Beauty: Ekphrastic Rhetoric and the Eikōn/Agalma of Human Perfection (2024)

Clement of Alexandria and the Judgement of Taste: Pedagogical Rhetoric and Christian Formation

J. M. F. Heath

Published:

2024

Online ISBN:

9780198902041

Print ISBN:

9780198902010

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Clement of Alexandria and the Judgement of Taste: Pedagogical Rhetoric and Christian Formation

J. M. F. Heath

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J. M. F. Heath

J. M. F. Heath

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Pages

128–160

  • Published:

    May 2024

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Heath, J. M. F., 'Beauty: Ekphrastic Rhetoric and the Eikōn/Agalma of Human Perfection', Clement of Alexandria and the Judgement of Taste: Pedagogical Rhetoric and Christian Formation (Oxford, 2024; online edn, Oxford Academic, 23 May 2024), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198902010.003.0005, accessed 27 May 2024.

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Abstract

Taste is traditionally closely associated with the judgement of beauty, although Bourdieu reduced this too to a social commodity. Beauty has been important in Christian accounts of taste, wherein it is normally emphasized that Christian taste means acquiring a taste for divine beauty made visible in Christ. Clement focuses on drawing people away from forms of beauty that elicit appetite for wealth or sexual desire, and turning their attention to beauty that is manifest in the human being who is perfectly formed through divine creation, clearly visible through Christ. This Christian ideal of the perfect human person is a counterpart to Hellenistic philosophical speculation about the sage, and to Plato’s ideal of forming a beautiful statue as a model for the beautiful city, both of which are further developed in the Stromateis. In presenting this ideal, Clement develops a new, Christian style of ekphrasis.

Keywords: ekphrasis, Stoicism, sage, beauty, icon, statue, Platonism, hom*oiōsis theōi, love, Stromateis

Subject

Early Christianity

Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

Clement of Alexandria and the Judgement of Taste: Pedagogical Rhetoric and Christian Formation. J. M. F. Heath, Oxford University Press. © J. M. F. Heath 2024. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198902010.003.0005

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