Against Celsus, Book IV · §62 · Origen of Alexandria

Celsus misreads Plato on the amount of evil

After this he thinks that we can learn, from a few little phrases, what has been inquired into in many ways about the nature of evils, through many arguments not to be lightly dismissed, and has been interpreted in different ways. He says: “Evils in the things that exist could become neither fewer nor more, in the past, now, or hereafter. For the nature of the whole is one and the same, and the origin of evils is always the same.”

This too seems to have been paraphrased from what is in the Theaetetus, where Socrates in Plato says: “But it is not possible for evils to perish from among men, nor for them to be established among the gods” (Plato, Theaetetus 176a), and what follows. And it seems to me that the man who encompasses the truth in this one treatise, and gives his book against us the title True Doctrine, has not even listened to Plato carefully.

For the passage in the Timaeus that says, “When the gods cleanse the earth with water” (Plato, Timaeus 22d), has shown that the earth, when it is cleansed by the waters, has fewer evils than in the time before it was cleansed. And we say, following Plato, that evils are at times fewer, because of the passage in the Theaetetus that says that “evils” cannot “perish from among men.”

Greek

Ἑξῆς τούτοις τὰ διὰ πολλῶν καὶ οὐκ εὐκαταφρονήτων λόγων ποικίλως ζητηθέντα περὶ φύσεως κακῶν καὶ διαφόρως ἑρμηνευθέντα δι᾿ ὀλίγων λεξειδίων οἴεται δύνασθαι ἡμᾶς μαθεῖν, φάσκων· κακὰ δ᾿ ἐν τοῖς οὖσιν οὔτε πρόσθεν οὔτε νῦν οὔτε αὖθις ἥττω καὶ πλείω γένοιτ᾿ ἄν· μία γὰρ ἡ τῶν ὅλων φύσις καὶ ἡ αὐτὴ, καὶ κακῶν γένεσις ἀεὶ ἡ αὐτή. ἔοικε δὲ καὶ ταῦτ᾿ ἀπὸ τῶν ἐν τῷ Θεαιτήτῳ παραπεφράσθαι, ἐν οἷς ἔλεγεν ὁ παρὰ Πλάτωνι Σωκράτης· „ἀλλ᾿ οὔτε τὰ κακὰ ἐξ ἀνθρώπων ἀπολέσθαι δυνατὸν οὔτε παρὰ θεοῖς αὐτὰ ἱδρύσθαι“ καὶ τὰ ἑξῆς. καὶ δοκεῖ μοι μηδὲ Πλάτωνος ἀκριβῶς ἀκηκοέναι ὁ τὴν ἀλήθειαν ἐκπεριλαμβάνων ἐν τῷ ἑνὶ τούτῳ συγγράμματι καὶ ἐπιγράφων ἀληθῆ λόγον τὸ καθ᾿ ἡμῶν ἑαυτοῦ βιβλίον. ἡ γὰρ ἐν τῷ Τιμαίῳ λέξις φάσκουσα· „ὅταν δ᾿ οἱ θεοὶ τὴν γῆν ὕδατι καθαίρωσι“ δεδήλωκεν ὅτι καθαιρομένη ἡ γῆ τοῖς ὕδασιν ἥττονα ἔχει τὰ κακὰ παρὰ τὸν πρὸ τοῦ καθαίρεσθαι χρόνον. καὶ τοῦτό φαμεν κατὰ Πλάτωνα, τὸ ἥττονα εἶναί ποτε τὰ κακὰ, διὰ τὴν ἐν τῷ Θεαιτήτῳ λέξιν, φάσκουσαν μὴ δύνασθαι „ἀπολέσθαι ἐξ ἀνθρώπων τὰ κακά.“

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About this text

Origen answers Celsus’s scorn for the belief that God or his Son comes down to the world, showing that the Word comes down without change and that God’s threats and punishments are a cure, not a fit of temper. He then defends the stories of Genesis and the patriarchs, read in their deeper sense, against the charge that they are silly tales, and rejects Celsus’s claim that the world was made no more for man than for the animals, which Celsus thought nearer to God than men.

Translated from the Greek of Koetschau, GCS 2–3 (1899), via the Perseus digital text, which serves as the base text. Each chapter was translated from the Greek and then checked clause by clause against it in a separate review. No earlier English translation was consulted.

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Translated from Koetschau GCS 2 – 3 (1899) — Greek (Greek · Book IV, chapters 1 – 99)

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