This book brings to fruition a long held plan to investigate Clement of Alexandria’s position on the doctrine of reincarnation. Having completed my Master’s thesis on Philo of Alexandria’s stance on the tenet almost twenty years ago, I originally intended to write my doctoral dissertation on Clement. Fortunately, I was persuaded by Docent Erkki Koskenniemi to continue with Philo and study his position in a much greater depth. Thus, I defended my doctoral thesis at Åbo Akademi University, Finland, in 2013 and had the great privilege of having Prof. David T. Runia as my opponent. The revised dissertation was subsequently published in the Studia Philonica Monographs series.
I made (and published) some intriguing observations about the ways in which Flavius Josephus speaks of reincarnation while I was a member of the Centre of Excellence in Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions, funded by the Academy of Finland (now the Research Council of Finland), led by Prof. Martti Nissinen at the University of Helsinki. After receving my own three-year AoF funding (2016–19) for my project on Clement’s position on reincarnation, I joined the other AoF CoE operative at the Faculty of Theology at the time, the one in Reason and Religious Recognition led by Prof. Risto Saarinen. I am very grateful for the Council for the funding, and thank both professors for their support and the opportunity to work in these inspiring and professionally excellent research environments.
The standard time for writing a dissertation is four years of full-time work. Although Philo’s allegories can be highly complex and his oeuvre is vast, I found that investigating Clement’s attitude towards reincarnation was a tougher case that required a longer, and not a shorter, amount of time. Hence I was not able to finalise the study during my actual three-year project and have had to complete it more slowly over the past years. This is not to say that the big picture did not begin to emerge early on, a picture that has remained essentially unchanged: Clement endorsed the doctrine, but did not want to communicate this with full openness. I presented my main results at the 2019 International Conference on Patristic Studies in Oxford, and that paper was later published in Studia Patristica. I thank Prof. Ilaria Ramelli for her critical comments on the paper (published in the same volume). Work still remained. Clement’s style of writing is both elusive and allusive to such an extent that a lot of loose ends and details had to be addressed before I could present my entire case for evaluation by the international scholarly community. That is where we finally are.
I thank Brill for accepting my manuscript for the Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae and the anonymous reviewer for their useful comments and suggestions. I also thank the Brill staff, Nitzan Shalev in particular, for the smooth and highly professional cooperation in the process of finalising this book for publication.
Sami Yli-Karjanmaa
Laukaa, Finland
18 December 2024