SOURCE: “The Image of God: A Study in Clement of Alexandria,” in The Church Quarterly Review, Vol. C, April-July, 1925, pp. 96-121.

In the following essay, de Pauley summarizes Clement's views on God the Father and explores the difficulties involved with his use of the word “spirit” in analyzing man's psychic elements.

Religion, mysticism, and idealist philosophy, even when their careers have run along different roads, have always made the problem of man's relation to God a central problem; for right thinking and right living presuppose that man is aware, more or less clearly, of his place in the order of things. The Alexandrian Fathers, though acquainted with the wealth of Greek speculation, did not pass by the simple intuitive insight of the Hebrew seer who conceived this mysterious relation after the analogy of a reality and an image of it. It will be the object of this study...