Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Those who trace themselves back to Carpocrates and Epiphanes claim that women should be held in common, and from this the greatest blasphemy has flowed against the Name. This Epiphanes, whose writings are also in circulation, was the son of Carpocrates and of a mother named Alexandria; on his father's side he was of Alexandria, on his mother's side of Cephallenia. He lived in all seventeen years, and he has been honored as a god at Same in Cephallenia, where a temple of hewn stones has been built and consecrated to him, together with altars, sacred precincts, and a shrine of the Muses; and the Cephallenians, gathering at the temple at the new moon that is his birthday, offer sacrifices of deification to Epiphanes, pour libations, feast, and sing hymns to him. He was educated by his father in the ordinary curriculum and in the teachings of Plato, and he became the founder of the so-called monadic gnosis, from which the heresy of the Carpocratians derives.
This man, then, says in his work On Righteousness that the righteousness of God is a certain fellowship together with equality. For the heaven, stretched out equally on every side, encompasses the whole earth in a circle, and the night displays all the stars equally, and the sun, cause of the day and father of light, God has poured out from above equally upon the earth for all who are able to see; and all see it in common, since it does not distinguish rich from poor, people from ruler, the foolish from the wise, females from males, free from slave. Nor does it act differently even toward the irrational animals, but pouring itself out equally in common upon all living things from above, upon good and bad alike, it establishes righteousness, since no one is able to have more or to take away from his neighbor, so that he himself might have the other's light doubled as well. The sun rises to give common nourishment to all living creatures, and since righteousness common to all is given equally, in such matters the race of oxen becomes alike as oxen, of swine as swine, of sheep as sheep, and all the rest likewise; for righteousness shows itself among them as commonality. Then, in accordance with commonality, all things alike are sown according to kind, and common food is provided for all cattle that graze upon the ground, and for all equally, mastered by no law, but present to all in harmony through the provision of the one who gives and commands it.
But not even the matter of begetting has a written law (for it would have been transcribed by now); rather, they sow and beget equally, having fellowship implanted in them by righteousness. The maker and father of all, having legislated by his own righteousness, granted an eye for seeing to all equally in common, not distinguishing female from male, nor rational from irrational, and in a word nothing from nothing at all, but having apportioned the power of sight with equality and commonality, he has bestowed it on all alike by a single command. But the laws, he says, being unable to punish the ignorance of men, taught them to transgress the law; for the peculiar character of the laws has cut up the fellowship of the divine law and gnaws at it, not understanding the apostle's saying, where he says, 'through the law I came to know sin.' And he says that 'mine' and 'yours' crept in through the laws, so that people no longer enjoy the earth or possessions in common as something new, nor even marriage in common; for God made the vines common to all, which refuse neither the sparrow nor the thief, and likewise the grain and the other fruits. But fellowship, having been transgressed, has also given birth, along with the loss of equality, to the thief of livestock and of crops.
God, then, having made all things in common for man, and having brought together the female with the male in common, and having joined together all the animals alike, has shown righteousness to be fellowship together with equality. But those who were thus born have denied the fellowship that begot their own generation, and they say: let the one who takes a single wife keep her — though all might hold women in common, just as he declared the rest of the animals do. Having said this in these very words, he goes on again, in the same wording, as follows: for God made desire strong and more vehement in males for the perpetuation of the species, a desire which neither law nor custom nor anything else among existing things can do away with, for it is God's own decree. And how, then, could this man still be examined by our own reasoning, when by these very words he openly overthrows both the Law and the Gospel? For the one says, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But the other says, 'everyone who looks with desire has already committed adultery.' For the saying 'you shall not desire,' spoken by the Law, shows the one God proclaimed through Law, Prophets, and Gospel alike; for it says, 'you shall not desire what belongs to your neighbor.' But the neighbor is not the Jew to the Jew, for he is a brother and shares the very same spirit; it remains, then, that the neighbor must mean the man of another nation. For how is he not a neighbor who is able to share in the Spirit? For Abraham is father not only of the Hebrews, but also of the nations.
But if the woman who commits adultery and the man who fornicates with her are punished with death, it is surely clear that the commandment which says, 'you shall not desire the wife of your neighbor,' speaks concerning the nations, so that a man, having in accordance with the Law abstained from both his neighbor's wife and his own sister, might then hear directly from the Lord: 'But I say to you, you shall not desire.' And the addition of the word 'I' shows that the force of the commandment reaches closer still, and that both Carpocrates and Epiphanes are fighting against God — Epiphanes, who in that very much-talked-of book, I mean On Righteousness, adds words to this effect: whence, as though the lawgiver had spoken absurdly in saying 'you shall not desire,' he adds, to make it seem still more absurd, 'the things of your neighbor'; for the very one who gave desire as that which holds together the process of generation commands that it be taken away, though he has removed it from no other animal. And by making 'the wife of your neighbor' a matter of private possession, when he compels fellowship, he speaks even more absurdly still.
These, then, are the doctrines the noble Carpocratians teach. They say that these men, together with certain other zealots of the same kind of evils, gather at their banquets — I could not myself call their assembly a love-feast — men and women together, and that after they have taken their fill (for Cypris, as they say, dwells in satiety), having put out of sight that which would shame this fornicating 'righteousness' of theirs by turning the lamp about so its light is hidden, they mingle with whomever they wish, as they wish; and having thus practiced fellowship in such a 'love,' by day they then demand from whichever women they wish obedience to the law of Carpocrates — for it is not right to call it divine. Such laws, I think, Carpocrates ought rather to have made for the lusts of dogs and swine and goats. It seems to me too that he misheard Plato, who in the Republic says that women are to be held in common by all — common, that is, before marriage, for those who are still eligible suitors, just as he says the theater is common to all who watch it, but that once a woman is claimed by someone she belongs to that one alone and is no longer common, once married.
Xanthus, in the work entitled Magica, says that the Magi hold it lawful to have intercourse with mothers, daughters, and sisters, and that wives are held in common, not by force or in secret, but with the consent of both parties, whenever one man wishes to marry the wife of another. It is concerning these and similar sects, I think, that Jude spoke prophetically in his epistle: 'these also, dreaming in like manner' — for indeed they lay hold of no waking reality — 'even until their mouth speaks bombastic things.'
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