Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies 13

Everything that falls under a name is a created thing, whether people want it to be or not. If the Father himself draws to himself all who have lived purely and have attained an understanding of the blessed and immortal nature, or if the autonomous faculty within us—reaching knowledge of the good—leaps and springs beyond the fenced-in limits, as the trainers say, still the soul does not grow wings, rise, and soar above the things that are above unless it is borne aloft by exceptional grace. In that ascent it puts aside every burden and returns it to its kindred source.

Plato declares in the Meno that virtue is God-given, as his words show: 'From this reasoning, Meno, virtue appears to come to us by divine allotment, to those to whom it comes.' He asks, 'Does it not seem to you that the cognitive capacity which has not reached everyone has been assigned a divine portion?' He states it even more plainly: 'If we have conducted this whole inquiry well, virtue would be neither natural nor teachable, but comes by divine allotment, not without mind, to those to whom it comes.' Therefore wisdom is God-given, being a power of the Father. It persuades our free will, welcomes faith, and rewards the knowledge of our supreme choice with perfect communion.

I will now set Plato before you as one who already considered it right to believe in the children of the gods. In the Timaeus, after discussing visible and created gods, he says that speaking and knowing the generation of the other divine beings is greater than we can manage; we must believe those who spoke before, since they are offspring of the gods, as they claimed, and clearly know their own ancestors. It is impossible, then, for the children of the gods not to believe, even if they speak without analogies and necessary proofs.

I do not think the Greeks could give clearer testimony to our Savior and to those anointed for prophecy—who are called children of God, while the Lord is the genuine Son—as true witnesses of divine matters. Therefore one must believe them, since they are God-inspired. Even if someone objects more tragically, saying, 'Zeus was not the herald of these things to me,' let it be known that God himself has heralded the scriptures through the Son. The one who announces his own matters is trustworthy, because the Lord says no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him (John 3:36). So we must believe him, even on Plato's terms, even though he is proclaimed through both the old and the new covenant without analogies and necessary proofs.

For the Lord says, 'If you do not believe, you will die in your sins'; on the other hand, 'the one who believes has eternal life.' Blessed, then, are all who have trusted in him. Trust is more than faith: when someone knows that the Son is the teacher from God, he trusts that his teaching is true. Just as learning, according to Empedocles, enlarges the mind, so trust in the Lord enlarges faith.