Against Celsus, Book VI

Why plain speech serves the many§1

1In beginning this sixth book against the charges Celsus brings against Christians, holy Ambrose, what we need to contend with in it is not, as one might suppose, the passages from philosophy he sets out. For Celsus has quoted a good many passages, chiefly from Plato, and has set beside them passages from the sacred writings that could win over even an intelligent reader, claiming that these things were said better among the Greeks, and without the lofty pretension and the claim that they come from God or from a Son of God.

We say, then, that if the aim of those who champion the cause of truth is to benefit as many people as they can and, out of love for humankind, to bring to the truth, as far as possible, everyone whatever, not only the quick-witted but also the dull, and again not Greeks only while leaving out the barbarians (and it is a great civilizing work if a man is able to turn even the most boorish and unlearned), then it is clear that he must also take care to speak in a style that benefits all and is able to draw every hearer.

But those who have bidden a long farewell to the unlearned, as if they were slaves unable to follow the train of thought set out in literary phrasing and arrangement, and have cared only for those brought up in letters and learning, have narrowed what they share with others into a very small and narrow compass.

Power from God, not polished words§2

2I have said this in defence of the plain diction of the Scriptures, for which Celsus and others accuse them, a plainness that seems to be eclipsed by the brilliance of artful composition. For our prophets, and Jesus and his apostles, had in view a way of speaking that not only contains the truth but is also able to draw the many, until, encouraged and led in, each according to his capacity rises to the things spoken in hidden ways in words that seem plain.

And if I must make bold to say it, the very beautiful and studied diction of Plato and of those who wrote in a similar way has benefited few, if it has benefited anyone at all; but the diction of those who taught and wrote more plainly, and at the same time with an eye to the substance and to the many, has benefited more. At any rate, one can see that Plato is in the hands only of those who are thought to be lovers of letters, while Epictetus is admired even by ordinary people who have an inclination toward being helped, since they sense the improvement that comes from his words.

And we say this not to find fault with Plato (for the great world of humankind has usefully produced him too), but also to show the meaning of those who said: “My word and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that our faith might not rest on the wisdom of men but on the power of God” (1 Corinthians 2:4–5). The divine word says that what is spoken, even if it is true in itself and most persuasive, is not enough to reach a human soul unless some power is also given from God to the speaker and grace blooms upon what is said; and this grace too does not come without God to those who speak to good effect. So the prophet says in the sixty-seventh Psalm (Psalm 68 in English Bibles): “The Lord will give a word to those who bring good news with great power” (Psalm 68:11).

So, granting that in some cases the same doctrines are held by the Greeks and by those of our teaching, they still do not have the same power to win souls and to shape them according to those doctrines. That is why the disciples of Jesus, unlearned as far as Greek philosophy is concerned, travelled through many nations of the world, shaping each of their hearers according to his worth, as the Word willed; and these hearers, in proportion to the inclination of their free will toward accepting the good, became much better.

Plato knew the truth, yet was without excuse§3

3Let the wise men of old, then, make things known to those able to understand them; and let Plato, the son of Ariston, indicate in one of his letters what concerns the first good, and say that the first good can by no means be “spoken”, but that it arises “from long association” and appears “suddenly, like a light kindled from a leaping fire, in the soul” (Plato, Seventh Letter 341c–d). When we hear these words we too agree with them as well said, “for God showed them” (Romans 1:19) these things and whatever else has been well said.

This is why we say that even those who have grasped the truth about God, but have not practised the worship of God that is worthy of the truth about him, are liable to the punishments of sinners. For Paul says of such people in so many words: “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold the truth in unrighteousness, because what can be known of God is plain among them, for God showed it to them. For his invisible things, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made, both his eternal power and divinity, so that they are without excuse; because, although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or give thanks, but became futile in their reasonings, and their senseless heart was darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptible man, and of birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things” (Romans 1:18–23).

So those people do indeed “hold the truth”, as our own word also bears witness, who think that the first good “can by no means be spoken”, and say that “from long association with the matter itself, and from living with it, suddenly, like a light kindled from a leaping fire, it comes to be in the soul and from then on nourishes itself” (Plato, Seventh Letter 341c–d).

Philosophers who saw God and worshipped idols§4

4Yet those who wrote such things about the first good go down “to the Piraeus” to pray to Artemis as a goddess and to watch the festival held by the common people (Plato, Republic 1.327a). After philosophizing so loftily about the soul and describing the life of the soul that has lived well, they abandon the greatness of what “God showed them” (Romans 1:19) and think mean and petty thoughts, paying “a cock to Asclepius” (Plato, Phaedo 118a). And though they pictured to themselves “the invisible things” of God and the ideas “from the creation of the world” and from the things of sense, from which they ascend to the things known by the mind, and though they saw, not ignobly, his eternal power and divinity, they nonetheless “became futile in their reasonings” (Romans 1:20–21), and their “senseless heart” (Romans 1:21), as it were, wallows in darkness and ignorance about the worship of the divine.

And one can see men who pride themselves on their wisdom and their theology bowing down to “the likeness of an image of corruptible man” (Romans 1:23), in honour, so it is said, of that being, and sometimes even going down with the Egyptians to birds or four-footed beasts or creeping things. And even if some seem to have risen above these things, they will still be found to have “exchanged the truth of God for a lie” and to be worshipping and serving “the creature rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25).

Therefore, since the wise and learned among the Greeks go astray in their deeds concerning the divine, “God chose” “the foolish things of the world” “to put the wise to shame”, “and the base things” “and the weak things” “and the things despised”, and “the things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:27–28); and truly, so that “no flesh may boast before God” (1 Corinthians 1:29).

But our own wise men, Moses, the most ancient of all, and the prophets after him, were the first to know that the first good can “by no means” be “spoken”. They did write, since God shows himself to those who are worthy and fit, that God “appeared”, for example, to Abraham or to Isaac or to Jacob (Genesis 12:7; Genesis 26:24; Genesis 35:9; Exodus 6:3). But who it was that appeared, and of what kind, and in what manner, and to which part of us, they have left to be examined by those able to make themselves like the men to whom God appeared; for he was seen not by their bodily eyes but by their pure heart. For, according to our Jesus, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8).

The light kindled in the soul§5

5That a “light” is kindled “in the soul” “suddenly, as from a leaping fire” (Plato, Seventh Letter 341c–d), the Word knew first, saying in the prophet: “Light for yourselves the light of knowledge” (Hosea 10:12). And John, who lived after him, says that “what came to be” in the Word “was life, and the life was the light of men” (John 1:3–4); and this “true light” “enlightens every man coming into the” true and intelligible “world” (John 1:9), and makes him “a light of the world” (Matthew 5:14). For this light “shone in our hearts to give the light of the gospel of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6; 2 Corinthians 4:4).

That is why a most ancient prophet, who prophesied many generations before the reign of Cyrus (for he was more than fourteen generations older than Cyrus), says: “The Lord is my light and my saviour; whom shall I fear?” (Psalm 27:1); and: “Your law is a lamp to my feet and a light to my paths” (Psalm 119:105); and: “The light of your face has been marked upon us, O Lord” (Psalm 4:6); and: “In your light we shall see light” (Psalm 36:9). And the Word in Isaiah, urging us toward this light, says: “Be filled with light, be filled with light, Jerusalem; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you” (Isaiah 60:1). And this same prophet, prophesying of the coming of Jesus, who turns people away from the worship of idols and images and demons, says: “To those who sat in the region and shadow of death a light has risen” (Isaiah 9:2; Matthew 4:16); and again: “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light” (Isaiah 9:2; Matthew 4:16).

See, then, the difference between what Plato said well about the first good and what is said in the prophets about the light of the blessed. And see that the truth about this in Plato did nothing to help his readers toward pure piety, nor even the man himself who philosophized in such terms about the first good; whereas the plain diction of the divine writings has filled with divine inspiration those who read it sincerely. In such readers this light is nourished by the oil spoken of in a certain parable, the oil that kept the light of the torches burning for the five wise virgins (Matthew 25:1–13).

Things too great to be written§6

6Celsus also sets out another passage from Plato’s letter, which runs as follows: “If it had seemed to me that these things could be adequately written and spoken for the many, what finer thing could I have done in my life than to write what is of great benefit to humankind and to bring nature to light for all?” (Plato, Seventh Letter 341d). So let us discuss this too, briefly. Whether Plato had something more sublime than what he wrote, and more divine than what he left behind, or not, we leave to each person to examine as best he can. But we show that our prophets too had in mind certain things greater than what is written, which they did not write down.

For Ezekiel receives a roll “of a book”, written “in front” and behind, in which there was “lamentation and song and woe” (Ezekiel 2:9–10); and at the command of the Word he eats the book, so that he might not write it down and betray it to the unworthy (Ezekiel 3:1–3). John too is recorded to have seen and done something similar (Revelation 10:9–10). And Paul too “heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter” (2 Corinthians 12:4). And Jesus, who is greater than all of these, is said to have “spoken” the word of God “to the disciples” “privately” (Mark 4:33–34), especially in times of retreat; but what he said has not been recorded. For it did not “seem” to them that these things “could be adequately written for the many” or “spoken”.

And if it is not tasteless to tell the truth about such great men, I say that these men saw better than Plato, from the thoughts they received by the grace of God, which things are “to be written” and how they are “to be written”, and which are by no means “to be written for the many”, and which are “to be spoken” and which are not of that kind. And again John, teaching us the difference between what is to be written and what is not, says that he heard seven thunders teaching him about certain things and forbidding him to commit their words to writing (Revelation 10:3–4).

The prophets did not borrow from Plato§7

7Many things could also be found in Moses and the prophets, who are older not only than Plato but even than Homer and than the invention of letters among the Greeks, things worthy of the grace God gave them and filled with greatness of mind. These men did not, as Celsus supposes, say such things because they had misheard Plato. For how could they have heard a man who had not yet been born?

And even if someone applies Celsus’s argument to the apostles of Jesus, who lived later than Plato, consider whether it is not unbelievable on the face of it to say that Paul the tentmaker (Acts 18:3), Peter the fisherman (Matthew 4:18), and John, who left his father’s nets (Matthew 4:21–22), handed down such teaching about God because they had misheard what Plato said in his letters.

Celsus has already harped many times on the charge that people are required to believe at once, and now he says it again as if it were something new beside what he said before. What we have said in answer to this is enough for us.

Since he also sets out another passage of Plato, in which he says that wisdom shines out upon those who practise philosophy in Plato’s way “when they use questions and answers” (Plato, Seventh Letter 344b), come, let us show from the sacred writings that the divine word also urges us toward dialectic. In one place Solomon says, “Instruction left unexamined goes astray” (Proverbs 10:17); in another Jesus son of Sirach, who left us the book called Wisdom, says, “The knowledge of the senseless man is unexamined talk” (Sirach 21:18). So it is rather among us that kindly refutations are found, among those who have learned that the one who presides over the word must be able “to refute those who contradict” (Titus 1:9).

But if some are careless, and do not train themselves to attend to the divine readings, to “search the Scriptures” (John 5:39), and, as Jesus commanded, to seek the meaning of the Scriptures, to ask God about them, and to knock at what is shut in them (Matthew 7:7), the word is not for that reason empty of wisdom.

Greek wonder-tales and Plato’s oath§8

8Then, after other passages of Plato showing that the good is known to “few,” because the many, filled “with a contempt that is not right” and “with a lofty and empty hope,” speak of certain things as true “as though they had learned something grand” (Plato, Seventh Letter 341e), he says that Plato, though he had said this beforehand, still does not tell tales of wonder, nor does he stop the tongue of anyone who wishes to weigh what it is that he professes, nor does he bid people believe straight away: “God is of such a kind, and he has a Son of such a kind, and this Son came down and talked with me.”

To this I reply that Aristander, I think, wrote of Plato that he was not the son of Ariston but of an apparition that came to Amphictione in the form of Apollo; and many other Platonists have said such things in their accounts of Plato’s life. And as for Pythagoras, who told a great many marvels, who showed his ivory thigh at a festival gathering of the Greeks, who claimed he recognized the shield he had used when he was Euphorbus, and who is said to have appeared in two cities on one day, what need is there even to speak?

Anyone who wants to charge that tales of wonder are told about Plato and Socrates will cite the swan that was presented to Socrates in a dream, and the teacher who said, when the young man was presented to him, “So this was the swan.” He will also take up as a tale of wonder the third eye that Plato saw he himself had. Malicious people, who wish to speak evil of what has appeared to those who stand above the many, will never lack slander and abuse; they will also mock the divine sign of Socrates as a fiction.

We, then, are not telling tales of wonder when we relate the things about Jesus, and his true disciples did not write such stories about him. But Celsus, who professes to know everything and quotes many passages of Plato, deliberately, I think, keeps silent about the teaching on the Son of God that is stated by Plato in the letter to Hermias and Coriscus. Plato’s words run thus: “and swearing by the God of all things, leader of what is and of what is to be, Father and Lord of the ruling principle and cause; whom, if we truly practise philosophy, we shall all know clearly, as far as is possible for blessed human beings” (Plato, Sixth Letter 323d).

Plato’s steps to knowledge and Christ§9

9Celsus also sets out another passage of Plato, which runs thus: “It has come into my mind to speak still more at length about these matters, for perhaps what I am speaking of would become clearer once this has been said. There is a true argument that stands against anyone who has dared to write anything at all on such subjects; I have often stated it before, yet it seems it must be stated now as well. Each of the things that exist has three things through which knowledge must come; the fourth is knowledge itself; and as a fifth one must set the thing itself, which is knowable and true. Of these, the first is the name, the second the word, the third the image, and the fourth knowledge” (Plato, Seventh Letter 342a–b).

Along the same lines we might say that John, “the voice of one crying in the wilderness” (John 1:23; Isaiah 40:3), was brought in before Jesus, corresponding to the name in Plato; and that second, after John, comes Jesus, pointed out by him (John 1:29), to whom the words “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14) apply, corresponding to the word in Plato.

Plato calls the third the image. But since we give the name “image” another use, we will say more plainly that the imprint of the wounds that forms in the soul after the word is the Christ in each person, coming from Christ the Word. And whether Christ, the wisdom that is “among the mature” on our side (1 Corinthians 2:6; 1 Corinthians 1:24), also corresponds to the fourth, which is knowledge, let anyone who is able consider.

Faith with reasons, suited to each hearer§10

10Then he says: “You see how Plato, though he has firmly declared that it cannot be ‘spoken,’ nevertheless, so as not to seem to take refuge in what cannot be examined, gives a reasoned account of this difficulty; for perhaps even ‘nothing’ could be ‘spoken.’” But since he brings this forward to establish that one must not simply believe but must give a reasoned account of what is believed, we too shall use the saying of Paul that rebukes the one who believes rashly, in which he says, “unless you believed rashly” (1 Corinthians 15:2).

As far as it rests with him, Celsus, by repeating himself, forces us to repeat ourselves. After the boasts he has already described, as though they were the boasts of impostors, he says that Plato does not boast and lie by claiming that he himself has discovered something new, or that he has come from heaven to announce it, but admits where these things come from.

Anyone who wished to answer Celsus might say in reply that Plato too boasts, in the speech of Zeus in the Timaeus, where he says, “Gods of gods, whose maker and father I am” (Plato, Timaeus 41a), and the rest. But if someone defends these words by appeal to the meaning of the Zeus who makes the speech in Plato, why should not one who examines the meaning of the words of the Son of God, or of the Creator’s words in the prophets, say something even greater than the speech of Zeus in the Timaeus? For what marks out divinity is the foretelling of things to come, things spoken not by the power of human nature and shown by their outcome to have been announced by a divine Spirit.

So we do not say to everyone who comes to us, “First believe that the one I am introducing to you is the Son of God.” Rather, we bring the word to each person in the way that suits his character and condition, for we have learned “to know how we ought to answer each one” (Colossians 4:6). There are some to whom we preach this, since they can do no more than be urged to believe; to others we come, as far as we can, with proof by way of questions and answers.

Nor do we say what Celsus said in mockery: “Believe that the one I am introducing to you is the Son of God, even though he was bound in the most dishonourable way or punished in the most shameful way, even though only yesterday or the day before he was knocked about most disgracefully before the eyes of all.” Nor do we say, “For this reason believe all the more.” For on each of these points we try to say even more than we have set out above.

Only one Son of God has been preached everywhere§11

11After this Celsus says: “If these men” (he means the Christians) “introduce one, and others another, and the common and ready word of them all is ‘Believe, if you want to be saved, or go away,’ what will those do who truly want to be saved? Will they throw dice to divine where to turn and whom to join?”

To this too we shall say, starting from what is plain to see: if there had been several who, like Jesus, were recorded to have come into human life as sons of God, and each of them had drawn some people away to himself, so that, because their claims were alike, it was disputed whether the one attested by those who believe in him was the Son of God, then there would be room for the words “If these men introduce one, and others another, and the common and ready word of them all is ‘Believe, if you want to be saved, or go away,’” and the rest. But as it is, Jesus has been preached throughout the whole inhabited world as the only Son of God who has come to the human race.

For those who, like Celsus, supposed that wonders had been invented, and who therefore wanted to invent wonders in the same way, thinking that they too would gain the same mastery over people, were shown to be nothing: Simon, the Samaritan magician, and Dositheus, who came from the same country as he. For the one claimed that he was the power of God that is called great (Acts 8:10), and the other that he too was the son of God.

Indeed, nowhere in the inhabited world are there Simonians. And yet Simon, in order to win more followers, took away from his disciples the danger of death, which Christians have been taught to choose, by teaching them to treat idolatry as a matter of indifference. But not even at the beginning were the Simonians plotted against; for the evil demon who plots against the teaching of Jesus knew that none of his own purposes would be undone by the teachings of Simon. The Dositheans did not flourish even in earlier times, and now they have died out entirely, so that their whole number is reported to be not even thirty.

Judas the Galilean too, as Luke wrote in the Acts of the Apostles, wanted to call himself someone great, and before him Theudas; but since their teaching was not from God, they were destroyed, and “all who obeyed” them were at once scattered (Acts 5:36–39). So we do not throw dice to divine where to turn and whom to join, as though there were several who could draw us away with the claim that they had come from God to the human race. But enough about these things.

Celsus traces the saying on worldly wisdom to the Greeks§12

12So we pass on to another charge of Celsus. He does not even know our actual words, but from scraps he has misheard he said that we say “the wisdom among men is foolishness with God,” although what Paul says is: “The wisdom of the world is foolishness with God” (1 Corinthians 3:19). Celsus says that the reason for this has been given already. He thinks the reason is that by this saying we want to win over only the uneducated and the stupid. But, as he himself noted, he said the same thing earlier, and we have answered that argument as well as we could. Even so, he wanted to show that this too was made up by us and taken from the wise men of the Greeks, who said that human wisdom is one thing and divine wisdom another.

He does indeed set out sayings of Heraclitus: one in which he says, “For human character has no insight, but divine character has” (Heraclitus, fragment 78 DK), and another, “A man is called an infant by a divinity, as a child is by a man” (Heraclitus, fragment 79 DK). He also sets out these words from the Apology of Socrates written by Plato: “For I, men of Athens, have gained this name through nothing else than wisdom. What sort of wisdom is this? The kind that is perhaps human wisdom; for in truth I may well be wise in that” (Plato, Apology 20d).

These, then, are the passages Celsus sets out. I will add these as well, from Plato’s letter to Hermias, Erastus and Coriscus: “To Erastus and Coriscus I say, old as I am, that besides this fine wisdom of the Forms they still need a wisdom that guards against wicked and unjust men, and a certain power of self-defence. For they lack experience, because they have spent much of their life with us, who are moderate men and not bad ones. That is why I said they still need these things, so that they may not be forced to neglect the true wisdom and to attend to the human and necessary kind more than they should” (Plato, Letter 6, 322d–e).

Divine wisdom, knowledge and faith§13

13According to these passages, then, there is a divine wisdom and a human one. The human is what we call “the wisdom of the world,” which is “foolishness with God” (1 Corinthians 3:19). But the divine, which differs from the human, if it is indeed divine, comes by the grace of God, who gives it to those who have made themselves fit to receive it, and above all to those who know how each wisdom differs from the other and therefore say in their prayers to God: “For even if one is perfect among the sons of men, yet if the wisdom that comes from you is absent, he will be counted as nothing” (Wisdom of Solomon 9:6).

We say that human wisdom is a training ground for the soul, and divine wisdom its goal. Divine wisdom is also called the “solid food” of the soul by the one who said: “But solid food is for the mature, for those whose faculties have been trained by practice to distinguish good from evil” (Hebrews 5:14).

This view is truly ancient, but its antiquity does not go back, as Celsus thinks, to Heraclitus and Plato. For before them the prophets drew the distinction between the two kinds of wisdom. For the present it is enough to quote from the words of David what is said of the man who is wise with divine wisdom: he “will not see corruption,” David says, “when he sees the wise dying” (Psalm 49:9–10).

Divine wisdom, then, which is different from faith, is the first of what are called the “gifts” of God (1 Corinthians 12:4). After it, second, for those who know how to be exact in such matters, comes what is called knowledge; and third, since the simpler people too, who come to godliness as best they can, must be saved, comes faith. That is why Paul says: “To one is given through the Spirit the word of wisdom, to another the word of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:8–9). So you would find that it is not ordinary people who have a share in divine wisdom, but those who rise above and excel all who hold to Christianity; nor does anyone expound the matters of divine wisdom to the most uneducated, or to slaves, or to the most ignorant.

Who are truly the uneducated§14

14It is true that Celsus calls one set of people “most uneducated and slaves and most ignorant”: those who do not know his precepts and have not been schooled in the learning of the Greeks. We, however, call most uneducated those who are not ashamed to talk to lifeless things, who call on what is weak for health, ask what is dead for life, and beg what is most helpless for help (Wisdom of Solomon 13:17–18). And even if some say that these things are not the gods but imitations and symbols of the true ones, these too are none the less uneducated and slaves and ignorant, since they imagine that imitations of the divine are in the hands of common craftsmen. So we say that even the least among us have been freed from this lack of education and this ignorance, and that the divine hope is understood and grasped by the most intelligent.

We also say that it is impossible for one who has not been trained in human wisdom to take in the more divine wisdom; and we confess that all human wisdom is foolishness compared with the divine. Then, when he ought to argue the point, he calls us charlatans and says that we flee headlong from the more cultivated, since they are not ready to be deceived, and lure in the more rustic like birds. For he did not see that from the very beginning our wise men were schooled in outside learning as well: Moses “in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (Acts 7:22), and Daniel, Hananiah, Azariah and Mishael in all the learning of the Assyrians, so that they were found ten times better than all the wise men there (Daniel 1:4, 17, 20). Even now the churches have, in proportion to their numbers, few wise men who have come to them from what we call wisdom “according to the flesh” (1 Corinthians 1:26); but they also have those who have passed from that wisdom to the divine wisdom.

Humility, Plato’s and ours§15

15Next, Celsus, like someone who has heard talk of humility at second hand and has not taken the trouble to understand it, wants to speak ill of the humility we teach, and thinks it a mishearing of Plato’s words. Plato says somewhere in the Laws: “God, as the ancient saying has it, holding the beginning, the end and the middle of all things that are, goes straight to his end as he moves round according to nature. And Justice always follows him, the avenger of those who fall short of the divine law; and he who is to be happy holds fast to her and follows, humble and well-ordered” (Plato, Laws 4.715e–716a). Celsus does not see that, among men far more ancient than Plato, these words were spoken in prayer: “Lord, my heart was not lifted up, nor were my eyes raised high; nor did I walk among great things, nor among wonderful things above me, unless I was humble-minded” (Psalm 131:1–2).

At the same time these words show that the humble-minded man does not necessarily humble himself in an unseemly and degrading way, falling to the ground on his knees and throwing himself face down, putting on the clothes of the wretched and heaping dust on himself. For the man who is humble-minded as the prophet describes walks “among great and wonderful things” above him (Psalm 131:1), among doctrines that are truly “great” and thoughts that are truly “wonderful,” and he humbles himself “under the mighty hand of God” (1 Peter 5:6). If some, through lack of learning, have not grasped clearly the teaching on humility and act in this way, the teaching is not to blame; rather we should pardon the lack of learning in those who have set the better things before themselves but, through their simplicity, fail to reach them.

For more truly “humble and well-ordered” than Plato’s humble and well-ordered man is the one who is well-ordered because he walks “among great” and “wonderful things” above him, and humble because, even while among these, he humbles himself of his own will, not under just anyone but “under the mighty hand of God” (1 Peter 5:6), through Jesus, the teacher of such lessons, who “did not count being equal with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,” and “being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6–8). So great is the teaching on humility that its teacher is no ordinary one, but our Saviour himself, great as he is, says: “Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11:29).

The camel and the eye of the needle§16

16After this he takes the pronouncement of Jesus against the rich, when he said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24), and says that it was plainly borrowed from Plato, and that Jesus corrupted Plato’s saying where Plato said that “for one who is exceptionally good to be exceptionally rich as well is impossible” (Plato, Laws 5.742e–743a).

Who with even a moderate power to weigh the facts, not only among those who believe in Jesus but among the rest of mankind as well, would not laugh at Celsus on hearing that Jesus, who was born and brought up among the Jews, who was thought to be the son of Joseph “the carpenter” (Luke 3:23; Matthew 13:55), and who had not learned letters, not only those of the Greeks but not even those of the Hebrews (John 7:15), as the truth-loving writings about him also testify, read Plato, and, pleased with his saying about the rich, that “it is impossible to be exceptionally good and rich,” corrupted it and turned it into “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24)?

If Celsus had loved the truth, and had not read the Gospels with hatred and hostility, he would have considered why a camel was chosen for comparison with the rich man, an animal crooked in its build; and what Jesus meant by the narrow “eye of the needle” (Mark 10:25), since he says that the way that leads “to life” is narrow and hard (Matthew 7:14); and the fact that in the law this animal is recorded as “unclean,” having something acceptable, in that it chews the cud, but also something to be blamed, in that it does not part the hoof (Leviticus 11:4; Deuteronomy 14:7). He would also have examined how often the camel is mentioned in the divine Scriptures, and in connection with whom, so as to see the intent of the saying about the rich. Nor would he have left unexamined the fact that Jesus calls the poor blessed and the rich wretched (Luke 6:20, 24): whether these words of his […] refer to the poor and the rich as the senses perceive them, or whether the Word knows a poverty that is wholly blessed and a wealth that is wholly to be blamed. For not even an ordinary person would praise the poor without discrimination, since most of them are of very bad character. But enough of this.

God hidden in darkness, made known by the Son§17

17Next, wishing to belittle what is written among us about the kingdom of God, he quotes none of it, as if it were not even worth recording in his book (perhaps because he did not even know it), but sets out passages of Plato from the Letters and the Phaedrus, as though these were spoken by divine inspiration, while our writings have nothing of the kind. Come, then, let us set a few of ours beside them, for the sake of comparison with what Plato said. His words are not unpersuasive; yet they did not lead the philosopher to conduct himself in a way worthy at least of himself in his piety toward the Maker of all things, a piety he ought not to have adulterated or defiled with what we call idolatry, or, to use the word most people would use, superstition.

In a Hebrew manner of speaking, then, it is said of God in the seventeenth Psalm (Psalm 18 in English Bibles) that “God made darkness his hiding place” (Psalm 18:11). This is said to show that what could be worthily conceived about God is hidden and unknown, since he has hidden himself, as it were, in darkness from those who cannot bear the flashing brightness of the knowledge of him and cannot see him: partly because of the defilement of the mind, bound as it is to a human “body of humiliation” (Philippians 3:21), and partly because of its too limited power to comprehend God.

And to show that the knowledge of God reaches human beings rarely and is found in very few, Moses is recorded to have entered “into the thick darkness where God was” (Exodus 20:21). And again it is said of Moses: “Moses alone shall come near to God, but the rest shall not come near” (Exodus 24:2). And again, to present the depth of the teachings about God, a depth beyond the grasp of those who do not have the “Spirit” who searches all things, and searches “even the depths of God” (1 Corinthians 2:10), the prophet said: “The abyss, like a garment, is his covering” (Psalm 104:6).

Our Saviour and Lord too, the Word of God, shows the greatness of the knowledge of the Father: that the Father is grasped and known as he deserves first of all by the Saviour alone, and secondarily by those whose ruling faculty is enlightened by the Word and God himself. He says: “No one has known the Son except the Father, nor the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son reveals him” (Matthew 11:27). For no one can know the uncreated one, the firstborn of all created nature (Colossians 1:15), as he deserves, as the Father who begot him knows him; nor can anyone know the Father as his living Word, his Wisdom and Truth, knows him. It is by sharing in the Word that whoever has the capacity to know the Father knows him, since the Word takes away from the Father what is called the “darkness” that he “made his hiding place” and what is called his “covering,” the abyss, and in this way reveals the Father.

Something holier than Plato’s King of all§18

18I thought it right to set out these few things, out of the very many that holy men have conceived about God, to show that the sacred writings of the prophets hold something more majestic than the Platonic sayings Celsus admired, for those whose eyes are able to see the majesty of the Scriptures.

The passage of Plato that Celsus set out runs as follows: “All things are about the King of all, and all things are for his sake, and that is the cause of all beautiful things. The second is about the second things, and the third about the third. The human soul, then, longs to learn about them, what sort of things they are, looking to what is akin to itself, none of which is adequate. But concerning the King and the things I have spoken of, there is nothing of that kind” (Plato, Second Letter 312e–313a).

I could have set out what is written in Isaiah about those the Hebrews call “seraphim,” who cover the “face” and the “feet” of God (Isaiah 6:2), and about those named “cherubim,” whom Ezekiel described (Ezekiel 10:1–22), and their forms, so to speak, and in what way God is said to ride upon the cherubim (Psalm 18:10). But since these things are said in a very hidden way, because of the unworthy and the irreverent, who cannot follow the grandeur and majesty of theology, I did not think it fitting to discuss them in this treatise.

The place above the heavens was sung before Plato§19

19Next after this Celsus says that some Christians, having misunderstood the words of Plato, boast of “the God above the heavens,” climbing up past “the heaven of the Jews.” Here he does not make clear whether they climb past the God of the Jews as well, or only past the heaven by which the Jews swear. It is not our task now to speak about those who proclaim another God besides the one whom the Jews also worship; our task is to defend ourselves and to show that the prophets of the Jews whom we accept cannot have taken anything from Plato, for they were older than he.

So we did not take from Plato the saying “All things are about the King of all, and all things are for his sake.” We have learned from the prophets things said better than these, since Jesus and his disciples made plain the meaning of the Spirit who was in the prophets, who was none other than the Spirit of Christ (1 Peter 1:11). Nor is the philosopher the first to set forth what concerns the place above the heavens. Long ago David set forth the depth of the many insights about God that belong to the realms beyond the things of sense, when he said in the book of Psalms: “Praise God, you heavens of heavens, and the water that is above the heavens; let them praise the name of the Lord” (Psalm 148:4–5).

For my part, I do not rule out that Plato learned the words in the Phaedrus from certain Hebrews and, as some have recorded, had even come upon the prophetic writings when he set them out. There he said: “The place above the heavens no poet here below has ever yet sung, nor ever will sing, as it deserves,” and what follows (Plato, Phaedrus 247c), among which is this too: “For the being that truly is, colourless, shapeless and intangible, visible only to mind, the pilot of the soul, the being with which the true kind of knowledge is concerned, holds this place” (Plato, Phaedrus 247c).

And our Paul, trained by those very prophetic words, longing for what lies beyond the world and beyond the heavens and doing everything for its sake, that he might attain it, says in the Second Letter to the Corinthians: “For our momentary light affliction is working out for us, beyond all measure, an eternal weight of glory, as we look not at what is seen but at what is not seen; for what is seen is temporary, but what is not seen is eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:17–18).

Seeing the unseen beyond the heavens§20

20For to those able to hear he states it plainly, calling the things of sense “what is seen,” and naming the intelligible things, grasped by the mind alone, “what is not seen.” He also knows that the things of sense, the things “seen,” are “temporary,” and that the intelligible things, the things “not seen,” are “eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18). And since he wished to be engaged in contemplating those things, helped by his longing for them he counted every affliction as nothing and as something light. In the very time of “affliction” and toil he was in no way weighed down by them; because of his contemplation of those things he made light of every hardship.

For we too have “a great high priest,” who by the greatness of his power and of his mind “has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God” (Hebrews 4:14). He has promised those who have truly learned divine things and have lived worthily of them that he will lead them on to what lies beyond the world. For he says: “so that where I am going, you also may be” (John 14:3).

For this reason we hope, after the toils and the contests here, to reach the very heights of the heavens. Having received, according to the teaching of Jesus, springs of “water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:14), and having made room for rivers of contemplation (John 7:38), we hope to be with the waters said to be “above the heavens,” which praise “the name of the Lord” (Psalm 148:4–5). And as long as we praise him, we shall not be carried round by the revolving of heaven, but shall always be engaged in contemplating the invisible things of God, no longer understood by us “from the creation of the world through the things that are made” (Romans 1:20), but as the true disciple of Jesus put it, when he said, “but then face to face” (1 Corinthians 13:12), and, “when what is perfect comes, what is partial will be done away” (1 Corinthians 13:10).

Not seven heavens, but Jacob’s ladder§21

21The Scriptures in use in the churches of God do not speak of seven heavens, or of any fixed number of them at all, but of “heavens”; and their words seem to teach either the spheres of what the Greeks call the planets or something else more secret.

Celsus, following Plato, says that the road for souls to the earth and from the earth passes through the planets. But Moses, our most ancient prophet, says that a divine dream was seen by our patriarch Jacob: a ladder reaching “to heaven,” and angels “of God” going up and coming down on it, and the Lord resting firmly at its top (Genesis 28:12–13). In his account of the ladder Moses was hinting either at these same things or at something greater than these. Philo too has written a book about this ladder, which deserves thoughtful and intelligent study by lovers of truth.

Celsus parades the mysteries of Mithras§22

22After this, Celsus, wishing to display his wide learning in his treatise against us, also sets out certain Persian mysteries, where he says: “These things are hinted at also by the teaching of the Persians and by the rite of Mithras that is among them. For in it there is a symbol of the two revolutions in heaven, that of the fixed stars and that assigned in turn to the planets, and of the soul’s passage through them. The symbol is this: a ladder with seven gates, and on top of it an eighth gate. The first of the gates is of lead, the second of tin, the third of bronze, the fourth of iron, the fifth of alloyed coin-metal, the sixth of silver, and the seventh of gold. The first they assign to Kronos, taking the lead as a sign of the slowness of that star; the second to Aphrodite, likening to her the brightness and softness of tin; the third to Zeus, the bronze-floored and solid one; the fourth to Hermes, for iron and Hermes alike endure every kind of work, make money, and toil hard; the fifth to Ares, the gate of mixed metal, uneven and varied; the sixth, the silver one, to the Moon; the seventh, the golden one, to the Sun, imitating their colours.”

Next he examines the reason for the stars being listed in this order, which is shown by symbols in the names of the rest of the materials, and he attaches musical ratios to the Persian theology he sets out. Not content with this, he takes pains to set out a second explanation as well, again bound up with musical theory.

But it seemed to me absurd to set out Celsus’s words on these matters. It would be like what he himself has done: in his accusation against Christians and Jews he brought in, out of season, not only the teachings of Plato, when he might have been content with those, but also what he calls the Persian mysteries of Mithras and their explanation. For however these things stand for those who honour the rites of Mithras and for the Persians, whether falsely or truly, why did he set out these rather than one of the other mysteries along with its explanation? For among the Greeks the mysteries of Mithras are not thought to be anything special compared with the Eleusinian mysteries, or with the rites of Hecate handed down to those initiated in Aegina.

And if he wanted to set out barbarian mysteries with their explanation, why not rather those of the Egyptians, in which many take pride, or those of the Cappadocians about the Artemis at Comana, or those of the Thracians, or even those of the Romans themselves, who initiate the noblest members of the Senate? But if he thought it out of place to bring in any of those, as contributing nothing to his accusation of Jews or Christians, how did the same thing not seem out of place to him when he set out the Mithraic rites?

Scripture’s own gates and camps§23

23But suppose someone wished to find starting points for a more mystical contemplation of how souls enter into divine things, not in the very obscure sect that he cited, but in books partly Jewish, read in their synagogues and accepted by Christians as well, and partly belonging to Christians alone. Let him read the visions seen by the prophet at the end of the prophecy of Ezekiel, in which different gates are described, hinting at something about the different ways in which more divine souls enter upon better things (Ezekiel 40–48). Let him read also, in the Revelation of John, what is said about the city of God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and about its foundations and its gates (Revelation 21:2, 10–21; compare Hebrews 12:22).

And if he is able to learn also the way, shown through symbols, of those who will journey to divine things, let him read the book of Moses entitled Numbers, and let him look for someone able to initiate him into what is written there about the camps of the sons of Israel (Numbers 2:1–31): which are drawn up on the east side as first, which toward the southwest or the south, which toward the sea, and which are last, toward the north. For he will see in these passages contemplations not to be despised, and not, as Celsus supposes, such as need foolish hearers and slaves; for he will discern who are in them, and what concerns the nature of the numbers listed in them and assigned to each tribe; but we did not think it timely to set these things out now.

Let Celsus, and those who read his book, know that nowhere in the Scriptures received as genuine and divine are seven heavens spoken of. Nor do our prophets say anything they have taken from the Persians or the Cabiri; nor do the apostles of Jesus; nor does the Son of God himself.

The diagram of an obscure sect§24

24Next, after the account he drew from the Mithraic mysteries, Celsus proposes that anyone who wishes should examine a certain rite of the Christians side by side with the Persian rite described before, setting them against each other and laying bare the Christian rite as well, and so see the difference between them. Now where he knew the names of sects to give, he did not hesitate to set out those he thought he knew. But where he ought rather to have done so, if indeed he knew, and to have taught which sect uses the diagram he sketched, this he has not done. It seems to me that here too he has set out the contents of the diagram in part, from garbled reports of a very obscure sect, the Ophites, I think.

We ourselves, in our love of learning, have come upon this diagram. In it we found the inventions of men of the kind Paul named, who make their way “into houses” and take captive “weak women burdened with sins, led away by various desires, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:6–7). But the diagram was so wholly unconvincing that neither the easily deceived “weak women” nor the most boorish people, ready to be led by anything at all that sounds plausible, would have assented to it. At any rate, although we have travelled through many places of the earth and sought out those who everywhere profess to know something, we have met no one who championed the teaching of the diagram.

Leviathan, Behemoth and Gehenna§25

25In it was a drawing of circles, ten of them separate from one another but bound together by one circle, which was said to be the soul of the universe and was named Leviathan. Of him the Jewish Scriptures, whatever their riddle may mean, said that he was formed by God as a plaything. For in the Psalms we found: “In wisdom you have made all things; the earth is filled with your creation. Here is the great and wide sea; there ships pass through, small living things with great; this dragon, which you formed to make sport of” (Psalm 104:24–26). In place of “dragon” the Hebrew has Leviathan. So the impious diagram said that the Leviathan so plainly condemned in the prophet is the soul that pervades the universe.

We found in it also the one named Behemoth, placed, as it were, after the lowest circle. The one who devised that foul diagram wrote this Leviathan on the circle and at its centre, setting down his name twice. Further, Celsus says that the diagram was divided by a thick black line, and he said that the diagram called this line Gehenna, which is also Tartarus.

Now since we found Gehenna written in the Gospel as a place of punishment (Matthew 5:22; 10:28), we searched whether it was named anywhere in the old writings, especially since the Jews too use the name. We found that in some places Scripture calls it the “Valley of the son of Ennom” (Jeremiah 7:31–32); but in the Hebrew, as we have learned, where “Valley” stands, “the Valley of Ennom” and “Gehenna” were used of one and the same place. Keeping close watch on the readings, we find also that Gehenna, or the Valley of Ennom, is listed in the lot of the tribe of Benjamin, in which Jerusalem also lay (Joshua 18:16, 28).

And as we examine what follows from there being a heavenly Jerusalem (Hebrews 12:22), starting from the lot of Benjamin and the Valley of Ennom, we find something that bears on the teaching about punishments: souls of this kind are brought to a purification that comes through torment, according to the words, “Behold, the Lord comes in like the fire of a smelting furnace and like the washers’ lye; and he will sit smelting and purifying as gold and as silver” (Malachi 3:2–3)…

A teaching not for every ear§26

26…and in keeping with the saying that around Jerusalem punishments come upon those who are being smelted (Ezekiel 22:18–22), those who have taken into the very substance of their own soul what comes from vice; and vice is somewhere called lead, in a figure. That is why, in Zechariah, lawlessness was sitting upon “a talent of lead” (Zechariah 5:7–8).

Whatever might be said on this subject is not for everyone, nor is this the time to set it out. Nor is it without danger to entrust a plain account of such things to writing, since the many need no further teaching than that about the punishment of sinners. For it is not useful to go up to what lies beyond it, because of those who, through fear of eternal punishment, barely check, even in some measure, the flood of vice and of the sins that come from it.

So neither the diagram nor Celsus knows the teaching about Gehenna. Otherwise those people would not have made so solemn a show of pictures and diagrams, as though they were presenting the truth through them; nor would Celsus, in his treatise against Christians, have inserted into his charges against Christians things in no way said by Christians, but by certain people who perhaps no longer even exist, but have wholly died out and dwindled to a very few, easily counted.

And just as it is not fitting for those who follow the philosophy of Plato to answer for Epicurus and his impious doctrines, so neither is it fitting for us to answer for what is in the diagram and for what Celsus says against it. Therefore we leave aside, as superfluous and set out to no purpose, what Celsus has said on these matters; for we ourselves will accuse those people more than Celsus does, before any who are held fast by such teachings.

An invented seal and an accursed God§27

27Next, after what he says about the diagram, Celsus, without having even half-heard what members of the Church call the seal, sets out on his own some strange things and an exchange of words: that the one who puts on the seal is called father, and the one who is sealed is called young one and son, and answers, “I have been anointed with white ointment from the tree of life” (compare Genesis 2:9). We have not heard that this is done even among the sects.

Then he even fixes a number, said to be given by those who hand down the seal: seven angels, who stand on either side by the soul as it departs from the body, some of them angels of light, the others of those called “of the rulers”. And he says that the ruler of those called “of the rulers” is called an accursed god.

Then, seizing on the phrase, he rightly accuses those who dare to say this; and for this reason we too share the indignation of those who blame such people, if indeed there are any who call the God of the Jews accursed, the God who sends rain and thunder, the Creator of this world, the God of Moses and of the account of the world’s making that Moses gave.

But Celsus seems to have intended by this something not fair-minded, but, out of his unphilosophical hatred of us, utterly unfair. For he wanted to set against us those unacquainted with our teaching who read his work, as though we called the good Creator of this world an accursed god. And he seems to me to have done much the same as the Jews, who, when the teaching of Christianity first began, spread slander about the word: that Christians sacrifice a little child and partake of its flesh; and again, that those who follow the word, wishing to do the works of darkness, put out the light, and each lies with whatever woman happens to be beside him. This slander, against all reason, once held sway over very great numbers, persuading those who were strangers to the word that Christians are such people; and even now it still deceives some, who because of such stories turn away from coming even into the simplest conversation with Christians.

The Ophites are no Christians§28

28Something of this kind, it seems to me, Celsus contrived when he set out that Christians call the Creator an accursed god, so that anyone who believed him when he says these things against us might, if possible, go so far as to put Christians to death as the most impious of all. Confusing the matter, he also sets out the reason why the God of the world’s making according to Moses is called accursed: he says that he is such, and deserving of a curse, in the view of those who hold these opinions about him, since he cursed the serpent that introduced the knowledge of good and evil to the first human beings (Genesis 3:5, 14).

He ought to have known that those who have taken the serpent’s side, as though it gave the first human beings good counsel, who outdo the Titans and Giants of myth, and who for this reason are called Ophites, are so far from being Christians that they accuse Jesus no less than Celsus does, and admit no one to their assembly unless he first pronounces curses against Jesus.

See, then, how utterly irrational Celsus has been, in his discourse against Christians, in treating as Christians people who will not even hear the name of Jesus, not even to hear it said that he was a wise man, or of modest character, or simply a man. What then could be more foolish or more mad, not only than those who chose to take their name from the serpent as the author of good things, but also than Celsus, who thought that the charges against the Ophites were charges against Christians?

Long ago the philosopher of the Greeks who loved plain living, and who set out a pattern of the happy life, showing that utter lack of possessions did not prevent him from being happy, proclaimed himself a Cynic. But these unholy men pride themselves on being called Ophites, after the serpent, the creature most hostile and most dreadful to human beings, as though they were not human beings, to whom the serpent is an enemy (Genesis 3:15), but serpents; and they boast of a certain Euphrates as the founder of their unholy teachings.

One and the same God§29

29Then, in what follows, as though he were reviling Christians, accusing those who called the God of Moses and of his law accursed, and supposing that those who say this are Christians, he says: “What could be more foolish or more mad than this senseless wisdom? For what mistake did the lawgiver of the Jews make? And how is it that you claim for yourself his account of the world’s origin, or the law of the Jews, by means of some figurative allegory, as you call it, and yet praise against your will, most impious man, the Creator of the world, who promised them everything, who promised to increase their race to the ends of the earth and to raise them from the dead in their very flesh and blood, and who inspired the prophets? And then you revile him again? But when you are pressed by these people, you confess that you worship the same God; yet when your teacher Jesus and Moses of the Jews lay down contrary laws, you seek another god in place of this one and of the Father.”

In these words too this most noble philosopher Celsus plainly slanders Christians, saying that the same people, whenever the Jews press them, confess the same God as theirs, but whenever Jesus lays down laws contrary to Moses, seek another in his place. For whether we are in discussion with Jews or among ourselves, we know one and the same God, whom the Jews also worshipped of old and now profess to worship, and we in no way act impiously toward him.

Nor do we say that God will raise the dead in their very flesh and blood, as was said earlier. For we do not say that what is sown “in corruption” and “in dishonour” and “in weakness”, a “natural body”, rises such as it was sown (1 Corinthians 15:42–44). But on these matters we have spoken sufficiently earlier.

The seven archons of the Ophite diagram§30

30Next he takes up again what he said about the seven ruling demons, who are never named by Christians but are, I think, accepted by the Ophites. And indeed, in the diagram that we ourselves obtained because of them, we found the order set out just as Celsus set it out. Celsus said that the first is formed in the shape of a lion, without stating what name these truly most impious people give him. But we found that that foul diagram said the lion-shaped one was Michael, the angel of the Creator who is honoured in the holy Scriptures. Again, Celsus said that the next one, the second, is a bull; the diagram we had said that Suriel is the bull-shaped one. Then Celsus spoke of a third, an amphibious creature that hisses horribly; the diagram said that the third is Raphael, the serpent-shaped. Again, Celsus said that the fourth has the form of an eagle; the diagram said that Gabriel is the eagle-shaped one. Then Celsus said that the fifth has the face of a bear; the diagram said that Thauthabaoth is the bear-shaped one. Then Celsus said that among them the sixth is described as having the face of a dog; the diagram said that he is Erathaoth. Then Celsus said that the seventh has the face of an ass and is named Thaphabaoth or Onoel; but we found in the diagram that he is called Onoel or Thartharaoth, and that he has the shape of an ass.

We too decided to set out such things exactly, so that we may not seem ignorant of what Celsus professed to know, and also so that we Christians may show that we know these things more exactly than he does, and know them as the words not of Christians but of people wholly estranged from salvation, who in no way call themselves by the name of Jesus, or of Saviour, or God, or Teacher, or Son of God.

The passwords at the gates of the archons§31

31If anyone wishes to learn the inventions of those sorcerers as well, by which they wanted to draw people into their teaching as though they possessed certain secrets, though they were not really able to do so, let him hear what they are taught to say after passing through what they call “the barrier of evil”, the gates of the archons, bound for ever: “I greet the solitary king, the bond of blindness, heedless forgetfulness, the first power, kept by the spirit of providence and by wisdom. From there I am sent forth pure, already a part of the light of the Son and the Father. May grace be with me; yes, Father, may it be with me.” And they say that the beginnings of the Ogdoad lie here.

Next, as they pass through the one they call Ialdabaoth, they are taught to say: “And you, Ialdabaoth, first and seventh, born to rule with confidence, being the ruling word of a pure mind, a perfect work for the Son and the Father: I bring a symbol stamped with the figure of life, and I have opened to the world the gate that you shut for your aeon. Free once more, I pass by your dominion. May grace be with me; yes, Father, may it be with me.” And they say that the star Phaenon is in sympathy with the lion-shaped archon.

Then they think that whoever has passed Ialdabaoth and reached Iao must say: “And you, ruler of the hidden mysteries of the Son and the Father, who shine by night, second Iao and first master of death, portion of the innocent one: bearing now my own beard as a symbol, I pass by your rule, ready. By a living word you have overpowered the one who came forth from you. May grace be present, Father, may it be present.”

Next comes Sabaoth, to whom they think they will say: “Ruler of the fifth authority, mighty Sabaoth, advocate of the law of your creation, a creation being undone by grace, by a mightier pentad: let me pass, seeing the blameless symbol of your art, kept safe by the image of a figure, a body set free by the pentad. May grace be with me, Father, may it be with me.”

After him comes Astaphaeus, to whom they believe they will say such things as these: “Ruler of the third gate, Astaphaeus, overseer of the first source of water, looking on one initiate, let me pass, cleansed by the spirit of a virgin, seeing the substance of the world. May grace be with me, Father, may it be with me.”

After him comes Ailoaeus, to whom they think they are to say such things as these: “Ruler of the second gate, Ailoaeus, let me pass, as I bring you the symbol of your mother, a grace hidden by the powers of the authorities. May grace be with me, Father, may it be with me.”

Last they name Horaeus, and they think they are to say to him: “I have crossed the barrier of fire without fear. You who were allotted the rule of the first gate, Horaeus, let me pass, seeing the symbol of your power undone by a figure of the tree of life (Genesis 2:9), taken in an image after the likeness of an innocent one (Genesis 1:26). May grace be with me, Father, may it be with me.”

Names taken from magic and from Scripture§32

32Celsus’s reputed learning, which is really meddling curiosity and idle talk, has drawn us on to these matters. We wished to show anyone who reads his book and what we have written against it that we are not at a loss about the lore Celsus learned, on which he bases his lies against Christians, who neither hold nor know such things, even though we too have chosen to learn these things and to set them out; so that the sorcerers may not, by claiming to know something more than we do, deceive those who are carried away by the show of these names.

I could also cite many more things and show that we know the teachings of the deceivers, but disown them as alien and impious and not compatible with the truly Christian doctrines that we confess even to death. Yet it must be understood that those who composed these things, neither understanding the things of magic nor discerning those of the divine Scriptures, mixed everything together. From magic they took Ialdabaoth and Astaphaeus and Horaeus; from the Hebrew Scriptures they took the one the Hebrews call Iao, and Sabaoth, and Adonaeus, and Eloaeus. But the names taken from the Scriptures are titles of one and the same God. Not understanding this, these enemies of God, as they themselves admit they are, thought that Iao was one, Sabaoth another, Adonaeus a third besides him, whom the Scriptures call Adonai, and Eloaeus yet another, whom the prophets name in Hebrew Eloi.

The flaming sword and the rite that leads nowhere§33

33Next Celsus sets out other myths: that some people go back into the forms of the archons, so that some become lions, others bulls, others serpents or eagles or bears or dogs. In the diagram we had we found also what Celsus called “the square figure”, and what those wretched people say is at the gates of paradise. The flaming sword was drawn as the diameter of a fiery circle, as though escorted by the tree of knowledge and the tree of life (Genesis 3:24; Genesis 2:9).

Celsus, then, would not, or could not, set out the speeches that, according to the myths of these impious people, those who pass through each gate will make. But we have done this too, so that we may show Celsus and those who read this work that we know the end of that initiation which initiates into nothing, and know it as alien to the reverence toward God that Christians hold.

Celsus’s heap of misheard phrases§34

34After setting out what was mentioned above and things like it (the things we ourselves have added), Celsus says this: “And they go on adding one thing after another: words of prophets, and circles upon circles, and emanations of an earthly church and of circumcision, and the flowing power of a certain virgin, Prunicus, and a living soul, and a heaven slain that it may live, and an earth slain with a sword, and many slain that they may live, and death coming to an end in the world when the sin of the world dies, and again a narrow way down, and gates that open of their own accord. And there, everywhere, is the tree of life, and a resurrection of the flesh from a tree, because, I suppose, their teacher was nailed to a cross and was a carpenter by trade. So if he had happened to be thrown down a cliff, or pushed into a pit, or strangled with a noose, or if he had been a shoemaker or a stonecutter or a smith, there would be above the heavens a cliff of life, or a pit of resurrection, or a rope of immortality, or a blessed stone, or iron of love, or holy leather. Or what old woman, crooning a tale to lull a child to sleep, would not be ashamed to whisper such things?”

In this Celsus seems to me to be jumbling together things he has misheard. For it is likely that whenever he heard some scrap of a phrase from any heresy at all, he did not make it clear even according to that heresy’s own meaning, but piled up bits of words and showed off before people who know nothing either of our teachings or of those in the heresies, as though he really knew everything that belongs to the Christians. The passage before us makes this plain too.

Where Celsus’s phrases came from§35

35For to use the words of prophets is indeed our practice: we show that Jesus is the Christ proclaimed beforehand by them, and we prove from the prophetic writings that what the Gospels record about Jesus was fulfilled. To speak of “circles upon circles” perhaps belongs to the heresy mentioned before, which encloses within one circle, which they say is the soul of the universe and Leviathan, the seven circles of the archons. Or perhaps it is a mishearing of Ecclesiastes, who says: “Circling round and round the wind goes, and on its circles the wind returns” (Ecclesiastes 1:6).

“Emanations of an earthly church and of circumcision” was perhaps taken from the claim made by some that the church on earth is an emanation of a heavenly church and a higher aeon, and that the circumcision written in the law is a symbol of a circumcision performed there in a certain rite of cleansing. The followers of Valentinus give the name Prunicus to a certain Wisdom, in keeping with their own wisdom that has gone astray, and they want the woman who had a flow of blood for twelve years to be a symbol of her (Matthew 9:20; Mark 5:25; Luke 8:43). The man who jumbles together everything from Greeks and barbarians and those in the heresies misheard this and spoke of “the flowing power of a certain virgin, Prunicus”.

“A living soul” has perhaps been said in secret teachings by some of the followers of Valentinus of the one they call “the psychic demiurge”; or perhaps the soul of one who is being saved has been called, not unworthily, “the living soul” by some, to distinguish it from a dead soul. But I do not know of any talk of “a heaven slain”, or “an earth slain with a sword”, or “many slain that they may live”; and it is not unlikely that Celsus brought these in out of his own head.

Death abolished, the gates of righteousness, and the tree of life§36

36“Death coming to an end in the world, when the sin of the world dies” is something we ourselves might say, when we explain the mystical teaching in the apostle, which runs like this: when he has brought “all the enemies” into subjection “under his feet”, then “the last enemy, death, is abolished” (1 Corinthians 15:25–26). And it is also said: “When this perishable puts on imperishability”, “then the saying that is written will come to pass: Death has been swallowed up in victory” (1 Corinthians 15:54).

As for “a narrow way down again”, perhaps those who bring in the passing of souls into other bodies will speak of it. And it is not unlikely that “gates that open of their own accord” was said by some who were hinting at and expounding the words: “Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may go in through them and give thanks to the Lord. This is the gate of the Lord; the righteous shall go in through it” (Psalm 118:19–20). And again it is said in the ninth psalm: “You who lift me up from the gates of death, so that I may declare all your praises in the gates of the daughter of Zion” (Psalm 9:13–14). By “gates of death” the text means the sins that lead to destruction, just as, on the other hand, by “the gates of Zion” it means good deeds. So too “gates of righteousness” is the same as “the gates of virtue”; and these open readily to anyone who pursues the deeds of virtue.

As for the tree of life, someone will explain it at a more suitable time, when interpreting what is recorded in Genesis about the paradise of God, planted by him (Genesis 2:8–9). Celsus has often mocked the resurrection, which he did not understand; and now, not content with what he has already said, he says that “a resurrection of the flesh from a tree” is spoken of. He has misheard, I think, what is said in a figure: that through a tree came death and through a tree came life, death in Adam and life in Christ (1 Corinthians 15:22). Then, making sport of what is said about the tree, he mocks it on two counts, saying that it is adopted for this reason: either because our teacher was nailed to a cross, or because he was a carpenter by trade. He does not see that the tree of life is recorded in the writings of Moses (Genesis 2:9); nor does he see that nowhere in the Gospels current in the churches is Jesus himself described as a “carpenter”.

Celsus mocks the tree of life§37

37He also thinks that we, speaking about the cross in a figurative way, have invented the tree of life (Genesis 2:9). And, in keeping with his own error on this point, he says: “If that man had happened to be flung down a cliff, or pushed into a pit, or choked with a noose, a cliff of life above the heavens would have been invented, or a pit of resurrection, or a rope of immortality.” And again he says: “If the tree of life was invented because he was a carpenter, it would have followed that, had he been a cobbler, something would be said about holy leather; had he been a stonecutter, about a blessed stone; had he been a smith, about an iron of love.”

Who, then, does not see at once how cheap his accusation is, when he heaps abuse on people whom he had undertaken to win back as people who were deceived?

Next after this he says things that fit those who invented the lion-shaped, ass-headed and serpent-shaped rulers, and anyone else who has told myths like theirs, but not those who belong to the Church. For truly, even a drunken old woman singing a child to sleep would have been ashamed to chant and whisper to the child a tale like the one told by those who invented the ass-headed rulers and the speeches, so to speak, made at each gate.

But Celsus does not know the teachings of those who belong to the Church. Very few have trained themselves to understand them: those who, following the command of Jesus, have devoted their whole life to searching “the Scriptures” (John 5:39), and who have toiled over examining the meaning of the sacred writings more than the Greek philosophers toiled to gain some supposed knowledge.

What the Ophite diagram really shows§38

38Not content with what comes from the diagram, our noble friend wanted to put in some other things along the way, to swell his charges against us, who have nothing in common with it; and he repeated the doctrines of those people as though they were ours. For he says: “Not the least of their marvels is this: they expound certain things inscribed between the higher circles above the heavens, and among them two in particular, a greater and a smaller, of Son and Father.”

We for our part found in this diagram the greater circle and the smaller, on whose diameter was written “Father and Son.” Between the greater circle, inside which the smaller one lay, and another made up of two circles, the outer yellow and the inner dark blue, was the inscribed partition, shaped like an axe. Above it was a small circle touching the greater of the first two, with “Love” written in it; and below it, touching the circle, one with “Life” written in it. On the second circle, which was entwined with and enclosed two other circles and another figure shaped like a rhombus, was written “Providence of Wisdom.” Inside the area where those two overlapped was “Nature of Wisdom”; above that shared area was a circle in which was written “Knowledge,” and below it another, in which was written “Understanding.”

We have included these things too in our treatise against Celsus, to show our readers that we know, more clearly than he does and not from garbled hearsay, the very things that we too condemn. Whether those who pride themselves on such things also promise some magical sorcery, and whether this is for them the sum of wisdom, we do not affirm; for we have never come across anything of the kind. Celsus, who has often been caught already in false testimony and unreasonable accusations, may know whether he is lying here too, or whether he came upon something of this sort about certain people who are strangers and aliens to the faith and set it out in his own book.

Scythian names for the gods and magic charms§39

39Then, against those who, as he says, use some magic and sorcery and invoke barbarous names of certain demons, he says something like this: that these people act like those who stage wonders with the same underlying realities before people who do not know that the names of those realities are one thing among the Greeks and another among the Scythians. Then he sets out, taking it from Herodotus, that the Scythians call Apollo Gongosyrus, Poseidon Thagimasadas, Aphrodite Argimpasa, and Hestia Tabiti (Herodotus, Histories 4.59).

Anyone who is able will examine whether Celsus, together with Herodotus, is perhaps lying about these things too, since the Scythians do not recognise the same underlying realities as the Greeks with regard to their supposed gods. For how could it be likely that Apollo is called Gongosyrus among the Scythians? I do not think that Gongosyrus, translated into the Greek tongue, yields the etymology of Apollo, or that Apollo, put into the Scythian language, means Gongosyrus. In the same way, no one will say the same about the rest either. For the Greeks, starting from certain things and etymologies, gave the names they did to those whom they regard as gods, and the Scythians started from others; so too the Persians started from others, and the Indians, the Ethiopians or the Libyans from others again, or named them in whatever way each people liked, since they did not hold fast to the first and pure conception of the Maker of the universe.

We have said enough about this in what came before as well, when we wished to show that Sabaoth and Zeus are not the same, and when we also set out something about languages from the divine writings. So we deliberately pass over these matters, in which Celsus calls us to repeat ourselves.

Then once more he mixes together things drawn from magical sorcery, and attaches them perhaps to no one, since there are none who practise sorcery under the cover of this kind of religion, or perhaps to some who use such things on the easily deceived, so that they may seem to do something by divine power. He sets out certain things, saying: “Why should I list all who have taught purifications, or songs of release, or cries to drive evil away, or clangings, or demonic figures, or every sort of charm against harm, made from clothing, numbers, stones, plants, roots, and in short things of every kind?” Reason does not require us to make a defence on these matters, since we are not in the least open to such suspicions.

A slander like the old lies about Christians§40

40After this, he seems to me to do much the same as those who, out of their great hatred of Christians, assure people who know nothing at all about Christians that they have found out by experience that Christians eat the flesh of little children and have intercourse without restraint with the women among them. For just as these stories are now condemned as lies told against Christians, even by the multitude, people wholly foreign to our religion, so too statements like these of Celsus would be found to be lies: where he said he had seen, among certain elders who share our beliefs, barbarous books containing names of demons and wonder-working tricks. And he alleged that these men (these supposed elders who share our beliefs) promise nothing good, but everything for harming people.

Would that everything Celsus says against Christians were of this kind, so that it might be refuted by the great majority, who have learned by experience that such things are false, because they have lived alongside most Christians and have never even heard anything of the sort about them.

Magic has no power over those who pray§41

41After this, as if he had forgotten that his task is to write against Christians, he says that a certain Dionysius, an Egyptian musician, who had spent time with him, said about the workings of magic that it has power over the uneducated and over people corrupt in character, but over those who have studied philosophy it can do nothing, since they have taken care to keep a healthy way of life.

Now if our present task were to discuss magic, we would have added a little on this point to what we said about it above. But since we must say what is more to the purpose in answer to Celsus’s book, we say this about magic: whoever wishes to examine whether even philosophers can be caught by it or not should read what Moeragenes wrote in his Memoirs of Apollonius of Tyana, the magician and philosopher. In them this man, no Christian but a philosopher, said that some philosophers of no mean standing were caught by the magic in Apollonius, having gone to him as to a sorcerer. Among them, I think, he told of the famous Euphrates and of a certain Epicurean.

But we affirm, having learned it also by experience, that those who, in the Christian way, worship through Jesus the God who is over all, who live according to his Gospel, and who use the prayers that have been commanded constantly and as they ought, night and day, cannot be caught either by magic or by demons. For truly “the angel of the Lord will encamp around those who fear him, and will deliver them” (Psalm 34:7) from every evil. And “the angels” of the little ones in the Church, who are appointed to watch over them, are said “always” to behold “the face of the Father in heaven” (Matthew 18:10), whatever that face may be and whatever that beholding may be.

Celsus on Satan and the old myths of a war in heaven§42

42Next, starting afresh from another point, Celsus says the following against us: “They also fall into some most impious errors, in connection with this very great ignorance, which has likewise wandered away from divine riddles: they make someone an opponent of God, and they name this same being ‘devil’ and, in the Hebrew tongue, ‘Satan.’ Besides, these notions are wholly the thoughts of mortals, and it is not even holy to say that the greatest God, when he wishes to do men some good, has someone working against him and is powerless. So, then, the Son of God is defeated by the devil, and, being punished by him, teaches us also to despise the punishments he inflicts. He foretells that Satan too will appear in like manner and display great and marvellous works, claiming for himself the glory of God, and that men must not be led astray by these and choose to turn aside to the other, but must believe in himself alone” (Matthew 24:24). “These are plainly the words of a sorcerer who is out for gain, and who guards himself in advance against those who hold rival opinions and gather rival crowds.”

Then, wishing next to set out the riddles which, he thinks, we have misheard and so bring in what we say about Satan, he says that the ancients hint at a kind of divine war. Heraclitus, for one, speaks thus: “One must know that war is common to all, and that justice is strife, and that all things come to be through strife and run their course” (Heraclitus, fragment 80). Pherecydes, who lived long before Heraclitus, tells a myth of army drawn up in battle against army: he makes Kronos the leader of one and Ophioneus of the other, and relates their challenges and contests; and they make a compact that whichever side falls into Ogenos should be the vanquished, while those who drive them out and conquer should hold heaven. He says that the mysteries about the Titans and Giants, who are reported to fight against the gods, also bear this meaning, and so do the Egyptian stories about Typhon, Horus and Osiris.

Then, having set out such things without explaining how those stories hold a higher meaning while ours are mishearings of them, he heaps abuse on us, saying that those stories are not like the ones about a daemon who is a devil, or (as is said with more truth) about a human sorcerer holding rival opinions. He takes Homer in the same way, as hinting at things like those in Heraclitus and Pherecydes and in those who bring in the mysteries about the Titans and Giants, in these words of Hephaestus to Hera: “For once before, when I was eager to defend you, he seized me by the foot and hurled me from the divine threshold” (Homer, Iliad 1.590–591); and in these words of Zeus to Hera: “Do you not remember when you hung on high, and from your feet I let down two anvils, and around your hands I cast a golden band that none could break? You hung in the upper air and the clouds, and the gods throughout high Olympus were indignant, yet they could not stand near and set you free; but whomever I caught I would seize and hurl from the threshold, until he reached the earth with his strength spent” (Homer, Iliad 15.18–24).

In explaining the Homeric verses he says that the words of Zeus to Hera are words of God to matter, and that the words to matter hint that from the beginning matter was in disorder, and God took it in hand, bound it together by certain proportions and set it in order; and that the daemons around it, as many as are insolent, he hurls away, punishing them with the journey down here. He says that Pherecydes, understanding these verses of Homer in this way, said: “Below that portion is the portion of Tartarus; the daughters of Boreas, the Harpies and Thyella, guard it; there Zeus casts out any of the gods whenever one grows insolent.” He says that the robe of Athena, which all behold in the procession of the Panathenaea, also bears such ideas. “For it shows,” he says, “that a motherless and undefiled divinity masters the earthborn in their arrogance.”

Having accepted the fictions of the Greeks, he adds, by way of accusing our teachings, that the Son of God is punished by the devil, and that he teaches us also to endure when we are punished by the same one. “These things too are utterly ridiculous. For it would have been right, I think, to punish the devil, and not to threaten the men whom he had slandered.”

Moses spoke of the fallen one long before the Greeks§43

43See, then, whether the man who charges us with most impious errors and with having strayed from divine riddles is not himself plainly in error. He has not perceived that the writings of Moses, which are much older not only than Heraclitus and Pherecydes but even than Homer, brought in the account of this evil one who fell from the heavenly places. For the “serpent” (Genesis 3:1), from whom Pherecydes’ Ophioneus derives, and who became the cause of man’s being cast out of the divine paradise (Genesis 3:23–24), hints at something of this kind: he deceived womankind with a promise of divinity and of greater things (Genesis 3:5), and the man is said to have followed her (Genesis 3:6).

And the destroyer in Moses’ Exodus (Exodus 12:23): who else could he be but the one who causes destruction for those who obey him and do not resist his wickedness or struggle against it? Again, the one sent away in Leviticus, whom the Hebrew text named Azazel (Leviticus 16:8–10), was no other than he. The one that bore his lot had to be sent away into the wilderness and driven off to avert evil; for all who belong, through their wickedness, to the portion of the worse one stand opposed to those who are of God’s lot, and are deserts, empty of God. And the sons of Belial in Judges (Judges 19:22): whose sons are they said to be, because of their wickedness, if not his?

But more clearly than all these, in Job, who is older even than Moses himself, “the devil” is recorded as standing before God (Job 1:6; 2:1) and asking for power against Job (Job 1:9–12; 2:4–6), so as to surround him with the heaviest calamities: first the loss of all his possessions and of his children (Job 1:13–19), and second the covering of Job’s whole body with a savage elephantiasis, as the disease is called (Job 2:7). For I pass over what the Gospels say about the devil who tempted the Saviour (Matthew 4:1–11; Luke 4:1–13), so as not to seem to bring proof against Celsus on the point in question from more recent writings. In the last parts of Job too, where the Lord spoke to Job through whirlwind and clouds (Job 38:1) the words recorded in the book that bears his name, one may find not a few things said about the dragon (Job 41:1–34).

I say nothing yet of the passages in Ezekiel that speak as though of “Pharaoh” (Ezekiel 29:2–3; 32:2), or “Nebuchadnezzar,” or the ruler of “Tyre” (Ezekiel 28:2–19), or of those in Isaiah where the king of Babylon is lamented (Isaiah 14:4–21). From them one could learn not a little about wickedness: what beginning and origin it had, and that wickedness came into being from some who shed their wings and followed the first who shed his wings.

How evil began, and who the Adversary is§44

44For what is good by accident, as something added on, could not be good in the same way as what is good in its essence. Such goodness would never fall away from one who takes in, so to speak, the living bread (John 6:51) to preserve himself. If it falls away from anyone, it falls away through his own fault, because he grew careless about partaking of the living bread and the true drink (John 6:55). Fed and watered by these, the wing is restored, as the most wise Solomon also says, speaking of the man who is truly rich: “For he has made himself wings like an eagle’s, and he returns to the house of the one who is set over him” (Proverbs 23:5).

For it was fitting that God, who knows how to make due use even of those who have come to be what they are through wickedness, should assign such wicked beings a place somewhere in the universe, and should set up a training-ground for virtue, open to those who wish to strive “lawfully” (2 Timothy 2:5) to win it back. So, tested like gold in the fire (Sirach 2:5; 1 Peter 1:7) by the wickedness of these, and doing everything so as to let nothing counterfeit into their rational nature, they may show themselves worthy of the ascent to divine things and be drawn up by the Word to the highest blessedness of all and, so to speak, to the summit of good things.

He who in the language of the Hebrews is called Satan, and by some, in a more Greek form, Satanas, is, when translated into Greek, “Adversary.” Everyone who has chosen wickedness and the life that goes with it, since he does what is contrary to virtue, is a Satan, that is, an adversary of the Son of God, who is righteousness and truth and wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:30; John 14:6). But in the more proper sense the Adversary is he who, first of all those who were at peace and living in blessedness, shed his wings and fell from blessedness. He, as Ezekiel says, walked “blameless” in all his ways, until lawlessness was found in him (Ezekiel 28:15); and though he was “a seal of likeness and a crown of beauty” (Ezekiel 28:12) in the paradise of God (Ezekiel 28:13), as though sated with good things he came to destruction, as the word spoken to him with a hidden meaning says: “You have become destruction, and you shall be no more for ever” (Ezekiel 28:19).

These few things, then, we have set out boldly and at some risk in committing them to this treatise, though perhaps they amount to nothing. But if anyone with leisure for the close testing of the sacred writings were to gather from every part of them a full body of teaching about wickedness, how it first came to be and in what way it is brought to an end, he would see that neither Celsus nor any of those whose souls are dragged down and drawn away by this evil demon from God, from the right conception of him, and from his Word, has so much as dreamed of what Moses and the prophets meant about Satan.

Two extremes: Christ and the Antichrist§45

45Since Celsus also tosses in, in passing, what is said about the one called Antichrist, though he has not read what is said of him in Daniel (Daniel 8:23–25) or in Paul (2 Thessalonians 2:3–12), or what the Saviour prophesied in the Gospels about his coming (Matthew 24:23–26), we must say a little about this too. Since “just as faces are not like faces, so neither are hearts like the hearts of men” (Proverbs 27:19), it is clear that there would be differences in “the hearts of men” both among those who have inclined toward the good, since they have not all been stamped and shaped toward it equally and alike, and among those who through neglect of the good rush toward the opposite. For among these also wickedness is poured out in great measure in some, and in others to a lesser degree.

What is absurd, then, in there being among men two extremes, if I may so call them, one of good and the other of its opposite, so that the extreme of good is in the man discerned in Jesus, from whom so great a conversion, healing and betterment flowed to the human race, and the extreme of the opposite is in the man discerned in the one called Antichrist? God, who has embraced all things in his foreknowledge and has seen what concerns both of these, willed to make these things known to men through the prophets, so that those who understand their words might be drawn close to the better and guard themselves against the opposite.

It was fitting that one of the two extremes, the best, should be proclaimed Son of God because of his surpassing excellence, and the one diametrically opposite to him the son of the evil demon, Satan, the devil. Then, since evil is most clearly marked as being at the outpouring of wickedness and at its height when it plays the part of the better, for this reason signs and wonders and powers of falsehood attend the worse one, through the help of his father the devil (2 Thessalonians 2:9). For beyond the help that demons give to sorcerers, who deceive men for the basest ends, there comes help from the devil himself for deceiving the human race.

Paul speaks about this one called Antichrist (2 Thessalonians 2:3–12), teaching and showing, with a certain reserve, in what way he will come among the human race, and when, and why. And see whether Paul does not set these things out with the greatest dignity, in a way that deserves not even the slightest mockery.

Paul and Daniel on the Antichrist§46

46He speaks as follows: “We ask you, brothers, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to him, not to be shaken from your mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or by a word or by a letter as if from us, as though the day of the Lord were already here. Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. Do you not remember that I told you these things while I was still with you? And now you know what restrains him, so that he may be revealed in his own time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only the one who now restrains is still here, until he is out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will consume with the breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the appearing of his coming. The lawless one’s coming is according to the working of Satan, with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all the deceit of unrighteousness for those who are perishing, because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved. And for this reason God sends them a power that leads them astray, so that they believe the lie, in order that all may be judged who did not believe the truth but took pleasure in unrighteousness” (2 Thessalonians 2:1–12).

To make each of these points clear does not suit the present treatise. But the prophecy about him is given in Daniel, and it can move one who reads with good sense and fairness to marvel at the words as truly inspired and prophetic. In them are told the things concerning the kingdoms to come, beginning from the times of Daniel and reaching to the destruction of the world. Anyone who wishes may read it; but see whether what concerns the Antichrist is not as follows: “And at the last of their kingdom, when their sins are coming to the full, there shall arise a king shameless of face and understanding riddles. And his strength shall be mighty, and he shall destroy marvellously, and shall prosper and act, and shall destroy the mighty and a holy people. And the yoke of his collar shall prosper; deceit is in his hand, and he shall be magnified in his heart, and by deceit he shall destroy many, and he shall stand up for the destruction of many, and shall crush them like eggs in the hand” (Daniel 8:23–25).

And what is said in Paul, in the passage of his that I set out, which says, “so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God” (2 Thessalonians 2:4), is also said in Daniel in this way: “And upon the temple an abomination of desolations, and until the end of the time an end shall be given upon the desolation” (Daniel 9:27).

It seemed reasonable to me to cite these few passages out of many, so that the hearer may understand, at least a little, the intent of the divine words when they teach about the devil and the Antichrist. Content with these on this subject, let us look at another passage of Celsus and contend against it as best we can.

Where the name Son of God comes from§47

47After the passages set out above, Celsus went on to say something like this: “I shall show where they got this very idea of calling him Son of God. Men of old called this world the child of God and a youth, since it came into being from him. Very like each other, to be sure, are this child of God and that one!”

He supposed, then, that we speak of a Son of God by twisting what is said about the world, namely that it came into being from God and is his son and a god. For he was not able to attend to the times of Moses and the prophets and see that the prophets among the Jews foretold that there is a Son of God at all, before the Greeks and before those whom Celsus calls men of old. Nor did he wish to quote what is said in Plato’s letters, which we mentioned earlier, about the one who ordered this universe as being the Son of God (Plato, Letter 6, 323d), for fear that he too might be compelled by Plato, whom he often extolled, to accept that the maker of this universe is the Son of God, while the first God, who is over all, is his Father.

And if we say that the soul of Jesus has been united with so great a Son of God by the highest participation in him, and so no longer separate it from him, there is nothing to wonder at. For the sacred words of the divine writings know of other things too which, though two in their own nature, are reckoned as one and are one with each other. For example, it is said of husband and wife, “They are no longer two but one flesh” (Matthew 19:6); and of the perfect man, who is joined to the true Lord, the Word and Wisdom and Truth, that “he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:17).

But if “he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit,” who has been joined to the Lord, to the Word himself, Wisdom himself, Truth himself and Righteousness himself, more than the soul of Jesus, or even nearly as much? If this is so, the soul of Jesus and God the Word, the firstborn “of all creation” (Colossians 1:15), are not two.

The Church as a body moved by the Word§48

48Further, if the philosophers of the Stoa, who say that the virtue of man and of God is the same, say that the God who is over all is no happier than the one they count wise among men, but that the happiness of both is equal, Celsus does not laugh at the doctrine or mock it. But if the divine word says that the perfect man is joined and united by virtue to the Word himself, so that, rising by this line of reasoning, we do not separate the soul of Jesus from the firstborn “of all creation” (Colossians 1:15), he laughs at Jesus’ being called Son of God, not seeing what it is that the divine Scriptures say of him in secret and in a mystery.

In order to bring anyone who wishes to follow the sequence of doctrines and to profit by it to accept what is said, we say this. The divine words say that the whole Church of God is the body of Christ, given its soul by the Son of God, and that individual believers are members of this body, taken as a whole (1 Corinthians 12:27; Ephesians 1:22–23). For just as the soul gives life to the body and moves it, though the body is not by nature able to move itself with the motion of life, so the Word, moving the whole body, the Church, to what is needful and working in it, moves it and each member of those who belong to the Church; and they do nothing apart from the Word.

If, then, this has a coherence not to be lightly despised, as I think it has, what difficulty is there in holding that the soul of Jesus, or in a word Jesus himself, by that highest and unsurpassable communion with the Word himself, has not been separated from the only-begotten and firstborn “of all creation” (Colossians 1:15), and is no longer other than he? But enough of this here.

Celsus calls the creation story silly§49

49Let us look also at what comes next, where he makes his pronouncement in a single phrase and, without saying anything even plausible, finds fault with Moses’ account of the making of the world, saying: “Moreover, the account of the world’s origin is also very silly.” Now if he had put forward the way in which it seemed to him silly, and some plausible arguments, we would have contended against them. But it does not seem reasonable to me to establish, in answer to his assertion, in what way it is not silly.

If anyone wishes to consider what moved us, and what we established, with what appeared to us a proof, about Moses’ account of the making of the world, let him take up what we have worked out on Genesis, from the beginning of the book as far as “This is the book of the generation of men” (Genesis 5:1). There we have tried, from the divine writings themselves, to establish what the heaven and earth are which came to be “in the beginning” (Genesis 1:1), and what is meant by the earth’s being invisible and unformed, and what the abyss is and the darkness upon it, and what the water is and the “Spirit of God” borne above it (Genesis 1:2), and what the “light” is which came to be (Genesis 1:3), and what “the firmament” is (Genesis 1:6) as distinct from the heaven made “in the beginning” (Genesis 1:1), and so on in order.

He has also pronounced the writing about the generation of human beings very silly, neither setting out the proofs nor contending against them. For he had, I think, no arguments able to overturn the statement that man was made “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:27). Nor did he understand the “paradise” planted by God (Genesis 2:8), and the life of man in it, which came first, and the life that came about through circumstance, when man was cast out because of sin and made to dwell opposite “the paradise of delight” (Genesis 3:24).

Let the man who says these things were told in a very silly way first attend to each of them, and to this one as well: “He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword that turns, to guard the way of the tree of life” (Genesis 3:24). But suppose Moses wrote these things with no meaning in his mind, doing something like what the poets of the Old Comedy wrote in jest: “Proetus married Bellerophon, and Pegasus came from Arcadia.” Yet those poets put such things together because they wanted to raise a laugh; but it is not plausible that one who left writings to a whole nation, and wished to persuade those under his laws that these writings came from God, wrote what was irrelevant, and said without any meaning, “He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword that turns, to guard the way of the tree of life” (Genesis 3:24), or any other of the things said about the generation of human beings and explored philosophically by the wise men among the Hebrews.

The days of creation§50

50Next, having heaped together in bare assertions the differences in what some of the ancients said about the generation of the world and of human beings, he says that those who left our writings, Moses and the prophets, did not know what the nature of the world and of human beings is, and composed “profound nonsense.” Now if he had said in what way the divine writings seemed to him profound nonsense, we would have tried to overturn the plausible arguments that appeared to him to show that they are profound nonsense. But as things are, we too will do as he does, and jest, and pronounce that Celsus, who knows nothing at all of the nature of the meaning and of the word in the prophets, has composed profound nonsense and boastfully entitled it “True Doctrine.”

And since he brings forward as a charge, as though it were clear and precisely understood by him, the matter of the days of the making of the world, some of which passed before light and heaven, sun and moon and stars came to be, and some after these came to be, we will remark only this to him. Did it escape Moses that he had said earlier that the world’s making was completed in six days, and does he, forgetting himself, add to this: “This is the book of the generation of men, in the day when God made the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 5:1; Genesis 2:4)? But it is not at all plausible that Moses, with no meaning in his mind, said after the account of the six days, “in the day when God made the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 2:4).

And if anyone thinks that these words can be referred back to “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1), let him notice that “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1) was said before “Let there be light, and there was light” (Genesis 1:3) and before “God called the light day” (Genesis 1:5).

The days of creation and the borrowed light§51

51But it is not our purpose now to give the account of things known by the mind and things perceived by the senses, and of how the natures of the days are divided between both kinds, nor to examine the passages one by one. For we would need whole treatises to explain the creation of the world as Moses tells it. This we did, as far as we could, long before the present treatise against Celsus, when, with the grasp we had many years ago, such as it was then, we discussed the six days of creation in Moses.

One should know, however, that through Isaiah the word promises the righteous that they will be in a state of day, in which not the sun but “the Lord” himself will be to them “an everlasting light, and God” their “glory” (Isaiah 60:19).

It was, I think, because he had misheard some wicked sect, which wrongly explained “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3) as spoken by the Creator in the form of a wish, that he said: “For the Creator certainly did not borrow light from above, like people who light their lamps from their neighbours.” And it was because he had misheard another, impious sect that he also said this: “If the one who made these things against the great God’s will was some accursed god opposed to him, why did he lend him the light?”

We are so far from having to defend ourselves against these charges that we want to accuse those people’s opinion of error more plainly still, and take our stand not, as Celsus does, against what we do not know of theirs, but against what we know accurately: partly from the people themselves, whom we have followed closely, and partly from careful reading of their writings.

The Spirit over the waters is not on loan§52

52After this Celsus says: “For my part, as for the coming into being and the destruction of the world, whether it is ungenerated and indestructible, or generated but indestructible, or the reverse, I say nothing about this now.” So we too say nothing about these questions now, for the present treatise does not require it.

Nor do we say that the Spirit of the God over all came to be in the things here as in things foreign to him, on the strength of the words “The Spirit of God was moving over the water” (Genesis 1:2). Nor do we say that certain things wickedly contrived against his Spirit, as if by another, a Creator distinct from the great God, while the higher God put up with it, needed to be pulled down. So a long farewell to those who say such things, and to Celsus too, who accuses them without dealing with the substance. For he should either not have mentioned such things at all, or else, in keeping with what he takes to be humane, have set them out carefully and contended against the impious things they say.

Nor have we ever heard that the great God, after giving the Spirit to the Creator, demands it back. Then next, foolishly attacking impious doctrines, he says: “What god gives something intending to demand it back? For demanding back is the mark of one in need, but God needs nothing.” And to this he adds, as if saying something clever against certain people: “Why, when he lent, did he not know that he was lending to an evil being?” He also says: “Why does he look on while an evil Creator works against him?”

Celsus mixes sect with sect§53

53Then, I think, mixing up sects with sects and not noting that these views belong to one sect and those to another, he brings forward the difficulties we raise against Marcion. Perhaps he misheard these too from some who attack that teaching cheaply and like amateurs, and not very intelligently at that. So, setting out what is said against Marcion, and without noting that he is speaking against him, he says: “Why does he send in secret and destroy the works this one has made? Why does he force his way in covertly, and entice, and lead astray? Why does he beguile those whom this one has condemned or cursed, as you say, and spirit them away like some kidnapper? Why does he teach them to run away from the Master? Why to flee the Father? Why does he adopt them himself, without the Father’s consent? Why does he profess to be the father of those who belong to another?”

And he adds to these words, as if in astonishment: “A fine God indeed, who longs to be father of sinners condemned by another, of the disinherited, and, as they themselves say, of refuse; and who could not avenge the one he sent to steal them away from the other, when that one was caught!”

Next after these, as if speaking to us who confess that this world does not belong to some foreign and strange god, he says something like this: “But if these are his works, how did God make evils? How is he unable to persuade and admonish? How does he repent over them when they have become ungrateful and wicked, and find fault with his own craftsmanship, and hate, and threaten, and destroy his own offspring (Genesis 6:6–7)? Or where does he lead them away to, out of this world which he himself made?”

It seems to me that here too he does not make clear what evils are, although among the Greeks too there have been many schools of thought about goods and evils. Instead he jumps to the conclusion that, on our teaching, God is the maker of evils, as though this followed for us, who say that this world too is the work of the God over all. Let the question of evils stand however it stands, whether God made them, or whether instead they came about as a by-product of what he primarily made. But I should be surprised if what he thinks follows for us, who say that this world too is the work of the God over all, namely that God has made evils, does not follow for him as well, judging by what he himself says. For one might say to Celsus: “If these are his works, how did God make evils? How is he unable to persuade and admonish?” And the worst fault in argument is to accuse people of other opinions of holding certain doctrines that are unsound, when one’s own doctrines are open to those very charges, and far more so.

What Scripture calls good and evil§54

54Let us, then, for our part, look briefly at what the divine Scriptures say about goods and evils, and at what we should say in answer to “How did God make evils? How is he unable to persuade and admonish?” In the proper sense, according to the divine Scriptures, goods are the virtues and the actions that accord with them, just as evils in the proper sense are their opposites. For the present we shall be content with the words of the thirty-third Psalm (Psalm 34 in English Bibles), which establish this point as follows: “But those who seek the Lord will not lack any good thing. Come, children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord. Who is the man who desires life, who loves to see good days? Keep your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking deceit. Turn away from evil and do good” (Psalm 34:10–14).

For “Turn away from evil and do good” (Psalm 34:14) is not said about bodily goods or evils, as some people call them, nor about external ones, but about the goods and evils of the soul. For whoever has turned away from evils in this sense and done good things of this kind, as one who desires the true life, would come into that life, “loving to see good days” (Psalm 34:12), days whose “sun of righteousness” is the Word (Malachi 4:2); and he would reach those days, as God rescues him “from the present evil age” (Galatians 1:4) and from the evil days of which Paul said: “redeeming the time, because the days are evil” (Ephesians 5:16).

God did not make vice§55

55But we may also find bodily and external things called goods and evils in a looser sense: those that contribute to life according to nature are regarded as goods, and those that work against it as evils. It is in this sense that Job says to his wife: “If we have received good things from the hand of the Lord, shall we not endure evil things?” (Job 2:10). Now in the divine Scriptures we find, in one place, God saying in his own person, “I am he who makes peace and creates evils” (Isaiah 45:7), and in another place, again about him, “that evils came down from the Lord upon the gates of Jerusalem, the noise of chariots and horsemen” (Micah 1:12–13). These texts have troubled many who read Scripture, since they cannot discern what Scripture means by goods and evils. It is likely, then, that Celsus took his start from these texts: either he raised a further difficulty and said, “How did God make evils?”, or else he heard someone who held rather untrained views on this subject and set down the words quoted above.

But we say that God did not make evils, meaning vice and the actions that spring from it. For how could the preaching of judgment speak boldly, teaching that the wicked are punished for their vicious actions in proportion to their sins, and that those who have lived by virtue, or done virtuous actions, are blessed and will receive rewards from God, if God had made the things that are truly evil? I know well that those who want to venture the claim that these too came from God will take up certain texts of Scripture. They cannot show that Scripture is woven as one whole: Scripture that blames those who sin and welcomes those who do well, and yet no less says those other things, not few in number, which seem to unsettle those who read the divine writings without learning. I did not think it suitable to the present treatise to set out now the unsettling texts, which are many, together with their interpretations, which need much argument.

So God has not made evils, if one understands evils in the proper sense; but some, which are few compared with the ordering of the whole, have followed as consequences of his principal works. Just so, the curling shavings and the sawdust follow upon a carpenter’s principal works, and builders seem to make the debris that lies beside their buildings, a kind of rubbish falling from the stones and the mortar.

Pains that God sends to heal§56

56But if someone means the things loosely so called, the so-called bodily and external evils, let it be granted that God has at times made some of these, in order to turn certain people back through them; what absurdity can the doctrine then contain? For suppose we loosely take as evils the pains that fathers, teachers and tutors inflict on those they are training, or that doctors inflict on those they cut or cauterize for the sake of treatment, and say that the father does evil to his sons, or that tutors, teachers or doctors do so: those who strike or cut would face no accusation at all. In the same way, if God is said to bring such things for the sake of the conversion and healing of those who need such pains, the doctrine would contain nothing absurd.

Nor would it be absurd if “evils come down from the Lord upon the gates of Jerusalem” (Micah 1:12), evils that consisted in the pains inflicted by enemies and brought upon them for their conversion; nor if he visits “with a rod the iniquities” of those who have forsaken “the law” of God, “and with scourges their sins” (Psalm 89:30–32); nor if he says: “You have coals of fire; sit upon them; these will be a help to you” (Isaiah 47:14–15).

In this way we also explain “who makes peace and creates evils” (Isaiah 45:7): he creates bodily or external evils, purifying and training those who were unwilling to be trained by word and sound teaching. So much, then, for “How did God make evils?”

Why some are not persuaded by God§57

57As for the question: “How is He unable to persuade and admonish?” It has been said already that, if this is really a charge, Celsus’s words could be brought against everyone who accepts providence. But one might answer in defence that God is not unable to admonish. For He admonishes those who listen, through the whole of Scripture and through those who teach by the grace of God; unless, perhaps, one were to give “admonish” some special meaning of its own, so that it also includes succeeding with the person admonished and his hearing the teacher’s word. But that departs from the sense the word commonly bears in ordinary use.

To the question: “How is He unable to persuade?”, which could likewise be brought against all who accept providence, this must be said. Being persuaded belongs, as it were, to the so-called reciprocal terms, like a man’s having his hair cut, where he acts by offering himself to the one cutting it. For this reason it needs not only the activity of the one who persuades, but also, if I may call it so, the yielding of oneself to the persuader, or the acceptance of what the persuader says. Therefore we must say that those who are not persuaded are not persuaded, not because God is unable to persuade, but because they do not accept God’s persuasive words.

One would not be wrong to say this of men too, those who are called “craftsmen of persuasion” (Plato, Gorgias 453a). For it is possible that even a man who has mastered the principles of rhetoric to the highest degree and uses them as he should may do everything to persuade, and yet, because he fails to win the will of the one who ought to be persuaded, may seem not to persuade.

And that, even if the speaking of persuasive words comes from God, being persuaded at any rate does not come from God, Paul teaches clearly when he says: “This persuasion does not come from Him who calls you” (Galatians 5:8). Of the same kind too is the saying: “If you are willing and listen to Me, you shall eat the good things of the land; but if you are not willing and do not listen to Me, the sword shall devour you” (Isaiah 1:19–20). For if someone is to will what the one who admonishes says, and, having listened to it, is to become worthy of God’s promises, there must be the hearer’s choice and his assent to what is said. That is why it seems to me that this was said with emphasis in Deuteronomy: “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you, but to fear the Lord your God, and to walk in all His ways, and to love Him, and to keep His commandments?” (Deuteronomy 10:12–13).

Genesis says nothing of God repenting§58

58Next we must answer this: “How does He repent over them when they have become ungrateful and wicked, and find fault with His own art, and hate, and threaten, and destroy His own offspring?” Here he slanders and misrepresents what is written in Genesis, which runs as follows: “When the Lord God saw that the wickednesses of those on the earth had multiplied, and that everyone was intently planning evil things in his heart all the days, God took it to heart that He had made man on the earth. And He considered it in His heart, and God said: I will wipe out man, whom I made, from the face of the earth, from man to beast, and from creeping things to the birds of the sky; for I am angry that I made them” (Genesis 6:5–7). He sets out what is not written as if it were made plain by what is written. For in these words no repentance of God is named, nor is it said that He finds fault with His own art and hates it.

But if God seems to threaten the flood, and in it to destroy His own offspring, we must say that, since the soul of men is immortal, the supposed threat is meant to turn the hearers back, while the destruction of men in the flood is a cleansing of the earth. So too those Greeks whose philosophy is not to be despised have said, in the words: “But when the gods cleanse the earth” (Plato, Timaeus 22d). As for the expressions that ascribe, as it were, human passions to God, we have said a good deal about them in the earlier parts as well.

Where the drowned were taken§59

59Next Celsus, suspecting, and perhaps himself perceiving, what could be said about those destroyed in the flood by those who make the defence, says: “But if He does not destroy His own offspring, where then does He remove them to, out of this world which He Himself made?”

To this too we say that He by no means removes those who suffered the flood from the whole world, which consists of heaven and earth. But He frees them from life in the flesh, and, in releasing them from their bodies, He releases them at the same time from being on the earth, which in many places of the Scriptures is commonly called “world.” Especially in the Gospel according to John one can often find the region around the earth called “world,” as in: “That was the true light, which enlightens every man coming into the world” (John 1:9), and: “In the world you have affliction; but take heart, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

If, then, someone takes “He removes them out of this world” to mean this region around the earth, nothing absurd follows for the argument. But if someone calls “world” the system made of heaven and earth, those who suffered the flood are by no means removed from the world so named. And yet a person who has understood the words: “while we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are not seen” (2 Corinthians 4:18), and: “For His invisible things are clearly seen from the creation of the world, being understood through the things that are made” (Romans 1:20), might say that one who is occupied with the invisible things, the things called, in a word, “not seen,” has gone out of the world, since the Word removes him from here and moves him to the region above the heavens (Plato, Phaedrus 247c) to behold the things that are beautiful.

Celsus repeats himself on the six days§60

60After the passage we have examined, as though his aim were somehow to fill his book with many words, he says in other words much the same as what we examined a little earlier, where he said: “Far more foolish is it also to parcel out certain days to the origin of the world, before there were days. For when heaven had not yet come to be, nor the earth yet been made firm, nor the sun yet borne round in its course here, how were there days?” For how does that differ from this: “Further, taking it from the beginning, let us consider: how would the first and greatest God not be absurd, giving the command: Let this come to be, and something else, this or that, and on one day fashioning so much, and on the second again so much more, and on the third, the fourth, the fifth and the sixth?”

We have in effect already spoken also to the words “giving the command: Let this come to be, and something else, this or that,” when we cited: “He spoke, and they came to be; He commanded, and they were created” (Psalm 33:9; Psalm 148:5). We said that the immediate Creator, the one who as it were made the world with His own hands, is the Son of God, the Word, while the Father of the Word, by having commanded His own Son, the Word, to make the world, is Creator in the primary sense.

As for “the light” having come to be on one day (Genesis 1:3–5), “the firmament” on the second (Genesis 1:6–8), and on the third the waters “under the heaven” having been gathered into their gatherings, and so the earth having sprouted the things governed by nature alone (Genesis 1:9–13), and on the fourth “the lights” and “stars” (Genesis 1:14–19), and on the fifth the creatures that swim (Genesis 1:20–23), and on the sixth the land animals and “man” (Genesis 1:24–31), we have spoken as far as we could in our work on Genesis. And in the earlier parts too, when we found fault with those who, following the more obvious interpretation, said that a span of six days passed in the making of the world, we cited the words: “This is the book of the origin of heaven and earth, when it came to be, on the day that God made heaven and earth” (Genesis 2:4).

God’s Sabbath is not a tired workman’s rest§61

61Then again, having misheard the words: “And God finished on the sixth day His works which He had made; and He ceased on the seventh day from all His works which He had made. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it He ceased from all His works which God had begun to make” (Genesis 2:2–3), and supposing that “He ceased on the seventh day” is the same as “He rested on the seventh day,” he says: “After this, indeed, like a downright bad workman, worn out and in need of idleness to rest.”

For he does not know what the day of the Sabbath and of God’s rest is, the day that comes after the making of the world, a making carried on for as long as the world stands. On that day those who have done all their works in the six days will keep festival together with God (compare Hebrews 4:9–10), those who, because they have left undone nothing of what fell to them, go up to contemplation and to the festal gathering of the righteous and blessed held on that day (compare Hebrews 12:22–23).

Then, as if either the Scriptures said so or we ourselves explained it so concerning God, that He grew weary and rested, he says: “It is not right for the first God to grow weary, nor to work with His hands, nor to give commands.” Celsus, then, says that it is not right for the first God to grow weary. But we would say that neither does God the Word grow weary, nor do any who already belong to the better and more divine order; for growing weary belongs to beings in a body. You may ask whether it belongs to those in a body of any kind whatever, or to those in an earthly body and one a little better than this.

But neither is it right for the first God to work with His hands; and if you take “work with the hands” in its proper sense, neither is it right for the second, nor for any other of the more divine beings. But let “working with the hands” be said loosely or figuratively, so that we may explain also: “The firmament proclaims the work of His hands” (Psalm 19:1), and: “His hands set up the heaven” (compare Isaiah 45:12), and anything said like these, when we take the hands and limbs of God figuratively. What, then, is absurd in God’s working with His hands in this way? And as it is not absurd for God to work with His hands in this way, so neither is it absurd for Him to give commands, so that the things carried out by the one commanded may be good and praiseworthy because the one who gave the command about them is God.

God has no mouth or voice, and does not change§62

62Again Celsus, perhaps having misheard the words: “For the mouth of the Lord has spoken these things” (Isaiah 1:20), and perhaps also because simple people have been rash in explaining such things, and not understanding what is meant when the names of bodily members are used of the powers of God, says: “He has neither mouth nor voice.” Indeed God will truly have no voice, if voice is struck air, or a striking of air, or a kind of air, or whatever else those skilled in these matters define voice to be. But what is called the voice of God is said, as the voice of God, to be seen by the people, in the words: “All the people saw the voice of God” (Exodus 20:18), “seeing” being taken, to use the customary language of Scripture, spiritually.

He also says: “Nor has He any other of the things we know.” But he does not make clear which things we know he means. If he means members, we agree with him, understanding “of the things we know” as those named in a bodily and more common way. But if we take “of the things we know” in a general sense, many things that we know are included; for God has virtue and blessedness and divinity. And if someone takes “of the things we know” in a loftier sense, since all things that we know are less than God, there is nothing absurd in our too accepting that God has none of the things we know. For what belongs to God is greater than all that is known, not only by the nature of man, but also by the nature of the beings who have risen above it.

If he had read the words of the prophets, David saying: “But You are the same” (Psalm 102:27), and Malachi, I think: “And I have not changed” (Malachi 3:6), he would have seen that none of us says that there is change in God, either in deed or in thought. For, remaining “the same,” He governs changeable things according to their nature, and His Word chooses that they be governed.

Where the image of God is found§63

63Next Celsus speaks without having noticed the difference between “after the image of God” (Genesis 1:27) and “his image”: that the “image of God” is the “firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15), the very Word, the very Truth, and also the very Wisdom, which is “the image of his goodness” (Wisdom of Solomon 7:26), while man has been made “after the image” of God (Genesis 1:27); and further, that every man of whom “Christ is the head” (1 Corinthians 11:3) is “the image and glory of God” (1 Corinthians 11:7). He speaks, too, without even having stopped to consider in which part of man the “after the image” of God is stamped, and that it lies in the soul that either never had or no longer has “the old man with his deeds” (Colossians 3:9), a soul which, because it does not have these, is called “after the image” of the Creator (Colossians 3:10). He says: “Nor did he make man his image; for God is not of this kind, nor like any other form.”

What sort of notion is it to suppose that the “after the image” of God resides in the worse part of the composite man, I mean the body, and, as Celsus has taken it, that the body itself is what is “after the image” of him? For if the “after the image” of God is in the body alone, then the better part, the soul, has been deprived of the “after the image”, and it lies in the corruptible body; and none of us says this. And if the “after the image” of God is in both together, then God must be composite, and must himself consist, as it were, of soul and body, so that the better part of the “after the image” would be in the soul, and the lesser, the part that answers to the body, would be in the body; and none of us says this either.

It remains, then, that the “after the image” of God is to be understood as lying in what we call the inner man, which is being renewed (2 Corinthians 4:16) and is by nature able to become “after the image of the Creator” (Colossians 3:10). This happens when someone becomes “perfect, as the heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48), and hears, “You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy” (Leviticus 19:2), and, learning the words “Be imitators of God” (Ephesians 5:1), takes up into his own virtuous soul the features of God. Then too the body of one who has taken up the things of God into what is “after the image” is a “temple” of God (1 Corinthians 6:19), since he has a soul of this kind and, because of the “after the image”, has God in his soul.

God is shared in, not sharing§64

64Once again he strings together a number of points, stating them as though we granted them, though no Christian of sense grants them. For none of us says that God shares in shape or colour. Nor does he share in motion: it is because he stands firm and his nature is steadfast that he calls the righteous man too to the same, saying, “But you, stand here with me” (Deuteronomy 5:31). And if some passages seem to describe a kind of motion in him, such as the one that says, “They heard the Lord God walking in the garden in the evening” (Genesis 3:8), we must understand such passages to mean that God is thought of as moving by those who have sinned; or we must understand them in the same way as when sleep, or anger, or anything of the kind is ascribed to God figuratively.

Nor, again, does God share in substance. For he is shared in rather than sharing, and he is shared in by those who have “the Spirit of God” (Romans 8:9). Our Saviour, too, does not share in righteousness; rather, being “righteousness” (1 Corinthians 1:30), he is shared in by the righteous.

The question of substance is a large one and hard to see into, above all if substance in the proper sense is what is stable and incorporeal. We would need to find out whether God is “beyond substance in dignity and power” (Plato, Republic 509b), imparting substance to those to whom he imparts it according to his own Word, and to the Word himself; or whether he too is substance, though he is called invisible in nature in the passage about the Saviour that says, “who is the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), where the word “invisible” signifies the incorporeal. We must also inquire whether the only-begotten, the firstborn “of all creation” (Colossians 1:15), is to be called substance of substances, idea of ideas, and first principle, while his Father and God is beyond all these.

In what sense God is beyond word and name§65

65Celsus says of God that “from him are all things”, though, I do not know how, he has cut all things loose from him. Our Paul, however, says, “From him and through him and to him are all things” (Romans 11:36), showing the beginning of the existence of all things in “from him”, their holding together in “through him”, and their end in “to him”. And in truth God is from no one.

But since he says, “Nor is he attainable by reason”, I distinguish the meaning and say this. If he means the reason within us, whether held within or spoken aloud, we too shall say that God is not attainable by reason. But if, having understood the words, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1), we declare that God is attainable by this Word, and is comprehended not by him alone but also by anyone to whom he reveals the Father (Matthew 11:27), then we shall prove false the saying of Celsus, who states: “Nor is God attainable by reason.”

His “not nameable”, too, needs a distinction. If it means that nothing in words and their meanings can present the properties of God, what is said is true, since many qualities too cannot be named. For who can express in names the difference in quality between the sweetness of a date and the sweetness of a dried fig? Who can distinguish by a name and present the proper quality of each? It is no wonder, then, if in this sense God cannot be named. But if you take “nameable” to mean that it is possible to present in names something of what concerns him, so as to lead the hearer by the hand and help him grasp some things about God, as far as human nature can attain, there is nothing absurd in calling him nameable.

In the same way we shall also distinguish the saying, “For he has experienced nothing that can be grasped by a name.” And it is true as well that God is “outside every passion”. So much for this.

Darkness for idolaters, light for the Word’s followers§66

66Let us look also at his next statement, in which he brings on stage, as it were, someone who, after hearing these things, says something like this: “How then am I to know God? And how am I to learn the way there? And how do you show him to me? For now you cast darkness before my eyes, and I see nothing clearly.” Then he gives what is meant as an answer to the one who raised this difficulty, and thinks he is supplying the reason why darkness has been poured over the eyes of the one who said these things. He says: “Those whom someone leads out of darkness into bright light, being unable to bear the brilliance, have their sight afflicted and harmed, and think they have been blinded.”

To this too we shall reply that all those sit in darkness and are settled in it who gaze at the wicked crafts of painters, modellers and makers of statues, and who refuse to look up and to rise in mind from things visible and from everything perceived by the senses to the Maker of the universe, who is light (1 John 1:5). But everyone who has followed the rays of the Word is in light. For the Word has shown from how great an ignorance and impiety, and from how great a want of learning about the divine, these things were worshipped instead of God, and has taken the mind of anyone who wishes to be saved and led it by the hand to the uncreated God who is over all. For “the people who sat in darkness”, the people of the nations, “saw a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death a light dawned” (Matthew 4:16; Isaiah 9:2), namely Jesus, who is God.

No Christian, then, answers Celsus or any of those who accuse the divine word by saying, “How am I to know God?” For each of them has known God, as far as that is possible. And no one says, “How am I to learn the way there?”, since he has heard the one who said, “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6), and has tasted, in walking it, the benefit that comes from walking it. Nor would any Christian say to Celsus, “How do you show God to me?”

Celsus’s darkness and the light that heals the blind§67

67This, however, Celsus said truly in the passage before us: that someone who has heard his words, and has seen that they are words of darkness, answers, “You cast darkness before my eyes.” Celsus, then, and those like him wish to cast darkness before our eyes; but we, by the light of the Word, make the darkness of impious doctrines vanish. And the Christian might well say to Celsus, who says nothing clear or compelling, “I see nothing clearly in your words.” So Celsus does not lead us out of darkness into bright light. Rather, he wishes to move us from light into darkness, making “darkness light and light darkness”, and he falls under what Isaiah rightly said in these words: “Woe to those who make darkness light and light darkness” (Isaiah 5:20).

But we, since the Word has opened the eyes of our soul and we see the difference between light and darkness, choose in every way to stand in the light, and have no wish at all to come near the darkness. The true light (John 1:9), being alive, knows to whom its full brilliance should be shown and to whom only light; and, because of the weakness still in a man’s eyes, it does not display its own brightness to him.

And if we must speak at all of sight being afflicted and harmed, whose eyes would we say suffer this, if not the eyes of one held fast by ignorance about God and kept by the passions from seeing the truth? Christians, then, by no means think they are blinded by the words of Celsus, or of anyone else who is a stranger to the worship of God. But let those who perceive that they are being blinded by following crowds that go astray, and nations that hold festivals to demons, come to the Word who grants eyes, so that, like the poor and blind men lying beside the road who were healed by Jesus because they had said to him, “Son of David, have mercy on me” (Mark 10:46–48; Luke 18:35–39), they too may receive mercy and get back their eyes, new and beautiful, such as the Word of God would create.

How the Word makes the Father known§68

68So if Celsus asks us how we think we come to know God, and how we shall be saved and brought to him, we will answer that the Word of God is able, when he comes to those who seek him or to those who receive him when he appears, to make known and to reveal the Father (Matthew 11:27), who was not seen before his coming. Who else can save the soul of man and bring it to the God who is over all, except God the Word? He was “in the beginning with God” (John 1:2), and for the sake of those who had clung to the flesh and become what flesh is, he “became flesh” (John 1:14), so that he might be received by those who could not see him in so far as he was “the Word,” and was “with God,” “and was God” (John 1:1).

And being spoken of in bodily terms and proclaimed as “flesh,” he calls to himself those who are flesh, so that he may first make them be formed after the Word who became flesh, and after this lead them up to see him as he was before he became “flesh.” In this way, once they have been helped and have climbed up from the first lessons according to the flesh, they may say: “Even though we once knew Christ according to the flesh, yet now we no longer know him in that way” (2 Corinthians 5:16).

He “became flesh,” then, and having become “flesh” he “dwelt among us” (John 1:14), not coming to be outside us. And having dwelt and come to be among us, he did not stay in his first form. He led us up onto the “high mountain” (Matthew 17:1) of the Word and showed us his glorious form and the brightness of his garments (Matthew 17:2), and not his own only, but also that of the spiritual law, which is “Moses,” seen “in glory” with Jesus (Luke 9:30–31). He showed us also the whole of prophecy, which did not die even after he became man, but was taken up into heaven; Elijah was its symbol (2 Kings 2:11). And one who has gazed on these things could say: “We beheld his glory, glory as of the only-begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

Celsus, then, has made up in a rather crude way what he thinks we will say to his question, how we think we shall come to know God and how we shall be saved and brought to him. But we would say what has been set out above.

The Son shares the Father’s greatness§69

69Celsus, however, says that we answer with a likely guess, and he acknowledges that he is writing down our answer in this form: “Since God is great and hard to behold, he put his own spirit into a body like ours and sent it down here, so that we might be able to hear from him and learn.”

But in our teaching the God and Father of all is not the only one who is great. For he has given a share of himself and of his greatness to the only-begotten and “firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15), so that, being himself “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), he might keep the image of the Father in greatness too. For there could not have been a well-proportioned image, if I may call it that, and a beautiful image “of the invisible God,” that did not also present the image of his greatness.

Further, in our teaching God is invisible because he is not a body; but to those who can contemplate him he can be beheld with the heart, that is, with the mind; and not with just any heart, but with a pure one (Matthew 5:8). For it is not right for a defiled heart to gaze on God; what would behold the Pure One as he deserves must itself be pure.

Granted, then, that God is hard to behold; yet he is not the only one hard to behold, but so is his only-begotten. For God the Word is hard to behold, and in the same way so is the Wisdom in which God made all things (Psalm 104:24). For who can behold, in each and every thing, the Wisdom in which God made each and every thing? It was not, then, because God is hard to behold that he sent the Son as one easy to behold.

Celsus did not understand this, and said, as though speaking for us: “Because he is hard to behold, he put his own spirit into a body like ours and sent it down here, so that we might be able to hear from him and learn.” But, as we have explained, the Son too, though he is hard to behold, since he is God the Word through whom all things came to be (John 1:3), also “dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

God is spirit, not body§70

70If Celsus understood what we say about the Spirit of God, and that “as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God” (Romans 8:14), he would not have declared on his own, as though it came from us, that God put his own spirit into a body and sent it down here. For God always gives a share of his own Spirit to those who are able to partake of him; yet the Spirit does not come to be in the worthy by being cut off and divided. For the Spirit we speak of is not a body, just as fire is not a body either, which God is said to be in the words: “Our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29; Deuteronomy 4:24). All these things are said figuratively, to present the nature of what is grasped by the mind by means of familiar and bodily names.

Just as, if sins are said to be wood and hay and straw, we shall not say that sins are bodies, and if good deeds are said to be gold and silver and precious stone (1 Corinthians 3:12), we shall not say that good deeds are bodies; so too, even if God is said to be a “fire consuming” the “wood” and the “hay” and the “straw” and every substance of sin, we shall not think of him as a body. And just as, when he is called “fire,” we do not think of him as a body, so when God is called “spirit,” we do not say that he is a body.

For Scripture is accustomed to call the things grasped by the mind “spirits” and “spiritual,” to set them apart from things perceived by the senses. For example, when Paul says: “But our sufficiency is from God, who also made us sufficient as ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the spirit; for the letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:5–6), by “letter” he meant the sense-bound interpretation of the divine writings, and by “spirit” the interpretation grasped by the mind.

So it is, then, with “God is spirit” (John 4:24). Since both Samaritans and Jews were carrying out the commands of the law in a bodily way and in figures, the Saviour said to the Samaritan woman: “The hour is coming when neither in Jerusalem nor on this mountain will they worship the Father” (John 4:21); “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24). By these words he taught that God must be worshipped not in the flesh and with fleshly sacrifices, but “in spirit.” Indeed, he himself may be thought of as “spirit” in keeping with the way one serves him “in spirit” and with the mind.

Moreover, the Father must be worshipped not in figures but “in truth,” which “came through Jesus Christ” after the law was given “through Moses” (John 1:17). For “when we turn to the Lord” (“now the Lord is the Spirit”), “the veil” that lies on the heart “whenever Moses is read” “is taken away” (2 Corinthians 3:15–17).

Not the spirit of the Stoics§71

71Since, then, Celsus did not understand the things of the Spirit of God (“for the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually discerned,” 1 Corinthians 2:14), he draws an inference of his own, thinking that when we say God is “spirit,” we differ in nothing on this point from the Stoics among the Greeks, who claim that God is a spirit that has passed through all things and holds all things within itself.

Now the oversight and providence of God do pass through all things, but not in the way the spirit of the Stoics does. And providence does hold within it all the things it provides for, and embraces them; but it does not hold them as a body holds, when what is held is also a body, but as a divine power that has embraced what it holds.

According to the men of the Stoa, who say that the first principles are bodily, and for this reason make all things perishable, and who come close to making perishable even the God who is over all, had this not seemed to them utterly absurd, even the Word of God, who comes down as far as men and the very least things, is nothing other than a bodily spirit. But according to us, who try to prove that even the rational soul is higher than every bodily nature, and is an invisible and incorporeal substance, God the Word, through whom all things came to be (John 1:3), would not be a body. He reaches not only as far as men but also to the things thought to be the least and governed by nature, so that all things may come to be through the Word.

Let the men of the Stoa, then, burn up all things in their world-conflagration; but we know of no incorporeal substance that is burned up, nor do we know that the soul of man, or the being of angels or thrones or dominions or principalities or powers (Colossians 1:16), is dissolved into fire.

Arguments that are not ours§72

72So Celsus, as one who does not know the things of the Spirit of God (1 Corinthians 2:14), has spoken to no purpose when he says: “Since the Son is a spirit from God that has come to be in a human body, not even the Son of God himself would be immortal.”

Then again he muddles the argument to suit himself, as though some of us would grant not that God is spirit but that his Son is, and he thinks he meets this by saying: “There is no spirit of such a nature that it lasts forever.” It is as if, when we say that God is “a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29), he were to say: “There is no fire of such a nature that it lasts forever.” He does not see in what sense we say that our God is “fire,” and what it is that he consumes: sins and wickedness. For it befits a good God, once it has become clear, after each one has contended, what kind of contender he has been, to consume wickedness with the fire of punishments.

Then again he assumes, to suit himself, something we do not say: “It is necessary that God drew his breath back in”; and, as following from this, that “Jesus could not rise with his body; for God would not have taken back the spirit he gave once it had been defiled by the nature of the body.” It is foolish, then, for us to answer arguments as if they were ours, when they are not ours.

The virgin birth and the limits of sight§73

73Next, repeating himself after saying a great deal in the earlier parts and mocking the birth of God from a virgin, to which we have replied as well as we could, he says: “If he wanted to send down a spirit from himself, why did he need to breathe it into a woman’s womb? For since he already knew how to form men, he could have formed a body around this one too, and not cast his own spirit into such great pollution. In that way he would not even have been disbelieved, if he had been begotten straight from above.”

He said this because he did not know the virgin and pure birth, without any corruption, of the body that was to serve the salvation of men. And though he sets out the Stoic doctrine, he shows no sign of having learned what it teaches about things indifferent, and thinks that the divine nature was cast into pollution and was polluted, whether by coming to be in a woman’s body until a body was formed around it, or by taking up a body. He does much the same as those who think that the rays of the sun are polluted in mire and in foul-smelling bodies, and do not remain pure even there.

Even if, on Celsus’s supposition, the body had been formed for Jesus without birth, those who saw the body would not at once have believed that it did not come from birth. For what is seen does not also announce the nature from which it came. Suppose, for instance, there were some honey not made by bees: no one could tell from tasting it or looking at it that it was not from bees. Just so, honey from bees does not show its origin to the senses; experience shows that it comes from bees. So too experience teaches that wine comes from the vine; for the taste does not tell us that it comes from the vine. In the same way, then, the body that is perceived does not announce how it came into being.

You will be brought to accept what I say by the example of the heavenly bodies. We perceive their existence and their brightness when we see them; but sense surely does not suggest to us whether they have come into being or are without origin. In fact schools of thought have arisen about these very things; and even those who say they have come into being do not agree on how they came into being. For sense does not suggest to them in what way they came into being, even if reason, pressing hard, finds that they did come into being.

Mockery in place of argument§74

74Next he goes back over what he has often said before about Marcion’s opinion. In some places he sets out Marcion’s views truly; in others he has misheard even those. We need not answer that opinion, or even refute it.

Then he again brings up, on his own account, what can be said for Marcion and what against him, saying which charges they escape and into which they fall. And when he wants to side with the argument that claims Jesus was foretold, so as to accuse Marcion and his followers, he says plainly: “How will one who was punished like this be shown to be a child of God, unless it has been foretold about him?”

Then he jests again and, as is his habit, mocks, bringing in two sons of gods, one the son of the Creator and the other the son of Marcion’s god. He paints a picture of their single combats, saying they are like the fights of quails, and of the battles of their fathers, the gods; or else he says that the fathers, useless and doting from old age, do nothing to one another but leave their sons to fight.

So what he himself said earlier, we shall say to him: what old woman lulling a child to sleep would not be ashamed to say such things as he says in his book entitled The True Doctrine? For he ought to have stood up to the arguments in earnest; instead he leaves the substance aside and jests and plays the buffoon, thinking that he is writing mimes or lampoons. He does not see that such a way of conducting the argument works against his own purpose, since he wants us to leave Christianity and attend to his doctrines. Had he set these out with dignity, they might perhaps have been more persuasive; but since he mocks and jests and plays the buffoon, we shall say that it was for lack of serious arguments (for he neither had them nor knew any) that he fell into such great nonsense.

What Scripture says of his appearance§75

75After this he says: “Since a divine spirit was in a body, it surely ought to have differed somewhat from the rest, in size or beauty or strength or voice or power to astonish or persuasiveness. For it is impossible that one to whom something divine belonged beyond others should differ in nothing from another. Yet this body differed in nothing from another, but, as they say, was small and ugly and ignoble.”

Here too it is plain that when he wants to accuse Jesus, he cites what comes from the Scriptures that seem to him to offer grounds for accusation, as if he believed them; but where, by the same Scriptures, one might think the opposite is said to what he takes up for his accusation, he does not even pretend to know it.

It is admitted, then, that it is written that the body of Jesus was ugly; not, however, that it was ignoble too, as he has set it out, nor is it clearly shown that it was small. The passage recorded in Isaiah, who prophesies that he would come among the many not in a comely form nor with any surpassing beauty, reads as follows: “Lord, who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? We announced before him as a child, as a root in thirsty ground. He has no form nor glory; and we saw him, and he had no form nor beauty; but his form was without honour, falling short compared with the sons of men” (Isaiah 53:1–3).

Did Celsus, then, listen to these words because he thought them useful for accusing Jesus, but pay no attention to what is said in the forty-fourth psalm (Psalm 45 in English Bibles), and how it is said: “Gird your sword upon your thigh, O mighty one, in your comeliness and your beauty; and press on, and prosper, and reign” (Psalm 45:3–4)?

The prophecy and the Transfiguration§76

76Let us grant that he did not read that prophecy, or that, having read it, he was led astray by those who misinterpret it as not prophesied about Jesus Christ. What will he say about the Gospel too, in which Jesus went up “onto a high mountain” and “was transfigured before” the disciples (Matthew 17:1–2) and was seen in glory, when also “Moses and Elijah,” “appearing in glory, spoke of his departure, which he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem” (Luke 9:30–31)?

Or is it that, when a prophet says, “We saw him, and he had no form nor beauty” (Isaiah 53:2), and what follows, Celsus accepts that this prophecy refers to Jesus, blind as he is in accepting what is said, and not seeing that it is a strong proof that Jesus, who seems to be without form, is the Son of God, that even his appearance was prophesied many years before his birth; but when another prophet says that comeliness and beauty belong to him, he no longer wants the prophecy to refer to Christ?

Now if it were clearly possible to gather from the Gospels that “he had no form nor beauty, but his form was without honour, falling short compared with the sons of men” (Isaiah 53:2–3), someone might have said that Celsus said these things not on the basis of the prophetic writing but on the basis of the Gospel. But as it is, since neither the Gospels nor even the apostles show that “he had no form nor beauty,” it is clear that he is forced to accept what comes from the prophecy as true of Christ; and that no longer allows his charges against Jesus to go forward.

The many forms of the Word§77

77Again, the man who says, “Since a divine spirit was in a body, it surely ought to have differed somewhat from the rest, in size or voice or strength or power to astonish or persuasiveness”: how did he not see that his body differed according to what the beholders were able to receive, and was useful for that very reason, appearing such as it had to be seen by each? And it is not surprising that matter, which by nature is mutable and alterable, can be changed into whatever the Creator wills, and can receive every quality the Craftsman wills, should at one time have the quality of which it is said, “He had no form nor beauty” (Isaiah 53:2), and at another time one so glorious and awe-inspiring and wonderful that those who beheld such great beauty, the three apostles who had gone up with Jesus, fell “on their faces” (Matthew 17:6).

But he will say that these are fictions, no different from myths, like the rest of the wonders told about Jesus. We have already answered this at length in what came before. But the account also holds something more mystical: it declares that the different forms of Jesus refer to the nature of the divine Word, who does not appear in the same way to the many and to those able to follow him “onto a high mountain,” as we have explained it.

For to those who are still below and not yet ready to go up, the Word “has no form nor beauty”; for to such people “his form” is “without honour, and falls short compared with” the words that men have brought forth, which are figuratively called “sons of men” in this passage (Isaiah 53:2–3). For we might say that the words of the philosophers, which are “sons of men,” appear far more comely than the Word of God preached to the many, which also shows a “foolishness of preaching” (1 Corinthians 1:21); and because of the “foolishness of the preaching” that shows in it, those who look at this alone say, “We saw him, and he had no form nor beauty.”

But to those who, by following him, have received the power to keep up with him even as he goes up “onto the high mountain,” he has a more divine form. They see it, if anyone is a “Peter,” who has made room within himself for the building of the Church by the Word and has reached so firm a state that no gate of Hades will prevail against him (Matthew 16:18), since he has been lifted up, because of the Word, “from the gates of death, that he may” declare “all the praises” of God “in the gates of the daughter of Zion” (Psalm 9:13–14); and they see it, if there are any who have received their birth from words of a mighty voice, and fall in no way short of a “thunder” that the mind perceives (Mark 3:17).

And “his garments” are different below: they are not “white,” they are not “as the light” (Matthew 17:2). If you go up “onto the high mountain,” you will see his light and “his garments.” The “garments” of the Word are the wording of Scripture; these words are the clothing of the divine thoughts. So as he himself appears different below, and when he has gone up is transfigured and “his face” becomes “like the sun” (Matthew 17:2), so too his clothing, so too “his garments.” When you are below, they are not bright, they are not “white”; but if you go up, you will see the beauty and “the light” of the garments, and you will marvel at “the face” of Jesus transfigured.

Consider whether it is not the same with what we learn about the Saviour in the Gospels too. For what concerns his birth, as his descent is traced from Abraham and he is “born of the seed of David according to the flesh” (Romans 1:3), is “the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ” (Matthew 1:1). But of the more divine and greater things that might be said about him and that he himself declared, John says that “not even the world, I suppose, could contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25). For the saying that “the world could not contain the books that would be written” is to be understood not, as some take it, of the number of the writings, but of the greatness of the matters; for the greatness of the matters not only cannot be written down, but cannot even be told by a tongue of flesh, nor expressed in human languages and sounds.

That is why Paul too, when he was about to learn the more divine things, came to be outside this earthly world of ours and was caught up into the third heaven, so that he might be able to hear the “unspeakable words” there (2 Corinthians 12:2–4). For what is spoken here, and is held to be the word of God, is told now that the Word has become flesh and, in respect of his being “God” “with God” (John 1:1), empties himself (Philippians 2:7). That is why we see the Word of God on earth as human, since he has become man; for in the Scriptures “the Word” is always becoming “flesh,” that he may dwell “among us” (John 1:14).

But if we lean back on “the breast” of the Word made flesh (John 13:25), and are able to follow him as he goes up “onto the high mountain,” we shall say, “We saw his glory” (John 1:14). Perhaps some others too, besides those who leaned on his breast and followed him “onto the high mountain,” will say, “We saw his glory,” but will not go on to add, “glory as of the only-begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14); for this utterance befits John and those like him.

And by another, higher interpretation, those who have been able to follow close in the footsteps of Jesus as he goes up and is transfigured from his earthly appearance will see his transfiguration in each Scripture. It is as though the Jesus who appears to the many were the plain wording, while the Jesus who goes up “onto a high mountain” and is transfigured before very few of the disciples, and before those who have been able to follow to the heights, were the highest and loftiest sense, which holds the oracles of the wisdom hidden “in a mystery,” “which God foreordained before the ages for the glory” of his righteous ones (1 Corinthians 2:7).

But how could Celsus, and the enemies of the divine Word, who have not examined Christianity with a love of truth, know the meaning of the different forms of Jesus? And I mean also of his different ages, and of whatever he did before he suffered and after he rose from the dead.

Zeus in the comedy and the one corner§78

78Next Celsus says something like this: “Moreover, if God, like Zeus in the comic poet, woke from his long sleep and wished to rescue the human race from evils, why did he send this spirit, as you call it, into one corner? He ought to have breathed it alike into many bodies and sent them out over the whole world. But the comic poet was raising a laugh in the theatre when he wrote that Zeus woke up and sent Hermes to the Athenians and the Spartans; do you not think you have made a more laughable thing of it, with the Son of God sent to the Jews?”

See here too how unseemly Celsus is. Quite unlike a philosopher, he takes up a comic poet whose business is laughter, and he compares our God, the Maker of the universe, with that poet’s Zeus, who wakes up and sends Hermes. We said earlier that God did not send Jesus to the human race as though he had risen from a long sleep. For good reasons he has now carried out the dispensation of the incarnation, but he has always done good to the human race. For nothing good among men has come about without the divine Word coming to dwell in the souls of those who were able, even for a short time, to receive such workings of the divine Word. Moreover, the coming of Jesus, which seems to have been into one corner, took place for good reason. The one foretold had to come to those who had come to know the one God, who read his prophets and were learning of the Christ proclaimed to them; and he had to come at the time when the Word was about to be poured out from one corner over the whole world.

One sun of righteousness, many anointed§79

79That is why there was no need for many bodies to come into being everywhere, with many spirits like that of Jesus, in order that the whole inhabited world of men might be enlightened by the Word of God. The one Word was enough, rising as the “sun of righteousness” (Malachi 4:2), to send out from Judea the rays that reach the souls of those willing to receive him. And if anyone longs to see many bodies filled with a divine spirit, serving, as that one Christ did, the salvation of men everywhere, let him consider those who everywhere teach the word of Jesus soundly and with an upright life. The divine Scriptures call them christs too, in the verse: “Do not touch my christs, and do my prophets no harm” (Psalm 105:15). For just as we have heard “that antichrist is coming,” and have learned no less that there are “many antichrists” in the world (1 John 2:18), in the same way, knowing that Christ has come, we see that because of him many christs have come into being in the world. Like him, they have “loved righteousness and hated injustice; and therefore God, the God” of Christ, “has anointed” them too “with the oil of gladness” (Psalm 45:7; Hebrews 1:9). But he, who loved “righteousness” and hated “lawlessness” more than his “companions” (Psalm 45:7), received the firstfruits of the anointing and, if one may so name it, the whole anointing with the oil of “gladness”; while his companions, each according to his capacity, shared in his anointing too. Therefore, since Christ is “the head of the church” (Ephesians 5:23), so that Christ and the church are one body, “the ointment upon the head” has come down “upon the beard,” the marks of the full-grown man, the beard “of Aaron”; and this “ointment,” “coming down,” has reached “to the hem of his garment” (Psalm 133:2).

This too I have said in answer to the unseemly argument of Celsus, when he said: “He ought to have breathed it alike into many bodies and sent them out over the whole world.” The comic poet, then, to raise a laugh, made Zeus sleep, wake up, and send Hermes to the Greeks. But let our doctrine, which knows that God’s nature never sleeps, teach us that God orders the affairs of the world at fitting times, as reason requires. And it is no wonder if, because the judgments of God are great and hard to set forth, “uninstructed souls” go astray (Wisdom of Solomon 17:1), and Celsus with them. There is nothing laughable, then, in the fact that the Son of God was sent to the Jews, among whom the prophets had arisen, so that, beginning there in the body, he might rise with power and spirit upon the world of souls, which no longer wished to be left empty of God.

Celsus’s inspired nations and the Jews§80

80After this Celsus saw fit to name the Chaldeans among the nations that have been most inspired from the beginning, and it is from them that the deceitful art of casting horoscopes has spread among men. He also ranks the Magi among the most inspired nations, and from them magic, which takes its name from their nation, has spread to the other nations as well, to the ruin and destruction of those who practise it. Earlier, even in Celsus’s own account, the Egyptians were in error, since they have stately precincts around what they consider temples, yet inside there is nothing but apes or crocodiles or goats or asps or some other animal. But now Celsus has seen fit to call the Egyptian nation too most inspired, and most inspired from the beginning, perhaps because they have waged war on the Jews from the beginning. And the Persians, who marry their mothers and lie with their daughters, seem to Celsus an inspired nation; so do the Indians, some of whom, as he said earlier, have even tasted human flesh.

But the Jews, and above all the Jews of old, who did none of these things, he not only did not call most inspired but even said would soon perish. He says this about them now as though he were a diviner as well, not seeing the whole dispensation of God concerning the Jews and their venerable ancient way of life, nor how “through” their “transgression salvation” has come “to the Gentiles” (Romans 11:11), and “their transgression is riches for the world, and their failure riches for the Gentiles” (Romans 11:12), “until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in” (Romans 11:25), so that after this “all Israel,” an Israel Celsus does not understand, “may be saved” (Romans 11:26).

Did God not know, and the close of the sixth book§81

81I do not know how he can say of God: “He who knows all things did not understand this, that he was sending his Son to wicked men, who would sin and would punish him.” But it seems that here he has deliberately forgotten our teaching, which says that the prophets of God foresaw by the divine Spirit everything that Jesus Christ would suffer, and foretold it. From this it does not follow that God did not know that he was sending his Son to wicked men, who would sin and would punish him. Yet in the very next breath he says that our claim that these things were foretold long ago is something we say in self-defence.

But since our sixth book has reached a sufficient length, we will end the argument about here, and, if God grants it, we will begin the seventh. In it Celsus thinks he is answering our statement that the prophets foretold everything about Jesus. These matters are many and need a longer reply, and so we did not wish either to break the discussion off, forced by the size of the book, or, so as not to break off the argument, to make the sixth book very long and out of proportion.