Faith & Spirit Quote by Clement of Alexandra

Clement is selling a counterintuitive form of strength: not the kind that bulldozes trouble, but the kind that makes trouble less sovereign. The line hinges on “easily,” a word that sounds soft until you remember his context. In the early Christian intellectual world of Alexandria, “the Word” isn’t just a comforting slogan; it’s Logos language, a claim that reality has an intelligible spine and that Christ is its grammar. To “obtain” it easily signals a paradox: the truth is given, not wrestled from the heavens by heroic effort. The difficulty comes later.

That later difficulty is smuggled into “keeps it with all his soul.” Clement’s intent is pastoral and disciplinary at once. He’s not praising quick epiphanies; he’s warning that the real work is retention, the slow, interior custody of meaning when the nervous system is flooded by fear, loss, or social pressure. “Keep” is a monastic verb before monasticism hardens into an institution: guard the deposit, rehearse it, let it reorder desire.

The subtext is a quiet polemic against two temptations of his era: pagan Stoic self-sufficiency and the more elitist Christian claims that salvation is secret knowledge for the few. Clement offers a third posture. You can “live well” in trouble not because you become numb or special, but because you anchor your life in a Word that outlasts circumstance. It’s resilience with metaphysical teeth, and it’s aimed at believers learning to endure a world that could turn hostile without warning.