Against Celsus 4.44–4.57

Being far from the intention of what is written, he says that God also gave wells to the righteous. For he did not observe that the righteous do not construct cisterns but dig “wells,” seeking to find the spring and source of drinkable good things that lies within, taking figuratively the command which says: “Drink waters from your own vessels and from the spring of your own wells. Let not your waters overflow outside your spring, but let your waters pass into your own streets. Let them be yours alone, and let no stranger share them with you.” In many places the Scripture has used events that happened in history and recorded them to present greater things revealed in hidden meaning; such are the stories about wells, and about the marriages and various unions of the righteous, which someone will try to explain more opportunely in commentaries on those very passages. That wells were indeed constructed by the righteous in the land of the Philistines, as is recorded in Genesis, is clear from the marvelous wells shown at Ascalon, worth recording for the strangeness and peculiarity of their construction compared with other wells. That brides and maidservants are to be taken figuratively is not our own teaching, but we have received it from wise men of old, one of whom, rousing his hearer to figurative interpretation, said: “Tell me, you who read the law, do you not hear the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and one by the free woman. But the son of the slave woman was born according to the flesh, and the son of the free woman through the promise. These things are allegorized; for these women are two covenants, one from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery, which is Hagar”; and a little after, he says, “But the Jerusalem above is free, which is our mother.” Whoever will take up the letter to the Galatians will know how the stories of the marriages and of the unions with maidservants have been allegorized, the Scripture wanting us too to imitate not the bodily actions, as they are thought, of those who did these things, but, as the apostles of Jesus are accustomed to call them, the spiritual ones.

He ought to have accepted the love of truth of those who wrote the divine Scriptures, who did not hide even what is unseemly, and to have been drawn to accept the other and more marvelous things as not fictitious. But he did the opposite, and the story of Lot and his daughters, without examining it literally or investigating it according to the higher sense, he called “more lawless than the evils of Thyestes.” It is not necessary now to state the figurative meaning of the passage: what Sodom is, and what is meant by the angels' words to the one who escaped from there, “Do not look behind you, nor stop anywhere in the surrounding country; escape to the mountain, lest you be taken along with them”; who Lot is, and who his wife, who became “a pillar of salt” because she turned back; and who his daughters are, who made their father drunk in order to become mothers by him. But let us briefly soften the unseemliness of the story. The Greeks too inquired into the nature of good, evil, and indifferent things; and those of them who succeed place good and evil in the will alone, and say that all things considered apart from the will are by their own nature indifferent, but that the will, when it uses these things as it should, is praiseworthy, and when it does not, blameworthy. So in the treatment of indifferent things they said that to have intercourse with one's daughters is by its own nature indifferent, even if one must not do such a thing in established states; and, for the sake of a hypothesis, to show that such a thing is indifferent, they have taken the case of the wise man left alone with his daughter, the whole human race having been destroyed, and they ask whether the father will fittingly unite with his daughter so that, on this hypothesis, the whole human race may not perish. Is this, then, soundly said among the Greeks, and does the not contemptible school of the Stoics argue for it; but when young girls, who had learned about the conflagration of the world but not clearly, seeing fire overwhelming their city and land, and supposing that the living spark of the human race was left in their father and themselves, wished on such a supposition to preserve the world, are they to be judged worse than the wise man of the Stoics' hypothesis, who fittingly unites with his daughters when all men have been destroyed? I am not unaware that some, offended by the intention of Lot's daughters, have supposed the act to be unholy, and have said that from unholy unions came accursed nations, the Moabites and the Ammonites. And in truth the divine Scripture is not found clearly approving such a thing as well done, nor charging or blaming it. But however the event stands, it is taken up into figurative interpretation, and it also has in itself a certain defense.

Celsus throws in the hatred, I think, of Esau for Jacob, a man admitted by Scripture to be wicked; and, without setting out clearly the story of Simeon and Levi, who avenged the outrage to their sister, violated by the son of the king of Shechem, he accuses them. He speaks of “brothers selling,” meaning the sons of Jacob, and of “a brother sold,” Joseph, and of “a father deceived,” Jacob, since he suspected nothing about his sons when they showed Joseph's “many-colored coat,” but believed them and “mourned for Joseph as lost,” while he was a slave in Egypt. See how hatefully and without love of truth Celsus has gathered material from the history: where the history seemed to him to contain an accusation, he sets it out; but where a notable display of chastity took place, when Joseph did not yield to the passion of his supposed mistress, who now entreated and now threatened, he did not even mention the story. For we might see Joseph as far better than what is recorded of Bellerophon, since he chose to be shut up in prison rather than lose his chaste mind; for though he could have defended himself and pleaded his case against the woman who accused him, he magnanimously kept silent, entrusting his cause to God.

After this Celsus, for form's sake, mentions with complete obscurity the dreams of the chief cupbearer, the chief baker, and Pharaoh, and their interpretation, by which Joseph was brought from prison to be entrusted by Pharaoh with the second throne in Egypt. What absurdity, then, did the account of the story have even in itself, that he who entitled his book The True Word, which sets out no doctrines but accuses Christians and Jews, put these things forward as part of his accusation? And he says that the one who had been sold showed kindness to the brothers who had sold him, when they were starving and had been sent to trade with their donkeys; which Celsus did not even set out. And he includes the recognition, wanting I know not what, and showing no absurdity arising from the recognition; for not even Momus himself, so to speak, could reasonably accuse these things, which even without figurative interpretation have great charm. He includes also Joseph, sold as a slave, being set free and going up with a procession to his father's tomb, and thinks the account contains an accusation when he says: “by whom (clearly Joseph) the illustrious and divine race of the Jews, having grown to a multitude in Egypt, was ordered to live as sojourners somewhere outside and to pasture flocks in places of no honor.” From his hateful purpose he added that they were ordered to pasture flocks in places of no honor, without showing how Goshen, a district of Egypt, is without honor. And he called the people's exodus from Egypt a flight, not even mentioning at all what is written in Exodus about the departure of the Hebrews from the land of Egypt. We have set out these things too, to show that Celsus put in the category of accusation and nonsense things that did not appear worthy of accusation even literally, without showing by argument what he thinks is wrong in our Scripture.

Then, as one who has given himself up only to hating and detesting the teaching of Jews and Christians, he says that “the more reasonable of the Jews and Christians allegorize these things”; and he says that, being ashamed of them, they take refuge in allegory. One might say to him: If the stories of myths and fictions in their first sense, whether written with hidden meaning or in any other way, must be called worthy of shame, to what should this be said if not to the Greek stories? In them sons who are gods castrate fathers who are gods, and fathers who are gods swallow sons who are gods, and a goddess mother gives to the father “of men and gods” a stone in place of her son, and a father has intercourse with his daughter, and a wife binds her husband, taking as helpers in the binding the brother of the one being bound and his daughter. And why must I list the absurd stories of the Greeks about the gods, obviously worthy of shame even when allegorized? For Chrysippus of Soli, who is thought to have adorned the Stoa of the philosophers with many intelligent writings, interprets a painting at Samos in which Hera was depicted performing an unspeakable act on Zeus. The dignified philosopher says in his writings that matter, having received the seminal principles of God, holds them in itself for the ordering of the universe; for in the painting at Samos Hera is matter and Zeus is God. For these reasons, then, and because of such myths and countless others, we do not want even to call the God over all by the name Zeus, nor the sun Apollo, nor the moon Artemis; but practicing pure piety toward the Creator and speaking well of his beautiful works, we do not defile divine things even by a name, accepting Plato's words in the Philebus, when he did not wish to admit pleasure as a goddess: “For my fear, Protarchus, about the names of the gods is such.” We truly have “fear,” then, about the name of God and of his beautiful works, so as not to accept any myth, even on the pretext of figurative meaning, to the harm of the young.

If Celsus had read the Scripture impartially, he would not have said that “our writings are not such as to admit allegory.” For from the prophecies, in which events of history are written, one can be brought, not from the history itself, to see that the histories too were written with the aim of figurative meaning and most wisely arranged, having regard both to the multitude of those who believe more simply and to the few who wish, or are able, to examine things with understanding. And if those who today are considered reasonable among the Jews and Christians, according to Celsus, were the ones who allegorized the Scriptures, Celsus might perhaps be thought to say something plausible; but since the very fathers of the doctrines and the writers themselves interpret such things figuratively, what else can one suppose than that they were written so as to be interpreted figuratively according to their primary sense? We shall set out a few out of very many passages to show that Celsus slanders the Scriptures in vain as not able to admit allegory. Paul the apostle of Jesus says: “It is written in the law, ‘You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain.’ Is it for oxen that God cares? Or does he not speak entirely for our sake? It was written for our sake, because the plowman ought to plow in hope and the thresher to thresh in hope of a share.” And elsewhere the same says: “For it is written, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is great; but I speak of Christ and the church.” And again in another place: “We know that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.” Then, interpreting the story of the manna and that of the water recorded to have come marvelously out of the rock, he says this: “And all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from a spiritual rock that followed, and the rock was Christ.” And Asaph, showing that the stories of Exodus and Numbers are “problems” and “parables,” as is written in the book of Psalms, when about to recall them, begins in this way: “Attend, my people, to my law; incline your ear to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter problems from the beginning, which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us.”

Moreover, if the law of Moses had nothing written in it that is revealed through hidden meanings, the prophet would not have said to God in prayer, “Uncover my eyes, and I will perceive the wonders of your law.” But as it is, he knew that there is a “veil” of ignorance lying on the heart of those who read and do not understand what is spoken figuratively; which “veil is taken away” by God's gift, when he hears the one who has done everything in his power, has trained his faculties by habit to distinguish good and evil, and has said most constantly in prayer, “Uncover my eyes, and I will perceive the wonders of your law.” And who, reading of a dragon living in the river of Egypt, and fish nestling in its scales, or of the mountains of Egypt filled “with the excrement” of Pharaoh, is not led at once to inquire who it is that fills the mountains of Egypt with such foul-smelling “excrement,” and what the mountains of the Egyptians are, and what the rivers in Egypt are, about which the aforesaid Pharaoh boasts, saying, “The rivers are mine, and I made them,” and who is the dragon corresponding to the rivers that will be shown by interpretation, and who are the fish in its scales? And why need I establish further what needs no establishing? Of such things it is said: “Who is wise, and will understand these things? Or intelligent, and will know them?” I have extended my discourse at some length because I wanted to show that Celsus did not speak soundly in saying that “the more reasonable of the Jews and Christians try somehow to allegorize these things, but they are not such as to admit any allegory, but are plainly very silly myths.” For far more are the Greek stories not only very silly but also very impious myths. For ours have regard also to the multitude of simpler people, which those who made the Greek fictions did not take care to do. That is why Plato, not without reason, expels such myths and such poems from his republic.

He seems to me also to have heard that there are writings containing allegories of the law; had he read them, he would not have said: “At any rate, the allegories that seem to have been written about them are much more shameful and absurd than the myths, joining with some marvelous and utterly senseless folly things that can in no way be fitted together.” He seems to say this about the writings of Philo, or of those still older, such as those of Aristobulus. I conjecture that Celsus had not read the books, since in many places they seem to me so successful that even the philosophers among the Greeks would be won over by what is said; in them not only the style is polished, but also the thoughts and doctrines and the use of what Celsus thinks are the myths of the Scriptures. I know also that Numenius the Pythagorean, a man who expounded Plato far better and championed the Pythagorean doctrines, in many places in his writings sets out the words of Moses and the prophets and interprets them figuratively not implausibly, as in the work called Epops, and in his books On Numbers and On Place. And in the third book On the Good he sets out even a story about Jesus, without naming him, and interprets it figuratively; whether successfully or unsuccessfully, it is for another occasion to say. He sets out also the story of Moses, Jannes, and Jambres. We do not pride ourselves on it, but we approve of him more than Celsus and other Greeks, since he wished to examine our writings too with love of learning, and was moved by them as writings to be interpreted figuratively and not foolish.

Next after this, picking out from all the writings that contain allegories and expositions in no contemptible style the one that is simpler, which can contribute something to the faith of the many and simpler people but cannot move the more intelligent, he says: “Such, for instance, is a certain dispute between one Papiscus and Jason which I came across, worthy not of laughter but rather of pity and hatred. It is not my task to refute these things; for they are surely clear to everyone, especially if one has the patience to endure listening to the writings themselves. But I want rather to teach this about nature: that God made nothing mortal, but the works of God are all that are immortal, and mortal things are theirs. And the soul is the work of God, but the nature of the body is different. And in this respect the body of a bat, or a worm, or a frog, or a man will not differ; for the matter is the same, and their corruptibility is alike.” Nonetheless I would want everyone who hears Celsus speaking vehemently and saying that the writing entitled the Dispute of Jason and Papiscus about Christ is worthy not of laughter but of hatred, to take the little work in his hands and have the patience to endure hearing what is in it, so that he may at once condemn Celsus, finding nothing worthy of hatred in the book. And if anyone reads it impartially, he will find that the book does not even move one to laughter; in it a Christian is recorded arguing with a Jew from the Jewish Scriptures and showing that the prophecies about Christ fit Jesus, although the other, in the person of the Jew, stands against the argument not ignobly or unfittingly.

I do not know how he combined things that cannot be mixed and do not naturally occur together in human nature, and said that book was worthy of pity and hatred. For everyone will admit that one who is pitied is not hated when he is pitied, and one who is hated is not pitied when he is hated. Celsus says that it is not his task to refute these things because he thinks they are surely clear to everyone as bad, and worthy of pity and hatred, even before a reasoned refutation is brought. But we urge the reader of this defense, written against Celsus's accusation, to have patience and to listen to our writings, and as far as possible to conjecture from what is written the purpose, conscience, and disposition of those who wrote them. For he will find men contending ardently for what they believed, and some showing that they are recording a history they saw and grasped as marvelous and worth writing for the benefit of those who would hear it. Or let anyone dare to say that it is not the source and beginning of every benefit to believe in the God of the universe, to do everything with reference to pleasing him in every matter whatever, and not even to think anything displeasing to him, since not only words and deeds but also thoughts will be judged. And what other teaching could bring human nature more effectively to a good life than the faith or conviction that the God over all sees what we say and do and even what we think? Let whoever wishes compare another way that turns and improves at once not just one or two people but as many as possible, so that by comparing both ways one may accurately perceive the teaching that disposes people toward the good.

Since in the passage of Celsus I set out, which paraphrases certain things from the Timaeus, it is written that God made nothing mortal, but only immortal things, while mortal things are the works of others; and that the soul is the work of God, but the nature of the body is different; and that the body of a man will not differ from the body of a bat, or a worm, or a frog, for the matter is the same and their corruptibility is alike: come, let us discuss these things too for a little, refuting a man who either does not profess his own Epicurean opinion, or, as one might say, later changed to better views, or, as another might say, is a namesake of the Epicurean. For when he declared such things, he ought to have undertaken to contradict not only us but also the not ignoble school of philosophers descended from Zeno of Citium, and to establish that the bodies of animals are not works of God, and that the great skill shown in them did not come from the first Mind. He should also, about the many plants of every kind, governed by an indwelling nature without imagination and made for no contemptible use in the universe for men and for the animals that serve men, however else they may exist, not merely have declared but also have taught that it was not some perfect Mind that implanted such great qualities in the matter of plants. And if he once made gods the creators of all bodies, the soul alone being the work of God, how was it not consistent for one who divided up so many created things and gave them to many creators to establish, with some not contemptible argument, the differences among the gods, some making human bodies, others, say, the bodies of cattle, and others those of wild beasts? And seeing gods as creators of serpents, asps, and basilisks, and some as creators according to each individual species of them, and others according to the species of each plant and each herb, he should have stated the reasons for the divisions. For perhaps, if he had given himself to a precise examination of this subject, he would either have kept one God as creator of all things, who made each thing for some purpose and reason, or, not keeping to this, he would have seen what defense he had to make about corruptibility, a thing indifferent by its own nature, and that there is nothing absurd in a world composed of unlike things having been made by one craftsman, who formed the differences of species for the benefit of the whole. Or at the very least he should not have declared anything at all about so great a doctrine, if he was not going to establish what he professed to teach; unless, perhaps, he who accuses those who profess bare faith himself wanted us to believe what he declared, although he professed not to declare but to teach.

I do not yet say that if he had had the patience to endure listening to the writings, as he calls them, of Moses and the prophets, he would have noticed why the words “God made” are applied to heaven and earth, and to what is called the firmament, and further to the lights and stars, and after that to the great sea creatures and every soul “of creeping living things which the waters brought forth according to their kinds,” and every winged bird “according to its kind,” and next to the wild beasts “of the earth according to their kind,” and the cattle “according to their kind,” and all the creeping things “of the earth according to their kind,” and lastly to man; whereas “made” is not said of other things. For light the Scripture is content with “there was light”; for the gathering into one of all the water under the whole heaven, with “and it was so”; and likewise for the things that sprouted from the earth, when “the earth brought forth grass, plants yielding seed according to their kind and likeness, and fruit trees bearing fruit, whose seed is in it according to its kind on the earth.” And he would have inquired to whom, or to what beings, the recorded commands of God for the coming into being of each part of the world were spoken; and he would not easily have accused, as unintelligible and containing no secret meaning, what was written in these passages either by Moses or, as we would say, by the divine Spirit in Moses, from whom he also prophesied; since he knew “the things that are, the things that will be, and the things that were before” better than the seers spoken of by the poets are said to have known them.

Further, since Celsus says, “The soul is the work of God, but the nature of the body is different; and in this respect the body of a bat, a worm, a frog, or a man will not differ, for the matter is the same and their corruptibility is alike,” it must be said to this argument of his too: if, because the same matter underlies the body of a bat, a worm, a frog, or a man, these bodies will not differ from one another, then clearly the bodies of these will not differ from the sun, moon, stars, heaven, or any other of what the Greeks call perceptible gods. For the same matter underlies all bodies, by its own nature without quality and without shape; and from whom it receives its qualities, according to Celsus, who does not want anything corruptible to be the work of God, I do not know. For by Celsus's own argument the corruptibility of everything whatever that has come from the same underlying matter must be alike. Unless, perhaps, Celsus, hard pressed here, will leap away from Plato, who makes the soul from a kind of mixing bowl, and take refuge with Aristotle and the Peripatetics, who say that the ether is immaterial and of a fifth nature besides the four elements; against which view both the Platonists and the Stoics have stood firm, not ignobly. And we too, whom Celsus despises, will stand firm, when asked to explain and establish what is said in the prophet thus: “The heavens will perish, but you remain; and they will all grow old like a garment, and like a cloak you will roll them up, and they will be changed; but you are the same.” But this is enough against Celsus, who declared that “the soul is the work of God, but the nature of the body is different”; from whose argument it followed that the body of a bat, a worm, or a frog does not differ from the ethereal body.

See, then, whether one must side with a man who accuses Christians with such doctrines, and abandon the teaching which grants a difference to bodies because of the qualities that lie upon and about them. For we too know that there are “heavenly bodies and earthly bodies,” and that the “glory” of the “heavenly” bodies is one and that of the “earthly” another; and not even that of the “heavenly” ones is the same, for “there is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the stars,” and among the stars themselves “star differs from star in glory.” That is why, accepting the resurrection “of the dead,” we say that changes take place in the qualities in bodies; since some of them, sown “in corruption, are raised in incorruption,” and sown “in dishonor, are raised in glory,” and sown “in weakness, are raised in power,” and bodies sown natural are raised spiritual. That the underlying matter is receptive of whatever qualities the Creator wills, all of us who accept providence establish; and, God willing, there is now such and such a quality in this matter, and afterward such and such another, better, say, and different. And since there are set courses for the changes in bodies, from the time the world has existed and as long as it exists, and I do not know whether a new and different course will not follow after the destruction of the world, which our Scriptures call the consummation, it is not surprising if at present, as most people say, a serpent is formed from a dead man, coming from the spinal marrow, and a bee from an ox, a wasp from a horse, a beetle from a donkey, and, in a word, worms from most things. But Celsus thinks this establishes that none of these is the work of God, but that the qualities, ordered I know not from where, so that these come from those, are not the work of some divine Word who changes the qualities in matter.