It was at Caesarea, between the years 243 and the breaking out of the Decian persecution in 249, that was written the famous Contra Celsum. It is justly considered the masterpiece of its author. Ostensibly an answer to the gainsayings of a heathen philosopher, it really takes up, with the calmest scientific precision, the position that Christianity is so true and hangs together with such completeness of moral beauty, that the barkings of Gentile learning cannot confute it, nor the violence of Gentile hatred stop its inevitable march. With no rhetorical passion, with profound learning, with a knowledge of Holy Scripture truly worthy of Adamantins, with frequent passages of noble and profound eloquence, the Christian doctor builds up the monument of the faith he loved and taught; and the work that has come down to us through all those ages since it was written, has been recognized for fifteen hundred years as one of those great, complete, finished productions that are only given to the world by the pen of a genius. Eusebius, his biographer, speaks of it as containing the refutation of all that has been asserted, and, "by pre-occupation," of all that could ever be asserted on certain vital matters of controversy. S. Basil and S. Gregory Nazianzen strung together a series of favorite passages mainly from it and called their work Philocalia, "love for the beautiful." S. Jerome, whose praise cannot be suspected of partiality, puts him by the side of two other great apologists his successors, and exclaims that to read them makes him think himself the merest tyro, and shrivels up all his learning to a sort of a dreamy remembrance of what he was taught as a boy. Bishop Bull takes the Contra Celsum as the touchstone of Origen's dogmatic teaching; "he meant it for the public," he says, "he wrote it thoughtfully and of set purpose, and he wrote it when he was more than sixty years of age, full of knowledge and experience."
It must have been about the time when Marcus Aurelius was engaged in persecuting the church (160-180) that a certain eclectic Platonist philosopher called Celsus, in order to contribute his share to the good work, wrote an uncompromising attack on Christianity, and called it by the title of The True Word; or, The Word of Truth. We have called him an eclectic Platonist; but, in fact, it is very much disputed among the learned what sect of philosophers he honored with his allegiance. Some call him a Stoic, others an Epicurean, and this latter opinion is the common traditional one; and what would seem to settle the question, Epicurean is the epithet given to him by Origen himself. That Origen, when he took up The Word of' Truth to refute it, thought he was going to refute an Epicurean, is quite evident; but it is no less evident that he had not read many sentences of the work itself before he began to doubt and more than doubt whether the name of Epicurean was a true description of its author. In one place he is amazed to hear "an Epicurean say such things," in another he charges him with artfully concealing his Epicurism for a purpose, and in a third he [{779}] supposes that if he ever was an Epicurean he has renounced its tenets and betaken himself to something more sound and sensible. What made Origen hesitate to state plainly that he was no follower of Epicurus seems to have been the broad tradition that had attached the epithet to the name of Celsus, thereby identifying the writer of The Word of Truth with the writer of a certain work against magic, well known to literary men, which was beyond all doubt from the pen of an Epicurean Celsus. This latter was also probably the same as the Celsus to whom the scoffer Lucian dedicated his Alexander, in which he shows up that impostor's tricks and sham magic; and Lucian, in his dedication, alludes to the works against magic, just as Origen does. As Lucian died some years before Origen was born, the works against magic must have been very widely known, and their author must have been accepted as the Celsus, and as he was certainly an Epicurean, that designation fastened itself also upon the other Celsus, the author of The Word of Truth, who had not had the advantage of an admiring Lucian to fix his proper title in the memory of the literary world. But an Epicurean he certainly was not. One proof is quite sufficient. The subject of magic was a decisive test of a true Epicurean. Not believing in Providence and professing, in fact, a sort of philosophic atheism, he considered that gods and demons never interfered in the concerns of the earth and the human race. Human and mundane atoms, as they got created by a species of accident and came together fortuitously, so they continued to blunder against each other in various ways, and thus caused what men foolishly called the cosmos, or order of the universe; whilst the divine nature of the immortals, serene on Olympus
Semotá a nostris rebus, sejunctaque longè,
Jam privata dolore omni, privata periclis,
Ipsa suis pollens opibus, nil indiga nostri,
Nec benè pro meritis capitur nec tangitur irâ.
Lucretius, de Rerum Naturtâ, I. 50.
The Epicurian, therefore, laughed alike at the notion of benevolent god and malignant demon, at providence and at magic, and crowned himself with flowers and drank and sinned, if his means allowed it, under the soothing persuasion that "to-morrow" he was "to die." When, therefore, we find that the author of The Word of Truth not only attributes miracles to AEsculapius, Aristeas, and others, and magic to Christ, but also considers that this world and its various parts are committed to the custody of demons, whom it is, therefore, proper to propitate by worship and sacrifice, we need no other evidence that he was no follower of Epicurus.
On the other hand, a prominent belief in the agencies of unseen powers was a mark of the Platonist of the day. Whatever Plato may have thought of the inferior gods and demons (and on some occasions, as in the Timaeus, he speaks of them with considerable levity), the followers, who revived his doctrine in the first centuries after Christ, gave them a very large share of their attention. A creator or first father of all things was a Platonic dogma, and man and matter must have in some way come from him; but in order to bridge over the interval between two such extremes as God and matter, recourse was had to an immense army of intermediate beings, of which the highest was so dignified as to be little more than an abstraction, and the lowest shaded off into a species of superior animal. It is this, multitude of good and bad demons that makes its appearance in modified shape and number in Platonist and Gnostic cosmogonies, and which is so puzzling to follow through all its fantastic intermarriages and combinations. When Celsus must have been writing, that is, about the time S. Clement of Alexandria began to teach, the spirit of Plato was abroad, not only at Alexandria but at Athens and in Rome. Theurgy was openly professed by the most reputable teachers; their enemies called it sorcery; but whatever it was, it meant some intimate communion with [{780}] the invisible world. A writer; therefore, who puts the moon and stars under the guardianship of heavenly powers, who pathetically defends the case of the demons and deprecates their being deprived of the gratification they derive from the "smell" of a sacrifice, and who attributes supernatural powers to friends and enemies—calling them in the one ease miracles, in the latter, magic—is evidently closer to Saceas and Porphyry than to Epicurus and Democritus. Celsus, however, though he says all this, cannot be called a real Platonist or Neo-Platonist. He came in the early days of a revival, and his philosophic pallium hung rather loosely about him; he was not above following a new leader on an occasion, provided he saw his way to a new stroke against the Christians. It must be admitted that he shows a fair share or learning, some acuteness, and some acquaintance with a variety of different peoples and customs. On the other hand, he is occasionally guilty of the most absurd and transparent sophisms, his conceit is unbounded, and his tone generally sneering and often very offensive.
It was this philosopher then, Eclectic, Platonist, and man of the world, whose Word of Truth seemed to the pious and indefatigable Ambrose to be so dangerous and damaging that no time ought to be lost in answering it. With this view, he attacked Origen on the subject, and by dint of prayers and representations made him take in hand its refutation. Origen was by no means eager to undertake the work; and we can partly enter into his objections. The book of Celsus was not a new one: it had been in the hands of the reading world and in the centres of learning, such as Athens, Antioch, Caesarea, and Alexandria, for at least sixty years, and it is to be supposed that answers to its most important objections were common enough in the Christian schools, though, perhaps it was itself ignored. Then, it was not the sort of book that could do the faithful any harm, for they could not read it, or, if they did, they distrusted it even where they could not refute it. It was too late in the day for an open-mouthed pagan to have any chance against the gospel of Christ. The dangerous people were those who, like the heretics, came with the elements of this world disguised under the sheep's clothing of Christianity; but an honest wolf only lost his trouble; and so Origen, whilst promising to comply with the wishes of his friend, plainly says that what he has undertaken to overthrow, he cannot conceive as having the least effect in shaking the orthodoxy of a single faithful man. "That man," he says, "would be little to my taste, whose faith would be in danger of shipwreck from the words of this Celsus, who has not now even the advantage of being alive; and I do not know what I should think of one who required a book to be written before he could meet his accusations. And, yet, because there might possibly be some professing believers who find Celsus's writings a stumbling-block, and would be proportionally comforted by anything in the shape of a writing that undertook to crush him, I have resolved to take in hand the refutation of the work you have sent me." The expressions, "a book to be written," "writings," and "hand-writing," are noticeable, for they show clearly enough, what has not been much observed, that Origen's chief objection to answering Celsus was that Celsus was already answered in the oral teachings of the church. In this also we have the explanation of the contempt in which he seems to hold his antagonist—a temper which is seldom advisable either in war or polemics. But Celsus had been, and was daily being answered, and the only question was, whether it was worth while to put formally on paper what every Christian catechist had by heart. Was it not better to imitate the majestic silence of Jesus Christ, who spoke no word, but let his life speak for him? "I dare affirm," he says, "that the defence you ask me to write will be swamped and disappear before that other defence of [{781}] facts and the power of Jesus, which none but the blind can fail to see." And he adds, that it is not for the faithful he writes, but for those who have not tasted the faith of Christ, or for those weak believers who, in the apostle's phrase, must be kindly taken up.
And yet Ambrose seems to have been quite right in insisting that Origen should answer the book of Celsus. Its arguments might be stale, and its influence small, but there it was, a formal written record of some of the ugliest things that could be said against Christianity and its founder. What seemed more becoming, than that the foremost Christian doctor of his day should take in hand, at a time when external peace and internal growth seemed to warrant it, to give a formal, written answer to an attack that was a standing piece of impertinence, even if it did no harm? Besides, some harm it must have done, at least in the shape of keeping well-meaning pagans from the truth; and though Origen is always more fond of working for the spiritual welfare of his own household than of direct proselytizing, yet Ambrose, as a convert, knew what prejudice was, and what was the importance of a work from the pen of a Christian doctor who had the ear of the Gentile world. And Ambrose, moreover, was perfectly aware, as was everyone except the Adamantine himself, that even if the refutation embraced only the common topics that were handled daily in the Christian instructions, yet the result would be as far above the ordinary catechetical lesson as the master was above the ordinary catechist. Perhaps he hardly knew, as we know, that his instances would produce a master-piece of polemical writing, from which all ages have borrowed, and in which the immense knowledge of Scripture, the beautiful and tender piety, and the sustained eloquence of expression were unrivalled until, perhaps, Bossuet wrote his Histoire Universelle.
It is by no means our intention to give a detailed analysis of this wonderful work: it is described at great length in easily accessible authors. But it will be interesting to seize on some of its most salient characters, and thus to throw what light may be possible upon the subject of our discussion. And the first remark that occurs seems to be a contradiction of Origen's own statement. The Contra Celsum was written more for the faithful than for the philosophers, and was less aimed at the dead and gone Celsus than at the living children of the church. It may be true that it was not meant precisely to confirm tottering faith or to prop up consciences that the objections of Celsus had shaken; but its effect would naturally be to encourage the devout Christian by showing him how much could be said for his profession, and exposing to scorn with irresistible logic the best that could be said by his gainsayers. If Origen had not had in view the same audience as that to which he preached on Sundays and Fridays, he would hardly have dealt so abundantly in the citations from Holy Scripture which are such a marked. feature of the work, and he would not have cared to expand as he does the bare polemical branch into the flowers and fruit of homiletic exhortation. But the faithful were always his first thought, and the ground-color of all he has written is warm and outspoken piety. He knew much about pagan philosophy and worldly science, but when Porphyry (quoted by Eusebius) says that Plato was never out of his hands, we can only say that Plato is never mentioned in his writings save where an adversary or an error-compels him. A far truer picture of himself is given in his own words to his favorite pupil, Gregory Thaumaturgus. "You have talents," he says, "that might make you a perfect Roman lawyer, or a leader of any of the fashionable sects of Greek philosophy; but the wish of my heart is, dear lord and my most honored son Gregory, that you make Christianity your last end" (
—alluding to the summum bonum of the stoics), "and that you [{782}] use Greek philosophy and all its attendant sciences as handmaids to the Holy Scriptures, and as the means