Against Celsus 1 part 2/42

among whom there are rites, reverently honoured in a rational manner by their learned men, but performed symbolically by their multitude and more superficial people.

And the same must be said also concerning the Syrians and Indians, and all who have both myths and writings.

And since Celsus has set down, as said by many Christians, 'Wisdom in life is an evil thing, but folly is a good thing', it must be said that he misrepresents the word, in that he does not set forth the very saying that stands in Paul, which runs thus:

If anyone among you thinks himself to be wise in this age, let him become a fool, that he may become wise;

...is. Therefore the apostle does not say simply:

Wisdom is folly with God, but 'The wisdom of this world'. And again, not 'If anyone among you thinks himself to be wise, let him become a fool' absolutely, but 'in this age let him become a fool, that he may become wise'. We call, then, the wisdom of this age all the falsely opinionated philosophy that, according to the Scriptures, is being brought to nought;

and we call folly a good thing, not absolutely, but when one becomes a fool to this age;

as if we should say that the Platonist too, believing in the immortality of the soul and the doctrines concerning its transmigration, has taken on folly in the eyes of the Stoics who deride the assent to these things, and in the eyes of the Peripatetics who babble about the 'trifling' of Plato, and in the eyes of the Epicureans who charge with superstition those who introduce providence and set a God over the universe.

And further, that even according to what is pleasing to the word, it is far better to assent to doctrines with reason and wisdom than with mere faith, and that it was by way of accommodation that the word willed even this, lest it should leave men wholly unbenefited - this is shown by Paul, the genuine disciple of Jesus, when he says:

For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the folly of the proclamation to save those who believe. Clearly, then, through these words it is shown that, in the wisdom of God, God ought to have been known.

And since this did not so come to pass, God in the second place was pleased to save those who believe, not absolutely through folly, but through folly so far as it pertains to the proclamation.

For 'Jesus Christ crucified', proclaimed of itself, is folly of proclamation;

as Paul too, perceiving this, says in the words:

But we proclaim Jesus Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling-block and to the Gentiles folly, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Thinking that there is among many of the nations a kinship of this same doctrine, Celsus names all the nations as having begun such a teaching;

but I do not know how it is that he slanders the Jews alone, not reckoning their nation along with the rest, as either having laboured together with them and shared their views, or as having held closely similar doctrines in many points.

It is worth asking him, then, why ever he has believed the histories of barbarians and Greeks concerning the antiquity of those whom he named, but falsifies the histories of this nation alone.

For if each people set forth their own affairs with a love of truth, why do we disbelieve the Jewish prophets alone? But if Moses and the prophets wrote many things in their own favour to gratify their own account, why shall we not say the like also concerning the writers among the rest of the nations? Or are the Egyptians, when in their own histories they speak ill of the Jews, to be trusted concerning the Jews;

while the Jews, saying the same things concerning the Egyptians - recording that they themselves suffered many wrongs, and for this reason saying that the Egyptians were punished by God - are lying? And this must be said not concerning the Egyptians alone;

for we shall find an entanglement of the Assyrians with the Jews, and these things too recorded in the antiquities of the Assyrians.

And in the same way the Jewish writers too recorded the Assyrians as their enemies, that I may not seem to be begging the question by saying 'the prophets'.

See, then, at once the self-love of one who believes certain peoples as wise nations, but condemns others as wholly senseless.

For hear Celsus saying that there is an ancient doctrine from the beginning, about which the wisest nations and cities and wise men have always concerned themselves.

And he was not willing to call the Jews a most wise nation, even on a par with the Egyptians and Assyrians and Indians and Persians and Odrysians and Samothracians and Eleusinians.

...he has divided up; he ranked the Jews among them, not shrinking from using in his treatise even prophetic sayings and from allegorising them.

It is said too that Hermippus, in his first book On Lawgivers, recorded that Pythagoras brought his own philosophy from the Jews to the Greeks.

And there is a book about the Jews by Hecataeus the historian, in which he gives even greater assent to the nation as wise, to such an extent that Herennius Philo, in his treatise On the Jews, first doubts whether the writing is the historian's, and second says that, if it is his, it is likely that he was carried away by the persuasiveness found among the Jews and gave his assent to their account.

I marvel, then, how Celsus ranked the Odrysians and Samothracians and Eleusinians and Hyperboreans among the most ancient and wisest nations, but did not count the Jews worthy of admission either among the wise or among the ancient;

though many writings are extant among the Egyptians and Phoenicians and Greeks, bearing witness to their antiquity - which I have thought it superfluous to cite.

For whoever wishes can read what was written by Flavius Josephus, in two books, concerning the antiquity of the Jews, where he brings forward a great collection of writers bearing witness to the antiquity of the Jews.

And there is also the discourse Against the Greeks by Tatian, a younger writer, in which most learnedly he sets forth those who have recorded the antiquity of the Jews and of Moses.

It seems, then, that Celsus says these things not truthfully, but out of contentiousness, having the aim of accusing the origin of Christianity, which depends on the Jews.

But moreover, he says that the Galactophagi of Homer, and the Druids of the Gauls, and the Getae are most wise and ancient nations, treating of doctrines akin to the Jewish ones, whose writings I do not know whether they are extant;

but the Hebrews alone, so far as in him lies, he casts out both from antiquity and from wisdom.

And again, making a catalogue of ancient and wise men who benefited those of their own time and, through their writings, those who came after them, he cast Moses out of the catalogue of the wise.

And of Linus, whom Celsus placed first among those he named, neither laws nor discourses are extant that turned and healed nations;

but a whole nation, scattered throughout all the inhabited world, carries the laws of Moses.

See, then, whether it was not by sheer malice that he cast Moses too out of the catalogue of the wise, while saying that Linus and Musaeus and Orpheus and Pherecydes and the Persian Zoroaster and Pythagoras treated of these matters, and that they set down their doctrines in books, and that these have been preserved down to the present.

And he willingly forgot the myth concerning the so-called gods as having human passions, recorded especially by Orpheus, but in what follows, in accusing the history of Moses, he finds fault with those who interpret it tropologically and allegorise it.

It would have been possible to say, to the most noble man who entitled his book 'The True Doctrine': why ever, O sir, do you speak solemnly of the gods as recorded to have dared and done and suffered such great things - falling into such great calamities as your wise poets and philosophers record, employing accursed unions, and warring against their fathers, and cutting off their private parts -

but when Moses says no such things concerning God, nor even concerning holy angels, and concerning men far lesser things - for no one in his account dared what Cronus dared against Uranus, nor what Zeus dared against his father, nor that 'the father of men and gods' lay with his own daughter - is he thought to lead astray those legislated for by him, deceiving them? And it seems to me that Celsus does something closely resembling the Platonic Thrasymachus, who would not allow Socrates to answer as he wished concerning justice, but said:

See that you do not say that the just is the beneficial, nor the obligatory, nor any other of the like things.

...the more reasonable men are, as it were he hinders, having accused as he wishes, those who are able from defending themselves, according as the nature of things stands.

And we would say, challenging him to compare books with books: come, O sir, take the poems of Linus and Musaeus and Orpheus and the writing of Pherecydes, and examine them side by side with the laws of Moses, setting histories beside histories and ethical discourses beside laws and ordinances;

and see which of them is more able to turn and convert the hearers at once, and which of them might even corrupt the hearer;

and observe how the company of your writers gave little thought to those who would read them straightway, but wrote their own philosophy, as you say, only for those able to interpret tropologically and to allegorise.

But Moses, like a noble orator practising figure and everywhere guardedly producing the double sense of his diction, has done this in the five books, neither giving the multitude of the Jews who were legislated for occasions of harm in the ethical realm, nor setting forth to the few, and to those able to read with more understanding, a writing not full of contemplation - for those able to search out his intention.

And of your wise poets the books seem no longer even to be preserved, though they would have been preserved had the reader perceived their usefulness;

but the writings of Moses have moved many even of those foreign to the Jewish way of life to believe that, according to the profession of the writings, the one who first legislated them and delivered them to Moses was God, the creator of the world.

For it was indeed fitting that the maker of the whole world, having laid down laws for the whole world, should supply to his words a power able to prevail everywhere.

And I say these things while not yet examining the matters concerning Jesus, but still showing Moses - far lesser than the Lord - to be, as the argument will establish, far superior to your wise poets and philosophers.

Next to these, Celsus, secretly wishing to slander the Mosaic account of the world's creation - which indicates that the world does not yet have the number of ten thousand years, but falls far short of this - aligns himself, stealing his meaning, with those who say that the world is uncreated.

For his saying that there have been from all eternity many conflagrations and many floods, and that the flood in the time of Deucalion, having occurred recently, is the more recent, clearly sets forth, to those able to hear him, his view that the world is uncreated.

But let him who brings a charge against the faith of the Christians tell us, by what demonstrative arguments he was compelled to accept that there have been many conflagrations and many floods, and that, of all of them, the more recent is the flood in the time of Deucalion, and the conflagration that in the time of Phaethon.

But if he should put forward the dialogues of Plato concerning these matters, we shall say to him that it is permitted to us also to believe that in the pure and pious soul of Moses - who rose above all that is created and attached himself to the creator of the universe - there dwelt as a citizen a divine Spirit, which set forth the things of God far more clearly than Plato and than the wise men among the Greeks and barbarians.

But if he demands of us reasons for such a faith, let him first give them concerning the things which he himself declared without demonstration, and then we in turn shall establish that these our positions are so.

Yet even against his will Celsus fell into bearing witness that the world is more recent and not yet ten thousand years old, when he said that the Greeks too regard these things as ancient, supposing them, on account of the floods and conflagrations, to be older, because they have not contemplated nor remembered them.

But let those who, according to him, are the wisest Egyptians be Celsus' teachers of the myth concerning the conflagrations and inundations - those Egyptians whose traces of wisdom are irrational animals that are worshipped, and arguments that present such worship of the divine as reasonable and as a certain withdrawn and mystical service.

And if the Egyptians, in glorifying their account concerning the animals, bring forward theologies, they are wise;

but also, when their account brings down the divine into irrational creatures, beyond even the mythical transmigration concerning the soul that falls from the vaults of heaven and descends as far as the irrational animals - not only the tame ones but even the most savage...

And if the Egyptians tell myths, they are believed to have philosophised through riddles and secret things; but if Moses, writing for a whole nation, leaves them histories and laws, his words are reckoned empty myths, not even admitting of allegory;

for this is how it seems to Celsus and to the Epicureans.

Having heard, then, this doctrine - he says - that is current among the wise nations and men of repute, Moses got a reputation for divinity.

And to this too it must be said that, granting him that Moses heard a more ancient doctrine and delivered it to the Hebrews: if it was a false doctrine he heard, neither wise nor venerable, and he received it and delivered it to those under him, he is liable to accusation;

but if, as you say, he assented to wise and true doctrines and educated his own people through them, what has he done worthy of accusation? Would that Epicurus too, and Aristotle, who is less impious than he toward providence, and the Stoics who say that God is body, had heard this doctrine;

so that the world might not be filled with a doctrine that does away with providence, or interrupts it, or introduces a corruptible material first principle, according to which God too, for the Stoics, is body - they not being ashamed to say that he is changeable and alterable throughout and mutable and, in a word, able to be corrupted, if there be one to corrupt him, but, faring well, not corrupted because there is nothing to corrupt him.

But the doctrine of the Jews and Christians, which preserves the unchangeableness and unalterableness of God, is reckoned impious, because it does not join in impiety with those who hold impious views concerning God, when it says in its prayers to the Divine:

But you are the same. And it is believed too that God has said: 'I have not changed.' After this, Celsus, not slandering the circumcision of the private parts as practised by the Jews, says that it came from the Egyptians, trusting the Egyptians rather than Moses, who says that Abraham was the first among men to be circumcised.

And the name of Abraham, not Moses alone records as appropriating him to God; but indeed many of those who charm down demons use in their formulas 'the God of Abraham', doing something on account of the name and of his close relationship to the righteous one of God - wherefore they take up the expression 'the God of Abraham', though they do not know who Abraham is.

And the same must be said also concerning Isaac and concerning Jacob and concerning Israel;

names which, being confessedly Hebrew, have been sown in many places into the studies of the Egyptians who profess some efficacy.

But the rationale of circumcision, beginning from Abraham and hindered by Jesus, who did not wish his disciples to do this, it is not now my purpose to interpret.

For the present is not the occasion for teaching about these things, but for a contest demolishing the charges brought by Celsus against the doctrine of the Jews, who supposes he will the more quickly falsify Christianity, if, by accusing its origin which lies in the Jewish writings, he shows that one too to be false.

Next to these, Celsus says that goatherds and shepherds, following Moses who led them, beguiled by rustic deceptions, supposed there to be one God.

Let him show, then, how, after the goatherds and shepherds had irrationally, as he thinks, departed from worshipping gods, he himself is able to establish the multitude of gods among the Greeks, or the rest of the barbarians.

Let him show, then, the subsistence and substance of Mnemosyne giving birth to the Muses from Zeus, or of Themis to the Hours; or let him establish that the Graces, ever naked, are able to subsist according to substance.

But he will not be able, from the facts, to show that the Greek fabrications, which only seem to be given bodily substance, are gods.

More effective than all these fabrications, and better, is that which, persuaded by the things seen, worships the Maker of the universe according to the good order of the world - one Maker, who is one, and in harmony with his whole self, and therefore unable to have come to be by many makers, just as the whole heaven cannot be held together by many souls moving it;

for one soul suffices, which carries the whole fixed sphere from east to west and encompasses within all things of which the world has need - the things that are not self-complete.

For all things are parts of the world, but no part is God;

for God must be not imperfect, just as the part is imperfect.

And perhaps a deeper argument will show that God, properly speaking, just as he is not a part, so neither is he a whole, since the whole consists of parts;

and reason does not allow us to accept that the God who is over all is composed of parts, of which each cannot do what the other parts can.

After this he says that the goatherds and shepherds supposed there to be one God, whether called Most High, or Adonai, or Heavenly, or Sabaoth, or however else they delight to name this world;

And in what follows he says that it makes no difference whether one calls the God who is over all by the name current among the Greeks, Zeus, or by such-and-such a name, let us say, among the Indians, or by such-and-such a name among the Egyptians.

And to this too it must be said that there falls under the present subject a deep and secret argument, the one concerning the nature of names;

whether, as Aristotle thinks, names are by convention, or, as those of the Stoa hold, by nature - the first utterances imitating the things of which they are the names, in accordance with which they also introduce certain elements of etymology - or, as Epicurus teaches, names are by nature in a manner different from how those of the Stoa hold, the first men having broken forth certain utterances corresponding to things.

If, then, we are able in a prior argument to establish the nature of efficacious names, some of which are used by the wise of the Egyptians, or by the learned among the Magi of the Persians, or by the Brahmans or Samanaeans who philosophise among the Indians, and so on for each of the nations - and if we are able to establish that so-called magic is not, as those of Epicurus and Aristotle think, a thing wholly without consistency, but, as the experts in these matters demonstrate, is something consistent, having principles known to very few -

then we shall say that the name Sabaoth, and Adonai, and other names handed down among the Hebrews with much solemnity, are not applied to any chance and created things, but to a certain secret theology that refers to the Creator of all things.

Wherefore these names, when uttered with a certain sequence proper to them, are able to do something, while others, pronounced in the Egyptian tongue, are efficacious upon certain demons that can do only such-and-such things, and others, in the dialect of the Persians, upon other powers, and so on for each of the nations, being taken up for certain uses.

And thus it will be found that of the demons on earth, who have been allotted different places, the names are borne fittingly in accordance with the local and national dialects.

He, then, who has somewhat more nobly grasped even a little insight into these matters, will be cautious about fitting different names to different things, lest he ever suffer the same thing as those who erroneously apply the name 'God' to lifeless matter, or who drag down the appellation 'the good' from the first cause, or from virtue and the beautiful, to blind wealth and to the symmetry of flesh and blood and bones in health and good condition, or to so-called good birth.

And perhaps the danger is no less for the man who drags down the name of God, or the name of the good, to things to which they should not be applied, than for the man who interchanges names that follow some secret principle, applying some that belong to lesser things to greater things, and some that belong to greater things to lesser things.

...the fathers of Celsus' doctrines and the ancient theologians of the Greeks.

For what is the arbitrary choice, that Zeus is to be spoken of in the proper sense, but not also that his father is Cronus and his mother Rhea? And the like must be done concerning the others named as gods.

But this charge in no way touches those who, according to some secret principle, apply the name Sabaoth to God, or Adonai, or some other of the remaining names.

And when one is able to philosophise about names in their secret aspects, one would find much also concerning the invocation of the angels of God;

of whom one is called Michael, another Gabriel, and another Raphael, named appropriately to the things which they minister according to the will of the God of all in the universe.

And of the like philosophy concerning names partakes also our Jesus, whose name has already been clearly seen to drive out countless demons from souls and bodies, having had effect upon those persons from whom they were driven away.

And further, upon the topic of names it must be said that those skilled in the use of incantations record that, when the same incantation is spoken in its proper dialect, it is possible for it to effect what the incantation professes;

but when transferred into any other language whatsoever, it is to be seen as powerless and able to do nothing.

Thus it is not the things signified concerning the objects, but the qualities and properties of the sounds, that have in themselves a certain power toward these or those particular effects.

And by such considerations we shall also make our defence concerning the Christians' contending unto death, that they may not proclaim Zeus to be God nor name him in any other dialect.

For either they confess indefinitely the common name 'God', or with the addition 'the Creator of all things, the maker of heaven and earth, who sent down to the race of men these certain wise men';

to whose name the name 'God' being fitted accomplishes a certain power among men.

And many other things might be said upon the topic of names, against those who think one ought to be indifferent about their use.

And if Plato is admired for saying in the Philebus:

My fear, O Protarchus, concerning the names of the gods is no small one - since Philebus, the one conversing with Socrates, called pleasure a god -

how shall we not the more approve the Christians for their reverence, in that they attach to the Creator of the universe none of the names taken up in the myth-makings? But indeed, of these matters enough for the present.

But let us see in what manner Celsus, who professes to know all things, slanders the Jews, saying that they worship angels and are addicted to sorcery, of which Moses became their expounder.

For where in the writings of Moses did he find the lawgiver handing down the worship of angels? Let the one who professes to know the things of the Christians and Jews say.

And how is there sorcery among those who have received the law of Moses, who have read also 'You shall not cleave to enchanters, to be defiled by them'? And he professes to teach next how the Jews too, through ignorance, went astray, being deceived.

And if indeed he had found the ignorance among the Jews concerning Jesus the Christ, in that they did not hearken to the prophecies concerning him, he would truly have taught how the Jews went astray;

but as it is, not even willing to imagine these things, he supposes the things that are not errors of the Jews to be errors.

And Celsus, having professed that he would later teach the things concerning the Jews, first makes his argument concerning our Saviour, as having become the leader, in that birth of ours according to which we are Christians, and says that he, very few years ago, took the lead of this teaching, being supposed by the Christians to be the Son of God.

And concerning this very point - that he came into being a few years ago - we shall say such things as these:

not flattering the doctrine, but endeavouring to examine the matters with contemplation, I would say that not even those who heal many bodies that are gravely ill attain, apart from God, the end of bodily health;

but if a man were able to deliver souls also from the flood of wickedness and from intemperances and unjust deeds and contempt of the Divine, and could give proof of such a work in a hundred who had been bettered - let the argument be set at so many - would not anyone reasonably say that this man too did not, apart from God, implant in those hundred a word delivering from so many evils? And if the man who fair-mindedly considers these things will assent that nothing better has come to pass among men apart from God, how much more, taking courage, will he declare such a thing concerning Jesus, comparing the earlier lives of the many who came to his word with their later lives, and considering in what intemperances, in what injustices and greeds, each of these men was, before, as Celsus and those who hold his views say, they were deceived and received a word which, as those men say, ruins the life of men - but from the time they received the word, in what manner they became more reasonable and more venerable and more steadfast, so that some of them, out of love for surpassing purity and in order more purely to worship the Divine, do not even touch the sexual pleasures permitted by the law? And one examining the matters will see that Jesus dared things beyond human nature, and, having dared, accomplished them.

For when all from the beginning were opposing the sowing of his word over the whole inhabited world - the kings of each period and their commanders-in-chief and all the governors, and, in a word, all who had been entrusted with any authority whatever, and moreover the rulers in the cities and the soldiers and the peoples - he conquered, since by nature he could not be hindered, being the Word of God, and, becoming stronger than so many adversaries, he prevailed over all Greece and, to a greater extent, over the barbarian world, and transformed countless souls to the worship of God that is according to him.

And it was inevitable that, among a multitude conquered by the word - of whom the laymen and more rustic are many times more numerous than those trained in arguments - the laymen and more rustic should become many times more numerous than the more intelligent.

But Celsus, not willing to consider these things, thinks that the love of man shown by the word, reaching to every soul from the rising of the sun, is a vulgar thing, on the ground that it is vulgar and in no way able in argument, having prevailed over laymen only.

And yet not even he himself says that laymen only have been led by the word to the worship of God according to Jesus;

for he confesses that there are among them also some who are moderate and reasonable and intelligent, and ready for allegory.

And since he also makes use of impersonation, having in a way imitated a child introduced by a rhetorician, and brings on a Jew saying certain things to Jesus in a puerile manner, nothing worthy of a philosopher's grey hairs;

come, let us examine these things too as far as we are able, and prove that he has not at all preserved, in what is said, the character that fits the Jew.

After this he impersonates a Jew conversing with Jesus himself and refuting him on many points, as he thinks, first that he fabricated the story of his birth from a virgin;