Chapter XXV. Clement on the Same

[CLEMENT] [1] ‘AND again the Barbarian philosophy knows one world of thought, and another of sense, the one an archetype, and the other an image of the fair model. And the former it assigns to Unity, as being perceptible to thought only; but the sensible it assigns to the number six: for among the Pythagoreans six is called marriage, as a number that generates.

‘And in the Unity it establishes an invisible heaven, and a holy earth, and an intellectual light. For “In the beginning,” says Moses, “God created the heaven and the earth: and the earth was invisible.”[2] Then he adds, “And God said, let there be light, and there was light.”[3] But in the cosmogony of the sensible world He creates a solid heaven (and the solid is sensible), and a visible earth, and a light that is seen.

‘Does it not seem to you from this passage that Plato leaves the idsas of living creatures in the intelligible world, and creates the sensible species after their kindsin the intelligible world?

‘With good reason then Moses says that the body was fashioned out of earth, which Plato calls an “earthly tabernacle,”[4] but that the reasonable soul was breathed by God from on high into man’s face.[5]

‘For in this part, they say, the ruling faculty is seated, interpreting thus the accessory entrance of the soul through the organs of sense in the case of the first-formed man; for which reason also man, they say, is made after the image and likenessof God. For the image of God is the divine and royal Word, the impassible Man; and an image of that image is the human mind.’

But let us now listen to what remains to be said.