Pandora and the Garden

For we put a question to everyone who uses invocations of God like these. Tell us, gentlemen: who was Abraham? What sort of man was Isaac? What power did Jacob have, that the title “God” fitted to their names should produce effects on such a scale? And from whom have you learned, or from whom could you learn, the facts about these men? Who ever took the trouble to write up their history — either a history that honors these men outright, in matters not to be spoken of, or one that hints through veiled suggestions at certain great and marvelous things, for the people able to see them? [a]

Then, when we have asked and no one can point to any history at all — Greek or foreign — or, failing a history, to any secret record from which the accounts of these men come, we will bring forward the book called Genesis, which contains the deeds of these men and the oracles God spoke to them. And we will say: the very fact that you too take up the names of these three founders of the nation, grasping from the plain evidence that calling on them achieves nothing to be despised — does that not establish that there was something divine about these men? And we take them from nowhere but the sacred books of the Jews. Indeed “the God of Israel,” and “the God of the Hebrews,” and “the God who drowned the king of Egypt and the Egyptians in the Red Sea” are named again and again, taken up against demons and against certain wicked powers.

And we learn the history behind the names, and what the names mean, from Hebrews — who in their ancestral writings and their ancestral language hold these things in honor and explain them. How, then, can the Jews, who set out to trace their descent from the first sowing of these men — men Celsus supposes to have been sorcerers and impostors — be said to be tracing themselves and their beginning back to them shamelessly, when the names of those men are Hebrew and are evidence to Hebrews, who have their sacred books in the Hebrew language and the Hebrew script, that their nation belongs to these men? For down to the present day the Jewish names, which keep to the Hebrew language, have been taken either from those writings or, quite simply, from what the Hebrew tongue means.

And let anyone who reads Celsus’ book see whether this is not what he is hinting at when he says: “They also 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.” [e]

These names are indeed hidden, and not out in the light and in the knowledge of most people. To us they are not ambiguous, even when they are taken up by people outside our worship of God. But Celsus, who does nothing to establish that the words are ambiguous, has tossed the charge in — and I cannot see on what ground.

And yet, if he had honestly wanted to overturn the genealogy he thought the Jews had claimed most shamelessly, boasting of Abraham and those descended from him, he ought to have set out the whole matter: first speaking for the case with whatever plausibility he thought it had, and then bravely overturning it by what appeared to him to be the truth and by the arguments in its favor. But neither Celsus nor anyone else, taking up the question of the nature of names used for the working of powers, will be able to give the exact account of them and prove that men were contemptible whose very names have power — not only among their own people, but among foreigners as well.

He ought also to have set out, side by side, how we twist what concerns these names for the ignorant and the unthinking, and so deceive our hearers, as he supposes, while he himself — who boasts that he is neither ignorant nor unthinking — gives the true interpretation of them. And in his remarks about these names, the names from which the Jews trace their descent, he tossed off this: “Never in all the long time before has there been any dispute about names of this kind; but now the Jews dispute about them with certain others.” He does not name them. So let anyone who wishes show who these rival claimants are, and what plausible arguments they bring against the Jews, to prove that Jews and Christians do not report soundly about these matters and about the men the names belong to, and that there are others who have grasped them most wisely and most truly. But we are convinced that no one will be able to do anything of the sort, since it is plain that the names were taken from the Hebrew language, which is found among Jews alone.

After this Celsus sets out material from history outside the divine word: the claims to great antiquity made by many peoples — Athenians, Egyptians, Arcadians, Phrygians — who say that certain earth-born men appeared among them, and who each bring forward proofs of it. Then he says: “The Jews, huddled together in some corner of Palestine, completely uneducated, and never having heard that these things were sung long ago by Hesiod and countless other inspired men, put together the most incredible and graceless stories: that a certain man was molded by the hands of God and inflated with breath, that a woman came out of his side, that God gave certain commands, that a serpent worked against them, and that the serpent got the better of God’s orders. They tell a myth as if to old women, and most impiously they make God out to be weak from the very start, unable to persuade even one man, whom he had molded himself.” [h]

By all this our man of wide reading and much learning — Celsus, who charges Jews and Christians with ignorance and lack of education — plainly shows how exactly he knew the dates of every writer, Greek and foreign. He supposes that Hesiod and the countless others he names as inspired men are older than Moses and Moses’ writings — Moses, who is shown to be far older than the Trojan war.

So it is not the Jews who put together the most incredible and graceless accounts about the earth-born man. It is Celsus’ inspired men: Hesiod and his other countless companions, who had neither learned nor heard the far older and far more honorable accounts in Palestine, and who wrote the sort of histories of ancient times that their Theogonies are — assigning birth to gods, so far as it lay in their power, and countless other things besides. With good reason, then, Plato throws Homer and the men who write poems like his out of his own Republic, as men who wear the young down. Plato is plainly not of the opinion that men who left such poems behind were inspired. But the man who is better able to judge than Plato — Celsus the Epicurean, if this is the same Celsus who also put together two other books against the Christians — perhaps out of sheer contentiousness with us, gave the name “inspired” to men he did not think inspired.

He charges us, further, with bringing in a man molded by the hands of God. But the book of Genesis takes up no hands of God, either at the making of the man or at his molding. It is Job and David who say, “Your hands made me and molded me.” It would take a long discussion to set out what the men who said this had in mind, both about the difference between making and molding and about the hands of God. People who do not understand these expressions, and others like them, in the divine writings suppose that we attach to the God who is over all things the same sort of shape a human being has; and on their reckoning it follows that we think there are wings on the body of God as well, since our Scriptures, taken by the letter, say that about God too. But the work in hand does not require us to interpret these. We have made them a subject of investigation, as best we could, in their proper place, in the commentary on Genesis. [l]

Then see the malice of Celsus in what follows. Our Scripture says, of the molding of the man, “And he breathed into his face a breath of life, and the man became a living soul.” He, wanting maliciously to tear down the phrase “he breathed into his face a breath of life” — which he has not even understood, in what way it was said — wrote that they composed a story of a man molded by the hands of God and inflated with breath. He did it so that anyone taking “inflated” to be used the way wineskins are inflated might laugh at “he breathed into his face a breath of life” — a thing said figuratively, and needing an explanation to show that God gave the man a share of his own incorruptible Spirit, as it says: “Your incorruptible Spirit is in all things.”

Then, since his purpose was to speak ill of what is written, he made a mockery of this too: “And God cast a trance upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs and filled up flesh in its place; and the rib that he took from Adam he built into a woman” — and what follows. He did not even set out the wording, which could have brought a hearer up short and shown him that it is said with a turn of meaning. And he was not willing even to grant that such things are read as allegory, although further on he says that “the more reasonable among Jews and Christians are ashamed of these things and try somehow to allegorize them.” [o]

We may say to him: are the things your inspired Hesiod said about the woman, in the shape of a myth, to be taken as allegory — that she was given to men by Zeus as an evil in exchange for the fire — while the woman who was taken from the side of the man after he slept in the trance, and was built by God, appears to you to have been told with no reason in it at all and nothing hidden? It is not fair-minded to refrain from laughing at those as a myth, and to admire them instead as philosophy in the dress of a myth, and then to fasten your mind on the bare wording of these and sneer at them and think there will be nothing in them worth a word. For if we must find fault with things said in hidden meanings simply because of the bare wording, see whether Hesiod’s lines are not more likely to earn a laugh — Hesiod, a man who, as you say, was inspired, and who wrote this:

And what is said about the jar is laughable on the face of it:

To the man who allegorizes these things solemnly — whether he hits the mark in his allegory or not — we will say: is it only Greeks who are allowed to do philosophy in hidden meanings? Or Egyptians as well, and all the foreigners who take pride in mysteries and in truth? And do only the Jews seem to you, along with their lawgiver and their historians, to be the most unintelligent of all men, this the one nation to have received no share in any power of God — the nation that was taught so magnificently to climb up to the uncreated nature of God, and to look at him alone, and to expect their hopes from him alone?

Celsus makes a comedy of the serpent as well, as working against the commands God gave the man; he takes the account to be a myth like the ones handed on to old women. And he deliberately did not name the paradise of God, or say that God is described as planting it “in Eden toward the east,” and that afterwards there came up “out of the ground every tree beautiful to look at and good for food, and the tree of life in the middle of the paradise, and the tree of knowing good and evil” — and what is said after that, which by itself could stir a fair-minded reader to see that none of this is given a turn of meaning without dignity. So let us set beside it what is said about Eros in Plato’s Symposium: said by Socrates, and put into the mouth of Socrates as more dignified than what all the others at the Symposium said about him. Plato’s words run like this: “When Aphrodite was born, the gods were feasting, the rest of them and Porus, the son of Metis. When they had dined, Penia came to beg, as people do when there is a banquet, and she stood about the doors. Now Porus, drunk on nectar (for there was no wine yet), went into the garden of Zeus and, weighed down, lay asleep. So Penia, plotting because of her own lack of means to make a child by Porus, lay down beside him and conceived Eros. That is why Eros has become the follower and attendant of Aphrodite: he was begotten at her birthday feast, and at the same time he is by nature a lover of the beautiful, since Aphrodite too is beautiful. Being, then, the son of Porus and Penia, Eros stands in this condition. First, he is always poor, and far from being soft and beautiful, as most people suppose, but hard and grimy and barefoot and homeless, always lying on the ground with nothing under him, sleeping in the open beside doorways and along the roads: he has his mother’s nature, and lives always with want. But after his father he is a plotter against the beautiful and the good, being brave and headlong and intense, a formidable hunter, forever weaving contrivances, a man who longs for wisdom and is full of resource, doing philosophy his whole life through, a formidable sorcerer and mixer of drugs and a sophist as well. He is not by nature immortal, nor mortal either: on the same day, at one time he flourishes and lives, when he has plenty, and at another he dies, and comes back to life again through his father’s nature. But what he gets always slips away, so that Eros is never without resources and never rich. And again, he stands midway between wisdom and ignorance.” [t]

Now if the people who read this were to imitate the malice of Celsus — and may that be far from Christians — they would laugh the myth down and make the great Plato a matter of mockery. But if they examine in a philosophical spirit what is said in the shape of a myth, and can find Plato’s intention, they will be struck by the way he was able to hide the doctrines that seemed great to him — hide them, because of the crowd, in the shape of a myth — and yet to say them as he had to for the people who know how to find, out of myths, what the man who wove them together meant about the truth.

I have set out this myth from Plato because of “the garden of Zeus” in it, which seems to have something like the paradise of God about it; and because of Penia, who is put beside the serpent in our account; and because of Porus, plotted against by Penia, beside the man plotted against by the serpent. It is not at all clear whether Plato fell in with these things by chance, or whether — as some think — on his journey to Egypt he met people who philosophize about Jewish matters and learned some things from them, and kept some of it and altered the rest, being careful not to offend the Greeks by keeping everything that belongs to the wisdom of the Jews: a people the crowd slandered because of the strangeness of their laws and their peculiar way of governing themselves. But this was not the moment to explain either Plato’s myth or the business of the serpent and the paradise of God and everything recorded to have happened in it; we have worked at those, as far as we could, in their proper place, in the commentaries on Genesis.