Clement's opponents

Just a short post to point to another interesting text - one that reveals Clement's comments on the Odyssey to be part of a struggle over the appropriate Christian response to classical learning and to the interpretation of the Homeric material itself. Once again, this is from Rahner:

Christians started off by seeing in the Sirens that "know all things", a symbol of the danger that threatened the faith from the allurements of pagan wisdom. In the very century in which Clement wrote we find in the Address to the Hellenes a sort of blustering rejection of all that was Greek; it was a rejection of their smooth-tongued fables, it was a rejection in toto of all Greek "Sirens", and Plato and Aristotle were accounted as being among the latter. As a protection against these dangers the Christian needs a prudent and virtuous perspicacity, agathē phronēsis. "No one who is capable of prudent discrimination will prefer the fine phrases of these two philosophers to the salvation of his soul. No, he will rather, like the mariners in the old story, stop his ears with wax and so escape from the sweet peril of the Sirens that threatens to ensnare him." [Cohortatio ad Gentiles, 36]

Entirely by coincidence, I've recently read a novel by Iain Pears called The Dream of Scipio, one of the three plot lines of which is concerned with a gallic aristocrat from the 5th Century AD who becomes a Christian bishop while still wedded to the Neoplatonist philosophy he has studied throughout his life. It touches upon very much the debates that are emerging here. You might like it!