The title of this book may arouse some surprise, which will not be allayed by the discovery that it takes as its foil the cultural philosophy of Pierre Bourdieu, for whom ‘taste’ denotes the choice and appreciation of manufactured products, from works of art to artisanal coffee, as marks of social or economic status. In her introduction, however, Heath contends that whether we treat him as a savant of the Roman world, as an exemplar of ancient rhetoric or as one in a series of Christian intellectuals, Clement’s writings illustrate both the validity of Bourdieu’s approach and the limits of its application to theological texts. That his extant corpus is indeed a theological text is one of the claims that she sets out to prove against the widespread view that Clement is a moralist in the mould of the Stoics and Plutarch: what they present as the culture of a noble soul, she argues, is for him an ‘ordering of loves’ in obedience to our Creator and Redeemer, and the key to that ordering is to be found in the scriptural metaphors of tasting, seeing, hearing, eating and drinking to which he continually recurs.

In chapter 2, a study of the word philanthropia in the Protrepticus and Paedagogus reveals it to be not so much a virtue to be cultivated by humans, as the Greeks supposed, but the essence of God himself as manifested in his creating us with the intent that we should grow into his likeness. In contrast to the Greek deities, whose cults of sacrifice and obscenity expose their misanthropia, the true God displays his love by giving his Word to us as food and drink, conceived as milk and honey because the obedience to which he calls us is that of an innocent child to an infinitely compassionate father. Even the vituperative element in Clement’s work is an instrument of charity, as are the numerous specimens of comic abuse and scabrous quotation cited in chapter 3 to show that Clement anticipated Bourdieu’s maxim that we acquire taste through the experience of disgust. Clement’s asceticism – falsely belittled in current scholarship as a pursuit of salvation by works – is defended in chapter 4 as a means of perfecting a taste for spiritual realities, with a corresponding disdain for the merely transient and material. As Heath observes, Bourdieu allows for no such bifurcation of values, maintaining that the dominant class makes simultaneous use of the material and the symbolic to spread the illusion that its goods are the only goods. But Clement in his own mind is promoting not an aesthetic for the élite but an ethic of strength in simplicity, and of life in truth, through which every willing servant of God can attain the bliss that he sets before us as the one natural object of desire.

Much of Clement’s satire in the Protrepticus is directed against idolatry, and we may add that he is our chief witness to the rare denunciations of this practice in pagan literature. At the same time, as chapter 5 explains, he is not afraid to set Christ before his readers as a paradigm, using terms which remind Heath of ‘sophistic cultures of viewing’ (p. 137), of Stoic accounts of the wise man which she considers to be ekphrastic, and of Plato’s conceit that the philosophical lover should court his beloved as the devotee honours the statue of his god. In urging at the same time that no material thing can satisfy the thirst for beauty that God implants in our souls, he has as his allies not only Paul and Plato but the Greek convention, noted by David Konstan, of applying the adjective kalos (‘beautiful’) only to that which an image signifies, not to the image itself.

In chapter 6, Heath maintains that while Clement agrees with Bourdieu in treating the visible norm as the basis of politeia, or social order, he differs from him in envisaging a polity in which all distinctions of class and power are abolished, though it is set apart from the world by its collective dedication to love, prayer and the seeking of heaven. In chapter 7, Heath repeats and elaborates the thesis of her introduction, that one of Clement’s principal aims in writing was to establish a canon of taste that would conduce to the proper ordering of loves. Heath is surely right to suggest that the modern critics of Clement who accord the highest place among earthly loves to the sexual appetite would have seemed to him to show little knowledge of scripture, sin or the purpose of God for humanity; it is possible indeed that this reminder of the breadth of Clement’s theory of concupiscence will be the principal contribution of her book to future research. Bourdieu’s disciples are already forearmed against any appeal to a plane of values beyond the social and economic, whereas there may be theologians who will permit this thoughtful study to persuade them that Clement was neither too much of a gentleman to be a true disciple nor any more guilty than Paul of embracing a pagan dualism.