The God Who Comes Down

So he came — whether Celsus wants it or not. After the many prophets who set right the affairs of that Israel, Christ came, the one who sets right the whole world. He did not need, as under the earlier arrangement, to use whips and chains and instruments of torture on people. The teaching by itself was enough: when “the sower went out to sow,” it was to sow the word everywhere. [a]

But suppose some point of time is coming that will draw a line around the world — a line the world must have, since it had a beginning — and suppose some end is coming upon the world, and after the end a just judgment about all things. Then anyone who takes up these matters of the word as a philosopher will have to establish them with proofs of every kind: proofs drawn from the divine writings, and proofs drawn from the way one argument follows another. But the great mass of simpler believers, who cannot keep up with the most intricate ways of looking at the wisdom of God, will have to entrust themselves to God and to the Savior of our race, and be content with his “he himself said it” rather than with anybody else’s.

After this, as usual, Celsus establishes nothing and proves nothing, and then speaks as though we chattered about God in a way that is neither holy nor pure: “That they chatter these things about God in a way that is neither holy nor pure is perfectly plain.” He thinks we do this to astonish untrained people, and not because we are telling the truth about the punishments that are necessary for those who have sinned. And so he likens us to the people who bring on phantoms and terrors at the opening of the rites of Bacchus. [e]

As for the rites of Bacchus, whether there is any convincing account of them or none at all, let the Greeks say it, and let Celsus and his fellow revelers listen. We are speaking in defense of what is ours, and this is what we say. What lies before us is to set the human race right — either by the threats about punishments, which we are convinced are necessary for the whole of things, and which are perhaps not useless even to the people who will have to undergo them; or by the promises made to those who have lived well, promises that take in the blessed way of life in the kingdom of God, for those who are worthy to be ruled by him.

After this he wants to show that we are saying nothing surprising or new about a flood or a burning of the world, but that we misheard what is said among Greeks and foreigners about such things and then believed our own writings on the subject. He puts it this way: “These things came into their heads as well, from mishearing those accounts: that over long cycles of time, and the returnings and meetings of the stars, burnings and floods happen; and that since the last flood, the one in Deucalion’s time, the cycle, by the turn and exchange of all things, is due for a burning. That is what made them say, in a mistaken opinion, that God will come down bringing fire like a torturer.” [i]

In answer to this we will say that I do not know how Celsus — a man who has read a great deal and has shown that he knows many histories — failed to stop at the antiquity of Moses. Some Greek writers record that Moses lived in the days of Inachus the son of Phoroneus. The Egyptians agree that he is of the greatest antiquity, and so do the men who have worked over Phoenician history. Anyone who likes may read the two books of Flavius Josephus on the antiquity of the Jews, and learn how Moses was older than the men who said that floods and burnings happen in the world over long cycles of time — the very men Celsus says the Jews and the Christians misheard, and, not understanding what was said about a burning of the world, said that God will come down bringing fire like a torturer.

Whether there really are cycles, and floods or burnings by cycles, or whether there are not; and whether the divine word knows about these too, in many places, and in particular where Solomon says, “What is the thing that has been? The very thing that will be. And what is the thing that has been done? The very thing that will be done,” and so on — that is not for the present occasion. It is enough only to note this much: Moses and some of the prophets were men of the greatest antiquity, and they did not take what they say about the burning of the world from anyone else. On the contrary — if one must speak with an eye on the dates — it was others who misheard these men, and, not going carefully into what they said, made up cycles that repeat themselves exactly, differing in nothing, neither in their own qualities nor in what merely happens to belong to them. [m]

But we do not lay either the flood or the burning to cycles and the circuits of the stars. We say their cause is wickedness pouring out further and further, and being purged away by a flood or a burning. And if the voices of the prophets say that God “comes down” — the God who said, “Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord” — we take it as a figure of speech. God comes down from his own greatness and height when he manages the affairs of men, and above all of worthless men. Ordinary speech says that teachers stoop to small children, and that wise men, or men who are making progress, stoop to young men just turned toward philosophy — and they do not do it by coming down bodily. In the same way, if God is anywhere said in the divine writings to come down, it is understood on the model of the ordinary use of the word; and so also with going up.

Celsus says in mockery that we speak of God coming down bringing fire like a torturer, and so he forces us, out of season, to look into deeper arguments. We will say a little — only enough to give our hearers a taste of the defense that clears away his mockery of us — and then turn to what comes next. [q]

The divine word says that our God is “a consuming fire,” and that “rivers of fire are drawn along before him”; and further, that he comes in “like the fire of a smelting furnace and like the herb the fullers wash with,” to smelt his own people down. So when he is called “a consuming fire,” we ask what things it is fitting for God to consume, and we answer: wickedness, and the things done out of it, which are spoken of figuratively as “wood” and “hay” and “stubble.” These God consumes as a fire does.

The worthless man, then, is said to build on the foundation of reason already laid, and to build with “wood” and “hay” and “stubble.” If someone can show that the writer meant these words in some other way, and can point to a worthless man who builds bodily with wood or hay or stubble, then plainly the fire too will be understood as material, something the senses can take in. But if the works of the worthless man are plainly spoken of as a figure when they are called wood or hay or stubble, how does the question not fall out at once — what kind of fire is being taken up, so that wood of that sort may be used up? For it says: “The fire itself will test each man’s work, of what sort it is. If anyone’s work remains, the work he built, he will receive a wage; if anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss.” And what work could be spoken of in these words as burned up, except everything that is done out of wickedness?

So our God is “a consuming fire” in the sense we have given, and in this sense “he comes in like the fire of a smelting furnace,” to smelt down the reasoning nature when it has been filled with the lead that comes from wickedness and with the other unclean materials that have adulterated the gold of the soul — if I may call it that — or its silver. In this sense too “rivers of fire” are said to be “before” God, who will make the wickedness disappear that has been mixed through the whole soul. But this is enough in answer to “that is what made them say, in a mistaken opinion, that God will come down bringing fire like a torturer.”

Let us look at what Celsus goes on to say, announcing it with a great flourish: “Let us take the argument up again from the top, with more proofs. I say nothing new, but what has long been settled. God is good and beautiful and happy, and is in what is most beautiful and best. Now if he comes down among men he must undergo a change — and a change from good to bad, from beautiful to shameful, from happiness to wretchedness, and from best to worst. Who then would choose such a change? It is the nature of what is mortal to be altered and remade, but of what is immortal to stay the same and in the same way. So God would not accept this change either.” [t]

It seems to me that the needed answer to this can be given by setting out what the scriptures call the coming down of God to human affairs. He needs no change for it, as Celsus thinks we say; no turning from good to bad, or from beautiful to shameful, or from happiness to wretchedness, or from best to worst. Remaining unturned in his being, he stoops by his providence and by his arrangement of things to the affairs of men.

We for our part can produce the divine writings, which say that God is unturning, both in “But you are the same” and in “I have not changed.” The gods of Epicurus, on the other hand, are put together out of atoms, and so far as their make-up goes they can come apart; they are kept busy shaking off the atoms that would destroy them. And even the god of the Stoics, being a body, at one time has the whole substance for his guiding part, when the burning of the world comes; and at another time he comes to be in a part of that substance, when the world is set in order again. These men could not get a clear view of the natural idea of God, as of one altogether incorruptible and simple, uncompounded and undivided.

The one who came down among men “was in the form of God,” and out of love for humanity “emptied himself,” so that men could hold him. Surely no change came over him from good to bad, for “he did no sin”; nor from beautiful to shameful, for “he knew no sin”; nor did he go from happiness to wretchedness — he “humbled himself,” and was no less blessed even while he was humbling himself for our race’s benefit. Nor did any change come over him from best to worst: for where is what is kind and loving toward people the worst? [w]

Or is it time to say of the doctor as well, who looks at dreadful things and handles disgusting ones in order to heal the sick, that he is going from good to bad, or from beautiful to shameful, or from happiness to wretchedness? And the doctor who looks at dreadful things and handles disgusting ones does not altogether escape the possibility of falling into the same things himself. But the one who treats the wounds of our souls through the word of God that is in him could take on no wickedness at all.

And if the immortal God the Word, by taking up a mortal body and a human soul, seems to Celsus to be altered and remade, let him learn this: the Word, remaining the Word in his being, suffers none of the things the body or the soul suffers. But at times he stoops to the man who cannot look at his dazzling flashes and the brightness of his divinity, and becomes as it were “flesh,” spoken of in bodily terms — until the one who has taken him in that form is lifted little by little by the Word, and becomes able to look at what I may call his leading form.

For there are, as it were, different forms of the Word, according as the Word appears to each of the people who are being brought to knowledge — in proportion to the condition of the beginner, or of the man who has made a little progress, or more, or who has already come near virtue, or who is already in it. [z]

That is why our God “was transformed” — not in the sense Celsus and men like him would have it — and by going up “into the high mountain” showed a different form of his own, far better than the one that those who stayed below and could not follow him up on high were looking at. Those below did not have eyes able to see the Word transformed into what is glorious and more divine. They were barely able to hold him as he was, so that men unable to see the better thing in him might say of him: “We saw him, and he had no form or beauty; his form was without honor, falling short of the sons of men.” Let this be said in answer to Celsus’ supposition. He did not understand the changes or transformations of Jesus as they are told in the accounts, nor what is mortal and what immortal in him.

Will not these accounts, especially when they are understood in the way they must be, look far more dignified than the story of Dionysus — deceived by the Titans, thrown down from the throne of Zeus, torn to pieces by them, and afterward put together again, coming back to life, as it were, and going up into heaven? Or are the Greeks free to carry stories like that over to the teaching about the soul and read them as figures, while for us the door of a consistent explanation is shut — an explanation that everywhere sings in tune and agrees, in writings that come from the divine Spirit who has made his home in pure souls? [ab]

Celsus, then, did not see the intention of our writings at all. So what he is attacking is his own way of taking them, and not what the scriptures mean. If he had thought through what follows for a soul that is going to be in everlasting life, and what one ought to hold about its being and its beginnings, he would not have ridiculed in this way the immortal coming into a mortal body — a coming that is not Plato’s passage from one body into another, but something on another and higher view. And he would have seen one exceptional coming down, made out of great love for humanity, in order to turn back what the divine scripture named, in a hidden way, “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” They had come down from the mountains, and the shepherd is said in certain parables to have gone down to them, leaving on the mountains the ones that had not strayed.

Celsus keeps lingering over things he has not understood, and so he makes us repeat ourselves; we do not want to leave even the appearance that any one of his statements has not been put to the test. He goes on: “Either God really changes, as these people say, into a mortal body — and it has already been said that he cannot; or he does not change himself, but makes those who see him think he does, and misleads them, and lies. Now deceit and lying are in any other case evils, and a man would use them only as a kind of drug: either toward friends who are sick and out of their minds, to cure them, or toward enemies, when he is taking measures to escape danger. But no one who is sick or out of his mind is a friend of God, and God is not afraid of anyone, so as to escape danger by leading him astray.” [ad]

The answer to this could be made partly about the nature of the divine Word, who is God, and partly about the soul of Jesus. About the nature of the Word, then: the quality of food changes into milk in the woman who nurses, to suit the nature of the infant; or it is made ready by the doctor for what is useful to a sick man’s health; or it is got ready in another way for a stronger man, since he can take more. In the same way God changes for men — for each according to what he is worth — the power of the Word, whose nature it is to feed the human soul. To one it becomes, as the scripture named it, “reasonable milk without guile”; to another, who is weaker, something like a vegetable; and to another, who is full-grown, “solid food” is handed over. And the Word surely does not lie about his own nature by becoming nourishment for each man as each is able to receive him. He does not mislead, and he does not lie.

But if someone takes the change to be about the soul of Jesus, when it came into a body, we will ask in what sense he uses the word change. If he means a change of its being, that is not granted — not for that soul, and not for any other reasoning soul either. And if he means that it suffers something from the body it is mingled with, and from the place it has come to, then what is out of place about the Word, who out of great love for humanity brings down a Savior to the human race? For none of those who before this professed to heal was able to do as much as that soul showed it could do by what it did, coming down willingly into the dooms that belong to men, for the sake of our race.

The divine word knows this, and says much about it in many places in the scriptures. For the present it is enough to set down one saying of Paul’s, which runs like this: “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not count it something to be seized to be equal with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave” — “and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient as far as death, and death on a cross. That is why God also raised him high above all, and granted him the name that is above every name.”