Clement and the Noble Lie

Did Clement of Alexandria advocate a policy of deceit when it was necessary to further the cause of faith? I'll be arguing that he did.



Scott Brown wants to move away from any claim that Clement was condoning lying, due to the controversy over whether this would have been expected in Clement's time. I think, however, this reticence is a mistake: Clement clearly condones deceit under certain circumstances, concerning the protection of the mysteries of faith from unbelievers. This is a somewhat controversial subject, which Peter Jeffery makes a brief reference to on pp. 16-17 of his .pdf response to Brown, speaking of "the nineteenth-century debate over whether Clement condoned lying." He then adds a reference in a footnote to an article by David Satran on the subject, "Pedagogy and deceit in the Alexandrian Theological Tradition". Let's turn to Satran's article.

Satran opens by mentioning Origen's "deceit that is not vain", attributed to God himself (in Jer 20:7, in Origen's example). He then goes on to attribute the "use of deception in a distinctively pedagogical setting" to Clement of Alexandria (p. 120). Next he quotes a very interesting passage from Stromata 7.53--Clement there says of the gnostic that:

He also speaks the truth, except it be medicinally, on occasion; just as a physician, with a view to the safety of his patients, will practise deception or use deceptive language to the sick....solely for the good of his neighbours, he will do some things, which would not be done by him in the first instance.

Clement even favorably cites Paul's theologically needless circumsision of Timothy as an example of this.

Satran does note Smith's somewhat unfavorable treatment of Clement on truth. While he doesn't sympathize with Smith on the subject, he does defend Clement not by dismissing claims of Clementine deceit, but rather by citing "a larger nexus of attitudes regarding secrety, esotericism, and circumspection in speech which may have characterized the Alexandrian theological tradition." He cites two articles on this subject, R. M. Grant's "Early Alexandrian Christianity" and R. van den Broek's "The Beginning of Christian Platonism in Alexandria". While I have been unable to locate the latter, the former is available on JSTOR.

Grant not only relates Clement to Neopythagoreanism (p. 138), but also shows that Origen, too, refers explicitly and favorably to the Neopythagoreans, especially in terms of their doctrines of secrecy (p. 140ff.) and the defense of Christian secrecy. "It remains significant..." writes Grant, "that in the treatise Contra Celsum Origen defends Christian secrecy by comparing it with that of the Pythagoreans." Grant even thinks we can know the contents of this secret teaching:

In theory much of the teaching of the Alexandrian theologians was secret too. The question as to whether or not they had a secret tradition is not the basic one. any theologian who is good a allegorizing can find his whole system somewhere or other in the Bible. What counts is the content of the secret teaching, and this, as Cardinal Danielou sums it up [in his Message evangelique et culture hellenistique], is concerned with "the invisible world and the destiny of souls before their birth on earth and after their death; the world of their descent into bodies and their departure from bodies. It is also concerned with the descent of the Logos and of angels into bodies: incarnations of salvation after the incarnations of sin.

Before Origen, Clement had dealt with similar subjects in his late work the Hypotyposeis [as described in Photius].

He had referred to timeless matter and had found Platonic ideas in the Bible; he had spoken of the transmigration of souls and of the many worlds that existed before Adam. Similarly, Origen--following, as he said, Pythagoras, Plato, and Empedocles--was willing to claim that "there are certain secret principles by which each soul that enters a body does so in accordance with its merits and former character." Danielou has shown that in content much of the secret teaching was related to Jewish apocalypses and then to Gnostic ideas." (p. 143-144 in Satran)

Satran also cites Eric Osborn's "The Philosophy of Clement of Alexandria" in another note (n. 17, p. 124) as an example of a "charitable" treatment of Clement on truth, but Osborn's treatment is nearly apologetic in its uniform presentation of Clement's conception of truth. Osborn certainly never refers to the problematic passages in Strom. VII 53 mentioned above. He does, however, note that:

There is something esoteric about this truth. It is unwritten. It is given to us but not to all. It is the wisdom spoken in a mystery. The hidden traditions of the truth are interpreted in a sublime and lofty manner. The uninitiated cannot readily discover them. There are preperatory exercises for the reception of the exact tradition of truth.

(Osborn cites, in order, Strom. 6.131; 2.498, 2.15; 1.53; 2.35, 2.15; 1.56, 2.35, 2.31; 7.110; 3.78, 3.22; 6.82; and 2.473, 2.6.)

So even Osborn admits that Clement's truth is somehow hidden, subject to interpretation, and inaccessible to the uninitiated.

Satran concludes by returning to Origen, citing Jerome's quotation from Origen's own Stromateis, which Jerome presents as evidence that "Origen and his disciples formed an alliance "bonded together by orgies of lies.'" (122). The entire passage from Origen is a defence of necessary lying, citing Plato's Republic on rulers who may need to lie for necessity's sake, as well as examples of Old Testament figures who lied when it was needed (Judith, Esther, Jacob). We don't need to take Jerome's extreme rhetoric at face value, but it's at least evidence that he was shocked by the teachings he found in Origen regarding the occasional necessity of deceit.

Both Origen and Clement thus advocated moderate deception when dealing with non-believers and the mysteries of faith, in a manner that seems entirely congruent with the deception advised in To Theodore, regarding the authorship of the Secret Gospel.