Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Some people, thinking themselves naturally gifted, claim that they need touch neither philosophy nor dialectic, nor even learn thoroughly the study of nature, but demand faith alone and unadorned — as if they expected to take the clusters of grapes right from the start without ever having taken care of the vine. But the Lord is allegorized as a vine, from whom, with care and the skill of husbandry that accords with reason, the fruit must be harvested. One must prune, dig, tie up the shoots, and do the rest; and, I suppose, there is need of the pruning-hook and the mattock and the other tools of husbandry for the care of the vine, so that it may show forth to us its edible fruit. And just as in husbandry, so too in medicine, that man is well-schooled who has laid hold of the more varied branches of learning, so as to be better able both to farm skillfully and to cure the sick; thus too do I here name that man well-schooled who refers everything to the truth, so that, gathering what is useful even from geometry and music and from grammar and philosophy itself, he keeps his faith unassailed. The athlete too is looked down upon, as has been said before, yet he contributes to the whole composition.
For instance, we praise the pilot of vast experience, who has voyaged among the towns of countless peoples, and the healer who has grown skilled through many treated cases — from which certain people even fashion their notion of the "empiric." But the man who, in referring each matter to life, brings forward the correct examples both from Greek and from barbarian sources, this man of much experience is a tracker of truth and truly resourceful, and, like the touchstone (which is the Lydian stone entrusted with distinguishing the counterfeit from the native gold), being competent to separate the one from the other — this many-skilled and gnostic man of ours distinguishes the sophistical counterfeit of philosophy, the cosmetic counterfeit of gymnastic, the culinary counterfeit of medicine, the rhetorical counterfeit of dialectic, and magic and the other sects that pass, according to barbarian philosophy, for truth itself. And how is it not necessary for the man who longs to become a partaker of the power of God, when philosophizing about intelligible things, to make careful distinctions? And how is it not useful also to divide the ambiguous expressions and those uttered with the same name across the two covenants? For it was by means of ambiguity that the Lord outwitted the devil at the time of the temptation, and I for my part no longer see, in this matter, how the discoverer of philosophy and of dialectic — as some suppose him to be — could be led astray, deceived by the method of ambiguity.
But if the prophets and the apostles did not know the arts by which the exercises pertaining to philosophy are displayed, yet the meaning of the prophetic and teaching spirit, being spoken in a hidden manner because not everyone has the ear to understand, demands skilled teaching for its clarification. For the prophets and the disciples of the spirit knew that meaning securely; for it was from faith, and it was not possible to speak it as easily as the spirit itself had spoken it. Yet those lacking instruction cannot grasp it in this manner. "Write down the commandments," it says, "doubly, in resolve and in knowledge, so as to answer words of truth to those who put questions to you." What then is the knowledge of how to answer? It is the same as that of how to question; and this would be dialectic. What then? Is not speaking also a work, and does not doing come about from reasoned speech? For if we should not act by reason, we would be acting irrationally. But the rational work is accomplished in accordance with God; and nothing came into being apart from him, it says, that is, apart from the Word of God. Or did not the Lord also do all things by reason? Even cattle, driven by compulsion of fear, perform work. And do not those called "of right opinion" also engage in good works, not knowing what they are doing?
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