Against Celsus 7.39

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.