Posted on: February 3rd, 2009 Clement of Alexandria on Cities
“I pray to Christ to wing me to my Jerusalem. for the Stoics say that heaven is properly a city, though places here on earth are not…. For a city is an important thing, and its people a decorous body, a multitude of men regulated by law, as the Church (that city on earth impregnable, invulnerable) is ruled by the Word, a product of the divine will on earth as in heaven. Images of this city the poets create with their pens; the Hyperboreans, the Arimaspian cities, the Elysian plains, are commonwealths of just men. And we all know Plato’s city, laid up as a pattern in heaven.” — Clement of Alexandria, Strom.., iv, 26.
Filed under: History / Genealogy, liturgical theology, philosophy, political theology, Radical Orthodoxy, theology / ecclesiology
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