This monograph centers on Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus (Instructor), the second of a three-volume work that Clement composed to instruct a largely elite Alexandrian Christian audience. It is Heath’s second major study of Clement, following her earlier work on the Stromateis (Miscellanies: Clement of Alexandria and the Shaping of Christian Literary Practice: Miscellany and the Transformation of Greo-Roman Writing, published with Cambridge in 2020). In the Paedagogus, Clement addresses catechumens and the newly baptized, outlining what Christian devotion entails and the ideals it should cultivate. Heath challenges longstanding misreadings of Clement as merely a genteel moralist preoccupied with etiquette, a risible Miss Manners, or an ascetical theologian who devalues material creation and promotes withdrawal from the world. Instead, she presents Clement as a serious incarnational theologian who draws on pagan philosophy and ideals of paideia to shape Christians – especially wealthy ones – to live faithfully within society. For Clement, the Logos accompanies believers, guiding their embodied lives and social participation. Heath situates Clement’s theology within broader patristic currents and engages contemporary theological discussions on beauty, desire, sexuality, and the Trinity.
A distinctive feature of the book is its sustained dialogue with Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Heath uses Bourdieu both constructively and critically. While Bourdieu interprets taste as a social mechanism by which elites distinguish themselves from lower classes, Heath argues that Clement offers a richer theological account. For Clement, taste is not primarily a tool of social exclusion but an embodied orientation toward divine beauty. Heath contends that Clement enables theologians to reflect on how human desires and perceptions are shaped by God’s presence. Through divine accompaniment, tastes and loves are reordered to align with God’s self-giving in the incarnation, shaping how Christians perceive both God and the world. Each chapter opens with an engagement with Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory of taste, using it as a springboard to examine Clement’s own – and, in Heath’s view, superior – account of taste.
To address the potential anachronism of applying Bourdieu’s modern category of taste to an ancient text, Heath identifies an analogous concept in Clement’s phrase philokalos prohairesis (Paed. I.xii.99.2). Though difficult to translate precisely, it suggests a Christ-formed disposition that loves the good and the beautiful. This orientation permeates all aspects of life – from eating and dress to conversation and social engagement – signifying membership in a heavenly community. Clement’s program is thus affective and formative, shaping desires and habits as visible expressions of belonging to God.
Following the introduction, the book unfolds in five chapters and a conclusion. Each chapter begins with questions prompted by Bourdieu’s Distinction, considers them through Christian theological aesthetics, and then offers detailed analysis of Clement within the cultural world of the Second Sophistic.
The second chapter centers on philanthropia, God’s love for humanity. Heath argues that Clement represents an underappreciated development in this concept. Clement reconfigures traditional use of the term away from human love to a description of God’s loving kindness. God’s philanthropia leads believers away from disordered desires formed by pagan devotion and toward rightly ordered desires aligned with God’s revelation in creation and the incarnation. God’s love is corrective and pedagogical, shaping Christian character. Heath challenges interpretations such as John Behr’s claim that Clement’s exhortation to “tiptoe on earth” (Paed. I.v.16.2) implies world-denial. She contends that Clement’s intimate language about God’s love for creation and his sustained concern with embodied practice show that his asceticism aims not at rejection of the world but at its proper orientation.
After examining the affective presentation of “philanthropia” in the Protreptikos and the first book of the Paedagogus, Heath turns in the third chapter to Clement’s use of repellent imagery in Paed. Books II and III. Clement deploys vivid descriptions designed to evoke disgust toward practices that hinder communion with God. Such rhetoric trains emotional responses, teaching Christians to recoil from what distorts desire. Heath, then, in chapter four, analyzes Clement’s aesthetic framework structured around binary oppositions – true and false, good form and bad form, ordered and disordered, moderate and immoderate, fitting and unfitting, male and female, and life and death. Drawing on Stoic influences, Clement employs these binaries to cultivate discernment in everyday Alexandrian social life.
The discussion of eikones continues in chapter five with a focus on the relation between images of beauty and Clement’s teaching that Christ, the image of God, furnishes the pattern according to which Christians are to be conformed. The social dimension of Clement’s project comes to the fore in chapter six’s focus on the Christian politeia. While Bourdieu sees taste as reinforcing class distinction, Heath argues that Clement’s address to wealthy Alexandrians cannot be reduced to social snobbery. Though attentive to the real-life situations of elite Christians, Clement redefines their identity. Drawing on Platonic and Stoic political thought as well as New Testament imagery, he portrays believers as citizens of a heavenly commonwealth. Their embodied practices express membership in this transcendent community. Taste, in this context, marks allegiance not to social class but to God’s heavenly politeia.
The concluding chapter reorients discussion of Clement’s teaching on love. Rather than focusing as much as earlier scholarship has done on sexuality and marriage, Heath highlights Clement’s own emphases: love as it promotes individual and communal health; love of teacher and pupil; and friendship that informs civic relations within the community.
Heath’s study is ambitious and intricate, offering close readings of Clement’s engagement with and contrast to classical philosophy while also conversing with modern aesthetic theory. By placing Clement in dialogue with Bourdieu, she demonstrates both the limitations of purely sociological accounts of taste and the continuing relevance of patristic theology for contemporary debates about embodiment, beauty, and desire. At the same time, it is not always clear how contrast with/use of Bourdieu adds to the analysis; Heath might have as easily come to her conclusions without using his work as foil. Certainly, contrast with him reveals the richer theological understanding of taste than a purely secular and sociological one does. Engaging a century and a half of Clement scholarship, Heath displays mastery of the field and advances a compelling reinterpretation of this often-neglected early Christian thinker. With this second monograph, she establishes herself as a leading interpreter of Clement and a significant voice in theological aesthetics.
