Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
We who have received through the scriptures that the choice of good and the flight from evil have been given to men as sovereign, self-determined powers granted by the Lord, rest upon faith as an unshakeable criterion, showing a ready spirit, because we have chosen life and have believed God through his voice; and the one who believes the word knows that the matter is true, for the word is truth; but the one who has disbelieved the speaker has disbelieved God. By faith we grasp that the ages were fashioned through God's word, with the result that what appears was not produced from things visible, as the apostle states; by faith Abel brought a finer offering than Cain, through which he was testified to be righteous, God testifying to him upon his gifts; and through it, though he died, he still speaks, and the passage continues down to "or to have a fleeting enjoyment of sin." These men, then, even before the law, faith made righteous and established as heirs of the divine promise.
Why then do I go on setting forth further testimonies of faith, gathered from our own history? For time would fail me in the telling, were I to speak of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, and the prophets, along with those who came after them. There being four things in which truth resides — sense-perception, mind, knowledge, and supposition — by nature mind is first, but for us and in relation to us sense-perception is first; and out of sense-perception and mind the substance of knowledge is composed, while what is common to mind and sense-perception is clarity. But sense-perception is the stepping-stone to knowledge, whereas faith, having journeyed through the objects of sense, leaves behind mere supposition, and presses on toward things that cannot deceive, and abides in the truth. But if someone should say that knowledge is demonstrative, proceeding by reasoning, let him hear that even first principles are undemonstrable; for such things are grasped neither through skill nor through practical judgment, since the one concerns things that admit of being otherwise, and the other is only productive, not also contemplative.
By faith alone, then, is it possible to attain to the first principle of all things. For all knowledge is teachable, and what is teachable proceeds from what is already known beforehand. But the first principle of all things was not known beforehand by the Greeks — neither by Thales, who took water to be the first cause, nor by the other natural philosophers who followed him; for even though Anaxagoras was the first to set mind over things, not even he preserved the notion of an efficient cause, but pictured certain mindless vortices, along with the inactivity and unreason of mind. Wherefore the word also says: "Call no man your teacher upon the earth"; for knowledge is a demonstrative disposition, but faith is a grace that leads up from things undemonstrated to the universal, to the simple, which exists neither together with matter, nor as matter, nor under matter.
The unbelievers, it seems, drag everything down to earth from heaven and the unseen, embracing rocks and oaks with their hands, quite artlessly, as Plato says; for laying hold of all such things, they insist that this alone exists, whatever offers impact and a kind of tangible contact, defining substance and body as one and the same. But those who dispute against them defend themselves very cautiously from above, from somewhere in the unseen, forcing certain intelligible and incorporeal forms to be the true substance. Behold, then, "I make new things," says the word, "which eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man" — with a new eye, a new hearing, a new heart, all that is visible and audible and comprehensible through faith and understanding, as the Lord's disciples speak, listen, and act in a spiritual manner. For genuine currency exists, and counterfeit exists as well, which deceives ordinary people no less, though not the money-changers, who by training know how to separate and distinguish the falsified from the genuine. Thus the money-changer tells the ordinary person only this much about the coin — that it is counterfeit; but how it is so, how — only the one acquainted with the banker's trade, and the one trained for this purpose, learns. Aristotle says that the judgment which follows upon knowledge, as to whether this particular thing is true, is faith. Faith, then, is more authoritative than knowledge, and is its criterion.
Conjecture plays the hypocrite to faith, being a weak supposition, just as the flatterer plays the hypocrite to the friend, and the wolf to the dog. Since we see that the carpenter becomes a craftsman by having learned something, and the helmsman, once trained in the craft, gains the ability to guide the ship — reckoning that mere wishing to become good and noble is not sufficient, but that of necessity one must learn by being persuaded — and to be persuaded by the word, whom we have proclaimed as teacher, is to have believed that very one, in no way resisting him. For how could it be possible to stand opposed to God? Knowledge, then, is founded on faith, and faith is founded on knowledge, coming about by a certain divine sequence and reciprocal sequence. Indeed, even Epicurus, who esteemed pleasure above truth more than anyone, supposes faith to be an anticipation of the mind; and he defines anticipation as an apprehension directed at something evident, and at the evident conception of the thing; and he says that no one is able either to inquire, or to be at a loss, or indeed to hold an opinion, nor even to refute, apart from anticipation.
How could someone, not having an anticipation of what he seeks, learn concerning that which he inquires about? The one who has learned already makes the anticipation into apprehension. And if the one who learns does not learn apart from an anticipation receptive of what is said, then he himself has ears able to hear the truth; and blessed is he who speaks into the ears of those who hear, just as, of course, blessed also is the one who obeys. To hear fully is the same as understanding. If faith, then, is nothing more than an anticipation of the mind regarding what is said, and this has been called obedience, and understanding, and persuasion, then no one will learn without faith, since indeed no one learns without anticipation. That this is true is demonstrated more than anything by what was said by the prophet: "If you do not believe, neither will you understand." This same oracle Heraclitus of Ephesus paraphrased when he said: "Unless he hopes for the unhoped-for, he will not find it out, since it is unsearchable and trackless."
But Plato the philosopher too, in the Laws, says that the one who is to become blessed and happy must from the very beginning be a partaker of truth, so that he may live as long a time as possible being truthful; for such a one is faithful. But the unbeliever is the one who loves a voluntary lie; and the one for whom the lie is involuntary is mindless; and of these, neither is enviable as a living being, for everyone who is faithless and unlearned is friendless. And is it not this that he means, in a somewhat veiled way, by "kingly wisdom" in the Euthydemus? At any rate, in the Statesman he says, word for word: "Thus the understanding possessed by the true king is itself kingly, and whoever has gained it — whether ruling in fact or merely a private citizen — will properly, by the standard of the art itself, be called kingly in every instance." Accordingly, those who have believed in Christ are good, and are called so, as being truly kingly, since they are cared for by the King. For just as the wise are wise by wisdom, and the lawful are lawful by law, so those who belong to Christ the King are kingly — Christians of Christ. Then, going on a little further, he adds clearly: "What is right would be lawful, and law, being by nature the right reason, and not written in letters nor in anything else." And the Eleatic Stranger declares the kingly and statesmanlike man to be a law animate.
Such a one fulfills the law by carrying out the Father's will, and who was openly inscribed upon a certain lofty piece of wood, set forth as a pattern of divine virtue for those able to discern it. The Greeks know of the staves of the ephors at Lacedaemon, inscribed with law upon pieces of wood; but my law, as has already been said, is kingly, and animate, and is the right reason: "Law, the king of all, of mortals and immortals,"
as Pindar the Boeotian sings. For Speusippus, in his first work addressed to Cleophon, seems to write things similar to Plato's, through this: "For if kingship is a serious matter, and the wise man alone is king and ruler, and law, being right reason, is a serious matter" — which indeed it is. In accord with these things the Stoic philosophers teach that kingship, priesthood, prophecy, legislative authority, wealth, true beauty, noble birth, and freedom belong to the wise man alone — though he himself is exceedingly hard to find, as is admitted even by them.
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