Unseen stewards and demon executioners

After this, Celsus sets down what Christians and Jews alike say when they defend their abstaining from things offered to idols and declare that those who are devoted to the God over all must not feast with demons. It was in answer to this that he said what has been quoted. So far as foods and drinks are concerned, we know no other ways of feasting with demons than these: when someone eats what most people call sacred offerings, and drinks the wine of the libations poured to demons. But Celsus thinks that even the man who eats bread, and drinks wine in any way at all, and tastes fruits, feasts with demons. Indeed, even if someone takes only water, he says that in this too the drinker feasts with demons. And to this he adds that the man who breathes this air also receives it from certain demons, since the demons set over the air grant living creatures the air they breathe.

Let anyone who wishes, then, take the side of Celsus’s argument, and show how it is not certain divine angels of God, but demons, whose whole race is evil, who have been appointed to manage all the things just mentioned. For we too say that it is not without the oversight of invisible farmers, if I may call them so, and of other stewards, not only of what grows from the earth but also of all flowing water and of the air, that the earth brings forth what is said to be governed by nature, that water pours forth and runs in springs and in rivers that rise of themselves, and that the air is kept uncorrupted and becomes life-giving to those who breathe it.

Yet we do not say that these invisible beings are demons. But if one must venture to say something, and if these things really are the work of demons, we shall say this: famines, failures of the vine and of fruit trees, droughts, and also the corruption of the air to the ruin of crops, and sometimes even to the death of animals and to plague among men, all these the demons bring about with their own hands, as executioners. They have received authority by a certain divine judgment to work these things at certain times, either for the conversion of men who have been carried away into the flood of wickedness, or else for the training of the rational race.

This happens so that those who remain pious even amid such great calamities, and in no way become worse, may become manifest to the spectators, invisible and visible, who until then did not see their true state; while those who are disposed the opposite way but hide the display of their wickedness, being shown up by events for what they are, may become aware of themselves and may become plain to the spectators, if I may call them so.