echos from our past reverberate into our future


Up
until this
point in our text,
Clement reveals his own ideological stance
on the question of martyrdom as against gnosis.
Clement provides a link between Philo's Therapeutae
and the first Christian monks and is the first Christian writer
who placed the ascetic ideal
on the same level as that
of the martyr
...

All that
would be well
and good when there was no one making martyrs
of orthodox Christians anymore, that is, in the fourth century, when indeed the "white martyrdom" became central in orthodox Christian practice. In Clement's time, however, for a Christian writer to argue at last against martyrdom and for ascetisme and gnosis would be
to mark him
as a heretic.

Therefore
our text continues,
achieving its now-familiar denouement:
Then Heraclitus says, "Gods and men honor those slain in battle;"
and Plato in the fifth book of the Republic writes, "Of those who die in military service, whoever dies after winning renown, shall we not say that he is chief of the golden race?
Most assuredly."
But the golden race is with the gods, who are in heaven, in the fizex sphere, who chiefly hold command in the providence exercised towards men.
Now some of the heretics who have misunderstood the Lord, have at once an impious and cowardly love of life; saying that the true martyrdom is the knowledge of the only true G d (which we also admit), and that the man is a self-murderer and a suicide who makes confession by death;
and adducing other similar sophisms of cowardice.
To these we shall reply at the proper time; for they differ with us in regard to first principles.
Now we, too, say that those who hae rushed on death (for there are some, not belonging to us, but sharing the name merely), who are in haste to give thenselves up,
the poor wretches dying through
hatred to the Creator.
These, we say, banish themselves
without being martyrs, even though they are punished publicly.
For they do not preserve the characteristic mark of believing martyrdom, in as much as they have not known the only true G d, but give themselves up to a vain death,
as the Gymnosophists of the Indians
to useless fire.
Stromateis, IV, 4

Clearly Clement
was not opposed to martyrdom, per se.
He could hardly have been so and been an orthodox Christian at all in his time,
but his attitude was ambivalent in the extreme, to say the least?!
His sympathies, one suspects from this texts, are clearly with the Gnostic position on dying for G d,
or rather, we should say, with the Gnostic opposition to dying for G d.
Although Clement could not then take up a position as directly opposed to martyrdom as that of the trickster Rabbis, his stance seems not very different from, say, that of Rabbi Yose ben Kisma.
Indeed, his riposte to those who rush into voluntary martyrdom is much more enthusiastic that his promised but deferred refutation
of the Gnostic position.

In contrast
to both the Peter of the apocryphon
and the Cyprian of the Life,
Clement, in the time of Severan persecution of 202,
left Alexandria never to return, thus voting,
as it were, with his feet fot the trickster or escape option
that we find so prominently
in the Talmud,
too.

For Clement,
the very "rabbinic" Matthew 10:23,
"When they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another,"
was the defining text.

blozen
engel
cool!
30 jul 2008 - bewerkt op 30 jul 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
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