Celsus held that Christians spoke of God in a way that was neither holy nor guiltless (ouch hosíôs oud' euagôs, iv, 10); and he hinted that they did it to astonish ignorant listeners.[[21]] For himself, he was impressed with the thought, which Plato has in the Timæus,—a sentence that sums up what many of the most serious and religious natures have felt and will always feel to be profoundly true: "The maker and father of this whole fabric it is hard to find, and, when one has found him, it is impossible to speak of him to all men."[[22]] Like the men of his day, a true and deep instinct led him to point back to "inspired poets, wise men and philosophers," and to Plato "a more living (energesteron) teacher of theology"[[23]]—"though I should be surprised if you are able to follow him, seeing that you are utterly bound up in the flesh and see nothing clearly."[[24]] What the sages tell him of God, he proceeds to set forth.
"Being and becoming, one is intelligible, the other visible, (noetòn, horatòn). Being is the sphere of truth; becoming, of error. Truth is the subject of knowledge; the other of opinion. Thought deals with the intelligible; sight with the visible. The mind recognizes the intelligible, the eye the visible.
"What then the Sun is among things visible,—neither eye, nor sight—yet to the eye the cause of its seeing, to sight the cause of its existing (synístathai) by his means, to things visible the cause of their being seen, to all things endowed with sensation the cause of their existence (gínesthai) and indeed the cause himself of himself being seen; this HE is among things intelligible (noetà), who is neither mind, nor thought, nor knowledge, but to the mind the cause of thinking, to thought of its being by his means, to knowledge of our knowing by his means, to all things intelligible, to truth itself, and to being itself, the cause that they are—out beyond all things (pántôn epékeina òn), intelligible only by some unspeakable faculty.
"So have spoken men of mind; and if you can understand anything of it, it is well for you. If you suppose a spirit descends from God to proclaim divine matters, it would be the spirit that proclaims this, that spirit with which men of old were filled and in consequence announced much that was good. But if you can take in nothing of it, be silent and hide your own ignorance, and do not say that those who see are blind, and those who run are lame, especially when you yourselves are utterly crippled and mutilated in soul, and live in the body—that is to say, in the dead element."[[25]]
Origen says that Celsus is constantly guilty of tautology, and the reiteration of this charge of ignorance and want of culture is at least frequent enough. Yet if the Christian movement had been confined to people as vulgar and illiterate as he suggests, he might not have thought it worth his while to attack the new religion. His hint of the propagation of the Gospel by slaves in great houses, taken with the names of men of learning and position, whom we know to have been converted, shows the seriousness of the case. But to avoid the further charge which Origen brings against Celsus of "mixing everything up," it will be better to pursue Celsus' thoughts of God.
"I say nothing new, but what seemed true of old (pálai dedogména). God is good, and beautiful, and happy, and is in that which is most beautiful and best. If then he 'descends to men,' it involves change for him, and change from good to bad, from beautiful to ugly, from happiness to unhappiness, from what is best to what is worst. Who would choose such a change? For mortality it is only nature to alter and be changed; but for the immortal to abide the same forever. God would not accept such a change."[[26]] He presents a dilemma to the Christians; "Either God really changes, as they say, to a mortal body,—and it has been shown that this is impossible; or he himself does not change, but he makes those who see suppose so, and thus deceives and cheats them. Deceit and lying are evil, taken generally, though in the single case of medicine one might use them in healing friends who are sick or mad—or against enemies in trying to escape danger. But none who is sick or mad is a friend of God's; nor is God afraid of any one, so that he should use deceit to escape danger."[[27]] God in fact "made nothing mortal; but God's works are such things as are immortal, and they have made the mortal. The soul is God's work, but the nature of the body is different, and in this respect there is no difference between the bodies of bat, worm, frog, and man. The matter is the same and the corruptible part is alike."[[28]]
God's anger
The Christian conception of the "descent of God" is repulsive to Celsus, for it means contact with matter. "God's anger," too, is an impious idea, for anger is a passion; and Celsus makes havoc of the Old Testament passages where God is spoken of as having human passions (anthrôpopathés), closing with an argumentum ad hominem—"Is it not absurd that a man [Titus], angry with the Jews, slew all their youth and burnt their land, and so they came to nothing; but God Almighty, as they say, angry and vexed and threatening, sends his son and endures such things as they tell?"[[29]] Furthermore, the Christian account of God's anger at man's sin involves a presumption that Christians really know what evil is. "Now the origin of evil is not to be easily known by one who has no philosophy. It is enough to tell the common people that evil is not from God, but is inherent in matter, and is a fellow-citizen (empoliteúetai) of mortality. The circuit of mortal things is from beginning to end the same, and in the appointed circles the same must always of necessity have been and be and be again."[[30]] "Nor could the good or evil elements in mortal things become either less or greater. God does not need to restore all things anew. God is not like a man, that, because he has faultily contrived or executed without skill, he should try to amend the world."[[31]] In short, "even if a thing seems to you to be bad, it is not yet clear that it is bad; for you do not know what is of advantage to yourself, or to another, or to the whole."[[32]] Besides would God need to descend in order to learn what was going on among men?[[33]] Or was he dissatisfied with the attention he received, and did he really come down to show off like a nouveau riche (oi neóploutoi)?"[[34]] Then why not long before?[[35]]
Should Christians ask him how God is to be seen, he has his answer: "If you will be blind to sense and see with the mind, if you will turn from the flesh and waken the eyes of the soul, thus and thus only shall you see God."[[36]] In words that Origen approves, he says, "from God we must never and in no way depart, neither by day nor by night, in public or in private, in every word and work perpetually, but, with these and without, let the soul ever be strained towards God."[[37]] "If any man bid you, in the worship of God, either to do impiety, or to say anything base, you must never be persuaded by him. Rather endure every torture and submit to every death, than think anything unholy of God, let alone say it."[[38]]
Thus the fundamental conceptions of the Christians are shown to be wrong, but more remains to be done. Let us assume for purposes of discussion that there could be a "descent of God"—would it be what the Christians say it was? "God is great and hard to be seen," he makes the Christian say, "so he put his own spirit into a body like ours and sent it down here that we might hear and learn from it."[[39]] If that is true, he says, then God's son cannot be immortal, since the nature of a spirit is not such as to be permanent; nor could Jesus have risen again in the body, "for God would not have received back the spirit which he gave when it was polluted with the nature of the body."[[40]] "If he had wished to send down a spirit from himself, why did he need to breathe it into the womb of a woman? He knew already how to make men, and he could have fashioned a body about this spirit too, and so avoided putting his own spirit into such pollution."[[41]] Again the body, in which the spirit was sent, ought to have had stature or beauty or terror or persuasion, whereas they say it was little, ugly and ignoble.[[42]]