Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
At this point the followers of Basilides suppose faith to be something natural, inasmuch as they also assign it a place within the process of election, holding that it discovers its doctrines without demonstration, by an act of intellectual apprehension. The followers of Valentinus, on the other hand, having allotted faith to us simple believers, and knowledge to themselves, wish knowledge to be inherent, by an excess of a differing seed, in those who are by nature saved — a knowledge far removed indeed from faith, by which, they say, the spiritual is distinguished from the merely psychic. The followers of Basilides say further that faith together with election is proper to each order of being according to its own interval, and that, following upon the election that is above the world, there attends a faith belonging to the cosmic order proper to the whole of nature, corresponding both to the hope of each and to the gift of faith.
Faith, then, is no longer the achievement of moral choice, if it is an advantage of nature, nor will the man who has not believed meet with just retribution, being without blame, nor is the believer to be credited, and the whole distinctive character and difference between faith and unbelief would, to those who reason rightly, fall under neither praise nor blame, since it has as its antecedent a natural necessity arising from him who is able to do all things. And if we are worked like puppets by strings, moved like lifeless things by natural forces, then both the voluntary and the involuntary become superfluous, along with the impulse that leads the way to them. And I for my part can no longer conceive of that as a living creature whose very capacity for impulse has been allotted necessity, being moved by a cause from outside. Where then is left any repentance of the man once faithless, through which comes remission of sins? So that neither is baptism any longer reasonable, nor is the sacred seal of any use, nor do the Son and the Father count for anything; rather, it is God, I think, who on their view turns out to be the distributor of natures to men, without possessing the foundation of salvation, namely voluntary faith.
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