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2 - Clement’s Miscellanism and the Scholarly Trope of Christian Difference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2020

J. M. F. Heath
Affiliation:
University of Durham
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Summary

Despite the rapid growth of interest in Classical miscellanies since the 1990s, Clement of Alexandria's miscellanistic form has been consistently sidelined on account of his alleged ‘Christian difference’. But every miscellany is different from every other, and a Christian miscellany is not more thoroughly different just for being Christian. By casting an eye over the history of scholarship, we discover that the trope of ‘Christian difference’ marks the fracturing of relations between Theology and other intellectual disciplines since the nineteenth century. It resonates with anti-Christian stereotypes, which portray Christians as boring and authoritarian users of texts, by contrast with open-minded and playful pagans. In revisiting the nature and extent of Clement’s Christian ‘difference’, we should strive to achieve the Classicist’s eye for literary wit but the Theologian’s sensitivity to theological debate and to integrate the two in studying Clement's experiment with the Classical genre.

Type
Chapter
Information
Clement of Alexandria and the Shaping of Christian Literary Practice
Miscellany and the Transformation of Greco-Roman Writing
, pp. 9 - 22
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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