Against Celsus, Book VII

A prayer as the seventh book begins§1

1In the six books before this one, holy brother Ambrose, we have contended as well as we could against Celsus’s accusations against the Christians. So far as our strength allowed, we left nothing untested or unexamined and passed nothing by, but answered each point as best we could. Now we call upon God through Jesus Christ himself, the one whom Celsus accuses, that he, who is the Truth (John 14:6), may shine into our heart (2 Corinthians 4:6) what overturns falsehood; and so we begin this seventh treatise as well.

As we begin, we say to God in prayer that prophetic word: “In your truth destroy them” (Psalm 54:5). Plainly this means the arguments opposed “to the truth.” For these are destroyed by the truth of God, so that, once they are destroyed, everyone, set free from distraction, may say the words that follow: “Willingly I will sacrifice to you” (Psalm 54:6), and may offer to the God of the universe a rational sacrifice that sends up no smoke.

Celsus turns to the prophets§2

2Celsus now sets out to attack the teaching which says that the things concerning Christ Jesus were foretold by the prophets among the Jews. And first, at the very start, we examine his view that those who bring in another god besides the God of the Jews can give no answer at all to his objections, while we, who have kept to the same God, take refuge in the defence drawn from the prophecies about Christ.

On this he says: “Let us see how they will find a way out. Those who bring in another god will find none; and those who keep the same God will once more say the same thing, that famous piece of wisdom, that it had to happen this way. And the proof? These things had been foretold long ago.”

To this we shall say that what he said a little earlier about Jesus and the Christians is so weak that even those who bring in another god, and do so impiously, could very easily answer what Celsus says. And if it were not improper to give the weaker an opening for accepting worse doctrines, we too would have done this, to prove false his claim that those who bring in another god have no defence against what Celsus has said. But as it is, come, let us make our defence about the prophets, in addition to what we have said above.

The Pythia and her unclean spirit§3

3He says, then: “The things foretold by the Pythia, or by the priestesses of Dodona, or by the Clarian, or at Branchidae, or at the shrine of Ammon, and by countless other oracle-givers, under whose guidance nearly the whole earth was settled, these they count as nothing. But the things spoken, or not spoken, by those in Judaea after their fashion, the way people around Phoenicia and Palestine are still accustomed to do even now, these they think marvellous and unerring.”

Let us say, then, about the oracles he has listed, that we could collect from Aristotle and from those who have pursued philosophy in the Peripatetic school a good deal to overturn what is said about the Pythia and the other oracles. We could also set out what Epicurus and those who embrace his teaching have said on the same matters, and so show that some even among the Greeks overturn the oracles that are acknowledged and admired throughout all Greece.

But let it be granted that the accounts of the Pythia and the other oracles are not fictions, nor men’s pretence of being possessed by a god. Let us see, then, whether even so it cannot be proved to those who examine matters out of love for the truth that one who accepts these oracles as real need not admit that there are any gods in them, but, on the contrary, certain wicked demons and spirits hostile to the human race, which hinder the soul’s ascent, its journey by way of virtue, and its restoration to true piety toward God.

Now it is recorded of the Pythia, whose oracle seems more famous than the others, that Apollo’s prophetess, seated over the mouth of Castalia, receives a spirit through a woman’s private parts; filled with it, she utters the oracles that are held to be solemn and divine. See, then, whether this does not reveal how unclean and profane that spirit is. It enters the soul of the woman who prophesies, not through fine, unseen passages far purer than a woman’s private parts, but through those parts which a modest man may not rightly even look at, still less speak of or touch. And it does this not once or twice, which might perhaps have seemed more bearable, but as often as she is believed to prophesy from Apollo.

Moreover, to drive the supposed prophetess into ecstasy and a frenzied state, so that she is not aware of herself at all, is not the work of a divine spirit. For one who is held by the divine spirit ought to be benefited long before anyone at all who is taught by the oracles what helps toward ordinary, natural life, whether for profit or for advantage, and ought to see more clearly at that time above all when the divine is present with him.

Prophets enlightened, the Pythia darkened§4

4Hence we, gathering our evidence from the sacred writings, show that the prophets among the Jews, enlightened by the divine Spirit as far as was useful to the prophets themselves as well, were the first to enjoy the coming of the higher power into them. Through the touch, if I may call it so, of what is called the Holy Spirit upon their soul, they became clearer-sighted in mind and brighter in soul, and in body too, since the body no longer worked against the life of virtue, being put to death as regards what we call “the mind of the flesh” (Romans 8:6). For we are persuaded that by a Spirit more divine “the deeds of the body” are put to death (Romans 8:13), deeds which take their rise from “the mind of the flesh,” the mind that is enmity toward God (Romans 8:7).

But if the Pythia is beside herself and not in her own mind when she gives oracles, what kind of spirit must we think it, which poured darkness over her mind and her reasoning, if not one of the same kind as the race of demons? Not a few Christians drive these out of those who suffer from them, without any occult or magical practice or use of drugs, but by prayer alone and very simple adjurations, and such things as the plainest person could use. For, as a rule, it is unlearned people who do this, since the grace that is in the word of Christ shows how worthless and weak the demons are: to be beaten, to give way, and to withdraw from a man’s soul and body, they by no means require someone wise and powerful in reasoned proofs of the faith.

Earthbound spirits behind the oracles§5

5Moreover, it is believed not only among Christians and Jews but also by many others, both Greeks and barbarians, that the human soul lives and exists after its separation from the body. Reason, too, establishes that the pure soul, not weighed down by the lead weights of wickedness, is borne aloft to the regions of the purer, ethereal bodies, leaving behind the gross bodies here below and their defilements; while the wicked soul, dragged down to the earth by its sins and unable even to recover its breath, is carried about here and rolls around, one about “the tombs,” where “apparitions” of shadowy souls have even been seen (Plato, Phaedo 81c–d), another simply about the earth. If so, what sort of spirits must we think those are which have been bound, as it were, for whole ages (if I may put it so) to buildings and places, whether by certain spells or because of their own wickedness? Reason requires us to regard such beings as wicked: they use the power of foreknowledge, which is in itself neither good nor bad, to deceive men and to draw them away from God and from pure piety toward him.

That they are of this sort is shown also by this: their bodies are fed on the fumes that rise from sacrifices and on the vapours given off by blood and burnt offerings, in which they take delight, and so they come to this very thing, a kind of clinging to life, like wicked men who do not welcome the purer life apart from bodies, but for the sake of bodily pleasures cherish life in the earthy body.

If the Apollo at Delphi were a god, as the Greeks think, whom should he rather have chosen as his prophet than the wise man, or, if no such man was found, at least one who was making progress? And how could he not have wished a man, rather than a woman, to prophesy? And if he did want the female sex, perhaps because he could work through nothing else, or took pleasure in nothing else, than the private parts of women, how should he not rather have chosen a virgin than a woman to declare his will?

What Apollo’s choices reveal§6

6But as it is, the Pythian god admired among the Greeks judged no wise man, and indeed no man at all, worthy of what the Greeks suppose to be divine possession. Nor, even among the female sex, did he choose a virgin, or a wise woman who had profited from philosophy, but some ordinary woman. Perhaps the better sort among human beings were too good for his work of possession.

Again, if he were a god, he ought to have used his foreknowledge as a bait, so to speak, for the conversion, the healing, and the moral reform of men. But as it is, history hands down nothing of the kind about him. For even if he said that Socrates was the wisest of all men, he blunted that praise by what he said about Euripides and Sophocles, in the line: “Sophocles is wise, Euripides wiser.” So Socrates was judged better than tragic poets whom the god had called wise, men who compete on the stage and in the orchestra for some trifling prize, and who sometimes stir grief and pity in the audience and sometimes unseemly laughter (for that is what satyr plays aim at). Ranked above such men, Socrates is hardly shown to have the dignity that comes from philosophy and truth, a dignity worthy of praise.

And perhaps he called him the wisest of all men not so much for his philosophy as for the sacrifices and the smoke of burnt fat that he offered to him and to the other demons. And it is for these things, it seems, rather than for works of virtue, that the demons do what is asked by those who bring them offerings. That is why Homer, the best of the poets, describing what happens and teaching what chiefly persuades the demons to do what those who sacrifice want, brought in Chryses: for the sake of a few garlands and the thighs of bulls and goats, he obtained what he asked against the Greeks on account of his daughter, that they should be struck with plague and give Chryseis back to him (Homer, Iliad 1.37–42). I remember reading in one of the Pythagoreans, who wrote about what the poet said in a hidden sense, that Chryses’ words to Apollo, and the plague sent by Apollo upon the Greeks, teach that Homer knew that certain evil demons, who delight in the smoke of fat and in sacrifices, pay those who sacrifice with the ruin of others, if that is what the sacrificers pray for.

And “the lord of wintry Dodona,” at whose shrine are the prophets “with unwashed feet, who sleep on the ground” (Homer, Iliad 16.234–235), rejected the male sex for prophecy and uses the women of Dodona, as Celsus too has pointed out. Granted that there is someone much like these at Claros, another at Branchidae, another at Ammon’s shrine, or wherever on earth they give oracles: how then will it be shown that they are gods, and not some demons?

Prophets whose lives were worthy of the Spirit§7

7Among the prophets of the Jews, some were wise before they received prophecy and divine possession; others became wise when their minds were enlightened by the prophecy itself. They were chosen by providence to be entrusted with the divine Spirit and the words that come from him because of their way of life: a life hard to imitate, exceedingly strenuous and free, and wholly undaunted in the face of death and danger. For reason, too, shows that the prophets of the God who is over all must be such men. They made the hardihood of Antisthenes, Crates and Diogenes look like a game. At any rate, for the sake of truth and for rebuking sinners freely, “they were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were tempted, they died by the sword; for they went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, ill-treated, wandering in deserts and mountains and caves and the holes of the earth, men of whom the world on earth was not worthy” (Hebrews 11:37–38). They always fixed their gaze on God and on the invisible things of God, which are not seen by the senses and are for that reason eternal (2 Corinthians 4:18).

The life of each of the prophets has been recorded. For the present it is enough to set before you the life of Moses (for prophecies of his, too, are handed down, written in the law); that of Jeremiah, related in the prophecy that bears his name; and that of Isaiah, who, going beyond every discipline, walked “naked and barefoot” for three years (Isaiah 20:2–3). Look also at the robust life of the boys, Daniel and his companions, when you have read that they drank water and that their food was pulse, since they abstained from living things (Daniel 1:12–16). And if you can, consider also what came before them: Noah, who prophesied (Genesis 9:25–27); Isaac, who prayed prophetically over his son (Genesis 27:27–29); and Jacob, who said to each of the twelve, “Come, that I may tell you what will happen in the last days” (Genesis 49:1). These men, and countless others who prophesied for God, also foretold what concerns Jesus the Christ.

That is why we hold in no account the things foretold by the Pythia, or the priestesses of Dodona, or the Clarian, or at Branchidae, or at the shrine of Ammon, or by countless other so-called oracle-givers. But what was prophesied by those in Judaea fills us with awe, for we see that their robust, strenuous and dignified life was worthy of the Spirit of God, who prophesies in a new way, nothing like the divinations that come from demons.

The Spirit has left the Jews, but traces remain§8

8I do not know why Celsus, after saying “the things spoken by those in Judaea after their fashion,” added “or not spoken,” claiming, as an unbeliever would, that these things may never have been spoken at all, and that perhaps things never spoken were written down. For he did not look at the dates, nor the fact that many years beforehand the prophets foretold countless things and spoke also of the coming of Christ.

Again, wishing to slander the ancient prophets, he says that they prophesied in the way “that those around Phoenicia and Palestine,” he says, “are still accustomed to do even now.” He does not make clear whether he means people who are strangers to the teaching of the Jews and Christians, or people who prophesy in the Jewish way, after the pattern of the prophets. But however his words are taken, they are shown to be false. For neither have any of those outside the faith done anything like what the prophets did, nor is anyone recorded as having prophesied among the Jews in later times, after the coming of Jesus. For it is acknowledged that the Holy Spirit has left them, because they acted impiously toward God and toward the one whom their own prophets foretold.

Signs of the Holy Spirit were shown at the beginning of Jesus’ teaching, and more after his ascension, but fewer later. Yet even now traces of the Spirit remain among a few, whose souls have been cleansed by the Word and by actions done in keeping with the Word. “For the holy Spirit of discipline will flee from deceit, and will rise and depart from senseless thoughts” (Wisdom of Solomon 1:5).

Celsus describes the prophets of Phoenicia and Palestine§9

9Since Celsus also promises to describe the manner of the oracles in Phoenicia and Palestine, as one who has heard them and learned all about them, come, let us look at this too. First he says that there are several kinds of prophecy, but he does not set them out; for he had none to set out, and was only making a false show. But let us see what he says is the most perfect kind among the men of that region.

“Many nameless men,” he says, “very readily and on any chance occasion, both in temples and outside temples, and others who go begging and roam about cities or army camps, are stirred, so they make out, as though uttering oracles. Each has ready on his lips the customary words: ‘I am God, or a son of God, or a divine spirit. And I have come; for already the world is perishing, and you, O men, are going to ruin because of your wrongdoing. But I wish to save you. And you will see me coming back again with heavenly power. Blessed is he who worships me now; but on all the rest I will cast eternal fire, on cities and on lands alike. And men who do not know the punishments in store for them will repent in vain and groan; but those who have been persuaded by me I will keep for ever.’”

Then next he says: “Having brandished all this, they go on to add unintelligible, frenzied and altogether obscure words, whose meaning no one with any sense could discover; for they are unclear and mean nothing, but they give any fool or sorcerer an opening to seize on what was said and make it his own, on any matter and in whatever way he wishes.”

Why the prophets spoke in riddles§10

10But if he had been fair in his accusation, he ought to have set out the prophecies word for word, whether those in which the speaker announced himself to be God almighty, or those in which he announced himself the Son of God, or those in which the speaker was believed to be the Holy Spirit. For then he would have been making a real effort to overturn what was said and to show that the words were not inspired, words that contain a call to turn from sins, a rebuke of the people of that day, and foreknowledge of things to come. That is why those who lived in the prophets’ own time wrote down their prophecies and preserved them: so that later generations too, reading them, might marvel at them as words of God; and, helped not only by the rebukes and calls to conversion but also by the predictions, and convinced by the outcome of events that it was a divine Spirit who had foretold them, might persevere in practising the piety that accords with the word, obeying the law and the prophets.

The prophets, then, in accordance with the will of God, spoke without any concealment whatever their hearers could usefully understand at once and whatever helped to correct their conduct. But what was more mystical, more for the eyes of the initiated, and bound up with a contemplation beyond what the common ear can take in, they set forth “through riddles” (Numbers 12:8), through allegories, through what are called dark sayings, and through what are named parables or proverbs (Proverbs 1:6). They did this so that those who do not shrink from toil, but take on every labour for the sake of virtue and truth, might examine and find, and, having found, might put what they found to use as reason requires.

But the noble Celsus, as though angry at not having understood such words of the prophets, reviled them, saying: “Having brandished all this, they go on to add unintelligible, frenzied and altogether obscure words, whose meaning no one with any sense could discover; for they are unclear and mean nothing, but they give any fool or sorcerer an opening to seize on what was said and make it his own, on any matter and in whatever way he wishes.” He seems to me to have said this with cunning, wishing, so far as lay in his power, to keep readers of the prophecies from testing and examining their meaning. And something has happened to him like what happened to those who said of a certain prophet, who had gone in to someone and foretold the future to him: “Why did this madman come in to you?” (2 Kings 9:11).

Obscure, but not meaningless§11

11It is likely, then, that there are arguments far wiser than our ability allows, which could show that Celsus is lying here and that the prophecies are inspired. Still, we too have done what we could: in the works we have composed on Isaiah, on Ezekiel and on some of the Twelve, we have explained word by word the passages that Celsus calls “frenzied and altogether obscure.” And if God grants progress in his word, at the times he wills, there will be added to what we have already dictated on these books either what is still lacking or as much as we manage to make clear.

Others too, who wish to examine Scripture and have sense, would be able to find its meaning. It is truly unclear in many places, but it is not, as Celsus says, “nothing.” Nor can any fool or sorcerer smooth it out, or make what was said his own in whatever way he likes. Only the one who is truly wise in Christ, and every such person, could set out the whole connected sense of what was spoken with concealment in the prophets, “comparing spiritual things with spiritual” (1 Corinthians 2:13) and establishing each thing he finds from the usage of the Scriptures.

We must not believe Celsus when he says that he heard such men with his own ears. For in Celsus’s time there were no prophets like those of old; otherwise their prophecies too would have been written down one after another by those who accepted and admired them, as were the writings of long ago. And Celsus’s lie seems to me wholly plain from his claim that these supposed prophets whom he heard in person, when Celsus refuted them, admitted to him what they were after, and that they had been making it up, saying things that meant now one thing, now another. He ought also to have given the names of those he claimed to have heard in person, so that from the names, if he had any to give, it might be clear to those able to judge whether he was telling the truth or lying.

Celsus names no shameful passage§12

12He also thinks that those who use the prophets to defend what concerns Christ can say nothing to the point whenever something wicked, shameful, unclean or foul appears to be said about the Deity. So, as though no defence existed, he strings together countless arguments for himself on points that are not granted.

But it must be understood that those who wish to live by the divine Scriptures, who know that “the knowledge of the senseless is unexamined words” (Sirach 21:18), and who have read the words “always ready to make a defence to everyone who asks us for an account of the hope that is in us” (1 Peter 3:15), do not take refuge only in the fact that these things were foretold. They also try to resolve the apparent incongruities, and to show that there is nothing wicked, shameful, unclean or foul in the words, but that they become so for those who do not understand the divine Scripture as it ought to be interpreted.

He ought to have set out from the prophets what appears wicked in them, or what seemed shameful to him, or what he thought unclean, or what he took to be foul, if he really saw such things said in the prophets; for his argument would then have struck harder and done more to achieve what he wanted. As it is, he set nothing out, but with a threatening flourish he declares that such things appear in the Scriptures, and in this he lies about them. No reason, then, requires a defence against mere empty noises of words, to show that there is nothing wicked, shameful, unclean or foul in the words of the prophets.

What Christ suffered was not defilement§13

13But God neither does nor suffers the most shameful things, nor does he serve evil, as Celsus supposes; for nothing of the kind was foretold. And if he himself says that it was foretold that God would serve evil, or do or suffer the most shameful things, he ought to have quoted the prophets’ words to that effect, instead of wishing to defile his hearers to no purpose.

What Christ would suffer, the prophets did foretell, and they also set down the reason why he would suffer; and God knew what his Christ would suffer. But on what grounds were these things most foul and most unclean, as Celsus says? He will seem, though, to be showing how the things Christ endured were most foul and most unclean, since he says: “For what else was it for God to eat the flesh of sheep and to drink gall or vinegar, but to eat dung?”

But God, on our teaching, did not eat the flesh of sheep. For even supposing he did eat, it was as one who bore a body that Jesus ate. As for the gall and the vinegar, which were prophesied in the words, “They gave gall for my food, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink” (Psalm 69:21), we have spoken of them earlier, and Celsus forces us to say it again. For those who plot against the word of truth always bring to the Christ of God the gall that comes from their own wickedness and the vinegar that comes from their own turning toward what is base; and he, “when he has tasted it, will not drink” (Matthew 27:34).

Celsus sidesteps the argument from prophecy§14

14Then, after this, wishing to overthrow the faith of those who have accepted what concerns Jesus because it had been prophesied, he says: “Come now: if the prophets foretold that the great God (to say nothing more offensive) would be a slave, or fall sick, or die, will it then be necessary for God to die, or be a slave, or fall sick, since it had been foretold, so that by dying he might be believed to be God? But the prophets would not foretell this, for it is evil and unholy. So we must not consider whether they foretold it or did not foretell it, but whether the deed is worthy of God and good. What is shameful and evil we must disbelieve, even if all men, gone mad, should seem to foretell it. How then can the things done in his case, as though he were God, be holy?”

Through these words he appears to have suspected that the point about Jesus’ having been prophesied was a strong one for persuading those who hear it, and to be trying to overturn the argument with another plausible point, saying: “So we must not consider whether they foretold it or did not foretell it.” But if he wished to object to the claim by demonstration and not by fallacy, he ought to have said: “So we must show that they did not foretell it, or that the things said about Christ were not fulfilled in Jesus as they foretold,” and then to have added what seemed to him a demonstration.

In that way it would have become clear what the prophecies say that we apply to Jesus, and how he proves our interpretation false; and it would have been found out whether he nobly overturns what we bring from the prophets in support of our account of Jesus, or whether he is caught shamelessly trying to force the clear evidence of the truth to pass for something that is not true.

A Stoic proof turned against Celsus§15

15He sets down, by way of hypothesis, certain things that are impossible for God and unfitting for him, and says: “If these things were prophesied of the God over all, must we, because they are foretold, believe such things of God?” He thinks he is establishing that, even if the prophets had truly foretold such things of the Son of God, it was impossible that one should have to believe the predictions that he suffered or did them. To this we must say that his hypothesis, being absurd, would produce conditionals that end in statements that contradict each other. This is shown as follows.

If the true prophets of the God over all should say that God would be a slave, or always be sick, or die, these things will happen to God, for the prophets of the great God must speak without falsehood. But also, if the true prophets of the God over all say these same things, then, since what is impossible by nature is not true, what the prophets say would not happen to God. Now when two conditionals end in statements that contradict each other, by the theorem called the argument from two conditionals, the antecedent common to both conditionals is refuted. Here that antecedent is that the prophets foretell that the great God will be a slave, or fall sick, or die. The conclusion is therefore: the prophets did not, then, foretell that the great God would be a slave, or fall sick, or die. And the argument falls under a mode of this kind: if the first, then the second; if the first, then not the second; therefore not the first.

The Stoics also apply this mode to a concrete case, saying: if you know that you are dead, you are dead; if you know that you are dead, you are not dead; and it follows: therefore you do not know that you are dead. They establish the conditionals in this way. If you know that you are dead, what you know is so; therefore it is so that you are dead. And again: if you know that you are not dead, and what you know is so, you are not dead; and since a dead man knows nothing, it is plain that if you know that you are dead, you are not dead. And from both conditionals there follows, as I said before: therefore you do not know that you are dead. Something like this holds also for Celsus’s hypothesis, in the words of his that we set out above.

The prophets foretold the death of a man§16

16But not even the things we took up by way of hypothesis are like the prophecies about Jesus. For the prophecies did not foretell that God would be crucified. Of him who took death upon himself they say: “And we saw him, and he had no form or beauty; but his form was without honour, falling short of the sons of men; a man stricken and in pain, and knowing how to bear weakness” (Isaiah 53:2–3). See, then, how plainly they have called a man the one who suffered human things. And Jesus himself, knowing exactly that what was dying was a man, says to those plotting against him: “But now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth which I heard from God” (John 8:40).

But if there was something divine in the man understood in him, namely the Only-begotten of God and “the firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15), who says “I am the truth” (John 14:6), and “I am the life” (John 11:25), and “I am the door” (John 10:9), and “I am the way” (John 14:6), and “I am the living bread that came down from heaven” (John 6:51), then surely the account of him and of his essence is a different one from the account of the man understood in Jesus.

That is why not even the very simplest Christians, who have not been trained in critical reasoning, would say that the truth died, or the life, or the way, or the living bread that came down from heaven, or the resurrection. For he who, in the man seen in Jesus, taught the words “I am the resurrection” (John 11:25) says that he himself is the resurrection. Indeed, none of us is so witless as to say: “The life has died,” or “The resurrection has died.” Celsus’s hypothesis would have had some ground if we claimed that the prophets had foretold that God the Word would die, or the truth, or the life, or the resurrection, or any other of the things which the Son of God says he is.

What the prophets foretold was worthy of God§17

17In this passage, then, Celsus speaks the truth on one point only: “But the prophets would not foretell this, for it is evil and unholy.” And what is “this” but that the great God will be a slave or will die? What the prophets prophesied is worthy of God: that a certain “radiance” and “imprint” (Hebrews 1:3) of the divine nature would come to dwell in this life together with the holy soul of Jesus as it became man, in order to sow a word that makes kin to the God of the universe the one who receives it into his own soul, tends it, and brings it all to completion. That word holds in itself the power of God the Word, who was to be in a human body and soul. Yet it will be in such a way that his rays are not shut up in him alone, and it is not said that the light which gives these rays, being God the Word, is nowhere else.

The things concerning Jesus, then, in so far as they are understood to have been done by the Godhead in him, are holy and do not conflict with the notion of the divine. But in so far as he was a man, adorned more than any other man by the highest share in the very Word and the very Wisdom, he endured, as one wise and perfect, what had to be endured by one who does all things on behalf of the whole human race, or even of rational beings.

And there is nothing absurd in the man’s having died, and in his death not only standing as an example of dying for the sake of godliness, but also having brought about the beginning and the advance of the destruction of the evil one, the devil, who had held the whole earth as his domain. The signs of his overthrow are those who, through the coming of Jesus, have everywhere escaped the demons that held them, and who, having been freed from slavery under them, devote themselves to God and to a godliness toward him that grows purer day by day, as far as they are able.

Celsus sets Moses against Jesus§18

18Next after this Celsus says something like the following: “Will they not consider this point again? If the prophets of the God of the Jews foretold that this man would be his Son, how is it that through Moses he lays down that they are to be rich and hold power and fill the earth and slaughter their enemies young and old and kill them along with their whole race, which he himself also does before the eyes of the Jews, as Moses says, and besides this threatens outright, if they do not obey, to treat them as he treats their enemies (Numbers 33:56); while his Son, then, the Nazarene man, lays down contrary laws: that the man who is rich or loves power or lays claim to wisdom or glory has no access to the Father (Matthew 19:24), that one must take no more thought for food and storehouse than ‘the ravens’ do (Luke 12:24), and less for clothing than ‘the lilies’ (Luke 12:27), and that to one who has struck once one must offer oneself to be struck again (Luke 6:29)? Which of them is lying, Moses or Jesus? Or did the Father, when he sent this man, forget what commands he had given to Moses? Or did he condemn his own laws and change his mind, and is he now sending his messenger with the opposite charge?”

In saying this, Celsus, who professes to know everything, has made the mistake of a complete layman. As to the meaning of the Scriptures, he has supposed that the law and the prophets hold no deeper sense beyond the words taken by the letter. He does not see that Scripture would not have promised bodily wealth to those who lived rightly in a way so plainly unconvincing, when the most righteous men are shown to have lived in extreme poverty. The prophets, at any rate, who received the divine Spirit because they lived purely, “went about in sheepskins and goatskins, in want, afflicted, ill-treated, wandering in deserts and mountains and caves and the holes of the earth” (Hebrews 11:37–38); for “many are the afflictions of the righteous” (Psalm 34:19), as the psalmist says.

If Celsus did read the law of Moses, he probably supposed that the words “You shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow” (Deuteronomy 15:6), spoken to the one who keeps the law, meant this: that the righteous man is told, by way of promise, that he will grow so rich in blind wealth that, because of the abundance of his money, he will lend not only to Jews, and not just to one other nation, or a second, or a third, but to many. How much money, then, would the righteous man have possessed, having received it as the wage of his righteousness according to the law, so that he could lend “to many nations”? It follows from such an interpretation that one must also suppose that the righteous man never borrows, since it is written: “But you shall not borrow.”

Did the nation, then, remain for so long a time in the worship of God according to Moses, while it plainly saw, so far as Celsus’s view goes, that the lawgiver was lying? For no one is recorded to have grown so rich that he lent “to many nations”. But it is not plausible that they would have fought for the law if they had been taught to understand it as Celsus thought, and plainly saw that the law’s promises were false. And if someone brings forward the recorded sins of the people as proof that they despised the law, perhaps because they had condemned it as lying, we must tell him that he should also read of the times in which the whole people is recorded, after doing evil before the Lord (Judges 2:11), to have turned to the better and to the worship of God according to the law.

Promises that cannot be taken literally§19

19Moreover, if the law promised them dominion when it said, “You shall rule over many nations, but they shall not rule over you” (Deuteronomy 15:6), and nothing deeper is meant by these words, it is clear that the people would have condemned the promises of the law all the more. Celsus paraphrases certain words which suggest that the whole earth will be filled by the Hebrew seed. As a matter of history, this has come about after the coming of Jesus, because God was angry, if I may use that word, rather than because he was granting a blessing.

As for its being said to the Jews, by way of promise, that they would slaughter their enemies, we must say that anyone who reads and attends carefully to the words would find the literal interpretation impossible. For the present it is enough to cite from the Psalms the way in which the righteous man is introduced as saying, among other things, this too: “In the mornings I killed all the sinners of the earth, to destroy from the city of the Lord all who work lawlessness” (Psalm 101:8).

Consider, then, the wording and the frame of mind of the speaker. After first telling of virtuous deeds, which lie open to anyone who wishes to read them, could he go on to state, as something literally possible, that at no other time of day than the early morning he slew “all the sinners of the earth”, so as to leave none of them alive? And did he really destroy from Jerusalem every single man who worked “lawlessness”? And you would find many such sayings in the law as well, such as “We did not leave any of them alive” (Deuteronomy 2:34).

The law in letter and in meaning§20

20Celsus also cites the warning given them beforehand, that if they did not obey the law they would suffer the same things they were doing to their enemies. Before Celsus sets beside these passages, and puts to use, what he thinks are contradictions of the law drawn from the teaching of Christ, we must speak about what has been said so far.

We say, then, that the law is twofold: one law according to the letter, the other according to the meaning, as some of those before us have also taught. The law according to the letter is said to be “statutes not good” and “commandments not good” (Ezekiel 20:25), not so much by us as by God, who speaks in one of the prophets; but the law according to the meaning is said by the same prophet, speaking in the person of God, to be “good statutes” and “good commandments” (Ezekiel 20:11). For the prophet does not openly contradict himself in the same place. In keeping with this, Paul too said that “the letter” kills, which is the same as the law according to the letter, but “the spirit” gives life (2 Corinthians 3:6), which is equivalent to the law according to the meaning.

Indeed, one can find in Paul something that answers to what might be thought contradictions in the prophet. In one place Ezekiel says, “I gave them statutes that were not good and commandments that were not good, by which they shall not live” (Ezekiel 20:25), and in another, “I gave them good statutes and good commandments, by which they shall live” (Ezekiel 20:11), or at any rate words equivalent to these. So too Paul, where he wishes to disparage what belongs to the letter of the law, says: “If the ministry of death, carved in letters on stones, came in glory, so that the children of Israel could not gaze at the face of Moses because of the glory of his face, a glory that was passing away, how much more will the ministry of the Spirit be in glory?” (2 Corinthians 3:7–8). But where he admires and approves the law, he calls it spiritual, saying, “We know that the law is spiritual” (Romans 7:14); and he approves it in the words, “So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good” (Romans 7:12).

The wealth that sees§21

21If, then, the wording of the law promises wealth to the righteous, let Celsus, following the “letter” that kills (2 Corinthians 3:6), suppose that the promise speaks of blind wealth; but we take it to mean the wealth that sees sharply (Plato, Laws 631c): the wealth by which a man is rich “in all speech and all knowledge” (1 Corinthians 1:5), and the wealth meant when we charge “those who are rich in this present age not to be haughty, nor to set their hope on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides all things for enjoyment; to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous, ready to share” (1 Timothy 6:17–18). For “the wealth” that consists in true goods “is the ransom of a man’s soul”, according to Solomon, while the poverty opposed to it is ruinous; because of it “the poor man does not stand up to a threat” (Proverbs 13:8).

We must speak about dominion in the same way as we have spoken about wealth: the dominion by which “one” righteous man is said to pursue “a thousand, and two” to put “tens of thousands” to flight (Deuteronomy 32:30). If this is how the passages about wealth are understood, see whether it is not in keeping with God’s promise that the man who is rich “in all speech and all knowledge” (1 Corinthians 1:5), and in all wisdom, and in every good work, lends “to many nations” (Deuteronomy 15:6) out of his wealth in the word and in wisdom and knowledge, just as Paul lent when, “from Jerusalem and round about” as far as “Illyricum”, he fully preached “the gospel of Christ” (Romans 15:19) to all the nations he visited. And since divine things were made known to him by revelation (Ephesians 3:3), his soul being enlightened by the divinity of the Word, for this reason he himself did not borrow, nor did he need any man to minister the word to him.

And since it is also written in the same way, “You shall rule over many nations, but they shall not rule over you” (Deuteronomy 15:6), Paul, by the dominion that comes from the word, brought those from the nations under the teaching of Christ Jesus and ruled over them, never standing in the place of one subject to men as though they were his betters. In this way, too, he filled the earth.

Slaying the infants of Babylon§22

22And if we must also explain the slaughtering, and with it the righteous man’s power in all things, we must say that when he says, “In the mornings I killed all the sinners of the earth, to destroy from the city of the Lord all who work lawlessness” (Psalm 101:8), by “earth” he meant figuratively the flesh, whose “mind” “is enmity against God” (Romans 8:7), and by the city “of the Lord” his own soul, in which there was “a temple of God” (1 Corinthians 3:16), since he had received a right opinion and conception of God, one admired by all who saw it.

So at the moment when the rays of the sun “of righteousness” (Malachi 4:2) shone upon his soul, as though empowered and strengthened by them, he slew every “mind of the flesh” (Romans 8:7), which is called “sinners of the earth”, and destroyed from “the city of the Lord” within his own soul all the thoughts “that work lawlessness” and the notions hostile to the truth. In this way too the righteous destroy every living remnant (Deuteronomy 2:34) of the enemies, the ones that come from wickedness, so that not even an infant evil, just beginning to sprout, is left.

So too we understand the text in the hundred and thirty-sixth psalm, which runs thus: “O wretched daughter of Babylon, blessed is he who will repay you the recompense with which you repaid us; blessed is he who will seize your infants and dash them against the rock” (Psalm 137:8–9). For the “infants of Babylon”, a name that is interpreted “confusion”, are the confusing thoughts arising from wickedness that have just sprung up and are rising in the soul. The man who seizes them, so as to break their heads against the firmness and strength of the word, dashes “the infants” of “Babylon” “against the rock”, and for this reason becomes “blessed”.

Let God, then, command that the things of wickedness be slain “young and old” and “along with their whole race”; in this he teaches nothing contrary to what Jesus proclaimed. And let God bring about, “before the eyes” of those who are Jews “in secret” (Romans 2:29), the destruction of the enemies and of all that comes from wickedness. And let this be what is meant by saying that those who do not obey the law and word of God, having become like the enemies and been shaped by wickedness, shall suffer these things, which those who have fallen away from the words of God deserve to suffer.

Wealth, rule and wisdom in the teaching of Jesus§23

23From these points too, then, it is clear how Jesus, the “Nazarene” man, does not lay down contrary laws in what he said about wealth and about those who were amazed, namely, that it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God (Mark 10:23–26; Luke 18:24). This holds whether one takes the “rich man” more simply as the one who is distracted by wealth and hindered by it, as by thorns, from bearing the fruits of the word (Matthew 13:22), or as the one who is rich in false doctrines, of whom it is written in Proverbs: “Better a poor man who is righteous than a rich man who is a liar” (Proverbs 19:22).

It is likely that Celsus took the idea that Jesus forbade the love of rule from the sayings “Whoever wishes to be first among you, let him be the servant of all” (Mark 10:43–44; compare Mark 9:35), “The rulers of the nations lord it over them” (Matthew 20:25), and “Those who exercise authority among them are called benefactors” (Luke 22:25). This must not be thought contrary to “You shall rule over many nations, but they shall not rule over you” (Deuteronomy 15:6), especially in view of the explanations already given of that text.

Next after these points Celsus throws in something about wisdom, supposing that Jesus teaches that the wise man has no access to the Father. Let us say to him: Which wise man? If he means the one who has been shaped by what is called the wisdom “of this world,” which is foolishness “with God” (1 Corinthians 3:19), we too shall say that the man who is wise in this way has no access to the Father. But if one understands Wisdom to be Christ, since Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:24), we say not only that the man who is wise in this way has access to the Father; we also say that the one adorned with the gift called the word of “wisdom,” which is given through the Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:8), far surpasses those who are not such.

Glory, food and clothing in the law and the Gospel§24

24Again, we say that laying claim to glory from men is forbidden not by the teaching of Jesus alone but also by the old Scripture. One of the prophets, at any rate, calling down a curse on himself if he should be guilty of those sins, says that worldly glory too would come upon him as the greatest of evils. He speaks thus: “O Lord my God, if I have done this, if there is injustice in my hands, if I have repaid with evil those who repaid me, then may I fall away empty before my enemies; may the enemy pursue my soul and overtake it, and trample my life into the ground, and make my glory dwell in the dust” (Psalm 7:3–5).

Nor, again, are these sayings contrary to the blessings in the Law, which teach that the righteous man eats and is filled (compare Leviticus 26:5; Deuteronomy 11:15): “Do not be anxious about what you will eat or what you will drink. Consider the birds of the air,” or, “Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, and our heavenly Father feeds them. How much more do you surpass the birds?” (Matthew 6:25–26; Luke 12:24), and “Why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field” (Matthew 6:28), and what follows. Nor are they contrary to what Solomon said in these words: “A righteous man eats and fills his soul, but the souls of the ungodly are in want” (Proverbs 13:25).

For we must see that the blessing in the Law makes known the food of the soul, with which it is not the composite man that is filled, but the soul alone. From the Gospel, however, we should perhaps take something deeper, and perhaps also something simpler: that one must not let the soul be distracted by cares about food and clothing, but, practising plain living, be confident of being provided for by God, if one takes thought only for what is necessary.

Turning the other cheek in the old Scripture§25

25Celsus, then, without setting the passages from the Law that seem contrary beside those from the Gospel, also says this: “to let the man who has struck once strike again.” We shall reply that we know the saying “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” spoken to the men of old (Matthew 5:38; Exodus 21:24), and that we have also read “But I say to you” (Matthew 5:39): “To the one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also” (Luke 6:29).

But since Celsus, I think, has had his ears filled by those who divide the deity of the Gospel from the deity of the Law, and so puts forward such things, we must say in answer to his argument that the old writings too know the saying “To the one who strikes you on the right cheek, offer the other also” (Matthew 5:39). At any rate, it is written in the Lamentations of Jeremiah: “It is good for a man when he bears a yoke in his youth. He will sit alone and keep silent, because he has taken it upon himself. He will give his cheek to the one who strikes him, and he will be filled with reproaches” (Lamentations 3:27–28, 30).

The Gospel of God does not issue orders contrary to the God of the Law, not even about the blow on the cheek taken literally. Neither of the two is lying, neither Moses nor Jesus; nor did the Father, in sending Jesus, forget what he had commanded Moses; nor indeed did he condemn his own laws, change his mind, and send his messenger for the opposite purpose.

Why the law’s commonwealth gave way to the Gospel§26

26If we must say at least a little about the difference between the order of life the Jews once followed under Moses and the one Christians now seek to achieve according to the teaching of Jesus, we shall say this. It was not fitting for the calling of the Gentiles, who are placed under the Romans, to live according to the law of Moses taken to the letter; nor, on the other hand, could the Jews of old have kept the structure of their commonwealth intact if, let us suppose, they had obeyed the way of life set by the Gospel.

For Christians could not, according to the law of Moses, put enemies to death, or those who had acted against the law and been judged deserving of death by fire or by stoning; seeing that not even the Jews, though they wish to, are able to carry out these things according to that law, as the law commanded. Again, if you forbid the Jews of that time, who had a commonwealth and a land of their own, to march out against their enemies, to go to war for their ancestral ways, and to put to death or in some way punish those who had committed adultery or murder or done anything like these, nothing is left but for them to be utterly destroyed all at once when their enemies attacked the nation, since their own law would have hamstrung them and prevented them from defending themselves against their enemies.

And providence, which of old gave the Law and now has given the Gospel of Jesus Christ, not wishing the Jewish order to prevail any longer, destroyed their city and their temple, and the service of God that was carried on at the temple through sacrifices and the prescribed worship. And just as, not wishing those things to be carried on any longer, it destroyed them, in the same way it has made the Christian cause grow, and day by day that cause has advanced in numbers and now also in freedom of speech; and this although countless obstacles have arisen to keep the teaching of Jesus from being sown across the world. But since it was God who willed that those from the Gentiles too should be helped by the teaching of Jesus the Christ, every human plan against Christians has been brought down; and the more kings and rulers of nations and peoples everywhere humbled them, the more they multiplied “and grew exceedingly strong” (Exodus 1:7, 12).

Christians do not say that God has a body§27

27After this, Celsus at some length sets down, as if they were said by us, things about God that we do not say: as though God were by nature a body, and a body of human form. And he wishes to overturn positions we have not laid down, which it is superfluous to quote, or his refutation of them either. For if we said what he claims we assert about God, and he were taking his stand against that, we would have had to set down his words, to establish our own position and to undo his. But if he strings together for himself things that he either heard from no one, or, granting even that he heard them, heard from some simple and guileless people who do not know the intent of our teaching, we need not busy ourselves with what is not necessary.

For our Scriptures plainly say that God is incorporeal. That is why “no one has ever seen God” (John 1:18), and “the firstborn of all creation” is said to be “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), as if it said “of the incorporeal God.” We have also dealt with God adequately in what came before, when we examined how we understand “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24).

The better land promised to the righteous§28

28After what he says about God, in which he slanders us, he asks us where we expect to go, and what hope we have. And as though we had answered, he sets down supposed words of ours, which run: “To another land, better than this one.” To this he says: “Divine men of old have told of a happy life for happy souls. Some named it the Islands of the Blessed, others the Elysian Plain, from the release from the evils of this world, as Homer too says: ‘But the immortals will send you to the Elysian Plain and the ends of the earth, where life is easiest’ (Homer, Odyssey 4.563–565). And Plato, who holds the soul to be immortal, openly calls that region to which it is sent a ‘land,’ in these words: ‘that it is something very great, and that we who dwell from the Phasis to the Pillars of Heracles inhabit a small part of it, living around the sea like ants or frogs around a marsh, and that many others dwell elsewhere in many such places. For everywhere around the earth there are many hollows of every kind, in shape and in size, into which water, mist and air have flowed together; but the earth itself lies pure in the pure heaven’ (Plato, Phaedo 109a–c).”

Celsus supposes, then, that we have taken what we say about the other land, better than this one and far superior to it, from certain men whom he regards as divine men of old, and above all from Plato, who in the Phaedo discoursed as a philosopher about a pure earth lying in the pure heaven. He does not see that Moses, who is far older even than the writings of the Greeks, brought in God promising the holy land, “good and broad, flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8), to those who had lived according to his law; and not, as some think, promising as the “good” land the Judaea that is reckoned to be here below, which itself also lies within the earth that was cursed from the beginning in the works of Adam’s transgression.

For the words “Cursed is the earth in your works; in sorrows you shall eat of it all the days of your life” (Genesis 3:17) were spoken about the whole earth. Every man who has died “in Adam” (1 Corinthians 15:22) eats of it “in sorrows,” that is, in toils, and he eats of it “all the days of” his “life.” And because the whole earth is “cursed,” it “will bring forth thorns and thistles” (Genesis 3:18) “all the days of the life” of him who was cast out of paradise in Adam (Genesis 3:23–24); and every man eats his bread “in the sweat of” his “face, until he returns to the earth from which he was taken” (Genesis 3:19).

Everything in this passage calls for long discussion, which could be worked out to make its words clear. For the present we have been content with a few remarks, wishing to free from distraction anyone who supposes that what is said about the good land which God promises to the righteous was said about the land of Judaea.

The promised land is not Judaea§29

29If, then, the whole “earth” is itself “cursed in the works” (Genesis 3:17) of Adam and of those who died in him (1 Corinthians 15:22), it is clear that all its parts share in the curse as well. Among them is the land of Judaea, so that the words “into a good and large land, into a land flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8) cannot be fitted to it. This holds even if Judaea and Jerusalem are shown to be, in a symbolic way, a shadow of the good and large land, pure and lying in a pure heaven, in which is the heavenly Jerusalem. Of this Jerusalem the apostle speaks as one who had been raised together with Christ and was seeking the things above (Colossians 3:1), and who had found a meaning bound to no Jewish fable. He says: “But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels in festal gathering” (Hebrews 12:22).

So that anyone may be persuaded that what we say about the good and large land in Moses is not contrary to the intention of the divine Spirit, let him give his attention to all the prophets. They teach the return to Jerusalem of those who have wandered and fallen away from it, and, in a word, of those who are being restored to what is called the place and city of God in the words of the one who said, “His place is in holy peace” (Psalm 76:2), and who also says, “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God, on his holy mountain, well rooted, with the joy of the whole earth” (Psalm 48:1–2).

But for the present it is enough to set out the words of the thirty-sixth Psalm (Psalm 37), which speak thus about the land of the righteous: “But those who wait for the Lord, they shall inherit the land” (Psalm 37:9); and a little after, “But the meek shall inherit the land and delight in abundance of peace” (Psalm 37:11); and a little after, “Those who bless him shall inherit the land” (Psalm 37:22); and again, “The righteous shall inherit the land and dwell upon it for ever and ever” (Psalm 37:29). And see whether, to those who are able to hear these words in the same Psalm, it is not made plain that the earth is pure in the pure heaven: “Wait for the Lord and keep his way, and he will exalt you to inherit the land” (Psalm 37:34).

Plato’s precious stones and the city in Isaiah§30

30It seems to me that what Plato says about the stones thought precious here, which are said to have a kind of outflow from the stones in the better earth, was also taken from what is recorded in Isaiah about the city of God. Of that city it is written: “I will make your battlements jasper, and your stones stones of crystal, and your enclosing wall choice stones” (Isaiah 54:12); and again, “I will make your foundations sapphire” (Isaiah 54:11).

Now those who have taken the philosopher’s words in a loftier sense expound the myth in Plato allegorically. As for the prophecies, from which we conjecture that Plato too borrowed, they will be explained by those who have lived as kin to the prophets and filled with God, and who have given all their time to the study of the sacred writings; and they will explain them to those who are fitted for it by purity of life and by love of learning about divine things.

Our own aim was to show that we did not take what we say about the holy land from the Greeks or from Plato. They, rather, being later not only than Moses, the most ancient of all, but also than most of the prophets, either misheard certain people who spoke in riddles about such things, or else came upon the sacred Scriptures and, altering what they found on these matters, said things of this kind about the better earth. Haggai shows clearly that “the dry land” is one thing and “the earth” another, giving the name dry land to this ground on which we are. He speaks thus: “Once more I will shake the heaven and the earth and the dry land and the sea” (Haggai 2:6).

True realities bear the names of earthly things§31

31Celsus himself puts off the explanation of the myth in Plato, which is found in the Phaedo, saying: “What he means to show by these words is not easy for everyone to know, unless one were able to understand what it is that he says: ‘through weakness and slowness we are not able to pass through to the uttermost air’; and ‘if one’s nature were able to bear the sight, one would know that that is the true heaven and the true light’ (Plato, Phaedo 109d–110a).” In the same way we too, thinking that it does not belong to the present treatise to make clear what concerns the holy and good land and the city of God in it, put this off to our commentaries on the prophets. We have already given a partial account, as far as we could, of the city of God in what we have written on the forty-fifth Psalm and the forty-seventh Psalm (Psalms 46 and 48).

The most ancient teaching of Moses and the prophets knows that all the true things bear the same names as the more common things here. For example, it speaks of a “true light” (John 1:9), and a “heaven” other than “the firmament” (Genesis 1:1, 1:8), and a sun “of righteousness” (Malachi 4:2) other than the sun we perceive with the senses. And, in a word, to set them apart from the things of sense, none of which is true, it says: “God, true are his works” (Deuteronomy 32:4). It applies the name “works of God” to some things, and the so-called “works of his hands” to lesser ones. At any rate, when it reproaches certain people through Isaiah, it says: “They do not look upon the works of the Lord, and they do not consider the works of his hands” (Isaiah 5:12). So much for this.

Resurrection, not transmigration§32

32The doctrine of the resurrection is large and hard to explain. If any doctrine needs a wise man, and one far advanced, it needs one to set forth what is worthy of God and the grandeur of the doctrine, which teaches that what the Scriptures call the tent of the soul has the character of a seed: the tent in which the righteous groan, being burdened, not wishing to put it off but to put on over it (2 Corinthians 5:4). Celsus did not understand this doctrine; because he heard about it from unlearned people who could not set it forth with any reasoning, he mocks what is said. So, in addition to what we said about it earlier, it is useful to note only this in reply to his argument: we do not speak of resurrection, as Celsus thinks, because we have misheard the doctrine of transmigration of souls.

We speak of it because we know that the soul, which in its own nature is bodiless and invisible, when it is in any bodily place, needs a body suited to the nature of that place. This body it wears, at times having stripped off what was necessary before but is superfluous for its second state, and at times having put it on over what it had before, since it needs a better garment for the purer, ethereal, and heavenly places. So, when it came to birth here, it put off the membrane that was useful for its life in the womb of the mother who carried it, while it was there; and beneath that it had put on what was necessary for one who was to live on earth.

Then again, since there is a “tent” with an earthly house that is in some way necessary to the tent, the Scriptures say that the earthly house “of the tent” is dissolved, but that the tent puts on over itself “a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Corinthians 5:1). And the men of God say that “the perishable” puts on “imperishability,” which differs from the imperishable, and that “the mortal” puts on “immortality” (1 Corinthians 15:53), which is something other than the immortal. For as wisdom is related to the wise, and righteousness to the righteous, and peace to the peaceful, so imperishability is related to the imperishable, and immortality to the immortal. See, then, to what the passage urges us, when it speaks of putting on imperishability and immortality. Like garments on one who has put them on and is wrapped in them, these do not allow the one who wears them to perish or die.

We have ventured even this much because of the man who did not understand what we mean by the resurrection, and for that reason laughs and mocks at a doctrine he does not know.

God is known by the mind and seen by a pure heart§33

33Supposing that we hold the doctrine of the resurrection for the sake of knowing and seeing God, Celsus strings together whatever he likes, and says something like this: “When they are shut out on every side and refuted, they come back again, as if they had heard nothing, to the same question: ‘How then are we to know and see God? And how are we to go to him?’”

Let anyone who wishes know, then, that even if for other purposes we need a body, because we are in a bodily place, and a body suited to the nature of that bodily place, and even if, since we need the body, we put on over the tent what we have described, yet for the knowledge of God we have no need of a body at all. For what knows God is not the eye of the body but the mind, which sees what is “in the image” (Genesis 1:26–27) of the Creator, and which by the providence of God has received the power to know God.

And what sees God is a pure heart, from which there no longer “come forth evil thoughts,” no “murders,” no “adulteries,” no “fornications,” no “thefts,” no “false witness,” no “blasphemies” (Matthew 15:19), no “evil eye” (Mark 7:22), nor anything else that is wrong. That is why it is said: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). But since our own free choice is not enough for us to have a heart wholly “pure,” and we need God to create it so, the one who prays with understanding says: “Create in me a pure heart, O God” (Psalm 51:10).

Spiritual eyes, ears, and hands§34

34But neither shall we ask anyone, as though God were in a place, and say: “How are we to go to him?” For God is greater than every place and contains all things whatever, and there is nothing that contains God. So the command given us, “You shall walk after the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 13:4), does not tell us to go to God in a bodily way; nor is it in a bodily way that the prophet, who clung to God, says in his prayer: “My soul has clung close after you” (Psalm 63:8).

Celsus, then, lies about us when he says that we expect to see God with the eyes of the body, to hear his voice with our ears, and to touch him with hands perceptible to the senses. But we know that the divine words speak of eyes that bear the same name as the eyes of the body, and likewise of ears and of hands, and, what is more surprising still, of a sense more divine than, and different in kind from, the one that most people ordinarily call by that name.

For when the prophet says, “Uncover my eyes, and I will consider your wonders out of your law” (Psalm 119:18), or, “The commandment of the Lord shines far, giving light to the eyes” (Psalm 19:8), or, “Give light to my eyes, lest I ever sleep in death” (Psalm 13:3), no one is so dull-witted as to think that “the wonders” of the divine “law” are perceived with the eyes of the body, or that the Lord’s commandment gives light to the eyes of the body, or that the sleep that brings on death befalls the eyes of the body.

Again, when our Saviour says, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” (Luke 8:8), even an ordinary person understands that this is said of more divine ears. And when it is said that “the word of the Lord” came “by the hand” of Jeremiah the prophet (Jeremiah 37:2), or of someone else (Haggai 1:1), or that the law came “by the hand” of Moses (Leviticus 26:46), or, “With my hands I sought God, and I was not deceived” (Psalm 77:2), no one is so foolish as not to take it that there are hands so called in a figurative sense. Of these John too says: “Our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life” (1 John 1:1).

And if you wish to learn from the sacred writings about the better sense as well, the one that is not bodily, hear Solomon saying in Proverbs: “You will find a divine sense” (Proverbs 2:5).

Oracles of demons and the risen Jesus§35

35We have no need, then, since we seek God in this way, to go off where Celsus sends us, to Trophonius, to Amphiaraus and to Mopsus, where he says gods in human form are to be seen, and, as Celsus puts it, “not deceptive but even plainly visible.” For we know that these are demons, fed on the savour of burnt fat, on blood, and on the fumes that rise from the sacrifices, and so held fast in prisons built from their own craving; these the Greeks have taken to be temples of gods. But we know that such places are the dwellings of deceiving demons.

After this Celsus speaks with malice about the gods in human form already mentioned, as he calls them, saying that one will see them “not slipping by once, like the one who deceived these people, but always conversing with any who wish.” By these words he seems to have thought that Jesus, who appeared to his disciples after his resurrection from the dead, was a phantom, as though he had slipped by in order to be seen by them; while those he named gods in human form he supposes to converse always with any who wish.

But how can a phantom which, as he himself says, slipped by to deceive those who saw it, go on after that sight to accomplish so much, to turn the souls of such people, and to persuade them that they must do everything in a way pleasing to God, as men who will be judged? And how does what he calls a phantom drive out demons and perform other works not to be despised, not confined to one allotted place, as his gods in human form are, but reaching through the whole inhabited world, and by its own divinity gathering and drawing all whom it finds to have turned themselves toward the good life?

Words put in Christian mouths§36

36After this, which we have answered as well as we could, Celsus again says something like this: “And again they will say: ‘How will they know God if they do not grasp him by sense? What can be learned without sense?’” Then, in answer to this, he says: “This is the voice not of a man, nor of the soul, but of the flesh. Still, let them hear, if they can understand anything at all, cowardly and body-loving race that they are. If you close off sense and look up with the mind, and turn from the flesh and rouse the eyes of the soul, only so will you see God. And if you seek a guide for this way, you must flee the deceivers and sorcerers and those who woo men to idols, so that you may not be utterly ridiculous, blaspheming as idols the other gods, the ones that are displayed, while you worship one more wretched even than the real idols, no longer even an idol but in truth a dead man, and seek a father like him.”

First we must say, in reply to the speech he composes in our name, putting into our mouths words as though we spoke them in defence of the resurrection of the flesh, that the merit of one who writes a speech in another’s character is to keep the purpose and the character of the person represented, and the fault is to put into the speaker’s mouth words that do not fit him. Equally to blame are those who, in such speeches, put philosophy into the mouths of barbarians and uneducated people, or of household slaves, who have never heard philosophical discourse nor ever spoken it well: philosophy which the writer has learned, but which the character represented could not be expected to know. Equally to blame, again, are those who put into the mouths of characters presented in the story as wise and as knowing divine things the kind of words that uneducated people say from common passions and utter out of ignorance.

That is why Homer is admired in many places, for keeping the characters of his heroes as he set them up from the beginning, such as that of Nestor, or Odysseus, or Diomedes, or Agamemnon, or Telemachus, or Penelope, or any of the rest; while Euripides is mocked in comedy by Aristophanes as one who speaks out of season, because he often put speeches about doctrines he had learned from Anaxagoras or from one of the other wise men into the mouths of barbarian women or of slaves.

A speech that fits no Christian§37

37If, then, such is the merit in writing speeches for characters and such the fault, who could not laugh at Celsus, and with good reason, when he puts into the mouths of Christians things that Christians do not say? For if he was making up the words of simple folk, how could such people distinguish sense from mind and the objects of sense from the objects of thought, and teach, like the Stoics who do away with intelligible realities, that whatever is grasped is grasped by the senses and that all grasping depends on the senses? But if he is making up the words of those who study philosophy and who examine carefully, as far as they are able, the things of Christ, he has not given them words that fit them either.

For no one who has learned that God is invisible, and that there are some invisible created things, that is, intelligible ones (Colossians 1:15–16), would say, as though in defence of the resurrection: “How will they know God if they do not grasp him by the senses?” or “What can be learned without sense?” And it is written, not in writings kept apart and read only by a few lovers of learning, but in the more commonly read ones, that “the invisible things of God, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made” (Romans 1:20). From this we may know that, even if people in this life must begin from the senses and the objects of sense when they are going to rise up to the nature of intelligible things, they must certainly not remain among the objects of sense. Nor will they say that it is impossible to learn intelligible things without sense; and if they do use the words “Who can learn without sense?”, they will show that Celsus had no good reason to add to them “the voice not of a man, nor of the soul, but of the flesh.”

God known by the mind made in his image§38

38We say, then, that the God of the universe is mind, or beyond mind and being, simple, invisible and without body; and so we would say that God is grasped by nothing other than by what has been made in the image of that mind (Genesis 1:27). Now, to use Paul’s words, it is “through a mirror and in a riddle, but then face to face” (1 Corinthians 13:12). And if I say “face,” let no one misrepresent, because of the word, the sense it conveys. Let him learn instead from the words “with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, we are being transformed into the same image, from glory to glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18), that in such places it is not a face of the senses that is meant, but one understood figuratively, like the eyes and ears and all the other things we showed above to share their names with the members of the body.

Man, then, that is, the soul using a body, which is called “the inner man” (Romans 7:22; Ephesians 3:16) and also “soul,” answers not what Celsus wrote down but what the man of God himself teaches. A Christian would not use the voice of the flesh, since he has learned “by the Spirit to put to death the deeds of the body” (Romans 8:13), and “always to carry about in the body the dying of Jesus” (2 Corinthians 4:10), and “Put to death the members that are on the earth” (Colossians 3:5). He knows what is meant by “My Spirit shall not remain in these men for ever, because they are flesh” (Genesis 6:3); he understands too that “those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans 8:8); and for this reason he does everything so as no longer to be at all “in the flesh, but” only “in the Spirit” (Romans 8:9).

The two kinds of eyes§39

39Let us see, too, what he calls us to, so that we may hear from him in what way we shall know God. Here he thinks that no Christian can understand what he says, for he says: “Still, let them hear, if they can understand anything at all.” We must consider, then, what words of his he wants us to hear. The philosopher, who ought to teach us, rails at us instead; and whereas he ought to show his goodwill toward his hearers at the opening of his discourse, he calls “a cowardly race” those who go as far as death rather than renounce Christianity even in a word, and who are ready for every torment and every kind of death. He also says that we are “a body-loving race,” we who say, “Even though we once knew Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know him so no longer” (2 Corinthians 5:16), and who lay down the body for godliness so readily that a philosopher would not take off even his cloak as easily.

He says to us, then: “If you close off the senses and look up with the mind, and turn from the flesh and rouse the eye of the soul, only so will you see God.” And he thinks that this (I mean the teaching about two kinds of eyes), which he took from the Greeks, had not already been taught as philosophy among us. We must say that Moses, writing the account of the world’s making, presents man before the transgression as in one way seeing and in another not seeing. He was seeing, in what is said about the woman: “The woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasing to the eyes to look at, and beautiful to contemplate” (Genesis 3:6). He was not seeing, not only in the serpent’s words to the woman, spoken as though about blind eyes, “For God knew that on the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened” (Genesis 3:5), but also in the words “They ate, and the eyes of the two were opened” (Genesis 3:6–7).

So it was the eyes of sense that were “opened,” which they had done well to keep closed, so that they would not be distracted and hindered from seeing with the eye of the soul. But the eyes of the soul, which until then had been seeing and rejoicing in God and in his paradise, these, I think, they closed because of their sin. That is why our Saviour too, knowing that we have this twofold kind of eyes, says: “For judgement I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind” (John 9:39). By “those who do not see” he hints at the eyes of the soul, which the Word makes see; by “those who see,” at the eyes of the senses; and these the Word blinded, so that the soul might see without distraction what it ought.

In everyone, therefore, who lives as a Christian in the right way, the eye of the soul has been roused and the eye of sense has been closed; and in proportion to the rousing of the better eye and the closing of the eyes of sense, the God over all, and his Son, who is Word and Wisdom and all the rest, are understood and beheld by each.

Celsus confuses Christians with the Ophites§40

40After the passages we have examined, Celsus directs a speech as though to all Christians. If it was fitting to say it at all, it should have been said to those who admit that they are wholly foreign to the teaching of Jesus. For the Ophites, as we said earlier, who deny Jesus outright, or any others who think as they do, are the ones who traffic in idols, the deceivers and sorcerers; and they are the ones who wretchedly learn by heart the names of the doorkeepers. It is idle, then, for him to say to Christians: “And if you seek a guide for this road, you must shun the deceivers and sorcerers and those who traffic in idols.”

He does not even know that such men, sorcerers as they are, speak evil of Jesus and of all the worship of God that he taught, no less than Celsus does and together with him. Mixing us up with them in his own argument, he says: “so that you may not be utterly ridiculous, blaspheming the others, the gods that are displayed, as idols, while you revere one who is more wretched even than what are truly idols, and no longer even an idol but really a corpse, and seek a father like him.”

For that he does not know what Christians say and what is said by those who invent such myths, but supposes that the charges brought against them belong to us, and so says to us things that do not apply to us, is plain from these words: “This kind of deceit, then, and those wonderful counsellors, and the demonic words addressed to the lion, and to the amphibious one, and to the ass-shaped one, and to the others, and the marvellous doorkeepers, whose names you poor wretches learn by heart to your misery, and are grievously possessed and impaled.”

He did not see that none of those who believe that the lion-shaped, the ass-shaped and the amphibious one are doorkeepers of the ascent stands firm to the point of death, even for what seems to him to be the truth. But what we do from an excess of piety, if I may put it so, when we offer ourselves to every kind of death, and being impaled as well, he attaches to those who suffer none of these things; and to us, who are impaled for the sake of piety, he makes a reproach of their myth-making about the lion-shaped one, the amphibious one and the rest. It is not, then, because of Celsus that we shun the teaching about the lion-shaped one and the rest, for we never received any such thing to begin with. Rather, following the teaching of Jesus, we say the opposite of what they say, and we do not accept that Michael has a face of this sort, or some other of those listed earlier a face of that sort.

Which ancient guides should we follow?§41

41We must consider whom Celsus wants us to follow, as though we shall not be at a loss for ancient guides and holy men. He sends us back to “inspired poets”, as he calls them, and to “wise men and philosophers”, without giving them names; and though he promises to show us the guides, he speaks in vague terms of “the inspired poets and wise men and philosophers”. If he had given the names of each of them, it would have seemed reasonable for us to contend that he gives us guides who are blind about the truth, so that we should go astray; or, if not wholly blind, at least mistaken about many doctrines of the truth.

Whether, then, he means that Orpheus is an inspired poet, or Parmenides, or Empedocles, or even Homer himself, or Hesiod, let whoever wishes show how those who use such guides travel the road better, and are more helped in the conduct of life, than those who, through the teaching of Jesus Christ, have left behind all statues and images, and indeed all Jewish superstition too, and who, through the Word of God, look up to God alone, the Father of the Word.

And who are the wise men or the philosophers from whom Celsus wants us to hear “many divine things”? Are we to leave behind Moses, the servant of God (Numbers 12:7), and the prophets of the Maker of the universe, who in truth have spoken numberless things by inspiration? And are we to leave him who shone upon the human race and proclaimed the way of the worship of God, and who, as far as lay in him, left no one without a taste of his own mysteries? Rather, through his surpassing love for mankind he is able to give the more intelligent a theology that can lift the soul up from the things of this world; and yet no less does he come down also to the lower capacities of unlearned men and simpler women and slaves, and, in a word, of those whom no one helped but Jesus alone, so that they might live better, as far as they could, with such doctrines about God as they were able to receive.

Plato’s hidden maker and the Word made flesh§42

42Then, after this, he sends us back to Plato as to a more effective teacher of the things of theology, and sets out his words from the Timaeus, which run as follows: “Now to find the maker and father of this universe is a hard task, and having found him, it is impossible to declare him to all” (Plato, Timaeus 28c). Then he adds to these words, saying: “You see how the way of truth too is sought by seers, and how Plato knew that to walk this way is ‘impossible’ for all. But since, for this reason, wise men have devised a means by which we might grasp some idea of the Nameless and First, one that makes him plain either by synthesis applied to other things, or by analysis from them, or by analogy, and since I wish to teach what is otherwise beyond speech, I should be surprised if you were able to follow, bound as you are wholly to the flesh and seeing nothing pure.”

Plato, indeed, puts forward the passage set out above in a lofty way, and one not to be despised. But see whether the divine word does not show greater love for mankind when it presents God the Word, who was “in the beginning with God” (John 1:2), becoming flesh (John 1:14), so that the Word might be able to reach all: the very Word of whom Plato says that, for one who has found him, it is “impossible to declare him to all”.

Let Plato say, then, that “to find the maker and father of this universe” is “a hard task”, showing that it is “impossible” for human nature to find God as he deserves, or, if not as he deserves, at least more fully than the many do. If this were true, and God had in truth been found by Plato or by any of the Greeks, they would not have revered something else and called it god and bowed down to it, either abandoning him or taking alongside him things that may not be taken alongside so great a God.

But we declare that human nature is not sufficient in any way at all to seek God and find him purely, unless it is helped by the One it seeks. He is found by those who, after doing what lies in their power, confess that they need him, and he shows himself to those to whom he judges it reasonable to be seen (Wisdom of Solomon 1:2), so far as it is natural for God to be known by man, and for the soul of man, while it is still in a body, to know God.

He who has seen me has seen the Father§43

43Moreover, when Plato says that “having found” “the maker and father of the universe”, it is “impossible to declare him to all”, he does not say that he is beyond speech and nameless, but that, being expressible, he can be spoken of to a few. Then Celsus, as though he had forgotten the words of Plato that he quoted, says that God is nameless, in these words: “But since, for this reason, wise men have devised a means by which we might grasp some idea of the Nameless and First.”

We, however, say that not only God is beyond speech, but also other things that come after him. Paul, straining to point to these, says: “He heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter” (2 Corinthians 12:4). He uses “heard” in place of “understood”, as in the saying, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” (Luke 8:8; Matthew 11:15).

As for “the maker and father of the universe”, we say that to see him is “a hard task”. Yet he is seen, not only in keeping with the words, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8), but also in keeping with what is said by the image “of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15): “He who has seen me has seen the Father who sent me” (John 14:9; John 12:45). For no one with any sense would say that in these words Jesus was referring to his body, which could be perceived by the senses and was visible to men, when he said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father who sent me.” For on that reading all who said, “Crucify, crucify him” (Luke 23:21), would have seen God the Father, and so would Pilate, who received authority over his human nature; and that is absurd.

That the words “He who has seen me has seen the Father who sent me” are not to be taken in the commoner sense is clear from what was said to Philip: “Have I been with you so long, and you have not known me, Philip?” (John 14:9). He said this to him when he made the request, “Show us the Father, and it is enough for us” (John 14:8). Whoever, then, has understood how we must take what is said about the only-begotten God (John 1:18), the Son of God, “the firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15), inasmuch as “the Word” became “flesh” (John 1:14), will see how anyone who has seen the image “of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15) will know “the Father and maker of this universe”.

Knowledge of God is a gift of grace§44

44Celsus, then, thinks that God is known either by synthesis applied to other things, like what geometers call synthesis, or by analysis from other things, or else by analogy, like the analogy the same geometers use; if, that is, anyone can come in this way to the threshold of the Good (Plato, Philebus 64c). But the Word of God, who said, “No one has known the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son reveals him” (Matthew 11:27), declares that God is known by a divine grace, which comes to be in the soul not without God, but with a kind of inspiration.

For it is likely that the knowledge of God is greater than human nature can reach, which is why there are so many errors among men about God; but that, by the goodness and love for mankind of God, and by a wonderful and more divine grace, the knowledge of God reaches those whom God, in his foreknowledge, has laid hold of beforehand as people who would live worthily of him whom they have come to know. They would never debase their piety toward him, not even if they were led away to death by those who do not know what piety is, and who make anything at all out to be piety rather than what piety really is; nor even if they were thought to be the most ridiculous of men.

God, I think, also saw the arrogance, or the contempt for others, of those who pride themselves on having known God and on having learned divine things from philosophy, yet who, like the most ignorant, turn to statues and their temples and the much-talked-of mysteries. And so he “chose the foolish things of the world” (1 Corinthians 1:27), the simplest among Christians, who live more temperately and more purely than many philosophers, “to put to shame the wise” (1 Corinthians 1:27), who are not ashamed to converse with lifeless things as with gods or images of gods.

For who that has sense will not laugh at a man who, after all the great and numerous discourses in philosophy about God or gods, gazes at statues, and either sends up his prayer to them, or, through the sight of them, carries it up from what is seen, which is a symbol, to the being known by the mind, to whom he fancies he must ascend? But the Christian, even the unlearned one, is convinced that every place in the world is a part of the whole, since the whole world is God’s temple. Praying “in every place” (1 Timothy 2:8), and closing the eyes of sense and raising those of the soul, he rises above the whole world.

He does not even stop at the vault of heaven, but, coming in thought to the place above the heavens (Plato, Phaedrus 247b-c), led by the divine Spirit, and being as it were outside the world, he sends up to God a prayer that is not about ordinary things. For he has learned from Jesus to seek nothing small, that is, nothing that the senses perceive, but only the great and truly divine things (compare Matthew 6:33), which, given by God, help a man on his way to the blessedness that is with him, through his Son, who is the Word and God.

Celsus borrows Plato’s sun§45

45Let us see also what he says he will teach us, if indeed we shall be able to follow it. Here he says that we are bound fast to the flesh altogether, we who, if we live rightly and in keeping with the word of Jesus, hear the saying: “You are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you” (Romans 8:9). He says too that we see nothing pure, we who try to keep even our thoughts from being defiled by the promptings of wickedness, and who say in prayer, “Create a pure heart in me, O God, and renew a right spirit in my inmost parts” (Psalm 51:10), so that with the “pure heart” (Matthew 5:8), which alone is by nature able to see God, we may behold him.

What he says is this: “Being and becoming: the intelligible, the visible. With being goes truth; with becoming, error. Knowledge, then, is concerned with truth, and opinion with the other (compare Plato, Republic 534a; Timaeus 29c). Of the intelligible there is thought, of the visible, sight; mind knows the intelligible, and the eye the visible. What the sun is, then, among visible things, being neither eye nor sight, but the cause to the eye of its seeing, to sight of its existing through the sun, to visible things of their being seen, to all things perceived by sense of their coming into being, and indeed to itself of its being beheld, that is what he is among intelligible things, he who is neither mind nor thought nor knowledge, but is the cause to mind of its thinking, to thought of its existing through him, to knowledge of its knowing through him, and to all intelligible things, to truth itself and to being itself, of their being; he is beyond all things, and is known by the mind through a certain unspeakable power (Plato, Republic 508b-509b). These things have been said for men who have intelligence; and if you too understand any of them, it is well with you. And if you think that some spirit comes down from God to foretell divine things, this would be the spirit that proclaims these things, the spirit with which men of old were filled when they announced many good things. If you cannot grasp them, keep silent and cover up your own ignorance, and do not say that those who see are blind and that those who run are lame, when you yourselves are lamed and maimed in your souls in every way, and live by the body, that is, by what is dead.”

Who has truly lamed the soul§46

46To this we shall reply as men who have made it our practice to be hostile to nothing that is well said, and, even when those outside the faith speak well, not to quarrel with them or to seek to overturn what is sound. There are those who revile men who wish, as far as they are able, to be devout toward the God of all, the God who accepts the faith of the simple in him and the reasoned piety of the more intelligent toward him, as they send up prayers with thanksgiving to the Maker of all, and send them up as through a high priest who set pure reverence for God before men. These men call them lame and maimed in their souls, and they say that those who make it their practice to say from the heart, “For though we live in the flesh, we do not wage war according to the flesh; for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but mighty for God” (2 Corinthians 10:3–4), live by the body, a dead thing. Let them see to it that, in this very act of speaking ill of men who pray to be God’s, they do not make their own souls lame and maim their own “inner man” (Romans 7:22), cutting away from it the gentleness and steadiness that the Creator has naturally sown in rational nature, through their slanders against others, men who wish to live well.

But those who, besides other things, have learned from the divine word, and practise, to bless “when reviled,” to endure “when persecuted,” and to entreat “when slandered” (1 Corinthians 4:12–13), these would be the ones who have set the feet of the soul upright, and who are cleansing and making ready the whole soul. They do so not in order to separate, in words alone, being from becoming and the intelligible from the visible, joining truth to being and fleeing in every way the error that goes with becoming; rather, as they have learned, they look not at the things of becoming, which are “seen” and therefore “temporary,” but at the better things (2 Corinthians 4:18), whether one wishes to call them being, or “invisible” because they are intelligible, or “not seen” because their nature lies beyond the senses.

And the disciples of Jesus look at the things of becoming too, but in such a way as to use them as a kind of stepping-stone to the contemplation of the nature of intelligible things. For “the invisible things” of God, that is, the intelligible things, “from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made” (Romans 1:20); they are seen in being understood. And when they have climbed up from the created things of the world, they do not stop at the invisible things of God; but after exercising themselves enough in these and understanding them, they rise to the eternal power of God and, in a word, to his divinity (Romans 1:20). They know that God in his love for mankind “manifested” “the truth” and “what can be known” of himself (Romans 1:18–19), not only to those devoted to him, but also to some who are outside pure reverence for God and piety toward him; but that some of those who by the providence of God had climbed up to the knowledge of such great things do what is unworthy of that knowledge, act impiously, and “hold down the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1:18), and can no longer have even room for a defence before God, since they had knowledge of such great things (Romans 1:20).

Philosophers who knew God and bowed to images§47

47At any rate, the divine word bears witness about those who grasped what Celsus sets out and who profess to practise philosophy by these doctrines, that “although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or give thanks, but became futile in their reasonings, and,” after so great a light of knowledge about what God had manifested to them, “their senseless heart,” for all its eagerness, “was darkened” (Romans 1:21). One can see, indeed, how those “who claim to be wise” (Romans 1:22) display signs of great folly, when, after such great discourses in their schools about God and the intelligible things, “they 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 1:23).

And so they themselves, abandoned by providence as men who had not lived worthily of what God had manifested to them, wallow “in the lusts of their hearts, to uncleanness” (Romans 1:24), and “their bodies are dishonoured” (Romans 1:24) in indecencies and licentiousness, because they “exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25).

Purity without hemlock§48

48But those whom they despise for lack of learning, and call fools and slaves, even if all they do is entrust themselves to God, have received the teaching of Jesus and stand so far from licentiousness and uncleanness and every indecency in sexual relations that many of them, after the manner of perfect priests who have turned away from all sexual intercourse, keep themselves wholly pure, and not only from every act of union.

At Athens, I suppose, there is one hierophant who, not trusting himself to be master of his male desires and able to control them as far as he wishes, has his male parts treated with hemlock, and is then thought pure for the worship that is customary among the Athenians. But among Christians one can see men who have had no need of hemlock in order to serve the Divine purely, but who are content with the word instead of hemlock, so that, having driven every desire out of their minds, they serve the Divine with prayers.

In the service of others who are reckoned to be gods there are virgins, very easily counted, whether they are guarded by men or not (for it is not our purpose now to examine that), who seem to remain in purity for the sake of the honour paid to the deity. But among Christians it is not for honours from men, not for wages and money, nor for a scrap of glory, that they practise perfect virginity; and as “they saw fit to keep God in their knowledge” (compare Romans 1:28), they are kept by God in an approved mind and in “doing what is fitting,” filled with all righteousness and goodness (compare Romans 1:28–29).

Simple believers who live better§49

49I have said these things not out of any wish to quarrel with what has been well conceived among the Greeks too, nor to find fault with sound doctrines, but because I wish to show that these things, and things even greater and more divine than these, have been said by the divine men, the prophets of God and the apostles of Jesus, and are searched out by those who wish to be Christians more perfectly and who know that “the mouth of the righteous will meditate wisdom, and his tongue will speak judgment; the law of his God is in his heart” (Psalm 37:30–31).

And even among those to whom these things have not been made clear, whether through great lack of learning, or through simplicity, or through want of anyone to urge them on toward a reasoned piety, but by whom the God over all is believed in, and his “only-begotten Son” (John 3:18), Word and God, there may be found a plainness and simplicity of dignity, purity and character that is often better. Without it, those “who claim to be wise” (Romans 1:22) wallow with boys in what is unlawful, “men with men committing what is shameful” (Romans 1:27).

The error that comes with birth§50

50He, then, did not make clear how error goes with becoming, nor did he set out whatever he meant, so that we might understand it by comparing his views with ours. But the prophets, hinting at some wise teaching about the things of becoming, say that a sacrifice “for sin” is offered even for those just born, as not pure from sin (Leviticus 12:6–8). They also say: “In iniquities I was conceived, and in sins my mother conceived me” (Psalm 51:5). And they declare as well that “sinners were estranged from the womb,” and they also say, in a surprising way, “they went astray from the belly, they spoke lies” (Psalm 58:3).

So thoroughly do the wise men among us disparage the whole nature of things perceived by the senses that in one place bodies are called vanity, in the words “For the creation was subjected to vanity, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope” (Romans 8:20), and in another they are called the vanity “of vanities,” as the Preacher said: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). And who has so disparaged the life of the human soul here as he who said, “Nevertheless, all things are vanity, every man living” (Psalm 39:5)? For he had no doubt about the difference between the soul’s life here and its life outside the things of this world, nor did he say, “Who knows whether to live is to die, and to die is to live?” (Euripides, quoted in Plato, Gorgias 492e). Rather, he is bold to speak the truth in the words “our soul was brought low to the dust” (Psalm 44:25) and “you brought me down into the dust of death” (Psalm 22:15).

In keeping with this it has been said, “Who will deliver me from the body of this death?” (Romans 7:24), and also, “who will transform the body of our lowliness” (Philippians 3:21). He too is a prophet who said, “You brought us low in a place of affliction” (Psalm 44:19), calling the region about the earth a “place of affliction,” the place to which Adam, that is, man, came when he was cast out of paradise because of wickedness (Genesis 3:23–24). And as for him who says, “Now we see through a mirror and in a riddle, but then face to face” (1 Corinthians 13:12), and further, “While we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:6), and therefore “we are well pleased to be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8), see how great were the things he had contemplated about the different life of souls.

The Spirit given in different measure§51

51And why should I go on setting parallels against Celsus’s text, since these things were said among us long before, and our meaning is already plain from what has been said? In these words he also, as it were, grants that if a divine spirit coming down from God foretells divine things, “this would be the spirit that proclaims these teachings, filled with which men of old announced many good things.” But he did not see the distinction carefully drawn among us by those who say that “your incorruptible Spirit is in all things; therefore” God corrects “little by little those who go astray” (Wisdom of Solomon 12:1–2), and who also say, among other things, that “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22) shows a different measure of what is given from the one shown by “You will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now” (Acts 1:5).

It takes real effort, once these things have been carefully understood, to see the difference between those who, at long intervals, received a grasp of the truth and a brief notion of God, and those who were more fully inspired by God, who always stood with God, and who were at all times led by the divine Spirit. Had Celsus examined and understood this, he would not have charged us with “ignorance”, nor would he have told us not to call blind those who think they show their piety in the material crafts of men, the crafts that make statues. For no one who sees with the eyes of the soul worships the Divine in any other way than the way that shows us how always to keep our eyes on the Maker of the universe, to offer every prayer to him, and to do everything as in the sight of God, as before a spectator who sees even into our thoughts.

We, then, pray both to see and to be guides of the blind (Romans 2:19), until they come to the Word of God and recover the eyes of their soul, which ignorance has blinded. And if we also act worthily of him who said to the disciples, “You are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:14), and of the word that taught that “the light shines in the darkness” (John 1:5), we shall also be “a light” to those in darkness (Romans 2:19), and we shall train the foolish and teach the immature (Romans 2:20).

Who is lame and who runs§52

52Celsus must not be indignant when we call lame, crippled in the feet of the soul, those who hurry to the places reputed to be sacred as though they were truly sacred, and who do not see that no work of artisans can be sacred. But those who are devout according to the teaching of Jesus also run, until, having reached the end of the race, they say in a strong and truthful frame of mind: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith; from now on there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness” (2 Timothy 4:7–8). And each of us runs in this way, “not aimlessly”, and boxes against wickedness in this way, “not as one beating the air” (1 Corinthians 9:26), but beating those who are under “the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience” (Ephesians 2:2).

Let Celsus say that we “live by the dead body”, we who hear, “If you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Romans 8:13), and who learn, “If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit” (Galatians 5:25). And may we show by our deeds that the one who says of us that we live by the dead body is lying.

Celsus offers other heroes§53

53Next, after these remarks, which we have answered as well as we could, he says to us: “How much better would it have been for you, since you wanted to make some innovation, to have devoted yourselves to someone else among those who died nobly and who could lend themselves to a divine legend? Come, if Heracles and Asclepius and those glorified of old did not please you, you had Orpheus, a man who by common consent had a holy spirit, and who himself also died a violent death. But perhaps others had already claimed him. Anaxarchus, then: thrown into a mortar and pounded in the most lawless way, he utterly scorned the punishment and said, ‘Pound, pound the bag of Anaxarchus; for you are not pounding the man himself.’ Truly the voice of some divine spirit!

“But here too some natural philosophers got there first and followed him. Epictetus, then? When his master was twisting his leg, he smiled and, quite unshaken, said, ‘You will break it’; and when the master had broken it, he said, ‘Did I not tell you that you would break it?’ What did your God say that was like this, while he was being punished? You would even have had more reason to put forward the Sibyl, whom some of you use, as a child of God. As it is, you can recklessly slip many blasphemous things into her writings, yet you set up as God a man whose life was most infamous and whose death was most pitiable. How much more suitable for you than he would Jonah have been, Jonah ‘with the gourd’ (Jonah 4:6), or Daniel, who came out from the beasts (Daniel 6:23), or others still more fantastic than these?”

Celsus’s heroes weighed§54

54Since, then, he sends us back to Heracles, let him set before us records of Heracles’ sayings, and let him defend his unseemly slavery in the house of Omphale. Let him show whether divine honour was due to the one who took the farmer’s ox by force, like a robber, feasted on it, and enjoyed the curses the farmer called down on him as he ate; so that even to this day the demon of Heracles is said to receive its sacrifice with curses. He also calls us to repeat ourselves about Asclepius, though we have already spoken about him; but we are content with what we said there.

And what did he admire in Orpheus, that he says that he “by common consent had a holy spirit” and lived a good life? I should be surprised if Celsus too, who now sings the praises of Orpheus out of rivalry with us and in order to belittle Jesus, did not turn away from his poems when he came upon his impious myths about the gods, as deserving to be banished from the good state even more than the poems of Homer (Plato, Republic 398a, 607a). For Orpheus said far worse things than Homer about the so-called gods.

Anaxarchus, to be sure, was noble when he said to Aristocreon, the tyrant of Cyprus, “Pound, pound the bag of Anaxarchus.” But this is the one thing about Anaxarchus that the Greeks know and admire; and even if, as Celsus holds, some people ought rightly to revere a man for his virtue, it would not have been reasonable, on the strength of this, to proclaim Anaxarchus a god.

He also sends us to Epictetus, admiring what Epictetus did indeed say nobly; yet not so nobly that his saying when his leg was broken can be compared with the marvellous works of Jesus, which Celsus disbelieves, and with his words. For these were spoken with divine power, and to this day they convert not only some of the simpler folk but also many of the more intelligent.

The silence and gentleness of Jesus§55

55And since, after his list of so many men, he says, “What did your God say that was like this, while he was being punished?”, we would say to him that by his silence under the scourges and his many torments (Matthew 27:12–14) Jesus showed more endurance and patience than any Greek who spoke out under hardship; if, that is, Celsus is willing to believe even this, recorded in good faith by men who loved the truth, who told even the marvels without falsehood and counted among them his silence under the scourges.

Moreover, when he was mocked, and dressed in the “scarlet cloak”, and the “crown of thorns” was set about his head, and he took the “reed” in his hand in place of a sceptre (Matthew 27:28–29; John 19:5), he showed the utmost gentleness, saying nothing ignoble or resentful to those who dared so much against him. It was not, then, in keeping with one who kept silent under the scourges out of endurance, and who bore with gentleness everything that his mockers brought upon him, to have said out of cowardice, as some think, the words: “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39).

What seems to be a plea to be spared the cup, as it is called, has indeed its own explanation, which we have examined and set out at greater length elsewhere. But to take the saying more simply, see whether the prayer too was not spoken with piety toward God. For everyone at all regards hardship as not a matter of first choice, and yet, when the occasion calls, endures what does not come about by first choice. Moreover, the voice that says, “Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mark 14:36), was not the voice of one who had given way, but of one well content with what was happening, and who put first the hardships sent by providence.

Abuse without proof§56

56Next, I do not know why he wanted us to proclaim the Sibyl a child of God rather than Jesus, asserting that we had slipped many blasphemous things into her writings without even proving what we slipped in. He could have proved it if he had shown that the older copies were purer and did not contain what he thinks has been inserted. And without even proving that these things are blasphemous, he then again, not twice or three times but many times, called the life of Jesus “most infamous”, without stopping to deal with each of the deeds done in his life that are supposed to be most infamous; so that in saying this he seems not only to make assertions without proof, but also to revile one he does not know. For if he had set out the specific forms of a most infamous life that he saw in Jesus’ actions, we would have contended against each of the things that seemed to him most infamous.

As for Jesus having met “a most pitiable death”, the same could be said of Socrates too, and of Anaxarchus, whom he mentioned a little earlier, and of countless others. Or is the death of Jesus most pitiable, but not theirs as well? Or is theirs not most pitiable, while that of Jesus is most pitiable? You see, then, here too that Celsus’s aim was to heap abuse on Jesus. He was moved, I think, by some spirit that Jesus had overthrown and brought down, so that it no longer has the reek of sacrifices and the blood on which it fed while it deceived those who seek God in images on earth and do not look up to the One who is truly God over all.

Jonah and Daniel set against Jesus§57

57Then, next, as if his aim were to fill up a book, he wanted us to think Jonah a god rather than Jesus, preferring Jonah, who preached repentance to one city, Nineveh (Jonah 3:4–5), to Jesus, who preached repentance to the whole world and achieved more than Jonah did. He wanted us to proclaim as a god the man who, by a prodigy and against all expectation, spent “three days and three nights” “in the belly of the sea monster” (Jonah 1:17; Matthew 12:40); but the One who undertook to die for mankind, to whom God bore witness through the prophets, Celsus would not allow to be worthy of the honour that ranks second after the God of the universe, for the mighty deeds he did in heaven and on earth. And Jonah, so as not to preach what God had commanded, was swallowed by the sea monster (Jonah 1:3, 17), whereas Jesus, because he taught what God willed, took upon himself death for mankind.

Next he says that we ought to worship Daniel, who came up from the lions (Daniel 6:23), rather than Jesus, who trampled down the savagery of every opposing power and gave us “authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy” (Luke 10:19). Then, having no others to name, he says, “or others still more fantastic than these”, so as to revile Jonah and Daniel at the same time; for the spirit in Celsus did not know how to speak well of the righteous.

Celsus says turning the other cheek came from Plato§58

58After this, let us look also at his next passage, which runs as follows: “They also have a precept of this kind: not to retaliate against anyone who insults them. ‘And if he strikes one cheek,’ he says, ‘offer the other as well’ (Matthew 5:39; Luke 6:29). This too is ancient, and was said very well before them, but they have related it more crudely. For Plato too has Socrates say this in conversation with Crito: ‘Then one must in no way do wrong. – Certainly not. – Then neither must one who is wronged do wrong in return, as the many think, since one must in no way do wrong. – It seems not. – What then? Must one do harm, Crito, or not? – Surely one must not, Socrates. – What then? To do harm in return when one suffers harm, as the many say: is that just or not just? – Not at all. For doing harm to men surely differs in no way from doing wrong. – You speak the truth. – Then one must neither do wrong in return nor do harm to any man, whatever one may suffer at their hands’ (Plato, Crito 49b–c).

“These are Plato’s words, and again he says this: ‘Consider then, you too, very carefully, whether you share this view and agree with it, and let us begin our deliberation from this point: that it is never right either to do wrong, or to do wrong in return, or, when one suffers harm, to defend oneself by doing harm in return. Or do you stand apart and not share this starting point? For so it seemed to me long ago, and so it seems to me still’ (Plato, Crito 49d–e). This, then, was Plato’s view; but it had been held still earlier by divine men. But about these things, and all the others which they corrupt, let what has been said suffice; and whoever wishes to inquire further into any of them will find out.”

Truth is not condemned for being said plainly§59

59To this, then, and to everything else that Celsus has treated as common property, saying that these things were said among the Greeks too, because he could not look their truth in the face, we must answer as follows. If a doctrine is beneficial and its intent sound, and it has been said among the Greeks by Plato or by one of the Greek sages, among the Jews by Moses or by one of the prophets, and among Christians in the recorded words of Jesus or in what was said by one of his apostles, we must not think that what is said among Jews or Christians stands condemned because the same things were said among the Greeks too; and least of all if the Jewish teachings are shown to be older than the Greek.

Nor again must we think that the same thing, said with the beauty of Greek diction, is in every way better than what is expressed more plainly and in simpler words among Jews or Christians. And yet the original wording of the Jews, which the prophets used in the books they have left us, was written in the Hebrew language and with an arrangement of words that is skilful by the standards of that language.

But if we must also show, though the claim may seem paradoxical, that the same doctrines are better expressed by the prophets of the Jews or in the words of Christians, the argument must be built from an example taken from foods and the way they are prepared. Let there be some wholesome food that gives strength to those who eat it. Suppose this food, prepared in one way and flavoured with certain seasonings, is eaten not by country people, raised on farmsteads and poor, who have not learned to eat such things, but only by the rich and those who live in luxury. And suppose that, prepared not in that way, nor as seems good to those reckoned more refined, but in the way the poor, the more rustic and the majority of men have learned to eat it, it is eaten by tens of thousands.

If, then, it were granted that from the one kind of preparation only those reckoned more refined are made healthy, while none of the many approach such foods, but that from the other the multitudes of men live in better health: which shall we approve the more, for the sake of the common good, on account of their wholesome foods? Those who prepare them usefully for the learned, or those who prepare them for the multitudes? Let it be granted that equal health and vigour come from food prepared in the one way or in the other; still it is plain that love for humankind itself, and concern for the common good, suggest that the physician who has cared for the health of the many is of more common benefit than the one who has cared for the health of a few only.

Divine teaching stoops to the speech of the many§60

60If the example has been understood, we must carry it over to the quality of the rational food of rational beings. And consider whether Plato and the wise men of the Greeks, in the things they say well, are not like the physicians who cared only for those reckoned more refined and despised the multitude of men; while the prophets among the Jews and the disciples of Jesus, who would have nothing to do with the ornate arrangement of words, and with what Scripture has called “the wisdom of men” (1 Corinthians 2:5) and “wisdom according to the flesh” (compare 1 Corinthians 1:26; 2 Corinthians 1:12), phrases by which it hints at skill in language, might be likened to those who took care to prepare and make ready the same most wholesome quality of food in an arrangement of words that reaches the multitudes of men: one that does not sound foreign to their speech, and does not, by sounding foreign, turn them away from listening, as though such discourses were unfamiliar to them.

For indeed, if the aim of rational food, if I may call it so, is to make the one who eats it forbearing and gentle, how could the discourse that produces multitudes of forbearing and gentle people, or at least of people advancing towards these virtues, not be better prepared than the one that makes a very few, easily counted, forbearing and gentle, granting even that it does so?

And just as, if Plato, being a Greek, had wished to benefit with sound doctrines those who speak Egyptian or Syriac, he would have taken care to learn the languages of those who were to hear him, and, as the Greeks call it, to speak like a barbarian for the improvement of Egyptians and Syrians, rather than remain a Greek and be able to say nothing useful to Egyptians and Syrians; so the divine nature, which cares not only for those reckoned educated in Greek learning but also for the rest of the Greeks, came down to the plainness of the multitude of its hearers, so that, by using the words familiar to them, it might call the multitude of ordinary people to listen. Once they have been introduced, they can readily strive to grasp even the deeper of the meanings hidden in the Scriptures. For it is plain even to anyone at all who reads them that many passages can have a meaning deeper than what appears at first sight, a meaning that becomes clear to those who give themselves to examining the word, and becomes clear in proportion to the leisure they devote to the word and their zeal in its practice.

Jesus taught forbearance more usefully than the Crito§61

61It has therefore been shown that when Jesus, speaking “more crudely”, as Celsus says, said: “To him who strikes you on the cheek offer the other also” (Luke 6:29; compare Matthew 5:39), and “to him who wishes to go to law with you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak too” (Matthew 5:40), he handled the teaching and set it before us, by speaking in this way, more usefully for life than Plato did in the Crito; for ordinary people cannot even follow Plato, and those who have learned the general studies that come before the solemn philosophy of the Greeks can do so only with difficulty.

We must also observe that the thought on forbearance is not corrupted by the plainness of the words. But in this too Celsus slanders the teaching when he says: “But about these things, and others which they corrupt, let what has been said suffice; and whoever wishes to inquire further into any of them will find out.”

Celsus on temples, altars and images§62

62Come, let us look also at what follows, where he says this: “But let us stop there. They cannot bear the sight of temples and altars and images. Nor, for that matter, can the Scythians, nor the Nomads of Libya, nor the godless Seres, nor other nations, the most unholy and lawless. And that the Persians too hold this view, Herodotus records in these words: ‘I know that the Persians follow these customs: it is not their custom to set up images and altars and temples; rather, they even charge those who make them with folly, because, as it seems to me, they did not think, as the Greeks do, that the gods are of human nature’ (Herodotus, Histories 1.131). And indeed Heraclitus too declares something like this: ‘And they pray to these images, as if one were to chat with houses, knowing nothing of gods or heroes, who they are’ (Heraclitus, fragment 5 Diels-Kranz).

“What wiser thing, then, do they teach us than Heraclitus? He at any rate hints, in a deeply veiled way, that it is foolish to pray ‘to the images’ if one does not know ‘gods and heroes, who they are’. So much for Heraclitus; but these men openly dishonour the images. If it is because stone or wood or bronze or gold, which this man or that has made, could not be a god, their wisdom is ridiculous. For who else, unless he is a complete child, thinks these things are gods, and not offerings to the gods and images of them? But if it is because one must not even suppose them to be divine likenesses, since the form of God is different, as the Persians also think, then they do not notice that they refute themselves when they say that ‘God made man’ his own ‘image’ (Genesis 1:26–27), and his form like himself. They will agree, indeed, that these things exist in honour of certain beings, whether like them or unlike them in form; but they will say that those to whom they are dedicated are not gods but demons, and that whoever reveres God must not serve demons.”

The same act can spring from different doctrines§63

63To this too we must say that, if the Scythians and the Nomads of Libya and the Seres, whom Celsus calls godless, and other most unholy and lawless nations, and the Persians as well, cannot bear the sight of temples and altars and images, their refusal to bear these things is not, on that account, the same as our refusal to bear them. For we must examine the doctrines that move those who cannot bear temples and images to refuse them, so that one who refuses them on the basis of sound doctrines may be praised, and one who refuses them on the basis of mistaken ones may be blamed. For the same act can come about from different doctrines.

For example, those who pursue the philosophy of Zeno of Citium shun adultery, but so do the followers of Epicurus, and so do some who are wholly unlearned. But see how great a disagreement there is among so many people about why they shun adultery. Some shun it out of regard for the common good, and because it is against nature for a rational being to corrupt a woman whom the laws have already secured to another, and to ruin another man’s household. But the followers of Epicurus, when they abstain from adultery, do not refrain for this reason; they refrain because they hold pleasure to be the end, and because many things that hinder pleasure meet the man who yields to the single pleasure of adultery: sometimes imprisonment or death, and often, before these, dangers too, in watching for the husband, and those who take his side, to go out of the house. So if, by hypothesis, a man committing adultery could escape the notice of the woman’s husband, and of all his household, and of those in whose eyes a man loses his good name through adultery, the Epicurean would even have committed adultery for the sake of pleasure.

And if the unlearned man too, at some time when he could commit adultery, does not commit it, he would sometimes be found refraining from adultery because of the fear that the law holds over him and its punishments; and it would not be in pursuit of greater pleasures that such a man abstained from adultery. You see, then, that what is thought to be one act, abstaining from adultery, is not the same but different according to the purposes of those who abstain; for it comes either from sound doctrines, or from the wicked and most impious ones held by the Epicurean, or by such an unlearned man.

Why Christians and Jews refuse images§64

64Just as this one act, abstaining from adultery, seems to be one thing yet is found to be many, according to the different doctrines and intentions behind it, so it is with those who will not tolerate worshipping the divine at altars, temples and images. The Scythians, the nomads of Libya, the godless Seres and the Persians do this from doctrines other than those from which Christians and Jews will not tolerate what is taken to be such service of the divine. None of those peoples refuses to tolerate altars and images because he shrinks from dragging down and lowering the worship of the divine to matter shaped in this way; nor because he has come to understand that demons haunt such shapes and places, either installed there by certain sorceries or able in some other way to seize places for themselves beforehand, where, greedily partaking of the fumes of the sacrifices, they will hunt after lawless pleasure and lawless men.

Christians and Jews, by contrast, act because of the words, “You shall fear the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve” (Deuteronomy 6:13), and “You shall have no other gods besides me” (Exodus 20:3; Deuteronomy 5:7), and “You shall not make for yourself an idol, nor a likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them, nor serve them” (Exodus 20:4–5), and again, “You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve” (Matthew 4:10; Luke 4:8), and many other sayings like these. Because of them they not only turn away from temples, altars and images, but go readily even to death, when they must, so as not to defile by any such transgression the conception they hold of the God of the universe.

Creation is not to be worshipped§65

65We have spoken earlier about the Persians, on the point that they do not build temples, yet worship the sun and the works that God has made. This is forbidden to us. We are taught not to serve “the creature rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25), but to know that “the creation will be set free from the bondage of corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21), and that “the eager expectation of the creation waits for the revealing of the sons of God” (Romans 8:19), and that “the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope” (Romans 8:20). We are taught, moreover, that the things subjected to the bondage “of corruption” (Romans 8:21) and to “futility” (Romans 8:20), which do their work in a better “hope”, must not be honoured in the place of God, who needs nothing, or of his Son, the firstborn “of all creation” (Colossians 1:15). Let this suffice, then, in addition to what was said there, about the Persian nation, who turn away from altars and images but serve “the creature rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25).

Since he also cited the saying of Heraclitus, and explained it as hinting that it is foolish to pray “to images” unless one knows “gods and heroes, who they are” (Heraclitus, fragment B5), we must say this. It is possible to know God, and his Only-begotten, and those whom God has honoured with the title “god” and who share in his divinity. These are different from all “the gods of the nations”; and as for “who they are”, they are “demons” (Psalm 96:5). But it is not possible both to know God and to pray “to images”.

No pretended worship and no likeness of God§66

66Not only is it foolish to pray “to images”; it is foolish also to go along with the multitude and pretend to pray “to images”, as those do who follow the philosophy of the Peripatetics, and those who embrace the views of Epicurus or Democritus. For nothing counterfeit should dwell in the soul of one who is truly devout toward the divine. We do not honour images for this reason also: so that, as far as it depends on us, we may not sink into the notion that the images are other gods. That is why we also find fault with Celsus and with all who admit that these are not gods: because those who are reputed to be wise give even the outward show of honour to images. The multitude follow that show, and they not only sin, supposing that they worship the images by way of accommodation, but even sink in their souls into thinking that these are gods, and cannot bear even to hear that the things they bow down to are not gods.

Celsus, then, says that these are regarded not as gods but as the gods’ votive offerings; but he does not show how they are not men’s offerings rather than, as he named them, offerings of the gods themselves. For it is clear that these are the offerings of men who have gone astray about the divine. Nor do we suppose that the images are divine likenesses, since we do not sketch a form of the invisible and bodiless God.

Celsus supposes that we contradict ourselves when we say that the divine is not of human form and yet believe that “God made man” his own “image”, and made him in the image of God (Genesis 1:27; 9:6). To this we must say, as was said also earlier, that we hold that what is “according to the image of God” (Genesis 1:27) is preserved in the rational soul that is shaped by virtue. Here, indeed, Celsus, not seeing the difference between the image of God and what is “according to the image of God”, says that we say “God made man” his own “image” and a form like himself. But this too has been answered earlier.

We drive out demons and do not serve them§67

67Then next he says of the Christians: “They will agree that these things exist in honour of certain beings, whether like or unlike them in form, but that those to whom they are dedicated are not gods but demons, and that whoever worships God must not serve demons.”

Yet if he had known the teaching about demons, and what each of them effects, whether summoned by those skilled in such things or giving himself of his own accord to whatever working he wishes and is able to perform, and if he had grasped the teaching about demons, which is vast and hard for human nature to comprehend, he would not have found fault with us for saying that whoever worships the God over all must not serve demons. And we are so far from serving demons that we even drive them out, by prayers and by the teachings drawn from the sacred writings, from human souls, and from the places where they have established themselves, and sometimes even from animals; for the demons often work certain things for the harm of these too.

Does God govern even sin?§68

68In view of the many things we have said earlier about Jesus, there is no need now to repeat ourselves in answer to this: “So then they themselves are clearly convicted of worshipping not a god, nor even a demon, but a corpse.” Passing this over at once for that reason, let us look at Celsus’s next words, in which he says: “But first I will ask: why should demons not be served? Are not all things governed according to the will of God, and is not all providence from him? And whatever there is in the universe, whether the work of God, or of angels, or of other demons, or of heroes, do not all these things have a law from the greatest God? And has not whoever was deemed worthy been appointed over each thing, having received a power by lot? Shall not, then, the one who worships God rightly serve this being, who has obtained his authority from that source?” “For it is not possible,” he says, “for the same man to serve many masters” (Matthew 6:24; Luke 16:13).

Notice, then, how much he takes for granted even in these words, matters that need no slight examination, and knowledge as well of deeper and more secret truths about the government of the whole universe. For we must examine in what sense it is said that all things are governed according to the will of God, and whether this governing extends to sins as well, or not. If the governing extends to sins as well, not only among men but also among demons and any other being outside the body whose nature can sin, let the one who says this see how absurd it is to say that all things are governed according to the will of God. For it follows from the argument that sins too, and all that comes from wickedness, are governed according to the will of God; and this is not the same as saying that they happen while God does not prevent them. And if someone takes “being governed” in its proper sense, he is saying that the things that come from wickedness are governed (since, of course, all things are governed according to the will of God); and then no one who sins transgresses against God’s government.

The same distinction must be drawn about providence. We must say that “all providence is from him” means something true when the providence is good. But if we say, without qualification, that everything that happens is according to providence, even when something happens wickedly, then “all providence is from him” will be false; unless perhaps someone were to say that what follows as a consequence of what comes from God’s providence is also from God’s providence.

He also declares that “whatever there is in the universe, whether the work of God, or of angels, or of other demons, or of heroes, all these things have a law from the greatest God”; and what he declares is not true. For those who transgress do not transgress while following the law that comes from the greatest God. And reason shows that not only wicked men transgress, but also the wicked demons and the wicked angels.

Why demons must not be served§69

69We are not the only ones to speak of wicked demons; nearly all who hold that demons exist do so. Not everything, then, has a law from the greatest God. For whatever has fallen away from the divine law, through its own heedlessness, vice or wickedness, or ignorance of what is good, does not have the law of God; rather, to use a new name, the one found in Scripture, it has the law “of sin” (Romans 7:23; 8:2). According to most of those who hold that demons exist, then, the wicked demons do not have the law that comes from God, but transgress it. According to us, however, all demons have fallen away from the road that leads to the good, and were not demons before; and the demons are one kind among those who have fallen away from God. Therefore whoever worships God must not serve demons.

The truth about demons is made plain also by those who summon demons for what are called love-charms or hate-charms, or to hinder undertakings, or for countless other such purposes. This is done by those who have learned through incantations and sorceries to summon demons and draw them to whatever they wish. Therefore the service of all demons is foreign to us, who worship the God over all. And the service of the reputed gods is service of demons, for “all the gods of the nations are demons” (Psalm 96:5). This is plain also from the fact that, at the very founding of such wooden images and temples, magical rites of installation were performed in those of the so-called sanctuaries that are thought more potent; and these rites were performed by those who devote themselves to the service of demons through sorcery. For this reason we have resolved to flee from the service of demons as from destruction; and we say that all the worship of gods practised among the Greeks at altars, images and temples is service of demons.

Are evil spirits God’s officers or bands of robbers?§70

70The words “and whoever has been deemed worthy of any task at all has been appointed over each, having been allotted power by the greatest God” also need a far deeper knowledge, one able to show which is the case. Are wicked demons appointed over certain things by the Word of God who governs the universe, in the way that executioners in cities, and those appointed over grim but necessary business in states, are appointed? Or, just as robbers in the wilderness set up one man to rule them, have the demons, as it were, formed bands in different regions of the earth and made themselves a ruler, to lead them in the deeds they have chosen, deeds aimed at stealing and plundering the souls of men?

Whoever means to speak well on these questions, so as to defend the Christians, who turn away from worshipping anything other than the God over all and His Word, “the firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15), needs also to explain the saying, “All who came before me are thieves and robbers, and the sheep did not hear them” (John 10:8), and the saying, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy” (John 10:10), and anything else like these that is said in the sacred writings, such as, “Behold, I have given you authority to tread upon serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall ever harm you” (Luke 10:19), and, “You shall tread upon the asp and the basilisk, and you shall trample the lion and the dragon” (Psalm 91:13).

But Celsus knew nothing at all of these things; for had he known them, he would not have said: “And whatever there is in the universe, whether the work of God or of angels or of other demons or of heroes, these things have a law from the greatest God, and whoever has been deemed worthy has been appointed over each, having been allotted power. Shall not, then, the one who worships God rightly serve this being, who has obtained his authority from that source?”

To these words he adds, “For it is not possible for the same man to serve many masters” (Matthew 6:24; Luke 16:13). We shall treat this in the next book, since this seventh volume, which we have written in answer to Celsus’s treatise, has now reached a sufficient length.