Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Everything that goes against right reason is sin. Certainly the philosophers see fit to define the most generic passions somewhat as follows: desire is an appetite disobedient to reason; fear is an aversion disobedient to reason; pleasure is an elevation of soul disobedient to reason; grief is a contraction of soul disobedient to reason. If, then, disobedience to reason is generative of sin, how could it not be, of necessity, that obedience to reason — which we call faith — is productive of what is called "duty"? For virtue itself is a disposition of soul in harmony with reason for the whole of life. Indeed, philosophy's very own crowning feature is that they render it the practice of rightness of reason, so that everything done amiss is of necessity produced through failure of reason, and is fittingly called a sin. Certainly, when the first man sinned and disobeyed God, "man was compared," it says, "to the beasts," having sinned against reason; fittingly, being reckoned irrational, he is likened to beasts. Hence too Wisdom says: "a horse to the mounting is the lover of pleasure and the adulterer," compared to an irrational beast, and so it adds: "he neighs beneath whoever sits upon him." No longer, it says, does the man speak; for he who sins against reason is no longer rational, but indeed an irrational beast, given over to desires, upon which all pleasures sit. Now what is set right in accordance with obedience to reason the children of the Stoics name "the fitting" and "the duty": the duty, then, is the fitting, and obedience is founded upon commandments; and these, being the same as the precepts and having truth as their aim, lead by pedagogy toward that final object of desire which is conceived as the end; and the end of piety is the eternal rest in God, and our end is the beginning of eternity. The right accomplishment of piety, however, fulfills its duty through works; hence duties are fittingly constituted with regard to actions, not to words; and action is the activity of the Christian's rational soul, carried out according to a noble judgment and desire of truth through the body, its congenital co-worker; while duty is the consequent single will toward God and Christ in life, brought to rightness by eternal life. For indeed the life of Christians, in which we are now being trained as children, is a certain system of rational actions, that is, an unfailing activity of the things taught by reason, which we have called faith. And the system is the Lord's commandments, which, being divine opinions, have been inscribed for us as spiritual precepts, suited both toward ourselves and toward our neighbors; and these in turn return back upon us, just as a ball, on account of its resilience, bounds back to the one who threw it; hence duties are necessary for divine pedagogy, as things enjoined by God and provided for salvation. And since, among necessary things, some pertain only to living here, while others from here lift us up toward living well there, so too, proportionally, of duties some are arranged with a view to living, others with a view to living well. Now as many things as are enjoined with a view to the life of the nations, these have also been made common property among the many; but the things that are fitted to living well, from which that eternal life results, these it is permitted to consider, gathered out in summary form from the scriptures themselves.
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