Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies 3

Many people have a disposition like the stubbornness of winter, uncontrolled and irrational. Unbelief has accomplished many good things, and faith has accomplished bad ones. Remember Epicharmus's saying: 'Disbelieve, for these are the joints of the mind.' Disbelieving the truth brings death just as believing brings life; conversely, believing a lie and disbelieving the truth drags one down to destruction. The same reasoning applies to self-control and self-indulgence. Self-control produces good works, and abstaining from injustice is the beginning of salvation. It seems to me that the Sabbath, through abstinence from evil, signifies self-control and poses the question of what distinguishes human beings from beasts. In this respect the angels of God are wiser; Scripture says, 'You have made him a little lower than the angels' (Psalm 8:5). They do not await the Scripture's fulfillment in the Lord, even though He bore flesh, but in the perfect Gnostic who in time and clothing is made lower than the angels. I therefore affirm that wisdom is something other than mere knowledge, since life itself does not differ; mortal nature — that is, humanity — shares the common lot, yet has been deemed worthy of immortality by living with the habit of contemplation and self-control, which sets it apart. It seems to me that Pythagoras, too, says that God alone is wise (since the apostle writes in Romans of the mystery made known to all nations for the obedience of faith, 'to the only wise God through Jesus Christ,' Romans 16:26), while he calls himself a philosopher through friendship toward God. 'God spoke to Moses as a friend speaks to a friend' (Exodus 33:11). The truth is clear to God; truth begets, and the Gnostic loves truth. Solomon says, 'Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise' (Proverbs 6:6), and become a disciple of the bee. If each creature has its single proper work — ox, horse, and dog alike — what shall we say is humanity's proper work? Humanity appears to me to resemble a centaur, a Thessalian composite of rational and irrational parts, soul and body. The body works the earth and hastens back to earth, but the soul stretches toward God; educated by true philosophy, it hastens toward its kindred above, turning away from the body's desires and toward the pains and fears that accompany them — though we have shown that endurance and fear can serve the good. If knowledge of sin comes through the law, as those who run after the law say, and 'sin was in the world until the law' (Romans 5:13), yet 'sin is dead apart from the law' (Romans 7:8), we answer them: when you remove the cause of fear — sin — you remove fear, and far more so punishment, when the natural desire is gone. 'The law is not laid down for the just,' Scripture says (1 Timothy 1:9). Heraclitus rightly says the name of justice would never have been known if these things did not exist; Socrates says law would not have been enacted for the sake of good things. Yet the accusers did not grasp this, as the apostle declares: 'The one who loves his neighbor does no evil' (Romans 13:10). For the commandments — 'You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal,' and any other commandment — are summed up in this word: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself' (Galatians 5:14; Leviticus 19:18; Matthew 22:39). This is how you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37-40). If the one who loves his neighbor works no evil, and every commandment is summed up in loving the neighbor, then the commandments that implant fear produce love, not hatred. Fear is not a passion of which the law is the generator. Therefore the law is holy, and truly spiritual, according to the apostle (Romans 7:12, 14). It is necessary, as it seems, to investigate the body's nature and the soul's substance, to grasp the end of each, and not to regard death as an evil. 'When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness,' the apostle says (Romans 6:20). What fruit did you have then? Things you are now ashamed of, for the end of those things is death. But now, having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you have your fruit for sanctification, and the end is eternal life (Romans 6:22). For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 6:23). It follows that death is the soul's communion with the body while the soul is sinful, and life is separation from sin. Many have trenches and ditches of desire, and pits of anger and rage, which one must leap over and avoid every contrivance of plots, no longer beholding the knowledge of God through a mirror. 'Half of a man's virtue does wide-seeing Zeus take away when the day of slavery seizes him' (Homer, Odyssey 17.322-323). Scripture knows those who are under sin and sold into sins as lovers of pleasure and lovers of body, more beasts than men, likened to cattle — wanton horses neighing after their neighbors' possessions. The self-indulgent man is an insolent donkey, the covetous a wild wolf, the deceiver a snake. The soul's separation from the body, practiced throughout life by the philosopher, builds a readiness to bear natural death easily — the dissolution of the bonds between soul and body. 'The world has been crucified to me, and I to the world,' he says (Galatians 6:14), 'and I live, though in the flesh, as one who lives in heaven, conducting my life as a citizen of heaven' (Philippians 3:20).