Clement of Alexandria: STROMATA (MISCELLANIES), Part V, Complete

Translated by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson.

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Page 47

Now, too what is good in the arts as arts, [3490] have their beginning from God. For as the doing of anything artistically is embraced in the rules of art, so also acting sagaciously is classed under the head of sagacity (phronesis). Now sagacity is virtue, and it is its function to know other things, but much more especially what belongs to itself. And Wisdom (Sophia) being power, is nothing but the knowledge of good things, divine and human.

But "the earth is God's, and the fulness thereof," [3491] says the Scripture, teaching that good things come from God to men; it being through divine power and might that the distribution of them comes to the help of man.

Now the modes of all help and communication from one to another are three. One is, by attending to another, as the master of gymnastics, in training the boy. The second is, by assimilation, as in the case of one who exhorts another to benevolence by practising it before. The one co-operates with the learner, and the other benefits him who receives. The third mode is that by command, when the gymnastic master, no longer training the learner, nor showing in his own person the exercise for the boy to imitate, prescribes the exercise by name to him, as already proficient in it.

[3490] For hos en technais it is proposed to read os an ai technai.

[3491] Ps. xxiv. 1; 1 Cor. x. 26.

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