He assumes the name and character of a _Gnostic_,[66] or philosophic Christian, not in the historical but in his own sense of the word, and professes himself an eclectic--as far as a liberal interpretation of his religion admitted. “By philosophy,” he says, “I do not mean the Stoic, the Platonic, the Epicurean, or the Aristotelian, but all that has been well said in each of those sects teaching righteousness with religious science--all this selected truth (τοῦτο σύμπαν τὸ ἐκλεκτικὸν) I call philosophy.” Again, he echoes the sentiments of Seneca in lamenting that “we incline more to beliefs that are in repute (τὰ ἔνδοξα), even when they are contradictory, than to the truth” (_Miscellanies_, i. and vii.). “It would have been well for Christianity if the principles, which he set forth with such an array of profound scholarship and ingenious reasoning, had been adopted more generally by those who came after him.... If anyone, even in a Protestant community, were to assert the liberal and comprehensive principles of the great Father of Alexandria, he would be told that he wished to compromise the distinctive claims of theology, and that he was little better than a heathen and a publican.”[67]
It is in his second treatise, the _Instructor_ or _Tutor_, that Clement displays his opinions on the subject of flesh-eating:--
“Some men live that they may eat, as the irrational beings ‘whose life is their belly and nothing else.’ But the Instructor enjoins us to eat that we may live. For neither is food our business, nor is pleasure our aim. Therefore discrimination is to be used in reference to food: it must be plain, truly simple, suiting precisely simple and artless children--as ministering to life not to luxury. And the life to which it conduces consists of two things, health and strength: to which plainness of fare is most suitable, being conducive both to digestion and lightness of body, from which come growth, and health, and right strength: not strength that is violent or dangerous, and wretched, as is that of the _athletes_ which is produced by artificial feeding.”
Referring to the injunction of Jesus, “When thou makest an entertainment, call the poor,” for “whose sake chiefly a supper ought to be made,” Clement says of the rich:--