Against Celsus 6.12

So we pass on to another accusation of Celsus, who does not even know our words but says, from things he has half-heard, that we say that wisdom among men is foolishness with God, since Paul says: “The wisdom of the world is foolishness with God.” And Celsus says that the reason for this was stated long ago. He thinks the reason is that by this saying we wish to attract only the uneducated and the simple-minded. But, as he himself noted, he said the same thing above, and we have answered the argument as well as we could. Yet he wished to show that this too was invented by us and taken from the wise men among the Greeks, who said that human wisdom is one thing and divine wisdom another. And he sets out sayings of Heraclitus: one in which he says, “For human character has no insight, but divine character has,” and another, “A man is called childish by a divinity, just as a child is by a man.” He also sets out these words from Plato's Apology of Socrates: “For I, men of Athens, have gained this name through nothing other than a kind of wisdom. What kind of wisdom is this? The kind that is perhaps human wisdom; for in this I really may be wise.” These, then, are the passages Celsus sets out. But I will add these words from Plato's letter to Hermias, Erastus, and Coriscus: “To Erastus and Coriscus, besides this fine wisdom of the Forms, I say, old man though I am, that they also need wisdom that guards against wicked and unjust men, and a certain power of self-defence. For they are inexperienced, because they have spent much of their life with us, who are moderate and not wicked. That is why I said that they need these, so that they may not be compelled to neglect the true wisdom and to attend more than they should to the human and necessary kind.”