Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies 5.14

We must now return to the remaining points and demonstrate more clearly the Greek theft from barbarian philosophy. The Stoics claim that God is a body and spirit in essence, just as they also claim the soul is. You will find all these things stated plainly in the scriptures. Do not suppose that I am now treating their allegories as the gnostic tradition hands down the truth, for if they demonstrate one thing while signaling another, they are like wrestlers who feint one way and throw another. The Stoics say that God pervades all existence, but we call him only the Creator, the Maker by his Word. The passage in Wisdom led them astray: ‘For she passes through and penetrates all things because of her purity’ (Wisdom 7:24), since they failed to understand that these words refer to the primordial Wisdom created by God. ‘Yes,’ they say, ‘but the philosophers posit matter as a first principle—the Stoics, Plato, Pythagoras, and Aristotle the Peripatetic as well—not a single principle.’ Let them acknowledge that this so-called matter is described by them as void and unqualified, and it is even more boldly said by Plato that it is non-being. And in the Timaeus, knowing the one truly existing principle in a most mystical way, he speaks in these very words. Now, then, let our position be this: the question concerning all things, whether it is a principle or principles or whatever one thinks about them, is not to be discussed now, for no other reason than that it is difficult to set forth the apparent truths in the present mode of exposition. Besides, the prophetic word, ‘The earth was invisible and unformed’ (Gen 1:2), has supplied them with a starting-point for material substance. Indeed, Epicurus, because he did not attend to the oracle, fell from this into vanity of vanities: ‘All is vanity.’ Aristotle, drawing providence down only as far as the moon from this psalm, ‘Lord, your mercy is in the heavens, and your truth reaches to the clouds’ (Ps 36:5), limited it thus because the prophetic revelation of mysteries had not yet been disclosed before the Lord’s coming. The punishments after death and the punishment by fire were borrowed from barbarian philosophy by the entire poetic Muse, and by Greek philosophy as well. In the last book of the Republic, Plato writes in these very words: ‘Here, indeed, wild men, fiery to look upon, stood by, discerning the voice; taking some privately, they led them away, but binding the hands and feet and head of Aridaeus and the others, throwing them down and flaying them, they dragged them along the road outside, tearing them on thorns.’ The fiery men, he says, represent angels who, seizing the unjust, punish them; ‘He makes his angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire’ (Ps 104:4). It follows from this that the soul is immortal. For whatever is punished or disciplined while endowed with sensation lives on, even if it is said to suffer. What? Does Plato not know of rivers of fire and the depths of the earth, poetically naming the barbarians’ Gehenna ‘Tartarus,’ and introducing Cocytus, Acheron, Pyriphlegethon, and such like as correctional punishments for discipline? And regarding the ‘little ones’ of scripture, he does not hesitate to write of the angels who behold God, and of the oversight that has come to us through the angels set over us.