Against Celsus 6.11–6.24

After this Celsus says: If these (meaning the Christians) introduce this one, and others another, and the common and ready word of all is “Believe, if you wish to be saved, or go away,” what will those do who truly wish to be saved? Will they throw dice and divine where to turn and whom to join? To this too, starting from what is evident, we shall say the following. If there had been several who, like Jesus, were recorded to have come into human life as sons of God, and each of them had drawn some people to himself, so that because of the likeness of their claims it was disputed which one, attested by those who believed in him, was the Son of God, then there would be room for “If these introduce this one, and others another, and the common and ready word of all is ‘Believe, if you wish to be saved, or go away,’” and the rest. But as it is, Jesus has been preached to the whole world as the only Son of God who has come to the human race. For those who, like Celsus, supposed that marvels had been invented, and for that reason wished to invent marvels in the same way, thinking that they too would gain power over men in a similar way, were proved to be nothing: Simon the Samaritan magician, and Dositheus, who came from the same country as he; for the one claimed that he was the power of God that is called great, and the other that he himself was the Son of God. For nowhere in the world are there Simonians; and yet, to win over more followers, Simon removed from his disciples the danger of death, which Christians have been taught to choose, by teaching them that idolatry is a matter of indifference. But the Simonians were never plotted against at all, for the evil demon who plots against the teaching of Jesus knew that none of his own purposes would be undone by the teachings of Simon. And the Dositheans did not flourish even before; now they have died out entirely, so that their whole number is said not to reach thirty. And “Judas the Galilean,” as Luke wrote in the Acts of the Apostles, wished to call himself someone great, and before him “Theudas”; but since their teaching was not from God, they were destroyed, and “all who obeyed” them were at once scattered. We do not, then, throw dice to divine where to turn and whom to join, as though several could draw us away by claiming to have come from God to the human race. But enough of these matters.

So we pass on to another accusation of Celsus, who does not even know our words but says, from things he has half-heard, that we say that wisdom among men is foolishness with God, since Paul says: “The wisdom of the world is foolishness with God.” And Celsus says that the reason for this was stated long ago. He thinks the reason is that by this saying we wish to attract only the uneducated and the simple-minded. But, as he himself noted, he said the same thing above, and we have answered the argument as well as we could. Yet he wished to show that this too was invented by us and taken from the wise men among the Greeks, who said that human wisdom is one thing and divine wisdom another. And he sets out sayings of Heraclitus: one in which he says, “For human character has no insight, but divine character has,” and another, “A man is called childish by a divinity, just as a child is by a man.” He also sets out these words from Plato's Apology of Socrates: “For I, men of Athens, have gained this name through nothing other than a kind of wisdom. What kind of wisdom is this? The kind that is perhaps human wisdom; for in this I really may be wise.” These, then, are the passages Celsus sets out. But I will add these words from Plato's letter to Hermias, Erastus, and Coriscus: “To Erastus and Coriscus, besides this fine wisdom of the Forms, I say, old man though I am, that they also need wisdom that guards against wicked and unjust men, and a certain power of self-defence. For they are inexperienced, because they have spent much of their life with us, who are moderate and not wicked. That is why I said that they need these, so that they may not be compelled to neglect the true wisdom and to attend more than they should to the human and necessary kind.”

Accordingly, then, there is a divine wisdom and a human wisdom. The human is what we call “the wisdom of the world,” which is “foolishness with God”; but the divine, which is different from the human, if indeed it is divine, comes by the grace of God, who gives it to those who have made themselves fit to receive it, and especially to those who, knowing the difference between the one wisdom and the other, say in their prayers to God: “For even if someone is perfect among the sons of men, when the wisdom that comes from you is absent he will be counted as nothing.” And we say that human wisdom is a training ground for the soul, but divine wisdom is its goal; and the latter is also called the “solid food” of the soul by the one who said: “Solid food is for the perfect, who because of practice have their faculties trained to distinguish good and evil.” This view is indeed truly ancient; not, as Celsus supposes, in that its antiquity goes back to Heraclitus and Plato. For before these the prophets distinguished the two kinds of wisdom. For the present it is enough to quote from the words of David what is said about the man who is wise with divine wisdom, who “will not see corruption,” he says, “when he sees wise men dying.” Divine wisdom, then, being different from faith, is the first of the so-called “gifts” of God; after it, second, for those who know how to make such distinctions precisely, is what is called knowledge; and third, since even the simpler people who come to piety as well as they can must be saved, is faith. That is why Paul says: “To one is given through the Spirit a word of wisdom, to another a word of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit.” Therefore you would find that it is not ordinary people who have received divine wisdom, but those who excel and stand out among all who are devoted to Christianity; nor does anyone expound the matters of divine wisdom to the most uneducated or to slaves or to the most ignorant.

Yet Celsus says that others are the most uneducated, slaves, and most ignorant, meaning those who do not know his precepts and have not been trained in the learning of the Greeks. But we say that the most uneducated are those who are not ashamed to talk to lifeless things, who call on what is weak for health, ask what is dead for life, and beg what is utterly helpless for help. And even if some say that these are not the gods but imitations of the true gods and symbols of them, these too are no less uneducated, slaves, and ignorant, since they imagine that imitations of the divinity can be in the hands of craftsmen. So we say that the lowest among us have been set free from this lack of education and ignorance, and that the divine hope is understood and grasped by the most intelligent. We also say that it is not possible for one who has not been trained in human wisdom to receive the more divine; and we acknowledge that all human wisdom is foolishness compared with the divine. Then, when he ought to argue about the doctrine, Celsus calls us sorcerers and says that we flee headlong from the more cultivated, because they are not ready to be deceived, and lure the more boorish. For he did not see that from the very beginning our wise men were educated in outside learning too: Moses “in all the wisdom of the Egyptians,” and Daniel, Ananias, Azarias, and Misael in all the letters of the Assyrians, so that they were found ten times better than all the wise men there. And now too the churches have, in proportion to their numbers, a few wise men who have come even from what we call wisdom “according to the flesh,” and they also have those who have passed from that to the divine wisdom.

Then, after this, Celsus, as though he had merely heard talk about humility and had not carefully understood it, wishes to disparage the humility we teach; he thinks it is a misunderstanding of the words of Plato, who says somewhere in the Laws: “God, as the ancient saying has it, holding the beginning and end and middle of all things that are, accomplishes his course straightforwardly, going round according to nature; and justice always follows him, the avenger of those who fall short of the divine law; and the one who is to be happy holds fast to her and follows her, humble and orderly.” He does not see that among men far older than Plato it was said in prayer: “Lord, my heart has not been lifted up, nor have my eyes been raised high; nor have I walked among great things, nor among wonderful things above me, unless I was humble-minded.” At the same time these words show that the humble-minded person does not in every case humble himself in an unseemly and ill-omened way, as Celsus puts it, falling on his knees, flinging himself headlong, wearing the clothes of wretches, and heaping dust upon himself. For the one who is humble-minded according to the prophet, while walking “among great and wonderful things” above him, that is, among truly “great” doctrines and “wonderful” thoughts, humbles himself “under the mighty hand of God.” And if some, through lack of education, have not grasped the doctrine of humility clearly and do such things, the teaching is not to be blamed; rather we must pardon the lack of education of those who aim at better things but miss them through simplicity. For more truly “humble and orderly” than the humble and orderly man of Plato is the one who is orderly because he walks “among great” and “wonderful things” above him, and humble because, even while among them, he willingly humbles himself, not under any chance person but “under the mighty hand of God,” through Jesus, the teacher of such lessons, “who did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,” “and being found in fashion as a man he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.” And the doctrine of humility is so great that it has no ordinary teacher, but our great Saviour himself says: “Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

After this Celsus says that Jesus' pronouncement against the rich, when he said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” was plainly taken from Plato, Jesus having corrupted the Platonic saying in which Plato said that “it is impossible to be exceptionally good and exceptionally rich.” Who that is able to attend to the facts even moderately would not laugh at Celsus, not only among those who believe in Jesus but among the rest of mankind as well, on hearing that Jesus, who was born and brought up among the Jews, who was thought to be the son of Joseph “the carpenter,” and who had not learned letters, not only those of the Greeks but not even those of the Hebrews, as the truthful writings about him also testify, read Plato, and, pleased with his saying about the rich, that “it is impossible to be exceptionally good and rich,” corrupted it and made it “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”? But if Celsus had read the Gospels as a lover of truth and not with hatred and hostility, he would have considered why the camel, of all animals the most crooked in build, was taken as a comparison for the rich man, and what was meant by the narrow eye “of the needle” for him who says that the way that leads “to life” is narrow and hard; and why this animal is recorded in the law as “unclean,” having something acceptable, in that it chews the cud, and something blameworthy, in that it does not divide the hoof. He would also have examined how often the camel is mentioned in the divine Scriptures and of whom, so as to see the meaning of the word about the rich. Nor would he have left unexamined why the poor are blessed by Jesus and the rich pitied, whether he says this of the poor and rich in the sensible sense … or whether the word knows a certain poverty that is in every way blessed and a wealth that is in every way blameworthy. For not even an ordinary person would indiscriminately praise the poor, most of whom are of very bad character. But so much for this.

Next, wishing to belittle what is written among us about the kingdom of God, Celsus quotes none of it, as though it were not worth recording in his book (perhaps because he did not even know it), but sets out passages of Plato from the letters and the Phaedrus, as though these were spoken under divine inspiration while our writings contain nothing of the kind. Let us, then, set a few things beside them for comparison with what Plato said, not unpersuasively indeed, yet without disposing the philosopher himself to conduct himself worthily of them in piety toward the Maker of the universe, a piety that he ought not to have adulterated or defiled with what we call idolatry, or, as the many might say, using their own word, with superstition. In a Hebrew manner of speech it is said of God in the seventeenth Psalm that “God made darkness his hiding place,” to show that the thoughts about God that would be worthy of him are hidden and unknown, since he has hidden himself as it were in darkness from those who cannot bear the radiance of the knowledge of him and are unable to see him, partly because of the defilement of the mind bound to a human body “of humiliation,” and partly because of its too limited capacity to comprehend God. And to show that knowledge of God rarely reaches men and is found in very few, Moses is recorded to have entered “into the thick darkness where God was”; and again of Moses: “Moses alone shall come near to God, but the rest shall not come near.” And again, to set forth the depth of the doctrines about God, which is incomprehensible to those who do not have “the Spirit” that searches all things, and searches “even the depths of God,” the prophet said: “The abyss like a garment is his covering.” And our Saviour and Lord, the Word of God, showing the greatness of the knowledge of the Father, which is received and known worthily first of all by himself alone, and secondarily by those whose governing faculty is illumined by the Word and God himself, says: “No one has known the Son except the Father, nor the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son reveals him.” For no one can know worthily the uncreated one, the firstborn of all created nature, as the Father who begot him does; nor can anyone know the Father as his living Word and Wisdom and Truth does. By participation in him, who removes from the Father what is called the “darkness” which “he made his hiding place,” and what is called his “covering,” the abyss, and so reveals the Father, whoever is able to know him knows him.

I thought it right to set out these few examples from a great many thoughts about God conceived by holy men, to show that the sacred writings of the prophets contain something more sublime than the Platonic words admired by Celsus, for those who have eyes able to see the sublime things of the Scriptures. The passage of Plato which Celsus set out runs thus: “All things are about the King of all, and all things are for his sake, and he is the cause of all beautiful things. And second things are about the second, and third things about the third. The human soul, then, longs to learn about them, of what sort they are, looking to what is akin to itself, none of which is adequate. But about the King and the things I have mentioned there is nothing of this sort.” I could also set out what is written in Isaiah about those whom the Hebrews call “seraphim,” who cover “the face” and “the feet” of God, and about those named “cherubim,” whom Ezekiel described, and their shapes, as it were, and in what manner God is said to ride upon the cherubim. But since these things are spoken in a very hidden way because of the unworthy and irreverent, who cannot follow the grandeur and sublimity of theology, I did not think it fitting to discuss them in this treatise.

Next Celsus says that certain Christians, having misunderstood some Platonic sayings, boast of the God above the heavens, going up beyond the heaven of the Jews. Here he does not make clear whether they go beyond the God of the Jews too, or only beyond the heaven by which they swear. It is not our present business to speak about those who proclaim another God besides the one worshipped by the Jews too, but to defend ourselves and to show that the prophets of the Jews whom we accept could not have taken anything from Plato, for they were older than he. So we did not take from Plato the saying that “all things are about the King of all, and all things are for his sake”; rather we have learned from the prophets things said better than this, since Jesus and his disciples made clear the intention of the Spirit in the prophets, which was none other than the Spirit of Christ. Nor was the philosopher the first to set forth what concerns the place above the heavens; David long ago set forth the depth and the multitude of the contemplations about God among those who have risen above sensible things, when he said in the book of Psalms: “Praise God, you heavens of heavens, and the water that is above the heavens; let them praise the name of the Lord.” And I do not rule out that Plato learned the words in the Phaedrus from certain Hebrews, or, as some have recorded, that he set them out after reading the prophetic writings, where he said: “No poet here below has ever sung, or ever will sing, worthily of the place above the heavens,” and what follows, among which is this: “For the being that truly is, without colour, without shape, intangible, visible only to mind, the soul's pilot, is the object of the true kind of knowledge, and occupies this place.” And our Paul, educated by those words and longing for what is beyond the world and above the heavens, and doing everything for their sake in order to attain them, says in the second letter to the Corinthians: “For our momentary light affliction is working for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, while we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are not seen; for the things that are seen are temporary, but the things that are not seen are eternal.”

For to those able to hear, he plainly presents sensible things, calling them “things that are seen,” and names the intelligible things, grasped by the mind alone, “things that are not seen.” He also knows that sensible and “seen” things are “temporary,” but intelligible and “unseen” things are “eternal”; and wishing to attain the contemplation of these, helped by his longing for them, he considered every affliction as nothing and light. Even in the very time “of affliction” and labours he was in no way weighed down by them, but made every hardship light through his contemplation of those things. For we too have “a great high priest,” great in the greatness of his power and his mind, “who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God,” who has promised to lead on to what is beyond the world those who have genuinely learned divine things and lived worthily of them; for he says: “that where I am going you also may be.” For this reason we hope, after the labours and struggles here, to come to the summits of the heavens, and, having received according to the teaching of Jesus springs “of water welling up to eternal life,” and having taken in rivers of contemplation, to be with the waters said to be “above the heavens,” which praise “the name of the Lord.” And as long as we praise him, we shall not be carried round by the revolution of the heaven, but shall always be engaged in the contemplation of the invisible things of God, no longer understood by us “from the creation of the world through the things that are made,” but, as the genuine disciple of Jesus put it when he said, “but then face to face,” and, “When the perfect comes, what is in part will be done away.”

The Scriptures that are current in the churches of God do not speak of seven heavens or of any fixed number of them at all; but the words seem to teach “heavens,” whether they mean the spheres of what the Greeks call the planets or something else more secret. And Celsus says, following Plato, that the path of souls to earth and from earth passes through the planets. But Moses, our most ancient prophet, says that a divine dream was seen in a vision by our patriarch Jacob: a ladder reaching “to heaven,” and angels “of God” ascending and descending on it, and the Lord standing firm at its top; whether in the account of the ladder he was hinting at these things or at something greater than these. Philo too composed a book about it, which deserves wise and intelligent examination by lovers of truth.

Next, wishing to display his wide learning in his book against us, Celsus also sets out certain Persian mysteries, where he says: These things are hinted at by the account of the Persians too, and by the rite of Mithras that is among them. For in it there is a symbol of the two revolutions in heaven, that of the fixed stars and that assigned to the planets, and of the soul's passage through them. The symbol is this: a ladder with seven gates, and above it an eighth gate. The first of the gates is of lead, the second of tin, the third of bronze, the fourth of iron, the fifth of an alloy, the sixth of silver, and the seventh of gold. They assign the first to Kronos, indicating by the lead the slowness of the star; the second to Aphrodite, comparing her to the brightness and softness of tin; the third to Zeus, the bronze-floored and solid one; the fourth to Hermes, for both iron and Hermes endure all works, make money, and labour much; the fifth to Ares, the one that is uneven and varied because of the mixture; the sixth to the Moon, the silver one; and the seventh to the Sun, the golden one, imitating their colours. Next he examines the reason for the stars being arranged in this order, which is indicated through symbols in the names of the rest of the materials, and he attaches musical theories to the theology of the Persians that he sets out; and he is ambitious enough to set out a second account as well, again connected with musical theories. But it seemed to me absurd to set out Celsus's words on these matters, and like what he himself did when, in his accusation against Christians and Jews, he brought in irrelevantly not only the writings of Plato, as though he were content with these, but also what he calls the Persian mysteries of Mithras and their explanation. However these things stand, whether falsely or truly, for the Persians and those who revere the rites of Mithras, why did he set out these rather than some other mysteries with their explanation? For the mysteries of Mithras do not seem to be held in special honour among the Greeks above the Eleusinian mysteries, or those of Hecate handed on to those initiated at Aegina. And if he wished to set out barbarian mysteries with their explanation, why not rather those of the Egyptians, in which many take pride, or those of the Cappadocians about Artemis at Comana, or those of the Thracians, or even those of the Romans themselves, who initiate the noblest members of the Senate? But if it seemed to him irrelevant to set out any of these, since they contributed nothing to his accusation of Jews or Christians, why did the same not seem irrelevant to him when he set out the Mithraic rites?

But if anyone wishes to take occasions for a more mystical contemplation of the entry of souls into divine things, not from the utterly obscure sect Celsus cited but from books that are partly Jewish, read in their synagogues and accepted by Christians, and partly Christian only, let him read what was seen by the prophet at the end of the prophecy of Ezekiel, where different gates are described, hinting at something about the different entry of more divine souls into better things. Let him also read in the Revelation of John what is said about the city of God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and its foundations and gates. And if he is able to learn, through symbols, the way also shown for those who will travel to divine things, let him read the book of Moses entitled Numbers, and let him seek someone able to initiate him into what is written about the camps of the children of Israel: which were placed first, toward the east; which toward the southwest or the south; which toward the sea; and which last, toward the north. For he will see in these passages contemplations that are not contemptible, nor, as Celsus thinks, in need of foolish hearers and slaves. For he will grasp who are among them and what concerns the nature of the numbers listed in them and assigned to each tribe; but it did not seem to me timely to set these out now. Let Celsus and those who read his book know that nowhere in the genuine Scriptures believed to be divine are seven heavens mentioned; nor do our prophets say anything taken from the Persians or the Cabiri, nor do the apostles of Jesus, nor the Son of God himself.

Next, after the account taken from the Mithraic rites, Celsus promises that anyone who wishes to investigate a certain Christian rite together with the Persian rite already described, comparing them with one another and laying bare the Christian one too, will thus see the difference between them. Where he knew names of sects to mention, he did not hesitate to set out those he thought he knew; but where he ought rather to have done so, if he knew it, and to have taught which sect uses the diagram he describes, this he has not done. It seems to me that here too he has set out the contents of the diagram in part from things half-heard about the utterly obscure sect of the Ophites, I believe. We ourselves, out of our love of learning, have come across this diagram, and in it we found the fictions of men who, as Paul put it, creep “into households” and captivate “silly women laden with sins, led away by various desires, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.” And the diagram was so wholly unconvincing that not even easily deceived “silly women,” nor the most boorish people who are ready to be led by anything plausible, would have assented to it. At any rate, though we have travelled through many parts of the earth and sought out those everywhere who profess to know something, we have never met anyone who upheld the teachings of the diagram.