Hidden Meanings and Mortal Bodies

If Celsus had read the Scriptures with an unbought mind, he would not have said that our writings are not the sort that can take an allegory. For the prophetic books, in which the matter of the histories is written up — though not written up as history is — can bring a man round to seeing that the histories too were composed with a figurative sense in view, and were framed with the greatest skill, aimed both at the crowd of simpler believers and at the few who are willing, or even able, to examine things with understanding. And if it were the people of our own day, the ones Celsus reckons the more reasonable among Jews and Christians, who were reading the writings as allegory, he might perhaps be suspected of having something plausible to say. But since it is the fathers and authors of the teachings themselves who give such things a figurative meaning, what else is there to suppose except that they were written in such a way as to be read figuratively — and that this is the sense that comes first? [a]

We will set out a few instances out of a great many, to show that Celsus lays an empty charge against our writings when he says they cannot take an allegory. Paul, the apostle of Jesus, says: “It is written in the law: You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain. Is God concerned about oxen? Or does he say it entirely for our sake? For it was written for our sake, that the one who plows ought to plow in hope, and the one who threshes, in hope of having a share.” And in another place the same man says: “For it is written: For this reason a man will leave his father and his mother and will be joined to his wife, and the two will be one flesh. This mystery is great; but I am speaking of Christ and of the church.” And again, somewhere else: “And we know that all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.” Then, explaining the account of the manna and the account of the water that is recorded as having come out of the rock against all expectation, he says this: “And all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from a spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.”

And Asaph, showing that the histories in Exodus and in Numbers are riddles and parables, begins in this way — as it is written in the book of Psalms — when he is about to bring those histories to mind: “Attend, my people, to my law; incline your ear to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter riddles from the beginning, all that we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us.”

And again: if the law of Moses had had nothing written in it that is shown through hidden meanings, the prophet would not have said in his prayer to God, “Uncover my eyes, and I will observe the wonders out of your law.” As it is, he knew that a veil of ignorance lies upon the heart of those who read and do not understand what is meant figuratively; and that veil is taken away by the gift of God, when God hears the man who has done everything in his own power, and who by long habit has trained his senses to tell good from bad, and who says over and over again in his prayer, “Uncover my eyes, and I will observe the wonders out of your law.” [h]

And who is there that reads of the dragon living in the Egyptian river, and of the fish lurking in its scales, or of the mountains of Egypt being filled from Pharaoh’s dung, and is not led on then and there to ask who it is that fills the mountains of the Egyptians with so much of his stinking dung; and what the mountains of the Egyptians are; and what the rivers in Egypt are, the rivers that same Pharaoh boasts of when he says, “The rivers are mine, and I made them”; and who the dragon is, to match the rivers as the interpretation will show them to be; and what the fish in his scales are? And why should I labor at greater length over what needs no laboring? To such things this applies: “Who is wise, and he will understand these things? Or prudent, and he will know them?”

I have drawn the discussion out at some length because I wanted to show that Celsus was not sound when he said that the more reasonable ones among Jews and Christians try somehow to allegorize these stories, but that some of the stories will not take an allegory at all and are, on the face of them, the silliest of fables. The tales of the Greeks are far more so — not only the silliest but the most impious. For our accounts have been aimed at the crowd of simpler people as well, and that is what the men who made up the Greek fictions did not guard against. And so it does Plato credit that he throws myths of that sort, and poems of that sort, out of his own republic.

It seems to me that Celsus has in fact heard that there are treatises in existence which contain the allegories of the law. If he had read them, he would not have said: “At any rate, the allegories that are supposed to have been written about these stories are far more shameful and more absurd than the fables themselves, since they join together things that cannot be fitted together in any way at all, and do it with an astonishing and altogether senseless folly.” [k]

He seems to mean the treatises of Philo, or even older ones, such as those of Aristobulus. But my guess is that Celsus has not read the books. In many places they seem to me to have hit the mark so well that even the men who study philosophy among the Greeks would have been won over by what is said in them; for in them not only is the style well worked, but so are the thoughts and the teachings, and the handling of what Celsus supposes to be fables out of the Scriptures.

I know of Numenius the Pythagorean too, a man who expounded Plato far better than others and who championed the teachings of Pythagoras. In many places in his writings he sets out the things of Moses and the prophets and gives them a figurative meaning that is not implausible — as in the work called Epops, and in the books On Numbers and On Place. And in the third book of his On the Good he sets out an account about Jesus as well, without giving his name, and reads it figuratively; whether he hit the mark or missed it, another time will do for saying. He sets out the account about Moses and Jannes and Jambres too. But we do not plume ourselves on that. We do approve of him over Celsus and the other Greeks, because he was willing, out of a love of learning, to examine our writings as well, and was moved by them as writings meant to be read figuratively, and not as foolish ones.

Next after this he picks out, from all the treatises that contain allegories and expositions in a style not to be despised, the cheapest one — one that can indeed contribute something toward the many and the simpler sort, for the sake of their faith, but is not able to move those who have more understanding. And he says: “Such as the Dispute of a certain Papiscus and Jason, which I have come to know — a thing that deserves not laughter but rather pity and hatred. It is not my business to refute these things; they are plain enough, I suppose, to everyone, especially if anyone would endure and bear to listen to the treatises themselves. What I want to teach instead is this, about nature: that God made nothing mortal. Whatever is immortal is God’s work, and the mortal things are theirs. And the soul is God’s work, but the nature of body is different. In that respect the body of a bat, or of a maggot, or of a frog, or of a man will differ in no way; for the matter is the same, and their corruptible part is alike.” [m]

All the same, I could wish that anyone at all who has heard Celsus talking so violently, and asserting that the treatise entitled A Dispute of Jason and Papiscus about Christ deserves not laughter but hatred, would take the little book in his hands and endure and bear to listen to what is in it, so that out of the book itself he might condemn Celsus, finding nothing in it that deserves hatred. If a man reads it with an unbought mind, he will find that the book does not even move anyone to laughter. In it a Christian is recorded as discussing with a Jew out of the Jewish Scriptures and showing that the prophecies about the Christ fit Jesus — and the other man holds up his side of the argument in no ignoble way, and not unbecomingly to the Jewish part he is playing.

I do not know how he could bring together things that do not mix, and that cannot naturally occur at the same time in a human being, and then say that that book deserves both pity and hatred. Everyone will agree that a man who is pitied is not hated while he is being pitied, and that a man who is hated is not pitied while he is being hated. Celsus says it is not his business to refute these things because he thinks they are plain enough to everyone even before any reasoned refutation is brought against them — plainly worthless, and deserving both pity and hatred. [r]

But we urge the man who reads this defense, written against Celsus’ accusation, to bear with a hearing of our own writings, and, as far as he is able, to guess from what is written at the purpose of the men who wrote, and at their conscience and their frame of mind. He will find men who contend fiercely for what they have taken to be true, and some of them making it plain that they are writing down a history they had themselves seen and got hold of, one that was beyond the ordinary course of things and worth writing down for the benefit of those who would hear it.

Or let a man dare to say that it is not the spring and the source of every benefit to trust the God of all things, and to do everything with a view to pleasing him in whatever it may be, and not to entertain so much as a thought that displeases him — seeing that not only our words and our deeds but our very reasonings will come to judgment. And what other argument could bring human nature round to living well more forcibly than this faith, or this conviction, that the God who is over all watches everything: not only what we say and do, but what we think as well? Let anyone who likes set another road beside it, one that turns people round and makes them better at the same time — not one man or a second, but, as far as its power reaches, as many as it possibly can — so that by setting the two roads side by side he may see exactly which argument it is that disposes a man toward the good.

Now in the passage of Celsus that I set out, which paraphrases parts of the Timaeus, certain things stand written: that God made nothing mortal but only the immortal things, and the mortal things are the works of others; and that the soul is God’s work, but the nature of body is different; and that a man’s body will differ in no way from a bat’s, or a maggot’s, or a frog’s, since the matter is the same and their corruptible part is alike. Come then, let us take these points up briefly, and put to the test a man who either will not own his own Epicurean opinion, or — as one person might say — later changed over to better views, or else — as another might say — has nothing in common with Celsus the Epicurean but the name. [u]

For a man who lays down such things, and who sets out to contradict not only us but a school of philosophers of no mean sort, the followers of Zeno of Citium, ought to have established that the bodies of animals are not works of God, and that the great skill in them has not come from the first Mind. And about plants — so many and of every kind, governed by a nature within them that has no impressions of its own, and brought into being for a use, in the whole scheme of things, that is not to be despised, the use of human beings and of the animals that serve human beings, whatever else may be true of them — about these he ought not merely to have made a declaration, but to have taught us that it was no perfect Mind that put so many qualities into the matter of plants.

And once he had made gods the craftsmen of all bodies, on the ground that the soul alone is God’s work, why was it not the next step for a man who parcels out so many acts of making and hands them over to many, to establish by some argument not to be despised what the differences among these gods are — some of them building the bodies of men, others, let us say, of cattle, and others of wild beasts? Seeing gods as the makers of dragons and asps and basilisks, and some of them makers of each of these down to its lowest kind, and others makers of each plant and each herb by its kind, he ought to have stated the causes of the divisions.

For if he had given himself to a careful testing of the questions involved, perhaps he would either have kept one God as the craftsman of all things, who made each thing for a purpose and for a reason; or, failing to keep that, he would have seen what answer he had to make about corruptibility, a thing that is in its own nature indifferent, and would have seen that there is nothing absurd in a world made up of unlike things having come from one craftsman, who builds the differences of the kinds to the advantage of the whole. Or at the very least he ought not to have made any pronouncement at all on so great a doctrine, if he was not going to establish what he had undertaken to teach — unless, of course, the man who charges people with offering bare faith wanted us to believe his own pronouncements, though what he promised was not to pronounce but to teach.

And I have not yet said this: that if he had endured and borne, as he puts it, to listen to the writings of Moses and the prophets, he would have noticed why “God made” is set down for heaven and earth and for what is called the firmament, and also for the lights and the stars; and after these for the great sea creatures and for every living thing among the creeping animals that the waters brought forth according to their kinds, and for every winged bird according to its kind; and next for the wild beasts of the earth according to their kind, and the cattle according to their kind, and all the creeping things of the earth according to their kind; and last of all for man. But “he made” is not said of the rest. About light the account is content with “and there was light”; about the gathering of all the water under the whole sky into one place, with “and it was so”; and likewise about the things that sprouted from the earth, where it says, “and the earth brought forth vegetation of grass sowing seed according to its kind and according to its likeness, and a fruit tree making fruit whose seed is in it, according to its kind, upon the earth.” [z]

He would have asked, too, whether the recorded orders of God about each part of the world coming into being were spoken to one or to more than one. And he would not have accused so lightly what is written in these passages — written by Moses, or, as we would put it, by the divine Spirit in Moses, from whom he also had his prophesying — of being unintelligible and of holding no hidden understanding; since he knew “the things that are, and the things that will be, and the things that were before,” and knew them better than the seers the poets speak of as having such knowledge.

Further, since Celsus says that the soul is God’s work but the nature of body is different, and that in this respect the body of a bat, or of a maggot, or of a frog, or of a man will differ in no way, since the matter is the same and their corruptible part is alike — this too has to be said in answer to that argument of his. If, because the same matter underlies the body of a bat or a maggot or a frog or a man, these bodies will differ in no way from one another, then plainly their bodies will differ in no way from the body of the sun, or of the moon, or of the stars, or of the sky, or of anything else the Greeks call a god that can be perceived by the senses. For the same matter underlies all bodies, and taken by itself it has no quality and no shape; and where it gets its qualities from I do not know, on Celsus’ showing, since he will not have anything corruptible be a work of God. For the corruptible part of anything whatever that has come to be out of the same underlying matter must, according to Celsus, be alike by his own argument. [ac]

Unless, that is, Celsus, hard pressed here, will jump away from Plato — who makes the soul out of a certain mixing bowl — and take refuge with Aristotle and the men of the Peripatos, who say that the aether has no matter in it and is of a fifth nature alongside the four elements. Both the Platonists and the Stoics have made a stand against that argument in no ignoble way; and we too, whom Celsus despises, will make a stand, since we are required to expound and to establish what is said in the prophet in these words: “The heavens will perish, but you will remain; and they will all grow old like a garment, and like a cloak you will roll them up, and they will be changed. But you are the same.”

But this much is enough against Celsus, who declared that the soul is God’s work while the nature of body is different — an argument from which it followed that the body of a bat, or of a maggot, or of a frog differs in no way from the aetherial body.