Clement of Alexandria and Secret Letters

Andrew Criddle notices that in Stromateis V, when Clement comments on Romans 15:29, the Greek text includes a parenthetical warning that the “fullness” in question is not to be communicated by letter, but this line disappears in the standard ANF English translation. In Greek, the passage cites Paul’s “I know that when I come to you, I shall come in the fullness of the blessing of Christ” (Rom 15:29), and then, in the manuscripts, inserts an aside that such things are not to be handed down epistolarily before continuing with the usual talk of spiritual gifts and “gnostic” instruction. Because the main English version omits that aside, generations of readers have encountered the passage as if Clement simply moves from Paul’s line into edifying commentary, without the explicit “not-by-letter” restriction that the Greek tradition actually preserves.

For debates about a Clementine “secret” letter, this matters because it sharpens the internal tension: the same author who can say that certain higher blessings or mysteries are not to be conveyed in writing is also being asked to serve as the author of a letter that both acknowledges and interprets special Markan material in some detail. That doesn’t automatically refute the letter, but it shifts the interpretive task. Either the restriction in Stromateis is read narrowly (as barring only the fullest, initiatory exposition, while still allowing guarded hints in letters), or else one has to explain why a Clement who programmatically keeps the highest teaching off the page would, in this one case, commit such teaching to a written, sendable document.The core of the whole discussion is actually pretty simple once you strip away the forum back-and-forth.

First, there’s a forgotten line in Stromateis V that matters a lot more than people realized. In the Greek, Clement comments on Romans 15:29 and explains that when Paul promises to come “in the fullness of the blessing of Christ,” he’s talking about a spiritual gift and a “gnostic” tradition that he wants to deliver in person. Clement then adds, in a parenthetical aside that the old ANF translation silently dropped: “for such things could not be communicated by letter.” That missing phrase has sat in the Greek manuscript tradition all along, reappears in Migne and modern editions and even older French translations, but disappeared from the English that everyone actually reads.

Once that line is put back where it belongs, it creates an obvious tension with the Letter to Theodore and the “secret” Gospel of Mark. If Clement really says “these things cannot be disclosed by letter,” how can he also be the author of a letter that seems to do exactly that—acknowledge a secret gospel, explain its purpose, and refute a heretical exegesis of its most notorious pericope?

The way out of this is not to deny the line in Stromateis V but to read it alongside Clement’s actual epistolary and rhetorical habits.

Two things come together.

First, Clement’s “not by letter” remark is aimed at full, initiatory exposition of mysteries, not at any and every mention of them. The logic is: the deepest “mystery hidden for ages” is something you cannot really convey in a brief, public document; it demands presence, the right audience, the right setting. That fits the wider patristic pattern where “viva voce” teaching is the proper vehicle for esoteric exegesis, and written texts are constrained, cautious, and often deliberately incomplete. The line in Stromateis V is an explicit articulation of this: letters are the wrong medium for the communication of the mystery in its fullness, not necessarily for guarded allusions or for policing other people’s misuse of it.

Second, once you look closely at how Clement actually writes, the supposed “incompleteness” of the Letter to Theodore stops being a problem. The notorious final phrase—“Ἡ μὲν οὖν ἀληθὴς καὶ κατὰ τὴν ἀληθῆ φιλοσοφίαν ἐξήγησις…”—has usually been read as the teaser for a lost mystical homily: “Now the true interpretation according to the true philosophy…” followed by nothing, a cliffhanger that invites theories about missing pages and forger’s tricks. But in the Stromateis, Clement uses ἡ μὲν οὖν as a hinge that closes a unit as often as (or more than) it opens one. Strom. 2.2.5.1 is the control case: he wraps up a discussion of Proverbs with a sweeping summary (“the barbarian philosophy we follow is truly perfect and true”) and then moves on to something else. There is no sense of a mutilated text there. On that intra-Clementine pattern, “Ἡ μὲν οὖν ἀληθὴς…” in Theodore reads perfectly well as a summative note pointing back over what he has just done, not a breadcrumb toward a missing mega-commentary.

What has he just done? Not a mystical exposé, but what you could call “exegesis without exegesis.” The problem on the table is a Carpocratian slogan about “many naked ones with the naked,” used to eroticize the initiation scene in the expanded Markan episode. Clement’s move is not to unpack the sacramental or mystical meaning, but to correct the story: there is only one naked youth with Jesus, not “many”; the scene is read as an initiation into a life of love and martyr-like renunciation, not as a sexual rite. That narrative correction is, for him, the “true exegesis according to true philosophy” at the level that is safe to commit to a letter. The deeper “gnostic tradition” behind it remains where Stromateis V says it belongs: taught face-to-face, not written out.

The language of “naked with the naked” itself is not some freakish Carpocratian invention that would force us to see Theodore as heretical. Later Christian authors can speak of martyrs as stripping off their mortal nature and sharing Christ’s nakedness as a mark of purity and union. Nicetas of Paphlagonia, for example, can describe the apostles as “naked to the Naked and pure to the purest Word” when they become a spectacle to angels and humans and pass through suffering into communion with Christ. That idiom—γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ, καθαροί τῷ καθαρωτάτῳ Λόγῳ—shows how easily this kind of language lives inside a perfectly orthodox discourse of Adamic restoration and martyrial asceticism. The dispute, then, is about whose reading of that imagery is legitimate, not about whether the imagery itself belongs only to “heretics.”

Put all of this together and the pieces stop fighting one another. Stromateis V’s “not by letter” aside marks a real boundary for Clement: letters are not the medium for full, hierophantic exegesis of the mystery. The Letter to Theodore, read on its own stylistic terms, stays on the safe side of that line: it acknowledges a secret Markan text, insists that its most charged scene was being misrepresented, and offers just enough narrative clarification to arm an insider against Carpocratian propaganda—without ever spelling out the initiatory theology that, by his own principle, must remain unwritten. The final “Ἡ μὲν οὖν ἀληθὴς…” functions as a Clementine wrap-up to that limited reassurance, not as the stump of a lost treatise.

The rediscovered clause in Stromateis doesn’t knock Theodore out of Clement’s orbit; it actually helps explain why the letter is as evasive and “exegesis-lite” as it is. Once you stop asking it to do something Clement explicitly says letters should not do, the supposed “problem” of its ending largely evaporates.