Miscellanies 5.11.67

Clement of Alexandria · Miscellanies · ca. 198–203 · Alexandria · Read in context

Summary: The 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.

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Greek text · Stählin 2:370–371

Θυσία δὲ ἡ τῷ θεῷ δεκτὴ σώματός τε καὶ τῶν τούτου παθῶν ἀμετανόητος χωρισμός. ἡ ἀληθὴς τῷ ὄντι θεοσέβεια αὕτη. καὶ μή τι εἰκότως μελέτη θανάτου διὰ τοῦτο εἴρηται τῷ Σωκράτει ἡ φιλοσοφία· ὁ γὰρ μήτε τὴν ὄψιν παρατιθέμενος ἐν τῷ διανοεῖσθαι μήτε τινὰ τῶν ἄλλων αἰσθήσεων ἐφελκόμενος, ἀλλʼ αὐτῷ καθαρῷ τῷ νῷ τοῖς πράγμασιν ἐντυγχάνων τὴν ἀληθῆ φιλοσοφίαν μέτεισιν. τοῦτο ἄρα βούλεται καὶ τῷ Πυθαγόρᾳ ἡ τῆς πενταετίας σιωπή, ἣν τοῖς γνωρίμοις παρεγγυᾷ, ὡς δὴ ἀποστραφέντες τῶν αἰσθητῶν ψιλῷ τῷ νῷ τὸ θεῖον ἐποπτεύοιεν. παρὰ Μωυσέως τοιαῦτα φιλοσοφήσαντες οἱ τῶν Ἑλλήνων ἄκροι. προστάσσει γὰρ τὰ ὁλοκαυτώματα δείραντας εἰς μέλη διανεῖμαι, ἐπειδὴ γυμνὴν τῆς ὑλικῆς δορᾶς γενομένην τὴν γνωστικὴν ψυχὴν ἄνευ τῆς σωματικῆς φλυαρίας καὶ τῶν παθῶν πάντων, ὅσα περιποιοῦσιν αἱ κεναὶ καὶ ψευδεῖς ὑπολήψεις, ἀποδυσαμένην τὰς σαρκικὰς ἐπιθυμίας, τῷ φωτὶ καθιερωθῆναι ἀνάγκη.

English · Claude translation

The sacrifice acceptable to God is an unswerving separation from the body and its passions. This is true piety indeed. And is it not fittingly for this reason that philosophy was called by Socrates a practice of death? For the one who neither sets sight alongside his thinking nor drags in any of the other senses, but meets things with pure mind itself, pursues the true philosophy. This, then, is what Pythagoras too means by the five years' silence that he prescribes for his pupils: that, turned away from sensible things, they might contemplate the divine with the mind alone. It was from Moses that the foremost of the Greeks learned to philosophize in this way. For he commands that the whole burnt offerings be flayed and divided into their limbs, since the soul that knows must be stripped of its material hide, without the body's triviality and all the passions that empty and false suppositions produce, and, having put off the fleshly desires, must be consecrated to the light.

About this passage

Source

Stählin 2:370–371 · Otto Stählin, ed., Clemens Alexandrinus, vol. 2, Stromata Buch I–VI, GCS 15 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1906); vol. 3, Stromata Buch VII und VIII, GCS 17 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1909) · Greek text: Otto Stählin, Clemens Alexandrinus 2–3 (GCS 15, 17, 1906–1909), digitized by the Perseus Digital Library, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text

As printed in Stählin, GCS 15, 17. Manuscript variants and the editor's apparatus are not reproduced; no textual problem is noted in this passage.

Translation

Claude translation (claude-opus-5-5), 2026-09-27 · Translated by Claude from the Greek text of Stählin (1906–1909); made independently of existing English translations.

Compare

Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2 (1885) (an older public-domain English translation, whole volume at CCEL; checked against ours only after ours was made) · Book 3 is left partly untranslated (in Latin) there.

Scripture

Lev 1:6 · allusion, high confidence

Extrabiblical texts

Plato, Phaed. 65e–66a (Plato (works)) · allusion, high confidence
Plato, Phaed. 67e (Plato (works)) · allusion, high confidence

Topics

Ethics

Notes

Translation notes

Socrates on philosophy as a practice of death: Plato, Phaedo 67e and 81a; on thinking with pure mind apart from the senses: Phaedo 65e–66a. The flaying and dividing of the burnt offering is Lev 1:6.

Cite this passage

Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 5.11.67 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/clement-stromata/5/11/67/).

Plain text

Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 5.11.67 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/clement-stromata/5/11/67/).

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