Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
So it was, it seems, the greatest of all lessons to know oneself; for if a man knows himself, he thereby comes to know God, and in that knowledge he is conformed to the divine likeness — this not through gilded ornament or flowing robes, but through right conduct and requiring as little as possible; for God alone is without need, and he rejoices most of all to see us pure in the ornament of the mind, and next also in that of the body, clothed in a holy garment, self-control. Since then the soul is of three parts, the intellectual part, which is called the rational, is the inner man, the ruler of this visible man that appears; but that inner man himself is led by another, God. The spirited part, being beast-like, dwells close to madness; and the desiring part is many-shaped and third, more varied than Proteus, the sea-daemon, changing its form now this way, now that, decking itself out for adulteries and lecheries and corruptions: 'First of all he became a bearded lion, still wearing his finery; the mane of the chin shows a man; but then a serpent, or a leopard, or a great boar' — the love of adornment has slid down into wantonness. No longer does the man appear in the strong beast [text uncertain], but he became flowing water and a tall-leaved tree. The passions pour out, the pleasures gush forth, the beauty withers, and it falls to the ground from its leaf-stem sooner still, whenever the lustful storms of insolence blow upon it, and before autumn even comes it withers away in decay; for desire becomes and fashions all things and wishes to deceive, in order to hide the man. But that other man, with whom Reason dwells as housemate, is not variegated, is not fashioned artificially; he has the form of Reason, he is made like God, he is beautiful, he does not adorn himself with beauty; the true beauty is his, for indeed it is God himself; and that man becomes God, because he wills what God wills. Rightly then did Heraclitus say: 'Men are gods, gods are men; for the Word is the same for both' — a mystery laid bare: divinity within humanity, humanity taken up into divinity, and the go-between accomplishes the Father's purpose; for the Word is the mediator common to both, the Son of God and the Savior of men, servant of the one and instructor of us. Since the flesh is a slave, as Paul too testifies, how could one reasonably adorn the servant-girl as a procuress would? For that the flesh is the form of a slave, the apostle says of the Lord: 'he stripped himself of glory and assumed a servant's shape,' calling the outer man a slave before the Lord became a slave and bore flesh. But God, sharing our suffering, himself freed the flesh from corruption and, delivering it from its death-bearing and bitter slavery, clothed it about with incorruption, placing upon the flesh this holy adornment of everlastingness, immortality. And there is also another beauty of men, love: 'love,' according to the apostle, 'is patient, is kind, does not envy, does not boast, is not puffed up.' For boastfulness is an adorning that carries the mark of excess and uselessness. Wherefore he adds also: 'does not behave shamefully.' For shameful is what is foreign and not according to nature; and the artificial is foreign, which he explains plainly, saying 'it does not seek what is not its own'; for truth calls what is proper to it its own, while the love of adornment seeks the foreign, being outside both God and the Word and love. And that the Lord himself was, in appearance, without comeliness, the Spirit testifies through Isaiah: 'so we looked upon him, yet he possessed neither shape nor comeliness, but his appearance was held in no honor, lacking what belongs to men.' And who surpasses the Lord? Yet it was not that showy handsomeness of flesh which he put forward; instead he manifested the genuine loveliness belonging to soul and to body alike, the soul's being its practice of goodness, the body's being its deathlessness.
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