Publication Announcement: “Clement of Alexandria and the Limits of Literary Production”

I’m pleased to share the advance online publication of my article, “Clement of Alexandria and the Limits of Literary Production: Speaking Unnoticeably, Revealing Hiddenly, and Showing Silently” in Vigiliae Christianae.

You can click here to read it.

In 2024, I co-organized a session at the North American Patristics Society with Dr. Jeremiah Coogan on the theme “Early Christian Creativity and Cultural Production.” The session was delightful. The participants were (unsurprisingly) thought-provoking, and I really enjoyed getting to interact with them all. This article is based on the paper I prepared for that session, with an expanded focus on bridging some gaps between literary theory, ancient anxieties about literature, and the unusual literary form of Clement’s Stromateis.

I am particularly grateful for the thoughtful reviewer comments I received throughout the process, which helped sharpen the article significantly. While I hadn’t quite captured it back in 2024, this revision helped clarify something that had been lingering at the edges: the competition between oral and textual authorities is not incidental to Clement’s work. His decisions as an author and teacher are not products of this tension but, instead, responding to it.

Here is the full abstract:

This article builds upon recent scholarship by investigating Clement of Alexandria’s Stromateis as a product of the literary and pedagogical dynamics of the Second Sophistic. Rather than merely mimicking Greco-Roman miscellanists, Clement repurposes the miscellany as a Christian strategy for negotiating the boundaries of genre, pedagogy, and textual transmission. Drawing on literary-theoretical insights from Bourdieu and Skinner, the study explores how Clement embeds divine knowledge within a polymathic textual body that simultaneously conceals and reveals. The Stromateis’ literary form reflects a commitment to preserving sacred truths and cultivating attentive reading practices. In composing the work this way, Clement positions the written word as a medium capable of transmitting apostolic instruction without forfeiting its mystery. The Stromateis thus exemplifies early Christian literary innovation, challenging second-century norms of textuality and offering a new model of Christian authorship that merges concealment, revelation, and pedagogy within the sociocultural matrix of the Second Sophistic.

Finally, as I included in the acknowledgments, I want to be sure I thank Jeremiah Coogan, Edward Creedy, and Brayden Hirsch. At various stages of thinking about this topic, they offered constructive feedback that shaped helped me articulate what I wanted to say.

Happy reading! I’m especially proud of this piece, and I would love your input as I continue thinking about the ways that Clement negotiated the boundaries of ancient literature. For those of you who may not be scholars and are reading this so you can keep up with what’s happening in my life, I hope to have a less academic article that covers similar territory available online soonish—so stay posted on my various social media pages.