Wrath and the Doctor’s Knife

I do not know why Celsus, writing against us, thought it useful to toss in a doctrine that needs a great deal of proof — or at least of what looks like proof — to establish, as far as it can be established, that “the round of mortal things is the same from beginning to end, and that by fixed cycles the same things must always have happened, and be happening, and be going to happen.” If that is true, what is up to us is done away with. [a]

For if by fixed cycles the same things must always have happened, and be happening, and be going to happen in the round of mortal things, then plainly Socrates must always be doing philosophy, and must always be charged with introducing strange divinities and corrupting the young; Anytus and Meletus must always be his accusers; and the council on the Areopagus must always vote him death by hemlock. In the same way, by the appointed cycles, Phalaris must always play the tyrant, and Alexander of Pherae must always commit the same cruelties, and the men condemned into the bull of Phalaris must always be bellowing inside it. If all that is granted, I do not see how what is up to us can be preserved, or how praise and blame can make any sense.

And this may be said to Celsus against such a position. If “the round of mortal things is always the same from beginning to end, and by fixed cycles the same things must always have happened, and be happening, and be going to happen,” then by the appointed cycles Moses must always come out of Egypt with the Jewish people; and Jesus must come again to live among men and do the same things he has done — not once, but countless times, as the cycles come around; and Christians will be the same people in the appointed cycles; and Celsus will write this book of his again, having written it countless times before.

Now Celsus says that it is only the round of mortal things that must, by the appointed cycles, always have happened, and be happening, and be going to happen. But most of the Stoics say that this holds not only of the round of mortal things but of immortal ones as well, and of the beings they count as gods. For after the burning up of the whole — which has happened countless times and will happen countless times again — the same arrangement of everything, from beginning to end, has been and will be. [d]

The men of the Stoa, trying somehow to patch up the absurdities in this, say — I do not know how — that everyone in a given cycle will be exactly like the people of the earlier cycles, so that Socrates does not come to be again, but someone exactly like Socrates, who will marry a woman exactly like Xanthippe and be accused by men exactly like Anytus and Meletus. I do not understand how the world can always be the same world, and not merely one world exactly like another, while the things in it are not the same things but only exactly alike. But the main argument against what Celsus says, and against the Stoa, will be examined more suitably somewhere else, since it does not fit the present occasion or the purpose in hand to spend more time on it.

After this he says that “the visible things have not been given to man either, but each thing comes to be and perishes for the safety of the whole, passing by that exchange I spoke of before, out of one thing into another.” There is no need to spend more time refuting this; the refutation has been set out already, as well as I could set it out. An answer has been given to this too: “neither the good things nor the bad among mortals can become fewer or more.” And this has been dealt with as well: “God does not need any newer correction.” [g]

But it is not as a man who has built something badly and made a poor job of the workmanship that God brings correction to the world, when he cleans it with a flood or a burning. He does it to stop the flood of wickedness from spreading further — and, I think, to make it disappear in a wholly ordered way, for the benefit of the whole. Whether, once wickedness has disappeared, there is any sense in its coming into being again is a question to be examined in a treatise of its own.

So God does always want, by a newer correction, to take up what has gone wrong. Even though in the making of the universe everything was arranged by him in the most beautiful and secure way, he still needed some healing art for those sick with wickedness, and for the whole world, polluted, as it were, by it. And nothing has been neglected by God, or will be, since at each moment he does what it is fitting for him to do in a world that turns and changes. As a farmer does different work on the land and on the things growing out of it according to the different seasons of the year, so God manages whole ages as though they were single years, so to speak, doing in each of them whatever the reasonableness of the whole requires — a thing grasped exactly as it truly is, and carried through, by God alone.

Celsus has put forward an argument about evils along these lines: “Even if something seems evil to you, it is not yet clear that it is evil; for you do not know what is of benefit to you, or to someone else, or to the whole.” There is something careful in the argument, and it hints that the nature of evils is not wholly bad, since what is counted evil in individual cases may possibly be of benefit to the whole. [j]

Still, so that no one may mishear what is said and find an excuse in it for going to ruin, as though his own wickedness were useful to the whole, or at least could be, let this be said. While what is up to each of us is preserved, God may use the wickedness of worthless men for the ordering of the whole, ranking them so as to serve the whole; and such a man is nonetheless blameworthy, and it is as a blameworthy man that he has been put to a use that anyone would pray to be spared, though it is useful to the whole. It is as if someone were to say, in the case of a city, that a man who had committed such and such crimes, and had been sentenced for them to public works useful to everyone, was doing something useful for the whole city, while he himself had come to be in a business to be prayed against, one that no one with even moderate sense would want to be in.

Paul too, the apostle of Jesus, teaches us that even the most worthless men will contribute something to the need of the whole, though by their own doing they will be among the things to be prayed against; and that the most earnest men will be of the greatest use to the whole, and by their own doing will be stationed in the noblest place. He says: “In a great house there are not only vessels of gold and silver but also of wood and of clay, some for honor and some for dishonor. So if anyone cleanses himself, he will be a vessel for honor, made holy, useful to the Master, prepared for every good work.” I thought it necessary to set these things out in answer to “even if something seems evil to you, it is not yet clear that it is evil; for you do not know what is of benefit to you, or to someone else,” so that no one may take from what has been said here an excuse for sinning, on the ground that his sin will make him useful to the whole.

In what comes next, Celsus does not understand that the words used about God in the Scriptures speak of him as though he had human feelings, and so he ridicules the passages where words of anger are spoken against the ungodly and threats against those who have sinned. This has to be said in answer. When we talk with very small children we do not aim at what we ourselves are capable of in speaking; we fit ourselves to the weakness of the ones in front of us, and we both say and do whatever seems to us useful for turning children, as children, around and setting them right. In the same way the word of God appears to have managed what is written down, measuring what was fitting in the telling by the capacity of the hearers and by what would do them good. [l]

And in general, about this manner of telling things concerning God, it is said in Deuteronomy: “The Lord your God bore with your ways, as a man would bear with the ways of his son.” It is as if the word bears the ways of a man, for the benefit of men, when it speaks like this; for the crowd had no need of a God who would say the things that had to be said to people like that in a manner fitting to himself. But anyone who cares about seeing clearly what the divine writings say will find in them the spiritual things spoken to those who are called spiritual, by comparing the intent of what is said to weaker minds with what is announced to quicker ones — both often lying in the same passage, for the man who knows how to hear it.

We do name a wrath of God, then. But we do not say that it is a feeling in him; we say it is something taken up in order to discipline, by sterner methods of training, people who have sinned so much and in such ways. That what is called the wrath of God and what is named his anger do discipline, and that this is what the word of Scripture means, is clear from what is said in the sixth psalm: “Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger, nor discipline me in your wrath”; and in Jeremiah: “Discipline us, Lord, but in judgment and not in anger, so that you may not make us few.” [o]

And anyone who reads in the second book of Kingdoms of a “wrath” of God that induced David to number the people, and reads in the first book of Chronicles of “the devil,” and sets the two statements side by side, will see what the “wrath” is put there for — the wrath whose “children” Paul says all men have become, when he says, “We were by nature children of wrath, like the rest.”

And that wrath is not a feeling of God’s, but something each man builds up for himself by the things he does wrong, Paul will make plain in this: “Or do you despise the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God is leading you to repentance? But by your hardness and your unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath and of the revealing of God’s righteous judgment.” How, then, can each man “store up wrath for himself on the day of wrath,” if “wrath” is understood as the feeling? And how could the feeling of anger discipline anyone? Besides, the word that teaches us not to be angry at all — that says in the thirty-sixth psalm, “Give up wrath and let anger go,” and that says through Paul, “You too, put them all away: wrath, anger, malice, slander, filthy talk” — would not fasten on God himself the very feeling it wants us rid of altogether.

That what is said about the wrath of God is a figure of speech is clear from the fact that his sleep is written of too. Waking him, as it were, out of it, the prophet says, “Get up! Why are you sleeping, Lord?” and again, “And the Lord woke up like one who sleeps, like a strong man sleeping off his wine.” If, then, “sleep” means something else, and not what the ready sense of the word shows, why should “wrath” not be understood in the same way?

The threats, too, are announcements of what will meet the worthless — as if someone were to call a doctor’s words threats when he tells the sick, “I will cut you and put searing irons to you, unless you obey my rules and eat and live the way I direct.” So we do not attach human feelings to God, and we do not hold irreverent opinions about him; nor do we go astray when we set out the accounts of him, drawn from the writings themselves and compared with one another. And those among us who act as ambassadors of the word with any sense have no other aim than to rid their hearers, as far as they can, of foolish simplicity, and to make them sensible.

Following on from his failure to understand what is written about the wrath of God, he says: “Isn’t it ridiculous? A man got angry with the Jews and destroyed them all, from the youths up, and burned their city — that is how completely they counted for nothing. But the greatest God, so they say, being angry and enraged and making threats, sends his own Son, and he suffers what he suffers?” [y]

If the Jews, after doing to Jesus what they dared to do against him, perished from the youths up and had their city burned, they suffered this from no other wrath than the one they stored up for themselves — the judgment of God against them having come about by God’s own settled order, and being called “wrath” by an ancestral custom of the Hebrews. And the Son of the greatest God does suffer, and suffers willingly, for the salvation of men, as has been said in the earlier pages as well as I could say it.

After this he says: “But so that my argument may not be about the Jews alone — that is not my subject — but about the whole of nature, as I promised, I will make what I have already said plainer.” Who, coming across this, if he is a modest man and feels how weak a human being is, would not shy away from the offensiveness of a man who promises to give an account of the whole of nature, and who boasts here just as he boasted when he dared to put that title on his book? But let us see what he promises to say about the whole of nature, and what he is going to make plain.

At length in what follows he blames us for saying that God made everything for man. From the study of animals, and from the shrewdness that shows in them, he wants to prove that everything came to be no more for men than for the irrational animals. [ab]

He seems to me to be doing something like what people do who, out of hatred for their enemies, accuse them of the very things for which their own dearest friends are praised. For as in those cases the hatred blinds them, so that they cannot see that they are accusing their dearest friends by the words with which they think they are speaking ill of their enemies, so too Celsus, muddled in his reasoning, has not seen that he is also accusing the philosophers of the Stoa — who are not wrong to put man, and rational nature in general, ahead of all irrational things, and who say that it was for the sake of rational nature that providence made everything, as its first concern.

Rational beings, then, being the first concern, stand where children being born stand, and the irrational and soulless things stand where the afterbirth stands, which is formed along with the child. And I think it is like this. In cities, the men who look after the goods and the market look after them for no one but human beings, though dogs and other irrational animals get a share of the plenty on the side; in the same way providence has rational beings as its first concern, and it follows that irrational ones too enjoy what is done for the sake of men. And as a man is wrong who says that the market officials look after men no more than dogs, since dogs also get their share of the plenty in the goods, so Celsus and those who think as he does are far more irreverent toward the God who takes thought for rational beings when they say: “Why should these things come into being as food for men any more than for the plants and trees and grass and thorns?”