The Charge of Blind Faith

After this — moved by something I cannot identify — Celsus claims that Christians appear to have their power from the names of certain demons and from spells chanted over people. He is hinting, I suppose, at those who chant over demons and drive them out. He is plainly slandering our message. It is not by chanted spells that Christians appear to prevail, but by the name of Jesus together with the recital of the accounts about him. Saying these things has often made demons leave people — above all when the ones saying them speak out of a sound frame of mind that genuinely believes. So great is the power the name of Jesus has against demons that there are times when it works even when bad men pronounce it. Jesus himself taught that this would be so when he said, “Many will say to me on that day, ‘In your name we drove out demons and did mighty works.’” Whether Celsus passed this over deliberately and out of malice, or simply did not know it, I cannot say. [a]

Next he brings a charge against the Savior himself. He says that Jesus was able by sorcery to do the astonishing things he seemed to do; that he foresaw that others would learn the same arts and do the same thing, and would make much of doing it by the power of God; and that he therefore drives such people out of his own commonwealth. Celsus’ accusation runs this way: if Jesus drives them out justly while being open to the same charge himself, then he is a bad man; but if he is not a bad man for doing these things, then neither are the people who do what he did. But leave that aside. Even if the question about Jesus — how he did these things — seems impossible to settle by argument, this much is plain: Christians practice no spells at all, but use the name of Jesus and other words they trust, according to the divine scripture.

Then, since he keeps calling our teaching a secret one, he must be refuted on this point too. Nearly the whole world knows what Christians proclaim better than it knows the favorite opinions of the philosophers. Who has not heard that Jesus was born of a virgin, and that he was crucified, and that many believe he rose, and that a judgment is announced which punishes sinners as they deserve and counts the righteous worthy of a reward? Even the mystery of the resurrection, when it is not understood, is on everyone’s lips and is laughed at by unbelievers. Given all this, to call our teaching secret is completely absurd. [e]

That there should be some things which come after the outer teaching and do not reach the crowd is not peculiar to the Christian message. It belongs to the philosophers too, among whom some teachings were for outsiders and others for insiders. Some of Pythagoras’ hearers were satisfied with “He himself said so”; others were taught in secret the things that were not fit to reach ears that were profane and not yet purified. And all the mysteries celebrated everywhere, throughout Greece and among the foreign nations, are held in secret, and no one holds it against them. So it is pointless for Celsus to attack the hidden side of Christianity, since he has never grasped exactly what it is.

He does appear, with a certain rhetorical force, to speak up for those who bear witness to Christianity even to the point of death. He says: “And I do not say this — that a man who holds to a good teaching should abandon it if he is going to be put in danger by other men on its account, or pretend that he has abandoned it, or deny it outright.” And he condemns those who hold the Christian views but pretend they do not, or deny them, saying that a man who is in a teaching should not pretend he has left it or disown it. [g]

Here Celsus must be convicted of contradicting himself. From his other writings he turns out to be an Epicurean; but here, because he thought he could accuse our message more plausibly by not admitting to Epicurus’ opinions, he pretends that there is something in a human being better than the earthly part and akin to God. Those in whom this — that is, the soul — is in good condition, he says, reach out in every way for what is akin to them (he means God) and long always to hear something about him and to call him to mind.

Now look at the counterfeit in his soul. He has just said that a man who holds to a good teaching must not abandon it even if he is going to be put in danger on its account, and must not pretend he has abandoned it, and must not deny it — and now he falls into every contradiction of himself. He knew that if he admitted he was an Epicurean he would carry no credit at all in accusing people who, in whatever way, bring in providence and set a God over the things that are. We have received the report that there were two Epicureans named Celsus: the earlier one under Nero, and this one under Hadrian and after.

After this he urges that in accepting teachings we should follow reason and a rational guide, since anyone who assents to anything otherwise is certain to be deceived. And he likens those who believe without reason to the begging priests of the Mother, and to portent-mongers, and to the devotees of Mithras and of Sabazius, and to whatever else a man may happen to run into — apparitions of Hecate, or of some other demon, or of demons. For just as among those people wicked men often trade on the simplicity of the easily deceived and lead them wherever they like, so, he says, it happens among Christians too. He says that some of them will not either give or receive an account of what they believe, but keep using the line “Do not examine, only believe,” and “Your faith will save you.” And he says they say, “The wisdom in the world is bad, and foolishness is good.” [k]

To this we must answer that if it were possible for everyone to leave the affairs of life behind and have leisure for philosophy, then no one should pursue any road but that one. For in Christianity too there will be found — not to say anything overbearing — an examination of what is believed that is no smaller: an unfolding of the riddles in the prophets, of the parables in the Gospels, and of countless other things that were done, or laid down as law, with a symbolic meaning. But since that is impossible, partly because of the necessities of living and partly because of human weakness, since very few dart after study at all, what better method could be found for helping the many than the one handed down by Jesus to the nations?

And we do ask this question about the mass of believers, who have put off the great flood of wickedness they used to wallow in. Is it better for them to believe without reasons, and so have their habits somewhat brought under control, and be helped by believing that people are punished for sins and honored for good deeds? Or is it better not to accept their turning around when it rests on bare faith, until they can give themselves to an examination of arguments? For plainly all of them, apart from a very few, would not get even this much, which they have gotten from simply believing, but would remain in the worst kind of life. So if there is anything else that shows that the love of human beings in our message did not come to live among us without God, this too must be counted with it. A reverent man will not suppose that even a physician of bodies, who has brought many sick people to better health, takes up residence in cities and nations without God, for nothing good happens among human beings without God. And if the man who has treated many bodies, or led them to something better, does not do his healing without God — how much more the one who has healed the souls of many, and turned them around, and made them better, and fastened them to the God who is over all, and taught them to refer every action to what pleases him and to turn away from everything that does not please God, down to the least thing said or done, or even entering the mind?

Next, since they keep harping on the matter of faith, this must be said. We take faith up as a useful thing for the many, and we admit that we teach people to believe even without reasons when they are unable to leave everything behind and follow an examination of argument. Our opponents do exactly the same in practice, though they will not admit it. For take a man who is drawn toward philosophy and throws himself into some school of philosophers as if by drawing lots, or because he happened to have a teacher of that school ready to hand. Why does he come to it, except that he believes that school to be the better one? He does not wait to hear the arguments of all the philosophers and of the different schools, and the case for overturning these and for establishing those. He simply chooses to be a Stoic, say, or a Platonist, or a Peripatetic, or an Epicurean, or a member of whatever school it may be. They are carried by a kind of unreasoning rush — though they will not admit that either — into the practice of, let us say, Stoic teaching, leaving the rest behind: looking down on Platonism as lower than the others, or on Peripateticism as the most human of them and the one that most candidly grants the goods of human life. And some, thrown into confusion at the very first assault of the question about providence — by what happens on earth to bad men and good — have too hastily agreed that there is no providence at all, and have chosen the account of Epicurus and Celsus. [m]

If, then, as the argument has taught, we must put our faith in some one of those who have introduced schools among the Greeks or the foreign nations, why not rather in the God who is over all, and in the one who teaches that he alone is to be worshiped, and that the rest are to be passed by — either as not existing, or as existing and worthy of honor, but not of prostration and religious reverence? On these matters the man who does not only believe but also looks at things with reason will state the demonstrations that come to him and that are found by hard searching. [n]

And how is it not more reasonable, since all human affairs hang on faith, to put faith in God rather than in them? For who sails, or marries, or has children, or throws seed into the ground, without believing that the better outcome will meet him — when the opposite is possible and sometimes happens? And yet the belief that the better things, the things they pray for, will meet them is what makes everyone dare even what is uncertain and could turn out otherwise. And if hope, and a better belief about what is coming, is what holds life together in every action whose outcome is unknown, why should this faith not be taken up all the more reasonably by the man who believes — more than in the sea he sails, the ground he sows, the wife he marries, and the rest of human business — in the God who made all these things? And in the one who, with surpassing greatness of mind and a divine largeness of spirit, dared to set this message before people in every part of the inhabited world, at the cost of great dangers and of a death considered dishonorable, which he endured for the sake of human beings; and who taught those who were persuaded at the beginning to serve his teaching to dare, through every danger and with death always expected, to travel to every part of the inhabited world for the salvation of human beings?

Next, Celsus says, in his own words: “If they are willing to answer me — not as one putting them to the test, for I know it all, but as one who cares equally about them all — it would be well. But if they are not willing, and say instead, as they usually do, ‘Do not examine,’ and the rest of it, then they must at least teach me what sort of things these are that they talk about, and where they have flowed from,” and so on. Against that “for I know it all,” which he has hurled out with the utmost boastfulness, this must be said. If he had read the prophets in particular — full as they are of acknowledged riddles and of sayings that are unclear to most people — and if he had come upon the parables of the Gospels and the rest of the writing of the law and of the Jewish history and the words of the apostles, and had read them candidly, wanting to enter into the sense of what they say, he would not have been so brazen, nor said “for I know it all.” [o]

Not even we, who have spent our lives on these writings, would say “for I know it all,” for truth is our friend. Not one of us will say “I know it all about Epicurus,” or be confident that he knows everything Plato says, given how many disagreements there are even among the men who expound them. For who is brazen enough to say “I know all the Stoic doctrines,” or “all the Peripatetic ones”? Unless perhaps he heard this “for I know it all” from certain ignorant and unfeeling people who have no sense of their own lack of learning, and then imagined that, having used such teachers, he knew it all.

He seems to me to have done something like this. Suppose a man went to stay in Egypt, where the wise among the Egyptians do a great deal of philosophizing on their ancestral writings about what they hold to be divine, while the ordinary people hear certain myths whose reasons they do not understand and think highly of themselves because of them. And suppose that man imagined he knew everything the Egyptians know, after being taught by the ignorant alone, without ever mixing with any of the priests or learning the Egyptians’ secret things from any of them. What I have said about the wise and the ignorant among the Egyptians can be seen among the Persians as well. They have rites which the learned among them treat as venerable and with a reason behind them, but which the many and more superficial among them merely carry out as symbols. And the same must be said of the Syrians and the Indians, and of all who have both myths and writings.

Since Celsus has set down, as a saying of many Christians, “The wisdom in this life is bad, and foolishness is good,” this must be said: he is slandering our message, since he has not set out the very words that stand in Paul, which run this way: “If anyone among you thinks he is wise, let him become a fool in this age, so that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.” So the apostle does not say simply, “Wisdom is foolishness with God,” but “the wisdom of this world.” And again, he does not say, “If anyone among you thinks he is wise, let him become a fool” without qualification, but “let him become a fool in this age, so that he may become wise.” [r]

By “the wisdom of this age,” then, we mean every philosophy that holds false opinions — the philosophy that, according to the scriptures, is being brought to nothing. And we call foolishness good, not without qualification, but when a man becomes a fool as regards this age. It is as if we were to say that the Platonist, who believes in the immortality of the soul and in what is said about its passing from one body into another, has taken on foolishness in the eyes of the Stoics, who tear that agreement to pieces; and in the eyes of the Peripatetics, who go on about Plato’s “twitterings”; and in the eyes of the Epicureans, who charge with superstition anyone who brings in providence and sets a God over the whole.

Furthermore, by what our own message approves, it is far better to assent to teachings with reason and wisdom than with bare faith; and the message wanted that second course only as a concession to circumstances, so as not to leave people entirely beyond help. This is shown by Paul, the genuine disciple of Jesus, when he says: “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God was pleased to save those who believe through the foolishness of the proclamation.” By these words it is plainly shown that God ought to have been known in the wisdom of God. And since that did not happen, God was pleased, in the second place, to save those who believe — not by foolishness without qualification, but by a foolishness that goes only so far as the proclamation. For Jesus Christ proclaimed as crucified, just as he is, is a foolishness of proclamation. Paul saw this too, and said: “But we proclaim Jesus Christ crucified — to Jews a stumbling block, to the nations foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”