Clement of Alexandria: INSTRUCTOR (PAEDAGOGUS) Complete

Translated by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson.

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Page 100

It has been appropriately said, "As the furnace proverb the steel blade in the process of dipping, so wine proveth the heart of the haughty." [1370] A debauch is the immoderate use of wine, intoxication the disorder that results from such use; crapulousness (kraipale) is the discomfort and nausea that follow a debauch; so called from the head shaking (kara pallein).

Such a life as this (if life it must be called, which is spent in idleness, in agitation about voluptuous indulgences, and in the hallucinations of debauchery) the divine Wisdom looks on with contempt, and commands her children, "Be not a wine-bibber, nor spend your money in the purchase of flesh; for every drunkard and fornicator shall come to beggary, and every sluggard shall be clothed in tatters and rags." [1371] For every one that is not awake to wisdom, but is steeped in wine, is a sluggard. "And the drunkard," he says, "shall be clothed in rags, and be ashamed of his drunkenness in the presence of onlookers." [1372] For the wounds of the sinner are the rents of the garment of the flesh, the holes made by lusts, through which the shame of the soul within is seen--namely sin, by reason of which it will not be easy to save the garment, that has been torn away all round, that has rotted away in many lusts, and has been rent asunder from salvation.

[1370] Ecclus. xxxi. 26.

[1371] Prov. xxiii. 20.

[1372] Prov. xxiii. 21.

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