It will be noted that, so far as our fragments serve us, Celsus confines himself essentially to the charges of folly, perversity, and want of national feeling. An excessive opinion of the value of the human soul and an absurd fancy of God's interest in man are two of the chief faults he sees in Christianity.[[105]] He sees well, for the love of God our Father and the infinite significance of the meanest and commonest and most depraved of men were after all the cardinal doctrines of the new faith. There can be no compromise between the Christian conception of the Ecclesia of God and Celsus' contempt for an "ecclesia of worms in a pool"; nor between the "Abba Father" of Jesus and the aloof and philosophic God of Celsus "away beyond everything." These two contrasts bring into clear relief the essentially new features of Christianity, and from the standpoint of ancient philosophy they were foolish and arbitrary fancies. That standpoint was unquestioned by Celsus.
The failure of Celsus
Confident in the truth of his premisses and the conclusions that follow from them, Celsus charged the Christians with folly and dogmatism. Yet it would be difficult to maintain that they were more dogmatic than himself; they at least had ventured on the experiment of a new life, that was to bring ancient Philosophy to a new test. They were the researchers in spiritual things, and he the traditionalist. As to the charge of folly, we may at once admit a comparatively lower standard of education among the Christians; yet Lucian's book Alexander, with its curious story of the false prophet who classed them with the Epicureans as his natural enemies, suggests that, with all their limitations, they had an emancipation of mind not reached by all their contemporaries. If they did not accept the conclusions of Greek thinkers as final, they were still less prepared to accept sleight-of-hand and hysteria as the ultimate authority in religious truth.[[106]] Plutarch, we may remember, based belief in immortality on the oracles of Apollo; and Celsus himself appeals to the evidence of shrines and miracles. If we say that pagans and Christians alike believed in the occurrence of these miracles and in dæmonic agency as their cause, it remains that the Christians put something much nearer the modern value upon them, while Celsus, who denounced the Christians as fools, tendered this contemptible evidence for the religion he advocated.
His Greek training was in some degree the cause of this. The immeasurable vanity of the Greeks did not escape the Romans. A sense of indebtedness to the race that has given us Homer, Euripides and Plato leads us to treat all Greeks kindly—with more kindness than those critics show them whose acquaintance with them has been less in literature and more in life. The great race still had gifts for mankind, but it was now mainly living upon its past. In Plutarch the pride of race is genial and pleasant; in Celsus it takes another form—that of contempt for the barbarian and the unlettered. The truism may be forgiven that contempt is no pathway to understanding or to truth; and in this case contempt cut Celsus off from any real access to the mind of the people he attacked. He read their books; he heard them talk; but, for all his conscious desire to inform himself, he did not penetrate into the heart of the movement—nor of the men. He missed the real motive force—the power of the life and personality of Jesus, on which depended the two cardinal doctrines which he assailed.
The extraordinary blunders, to which the very surest critics in literature are liable, may prepare us for anything. But to those who have some intimate realization of the mind of Jesus, the portrait which Celsus drew of him is an amazing caricature—the ignorant Jewish conjuror, who garbles Plato, and makes no impression on his friends, is hardly so much as a parody. It meant that Celsus did not understand the central thing in the new faith. The "godhead" of Jesus was as absurd as he said, if it was predicated of the Jesus whom he drew; and there he let it rest. How such a dogma could have grown in such a case he did not inquire; nor, finding it grown, did he correct his theory by the fact. Thus upon the real strength of Christianity he had nothing to say. This was not the way to convince opponents, and here the action of the Christians was sounder and braver. For they accepted the inspiration of the great men of Greece, entered into their spirit (as far as in that day it was possible), and fairly did their best to put themselves at a universal point of view.[[107]] They had the larger sympathies.
Yet for Celsus it may be pleaded that his object was perhaps less the reconversion of Christians to the old faith than to prevent the perversion of pagans to the new. But here too he failed, for he did not understand even the midway people with whom he was dealing. They were a large class—men and women open to religious ideas from whatever source they might come—Egypt, Judæa, or Persia, desirous of the knowledge of God and of communion with God, and in many cases conscious of sin. In none of these feelings did Celsus share—his interests are all intellectual and practical. Plutarch before him, and the Neo-Platonists after him, understood the religious instincts which they endeavoured to satisfy, and for the cold, hard outlines of Celsus' hierarchy of heavenly and dæmonic beings they substituted personalities, approachable, warm and friendly (ho phílos Apóllon). Men felt the need of gods who were Saviours,—of gods with whom they might commune in sacraments—as the rise of Mithra-worship shows. They sought for salvation from sin, for holiness—the word was much on their lips—and for peace with God. To Celsus these seem hardly to have been necessities; and whether we say that he made no effort to show that they were provided for in the old religion, or that he suggested, tacitly or explicitly, that the scheme he set forth had such a provision, the effect is the same. He really had nothing to offer.
The victory of the Christians
Celsus did not bring against the Christians the charges of "OEdipodean unions and Thyestean banquets" familiar to the reader of the Apologists[[108]]—and to the student of the events that preceded the Boxer movement in China. While he taunted Jesus with being a bastard and a deceiver, and roundly denounced Christians generally for imposing upon the ignorance of men with false religion and false history, he did not say anything of note against ordinary Christian conduct. At least the fragments do not show anything of the kind. Later on the defenders and apologists of paganism had to own with annoyance that Christians set their fellow-citizens an example; Maximin Daza and Julian tried vigorously to raise the tone of pagan society. Here lies an argument with which Celsus could not deal. The Fatherhood of God (in the sense which Jesus gave to the words) and the value of the individual soul, even the depraved and broken soul, are matters of argument, and on paper they may be very questionable; but when the people, who held or (more truly) were held by these beliefs, managed somehow or other to show to the world lives transformed and endowed with the power of transforming others, the plain fact outweighed any number of True Words. Whatever the explanation, the thing was there. Christians in the second century laid great stress on the value of paper and argument, and to-day we feel with Celsus that among them, orthodox and heretical, they talked and wrote a great deal that was foolish—"their allegories were worse than their myths"—but the sheer weight of Christian character carried off allegories and myths, bore down the school of Celsus and the more powerful school of Plutarch, Porphyry and Plotinus and abolished the ancient world, and then captured and transformed the Northern nations.
Celsus could not foresee all that we look back upon. But it stands to his credit that he recognised the dangers which threatened the ancient civilization, dangers from German without and Christian within. He had not the religious temperament; he was more the statesman in his habit of mind, and he clearly loved his country. The appeal with which he closes is a proposal of peace—toleration, if the Christians will save the civilized world. It was not destined that his hopes should be fulfilled in the form he gave them, for it was the Christian Church that subdued the Germans and that carried over into a larger and more human civilization all that was of value in that inheritance of the past for which he pleaded. So far as his gifts carried him, he was candid; and if sharp of tongue and a little irritable of temper, he was still an honourable adversary. He was serious, and, if he did not understand religion, he believed in the state and did his best to save it.
Chapter VIII Footnotes: