Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
The many have a disposition like the condition of storms, unsteady and irrational. Unbelief has done many good things, and belief many evil ones. Epicharmus says, "Remember to distrust; these are the joints of the mind." At once, to disbelieve the truth brings death, just as to believe it brings life; and conversely, to believe the falsehood, while disbelieving the truth, drags one down to destruction. The same account holds for self-control and lack of self-control. For to practice self-control is the work of abstaining from wickedness in doing good, while to abstain from injustice is the beginning of salvation. In this sense the Sabbath seems to me, through abstinence from evils, to hint darkly at self-control, and at what it is by which man differs from the beasts. Again, God's angels are wiser than man: "You made him a little lower than the angels," it says — for they do not take this scripture to refer to the Lord (although he too bore flesh), but to the perfect and gnostic man, who is made lower than the angels only in time and in his garment [of flesh]. I do not, then, mean by wisdom something other than knowledge, since life itself does not differ [for all]; for living is common to mortal nature, that is, to man, as much as to one who has been deemed worthy of immortality, though the one differs from the other in the state of contemplation and self-control.
In this sense it seems to me that Pythagoras too says that God alone is wise (since the apostle also, in his letter to the Romans, writes: "unto obedience of faith among all the nations, God who alone is wise was revealed through Jesus Christ"), while he calls himself, on account of his friendship toward God, a philosopher. "God used to converse with Moses," he says, "as a friend with a friend." What is true, then, is clear to God. Truth at once begets truth, and the gnostic loves truth. "Go to the ant, O sluggard," says Solomon, "and become a pupil of the bee." For if each creature has one work proper to its own nature — the ox likewise, and the horse, and the dog — what should we say is the proper work of man? He seems, I think, like the centaur, that Thessalian fabrication, to be composed of the rational and the irrational, of soul and body; but the body works the earth and hastens toward earth, while the soul is stretched out toward God — that soul, at least, which is trained through true philosophy, hastening toward its kindred above, having turned aside from bodily desire, and moreover away from toil and dread. And yet we have shown that both endurance and fear tend toward good. For if "through the law comes the knowledge of sin," as those who run down the law say, and sin already existed in the world before the law came, yet "apart from the law sin is dead" — this we sing back against them in reply. Once you remove sin, which is the source of dread, you have removed dread itself, and far more still the punishment, when that which is naturally disposed to desire is absent; for "law is not laid down for the righteous," scripture says.
Well then does Heraclitus say that men would never have learned what justice even meant, had these things not existed, and Socrates that law would not have come to be for the sake of good men. But the accusers did not even understand this, that the apostle says that he who loves his neighbor works no evil; for "you shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal," and whatever other commandment there is, is summed up in this one word: "you shall love your neighbor as yourself." In this same way it says, "you shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart," and "you shall love your neighbor as yourself." If then he who loves his neighbor works no evil, and every commandment is summed up in this, in loving one's neighbor, then the commandments that hang fear over us produce love, not hatred.
Fear, then, of which the law is the begetter, is not a [mere] passion. So the law is holy and truly spiritual, according to the apostle. It is necessary, it seems, for those who have inquired carefully into the nature of the body and the substance of the soul to grasp the end proper to each, and not to consider death an evil; for "when you were servants of sin," says the apostle, "you were free in regard to righteousness. What harvest did you reap then from deeds that now bring you shame? Their outcome is death. But now, released from sin and made servants to God, your harvest leads to holiness, and its outcome is life without end. Sin's payment is death, whereas what God freely grants is life without end, in Christ Jesus our Lord."
It has, then, perhaps been shown that death is the soul's fellowship with the body while it is given to sinning, and that life is separation from sin. Many are the palisades and trenches of desire that lie in our path, and the ditches of rage and wrath, over which one must leap, and one must escape every overturning of these plots, if one is not to see the knowledge of God any longer only "through a mirror": for "far-seeing Zeus takes away half a man's virtue, whenever the day of slavery seizes him." And scripture knows as slaves those who are under sin and sold to their sins, the pleasure-lovers and body-lovers, and it knows as beasts rather than men those who have been made like cattle — lust-maddened horses neighing after their neighbors' wives; the wanton donkey is the licentious man, the savage wolf the greedy man, and the serpent the deceiver. The soul's parting from the body, then, practiced by the philosopher throughout his whole life, produces in the gnostic a readiness to be able easily to bear the death that comes by nature, since it is merely the loosening of the bonds that tie soul and body together; hence "to me the world stands crucified, and I to the world," he says, and "I now live, while still in the flesh, as one whose citizenship is in heaven."
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