Against Celsus 7.28–7.41

After his remarks about God, in which he slanders us, he asks us: Where are we going to go? And what hope do we have? And as though we had answered, he sets out supposedly our words, thus: To another land, better than this one. To this he says: A happy life for happy souls has been recorded by divine men of old; some named it the Isles of the Blessed, others “the Elysian plain,” from their release (lysis) from the evils here, as Homer says: “But the immortals will send you to the Elysian plain and the ends of the earth, where life is easiest.” And Plato, who held the soul to be immortal, openly called that region to which it is sent “earth,” thus: saying that “it is something very great, and that we who live from the Phasis to the Pillars of Heracles inhabit a small part of it, like ants or frogs around a marsh, living around the sea; and that many others live elsewhere in many such places. For there are everywhere around the earth many hollows, of all kinds in form and size, into which water and mist and air have flowed together; but the earth itself lies pure in the pure heaven.” Celsus supposes, then, that we have taken what concerns the other land, better and far superior to this, from certain men of old whom he considers divine, and especially from Plato, who philosophized in the Phaedo about the pure earth lying in the pure heaven. He does not see that Moses, who is much older even than Greek letters, introduced God promising the holy land, “good and large, flowing with milk and honey,” to those who lived according to his law; not, as some think, the “good” land that is considered to be Judaea here below, which itself lies in the earth cursed from the beginning in the works of Adam's transgression. For “Cursed is the earth in your works; in sorrow you shall eat of it all the days of your life” is said of the whole earth, of which every man who has died “in Adam” eats “in sorrow,” that is, in toil, and eats of it “all the days of” his “life.” And, being “cursed,” the whole earth “will bring forth thorns and thistles” “all the days of the life” of him who was cast out of paradise in Adam; and every man eats his bread “in the sweat of his face,” “until he returns to the earth from which he was taken.” The whole passage admits of much discussion that could be worked out to clarify the words; but for the present we have been content with a little, wishing to remove the distraction of supposing that what is said about the good land which God promises to the righteous is said about the land of Judaea.

If, then, the whole “earth” itself is “cursed in the works” of Adam and of those who died in him, it is plain that all its parts share in the curse, among them the land of Judaea; so that the words “into a good and large land, into a land flowing with milk and honey” cannot apply to it, even if Judaea and Jerusalem are shown symbolically to be a shadow of the good and large land lying pure in the pure heaven, in which is the heavenly Jerusalem. Discussing this, the apostle, as one raised together “with Christ” and seeking “the things above,” and having found a meaning that clings to no Jewish mythology, says: “But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels in festal gathering.” And so that one may be persuaded that we are not speaking contrary to the intention of the divine Spirit about the good and large land in Moses, let him attend to all the prophets, who teach the return to Jerusalem of those who have wandered and fallen away from it, and, in a word, their restoration to what is called the place and city of God, in the words of him who said, “His place is in holy peace,” and who also says: “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God, on his holy mountain, spreading far the joy of all the earth.” For the present it is enough to cite what is in the thirty-sixth Psalm, which says this about the land of the righteous: “But those who wait for the Lord, they shall inherit the land”; and a little later: “But the meek shall inherit the land and delight in abundance of peace”; and a little later: “Those who bless him shall inherit the land”; and again: “The righteous shall inherit the land and dwell upon it for ever and ever.” And see whether the earth's being pure in the pure heaven is not indicated, for those able to hear, by what is said in the same Psalm: “Wait for the Lord and keep his way, and he will exalt you to inherit the land.”

It seems to me that what Plato says about the stones considered precious here, which are said to have a kind of emanation from the stones in the better land, was also taken by him from what is written in Isaiah about the city of God, of which it is written: “I will make your battlements of jasper, and your stones stones of crystal, and your enclosing wall choice stones”; and again: “I will lay your foundations with sapphire.” Those who have understood the philosopher's teachings in a loftier way explain Plato's myth allegorically. But the prophecies, from which we conjecture that Plato too took these things, will be set forth, for those fitted by purity of life and love of learning about divine things, by those who have lived like the prophets and in an inspired way, and have devoted all their time to the examination of the sacred writings. Our purpose was to show that we have not taken what concerns the holy land from the Greeks or Plato; rather they, who were later not only than Moses, the most ancient, but also than most of the prophets, either misunderstood some who spoke of such things in riddles, or read the sacred writings and, distorting them, said such things about the better land. Haggai clearly shows that “the dry land” is one thing and “the earth” another, calling this land on which we live dry land. He says this: “Yet once more I will shake the heaven and the earth and the dry land and the sea.”

Just as Celsus himself defers the explanation of Plato's myth in the Phaedo, saying: What he means by this is not easy for everyone to know, unless one can understand what it is that he says: “that because of weakness and slowness we are not able to pass through to the uppermost air,” and “that if our nature were able to bear the sight, we would know that that is the true heaven and the true light”; in the same way we too, thinking it does not belong to the present treatise to clarify what concerns the holy and good land and the city of God in it, defer it to the commentaries on the prophets, having explained in part, as far as we could, what concerns the city of God in our treatises on the forty-fifth and forty-seventh Psalms. The most ancient word of Moses and the prophets knows all true things by the same names as the more general things here, such as “true light,” and a “heaven” other than “the firmament,” and a sun “of righteousness” other than the sensible sun. And in a word it says, to distinguish them from sensible things, none of which is true: “God, his works are true,” applying “the works of God” to some things and what are called “the works of his hands” to lesser things. At any rate, finding fault with some through Isaiah, he says: “They do not regard the works of the Lord, and they do not consider the works of his hands.” So much for this.

The doctrine of the resurrection is vast and hard to interpret, and needs, more than any other doctrine, a wise man of great attainment to show what is worthy of God and the grandeur of the doctrine, which teaches that what Scripture calls the tent of the soul, in which the righteous “who are” in it groan “being burdened,” not wishing “to be unclothed but to be further clothed,” has the principle of a seed. Since Celsus did not understand it, and mocks what is said because he has heard about it from unlearned people who can explain it by no reasoning, it is useful, in addition to what we said above on this subject, to note only this in answer to his argument: that it is not, as Celsus thinks, from misunderstanding the transmigration of souls that we speak of the resurrection, but because we know that the soul, which is by its own nature incorporeal and invisible, when it is in any bodily place, needs a body suited to the nature of that place. Sometimes it wears this body after putting off the former one, which was necessary but is superfluous for the second state; sometimes it puts it on over what it had before, needing a better garment for the purer, ethereal, and heavenly places. When it came to birth here, it put off what was useful in the womb of the mother while it was in her, the chorion; and it put on under that what was necessary for one who was going to live on earth. Then again, since there is a “tent,” an earthly house, somehow necessary to the tent, the Scriptures say that the earthly house “of the tent” is destroyed, but that the tent puts on “a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” And the men of God say that “the corruptible” itself “puts on incorruption,” which is different from the incorruptible, and “the mortal puts on immortality,” which is other than the immortal. For as wisdom is to the wise, and righteousness to the righteous, and peace to the peaceful, so incorruption is to the incorruptible and immortality to the immortal. See, then, to what the word urges us, when it says we are “to put on” “incorruption” and “immortality,” which, like garments for one who has put them on and is wrapped in such garments, do not allow the one who wears them to be corrupted or to die. Let us have ventured to say this much on account of one who did not understand what we mean by the resurrection, and for this reason laughs at and mocks a doctrine he does not know.

Thinking that we uphold the doctrine of the resurrection for the sake of knowing and seeing God, he strings together for himself what he wishes and says this: When they are shut out on every side and refuted, they come back again, as though they had heard nothing, to the same question: How, then, shall we know and see God? And how shall we go to him? Let anyone who wishes know, then, that even if for other purposes we need a body, in order to be in a bodily place, and one of the kind that corresponds to the nature of the bodily place, and, needing the body, we put on over the tent what has been mentioned, yet for knowledge of God we have no need of a body at all. For what knows God is not the eye of the body but the mind, which sees what is “in the image” of the Creator and has received, by the providence of God, the power to know God. And what sees God is a pure heart, from which there no longer “come evil thoughts,” nor “murders,” nor “adulteries,” nor “sexual immoralities,” nor “thefts,” nor “false witness,” nor “blasphemies,” nor “an evil eye,” nor any other wrong thing; because of which it is said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” And since our own will is not sufficient to have a wholly “pure” “heart,” but we need God, who creates it such, for this reason the one who prays with understanding says: “Create in me a clean heart, O God.”

Nor shall we ask anyone, as though God were in a place, and say: How shall we go to him? For God is superior to every place and contains everything whatever, and there is nothing that contains God. Going to God, then, is not commanded to us in a bodily sense in “You shall walk after the Lord your God”; nor does the prophet, joined to God, say in a bodily sense in his prayer: “My soul has clung close behind you.” Celsus, then, lies about us when he says that we expect to see God with the eyes of the body, to hear his voice with our ears, and to touch him with sensible hands. We know that the divine words speak of eyes that share only the name with the eyes of the body, and likewise of ears and hands, and, more wonderful than these, of a more divine sense different from what the many ordinarily call sense. For when the prophet says, “Uncover my eyes, and I will consider the wonders of your law,” or “The commandment of the Lord is far-shining, enlightening the eyes,” or “Enlighten my eyes, lest I sleep in death,” no one is so thunderstruck as to think that “the wonders” of the divine “law” are perceived with the eyes of the body, or that the commandment of the Lord enlightens the eyes of the body, or that a sleep that brings death befalls the eyes of the body. And when our Saviour says, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear,” even an ordinary person understands that these words are said about more divine ears. And if it is said that “the word of the Lord” came by the hand of Jeremiah the prophet, or of someone else, or the law “by the hand” of Moses, or “With my hands I sought God, and I was not deceived,” no one is so foolish as not to take it that there are certain hands spoken of figuratively, about which John also says, “Our hands have handled concerning the Word of life.” And if you wish to learn from the sacred writings about the better sense, which is not bodily, hear Solomon saying in the Proverbs: “You will find a divine sense.”

We have no need, then, as people who seek God in this way, to go where Celsus sends us, to the shrines of Trophonius, Amphiaraus, and Mopsus, where he says gods in human form are seen, and, as Celsus says, not deceptive but even clearly visible. For we know that these are demons, fed on the savour of burnt fat, on blood, and on the fumes rising from the sacrifices, and so held fast in the prisons built by their own desire, which the Greeks have supposed to be temples of gods. But we know that such places are the dwellings of deceiving demons. After this Celsus says maliciously of the gods in human form he has just mentioned that one will see them “not slipping by once, like the one who deceived these people, but always conversing with those who wish.” By this he seems to have supposed that Jesus was a phantom when he appeared to his disciples after the resurrection from the dead, as though he slipped by in order to be seen by them; whereas those whom he named gods in human form he thinks always converse with those who wish. But how can a phantom, as he himself says, slipping by to deceive those who saw it, after that sight accomplish so much, turn the souls of such people, and persuade them that they must do everything in a way pleasing to God, as those who will be judged? And how does what he names a phantom drive out demons and accomplish other workings not to be despised, not confined to one allotted place like his gods in human form, but reaching through the whole inhabited world, and gathering and drawing by its own divinity whomever it finds inclined toward the good life?

After this, in answer to what we have said as well as we could, Celsus again says something like this: “And they will say again: How will they know God if they do not apprehend him by sense? What is it possible to learn without sense?” Then, answering this, he says: “This is the voice not of a man, nor of the soul, but of the flesh. Nevertheless, let them listen, if they are able to understand anything, cowardly and body-loving race that they are: if you close your senses and look up with the mind, and turning from the flesh awaken the eyes of the soul, only so will you see God. And if you seek a guide for this road, you must shun the deceivers and sorcerers and those who pander to idols, so that you may not be utterly ridiculous, blaspheming the others, the gods that are displayed, as idols, while worshipping one more wretched than even real idols, not even an idol any longer but truly a corpse, and seeking a father like him.” First we must say, in reply to his impersonation, in which he puts in our mouths words as though spoken by us in defence of the resurrection of the flesh, that the virtue of one who writes speeches in character is to keep the intention and the character of the person portrayed, and the fault is when someone puts words that do not fit into the mouth of the speaker. Equally blameworthy are those who, in speeches in character, put upon barbarians and uneducated people or household slaves, who have never heard philosophical discourse nor spoken well, a philosophy which the writer has learned but which the person portrayed could not be expected to know; and again those who put upon characters supposed to be wise and to know divine things what is said by the uneducated out of ordinary passions and reported out of ignorance. That is why Homer is admired in many respects, having kept the characters of the heroes as he established them from the start, for instance that of Nestor, or Odysseus, or Diomedes, or Agamemnon, or Telemachus, or Penelope, or any of the others; while Euripides is mocked by Aristophanes as one who speaks out of season, because he often put speeches of doctrines which he had learned from Anaxagoras or some other wise man into the mouths of barbarian women or slaves.

If such is the virtue in writing speeches in character, and such the fault, how could anyone not reasonably laugh at Celsus, who puts upon Christians what is not said by Christians? For if he was inventing speeches of simple people, how could such people distinguish sense from mind, and sensible things from intelligible things, and hold doctrines like those of the Stoics, who abolish intelligible beings, that whatever is apprehended is apprehended by the senses and that all apprehension depends on the senses? And if he is inventing speeches of those who philosophize and examine the teaching of Christ carefully and as far as they are able, he has not made them consistent with these either. For no one who has learned that God is invisible, and that there are some invisible created things, that is, intelligible things, would say, as though in defence of the resurrection: “How will they know God if they do not apprehend him by the senses?” or “What is it possible to learn without sense?” And it is written, not in secluded writings read only by a few scholars, but in those that are more widely read, that “the invisible things of God from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” From this one may know that, even if people in this life must begin from the senses and sensible things when they are about to ascend to the nature of intelligible things, yet they must by no means remain among sensible things. Nor will they say that it is impossible to learn intelligible things without sense; rather, using the question “Who is able to learn without sense?”, they will show that Celsus has no good reason to attach to it the remark, “This is the voice not of a man, nor of a soul, but of the flesh.”

So we say that the God of the universe is mind, or beyond mind and being, simple, invisible, and incorporeal, and we would say that God is apprehended by nothing other than that which is made in the image of that mind; now, to use the words of Paul, “through a mirror and in a riddle, but then face to face.” And if I say “face,” let no one misrepresent, because of the word, the sense it conveys, but let him learn, from “with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, and being transformed into the same image from glory to glory,” that in such passages it is not a sensible face that is meant but one understood figuratively, like eyes and ears and all the other terms which, as we showed above, share their names with the members of the body. And indeed the man, that is, the soul using a body, called “the inner man,” and also “soul,” answers not what Celsus wrote down, but what the man of God himself teaches. A Christian would not use the voice of the flesh, since he has learned to put to death “by the Spirit the deeds of the body,” and to carry about “always in the body the dying of Jesus,” and “Put to death your members which are on the earth”; and since he knows what is meant by “My Spirit shall not remain in these men for ever, because they are flesh,” and understands also that “those who are in the flesh cannot please God,” and therefore does everything so as to be no longer at all “in the flesh” but only “in the Spirit.”

Let us see also to what he calls us, so that we may listen to him on the way we shall know God; for he thinks no Christian can understand what he says, since he says: “Nevertheless, let them listen, if they are able to understand anything.” We must consider, then, what he wants us to hear from him. The philosopher, who ought to teach us, reviles us; and when he ought to show his goodwill to his hearers in the opening of his discourse, he calls “a cowardly race” those who die even to the point of death rather than forswear Christianity even with a word, and who are ready for every outrage and every kind of death. He says too that we are a “body-loving race,” we who say, “Even if we once knew Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know him no longer,” and who so readily lay down the body for the sake of piety that a philosopher would not so easily take off his cloak. He says to us, then: “If you close your senses and look up with the mind, and turning from the flesh awaken the eye of the soul, only so will you see God.” And he thinks that this (I mean the teaching about two kinds of eyes), which he has taken from the Greeks, was not taught among us before. We must say that Moses, describing the making of the world, presents man before the transgression as in one sense seeing and in another not seeing: seeing, when it is said of the woman that “the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasing to the eyes to see, and beautiful to contemplate”; and not seeing, not only when the serpent says to the woman, as though of blind eyes, “For God knew that on the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened,” but also in “They ate, and the eyes of the two were opened.” Their eyes of sense, then, “were opened,” which they had rightly kept closed, so that they might not be distracted and hindered from seeing with the eye of the soul; while the eyes of the soul, which until then they had kept seeing and rejoicing in God and his paradise, these, I think, they closed because of sin. That is why our Saviour too, knowing this twofold kind of eyes in us, says: “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind,” hinting by “those who do not see” at the eyes of the soul, which the Word makes to see, and by “those who see” at the eyes of the senses, which the Word blinded, so that the soul may see without distraction what it ought. In everyone, then, who lives as a Christian in the right way, the eye of the soul has been awakened and that of sense has been closed; and in proportion to the awakening of the better eye and the closing of the sight of sense, the God over all and his Son, who is Word and Wisdom and the rest, are understood and contemplated by each.

Next after what we have examined, Celsus addresses to all Christians a speech which it would have been fitting to address, if at all, to those who admit that they are wholly alien to the teaching of Jesus. For the Ophites, as we said above, who deny Jesus altogether, or any others who hold views like theirs, are the ones who pander to idols, the deceivers and sorcerers; and they are the ones who wretchedly learn by heart the names of the doorkeepers. It is in vain, then, that he says to Christians: “And if you seek a guide for this road, you must shun the deceivers and sorcerers and those who pander to idols.” And not even knowing that such people, no less than Celsus, being sorcerers, speak evil of Jesus along with him, and of all the worship of God he taught, he says, mixing us up with them in his speech: “So that you may not be utterly ridiculous, blaspheming the others, the gods that are displayed, as idols, while worshipping one more wretched than even real idols, not even an idol any longer but truly a corpse, and seeking a father like him.” That he does not know what Christians say and what those who invent such myths say, but thinks the charges brought against them belong to us and says these things to us though they do not apply to us, is clear from this: “Such deceit, and those wonderful counsellors, and the demonic words addressed to the lion, and the amphibian, and the ass-shaped one, and the others, and the divine doorkeepers, whose names you wretched people learn by heart to your misfortune, and so you are wickedly possessed and are impaled.” He did not see that none of those who think the lion-shaped, the ass-shaped, and the amphibian are doorkeepers of the ascent stands firm to the point of death, even for what seems to him the truth. But what we do out of piety, even, if I may say so, to excess, offering ourselves to every kind of death, including impalement, he attributes to those who suffer none of these things; and on us who are impaled for the sake of piety he heaps reproach for their mythmaking about the lion-shaped one, the amphibian, and the rest. It is not because of Celsus, then, that we shun the account of the lion-shaped one and the rest, for we never received anything of the kind in the first place; but following the teaching of Jesus we say the opposite of those people, and do not agree that Michael has such a face and some other of those previously listed has such another.

We must consider also whom Celsus wishes us to follow, so that we may not lack ancient guides and holy men. He refers us to inspired poets, as he calls them, and wise men and philosophers, without giving their names; and having promised to show us the guides, he indicates in vague terms “the inspired poets and wise men and philosophers.” If he had given the names of each of them, it would have seemed reasonable for us to argue that he is giving us guides who are blind about the truth, so that we may go astray, or if not wholly blind, at least mistaken about many doctrines of the truth. Whether he wants Orpheus to be an inspired poet, or Parmenides, or Empedocles, or even Homer himself or Hesiod, let whoever wishes show how those who use such guides will travel better and be helped in the conduct of life, compared with those who, because of the teaching of Jesus Christ, have abandoned all images and statues, and all Jewish superstition as well, and through the Word of God look up only to God, the Father of the Word. And who are the wise men or philosophers from whom Celsus wishes us to hear many divine things, abandoning Moses the servant of God and the prophets of the Creator of the universe, who truly spoke countless things by inspiration, and abandoning him who shone upon the human race and proclaimed the way of the worship of God, and who, as far as lay in him, left no one without a taste of his mysteries, but out of surpassing love for humankind was able to give to the more intelligent a theology capable of lifting the soul from the things of this world, while nonetheless also coming down to the lower capacities of simple men, of plainer women and slaves, and in short of those helped by no one but Jesus alone, so that they might live better, as far as possible, with such doctrines about God as they could grasp?