Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume IX/The Epistles of Clement/The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians/Chapter 3

by Various

Chapter III.—The Sad State of the Corinthian Church After Sedition Arose in It from Envy and Emulation.

Every kind of honour and happiness^[1] was bestowed upon you, and then was fulfilled that which is written, “My beloved did eat and drink, and was enlarged and became fat, and kicked.”^[2]  Hence flowed emulation and envy, strife and sedition, persecution and disorder, war and captivity.  So the worthless rose up against the honoured, those of no reputation against such as were renowned, the foolish against the wise, the young against those advanced in years.  For this reason righteousness and peace are now far departed from you, inasmuch as every one abandons the fear of God, and is become blind in His faith,^[3] neither walks in the ordinances of His appointment, nor acts a part becoming a Christian,^[4] but walks after his own wicked lusts, resuming the practice of an unrighteous and ungodly envy, by which death itself entered into the world.^[5]

Footnotes

1. Literally, “enlargement.”
2. Deut. xxxii. 15.
3. It seems necessary to refer αὐτοῦ to God, in opposition to the translation given by Abp. Wake and others.
4. Literally, “Christ;” comp. 2 Cor. i. 21; Eph. iv. 20.
5. Wisd. ii. 24.