Second Apology 10

Our teachings, then, are clearly greater than all human teaching, because the whole rational principle became Christ, who appeared for our sake: body, and Word, and soul. For whatever the philosophers and lawgivers ever rightly said and discovered, they worked out by discovery and contemplation according to a part of the Word. But since they did not know all that belongs to the Word, who is Christ, they often contradicted themselves. And those who lived before Christ, when they tried by human reason to consider and examine things, were brought before the courts as ungodly and meddlesome. Socrates, who was more earnest in this than all of them, was accused of the same things as we are; for they said that he introduced new divinities and did not believe in the gods the city recognizes. But he taught men to reject the evil demons, and those who did the things the poets told of, casting Homer and the other poets out of the state, and urged them to seek the knowledge of the God unknown to them by the search of reason, saying: “The Father and Maker of all it is not easy to find, nor, having found him, safe to declare him to all.” This our Christ did by his own power. For no one trusted Socrates so far as to die for this teaching; but Christ, who was known in part even by Socrates (for he was and is the Word who is in everything, who foretold what was to come both through the prophets and through himself when he became of like passions with us and taught these things), has been trusted not only by philosophers and scholars, but also by craftsmen and people wholly uneducated, who despised glory and fear and death; since he is the power of the ineffable Father, and not the vessel of human reason.