Clement of Alexandria

Titus Flavius Clemens was a convert who brought his classical education with him. Around 150 AD he landed at the Catechetical School of Alexandria, where he taught students including Origen and became the most Hellenistic Christian thinker of his era. He wove Plato, the Stoics, and traces of Jewish esotericism and Gnosticism into his three major works, and once claimed that Greek philosophy itself came from Egyptian scholars who taught Pythagoras and Plato. The Western church venerated him until 1586, when Pope Sixtus V scrubbed his name from the Roman Martyrology; the Eastern Orthodox had alr…