Daily Inspiration Quote by Clement of Alexandra

Clement is doing something rhetorically clever: he refuses the easy holiness of poverty without giving wealth a free pass. The line walks a narrow doctrinal ridge. “We do not want riches” signals moral distance from greed, but “train our minds to use them properly” shifts the battlefield from the purse to the psyche. For Clement, the sin isn’t the coin; it’s the attachment. That’s why the verb is “train” - not renounce, not despise. He’s pitching Christianity as a disciplined practice capable of governing desire, even in a market-saturated city.

The subtext is pastoral and political at once. Alexandria was a cosmopolitan hub where money, learning, and status were part of daily life, and early Christianity was attracting educated, sometimes affluent converts. A blanket condemnation of wealth would have been both socially disruptive and strategically self-sabotaging. Clement offers an ethic that can survive contact with privilege: wealth becomes morally legible if it’s treated as stewardship.

“Not our own... on trust” borrows the language of guardianship and accountability. It reframes property as temporary custody under a higher owner, turning the rich from proprietors into managers. That move does two things. It humbles without shaming (you can keep the assets, but you don’t get to feel entitled), and it authorizes redistribution without sounding like confiscation (a trustee is expected to deploy resources for the beneficiary’s good).

The intent, then, is to domesticate wealth inside a Christian moral imagination: keep it, but let it unsettle you; possess it, but don’t let it possess you.