The Charge of Empty Hopes

Celsus also says that the people who are going over to the Christians are led on by empty hopes. So here is what we will say to him, since the charge he is bringing is against our teaching about the blessed life and about fellowship with the divine. As far as your own argument carries, my good man, then empty hopes lead on the people who have accepted what Pythagoras and Plato taught about the soul as well: that it is the soul’s nature to climb to the vault of heaven and, in the place beyond the sky, to look at the sights the blessed spectators see. By your reckoning, Celsus, empty hopes also lead on the people who have accepted that the soul lives on after death, and who live in such a way as to become heroes and to spend their time in the company of the gods. And probably Celsus would say that empty hopes lead on the people who have been persuaded about the mind that comes in from outside — that it is deathless, and that mind will go on having a course of its own. [a]

So let him come out and fight. Let him stop hiding what school he belongs to and admit that he is an Epicurean. Let him take on what is said among Greeks and non-Greeks — and not said in any way that deserves contempt — about the immortality of the soul, or its living on after death, or the immortality of the mind. Let him show that these are only words, cheating with empty hopes the people who assent to them, and that the men of his own philosophy are clean of empty hopes, and either lead people on to good hopes or, which fits his opinions better, breed no hope at all, since the soul is destroyed outright and altogether.

Unless, of course, Celsus and the Epicureans will deny that the hope they hold about their own end is an empty one — pleasure, which on their account is the good: “the settled condition of the flesh,” and the confident expectation about it that Epicurus held out.

And do not suppose that it is out of keeping with the Christian message for me to have brought in against Celsus the philosophers who have argued for the immortality of the soul, or for its living on after death. We hold certain things in common with them, and that gives us a better opening to establish our own position: that the blessed life to come will belong only to those who have accepted the worship of God that goes by way of Jesus, and a reverence toward the Maker of all things that is sincere and pure and unmixed with anything whatever that has come into being. [i]

Let anyone who likes show what these “better things” are that we talk people into despising. And let him set our own end beside theirs. Ours is the blessed end that is with God, in Christ — that is, in the Word and the Wisdom and every virtue. It is the end that will come to those who have lived blamelessly and purely, and who have taken up a love toward the God of all things that is undivided and unsplit; and it will meet them as a gift of God. Let him set beside it the end that each philosophical school holds out among Greeks or non-Greeks, or the promise made in the mysteries. Then let him show that the end held out by one of the others is better than ours, and that it follows that theirs is the true one, while ours does not befit a gift of God or the people who have lived well. Or else let him show that these words were not spoken by a divine spirit that had filled the souls of the pure prophets. And let anyone who likes show that words everyone agrees are human are better than words that are shown to be divine and are delivered by men carried along by God.

And what are these “better things” that we teach the people who accept our word they will do better to be rid of? For, if it does not sound boorish to say so, it is plain from the start that nothing can even be thought up that is better than entrusting yourself to the God who is over all, and handing yourself over to a teaching that draws you away from everything that has come into being and brings you — through a Word that has a soul of its own and is alive, and that is also living Wisdom and the Son of God — to the God who is over all.

But the third of the books we have dictated in answer to Celsus’ treatise has now taken in as much as it can hold, so we will bring the discussion to a stop about here, and in what follows contend against what Celsus wrote after this.