Photius and the Stromateis: Unveiling a Variant Ending

Take note of the way the famous Byzantine reader recounts the end of Stromateis VII probably preserves a different “hinge” between book seven and what followed than the one in our lone medieval manuscript—and that this variant seam makes Clement’s deliberately guarded, “gnostic” style look much more at home, including in the Letter to Theodore.

The key move is to take seriously how that reader cites the close of Strom. VII in his Bibliotheca. He reproduces Clement’s self-explanation for writing in a scattered, non-linear way, then adds καὶ ἑξῆς and continues with “Ἡ μὲν οὖν τοῦ διερριμμένως αὐτὰ κατατάξαι αὐτῷ αἰτία αὕτη, ὥς φησι, γέγονεν.” On the back of his normal habits with καὶ ἑξῆς + ὥς φησι, the proposal is that he is still following Clement’s text verbatim here, not paraphrasing from a distance. In his copy, the seventh book seems to have ended, not with our long “wooded hill” peroration and “after this seventh Stromateus we will begin our discourse on what follows from another starting point,” but more abruptly with “This, then, is the reason why he arranged them in a scattered manner for him (the passerby).”

That line is then read back into Clement’s broader program statements inside the Stromateis. At the start of the work he describes preaching as casting seed that may benefit a random hearer “according to providence,” and later promises that his “notes” will contain the truth “scattered and strewn so as to escape the notice of those who, like jackdaws, gather seeds.” The end of VII, in this reconstruction, deliberately cashes out that promise: the material has been arranged διερριμμένως so that “the uninitiated passerby” will not easily find the holy traditions. One ancient voice already saw this clearly. The Byzantine reader sums it up: “This, he himself says, is the reason why the subject-matter is so unsystematically arranged.” That sentence is treated not as his gloss but as Clement’s own last word in some late-antique copies.

On that reading, the current “garden/wooded hill” conclusion and the explicit transition to a further λόγος from “another starting point” are secondary. They belong with the whole problem of an eighth book: ancient testimonies know “eight Stromateis,” yet the extant Book VIII is stylistically and theologically odd, and the same Byzantine witness reports that in some manuscripts Quis dives salvus? stood in eighth place, while in others an “Eighth Stromateus” with a different incipit did. One modern attempt to explain this (Rizzi) sees later editors trying to pad out a seven-book Stromateis set to match Eusebius’s “eight books” notice, by tacking extra Clementine material on behind VII. The alternative pushed here is bolder: that in at least one line of transmission Strom. VII really did end with the terse “Ἡ μὲν οὖν τοῦ διερριμμένως…,” and that Quis dives functioned as a kind of eighth Stromateus—a Mark-focused homily sitting behind seven veils of scattered doctrine.

That has two payoffs. First, it undercuts the claim that a deliberately abrupt, reserve-heavy ending is “un-Clementine.” Clement says, in so many words, that he sows ζώπυρα τῆς ἀληθοῦς γνώσεως in a way that frustrates the τῷ περιτυχόντι τῶν ἀμυήτων; an ending that simply states “this is why I arranged things scattered for him” is exactly what his own program would lead us to expect. Second, if ancient readers could already encounter a Clementine dossier where seven miscellaneous books funneled into a Mark-expositing “eighth,” it becomes easier to imagine other Clementine occasional writings—like the Letter to Theodore—where Alexandrian/Markan material is handled in the same mixture of openness and reserve. The parallel between a Stromateis VII that stops on “Ἡ μὲν οὖν τοῦ διερριμμένως…” and a letter that stops on “Ἡ μὲν οὖν ἀληθὴς καὶ κατὰ τὴν ἀληθῆ φιλοσοφίαν ἐξήγησις” is not proof of authenticity, but it makes that kind of abrupt Clementine cadence look far less anomalous than a tidy, linear-treatise model would suggest.