Him.

      Now let us look a little more closely at what Clement meant by the intellectual element in prayer. A man will pray, he says, for whatever he most sincerely desires and aspires after. Or, as he puts it otherwise, the subjects of our prayers are the objects of our desires. But how are we to know whether our desires are in accordance with the will of God? For if they are not in accord with His will, their satisfaction will be an injury both to ourselves and others. To know, therefore, the will of God is the essential preliminary to all true prayer. But to know the will of God is only possible through a perpetual converse with God. And that converse with God, the atmosphere in which alone legitimate requests can be addressed to God, Clement calls the real prayer of the Gnostic. Now, what is involved in that converse with God? It involves a familiar and constant contemplation of the perfect goodness in itself and in its unceasing care for man's salvation, and therefore the vision of that perfection for which in God's purpose man's nature [22] was destined. But it involves also a constant and besetting sense of our own actual imperfection, a steady hatred of and revulsion from it, an equally steady purpose of victory over the movements of the passions and of escape from their tumult, and, finally, an abiding joy in the self-discipline by which alone that conquest can be achieved. The prayer, therefore, of the Gnostic is a constant state. The converse with God which it implies must have become habitual, a second nature, or rather a recovery of the first and more authentic nature. Behind all our ordinary activity, informing and directing it all, there must have grown or be growing this near and intimate sense of God's presence with us and in us, this joyful inner abandonment of ourselves to God as to our own highest nature and destiny. "Holding festival in our whole life," says Clement, "persuaded that God is altogether on every side present, we cultivate our fields, praising: we sail the sea, hymning; in all the rest of our conversation we conduct ourselves according to rule. The Gnostic, then, is very closely allied to God, being at once grave and cheerful in all things--grave on account of the bent of his soul towards the Divinity, and cheerful on account of his consideration of the blessings of humanity which God hath given us." This is what Clement understands by the apostolic injunction, "Pray without ceasing." Make your whole life an increasingly familiar converse with God, so that that converse may increasingly impress upon your life [24] a definite character which will manifest itself in your every desire, purpose, and action. As he puts it elsewhere, "If the presence of a good man, through the respect and reverence which he inspires, always improves him with whom he associates, with much more reason does not he who always holds uninterrupted converse with God by knowledge, life, and thanksgiving, grow at every step superior to himself in all respects--in conduct, in words, in disposition?"

      But is there, you will ask, no room in Clement's scheme for prayer as we usually understand it, petition? Most unmistakably there is. Specific requests are the most fully conscious moments of prayer, the moments of most energetic aspiration towards God of the total character formed by habitual converse with Him. Petition especially needs clear and definite knowledge of what the Divine will is, and will warrant us in asking. The purpose of the whole Gnostic training is to give us that knowledge. For already in Clement we find that anxious concern, which is the characteristic attitude of all the great masters of the Christian life, to conform every desire of ours to the perfect and unchangeable will of God, to chasten and subdue the natural impulse which make His omnipotence the minister of our chance desires and would use even prayer for that purpose. He already lays down that rule which we shall find repeated throughout the whole history of the Christian doctrine of prayer, that the only things we can pray for with an absolute certainty [24] that they are according to God's will, and that it is, therefore, absolutely right to pray for them, are, as he puts it, "the things which are really good, the things which concern the soul." He distinctly lays it down, indeed, that the Gnostic--i. e., of course, the Christian seeking to be perfect--"in accordance with reason will ask for none of those things in life required for necessary use." We may, perhaps, be surprised at this express restriction, when we remember that the Lord's Prayer is the constant norm used by all the Fathers in their exposition of the nature of prayer, and then recall the clause, "Give us this day our daily bread." But, then, we must remember also that this petition was universally interpreted by the Christian Fathers as a request for spiritual food, for the needed nourishment of the soul day by day in its arduous pursuit of the righteousness of God. It was only later and very gradually that the reference to physical needs was admitted as an alternative, or rather supplemental, interpretation.

      Now, it is when we consider this conception of prayer which Clement sets forth as the prayer of the Gnostic that we can see most clearly the element of mysticism which entered into his conception of knowledge. We may say that it was the knowledge, not of information, but of acquaintance, not the knowledge which, when given, remains merely in the memory as in a kind of impersonal storehouse and does not enter into and affect our inner nature, but the knowledge [25] which cannot be given without becoming a renewing and transforming element in our own nature and life. It is obvious that the knowledge of acquaintance is always of this latter kind, that we cannot know anyone intimately without absorbing into ourselves something of the intimate quality of his spirit; perhaps I ought rather to say, until we have absorbed it. It is that unconscious chemistry of life, that mystic process of communication, that gives us our knowledge of persons. And our knowledge of God, in so far as it is real, is supremely of that kind. Yet Clement would not on that account have admitted that it was not strictly intellectual. To him it was the mind of man, the element of his spirit most free from the changing and inconstant movements of passion, the most detached and impersonal, or rather superpersonal, that could alone receive the communication of Divine grace and adequately turn it to account for the total growth of the spirit. It was the mind alone which could soar to those mystic heights of contemplation where good and evil might be perceived as God Himself eternally saw them. [26]

[PCT 11-26]