Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies 18

The dignity of our philanthropy and our pure way of life, according to Clement, seeks the common good, whether it bears witness or educates through both deed and word, in a twofold manner: unwritten and written. This is love: to love God and one's neighbor. It raises us to an unspeakable height. "Love covers a multitude of sins" (Proverbs 10:12). Love endures all things, is patient in all things. Love binds us to God, doing all things in harmony. In love, all the elect of God have been perfected. Without love, nothing is pleasing to God. There is no explanation of its perfection, he says. Who is able to be found in it, except those whom God himself deems worthy? At once the apostle Paul says, even if I give my body to be burned, if I do not have love, I am a clanging cymbal (1 Corinthians 13:1-3). Even if I testify from an elect disposition, he says, I do so through knowledgeable love, but also with fear. If, then, I confess the Lord with my lips for a hoped-for reward, spurring myself on to the Lord's witness, I am a common man, sounding the Lord but not knowing Him. For there is a people who love with their lips, and there is another who gives up his body to be burned. Even if I distribute all my possessions, he says, I do not do so according to the principle of the fellowship of love, but according to the principle of recompense, whether from the benefited man or from the promising Lord. Even if I have all faith so as to move mountains and cast off the obscuring passions, yet if I am not made faithful to the Lord through love, I am nothing. In comparison with the one who witnesses knowledgeably, I am reckoned as a multitude and as nothing differing from nothing. All generations from Adam until this day have passed away; but those who have been perfected in love according to the grace of God possess a place among the godly. They will be revealed in the visitation of the kingdom of Christ. Love does not permit us to sin. But if we fall unwillingly into some such circumstance because of the assaults of the adversary, imitating David we sing: "I will confess to the Lord, and it will please Him more than a young bull that has horns and hooves. Let the poor see and be glad." For He says: "Sacrifice to God a sacrifice of praise, and pay your vows to the Lord; and call upon me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me." "For a sacrifice to God is a broken spirit." Love, then, is also called God, since He is good. Where love toward one's neighbor is at work, it neither does wrong nor ever retaliates, but simply does good to all in the image of God. Love is therefore the fulfillment of the law, just as Christ is — that is, the presence of the Lord who loves us — and our loving teaching and way of life according to Christ. Through love, the command not to commit adultery and not to covet what belongs to one's neighbor is perfected, previously restrained by fear. The same action carries a difference, whether it is done from fear or completed from love, and whether it operates through faith or knowledgeably. It is reasonable, then, that the rewards for these are different: for the knowledgeable, those things which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered the heart of man have been prepared; for the one who has simply believed, a hundredfold of what he has left behind is witnessed, a promise that falls within human understanding.

At this point I recalled a certain man who claimed to be knowledgeable. Explaining the saying, "But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart," he maintained that not the bare desire, but only the completion within the desire of the act corresponding to it, should be judged. For if one has intercourse in the imagination as in a dream, he said, the body is already cooperating with the imagination. The compilers of histories, then, relate the judgment of Bocchoris the just judge as follows. A young man in love with a courtesan persuaded her servant with a fixed fee to bring the girl to him the next day. But when the servant arrived, the young man — having already satisfied his desire in a dream that anticipated the reality — refused to admit the courtesan, though she had come at the appointed time. She, however, demanded the fee, saying that she had already fulfilled the desire for him. They came before the judge. He ordered the young man to hold out the purse of the fee, and commanded the courtesan to take the payment in the sunlight, while the young man was to take the shadow — cleverly ordering her to give the image of the fee for the image of the embrace. One who dreams, then, with the imagination of the soul consenting, sins; so does the one who looks at a woman with desire — not only as that so-called knowledgeable man said, if one conceives the conversation at the same moment as the sight of the woman (for that is already an act of desire as desire), but if anyone looks at the beauty of a body and the flesh appears beautiful to him because of desire, he is judged carnally and sinfully through the very thing he admired. On the contrary, the one who looks upon beauty with pure love does not regard the flesh as beautiful, but the soul; he marvels at the body as a statue, and through it refers the beauty to the Craftsman and the truly Beautiful itself, displaying the luminous character of righteousness, the anointing of good pleasure — that is, the quality of the disposition added to the soul through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit — to the angels who attend the ascent. The people were not able to look upon the glory that shone on the face of Moses; therefore he took a veil to cover the glory from those who viewed it carnally. For those who are led away by worldly things are held fast by the passions that weigh them down, demanding the end; but the one who is stripped of the things that fall short of the end, full of knowledge and of righteousness from works — such a one those who pray with him send forward, blessing the man and his work. And his leaf shall not wither — the tree of life, nurtured by the channels of water. The righteous is likened to fruit-bearing trees, not only those according to the sacrifice of the transgressors; for there were also inspectors of blemishes for the priests at the approaches to the sacrifices according to the Law. The experts in these matters distinguish the reach of desire: they assign the desire for pleasures and licentiousness to the irrational, but the desire for things necessary by nature they deem a rational movement.