What the descent was for

Having said that we claim he has come down, and the Jews that he will come down as judge, he thinks he condemns the claim on the spot as most shameful and in need of no long refutation, and he says: “What would be God’s purpose in such a descent?” He does not see that in our teaching too the descent has a purpose. In the first place, it was to turn back those whom the Gospel calls “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 15:24; 10:6). In the second place, because of their disobedience, it was to take from them what is called the kingdom of God (Matthew 21:43) and to give it “to other tenants,” to the Christians, as distinct from the Jews of old, who “will render” to God “the fruits” of the kingdom of God “in their seasons” (Matthew 21:41), each action being a fruit of the kingdom.

Out of many answers, then, we have given a few to Celsus’s question when he said: “What, then, would be God’s purpose in such a descent?” But Celsus puts forward for himself things that neither the Jews nor we would say, when he asks: “Or is it to learn what goes on among men?” For none of us says that Christ came into human life in order to learn what goes on among men. Then, as though some would say “to learn what goes on among men,” he raises against himself, in reply to this, the objection: “Does he not know all things?” Then, as though they would answer that he does know, he raises a further difficulty: “Does he know, then, and yet not set things right, and is he not able to set them right by divine power?”

All this he says naively. For God always sets right those who listen to what is said, by his own Word, who in every generation passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God and prophets (Wisdom of Solomon 7:27). And at the coming of Christ too he sets right, by the word of the Christian faith, not those who are unwilling, but those who have chosen the better life, the life pleasing to God.

I do not know what sort of correction Celsus wanted to take place when he raised the difficulty: “Is he not able to set things right by divine power, unless he sends someone by way of nature for this purpose?” Did he, then, want the correction to come about by impressions put into men’s minds by God, God taking away their vice all at once and planting virtue in them? Another may inquire whether such a thing is consistent with nature, or possible for it. But we would say: let it be so, and let it be possible. Where, then, is what lies in our power? And where is praiseworthy assent to the truth, or acceptable refusal of falsehood?

And even if it were once granted that this is both possible and fittingly done, why should one not rather raise the question at the very start, saying something like what Celsus says: could God not by divine power have made men who did not even need correction, but were good and perfect from the outset, with vice never having existed at all? Such arguments can carry away the untrained and the unintelligent, but not one who looks into the nature of things; for if you take away the voluntary character of virtue, you have taken away its very being as well.

These matters need a whole treatise. The Greeks too have said a good deal about them in their works On Providence, and they would not have said what Celsus set out when he said: “He knows, but does not set things right, nor is he able to set them right by divine power.” We ourselves have spoken of these questions in many places, as far as we could, and the divine words have made them plain to those who are able to hear them.