Against Celsus 4.39

And since Celsus also ridicules the story of the serpent as opposing God's commands to man, supposing the account to be a myth like those handed down by old women, and deliberately did not name God's “paradise,” nor how “God” is said to have planted it “in Eden toward the east,” and after that to have made to grow “out of the earth every tree beautiful to see and good for food, and the tree of life in the middle of the paradise, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” and what is said after this, which could at once move a well-disposed reader to see that all these things are figuratively, and not unworthily, expressed: come, let us set beside it what is said about Eros by Socrates in Plato's Symposium, which is attributed to Socrates as more dignified than all that the speakers in the Symposium said about him. Plato's words are these: “When Aphrodite was born, the gods held a feast, and among them Poros, the son of Metis. When they had dined, Penia came to beg, as there was a banquet, and was about the doors. Now Poros, drunk with nectar (for there was not yet wine), went into the garden of Zeus and, heavy with drink, slept. Penia, then, plotting because of her own lack to have a child by Poros, lay down beside him and conceived Eros. That is why Eros has become the follower and attendant of Aphrodite, having been begotten on her birthday, and being by nature a lover of the beautiful, Aphrodite too being beautiful. Being then the son of Poros and Penia, Eros is in this condition. First, he is always poor, and far from being tender and beautiful, as most think, he is hard and parched and barefoot and homeless, always lying on the ground without bedding, sleeping in the open at doors and in the roads, having his mother's nature, always dwelling with want. But after his father he plots for the beautiful and the good, being brave, bold, and intense, a skilled hunter, always weaving some devices, desirous of understanding and resourceful, philosophizing all his life, a skilled sorcerer, poisoner, and sophist. And he is by nature neither immortal nor mortal, but on the same day he now flourishes and lives, when he has plenty, and now dies, and comes back to life again because of his father's nature. But what he acquires always slips away, so that Eros is never in want nor rich, and is in the middle between wisdom and ignorance.” If those who read this imitate Celsus's malice, which be far from Christians, they will laugh at the myth and mock the great Plato; but if, examining philosophically what is said in the form of a myth, they are able to find Plato's intention … how he was able to hide, for the sake of the many, in the form of a myth the doctrines that seemed great to him, but to speak as he should to those who know how to find from myths the intention of their author concerning the truth. I have set out this myth in Plato because of “the garden of Zeus” in it, which seems to have something like the paradise of God, and because of Penia, who is comparable to the serpent there, and Poros plotted against by Penia, comparable to the man plotted against by the serpent. It is not very clear whether Plato hit upon these things by chance, or, as some think, on his visit to Egypt met those who studied the philosophy of the Jews and, learning some things from them, kept some and altered others, taking care not to offend the Greeks by keeping the wisdom of the Jews entirely, since they were slandered among the many because of the strangeness of their laws and their peculiar way of life. But it was not now the occasion to explain either Plato's myth or the story of the serpent and the paradise of God and all that is recorded to have happened in it; for we have dealt with these things primarily, as best we could, in our exegetical works on Genesis.