Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies 16

We should set out the Decalogue as our example, by way of a brief digression, for the sake of clear knowledge. That the number ten is sacred need not be said now. Yet if the inscribed tablets are a work of God, they will be found to reveal a natural creation, because the finger of God is understood as the power of God through which the creation of heaven and earth is completed, and the tablets themselves will be recognized as symbols of those two realms. For the writing and shaping that God leaves on the tablet amounts to the creation of the world. On the one hand, the Decalogue contains the heavenly image: sun and moon, stars, clouds, light, spirit, water, air, darkness, and fire. This is the natural Decalogue of heaven. On the other hand, the image of the earth contains human beings, cattle, reptiles, wild beasts, and among aquatic creatures fish and sea monsters, and among birds likewise the flesh-eaters and those that feed by day, and among plants likewise the fruit-bearing and the barren. This is the natural Decalogue of earth.

The ark that encloses these things would be the knowledge and wisdom of both divine and human matters. Perhaps these two tablets are a twofold prophecy of covenants. They were therefore renewed mystically, because ignorance and sin abounded together. It appears that the commandments are written twice, by two spirits, the ruling and the subject, since the flesh desires against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh. There is also a certain ten that pertains to the human person himself: the five senses, the vocal faculty, and the generative faculty, and this eighth is the spiritual faculty according to the formation; the ninth is the ruling part of the soul; and the tenth is the distinctive mark of the Holy Spirit that is added through faith. Furthermore, the legislation appears to prescribe ten human parts: sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste, together with the two pairs of organs that serve them, hands and feet, for this is the human formation. The soul is also inscribed, and the ruling part is inscribed, by which we reason, not born according to the casting of the seed, so that the tenth number is assembled even without it, through which the whole activity of the human being is completed. For the human being, coming directly into order, takes the beginning of life from the passive elements. We say, therefore, that the rational and ruling part is the cause of the living thing's constitution, but also of the irrational part being ensouled and becoming a portion of it. The bodily spirit has received the vital power, by which the nourishing, growing, and in general moving functions are enclosed, being quick-moving and passing through all the senses and the rest of the body, and being moved and suffering first through the body. The ruling part, however, possesses the power of choice, concerning which there is investigation, learning, and knowledge. But since the reference of all things is ordered to one, the ruling part is constituted, and through it the human being lives and lives in some way.