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Clement of Alexandria
(See p. 393, note 5; also Elucidation xvii. p. 408, infra.)
Ingenious is Clement’s exposition of that saying of our Lord, “Where two or three are met together in my name,” etc. He explodes a monstrous exposition of the text, and ingeniously applies it to the Christian family. The husband and the wife living in chaste matrimony, and the child which God bestows, are three in sweet society, who may claim and enjoy the promise. This reflects great light upon the Christian home, as it rose, like a flower, out of the “Church in the house.” Family prayers, the graces before and after meat, the hymn “On lighting the lamps at eventide,” and the complines, or prayers at bedtime, are all the products of the divine contract to be with the “two or three” who are met in His name to claim that inconceivably precious promise. Other texts from St. Matthew are explained, in their Catholic verity, by our venerable author.
(See p. 394, note 1.)
He further expounds the Catholic idea of marriage, and rescues, from heretical adulteration, the precept of Moses (Ex. xix. 15); introducing a lucid parallel, with the Apostolic command,[2678] “Come out from among them, and be separate,” etc. He turns the tables on his foul antagonists; showing them that this very law obliges the Catholic Christian to separate himself alike from the abominations of the heathen, and from the depraved heretics who abuse the word of God, and “wrest the Scriptures to their own destruction.” This eleventh chapter of the third book abounds in Scriptural citations and expositions, and is to be specially praised for asserting the purity of married life, in connection with the inspired law concerning fasting and abstinence (1 Cor. vii. 3-5), laid down by the reasonably ascetic St. Paul.
(See p. 396, note 5.)
The melancholy example of Tatian is next instanced, in his departures from orthodox encraty. Against poor Tatian’s garrulity, he proves the sanctity of marriage, alike in the New and the Old Testaments. A curious argument he adduces against the ceremonial washing prescribed by thelaw (Lev. xv. 18), but not against the same as a dictate of natural instinct. He considers that particular ceremonial law a protest against the polygamy which God tolerated, but never authorized, under Moses; and its abrogation (i.e., by the Synod of Jerusalem), is a testimony that there is no uncleanness, whatever, in the chaste society of the married pair, in Christ. He rescues other texts from the profane uses of the heretics, proving that our duty to abstain from laying up treasures here, merely layouts the care of the poor and needy; and that the saying, that “the children of the kingdom neither marry nor are given in marriage,” respects only their estate after the resurrection. So the command about “caring for the things of God,” is harmonized with married life. But our author dwells on the apostle’s emphatic counsels against second marriages. It is noteworthy how deeply Clement’s orthodoxy has rooted itself in the Greek churches, where the clergy must be once married, but are not permitted to marry a second time.
A curious objection is met and dismissed. The man who excused himself “because he had married a wife,” was a great card for heretical manipulations; but no need of saying that Clement knows how to turn this, also, upon their own hands.
(See p. 398, note 8.)
Julius Cassianus (assigned by Lardner to a.d. 190) was an Alexandrian Encratite, of whom, whatever his faults, Clement speaks not without respect. He is quoted with credit in the Stromata (book i. cap. xxi. p. 324), but comes into notice here, as having led off the school of Docetism. But Clement does not treat him as he does the vulgar and licentious errorist. He reproves him for his use of the Gospel according to the Egyptians, incidentally testifying to the Catholic recognition of only four Gospels. He refutes a Platonic idea of Cassian, as to the pre-existence of the soul. Also, he promises a full explanation, elsewhere, of “the coats of skins” (which Cassian seems to have thought the flesh itself), wherewith Adam and Eve were clothed. Lardner refers us to Beausobre for a curious discussion of this matter. Clement refutes a false argument from Christ’s hyperbole of hatred to wife and children and family ties, and also gives lucid explanations of passages from Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezra, which had been wrested to heretical abuse. In a similar manner, he overthrows what errorists had built upon Job’s saying, “who can bring a clean thing out of the unclean;” as also their false teachings on the texts, “In sin hath my mother conceived me,” “the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul,” and the apostolic instance of the athlete who is “temperate in all things.”
(See p. 400, cap. xvii. and 401, note 2.)
He proclaims the purity of physical generation, because of the parturition of the Blessed Virgin; castigating the docetism of Cassian, who had presumed to speak of the body of Jesus as a phantasm, and the grosser blasphemies of Marcion and Valentinus, equally destructive to the Christ of the Gospel.[2679] He overturns the whims of these latter deceivers, about Adam’s society with his wife, and concludes that our Lord’s assumption of the flesh of His mother, was a sufficient corroboration of that divine law by which the generations of mankind are continued.
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