Against Celsus 4.14

Let us see also what Celsus says next, with great pomp, in this way: “Yet further,” he says, “let us take up the argument from the beginning with more proofs. I say nothing new, but what has long been held. God is good and beautiful and happy, and exists in what is most beautiful and best. If then he comes down to men, he needs a change, and a change from good to bad, from beautiful to shameful, from happiness to unhappiness, and from what is best to what is most wicked. Who then would choose such a change? And indeed it is the nature of the mortal to be altered and remolded, but of the immortal to remain the same and unchanged. So God would not accept such a change either.” It seems to me that what is needed in reply to this is said by one who has explained the descent of God to human affairs spoken of in the Scriptures, for which he does not need a change, as Celsus thinks we say, nor an alteration from good to bad, or from beautiful to shameful, or from happiness to unhappiness, or from what is best to what is most wicked. For, remaining unchangeable in his being, he comes down by his providence and dispensation to human affairs. We, then, present the divine writings as saying that God is unchangeable, both in “But you are the same” and in “I have not changed”; whereas the gods of Epicurus, being composed of atoms and, as far as their structure goes, dissoluble, busy themselves shaking off the atoms that would destroy them; and the god of the Stoics, being a body, at one time has his whole substance as the ruling part, when the conflagration occurs, and at another comes to be in a part of it, when the world is ordered. For these men have not been able to make clear the natural notion of God as wholly incorruptible, simple, uncompounded, and indivisible.