Against Celsus 1.23

Next Celsus says that "the goatherds and shepherds who followed Moses as their leader, beguiled by rustic deceits, thought there was one God." Let him show, then, since the goatherds and shepherds, as he thinks, abandoned the worship of the gods without reason, how he himself can establish the multitude of gods among the Greeks or the other barbarians. Let him show the subsistence and being of Mnemosyne, who bore the Muses to Zeus, or of Themis, who bore the Hours; or let him show that the Graces, always naked, can have real existence. But he will not be able to show from the facts that the fictions of the Greeks, which seem to be given bodies, are gods. For why are the Greek myths about the gods truer than, say, those of the Egyptians, who in their language know neither Mnemosyne as mother of the nine Muses, nor Themis of the Hours, nor Eurynome as one of the Graces, nor their other names? How much more effective, and better than all these fictions, it is to be persuaded from what is seen, by the good order of the world, to worship its maker as one, since it is one and wholly in harmony with itself, and therefore cannot have come to be by many makers, just as the whole heaven is not held together by many souls moving it. For one is enough, which carries the whole sphere of fixed stars from east to west and embraces within it all the things the world needs, which are not self-sufficient. For all are parts of the world, but God is no part of a whole; for God must not be incomplete, as a part is incomplete. And perhaps a deeper account will show that God, strictly speaking, just as he is not a part, so also is not a whole, since a whole is made of parts; and reason does not allow us to accept that the God over all is made of parts, each of which cannot do what the other parts do.