In 1932, Karl Rahner’s article ‘Le début d’une doctrine des cinq sens spirituels chez Origène’ marked the beginning of twentieth-century debate about the ‘doctrine of the spiritual senses’. In 2012, Gavrilyuk and Coakley’s The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity marked a renaissance of interest in this theme. Gavrilyuk and Coakley harked back to Rahner as the father of the debate but revised his definition of the ‘doctrine of the spiritual senses, rendering it flexible enough to include a wider range of theologians. However, they drew their further examplars only from among theologians later than Origen, without considering earlier Christian material. In this chapter, select portions of Clement of Alexandria and of the New Testament are discussed, with a view to showing that Christian material earlier than Origen uses the language of sense perception in ways that are historically and conceptually significant for the spiritual senses tradition.

The ekphrastic play with verbal and iconic representations reveals that not only literature but also pictures can effect apatē. Chapter 9 is devoted to a piece of early Christian apologetic writing that cashes in on the ambiguity of apatē for an assault against pagan idolatry. Clement’s Protrepticus, an interesting document for the multifaceted attempts of the early Christians to negotiate the relation of their faith with pagan culture, is couched in the language and imagery of the culture it is criticizing; it not only takes up specific theories of perception, but also knowingly transfers the aesthetics of deception from poetry to pictures. While other apologetes assume that demons instrumentalize statues for their deception, Clement makes the capacity of iconic representation for deception itself a cornerstone of his deconstruction of pagan modes of viewing.

Origen here represents Christian notions of angelification, although brief consideration is given to antecedents, namely Clement of Alexandria and the Valentinians. Origen, like Empedocles, offered a cosmic story of fall and redemption. According to Origen, humans are “cooled” intellects whose natural state is to burn with love for God. A species upgrade is part of humanity’s evolutionary design, but it takes intense moral labor. Origen offers the most speculation on the nature of angels, the original consubstantiality of angels and souls, how angels and souls fell from divine Love, and the moral means of their return.

‘Miscellany’ is not an ancient genre name. When scholars use the term, they are often vague about the definition and boundaries of the genre, and rely on well-known ‘examples’ that are treated as paradigmatic. Two scholars have sought to define the ‘miscellany’ more closely: Teresa Morgan gave a broad, inclusive definition grounded in the history of educational praxis; William Fitzgerald gave a narrower definition, focusing on the rhetorical characteristics of an elite, literary strand of miscellany-making. Fitzgerald's approach shall be our starting point as we investigate how and why Clement artfully deployed rhetorical tropes, imagery and metatextual observations to thematise his intentional participation in a wider discourse of learned literary miscellanism. But we must also situate his work in relation to particular examples of early imperial prose miscellanies, otherwise we risk lapsing into generalities about an irreducibly diverse group of texts. Plutarch’s Table Talk; Pliny’s Natural History; Gellius’ Attic Nights and Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists are introduced alongside Clement’s Stromateis,as appropriate for comparative study.

Clement of Alexandria’s Stromateis have long been recognised as a Christian version of the Greco-Roman genre of the miscellany. But how Clement shaped the Classical literary form for Christian formation deserves closer attention. In general, Classicists have studied miscellanies but not Clement, while Theologians have studied Clement but not miscellanies. By situating Clement's literary project in relation to Roman miscellanies, this book argues that Clement consistently reinterprets topoi and tropes of the Classical form through a Christian theological vision. His Christianisation of the genre is deeper and more interesting than has been recognised, as he seeks to enable his readers at once to delight in the variegated beauty of God and to become ever more focused on the contemplation of the one, hidden and transcendent Teacher, into whose likeness they are growing.

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.

In the Christian literature of the first centuries, notions such as those of harmonia, symphōnia and epōidē – just to mention a few – as well as many musical instruments and musical myths borrowed from pagan culture, appear, in an adequately reinterpreted form, in the description and explanation of fundamental aspects of Christian doctrine. The chapter examines some musical concepts and images in Clement of Alexandria’s and Origen’s works, with a specific focus on the Greek musical culture that lies in the background of this rich musical imagery. By analysing Clement’s and Origen’s strategy of reinterpretation and appropriation of fundamental figures and notions drawn from the Greek musical world – such as the figure of Orpheus and the notion of symphōnia – the chapter shows that the use of music stands out as a momentous feature in the apologetic and exegetical activities of these Christian writers, touching upon some crucial issues, such as the Christian attitude to pagan culture and the relationship between Christianity and philosophy.

This chapter looks at the manner in which Calcidius presents allusions to Christian views (in comparison with known Christian authors of the era), his use of the "Hebrews," and his minimal reliance on Origen.