One of the most famous sorites in early Christian literature is the second logia of the Gospel of Thomas, which was known to Clement of Alexandria:
Let the one seeking not stop seeking until he finds. And when he finds he will marvel, and marveling he will reign, and reigning he will rest.
I have been wondering all weekend why Clement's reference to 'naked to naked' (or 'naked man with naked man' as it is usually cited) seems to be known to Maximus of Tyre in a longer form:
the naked to the naked, the loving to the loved, and the free to the free
γυμνὸν γυμνῷ, φίλον φίλῳ, ἐλεύθερον ἐλευθέρῳ
I have been wondering whether Clement, Theodore and Maximus - all contemporaries living and writing in the age of Commodus - could have just arrived at the same citation 'by accident.' In other words, is Maximus's reference here just something 'he made up' as part of a speech against those who which to purify and perfect the body, or is Maximus citing something that he heard from Christians.
I am beginning to give serious consideration to the latter possibility.
The first thing I did in this series of posts is to compare Clement's γυμνὸς γυμνῷ Theod. III.13) with Maximus's γυμνὸν γυμνῷ. My working hypothesis would be that Maximus has adapted something that Christians say about the manner in which their mysteries 'perfect' the human body. Theodore may have heard this same saying - perhaps from Maximus or a hearer of Maximus's dissertation - and, after becoming aware of a 'secret gospel' associated with Mark, asking him whether the sorites appeared in the gospel. Clement's answer, which is preserved in the Letter to Theodore, makes clear that the saying does not appear in the gospel after Mark 10:34.
Yet notice at once that every part of the sorites forms a part of the fabric of the Letter to Theodore. At the very beginning, Clement makes some kind of reference to the Carpocratian claim that 'they are free':
and boasting that they are free (και καυχωμενοι ελευθερους), they have become slaves of servile desires
This would correspond to the conclusion of the sorites (ἐλεύθερον ἐλευθέρῳ). The manuscript ends with a segue to Clement's explanation of what the 'true love of God' (την αληθη φιλοσοφιαν εξηγησις where 'sophia' is a title of Jesus). This would correspond to the φίλον φίλῳ reference. And of course the citation of LGM 1 (= the first addition to the longer gospel of Mark) explains γυμνὸν γυμνῷ with Clement actually citing this, the first line of the sorites in his letter.
I have already demonstrated that Clement makes reference to the φίλον φίλῳ concept as being central to the mystery of Alexandrian Christianity in Strom 7.10. I have consistently demonstrated that all of these ideas appear in Plato originally. It can be noted that φίλον φίλῳ is drawn from a discussion in Lysias 916c. Now the reader should look at Plato's original use of ἐλεύθερον ἐλευθέρῳ in the Laws 9.857d:
You have reminded me of a previous reflection of mine, how that none of the attempts hitherto made at legislation have ever been carried out rightly—as in fact we may infer from the instance before us. What do I mean to imply by this remark? It was no bad comparison we made when we compared all existing legislation to the doctoring of slaves by slaves. For one should carefully notice this, that if any of the doctors who practice medicine by purely empirical methods [857d] devoid of theory, were to come upon a free-born (doctor) conversing with a free-born (patient) [ἐλεύθερον ἐλευθέρῳ], and using arguments, much as a philosopher would, dealing with the course of the ailment from its origin and surveying the natural constitution of the human body,—he would at once break out into a roar of laughter, and the language he would use would be none other than that which always comes ready to the tongue of most so-called “doctors”: “You fool,” he would say, “you are not doctoring your patient, but schooling him, so to say, as though what he wanted was to be made, not a sound man, [857e] but a doctor.”
We are rapidly approaching holy ground here - viz. an Alexandrian messianic tradition developed from Philo's fusion of Platonism and Judaism which gave birth to a gospel, the 'secret' gospel of Mark.
It will take some time to sort all these ideas out on paper and present them in a coherent systematic manner. But the next step is to demonstrate how similar Maximus's dissertation against an unnamed group is to Clement's attack against the Christian interest in perfecting the flesh of the human body. The reader should take the time to read Maximus's original argument (for which I provided a link in my last post).
