Abstract

The thesis includes three case studies of Clement's constructive-theological method. By thrice going back to an idea characteristic of one of the three respective intellectual traditions integral to Clement's Alexandrian background , and then forth to his appropriation of it, the thesis also indirectly lays bare the inner structure of his synthesis. ;At its center is the Christ-event in its two aspects of divine revelation and human deification, affecting the immanence, historicity, and finitude which distinguish the human condition from the divine. ;Insofar as the earliest Alexandrian Christian intellectuals---Basilides and Valentinus---grounded their idea of gnosis in the Christ-event, epitomized by the Jordan-theophany and participated sacramentally in baptism, Clement stands in continuity with them in a way he does not with Philo or the Hermetica. The first part of the thesis traces this continuity. ;The second part deals with Clement's appropriation of Philo's idea of God's presence as Light in the Old Testament theophanies. Clement draws upon Philo's respective interpretations of this Light as the pre-temporal Day of the creation account and the Logos operative in creation. Thus he reclaims the God revealed at the Jordan and in Hades as none other than the world's Creator. ;Clement transforms the teaching of his Alexandrian Christian predecessors in construing: baptismal illumination---as the deifying incarnation of this Logos-Light with which the neophyte is generated "from above"; the true Gnostic---as the one who strives for an ever greater unity with this Light, thus approximating the Human Being in God's "image and likeness." ;The final part deals with Clement's idea of deification as a process the end of which is infinite . By thus binding his "realized" eschatology with the Aristotelian ethical ideal of an action desirable for its own sake, he transforms the Middle Platonist interpretation of human telos as "assimilation to God." ;This corrects Antonie Wlosok's and Salvatore Lilla's perspectives, while retaining their stereoscopic quality