Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Everything, then, that falls under a name is begotten, whether men wish it or not. Whether it is the Father himself who draws to himself everyone who has lived purely and has advanced to a conception of the blessed and incorruptible nature, or whether it is the free will within us that, having arrived at knowledge of the good, leaps and bounds beyond the marked lines, as the trainers in the gymnasium say — yet not without that special grace does the soul grow wings and rise up and is lifted above the things that lie over it, laying aside every weight and rendering itself to its kindred nature. Plato too, in the Meno, holds that virtue is a gift of god, as these words make plain: "From this reasoning, then, Meno, virtue appears to us to come to those to whom it comes by divine allotment." Does it not seem to you that he has darkly hinted that the gnostic disposition, which does not come to all, is a divine allotment? He adds more clearly still: "But if in this whole discussion we have inquired well, virtue would be neither by nature nor teachable, but comes by divine allotment, not without understanding, to those to whom it comes." God-given, then, is wisdom, being a power of the Father; it summons forth our free will, welcomes faith, and repays the earnestness of our choosing with the utmost fellowship.
And indeed I shall set before you Plato himself, already thinking it right to believe outright in the children of god. For having made his argument about the visible and begotten gods in the Timaeus, concerning the other daimones he says that to speak of and know their origin is beyond us, but that we must trust those who spoke of it before, being, as they said, offspring of the gods, and who surely knew their own ancestors well. It is impossible, then, to disbelieve the children of gods, even though they speak without probable and necessary demonstrations. I do not think our savior and those anointed unto prophecy could be more clearly attested by Greeks than this — the former proclaimed sons of god, the latter, the lord, being a true son, are true witnesses concerning divine things; wherefore he added that one must trust them as being inspired by god. And even if someone should say more tragically that he does not believe — "for it was not Zeus who proclaimed these things to me" — let him know that it is god himself who, through the son, proclaimed the scriptures. Trustworthy is he who declares his own household's affairs, since the lord says no one has known the father except the son and whomever the son may reveal him to.
This one, then, must be believed, even according to Plato, even if he is proclaimed and spoken of without probable and necessary demonstrations, both through the old covenant and through the new. For if you do not believe, says the lord, you will die in your sins; and conversely, he who believes has eternal life. Blessed, then, are all who have put their trust in him. Trust is something more than faith; for when someone knows that the son is god, our teacher, he has come to trust that his teaching is true. And as learning, according to Empedocles, increases the mind, so trust toward the lord increases faith. We say, at any rate, that it belongs to the same men to disparage philosophy, to run down faith, to praise injustice, and to call blessed the life lived according to desire.
Now faith, even if it is a voluntary assent of the soul, is nonetheless a worker of good things and the foundation of righteous action. And even if Aristotle draws his technical distinctions, teaching that "making" applies also to irrational animals and to inanimate things, while "doing" belongs to men alone, let him set straight those who call god the maker of the universe. He says that whatever can be done is either good or necessary. To act wrongly, therefore, cannot be good, since nobody commits wrong except for some further purpose, and nothing among necessary things is done willingly; wrongdoing, then, is willed, and hence falls outside necessity. Among base men, the more accomplished ones differ chiefly in their choices and in their cultivated desires. For every corruption of the soul comes with lack of self-control, and one who acts under passion acts through lack of self-control and corruption. So it happens that at every turn I marvel at that divine saying: "Amen, amen, I tell you, whoever does not go in by the gate to the fold where the sheep are kept, but climbs over some other way, is a thief and a plunderer; whereas whoever goes in by the gate tends the sheep as their shepherd, and to him the gatekeeper opens up." Then, explaining further, the lord says: "I am the gate for the sheep."
It is necessary, then, that those who have learned the truth through Christ be saved, even if they happen to have philosophized in Greek philosophy; for now it has been shown plainly what was not made known to other generations of the sons of men, but is now revealed. For the impression of the one almighty god was always natural among all who thought rightly, and most people, even those who had not entirely lost their sense of shame before the truth, laid hold of the everlasting beneficence that comes according to divine providence. Universally, then, Xenocrates of Chalcedon does not despair of the notion of the divine even in irrational animals, and Democritus, even if he does not wish it, will admit it by the logical consequence of his own doctrines; for he has made the same images that impinge upon men also impinge upon irrational animals, coming from the divine substance. Far indeed is it from man to be without a share of the notion of the divine, seeing that he is recorded as having received a share of the breath of life at his creation, having partaken of a purer substance than the other animals.
Hence the followers of Pythagoras say that mind comes to men by divine allotment, just as Plato and Aristotle also agree. But we say that the holy spirit is further breathed into the one who has come to believe, while Plato's followers place mind within the soul as an emanation of a divine share, and place the soul within the flesh; for this is plainly declared through the prophet Joel, counted among the twelve: "And afterward it will come to pass that I will pour out my spirit on every living being, and your male and female children will speak as prophets." But the spirit is not a part of god in each of us. How this distribution works, and what the holy spirit actually is, will be shown by us in the treatises On Prophecy and On the Soul. But it is good, according to Heraclitus, to hide the depths of knowledge through distrust, "for through distrust it escapes being known."
XIV. What follows must next be rendered, and the Greek theft from barbarian philosophy must now be set forth more clearly.
For the Stoics say that god is a body, and spirit in substance, just as indeed the soul is too. All these things you will find outright in the scriptures. But do not now suppose that I mean their allegories in the way that gnostic truth hands them down, as if, like clever wrestlers, they show one thing and mean another. Rather, they say that god pervades all substance, while we call him maker alone, and maker by his word. What led them astray was the saying in the book of Wisdom: "it pervades and passes through all things because of its purity" — since they did not understand that this is said of the wisdom first created by god. Yes, they say, but the philosophers posit matter among their first principles — the Stoics, and Plato, and Pythagoras, and Aristotle the Peripatetic too — but not as a single first principle. Let them know, then, that what they call matter, according to their own account, has neither quality nor shape, and Plato even ventures, more boldly, to say it does not exist at all. And is it not perhaps in the most mystical way, knowing that there is truly one single first principle, that he says in the Timaeus, in these very words: "but as for our present discourse, let it stand thus: as to the beginning of all things, whether one beginning or several, or however it may seem regarding these matters, it is not now to be stated, for no other reason than that it is difficult, in the present manner of exposition, to make our views clear"?
Moreover, that prophetic saying, "and the earth was invisible and unformed," furnished them their starting points for the notion of material substance.
Indeed, for Epicurus the intrusion of chance came about because he did not follow the meaning of the saying, "vanity of vanities, all things are vanity" — hence his emptiness of emptinesses. As for Aristotle, he was led to limit providence's reach to no lower than the lunar sphere, taking his cue from this psalm: "Lord, your mercy is in heaven, and your truth reaches to the clouds." For the unveiling of prophecy's mysteries had not yet taken place before the lord's arrival.
As for the punishments after death and the retribution by fire, it was from barbarian philosophy that the whole poetic muse, and Greek philosophy too, stole them. Plato, at any rate, in the final book of the Republic, says in these very words: "There, fierce men, fiery to look upon, stood by, and understanding the sound, took some aside privately and led them away, and having bound Ardiaeus and the others hand and foot and head, and thrown them down and flayed them, dragged them along outside the road over thorn bushes, carding them." For by the fiery men he means to signify angels, who take the unjust and punish them: "He who makes," it says, "his angels spirits, and his ministers a flaming fire."
It follows from these things that the soul is immortal. For that which is punished or disciplined, being in sensation, lives, even if it is said to suffer. What then? Does Plato not know of both streams of fire and the earth's depths, giving poetic names to what the barbarians call Gehenna and Tartarus, and introducing Cocytus, Acheron, and Pyriphlegethon, along with certain other such places of punishment meant to discipline toward self-mastery? And of the small and least, according to scripture, does he not hesitate to write of the angels who see god, and further, showing the oversight that comes to us through the angels set over us: "since all the souls had chosen their lives, as they had drawn lots, they came forward in order to Lachesis, who sent along with each the daimon he had chosen, as guardian of his life and fulfiller of what had been chosen." Perhaps even to Socrates his daimonion hinted at something of this sort.
Indeed, the philosophers, having received from Moses that the world is generated, made a doctrine of it. And Plato himself states plainly: "Was it without any beginning of coming-into-being, or has it come to be, taking its start from some beginning point? It has come to be; for since it is visible, it can be touched, and since it can be touched, it likewise possesses body." And again, when he remarks that discovering the one who made and fathered this universe is itself a difficult undertaking, he has shown not merely that the world is generated, but also signifies that it has arisen from him in the manner of offspring, and that this maker is termed its father, as though the world had sprung from him alone and had been brought into being out of nothing that existed before. The Stoics too hold the world to be generated.
As for the one whom barbarian philosophy loudly proclaims, the devil, the ruler of the daimones, Plato says in the tenth book of the Laws that he is an evil-working soul, in these very words: "A soul administering and dwelling in all things that are everywhere in motion — must we not say it is necessary that it administer heaven too?" "Of course." "One soul, or more?" "More — I will answer on your behalf. Let us posit no fewer than two, at any rate: the beneficent one, and the one able to work the contrary effects."
Likewise in the Phaedrus he writes this: "There are indeed other evils too, but some daimon has mixed pleasure with most of them for the immediate moment." And also, in Laws book ten, he plainly displays that apostolic saying: "our struggle is not against blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the spiritual forces of the things in the heavens," writing something like this: "For since we have granted among ourselves that heaven is full of many good things, and also of their opposites, and more of the latter than the former, we say that this is an undying battle, and one requiring wondrous vigilance."
Again, barbarian philosophy knows a twofold cosmos, the intelligible and the sensible, the one archetype, the other an image of what is called the model; and it assigns the one to the monad, as being intelligible, and the sensible to the hexad; for among the Pythagoreans marriage, as being a fruitful number, is called the hexad. And in the monad he establishes an invisible heaven and an unseen earth and intelligible light; for it says, "In the beginning god made heaven and earth; and the earth was invisible."
Then it continues: "And god spoke: let light come to be; and light came to be." But in fashioning the perceptible cosmos he constructs a firm sky — firmness belonging to the perceptible order — along with a visible earth and light that can be seen. Does it not strike you that Plato, following this, keeps the forms of living things back within the intelligible cosmos, while he molds their perceptible shapes to match those intelligible patterns? Fittingly, then, Moses states that the body was molded out of earth, which Plato names the earthly tent, whereas the rational soul was breathed into the countenance from above by god. For that, they say, is where the governing faculty resides, taking the soul's entry through the senses to represent the arrival of the first-formed man, and this is precisely why humanity came into being after image and likeness. For god's image is the divine, kingly word — the man beyond suffering; and the image of that image is the human intellect. And should you wish to name this likeness by another term, you would discover in Moses a sequence termed divine; for he states: "follow the lord your god and observe his commandments." And I take it that all who practice virtue are god's followers and servants.
Hence the Stoics have declared the end of philosophy to be living in accordance with nature, while Plato calls it likeness to god (as we set forth in the second Stromateus); and Zeno the Stoic, borrowing this from Plato, though it too traces back to barbarian philosophy, holds that all good men share mutual friendship. For, in the Phaedrus, Socrates maintains that a bad man cannot be fated to befriend a bad man, nor can a good man fail to befriend a good man — a point he argued sufficiently as well in the Lysis, namely that friendship can never endure amid injustice and wickedness. And the Athenian stranger likewise says that an action that is dear and follows god has one ancient principle, namely, that like is dear to like when it is moderate, but immoderate things are dear neither to the immoderate nor to the measured.
"For God would be the measure of all things for us." Then, going down a little further, he adds again: "For each virtuous man resembles every other virtuous man, and in this respect, being similar to God, such a man is a friend both to every virtuous man and to God." Coming to this point I was reminded of that other passage as well; for at the end of the Timaeus he says that the perceiving part must be made like the thing perceived, according to its original nature, and that, having become like it, one attains the end of the best life set before man by the gods, both for the present time and for the time to come. For those words have the same force as these: "He who seeks shall not cease until he finds; and having found, he shall be amazed; and being amazed, he shall reign; and having reigned, he shall rest."
What then? Are not those sayings of Thales too dependent on these? That God is to be glorified "unto the ages of ages," and that he is called "knower of hearts," is plainly interpreted for us by what follows. For Thales, when asked what the divine is, said, "That which has neither beginning nor end." And when someone else inquired whether a man doing something escapes the notice of the divine, he said, "How could he, seeing that he does not even escape notice when merely thinking?"
Indeed, barbarian philosophy alone knows the good as identical with the beautiful/noble, and knows virtue to be self-sufficient for happiness, whenever it declares: "See, I have placed before your eyes today the good and the evil, life and death; choose life." For it calls life the good, and calls choosing it noble, and calls choosing the opposite evil. And the single goal of the good, and of life itself, is becoming one who loves God; for "in this lies your life and the length of your days," so as to cherish that which tends toward truth.
But those other sayings are clearer still. For the Savior, having commanded that we love God and our neighbor, says that on these two commandments the whole law and the prophets hang. These are the very doctrines the Stoics keep repeating, and before them Socrates in the Phaedrus, praying: "O Pan and you other gods, grant that I may become beautiful within." And in the Theaetetus he says outright: "For he who speaks well is both noble and good." And in the Protagoras he admits to Protagoras's companions that he has met one more beautiful than Alcibiades, if indeed the wisest is the most beautiful; for he said that virtue is the beauty of the soul, and conversely that vice is the ugliness of the soul. Antipater the Stoic, then, having written three books on the thesis that, according to Plato, only the noble is good, demonstrates that according to Plato too virtue is self-sufficient for happiness, and sets forth a good many other doctrines in agreement with the Stoics. And Aristobulus, who lived under Ptolemy Philometor and is mentioned by whoever compiled the digest of the Maccabean books, wrote a considerable number of books in which he demonstrates that the Peripatetic philosophy is drawn out of the Mosaic law and out of the remaining prophetic writings.
Let that matter stand as it is. As for our being brothers, inasmuch as we belong to one God and one teacher, Plato too, it seems, calls us so somewhere, speaking in this fashion: "You are all brothers, all of you who dwell in the city," as we shall say to them in telling the myth; "but the god, in fashioning you, mixed gold into the begetting of whichever among you are suited to govern, wherefore they are most honored; and silver into the auxiliaries; and iron and bronze for the farmers and the other craftsmen." Hence, he says, it is necessarily the case that these embrace and love the things belonging to knowledge, while those embrace and love the things belonging to opinion. For perhaps he is divining this chosen nature that reaches after knowledge — unless indeed, positing three natures, he is sketching out three commonwealths, as some have supposed, and assigning to the Jews the silver one, to the Greeks the third, and to the Christians, in whom the royal gold is mixed in, the Holy Spirit. And showing forth the life of Christians, he writes word for word in the Theaetetus: "Let us speak then of the leading men. For why should one speak of those who spend their time poorly in philosophy? These, I think, know neither the way to the marketplace, nor where the courthouse is, nor the council-chamber, nor any other common assembly-place of the city; and they neither see nor hear the laws and decrees as they are written up. The zeal of political clubs and their meetings, and revels with flute-girls — it does not so much as occur to them even in a dream to take part in these. Whether someone in the city has fared well or badly, or what evil has befallen someone from his ancestors — all this escapes them more than, as they say, the number of gallons in the sea. And they do not even know that they do not know these things, but in truth their body lies and sojourns in the city, while they themselves fly off, as Pindar says, exploring the regions beneath the earth and above the heaven, and searching out the whole of nature everywhere."
Again, that saying of the Lord, "Let your yes be yes and your no be no," is to be likened to this: "But it is in no way right for me to concede a falsehood or to suppress a truth." And this saying in the tenth book of the Laws harmonizes with the prohibition against swearing oaths: "Let praise and oath-taking be altogether absent." And broadly speaking Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato alike, when they say they hear the voice of god, are precisely contemplating the structure of the universe as having come to be by god and as being held together without ceasing; for they have heard Moses saying, "He spoke, and it came to be," describing the word of God as a deed.
And touching on the fashioning of man out of dust, the philosophers everywhere proclaim the body to be earthly; and Homer does not hesitate to place among his curses the line: "But may you all become water and earth," just as Isaiah too, saying, "and trample them like clay."
And Callimachus writes outright: "That was the year in which the bird, and the creature in the sea, and the four-footed beast, spoke thus, just as the clay of Prometheus." And again the same poet: "And if Prometheus fashioned you, and you were made from no other clay..." And Hesiod, concerning Pandora, says: "And he bade renowned Hephaestus as quickly as possible mix earth with water, and put in it a human voice and mind."
Fire, then, the Stoics define as the artificer that proceeds methodically toward generation, calling this nature; and by fire and light Scripture allegorizes God and his Word.
What then? Does not Homer too, paraphrasing the separation of the water from the earth and the visible uncovering of the dry land, say of Tethys and Oceanus: "For now a long time they hold themselves apart from one another's bed and love"?
Again, the most learned of the Greeks likewise attach the power to do all things to God — Epicharmus (who was a Pythagorean), saying: "Nothing escapes the divine; this you must know: he himself is our overseer, and God is powerless to do nothing,"
And the lyric poet: "It is possible for a god to raise up an unstained light out of black night, and to hide the pure gleam of day in dark-clouded darkness" (he who alone, while day stands present, has the power to make it night — this, he says, is God); and Aratus too, in the work entitled Phaenomena, having said "Let us begin from Zeus, whom, men, we must never leave unspoken; full of Zeus are all the streets, full all the marketplaces of men, full the sea and the harbors; everywhere we all have need of Zeus," adds: "For we too are his offspring," a work of divine craftsmanship; "and he, kindly to men, shows favorable signs, and stirs the peoples to their work; and he fixed these signs in the sky, distinguishing the stars; and he considered for the year which stars would give men the clearest signs of the seasons, that all things might grow steadfastly; wherefore they ever propitiate him first and last: hail, Father, great wonder, great benefit to men." And before him Homer, fashioning the world upon the Hephaestus-wrought shield after the manner of Moses, says: "On it he made the earth, and on it the sky, and on it the sea, and all the constellations with which the sky is crowned." For the Zeus who is celebrated in poems and in prose writings refers the notion back to God.
Already, so to speak, almost within our own sight of the light, Democritus writes that there are some few among men who, lifting up their hands toward that region the Greeks nowadays name the air, say: "Zeus discourses all things, and he knows all, gives all, and takes all away, being king over all." More mystically still, the Boeotian Pindar, being a Pythagorean, hands down: "One is the race of men, one the race of gods; from one mother we both draw breath" — namely, matter — and he hands down that there is one craftsman of these, whom he calls "the father, best of craftsmen," who has also granted advancements toward divinity according to merit. I say nothing of Plato. He himself, quite openly, in his letter to Erastus and Coriscus, seems, I know not how, to show forth father and son out of the Hebrew scriptures, exhorting word for word: "swearing together with earnest zeal, not unmusical, and with education, the sister of earnest zeal, by the god who is cause of all things, and by the lord who is father of the guide and cause, whom, if you philosophize rightly, you shall know." And the public address in the Timaeus calls the demiurge father, saying somewhat thus: "O gods sprung from gods, whose maker and father I am."
So that even when he says, concerning the king of all things, "all things are for the sake of him and he is the cause of all noble things, and a second is concerned with the second things and a third with the third things," I for my part hear this in no other way than as indicating the holy Trinity; for the Holy Spirit is the third, and the Son is the second, through whom all things came to be according to the will of the Father. And the same Plato, in the tenth book of the Republic, mentions Er the Armenian, of the tribe of Pamphylia, who is Zoroaster; for Zoroaster himself indeed writes: "These things I, Zoroaster son of Armenius, of the tribe of Pamphylia, have composed, having died in war, all that I learned in Hades from the gods." And Plato says that this Zoroaster, lying on his funeral pyre, came back to life on the twelfth day; and perhaps he hints thereby at the resurrection, or perhaps at this — that through the twelve signs of the zodiac the way lies for souls unto their ascent, and he himself says that the same descent occurs also for their coming into being. In this way one must also suppose that the labors of Heracles came to be twelve in number, after which the soul obtains release from the whole of this world. Nor do I pass over Empedocles either, who, in his natural-philosophical way, likewise mentions a taking-up of all things, as though there were one day to be a transformation into the substance of fire.
Most clearly of all is Heraclitus of Ephesus of this opinion — holding one world to be eternal, and another to be perishable, knowing the one that comes to be according to the ordered arrangement to be, in a sense, no other than that eternal one. That he knew the world, peculiarly qualified as it is out of the whole of substance, to be eternal, he makes plain when he says thus: "This world-order, the same for all, no one of gods or of men has made, but it always was and is and shall be, an ever-living fire, kindling in measures and being extinguished in measures." But that he held it also to be generated and perishable, what follows shows: "The turnings of fire: first, sea; and of sea, half is earth, half fiery storm-cloud." For he means, in effect, that fire, by the governing Word and God of all things, is turned through air into the moist, as it were the seed of the ordered arrangement, which he calls sea; and out of this again come earth and sky and the things contained within them. And how in turn it is taken back up and set ablaze he shows plainly by these words: "Sea is poured out and measured to the same proportion it was before it became earth." And likewise concerning the other elements the same holds.
Similar to this the most notable of the Stoics also teach doctrine, discoursing on the conflagration and the governance of the world and on the world and man each being peculiarly qualified, and on the continued survival of our souls. Again, too, Plato, in the seventh book of the Republic, has called the day here "nocturnal" (because of, I think, the world-rulers of this darkness), and has called the descent of the soul into the body sleep and death, in agreement with Heraclitus. And might not the Spirit have foretold this very thing concerning the Savior, speaking through David: "I lay down and slept; I awoke, because the Lord will sustain me"? For it allegorizes not only Christ's resurrection as a rising from sleep, but also the Lord's descent into flesh as sleep.
So too the Savior himself gives the charge: "Watch," as if to say, practice living and try to loosen the soul free of the body. Now the Lord's day is foreshadowed by Plato in the tenth book of the Republic through these words: "And when seven days had passed for each of those in the meadow, they must rise up from there on the eighth and journey on, and arrive on the fourth day thereafter." One must understand by "the meadow" the fixed sphere, as a tame and gentle region, a place of the holy; and by "seven days" each of the movements of the seven planets, and the whole busy craft of working straining toward the goal of rest. And the journey after the wandering stars brings one up into heaven, namely to the eighth motion and its day. And he says the souls depart "on the fourth day," signifying the journey through the four elements.
But not only the Hebrews but the Greeks too regard the seventh as a holy day, in step with which the whole cosmos turns amid all things that are born and grow. Hesiod, then, speaks thus of it: "First, the fourth, and the seventh, a holy day." And again: "And on the seventh once more the shining light of the sun." And Homer: "And thereafter on the seventh there descended a hallowed day." And: "Holy was the seventh." And again: "That was the seventh day, on which all things stood finished." And again: "On the seventh dawn we quit the stream of Acheron." Indeed, Callimachus the poet too writes: "By the seventh dawn all was likewise brought to completion for him." And again: "Numbered among the good days is the seventh, and a birthday too." And: "Counted among the first is the seventh, and it stands complete." And: "Seven of all things were wrought in the starry heaven, wheeling in circles as the years revolve."
But the elegies of Solon too very much deify the number seven.
What then? Are not the words like those of Scripture, which says, "Let us take away the righteous man from among us, for he is troublesome to us"? Plato, all but prophesying the economy of salvation, in the second book of the Republic says thus: "Being so disposed, the just man will be scourged, racked, bound, will have his eyes put out, and at the last, having suffered every evil, will be impaled." And Antisthenes the Socratic, paraphrasing that prophetic voice, "To whom will you liken me? says the Lord," says that God is like nothing; wherefore no one can come to know him fully from an image. And Xenophon the Athenian says similar things, word for word: "He who shakes and steadies all things is plainly some great and powerful being; but what he is in form is unseen. Nor indeed does even the sun, which seems to shine on all, allow itself to be looked upon directly; but if anyone looks at it shamelessly, it takes away his sight." "For what flesh can behold with its eyes the heavenly and true immortal god, who dwells in the vault of heaven? Nor indeed are men able to stand facing the sun's rays, being mortal creatures" — so the Sibyl foretold.
Xenophanes of Colophon too speaks well when, teaching that God is one and incorporeal, he adds: "One god, greatest among gods and men, in no way like mortals in body or in thought." And again: "But mortals suppose that gods are born, and that they have their own clothing, voice, and body." And again: "But if oxen or lions had hands, so as to draw with their hands and produce works as men do, horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and they would make their bodies of just the sort of shape that they themselves each had."
Let us hear again Bacchylides the lyric poet speaking of the divine: "They who are untamed by unseemly diseases and unharmed, in no way like men." And Cleanthes the Stoic, who wrote these things about God in a certain poem: "You ask me what the good is like? Listen then: ordered, just, holy, pious, master of itself, useful, noble, fitting, austere, straightforward, ever advantageous, fearless, painless, profitable, free from grief, beneficial, pleasing, secure, friendly, held in honor, agreed upon, of good repute, without conceit, careful, gentle, intense, enduring through time, blameless, ever abiding."
The same poet, covertly reproaching the idolatry of the many, adds: "Ungenerous is every man who looks to opinion, as though he would obtain some good thing from it." No longer, then, must one hold notions about the divine according to the opinion of the many. For "I do not think that Zeus came to your bed secretly in the guise of a mischievous light, taking a man's form, as Amphion says to Antiope. Sophocles, however, writes bluntly: "For Zeus wedded this man's mother, not in golden form, nor clothed in a swan's plumage, as when he got the maiden of Pleuron with child, but as a solid man." Then, stealing in further, he adds: "Swiftly the adulterer took his stand upon the bridal steps." On top of this he narrates the intemperance of the mythmakers' Zeus still more plainly thus: "He, touching neither feast nor washing-water, went to the bed, his heart gnawed with desire; and the whole of that night he reveled in lust." Let these things then be left to the follies of the theaters. Directly to the point, Heraclitus says that, though this account is always so, men prove uncomprehending both before they hear it and once they have heard it for the first time.
The lyric poet Melanippides, singing, says: "Hear me, O father, wonder of mortals, ruler of the ever-living soul." And the great Parmenides, as Plato says in the Sophist, writes somewhat thus about the divine: "Many things indeed, since it is unbegotten and imperishable, whole, of a single kind, and unmoving and unbegotten." And Hesiod too says that he himself is king and lord of all the immortals: "and none has ever contested your power."
Indeed tragedy too, drawing men away from idols, teaches them to look up to heaven.
Sophocles, as Hecataeus, the compiler of histories, says in his work Concerning Abraham and the Egyptians, cries out directly upon the stage: "In truth there is one, there is one God, who made heaven and the vast earth and the sea's grey-gleaming swell and the might of the winds. But we mortals, straying in heart, set up as a solace for our sorrows images of gods made of stone, or figures of bronze, gold-wrought, or ivory; and offering to these sacrifices and wicked festivals crowned with garlands, we suppose that in this way we act piously."
Euripides too, in tragic verses upon that same stage, says: "Do you see this boundless ether above, and the earth encircled in its moist embrace? Consider this to be Zeus, hold this to be god." And in the drama Pirithous the same poet also delivers this in tragic form: "You, the self-begotten one, who in the ethereal whirl have woven together the nature of all things, around whom light and dark night of many hues and the countless throng of stars dance in unending chorus." Here he has called the self-begotten one the creative mind, and what follows is assigned to the cosmos, in which are also the opposites of light and darkness. And Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, speaks very solemnly of God: "Zeus is the ether, Zeus is the earth, Zeus is the heaven; Zeus indeed is all things and whatever is above these."
I know too that Plato bears witness to Heraclitus when he writes: "The one, the sole wise thing, is unwilling and yet willing to be called by the name of Zeus." And again: "It is law also to obey the counsel of one." And should you wish to trace out that saying, "he who has ears to hear, let him hear," you would find it somewhat so expressed by the Ephesian: "The uncomprehending, though they hear, are like the deaf; the proverb bears witness of them that though present they are absent."
But do you desire to hear directly, even from the Greeks, of a single first principle? Timaeus the Locrian, in his treatise on nature, will bear witness for me in these very terms: "A single originating source of all beings exists, unproduced; for were it something that had arisen, it would cease to count as an origin, and instead that prior thing from which it arose would be the origin." For from that source flowed the true opinion: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one, and him alone shall you serve." "This one, behold, stands plain and unerring before all," as the Sibyl says.
Already too Homer appears, through the following words, to point to a father and a son, having chanced upon a well-aimed piece of divination, when he says: "If indeed no one does you violence while you remain as you are, yet there is no way to escape the sickness sent by great Zeus. For the Cyclopes take no heed of aegis-bearing Zeus." And before him Orpheus, treating of the same subject, has said: "Son of great Zeus, father of aegis-bearing Zeus." Xenocrates of Chalcedon, calling the one Zeus the Highest and the other the Lowest, leaves an implication of father and son. And, most astonishing of all, Homer appears to have some knowledge of the divine, even though he introduces the gods as subject to human passions - a thing Epicurus does not so much as blush at.
He says, at any rate: "Why, son of Peleus, do you pursue me with your swift feet, being yourself a mortal, an immortal god? You do not yet know that I am a god." He has made plain that the divine is not to be seized or comprehended by a mortal, neither with feet nor with hands nor with eyes, nor at all by means of the body. "To whom then will you liken the Lord? Or with what likeness will you compare him?" says Scripture. "Has a craftsman made an image, or has a goldsmith cast gold and overlaid it with gold?" and so on.
Epicharmus the comic poet too speaks clearly of the Logos, in his Politeia, somewhat thus: "Human life has great need of reckoning and number; we live by number and reckoning, for these things preserve mortals." Then he adds outright: "The Logos governs men, and rightly preserves them." Then, "if
there is reckoning in man, there is also a divine Logos; the one exists in man in regard to the vicissitudes of life, but that other, the divine Logos, accompanies every art among all men, ever itself teaching them what it is advantageous to do. For man did not discover art; rather it is god who bestows it. But man's own reasoning has its nature from the divine Logos."
Indeed, through Isaiah the Spirit exclaims: "Why do your many offerings matter to me? declares the Lord. I have had enough of the burnt rams, and I take no pleasure in the fat of lambs or the blood of oxen," and a little further on he adds: "Cleanse yourselves, make yourselves pure, put away the evil from your souls," together with what comes next - Menander, the writer of comedy, expresses this identical sense in the following lines: "If a man, O Pamphilus, in offering sacrifice, brings a great number of bulls or of kids, or, by Zeus, other such things, or fine furnishings, having made cloaks of gold or of purple, or little figures wrought of ivory or of emerald, thinks by this to make god well-disposed toward him, he has strayed and has a light mind. For a man ought by nature to be useful, not corrupting maidens and committing adultery, stealing and murdering for the sake of money; nor should you covet so much as the thread of a needle, Pamphilus; for god sees you, being present nearby. I am a god who draws near, and not a god from afar; or shall a man do something in secret places, and shall I not see him? says the Lord through Jeremiah."
And again Menander, paraphrasing that scripture, "offer a sacrifice of righteousness and hope in the Lord," writes somewhat thus: "Nor, dearest friend, should you ever covet so much as another's needle; for god delights in righteous deeds and not in unrighteous ones, and allows the man who labors to raise up his own life, plowing the earth by night and by day. Sacrifice to god continually by being righteous, not resplendent in your cloaks while base at heart. If you hear thunder, do not flee, being conscious in yourself of no wrongdoing, master; for god sees you, being present nearby. While you are yet speaking, says Scripture, I will say: behold, I am here."
Diphilus the comic poet, again, discourses somewhat as follows about judgment: "Do you suppose, Niceratus, that the dead who partook of every luxury in life have escaped the divine as though unnoticed? Justice possesses a watching eye that beholds everything. For indeed we hold that in Hades there are two paths, one the way of the righteous, the other of the ungodly. And: 'If the earth shall cover the two of us for all time,' he says, 'go and seize, steal, defraud, mix all together; be not at all deceived; there is judgment also in Hades, which the god, master of all, will render, whose name is fearsome and which I myself would not even utter; who to sinners grants a long extension of life.' If any mortal supposes that in doing some evil by day he escapes the notice of the gods, he thinks wickedly, and in so thinking he is caught, whenever Justice happens to have leisure. See, all you who suppose that there is no god - there is, there is one; and if some man of wicked nature fares well, let him make gain of the time, for in time he will later pay the penalty." Tragedy agrees with these things through the following: "For there will be, there will be, that age of time, when the gold-gleaming ether shall release its treasury laden with fire, and the raging flame, once fed, will burn up all things upon the earth and in the heights, gone mad."
And shortly after he again adds: "When the universe fails, the whole depth of the waves will vanish, the earth will be bereft of its foundations, nor will the air any longer bear up the winged tribes, being on fire; and then it will restore all the things it had before destroyed." Things like these we shall find also written in the Orphic writings, somewhat thus: "Having hidden all things, he brought them up again into the joyous light out of his sacred heart, working wonders." And if we live our lives in holiness and righteousness, we are blessed here, but more blessed still after our departure hence, possessing happiness not for some limited time, but able to rest in eternity, sharing the same hearth with the other immortals, being at their tables free from the sorrows of men, unwearied - so says the philosophical poetry of Empedocles. Not even among the Greeks will anyone be so great as to overreach justice, nor so small as to escape its notice.
The same Orpheus also says this: "Looking to the divine Logos, hold fast to this, directing the intelligent hollow of your heart; and walk well upon the path, and look only upon the immortal lord of the cosmos." And again, concerning God, calling him invisible, he says that he was known to only one man of the Chaldean race, whether he means Abraham himself or his son, through these words: "Unless there be some only-begotten offshoot sprung from of old from the Chaldean race - for he had knowledge of the star's course and of the sphere's motion about the earth, how it revolves in a circle evenly about its own axis, and he guides the winds about the air and about the flowing waters."
Then, as though paraphrasing "heaven is my throne, and earth the footstool of my feet," he adds: "He himself again is set fast upon great heaven, upon a golden throne, and earth lies beneath his feet. His right hand he has stretched out to the bounds of Ocean, and the foundations of the mountains tremble within their hearts, nor can they bear his mighty strength. He himself is everywhere heavenly, and on earth all things find their end, having himself the beginning and the middle and the end. It is not lawful for you to speak of him otherwise; my limbs tremble at the thought. From on high he rules," and so on. For through these words he has made plain all those prophetic sayings: "If you open the heaven, trembling will seize the mountains from before you, and they shall melt, as wax melts before the face of fire";
and the words spoken through Isaiah: "Who has gauged the sky with the span of a hand, and enclosed the entire earth within its hollow?" Again, when he says: "Lord of ether and of Hades, of sea and earth, who with thunders shake the strong house of Olympus; before whom the spirits tremble, and the assembled gods stand in dread; whom the Fates obey, relentless though they are; imperishable one, mother-father, by whose will all things are stirred; who move the winds, and cover all things with clouds, splitting the broad ether with thunderbolts; your order runs among the stars, in unchanging courses; beside your fiery throne stand the toiling angels, whose care it is that all things be accomplished for mortals; your spring shines fresh with purple flowers; your winter comes on with cold clouds; your autumn fruits the reveling Bromios once distributed."
Then he adds, expressly naming God Almighty: "Imperishable, immortal, spoken of only among the immortals. Come, greatest of all gods, with mighty compulsion, awesome, unconquered, great, imperishable, whom the ether crowns." By the word "mother-father" he has signified not only the generation of things out of what does not exist, but has also given occasion to those who introduce emanations perhaps to conceive also of a consort of God; and he paraphrases those prophetic scriptures - both the one through Hosea, "I who establish thunder and create wind, whose hands founded the host of heaven," and the one through Moses: "Behold, behold, that it is I, and no other god exists beside me; death and life are mine to give; I wound and I restore; and no one can snatch anyone free from my grasp." But he himself, according to Orpheus, plants evil for mortals out of good, and chilling war and tearful griefs.
Such things too Archilochus the Parian says: "O Zeus, father Zeus, yours is the power of heaven, and you look upon the deeds of men, both lawless and unrighteous." Let the Thracian Orpheus, too, chant for us once more: "He has extended his right hand to the farthest edge of Ocean all around, while the earth rests beneath his feet." Plainly enough these lines were drawn from that source: "The Lord shall deliver the cities where people dwell, and shall hold the whole earth in his hand like a nest"; "the Lord who made the earth by his strength," as Jeremiah says, "and set up the world by his wisdom." Further, besides these, Phocylides, calling the angels demons, shows through the following that some of these are good and some base - since we too have received that certain of them are apostates: "But there are demons among men, now one, now another; some, when evil is coming on, deliver men from it."
Well then, Philemon the comic poet also cuts down idolatry through these lines: "There is for us no Fortune that is a god, there is not; but whatever happens to each by chance is called Fortune." And Sophocles the tragedian says: "Not even to the gods are all things granted at their own choosing, apart from Zeus; for he holds both the end and the beginning." And Orpheus too: "One power, one god came to be, great, blazing through heaven, and all things have been fashioned into one, in which all these things revolve, fire and water and earth,"
and what follows upon these. And Pindar the lyric poet is fairly carried away in bacchic frenzy, saying outright: "What is god? The whole of everything." And again: "God is he who fashions all things for mortals." Yet when he says: "What do you hope for as wisdom? A man has but little advantage over another. To search out the counsels of the gods is hard for a mortal mind; for he was born of a mortal mother," from that he has drawn his own understanding — "Who has grasped the intention of the Lord? Or who has come to stand as his advisor?" But Hesiod too, in what he writes, agrees with what has been said before: "No seer among men upon the earth could know the mind of aegis-bearing Zeus." Fittingly, then, Solon the Athenian, in his elegies, himself likewise following Hesiod, writes: "Wholly hidden from men is the mind of the immortals."
Again, when Moses prophesied that because of the transgression the woman would bear children into toil and labor, a poet of no small repute writes: "Never will they cease from weariness and misery by day, nor at all be spared it by night as they are afflicted; for the gods will give them grievous cares." Further, Homer, when he himself says, "and the Father stretched out his golden scales," declares god to be just; while Menander the comic poet, interpreting god as good, says: "A spirit stands beside every man the moment he is born, a good guide initiating him into the mysteries of life; for an evil spirit must not be supposed to exist, harming a good life." Then he adds: "and that god is altogether good" — either meaning that every god is good, or, what is more likely, that god is good in all things.
Again, in turn, Aeschylus the tragedian, when he expounds the power of god, is not reluctant to call him even Most High through these lines: "Set god apart from mortal things, and do not suppose him to stand, like yourself, made of flesh. You do not know him: at one time he appears as fire, an irresistible onrush, at another as water, at another as darkness; and he becomes like the wild beasts themselves, like wind and cloud and lightning, thunder, rain. The sea obeys him, and the rocks, and every spring and the gatherings of water. The mountains tremble, and the earth, and the monstrous depth of the sea, and the great height of the mountains, whenever the terrible eye of the master looks upon them; for the glory of the Most High god is powerful over all things." Does this not seem to you to be paraphrasing that saying, "the earth trembles at the presence of the Lord"?
In addition to these, Apollo himself, most skilled in divination, bearing witness to the glory of god, is compelled to say concerning Athena, when the Medes were making war upon Greece, how she begged and entreated Zeus on behalf of Attica. The oracle runs thus: "Pallas cannot appease Olympian Zeus, though she beseeches him with many words and shrewd counsel; he will give many of the immortals' temples over to consuming fire, temples which now, it seems, stand streaming with sweat and quaking with dread," and what follows upon this.
Thearidas, in his work On Nature, writes: "The origin of beings, the truly real origin, is one; for those things exist, from the outset, singly and without partner." "And there exists nothing else besides the great king," says Orpheus; and following him the comic poet Diphilus most sententiously says: "Honor to the end this one alone as the true father of all things, the discoverer and founder of so many good things." Fittingly, then, Plato too accustoms the best natures to arrive at that study which we said before is the greatest — to see the good and to make that ascent; and this, as it seems, would not be a turning of a potsherd, but a turning about of the soul, a return from a kind of nocturnal day to the true upward path of being, which indeed we shall call true philosophy. And those who share in it he judges to be of the golden race, saying, "You are all indeed brothers," while those of the golden race, he says, judge most exactly and in every respect.
By nature, then, and without being taught, all things everywhere apprehend the Father and Maker of the universe, each after its own kind: the inanimate things sharing in sympathy with the living, and among living things, those already immortal working out this daily, while among those still mortal, some are still borne within the mother's womb in fear, others already possess self-determination — and of men, this holds for both Greeks and barbarians alike. For no people anywhere, whether of farmers or of nomads, nor even of city-dwellers, can live without having already been possessed beforehand by faith in something greater. Therefore every nation, whether it dwells toward the sunrise or touches the western shores, whether northern or all that lies toward the south, holds one and the same preconception concerning the one who established sovereign rule, seeing that even his most universal works have gone forth equally to all alike —
and far more the philosophers among the Greeks, those most given to inquiry, setting out from the philosophy of the barbarians, gave the privilege of place to that which is invisible, alone, most powerful, most skilled in craft, and most responsible for all that is most beautiful — yet, not having been instructed by us, they do not know the things that follow from this, nor even how god by nature is to be conceived, but only, as we have already said many times, by way of a true circumlocution. Fittingly, then, the apostle asks: "Is he a god belonging to the Jews alone? Is he not one for the nations too?" — not only speaking prophetically of the fact that those from among the Gentiles who believe will come to know god as Greeks, but also signaling this: that in power the Lord and god would be god of all, and in reality almighty, but in respect of knowledge he is not god of all; since they grasp neither his nature nor the manner in which he serves as Master, Father, and Craftsman, nor do they know the rest of the economy of the truth, not having been taught it by the truth itself.
Likewise the prophetic writings likewise carry a weight equal to that of the apostle's word, for Isaiah declares: "But if you say, 'We have put our trust in the Lord our God' — come then, strike an agreement with my master, the ruler of Assyria." Then he continues: "Have we now marched against this territory to wage war upon it apart from the Lord?" And Jonah, himself also a prophet, hints at the same thing through what he says: "And the ship's captain came to him and said to him, 'Why are you snoring? Get up, call upon your god, that he may save us and we may not perish.'" For the phrase "your god" was spoken to one who knew by way of full recognition, while "that god may save us" made clear the perception of the nations, who had not yet come to faith, of those who had turned their minds toward the Almighty. And again the same prophet: "And he told them, 'I serve the Lord, and it is the Lord I revere, the God who rules heaven.'"
And again the same prophet: "And they said, 'By no means, Lord; let us not perish for the sake of this man's life.'" And Malachi the prophet plainly makes clear god as saying: "I will not accept sacrifice from your hands, for from where the sun rises to the place it goes down my name is held in glory among the nations, and in every place a sacrifice is offered to me." And again: "For I am a great king, says the Lord Almighty, and my name is renowned among the nations." What name? Among those who have believed, the Son declaring the Father; among the Greeks, "god the maker." And Plato shows forth self-determination through these words: "Virtue has no master; honoring or dishonoring her, each of us will share in her more or less. The cause lies with the one who chooses; god is blameless." For god is never the cause of evils. "O Trojans dear to Ares," says the lyric poet, "Zeus who rules on high, who looks upon all things, is not to blame for mortals' great sufferings; but it lies in the midst for all men to find holy Justice, companion of pure Good Order and prudent Right — blessed are the children of those who find her dwelling with them."
Pindar plainly brings in Zeus himself as savior, dwelling together with Themis, a king, a just savior, interpreting it in this way: "First the Fates led wise-counseling heavenly Themis, on golden chariots, from the springs of Ocean, up the holy stairway of Olympus, along the shining road, to be the ancient consort of Zeus the savior; and she bore the gold-filleted, glorious-fruited true Seasons." Whoever then is not persuaded by the truth, but is puffed up by human teaching, is ill-starred and wretched, and, in the words of Euripides, "one who, beholding these things, does not perceive god, but has flung far away the crooked deceits of the astrologers, whose baneful tongue casts random guesses about things unseen, having no share in understanding."
Whoever, then, wishes to arrive at true learning, let him listen to Parmenides of Elea promising: "You shall know the nature of the ether, and all the signs in the ether, and the unseen works of the pure, radiant torch of the sun, and whence they came to be; and you shall learn the wandering works and nature of the round-faced moon; and you shall know also the heaven that encompasses all, whence it arose, and how Necessity led and bound it to hold the bounds of the stars." And Metrodorus too, though he had become an Epicurean, spoke these words as if inspired: "Remember, Menestratus, that being born mortal and having received a life bounded by limits, you have ascended in soul even to eternity and the infinity of things, and have beheld both "the things that shall be and that have been before" — when, together with the blessed company, in the words of Plato, we shall behold the blessed vision and sight, following, some of us in the train of Zeus, others in the train of other gods, being initiated into rites — as is right to speak of them — a most blessed initiation, which we celebrate, being ourselves whole and untouched by the evils which in later time awaited us, and gazing in pure light upon whole and untrembling visions as initiates and beholders, ourselves pure and unmarked by this thing which now, carrying it about, we call the body, bound to it after the manner of an oyster in its shell."
The Pythagoreans call the counter-earth heaven — the earth concerning which it is said through Jeremiah: "I will appoint you as children, and I will give you a chosen land, the inheritance of God the Almighty, which those who inherit it shall rule as kings over the earth."
And ten thousand upon ten thousand upon ten thousand things more flow in upon me to set forth; yet for the sake of due measure the discourse must now be brought to a close, lest we too should suffer the fate of Agathon the tragedian, regarding the incidental as the main task, and laboring over the main task as though it were incidental.
Since it has, then, been shown clearly, as I think, in what sense one must grasp the Lord's naming of the Greeks as thieves, I gladly set aside the teachings of the philosophers. For even if we should go through their very words, we would not get to the end of it, gathering together so vast a store of testimonies, and showing that all the wisdom current among the Greeks is borne along from the philosophy of the barbarians. And we shall lay hold of this subject of inquiry again, no less, as necessity requires, whenever we take up for review the opinions concerning first principles current among the Greeks. Yet this too, from what has been said, quietly presents itself to us for consideration: in what manner one who is able to swim must engage with the waves that are in the Greek books. Blessed, it seems, then, in the words of Empedocles, is he "who has gained a wealth of divine understanding," but wretched is he "whose concern is a dark opinion about the gods." By this he has, in godlike fashion, marked out understanding and unlearning as the two limits between which happiness and misery lie. For, as Heraclitus says, philosophic men must indeed be inquirers into very many things, and in truth one who seeks to be noble must of necessity wander much in the search.
It is already clear to us, then, from what has been said before, that god's kindness has no end, and that, starting from a start which itself had no start, justice by nature is, without artifice, equal toward all, coming to be according to the worth of each kind, never having had a beginning; for god never acquired a starting point for being Master and being good, since he has forever been what he is, nor indeed will he ever cease doing good, even though he brings each thing to its end. And each of us partakes of this beneficence according to what he wishes, since it is the choice and the sustained practice of the soul, becoming worthy, that has made the difference in what is selected.
Here then let this, our fifth Stromateus of gnostic memoranda according to the true philosophy, come to an end.
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