Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
"Cursed be the day on which I was born, and let it not be desired," says Jeremiah -- not calling birth itself simply cursed, but venting his distress over the sins of the people and their disobedience. At any rate he goes on: "For why was I born to see toils and pains, and my days have been spent in shame?" Indeed all who proclaim the truth are persecuted and endangered because of the disobedience of those who hear them. "For why did the womb of my mother not become a tomb, that I might not see the trouble of Jacob and the toil of the race of Israel?" says Ezra the prophet. "No one is clean of defilement," says Job, "not even if his life is a single day." Let them tell us where the child that has been born committed fornication, or how the thing that has done nothing has fallen under the curse of Adam. It remains for them, it seems, consistently to say that birth is evil -- not the birth of the body alone, but also that of the soul on whose account the body exists. And when David says, "In sins I was conceived, and in transgressions did my mother conceive me in the womb," he speaks prophetically of Eve as mother; but Eve became mother of the living, and even if she conceived in sin, he himself was not conceived in sin, nor indeed is he himself sin.
And if indeed everyone who turns from sin to faith turns from the sinful habit, as it were a mother, toward life, one of the twelve prophets will bear me witness, saying, "Shall I give my firstborn to pay for my ungodliness, the offspring of my womb as payment for my soul's sin?" He does not disparage the one who said, "Increase and multiply," but calls "ungodliness" the first impulses from birth, by which we do not yet know God. But if someone on this ground calls birth evil, let him on the other ground call it good as well, insofar as it is in birth that we come to know the truth: "Awake to righteousness and sin not, for some are ignorant of God" -- namely, those who sin -- since "our wrestling is not against blood and flesh, but against the spiritual powers," and the world-rulers of darkness are able to put us to the test; for this reason there is forgiveness. For this reason too Paul says, "I buffet my own body and bring it into subjection," because "everyone who contends is temperate in all things" (that is, temperate with a view to all things, not abstaining from all things, but using with self-control those things which he has judged fit), those athletes so that they may receive a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible one, conquering in the contest, and not being crowned without a struggle. Already some prize the widow above the virgin for her continence, on the ground that she has come to think little of the pleasure she has experienced.
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