Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
What, then, was it that urged him to flight and made him desert his teacher, his supplication, his hope, his life, and all his previous labors? "Sell what you possess." But what does this mean? Not what some people readily suppose it to mean — that he commands a man to throw away his existing property and to renounce his wealth — but rather to banish from the soul the opinions held about wealth, the attachment to it, the excessive desire for it, the fluttering agitation and sickness over it, the cares, the thorns of life that choke the seed of life. For it is no great or enviable thing simply to be without money for no reason bound up with life — since in that case those who have nothing at all anywhere, but are destitute and beg for their daily bread, the poor flung down along the roads, "not knowing" God and "the righteousness of God," would, merely on the strength of being utterly destitute and helpless in life and lacking even the smallest necessities, be the most blessed and the most beloved of God, and alone possess eternal life. Nor again is it anything new to renounce riches and give them away to the poor or to one's homeland, a thing which many did before the Savior's descent — some for the sake of leisure devoted to letters and to dead wisdom, others for empty fame and vain glory: the Anaxagorases and the Democrituses and the Crateses.
← All of Clement of Alexandria: Exhortation, Instructor & Miscellanies