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Clement of Alexandria and the Shaping of Christian Literary Practice Theological Interpretation of a Miscellanistic Aesthetic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2020
Variety was the hallmark of miscellanism, and Clement draws attention to his participation in this miscellanistic aesthetic in programmatic passages on the literary form of his work. He privileges the vocabulary of poikilia,which not only captured the miscellanistic aesthetic of variety but was also a key term in reflection on the problems and possibilities of variety in aesthetic, ethical, theological and pedagogical spheres. Plato and Philo had also given it prominence in their own engagement with ethical and theological problems of variety. Clement addresses the challenge of variety in shaping his project: his three works, Protrepticus, Paedagogus and Stromateis,organise a pattern of Christian formation that cultivates ethical simplicity with a view ultimately to discerning God’s poikilic wisdom and even in the poikilia of Clement’s own text. Whereas previous studies of Clement have wrestled with the philosophical problem of the ‘many and the one’, this chapter shows that that problem also had a significant literary, aesthetic and ethical dimension, better captured by the terminology of poikilia.
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