Against Celsus 1 part 32/42

"We beheld His glory, glory as of the only-begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth." Celsus, then, in too uneducated a fashion fabricated what he supposes we would say in answer to his question:

"How do we suppose we shall know God, and how shall we be saved unto Him?" But we would say the things set forth above.

But Celsus says we answer—admitting that with a plausible conjecture he records our answer as being thus:

"Since God is great and hard to contemplate, He cast His own Spirit into a body like ours and sent it down here, so that we might be able to hear from Him and learn."

But not only the God and Father of all is great according to us;

for He imparted of Himself and of His majesty to the Only-begotten and firstborn of all creation, that He, being Himself the image of the invisible God, might preserve the image of the Father also in His greatness.

For it was not possible for there to be a commensurate, so to speak, and beautiful image of the invisible God, not also presenting the image of the greatness.

But also God, according to us, by reason of not being a body, is invisible;

but to the contemplative He is contemplated by the heart, that is, by the mind—and by a heart not any chance one, but the pure one.

For it is not lawful for a defiled heart to gaze upon God, but the contemplative faculty of the pure must be pure according to its worth.

Let God indeed be also hard to contemplate;

...is so to someone, but so also is His Only-begotten.

For God the Word is hard to contemplate, and likewise hard to contemplate is the Wisdom in which God made all things.

For who can contemplate, in each of all things, the Wisdom in which God made each one of all things? It is not, then, because God is hard to contemplate, as though the Son were easy to contemplate, that He sent the Son.

Not having understood these things, Celsus said, as though from our person:

"On account of being hard to contemplate, He cast His own Spirit into a body like ours and sent it down here, so that we might be able to hear from Him and learn."

But as we have shown, the Son also is hard to contemplate, inasmuch as He is Word, God, through whom all things came to be, and He tabernacled among us.

And if Celsus understood the things we say concerning the Spirit of God, and that "As many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God," he would not have declared on his own, as though from us, that God, casting His own Spirit into a body, sent it down here.

For God always imparts of His own Spirit to those able to partake of Him, the Spirit coming to be in the worthy not by cutting off and division.

For neither is the spirit according to us a body, as neither is fire a body, which is said to be God in the verse:

"Our God is a consuming fire." For all these things are said figuratively, for the presentation, from the customary and bodily names, of the intelligible nature.

And just as, if sins are said to be wood and hay and stubble, we shall not say that sins are bodies, and if noble deeds are said to be gold and silver and precious stone, we shall not say that noble deeds are bodies;

so too, even if God be said to be a fire consuming the wood and the hay and the stubble and every substance of sin, we shall not conceive Him a body.

And as, if He be said to be fire, we do not conceive Him a body, so if God be said to be spirit, we do not say Him to be a body.

For in contradistinction to sensible things, it is customary for Scripture to name intelligible things "spirits" and "spiritual";

as in "But our sufficiency is from God, who also made us sufficient as ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit;

for the letter kills, but the spirit gives life"—by "letter" he named the sensible reception of the divine writings, and by "spirit" the intelligible one.

So therefore also in the "God is spirit";

since both Samaritans and Jews were doing in a bodily and typical manner the things commanded by the law, the Savior said to the Samaritan woman:

"That an hour cometh, when neither in Jerusalem nor in this mountain shall ye worship the Father;

God is spirit, and they that worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth." Through which He taught that one must not worship God in the flesh and with fleshly sacrifices, but in spirit.

For He Himself also might be conceived as Spirit, analogously to one's serving Him in spirit and intelligibly.

But also one must worship the Father not in types but in truth, which came through Jesus Christ after the law was given through Moses.

For whenever we turn to the Lord—and the Lord is the Spirit—the veil lying upon the heart is taken away, whenever Moses is read.

Inasmuch, then, as Celsus did not understand the things concerning the Spirit of God—for the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God;

for they are folly to him, and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually discerned—he attaches to himself the supposition that we, saying God is spirit, in this differ in nothing from the Stoics among the Greeks, who assert that God is a spirit that has gone through all things and contains all things in itself.

For the oversight and providence of God does indeed pervade all things, but not as the spirit of the Stoics;

and providence does indeed contain and encompass all the things it provides for, but it does not contain as a body containing—when that which is contained is also a body—but as a divine power both containing and encompassing the things contained.

...and the Word of God, which descends as far as men and the least of things, is nothing else than a bodily spirit;

but according to us, who try to demonstrate that the rational soul too is superior to all bodily nature, and an invisible and incorporeal substance, God the Word—through whom all things came to be, who reaches forth so that all things may come to be through the Word, not only as far as men but also as far as the things reckoned least and governed by nature—would not be a body.

Let all things, then, those of the Stoa, be consumed by fire; but we know no incorporeal substance being consumed by fire, nor the substance of man's soul, or of angels, or of thrones, or of dominions, or of principalities, or of powers being dissolved into fire.

Wherefore it has been vainly said by Celsus, as by one not knowing the things of the Spirit of God, that since the Son is a spirit from God who has come to be in a human body, neither would the Son of God Himself be immortal.

Then again he confuses the matter for himself, as though some of us would not confess that God is spirit, but His Son, and he thinks to meet it by saying that there is no such nature of spirit as to remain forever;

as if, when we say that God is a consuming fire, he were to say that there is no such nature of fire as to remain forever;

not seeing in what sense we say our God is fire, and of what things He is consumptive, namely of sins and of wickedness.

For it befits a good God, after each one has appeared as a contestant—of what sort he became as a contestant—to consume wickedness by the fire of punishments.

Then again he takes up for himself what is not said by us, that it is necessary that God should have breathed out.

And consequent upon this is that Jesus could not have risen with the body;

for God would not have received back the spirit which He gave, defiled by the nature of the body.

It is foolish, then, for us to answer to the arguments, as though ours, those which are not ours.

Then next, repeating himself, after having in the foregoing said many things and scoffed at the birth of God from a virgin—to which we replied as far as was possible for us—he says:

But if He wished to send down a spirit from Himself, what need was there to breathe it into the womb of a woman? For, knowing already how to mold men, He could have molded a body for this one too, and not have cast His own spirit into so great a defilement;

thus indeed it would not even have been disbelieved, if it had been sown straightway from above.

And he said these things because he did not see the virginal and pure birth, and from no corruption, of the body that was to minister to the salvation of men.

But he who sets forth the Stoic doctrine, and does not pretend to have learned the things concerning indifferents, supposes that the divine nature was cast into defilement and was defiled, whether by coming to be in a woman's body until the body was molded around it, or by having taken on a body;

doing something nearly like those who suppose that the rays of the sun are defiled in mire and ill-smelling bodies and do not remain pure even there.

And even if, according to Celsus's hypothesis, the body had been molded around Jesus without birth, those who beheld the body would not straightway have believed that it was not from birth;

for that which is seen does not also declare the nature whence it has come to be.

For example, if, by hypothesis, there were some honey not from bees, one would not declare from the taste or the sight that it is not from bees;

as neither does that which is from bees show its origin to the sense, but experience shows that this is from bees.

And so too experience teaches that wine is from the vine;

for the taste does not refer back to its being from the vine.

In the same manner, then, the sensible body does not declare the manner of its subsistence.

And you will be led on to what is said by the example of the things in the heavens, of whose subsistence and brilliance we are aware in beholding them;

but surely sense does not suggest to us whether they are generated or ungenerated.

At any rate, sects have arisen concerning these things too;

but even those who say they are generated do not agree about how they are generated;

for neither does sense suggest this, even if reason, forcing the matter, find that they are generated, concerning in what manner they have been generated.

...having already stated the things concerning the opinion of Marcion, and in some respects he truly sets forth the things of Marcion, but in others he has misheard even those things;

to which it is not necessary for us to reply or even to refute.

Then again he brings against himself the things for Marcion and the things against him, saying which of the charges they escape and into which they fall;

and when he wishes to plead alongside the doctrine asserting that He was prophesied, in order that he may accuse Marcion and those of his school, he clearly says that whence will it be demonstrated that one who was so punished is a son of God, unless it was foretold concerning him? Then again he plays and, as is his custom, scoffs, bringing in two sons of gods—one of the Demiurge and another of the god according to Marcion—and he portrays their single combats, saying they are like those of quails, and the wars of the fathers;

or that the fathers, being useless on account of old age and doting, do nothing to one another, but allow their sons to fight.

What, then, he said in the foregoing, this we shall say to him:

What old woman, lulling a child to sleep, would not be ashamed to say such things as this man says in what is entitled The True Word? For while he ought to have stood up factually against the arguments, he instead, letting go of the matters, plays and buffoons, supposing he is writing mimes or some jests, not seeing that such a conduct of his arguments is contrary to his own purpose—for he wishes us, having forsaken Christianity, to attend to his doctrines;

which, if he had treated with gravity, would perhaps have been more persuasive;

but since he scoffs and plays and buffoons, we shall say that, for lack of grave arguments—for he neither had them nor knew them—he fell into such great drivel.

Next to these he says that, since there was a divine spirit in a body, it altogether ought to differ in something from the rest, either in size, or beauty, or strength, or voice, or astonishing power, or persuasiveness.

For it is impossible that one to whom something divine, more than to the rest, was present should differ in nothing from another;

but this differed in nothing from another, but, as they say, was small and ill-favored and ignoble.

It appears, then, even in these things, that whenever he wishes to accuse Jesus, he speaks the things from the Scriptures as though believing those Scriptures that seem to him to provide occasions of accusation;

but where, according to the same Scriptures, one might think the contrary is said to the things taken up for accusation, these he does not even pretend to know.

Admittedly, then, it is written concerning Jesus that His body had become ill-favored, yet not, as he has set it forth, also ignoble, nor is it clearly shown that it was small.

The passage stands thus as recorded in Isaiah, who prophesies that He would sojourn among the multitudes, not in a comely form nor with any surpassing beauty:

"Lord, who hath believed our report? And the arm of the Lord, to whom hath it been revealed? We declared before Him as a little child, as a root in a thirsty ground;

He hath no form <nor glory;

and we saw Him, and He had no form> nor beauty;

but His form is without honor, failing beyond the sons of men." Did Celsus, then, hear these things, since he supposed them useful to him for accusing Jesus, but no longer attend to the things said in the forty-fourth psalm, in what manner it is said:

"Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O mighty one, with thy comeliness and thy beauty;

and bend the bow and prosper and reign"? Let it be, however, that he has not read the prophecy, or, having read it, was distracted by those who misinterpret it as not being prophesied concerning Jesus Christ;

what will he say also concerning the Gospel, in which, having gone up into a high mountain, He was transfigured before the disciples and was seen in glory, when also Moses and Elijah, appearing in glory, spoke of His departure which He was about to fulfill in Jerusalem? Or if, on the one hand, a prophet says:

"We saw Him, and He had no form nor beauty" and what follows, and Celsus accepts this prophecy as being referred to Jesus, being blind concerning the acceptance of what is said and not seeing that it is a great proof that the seemingly formless Jesus is the Son of God, that, many years before His birth, prophecy was also uttered concerning His form;

but, on the other hand, when a prophet says comeliness and beauty are about Him, he no longer wishes the prophecy to be referred to Jesus Christ? And if, on the one hand, it were possible to take clearly from the Gospels that "He had no form nor beauty, but His form was without honor, failing beyond the sons of men," one might say that Celsus said these things not according to the prophetic but according to the Gospel account;

but as it is, neither the Gospels nor even the Apostles indicating that He had no form nor beauty, it is clear that he is compelled to accept the thing from the prophecy as being truly spoken concerning Christ;

which no longer permits the accusations against Jesus to go forward.

"Since there was a divine spirit in a body, it altogether ought to differ in something from the rest, either in size, or voice, or strength, or astonishing power, or persuasiveness"—how did he not see what differed in His body, in relation to what was possible for the beholders and therefore useful—appearing such as it behooved each one to see it? And it is no wonder that matter, which is by nature changeable and alterable and transformable into all that the Demiurge wills, and receptive of every quality which the Artificer wills, at one time has a quality according to which it is said:

"He had no form nor beauty," and at another time so glorious and astonishing and wonderful, that the spectators of so great a beauty—the three apostles who had gone up with Jesus—fell upon their faces.

But he will say that these are fabrications and differ in nothing from myths, like the rest of the marvels concerning Jesus.

To this, then, we have made our defense at greater length in the things before these;

but the account has also something more mystical, declaring that the different forms of Jesus are to be referred to the nature of the divine Word, which does not appear alike to the many and to those able to follow Him up to the high mountain we have spoken of.

For to those still below and not yet prepared for ascending, the Word has no form nor beauty;

for His form is to such ones without honor and failing beyond the words begotten by men, figuratively in these passages called sons of men.

For we might say that the words of the philosophers appear far more comely, being sons of men, than the word of God proclaimed to the many, which displays even a foolishness of preaching;

and on account of the apparent foolishness of the preaching, those who behold this alone say:

"We saw Him, and He had no form nor beauty." But to those who, from following Him, have received power to accompany Him also as He ascends to the high mountain, He has a more divine form;

which they behold, if one is a Peter, having made room in himself for the building of the Church from the Word and taken on so great a habit, that no gate of Hades shall prevail against him, he having been exalted through the Word out of the gates of death, so that he may proclaim all the praises of God in the gates of the daughter of Zion;

and if there are some who have taken their origin from great-voiced words, who fall nothing short of an intelligible thunder.

But whence should Celsus and the enemies of the divine word, who have not examined the things of Christianity in a truth-loving manner, know the purpose of the different forms of Jesus? And I say also of His ages, and whatever was done by Him before His suffering and after His rising from the dead.

And next to these things Celsus says some such things:

Furthermore, if indeed God, like the Zeus in the comic poet, having waked from his long sleep, wished to deliver the race of men from evils, why ever did He send into one corner this spirit, as you say? He ought to have breathed similarly into many bodies and sent them throughout the whole inhabited world.

But the comic poet, making people laugh in the theater, wrote that Zeus, having awakened, sent Hermes to the Athenians and Lacedaemonians;

—Celsus comparing Hermes to the God of the whole, our Demiurge.

We have indeed said in the things before these, that not as if rising up from a long sleep did God send Jesus to the race of men—who now, for good reasons, fulfilled the dispensation according to the incarnation, but who has always benefited the race of men.

For none of the good things among men has come to be, without the divine Word having sojourned in the souls of those able, even for a little time, to receive such activities of the divine Word.

But also the seeming sojourn of Jesus in one corner came to be for good reason, since it behooved that to those who had learned of one God and who read His prophets and learned of a Christ being proclaimed, the One prophesied should sojourn, and should sojourn at a time when the Word was about to be poured forth from one corner upon all the inhabited world.

Wherefore also there was no need for many bodies to come to be everywhere, and many spirits analogous to Jesus, in order that the whole inhabited world of men might be enlightened by the Word of God.

For the one Word sufficed, having risen as a sun of righteousness, to send forth from Judea the rays that reach the soul of those willing to receive Him.

But if one also longs to see many bodies filled with divine spirit, ministering, analogously to that one Christ, to the salvation of men everywhere, let him consider those who everywhere soundly and with an upright life teach the word of Jesus, themselves also called "christs" by the divine Scriptures in the "Touch not my christs, and do my prophets no harm."

For just as we heard that "Antichrist comes," and nonetheless have learned that "many antichrists are in the world";

in the same manner, having come to know that Christ has sojourned, we behold that on His account many christs have come to be in the world, who, analogously to Him, loved righteousness and hated iniquity;

and on this account God, the God of Christ, anointed them too with the oil of gladness.

But He indeed, having loved righteousness and hated lawlessness beyond His partakers, received the first-fruits of the anointing and, if one must so name it, the whole anointing of the oil of gladness;

but His partakers, each as he has made room, partook also of His anointing.

Wherefore, since Christ is head of the Church, so that Christ and the Church are one body, the ointment came down from the head upon the beard—the symbols of the perfect man, Aaron—and this ointment reached, coming down upon the hem of his garment.

And these things have been said by me against the unseemly statement of Celsus, who said:

"He ought to have breathed similarly into many bodies and sent them throughout the whole inhabited world."

The comic poet, then, making people laugh, represented Zeus as sleeping and waking and sending Hermes to the Greeks;

but the Word, knowing the sleepless nature of God, let it teach us that God administers the affairs of the world according to seasons, as the reasonable requires.

And it is no wonder if, on account of the judgments of God being great and hard to expound, untaught souls go astray, and Celsus along with them.

There is nothing, then, laughable in the Son of God having been sent among Jews, among whom the prophets had come to be;

in order that, beginning thence, He might rise bodily, in power and spirit, upon the inhabited world of souls that no longer wished to be desolate of God.

Next to these things, Celsus thought to call most god-inspired from the beginning the nations of the Chaldeans, from whom the deceitful casting of nativities has been distributed among men.

But also Celsus ranks the Magi among the most god-inspired nations, from whom the magic, named after their nation, has come even to the rest of the nations, for the corruption and destruction of those who use it.

And the Egyptians, who in the foregoing, even according to Celsus, went astray, as having solemn precincts of their reputed temples, but within nothing but apes or crocodiles or goats or asps or some of the animals—

—he goes on to call also the Egyptian nation most god-inspired from the beginning, perhaps because they had warred against the Jews from the beginning.

And the Persians, who marry their mothers and have intercourse with their daughters, seem to Celsus to be a god-filled nation; and also the Indians, some of whom, in the things said before, he said had even tasted human flesh.

But of the Jews, who especially in olden times practiced none of these things, he not only did not call them most god-inspired, but even said they would presently perish.

This he says even as a soothsayer concerning them, not seeing the whole dispensation of God concerning the Jews and their solemn polity of old, and how by their transgression salvation came to the nations, and their transgression is the riches of the world, and their failure the riches of the nations;

until the fullness of the nations come in, that after this all Israel—whom Celsus does not understand—may be saved.

But I do not know how he says concerning God that He who knows all things did not know this, that He sends His Son to evil men who would also sin and would punish Him.

But he seems now willingly to have forgotten the doctrine that asserts all things which Jesus the Christ would suffer were foreseen by the divine Spirit, and were prophesied by the prophets of God;

from which it does not follow that God did not know that He sends His Son to evil men who would also sin and would punish Him.

And straightway he says that these things having been foretold of old is said by us by way of defense.

But since our sixth book has received a sufficient compass, having here brought our discourse to rest, we shall begin, God granting, a seventh;

in which he thinks to meet what is said by us, that the prophets foretold all the things concerning Jesus.

Since these things are many and need a longer discourse to deal with them, we neither wished to break off, being compelled by the size of the book, nor, for the sake of not breaking off the discourse, to make the sixth book very great and beyond due measure.

ORIGEN'S SEVENTH BOOK AGAINST THE WORK ENTITLED THE TRUE WORD OF CELSUS. In the six books before this one, holy brother Ambrose, having contended as far as was possible for us against Celsus's accusations against Christians, and having left, as far as our power allowed, nothing untested and unexamined, nor passed over anything to which we did not, as far as was possible for us, make reply—having called upon God through Jesus Christ Himself, the One accused by Celsus, that He, being truth, might shine forth in our heart the things subversive of falsehood—we begin also the seventh treatise, saying that prophetic word in our prayer to God:

"In Thy truth utterly destroy them"—clearly meaning the arguments contrary to the truth;

for these are destroyed by the truth of God, that, they having been destroyed, those freed from all distraction may say what follows that verse:

"I will sacrifice unto Thee willingly"—offering a rational and smokeless sacrifice to the God of all.

It now lies before Celsus to accuse the doctrine which asserts that the things concerning the Christ Jesus are prophesied by the prophets among the Jews.

And first, at the very beginning, we examine what he supposes—namely that those who introduce another god beside the God of the Jews can in no way meet his difficulties, while we, who have kept the same God, take refuge in the defense through the things prophesied concerning Christ.

Let us see by what means they will discover an evasion:

those who introduce another god will find none, while those who introduce the same God will again say the same thing, that clever point, namely that it behooved that it should so come to pass;

And here is the proof: for these things had been foretold long ago.

But to this we shall reply that the things said about Jesus and the Christians a little earlier are so feeble that even those who introduce another god and act impiously could most easily meet the assertions made by Celsus.

And were it not absurd to give occasions to weaker minds for accepting worse doctrines, we too would have done this, in order to expose as false the claim that those who introduce another god have no defence against what has been said by Celsus.

In addition to what was said above, let us make our defence.

The things foretold by the Pythia, or by the priestesses of Dodona, or by Clarius, or at Branchidae, or at the shrine of Ammon, or by countless other deliverers of oracles—by whom indeed almost the whole earth has been governed—these things they reckon of no account;

but the things said—or not said—after their manner by the people in Judaea, and such as those in the regions of Phoenicia and Palestine are still accustomed to utter even now, these they regard as marvellous and beyond compare.

Let us then say concerning the oracles enumerated that it is possible for us, gathering not a few arguments from Aristotle and those who philosophized in the manner of the Peripatetics, to speak for the overthrow of the account concerning the Pythia and the rest of the oracles;

and it is possible also, by setting forth what was said by Epicurus and those who embrace his teaching on these same matters, to show that even some of the Greeks overthrow the oracles that are believed and admired throughout all Greece.

But let it be granted that the matters concerning the Pythia and the rest of the oracles are not fabrications nor human pretences of divine inspiration;

let us then see whether even so it cannot be demonstrated, to those who examine matters in a love of truth, that even for one who admits that these oracles exist it is not necessary to concede that there are certain gods among them, but on the contrary that there are certain base demons and spirits hostile to the human race, hindering the soul's ascent and its journey through virtue and its restoration to God through true piety.