Clement of Alexandria and Pseudo-Basil Ep. 366: A Case for Clementine Authorship of the “Letter on Enkrateia”

The short ascetical treatise transmitted in the Basilian corpus as Ep. 366 has long been a textual orphan. Angelo Mai published it in 1845 from Marc. gr. 61, 324r, as a letter of Basil of Caesarea to the monk Urbicius. It entered Migne as Ep. 366 and has generally been printed and cited as “Basil.” Yet stylistic, doctrinal, and (above all) source-critical objections have steadily eroded confidence in Basilian authorship. Walther Völker’s classic 1953 study showed in detail that the letter is built as a mosaic of Clement of Alexandria’s Stromateis, especially book 3. More recently, Nathan Porter has argued that Ep. 366 preserves a lost letter of Valentinus, with Clement and the pseudo-Basilian compiler both dependent on that Valentinian tract. On his reconstruction, Ep. 366 is an essentially Valentinian document that happens to overlap with Clement because both draw from a common heretical source.

This essay argues a third position. The pseudo-Basilian Ep. 366 is neither a late florilegium mechanically excerpting Clement nor a Valentinian letter independently preserved. It is best understood as an authentic Clementine composition, probably identical with or closely related to Clement’s lost treatise Περὶ ἐγκρατείας, later misattributed to Basil. Völker’s synoptic table of parallels, Porter’s emphasis on the inner coherence of the tract, and more recent discussions (Criddle, Buckley) can all be re-read as evidence not for a compiler standing over against Clement, but for Clement re-deploying his own conceptual and verbal stock in a tightly focused ascetical epistle.

1. The State of the Question

Völker’s starting point is familiar. Style and theology do not fit Basil: the piece is neither situational nor polemical, has no concrete addressee beyond the generic “monk,” and is devoid of the pastoral concerns that dominate Basil’s genuine ascetic correspondence. On the other hand, it reads like a string of definitions and aphorisms on ἐγκράτεια (“continence” or “self-control”), and it contains several phrases that are strikingly close to Strom. 3.7.59–60, including the notorious Valentinian doctrine of Christ’s digestion. By printing the Greek of Ep. 366 in parallel with Stromateis and the Paedagogus, Völker showed that sizeable portions of the letter either match Clement word-for-word or are clearly dependent rephrasings. He concluded that an anonymous Byzantine compiler constructed the letter as a Clementine florilegium:

“ein Mosaik von ausgeschriebenen Clemens-Stellen … gehört vielmehr in die Welt der Florilegien hinein und hat mit Basilius nichts zu tun.”

That judgment—non-Basilian, Clement-dependent, late—has broadly carried the field. Markschies, while allowing that the underlying material may derive from a Valentinian or quasi-Valentinian tract known also to Clement, still treats Ep. 366 as a secondary work built on Clement’s text. Porter agrees with Völker that the dense verbal parallels demand literary dependence, but he reverses the direction: Clement and the pseudo-Basilian letter both rely on a lost Valentinian letter. Clement quotes that letter explicitly and polemically in Strom. 3.7.59–60; the compiler of Ep. 366, by contrast, incorporates it sympathetically into a positive encomium of ἐγκράτεια. On this view, Ep. 366 stands closer to the Valentinian original than Clement does.

Porter’s proposal forces the discussion out of the Basil-Clement binary and into a triangular relationship between Valentinus, Clement, and the pseudo-Basilian compiler. Yet it still assumes that Ep. 366 is a compilation from prior sources. The question this essay poses is whether that assumption is actually warranted by the data. What if the piece is not a compilation at all, but the kind of secondary Clementine composition that Clement himself describes—“memoranda” (ὑπομνήματα), “patchwork” (στρωματεῖς), constructed by reusing and recombining earlier material for a new purpose?

To answer that, we need to look closely at the letter’s diction, its rhetorical voice, its theology of ἐγκράτεια and the body, and its place within ancient practices of misattribution and “falsification.”

2. A Clementine Profile: Line-by-Line

The most fruitful way to characterize the letter’s style is not to treat it as a block, but segment by segment. Using a simple typology, we can distinguish:

(a) sentences that are essentially verbatim or very close paraphrases of extant Clement;
(b) sentences that are not verbatim but whose syntactic pattern and conceptual vocabulary are strongly Clementine;
(c) sentences that have no close parallel in our surviving Clement but fit comfortably in his conceptual and linguistic world.

On that basis, the letter divides into 28 discrete “units.” Eight are category (a): near-verbatim reuse of Stromata and Paedagogus. Twelve are category (b): very tight Clementine imitation. Eight are category (c): generically Clementine in voice and theology. Nothing falls clearly into a genuinely “generic” or non-Clementine category.

Examples of (a) are decisive. When the letter defines continence by saying “τὸ μὴ φθείρεσθαι θεοῦ μετέχειν ἐστίν,” it is essentially repeating Strom. 5.10.64.1, with its distinctive logic that “not being corrupted” is “participating in divinity.” The key clause “ἐγκράτεια γάρ ἐστιν σώματος … ὁμολογία πρὸς θεόν” is a near-duplicate of Strom. 3.1.4.2, where Clement calls ἐγκράτεια “bodily superiority in accordance with confession toward God.” The line “οὐ μόνον δὲ περὶ ἓν εἶδος τὴν ἐγκράτειαν δεῖ ὁρᾶν … οὐκ ἀρκουμένη τοῖς ἀναγκαίοις” simply restates Strom. 3.7.59.1 with minor verbal shifts. The catalogue “καὶ τὸ μὴ μεθύειν ἐγκράτειά ἐστιν … καὶ τὸ κυριεύειν λογισμῶν πονηρῶν” reproduces Clement’s own list of encratic behaviors. Most famous is the Christological digestional sentence: “ἤσθιεν καὶ ἔπιεν ἴδιος, οὐκ ἀποδοὺς τὰ βρώματα … ὥστε μὴ φθαρῆναι τὴν τροφὴν ἐν αὐτῷ,” which is effectively identical to Strom. 3.7.59.3, down to the clause “ἐπεὶ τὸ φθαρθῆναι αὐτὸς οὐκ εἶχεν.”

An especially striking “signature” appears at the end: “νοῦς ὁρᾷ, καὶ νοῦς ἀκούει.” This Epicharmus fragment is a favorite of Clement; he is, so far as we know, the first Christian author to deploy it, and later writers (such as Theodoret) seem to borrow it from him. Finding it in Ep. 366 is like finding an author’s fingerprint. Its function is also characteristically Clementine: it caps a noetic argument about the inner “eye” that sees τὰ ἀφανῆ, the unseen realities, and about every word being νοῦς for the perceptive reader.

Category (b) material is nearly as telling. The letter opens with “Καλῶς ποιεῖς ὅρους ἡμῖν εὐθεῖς ὁρίζων,” an epistolary commendation formula that closely echoes the opening of Clement’s letter To Theodore (“Καλῶς οὖν ἐποίησας…”). The theme of ὅροι as doctrinal boundaries matches Clement’s pastoral vocabulary in Stromateis and in that letter, where Theodore is praised for erecting “fences” against Carpocratian misuse of Mark. The repeated structure “μὴ μόνον … ἀλλὰ καὶ …” is a beloved Clementine device for expanding a topic; here it governs the progression from seeing ἐγκράτεια to seeing “its fruit” (ὁ καρπός), and from restricting continence to sexual matters to extending it to all desires, both of body and soul.

Definitions of God as the one who “μηδενὸς ἐπιθυμεῖ, ἀλλὰ πάντα ἔχει ἐν ἑαυτῷ … ἀνενδεὴς ὤν, πλήρης δ’ ὅλου” are likewise concentrated Clementine theology. Clement regularly defines God via apatheia (“desiring nothing, hating no one”) and via plenitude (“needing nothing, full in himself”). The pairing of ἀνενδεής with πλήρης is a recognizable Clementine tick. The aphorism “ἐπιθυμία νόσος ἐστὶ ψυχῆς, ὑγεία δὲ ἐγκράτεια” condenses Clement’s medical moralism—desire as “disease of the soul” and continence as “health”—which he works out at length in Paed. 1.1–2 and in several Stromata passages where Christ the Logos is physician of the νοσοῦσα ψυχή.

Category (c) sentences, though lacking exact textual twins, continue the same register. The idea that ἐγκράτεια makes one “ἀνώτερος ἁπάντων,” “above all,” fits Clement’s graded anthropology: the gnostic stands above the psychic, who stands above the hylic; mastery of passions confers superiority “over the world.” The remark that those who love the higher αἰῶνες and “ἀναπέμποντες τὸν νοῦν” will be found where they send up their mind is simply Clement’s standard ascent language, cast into a crisp new formulation. Even the more rhetorical questions (“τί γὰρ ἔπραττεν ἐκεῖ αὕτη ἡ νόσος, εἰ μή τις ἐκεῖ τοιοῦτος ὀφθαλμὸς ἦν;”) build on his stock metaphor of passions as diseases and of the “eye” as the faculty that can host or expel such diseases.

When all 28 units are counted, roughly 29% are verbatim or near-verbatim Clement (a), 43% are strongly Clementine in phraseology and logic (b), and the remaining 28% still sit squarely within his conceptual world (c). There is nothing distinctly Basilian; there is nothing that forces us into a Valentinian Sitz im Leben. The letter reads as Clement from top to bottom.

At this point one might concede that Ep. 366 is “Clementine” in language and still insist that it is not by Clement but about Clement—an anonymous Byzantine compiler pillaging Clement’s works. To move from “Clementine” to “Clement” we must ask whether the letter’s overall voice, genre, theology, and self-presentation better suit Clement himself than a hypothetical copyist.

3. Clement’s Self-Recycling and the Stromateis as Miscellany

The standard objection is that the letter is too “patchwork” to be an original composition. It looks like a string of excerpts. But Clement’s main surviving work literally calls itself Στρωματεῖς, “patchworks,” and he repeatedly describes his writing as a set of ὑπομνήματα, personal memoranda in which he stores what he heard from his teachers and what he wishes not to forget. At Strom. 1.1 and 1.16 he explains that he has already written other works (including a treatise Περὶ ἐγκρατείας) and that the Stromateis are not orderly treatises but a deliberately miscellaneous anthology of notes, quotations, and sketches, “an image and outline” of more vigorous spoken teaching. He confesses that he has omitted some things “on purpose” and others “through length of time,” that he revives forgotten things in his commentaries, and that he sometimes hides “the seeds of knowledge” under a shell so that only the diligent reader will crack them.

In other words, Clement is exactly the sort of author who (a) writes independent treatises on specific virtues; (b) later mines those treatises when assembling a bigger miscellany; and (c) consciously plays with the rearrangement and recombination of earlier material. That is, in effect, what the ps.-Basilian letter looks like if we flip the usual direction of dependence: not a late compiler raiding Stromateis, but an early Clementine tract on ἐγκράτεια that Strom. 3 and 5 subsequently cannibalize.

The very genre label of Ep. 366 points in this direction. The manuscript rubric calls it Περὶ ἐγκρατείας, “On Continence.” Clement in Paed. 2.10.94 refers to his own lost work “On Continence” as something distinct from Stromateis, and he lists ἐγκράτεια among the four principal virtues discussed in a cycle of ethical writings. It is scarcely far-fetched to suppose that some or all of that tract survived in an ascetic collection, lost Clement’s name, and was later reassigned to Basil.

4. Epistolary Voice and the Theodore Parallel

Genre and voice also matter. Ep. 366 is not just a string of gnomic sentences; it is couched in a recognizably epistolary frame. The opening commendation—“Καλῶς ποιεῖς ὅρους ἡμῖν εὐθεῖς ὁρίζων, ἵνα μὴ μόνον ἐγκράτειαν ἴδωμεν ἀλλὰ καὶ τὸν καρπὸν αὐτῆς”—is a personal, second-person address praising the addressee for “setting straight boundaries” and inviting him to reflect more deeply on the fruit of continence. This is exactly the tone of Clement’s letter To Theodore: “Καλῶς οὖν ἐποίησας φιλοπόνως γράψας…”—“You did well, then, to write diligently.” In both cases Clement commends the correspondent for taking a defensive stance against heterodox misreadings, and in both he casts the ensuing discourse as a kind of pastoral clarification.

Moreover, the argument of Ep. 366 is not random. It moves from God’s own ἐγκράτεια (defined via apatheia and plenitude) to human ἐγκράτεια as both gift and task: a divine δύναμις and χάρις, yet also a virtue attained by choice (αἵρεσις) and exercise (συνασκησις). It then proceeds to exemplary figures: angels who became ἀκρατεῖς and fell from heaven through desire, and Christ as the supreme ἐγκρατής, whose food is not corrupted in him because he “has no capacity for corruption.” It ends in pastoral encouragement: even a little ἐγκράτεια makes us “above all,” and those who love the higher aeons and send up their mind will be found where their mind has gone.

This movement mirrors Clement’s pattern in Strom. 3.1–7, where he begins with God’s apatheia, moves to ἐγκράτεια as a “divine power and grace,” illustrates it in the lives of Moses and other OT figures, and climaxes with the Valentinian doctrine of Christ’s digestion—quoted precisely to sharpen his own description of Christ’s impassible body. If Clement later mined that epistolary tract for Strom. 3, it would explain both why the letter reads like a compressed Stromateis book and why Strom. 3 sometimes seems to unfold terse formulas that in Ep. 366 already stand in polished aphoristic form.

The closing too is pastorally personal: “ταῦτά σοι ὀλίγα δοκοῦντα, πολλὰ γέγραφα, ὅτι ἑκάστη λέξις νοῦς ἐστιν: καὶ οἶδα ὅτι ἀναγνοὺς αἰσθήσῃ.” Clement loves such esoteric gestures. He repeatedly insists that he is writing only “images” and “outlines” for readers initiated enough to grasp the deeper νοῦς hidden in the words, and he explicitly differentiates between those who merely “hear” and those who truly “perceive” (αἰσθάνεσθαι) what is being said. It is hard to attribute this sort of self-conscious mystagogue voice to an anonymous Byzantine excerptor.

5. Enkrateia, Angelic Bodies, and the Charge of “Valentinian” Christology

Porter’s main theological objection to Clementine authorship lies in the Christology and body-theology of the letter. He reads the digestive doctrine and the image of Christ as “light to land and sea” (γῇ καὶ θαλάσσῃ κοῦφος γενόμενος) as distinctly Valentinian: Christ’s body as pneumatic, incorruptible, interacting with material elements without undergoing natural processes. Clement, he argues, cites that doctrine only to criticize it; Ep. 366 can therefore hardly be Clement’s own composition.

This objection rests on too sharp a dichotomy between Clement and Valentinus. Clement’s own anthropology and angelology positively require real, embodied transformations that anticipate the “angelic” mode of existence in this life. The soul is “sent from heaven,” a “heavenly plant,” made for contemplation of God. ἐγκράτεια is both a virtue and a divine δύναμις that makes one “equal to angels” (ἰσάγγελος), “already disembodied as it were” (οἷον ἀσάρκως ἤδη), and “God-bearing and God-borne” (θεοφορῶν καὶ θεοφορούμενος). Fasting “empties the soul of matter and makes it—along with the body—pure and light (κουφή) for the divine words.” The gnostic “touches the earth with little of the foot” (ὀλίγῳ ποδὶ τῆς γῆς ἐφαπτόμενος), standing on tiptoe as he raises his soul aloft.

Clement explicitly connects these anticipatory states with the transformation into an angelic body. In the Excerpta ex Theodoto he insists that angels and souls are “bodies,” though different in kind from ours, and he characterizes the angelic body as one that lacks organs such as tongue, throat, and stomach. When he says in Strom. 6.9.71 that Christ ate not out of bodily necessity—“for it would be ludicrous to suppose that his body, as a body, required such supports”—but in order to keep his companions from entertaining false opinions of him, he is very close to the Valentinian way of speaking. Christ’s body is held together “by a holy power” (δυνάμει ἁγίᾳ), not by material processes. He is “entirely impassible” (ἀπαθής), unaffected by pleasure or pain.

In that light, the digestive doctrine makes perfect sense as an extreme but not alien formulation within Clement’s own system. That he attributes it to Valentinus and quotes it with a critical edge does not mean that every element in it is theologically foreign. His use of heretical sources is famously eclectic. He can be hostile, as when he quotes Valentinus’ homiletic exhortation precisely to reject it; he can be neutral, as when reporting Valentinian claims of Pauline pedigree; and he can be positive, as when he cites Valentinus’ treatise On Friends to argue for “seeds of the Logos” among the heterodox. Valentinus and the “Valentinian Mark” play, for Clement, the same role as Plato and the Greek poets: they have glimpsed some truths, distorted others, and can be mined selectively for useful illustrations.

In Ep. 366, Christ’s “levitating” body is not presented as a purely docetic oddity but as the telos of enkratic transformation. Continence is “God’s grace” (χάρις Θεοῦ ἐγκράτεια), a power that can transform humans into angelic beings. Clement’s own favorite Marcosian passage in Irenaeus’s report—where the heretic says “I want to make you a partaker of my grace” (μεταδοῦναί σοι θέλω τῆς ἐμῆς χάριτος), so that the initiate’s angel stands before the Father—clearly fascinates him; he reproduces its language in the Protrepticus when speaking of Christ’s desire to “impart this grace” (ταύτης ὑμῖν μεταδοῦναι τῆς χάριτος), granting immortality and likeness to himself. The transformation of humans into “angelic” beings by grace is thus a shared motif at the boundary of Catholic and Valentinian discourse. Ep. 366’s portrayal of Jesus as embodied ἐγκράτεια, “light on land and sea,” whose incorrupt body implies incorrupt food, sits right at that boundary—but on the Clementine side of it.

What looks “more Valentinian than Clementine” when one’s Clement is limited to Strom. 3.7 and a handful of anti-heretical remarks looks entirely Clementine when read against the full range of his discussions of soul, body, ἐγκράτεια, and angelic transformation. The letter’s Christology does not require us to push it into a later Evagrian or Dionysian milieu; it fits comfortably within a late second-century Alexandrian environment in which Origen, Clement, and their opponents were all grappling with how to articulate the interplay between Christ’s humanity and divinity in ascetic terms.

6. Misattribution, Ascetic Networks, and Basil’s Name

Even if Ep. 366 is Clementine in language and theology, one might ask why it ended up under Basil’s name in a Venetian manuscript. Here the broader phenomenon of late antique and Byzantine “falsification” is instructive. As Lieve Van Hoof has shown, the corpus of Basil’s letters contains not only outright forgeries but also reassignments of genuine letters from other authors to Basil. The prominent example is the cluster of Basil–Libanius letters: at least four Basilian letters are actually excerpts from Libanius (including praise originally addressed to the emperor Julian) with the addressee’s name swapped. Others are abbreviated versions of Gregory of Nyssa’s correspondence with the sophist Stagirius, now presented as Basil’s. These reattributions are not sophisticated literary forgeries; they are opportunistic re-brandings, designed to harness the prestige of Basil’s name for edifying or polemical use.

A similar mechanism plausibly explains Ep. 366. Clement’s reputation was ambiguous at best in later centuries. Photius complains of heretical tendencies in the Hypotyposeis and Stromateis; Evagrius’s Origenist theology, deeply indebted to Clement, was condemned; works by Evagrius survive in Greek largely under other names, including Basil’s. It is entirely conceivable that a Clementine ascetic treatise on continence, cherished in monastic circles influenced by Origen and Evagrius, would be safer and more useful if filed under Basil.

The very fact that another Evagrian letter is transmitted in the Basilian corpus as Ep. 8 and can be identified in the Syriac collection of Evagrius’s letters shows that the traffic between “Clementine-Origenist-Evagrian” and “Basilian” material is not one-way. It is a porous boundary wherein texts migrate to the safest and most authoritative names. If Clement’s Περὶ ἐγκρατείας had already been excerpted, annotated, and used by Evagrius, its eventual appearance as a Basilian letter is not at all surprising.

Nor does the existence of Evagrian parallels weaken the Clementine case. Evagrius clearly depends on Clement for his fourfold division of philosophy, for his conception of exegesis, and for several ascetic topoi. Seeing similar ideas about “light” and “heavy” bodies in Evagrius and Ep. 366 may simply confirm that later fourth-century ascetics were reading Clement and rephrasing him in their own idiom. The question is not whether Evagrius sounds like the letter, but whether the letter sounds more like a fourth-century Evagrian reworking of Clement or like Clement himself. The density and texture of the Clementine parallels favor the latter.

7. Re-reading Völker and Porter

Within this framework, Völker’s and Porter’s observations can be re-employed rather than rejected. Völker was right that Ep. 366 depends heavily on Clementine formulations; he was also right that the letter has nothing to do with Basil and belongs “in the world of florilegia.” What he did not consider is that Clement himself produced mini-“florilegia” by anthologizing and recombining his own material. The Stromateis are, by his own testimony, precisely such a work. The fact that Ep. 366’s author likes concise, formally balanced definitions and juxtaposes phrases from widely separated Clementine contexts is an argument for Clement as architect of both works, not against him.

Porter’s insistence on a lost Valentinian letter behind Strom. 3.7 and Ep. 366 is a valuable reminder that Clement is often working with written heretical sources. But the direction of dependence is not as clear as he supposes. Clement’s explicit attribution of the digestive doctrine to “Valentinus” is not the sort of thing a later compiler would silently erase if he were excerpting Clement; nor is the letter’s positive redeployment of that doctrine as a model of ἐγκράτεια something we should automatically label “Valentinian.” It may instead reflect Clement’s own willingness to reframe opponents’ insights within his ascetic theology.

A triangular relationship remains: Valentinus, Clement, and the anonymous ascetic circles that transmitted both. Yet the simplest hypothesis is that Clement’s Περὶ ἐγκρατείας appropriated and corrected a Valentinian letter, that Strom. 3.7 then reused that appropriation in a broader polemical context, and that Ep. 366 preserves the original Clementine tract (perhaps abridged), later miscatalogued under Basil. On this view, Ep. 366 is not “closer to Valentinus than Clement” but “Clement closer to Valentinus than later orthodoxy was comfortable acknowledging.”

8. Conclusion

When the pseudo-Basilian Ep. 366 is read in isolation, its oddities invite either demotion to a late florilegium or promotion to a precious Valentinian relic. When it is read alongside Clement’s Stromateis, Paedagogus, and Excerpts ex Theodoto, and against the backdrop of Clement’s own description of his literary practice, a different picture emerges.

Linguistically, the letter is saturated with Clement: almost a third of its text is verbatim or near-verbatim Clementine, another two-fifths is tightly Clementine in phraseology, and the remainder is perfectly at home in his conceptual world. Rhetorically, it speaks with Clement’s epistolary voice, closely resembling the tone and strategies of the letter To Theodore. Theologically, its account of ἐγκράτεια as divine δύναμις and χάρις, its graded transformation of humans into angelic beings through ascetic practice, and its portrayal of Christ’s incorruptible body all track Clement’s own ascetic Christology. Historically, its misattribution to Basil fits well with known patterns of late antique “falsification,” especially in Origenist and Evagrian circles.

None of this proves Clementine authorship in a mathematically demonstrable way. Textual attribution in patristic studies rarely admits of such certainty, and Andrew Criddle is right to remind us that the letter’s later use in fifth- and sixth-century Christological debates may have colored how it was read and transmitted. But if we can live with high probabilities when identifying Evagrian letters under Basil’s name, we can live with a similar margin in assigning Ep. 366 to Clement.

At minimum, the burden of proof has shifted. The letter cannot be explained simply as “late, anonymous Clement-dependent compilation.” It is better described as a Clementine meditation on ἐγκράτεια, probably identical with or closely related to the lost Περὶ ἐγκρατείας, which Clement later mined for the Stromateis and which later ascetic tradition, seeking safe canonical names, misfiled under Basil. If that is right, then Ep. 366 joins To Theodore as one of the few surviving epistolary windows into Clement’s ascetic teaching—short, dense, and, as the author himself says, consisting of words that are each νοῦς, waiting for readers who will “perceive” what they say.