Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
What, then, is it that he announces as new and peculiar to God and alone life-giving, which did not save the men of old? But if the "new creation," the Son of God, reveals and teaches something distinctive, he does not enjoin the visible act, which others also have performed, but through it signifies something else, greater and more divine and more perfect: the stripping bare of the soul itself and its disposition from the passions that inhere in it, and the cutting out and casting away, root and all, of whatever is alien to right judgment. For this is a lesson peculiar to the believer, and a teaching worthy of the Savior. For the men of old, despising external things, gave up their possessions and let them go to ruin, but the passions of their souls, I think, they even intensified; for they fell into arrogance and boastfulness and vainglory and contempt for other men, as though they themselves had accomplished something beyond what is human. How then could the Savior have urged upon those who are to live forever things that would harm and corrupt them with respect to the life he promises? And besides, there is this further point: a man who has unloaded his possessions can nonetheless still have the desire and craving for wealth clinging to him and living on within him, having cast away the use of it while, being at once destitute and yearning for what he squandered, he grieves doubly - both from the absence of the means to serve his needs and from the presence of his regret. For it is unattainable and impossible for one who is in need of life's necessities not to have his judgment broken and to be kept from higher pursuits, while he tries by whatever means and from whatever source to procure these things.
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