Against Celsus 4.45

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.