Clement of Alexandria: the Emergence of Christian Subjectivity. Translation from English by Igor V. Pashkov

   The article traces back to Clement of Alexandria the first emergence of the understanding of freedom as the ground of human subjectivity in Christian thought. Up to Irenaeus, Christian understanding of freedom remained within the framework of the Middle Eastern mentality as exemplified by the Biblical story of the Ancestors’ disobedience, where freedom is pedagogically presented as one’s ability to choose between good and evil. With Clement of Alexandria, Christian thought first appropriates the Greek philosophical understanding of human nature, according to which one is in principle unable to choose whatever does not appear to one as good for him or her. Correlatively to this understanding of human nature as inherently «selfish», human freedom is understood as pursuing one’s true good (as distinguished from a merely apparent one): to be free is to truly serve oneself. Thus freedom already implies a self-relation, which is constitutive of the «subject» (or «I») in our modern sense. Michel Foucault had brought attention to self-forming ascetic practices developed in Late Antiquity within the framework of philosophy understood as a «way of life» (rather than a mere theorizing). In Middle Platonism, such practices aimed at purifying one’s mind so as to enable it to see one’s true good in one’s assimilation to God as much as possible. For Clement, one’s deification cannot be achieved by just one’s own efforts but is a work of God relating to Himself through a Christian in whom He dwells, along the lines of Paul’s words: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. This theocentric understanding of human subjectivity was then further developed in Byzantine patristic tradition, resulting, in particular, in Maxim the Confessor’s famous formula «One energy of God and the saints».

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