Pseudo-Basil Letter 366 as a (Lost) Letter of Clement of Alexandria

Epistle 366, transmitted under the name of Basil, is best understood as a Clementine text, effectively a lost letter of Clement of Alexandria or a very pure Clementine florilegium. The way to see this is to stop treating it as an isolated curiosity and instead run it sentence by sentence against Clement’s surviving works, especially the Stromateis and the Paedagogus, and then grade each clause on a scale: (a) verbatim or near-verbatim Clement, (b) very strongly Clementine in idiom and thought, (c) broadly compatible with Clement but not distinctive, and (d) generically Christian. When this is done, the “Clementine” share of the letter is overwhelming: large stretches fall into (a) and (b), and the remaining material is at least (c); almost none of it looks alien.

What gives the letter its spine is Clement’s theology of ἐγκράτεια. Self-control is not simply a moral skill; it is a divine power and grace that both heals and frees. The letter says that the fruit of self-control is Θῆοῦ μετουσία, participation in God, and that “not being subject to decay is participation in God,” just as being subject to decay is participation in mere mortal life. This is precisely the formulation found in Stromateis 5, where “not being corrupted is participation in divinity” and ignorance of God brings corruption. The letter’s medical metaphors—desire as a νόσος ψυχῆς, self-control as the ψυχῆς ὑγεία—match the Paedagogus, where the Word is the physician of the “sick soul” and admonition is described as a kind of regimen. The insistence that ἐγκράτεια does not merely teach chastity but actually “provides” it, as a δύναμις and χάρις Θεοῦ, is exactly the wording of Stromateis 3.1.4.2 and 3.7.57.

At the same time, the letter is shot through with Clement’s characteristic metaphysical oppositions and word-play. The repeated contrast between θεότης and θνητότης, between incorruption and corruption, between angels who fall through lack of self-control and a Christ whose food does not undergo decay in him because he “practiced divinity, not mortality,” all belong to Clement’s favorite way of staging the difference between earthly life and divine life. His ascetic Christology—Jesus eating and drinking “in a peculiar way,” not returning the food because the power of self-control in him prevents its decay—is explicitly quoted in Stromateis as part of a Valentinian letter, and in Epistle 366 it returns with the same wording and logic. Even the image of Jesus as so “light” in his ἐγκράτεια that he does not weigh down either land or sea belongs with Clement’s habit of describing the gnostic and the Lord as almost weightless, barely touching the world they traverse.

The letter also contains some of Clement’s most idiosyncratic themes. It rehearses the story of angels who became ἀκρατεῖς and were dragged down from heaven by desire, in wording that matches Stromateis 3.7.59. It treats even a “little” ἐγκράτεια as enough to make a person “above all things,” which corresponds to Clement’s depiction of the true gnostic as higher than the world because he has mastered his passions. It uses the eye as a metaphor for the νοῦς capable of seeing “the unseen,” a move characteristic of Clement’s language about spiritual perception. And it closes with the gnomic line from Epicharmus, “νοῦς ὁρᾷ, καὶ νοῦς ἀκούει,” a pagan maxim that Clement alone among the ante-Nicene Fathers makes into a kind of signature, citing it repeatedly as a crystallization of his doctrine that only the purified mind really hears and sees.

Taken together, these dense lexical overlaps, shared constructions, and highly specific theological and philosophical moves are hard to explain as random coincidence or as the work of a later Basilian compiler. The letter speaks in Clement’s voice about Clement’s favorite topics, in Clement’s vocabulary, often in Clement’s own sentences. On that basis, the best explanation is that Epistle 366 is either directly by Clement of Alexandria or preserves Clement closely enough that it belongs with his corpus rather than with Basil’s.