Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
The solemn and pure conduct of our love of humanity, according to Clement, seeks what is of common benefit, whether it bears witness or whether it also teaches, by deed and by word — and this in two modes, one unspoken and one set down in writing. Loving God and one's neighbor: that is what love means. This leads up to the height that cannot be told. "Love covers a multitude of sins"; love endures all things, is patient in all things; love binds us to God, does everything in concord; in love all the elect of God were made perfect; apart from love nothing is pleasing to God. "Of its perfection," he says, "there is no explaining." Who has the capacity for it, apart from those whom God himself judges worthy? Even the apostle Paul says, "if I give up my body" — but do not have love, "I am sounding brass and a clanging cymbal"; unless it be from a chosen disposition, through knowing love, that I bear witness, he says, and not out of fear.
For if I confess the Lord for the sake of a hoped-for reward, applauding with my lips in testimony to the Lord, I am a common man, one who echoes the Lord's name without knowing him. For there is a people who love with their lips, and there is another who hands over the body, that it may be burned. "And though I dole out all my possessions," he says, if this is not done according to the reasoning of loving communion, but according to the reasoning of repayment — either from the man benefited or from the Lord who has made the promise; and "though I have all faith, so as to move mountains" and cast off the passions that darken the mind, yet am not made faithful to the Lord through love, I am nothing — as compared with the one who bears witness with knowledge, being reckoned as no different from the crowd, the merely numerous. All the generations from Adam to this present day have passed away; but those made perfect in love, according to God's own grace, occupy the rank of the devout, who will be revealed when Christ's kingdom holds its oversight.
Love does not permit sinning; but if one falls unwillingly into some such circumstance through the incursions of the adversary, imitating David he will sing a psalm: "I will give thanks to the Lord, and it will please him more than a young calf that sprouts horns and cloven hoofs. Let the poor see and rejoice." For he says elsewhere: "Offer to God a sacrifice of praise, and render to the Lord your vows; then call on me in your day of trouble, and I will rescue you, and you will honor me"; "for the sacrifice pleasing to God is a spirit crushed with sorrow." Love, then, is what God himself is called, being good. He whose love does no wrong to his neighbor — neither doing injustice nor returning injustice ever, but doing good to all alike, in keeping with the likeness of God. Love, therefore, brings the law to its completion, exactly as Christ does — that is, the coming-near of the Lord who holds us dear, together with our love-formed teaching and way of living after the pattern of Christ. By love, then, not committing adultery and not desiring one's neighbor's wife are brought to completion — what fear had earlier only restrained. For the same deed differs according to whether it comes about through fear or is accomplished through love, and whether it is worked either through faith or, indeed, with knowledge.
Fittingly, then, their prizes also differ: for the one with knowledge there has been prepared what "eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man"; but to the one who has simply believed he promises a hundredfold of what he has left behind — a promise that happens to fall within the comprehension of ordinary men.
Having come to this point, I was reminded of a certain man who called himself a knower. For in explaining "but I say to you, whoever has looked at a woman with desire has already committed adultery with her," he did not think that the desire alone, taken bare, ought to be judged, but only if, alongside the desire, the deed corresponding to it, going further than the desire, is actually accomplished within it; for if it happens as in a dream, in the imagination only, the body has already been made complicit as well.
Now those who have compiled the histories tell the following judgment of Bocchoris the just. A young man in love with a courtesan persuades the girl, for an agreed fee, to come to him on the following day. But his desire, running ahead in a dream, having been satisfied with the girl beyond hope, when she arrived at the appointed time he shuts her out from entering; and she, learning what had happened, demanded her fee, saying that in this way she herself had fulfilled the lover's desire. So they came before the judge. He, having ordered the young man to hold out the purse of the fee — but in the sunlight — commanded the courtesan to take hold of its shadow, wittily ordering that the phantom of the fee be given in payment for a phantom embrace.
Now a man dreams when the soul has given its assent to the mere image; but he who looks with desire dreams even while awake — not only, as that so-called "knower" was saying, if together with the sight of the woman he grasps in his mind the act of intercourse (for this already is the work of desire as desire), but also if a man looks upon beauty of body, the reasoning goes, and the flesh itself seems to him beautiful according to desire, having looked upon it fleshly and sinfully — by this very thing that he has admired, he is judged. For, on the contrary, the one who looks with pure love regards the beauty not as belonging to the flesh, but considers the soul beautiful, admiring the body, I think, as one admires a statue, through whose beauty he sends himself onward to the craftsman and to that which is truly beautiful, displaying, as a holy token, the luminous mark of righteousness to the angels stationed along the ascent — I mean the anointing of well-pleasingness, the quality of disposition resting upon the soul, made radiant through the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit.
This glory that shone upon the face of Moses the people were not able to look upon; therefore he also took a veil over the glory, for the sake of those who beheld it in a fleshly way. For those who bring along with them something of the worldly, those who demand the fee hold fast, weighed down by their own passions; but the one who is stripped of what pertains to that fee, yet full of knowledge and of the righteousness that comes from works, they escort onward with joint prayers, having pronounced the man blessed together with his work; and "his foliage will never wither" — the foliage of the tree of life, fed by the streams of water; and the righteous man is likened to fruit-bearing trees, and not only to those offered in the sacrifice of high places; and there were also, in the bringing of the sacrifices under the law, inspectors of the blemishes of the victims. Those skilled in these matters distinguish appetite from desire, and they class the one directed toward pleasures and licentiousness as irrational, while the appetite directed toward the necessities according to nature they hold to be a rational movement.
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