Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies 14

We must now take up the remaining points and demonstrate more clearly the Greek appropriation of barbarian philosophy. The Stoics, for instance, claim that God is body and spirit in essence, just as they do the soul. You will find all these ideas stated plainly in the scriptures. Do not imagine that I am now treating their allegories as the gnosis delivers truth, as if they reveal one thing while actually signaling another, like those ancient wise men. The Stoics say that God pervades all of existence; we, by contrast, call Him only the Creator, the Maker by His Word. The statement in Wisdom — "He passes through and fills all things because of purity" — led them astray, because they failed to grasp that these words are spoken of the primal Wisdom created by God. They object: "But the philosophers posit matter at the beginning — the Stoics, Plato, Pythagoras, and also Aristotle the Peripatetic — not a single principle." Let them then recognize the so-called matter, described by them as unqualified and unformed, and, even more boldly, as non-existent according to Plato. And not knowing the most mystical truth — that there is only one truly existing principle — he speaks in the Timaeus using the very same 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 addressed at present, for no other reason than the difficulty of explaining these apparent matters by the present method of inquiry. Besides, the prophetic word, "the earth was invisible and unformed," supplied them with occasions for the notion of material substance. As for Epicurus, the intrusion of the idea of chance arose because he did not attend to the plain text, and so came vanity of vanities: all things are vanity. Aristotle, for his part, extended providence only as far as the moon, drawing from this psalm: "Lord, in the heavens is your mercy, and your truth reaches to the clouds" (Psalm 36:5). For the revelation of the prophetic mysteries had not yet been unveiled before the coming of the Lord. The punishments after death and the punishment by fire — the whole creative muse, indeed, but also Greek philosophy — were indebted to barbarian philosophy. Plato, at the end of his Republic, speaks in these very words: "Here indeed wild men, fiery to look upon, stood by, discerning the sound; taking some aside privately, they led them away, but Aridaeus and the others they bound hand and foot and head, threw them down and flayed them, and dragged them along the road outside, striking them with asphodels." They claim that these fiery wild men represent angels who, seizing the unrighteous, punish them; "He makes His angels spirits, and His ministers a flame of fire." And it follows for them that the soul is immortal. For what is punished or disciplined, existing in sensation, lives on, even if it is said to suffer.