Against Celsus 6.41–6.52

After this, as though he had forgotten that his task is to write against Christians, he says that a certain Dionysius, an Egyptian musician, who had met him, told him about magic that it has power over the uneducated and those of corrupt character, but can do nothing against those who have studied philosophy, since they have taken care to live a healthy life. If our task now were to discuss magic, we would have added a little on this to what we said about it above. But since we must say what is more to the point against Celsus's treatise, we say about magic that anyone who wishes to examine whether philosophers too can be caught by it or not should read what Moeragenes wrote in his memoirs of Apollonius of Tyana, the magician and philosopher. In them Moeragenes, who was not a Christian but a philosopher, said that some philosophers of no mean standing were caught by the magic of Apollonius, having come to him as to a sorcerer; among them, I believe, he told of the famous Euphrates and a certain Epicurean. But we affirm, having learned it by experience too, that those who, according to Christianity, worship the God over all through Jesus, live according to his gospel, and use the prayers commanded, continually and as they ought, night and day, are caught neither by magic nor by demons. For truly “the angel of the Lord will encamp around those who fear him and will deliver them” from every evil; and “the angels” of the little ones in the Church, who are appointed to watch over them, are said “always” to see “the face of the Father in heaven,” whatever the face is and whatever the seeing is.

Next, starting from another point, Celsus says such things against us: They also err most impiously in this, the greatest ignorance, which has likewise strayed from divine riddles, in making someone opposed to God, calling the same one devil and, in the Hebrew tongue, Satan. Otherwise, these things are utterly mortal notions and not holy to say, that the greatest God, wishing to benefit men in some way, has one who works against him and is powerless. The Son of God, then, is defeated by the devil, and, being punished by him, teaches us too to despise the punishments inflicted by him, announcing beforehand that Satan too will likewise appear and display great and marvellous works, appropriating the glory of God; that those who wish to be led astray by these must not be turned toward him, but must believe in him alone. These are plainly the words of a sorcerer, who is out for gain and guards himself beforehand against those who hold opposing views and gather rival crowds. Then next, wishing to set out the riddles which he thinks we misunderstood when we introduce the teaching about Satan, he says that the ancients hinted at a divine war: Heraclitus, saying this: “One must know that war is common, and justice strife, and that all things come about by strife and necessity”; and Pherecydes, who was much older than Heraclitus, telling a myth of one army ranged against another, giving Kronos as leader of one and Ophioneus of the other, and relating their challenges and contests; and that they made an agreement that whichever of them fell into Ogenos should be the vanquished, and those who drove them out and conquered should hold heaven. He says that the mysteries about the Titans and Giants, who are declared to fight against the gods, have this meaning too, as do the Egyptian stories about Typhon, Horus, and Osiris. Then, having set out such things without explaining how those contain a better meaning while ours are misunderstandings of them, he reviles us, saying that those stories are not like what is said about a devil-demon or (as they say more truly) a sorcerer holding opposing views. He understands Homer in the same way, as hinting at things similar to Heraclitus and Pherecydes and those who introduce the mysteries about Titans and Giants, in these words of Hephaestus to Hera, where he says: “For once before, when I was eager to defend you, he seized me by the foot and hurled me from the divine threshold”; and in these words of Zeus to Hera: “Do you not remember when you hung on high, and from your feet I let down two anvils, and around your hands threw an unbreakable golden chain? And you hung in the air and the clouds; and the gods throughout high Olympus were indignant, but could not come near and free you; whomever I caught I would seize and hurl from the threshold, until he reached the earth, faint.” And interpreting the Homeric verses, he says that the words of Zeus to Hera are words of God to matter, and that the words to matter hint that from the beginning it was in a disordered state, and God took it in hand, bound it together by certain proportions and ordered it; and that the demons around it who were insolent he hurls down, punishing them with the road hither. He says that Pherecydes, understanding these verses of Homer in this way, said: “Below that portion is the portion of Tartarus; the daughters of Boreas, the Harpies and Thyella, guard it; there Zeus casts out any of the gods when he behaves insolently.” He says that the robe of Athena, seen by all in the procession of the Panathenaea, has the same meaning. For, he says, it shows that a motherless and undefiled divinity masters the presumptuous earth-born. Having accepted the fictions of the Greeks, he adds, accusing our teachings, such things as this: that the Son of God is punished by the devil and teaches us too that when we are punished by the same one we should endure it. And these things are wholly ridiculous; for it was necessary, I suppose, to punish the devil, not to threaten the men who have been slandered by him.

See, then, whether the man who charges us with erring most impiously and straying from divine riddles does not clearly err himself, not perceiving that the writings of Moses, which are much older not only than Heraclitus and Pherecydes but also than Homer, introduced the account of this evil one who fell from heavenly things. For the “serpent,” from which Pherecydes' Ophioneus came, having been the cause of man's expulsion from the divine paradise, hints at something like this, since he deceived the weaker sex with a promise of divinity and greater things; and the man is said to have followed her. And the destroyer in Moses' Exodus, who else could he be than the one who is the cause of destruction for those who obey him and do not resist or fight against his wickedness? Further, the scapegoat in Leviticus, whom the Hebrew Scripture named Azazel, was none other; he who had the lot had to be sent away and banished into the wilderness; for all who belong to the portion of the worse one because of their wickedness, being opposed to those of God's lot, are deserted by God. And the sons of Belial in Judges, whose sons are they said to be because of their wickedness, if not his? And, most clearly of all, in Job, who is older even than Moses himself, “the devil” is recorded to present himself before God and ask for authority over Job, to encompass him with the heaviest trials: first, the destruction of all his possessions and his children; second, covering the whole body of Job with savage elephantiasis, the disease so called. I pass over what the Gospels say about the devil who tempted the Saviour, so that I may not seem to bring against Celsus, on the point in question, evidence from more recent writings. And in the last chapters of Job, where the Lord spoke to Job through whirlwind and clouds what is recorded in the book named after him, not a few things may be found said about a dragon. I do not yet mention what is in Ezekiel, as though about “Pharaoh” or “Nebuchadnezzar” or the ruler “of Tyre,” or what is in Isaiah, where the king of Babylon is lamented; from these one might learn not a little about wickedness, what beginning and origin it had, and that wickedness came into being through certain beings who shed their wings and followed the first one who shed his wings.

For it was not possible for what is good by accident and as an addition to be good in the same way as what is good in its very being. Goodness would never fall away from one who, so to speak, takes the living bread to preserve himself; and if it does fall away from anyone, it falls away through his own fault, because he has been negligent about partaking of the living bread and the true drink, by which the wing, nourished and watered, is restored, as the most wise Solomon says of the one who is truly rich: “For he has made himself wings like an eagle and returns to the house of the one who is set over him.” For it was necessary that God, who knows how to use for a needful end even those who have come into being through wickedness, should place those who are so evil somewhere in the universe and make a training ground for virtue available to those who wish to strive “lawfully” to attain it; so that, being tested like gold in the fire by the wickedness of these, and doing everything so as to admit nothing counterfeit into their rational nature, they may be shown worthy and be drawn up by the Word to the ascent to divine things, to the highest blessedness of all and, so to speak, the summit of good things. The one called Satan in the language of the Hebrews, and by some in a more Greek form Satanas, is, translated into Greek, the adversary. Everyone who has chosen wickedness and the life that goes with it, doing what is contrary to virtue, is a Satan, that is, an adversary of the Son of God, who is righteousness and truth and wisdom. But in the proper sense the adversary is the first of all beings living in peace and blessedness who shed his wings and fell from blessedness; who, according to Ezekiel, walked “blameless” in all his ways until iniquity was found in him, and being “a seal of likeness and a crown of beauty” in the paradise of God, as though sated with good things, came to destruction, according to the word that mystically says to him: “You have become destruction, and you shall not exist for ever.” These few things we have set out, perhaps boldly and at some risk, in entrusting them to this writing, though perhaps they are nothing. But if anyone who has leisure for testing the sacred writings were to gather from every part of them a full account of wickedness, how it first came to be and in what manner it is destroyed, he would see that neither Celsus nor any of those who are dragged down and drawn away in soul by this evil demon from God, from the right conception of him, and from his word, has even dreamed of the meaning of Moses and the prophets concerning Satan.

Since Celsus also throws in the matter of the so-called Antichrist, without having read what is said about him in Daniel or in Paul, or what was prophesied by the Saviour in the Gospels about his coming, a few words must be said on this too. Since “as faces are not like faces, so neither are the hearts of men like one another's hearts,” it is plain that there are differences in “the hearts of men,” both among those who incline to the good, since not all are shaped and formed to it equally or in the same way, and among those who, through neglect of the good, rush to the opposite; for in these too wickedness is poured out very greatly in some and less in others. What absurdity, then, is there in there being among men two extremes, so to speak, one of good and the other of its opposite, so that the extreme of good is in the man understood to be Jesus, from whom so great a conversion, healing, and improvement has flowed to the human race, and the extreme of the opposite in the one named Antichrist? God, embracing all things in his foreknowledge and seeing what concerns both of these, wished to make it known to men through the prophets, so that those who understand their words may attach themselves to the better and guard against the opposite. And it was fitting that one of the extremes, the best, should be proclaimed Son of God because of his pre-eminence, and the one diametrically opposed to him son of the evil demon, Satan and the devil. Then, since evil is most marked in its outpouring and its extreme when it pretends to be the better, for this reason signs and wonders and powers of falsehood occur around the worse one through the cooperation of his father the devil. For beyond the help given by demons to sorcerers, who deceive men for the basest ends, there comes a cooperation from the devil himself for the deception of the human race. Paul speaks of this so-called Antichrist, teaching and setting forth with a certain reserve in what manner he will come to the human race, and when, and why; and see whether Paul does not set these matters out most solemnly, and in a way not deserving even the slightest mockery.

He says this: “Now we ask you, brothers, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to him, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by spirit or by word or by letter as though from us, as though the day of the Lord had come. Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come unless the rebellion comes first and the man of sin is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things? And now you know what restrains him, so that he may be revealed in his own time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains will do so until he is out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will consume with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the appearing of his coming; the one whose coming is by the working of Satan with all power and signs and wonders of falsehood, and with all deception of unrighteousness for those who are perishing, because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved. And for this reason God sends them a working of error, so that they may believe the lie, in order that all may be judged who did not believe the truth but took pleasure in unrighteousness.” To explain each of these points is not suited to the present treatise. The prophecy about him is also given in Daniel, and it can move one who reads it intelligently and fair-mindedly to admire the words as truly inspired and prophetic, in which is foretold what concerns the kingdoms to come, beginning from the times of Daniel down to the destruction of the world. Anyone who wishes may read it; but see whether what concerns the Antichrist is not as follows: “And at the latter end of their kingdom, when their sins are coming to the full, there shall arise a king bold of face and understanding riddles; and his strength shall be mighty, and he shall destroy wonderfully, and prosper, and act, and destroy mighty men and the holy people. And the yoke of his collar shall prosper; deceit is in his hand, and he shall magnify himself in his heart, and by deceit he shall destroy many, and he shall stand up for the destruction of many, and he shall crush them in his hand like eggs.” And what is said in Paul, in the passage of his I have set out, which says, “so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God,” is also said in Daniel in this way: “And upon the temple an abomination of desolations, and until the end of the time an end shall be put to the desolation.” I thought it reasonable to set out these few out of many passages, so that the hearer may understand at least a little of the meaning of the divine words that teach about the devil and the Antichrist. Content with these on this subject, let us look at another passage of Celsus and contend against it as best we can.

After the passages set out above he said this: I will point out where this very idea of calling him Son of God came to them. Men of old called this world, as having come from God, his child and a youth. Very like indeed are this one and that one as child of God! He thought that we speak of a Son of God by distorting what is said about the world as having come from God and being his son and a god. For he was not able, by paying attention to the times of Moses and the prophets, to see that the prophets among the Jews prophesied in general that there is a Son of God before the Greeks and the men of old of whom Celsus speaks. Nor did he wish to quote what Plato says in the letters, which we mentioned above, about the one who ordered this universe as being the Son of God, lest he too should be compelled by Plato, whom he often extolled, to accept that the Maker of this universe is the Son of God, and the first God over all is his Father. And it is nothing surprising if, saying that the soul of Jesus has been united with so great a Son of God by the highest participation in him, we no longer separate it from him. For the sacred words of the divine writings know of other things too which, though two in their own nature, are counted as and are one with each other. So it is said of husband and wife: “They are no longer two but one flesh”; and of the perfect man who is joined to the true Lord, the Word and Wisdom and Truth: “He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit.” And if “he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit,” who has been joined to the Lord, to the Word himself and Wisdom itself and Truth itself and Righteousness itself, more than, or even as closely as, the soul of Jesus? If this is so, the soul of Jesus and God the Word, the firstborn “of all creation,” are not two.

Next: if the Stoic philosophers, who say that the virtue of man and of God is the same, say that the God over all is not happier than their wise man among men, but that the happiness of both is equal, Celsus does not laugh at or mock the doctrine. But if the divine word says that the perfect man is joined through virtue to the Word himself and made one with him, so that on this basis we do not separate the soul of Jesus from the firstborn “of all creation,” he laughs at Jesus being called Son of God, not seeing what is said about him mystically and secretly in the divine Scriptures. And to bring to acceptance of what is said anyone who wishes to follow the consistency of doctrines and be helped, we say that the divine words declare that the whole Church of God is the body of Christ, animated by the Son of God, and that those who believe are members of this body as of a whole. For just as the soul gives life to and moves the body, which by nature cannot move itself with life, so the Word, moving the whole body, the Church, toward what is needful and acting on it, moves both the Church and each member of those belonging to the Church, who do nothing apart from the Word. If this, as I think, is a consistent argument not to be despised, what difficulty is there in the soul of Jesus, and Jesus as a whole, not being separated from the only-begotten and firstborn “of all creation,” because of its highest and unsurpassable communion with the Word himself, nor being any longer other than he? But so much for this.

Let us look also at what follows, in which, pronouncing in a single phrase and not saying anything even plausible, he accuses the account of the creation of the world according to Moses, saying: Furthermore, their cosmogony is very silly. If he had put forward the way in which it seemed to him silly, and some plausible arguments, we would have contended against them; but it does not seem reasonable to me to argue, against his bare assertion, in what way it is not silly. If anyone wishes to consider what has moved us and what we have established with apparent demonstration concerning the account of creation according to Moses, let him take our treatises on Genesis from the beginning of the book up to “This is the book of the generation of men,” in which we have tried to establish from the divine writings themselves what the heaven and earth are that came to be “in the beginning,” and what the invisible and unformed state of the earth is, and what the abyss and the darkness upon it are, and what the water is and the “Spirit of God” moving over it, and what the created “light” is, and what “the firmament” is as distinct from the heaven made “in the beginning,” and so on. He also declared that the account of the creation of men is very silly, neither stating proofs nor contending against them; for he had, I think, no arguments able to overthrow the statement that man was made “in the image of God.” Nor did he understand the “paradise” planted by God, and man's original life in it, and the life that came about through circumstances when he was cast out because of sin and made to dwell opposite “the paradise of delight.” Let the man who says that these things are spoken very sillily first consider each of them, and this in particular: “He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword that turned, to guard the way of the tree of life.” Did Moses, then, write these things without understanding anything, doing something like what the poets of the Old Comedy wrote in jest: “Proetus married Bellerophon, and Pegasus came from Arcadia”? But they composed such things wishing to raise a laugh; it is not credible that one who left writings to a whole nation, and wished to persuade those to whom he gave laws that they came from God, wrote irrelevant things and said without any meaning, “He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword that turned, to guard the way of the tree of life,” or anything else said about the creation of men and made the subject of philosophy by the wise among the Hebrews.

Next, having piled together in bare assertions the differing views some of the ancients held about the origin of the world and of men, he says that Moses and the prophets, who left us our writings, not knowing what the nature of the world and of men is, composed utter nonsense. If he had said in what way he thought the divine writings were utter nonsense, we would have tried to refute the arguments that seemed plausible to him for their being utter nonsense. But as it is, doing the same as he and jesting too, we shall declare that Celsus, in no way knowing what the nature of the meaning and the word in the prophets is, composed utter nonsense, boastfully entitling it The True Word. And since he brings forward as an accusation, as though it were clear and precisely understood by him, the matter of the days of creation, some of which passed before light and heaven, sun, moon, and stars came to be, and some after they came to be, we shall only point out this to him: did Moses forget that he had just said that the world was completed in its making in six days, and, forgetting himself, did he add to these words, “This is the book of the generation of men, in the day when God made the heaven and the earth”? But it is not at all credible that Moses said, after the account of the six days, “in the day when God made the heaven and the earth,” without meaning anything. And if anyone thinks this can refer to “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth,” let him note that “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth” is said before “Let there be light, and there was light,” and before “God called the light day.”

But it is not our present purpose to expound the doctrine of intelligible and sensible things, and in what way the natures of the days are distributed to both kinds, nor to examine the passages; for whole treatises would be needed for an exposition of the creation according to Moses. We did this, as far as we could, long before the present treatise against Celsus, discussing the six days of creation according to Moses with the capacity we had some years ago. One should know, however, that through Isaiah the Word promises the righteous that there will be days in a state in which not the sun but the “Lord” himself will be their “everlasting light, and God their glory.” But Celsus, having misunderstood, I think, some wretched sect that wrongly interpreted “Let there be light” as spoken by the Creator in the form of a wish, said: For the Creator did not borrow light from above, like those who kindle their lamps from their neighbours. And having misunderstood another impious sect, he also said: If there was an accursed god opposed to the great God, who did these things against his will, why did the great God lend him the light? We are so far from making a defence on these points that we would rather accuse the opinion of those sects more clearly as mistaken, and oppose not, as Celsus does, what we do not know about them, but what we know precisely, partly from having heard them in person and partly from having carefully read their writings.

After this Celsus says: About the origin and destruction of the world, whether it is ungenerated and indestructible, or generated but indestructible, or the reverse, I say nothing about this now. Therefore we too say nothing about these things now, for the present treatise does not require it. But neither do we say that the Spirit of the God over all came to be in the things here as though in things alien to him, according to the words “the Spirit of God moved over the water”; nor do we say that certain things contrived wickedly against his Spirit by another, the Creator, distinct from the great God, with the higher God putting up with it, needed to be destroyed. Therefore let those who say such things go their way, far off, and Celsus too, who does not accuse them in a businesslike way; for he ought either not to have mentioned such things at all, or, in keeping with what he regards as love of mankind, to have set them out carefully and contended against the impious things they say. Nor have we ever heard that the great God, having given the Spirit to the Creator, asks for it back. Then next, foolishly charging these impious teachings, he says: What god gives something in order to ask it back? For asking back belongs to one in need, but God needs nothing. And he adds to this, as though saying something clever against certain people: Why, when he lent it, did he not know he was lending to an evil being? He also says: Why does he overlook an evil Creator working against him?