Posed and Pondered - Introductory Post

There’s a reason why St. Clement is the patron saint of this web site. I’m not sure I knew what it was before, except that I wanted Paedagogus to be the name of the site. The Paedagogus (Instructor) is the name of St. Clement’s second great work. It was written to introduce new Christians to life after conversion. When I first started this web site it contained my first journal, filled with quotes and reflections on MY new life as an Orthodox Christian. My Paedagogus was — still is! — Christ Himself.

Phase II of the web site involved a year-long journey tracing the liturgical year of the Church. I generated a lot of material during that year, but after the first round through, the cycle began again. Rather than keep going with new entries, I decided to rearrange the material I had collected into something more usable as a permanent reference. My “little” reorganization project turned out to be more than I could do in the time I had, so the web site has languished lately.

Now, however, reinspired by dear Clement, I am going to take another crack at semi-daily blogging. The liturgical material still awaits continued reorganization and  expansion.  I will get to those tasks perhaps during summers when there is a little more time.

Without further ado, here is a description of St. Clement, written by Hans von Campenhausen (The Fathers of the Greek Church). According to Hans, our dear saint posed and pondered…

Like Justin, Clement of Alexandria came to Christianity by way of philosophy. But the word has a much deeper and richer content for him than for Justin, who in his zealous endeavour to educate and convert always tried to take the shortest road and whose philosophical equipment contained nothing out of the way. No Father of the Church has been judged in so many different ways as Clement. For all his charm and the flexibility of his nature, he had at bottom a complicated or at any rate a many-sided nature containing many strata; he never kept to the beaten track, deliberately avoided established formulas and slogans, and never came to an end with his questioning, research, and thinking. He was a master of discussion, one might almost say a typical man of letters and a bohemian. But he too, in becoming a Christian, has taken a clear, decisive step which gives an ultimate and immovable goal to all his interests and intellectual efforts. Clement too is a servant, and regards it as the purpose of his life to lead men to Christ — a mission which he maintained in a strangely flexible, undogmatically personal way. Clement was not a public teacher of the Church and, despite his extensive knowledge, not really a scholar. He was a man of conversation, a man of spiritual experience, and a cultured pastor of souls. As such he acquired insights, posed questions, and pondered possibilities and problems which we meet almost nowhere else.