Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
As for righteousness, then, and the harmony of the Savior's teaching, being dignified and stable, some have stretched it too far, as we have shown, taking self-control blasphemously with utter godlessness, when it was possible to choose eunuchism according to the healthy rule with piety, giving thanks for the grace bestowed but neither hating creation nor despising those who have married; for the world is created, and eunuchism too is created, and both are things for which those appointed to them should give thanks, if they understand also the purpose for which they were appointed. But others, breaking loose, have run into wanton excess, becoming in truth 'horses mad after females' and neighing after their neighbors' wives, themselves pouring out uncontrollably and persuading their neighbors to love pleasure, wretchedly heeding those scriptures which say, 'cast in your lot among us, let us all get one common purse, let there be one bag for us.'
Because of such men the same prophet, counseling us, says: 'do not walk in the way with them, turn your foot aside from their paths; for it is not without cause that nets are spread for birds; for they, sharing in bloodshed, store up evils for themselves' — that is, laying claim to impurity and teaching their neighbors the same things, 'warriors, strikers with their tails,' according to the prophet, which the Greeks call 'kerkoi.' Those the prophecy hints at would be the licentious, the incontinent, warriors 'with their tails,' children of darkness and wrath, murderers, both self-slayers and slayers of their neighbors. 'Purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump,' the apostle cries to us. And again, indignant at certain such persons, he directs that we not mix with them: 'if any one called a brother is a fornicator or a covetous man or an idolater or a reviler or a drunkard or a robber, with such a one do not even eat.' 'For I, through the law, died to the law,' he says, 'that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; yet I no longer live, as I once lived according to my desires, but Christ lives in me,' through obedience to the commandments, purely and blessedly; 'so that then I lived in the flesh, fleshly, but what I now live in the flesh, I live in the faith of the Son of God.'
'Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and enter not into a city of the Samaritans,' the Lord says, turning us away from the opposite way of life, since 'the destruction of lawless men is evil.' 'And these are the ways of all who work lawlessness.' 'Woe to that man,' says the Lord; 'it were good for him if he had not been born, or that he should cause one of my elect to stumble; it were better for him to have a millstone hung about him and be sunk in the sea, than that he should pervert one of my elect'; 'for because of them the name of God is blasphemed.' Hence the apostle nobly writes, 'I wrote to you,' he says, in the epistle, 'not to mix with fornicators' — down to 'the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.' And to show that he does not call marriage fornication, he adds: 'or do you not know that he who joins himself to a harlot is one body with her?' Or will anyone call a virgin a harlot before she marries? 'And do not deprive one another,' he says, 'unless it be by agreement for a season,' by the word 'deprive' pointing to the debt of marriage, that is, the begetting of children, which he had made plain earlier when he said, 'let the husband render to the wife her due, and likewise also the wife to the husband,'
after which creation, according to keeping the household and faith in Christ, a helper — and still more plainly he says: 'to the married I give charge — not I, but the Lord — that a wife not be separated from her husband (but if she is separated, let her remain unmarried, or be reconciled to her husband), and that a husband not put away his wife. But to the rest I say — I, not the Lord — if any brother...' down to 'but now they are holy.' What then do those who run down the law say to this, and who hold that marriage was permitted only under the law, not also under the new covenant? What have they to say against these enactments, they who abominate procreation and generation, seeing that he even lays down as law that the bishop who presides well over his own household should preside over the church, and that the marriage of one wife constitutes a household fit for the Lord?
'All things, then, are pure to the pure,' he says, 'but to the defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure, but both their mind and their conscience are defiled.' Concerning pleasure contrary to the rule, 'do not be deceived,' he says: 'neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the soft, nor abusers of themselves with men, nor covetous, nor thieves, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners shall inherit the kingdom of God.' 'And such were some of us' — we who have been washed from these things; but others, washing themselves into this very licentiousness, baptize themselves out of self-control into fornication, teaching as doctrine that one should indulge pleasures and passions, teaching men to become incontinent instead of self-controlled, and resting their hope on the shameless acts of their private parts, preparing their disciples to be disowned, not enrolled, in the kingdom of God, having chosen, under the name of a falsely-called gnosis, the road to the outer darkness. 'Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is dignified, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is well-spoken of, if there is any virtue and if any praise, think on these things; what you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, these things practice; and the God of peace shall be with you.'
And Peter says similar things in his epistle: 'so that your faith and hope should be in God, having purified your souls in obedience to the truth,' as children of obedience, 'not conforming yourselves to the desires you formerly had in your ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves also in all your conduct, because it is written: "you shall be holy, for I am holy."'
But indeed the necessary polemic against the falsely-named pretenders to gnosis has led us away beyond what was fitting, and has stretched our discourse out to great length. Hence this third Stromateus of ours, among the notebooks of the true philosophy's gnostics, has its close here.
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