Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies 18

All the virtues recorded by Moses are therefore evident, and they gave the Greeks a starting point for every aspect of ethics: I mean courage, self-control, prudence, justice, patience, perseverance, dignity, self-control, and the piety that rests on these. Piety is somehow clear to everyone as the highest and most ancient cause to revere, honor, and teach. The law itself also sets forth justice, instructing prudence through the avoidance of sensory idols and the calling toward the Creator and Father of all, from whose glory, as from a source, all understanding grows. For the sacrifices of the lawless are an abomination to the Lord, but the prayers of the upright are acceptable to him (Isaiah 1:11). And Isaiah says the same: 'What is the multitude of your sacrifices to me?' says the Lord, and the whole passage declares: 'Loose every bond of injustice,' for this is a sacrifice acceptable to God, a broken heart seeking the one who fashioned it (Isaiah 58:6). Deceptive scales are an abomination before God, but a just balance is acceptable to him. From this, Pythagoras advises not to exceed the balance. Yet justice is called deceptive — the promise of the sects — and the tongue of the unrighteous will be destroyed, but the mouth of the righteous drips with wisdom. And yet they call the wise and prudent worthless. It would take too long to lay out testimonies about these virtues, which all Scripture praises.

Since they define courage as knowledge of things to be feared, things not to be feared, and the things in between, and self-control as a state that preserves the judgments of prudence in choice and avoidance, perseverance — which they call patience — stands beside courage as knowledge of what must be endured and what must not, and magnanimity stands beside it as knowledge of events that surpasses them. Caution also stands beside self-control as a withdrawal guided by reason. Keeping the commandments, which is a blameless observance of them, is the preservation of a secure life. One cannot be patient without courage, nor self-controlled without self-control. The virtues follow one another, and where the sequences of the virtues are, there also is salvation, which is the keeping of what is well-ordered. It is fitting, then, that by taking up these virtues we would be versed in all of them, because the one who knowingly possesses one virtue possesses them all through their mutual sequence.

Self-control is a disposition unconquerable by the impulses that appear according to right reason. A person is self-controlled who restrains impulses contrary to right reason, or who restrains himself so as not to be driven contrary to right reason. But self-control does not exist without courage, since it arises from the commandments, following the God-ordained prudence and the justice that imitates the divine disposition. In accordance with this, as we exercise self-control we become pure toward piety and the action that follows God, conforming ourselves to the Lord as far as we can, having a nature that is subordinate.