Whether a Nature Can Change

We also teach that “wisdom will not enter a soul that contrives evil, nor make its home in a body that is in debt to sin.” And so we say: whoever has clean hands, and for that reason lifts up holy hands to God, and can say, because the things he carries out are lifted high and heavenly, “The lifting of my hands is an evening sacrifice” — let him come to us. And whoever has understanding in his speech, through pondering the law of the Lord day and night and through having, by long practice, his senses trained to tell good from bad — let him not hesitate to come to the solid food of the mind, the food that suits athletes of reverence toward God and of every virtue. And since the grace of God is “with all those who love, in incorruption,” the teacher of the lessons of immortality, whoever is pure not only from every defilement but also from the sins that are counted lesser — let him take heart and be initiated into the mysteries of the worship of God that goes with Jesus, mysteries that are reasonably handed on to none but the holy and the pure. [a]

Now Celsus’ initiate says: “Let anyone whose soul knows no evil come forward.” But the man who conducts the initiation into God after the manner of Jesus will say, to those who have been cleansed in soul: “Let anyone whose soul has known no evil for a long time now — and above all since he came to the healing the word gives — hear as well the things Jesus spoke in private to his genuine disciples.” So when he sets what the initiators among the Greeks do side by side with what the teachers of Jesus’ words do, he does not know the difference between people who are called to be healed because they are bad, and people who are called to the more secret things because they are already the purest of all.

So it is not to mysteries, and to a share in the wisdom “hidden in a mystery, which God marked out beforehand, before the ages, for the glory” of his own righteous ones, that we invite the unjust man, and the thief, and the man who digs through a house wall, and the poisoner, and the temple-robber, and the grave-robber, and however many others Celsus may name in his lurid way. Men like these we invite to be healed. For in the divinity of the word there are some helps that cure the sick — the ones the word had in view when it said, “Those who are strong have no need of a doctor, but those who are sick.” And there are others that display, to people pure in soul and body, “the revealing of a mystery kept silent through ages of time but now made plain through the writings of the prophets” and through “the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ” — an appearing that shows itself to each of those who are complete, and lights up the ruling part of the soul into a knowledge of things that does not lie. [f]

But since he makes the charges against us sound as lurid as he can, he adds, after the foulest sort of men he has named, this remark: “What other kind of people would a bandit summon to himself by proclamation?” To that we will say: a bandit summons such people in order to use their villainy against the men he wants to murder and plunder. A Christian, even if he calls the very people the bandit calls, calls them with a different calling — to bind up their wounds with the word, and to pour on the soul that is inflamed with evils the drugs that come from the word, the ones that answer to wine and oil and a poultice and the other helps that belong to the medicine of the soul.

Next he twists what has been said and written to urge on people who have lived badly, calling them to repentance and to setting their soul straight. He claims that we say God was sent to sinners. What he is doing is much like bringing a charge against people who say that a doctor was sent to a city, by a king who loves his subjects, on account of the sick who were living there. God the Word was in fact sent as a doctor to sinners, and as a teacher of divine mysteries to those who are already pure and sin no more. Celsus could not tell the two apart — for he had no wish to learn anything — and so he says: “Why was he not sent to those who have not sinned? What is bad about not having sinned?” To that we say this. If by “those who have not sinned” he means those who sin no more, then our Savior Jesus was sent to them as well, only not as a doctor. But if by “those who have not sinned” he means those who have never once sinned — and he drew no distinction in his own wording — we will say that it is impossible for a man to be free of sin in that way. And we say this setting aside the man understood in the case of Jesus, “who did no sin.” [j]

It is with a bad intent that Celsus says of us, as though this were our claim, that God will receive the unjust man if he humbles himself over his own worthlessness, but will not receive the just man if from the beginning he looks up toward him with virtue. What we say is that it is impossible for a man to look up toward God with virtue from the beginning, since badness must first arise among human beings. As Paul says too: “When the command came, sin came back to life, and I died.” Nor do we teach about the unjust man that it is enough for him to humble himself over his worthlessness in order to be received by God. What we teach is this: if he condemns himself for his earlier life and then walks humble on account of it and orderly in what comes after, God will accept him.

After this — not understanding how it was said that “everyone who lifts himself up will be brought low,” and not having learned even from Plato that the fine and good man walks “humble and orderly,” and not knowing that we say, “Be humbled, then, under the mighty hand of God, so that he may lift you up in due time” — he says: “Men who preside properly over a trial stop those who wail over their crimes from their piteous speeches, so that the case may not be decided by pity rather than by truth. God, though, judges not by truth but by flattery.” What flattery is there, and what piteous speech, in what happens in the divine writings when a sinner says in his prayers to God, “I made my sin known, and I did not cover up my lawlessness; I said, I will confess my lawlessness against myself to the Lord,” and so on? Can he show that a thing like that does not turn sinners around, when they humble themselves under God in their prayers? [m]

And, muddled by his own rush to accuse, he says the opposite of himself. In one place he lets it appear that he knows of a man without sin, a just man who looks up toward God with virtue from the beginning. In another he accepts what we say: “What man is completely just? Or who is without sin?” For, as though he accepted it, he says: “This much is fair enough: the human race is somehow born to sin.” Then, as though everyone were not being called by the word, he says: “You ought, then, simply to call everyone, if indeed everyone sins.” And in the pages above we pointed out that Jesus said, “Come, all of you who are worn out and weighed down, and I will give you rest.” So all people, worn out and weighed down by the nature of sin, are called to the rest that lies with the word of God — “for God sent out his word and healed them, and rescued them from their ruin.”

He goes on to say, “What on earth is this preference given to sinners?” and he adds other things of the same kind. We answer that, taken flatly, a sinner is not preferred to one who is not a sinner. But there are times when a sinner who has become aware of his own sin, and who for that reason is moving toward repentance, humbled over what he has done, is preferred to a man who is counted the lesser sinner but does not think himself a sinner at all — a man lifted up over certain better qualities he believes he can see in himself, and puffed up over them. [q]

This is plain to anyone willing to read the Gospels fairly, from the parable of the tax collector who said, “Be merciful to me, a sinner,” and of the Pharisee who boasted with a certain wretched self-conceit and said, “I thank you that I am not like the rest of men — robbers, unjust men, adulterers — or even like this tax collector.” For to the account of them both Jesus adds: “This man went down to his house counted righteous rather than that one; for everyone who lifts himself up will be brought low, and everyone who humbles himself will be lifted up.” So we are not speaking against God, and we are not telling lies about him, when we teach that every single person is to become aware how small a human being is beside the greatness of God, and is always to ask from him what our nature lacks — since he alone is able to fill up what falls short in us.

He supposes that we say such things to urge sinners on because we are unable to win over any man who is genuinely good and just, and that this is why we open our gates to the most unholy and the most ruined of men. But if anyone would look fairly at our gathering, we can present more people who turned from a life that was not very bad than people who turned from the most ruinous sins. It stands to reason. Those who are aware of better things in themselves, and who pray that what is proclaimed about God’s repayment to the better sort is true, agree more readily to what is said than men who have lived thoroughly bad lives. Their own conscience keeps such men from accepting that they will be punished by the Judge over all, with the punishment that would fit a man who has sinned so greatly and that the Judge over all would never apply contrary to right reason. And sometimes, even when utterly ruined men are willing to accept what is said about punishment, because of the hope that rests on repentance, their habit of sinning holds them back: they have been dipped again and again and, so to speak, dyed fast by wickedness, and they can no longer leave it easily for the settled life, the life lived by right reason. [s]

Celsus noticed this himself, and yet — I do not know how — he goes on to say things like this: “And surely it is plain to anyone that no one could completely change people who are given to sin both by nature and by habit, not even by punishing them, let alone by pitying them. To change a nature completely is exceedingly hard. But those who are without sin make better partners in life.”

Here too Celsus seems to me to have gone badly wrong, refusing a complete change to people who are given to sin by nature and are used to doing it, since he thinks they cannot even be cured by punishments. For it is clear enough that all of us human beings are born with a bent toward sinning, and that some are not only born that way but have made a habit of sinning as well — and yet not all people are shut out from a complete change. In every school of philosophy, and in the divine word, there are men on record who changed so far that they are set up as a pattern of the best life. Some bring forward, among the heroes, Heracles and Odysseus; among later men, Socrates; and among those born only yesterday and the day before, Musonius. So Celsus told a lie not only against us when he said it was plain to anyone that people given to sin by nature and habit could not be brought all the way over to something better by anybody, not even by punishment, but also against the men who took up philosophy nobly and never gave up the recovery of virtue as possible for human beings. And even though he did not set out exactly what he meant, we will hear him fairly all the same, and show even so that he is not talking soundly. His words were: “No one could completely change people who are given to sin by nature and habit, not even by punishing them.” And what can be heard from that wording we have overturned as far as we were able. [v]

It is likely, though, that he meant to make some such point as this: that no one could completely change, not even by punishing them, people who are not only born toward the kind of sins the most ruined men commit but are also in the habit of them. And this too is shown to be false from the record of certain men who took up philosophy. Who among men would not rank among the most ruined the man who somehow submitted to yield to a master, when that master set him up in a brothel so that he could take in anyone who wanted to shame him? Such things are recorded of Phaedo. And who would not call the foulest of all men the one who burst into the school of the most dignified Xenocrates with a flute-girl and a band of revellers, his companions in dissipation, in order to insult a man whom even his own associates admired? And yet reason was strong enough to turn even these two around and to make them advance so far in philosophy that the one was judged by Plato worthy to recount Socrates’ discourse on immortality and to set out his firmness in prison — Socrates giving no thought to the hemlock, but going through, without fear and with the whole soul at calm, so many great matters that even people who are entirely settled and troubled by no circumstance can barely follow them. And the other, Polemon, who went from a wastrel to the most self-restrained of men, took over the school of Xenocrates, whose dignity was famous. So Celsus does not tell the truth when he says that no one could completely change people who are given to sin by nature and habit, not even by punishing them. [x]

Now that the arrangement, the composition and the phrasing of the discourses of philosophy did this much for the men just named, and for others whose lives were bad in other ways, is not very surprising. But when we take a good look at what Celsus calls “the words of untrained men,” and see that they are filled with power, like incantations; and when we watch those words turning whole crowds at once from a life with no self-restraint to the steadiest life there is, and from unjust lives to more decent ones, and from cowardice or unmanliness to a firmness so great that they think nothing even of death, because of the reverence toward God that has shown itself in them — how should we not rightly wonder at the power in it? For the word of the men who first went as ambassadors of these things, and who wore themselves out to put together churches of God — their proclamation too — came with persuasion, but not the kind of persuasion found among men who advertise the wisdom of Plato, or of some other man who took up philosophy: they are human beings, and they have nothing but human nature. The demonstration given from God among Jesus’ apostles carried conviction, and it came from Spirit and power. That is why their word ran so fast and so keenly — or rather, God’s word did, through them — changing many who were given to sin by nature and by habit, men whom no human being could have changed even by punishing them. The word remade them, shaping them and stamping them according to its own will. [aa]

Celsus goes on, drawing out what follows from his own position, and says that “to change a nature completely is exceedingly hard.” We, for our part, know of one nature belonging to every rational soul, and we say that not one of them was made evil by the one who created the whole. Many have become bad through the way they were brought up, through the twists put into them, and through what has rung constantly in their ears, so that in some people badness has grown into a second nature. And we are convinced that for the divine word to change a badness that has grown into a nature is not only not impossible but not even very hard — provided only that a man accepts that he must entrust himself to the God who is over all, and do everything with a view to pleasing him. With that God it is not the case that [ac]

But if for some people changing really is very hard, we have to say the cause lies in their assent, which shrinks from accepting that the God over all is a just judge for every person about everything done in a lifetime. For deliberate choice and training count for a great deal, even toward things that seem hardest and — to put it with some exaggeration — pretty nearly impossible. When human nature wanted to walk a rope stretched high across the middle of the theater, and to carry so many and such heavy weights at the same time, it managed by training and attention to do exactly that. And when it wants to live by virtue, is it powerless — even if it had been thoroughly bad before? See whether a man who talks that way is not bringing a charge against the nature that fashioned the rational animal rather than against the thing that was made, if it made human nature able for things that hard and of no use at all, but unable for its own blessedness. But this much is answer enough to “to change a nature completely is exceedingly hard.”

Next he says that “those who are without sin make better partners in life,” without making clear whom he means by “those without sin” — whether those who are so from the start, or those who become so by a change. There cannot be any who are so from the start; and those who are so by a change are found only rarely, being people who become such by having come to a word that saves. They do not come to the word already being such. For apart from a word, and a complete word at that, there is no way for a person to become free of sin.