Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Endurance too presses forward toward likeness to God, through patience bearing the fruit of freedom from passion, if the stories told of the companions of Ananias are still ringing in one's ears — among whom was Daniel the prophet, filled with divine faith. Daniel lived in Babylon, just as Lot lived in Sodom and Abraham, who a little later became the friend of God, lived in the land of the Chaldeans. So the Babylonian king had Daniel thrown into a den crowded with savage beasts, yet the Lord who is faithful over all raised him out unhurt. This is the endurance the Gnostic will acquire, insofar as he is a Gnostic: tested, he will bless God as the noble Job did; like Jonah he will pray while being swallowed by the sea-monster,
and his trust will bring him back to preach repentance among the Ninevites. And if he is confined among lions, he will subdue the creatures; if cast into flame, he will feel only dew, never scorching. He will bear witness by night, he will bear witness by day; in word, in life, in manner he will bear witness. Dwelling with the Lord, a familiar companion and table-fellow according to the spirit, he will remain pure in flesh, pure in heart, having sanctified the Word — "the world," he says, "has been crucified to him," and he himself has been crucified to the world. This man, carrying about the cross of the Savior, follows the Lord "as a footprint follows the god," having become holy of holies.
Mindful therefore of every virtue, the divine law trains the human being especially toward self-control, laying this down as the foundation of the virtues; and indeed it first schools us toward the acquisition of self-control by way of the use of animals, forbidding us to partake of whatever creatures are naturally rich in fat, such as the swine, which happens to be the fattest-fleshed kind — for such a diet supplies fuel to those given to luxury. It is said, at any rate, that a certain philosopher, etymologizing the word "hys" (swine), said it was really "thys," as being fit only for sacrifice and slaughter — since this animal has been given a soul for no other purpose than that its flesh might swell with fat. In like manner the law forbade partaking of fish, curbing our appetite for those lacking both fin and scale; for these outdo the other fish in oiliness and richness of flesh.
From this same source, I think, the founder of the mysteries also forbade the touching not only of certain animals but even withdrew from use certain parts of the sacrificial victims, for reasons known to the initiates.
If then the belly and what lies below the belly must be mastered, it is clear that we have received from above, through the law, from the Lord, the command to cut off desire. This would be accomplished perfectly if, without pretense, we condemned the kindling-material of desire, I mean pleasure. They say that the very notion of it is a smooth and gentle movement accompanied by a certain sensation. Enslaved to this, they say, Menelaus after the fall of Troy rushed to kill Helen as the cause of so many evils, yet he was unable to do the deed, overcome by her beauty, through which he arrived at the memory of pleasure.
Hence the tragic poets, mocking him reproachfully, cried out: "But you, when you saw her breast, threw down your sword and received her kiss, fawning on the treacherous bitch." And again: "Are swords then struck deaf before beauty?" I myself approve of Antisthenes, who said of Aphrodite, "I would shoot her down with arrows, if I could catch her," because she has corrupted many of our fair and good women. And he says love is a vice of nature, and that the wretched, being overcome by it, call the disease a god. For it is shown by this that the more ignorant are overcome through ignorance of pleasure, which one ought not to admit even if it is called a god — that is, even if it happens to be given by the god for the purpose of child-bearing. And Xenophon, calling pleasure outright a vice, says: "O wretched one, what good do you know, or what fine thing do you contemplate — you who do not even wait for the desire for pleasant things, but eat before you are hungry, and drink before you are thirsty, and to eat pleasantly you contrive cooks, and to drink pleasantly you procure costly wines, and in summer you run about seeking snow; and to sleep pleasantly, you provide not only soft beds but even stands beneath the beds."
Hence, as Ariston used to say concerning the whole "tetrachord" — pleasure, pain, fear, desire — much training and much combat is needed; for these, these are what enter into the very bowels and stir up the human heart. For even in those who suppose their tempers to be dignified, pleasure makes them, in Plato's words, waxen — because each pleasure and pain nails the soul to the body when it does not mark itself off and fence itself apart from the passions. "Whoever loses his own soul," says the Lord, "shall save it" — either by recklessly giving it up for the Savior's sake, as he himself did on our behalf, or by releasing it from partnership with our accustomed way of life. For if you are willing to release, separate, and fence off (for this is what the cross signifies) the soul from the delight and pleasure found in this present life, you will find it kept safe and at rest in the hope that is awaited.
This would be the practice of death, if we were willing to be content with desires measured only by nature, transgressing nothing of what is natural toward excess or against nature — the point at which sin is bred. We must therefore clothe ourselves in the complete panoply of God, so that we may hold our ground against the devil's schemes, since "our warfare's weapons are not of the flesh but mighty before God, tearing down fortified places, overturning arguments and every proud thing raised up in opposition to the knowledge of God, and taking every thought captive into obedience to Christ," as the apostle of God declares. There is need of a man who will use, without wonder and without confusion, the things from which the passions arise — such as riches and want, honor and shame, being well or ill, living or dying, labor and delight. For so that we might treat neutral matters neutrally, a great store of discernment is required, being as we are already damaged beforehand by much weakness and by the prior perversion of a bad upbringing and nurture enjoyed beforehand along with ignorance.
Now the simple account of our philosophy holds that all the passions are impressions fixed in the soul when it is soft and yielding — impressions, as it were, sealed in by spiritual powers, against which our wrestling-match is waged. For it is the work, I think, of these malicious powers to attempt at every turn to bring some effect of their own condition to bear, so as to overpower and reclaim as their possession those who have forsworn them. And it follows naturally that some fall in the struggle, while those who conduct the contest in a more athletic way — engaging in the all-in combat and pressing on even to the crown — leave the aforesaid powers, at that point, exhausted amid much gore, marveling at the victors.
Of things that move, some move by impulse and imagination, as animals do, others by displacement, as inanimate things do. And they say that even among inanimate things, plants move progressively toward growth — if one will grant that plants are indeed inanimate.
Stones, then, belong to the category of mere condition; plants, to that of nature; while the irrational animals share both in impulse and imagination and in the two previously mentioned categories as well. But the reasoning power, belonging as it does to the soul of a human, should not be stirred in the manner of the unreasoning animals, but rather to discriminate the impressions and not be carried away along with them.
These very powers, the ones already discussed, dangle before souls too readily carried off alluring pictures of beauty, fame, adultery, and delight, and the like — just as those who drive along cattle wave green branches before them — and then, having outwitted those unable to distinguish true pleasure from false, and the perishable and insolent from the holy beauty, they lead them off, having enslaved them. And each deception, continually pressing upon the soul, stamps its image within it. And the soul, without noticing, goes about carrying the imprint of the passion, the cause arising both from the bait and from our own assent.
The followers of Basilides are accustomed to call the passions "appendages," maintaining that they are, at bottom, particular spirits fastened onto the reasoning soul owing to some primal disturbance and disorder, and that other bastard and alien-natured spirits again grow upon these — of wolf, of ape, of lion, of goat — whose peculiar properties, appearing about the soul, they say assimilate the desires of the soul to those of the animals in a similar fashion; for they imitate the deeds of those whose properties they bear, and they are made akin not only to the impulses and imaginations of irrational animals, but even emulate the movements and beauties of plants, because they also carry attached to them the properties of plants,
and further even the properties of mere condition, such as the hardness of adamant.
But against this doctrine we will argue later, when we take up the discussion concerning the soul. For now this alone must be noted: that the man according to Basilides preserves the image of a kind of wooden horse, as in the poet's myth, having tucked within a single body a whole army of so many differing spirits. Indeed Isidore himself, the son of Basilides, in his work On the Attached Soul, sensing the difficulty of the doctrine, writes, as it were accusing himself, word for word as follows: "For if you persuade someone that the soul is not a single unit, but that through the force of the appendages the passions of the baser kind occur, wicked men will possess a ready-made excuse to claim, 'I was forced, I was swept off, I did it against my own will, I acted contrary to my wish' — they themselves having led the way into desire for evil things and not having fought against the forces of the appendages."
But it is necessary, having become superior by the rational faculty, to show ourselves masters of the lesser creation within us. For this man too supposes, like the Pythagoreans, that there are two souls within us — a matter we shall examine later. But Valentinus also, writing to certain people in these very words, says concerning the appendages: "There is One who is good, whose free utterance is the manifestation through the Son, and through him alone can the heart become pure, every evil spirit being driven out of the heart. For the numerous spirits that inhabit it prevent its purity, and each one carries out its own business, offending it repeatedly with unseemly cravings. And it seems to me that the heart suffers something similar to an inn: for that too is pierced and dug into, and often filled with dung, as men lodge in it dissolutely and take no thought for the place, as though it belonged to another. In just this way the heart too, as long as it goes without provident care, stays defiled, serving as home to a crowd of demons; but once the sole good Father comes to it, it is made holy and gleams with radiance, and thus the one who has such a heart is blessed, because he shall see God."
What, then, accounts for such a soul going uncared-for from its origin — let them tell us. For either it is not worthy (and how then does forethought come to it, as it were out of repentance?); or else it is by nature saved, as he himself wishes, and it must be that this soul, being from the beginning cared for on account of kinship, admits no infiltration by unclean spirits — unless it should be overpowered and proved weak. For if he grants that the soul, upon repenting, chooses the better things, he will unwillingly be saying just what our own truth teaches as doctrine: that salvation comes from a change of obedient disposition, and not from nature. For just as exhalations, both from the earth and from marshes, condense into mists and cloudy masses, so the risings of fleshly desires bring on a sickly condition in the soul, scattering the phantom-images of pleasure before it,
and so they darken the intellectual light, as the soul draws to itself the risings that come from desire, and thickens the masses of the passions through the continuance of pleasures. Now a lump of gold is not lifted straight from the earth, but is refined and purified by smelting, and only then, having become pure, is called gold — earth that has been cleansed. "Ask, and it shall be given you" is said to those who are able to choose for themselves the noblest things. And as for how we say that we sow the workings of the devil's cast net and the unclean spirits into the soul of the sinner, I need not add many more words, calling as my witness Barnabas the apostolic man — numbered among the Seventy and a co-laborer with Paul — whose own words run roughly thus: "Prior to our believing in God, the abode of our heart was frail and perishable, a temple truly fashioned by hand; for it teemed with idol-worship and stood as a residence of demons, since it practiced everything hostile to God."
He says, then, that sinners perform the works that correspond to the demons, yet he never claims that the spirits themselves take up residence in the unbeliever's soul. For this reason he goes on to add: "Take heed, that the temple of the Lord may be gloriously built. How? Learn: having received the remission of sins and and having placed hope in the name, we are made new, formed afresh from the start. For it is not that our demons are driven away, but rather, he says, our sins are forgiven — the very sins which, like those demons, we used to commit before believing." Fittingly, then, he set in contrast what follows: "Therefore in our dwelling-place God truly dwells within us." How? "His word of faith, his call of promise, the wisdom of his ordinances, the commandments of his teaching." I know of a certain heresy I once encountered, whose leader used to claim that by the use of pleasure one fights pleasure with pleasure — this "noble Gnostic" (for he claimed to be a Gnostic too) deserting to pleasure through a pretended combat, given that he claimed there was nothing remarkable in refraining from a delight one had never tasted, but rather, having entered into it, not to be mastered by it — and so, he said, one trains oneself against it by means of it.
But the wretched man, unawares, was outwitting himself with his own pleasure-loving art. It was clearly to this same opinion that Aristippus of Cyrene inclined, he who boasted of being a sophist of the truth. At any rate, reproached for his constant association with the Corinthian courtesan, he replied, "Lais is mine to have, yet she holds no claim over me." Such too are those who claim to follow Nicolaus, adducing some saying of the man, wrested out of its true sense, to the effect that one must abuse the flesh. But the noble man meant that one ought to curb pleasures and desires, and by this discipline wither away the impulses and assaults of the flesh. These others, however, poured out into pleasure like goats, as it were insulting the body, indulge in soft living, not knowing that the body by nature wastes away being a fluid thing, while their soul lies buried in the mire of vice — pursuing a doctrine of pleasure itself, not that of an apostolic man. For how do these differ from Sardanapalus, whose life the epitaph reveals: "These things I have, as many as I ate and as I wantoned in and the delights of love I enjoyed; but those many splendid possessions have been left behind. For I too am ashes, who once ruled great Nineveh." For in general the passion of pleasure is not a necessity, but an accompaniment of certain natural needs — hunger, thirst, cold, marriage.
If, at any rate, it were possible to drink apart from pleasure, or to take food, or to beget children, no other use for pleasure would have been shown to exist. For pleasure is neither an activity nor a disposition, nor indeed any part belonging to us, but it came into life for the sake of service, just as they say salt was given for the seasoning of food. But pleasure, having run out of control and taken mastery of the household, begets desire first of all — an irrational craving and reaching after whatever gratifies it — the very thing that persuaded Epicurus to set down pleasure as the philosopher's end; at any rate he deifies the settled condition of the flesh and the confident hope concerning it. For what else is luxury but a pleasure-loving greed and a superfluous excess given over to soft living? Diogenes writes emphatically in a certain tragedy: those who, stuffed with the pleasures of an unmanly and degraded luxury, are unwilling to labor even a little at heart. And the words that follow these, shameful indeed to speak, are fittingly matched to lovers of pleasure.
For this reason the divine law seems to me necessarily to hold fear suspended over us, so that through caution and attentiveness the philosopher may both acquire and preserve freedom from anxiety, remaining unstumbling and sinless in every respect. Freedom and peace, after all, are won by no other route than an unceasing, unrelenting battle waged against our passions. For these antagonists are massive and Olympic-class, sharper, so to speak, than wasps — pleasure most of all, which plots against us and bites not only by day but also by night, in our very dreams, seductively, with sorcery. How then can the Greeks still be justified in disparaging the Law, seeing that they themselves instruct that pleasure must be mastered through fear? Socrates, at any rate, bids us guard against whatever persuades us to eat without hunger or to drink without thirst, and against the glances and kisses of the beautiful, which by nature inject a poison harsher than that of scorpions and spiders.
Antisthenes too chooses madness rather than pleasure, and Crates the Theban says of women: she who exults in mastery of soul and character, enslaved neither by golden things nor by love that melts one with longing, nor by whatever else keeps company with wanton insolence. And he adds the sum of it: unenslaved and unfulled by servile pleasure, they love an immortal kingdom and freedom. This same man writes elsewhere, plainly, that hunger is the plaster for the uncontrollable impulse toward the pleasures of Aphrodite, and if not hunger, then the noose. As for Zeno the Stoic, even the comic poets, though mocking him, bear witness to his teaching in something like these words: this man philosophizes a strange new philosophy — he teaches hunger and takes on pupils; one loaf, a dried fig for relish, and water to drink after.
All these men, then, plainly are not ashamed to confess the benefit that comes from caution; but true wisdom, which is not without reason, is not persuaded by bare words and oracular sayings, but, practicing with unwounded defenses and effectual mysteries — the divine commandments — through joint training and joint discipline, receives a divine power in the part of it that is inspired by the Word. Indeed, they already depict even the poetic Zeus's aegis as terrible, around which on every side Fear is wreathed as a crown, and in it Strife, and in it Might, and in it chilling Pursuit; and in it the Gorgon head of the dread monster, dreadful and terrifying, a portent of aegis-bearing Zeus.
To those able to discern rightly what brings salvation, I do not know whether anything will appear more dear than the majesty of the Law and its daughter, caution. But when it is said to sing in too high a pitch — as the Lord too says of certain people, lest some of those who are zealous for him should sing off the string and out of tune — I understand it thus: not that it is really too high, but that to those unwilling to take up the divine yoke, it seems too high; for to the untuned and the weak, moderation itself seems excessive, and to the unjust, what is fitting seems the strictest, over-rigorous justice. For all those whom pardon enters because they are on friendly terms with sins take truth for harshness and strictness for cruelty, and count as merciless the one who does not sin along with them nor gets dragged down with them.
Well does tragedy say of Hades: but to what sort of spirit will you come, like Love himself — one who knew neither fairness nor favor, but loved only strict justice, unadorned. For even if you cannot yet accomplish what the Law leaves uncommanded, still, by observing how the finest examples for us are set out in it, we can nourish and increase our love of freedom; and in this way we would be helped, striving according to our ability more eagerly — in part provoked to emulation, in part imitating, in part even put to shame. For the just men of old, who lived according to the law, did not spring from a legendary oak or from a rock. By their genuine will to be true philosophers, offering themselves entirely, they dedicated themselves to God, and it was reckoned to them as faith.
Most finely did Zeno say, concerning the Indians, that he would rather see one Indian being roasted alive than learn all the demonstrations about enduring pain. But for us there are unstinting springs of witnesses, beheld with our own eyes every day — men being roasted, impaled, beheaded. All these the fear that comes from the Law, leading them by the hand as tutor toward Christ, trained to practice caution and to display it even through blood. God stood in the assembly of gods; in the midst he will judge the gods. Who are these? Those stronger than pleasure, those superior to the passions, those who understand each of the things they do, the gnostics, those greater than the world. And again, I said, you are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High — of whom does the Lord speak? Of those who renounce, as far as possible, everything human. And the apostle says: for you exist in the flesh no longer, but rather in the spirit. And again he says: though we are in the flesh, we do not wage war according to the flesh; for flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does corruption inherit incorruption; and yet, behold, you die as men — this the spirit has said, refuting us.
We must, then, train ourselves in caution against the things that fall subject to the passions, banishing, in the manner of true philosophers, foods that stir lust, and the slack self-indulgence beside the bed, and luxury, and the passions that lead to luxury — a heavy trial for others, but no longer for us; for self-control is the greatest gift of God. For he himself has said, I will not let you go, nor will I ever abandon you, judging us worthy on account of our genuine choice. Thus then, as we try to approach with caution, the Lord's kindly yoke will receive us, one charioteer driving each of us from faith to faith, by progress, toward salvation, so that each may gain the fruit of happiness that is fitting. And training, according to the Coan Hippocrates, belongs not only to the body but also to the health of the soul: tireless endurance of labors, and no surfeit of food.
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