HistoricalChristian.Faith

Clement of Alexandria on the Nephilim

Dates: c. 215 Summary: Clement of Alexandria reads the "sons of God" as angels who abandoned the beauty of God for perishable, earthly beauty and fell. He treats their fall as a cautionary example of the mind led astray by pleasure, and he reports that these fallen angels disclosed hidden secrets to the women.

Claims & evidence

The angels forsook the beauty of God and fell

An example of this for you is the angels who forsook the beauty of God for perishable beauty and fell as far as heaven is from the earth.

— The Instructor Book 3, source. Clement uses the fallen angels of Genesis 6 as a moral example of how pleasure leads the mind into licentiousness and ruin.

The fallen angels told the women secret knowledge

To which also we shall add, that the angels who had obtained the superior rank, having sunk into pleasures, told to the women the secrets which had come to their knowledge; while the rest of the angels concealed them, or rather, kept them against the coming of the Lord.

— The Stromata Book 5, source. Clement distinguishes the angels who fell into pleasure and divulged hidden secrets from the faithful angels who guarded them, echoing the tradition of forbidden teachings given to women.

Notes

• Clement clearly assumes the angelic reading: the "sons of God" are angels who fell through desire for women, sharing forbidden knowledge with them.
• His emphasis is moral and exemplary, using the angels' fall to warn against the pull of pleasure rather than dwelling on the giants themselves.
• The forbidden teachings. That the fallen angels "told to the women the secrets which had come to their knowledge" is the forbidden-knowledge half of the Watcher-instruction tradition of 1 Enoch 7–8 (the arts of metallurgy, cosmetics, sorcery, and astrology). Whether the fallen angels really are the origin of those arts is weighed on the Watchers-taught-the-arts argument (assessment: contested).