Clement of Alexandria — Stromata 11

Now the sacrifice which is acceptable to God is unswerving abstraction from the body and its passions . This is the really true piety . And is not, on this account, philosophy rightly called by Socrates the practice of Death? For he who neither employs his eyes in the exercise of thought, nor draws anything from his other senses, but with pure mind itself applies to objects, practices the true philosophy . This is, then, the import of the silence of five years prescribed by Pythagoras, which he enjoined on his disciples ; that, abstracting themselves from the objects of sense, they might with the mind alone contemplate the Deity. It was from Moses that the chief of the Greeks drew these philosophical tenets. For he commands holocausts to be skinned and divided into parts.

For the gnostic soul must be consecrated to the light, stript of the integuments of matter, devoid of the frivolousness of the body and of all the passions , which are acquired through vain and lying opinions, and divested of the lusts of the flesh. But the most of men , clothed with what is perishable, like cockles, and rolled all round in a ball in their excesses, like hedgehogs, entertain the same ideas of the blessed and incorruptible God as of themselves. But it has escaped their notice, though they be near us, that God has bestowed on us ten thousand things in which He does not share: birth, being Himself unborn; food, He wanting nothing; and growth, He being always equal; and long life and immortality , He being immortal and incapable of growing old.

Wherefore let no one imagine that hands, and feet, and mouth, and eyes, and going in and coming out, and resentments and threats, are said by the Hebrews to be attributes of God . By no means; but that certain of these appellations are used more sacredly in an allegorical sense, which, as the discourse proceeds, we shall explain at the proper time. Wisdom of all medicines is the Panacea, writes Callimachus in the Epigrams . And one becomes wise from another, both in past times and at present, says Bacchylides in the Pœans; for it is not very easy to find the portals of unutterable words. Beautifully, therefore, Isocrates writes in the Panathenaic , having put the question, Who, then, are well trained?

adds, First, those who manage well the things which occur each day, whose opinion jumps with opportunity, and is able for the most part to hit on what is beneficial; then those who behave becomingly and rightly to those who approach them, who take lightly and easily annoyances and molestations offered by others, but conduct themselves as far as possible, to those with whom they have intercourse, with consummate care and moderation; further, those who have the command of their pleasures, and are not too much overcome by misfortunes, but conduct themselves in the midst of them with manliness, and in a way worthy of the nature which we share; fourth — and this is the greatest — those who are not corrupted by prosperity, and are not put beside themselves, or made haughty , but continue in the class of sensible people.