As the church grew, it had to deal with pagan culture. While Church History is filled with heretical examples where people brought in pagan ideas uncritically, it is hard to say that the World that God created and called very good, where the heavens declare the glory of God is completely unaware of ANYTHING, even if Jesus came to this world and the world did not know him. And so the "culture wars" go back as long as the church has.
Alexandria was one of the biggest melting pots of ideas in the Roman Empire. And Alexandria had quite the tradition of learning - this is where the famous "great library" was. There was also a significant Jewish population, which had already been trying to figure out how the tradition of Israel fit with Hellenistic culture in figures like Philo.
And the Church joined in this process too, setting up a catechetical school to teach Christianity to the world there. Two early leaders of this school are featured in the collection Alexandrian Christianity, available in the Universal Digital Library at http://archive.org/details/alexandrianchris012826mbp . Since PBB's do not work so well with multiple author datatypes, I have extracted the section of Clement of Alexandria from the larger work. and have created a PB.
This contains books 3 and 7 from Clement's Stromateis, or Miscellanies. As the title suggests, they kind of wander around a bit, but the general topics are Christian Marriage for #3 and the goal for the Spiritual life in #7. Clement spends more than a bit of time arguing against alternative (Gnostic) views, using his considerable knowledge of the Bible as well as Greek Classics.
Back when the ECF set was collected, they tended to hide talk about sex in the fathers by putting it in Latin instead of English, and so book 3 is Latin in the ECF set, but English here. So even if you have ECF, this is useful, if your English is better than your Latin.
As I said above, the text is from Universal Digital Library. I have added tagging with the Clement of Alexandria datatype, as well as links to Plato, Philo, and many others. There is room for more links to be added to this to other works of Clement as well as Origen, but I figure it is good enough to go.
SDG,
Ken McGuire
