Sects and Sacred Animals

Next, as though it were a charge against the teaching, he throws the sects within Christianity in our faces. He says: “Sown broadcast into a multitude, they split apart again and cut themselves up, and every one of them wants a faction of his own.” And he says that, separated once more by their very numbers, they refute one another — “still sharing, so to speak, one thing, the name, if indeed they share that; and this alone they are nevertheless ashamed to abandon, while on everything else different men are drawn up in different ranks.” [a]

To this we will say that different sects have never arisen over any matter whose starting point was not serious and useful to life. Medicine, for instance, is useful and necessary to the human race, and there are many disputed questions in it about the way to cure bodies; and for that reason a good many sects are admittedly found in medicine among the Greeks, and among non-Greeks too, I suppose — at any rate among those who claim to practice medicine. Again, philosophy professes truth and a knowledge of the things that are; it lays down how one must live and tries to teach what is useful to our race; and the matters it investigates pull hard in opposite directions. For that reason a great many sects have grown up in philosophy, some of them more distinguished than others. Judaism too had an occasion for sects to arise in it: the different ways of taking the writings of Moses and the words of the prophets.

So then, since Christianity appeared to people to be something worth respecting — and not only to the more slavish sort, as Celsus supposes, but to many of the learned men among the Greeks — sects inevitably arose. They did not arise at all out of faction and the love of a quarrel, but because a good many of the learned were in earnest about understanding the things of Christianity. What followed from that was this: since men took in different ways the writings that everyone alike believed to be divine, there came to be sects named after the men who admired the beginnings of the teaching but were moved, one way or another, by certain plausible arguments into disagreeing with one another. And yet no one would be reasonable in avoiding medicine because of the sects in it, and no one who aims at what is fitting would hate philosophy and make its many sects his excuse for hating it. In the same way, the holy books of Moses and the prophets are not to be condemned because of the sects among the Jews.

And if this argument holds, why should we not defend the sects among Christians in the same way? Paul seems to me to have spoken about them quite remarkably when he said, “For there must be sects among you, so that those who are approved may become plain among you.” For the approved man in medicine is the one who has trained himself in the various sects, examined most of them honestly, and chosen the better; and the man who really makes progress in philosophy is the one who, from knowing more of them, has exercised himself in them and attached himself to the argument that won out. In just that way I would say that the man who has looked carefully into the sects of Judaism and of Christianity has become the wisest Christian. [f]

Whereas the man who finds fault with the teaching because of its sects would also have to find fault with the teaching of Socrates, since out of his lecture room came many schools of men who did not think alike. He could bring a charge against Plato’s opinions too, on account of Aristotle, who left Plato’s school with innovations of his own — a matter we have spoken of in the pages above. But it seems to me that Celsus has come to know certain sects that do not even share the name of Jesus with us. Some noise about the so-called Ophites and Cainites had probably reached him, or about some other group of that kind, formed by men who had departed from Jesus altogether. But none of this counts toward putting the Christian teaching on trial.

After this he says: “The bond among them is the more astonishing, the more it can be shown to rest on no ground worth taking seriously. But rebellion is a ground worth taking seriously, and so is the advantage that comes from it, and the fear of outsiders. These are what make their faith secure.” To this we will say that our bond does rest on a ground — or rather not on a ground at all, but on the working of God — such that its beginning is God, teaching people in the prophets to hope for the coming of Christ, who would save them. For to the degree that this is not truly refuted, even if unbelievers think they are refuting it, to that same degree the teaching stands as the teaching of God, and Jesus is shown to be the Son of God, both before he became a human being and after. [i]

And I say that even after he became a human being he is always found, by those whose eyes of the soul see most sharply, to be most like God and to have truly come down to us from God — having his beginning, and everything that followed his beginning, not from human intelligence but from the showing forth of God, who by his manifold wisdom and manifold powers established Judaism first and Christianity after it. And the notion that rebellion, and the advantage that comes from rebellion, was the beginning of a teaching that has turned so many people around and made them better — that too has been refuted.

That it is not the fear of outsiders either that holds our bond together is plain from this: God has willed that this too should stop, and it has now been stopped for a considerable time. And the freedom from fear that believers have come to enjoy, so far as this present life goes, will probably come to an end, once the men who slander the teaching in every way again decide that the cause of so much unrest now lies in the number of believers, and in their not being made war on by the authorities as they were in earlier times. For we have learned from the teaching neither to go slack in peacetime and give ourselves up to ease, nor, when the world makes war on us, to lose heart and fall away from the love toward the God of all things that is in Jesus Christ. [m]

And we plainly display the dignity of our beginning; we do not hide it, as Celsus imagines. We display it whenever we work into those who are just being brought in a contempt for idols and for images of every kind, and, over and above that, lift up their minds from serving created things instead of God and bring them up to the one who created all things — showing him openly to be the one who was prophesied, both from the prophecies about him, of which there are many, and from what is handed on, after careful examination, to those who are able to hear the Gospels and the words of the apostles with more understanding.

What sorts of things we drag in, or what terrors we make up — as Celsus writes, without proof — let anyone who likes show. I do not know what he means by made-up terrors, unless he means our teaching that God is judge and that all people are judged for what they have done, backed up in various ways, partly from the Scriptures and partly from probable argument. And yet — for truth is dear — Celsus says near the end of his book: “May it never fall to them, or to me, or to any other human being, to put away the teaching that the unrighteous will be punished and the righteous counted worthy of rewards.” So what terrors do we make up and draw people in with, if you take away the teaching about punishment? And when he says that “we make up misheard scraps of the ancient teaching, and with these we pipe at people beforehand and din it into their ears beforehand, the way men make a booming racket around those in the Corybantic frenzy,” we will say to him in reply: misheard scraps of which ancient teaching? Whether he means the Greek one, which taught that there are courts of justice under the earth, or the Jewish one, which among other things prophesied about the life that follows this one, he would be unable to show that we are living on a misheard version of the truth — we, that is, who try to believe with reason, and who shape our lives toward such teachings. [o]

He wants to set the articles of our faith beside the practices of the Egyptians: “As you approach, there are splendid precincts and sacred groves, gateways of great size and beauty, astonishing temples, magnificent tents all around, and rites full of superstition and mystery. But once you are inside and have gone further in, the object of worship turns out to be a cat, or an ape, or a crocodile, or a goat, or a dog.” Now what among us corresponds to the grand show the Egyptians put on for those approaching? And what corresponds to the irrational animals worshiped inside, past the imposing gateways? Or are the prophecies, and the God who is over all, and the arguments against images, the impressive things in his eyes too — while Jesus Christ crucified is what corresponds to the irrational animal that is worshiped? But if he does say this, and I do not think he will say anything else, we shall answer that we have said a good deal in the pages above in support of the things concerning Jesus: that even what seems to have happened to him on the human level happened for the good of the whole, and for the salvation of the whole world. [s]

Next, about the Egyptians, who talk in lofty terms even about the irrational animals and say that these are certain symbols of God — or whatever the men among them who go by the title of prophets like to call them — Celsus says that “they send out an impression on those who have learned these things, that they have not been initiated for nothing.” But the things set out in our own writings, out of what Paul calls the gift — in the word of wisdom “through the Spirit” and the word of knowledge “according to the Spirit” — to men of wide learning within Christianity: of these Celsus seems to me to have received no impression at all. I judge that not only from what he has said already, but from what he says further on in accusing the Christian body, when he asserts that they “drive every wise man away from the account of their faith and call only the senseless and the slavish.” We shall look into those charges at the proper time, when we come to the place. [u]

He says, in fact, that “we laugh at the Egyptians, although they offer many riddles that are far from worthless, when they teach that such rites are honors paid to eternal ideas and not, as most people suppose, to animals that live a day; and that we are simple-minded, since we bring nothing more impressive than the Egyptians’ goats and dogs into our accounts of Jesus.” To this we will say: my good man, is it right, then, for you to praise the Egyptians in your argument for offering many riddles that are far from worthless, and obscure explanations about the animals among them — while you do wrong in accusing us as though you were convinced that we have nothing to say, that all of it is worthless and beneath argument, when we go through the things about Jesus according to the wisdom of the word for those who are mature in Christianity? Paul, teaching about these people as being competent to hear the wisdom that is in Christianity, says: “We do speak wisdom among the mature — not the wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. We speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the wisdom that has been hidden, which God marked out beforehand, before the ages, for our glory, and which none of the rulers of this age has known.” [w]

And to those who think as Celsus does we say: so Paul had no surpassing wisdom in view, then, when he professed to speak wisdom among the mature? And when a man says, with his usual brazenness, that Paul made such a profession while having nothing wise to say, we shall answer him back and tell him: first give a clear account of the letters of the man who says this. Look hard at the intent of every phrase in them — in the letter to the Ephesians, say, and to the Colossians, and the one to the Thessalonians and the Philippians and the Romans. Then show us both things: that you have understood Paul’s words, and that you can point to any of them as simple-minded or stupid. For if he gives himself to reading them with attention, I am quite sure that either he will be amazed at the mind of the man, who thinks great things in the language of an untrained man; or, if he is not amazed, he will simply make himself ridiculous, whether he sets out an explanation as though he had grasped the man’s intent, or tries to contradict and overturn what he only imagined he had grasped. [z]

And I have not yet spoken about the keeping of everything written in the Gospels. Every one of them holds much teaching that is hard to see into, not only for most people but even for some of the intelligent; and every one of them has a very deep exposition of the parables that Jesus spoke to “those outside,” while keeping their clear meaning for the men who had gone beyond the outsiders’ way of hearing and came to him privately “in the house.” And when a man understands it, he will be amazed at the reason why some are called “outside” and others “in the house.” [ab]

And again, which of the men who are able to see Jesus’ movements from place to place would not be struck with wonder? He goes up a mountain for certain words or deeds, or for his own transfiguration, and down below he heals the sick, who cannot climb to where his disciples follow him. But this is not the time to set out what is truly weighty and divine in the Gospels, or the mind of Christ that is in Paul — that is, of the Wisdom and the Word. Even what we have said is enough against the unphilosophical sneering of Celsus, who likens the inner and hidden things of the church of God to the Egyptians’ cats and apes and crocodiles and goats and dogs.

Leaving out no form of jeering and ridicule against us, the buffoon Celsus names in his book the Dioscuri, and Heracles, and Asclepius, and Dionysus, whom the Greeks believe to have been men who became gods. He says that we cannot bear to reckon these as gods, because they were men to begin with, and yet they displayed many noble deeds for the benefit of humanity; whereas we say that Jesus, after he died, was seen by his own band of devotees. And he brings a further charge against us, as though we said that “he was seen indeed — and a shadow at that!” To this we will say that Celsus was terribly clever here. He did not plainly make out that he does not revere these beings as gods, for he was wary of what the readers of his book would think — they would take him for an atheist if he set any store by the truth as it appeared to him. And on the other hand he did not pretend that he himself reckoned them gods. We are ready with an answer to either position. [ae]

Come, then, let us say this to those who do not reckon them gods. Do these beings not exist at all — so that, as some think about the human soul, that it perishes on the spot, their souls perished too? Or, on the view of those who say the soul lives on, or is immortal, do these men live on, or are they immortal, and are not gods but heroes — or not even heroes, but simply souls? If, then, you suppose they do not exist, we shall have to establish the argument about the soul that stands first with us. But if they do exist, then in that case too the argument about immortality has to be proved, not only from the Greeks who have spoken well about it, but also in a way that agrees with the divine teachings. And we shall show that men who held many gods cannot have come into a better country and portion after their departure from here, by bringing forward the histories told about them. In those histories are written the great debauchery of Heracles and his womanish slavery to Omphale, and the account of Asclepius, that their own Zeus struck him down with a thunderbolt. And the story of the Dioscuri will be told as well, how

men who die over and over again. How, then, can they reasonably suppose that any of these is to be reckoned a god, or even a hero?

But we show the things about our Jesus from the prophetic writings, and then set the account of him beside the accounts of those others, and we show that no debauchery of his is on record. For not even the men who plotted against him, and who looked for false testimony against him, found so much as a plausible pretext for false testimony against him, so that they could accuse him of debauchery. His death came about from a human plot, and had nothing in common with the thunderbolt that struck Asclepius. And what is there worth reverence in Dionysus, raving mad and wrapped in women’s clothes, that he should be worshiped as a god? [aj]

And if the men who defend such beings take refuge in allegories, then we must examine the allegories on their own, to see whether they are sound; and separately, whether beings torn apart by Titans and thrown down from the heavenly throne can have real existence and be worthy of reverence and worship. But our Jesus, who was seen by his own band of devotees — I will use the word Celsus himself uses — was really seen; and Celsus lays a false charge against the teaching when he says that what was seen was a shadow.

Let the accounts told about those others be examined side by side with the account of Jesus. Or does Celsus want those to be true, and these to be fabrications — these, which were written down by men who had seen, who showed by what they did how clear their grasp was of what they had looked at, and who made their state of mind plain in the things they gladly suffered for his teaching? And who, if he wants to do everything according to reason, would give his assent at random to what is told about those others, but rush at the accounts of this man without examination and refuse to believe what is recorded of him?