Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
But you say it is not reasonable to overturn a custom handed down from our fathers. Then why do we not still use our first nourishment, the milk that our childhood nurses trained us to take? Why do we increase or diminish our paternal estate, instead of keeping it just as we received it? Why do we no longer dribble at our fathers' laps, or go on doing the other things which, as infants reared by our mothers, we used to get laughed at for, but instead correct ourselves, even if we did not have good tutors? Then again, in voyages, digressions from the course, though costly and dangerous, nevertheless strike us as somehow sweet — yet in life shall we not abandon the wicked, passion-ridden, godless custom, even if our fathers are angered, and turn aside toward the truth and seek out the Father who truly is, thrusting away habit as one thrusts away a deadly poison? For this very thing is the finest of the undertakings before us — to show you how, out of madness and this thrice-wretched custom, reverence for God came to be hated; for so great a good, than which nothing greater has ever been granted by God to the race of men, would never have been hated or renounced, had you not been swept away by custom, and then, stopping up your ears like stiff-necked horses that refuse the rein, biting the bit, you fled from reason — longing to throw off us, the charioteers of your life, and being carried by folly toward the cliffs of destruction, you took the holy word of God for something accursed. So there follows for you, as Sophocles says, the wages of your choice: mind gone, ears useless, thoughts empty; and you do not know that this above all is true — that the good and God-fearing will meet with a good reward, having honored the good, while the wicked, from the opposite course, will meet a punishment to match, and over the ruler of wickedness himself a chastisement hangs. The prophet Zechariah threatens him thus: 'May he who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you; is this not a brand plucked from the fire?' What longing, then, still lies in men for a self-chosen death? Why have they fled for refuge to this death-bearing brand, with which they will be burned up, when it is possible to live well according to God, not according to custom? For God grants life, but wicked custom, after our departure from here, brings upon us an empty repentance together with punishment — 'and the fool learned only by suffering,' how superstition destroys and reverence for God saves. Let one of you look at those who serve among the idols: filthy-haired, disgraced by squalid and torn clothing, utter strangers to baths, their nails grown wild and beastlike, many of them even deprived of their manhood, showing by their very deeds that the precincts of the idols are tombs, or prisons. These men seem to me to be mourning, not worshiping, the gods, having suffered things that call for pity rather than for reverence. And seeing these things, are you still blind, and will you not look up toward the Master of all and Lord of the universe? Will you not flee, escaping from the prisons here, to the mercy that comes from the heavens? For God, out of great love for mankind, clings to man, just as, when a nestling falls from its nest, the mother bird flies to it; and if some crawling beast should gape to seize the nestling, the mother flutters about it, mourning her dear young; so God the Father both seeks out his handiwork and heals its fall and drives off the beast and takes up the nestling again, urging it to fly back up to the nest. Even dogs, once astray, have tracked down their master by scent, following the trail with their noses, and horses, throwing off their rider, have obeyed their master at a single whistle; 'the ox,' it says, 'knew its owner, and the ass its master's manger, but Israel has not known me.' What then does the Lord do? He bears no grudge; he still shows mercy; he still demands repentance. I want to ask you whether it does not seem monstrous to you that you men, who exist as the handiwork of God and whose soul is a gift received from him, entirely his own, should be enslaved to some other lord, and should worship, instead of the King, the tyrant, and instead of the Good, the Evil One. For who, I ask by the truth, being of sound mind, forsakes the good to consort with wickedness? Who, fleeing God, lives together with demons? What man, able to be a son of God, delights to be a slave? Or who, able to be a citizen of heaven, pursues after darkness, when it is possible instead to cultivate paradise and range over heaven and partake of the life-giving and undefiled spring, walking the air in the track of that luminous cloud, as Elijah did, beholding the saving rain? But others, in the manner of worms, wallowing about marshes and mud — the streams of pleasure — feed on useless and senseless delights, being certain swinish men. For pigs, it is said, 'delight in mud' rather than in clean water, and 'go wild over rubbish,' as Democritus says. Let us not, then, let us not be enslaved, nor become swinish, but as true 'children of light,' let us look up and gaze into the light, lest the Lord expose us as bastards, as the sun exposes the eagles. Let us repent, then, and pass over from ignorance to knowledge, from folly to prudence, from incontinence to self-control, from injustice to righteousness, from godlessness to God. Fair is the risk of deserting to God. And there are many other goods for the lovers of righteousness to enjoy, we who pursue eternal salvation — and indeed the goods which God himself hints at, speaking through Isaiah: 'There is an inheritance for those who serve the Lord' — a fair and lovely inheritance indeed, not gold, not silver, not clothing, where moth and the plunderer of the earth creep in around wealth that grovels on the ground and covets with its eyes, but that treasure of salvation, toward which those who have become lovers of the word must hasten; and our good deeds set out together with us from here, and fly up together with the wing of truth. This inheritance is put into our hands by the eternal covenant of God, bestowing the eternal gift; and this loving Father of ours, our true Father, never ceases exhorting, admonishing, teaching, loving; for he never ceases saving, and he counsels what is best: 'Become righteous, says the Lord; you who thirst, go to the water, and as many as have no money, go, buy, and drink without money.' He calls us to the washing, to salvation, to illumination, all but crying aloud and saying: I give you earth and sea, my child, and heaven, and I grant you all the living creatures in them; only, O child, thirst for your father, and God will be shown to you without price; truth is not peddled for gain; he gives you both the birds and the swimming creatures and those upon the earth; these your Father has fashioned for your grateful delight. The bastard child, who is a child of destruction, and has chosen 'to serve mammon,' will buy things with money; but to you, the true son, who loves the Father — for whom he still labors — he entrusts what is your own, to you alone he also makes the promise, saying: 'The soil must never pass into permanent sale' — since it cannot be handed over to ruin — 'for the whole earth belongs to me'; and it is yours too, if you receive God back. Whence Scripture rightly announces good news to all who have come to trust: 'Those set apart for the Lord will possess as their inheritance God's splendor and his might.' What glory, blessed one, tell me? 'What no eye has beheld, what no ear has caught, what has never risen within a human mind — such things await them, and they will exult in their Lord's kingdom without end, so be it.' You have now received, fellow men, God's gracious pledge; and you have likewise heard the opposing warning, that of punishment, by which the Lord saves, disciplining man with fear and grace. What are we waiting for? Why do we not turn aside from punishment? Why do we not accept the gift? Why do we not select what is superior — God rather than the Wicked One — and set wisdom above the worship of images, and exchange life for death? 'Behold, I have set before your face,' he says, 'death and life.' The Lord is putting you to the test so that you will pick life; like a parent he urges you to heed God. 'For if you listen to me,' he says, 'and are willing, you shall eat the good things of the earth' — that is the grace of obedience; 'but if you do not listen to me nor are willing, the sword and fire shall devour you' — that is the sentence passed on defiance. 'For it is the Lord's own mouth that has uttered these words': the word of the Lord is the law of truth. Do you wish me to become a good counselor for you? Then listen; and I, if I can, will show you. You ought, O men, in reflecting on the Good itself, to bring to it an innate faith, a witness sufficient in itself, from your own household, manifestly choosing the best, and not to inquire whether it should be pursued, but to labor at the good. For even if one must get drunk, so to speak, one ought to hesitate; but you get drunk before even considering it; and if one must act insolently, you do not stop to think it over, but commit the insolence as quickly as possible. Only, it seems, when it comes to whether one ought to reverence God, and whether one ought to follow this wise God and Christ, do you think this matter worthy of deliberation and consideration, though you have not even conceived what is fitting for God, whatever that may be. Believe us, if only as you would believe about drunkenness, so that you may become sober; believe, if only as about insolence, so that you may live. But if you also wish to be persuaded, having beheld the manifest proof of the virtues, come, I will lay before you, out of abundance, persuasion concerning the Word. And you — for the ancestral customs no longer keep you from the truth, since you have already been instructed beforehand — may now hear how the matter stands next; and let no shame over this name seize you beforehand, the shame that 'does great harm to men,' turning them aside from salvation. Let us, then, stripping off our garments openly in the stadium of truth, contend nobly as true athletes, with the holy Word as our umpire and the Master of the universe as president of the games. For no small prize lies before us: immortality. So do not be concerned any longer, not even a little, with what some marketplace rabble say about you — godless dancers in the train of superstition, driven by folly and madness straight into the pit itself, makers of idols and worshipers of stones; for these men have dared to deify men, recording as a god the thirteenth, Alexander the Macedonian, 'whom Babylon proved dead.' I admire, then, the sophist of Chios, Theocritus by name, who, after the death of Alexander, poking fun at the hollow notions people held concerning the gods, told his fellow townsmen: 'Cheer up, friends — for now the gods keep dying off before we do.' As for the visible gods and that mongrel crowd of created things, whoever worships and consorts with them is far more wretched than those very demons themselves. For God is in no way at all unjust, as the demons are, but is as righteous as can be, and nothing is more like him than whoever among us becomes most righteous. Off with you to your road, then, all you handicraftsmen, who turn to the grim-eyed Athena Ergane as a goddess with your fixed winnowing-baskets — foolish makers and worshipers of stones. Let your Phidias come, and your Polyclitus, and Praxiteles too, and Apelles, and all who practice the vulgar crafts, earthborn workers of earth. For a certain prophecy says that the affairs of this world will fare badly whenever men put their trust in statues. Let these petty craftsmen come again — for I will not cease from summoning them. Not one of them has ever fashioned a breathing image, nor has any of them molded soft flesh out of earth. Who melted marrow, or who fixed bones in place? Who stretched out sinews, or who blew veins into shape? Who poured blood into them, or who stretched skin around them? Where would any of them make eyes that could see? Who breathed in a soul? Who granted righteousness? Who has promised immortality? Only the Craftsman of the universe, 'the Father, best of all artisans,' has fashioned such a living statue as us, mankind; but that Olympian statue of yours, a copy of a copy far removed from what is real, is merely a silent product shaped by Athenian craftsmen. For God's 'likeness' is nothing other than his Word — the genuine Offspring of Mind, that divine Word, is light sprung from the original light — and what images the Word in turn is the real human being, namely the mind within a person, who is said for this reason to have come to be 'according to the image' of God and 'according to his likeness,' being likened, in the wisdom of his heart, to the divine Word, and thereby rational; but of the man who is seen, the earthborn man, the earthy image is those man-shaped statues, appearing far from the truth as a transient impression. Life, then, seemed to me to have become nothing but full of madness, being so busy about matter with such earnestness. Custom has been ruined by empty opinion, having given you a taste of slavery and irrational fussing; and ignorance is the cause of lawless observances and deceitful pretenses — ignorance which, having contrived many forms of demons out of deadly wax figures and hateful idols, has stamped upon its followers the mark of a long death. Take, then, the water of reason; wash yourselves, you who are defiled; sprinkle yourselves free of custom with the true drops; one must ascend into the heavens pure. You are a man — the most common thing; seek out him who fashioned you. You are a son — the most particular thing; recognize your father. But do you still remain in your sins, melted away with pleasures? To which of you will the Lord announce, 'Heaven's kingdom belongs to you'? It is yours, if you are willing — you who have set your resolve toward God; it is yours, if only you are willing to believe and to follow the brevity of the proclamation, which, when the Ninevites obeyed it, they exchanged their expected destruction, through genuine repentance, for glorious salvation. How, then, shall I go up to heaven, one may ask? The Lord is 'the way,' narrow indeed, but 'from heaven,' narrow indeed, but sending us up into heaven — narrow, looked down upon on earth, but broad, worshiped in the heavens. Then he who has never heard the word has ignorance as his excuse for going astray, but he into whose ears it is cast bears, from his own judgment, the blame of disobedience before his soul, and the wiser he seems to be, the more his intelligence works against him, since he has used his prudence as his own accuser by not choosing the best; for it is natural for man to be akin to God. Just as, then, we do not force the horse to plow nor the bull to hunt, but draw each animal toward that for which it is by nature suited, so likewise we call man too — brought into being for the contemplation of heaven, a truly heavenly plant — toward the knowledge of God, having grasped that which is his own peculiar and distinctive property beyond the other animals, counseling him to lay up piety as sufficient provision for eternity. Farm, we say, if you are a farmer — but know God as you farm; and sail, you who love seafaring, but call upon the heavenly pilot; knowledge has taken hold of you as a soldier — then listen to the general who signals what is just. So then, as if heavy with drowsiness and drunkenness, sober up, and looking about a little, consider what the worshiped stones want with you, and what you spend so vainly and foolishly on matter; into ignorance you consume both your money and your life, spending your very living toward death, having found this alone as the end of your vain hope, unable even to pity yourselves, and yet unwilling to be persuaded by those who pity you your error, enslaved by an evil custom, from which, having hung yourselves off by your own choice, you are carried down to destruction until your last breath — 'because the light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light,' though it is possible to wipe away what stands in the way of salvation — the delusion, the wealth, and the fear — crying out that line of the poet: whither indeed do I carry all these many goods? And whither do I myself wander? Are you not willing, then, casting away these empty fantasies, to renounce this very custom, adding, out of vainglory: 'False dreams, farewell, you were nothing after all'? For what, O men, do you take the Hermes of Tychon, and the Hermes of Andocides, and the Hermes of Amyetus to be? Surely it is plain to everyone that they are stones, just as that Hermes himself is. In the same way a halo around the moon is no deity, nor is a rainbow one, but affections of air and clouds, and just as day is not a god, nor even the year nor time made up of these, so too neither is the sun a god nor the moon, by which each of the aforementioned things is marked out. Who, then, in his right mind, would suppose that correction and chastisement and justice and retribution are gods? Neither are the Furies gods, nor the Fates, nor Destiny, since neither citizenship nor reputation nor wealth are gods either — wealth, whom painters even portray as blind; and if you deify shame and love and Aphrodite, then disgrace and impulse and beauty and intercourse must follow along with them as gods too. It would then no longer be reasonable for you to consider Sleep and Death twin gods, since these are affections that happen naturally to living creatures; nor indeed will you rightly call Fate or Destiny or the Moirai goddesses. And if strife and battle are not gods, then neither are Ares nor Enyo. Again, if bolts of lightning, thunderclaps, and downpours are no gods, how then could fire or water qualify as gods? And how can shooting stars and comets, which come to be through an affection of the air? And let him who calls Fortune a god call Action a god too. If, then, not one of these is thought to be a god, nor indeed those handmade and senseless images, but a certain providence of a divine power is manifestly at work around us, nothing remains but to confess this — that there really is and truly subsists the one God who alone truly exists. But you, unhappy people, resemble those dosed on mandrake root or some similar narcotic; may God at long last allow you to rouse yourselves from such stupor and to understand that God is not to be imagined as gold or stone or tree or an act or a passion or a disease or a fear. For truly there are 'thrice ten thousand demons upon the bounteous earth,' not 'immortal,' nor indeed mortal either (for they have no share in sensation, and hence none in death), but stone and wooden masters of men, insulting and betraying human life through custom. As it is written, 'The world and everything filling it belong to the Lord'; then why do you dare, luxuriating in what belongs to the Lord, to remain ignorant of the Master? Leave my land, the Lord will say to you; do not touch the water which I give forth; do not partake of the fruits which I cultivate; give back, O man, your nourishment to God; recognize your Master; you are God's own handiwork; how could what is his own rightly become alien to him? For what has been alienated, deprived of its proper belonging, is deprived of the truth. Are you not, in some sense — or rather, to speak to you more mysteriously — turning, like Niobe, or rather in the manner of that Hebrew woman (the ancients called her Lot's wife), into insensibility? We have received the tradition that this woman was turned to stone because of her love for Sodom; and the Sodomites are the godless, those turned toward impiety, hard-hearted and foolish. Suppose that these words are addressed to you from God: do not suppose that stones and wood and birds and snakes are sacred, but men are not; quite the contrary — hold that men are truly sacred, and that beasts and stones are exactly what they are. For the wretched and miserable among men suppose that God cries out through raven and jackdaw, but is silent through man, and they have honored the raven as God's messenger, while they persecute the man of God, who does not caw or clatter, but speaks — alas — and while he instructs them rationally and lovingly, they attempt inhumanly to slaughter him, though he calls them to righteousness, neither awaiting the grace from above nor turning away from the punishment. For they do not trust God, nor do they learn his power. But he whose love for mankind is unspeakable has an equally unspeakable hatred of evil. Wrath nurses punishment for sin, but love for mankind does good in response to repentance. Most pitiable of all is to be deprived of the help that comes from God. The loss of the eyes and the deafness of hearing are more painful than the rest of the wicked one's advantages; for the one is deprived of the sight of heaven, the other is deprived of divine learning. But you, crippled and blind in mind toward the truth, and deaf in understanding, feel no pain, show no indignation; you have felt no desire to behold the sky and the one who made it, nor have you cared to hear and be taught about the fashioner and father of everything, uniting your resolve with salvation; for nothing stands in the way of one who hastens toward the knowledge of God — not lack of education, not poverty, not disrepute, not lack of possessions; nor does anyone pray to exchange true wisdom itself 'by ravaging it with bronze' or with iron; for it has been well said, more truly than anything: the good man is everywhere a savior; for the zealot of righteousness, as a lover of that which needs nothing, needing little himself, having laid up his blessedness in nothing else but in God himself, where there is no moth, no plunderer, no pirate, but only the eternal giver of good things. So then you have rightly been likened to those serpents whose ears are closed against those who charm them. 'For their fury,' says Scripture, 'is like the likeness of the serpent, like a deaf asp that stops up its ears, which will not listen to the voice of enchanters.' But be charmed out of your savagery, and accept the tame and kindred word that is ours, and spit out the deadly venom, so that it may be granted you, as much as possible, to strip off corruption, just as those serpents strip off their old age. Listen to me, and do not stop up your ears nor block your hearing, but take to heart what is said. Fair is the medicine of immortality; halt at last your crawling, serpentine coils. 'For the enemies of the Lord shall lick the dust,' it says; lift your heads from the earth toward the upper air, look up to heaven, marvel, cease lying in wait for the heel of the righteous and obstructing 'the way of truth'; become prudent and harmless; perhaps the Lord will grant you the wing of simplicity — for he has chosen to give wings to those born of earth — so that, leaving your burrows, you may come to dwell in the heavens. Only let us repent with our whole heart, that with our whole heart we may be able to contain God. 'Hope in him,' it says, 'all you assembly of the people; pour out all your hearts before him' — this is said to those emptied of wickedness; he has mercy and fills them with righteousness; believe, O man, in a man who is also God; trust, mortal, in the one who suffered and is now adored; you who serve a lifeless deity, put your trust instead in the God who lives; every one of you, put trust in the single God over all humanity; trust him, and take up salvation as your recompense; 'search for God, and your very soul will live on.' Whoever searches for God is earnestly chasing after his own deliverance; once God is found, life is yours. So let us search, that we too may go on living. The prize of that search is a life shared with God. 'Let all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you, and let them say continually, let God be magnified.' A fair hymn to God is an immortal man, built up in righteousness, on whom the sayings of truth have been carved. For where else, if not in a sound soul, should righteousness be inscribed? Where love? Where reverence? Where gentleness? These divine writings, I think, once sealed upon the soul, one must consider a fine starting-point of wisdom for those setting out toward any part of life whatsoever, and must regard the same wisdom as an unruffled harbor of salvation; through which good fathers of children are those who have run to the Father, good sons to their parents are those who have come to know the Son, good husbands to their wives are those who remember the Bridegroom, and good masters of servants are those who have been ransomed from the ultimate slavery. Oh, the beasts are more blessed than the delusion found among men — they pasture in ignorance, as you do, but they do not play-act at truth; among them there is no race of flatterers, fish are not superstitious, birds do not practice idolatry; they marvel at only heaven, since they cannot conceive of God, having been judged unworthy of reason. And are you not ashamed, having made yourselves more irrational than the irrational creatures, you who through so many stages of life have worn yourselves out in godlessness? You were children, then youths, then adolescents, then men — but good, never. Even if you feel shame before your old age, come to your senses now that you stand at the sunset of your life; even if only at the end of your life you come to know God, may that very end of your life recover for you the beginning of salvation. Though you grew old toward superstition, come as new men toward reverence for God; God will approve harmless children. Let the man of Athens keep to Solon's statutes, then, the Argive to those of Phoroneus, and the man of Sparta to those set by Lycurgus; but if you enroll yourself among the people of God, heaven is your homeland, and God your lawgiver. And what are these laws? 'You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not corrupt boys, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness; you shall love the Lord your God.' And there are supplements to these as well — rational laws and holy words inscribed on the very hearts: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself,' and 'to him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also,' and 'you shall not desire, for by desire alone you have already committed adultery.' How much better it is for men, instead of obtaining their desires, not even to wish to desire what they ought not! But you cannot endure the austerity of salvation; and just as, among foods, we delight in sweet things, preferring them for the smoothness of their pleasure, while bitter things, which roughen the sense, heal and restore us to health, and the harshness of medicines strengthens the weak stomach, so custom pleases and tickles, but the one — custom — pushes us toward the pit, while the other — truth — leads us up to heaven: 'harsh' in its first taste, 'yet a sound rearer of the young'; and this women's chamber is stately, and this senate is chaste; nor is it hard of access, nor impossible to attain, but is very near, dwelling within us, as the all-wise Moses hints, dwelling among us in three parts: 'in hands and mouth and heart.' This is a true symbol, of truth being fulfilled through all three: in counsel and in deed and in word. Do not fear this either: that the many delightful appearances of things might rob you of wisdom; you yourself will willingly step over the nonsense of custom, just as children, once grown into men, throw away their toys. And with matchless speed and gracious accessibility, the divine power, shining upon the earth, has filled the whole world with the seed of salvation. For the Lord could never have accomplished so great a work in so short a time without divine attendance — he who is despised in appearance, worshiped in deed, the purifying and saving and gentle one, the divine Word, the truly most manifest God, set on equal footing with the Ruler of all, seeing he was God's own Son and 'the Word existed alongside God' — never doubted once he was first announced, nor left unknown when, putting on the guise of a human and molding himself into flesh, he performed humanity's rescuing drama; for he was a genuine contestant and a fellow-contestant with his own creature, and, spreading with the greatest speed to all men, rising quicker than the sun straight out of the Father's very will, he shone the light of God upon us most easily — whence he himself was, and who he was — showing us this through what he taught and demonstrated, he our herald of peace and reconciler and savior, the Word, a life-giving spring, a peaceful one, poured out over the whole face of the earth, through whom, so to speak, the whole world has already become a sea of good things.
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