Against Celsus 6.53–6.66

Then, I think, mixing sects with sects and not noting that these views belong to one sect and those to another, he brings forward the objections we raise against Marcion, perhaps having misunderstood these too from some who argue against him in a cheap and unlearned way, not very intelligently. Setting out, then, what is said against Marcion, and not noting that he is speaking against him, he says: Why does he send secretly and destroy the works of this one? Why does he force his way in stealthily and lead astray and deceive? Why does he beguile those who, as you say, have been condemned or cursed by this one, and carry them off like a slave-dealer? Why does he teach them to run away from their master? Why to flee from their father? Why does he adopt them himself, without the father's consent? Why does he profess to be the father of strangers? And he adds to these, as though in astonishment: A fine god indeed, who desires to be the father of sinners condemned by another, of the disinherited, and, as they themselves say, of refuse, and who is unable to punish the one he sent to carry them off from him when he was caught. Next, as though addressing us who confess that this world belongs to no alien or strange god, he says such things as this: If these are his works, how did God make evil things? How is he unable to persuade and admonish? How does he repent when men become ungrateful and wicked, and find fault with his own art, and hate and threaten and destroy his own offspring? Or where will he carry them off to out of this world, which he himself made? Here too, it seems to me, without making clear what evils are, although among the Greeks too there have been many schools of thought about goods and evils, he snatches at it as though it followed for us, who say that this world too is the work of the God over all, that in our view God is the maker of evils. Let the matter of evils be as it may, whether God made them or not, or whether they came about as a consequence of his principal works; but I wonder whether what he thinks follows for us, who say that this world too is the work of the God over all, namely that God made evils, does not follow also from what he himself says. For one might say to Celsus: If these are his works, how did God make evil things? How is he unable to persuade and admonish? And the greatest fault in argument is when someone accuses those of other views of holding unsound doctrines, while he himself has the same faults in his own doctrines much more.

Let us, then, look briefly at what the divine Scriptures say about good and evil things, and what we should say in reply to: How did God make evil things? How is he unable to persuade and admonish? According to the divine Scriptures, good things in the proper sense are the virtues and the actions that accord with them, just as evils in the proper sense are their opposites. For the present we shall be content with the words of the thirty-third Psalm, which show this: “But those who seek the Lord shall not lack any good thing. Come, children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord. Who is the man who desires life, who loves to see good days? Keep your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking deceit. Turn away from evil and do good.” For “Turn away from evil and do good” is not said of bodily goods or evils, as some call them, nor of external ones, but of the goods and evils of the soul. For the one who turns away from such evils and does such goods, as one who desires the true life, would come to it, “loving to see good days,” whose “sun” is the Word “of righteousness,” and would reach them, since God rescues him “from the present evil age” and from the evil days of which Paul said: “Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.”

But bodily and external things might be found, in a looser sense, to be called goods when they contribute to life according to nature, and evils when they oppose it. So Job says to his wife: “If we received good things from the hand of the Lord, shall we not bear evil things?” Since, then, it is found in the divine Scriptures, in one place, spoken in the person of God, “I am the one who makes peace and creates evils,” and in another place again about him, “that evils came down from the Lord upon the gates of Jerusalem, the noise of chariots and horsemen,” sayings that have troubled many readers of Scripture who cannot discern what it means by good and evil, it is likely that from this Celsus raised the difficulty and said, How did God make evil things? or that he heard someone with a rather simple view of the passage and set down the words quoted. But we say that God did not make evils, meaning wickedness and the actions that come from it. For how could the preaching of judgment speak with confidence, teaching that the wicked are punished for their wicked actions in proportion to their sins, and that those who have lived virtuously or done virtuous actions are blessed and will receive rewards from God, if God had made what is truly evil? I know well that those who want to dare to say that these too come from God will adduce certain texts of Scripture, being unable to show the one consistent thread of Scripture, which blames sinners and approves those who do well, and nonetheless also says those things, not few in number, that seem to distract those who read the divine writings ignorantly. I did not think it suited to the present treatise to set out now the distracting texts, which are many, and their interpretations, which need much argument. Evils, then, if one understands those properly so called, God has not made; but some, few in comparison with the order of the universe, have followed as consequences of his principal works, just as the spiral shavings and sawdust follow as consequences of the carpenter's principal works, and as builders seem to make the rubbish of stones and mortar that falls off and lies beside the buildings.

But if one means the things called evils in a looser sense, the so-called bodily and external evils, let it be granted, someone says, that God sometimes makes some of these in order to convert some people through them; and what absurdity can the statement contain? For just as, if we loosely call evils the pains inflicted on those being disciplined by fathers, teachers, and tutors, or by physicians on those who are cut or cauterized for the sake of healing, and we say that the father does evil to his sons, or the tutors or teachers or physicians do, those who beat or cut would not be accused of anything; so if God is said to bring such things for the conversion and healing of those who need such pains, the statement would contain nothing absurd. Nor would it if “evils come down from the Lord upon the gates of Jerusalem,” consisting in the pains inflicted by enemies, brought on them for their conversion; nor if he visits “with a rod the iniquities” of those who have forsaken “the law” of God, “and with scourges their sins”; nor if he says: “You have coals of fire; sit upon them; these will be a help to you.” In this way we also explain “who makes peace and creates evils”: for he creates bodily or external evils, purifying and disciplining those who were unwilling to be disciplined by reason and sound teaching. So much in answer to “How did God make evil things?”

To “How is he unable to persuade and admonish?” it has been said already that, if this is a charge at all, Celsus's words could be brought against all who accept providence. But one might reply in defence that God is not unable to admonish; for he admonishes his hearers through all of Scripture and through those who teach by the grace of God; unless, indeed, one were to understand “admonish” in a special sense, as including success with the one admonished and his heeding the teacher's word, which is contrary to the ordinary meaning in common use. And to “How is he unable to persuade?”, which could also be brought against all who accept providence, this must be said. Since being persuaded belongs, as it were, to what are called correlative terms, like a man's having his hair cut, when he acts by offering himself to the barber, it requires not only the action of the one persuading but also, so to speak, the submission to the persuader, or the acceptance of what the persuader says. Therefore it must not be said that those who are not persuaded are not persuaded because God is unable to persuade, but because they do not accept the persuasive words of God. One would not be wrong to say this of men, too, who are called craftsmen of persuasion; for it is possible that one who has mastered the principles of rhetoric perfectly and uses them properly may do everything to persuade, yet, failing to win the will of the one who ought to be persuaded, seem not to persuade. That, even if persuasive words come from God, being persuaded does not come from God, Paul teaches clearly when he says: “This persuasion is not from him who calls you.” Such also is the saying: “If you are willing and listen to me, you shall eat the good things of the land; but if you are not willing and do not listen to me, the sword shall devour you.” For a person to will what the one admonishing says, and, having heeded it, to become worthy of God's promises, the choice of the hearer and his assent to what is said are needed. That is why, it seems to me, it is said with emphasis in Deuteronomy: “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God and to walk in all his ways and to love him and to keep his commandments?”

Next we must answer: How does he repent when they become ungrateful and wicked, and find fault with his own art, and hate and threaten and destroy his own offspring? Here he slanders and misrepresents what is written in Genesis, which runs thus: “And the Lord God, seeing that the wickednesses of those on the earth were multiplied, and that each one was intently thinking evil in his heart all the days, considered that he had made man on the earth; and he pondered in his heart, and God said: I will wipe out man whom I made from the face of the earth, from man to beast, and from creeping things to the birds of heaven; for I was angry that I made them.” He sets out things that are not written as though they were indicated by what is written. For in these words neither repentance of God is named nor that he finds fault with his own art and hates it. And if God seems to threaten the flood and to destroy his own offspring in it, it must be said that, since the human soul is immortal, the supposed threat is meant to convert the hearers, and the destruction of men in the flood is a purification of the earth, as those of the Greeks who philosophized in no contemptible way also said in the words: “When the gods purify the earth.” About expressions that attribute human feelings, as it were, to God, we have said not a little above as well.

Next, Celsus, suspecting or perhaps perceiving for himself what could be said by those who defend the matter of the people destroyed in the flood, says: But if he does not destroy his own offspring, where does he carry them off to out of this world which he himself made? To this too we say that he does not at all carry those who suffered the flood out of the whole world composed of heaven and earth, but frees them from life in the flesh, and releasing them from their bodies, at the same time releases them from being on the earth, which in many places of Scripture is customarily called the world. Especially in the Gospel according to John one can often find the region around the earth called the world, as in “It was the true light, which enlightens every man coming into the world,” and “In the world you have tribulation; but take courage, I have overcome the world.” If, then, one understands “carries them off out of this world” as the region around the earth, the statement meets with no absurdity; but if one calls the system of heaven and earth the world, those who suffered the flood are not at all carried off out of the world so named. And yet one might say, understanding the words “while we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are not seen,” and “For his invisible things are clearly seen from the creation of the world, being understood by the things that are made,” that one who is occupied with the invisible things, and in general with what are called things not seen, has departed from the world, since the Word leads him out from here and transfers him to the place above the heavens, to contemplate the things that are beautiful.

After the passage we have examined, as though his aim were somehow to fill his book with many words, he says in other words things similar to those examined a little earlier, where he said: Much more silly is it to distribute certain days to the making of the world before there were days. For when heaven had not yet come to be, nor the earth yet been fixed, nor the sun yet borne round here, how were there days? For how does this differ from: Let us take it again from the beginning and consider how it would not be absurd for the first and greatest God to command, “Let this come to be,” and another thing, “this or that,” and on one day to fashion so much, and on the second again so much more, and on the third and fourth and fifth and sixth? We have in effect answered “commanding, ‘Let this come to be,’ and another thing, ‘this or that’” when we cited “He spoke and they came to be; he commanded and they were created,” saying that the immediate Creator, and as it were the very maker of the world, is the Word, the Son of God, while the Father of the Word, by having commanded his own Son, the Word, to make the world, is Creator in the primary sense. As for “light” being made on one day, “the firmament” on the second, the gathering of the waters “under the heaven” into their gatherings on the third, and so the earth's bringing forth the things governed by nature alone, and the “lights” and “stars” on the fourth, the swimming creatures on the fifth, and the land animals and “man” on the sixth, we have spoken as well as we could in our treatises on Genesis. And above, too, when we found fault with those who said, following the more obvious interpretation, that a period of six days passed in the making of the world, we cited: “This is the book of the generation of heaven and earth, when it came to be, in the day when God made the heaven and the earth.”

Then again, having misunderstood “And on the sixth day God finished his works which he had made; and he ceased on the seventh day from all his works which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because on it he ceased from all his works which God began to make,” and thinking that “he ceased on the seventh day” is the same as “he rested on the seventh day,” he says: After this, like some thoroughly bad workman, he grew weary and needed a holiday to rest. For he does not know what the day of the sabbath and of God's ceasing is, which follows the making of the world that goes on as long as the world lasts, the day on which those who have done all their works in the six days will keep festival with God, and, because they have left undone nothing that falls to them, will ascend to contemplation and to the festal assembly of the righteous and blessed in it. Then, as though either the Scriptures said so or we ourselves explained it so, that God grew weary and rested, he says that it is not lawful for the first God to grow weary, or to work with his hands, or to give orders. Celsus says that it is not lawful for the first God to grow weary; but we would say that neither does God the Word grow weary, nor any of those who already belong to the better and more divine order; for growing weary belongs to beings in a body. You will inquire whether it belongs to those in any body whatever, or to those in an earthly body and one a little better than this. Nor is it lawful for the first God to work with his hands; and if you understand working with hands in the proper sense, neither for the second God nor for any other of the more divine beings. But let working with hands be spoken of loosely or figuratively, so that we may explain “The firmament proclaims the work of his hands” and “His hands established the heaven,” and anything said similarly, interpreting figuratively the hands and limbs of God. What is absurd, then, in God's working with his hands in this way? And as it is not absurd for God to work with his hands in this way, so neither is it absurd for him to command, so that what is accomplished by the one commanded may be good and praiseworthy, because the one who commanded them is God.

And again Celsus, perhaps having misunderstood “For the mouth of the Lord has spoken these things,” or perhaps because unlearned people have been rash in explaining such things, and not understanding to what the terms for bodily members applied to the powers of God refer, says: Neither has he a mouth nor a voice. Truly God will have no voice, if voice is air that has been struck, or a striking of air, or a form of air, or whatever those skilled in these matters define voice to be. But what is called the voice of God is said, as the voice of God, to be seen by the people in the words “All the people saw the voice of God,” the seeing being understood, to use the customary language of Scripture, spiritually. He says also that God has nothing else of what we know; but he does not make clear of what things we know. If he means members, we agree with him, understanding “of what we know” as the things named in a bodily and more common sense. But if we take “of what we know” in general, since we know many things, then he has virtue, blessedness, and divinity. And if one takes “of what we know” in a loftier sense, since all that we know is less than God, there is nothing absurd in our too accepting that God has nothing of what we know. For the attributes of God are greater than everything known not only to human nature but also to the beings that have risen above it. If he had read the words of the prophets, David saying, “But you are the same,” and, I think, Malachi, “and I have not changed,” he would have seen that none of us says there is any change in God, either in act or in thought. For remaining “the same” he governs changeable things according to their nature, and his reason chooses to govern them so.

Then Celsus, not having noticed the difference between “in the image of God” and “his image,” that “the image of God” is “the firstborn of all creation,” the Word himself and Truth itself and also Wisdom itself, being “the image of his goodness,” whereas man has been made “in the image” of “God”; and further that every man of whom “Christ is the head” is “the image and glory of God”; and without considering in which part of man being “in the image” of “God” is marked, and that it is in the soul that either has not had, or no longer has, “the old man with his deeds,” and which, from not having these, is called “in the image” of its Creator, says: Nor did he make man his image; for God is not like this, nor like any other form. Is it conceivable that being “in the image” of “God” should exist in the worse part of man, who is composite, I mean in the body, and that this, as Celsus has taken it, is itself what is “in his image”? For if being “in the image” of “God” is in the body alone, the better part, the soul, has been deprived of being “in the image,” and it is in the corruptible body, which none of us says. And if being “in the image” of “God” is in both together, then God must be composite and must himself consist, as it were, of soul and body, so that the better part of being “in the image” may be in the soul, and the lesser, corresponding to the body, in the body, which none of us says. It remains, then, that being “in the image” of “God” is to be understood in what we call the inner man, who is renewed and is by nature able to become “in the image of the Creator,” when one becomes “perfect,” “as the heavenly Father is perfect,” and hears, “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy,” and, learning “Be imitators of God,” takes up into his virtuous soul the features of God. Then too “the body” of one who has taken up what is God's in being “in the image” is a “temple” of God, since he has such a soul, and has God in the soul because of being “in the image.”

Again, he strings together for himself many things as though granted by us, which none of the Christians who have sense grants. For none of us says that God partakes of shape or colour. Nor does he partake even of motion, he who because he stands firm and his nature is stable calls the righteous man too to something similar, saying: “But you, stand here with me.” And if some expressions seem to represent a kind of motion in him, like the one that says, “They heard the Lord God walking in the paradise in the evening,” such things must be understood as God being thought of as moving by those who have sinned, or understood in the same way as sleep or anger or something similar is said of God figuratively. Nor does God partake of being; for he is partaken of rather than partakes, and he is partaken of by those who have “the Spirit of God.” And our Saviour does not partake of righteousness, but, being “righteousness,” is partaken of by the righteous. The subject of being is vast and hard to contemplate, especially if being in the proper sense is that which is stable and incorporeal: so as to find whether God is beyond being in dignity and power, giving a share of being to those to whom he gives it according to his Word, and to the Word himself; or whether he himself too is being, yet is said to be invisible by nature in the passage about the Saviour which says, “who is the image of the invisible God,” where by the word “invisible” the incorporeal is meant. One must also inquire whether the only-begotten and firstborn “of all creation” should be called being of beings, idea of ideas, and first principle, and his Father and God beyond all these.

Celsus, then, says of God that all things come from him, having detached, I do not know how, “all things” from him. But our Paul says: “From him and through him and to him are all things,” showing the beginning of the existence of all things in “from him,” their holding together in “through him,” and their end in “to him.” And truly God himself is derived from nothing. And since Celsus says, Nor is he attainable by reason, I distinguish the meaning and say: if he means by the reason within us, whether the inward or the spoken word, we too will say that God is not attainable by reason. But if, understanding “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” we declare that God is attainable by this Word, being comprehended not by him alone but also by anyone to whom he reveals the Father, we shall prove false Celsus's saying, Nor is God attainable by reason. The words He is not nameable also need distinguishing. If it means that nothing in words and meanings can express the properties of God, the statement is true, since even many qualities cannot be named. For who can express by names the difference between the quality of sweetness of a date and the sweetness of a dried fig? Who can distinguish by a name and represent the particular quality of each? It is not surprising, then, if God is not nameable in this sense. But if you take nameable to mean that it is possible to represent something about him by names, so as to lead the hearer by the hand and make him understand some things about God so far as is attainable by human nature, there is nothing absurd in saying he is nameable. In the same way we shall distinguish the words For he has experienced nothing that can be grasped by a name. It is true too that God is beyond all passion. So much for this.

Let us look also at his next passage, in which he as it were introduces someone who, after hearing these things, says: How, then, shall I know God? And how shall I learn the way there? And how do you show him to me? For now you cast darkness over my eyes, and I see nothing clearly. Then he, as it were, answers the one who raised this difficulty, and thinks he gives the reason why darkness has been poured over the eyes of the one who said this, saying: Those whom one leads out of darkness into bright light, being unable to withstand its brilliance, suffer in their sight, are harmed, and think they have been blinded. To this we shall say that all who look to the evil arts of painters, modellers, and sculptors sit in darkness and are settled in it, not wishing to look up and ascend with the mind from visible and all sensible things to the Creator of the universe, who is light; but that everyone who has followed the rays of the Word is in light, since the Word has shown from what ignorance, impiety, and lack of learning about the divine these things were worshipped instead of God, and has led by the hand the mind of the one who wishes to be saved to the uncreated God over all. For “the people who sat in darkness,” the people of the Gentiles, “saw a great light, and on those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has risen,” God Jesus. No Christian, then, answers Celsus or any of those who accuse the divine word by saying, “How shall I know God?” For each of them, as far as he can, has known God. And no one says, “How shall I learn the way there?” since he has heard the one who said, “I am the way and the truth and the life,” and has tasted, in travelling it, the benefit of travelling. And no Christian would say to Celsus, “How do you show God to me?”