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Clement of Alexandria

2025· reference-entry· en· W4411356528 on OpenAlexaff
Harry O. Maier

Bibliographic record

VenueOxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion · 2025
Typereference-entry
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicMedieval Philosophy and Theology
Canadian institutionsInstitute for Christian Studies
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMathematicsGeology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–216 ce) was an Athenian-born Christian theologian and philosopher, active for most of his career in Alexandria, where, according to Christian tradition, he was the teacher at a catechetical school. It is more likely that he was one of many teachers representing different forms of emergent Christianity in a metropolitan center known for its diverse intellectual life. He fled persecution of Christians in Alexandria in 202 and died in 216, probably in Antioch. Clement is best known for a trio of writings, the Protreptikos, Paedagogus, and Stromateis, which, respectively, exhort pagans to a progressive spiritual path of conversion, teach ethical formation, and advance ideals of contemplation. The last of these works, Stromateis, was written for more advanced and spiritually insightful male and female students of Clement’s teachings. Clement refers to those pursuing the most advanced stage as “gnostics”—but these are to be distinguished from the similarly named followers of the teachings of contemporary Alexandrian Christian teachers such as Basilides and the adherents of Valentinus. Five longer fragments of Clement’s works probably belong to the same spiritual program, specifically related to the third level. Another treatise, titled Who Is the Rich Man That Is Saved?, takes the form of a sermon on Mk 10:17–31. Addressing the problem of attachment to money and other material goods, it offers valuable information about the wealth of some Christians in 2nd-century Alexandria. Clement’s works use an eclectic set of philosophical concepts drawn from Middle Platonism, Stoicism, and Aristotelianism to interpret the Bible and to outline the goals of Christian life. Like the earlier works of Philo, Clement’s writings attest to a synthesis, uniting an emergent religious tradition with Hellenistic philosophical ideals, that was formulated to shape ethical and spiritual teaching and to further theological insight.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.079
Threshold uncertainty score0.263

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0030.001
Scholarly communication0.0020.000
Open science0.0000.002
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0790.017

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.067
GPT teacher head0.336
Teacher spread0.268 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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