The Seat God Never Leaves

In the three books before this one, holy Ambrosius, we went through everything that came to us by way of answer to Celsus’ treatise. Now, having prayed to God through Christ, we dictate a fourth in answer to what comes next. And may words be given us of the kind written of in the book of Jeremiah, where the Lord said to the prophet: “Look, I have put my words in your mouth as fire. Look, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to uproot and to tear down and to destroy and to drag down, and to build up and to plant.” [a]

For we too need words now that will uproot, out of every soul that has been wounded by Celsus’ treatise or by thoughts like his, the things said against the truth. And we need thoughts that will tear down the buildings of every false opinion, and above all the building Celsus has put up in his treatise, which is much like the building of the men who said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach to heaven.” And we need a wisdom that will drag down every high thing that lifts itself up “against the knowledge of God,” and in particular that high thing of arrogance which Celsus lifts up against us.

And since we must not stop at the uprooting and the tearing down of what has just been named, but must plant, in the ground the roots came out of, the planting of God’s farm, and build, in the place of what was torn down, a building of God and a temple of God’s glory — for that reason we too must pray to the Lord who gave what is written in Jeremiah, that he may give us words as well, both for building up the things of Christ and for planting the spiritual law and the prophetic words that answer to it.

Most of all, for what Celsus says next after what has already been quoted, we need to establish that the things about Christ were rightly prophesied. For he takes his stand against both parties at once — against the Jews, who deny that Christ’s coming has happened and hope that it is still to come, and against the Christians, who acknowledge that Jesus is the Christ who was prophesied — and he says:

“That some Christians, and the Jews, should say — the one party that a certain god, or son of a god, has come down to the earth, the other that he will come down, to make the things here righteous — this is utterly shameful, and refuting it does not even need a long argument.” [e]

He does seem to speak precisely when he says of the Jews, not that some of them but that all of them think someone will come down to the earth, and of the Christians that some of them say he has already come down. For he is pointing to those who prove from the Jewish scriptures that Christ’s coming has already happened, and he seems to know that there are certain schools which deny that Christ Jesus is the one who was prophesied. We have already dealt with the question of Christ having been prophesied, as well as we could, in the earlier books, so we will not take up again most of what could be said on the point; there is no use going over the same ground twice.

But notice this. If he had wanted to overturn faith in the prophecies — faith that Christ’s coming is still ahead, or that it has already happened — with even the appearance of a consistent argument, he ought to have set out the prophecies themselves, the ones we Christians and Jews use when we argue with one another. That way he would at least have seemed to be turning people away, people carried off by what he takes to be the plausible sound of the prophetic writings, from giving their assent to them, and from believing on their account that Jesus is the Christ. As it is, either he cannot meet the prophecies about Christ, or he does not know in the first place what the prophecies about him are. He sets down not one prophetic sentence, though there are countless numbers of them about Christ, and still he thinks he is bringing a charge against the prophetic writings — without even setting out the plausibility he himself would say they have. He does not know, though, that the Jews do not at all say that the Christ who is to come down is a god, or a son of a god, as we have said in the earlier pages.

And having said that we say he has come down, while the Jews say he will come down to make things righteous, he thinks that this by itself convicts what is said as utterly shameful and as not even needing a long refutation.

And he goes on, asking: “What is the point of such a descent for God?” [i]

He does not see that with us too the descent has a point. First of all it is to turn back what the Gospel calls “the lost sheep of the house of Israel”; and secondly, because of their disobedience, to take from them what is called the kingdom of God and to give it to “other farmers” than the Jews of old — that is, to the Christians, who “will give back” to God the fruits of God’s kingdom “in their seasons,” since every single action is a fruit of the kingdom.

So out of a great deal that could be said we have said a little in answer to Celsus’ question, when he asked, “What is the point of such a descent for God?” Celsus, though, gives himself an answer that neither the Jews nor we would ever have given. He says: “Or was it in order to learn what goes on among men?”

Not one of us says that Christ comes to stay in this life in order to learn what goes on among men. Then, as though someone might have said “in order to learn what goes on among men,” he raises an objection to it himself: “Does he not know all things?” Then, as though we would answer that he does know, he puts a further difficulty: “Then he knows, but does not set things right? And it is not possible for him to set them right by divine power?”

All of this he says like a simpleton. For God is always setting right those who listen to what he says, by his own Word, which passes down the generations into holy souls and makes them friends of God and prophets. And at Christ’s coming he sets right, by the message that goes with Christianity, not the people who do not want it, but the people who have chosen the better life, the life that pleases God.

I do not know, either, what sort of setting right Celsus wanted to happen when he raised this difficulty: “Is it not possible for him to set things right by divine power, unless he sends someone whose nature fits him for the task?”

Did he want the setting right to come about by God’s putting impressions into people’s minds — stripping the wickedness away all at once and planting virtue in them? Someone else will look into whether such a thing is consistent, or possible in nature. We would simply say: let it be so, and let it be possible. Where, then, is what is up to us? Where is the assent to the truth that deserves praise, or the refusal of what is false that deserves approval?

And even if it were granted once for all that this is possible, and that it would happen fittingly, why would a man not rather go back to the beginning and ask something parallel to Celsus’ own question: was it not possible for God, by divine power, to make human beings who needed no setting right at all, but who were good and complete from the outset, with wickedness never coming into existence in the first place? Questions like these can carry off untrained and unintelligent people, but not the man who looks into the nature of things. For if you take away what is voluntary in virtue, you have taken away the very being of virtue.

It would take a whole treatise to work these matters through, and the Greeks too have said a good deal about them in their books on providence — men who would never say what Celsus has set down: “He knows, but does not set things right, and it is not possible for him to set things right by divine power.” We ourselves have spoken about these things in many places as well as we could, and the divine words have established them for those who are able to hear them.

So what Celsus brings against us and against the Jews will be turned and said to him as well. You there: does the God who is over all know what goes on among men, or does he not? If you hold that there is a God and a providence, as your treatise makes out, then he must know. And if he knows, why does he not set things right? Or must we be the ones to give an account of why he knows and does not set things right, while the same question will not be put equally to you — you who do not quite show yourself an Epicurean in your treatise, but make a pretense of acknowledging providence — why God, knowing everything that goes on among men, does not set them right, and does not free them all from wickedness by divine power? [n]

For our part we are not ashamed to say that he is always sending men who will set things right. The words that summon people to what is best are there among men, and it was God who gave them. There are many differences, though, among those who serve God, and few are the men who serve as ambassadors of the truth wholly and purely and who work a complete setting right, as Moses and the prophets did. And beyond all of them stands the great setting right that came through Jesus, who wanted not only the people in one corner of the inhabited world to be healed, but, as far as it lay with him, the people everywhere; for he came as “Savior of all men.”

After this our most noble Celsus, taking his cue from I do not know what, raises a difficulty against us, as though we said that God himself comes down to men, and he thinks it follows from this that God leaves his own seat. For he does not know the power of God, or that “the spirit of the Lord has filled the inhabited world, and that which holds all things together knows every voice.” He cannot take in the words “Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord.” And he does not see that, on the Christian teaching, we all “live and move and have our being in him,” as Paul also taught in his speech to the Athenians. [p]

So even if the God of the universe comes down by his own power along with Jesus into the life of men, and even if the Word who was “in the beginning with God,” being himself “God,” comes to us, he does not go out of his seat or leave his own seat behind, as though one place were emptied of him and another, which did not hold him before, were filled. The power and divinity of God come to stay through whomever he wills and in whomever he finds room, without changing place, without leaving a place of his own empty and filling another. For even when we do say that he leaves one man and fills another, we are not making a statement about place. We are saying that the soul of the worthless man, poured out into wickedness, is left behind by God, and that the soul of the man who wants to live by virtue — or who is making progress, or who already lives that way — is filled with a divine spirit, or shares in it.

There is no need, then, for Christ’s descent, or for God’s turning toward men, that a greater seat should be abandoned and that things here should be altered, as Celsus supposes when he says, “If you were to alter even one of the least of the things here, everything would be overturned and gone.” But if we must speak of anyone being altered by the presence of God’s power and by the Word’s coming among men, we will not shrink from saying that the man who has received the coming of God’s Word into his own soul is altered from worthless to accomplished, from unrestrained to self-controlled, and from a man afraid of the divine powers to a man who reveres God.

But if you want us to meet even the most laughable of Celsus’ charges, listen to him saying this: “But is it that God, being unknown among men and thinking himself the worse off for it, would want to be known, and to put to the test both those who believe in him and those who do not — like men newly rich, who cannot stop showing off? At any rate they bear witness against God to an ambition that is large, and thoroughly mortal.” [t]

We say, then, that God, being unknown by worthless men, would want to be known — not because he thinks himself the worse off for it, but because knowing him releases the man who knows from his wretchedness. And it is not out of a wish to test those who believe in him or those who do not that he either comes himself, by unspeakable and divine power, to stay in certain men, or sends his Christ. He does it so that those who believe and grasp his divinity may be released from all their wretchedness, and so that those who do not believe may no longer have room for a defense — as though their not believing came of never having heard and never having been taught.

What argument, then, shows that it follows from what we say that God, on our account, is like men newly rich who cannot stop showing off? God does not show off toward us out of a wish that we should understand and consider how far he is above us. What he wants is that the blessedness which comes into our souls from our knowing him should be planted in us; and so, through Christ and through the Word’s never-ceasing coming, he works it out that we should take up a closeness to him and belong to him as his own. The teaching of the Christians, then, bears witness to no mortal ambition on God’s part.

I do not know how it is that, after talking empty nonsense to no purpose on the matters we have just set out, he later on sets down this: that God does not need to be known for his own sake, but wants to grant us knowledge of himself for the sake of our salvation, so that those who receive it may become good and be saved, while those who do not receive it may be shown to be wicked and be punished. And yet, having set out something like that, he raises a difficulty: “So now, after so long an age, did God remember to make human life righteous, and neglect it before?” [w]

To this we will say that there is no time when God did not want to make human life righteous. He has always taken care of it, giving the reasoning animal the starting points of virtue, so that it might be set right. For in each generation the wisdom of God passes into the souls it finds holy and makes them friends of God and prophets. And in the sacred books one could find the men in each generation who were holy and able to receive the divine spirit, and how they turned their own contemporaries around as far as they had the power.

It is no wonder that in certain generations there have been prophets who surpassed other prophets in their reception of the divine — some prophets of their own time, others earlier or later — because their life was more taut and more vigorous. And in the same way it is no wonder that there was also a certain time when something exceptional came to stay among the human race, something that stood out beyond what came before it and beyond what came after. [x]

But the account of these things has something in it more hidden and deeper, something not really able to reach the more common sort of hearing. And in order that these matters may be made clear, and that an answer may be given to what is said against Christ’s coming — “So now, after so long an age, did God remember to make the human race righteous, and neglect it before?” — one has to take up the account of the portions, and to make clear why it says: “When the Most High was dividing up the nations, as he scattered the sons of Adam, he fixed the boundaries of the nations according to the number of the angels of God; and the Lord’s portion became his people Jacob, Israel the measured line of his inheritance.”

And it will be necessary to say why each man’s birth fell inside one particular boundary, under the one who had that boundary allotted to him; and how it was reasonable that “the Lord’s portion became his people Jacob, Israel the measured line of his inheritance”; and why in earlier times “the Lord’s portion was his people Jacob, Israel the measured line of his inheritance,” while about those who come later the Father says to the Savior, “Ask of me, and I will give you nations for your inheritance, and the ends of the earth for your possession.” For there are certain chains and sequences, unspeakable and beyond telling, that have to do with the different way human souls are managed.