Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Concerning faith, then, we have set forth sufficient testimonies from the writings current among the Greeks; but so that we may not stray on too long, aspiring to gather up a very great deal also about hope and about love, it suffices to say only this much: that Socrates in the Crito, holding that living well and dying well come before mere living, supposes that he has a certain hope of another life after death. And indeed also in the Phaedrus, saying that the soul, having come to be by itself alone, is alone able to partake of true wisdom and of a power greater than the human, whenever the love from this place here has winged it up toward heaven, he says that, arriving through philosophic love at the goal of hope, it takes the beginning of another, everlasting life.
And in the Symposium he says that in all there is mingled a natural love for the begetting of one's like, and that for men it is only the begetting of men, but for the good man it is the begetting of what is nearly akin to himself. And this the good man simply cannot accomplish unless he holds the virtues in full measure, and by their power he will train the youths who approach him — and, as is stated in the Theaetetus, he will bring them forth and carry them to fulfillment as men; for some, he says, are pregnant according to the body, others according to the soul, since indeed among the barbarian philosophers too the catechizing and enlightening of a person is called begetting anew, and "I have begotten you in Christ Jesus," as the noble apostle says somewhere. And Empedocles among his first principles reckons in also Friendship, conceiving a certain unifying love — "which do thou behold with the mind, and sit not dazed with the eyes." But Parmenides too, in his own poem, speaking in riddles about Hope, says such things as this: "Yet look upon things absent as firmly present to the mind; for thou shalt not cut off the existent from holding fast to the existent, neither scattering itself everywhere entirely throughout the world-order, nor drawing together."
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