Essays in Idleness

It is difficult to insist that something is unknowable, especially when there is constant theorizing about it, and speculation is never relaxed. There must be an answer, some believe, with an earnest, misplaced faith, and unsearchable assumptions, within a fenced enclosure of time. If they “follow the science” (ho-ho!), they will of course get nowhere, because in our understanding science and mathematics were constructed by men; whereas, in the objective spirit of Aristotle, even when knowledge comes from deep within ourselves (as the laws do), they must be discovered. That anything can be known, at all, is the consequence of God’s willing; and in this we find our security.

The reader may think I am a believing Catholic, and I am, but should confess that in at least this one respect I am inclined to be a Coptic Christian, whimsically sprung out of Hellenistic reasoning. With Clement of Alexandria, I understand that the world was not created in time; that time came to be with all that it contains; and that it is perhaps spread, like space, over greater (or lesser) distances than the number of light years our astrophysicists have counted. So it may be in a sense finite, and yet infinite, having no definite edge. Therefore, in time, we cannot find its beginnings. It does not have a before nor an after, nor befores nor afters except within itself. It cannot have an age for, as it says in the IInd beuk of Peter, a day is as a thousand years with the Lord, and a thousand years as a day. Note, in the beuk of Genesis, that the word “day” is used in quite a few different senses.

I was first introduced to Clement while visiting Egypt, having known of him only by reputation as a theologian and philosopher occasionally in bad odour with Rome, rather like his younger contemporary Origen — an even more breathtaking Alexandrian spectacle.

Another Clement, of Alexandria — a young Scotsman working for the archaeologist Jean-Yves Empereur in Alexandria at the turn of the present century — performed the intoduction. Too, I found the crumbling Butterworth (Loeb) edition of the ancient Clement among the rubbish in the antique emporium of that city. Ah, those were the days.