- Lived:
- c. 185–253 CE · Alexandria, then Caesarea in Palestine
- Tradition:
- Alexandrian; the first great Christian philosopher — Plato's toolkit put to work on the Bible
- The Big Idea:
- The whole cosmos is a rescue operation: free souls fell away from God, the material world is their rehabilitation, and in the end — perhaps — every last one of them comes home.
- In their words:
- "The end is always like the beginning."
- If you remember one thing:
- He built Christianity's first complete philosophical system, taught the church how to read its own book — and three hundred years after his death, the church condemned him for it.