Against Celsus 7.46

To this we, who have made it our practice to be hostile to nothing that is well said, even if those outside the faith say it well, and not to quarrel with them nor seek to overturn what is sound, will say this. Those who revile people who wish, as far as they can, to worship the God of the universe (who accepts the faith of the simple in him and the reasoned piety of the more intelligent toward him), people who send up prayers with thanksgiving to the Creator of the universe and send them up as through the high priest who has shown humankind pure worship of God; who call them lame and mutilated in their souls and say that they live by the dead body, those who practise saying from the heart, “For though we live in the flesh we do not wage war according to the flesh; for the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly but mighty before God”: let them take care that by this very reviling of people who pray to belong to God they do not make their own souls lame and mutilate their own “inner man,” cutting off from him, by their slanders against others who wish to live well, the gentleness and steadiness sown naturally by the Creator in rational nature. But those who, besides other things, have learned from the divine Word and practise blessing when “reviled,” enduring when “persecuted,” and entreating when “slandered,” these would be the ones who have set upright the feet of the soul and are cleansing and making ready the whole soul; not so that they may separate being from becoming, and the intelligible from the visible, in words only, and join truth to being and flee by every means the error that goes with becoming, but looking, as they have learned, not at the things of becoming, which are “seen” and therefore “temporary,” but at the better things, whether one wishes to call them being, or “invisible” because they are intelligible, or “not seen” because their nature lies outside the senses. In this way the disciples of Jesus also look at the things of becoming, so as to use them as a kind of stepping-stone to the understanding of the nature of intelligible things: “for the invisible things” of God “from the creation of the world,” that is, the intelligible things, “are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” And having ascended from the creatures of the world to the invisible things of God, they do not stop there; but having exercised themselves sufficiently in them and understood them, they ascend to the eternal power of God and, in a word, to his divinity, knowing that God in his love for humankind “has shown” “the truth” and what may be “known” of him not only to those dedicated to him but also to some outside the pure worship of and piety toward him; while some of those who by God's providence have ascended to the knowledge of such great things do deeds unworthy of that knowledge, act impiously, and hold “the truth in unrighteousness,” and can no longer have any room for defence before God, given their knowledge of such great things.