Miscellanies

Contents

Published so far: Books 1–5 and 8. Books 6–7 will be added as their translation is completed.

1. 1.1.1Clement defends writing down Christian teaching: if pagans write freely, the preacher of truth should leave written benefit to later generations, as a father leaves children.
2. 1.1.2Teaching gives life when soul meets soul; but since knowledge is not for all, Christ spoke in parables, exposing the ignorance that already existed rather than causing it.
3. 1.1.3The parable of the talents shows that teaching must be put to work, not hidden; Paul too commands entrusting the word to faithful teachers.
4. 1.1.4Both writer and preacher proclaim the word; the hearer is responsible for his choice; proclaiming gives the beginnings of faith and salvation, and Paul charges Timothy to teach impartially.
5. 1.1.5Writer and reader must each examine themselves, as each communicant takes his own portion of the Eucharist after self-examination, as Paul teaches.
6. 1.1.6The teacher must examine his motives, seeking only his hearers' salvation, as Paul did; hearers too must not come from curiosity or for material gain.
7. 1.1.7Workers are few, so we should pray for more; the Lord's farming is both oral and written; those who teach bring peace, and each worker will be rewarded, as Paul says.
8. 1.1.8The word should not be handed to those full of sophistry, but received by faith, which then brings understanding; the believer should pray David's psalm of cleansing.
9. 1.1.9A speaker can judge his hearers like the soils of the parable; a writer dedicates his work to God, seeking only the readers' salvation and no reward, giving freely as he has received.
10. 1.1.10Those whose inner eye is dimmed should turn to the truth in Scripture, which rekindles the soul's spark; as Plato and Pythagoras taught, one should help the needy but not the idle.
11. 1.1.11Clement's notes preserve the teaching of the blessed men he heard in Greece, southern Italy, and the East, and last in Egypt, a teacher like a Sicilian bee; they handed on the apostles' tradition.
12. 1.1.12Writing preserves the tradition, as used wells stay clear and used iron stays bright; wisdom must be shared like a lamp on a stand; teachers learn as they teach, since the one Teacher inspires both.
13. 1.1.13Christ shared the mysteries only with those able to receive them; secret things are entrusted to speech, not writing; what is hidden will be revealed to the few who can grasp it; God gave the church apostles, prophets, and teachers.
14. 1.1.14Clement's notes are a weak image of his teachers' living word, meant to remind rather than fully explain; he deliberately leaves some things unwritten, since writing cannot answer questions and may mislead the unprepared.
15. 1.1.15The Stromata will hint rather than state, refute the heresies, and prepare the ground for the higher knowledge of the tradition; it will use the best of philosophy, becoming Greek to the Greeks, as Paul did.
16. 1.1.16Learning seasons the work like sauce on an athlete's food; familiar sayings are included to win the many, and with time and labor the one pearl of truth will shine out among them.
17. 1.1.17Like the cook and the shepherd, readers use Greek learning for different ends; Clement uses the Greeks' own writings to water their soil so that it may receive the spiritual seed.
18. 1.1.18The Stromata hide the truth among philosophical doctrines like a kernel in its shell; against those who think philosophy useless or evil, Clement will show that it too is a work of providence.
19. 1.2.19Even if philosophy were useless, showing it so is useful; one must understand the Greeks to refute them; and wide learning commends the truth to hearers and catechumens.
20. 1.2.20Philosophy is not a corrupter of life but a clear image of truth, a divine gift to the Greeks; comparing doctrines strengthens faith and leads to knowledge, and the Stromata hide its seeds in learning.
21. 1.2.21Truth sought with labor is sweet; the work is arranged obscurely because it is dangerous to divulge secret teaching to contentious people.
22. 1.3.22Many mock the truth or attack it with sophistries: talkative sophists who please itching ears with a river of words but a drop of sense.
23. 1.3.23Solon mocked those who follow the fox's tracks; Christ, who had nowhere to lay his head among the foxes, rests only on the believer, and catches the wise in their craftiness.
24. 1.3.24The Greeks themselves called busybodies sophists; of such empty talkers Scripture says God will destroy the wisdom of the wise.
25. 1.4.25Homer, Hesiod, and Daniel call craftsmen and sages “wise”; Scripture calls every worldly art wisdom and shows that skill comes from God, who filled Bezalel with the spirit of wisdom.
26. 1.4.26God gives understanding to those who prepare themselves; craftsmen excel in bodily senses, and poets, rhetoricians, dialecticians, and philosophers in a mental perception strengthened by practice.
27. 1.4.27God's wisdom is manifold, working through art, knowledge, faith, and prophecy; all wisdom comes from the Lord; beyond philosophy's perception lies the divine perception of godliness.
28. 1.5.28Before Christ, philosophy was given to the Greeks for righteousness, as the law was to the Hebrews: a schoolmaster to lead them to Christ; now it is a useful preparation for faith.
29. 1.5.29There is one way of truth fed by many streams; Scripture speaks of many ways of wisdom; the harlot of Proverbs is foolish pleasure, not Greek learning; worldly studies should be used but not dwelt in, as some neglect their mistress philosophy for her maidservants.
30. 1.5.30As general studies serve philosophy, philosophy serves wisdom, the knowledge of things divine and human; Abraham first took Hagar, worldly learning, and afterward Sarah, true wisdom, bore Isaac.
31. 1.5.31Following Philo, Hagar is “sojourning” and Sarah “my rule”; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob stand for learning, natural gift, and practice, which together make the seal of knowledge.
32. 1.5.32Abraham's words to Sarah show that worldly learning is a handmaid to true knowledge; philosophy is an inquiry into truth, and Christ is the truth; preliminary training sharpens the mind for rest in him.
33. 1.6.33Mathematical studies train the mind, purify the soul from the senses, and prepare it to see truth; good education improves good natures, as Proverbs' ant and bee show.
34. 1.6.34Prayer and the care of the soul need knowledge: goodness comes by learning, not by nature alone; the gifted can fall through neglect, the less gifted rise by education; God made us sociable and just.
35. 1.6.35One can believe without letters, but understanding the faith requires learning; education makes virtue easier to attain and guards against deception by the sophists.
36. 1.6.36Anaxarchus says much learning helps the wise and harms the babbler; wisdom knows the right moment; Hesiod's epithets describe the true sage.
37. 1.7.37Greek learning and philosophy came from God indirectly, like rain falling everywhere; by philosophy Clement means not any one school but the selection of whatever each has said well about righteousness and piety.
38. 1.7.38Good deeds without faith do not profit after death; the Scriptures were translated into Greek so the Greeks would have no excuse; many ways lead to the one gate of righteousness, which is Christ, as 1 Clement shows.
39. 1.8.39Sophistry creates false opinions that seem true; Plato and Aristotle condemned it; rhetoric aims at persuasion, eristic at victory, sophistry at astonishment, and none at truth.
40. 1.8.40Paul calls the sophists' love of disputes a sickness; Euripides agrees; the sound word is Christ, the truth; false teachers are wolves in sheep's clothing who prey on the simple.
41. 1.8.41Eloquence can steal the truth, as the tragedians say; contentious heretics and dialecticians are futile deceivers; the Christian does not seek to please the many.
42. 1.8.42Plato followed reason alone and blamed those who trust opinion without knowledge; people lose the truth unwillingly through deception, force, or enchantment, but none of these can drive out real knowledge.
43. 1.9.43Some want bare faith without learning, like expecting grapes without tending the vine; but Christ, the vine, must be cultivated; the educated believer gathers what is useful from every study to defend the faith.
44. 1.9.44The experienced Christian, like a touchstone, can tell true philosophy from sophistry and truth from heresy; distinguishing ambiguous words is useful, as Christ did against the devil in the temptation.
45. 1.9.45Though prophets and apostles lacked technical learning, their hidden meaning needs skilled teaching to be understood; dialectic helps answer questioners; action should come from reason, the Word, not mere habit.
46. 1.10.46Christ spoke and gave thanks before breaking bread, so that we might eat “rationally”; good speech and good deeds belong together, and each person should serve by his own gift.
47. 1.10.47Word and deed need each other; sophistry must be rejected, for its victories are ruinous; Scripture denies that the knowledge of wickedness is wisdom, which belongs to the righteous.
48. 1.10.48Clement cares for meaning, not eloquence; Plato and Scripture warn against preoccupation with words; style is only clothing, and speech, like food, should nourish rather than merely please.
49. 1.10.49The one who knows seeks no display; one hearer suffices; Pindar commends silence, and Paul warns against wordy disputes and empty chatter.
50. 1.11.50Worldly wisdom is folly with God, and boasting belongs only in knowing the Lord; when Paul warns against “philosophy and empty deceit,” he means not all philosophy but the Epicurean, which denies providence.
51. 1.11.51Paul also opposes the Stoics' material god and hair-splitting logic; true inquiry, like an athletic contest, needs daring and wisdom, and Christ's “seek and you will find” leads to real finding.
52. 1.11.52True philosophy, following the divine tradition, upholds providence and the Creator, and teaches likeness to God; the philosophy Paul condemns deifies the elements and denies providence.
53. 1.11.53Paul prays for discerning love; philosophers are infants under the elements unless Christ makes them mature; Hagar's son is still Abraham's seed; solid food is for the mature, who test all things.
54. 1.11.54Instruction needs loving reproof; the upright seek knowledge of God; God's kingdom is in power, not persuasive words; knowledge that puffs up is not truth, but love builds up.
55. 1.12.55The tradition is not for all; the wisdom Christ taught in a mystery must be guarded, as Isaiah's lips were cleansed; Clement hesitates to cast pearls before swine.
56. 1.12.56The natural man cannot receive the Spirit's truths; the secret tradition must be handed on only to the fit; the Stromata scatter the truth so that only a good farmer will make it grow.
57. 1.13.57Truth is one, but the philosophical schools, like the Bacchants tearing Pentheus, each hold a fragment and claim it is the whole; whoever reassembles the fragments into the one Word will see the whole truth.
58. 1.13.58Ecclesiastes and Proverbs praise abundant wisdom; the one versed in every kind of wisdom, Greek and barbarian, is truly knowing; wisdom is worth more than gold.
59. 1.14.59The Greeks' Seven Wise Men are listed; Paul quotes Epimenides of Crete as a prophet and a Greek poet on the resurrection, showing that Greek poets held some truth.
60. 1.14.60The Greek sages lived after Moses, and their brief, riddling style resembles the Hebrew; “Know yourself,” variously attributed, urges us to seek knowledge of the whole, including the origin of the world.
61. 1.14.61The famous sayings of the Seven Sages and their disputed authors are listed; Pythagoras was the first to call himself a philosopher.
62. 1.14.62Greek philosophy descends in three successions, Italian, Ionian, and Eleatic; Pythagoras and Thales were probably of barbarian origin, and Thales learned from Egyptian priests.
63. 1.14.63The succession of the Ionian school leads to Socrates, then Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum, with their successors.
64. 1.14.64The Stoic and Eleatic successions are traced to Epicurus; next Clement will give their dates to prove that Hebrew philosophy is many generations older.
65. 1.14.65The dates of the early philosophers are fixed by events: Thales' eclipse about the fiftieth Olympiad, Pythagoras about the sixty-second, Solon about the forty-sixth, Heraclitus in the time of Darius.
66. 1.15.66Most early Greek sages were barbarians or learned from barbarians: Pythagoras from Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Magi; Plato admits he learned from barbarians and visited Egypt.
67. 1.15.67Plato, unlike Epicurus, recognizes barbarian philosophers; barbarians honored their lawgivers as gods, believing good souls came down to give laws and philosophy, the greatest gift of the gods.
68. 1.15.68Many barbarian peoples philosophized about divine things; Plato honored them, knowing that he and Pythagoras learned their best doctrines from them.
69. 1.15.69Pythagoras, Plato, and Eudoxus studied with Egyptian priests; Plato tells how an Egyptian taught Solon that the Greeks are children; Democritus learned from Babylon, Persia, and Egypt.
70. 1.15.70Pythagoras is said to have studied with an Assyrian sage and with Galatians and Brahmins; a Jew associated with Aristotle; stories of the Sibyl's origin and continued prophecy are reported.
71. 1.15.71Numa, taught by Moses, forbade images of God; philosophy flourished first among barbarian peoples, Egyptians, Chaldeans, Druids, Magi, and Indian sages, including the followers of Boutta (the Buddha), before reaching the Greeks.
72. 1.15.72Scythians, Hyperboreans, and German prophetesses had their sages, but the Jews are by far the oldest; Philo, Aristobulus, and Megasthenes show that their philosophy preceded the Greeks'.
73. 1.15.73Myths make the Idaean Dactyls, Atlas, and Chiron the first sages, all barbarians; their dates should be compared with Moses' age.
74. 1.16.74The barbarians invented nearly every art: astronomy, calendars, geometry, divination, and music.
75. 1.16.75Barbarians invented letters, medicine, ships, iron and bronze working, weapons, sculpture, mining, and instruments.
76. 1.16.76More inventions of barbarians: dyes, metallurgy, boxing, musical modes and instruments, furniture, ships, linen, and letters.
77. 1.16.77Clement lists his sources on inventions; the Greeks learned from barbarians; Anacharsis the Scythian shows a philosophy of deeds, not words.
78. 1.16.78Paul says that one who does not understand a language is a “barbarian” to its speaker; prose and many poetic forms came late to the Greeks.
79. 1.16.79Greek poetic forms, rhetoric, grammar, and lawgiving all came long after Moses.
80. 1.16.80Some say Greek philosophy grasps truth by chance, others that it comes from the devil or lesser powers; Clement holds that, though it cannot grasp the whole truth, it prepares the way for Christ's teaching.
81. 1.17.81Some apply “all who came before me are thieves” to philosophy, saying it was stolen by a fallen angel; the prophets were sent servants; even if philosophy was stolen, God permitted it and providence turned it to good.
82. 1.17.82Against critics who say God is the cause of evil because he did not prevent it, Clement argues that a cause acts, while the one who does not prevent does nothing; otherwise the shield, not the arrow, would be blamed for a wound.
83. 1.17.83The devil, free to repent or to steal, is the cause of the theft, not God; praise, blame, reward, and punishment are just only because the soul is free.
84. 1.17.84Sin begins in choice and mistaken belief, and it is in our power to avoid it; “all who came before me are thieves” refers to the false prophets the devil mixed among the true, like tares among wheat.
85. 1.17.85The false prophets stole the name of prophet; they served the devil, the father of lies, yet spoke some truths, as Hermas says; God orders all things for good.
86. 1.17.86God's providence steers even the apostates' evil to a good end; divine wisdom is shown above all in bringing good out of evil, as in martyrdom that arises from persecution.
87. 1.17.87Philosophy holds a little stolen fire, a trace of wisdom: the Greek philosophers took portions of truth from the Hebrew prophets, distorting some and discovering some; the prophets, by contrast, received from Christ's fullness.
88. 1.18.88Paul's “wise man” and “debater of this age” are the Greek philosophers; the cross is a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Greeks, but Christ's coming made believers wise; those who refused chose unbelief.
89. 1.18.89Better to read Paul as denying that God made worldly wisdom foolish: unbelief is chosen, not caused by God; the wise are outshone by the gospel as a lamp by the sun; all are called, and those who obey are the called.
90. 1.18.90Isaiah shows that choice rests with us; God's wisdom is the teaching handed on through the Son; Paul exhorts those who think themselves wise to put on the new man, seek truth, and share it.
91. 1.19.91Paul at the Areopagus approved what Greek poets said well, quoting Aratus, and taught that the “unknown god” the Greeks honored is the Creator, who must be known through the Son.
92. 1.19.92Christ sent Paul to open the Gentiles' eyes, turning them to God through the Son; Clement accepts not all philosophy, but that of the few true philosophers, as Socrates says in Plato: many are called, few chosen.
93. 1.19.93Plato shows the hope of the righteous after death and distinguishes true philosophers, lovers of truth, from the merely learned; the general studies are roads to the good, not the good itself.
94. 1.19.94However the Greeks came by some truths, whether by chance, nature, or reflection, all comes from the one God; they saw God dimly as in a mirror, as we do now, but face to face comes after death.
95. 1.19.95Proverbs speaks of sowing righteousness; Gentiles who keep the law by nature are a law to themselves; philosophy is like a near friend, but heresies, which leave the ancient church, wander in a waterless desert.
96. 1.19.96Proverbs' stolen bread and water are the heretics' Eucharists, some using only water, contrary to the church's rule; their baptism is “strange water” that sweeps people back into the sea of paganism.
97. 1.20.97Philosophy is a joint cause helping toward the truth, like one of many men hauling a ship; truth is one, with partial truths in each field, but the sovereign, unassailable truth is found through the Son.
98. 1.20.98As one coin has many names, virtue and truth appear in many forms; Greek truth differs from Christian truth in greatness, proof, and divine power, since Christians are taught by the Son of God.
99. 1.20.99Philosophy is a preliminary training and joint cause, not a necessary condition: most believers received the word of God by faith without it; it justified the Greeks partially, and it helps with clarity and defense against heresies.
100. 1.20.100Christ's teaching is complete in itself; philosophy adds no power to it but serves as a hedge against sophistry and as dessert to the bread of faith; the Greeks who took from the barbarians as their own are thieves who hold partial truths.
101. 1.21.101Clement now turns to chronology, to prove that Hebrew philosophy is the oldest; following Tatian and Cassian, he cites Apion and Ptolemy of Mendes, who date the Exodus under Amosis, in the time of Inachus.
102. 1.21.102Greek history begins with Inachus of Argos; the Exodus under Amosis falls in Inachus' time, long before the Trojan War and the other Greek genealogies.
103. 1.21.103Plato follows Acusilaus in making Phoroneus the first man; the mythical events of Greece are dated by the kings of Argos after Inachus.
104. 1.21.104The various dates given for the fall of Troy are set out; Theseus and Heracles lived a generation earlier.
105. 1.21.105Moses preceded the deification of Dionysus by 604 years and the other Greek heroes and gods by even more.
106. 1.21.106Cadmus, Isis, Prometheus, and Apis all lived generations after Moses; Sarapis is explained as the deified Apis.
107. 1.21.107Leto, Apollo, the first musicians, Homer and Hesiod, the lawgivers, and the sages all came after Moses, who is older even than most Greek gods.
108. 1.21.108The Sibyl, of whom there were several, is older than Orpheus.
109. 1.21.109Clement begins the chronology of Israel after Moses: Joshua, then the judges Othniel and Ehud.
110. 1.21.110The chronology continues through Deborah and Barak, Gideon, Abimelech, and Tola.
111. 1.21.111The chronology continues through Jephthah, the minor judges, Samson, Eli, Samuel, and Saul.
112. 1.21.112The chronology continues through Samuel, Saul, and David; from Joshua to David's death Clement counts 523 years and seven months.
113. 1.21.113Solomon reigned forty years; Nathan and Ahijah prophesied; from Moses to Solomon some count 595 or 576 years, or 610 on another reckoning.
114. 1.21.114To Solomon's death Clement counts 683 years and seven months from Moses; Solomon married Hiram's daughter at the time of Menelaus; the kingdom divided under Rehoboam and Jeroboam.
115. 1.21.115The chronology continues through Abijam, Asa, Jehoshaphat, Joram, and Ahaziah, with the prophets Jehu, Elijah, Micaiah, and Elisha.
116. 1.21.116Athaliah reigned until Joash, saved by Jehosheba, took the throne; from Solomon to Elisha's death Clement counts 181 years.
117. 1.21.117The dates given for Homer vary widely, but on any reckoning he and Hesiod lived after Solomon and Elisha.
118. 1.21.118Under Amaziah, Uzziah, and Jotham, the prophets Amos, Isaiah, Hosea, Jonah, Micah, and Joel prophesied.
119. 1.21.119Under Ahaz, Hoshea, and Hezekiah, Israel was deported; God added fifteen years to Hezekiah's life by turning back the sun; the prophets of this time lived about the age of Lycurgus.
120. 1.21.120Manasseh, Amon, and Josiah reigned; Josiah destroyed the idols and kept the Passover; the book of the law was found; Huldah, Zephaniah, and Jeremiah prophesied; Josiah was killed by Neco.
121. 1.21.121The last kings of Judah, Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim, Jehoiachin, and Zedekiah, bring the chronology to the exile: from Moses' birth, 1,085 years; from David, 482.
122. 1.21.122Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem, blinded Zedekiah, and began the seventy-year captivity; Jeremiah, Habakkuk, Ezekiel, Nahum, Daniel, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi prophesied.
123. 1.21.123In the period of the exile and return: Nehemiah rebuilt Jerusalem; Esther and Mordecai, the three youths in the furnace, Daniel in the lions' den, Jonah, and Tobit belong to this time.
124. 1.21.124Zerubbabel won the right to restore Jerusalem; with Ezra came the renewal of the Scriptures, the Passover, and the end of foreign marriages; from Moses' birth to the restoration Clement counts 1,155 years.
125. 1.21.125Daniel's prophecy of the seventy weeks, fulfilled from the Babylonian captivity, is quoted in full.
126. 1.21.126Clement interprets the seventy weeks: the temple rebuilt in seven weeks, Christ anointed within the sixty-two, and the last week ending with Nero and the destruction of Jerusalem under Vespasian.
127. 1.21.127The captivity began in the forty-eighth Olympiad and lasted seventy years to the second year of Darius, when Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi prophesied and Zerubbabel rebuilt the temple.
128. 1.21.128Clement lists the Persian kings (235 years) and the Macedonian kings of Egypt.
129. 1.21.129Even the latest prophets, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, were older than Pythagoras and Thales, the oldest of the Greek sages.
130. 1.21.130Solomon, contemporary with the Trojan War, was far older than the Greek sages, and Moses older still; letters between Solomon and the kings of Egypt and Tyre are recorded by Alexander Polyhistor.
131. 1.21.131The poems ascribed to Orpheus and Musaeus are late forgeries; the early Greek poets are all dated centuries after Moses.
132. 1.21.132Clement lists many Greek soothsayers and Sibyls, all later than the Hebrew prophets.
133. 1.21.133Many Greeks practiced divination, from Mopsus and Pythagoras to Socrates, who spoke of his divine sign.
134. 1.21.134Clement lists more Egyptian and Greek seers, all later than the Hebrew prophets.
135. 1.21.135Greek seers foretold by observation or demonic influence, but the Hebrew prophets spoke by God's power; Clement lists them from Adam to Malachi.
136. 1.21.136There were thirty-five prophets and five prophetesses, and in the New Testament John, Anna, Simeon, and Zechariah; the Greek chronology from Moses is then summarized.
137. 1.21.137The chronology of Greek legend from Perseus to the first Olympiad.
138. 1.21.138Eratosthenes' chronology from Troy to Alexander, and the Roman dates from the founding of Rome.
139. 1.21.139The chronology is brought down to the death of the emperor Commodus (AD 192), with the differing reckonings of the historians.
140. 1.21.140The biblical chronology from Adam to the death of Commodus is summarized by major periods.
141. 1.21.141The Jewish chronographers Demetrius and Eupolemus reckon the years of the captivities and from Adam to the Hellenistic kings.
142. 1.21.142Some historians count seventy-five nations from Moses' seventy-five descendants of Jacob; Scripture counts seventy-two languages; the Greeks have five dialects.
143. 1.21.143Plato attributes language to gods and even animals; the original languages are barbarian and name things by nature, as Plato admits of the word “fire.”
144. 1.21.144Clement lists the Roman emperors and their reigns from Augustus to Commodus, to fix the date of Christ's birth.
145. 1.21.145Christ was born in the twenty-eighth year of Augustus; baptized at about thirty in Tiberius' fifteenth year, he preached for one year; some even fix the day of his birth on 25 Pachon.
146. 1.21.146The Basilidians celebrate Christ's baptism on 15 or 11 Tybi and date his passion variously; Clement applies Daniel's 2,300 days to the years from Nero's desecration to the fall of Jerusalem.
147. 1.21.147Daniel's 1,290 and 1,335 days are cited; Josephus and others reckon from Moses; Matthew's genealogy has three periods of fourteen generations, six sevens.
148. 1.22.148The Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek under Ptolemy I or II, with Demetrius of Phalerum managing the work, for the library at Alexandria.
149. 1.22.149Seventy elders translated separately, yet their translations agreed word for word by God's will, a kind of Greek prophecy; so too Ezra, inspired, restored the Scriptures lost in the exile.
150. 1.22.150Aristobulus says Plato and Pythagoras learned from an earlier Greek translation of the law; Numenius calls Plato “Moses speaking Attic”; Clement now turns to Moses' life.
151. 1.23.151Moses, of Chaldean descent and born in Egypt, was hidden three months from Pharaoh's decree and then placed in a papyrus basket by the river, watched by his sister.
152. 1.23.152Pharaoh's daughter found Moses, his sister brought his own mother as nurse, and the princess named him Moses, from the Egyptian word for water.
153. 1.23.153Moses, also called Joachim and in heaven Melchi, was educated by Egyptians and Greeks in every science; Eupolemus says he taught letters to the Jews, from whom they passed to the Phoenicians and Greeks; he killed the Egyptian who attacked a Hebrew.
154. 1.23.154A tradition says Moses killed the Egyptian by a word, as Peter did Ananias and Sapphira; Artapanus tells how Moses, freed from prison, spoke God's name into Pharaoh's ear and struck him speechless.
155. 1.23.155Ezekiel the tragic poet's drama The Exodus tells Moses' birth and upbringing in verse, in Moses' own words.
156. 1.23.156Ezekiel's drama continues with the Hebrew's challenge to Moses; Moses fled and became a shepherd, a training for ruling the human flock.
157. 1.23.157The Egyptians ignored God's warnings; the Hebrews' taking of Egyptian goods at the Exodus was not greed but a just wage for years of unpaid slavery.
158. 1.24.158Moses was prophet, lawgiver, general, statesman, and philosopher; true kingship is divine rule by God and his Son, above rule by spiritedness or mere conquest.
159. 1.24.159The worst kingship serves the desires; true rule is by reason and virtue; the true king rules willing subjects by law, as Christ does, to whom God has subjected all things.
160. 1.24.160Moses was the source of Greek strategy: leading Israel out, he avoided the direct road, took the desert route, and traveled by night, and the long journey trained the people in faith.
161. 1.24.161Moses' foresight was proved when the pursuing Egyptians drowned; the pillar of fire led Israel through the desert, training them in courage and endurance before the promised land.
162. 1.24.162Moses' tactic of attacking from the desert was imitated by Miltiades at Marathon, who led the Athenians by night along a trackless way to surprise the Persians.
163. 1.24.163A guiding fire led Thrasybulus by night, making the pillar of fire credible to Greeks; the pillar signifies that God cannot be imaged and that his light is unchanging.
164. 1.24.164Early Greeks worshiped pillars before statues; the pillar of fire and the burning bush symbolize the holy light that returns to heaven through the wood of the cross.
165. 1.25.165Plato learned legislation from Moses: he preferred a constitution with one aim, looking to one God and justice; the true statesman is the Creator, and good government unites fitting rulers and obedient subjects, as Moses sought.
166. 1.25.166Plato made contemplation the goal of both statesman and law-abiding citizen; law is true opinion that finds what truly is, as God is “He who is”; some call it right reason commanding and forbidding.
167. 1.26.167The law given through Moses is a rule of justice leading to God; Paul says it was a schoolmaster guarding us until Christ; Moses was a living law.
168. 1.26.168Moses' constitution and judgments corrected souls; the philosophers call only the wise man king, lawgiver, general, just, and holy, and Scripture shows all this in Moses, who was truly wise.
169. 1.26.169As the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, the true lawgiver cares for the human flock; Christ is both shepherd and lawgiver, the Word through whom the law was given and who reveals the Father.
170. 1.26.170The Greeks disbelieve that God gave the law through Moses, yet claim their own lawgivers received laws from gods, imitating Moses without acknowledging him.
171. 1.27.171The law's punishments are like a physician's surgery: they heal the soul and, when someone is incurable, protect the rest of the body politic.
172. 1.27.172God's judgments discipline us so that we are not condemned; he trained Israel in the desert as a father disciplines his son.
173. 1.27.173Punishment deters others and even benefits the incurable; God's providence is both sovereign and good; one may rise from servant to faithful attendant to son and friend of God.
174. 1.27.174Paul shows the law's benefit to the Jews; wisdom bears law and mercy; the law and the gospel are the work of one Lord, Christ, God's power and wisdom.
175. 1.27.175The prophets and Paul reproach those who do not understand the law; the law is good if used rightly, and its aim is love from a pure heart.
176. 1.28.176Moses' philosophy has four parts: history, law, priestly ritual, and theology; true dialectic, as Plato says, aims to speak and act in a way pleasing to God.
177. 1.28.177True dialectic, joined to true philosophy, rises to God and guides right action; Scripture calls us to be approved money-changers, testing all things and keeping what is good.
178. 1.28.178Dialectic leads to true wisdom only with the Savior, who clears the mist of ignorance from the soul's eye and reveals the Father to whom he wishes.
179. 1.28.179Paul knew the mystery by revelation and spoke to those able to receive it; the law must be read in three ways, as sign, as commandment, and as prophecy; Scripture must be studied carefully, not all lumped together.
180. 1.29.180The Egyptian priest in Plato calls the Greeks children without ancient learning; the “old” wisdom is that of the barbarians, the Hebrews, while Greek myths and reasonings are childish.
181. 1.29.181Hermas says revelations are given for the double-minded; learning strengthens the wavering; Scripture calls the law a light, and Pindar and Hesiod, guessing, speak of the divine lawgiver who gave justice to humans.
182. 1.29.182The law of nature and the law of learning come from the one God and the one Word; Moses calls the Lord a covenant, and the Preaching of Peter calls him Law and Word. So ends Book 1.
183. 2.1.1Book 2 will show that the Greeks stole and falsified the Hebrews' doctrines on faith, wisdom, knowledge, hope, repentance, self-control, and the fear of God, and imitated their symbolic style.
184. 2.1.2Clement will also answer Greek charges against Christians, hoping to convert both Jews and Greeks by a loving refutation, and will examine the general studies, astrology, and magic.
185. 2.1.3Clement cares for meaning, not polished Greek; truth hidden among Greek writings must be sought with effort, like a rose among thorns or a pearl in an oyster.
186. 2.2.4Proverbs teaches that deeds must follow words and that we should take what is useful from all learning; the fear of God is turning from evil, and God disciplines those he loves.
187. 2.2.5The Christian philosophy is perfect: Wisdom speaks of knowledge of nature and of hidden things; it leads to God, who is far in essence but near in power, seeing all things.
188. 2.2.6Moses, knowing God cannot be known by human wisdom, entered the darkness, that is, the formless thoughts about God, who is beyond place and time and cannot be contained.
189. 2.2.7Solomon praises those who seek wisdom and understanding; the inspired search the depths of God, but holy things must not be given to the dogs.
190. 2.2.8Heraclitus blames those who do not believe; the prophets say the righteous live by faith and that without faith there is no understanding; faith is a voluntary preconception and assent, as Hebrews defines it.
191. 2.2.9Faith is an intellectual assent and the beginning of action and knowledge; for the believer, God's voice in Scripture is itself an irrefutable demonstration; blessed are those who believe without seeing.
192. 2.3.10The Basilidians make faith a natural gift of the elect; the Valentinians leave faith to simple Christians and claim knowledge for themselves, the spiritual saved by nature.
193. 2.3.11If faith were a natural gift, there would be no praise or blame, no repentance, no baptism, no need of the Son or the Father: salvation rests on voluntary faith.
194. 2.4.12Christians, free to choose, rest on faith in God's word as an unshakable criterion; Hebrews 11 shows that faith justified the righteous even before the law.
195. 2.4.13Hebrews lists many heroes of faith; truth is known through sense, mind, knowledge, and opinion; faith passes beyond opinion to truth; first principles cannot be demonstrated.
196. 2.4.14Only faith reaches the first principle of all things, which the Greek philosophers never knew; knowledge is demonstrative, but faith is a grace that rises to the simple, immaterial God.
197. 2.4.15Materialists drag everything down to what can be touched, while Platonists defend invisible forms; Christ gives new eyes to see what faith grasps; faith, like a money-changer's skill, is the criterion of knowledge.
198. 2.4.16Conjecture counterfeits faith; virtue is learned by obeying the Word, and to obey him is to believe him; faith and knowledge support each other; even Epicurus called faith a preconception without which no inquiry is possible.
199. 2.4.17No one can learn without a preconception, which is faith; so Isaiah's “if you do not believe, you will not understand” is true, and Heraclitus paraphrased it.
200. 2.4.18Plato says the happy man must share in truth from the beginning, and that kingly knowledge makes one kingly; so Christians, belonging to Christ the King, are truly kingly; law is right reason, and the true king is a living law.
201. 2.4.19Christ, who fulfilled the law, is the living law inscribed on the high wood of the cross; the philosophers too call the wise man king and law right reason, and the Stoics make the wise man alone king, priest, and prophet.
202. 2.5.20The Greek doctrine that the wise man possesses all things and is dear to God comes from Moses: Abraham was God's friend, Jacob saw God, Isaac was a type of Christ's sacrifice, and God spoke with Moses as with a friend.
203. 2.5.21Moses was wise, king, and lawgiver, but Christ surpasses all: he is the true beauty and light, the king hailed by children, rich enough to scorn the devil's offers, the high priest after Melchizedek, and the lawgiver who spoke through the prophets.
204. 2.5.22Christ, whose Father is God, is the truly noble; Plato too calls the wise man rich, free, beautiful, and king, agreeing with Scripture that riches lie in the soul and freedom comes from the truth.
205. 2.5.23Plato holds that faithfulness is the greatest virtue, containing the others, and that peace is best; so faith is the mother of the virtues.
206. 2.5.24Wisdom belongs to the faithful; knowledge of the first principle is by faith; if Pythagoreans accept “he himself said it,” how much more should we trust Christ, the only Savior; only the mind truly hears.
207. 2.6.25Faith comes from hearing the preached word of God; the word of the Lord is itself a demonstration; as in a ball game, teaching needs hearers who receive it with faith.
208. 2.6.26Teaching needs a receptive learner, as fire needs dry wood and a magnet iron; God calls all, knowing who will refuse, since obedience rests with us; actions are judged by choice, and repentance is knowledge that comes late.
209. 2.6.27Repentance and hope arise from faith; the faithful servant keeps what God has entrusted; God is faithful and worthy of belief; faith is not mere supposition but assent to what is strong.
210. 2.6.28Faith is a willing preconception, confidence a firm judgment; we trust God alone, who keeps his promises; Abraham's faith was reckoned as righteousness, and we, his seed by hearing, must believe; the one God gave both covenants.
211. 2.6.29The Gentile church has inherited Israel's covenant; the old and new covenants are one in power, given by one God through the Son; salvation runs “from faith to faith,” from prophecy to gospel.
212. 2.6.30Faith is not cheap: if it were merely human it would have died out, but it grows everywhere; whether born of love or fear, it is divine; fear, the law's schoolmaster, itself depends on faith.
213. 2.6.31Faith is the first step to salvation, followed by fear, hope, repentance, self-control, and endurance, leading to love and knowledge; as Barnabas says, faith is the foundation of knowledge, as breath is of life.
214. 2.7.32To attack fear is to attack the law and the God who gave it; without law, desire rules; the fear the commandments inspire is not irrational but rational, whatever the philosophers call it.
215. 2.7.33Renamed “caution,” fear is rational, avoiding harm and leading to repentance; the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, so those who reject the law are without wisdom.
216. 2.7.34The law threatens not outward misfortunes but real evils, such as adultery and the soul's death; it does not create sin but reveals it, as a good teacher shows what saves and what harms.
217. 2.7.35The law revealed sin but did not create it; it is a good schoolmaster to Christ, leading through fear to repentance; the one near the Lord endures hardship for the truth; Barnabas too joins fear with keeping the commandments.
218. 2.8.36The Basilidians read “fear is the beginning of wisdom” of the Ruler's astonishment at the gospel; Valentinus writes that the angels feared Adam because of the higher seed placed in him, and destroyed their work.
219. 2.8.37There is one first principle; God gave fear through Moses to tame the hard of heart; if the Ruler's astonishment began wisdom, then ignorance would be the cause of God's wisdom, creation, and salvation.
220. 2.8.38Clement presses dilemmas against Basilides and Valentinus: if ignorance is good, baptism is needless; if evil, evil causes the best things; and the angels' plot against Adam fails on every account of what they knew.
221. 2.8.39Against the Marcionites, who call the law just but not good, Clement argues that the fear of the Lord destroys evil and so is good, bringing fearlessness and moderation; to fear sinning and keep the commandments honors God.
222. 2.8.40Not all fear is a passion: superstition fears passionate demons, but fear of the passionless God is itself free from passion, since what one fears is falling away from God.
223. 2.9.41Fear leads to repentance and hope, and hope to love; love is fellowship of life; hospitality, philanthropy, and affection accompany it; strangers to the world are our guests, friends, and brothers.
224. 2.9.42Brotherly love binds those who share the Spirit, as Paul teaches in Romans 12; the Jews had zeal without knowledge, following the letter of the law and not the Christ it prophesied, the end of the law.
225. 2.9.43The calling of the Gentiles was foretold because of Israel's disobedience, yet God's goodness seeks Israel's repentance; the Shepherd of Hermas knows righteous people among Gentiles and Jews even before the law.
226. 2.9.44Hermas says the apostles, after death, preached to the righteous dead and gave them the seal of baptism, so that they too were built into the tower; Gentiles who keep the law by nature are a law to themselves.
227. 2.9.45The virtues follow one another from faith to love and knowledge; only God is wise by nature; philosophy begins in wonder, as Plato, the Traditions of Matthias, and the Gospel of the Hebrews say; godliness is following God.
228. 2.10.46The Christian philosopher holds to three things, contemplation, keeping the commandments, and forming good people; Leviticus 18 commands Israel to keep God's ordinances and live by them.
229. 2.10.47Egypt and Canaan symbolize the world and the passions; “he will live in them” means life for Jews and Gentiles alike; the repeated “I am the Lord your God” calls us to seek and know God, a knowledge never separated from just action.
230. 2.11.48Worldly knowledge puffs up, but faithful knowledge is a sure demonstration from the Scriptures; faith and demonstration are each twofold, scientific or opinion-based, and faith is a power of God.
231. 2.11.49Faith moves mountains and heals; human demonstration uses rhetoric and logic, but the highest demonstration, from the divine Scriptures, produces faith and true knowledge.
232. 2.11.50The manna jar holding a tenth of three measures points to sense, speech, and mind; the one who knows avoids sins of all three, as the Lord teaches; the human being is a decad.
233. 2.11.51Rising above the nine parts of the cosmos, the soul reaches the tenth, the knowledge of God, as the tithe and Passover signify; the one who knows stands firm in faith, while the self-wise drift like Cain into “tossing.”
234. 2.11.52Abraham and Moses “stood” before God, as faith keeps the soul steady; false knowledge has discredited true knowledge, as Paul warns Timothy, which is why the heretics reject those letters; the one who knows Christ knows the Father.
235. 2.12.53Faith looks to past and future, with memory and hope; fear grows into faith and then love, not the fear of a beast but a son's reverent fear of his father; blessed is the one in whom love and fear are blended.
236. 2.12.54Knowledge understands prophecy, whose fulfillment in past and present confirms what is still hoped for; faith grasps the past and hope the future; even the philosophers say assent is in our power.
237. 2.12.55All assent is a kind of faith; the Shepherd of Hermas makes faith the virtue that holds the church together, with the other virtues its daughters; fear God, not the devil; repentance is great understanding.
238. 2.13.56Those forgiven must sin no more; the first repentance cleanses the life of ignorance; but the Lord foresaw human weakness and the devil's jealous schemes against the forgiven.
239. 2.13.57God in mercy allows one second repentance after baptism for those overcome by temptation; but repeated repentance followed by the same sins is no better than unbelief, since such a person sins knowingly.
240. 2.13.58Converts receive forgiveness once in baptism; one who sins afterward and repents may be pardoned but should feel shame, since there is no second washing; the reborn must abandon their old works, not repent of the same sin again and again.
241. 2.13.59Repeated requests for pardon for repeated sins are only a show of repentance; Scripture blesses those who fear the Lord; passions are excessive impulses disobedient to reason, and since obedience is in our power, voluntary acts are judged.
242. 2.14.60Involuntary acts, done in ignorance or under necessity, are not judged; Clement lists examples of ignorance of self, act, person, instrument, manner, and purpose.
243. 2.14.61The law distinguished involuntary from voluntary offenses; spiritually understood, the one who cannot restrain the generative word, the idle talker, is to blame; God judges the intention, as Lot's wife shows.
244. 2.15.62Voluntary acts spring from appetite, choice, or thought; Clement distinguishes sin, mishap, and wrong; sin comes from ignorance or weakness, but accepting instruction and obeying the commandments are in our power.
245. 2.15.63Giving ourselves up to anger and desire wrongs our own soul, as the tragic figures Laius, Medea, and Ajax confess.
246. 2.15.64Desire ruins many in tragedy and comedy; a mishap is an unexpected sin, a sin an involuntary wrong, and a wrong is voluntary vice; for believers sin has no dominion, since by Christ's wound we are healed.
247. 2.15.65The psalm distinguishes sins wiped out, covered, not counted, and forgiven; this blessing belongs to those chosen through Christ; love covers sins and God, who prefers repentance, wipes them out.
248. 2.15.66Sins not arising from choice are not counted; God, who is both just and good, forgives sins, as Jeremiah says; John's first letter distinguishes sins unto death and not unto death.
249. 2.15.67Following Barnabas, Clement reads Psalm 1 with the food laws: scaleless fish, the pig, and birds of prey stand for kinds of sinners; a wise teacher read the three phrases as Gentiles, Jewish belief, and the heresies.
250. 2.15.68Another teacher applied Psalm 1 to evil opinions, the broad way, and fellowship with destructive powers; Peter's Preaching calls the Lord Law and Word; the food laws also teach avoidance of sins in word, deed, and thought.
251. 2.15.69Psalm 1 says the ungodly will not stand in judgment; the unbeliever is already judged; through Ezekiel the Lord rebukes the shepherds who neglect the weak, since the Father rejoices over one sinner saved; Abraham obeyed.
252. 2.15.70Greek maxims such as “Follow God,” “Pardon is better than punishment,” and “Give a pledge and ruin is at hand” come from Scripture; Enoch after Cain shows that repentance brings pardon, understood as healing; “Know yourself” means seeing God in one's brother.
253. 2.15.71Knowing oneself leads to love of God and neighbor, on which the law and the prophets hang, and to Christ's command of mutual love; mercy and faithfulness purge sins, and the fear of the Lord turns from evil.
254. 2.16.72Critics say joy and pity are passions; but we err if we read Scripture's language about God in a fleshly way, for the prophets spoke as we could hear, the Lord accommodating himself to human weakness.
255. 2.16.73God makes our joy his own without being changed, as Christ is fed in the least of his brothers; God shows mercy richly through the law, the prophets, and the Son, and only God, the greater, truly shows mercy to us.
256. 2.16.74Against the Gnostics, we are not parts of God or of his substance, or God would sin in us; God, rich in mercy, cares for us out of goodness, though we are neither parts of him nor his children by nature.
257. 2.16.75God's greatest goodness is to care for us though we are not related to him by nature, only as works of his will; he calls to adoption those who seek the truth; our sins, not God, ensnare us.
258. 2.17.76Knowledge is a state unshakable by reason, ignorance a yielding impression; Clement defines the related terms: experience, cognizance, intellection, understanding, knowing, and truth.
259. 2.17.77We fail to act from inability, unwillingness, or both; we cannot become like the Lord in substance, since adoption is not nature, but we can become eternal sons who behold the Father; willing comes first; the one who knows lives consistently.
260. 2.18.78The virtues recorded by Moses gave the Greeks the beginning of ethics; the law teaches godliness, justice, and prudence by forbidding idols and binding us to the Maker and Father.
261. 2.18.79God rejects the sacrifices of the lawless and accepts prayer, justice, and a broken heart; Pythagoras's “do not step over a balance” comes from Proverbs; Clement begins defining courage, self-restraint, and related virtues.
262. 2.18.80Keeping the commandments secures life; the virtues imply one another, so the one who truly has one has all; self-control, joined with courage, prudence, and justice, makes us like the Lord as far as mortals can be.
263. 2.18.81God is without need or passion; we, subject to passion, need self-control to become like him and need little; the law forbidding men to wear women's clothing teaches manliness in endurance, even to martyrdom.
264. 2.18.82The law exempts from war the man with a new house, vineyard, or bride, both so soldiers are undistracted and out of humanity, lest another enjoy his labors.
265. 2.18.83The law's promises show that the hopes of the disciplined are not in vain; the Midianite women, by beauty and pleasure, led Israel from self-restraint into idolatry until fear restrained them.
266. 2.18.84True understanding of the law is not passionate fear; the fear of the Lord gives life, as Barnabas teaches; the law forbids lending at interest to a brother, and the generous receive the interest of virtue and good name.
267. 2.18.85The law's humanity shows in paying the poor the same day, forbidding creditors to seize pledges by force, and leaving gleanings and uncut corners for the poor.
268. 2.18.86The law shows God's justice and goodness in the gleanings, the tithes, the sabbatical year, and the jubilee restoring land to the poor; so it is good and a teacher of justice; mercy to the poor is blessed.
269. 2.18.87Love shows itself in gentleness, patience, and freedom from envy and resentment; the law commands returning a stray animal, teaching us to treat what we find as a deposit and to bear no grudge.
270. 2.18.88The law commands love of strangers as oneself, forbids abhorring an Egyptian, requires offering peace before war, and protects the captive woman, allowing intercourse only in marriage and for children.
271. 2.18.89The law restrains the captor's desire by a waiting period and by cutting the captive's hair; if he no longer wants her, he may not sell her or keep her as a slave but must set her free.
272. 2.18.90The law commands helping an enemy's burdened animal and returning his stray, training us not to rejoice at enemies' misfortunes but to pray for them; forgetting wrongs ends enmity and leads to concord.
273. 2.18.91The law is humane, a schoolmaster to Christ, and the one God is good with justice; the Lord's saying on mercy and measure sums it up; the law protects servants, debtors, and suppliants, and God tests hearts.
274. 2.18.92Pythagoras learned gentleness to animals from the law, which forbids separating the newborn from its mother for seven days; how much more does it condemn the Greeks' exposure of human infants.
275. 2.18.93There is no excuse for exposing children: one who does not want children should not marry; the law forbids killing an animal with its young, and the Romans spare pregnant condemned women, showing the law's humane concern.
276. 2.18.94Those who kill pregnant animals for delicacies make the womb a tomb, against the law forbidding boiling a lamb in its mother's milk; the unmuzzled ox and the ban on yoking ox with donkey teach fairness to foreigners and, allegorically, discernment in teaching.
277. 2.18.95The law forbids destroying fruit trees, even an enemy's, and commands tending young trees for three years, offering the firstfruits to God in the fourth.
278. 2.18.96The farming law teaches us to prune away sins until faith is firm; the fourth year signifies the four virtues offered to God; God gives the strength and gifts that we, as ministers of grace, pass on to others.
279. 2.19.97The one who knows is the true image and likeness of God, imitating him in self-control, justice, and generosity; he who does and teaches is greatest; pride provokes God, and repentance must reach mouth, heart, and hands.
280. 2.19.98Hands, heart, and mouth stand for action, counsel, and speech; God chooses the repentant as his people, and even one counts as the people; true nobility lies in choosing the good, which Adam, noblest of all, neglected, exchanging immortality for death, though not forever.
281. 2.19.99Noah was saved by devotion to God; of Abraham's many children only Isaac inherited, and of Isaac's twins the younger received the blessing, a prophetic type; all things belong to the wise, who long for the one through whom all things were made.
282. 2.19.100The good man becomes fellow citizen of the righteous of old and a king, as the Hittites said to Abraham; Plato's goal of likeness to God may come from Moses, whose law calls it “following” God; Christ bids us be merciful like the Father.
283. 2.19.101The Stoics' “life according to nature” borrows from Moses but wrongly calls God nature; Scripture praises those who love the law; Clement lists three kinds of friendship: of virtue, of exchange, and of habit or pleasure.
284. 2.19.102Friendship is of gods, men, or animals; the one who does good is God's image and receives good in giving; we should help friends and enemies alike; the image of God lies in mind and reason, not the body.
285. 2.20.103Endurance leads to likeness to God, as Daniel and his companions show; the king of Babylon threw Daniel to the lions, but the Lord, King of all, brought him out unharmed.
286. 2.20.104The one who knows has the patience of Job, Jonah, Daniel, and the three young men, bearing witness by word and life, crucified to the world, carrying the cross and following the Lord.
287. 2.20.105The law trains us in self-control, the foundation of the virtues, by forbidding the fattest foods, pork and fish without fins or scales, which serve luxury.
288. 2.20.106The mysteries' food taboos also derive from the law, which teaches us to master the belly and cut out desire by condemning pleasure; Menelaus, overcome by Helen's beauty, could not kill her.
289. 2.20.107The tragedians mock Menelaus for yielding to Helen; Antisthenes would shoot Aphrodite for corrupting women; pleasure, even if God-given for procreation, must not be admitted; Xenophon's Virtue rebukes pleasure's luxuries.
290. 2.20.108Pleasure, grief, fear, and desire require hard training; pleasure nails the soul to the body; losing one's life for Christ, whether in martyrdom or by separating the soul from pleasure, is the meaning of the cross.
291. 2.20.109The practice of death is to be content with natural needs; we must put on God's armor and take every thought captive to Christ, using wealth, health, and life without being moved by them, which requires much discernment.
292. 2.20.110The passions are impressions stamped on the soul by the spiritual powers we wrestle against; some are thrown, but athletes of faith win the crown and the powers give up; things move by impulse or by being moved.
293. 2.20.111Humans, unlike animals, can judge impressions; the evil powers dangle pleasures like branches before cattle and enslave those who cannot tell true from false; each deception leaves its image through our assent.
294. 2.20.112The Basilidians call the passions “appendages,” spirits of animals and plants attached to the soul, whose characteristics make the soul's desires like those of beasts.
295. 2.20.113The Basilidian man is like a Trojan horse full of spirits; even Isidore, Basilides' son, warns that the doctrine gives the wicked an excuse to say they were forced.
296. 2.20.114Isidore urges mastering the lower soul; Valentinus writes that the heart is like an inn fouled by demons until the one good Father, revealed through the Son, visits and purifies it, so that the pure in heart see God.
297. 2.20.115If the soul is saved by nature, as Valentinus holds, why is it not cared for from the start? If it must repent, salvation comes from obedient change, not nature; fleshly desires cloud the soul like marsh mists.
298. 2.20.116Desires darken the mind; the soul, like gold, must be purified; Barnabas says that before faith the heart was a house of demons, full of idolatry.
299. 2.20.117Barnabas speaks of sins, not indwelling demons, being removed when God comes to dwell in us; Clement tells of a heretic leader who claimed to fight pleasure by indulging it.
300. 2.20.118Like Aristippus with Lais, the Nicolaitans misuse Nicolaus' saying “abuse the flesh” to justify indulgence, though he meant self-discipline; they are no better than Sardanapalus; pleasure merely accompanies natural needs.
301. 2.20.119Pleasure is only a helper to natural needs, like salt to food; when it rules, it begets desire; Epicurus made it the goal; Diogenes mocks the soft lovers of luxury.
302. 2.20.120The law threatens fear so that we may win peace by unceasing struggle against the passions, especially pleasure, which attacks even in dreams; the Greeks, like Socrates, teach the same, so they cannot fault the law.
303. 2.20.121Greek philosophers too opposed pleasure: Antisthenes preferred madness, Crates praised the soul free of gold and love and prescribed hunger or the noose for lust, and the comic poets mocked Zeno's frugality.
304. 2.20.122Even the Greeks admit the value of caution; true wisdom trusts not in words but in the divine commandments and receives divine power; Homer's aegis of Zeus is crowned with fear.
305. 2.20.123The law and caution are precious to the discerning; the Lord seems too demanding only to those who refuse his yoke; those friendly to sin call truth harsh and the one who will not sin with them merciless.
306. 2.20.124The law sets out the finest examples to nourish our love of freedom; the righteous of old were ordinary people who gave themselves wholly to God, and it was counted to them as faith.
307. 2.20.125Zeno would learn more from one Indian enduring fire than from arguments; Christians see martyrs burned and beheaded daily, trained by the law's fear; the “gods” of Psalm 82 are those who rise above pleasure and the flesh.
308. 2.20.126We must avoid exciting foods and luxury; self-restraint is God's great gift, and he will not forsake those who choose it; Christ's kind yoke drives us from faith to faith to salvation.
309. 2.21.127Clement begins a survey of philosophers' views of the goal of life: Epicurus and the Cyrenaics make it pleasure, others freedom from disturbance.
310. 2.21.128Continuing the survey: the Cyrenaics make virtue serve pleasure; the Aristotelians make the goal life according to virtue but require the three kinds of goods, so the poor, the sick, and slaves cannot be happy.
311. 2.21.129The survey continues with the Stoics (Zeno, Cleanthes, Diogenes, Antipater, Archedemus, Panaetius, Posidonius), Ariston, Herillus, the Academics, and Peripatetics such as Lycon and Critolaus.
312. 2.21.130Clement lists the goals proposed by the natural philosophers: contemplation (Anaxagoras), cheerfulness (Democritus), self-sufficiency, and others; the Cyrenaics reject Epicurus's definition of pleasure as absence of pain.
313. 2.21.131Metrodorus, Epicurus's disciple, locates the soul's good in a stable bodily condition and the hope of keeping it.
314. 2.22.131Plato makes the goal twofold, the Good itself and likeness to it in virtuous men; happiness is likeness to God, being just and holy with prudence; so some Christians say the image is given at creation and the likeness at perfection.
315. 2.22.132Plato teaches that likeness to God comes with humility, as Christ said the humble will be exalted; in the Laws, Justice follows God to punish transgressors, and only the humble and orderly, being like God, are dear to him.
316. 2.22.133Plato calls the self-restrained God's friend and happiness flight from evil into likeness to God; Speusippus, Xenocrates, and Polemon give their definitions of happiness.
317. 2.22.134The Christian goal is an endless end: obedience to God, likeness to right reason, and perfect adoption through the Son; Paul calls it eternal life and the fulfillment of hope through the love poured out by the Spirit.
318. 2.22.135Ezekiel describes the righteous man who avoids idolatry, adultery, and oppression, gives to the poor, and takes no interest; he shall live; Isaiah calls the wicked to seek the Lord and turn to him.
319. 2.22.136We wait in faith for the hope of righteousness, and Proverbs says the one who hears Wisdom will dwell confident; Paul bids us imitate him as he imitates Christ, and Christ God; the aim is likeness to God, the goal the fulfillment of the promise.
320. 2.23.137Clement begins his discussion of marriage: it is the lawful union of man and woman for legitimate children; whether to marry depends on the person, time, and age, and should be for children, with a willing and suitable wife.
321. 2.23.138Abraham's words teach that half-sisters by the same mother may not marry; philosophers differed on marriage, Plato approving, Democritus and Epicurus refusing, the Stoics indifferent, but in practice many were slaves to pleasure.
322. 2.23.139One should not urge on others what one would not do oneself; defenders of marriage appeal to nature and “increase and multiply,” but humans should be more faithful than the birds that keep one mate; the childless, they say, lack natural perfection.
323. 2.23.140One should marry for one's country, children, and the completion of the world; the poets pity childless marriage; in sickness a wife's constant care surpasses all others, a true helper as Scripture says.
324. 2.23.141Even Menander admits marriage's goods; it supports the aged, and children preserve a man's memory; the Spartan and Platonic laws penalized not marrying, since without children cities would perish.
325. 2.23.142Refusing marriage is impious and unmanly; since losing children is a great evil, having them is good, and so marriage is good; a child needs both father and mother.
326. 2.23.143Homer prays for a husband and home with like-mindedness; Christian marriage seeks rational concord, adorns character not appearance, treats the wife as life's helper, and must be purged of all impurity, since human seed is more precious than grain.
327. 2.23.144Animals mate in season and depart; Polyxena, even when slain, fell modestly; yielding to the passions is the worst slavery and mastering them the only freedom; transgressors are sold to foreign sins until they repent.
328. 2.23.145Marriage must be kept pure like a sacred image, with prayer morning and night and decency in word and deed; Scripture forbids divorce except for sexual immorality and counts remarriage adultery while the other spouse lives.
329. 2.23.146A wife is beyond suspicion through modesty, prayer, and care of her home; whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery, and the man who divorces her makes her an adulteress, as does the one who receives her, since otherwise she would return to her husband.
330. 2.23.147The law's death penalty for adultery agrees with the gospel, since one Lord gave both: the adulteress dies to the commandments, but the one who repents is reborn; more is required of those given more. Book 2 ends here.
331. 3.1.1Book 3 opens with the heretics' views on marriage: the Valentinians approve it; the Basilidians explain Christ's saying about eunuchs, praising those who renounce marriage for the kingdom to avoid its cares.
332. 3.1.2The Basilidians read “better to marry than to burn” as advice not to wear out the soul in struggle; Isidore counsels marriage for those who cannot pray free of desire, and otherwise brotherly help.
333. 3.1.3Isidore distinguishes necessary from merely natural desires; Clement quotes him to rebuke later Basilidians who claim that their election lets them sin, bringing blasphemy on Christ's name.
334. 3.1.4Self-control covers the tongue, possessions, and desires, and is a gift of divine grace; the church blesses celibacy given by God, admires a single marriage, bears with others' weakness, and permits second marriage to those who burn.
335. 3.2.5The Carpocratians hold wives in common; Epiphanes, son of Carpocrates, died at seventeen and was worshiped as a god in Cephallenia; he taught a doctrine of the Monad.
336. 3.2.6Epiphanes argues from the sun, sky, and nature, which God gives equally to all creatures, that divine justice is community with equality.
337. 3.2.7Epiphanes claims that God gave all things equally, while human laws, introducing “mine and yours,” created lawbreaking and theft; Clement notes that he misunderstands Paul on the law revealing sin.
338. 3.2.8Epiphanes says God made male and female for common union and gave men strong desire, which no law can abolish; Clement answers that this destroys both law and gospel, which forbid adultery and coveting a neighbor's wife.
339. 3.2.9The law's death penalty and Christ's “but I say, do not desire” show the force of the commandment; Epiphanes mocks “you shall not covet” as absurd, since God gave desire, and calls marriage private ownership.
340. 3.2.10Clement reports that the Carpocratians' common meals end in promiscuity in the dark; he says Carpocrates misread Plato, who meant women are open to suitors before marriage but not after.
341. 3.2.11The Persian Magi, Xanthus reports, allowed incest and wife-sharing; Jude's letter prophetically describes such heretics as dreamers speaking arrogant things.
342. 3.3.12The Marcionites refuse marriage not from choice but from hatred of the Creator, whose world they think evil; yet they eat his food, breathe his air, and received the gospel in his world.
343. 3.3.13The Marcionites took from the philosophers the idea that birth is evil; but the philosophers meant that the divine soul is sent into the world as a place of punishment, a view belonging to believers in reincarnation.
344. 3.3.14Heraclitus, Empedocles, the Sibyl, and Homer lament birth and the frailty of mortal life.
345. 3.3.15Theognis says it is best never to be born; Euripides would mourn births and celebrate deaths, and asks whether life is death.
346. 3.3.16Herodotus's Solon calls man a misfortune; Homer compares men to leaves; Plato attributes to Orpheus the idea that the body is the soul's tomb and prison.
347. 3.3.17Philolaus says the soul is buried in the body as a punishment; Pindar blesses the initiate; Plato's Phaedo calls the body an evil and philosophy a practice of dying.
348. 3.3.18Plato says the philosopher's soul flees the body, like Paul's cry about “the body of this death”; in the Republic he welcomes old age for freeing him from sexual desire, a savage master.
349. 3.3.19Plato calls this life a prison but forbids escaping it by suicide, and speaks piously of the world as receiving all good from its Maker; he gave Marcion no ground for calling matter evil.
350. 3.3.20Plato traces the world's evils to the disorder of matter, pities the toiling human race, and in the Epinomis describes how hard birth and upbringing are.
351. 3.3.21Heraclitus too calls life death; Clement concludes that Marcion took his strange doctrines from Plato, ungratefully and ignorantly.
352. 3.3.22The Greek tragedians complained of the pains of bearing and raising children; the Marcionites took such complaints godlessly and turned them against the Creator.
353. 3.3.23More tragic laments: no mortal is happy, human woes are endless.
354. 3.3.24Clement thinks the Pythagoreans married for children and then abstained; their ban on beans, he suggests, was because beans were thought to cause barrenness.
355. 3.4.25Marcion is self-controlled only out of hatred of the Creator; Christ's “let the dead bury their dead” does not condemn the flesh; the Nicolaitans misuse a story of Nicolaus giving up his wife to justify sexual immorality.
356. 3.4.26Nicolaus himself was faithful to one wife and his children lived chastely; his gesture renounced passion, and “abusing the flesh” meant self-control, as Matthias also taught.
357. 3.4.27Some heretics call promiscuity “mystical fellowship”; one quoted “give to everyone who asks” to a Christian virgin, who answered innocently that he should speak to her mother about marriage; they falsify Christ's words.
358. 3.4.28Such “fellowship” belongs in the brothel; Paul teaches Christians to put off the old man and put on the new, to imitate God in love, and not even to name sexual immorality among them.
359. 3.4.29Their doctrine comes from an apocryphal book telling how the One had “fellowship” with an Inspiration to produce the Beloved and invisible powers; they turn this into a license for carnal union.
360. 3.4.30The followers of Prodicus claim to be sons of the first God, above all law, and live for pleasure; but they commit adultery in secret like slaves, and whoever sins is a slave.
361. 3.4.31One cannot live for God while giving oneself to every desire; if the Gnostics are strangers in the world, they should behave as good sojourners, not like adulterers the pagans themselves condemn.
362. 3.4.32Lawless living is hateful to human and divine lawgivers, as Phinehas's zeal shows; John says those who walk in darkness cannot claim fellowship with God.
363. 3.4.33Those who live like the worst of the worldly cannot claim a higher nature; Christ demands righteousness greater than the Pharisees', and Scripture teaches obedience and self-control.
364. 3.4.34Some claim the lower body was made by an inferior power, contrary to Christ, who said the same God made inner and outer man; the “Opposers” commit adultery to defy the lesser god who gave the law.
365. 3.4.35False prophets are known by their works; if the commandments against shameful deeds are good, the “Opposers” are fighting the good and doing evil.
366. 3.4.36Christ commands reconciliation and good works, not defiance and display of vice; if the Opposers truly defied the lawgiver, why only in matters of self-control, and not by overturning the seasons like Xerxes?
367. 3.4.37If the Opposers were consistent they would defy every commandment, even to abstain from marriage and food, and worship idols; by following the lawgiver's will to sin they make him stronger than their own “good” father.
368. 3.4.38The Opposers misread Malachi's “they opposed God and were saved,” which reports the grumbling of the chastised people, not a command; if any God is “shameless,” it is the devil.
369. 3.4.39Paul condemns “let us do evil that good may come”; the heretics twist Scripture by changing accents and punctuation, and Malachi rebukes those who say evildoers please God.
370. 3.5.40Clement divides the heresies into two classes, the libertine and the harshly ascetic; against the first, if all lives are permitted to the elect, the self-controlled life is all the more permitted.
371. 3.5.41God gave us free choice; both the licentious and the self-controlled are free, but only the latter frees the soul; the libertines must either obey every desire, even the most unholy, or admit that some must be refused.
372. 3.5.42One enslaved to bodily pleasure cannot become like the Lord or know God; since the commandments show the blessed life and failure brings endless evil, we must purify ourselves, so that the divine image is restored in a pure mind.
373. 3.5.43Those led by passion cannot know God, and conduct reveals ignorance of him; Paul tells believers, circumcised in Christ and raised with him, to seek things above and put to death sexual immorality and evil desire.
374. 3.5.44Knowledge is tested by conduct, as a tree by its fruit; true knowledge is a divine light from obedience; true freedom is release from pleasure through Christ, and whoever claims to know God but disobeys is a liar.
375. 3.6.45Against ascetics who reject marriage as feeding death, Clement cites John on antichrists who left the church, and explains the saying to Salome, “as long as women bear children,” as teaching the natural order, not that birth is evil.
376. 3.6.46The law aims at self-restrained marriage and family life; Christ fulfilled, not abolished it; marriage can be used with self-control, and those who call intercourse polluted, being born of it, condemn themselves.
377. 3.6.47The seed of the sanctified is holy, and spouses sanctify each other; Christ forbade divorce except for sexual immorality, citing “the two shall be one flesh”; that there is no marriage after the resurrection, like the end of food, does not license indulgence now.
378. 3.6.48If the ascetics have already received the resurrection, they should stop eating too; abstinence alone proves nothing, since pagans and the Magi practice it; the kingdom is not food and drink, and self-control is a hidden virtue of the soul.
379. 3.6.49Some call marriage fornication from the devil and claim to imitate the unmarried Lord; but Christ's bride was the church, he needed no helper or heirs, and he himself upheld marriage and spoke of it continuing until his coming.
380. 3.6.50Christ's saying about eunuchs followed the disciples' question about divorce: they asked whether a man could remarry after putting away an adulterous wife; even pagan athletes and musicians practiced sexual abstinence.
381. 3.6.51Aristotle of Cyrene kept his oath to Lais by sending her portrait home; celibacy is no virtue unless for love of God; Paul condemns those who forbid marriage and counsels spouses to stay together.
382. 3.6.52The righteous of old ate with thanksgiving and married with self-control; Paul forbids judging over food; Christ himself ate and drank; the ascetics cannot claim to surpass them.
383. 3.6.53Peter and Philip had children, and Paul had a wife; the apostles took their wives along as sisters and fellow ministers to women; the kingdom is not food and drink; the ascetics do not match the prophets, who lived austerely yet thanked the Creator.
384. 3.6.54Christ's command to give and lend presupposes private property, refuting Carpocrates' “community”; he identifies himself with the needy, and the old covenant also commands giving to the poor.
385. 3.6.55Scripture presupposes givers and receivers, as the world consists of opposites; Christ's call to the rich young man exposed his failure to love his neighbor and taught him to share out of love.
386. 3.6.56Christ forbids not wealth rightly used but greed; the generous gain eternal riches by sharing, while the hoarder, like the rich fool, stores up treasure on earth and loses his soul.
387. 3.7.57Greek self-control fights desire; Christian self-control, a gift of God's grace, aims not to desire at all, as Moses fasted forty days; desire that lingers inside still sins in memory.
388. 3.7.58In marriage, food, and all else we should act by will, not desire; the husband who marries for children should love his wife but beget them with a reverent will, walking decently as in the day.
389. 3.7.59Self-control extends beyond sex to money, luxury, speech, and thought; even angels fell through desire; Valentinus claimed Jesus did not digest food; Christians embrace self-control out of love for the Lord, sanctifying the Spirit's temple.
390. 3.7.60Those who reject marriage and food out of hatred for the flesh are like pagan ascetics, such as the Brahmans and the Indian “Holy Men,” who abstain from meat, wine, and women.
391. 3.8.61The libertines cite “you are not under law but under grace,” but Paul himself answers: “Shall we sin because we are under grace? By no means.”
392. 3.8.62All must appear before Christ's judgment for deeds done in the body; in Christ one is a new creation, washed from the old life; righteousness has no fellowship with lawlessness, so we must cleanse ourselves in holiness.
393. 3.9.63The ascetics cite the Gospel of the Egyptians, “I came to destroy the works of the female”; but the world still goes on, so Christ destroyed the works of desire, the vices that are the soul's decay, not natural birth.
394. 3.9.64Christ's answer, “as long as women bear children,” means as long as desires are active, since sin is the soul's death; death follows birth by God's order, and woman, bearing children, is also the source of life.
395. 3.9.65Eve was called Life as mother of all, righteous and unrighteous; Paul did not despise life in the flesh but saw it as thankful endurance for others, while departure to be with Christ is love's perfection.
396. 3.9.66The ascetics omit the rest of the Salome dialogue: when she said she did well not to bear children, the Lord answered, “Eat every plant, but not the bitter one,” leaving marriage or celibacy to free choice.
397. 3.9.67Marriage according to reason is no sin; each is free to choose regarding children; some who reject marriage fall into hatred of humanity and lose love, while others indulge within marriage and become like beasts.
398. 3.10.68“Where two or three are gathered” may mean husband, wife, and child, since God joins them; the heretics set the Creator with the many and the Savior with the one elect, but the same God is with the married and the celibate.
399. 3.10.69The triad may signify the called, the elect, and those of highest rank; the one who rises above anger and desire, uniting knowledge, faith, and love, becomes one, perfect in Christ's image, brother, friend, and son.
400. 3.10.70The two or three may also be Jews and Gentiles made one new man in the church, and law, prophets, and gospel united in one knowledge; those who refuse marriage from hatred or misuse the flesh from desire are not among them.
401. 3.11.71Clement turns to the Scriptures that refute the heretics: the law's “you shall not covet” anticipated Christ's “you shall not desire”; the law's rule on captive women shows it meant marriage to be used with restraint and for children.
402. 3.11.72Clement claims the patriarchs did not approach pregnant or nursing wives, citing the three years between Aaron and Moses and the small numbers of the tribe of Levi.
403. 3.11.73Moses required three days' abstinence before Sinai; Paul's call to “come out and be separate” means separation from pagan immorality and heresy, not from the married.
404. 3.11.74Paul wants the church presented as a pure virgin to Christ, its only Bridegroom; but each believer may lawfully marry, meaning a first marriage; Paul fears deception like Eve's.
405. 3.11.75Peter urges Christians as exiles to abstain from fleshly desires and not use freedom as a cover for evil; Paul teaches that those who died to sin cannot live in it.
406. 3.11.76Paul proclaims the same God in law and gospel, attributing “you shall not covet” to the law; his words that no good dwells in his flesh refer to indwelling sin, not to the Creator's work.
407. 3.11.77Paul attributes his evil deeds to indwelling sin, from which the law of the Spirit sets him free through the Son; the body, dead through sin, becomes a temple when the Spirit who raised Jesus dwells in it.
408. 3.11.78Paul contrasts living by the flesh, which is death and enmity to God, with life in the Spirit; believers are sons of God by the Spirit of adoption, not free to indulge the flesh.
409. 3.12.79Paul's permission for spouses to abstain by consent and for a time teaches self-control without endangering marriage; celibacy and marriage each have their own service to the Lord, and bishops should be tested by ruling their households.
410. 3.12.80Paul's image of the wife bound to her husband applies allegorically to the church's union with the risen Christ; his permission for a widow to remarry “only in the Lord” and his preference that she remain establishes monogamy, and does not make marriage devilish.
411. 3.12.81Tatian taught that returning to marital relations after prayer serves the devil; Clement answers that sexual immorality is devilish, but chaste marriage unites for prayer and children, as Scripture's “Adam knew Eve … God raised up seed” shows.
412. 3.12.82Paul's “come together again” prevents temptation; Christ, the same Lord of law and gospel, replaced polygamy with monogamy; second marriage after a spouse's death is permitted but falls short of the gospel's perfection; baptism replaces the law's washings after intercourse.
413. 3.12.83The law's washing after emission of seed foreshadowed baptismal rebirth without condemning birth; marriage is not merely of the old law, for the same God gave law and gospel, and what God joined man may not separate.
414. 3.12.84The law is holy and shows sin without creating it; so marriage according to the law is holy, a mystery of Christ and the church; sexual immorality and marriage are as far apart as the devil from God.
415. 3.12.85Paul foretold that some would forbid marriage and foods, which God created good to be received with thanksgiving; no one may be compelled to abstain from marriage, meat, or wine, though abstaining with thanksgiving is also good.
416. 3.12.86Paul's letters never reject chaste marriage but accept both marriage and celibacy; a heretic reads “do not store up treasure on earth” as forbidding children, but Christ was urging the rich to share with the needy.
417. 3.12.87“They neither marry nor are given in marriage” does not reject marriage but corrects hopes of fleshly pleasure in the resurrection; “call no one father on earth” means the earthly father is only a servant of birth, God the true Father.
418. 3.12.88We become children again, reborn through water; the married too may care for the Lord's things, and both wife and virgin are holy in the Lord; Paul speaks sternly to restrain those inclined to a second marriage.
419. 3.12.89To call marriage fornication is blasphemy; fornication, like idolatry, is falling from the one to the many, and defilement is union with another's body; Paul wants younger widows to marry and bear children.
420. 3.12.90Paul accepts the husband of one wife, whether presbyter, deacon, or layman; Christ called the Jews adulterous for abandoning the law's intent; the man who excused himself from the supper because of marriage illustrates preferring pleasure to God, not a condemnation of marriage.
421. 3.13.91Julius Cassianus, founder of Docetism, argues that sexual organs do not prove intercourse is from God, since Christ blessed eunuchs and Isaiah calls them not fruitless trees.
422. 3.13.92Cassianus, like Tatian but from Valentinus's school, thinks Christ freed us from sexual union; he cites the Lord's saying to Salome: “when you tread on the garment of shame, and the two become one.”
423. 3.13.93The saying Cassianus cites is not in the four Gospels handed down but in the Gospel of the Egyptians; male and female there mean anger and desire, and when they are overcome the soul becomes one, as Paul says there is neither male nor female.
424. 3.14.94Cassianus misreads Paul's warning about Eve's deception as saying birth came from deception; Christ came to those who had strayed in mind through disobedience, perhaps because Adam sought marriage before God's time.
425. 3.14.95The old and new man mean disobedient and obedient life, not birth and rebirth; Cassianus wrongly takes the garments of skin as bodies; Christians, citizens of heaven, should marry and possess as though not doing so, using creation with thanksgiving.
426. 3.15.96Paul's “because of sexual immorality let each have his own wife … lest Satan tempt you” is addressed not to those who use marriage restrainedly for children but to those tempted beyond that, whom Satan seeks to lead astray.
427. 3.15.97“Better to marry than to burn” preserves mutual marital duty; “hate father, mother, wife” means not to be led by irrational impulses, since the same Scripture commands honoring parents; the married should not divorce, and the one vowed to celibacy should stay unmarried.
428. 3.15.98Isaiah promises both the faithful eunuch and the married their reward: celibacy justifies only with obedience, and the children of the chosen are blessed, not cursed, as the heretics claim.
429. 3.15.99The true eunuch is the one who begets no truth; by obedience he bears fruit; the apostles begot spiritual children; the eunuch barred from God's assembly is the barren in word and deed, but those who make themselves eunuchs from sin are blessed.
430. 3.16.100Jeremiah's curse on his birthday laments the people's sins, not birth; Ezra and Job lament too; a newborn has committed no sin; David's “in sin my mother conceived me” refers to Eve, mother of the living, not to his own sinfulness.
431. 3.16.101Micah's “firstborn for ungodliness” refers to sinful habits, not birth; birth is also good, since in it we learn the truth; Paul disciplines his body like an athlete, using things with self-control; some prefer widows to virgins for self-control.
432. 3.17.102If birth were evil, then Christ and the Virgin would be in evil; this is the root of Docetism in Cassianus, Marcion, and Valentinus; man becomes a beast not in marriage but in adultery; the view that the serpent taught Adam intercourse insults the Creator.
433. 3.17.103Even if Adam and Eve sinned by coming together too soon, birth itself is holy, the means by which all things exist; the church's life needs the body, since Christ came in the flesh; good desire is a tree of life.
434. 3.17.104Some claim marital “knowledge” was the sin of the tree of knowledge; but then knowledge of truth is the tree of life, and chaste marriage shares in it; Christ healed bodies, so the flesh is not the enemy; “flesh and blood” that cannot inherit the kingdom is sin.
435. 3.18.105Clement sums up: some, strict to the point of blasphemy, reject creation and marriage, though celibacy should be chosen with thanksgiving and without despising the married; others, libertines, follow the words of the wicked in Proverbs about a common purse.
436. 3.18.106Proverbs warns against the paths of the wicked, who destroy themselves and others; Paul commands cleaning out the old leaven and not associating with immoral “brothers”; the believer, crucified with Christ, lives by faith.
437. 3.18.107Christ warns against leading his elect astray; Paul forbids association with the sexually immoral but does not call marriage immorality; spouses must not deprive each other except by agreement for a time.
438. 3.18.108Paul, citing the Lord, forbids divorce, requiring a separated wife to remain unmarried or be reconciled; he also makes good household management a qualification for bishops; this refutes those who say marriage belongs only to the old law.
439. 3.18.109To the pure all things are pure; Paul lists those excluded from the kingdom, from which believers were washed; the libertines “baptize” into immorality under the name of false knowledge; Christians should think on what is true and pure.
440. 3.18.110Peter too calls believers to holiness, not to their former desires; Clement ends Book 3, noting that the controversy with the false Gnostics has made it long.
441. 4.1.1Clement outlines Book 4 and beyond: martyrdom, the perfect Christian, the equal calling of slave and free, men and women, to philosophy, faith, the symbolic method, and a summary of Scripture against Greeks and Jews.
442. 4.1.2Clement plans to treat the philosophers' first principles, then prophecy and the authority of Scripture, showing against the heresies one God proclaimed by law, prophets, and gospel.
443. 4.1.3Only after completing the ethical preparation, like the lesser mysteries before the greater, will Clement treat the knowing tradition's natural philosophy, beginning from the creation account and rising to theology.
444. 4.2.4The Miscellanies are deliberately varied and indirect, so that only the right reader finds the gold; like miners, the akin will find much in little.
445. 4.2.5The reader must discover more for himself; virtue's path is steep, as Hesiod says, and the Lord's way narrow; “seek and you will find.”
446. 4.2.6The Miscellanies, rich in seed like every herb of the field, are named fittingly, like the mixed ancient offering Sophocles describes.
447. 4.2.7Like a farm that yields everything, the Miscellanies offer mixed fruits; the reader must winnow them to pick out the wheat.
448. 4.3.8Both belief and unbelief can be good or bad depending on their object, as with abstaining; the Sabbath signifies abstinence from evil; man, lower than the angels by time and flesh, shares life with them but differs in contemplation and self-control.
449. 4.3.9God alone is wise, and the philosopher is his friend; man is like a centaur of soul and body, the body tending to earth, the soul to God; the law's fear exists because of sin, and the law is not for the righteous.
450. 4.3.10Justice is known only where there is wrongdoing; Paul says love fulfills all the commandments; so the commandments that threaten fear aim at love, not hatred.
451. 4.3.11The fear produced by the law is not a passion, for the law is holy and spiritual; death is not an evil; the end of sin is death, but God's gift is eternal life in Christ.
452. 4.3.12Death is the soul's union with sin, life its separation; sinners are slaves and beasts; the philosopher who practices separation from bodily passions all his life can bear natural death easily, crucified to the world and living as a citizen of heaven.
453. 4.4.13When called, the true Christian gives up his body readily, bearing witness to his own faithfulness, against the tempter, and for the Lord's teaching, confirming the gospel by his death and shaming unbelievers.
454. 4.4.14The true martyr dies not from fear of punishment or hope of reward, but out of love for the Lord, even grateful to his persecutors; martyrdom is called “perfection” because it is the perfect work of love.
455. 4.4.15Every soul that lives purely with knowledge of God and obeys the commandments is a martyr in life and word, however it dies; Christ's call to leave family for his name means detachment from worldly ties.
456. 4.4.16Heraclitus and Plato honor those who fall in battle; some heretics, misreading the Lord, say true martyrdom is only knowledge of God and that dying for the faith is suicide, a cowardly sophism.
457. 4.4.17Clement condemns those who rush to death out of hatred for the Creator; such heretics die without true martyrdom, like the Indian ascetics who burn themselves; the body's health aids the mind.
458. 4.4.18Plato too taught care of the body for the soul's harmony; life and health are the path to knowledge, and the good life lived in the body leads to eternity.
459. 4.5.19Against the Stoic indifference to the body, Job's endurance in poverty and sickness is our example; Paul's chains encouraged others to preach boldly; martyrdoms are sanctified examples written for our instruction.
460. 4.5.20Pain distracts the soul from study and virtue; virtue itself does not suffer, but one not yet established in self-control may be overcome, which is as bad as flight.
461. 4.5.21Poverty, like pain, distracts the soul with getting a living, while health and sufficiency leave it free for God, as Paul wishes believers free from anxiety.
462. 4.5.22Health and means are for the body, and the body for the soul; pleasure is not the good, since some pleasures are bad; knowledge, which chooses among pleasures and pains, is the good.
463. 4.5.23The martyr chooses the hoped-for pleasure through present pain; pain and pleasure are not evils in themselves; the poets disagree whether wealth is a good or a blinding evil.
464. 4.5.24The poets call wealth blind and a bad teacher of manliness; poverty is akin to wisdom; love of money ruins cities; virtue is true currency.
465. 4.6.25Christ's beatitudes apply to spiritual and material states; the one who is persecuted, poor, or hungry for righteousness' sake is a witness, a martyr, to righteousness.
466. 4.6.26The beatitudes bless those who mourn, hunger, and are poor for righteousness' sake, choosing poverty to gain the good; true nobility is adoption as God's children, with authority over snakes and demons.
467. 4.6.27The Lord's discipline separates the soul from the body; “whoever loses his soul will find it” means losing the sinful self in repentance and finding it alive by faith; to find the soul is to know oneself.
468. 4.6.28Conversion is described by Stoics and Plato; the persecuting judge reveals who truly loves God; abstaining from evil deeds extinguishes vices; “sell your possessions … follow me” means following the Lord's words.
469. 4.6.29Some allegorize the rich man's “possessions” as passions, but God distributes goods justly, and the command is to despise them and follow Christ; the rich man lacked love of neighbor; one should come to Christ for the good itself, not fear or reward.
470. 4.6.30Those who seek incorruption for its own sake stand at the right; those who bargain are hired servants; likeness and image correspond to choosing by knowledge and by imitation; the parables of Lazarus and of the two masters warn against love of money.
471. 4.6.31Those who refuse the supper are held back by passionate attachment to possessions; the foxes are the earthbound greedy, the birds the heavenly-minded; poverty too, badly borne, brings cares that choke the word like thorns.
472. 4.6.32We must learn to use every circumstance for eternal life; the exalted ungodly vanish, but the peaceful and upright have a future; God rejects those who honor him with their lips while their hearts are far from him.
473. 4.6.33God silences the boastful and rises for the poor; Christ belongs to the humble; the treasures of earth that thieves break into are possessions, anxieties, and bodily loves; the true treasure is with God, gained by sharing.
474. 4.6.34The broad road to destruction is profligacy, lust, and ambition; the rich fool loses his soul; Christ warns against greed and anxiety and bids us seek first the kingdom, and the small things will be added.
475. 4.6.35Christ counts the choice, not the size of the gift; Zacchaeus (or Matthias, some say) gave half his goods and was saved; the widow's two coins were more than the rich man's gift.
476. 4.6.36The meek are those who have ended the war of anger and desire within; there are many rewards and dwelling places according to one's life; the laborers in the vineyard show both differing merit and equal salvation.
477. 4.6.37The saved will serve in dwelling places proportioned to their merit; Plato describes the purified dwelling above; “blessed are those who mourn” refers to repentance, whether from fear or from conscience, here or hereafter.
478. 4.6.38Mercy is not grief but a noble thing God desires more than sacrifice; those who wish to show mercy but cannot, through poverty, illness, or age, share the same honor as those who can.
479. 4.6.39Works and knowledge are two ways to perfection; the pure in heart see God; knowledge purifies the mind, and good actions need the neutral things of life and health; those who come to know God must be pure in body and thought.
480. 4.6.40In contemplation the knower becomes knowledge itself; the peacemakers are those who have subdued the war of the passions against reason and will be adopted as God's children; perfect peace sees the world's order as good and brings others to faith.
481. 4.6.41The sum of virtue is to despise death for love of God; Christ blesses the persecuted, in the Gospels and in variant forms; we must endure persecutors without hating them, knowing every trial is an occasion for witness.
482. 4.7.42The one who denies Christ in persecution goes over to the devil and deceives his own hope; denying the Savior is denying one's own life; such people are faithless hypocrites; true self-love is loving the Lord and confessing salvation.
483. 4.7.43Dying for Christ, our nearest neighbor, is dying for our own salvation; those who keep Christ's commandments bear witness in every act, having crucified the flesh and living by the Spirit.
484. 4.7.44Unbelievers think martyrdom the most violent death, not knowing it is the gate of true life; even their own writers, Theano and Plato, teach rewards and punishments after death.
485. 4.7.45Many sins lead to Hades; poets mock mortal frailty, but Christ says the spirit is willing though the flesh is weak; Paul shows the body is dead through sin yet the Spirit gives life, and present sufferings are nothing beside the coming glory.
486. 4.7.46All things work for good to those who love God; martyrdom is taught for love, and even hope of reward is hope for the unseen; Peter blesses those who suffer for righteousness and bids them be ready to give an account of their hope.
487. 4.7.47Weak flesh can resist the spiritual powers by trust in the Almighty, who is at hand; Peter bids Christians rejoice in the fiery trial as sharing Christ's sufferings; in all things we conquer through him who loved us.
488. 4.7.48A tragic heroine defies torture, Antigone defies Creon; Christians obey God's proclamation, believing in the heart and confessing with the mouth; virtue, as Simonides says, is reached only by strenuous climbing.
489. 4.7.49Poets praise glory won by toil; the one unafraid of death is no slave; God gave us a spirit of power and love, so we should not be ashamed of the Lord's testimony; love fulfills the law, and we confess our hope.
490. 4.7.50The Indian sages defied Alexander, despising fire; Heraclitus chose one glory over all things, leaving the many to their bodily toils.
491. 4.7.51Christians have crucified the old man; Paul describes the apostles as a spectacle to the world, hungry, beaten, persecuted, and treated as refuse.
492. 4.7.52Plato says the just man is happy even under torture; the one who knows has happiness in himself, not in fortune, and no dishonor, exile, or death can tear him from his love of God.
493. 4.7.53Salvation proceeds from fear to hope to love; the Greeks submit unwillingly to blind necessity, as Euripides says.
494. 4.7.54The foundation of knowledge is faith, hope, and love, love being greatest; Christian freedom yields to the weaker brother's conscience and does all to God's glory; our warfare is spiritual.
495. 4.7.55Armed with spiritual weapons, the one who knows asks the Lord for occasion to prove his love; virtue is its own reward; Christians should put on compassion, humility, and love, the bond of perfection.
496. 4.8.56Pagans too endured torture bravely: Spartans, Zeno of Elea, who spat his bitten-off tongue at the tyrant, Pythagoreans, the Roman Postumus, and Anaxarchus, who mocked his torturer.
497. 4.8.57Love for God remains free under beasts, fire, or torture, yielding only the body; even the barbarian Getae sent an envoy each year to their hero Zamolxis.
498. 4.8.58The Getae's chosen envoy is sacrificed, and the rest grieve at being passed over; the church is full of men and women who practice the life-giving death for Christ; anyone, without letters, of any race, age, or sex, may philosophize.
499. 4.8.59Man and woman share one human nature and so the same virtue; women, like men, free and slave, must pursue self-restraint and justice; they differ only in what belongs to sex, such as childbearing.
500. 4.8.60Woman shares man's virtue in soul and differs in body; Paul teaches headship yet mutual dependence in the Lord; women, like men, must master pleasure by walking in the Spirit.
501. 4.8.61Paul lists the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit; flesh means sinners and spirit the righteous; Christian courage is endurance, turning the other cheek; women are not trained for war, for even men should be peaceful.
502. 4.8.62Women of some nations fight and labor like men, and even female dogs work as males do; so women must philosophize like men, though men hold the first place.
503. 4.8.63All humanity needs education and virtue; Euripides speaks both ill and well of wives, and Homer praises like-minded spouses; as Christ is head of man, the husband is head of his wife, being God's image and glory.
504. 4.8.64Paul in Ephesians calls for mutual submission: wives to husbands as the church to Christ, and husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church.
505. 4.8.65Paul's household code in Colossians sets out the duties of wives and husbands, children and fathers, slaves and masters, all under the one Lord in whom there is neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free.
506. 4.8.66The earthly church is an image of the heavenly, as we pray; Paul's call to compassion, forgiveness, love, and thankfulness is repeated to shame Marcion, who should be grateful to the Creator who called us in the body.
507. 4.8.67Wives and slaves may pursue true philosophy even against husbands' or masters' threats, and free men even under tyrants; to die for virtue is noble for women as for men, for it belongs to the good, not to one sex.
508. 4.8.68Old and young, slaves, children, and wives often become excellent despite opposition; opposition should increase their zeal, since serving God and serving demons admit no comparison; we act for our own salvation whether others approve or not.
509. 4.8.69Virtue must be pursued regardless of others' opinion; as Epicurus wrote to Menoeceus, it is never too early or too late to philosophize, for young and old alike.
510. 4.9.70Clement gathers Christ's sayings on martyrdom: whoever confesses him before men he will confess before the angels and the Father; whoever denies or is ashamed of him he will deny; the Spirit will give words before rulers.
511. 4.9.71Heracleon distinguishes confession in faith and life, which is universal, from confession by voice before authorities, which is partial; not all the saved, such as Matthew, Philip, and Thomas, confessed by voice and died.
512. 4.9.72Heracleon notes that Christ says “confess in me” but “deny me”: those who are in him confess by their lives and can never deny him; those who deny are not in him.
513. 4.9.73Against Heracleon, Clement holds that confession by voice unto death proves genuine faith, and such martyrdom cuts off all passions at once, a sudden repentance; the Spirit bears witness in martyrs, whose defense strengthens the church and wins outsiders.
514. 4.9.74Confession is always required, a defense only when given; those who confess God but deny him by works are condemned, while those who confess at the end have done one good work; martyrdom purifies sins with glory.
515. 4.9.75Christ first drank the cup for sinners, and the apostles suffered for their churches; those who follow them should be ready to drink it for the church; those who witness in life and in court surpass mere lip-confessors, and the one moved by love is the true martyr.
516. 4.10.76Christ's command to flee persecution is not because persecution or death is evil, but so that we may not be the cause of the persecutor's sin; the one who disobeys is reckless.
517. 4.10.77One who hands himself over to the court shares the guilt of his killer and helps the persecutor sin; we should not provoke persecution by conflict or litigation, but yield even our goods, lest we provoke blasphemy of Christ's name.
518. 4.11.78Pagans ask why God lets Christians be persecuted; God did not will persecution but foretold it, to train us for endurance, to which he promised the inheritance.
519. 4.11.79Persecutors unwillingly testify to Christians' innocence; the unjust judge acts freely and so does not implicate God's providence; he condemns from prejudice, simply because we are Christians.
520. 4.11.80Death is no harm to Christians but a release to the Lord, for which we may even thank our persecutors; as Socrates said, the worse cannot harm the better; the Lord is our helper, and the souls of the righteous are in God's hand.
521. 4.12.81Basilides taught that martyrs suffer for hidden sins, mercifully under the name of Christians; even the apparently sinless suffer, as infants do, not by a hostile power.
522. 4.12.82Basilides argues that even infants and the seemingly perfect suffer because they have the capacity to sin, as one who wills adultery is an adulterer; he would say anything rather than call providence evil.
523. 4.12.83Basilides, pressed about the Lord's sufferings, would call even him a sinful man; his theory that martyrs are punished for sins in a former life fails, since confessing or denying rests with our choice.
524. 4.12.84If martyrdom were punishment decreed by providence, denial would thwart providence, martyrs would deserve no reward, and providence would be unjust both to the righteous sufferer and to the sinner spared.
525. 4.12.85Basilides virtually deifies the devil and makes the Lord a sinner; the devil is permitted to tempt only to test our free choice, shame himself, and strengthen the church; if martyrdom were punishment, faith, love, and virtue would lose their meaning.
526. 4.12.86If suffering were God's will, persecution would be good or persecutors innocent; rather, God does not will persecution but does not prevent it, which preserves both his providence and his goodness.
527. 4.12.87God does not cause afflictions but permits them and turns them to good as training, for others because of their sins, for the Lord and the apostles because of ours; God's will is our sanctification, for which the Lord was not prevented from suffering.
528. 4.12.88If martyrs suffer for sins in a former life by providence, then either the persecutors act justly or persecution is God's will; the Basilidian theory destroys itself.
529. 4.13.89Valentinus taught that the spiritual, immortal by nature, came down to destroy death, which is the Creator's work; he reads “no one sees God's face and lives” of the Creator, and calls the world an image inferior to the living Aeon.
530. 4.13.90Valentinus called the Creator an image of the true God, fashioned by Wisdom, and taught that a distinct spiritual seed was breathed into the elect unknown to the Creator, reading Genesis's creation of man in this sense.
531. 4.13.91If the spiritual race destroys death, Christ did not; if Christ did, the Valentinians do not; their doctrine secretly sets them and Christ above the Creator, as if a son contended with his father.
532. 4.13.92Clement defers proof that the Creator is Christ's Father; Paul tells the Philippians suffering for Christ is a gift, and calls them “united in soul,” refuting the Valentinian contempt for the “psychic.”
533. 4.13.93Neither Valentinians nor Montanists should call other Christians “psychics”; the perfect practice love, which means loving enemies as God's creatures, not their sins, for sin lies in activity, not in substance.
534. 4.13.94Sinners are God's enemies by rejecting his commands; “desire nothing” does not mean the world is evil or belongs to another god, but that worldly goods are ours only for use, not permanent possession, to be used well without excess.
535. 4.14.95Christ commands love of enemies to make us like the Father; the “adversary” to be reconciled on the way is not the body but the devil, whose servants will hand over those who profess Christ while doing the devil's works.
536. 4.14.96Clement interprets Romans 8:38–39 phrase by phrase: no persecutor's death, life, fallen angel, satanic power, or worldly hope can separate us from God's love in Christ; this sums up the knowing martyr.
537. 4.15.97Knowledge about idol meat must yield to the weak; Paul's permission to buy market meat excludes what the apostolic decree forbade (idol meat, blood, strangled things, fornication); Paul renounced his right to a wife and food to set an example.
538. 4.15.98Paul, free, made himself a slave to all; the knowing Christian abstains for the weaker brother's conscience, not his own, and does everything to God's glory within the rule of faith.
539. 4.16.99Paul describes perfect righteousness as believing in the heart and confessing with the mouth; we must bless persecutors, and our boast is a conscience that has lived in holiness by God's grace.
540. 4.16.100The common faith is the “fragrance of knowledge”; the veil remains until one turns to the Lord; the pleasure-loving are “offspring of vipers”; John teaches love in deed, the perfect love that casts out fear, shown in keeping the commandments.
541. 4.16.101Paul's contentment in plenty and want is the knower's rule; Hebrews recalls believers who, after enlightenment, joyfully endured suffering and loss of goods, and urges endurance and faith.
542. 4.16.102Hebrews lists the faithful who endured mocking, scourging, stoning, and death, of whom the world was not worthy, who did not receive the promise without us.
543. 4.16.103The saints of old are perfected with us, a cloud of witnesses encouraging us to run looking to Jesus; there is one salvation in Christ for them and us; Moses chose Christ's reproach; Wisdom says the martyrs, though they seem to die, are at peace.
544. 4.16.104Wisdom teaches that martyrdom is a glorious purification: God tests the martyrs like gold and accepts them as a burnt offering; they will shine and judge the nations.
545. 4.17.105Clement of Rome, whom Clement calls an apostle, praises the Corinthians' faith, godliness, hospitality, and knowledge, and holds up Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Lot, Rahab, and the prophets as models.
546. 4.17.106Following 1 Clement, Abraham, Job, and Moses are models of humility: Abraham called himself dust and ashes, Job confessed no one is pure, Moses called himself slow of tongue; God gives grace to the humble.
547. 4.17.107David, chosen by God, still begged for mercy and confessed his sin; the Spirit searches the inner self, and the Lord Jesus, overseer of the heart, whose blood was offered for us, knows all our thoughts.
548. 4.17.108Following 1 Clement: respect leaders and elders, instruct the young, lead wives to purity, gentleness, and impartial love, and teach children humility, pure love, and the fear of the Lord, who searches hearts.
549. 4.17.109Following 1 Clement, faith in Christ confirms the psalm's call to fear the Lord, avoid evil, do good, and seek peace, which Clement reads as the mystery of the seventh and eighth: perfection in deed and word.
550. 4.17.110Following 1 Clement: the Lord rescues the righteous and surrounds the hopeful with mercy; through Christ we taste immortal knowledge; the wise must show it in works, the humble not praise themselves, the chaste not boast; more knowledge means more danger.
551. 4.18.111Following Clement of Rome: love of God and neighbor lifts us to God, covers sins, and perfects the elect; Paul says that even martyrdom without love, done from fear, is nothing.
552. 4.18.112Confessing Christ for reward, giving to be repaid, or great faith without love count for nothing compared with the knowing martyr; those perfected in love will be revealed at the coming of Christ's kingdom.
553. 4.18.113Love keeps one from sin, and if one falls, confession and a broken spirit please God; God is love, and love fulfills the law, as Christ does; the same deed differs as done from fear or from love, by faith or by knowledge.
554. 4.18.114Rewards differ: the knower receives what eye has not seen, the simple believer a hundredfold; Clement recalls a self-styled Gnostic who taught that desire alone is not sin unless it is acted out, even in imagination.
555. 4.18.115Clement tells of King Bocchoris, who, when a courtesan demanded pay for a youth's dream of her, had her take the shadow of the purse: an image of payment for an image of union.
556. 4.18.116Looking with desire is sin even without imagined intercourse, if one admires flesh lustfully; but one who looks with pure love sees the soul's beauty and rises through it to the Creator, bearing the Spirit's anointing to the angels at the ascent.
557. 4.18.117Moses' face shone with a glory the people could not bear; at the soul's ascent the heavenly toll-collectors hold back those laden with worldly passions but send on the one full of knowledge and righteousness, like the tree of Psalm 1.
558. 4.19.118Perfection belongs equally to men and women: Moses offered to be blotted out for his people, and Judith, perfected among women, risked her life for her city and slew Holofernes.
559. 4.19.119Esther, by fasting and prayer, saved Israel from Haman; Miriam shared leadership with Moses; Susanna, condemned by the lustful elders, remained an unwavering witness to chastity even to death.
560. 4.19.120Pagan women too showed virtue: Lysidice and Philotera in modesty, Leaena who endured torture without betraying the tyrannicides, and the Argive women led by Telesilla who repelled the Spartans.
561. 4.19.121Greek poets praised heroic women, and many women philosophized: Theano's modest sayings, Themisto the Epicurean, Myia and Arignote the Pythagoreans, the five dialectician daughters of Diodorus, and Hipparchia the Cynic.
562. 4.19.122More learned women: Arete who taught her son, Plato's women students, Aspasia who taught Socrates and Pericles, and women poets and painters.
563. 4.19.123Noble women of old did humble work, like Sarah serving the angels; a wife should first try to win her husband to the way of salvation, otherwise pursue virtue alone, obeying him in all but what concerns virtue and salvation.
564. 4.19.124No one excels without learning and training; virtue is in our power as God's gift, which no one else can take away, so vice and virtue belong to each person's own choice.
565. 4.20.125Euripides describes the loving wife who honors her husband's words, shares his sorrows and joys, and bears his sickness with him.
566. 4.20.126Marriage conducted according to reason, in faith, with hearts cleansed and bodies washed in baptism, is sanctified; a good marriage is judged by virtue, not wealth or beauty; the wife is God's gift to the husband as a helper.
567. 4.20.127A wife troubled by her husband will first try reason and persuasion; if he will not listen, she will live sinlessly, even to death, with God as her helper and guide, aiming at his friendship.
568. 4.20.128Paul tells older women to train the younger to love their husbands and children and live purely; Hebrews urges peace and holiness, warning against immorality like Esau's.
569. 4.20.129Hebrews crowns the discussion of marriage: it is honorable and the bed undefiled; for man and woman alike, Peter says, faith tested in trials brings joy and salvation; Paul boasts of his sufferings for Christ.
570. 4.21.130One may be perfect in particular virtues, but no one save Christ in all; the law's perfection leads to the gospel; even the knowing martyr is called “perfect” only at the completion of life, when his blood, offered through love, sends his spirit on.
571. 4.21.131The perfect Christian relies on God's power, enduring affliction and persecution without despair, commending himself to God by patience, purity, knowledge, and love, cleansing himself and perfecting holiness; godly grief leads to repentance and salvation.
572. 4.21.132God gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers to build up the church toward the perfect man, Christ's fullness; we must strive for perfection in the flesh; the one Spirit distributes varied gifts to each.
573. 4.21.133Prophets, the righteous, martyrs, and preachers are each perfect in their own gift while sharing the common virtues; each has his own gift from God, but the apostles were filled with all.
574. 4.21.134The apostles' writings show all the virtues; though Paul came later, his writing breathes the Old Testament, since faith in Christ explains and fulfills the law; without faith the old covenant is not understood.
575. 4.22.135The knower's work is neither mere abstention from evil, nor doing good out of fear or hope of reward, but doing good out of love, for the sake of the good itself.
576. 4.22.136The knower seeks the knowledge of God for itself, not for any benefit; if knowledge of God and eternal salvation could be separated (though they are one), he would choose knowledge of God without hesitation.
577. 4.22.137The perfect man does good constantly for its own sake, not for glory or reward, becoming like the Lord, good to just and unjust; his flesh has died, and his body, once a tomb, is now a holy temple.
578. 4.22.138The perfect man has passed beyond self-control to freedom from passion; he gives and fasts in secret, doing good by settled habit; he must walk the narrow way, drawn by the Father through grace, and pities those who hate him.
579. 4.22.139Knowledge loves and teaches others to honor all creation; the one who has learned to love God keeps virtue even in dreams, his mind unchanged; Christ's command to stay awake means keeping the soul pure by night as by day, which is likeness to God.
580. 4.22.140The Greeks called night “the kindly time” because the soul then withdraws from the senses toward wisdom; Paul bids Christians, children of the day, to stay awake and sober, armed with faith, love, and hope.
581. 4.22.141Sleep and death both withdraw the soul, as Heraclitus says; Paul calls us to wake, for salvation is near, and to put on the weapons of light, that is, the Son's precepts; hence washing before prayer.
582. 4.22.142Outward washing before prayer symbolizes inner purity, holy thought; the image of baptism passed from Moses to the poets, as in Homer's Penelope and Telemachus; true purity is of mind, deeds, words, and even dreams.
583. 4.22.143Firm repentance purifies; knowledge and faith make the soul stand firm; the truly righteous man is just not from fear of punishment or detection, unlike Epicurus's sage, who would do wrong if sure of not being caught.
584. 4.22.144Doing right only for reward is no better than doing it from fear; yet the hope of reward and punishment after death is taught by Scripture and by Pythagoreans, Socrates, and Heraclitus.
585. 4.22.145Paul says affliction produces endurance, character, and hope that does not disappoint; the true knower pursues knowledge not from fear or for gain but drawn by love of God, the truly lovable.
586. 4.22.146The knower would do no wrong even with impunity, reward, or secrecy, having chosen the good for itself; food, marriage, or celibacy without knowledge do not commend us; abstinence from fear is no better than a dog's fear of the stick.
587. 4.23.147All created things, including marriage and childbearing with self-restraint, are good, though freedom from passion is better; those who abstain from fear or dislike slander the Creator; true obedience to “do not desire” comes from within.
588. 4.23.148Obedience for reward is bait; the knower turns from sensible to intelligible things out of love, admiring creation and its Maker, and prays to be free of desire, content with little, near to God.
589. 4.23.149Paul teaches choosing the better among goods, not rejecting marriage as bad; God made necessities easy to obtain; as Democritus says, teaching reshapes nature; God gave both nature and renewal; the one who trusts God finds peace and may become a god.
590. 4.23.150Empedocles says wise souls become gods; man is formed by nature, but each person is shaped by what he chooses; Adam was perfect in formation but was to attain perfection by obedience; his fall was his own choice, and God is not to blame.
591. 4.23.151Human courage and self-restraint master anger and desire, but God, without passion, needs neither; as the Pythagoreans said, man too must become one, like the one high priest and the one God.
592. 4.23.152Christ removed anger with desire; the one deified into freedom from passion becomes one; like sailors pulling on an anchor who draw themselves to it, those who seek God are drawn to him; serving God is caring for oneself, and purity makes one like God.
593. 4.24.153What rests with us is choosing between opposites, such as believing or not; God forgives sins before faith, all of them, not only involuntary ones as Basilides held; punishment aims at preventing future sin, not undoing the past.
594. 4.24.154God disciplines to improve the sinner, warn others, and protect the wronged; correction is by teaching or by punishment; sins before baptism are forgiven, those after are cleansed by discipline; unbelievers are like chaff.
595. 4.25.155Euripides blesses the contemplative, and Plato calls the one who contemplates the Ideas a god among men; the soul that rises above becoming becomes like an angel and dwells with Christ, while the rest are shadows and the dead.
596. 4.25.156God the Father is beyond demonstration, but the Son is wisdom, knowledge, and truth, open to demonstration; all the Spirit's powers are united in him, not as parts but as one, a circle of all powers.
597. 4.25.157The Word is Alpha and Omega, whose end is his beginning; believing in him makes one united, while unbelief divides; the foreigner uncircumcised in heart and flesh, excluded from the sanctuary, is the one who chooses unbelief.
598. 4.25.158Only those who live purely are God's true priests; the priests' avoidance of the dead signifies avoiding sin, which is dead; their seven days of purification and eighth-day offering point to the promise.
599. 4.25.159Perfect purification is faith leading through law and prophets to the gospel, and propitiation is obedient purity until the soul's release; whether the seven are periods or heavens and the eighth the fixed sphere, the knower must rise above becoming and sin.
600. 4.25.160Job's “naked I shall depart” means leaving free of sin, as Christ calls us to become like children, pure as when born of the womb of water in baptism; the lamp of the ungodly will be quenched.
601. 4.25.161Rebecca, “virgin” said twice, signifies purity of body and soul, the glory of God; righteousness is peace; Christ is king of Salem, “peace,” foreshadowed by Melchizedek, who gave bread and wine as a type of the Eucharist.
602. 4.25.162Basilides made Righteousness and Peace beings of the Ogdoad; the Savior initiates us into his mysteries, as Euripides' Dionysus says; God, without beginning, is the source of physics, ethics, and logic, and the Word, his Son, is the only teacher.
603. 4.26.163The body, made upright to see heaven and with senses for knowledge, is not evil but a fit dwelling for the soul and the Holy Spirit; wisdom, justice, and holiness go together; Isaiah's “all flesh is grass” is explained by Jeremiah as referring to the disobedient.
604. 4.26.164Jeremiah shows that “flesh” means sinful living, not the body as such; the soul is better than the body, but neither is good or evil by nature; man is composed of different, not opposed, elements.
605. 4.26.165The wise soul lodges in the body as a guest, respecting it but ready to leave; Basilides wrongly made the elect foreign to the world by nature, for all belongs to the one God; the elect lives as a stranger by choice.
606. 4.26.166The knower uses bodily and external goods like a traveler uses inns, caring for them without attachment and leaving gladly, thankful for his stay and longing for the heavenly dwelling, as Paul says.
607. 4.26.167Paul aims to please the one God, creator of all; Epicharmus and a lyric poet also teach that pious souls go to heaven and the ungodly suffer; the soul was not sent down from heaven as punishment, but the righteous soul rises from earth to heaven.
608. 4.26.168Job, having gained knowledge, called himself earth and ashes; the ignorant are “earth,” while the knower, made like God, is spiritual and elect; Jeremiah calls the disobedient “earth.”
609. 4.26.169Isaiah's “hear, heaven, give ear, earth” addresses the knowing soul as heaven and the ignorant as earth; Micah and Abraham also address the earthbound; the unbeliever is already judged.
610. 4.26.170Scripture proclaims that God hears the righteous and does no wrong, refuting the heresies that make God responsible for evil; God asks Israel to fear, love, and serve him, and we have the power to choose salvation.
611. 4.26.171The Pythagoreans prayed aloud so that prayers would be just; Christians should let their works cry out as in daylight, imitating God; the poets' epithets “godlike” echo the image and likeness of God.
612. 4.26.172Euripides longs for golden wings to reach Zeus; Clement prays for the Spirit of Christ to lift him to his Jerusalem; the Stoics call heaven the true city, and the church, governed by the Word, is God's city on earth, of which the poets' and Plato's ideal cities are images.
613. 5.1.1Book 5 opens on faith: faith and knowledge cannot be separated, as the Father cannot be without the Son; we believe the Son to know the Father; Christians believe and know what most disbelieve and do not know.
614. 5.1.2Faith is the ear of the soul; Paul speaks of faith growing “from faith to faith”: the common faith is the foundation, and the excellent faith built on it, like the apostles', is perfected through learning and obedience.
615. 5.1.3Faith grows like a mustard seed; if, as Basilides and Valentinus hold, the elect know God and are saved by nature, the commandments and even Christ's coming would be superfluous; if his coming was necessary, salvation is by learning and good works, not nature.
616. 5.1.4Abraham believed and was counted righteous before Christ's coming, disproving salvation by nature; and if, as Marcion says, the Creator saved Abraham, the “good God” came late, imitating him and saving by force or stealth, which is not goodness.
617. 5.1.5Unbelievers are foolish, and useless disputes should be avoided; inquiry with faith is best; there are things not to be inquired into, but where God has spoken in Scripture, faith is established beyond dispute.
618. 5.1.6It is godless to demand proofs from God; some questions need sense, some rebuke, and some, like whether providence exists, deserve punishment; providence is plain from creation; the Word is not a spoken word but God's wisdom, goodness, and power.
619. 5.1.7We are saved by grace, but not without good works and a sound will; we need grace, right teaching, and the Father's drawing; God cannot be seen clearly in this life, as Paul, Plato, and Moses say, but the pure in heart will see him; so the Savior was sent as divine teacher.
620. 5.1.8God makes foolish the wisdom of the world; Jeremiah bids us ask for the good way; Numa founded a temple of Faith; Abraham believed, and his name change from Abram, “elevated father,” signifies his turn from natural philosophy to knowledge of the one God.
621. 5.1.9Empedocles praises faith; Paul wants faith to rest on God's power, not human wisdom; Heraclitus, taught by barbarian (biblical) philosophy, knew of judgment by fire, which the Stoics made the conflagration; Plato speaks of cleansings by fire and flood.
622. 5.1.10The Greek philosophers stole their chief doctrines from Moses and the prophets; also the fallen angels revealed secrets to women; so Greek thought is partly true by conjecture and partly wrong through misreading prophetic allegory.
623. 5.1.11Faith must advance with inquiry, for “seek and you will find”; but inquiry must be free of rivalry, envy, and strife, which Timon mocks in the philosophers' quarrels over sophisms.
624. 5.1.12Inquiry about God aimed at discovery, not strife, is saving; the psalm promises those who seek the Lord knowledge and life; but we should not open our ears to everyone, lest faith's pure hearing be spoiled, like cups whose handles break.
625. 5.1.13Love is learned through hearing, as children are taught to kiss relatives held by the ears; God is love, known to those who love; we must become pure and childlike, as the Epidaurus inscription and Christ teach, entering God's temple founded on faith, hope, and love.
626. 5.2.14Plato's Socrates, in the Crito and Phaedrus, speaks of hope of another life after death and of the soul winged by love reaching the goal of hope and eternal life.
627. 5.2.15Plato speaks of the love that begets like, and of teachers begetting pupils, as Christians call instruction rebirth and Paul begot the Corinthians in Christ; Empedocles speaks of Love, and Parmenides of seeing absent things with the mind.
628. 5.3.16Hope and faith see with the mind; the Word, who is the truth, is seen by the mind, as Plato's truth is seen only by the mind; the Word created the world and then became flesh to be seen; the kingdom is seized by persistent righteous living and prayer.
629. 5.3.17Recognizing ignorance begins learning: seeking leads to the teacher, then faith, hope, love, and likeness to the beloved; the wise virgins' lamps are souls lighting the light in ignorance's night; few are chosen, as Plato and Cleanthes also say.
630. 5.3.18The many demand proofs rather than trusting faith; Empedocles says the wicked distrust the truth; Clement will speak to Greeks through their own wisdom, as Paul became all things to all, for God's grace falls on all and God is God of the Gentiles too.
631. 5.4.19The crowd judges by pleasure, not truth; the unready must stay outside the divine chorus; hence the Egyptians' sanctuaries and the Hebrews' veil symbolize the concealment of sacred truth, which only the purified may approach.
632. 5.4.20Prophecies and mysteries are veiled in riddles; the Egyptians learn three scripts, demotic, hieratic, and hieroglyphic, the last partly literal and partly symbolic, figurative, or enigmatic.
633. 5.4.21The Egyptians used enigmatic hieroglyphs, like the scarab for the sun; all theologians, barbarian and Greek, have veiled first principles in riddles, symbols, and allegories, as the Greek oracles did.
634. 5.4.22The sayings of the Greek sages, like “spare time,” pack large meanings into few words.
635. 5.4.23“Know yourself” has many meanings: that you are mortal, of little account, whose image you bear, and how you are akin to God; Isaiah's hidden treasures are God's wisdom, hard to find.
636. 5.4.24The poets, taught by the prophets, veiled their theology in poetry, not from envy but to stir inquiry, as Sophocles says the god speaks in riddles to the wise.
637. 5.4.25All Scripture is spoken in parables, as the psalm says; Paul speaks God's hidden wisdom among the perfect, revealed by the Spirit; the unspiritual man cannot receive it.
638. 5.4.26Paul calls the common faith milk and foundation, and knowledge solid food and precious building; the heresies build stubble; fire will test each work; spiritual gifts could not be written openly.
639. 5.5.27Pythagorean symbols depend on Scripture: “no swallow in the house” means shun gossips; “confuse the pot's mark in the ashes” means leave no trace of anger, as Scripture says not to let the sun set on anger.
640. 5.5.28More Pythagorean symbols: disturbing the bed means forgetting nocturnal emissions; “don't sail on land” means avoid tax-farming; “wear no ring with gods' images” agrees with Moses' ban on images, as the Hebrews' temple had none.
641. 5.5.29Eurysus the Pythagorean said the Creator made man using himself as model, echoing Genesis; Pythagoras and Plato drew on Moses; Greek philosophy is like lamplight stolen from the sun, useful by night but outshone when the Word dawned.
642. 5.5.30Pythagoras's “do not step over the balance” summarizes Moses on justice; Christ's light yoke and call to be like children teach equality; in Christ there is no slave or free; the mysteries' ban on eating the heart means not consuming the soul with grief.
643. 5.5.31The two ways of Scripture, narrow and broad, are echoed by Prodicus's fable and Pythagoras's ban on public roads; a Scythian king and Euphorion speak symbolically of war; the Egyptian sphinx signifies that God is to be loved and feared.
644. 5.6.32Almost all Scripture speaks in riddles; the temple's enclosures and the high priest's robe are symbols, and the veil's four colors stand for the four elements that reveal God.
645. 5.6.33The altar of incense stood between the holy of holies and the court, symbolizing earth or the boundary of the intelligible and sensible worlds; the outer veil with five pillars bars those bound to the five senses, as the five loaves fed the crowd; knowledge of God is beyond the senses.
646. 5.6.34The Son is the Father's face, made flesh; the inner veil with four pillars signifies the four covenants and the four-letter divine Name, pronounced “Iaoue”; Christ alone as high priest enters the unspeakable; the seven-branched lampstand represents the sun among the planets.
647. 5.6.35The golden lampstand is a sign of Christ, giving light in many ways; the seven lamps are the seven spirits on Jesse's rod; the table of loaves, the ark, and the six-winged cherubim symbolize the churches, the intelligible world, and the heavens.
648. 5.6.36A tragic poet describes time and the twin Bears; the ark (Hebrew tēbāh) signifies the intelligible world or God, and rest with the glorifying spirits; the cherubim are not images but symbols of the rational soul, its ministries, and ceaseless praise.
649. 5.6.37The high priest's robe symbolizes the sensible world: the stones are the planets or ways of salvation, the 360 bells the year of the Lord's favor proclaiming the Savior, and the golden crown Christ's kingship as head of the church.
650. 5.6.38The high priest's headdress signifies that God is head of Christ; the breastpiece's parts signify work and the Word; its twelve stones the zodiac or the righteous of both covenants; the Name on the gold plate is the Son, image of the invisible God, beginning of all things.
651. 5.6.39The oracle signifies prophecy and judgment by the Word; the robe the incarnation; the high priest changing garments on the Day of Atonement signifies the knower rising beyond the baptized faithful, cleansed no longer by water but by the Word of knowledge.
652. 5.6.40The perfected knower, purified in word and life, receives the unseen inheritance, becomes son and friend, and sees God face to face; the high priest's changing of robes signifies both Christ's incarnation and the believer's putting on the holy garment.
653. 5.7.41The Egyptians, like the Hebrews, kept their mysteries hidden; their symbols include the sun on a ship or crocodile; a temple gate at Diospolis shows a child, an old man, a hawk, a fish, and a crocodile.
654. 5.7.42The Diospolis symbols together say, “You who are born and die, God hates shamelessness”; votive ears and eyes mean God sees and hears all; the lion, ox, horse, sphinx, and man are further Egyptian symbols.
655. 5.7.43In Egyptian processions two dogs, a hawk, and an ibis, called “four letters,” symbolize the hemispheres or tropics, the sun or equator, and the moon or ecliptic.
656. 5.8.44Barbarians too used symbols: the Scythian king sent Darius a mouse, frog, bird, arrow, and plow, variously interpreted; Anacharsis slept guarding mouth and genitals, meaning the tongue is harder to master than pleasure.
657. 5.8.45The Greeks too used symbols: the Ephesian letters, which Androcydes interprets as darkness, light, earth, year, sun, and true voice; the Delphic sayings; the turning wheel and branches, which signify the circling of human affairs and life's brevity.
658. 5.8.46Symbolic interpretation serves theology, piety, and wisdom; children's primers teach the elements through obscure words like the Phrygian “bedy,” meaning water or air.
659. 5.8.47Greek writers explain the obscure words of the old primer: bedy is air or water, zaps the sea, chthōn the earth, plēktron the pole or air.
660. 5.8.48Cleanthes calls the sun plēktron; sphinx is the ether binding all things, as Empedocles says; Branchus's Milesian hymn used these words, which Thespis applies to offerings, and which Clement reads as the soul's growth from milk to the wine of the Word.
661. 5.8.49A third primer line hints that salvation is won by toil through understanding the world; Epigenes explains Orpheus's symbolic words for plows, seed, rain, the moon, and the seasons.
662. 5.8.50The Pythagoreans and many philosophers and poets wrote enigmatically; Heraclitus was called “the Obscure,” and difficult poets like Callimachus and Lycophron are exercises for students.
663. 5.8.51Moses' food laws are symbolic: the pig stands for greedy, unclean desire; as Barnabas explains, clean animals that part the hoof and chew the cud signify those who ponder God's word and live in this world while awaiting the next.
664. 5.8.52The unclean birds stand for plunderers, the unjust, and the greedy, whom we must avoid; the Psalms, 1 Clement, and Theognis teach that companions shape us; the horse and rider cast into the sea are desire and the soul that gives it rein.
665. 5.8.53Plato's fallen charioteer and Phaethon signify the soul overcome by passion; Joseph stripped of his coat and cast into the waterless pit signifies knowledge rejected by those with bare faith; the uncovered pit in the law introduces a lesson about teaching.
666. 5.8.54The law of the uncovered pit teaches teachers to hide the depths of knowledge from those not ready, lest they stumble; the knowing teacher is accountable to God for those harmed by teaching beyond their capacity.
667. 5.8.55The law and prophets were types until John, who, pointing to Christ, confessed himself unworthy to loose his sandal, that is, to baptize with his power, and so loosed the meaning of the prophecies; Roman will ceremonies are also symbolic.
668. 5.9.56Scripture, the barbarian philosophy, is written symbolically for memory, brevity, and elevation; it is meant for those tested in faith and life, needing a guide; truth seen through a veil appears greater.
669. 5.9.57Concealed sayings admit several meanings, clear to the knower but not to the ignorant; the Pythagoreans expelled Hipparchus for publishing secrets; Scripture calls apostates dead and bids believers separate from the unclean.
670. 5.9.58Epicureans, Stoics, and Aristotelians also had secret teachings, and the mysteries hid doctrines in myths; so much more should holy contemplation be veiled; yet Scripture and Plato's myths are not to be allegorized word by word, only in their general meaning.
671. 5.9.59Greek philosophers too had a twofold teaching, one open and one hidden: Pythagoras had outer and inner disciples, the Peripatetics distinguished opinion from knowledge, and Empedocles, Heraclitus, and Parmenides contrasted the few with the many.
672. 5.10.60Paul speaks of a mystery hidden for ages and now revealed, and of a fuller knowledge for which he prays that the Colossians may be filled.
673. 5.10.61Clement distinguishes the mysteries handed down by the apostles from the faith preached to the Gentiles, and reads “every person perfect in Christ” as the whole person purified, since knowledge is not for all.
674. 5.10.62Paul asks for prayer to speak the mystery of Christ, and Hebrews distinguishes milk for infants from solid food for the perfect; some things were handed down unwritten.
675. 5.10.63Barnabas reads the promise of a land flowing with milk and honey as a hidden teaching about Christ in the flesh; the Lord keeps his mystery for the sons of his house, and knowing the Father is eternal life.
676. 5.10.64The prophets and David speak of hidden treasures and secret wisdom; Christ the Teacher has opened what was hidden, and Paul reserved the fullness of the tradition for teaching in person.
677. 5.10.65Plato wrote about God in riddles and warned against writing down the highest things; Paul likewise speaks hidden wisdom among the perfect.
678. 5.10.66Paul's milk and solid food mean elementary instruction and the highest contemplation, which is the flesh and blood of the Word; Plato's great sacrifice points to Christ our Passover.
679. 5.11.67The acceptable sacrifice is separation from the body's passions; Socrates' “practice of death,” Pythagoras' silence, and Moses' flaying of the burnt offering all mean that the soul must be stripped bare to contemplate God.
680. 5.11.68Most people imagine God to be like themselves, but God gives us birth, food, and growth without sharing them; the Hebrew Scriptures' talk of God's hands, eyes, and anger is to be read allegorically.
681. 5.11.69Isocrates' description of the truly educated man shows that even the Greeks admired the life of the one who knows, though they did not know what knowledge is.
682. 5.11.70Those who hunger for truth will be filled with knowledge; Euripides unknowingly hints at the Father and the Son and at Christ's fireless sacrifice, and the Greek mysteries begin with purification as Christians begin with the washing.
683. 5.11.71As in the Greek mysteries purification comes before contemplation, so we approach God by stripping away everything bodily until we know what he is not; God is beyond place, time, and name, and is known only by the grace that comes through the Son.
684. 5.11.72Divine wisdom is the tree of life in paradise; the Word made flesh bore fruit on the tree of the cross, and choosing life means loving God.
685. 5.11.73Abraham's seeing the place “on the third day” means that after sight and desire the mind perceives spiritual things, opened by Christ who rose on the third day; God's place is seen only from afar.
686. 5.11.74We see God now only as in a mirror; Moses allowed one temple and no image, showing that God is invisible and uncircumscribed, and the prophets reject temples and sacrifices as containing God.
687. 5.11.75Euripides and Plato agree that God cannot be housed in buildings and needs nothing, as Paul says in Acts.
688. 5.11.76The Stoic Zeno rejected temples and statues as unworthy of the gods, and Plato forbade private images and costly offerings.
689. 5.11.77Plato says the highest truth cannot be written but is kindled in the soul like a flame; a prophecy ascribed to Zephaniah describes angels in the fifth heaven praising the ineffable God.
690. 5.12.78Plato said the Maker of all cannot be declared to all, having learned from Moses, who entered the thick darkness where God was; Orpheus too says that no mortal sees God, for a cloud surrounds him.
691. 5.12.79Paul's “unspeakable words” heard in the third heaven show that God cannot be expressed in human speech; Plato too speaks of heavens and worlds.
692. 5.12.80Scripture repeatedly speaks of hidden wisdom: the unleavened cakes hidden in ashes, Paul's hidden wisdom, Christ's mystery of the kingdom, his parables, and the leaven hidden in the meal.
693. 5.12.81Solon, Empedocles, and John agree that God cannot be seen or grasped; God is the first principle, beyond every category, indivisible, infinite, without form or name.
694. 5.12.82The names we give God are not his proper name but aids to thought; God cannot be reached by demonstration and is known only by grace through the Word, as Paul told the Athenians about the unknown god.
695. 5.13.83Whether the Father draws the soul or free will leaps toward the good, the soul rises only by grace; Plato too said virtue comes by divine gift, and God's Wisdom rewards faith with fellowship.
696. 5.13.84Plato said we must believe the children of the gods even without proof; Clement applies this to the prophets and to Christ, the true Son, through whom God proclaimed the Scriptures.
697. 5.13.85The Son must be believed even without demonstration; trust, which is more than faith, grows as learning grows, and those who scorn philosophy scorn faith as well.
698. 5.13.86Faith is a voluntary assent that produces good works; wrongdoing is voluntary, not necessary; and Christ is the door through which alone one rightly enters.
699. 5.13.87Salvation comes by learning the truth through Christ, even for those trained in Greek philosophy; all right-thinking people had a natural perception of the one God, and humans received God's breath at creation.
700. 5.13.88The Greeks said mind comes to humans by divine gift, but Christians say the Holy Spirit is breathed upon the believer, as Joel foretold, though not as a part of God.
701. 5.14.89Chapter 14 begins Clement's account of how the Greeks borrowed from the Hebrew Scriptures: the Stoic idea of God pervading all things misread Wisdom, and Plato hinted at a single first principle.
702. 5.14.90Greek ideas of formless matter, chance, and providence reaching only to the moon came from misreading Scripture, and the Greek pictures of punishment by fire after death, as in Plato's Republic, came from the same source.
703. 5.14.91Punishment after death implies that the soul is immortal; Plato knew of rivers of fire and Tartarus, which Scripture calls Gehenna, and of guardian spirits, as Scripture speaks of the angels of the little ones.
704. 5.14.92The philosophers learned from Moses that the world had a beginning, as Plato says in the Timaeus, and Plato's evil-working soul in the Laws corresponds to the devil of Scripture.
705. 5.14.93Plato's teaching on evil spirits and an undying battle matches Paul's warfare against spiritual powers; Scripture too distinguishes an intelligible world, made “in the beginning,” from the sensible world made in six days.
706. 5.14.94Scripture's account of an invisible and a visible creation is the source of Plato's intelligible and sensible worlds; man's body is from the earth and his soul from God's breath, and the image of God is the Word, of whom the human mind is an image.
707. 5.14.95The Stoic goal of living by nature and Plato's goal of likeness to God come from Moses' command to follow God; Zeno's teaching that the good are friends was taken from Plato.
708. 5.14.96Plato's goal of becoming like God matches the saying that the seeker will find and reign and rest; Thales' sayings about God echo Scripture, and Moses' “choose life” teaches that only the good is to be chosen and that the end of life is to love God.
709. 5.14.97Christ's two great commandments underlie Socrates' prayer for inner beauty and the Stoic view that only the noble is good; Aristobulus showed that Peripatetic philosophy depended on Moses.
710. 5.14.98Plato's myth of the golden, silver, and bronze citizens can be read of the elect who long for knowledge, or of Jews, Greeks, and Christians; his portrait of the true philosopher in the Theaetetus pictures the Christian life.
711. 5.14.99Christ's teaching on plain speech and on oaths has parallels in Plato; the Greeks' “voice of God” echoes Moses' “he spoke and it came to be,” and their teaching that the body is earthly echoes the forming of man from dust.
712. 5.14.100Greek poets speak of humans fashioned from clay, as Genesis does; the Stoics' creative fire corresponds to Scripture's calling God fire and light; Homer echoes the separation of sea and land; and Epicharmus says nothing is impossible for God.
713. 5.14.101A lyric poet, Aratus, and Homer all speak of the supreme God who rules day and night, fills all things, makes us his offspring, and made heaven and earth; the “Zeus” of the poets points the mind toward God.
714. 5.14.102Democritus, Pindar, and Plato all hint at one supreme God, the Father and Maker, and Plato even seems to speak of the Father and the Son.
715. 5.14.103Clement reads Plato's “king of all” with a second and a third as a hint of the Trinity, and Plato's tale of Er, whom he identifies with Zoroaster, as a hint of the resurrection or the soul's ascent; Empedocles speaks of a final change of all things into fire.
716. 5.14.104Heraclitus taught both an everlasting world of fire and a world that comes to be and is dissolved again into fire.
717. 5.14.105The Stoics follow Heraclitus on the world's conflagration; Plato calls our daylight night and the soul's entry into the body sleep, and David's “I slept and awoke” foretells Christ's incarnation and resurrection.
718. 5.14.106Christ's command to watch means separating the soul from the body; Plato's souls who rise on the eighth day from the meadow point to the Lord's day and the soul's ascent beyond the planets to heaven.
719. 5.14.107The Greeks too held the seventh day holy, as verses ascribed to Hesiod, Homer, and Callimachus show.
720. 5.14.108Plato's description of the righteous man who is scourged and impaled nearly prophesies Christ's passion; Antisthenes, Xenophon, and the Sibyl agree with the prophets that God cannot be pictured or seen.
721. 5.14.109Xenophanes taught that God is one, not like mortals, and mocked the human habit of picturing the gods in their own image.
722. 5.14.110Bacchylides says the gods are free from human ills, and Cleanthes the Stoic lists the qualities of the good.
723. 5.14.111Cleanthes rebukes those who look to opinion; the tragedians' tales of Zeus's adulteries are theatrical folly, while Heraclitus speaks of the everlasting Word that people fail to understand.
724. 5.14.112Melanippides, Parmenides, and Hesiod speak of one supreme, unbegotten ruler, and tragedy too draws people from idols to heaven.
725. 5.14.113Lines ascribed to Sophocles proclaim one God, maker of heaven and earth, and condemn the worship of images.
726. 5.14.114Euripides and Aeschylus speak of a supreme, self-begotten God who is over all things.
727. 5.14.115Heraclitus and Timaeus of Locri speak of one wise principle, unbegotten, a teaching that flowed from Moses' “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one.”
728. 5.14.116Clement finds hints of the Father and the Son in lines of Homer, in Orpheus, and in Xenocrates' highest and lowest Zeus.
729. 5.14.117Homer shows that no mortal can catch or grasp a god, as Isaiah asks to whom God could be compared or what image could represent him.
730. 5.14.118Verses ascribed to Epicharmus say that human reason springs from a divine Reason that teaches all the arts.
731. 5.14.119Isaiah's rejection of sacrifices without repentance is echoed by verses ascribed to Menander, which say that God is not won by costly offerings but sees and requires an upright life.
732. 5.14.120Verses ascribed to Menander, echoing the psalm's “sacrifice of righteousness,” teach that God delights in just deeds and is always near.
733. 5.14.121Verses ascribed to Diphilus teach that there is judgment after death with two paths for the righteous and the ungodly, and a tragic poet foretells the burning of the world by fire.
734. 5.14.122Tragic and Orphic verses speak of the world's destruction and restoration, and Empedocles of the blessed life with the immortals; no one is too great or too small to escape justice.
735. 5.14.123The Orphic poem bids the reader look to the divine Word and the immortal king, and says God was known only to one Chaldean, whom Clement takes to be Abraham or his son.
736. 5.14.124The Orphic poem, describing God enthroned in heaven with the earth beneath his feet and the mountains trembling, paraphrases the prophets.
737. 5.14.125An Orphic hymn to the ruler of all, whose throne is surrounded by angels and who orders the stars and seasons, echoes Isaiah's God who measured the heavens.
738. 5.14.126The Orphic hymn's “mother-father” points to creation from nothing (though Gnostics misuse it to imagine a consort of God), and its verses paraphrase the prophets' God who makes the thunder and alone kills and makes alive.
739. 5.14.127Archilochus and Orpheus speak of God who sees all deeds and holds the world in his hand, as Isaiah and Jeremiah do, and Phocylides knows of good and bad spirits, as Scripture knows of fallen angels.
740. 5.14.128Philemon denies that Fortune is a god, and Sophocles says that all things depend on the supreme God, who holds the beginning and the end.
741. 5.14.129Orpheus, Pindar, Hesiod, and Solon speak of one God who makes all things and whose counsels no mortal can search out, as Isaiah and Paul say.
742. 5.14.130Hesiod echoes the curse of toil after the fall, Homer's golden scales show that God is just, and Menander that God is good in all things.
743. 5.14.131Verses ascribed to Aeschylus describe God as unlike mortal flesh, appearing in fire, water, and darkness, before whom mountains and sea tremble, echoing the psalms.
744. 5.14.132Even Apollo's oracle during the Persian invasion admits that Athena could not sway the supreme God.
745. 5.14.133Pythagorean, Orphic, and comic writers speak of one first principle and one Father of all; Plato's philosophy is the turning of the soul toward the Good; and every nation has a natural preconception of the one Maker.
746. 5.14.134The Greek philosophers, drawing on the Scriptures, gave first place to one invisible God, but without Christian teaching they could not know him truly; he is God of all in power, but not in knowledge.
747. 5.14.135Isaiah's Assyrian envoy and the sailors in Jonah show that even nations who had not believed had some awareness of the Almighty God, while believers know him as their own God.
748. 5.14.136Malachi foretells that God's name will be glorified among the nations; Plato and Bacchylides teach that virtue is freely chosen and that God is never the cause of evil.
749. 5.14.137Pindar pictures Zeus the Savior joined to Justice; whoever ignores the truth for human teaching is wretched, as Euripides says of those who see creation and do not perceive God.
750. 5.14.138True learning leads to knowledge of the heavens, as Parmenides and Metrodorus promise, and finally to the blessed vision of which Plato speaks, free from the body.
751. 5.14.139The Pythagorean “counter-earth” is the promised land of the heavenly inheritance; Clement now stops citing examples so as not to turn a side-issue into his main work.
752. 5.14.140Having shown that the Greeks borrowed from the Scriptures, as the Lord's word about thieves implies, Clement stops, adding that Greek books must be read with care and that knowledge is the boundary of happiness.
753. 5.14.141God's goodness and justice toward all are everlasting and without beginning; each person shares in them as he chooses, and so ends the fifth book of the Miscellanies.
754. 8.1.1Christians should not be quarrelsome disputers like the later Greek philosophers but should inquire as Scripture bids, “Seek and you will find,” since inquiry by question and answer opens the door to true knowledge.
755. 8.1.2Finding requires seeking, searching, and questioning; the lover of truth inquires peaceably, from Scripture and common notions, toward sure knowledge given by God.
756. 8.2.3Inquiry should begin by stating clearly, in terms all agree on, what a word such as “demonstration” means; then one asks whether the thing exists and what its nature is.
757. 8.2.4A claim must be confirmed from something all agree on, or it leads to an endless regress; so a term should be defined clearly, as “the sun” is better defined as the brightest heavenly body than by the Stoics' obscure formula.
758. 8.3.5Demonstration supplies conviction about disputed things from agreed ones; in its full sense it produces scientific certainty, just as a true physician or a true knower lacks nothing of his skill.
759. 8.3.6A syllogism draws a valid conclusion from agreed premises; a demonstration does so from true premises; and either everything needs proof or some things are credible in themselves.
760. 8.3.7Since proof cannot go back forever, all demonstration rests on first principles that are believed without proof, that is, on faith, and on what is plainly evident to sense and thought.
761. 8.3.8Analysis traces a proof back to its first principles, demonstration leads from them to the conclusion; the demonstrator must care about true premises and valid inference, not about names, and every inquiry starts from something known and believed without proof.
762. 8.4.9Every inquiry starts from some prior knowledge, of a thing's substance or of its activities; the first step is to see what kind of problem is being asked, as in the question whether an unborn child is an animal.
763. 8.4.10Before answering whether the unborn is an animal, one must ask what the questioner means by “animal,” since Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics define it differently.
764. 8.4.11If the questioner says what he means by “animal,” the question becomes clear; if he refuses, he shows himself contentious and must listen to a full exposition before objecting.
765. 8.4.12The questioner must say whether “what is in the womb” means the seed or the formed embryo; otherwise his question is as ambiguous as asking whether “the dog” is an animal.
766. 8.4.13An animal is what is naturally able to perceive and move by impulse; the real question is whether the embryo already has this ability, not merely whether it is nourished or will one day have it.
767. 8.4.14Demonstration confirms one thing from others that the learner already knows, starting from what is evident to sense and thought; the second kind of problem asks what a thing is when its effects are known, such as where the soul's ruling part resides.
768. 8.5.15Against the skeptics: a universal suspension of judgment refutes itself, since the claim that nothing is certain must either be true, and so something is certain, or false.
769. 8.5.16The skeptic who says truth cannot be known contradicts himself; a school of thought is defined as adherence to a coherent set of doctrines, and even dogmatists suspend judgment on some questions.
770. 8.6.17A method for inquiry: first distinguish the meanings of a term, then ask whether a thing is, what it is, and why it is, using induction, division, definition, and demonstration, each of which shows something different.
771. 8.6.18To define a thing one takes its genus and divides it step by step by its differences until only the thing remains, as man is defined as a mortal, land-dwelling, walking, rational animal.
772. 8.6.19Division supplies the material and definition shapes it; definitions express our universal concepts, and the only sound division is that of a genus into its species.
773. 8.6.20A genus is best divided into two or three species, classified by the ten categories; whoever truly knows a thing can define it, and ignorance of definitions causes most disputes.
774. 8.6.21Distinguishing marks such as “capable of laughter” are added to definitions as signs; a short definition names the genus and two key differences, and no definition fully captures a thing's nature.
775. 8.7.22The skeptics say that suspension of judgment arises from the instability of human opinion and from the conflict among things, which fill life with disputes and libraries with contradictory books.
776. 8.8.23Words are symbols of thoughts, and thoughts are impressions of things; as grammar reduces words to twenty-four letters, philosophy reduces things to ten categories, while immaterial realities are grasped by the mind alone.
777. 8.8.24Kinds of words and their meanings: synonyms, heteronyms, polyonyms, paronyms, and homonyms, with homonyms arising by chance, likeness, analogy, function, or a common reference.
778. 8.9.25Causes are initiating, sustaining, cooperating, or necessary conditions, illustrated by learning: the father starts it, the teacher sustains it, the learner's nature cooperates, and time is its condition.
779. 8.9.26Philosophers dispute whether causes produce bodies or incorporeal effects; Clement holds that causes produce incorporeal predicates such as “being cut,” which also solves the sophism that a house passes through your mouth when you say “house.”
780. 8.9.27Many conditions lead to an event, as the building of the Argo led at last to Medea's killing of her children, but only the agent, Medea, is the cause; what merely fails to prevent something is not a cause.
781. 8.9.28There are four kinds of cause (maker, matter, form, end); a thing's readiness to be affected is a cooperating condition, not the cause, and sustaining causes act at once while some initiating causes take time.
782. 8.9.29A cause is always relative to an effect and to something able to receive it; therefore nothing can be its own cause, just as no one can be his own father.
783. 8.9.30Two things can be causes to each other of some effect without causing each other, as the stones of an arch hold each other up; so the law of “eye for eye” is not a cause of wrong but brings justice to one and correction to the other.
784. 8.9.31Whether several things that together produce one effect are many causes or one: men hauling a ship, the many virtues producing happiness, and the many things that cause illness or fragrance.
785. 8.9.32One cause can produce opposite effects depending on its strength or on the thing it acts on, as the sun melts wax but hardens clay; causes are also classed as evident or hidden, and hidden ones as knowable by signs or wholly unknowable.
786. 8.9.33A sustaining cause keeps its effect in being; a cooperating cause intensifies what another cause produces; a joint cause produces an effect only together with another cause.