The genesis of the Stromateis, the meaning of the title and Clement's object in composing the work, have been topics of dispute for more than a century. It is one of the merits of this unusual and arresting monograph that it gives a full survey of scholarly opinions on these points, devoting particular attention to the tissue of fragments commonly styled the eighth book, which is at times so reminiscent of the first that certain scholars have identified it as the lost exordium to the whole enterprise. Others, on the contrary, have maintained that it was in fact the introduction to Clement's Hypotyposes, or Outlines of theology, of which only a few testimonia survive. Itter concurs with neither party, and, after a detailed summary of the views of Pierre Nautin, is largely disposed to accept his verdict that the Hypotyposes was the work to which Clement postponed his exposition of physics, while our ‘eighth book’ is indeed a remnant of the Stromateis. However, he is not content to leave the question where the philologist thinks that he has answered it; he wishes the demonstrate that the opacity is not accidental, that it arises from Clement's use of the written text as a cryptogram for a higher doctrine, and that the clue lies in the mystical value that he assigns to numbers. Admission to the mysteries is for Clement first a turning from unbelief to faith, then a progress from faith to knowledge, and finally an ascent to God through eight appointed stations (or ‘mansions’) of illumination. A sequence of three stages thus encompasses one of eight, making ten in all, and hence encapsulating the symbolism which Clement and others attached to the 318 members of Abraham's household; the eighth book resembles the first as the Ogdoad which completes the week reiterates the first Sabbath. Clement feels obliged to give this esoteric cast to his thought because the supernal truths cannot be discerned without prolonged and disciplined exercise of the spiritual faculties; theology is not a discipline supervening on the acquisition of sublunar knowledge, but the ardent turning of the soul to God, without which even secular knowledge is misapprehended and misused. Itter shows that Clement effects a cross-like interlacing of two metaphors by adopting puros as his term for wheat and juxtaposing it with puros the genitive of the Greek word for fire, so that the refining flame of gnosis in the elect becomes the inseparable complement of Christ's husbandry in the soul. While this fire perfects the Gnostic, or the enlightened Christian, it consumes the sinner together with the sin – not so much reducing them to nothing as ensuring that God, who is ‘no thing’ because he precedes and transcends existence, should once again be all in all. This is a book to be read alongside others which, in exonerating Clement from anachronistic charges of heterodoxy, forget to praise him for a density and intrepidity of speculation which was unparalleled among catholics of his own epoch, or of ours.