SOURCE: “Clement of Alexandria and the Beginnings of Christian Platonism,” in Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 18, No. 1, January, 1925, pp. 39-101.

In the following essay, Casey examines the effect of Platonism and Stoicism on Clement's theology and summarizes the “great trilogy.”

One of the most fruitful branches of recent patristic study has been the effort to determine the relation between early Christian theology and Greek philosophy. Starting from the assumption that the affinities between the two were many and close, scholars have found themselves able to draw detailed inferences of literary and intellectual dependence, and in the case of many Christian authors to discover the exact sources from which they drew their philosophic ideas, or at least to assign these to some contemporary school. Without such work an accurate estimate of the fathers' views and ways of thinking is impossible, but it must be remembered that an author is not...