Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Our Instructor, O you children, resembles his own Father, God, whose Son he is, sinless, blameless, and passionless in soul, God unstained in the form of man, servant executing what the Father wills, that Word who exists as God, dwelling within the Father, seated at the Father's right hand, divine likewise in his very shape. He is for us the unspotted image; it is to him with all our strength that we must try to make our soul resemble. But he is set free altogether from human passions—precisely for this cause he alone holds the office of judge, since he alone is without sin—while we, so far as lies within our power, endeavor to keep wrongdoing to a bare minimum. For nothing presses so urgently as, first, deliverance from the passions and sicknesses, and then, the prevention of an easy slide into the habit of sinning. The best thing, then, is never to commit sin whatsoever, under any circumstance, which we say belongs to God alone; second is never to lay hold of any wrongdoing done deliberately, which is proper to the wise man; third is not to fall into very many involuntary faults, which is characteristic of those nobly trained by the Instructor; and let it be set down last of all not to linger long in one's sins—though even this, for those who are called back to repentance, is a saving recovery of ground. And it seems to me that the Instructor speaks most beautifully through Moses when he says, 'If someone should die suddenly beside him, at once the head of his vow shall be defiled, and it shall be shaved'—calling involuntary sin 'sudden death,' and saying that it defiles by staining the soul; wherefore he prescribes the remedy with all speed, counseling that the head be shaved at once, urging that the hair overshadowing the reasoning faculty with ignorance be wiped away, so that the reasoning faculty—stripped bare of the thick undergrowth of vice (it is enthroned in the brain)—may run back to repentance. Then, after saying a little more, he adds, 'but the former days are without reason [irrational],' by which it is plain that the sins are indicated which did not happen according to reason. And so he called the involuntary act 'sudden,' and the act of sinning 'irrational.' For this very reason the Word, the Instructor, has been allotted the oversight for the prevention of irrational sin. Consider this too from Scripture: 'Therefore thus says the Lord'—the sin that had gone before is shown reprovingly by the utterance that follows, in accordance with which the just judgment ensues, and this is made plain openly through the prophets, as when they say, in effect, 'had you not sinned, he would not have threatened you with this,' and 'therefore thus says the Lord,' and 'because you did not listen to these words, therefore thus says the Lord,' and 'therefore behold, says the Lord.' For this is why prophecy exists, for the sake of obedience and disobedience—the one, that we might be saved; the other, that we might be disciplined.
Our Instructor, then, is the Word, who through exhortations heals the soul's passions that are contrary to nature. For properly speaking, the treatment of the body's diseases is called medicine, an art taught by human wisdom; but the Word of the Father alone is the healer of human ailments, a physician bringing relief, and a holy charmer of the sick soul. 'Save your servant,' he says, 'O my God, who hopes in you; have mercy on me, O Lord, for to you I will cry all the day long.' 'Medicine,' according to Democritus, 'cures the diseases of the body, but wisdom takes away the passions of the soul'; but the good Instructor, Wisdom, the Word of the Father, who fashioned man, cares for the whole of his creation, and heals both body and soul—he, the all-healing physician of humanity. The Savior says to the paralyzed man, 'Rise, take up the pallet on which you lie and go home'; and at once the sick man was made whole. And to the dead man he said, 'Lazarus, come forth'; and he came out of the tomb, the dead man, such as he had been before he suffered, having rehearsed the resurrection. Indeed, he heals the soul itself, in its own right, by commandments and by gifts of grace—though by his precepts, perhaps, he is still about to heal it; but rich in gifts of grace he says to us sinners, 'Your sins are forgiven you.' As for us, in the very moment of thought we became infants, receiving the best and most secure order from his good ordering—an order which first busies itself, for man's sake, about the universe and the heaven and the sun's circlings and the courses of the other stars, and then concerns itself with man himself, about whom all its zeal is occupied; and counting this its greatest work, it has guided his soul aright with prudence and self-control, and has blended his body together with beauty and good proportion, and has breathed into his actions, as a human being, both success in them and the good order that is its own.
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