Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies 5.14

I must now return to the topics that follow and demonstrate more clearly the Greek appropriation of barbarian philosophy. The Stoics claim that God is a body and spirit in essence, just as they claim the soul is; you will find all these assertions plainly stated in the scriptures. Do not suppose that I now treat their allegories as the gnosis delivers the truth, for if they point to something other than what they appear to say—much like the ancient wise wrestlers who feint one way and strike another—they signal a different meaning entirely. The Stoics say that God permeates all existence, but we call Him only the Creator, the Maker by His Word. The statement in Wisdom—‘He passes through and fills all things because of His purity’—misled them, since they failed to grasp that these words refer to the primal Wisdom created by God. They object that the philosophers—Stoics, Plato, Pythagoras, and Aristotle the Peripatetic alike—posit matter as a first principle, not a single one. Let them acknowledge, then, that this so-called matter is described by them as qualityless and formless, and even more boldly, that it does not exist according to Plato. And lest they claim to know the one truly existing principle in the most mystical sense from the Timaeus, he speaks in those very words. For now, let our position stand thus: the question concerning all things, whether there is one principle or many or whatever they suppose, is not to be discussed at present, for no other reason than the difficulty of explaining what appears plausible by our current method. Besides, the prophetic utterance, ‘the earth was invisible and unformed,’ gave them an opening for the notion of material substance. Epicurus, failing to follow the sense of the text, let the idea of chance slip in, ending in ‘vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’ Aristotle, drawing providence down only as far as the moon from the psalm ‘Lord, your mercy is in the heavens, and your truth reaches to the clouds’ (Psalm 36:5), did so because the revelation of the prophetic mysteries had not yet come before the Lord’s advent. The punishments after death and the punishment by fire were borrowed from barbarian philosophy by the entire poetic tradition and by Greek philosophy itself. Plato, in the final book of the Republic, says in these very words: ‘Here wild men, fiery to behold, stand by, discerning the sound; taking some aside privately they lead them away, but binding the hands, feet, and head of Aridaeus and the others, throwing them down and flaying them, they drag them along the road outside, striking them on asphodels.’ The fiery wild men, he says, represent angels who seize the wicked to punish them—‘He who makes His angels spirits, and His ministers a flame of fire.’ It follows for them that the soul is immortal, for what is punished or instructed while possessing sensation lives on, even if it is said to suffer.