Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies 11

The sacrifice acceptable to God is the unregretted separation of soul from body and its passions, and this constitutes true devotion to the living God. It is therefore not without reason that Socrates calls philosophy a study of death; for the philosopher neither brings sight into his thinking nor allows himself to be drawn by any other sense, but encounters reality with a pure mind and so pursues true philosophy. Pythagoras intends the same thing by the five-year silence he prescribes to his acquaintances, so that, turning away from sensory things, they may contemplate the divine with a bare intellect. The greatest of the Greeks have philosophized in this manner, following Moses; for he commands that the whole burnt offerings be flayed and divided into parts (Leviticus 1:9), since the cognitive soul, once stripped naked of its material covering and having shed all passions born of empty and false assumptions and stripped off fleshly desires, must be dedicated to the light. Most people, however, clothe themselves in mortality like snails and curl around their own excesses like hedgehogs, and they attribute to the blessed and immortal God the very qualities they find in themselves. This escapes their notice, even when they are near us: God has given us countless gifts of which He Himself has no share—being unborn, He has no need of birth; being self-sufficient, He has no need of nourishment; being unchanging, He has no need of growth; being immortal and ageless, He has no need of a good old age or a good death. Therefore no one should suppose that hands, feet, mouth, eyes, entrances, exits, organs, and threats are passions of God, as they are spoken of among the Hebrews; rather, certain of these names are to be understood allegorically in a holier sense, which we will clarify as the discussion proceeds. Wisdom is the panacea for all things, as Callimachus writes in his epigrams, and Bacchylides says in his Paeans, 'One man becomes wise from another, both in the past and in the present.' For it is not easy to find the gates of unspoken words. Isocrates asks in his Panathenaic Oration, 'Whom do I call educated?' and answers: first, those who handle well the things that meet them each day and possess a good reputation for judging the times so as to aim for the most part at what is beneficial; second, those who conduct themselves toward their associates with propriety and justice, bearing the unpleasantness and heaviness of others easily and lightly, and presenting themselves as lightly and moderately as possible to their companions; third, those who master their pleasures and are not utterly defeated by misfortunes, but behave manfully in them and live worthily of the nature they share; fourth, and most important, those who are not corrupted by good fortune, nor carried out of themselves, nor made arrogant, but remain steadfast in the discipline of sound judgment. He concludes by saying that those who possess a well-ordered soul not merely in one of these respects but in all of them are wise, perfect men who possess every virtue.