A Physician Among the Sick

Next he brings up an objection, as though we were the ones saying that God will be able to do all things — and here again he does not see how the words are meant, what the “all things” are that they take in, or in what sense God “is able.” There is no need to go into that now. Celsus did not go into it either, though he could plausibly have made a stand against the proposition. He let it pass. Perhaps he did not follow the plausible case that could be made against it; or he did follow it, but saw as well the answer that could be given. [a]

In our judgment God can do all the things he can do without stepping outside being God, and good, and wise. But Celsus says — not having understood in what sense God is said to be able to do all things — that God will not want to do anything unjust; he grants that God can also do what is unjust, but does not will it. What we say is this. What is by nature sweetening cannot, by the very fact of being sweet, make things bitter, contrary to the one thing that makes it what it is; and what by nature gives light cannot, by being light, make darkness. Neither, then, can God act unjustly. The power to act unjustly is the contrary of his divinity and of all the power that goes with it. And if some existing thing can act unjustly because it is so made as to be inclined toward injustice, it can act unjustly precisely because it does not have in its nature the impossibility of ever acting unjustly.

After this he takes for granted something the more reasonable believers do not grant, though perhaps some unintelligent people think it true: that God, like men who are slaves to pity, is himself made a slave by pity for those who wail, and so lightens the load of the wicked, while he throws away the good, who do nothing of the kind — which is the height of injustice. [c]

In our judgment God lightens the load of no wicked man who has not yet turned toward virtue, and throws away no one who is already good. And he neither lightens the load of a man who wails simply because he is wailing, nor shows him mercy — to use “mercy” in the ordinary sense of the word. But there are people who have condemned themselves severely for their sins, so that they mourn over this and lament over themselves as lost, as far as their earlier conduct goes, and who show a change worth speaking of. These God receives on account of their repentance, and receives those who come out of a change from the worst kind of life. For virtue grants such people an amnesty when it comes to live in their souls and drives out the wickedness that had taken possession of them first. And even if it is not virtue but a considerable advance that comes about in the soul, that too is enough — in proportion to how far the advance goes — to drive out the flood of wickedness and make it disappear, so that it comes near to being in the soul no longer.

Then, speaking as though in the character of a man who teaches our message, he says: “The wise turn away from what we say, because they are led astray by their wisdom and tripped up by it.” [e]

To this we will answer: wisdom is the knowledge of things divine and human and of their causes — or, as the divine word defines it, “a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty,” and “a radiance of everlasting light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness.” If that is what wisdom is, no one who really is wise would turn away from what a Christian who knows Christianity says, nor would he be led astray or tripped up by it. True wisdom does not lead astray; ignorance does. Of everything that exists, knowledge alone is secure, and the truth that comes from wisdom.

But if, against the definition of wisdom, you call a man wise for laying down doctrines of any sort at all with a bit of sophistry, then we say that the man who is wise by this wisdom of yours really does turn away from the words of God — led astray by plausibilities and sophistries and tripped up by them. And since on our teaching “the knowledge of wickedness is not wisdom,” while a “knowledge” of wickedness, if I may put it that way, is exactly what is found in people who hold false opinions and are deceived by petty sophistries, I would call what is in such people ignorance rather than wisdom.

After this he again abuses the man who serves as an ambassador for Christianity, declaring that he recounts ridiculous things — though he neither proves nor plainly shows what these ridiculous things are. And in his abuse he says that no sensible man believes the message, because he is put off by the crowd of people attaching themselves to it. [g]

He is doing here what a man would be doing who said that, because of the crowd of untrained people governed by the laws, no sensible man obeys Solon, say, or Lycurgus, or Zaleucus, or any of the rest — especially if by “sensible” he means the man whose character is shaped by virtue. For as, in the case of those untrained people, the lawgivers did what seemed useful to them and surrounded them with that kind of upbringing and those laws, so God, laying down law in Jesus for people everywhere, leads even those who are not sensible, in the way such people can be led toward what is better.

Knowing this, as we have said above, the God who speaks in Moses says: “They provoked me to jealousy with what is no god; they made me angry with their idols. And I will provoke them to jealousy with what is no nation; with a nation without understanding I will make them angry.” Paul knew it too, and said: “God chose the foolish things of the world to put the wise to shame” — calling “wise,” in the ordinary way, all those who seem to have gone far in learning but have fallen into a godless worship of many gods, since “claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptible man, and of birds, and four-footed animals, and creeping things.”

He also charges the teacher with seeking out the unintelligent. To him we would say: whom do you call unintelligent? Strictly speaking, every bad man is unintelligent. So if it is the bad you are calling unintelligent — when you bring people to philosophy, is it the bad you seek to bring, or the good? It cannot be the good, since they have already taken up philosophy. The bad, then; and if the bad, the unintelligent. And you seek to bring many such people to philosophy, so you too are seeking the unintelligent. [j]

And if I do seek those who are called unintelligent in that sense, I am doing what a humane physician does when he seeks out the sick, so that he can bring them what will help them and make them strong again. But if by “unintelligent” you mean people who are not quick-witted, but the more abnormal sort of men, then I will answer you that I try to improve these too, as far as I am able — though I do not want to build up the gathering of the Christians out of them. What I look for rather are the quicker and sharper minds, since they are able to follow the explanation of the riddles and of the things said with concealment in the law and the prophets and the Gospels: the very things you have despised as containing nothing worth mention, because you never tested the meaning in them or tried to enter into the intention of the men who wrote them.

After this he says that the man who teaches Christianity does much the same as a man who promises to make bodies healthy but keeps his patients from consulting skilled physicians, because they would expose how untrained he is. To this too we will say: which physicians do you mean — the ones we turn untrained people away from? Surely you do not suppose that we bring our appeal to the message to men who practice philosophy, so that they would be the physicians from whom we turn away the people we call to the divine word. So either he gives no answer, having no physicians he can name, or he must take refuge in untrained people themselves, men who slavishly din out the talk about many gods and whatever else untrained people would say. Either way he will be shown to have brought the man who keeps others from skilled physicians into his argument for nothing. [m]

Suppose we do turn people who are being deceived away from the philosophy of Epicurus, and from the physicians reckoned Epicureans. How could we be doing anything more reasonable than removing them from a grievous disease, one that Celsus’s physicians brought on: the disease that consists in doing away with providence and bringing in pleasure as the good? But grant that we do turn the people we call to our message away from other philosopher-physicians as well — from the Peripatetics, who do away with providence over us and with any relation of the divine to human beings. How could we not be making the people we have called reverent, and healing them, when we persuade them to devote themselves to the God who is over all, and free those who take our advice from great wounds, the wounds inflicted by the words of men reckoned philosophers?

And let it be granted as well that we turn others away from Stoic physicians, who bring in a corruptible god and say that his substance is a body, changeable through and through, alterable and subject to change, and who say that one day everything will be destroyed and God alone left. How could we not, in this case too, be freeing those who take our advice from evils, and bringing them to a reverent teaching — that they should devote themselves to the Creator and admire the Father of the Christians’ teaching, who arranged that lessons of the most humane kind, able to turn souls around, should be sown throughout the whole human race?

And suppose we cure those who have caught from physicians the folly about souls passing into other bodies — physicians who bring the reasoning nature down, sometimes into every kind of irrational animal, and sometimes into what has no imagination at all. How could we not be making better in soul those who take the advice of a message that does not teach that insensibility or the loss of reason is handed to a bad man as his share of punishment, but sets out the labors and punishments God brings on bad men as medicines that turn a person around? This is how those who live as Christians with good sense manage the simpler people, as fathers do with quite small children.

We do not, then, run to infants and silly country people and say to them, “Flee the physicians.” We do not say, “See that none of you lays hold of knowledge.” We do not assert that knowledge is an evil, and we are not mad enough to say that knowledge trips people up out of the soul’s health. We would never say that anyone at all has perished from wisdom. And though we teach, we are not the people who say, “Pay attention to me”; we say, “Pay attention to the God of all things, and to Jesus, the teacher of the lessons about him.” None of us is such a braggart as to say to his acquaintances what Celsus has draped around the character of the teacher: “I alone will save you.” See, then, how many lies he tells against us. And we do not say that true physicians destroy the people they promise to heal.

He brings a second illustration against us as well, saying that the teacher among us does the same as a drunk man who comes into a company of drunk men and abuses the sober as drunk. Then let him show, from the writings of Paul, say, that the apostle of Jesus was drunk and that his words were not sober; or from what John wrote, that his thoughts do not breathe of a man in his right mind, freed from the drunkenness that comes of wickedness. No one, then, who is in his right mind and teaches the message of the Christians is drunk. Celsus abuses us in a way no philosopher would when he says these things. [r]

And let Celsus say who these sober people are whom we, the ambassadors of the Christians’ teachings, abuse. For in our judgment everyone is drunk who talks to lifeless things as though to God. And why do I say drunk? They are out of their minds, rather — hurrying into the temples and bowing down to statues, or to animals, as gods. And no less out of their minds are those who think that things put together by workmen for hire, and sometimes by the worst of men, were built for the honor of true gods.

After this he likens the teacher to a man with sore eyes, and those who learn from him to men with sore eyes, and says that such a man, in a company of people with sore eyes, blames the sharp-sighted for being blind. Who then, Greeks, are the people who in our judgment do not see? Who but those who, out of all the greatness of the things in the world and the beauty of what has been made, cannot look up and see that one ought to bow down and admire and revere only the one who made them — and that nothing put together by human beings and taken up for the honor of gods could rightly be revered by anyone, whether apart from the Creator God or along with him? To compare things that cannot be compared at all with the infinite, which surpasses all created nature in its superiority, is the work of men whose understanding is blind. [s]

So we do not say that the sharp-sighted have sore eyes or are blind. We say that the people who wallow in ignorance of God among the temples and the images and the so-called sacred months have been blinded in mind — and especially when, on top of their irreverence, they live in licentiousness as well, never even looking for anything that deserves respect, but doing everything that deserves shame.

After bringing so many charges against us, he wants to give the impression that he has others he could bring and is passing over them in silence. His own words run this way: “These are the charges I bring, and others like them — I will not list them one by one — and I say that they do wrong and insult God, in order to draw wicked men on with empty hopes and persuade them to despise better things, telling them that if they keep away from these things it will be better for them.” [t]

To this it might be said, from the actual working of the message on those who come to Christianity, that it is not really wicked people the message draws on, so much as the simpler sort and — as most people would call them — the unpolished. For these, through fear about the punishments that are announced, a fear that stirs them and urges them to keep away from the things the punishments are for, try to give themselves over to the reverence for God that Christianity teaches. They are so mastered by the message that, out of fear of what it calls the eternal punishments, they despise every torture devised against them among men, and death itself with countless labors — which no one in his right mind would say is the work of a wicked choice.

How could self-control and self-restraint be practiced out of a wicked choice, or a readiness to share what one has and to live a common life? Not even the fear of the divine could be. That fear is useful to the many, and the message urges it on those who are not yet able to see what is worth choosing for its own sake and to choose it as the greatest good, above every promise — and nothing of the kind naturally arises in a man who chooses to live in wickedness.

But suppose someone imagines that what shows itself in most of those who believe the message is superstition rather than wickedness, and charges our message with making people superstitious. We will say to him: one of the lawgivers, asked whether he had laid down the finest laws for his citizens, answered that they were not the finest absolutely, but the finest of those his citizens were able to receive. So it might also be said by the Father of the Christians’ message: [v]

“Of the laws and the teaching that the many were able to receive for the improvement of their characters, I laid down the finest — threatening sinners not with labors and punishments that are false, but with ones that are true and necessary, brought on those who resist in order to set them right, even though they do not at all understand the intention of the one who punishes, or what the labors accomplish.”

For the teaching about punishment is stated with an eye to what is useful, and in accordance with truth, and it is stated with concealment because that is to the hearers’ advantage. Besides, on the whole it is not the wicked whom the ambassadors of Christianity draw on. Nor do we insult the divine. What we say about him is both true and, to the many, apparently clear — though it is not as clear to them as it is to the few who train themselves to examine the things of the message as a philosopher does.