Worms, Frogs, and Bats

Celsus has made the people he takes for worms — the Christians — say this: “God has left the circuit of the heavens behind and looked straight past this great earth. He lives as a citizen among us alone; to us alone he sends his heralds; and he never stops sending and searching for a way that we may be with him forever.” [a]

The answer is that he is hanging on us words we never say. We read, and we know, that God loves everything that exists and detests nothing he has made — he would not have built a thing he hated. And we have read this as well: “You spare all things, because all things are yours, lover of souls. For your imperishable Spirit is in them all. And so you correct those who slip, a little at a time; you remind them of the very things they are sinning in, and you warn them.”

How can we say that God has left behind the circuit of the heavens and the whole world, and has looked past this great earth, and lives as a citizen among us alone — when it is we who have found that in our prayers we must say, and mean it, that “the earth is full of the Lord’s mercy,” and that “the Lord’s mercy is on all flesh,” and that God, being good, “makes his sun rise on the wicked and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust”? He urges us on to do the same, so that we may become his sons, and he teaches us to stretch our acts of kindness out to everyone, as far as we are able. For he himself is called “the Savior of all people, and most of all of those who believe,” and his Christ is called “the atoning sacrifice for our sins — and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world.”

That is our answer to what Celsus alleges. It may be that some Jews would say things of their own — not the ones Celsus wrote down, but other crude ones. Christians would not. We have been taught that “God proves his own love toward us in this: that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us,” and that “a man will hardly die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might perhaps even dare to die.” But as it is, the announcement is that Jesus came for the sake of sinners everywhere — so that they might leave their sin behind and entrust themselves to God — and that by an old habit of speech in these writings he is also called the Christ of God.

Perhaps Celsus has misheard some of the people he calls worms, when they say that God exists and that we come next after him. He is behaving like men who bring a charge against a whole school of philosophy because of something said by a rash boy who has attended a philosopher’s lectures for three days and then swaggers about, treating everyone else as beneath him and unphilosophical. [g]

For we know that there are many things more honorable than a human being. We have read that “God stood in the assembly of gods” — gods, but not the ones the rest of the world worships, “for all the gods of the nations are demons.” And we have read that “God, standing in the assembly of gods, judges gods in their midst.” We know too that “even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth — as indeed there are many gods and many lords — still, for us there is one God, the Father, from whom all things come and for whom we exist; and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things come and through whom we exist.”

We know as well that the angels stand above human beings in this way: that human beings, once brought to completion, become the angels’ equals. “For in the resurrection of the dead they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but the righteous are like the angels in heaven,” and they become “equal to the angels.” And we know that in the ordering of the whole there are certain beings called thrones, and others dominions, and others authorities, and others rulers. We can see that we human beings fall far short of these, and even so we have hope: that by living well and doing everything according to reason we may climb to a likeness with all of them. And last of all — since “it has not yet been shown what we shall be, but we know that if he is shown, we shall be like God, and shall see him as he is.”

Suppose someone does say what some people say — whether they understand it, or do not understand it but have misheard a sound argument — that God exists and we come next after him. I would give it this interpretation: by “we” I would mean the rational beings, and still more, the serious ones among the rational. For in our view the same virtue belongs to all the blessed, so that the virtue of a human being and the virtue of God are one and the same. That is why we are taught to become “perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” So no good and honorable man is a worm swimming in mud; no reverent man is an ant; no righteous man is a frog; and no man whose soul is lit up by the bright light of truth could reasonably be compared to a bat.

It seems to me that Celsus has misheard this as well: “Let us make man according to our image and likeness.” That is why he has made the worms say that, having been made by God, we resemble him in every way. If he had known the difference between a human being’s having come to be “according to the image” of God and his being “according to the likeness” — and had noticed that God is recorded as saying “Let us make man according to our image and likeness,” but that God then made the man “according to the image” of God and not also “according to the likeness,” not yet — he would not have made us say that we are like God in every way. [q]

Nor do we say that the stars, too, have been put under us. The resurrection that is called the resurrection of the righteous, and that wise men understand, is compared to the sun and the moon and the stars by the man who said: “There is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead.” Daniel prophesied about these things long ago.

Celsus goes on to say that we claim everything has been arranged to be our slave. Perhaps he never heard the intelligent among us say such a thing; and perhaps he does not know in what sense it has been said that the greater among us is everyone’s slave. When Greeks say, “So sun and night are slaves to mortals,” they praise the line and expound it; but when the same sort of thing is either not said by us at all, or said in a different way, here too Celsus lays a false charge against us.

And we — the worms, on his account — are made to say in Celsus’ book that, because some among us do wrong, God will come to us, or will send his own Son, to burn up the unjust, while the rest of us frogs enjoy everlasting life along with him. Look how this solemn philosopher, like a low buffoon, has turned into mockery and laughter and ridicule the divine announcement of a judgment, of punishment for the unjust and reward for the righteous. And to all this he adds that such things would be more bearable coming from worms and frogs than they are when announced by Jews and Christians quarreling with each other.

We, at any rate, will not imitate him. We will not say the same sort of thing about the philosophers who profess to know the nature of the whole, and who argue with each other about how the whole was put together, and how heaven and earth came to be, and everything in them; and about whether souls, being unbegotten and not created by God, are nevertheless set in order by him and exchange one body for another, or whether they are sown together with the bodies and then live on, or do not live on. Someone could have said this about them as well, instead of speaking of them with respect and accepting the purpose of men who have given themselves to the examining of the truth. He could have jeered and abused, and said that these men are worms in a corner of the mud of human life who do not take their own measure — and who therefore pronounce on matters of that size as though they had grasped them, and strain to speak as though they had seen for themselves things that cannot be seen without a greater inspiration and a more divine power. “For no man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man that is in him; so too no one has known the things of God except the Spirit of God.”

But we are not out of our minds. Human understanding on that scale — I use the word “understanding” in its everyday sense — busied not with what occupies most people but with the examining of the truth: we do not compare it to the wrigglings of worms or of any other such creature. On the contrary, out of love for the truth we bear witness about certain Greek philosophers that they did recognize God, since “God showed himself to them,” even though “they did not glorify him as God or give thanks, but became empty in their reasonings, and, claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the imperishable God for the likeness of an image of a perishable man, and of birds and four-footed animals and creeping things.”

After this, wanting to establish that Jews and Christians are no different from the animals he listed earlier, he says: “The Jews were runaway slaves out of Egypt. They never did anything worth mentioning. They were never of any account or of any number.” [y]

As to their not being runaways, and not being Egyptians but Hebrews who had settled as foreigners in Egypt, we have spoken in the earlier pages. But if he thinks he has established that they were never of any account or of any number because not much history about them is found among the Greeks, here is our answer. If a man will look steadily at their commonwealth from its beginning, and at the arrangement of their laws, he will find that they were men who set out on earth a shadow of the heavenly life. Among them nothing was reckoned as God except the One who is over all things, and no maker of images held citizenship. There was no painter and no sculptor in their commonwealth, because the law drove every such man out of it, so that there would be no pretext for the making of statues — an art that draws foolish men in and drags the eyes of the soul down from God to the earth.

They had a law that ran like this: “Do not act lawlessly and make for yourselves a carved likeness, any image — a likeness of male or female, a likeness of any beast that is on the earth, a likeness of any winged bird that flies under heaven, a likeness of any creeping thing that creeps on the earth, a likeness of any fish that is in the waters under the earth.” What the law wanted was that they should keep company with the truth of each thing, and not mold up other things alongside the truth, things that tell a lie about what is really male or really female, or about the nature of beasts, or the kind that birds are, or creeping things, or fish. And this prohibition of theirs was solemn and great-hearted too: “Do not look up to the sky and see the sun and the moon and the stars, the whole array of heaven, and be led astray into bowing down to them and serving them.”

What a commonwealth belonged to a whole nation — one in which it was not even possible for a womanish man to show himself in public! And this too is worth marveling at: that the prostitutes, the kindling of young men’s passions, were cleared out of their commonwealth. Their courts, too, were made up of the most upright men, men who had given proof of a sound life over a long stretch of time and were trusted with judgments; men who, because their character was clean and because of what in them was above the human, were called gods, by an old habit of speech among the Jews. Here was a whole nation to be seen doing philosophy — and so that there would be leisure for listening to the divine laws, the days called sabbaths and their other festivals were laid down. And why should I speak about the orders of their priests and their sacrifices, which hold countless symbols, made plain to those who love to learn?

But since nothing in human nature stands firm, that commonwealth too had to decay bit by bit and change its manner of life. And Providence remade what was solemn in their teaching, refitting it wherever refitting was needed so that it would suit people everywhere; and in place of them, Providence handed over to believers drawn from people everywhere the solemn worship of God that comes by way of Jesus. [ae]

Jesus was furnished not only with understanding but with a portion of divinity. He threw down the whole account of the demons on earth — the ones who delight in frankincense and blood and the steam that rises off burning fat, and who drag human beings away from any thought of God, the way the Titans or Giants of the stories do. He himself paid no attention to their plotting, though they plot most of all against the better sort of men; and he laid down laws by which those who live will be blessed — laws under which men never flatter the demons with sacrifices, but despise them altogether, on the strength of the word of God, which helps those who look upward and toward God.

And since it was God’s will that the teaching of Jesus should win out among men, the demons could do nothing, though they let out every sail to see that there should be no more Christians. They stirred up the emperors, and the Senate, and the governors everywhere, and even the city crowds themselves — who did not notice the unreasoning and wicked working of the demons — against the word and against those who believed it. And still the word of God, which is more powerful than everything, took the very hindering of it as food to grow on, went forward, and spread through more and more souls. That was what God wanted.

We have said all this as a digression, though a necessary one, I think. What we wanted was to meet what Celsus says about the Jews — that they were runaway slaves out of Egypt, and that these men, loved by God, never did anything worth mentioning. And to his “they were never of any account or of any number” we answer this. As a “chosen race” and a “royal priesthood” they withdrew and turned aside from mixing with the many nations around them, so that their character would not be ruined, and they were kept under guard by the divine power. They did not crave the acquiring of other kingdoms, as most people do; and they were not so left to themselves that their smallness made them easy to plot against and, so far as their smallness went, wiped out altogether. And this held as long as they were still worthy of God’s guard. But when, as a whole nation sinning, they had to be turned back toward their God through hard suffering, they were left to themselves — sometimes for a longer stretch, sometimes for a shorter one — until, in the time of the Romans, having committed the greatest sin in killing Jesus, they were left to themselves completely.

Right after this Celsus runs over the contents of the first book of Moses, the one titled Genesis, and says: “So they tried to trace their own descent from the first sowing of sorcerers and impostors, calling as their witnesses dim and ambiguous utterances hidden away somewhere in the dark, and twisting them for the unschooled and the senseless — and this when nothing of the kind had ever been so much as disputed in all the long time before.” [ak]

In these words Celsus seems to me to have said what he meant very unclearly. Probably he made his obscurity here deliberate, since he saw the strength of the argument that establishes the descent of the Jewish nation from such forefathers; and then again, he did not want to look ignorant of a matter concerning the Jews and their race that cannot be brushed aside.

It is plain, at any rate, that the Jews do trace their descent from the three fathers, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. And their names, joined to the title of God, have such power that not only do people of that nation use them in their prayers to God and in chanting spells over demons — “the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” — but so do almost all the people who make a business of spells and magic. In the books on magic that invocation of God is found in many places, along with that taking up of God’s name, in a way that shows these men handle it as something of their own when they work against demons. So it seems to me that these facts — brought forward by Jews and Christians as proof that Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the fathers of the Jewish nation, were holy men — were not altogether unknown to Celsus; but he did not set them out plainly, because he could not answer the argument built on them.