The Paedagogus (The Instructor) — Book II

Clement of Alexandria

Summary

Written around 198 AD in Alexandria, Book II of The Paedagogus continues the practical moral instruction introduced in [[father:Clement of Alexandria|The Paedagogus (The Instructor) — Book I]]. Having established that [[Christ]] is the Divine Instructor who heals the soul and bestows illumination in Holy [[Baptism]], Clement turns his attention to regulating the bodily habits and social ethics of newly baptized Christians living in a wealthy, hedonistic Roman metropolis.

In Book II, Clement systematically addresses the mundane physical details of daily life: eating, drinking, household utensils, social banquets, speech, laughter, sleep, dreams, and personal adornments such as perfumes and floral wreaths. Drawing on scriptural precepts alongside Stoic and Platonic ethical concepts, Clement argues for moderation (sophrosyne) and simplicity. He dismantles the surrounding pagan culture’s obsession with luxury (tryphe), insisting that food and wine are meant solely to sustain health and community, not to indulge gluttony or drunkenness. He instructs believers to avoid ostentatious gold or silver tableware, coarse speech, unbridled laughter, and nocturnal excesses, offering detailed behavioral guidelines so that Christians can navigate public life without being absorbed by its vices.

Eastern Orthodox Theological Significance

Book II provides a foundational blueprint for lay asceticism (askesis). Long before the rise of desert monasticism, Clement demonstrates that holy living and spiritual struggle are not reserved for hermits, but must be practiced in the kitchen, at the dinner table, and within family life.

Book II also affirms the goodness of creation. In opposition to [[Gnostic]] dualists who viewed the material world as evil, Clement maintains that food, wine, and bodily life are good gifts from God that must be received with temperance and thanksgiving. Physical self-discipline cleanses the passions (pathe), keeping the body in harmonious subjection to the soul as it progresses toward theosis (deification). Furthermore, Clement emphasizes that outer bodily decorum reflects inner spiritual order; guarding one’s speech, dining, and senses protects the heart (kardia) against demonic distraction and fosters constant spiritual alertness (nepsis).

Theological Caveats & Critiques

From an Orthodox perspective, Clement’s instructions in Book II occasionally suffer from pedantic rigorism. He frequently dictates hyper-specific rules—such as exact bodily postures for eating, prohibitions against laughing so widely that teeth are exposed, or forbidding specific types of shoes—which can substitute external legalism for inner evangelical freedom.

Additionally, many guidelines in Book II reflect 2nd-century Alexandrian aristocratic etiquette and Stoic social anxieties rather than timeless Christian dogma. Readers must exercise discernment to separate universal gospel principles from ancient cultural customs. Finally, Clement’s heavy reliance on Stoic apatheia occasionally risks treating physical pleasure itself as inherently suspicious, rather than viewing pleasure as a natural byproduct of God’s creation that simply requires proper spiritual ordering.

1. On Eating.
2. On Drinking
3. On Costly Vessels
4. How to Conduct Ourselves at Feasts
5. On Laughter
6. On Filthy Speaking
7. Directions for Those Who Live Together
8. On the Use of Ointments and Crowns
9. On Sleep.
10. — Quænam de Procreatione Liberorum Tractanda Sint.
11. — On Clothes
12. On Shoes.
13. Against Excessive Fondness for Jewels and Gold Ornaments

Keeping, then, to our aim, and selecting the Scriptures which bear on the usefulness of training for life, we must now compendiously describe what the man who is called a Christian ought to be during the whole of his life. We must accordingly begin with ourselves, and how we ought to regulate ourselves. We have therefore, preserving a due regard to the symmetry of this work, to say how each of us ought to conduct himself in respect to his body, or rather how to regulate the body itself. For whenever any one, who has been brought away by the Word from external things, and from attention to the body itself to the mind, acquires a clear view of what happens according to nature in man, he will know that he is not to be earnestly occupied about external things, but about what is proper and peculiar to man — to purge the eye of the soul, and to sanctify also his flesh. For he that is clean rid of those things which constitute him still dust, what else has he more serviceable than himself for walking in the way which leads to the comprehension of God.

Some men, in truth, live that they may eat, as the irrational creatures, 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; but both are on account of our life here, which the Word is training up to immortality. Wherefore also there is discrimination to be employed in reference to food. And it is to be simple, truly plain, 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 wrong or dangerous and wretched, as is that of athletes produced by compulsory feeding.

We must therefore reject different varieties, which engender various mischiefs, such as a depraved habit of body and disorders of the stomach, the taste being vitiated by an unhappy art — that of cookery, and the useless art of making pastry. For people dare to call by the name of food their dabbling in luxuries, which glides into mischievous pleasures. Antiphanes, the Delian physician, said that this variety of viands was the one cause of disease; there being people who dislike the truth, and through various absurd notions abjure moderation of diet, and put themselves to a world of trouble to procure dainties from beyond seas.

For my part, I am sorry for this disease, while they are not ashamed to sing the praises of their delicacies, giving themselves great trouble to get lampreys in the Straits of Sicily, the eels of the Mæander, and the kids found in Melos, and the mullets in Sciathus, and the mussels of Pelorus, the oysters of Abydos, not omitting the sprats found in Lipara, and the Mantinican turnip; and furthermore, the beetroot that grows among