Which physicians do we turn people from?

After this he says that the man who teaches the things of Christianity acts much like one who promises to make bodies well, yet turns people away from heeding skilled physicians, because they would expose his own lack of skill. To this too we shall reply: Which physicians do you mean, from whom we turn away the unlearned? For you surely do not suppose that we bring our call to the word to people who study philosophy, so that you might take them to be the physicians from whom we turn away those we summon to the divine word. Either, then, he gives no answer, since he cannot name the physicians, or he must fall back on the unlearned, who themselves go about repeating like slaves what is said of many gods and whatever else the unlearned might say. Either way he will be shown to have brought into his argument, to no purpose, the man who turns people away from skilled physicians.

And even supposing that we turn away from the philosophy of Epicurus, and from the physicians reckoned Epicureans after Epicurus, those who have been deceived by them, how shall we not be acting with the best of reason when we draw them away from a grievous disease which the physicians of Celsus have put into them, the disease of doing away with providence and bringing in pleasure as a good? Or let it be granted that we draw those whom we urge toward our word away from other physicians, philosophers of the Peripatetic school, who do away with providence toward us and with the relation of the divine to human beings. How shall we not make those we have converted godly, and heal them, by persuading them to devote themselves to the God who is over all, and free those who listen to us from great wounds, the wounds that come from the arguments of so-called philosophers?

Let it be granted too that we turn others away from Stoic physicians, who bring in a God who can perish and say that His substance is a body that can be changed throughout, altered and transformed, and who at some time destroy all things and leave God alone. How shall we not, in this case also, free from evils those who listen to us, and bring them to the godly doctrine that teaches them to devote themselves to the Creator and to marvel at the father of the Christian teaching, who out of the greatest love for mankind arranged for teachings that turn souls back to be sown throughout the whole human race? And if we heal those who have caught the folly of transmigration from physicians who bring the rational nature down, sometimes into any irrational nature at all, and sometimes even into a nature without sense-impressions, how shall we not make better in soul those who listen to a doctrine that does not teach that the wicked man is given insensibility or irrationality as his share of punishment, but shows that the pains and punishments God brings on the wicked are remedies meant to turn them back? For Christians who live wisely guide the simpler ones with this in mind, as fathers guide their very little children.

We do not, then, turn to children and foolish rustics and say to them, “Flee the physicians.” Nor do we say, “Take care that none of you ever lays hold of knowledge.” Nor do we assert that knowledge is an evil, nor are we so mad as to say that knowledge leads people astray from health of soul. Nor would we ever say that anyone perishes from wisdom, we who do not say even when we teach, “Attend to me,” but, “Attend to the God of the universe, and to Jesus, the teacher of the lessons about Him.” None of us is such a braggart as to say to his disciples what Celsus put into the mouth of the teacher: “I alone will save you.” See, then, how many lies he tells about us. Nor do we say that the true physicians destroy those they promise to heal.