The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire Part 32

Of the personal history of Celsus nothing can be said, but the features of his mind are well-marked. He was above all a man of culture,--candid, scholarly and cool. He knew and admired the philosophical writings of ancient Greece, he had some knowledge of Egypt, and he also took the pains to read the books of the Jews and the Christians. On the whole he leant to Plato, but, like many philosophic spirits, he found destructive criticism more easy than the elaboration of a system of his own. Yet here we must use caution, for the object he had set before him was not to be served by individual speculation.

It was immaterial what private opinions he might hold, for his great purpose was the abandonment of particularism and the fusion of all parties for the general good. Private judgment run mad was the mark of all Christians, orthodox and heretical,--"men walling themselves off and isolating themselves from mankind"[4]--and his thesis was that the whole spirit of the movement was wrong. A good citizen's part was loyal acceptance of the common belief, deviation from which was now shown to impair the solidarity of the civilized world. Of course such a position is never taken by really independent thinkers; but it is the normal standpoint of men to whom practical {241} affairs are of more moment than speculative precision--men, who are at bottom sceptical, and have little interest in problems which they have given up as insoluble. Celsus was satisfied with the established order, alike in the regions of thought and of government. He mistrusted new movements--not least when they were so conspicuously alien to the Greek mind as the new superst.i.tion that came from Palestine. He has all the ancient contempt of the Greek for the barbarian, and, while he is influenced by the high motive of care for the State, there are traces of irritation in his tone which speak of personal feeling. The folly of the movement provoked him.

[Sidenote: The Christian propaganda]

This, he says, is the language of the Christians: "'Let no cultured person draw near, none wise, none sensible; for all that kind of thing we count evil; but if any man is ignorant, if any is wanting in sense and culture, if any is a fool, let him come boldly.' Such people they spontaneously avow to be worthy of their G.o.d; and, so doing, they show that it is only the simpletons, the ign.o.ble, the senseless, slaves and women-folk and children, whom they wish to persuade, or can persuade."[5] Those who summon men to the other initiations (_teletas_), and offer purification from sins, proclaim: "Whosoever has clean hands and is wise of speech," or "Whosoever is pure from defilement, whose soul is conscious of no guilt, who has lived well and righteously." "But let us hear what sort these people invite; 'Whosoever is a sinner, or unintelligent, or a fool, in a word, whosoever is G.o.d-forsaken (_kakodaimon_), him the kingdom of G.o.d will receive.' Now whom do you mean by the sinner but the wicked, thief, house-breaker, poisoner, temple-robber, grave-robber? Whom else would a brigand invite to join him?"[6] But the Christian propaganda is still more odious. "We see them in our own houses, wool dressers, cobblers, and fullers, the most uneducated and vulgar persons, not daring to say a word in the presence of their masters who are older and wiser; but when they get hold of the children in private, and silly women with them, they are wonderfully eloquent,--to the effect that the children must not listen to their father, but believe _them_ and be taught by _them_; ... that they alone know how to live, and if the children will listen to them, they will be happy themselves, and will make {242} their home blessed. But if, while they are speaking, they see some of the children's teachers, some wiser person or their Father coming, the more cautious of them will be gone in a moment, and the more impudent will egg on the children to throw off the reins--whispering to them that, while their father or their teachers are about, they will not and cannot teach them anything good ... they must come with the women, and the little children that play with them, to the women's quarters, or the cobbler's shop, or the fuller's, to receive perfect knowledge. And that is how they persuade them."[7]

They are like quacks who warn men against the doctor--"take care that none of you touches Science (_episteue_); Science is a bad thing; knowledge (_gnosis_) makes men fall from health of soul."[8] They will not argue about what they believe--"they always bring in their 'Do not examine, but believe,' and 'Thy faith shall save thee'"[9]--"believe that he, whom I set forth to you, is the son of G.o.d, even though he was bound in the most dishonourable way, and punished in the most shameful, though yesterday or the day before he weltered in the most disgraceful fashion before the eyes of all men--so much the more believe!"[10] So far all the Christian sects are at one.

And the absurdity of it! "Why was he not sent to the sinless as well as to sinners? What harm is there in not having sinned?"[11] Listen to them! "The unjust, if he humble himself from his iniquity, G.o.d will receive; but the just, if he look up to Him with virtue from beginning to end, him He will not receive."[12] Celsus' own view is very different--"It must be clear to everybody, I should think, that those, who are sinners by nature and training, none could change, {243} not even by punishment--to say nothing of doing it by pity! For to change nature completely is very difficult; and those who have not sinned are better partners in life."[13] Christians in fact make G.o.d into a sentimentalist--"the slave of pity for those who mourn"[14] to the point of injustice.

[Sidenote: The ecclesia of worms]

Jews and Christians seem to Celsus "like a swarm of bats--or ants creeping out of their nest--or frogs holding a symposium round a swamp--or worms in conventicle (_ekklesiaxiousi_) in a corner of the mud[15]--debating which of them are the more sinful, and saying 'G.o.d reveals all things to us beforehand and gives us warning; he forsakes the whole universe and the course of the heavenly spheres, and all this great earth he neglects, to dwell with us alone; to us alone he despatches heralds, and never ceases to send and to seek how we may dwell with him for ever.'" "G.o.d is," say the worms, "and after him come we, brought into being by him (_hup' autou gegonotes_), in all things like unto G.o.d; and to us all things are subjected, earth and water and air and stars; for our sake all things are, and to serve us they are appointed." "Some of us," continue the worms ("he means us,"

says Origen)--"some of us sin, so G.o.d will come, or else he will send his son, that he may burn up the unrighteous, and that the rest of us may have eternal life with him."[16]

The radical error in Jewish, and Christian thinking is that it is anthropocentric. They say that G.o.d made all things for man,[17] but this is not at all evident. What we know of the world suggests that if is not more for the sake of man than of the irrational animals that all things were made. Plants and trees and gra.s.s and thorns--do they grow for man a whit more than for the wildest animals? "'Sun and night serve mortals,' says Euripides--but why us more than the ants or the flies? For them, too, night comes for rest, and day for sight and work." If men hunt and eat animals, they in their turn hunt and eat men; and before towns and communities were formed, and tools and weapons made, man's supremacy was even more questionable. "In no way is man better in G.o.d's {244} sight than ants and bees" (iv. 81). The political instinct of man is shared by both these creatures--they have const.i.tutions, cities, wars and victories, and trials at law--as the drones know. Ants have sense enough to secure their corn stores from sprouting: they have graveyards; they can tell one another which way to go--thus they have _logos_ and _ennoiai_ like men. If one looked from heaven, would there be any marked difference between the procedures of men and of ants?[18] But man has an intellectual affinity with G.o.d; the human mind conceives thoughts that are essentially divine (_theias ennoias_).[19] Many animals can make the same claim--"what could one call more divine than to foreknow and foretell the future? And this men learn from the other animals and most of all from birds;" and if this comes from G.o.d, "so much nearer divine intercourse do they seem by nature than we, wiser and more dear to G.o.d." Thus "all things were not made for man, just as they were not made for the lion, nor the eagle, nor the dolphin, but that the universe as a work of G.o.d might be complete and perfect in every part. It is for this cause that the proportions of all things are designed, not for one another (except incidentally) but for the whole. G.o.d's care is for the whole, and this Providence never neglects. The whole does not grow worse, nor does G.o.d periodically turn it to himself. He is not angry on account of men, just as he is not angry because of monkeys or flies; nor does he threaten the things, each of which in measure has its portion of himself."[20]

[Sidenote: The G.o.d of the philosophers]

Celsus held that Christians spoke of G.o.d in a way that was neither holy nor guiltless (_ouch hosios oud' euagos_, iv, 10); and he hinted that they did it to astonish ignorant listeners.[21] For himself, he was impressed with the thought, which Plato has in the _Timaeus_,--a sentence that sums up what many of the most serious and religious natures have felt and will always feel to be profoundly true: "The maker and father of this {245} whole fabric it is hard to find, and, when one has found him, it is impossible to speak of him to all men."[22] Like the men of his day, a true and deep instinct led him to point back to "inspired poets, wise men and philosophers," and to Plato "a more living (_energesteron_) teacher of theology"[23]--"though I should be surprised if you are able to follow him, seeing that you are utterly bound up in the flesh and see nothing clearly."[24] What the sages tell him of G.o.d, he proceeds to set forth.

"Being and becoming, one is intelligible, the other visible, (_noetn, horatn_). Being is the sphere of truth; becoming, of error. Truth is the subject of knowledge; the other of opinion. Thought deals with the intelligible; sight with the visible. The mind recognizes the intelligible, the eye the visible.

"What then the Sun is among things visible,--neither eye, nor sight--yet to the eye the cause of its seeing, to sight the cause of its existing (_synistathai_) by his means, to things visible the cause of their being seen, to all things endowed with sensation the cause of their existence (_ginesthai_) and indeed the cause himself of himself being seen; this HE is among things intelligible (_noeta_), who is neither mind, nor thought, nor knowledge, but to the mind the cause of thinking, to thought of its being by his means, to knowledge of our knowing by his means, to all things intelligible, to truth itself, and to being itself, the cause that they are--out beyond all things (_panton epekeina n_), intelligible only by some unspeakable faculty.

"So have spoken men of mind; and if _you_ can understand anything of it, it is well for you. If you suppose a spirit descends from G.o.d to proclaim divine matters, it would be the spirit that proclaims this, that spirit with which men of old were filled and in consequence announced much that was good. But if you can take in nothing of it, be silent and hide your own ignorance, and do not say that those who see are blind, and those who run are lame, especially when you yourselves are utterly crippled and mutilated in soul, and live in the body--that is to say, in the dead element."[25]

Origen says that Celsus is constantly guilty of tautology, and the reiteration of this charge of ignorance and want of {246} culture is at least frequent enough. Yet if the Christian movement had been confined to people as vulgar and illiterate as he suggests, he might not have thought it worth his while to attack the new religion. His hint of the propagation of the Gospel by slaves in great houses, taken with the names of men of learning and position, whom we know to have been converted, shows the seriousness of the case. But to avoid the further charge which Origen brings against Celsus of "mixing everything up," it will be better to pursue Celsus' thoughts of G.o.d.

"I say nothing new, but what seemed true of old (_palai dedogmena_).

G.o.d is good, and beautiful, and happy, and is in that which is most beautiful and best. If then he 'descends to men,' it involves change for him, and change from good to bad, from beautiful to ugly, from happiness to unhappiness, from what is best to what is worst. Who would choose such a change? For mortality it is only nature to alter and be changed; but for the immortal to abide the same forever. G.o.d would not accept such a change."[26] He presents a dilemma to the Christians; "Either G.o.d really changes, as they say, to a mortal body,--and it has been shown that this is impossible; or he himself does not change, but he makes those who see suppose so, and thus deceives and cheats them. Deceit and lying are evil, taken generally, though in the single case of medicine one might use them in healing friends who are sick or mad--or against enemies in trying to escape danger. But none who is sick or mad is a friend of G.o.d's; nor is G.o.d afraid of any one, so that he should use deceit to escape danger."[27]

G.o.d in fact "made nothing mortal; but G.o.d's works are such things as are immortal, and _they_ have made the mortal. The soul is G.o.d's work, but the nature of the body is different, and in this respect there is no difference between the bodies of bat, worm, frog, and man. The matter is the same and the corruptible part is alike."[28]

[Sidenote: G.o.d's anger]

The Christian conception of the "descent of G.o.d" is repulsive to Celsus, for it means contact with matter. "G.o.d's anger," too, is an impious idea, for anger is a pa.s.sion; and {247} Celsus makes havoc of the Old Testament pa.s.sages where G.o.d is spoken of as having human pa.s.sions (_anthropopathes_), closing with an _argumentum ad hominem_--"Is it not absurd that a man [t.i.tus], angry with the Jews, slew all their youth and burnt their land, and so they came to nothing; but G.o.d Almighty, as they say, angry and vexed and threatening, sends his son and endures such things as they tell?"[29] Furthermore, the Christian account of G.o.d's anger at man's sin involves a presumption that Christians really know what evil is. "Now the origin of evil is not to be easily known by one who has no philosophy. It is enough to tell the common people that evil is not from G.o.d, but is inherent in matter, and is a fellow-citizen (_empoliteuetai_) of mortality. The circuit of mortal things is from beginning to end the same, and in the appointed circles the same must always of necessity have been and be and be again."[30] "Nor could the good or evil elements in mortal things become either less or greater. G.o.d does not need to restore all things anew. G.o.d is not like a man, that, because he has faultily contrived or executed without skill, he should try to amend the world."[31] In short, "even if a thing seems to you to be bad, it is not yet clear that it is bad; for you do not know what is of advantage to yourself, or to another, or to the whole."[32] Besides would G.o.d need to descend in order to {248} learn what was going on among men?[33] Or was he dissatisfied with the attention he received, and did he really come down to show off like a _nouveau riche_ (_oi neoploutoi_)?"[34] Then why not long before?[35]

Should Christians ask him how G.o.d is to be seen, he has his answer: "If you will be blind to sense and see with the mind, if you will turn from the flesh and waken the eyes of the soul, thus and thus only shall you see G.o.d."[36] In words that Origen approves, he says, "from G.o.d we must never and in no way depart, neither by day nor by night, in public or in private, in every word and work perpetually, but, with these and without, let the soul ever be strained towards G.o.d."[37] "If any man bid you, in the worship of G.o.d, either to do impiety, or to say anything base, you must never be persuaded by him. Rather endure every torture and submit to every death, than think anything unholy of G.o.d, let alone say it."[38]

Thus the fundamental conceptions of the Christians are shown to be wrong, but more remains to be done. Let us a.s.sume for purposes of discussion that there could be a "descent of G.o.d"--would it be what the Christians say it was? "G.o.d is great and hard to be seen," he makes the Christian say, "so he put his own spirit into a body like ours and sent it down here that we might hear and learn from it."[39] If that is true, he says, then G.o.d's son cannot be immortal, since the nature of a spirit is not such as to be permanent; nor could Jesus have risen again in the body, "for G.o.d would not have received back the spirit which he gave when it was polluted with the nature of the body."[40] "If he had wished to send down a spirit from himself, why did he need to breathe it into the womb of a woman? He knew already how to {249} make men, and he could have fashioned a body about this spirit too, and so avoided putting his own spirit into such pollution."[41] Again the body, in which the spirit was sent, ought to have had stature or beauty or terror or persuasion, whereas they say it was little, ugly and ign.o.ble.[42]

Then, finally, "suppose that G.o.d, like Zeus in the Comedy, waking out of long sleep, determined to rescue mankind from evil, why on earth did he send this spirit (as you call it) into one particular corner? He ought to have breathed through many bodies in the same way and sent them all over the world. The comic poet, to make merriment in the theatre, describes how Zeus waked up and sent Hermes to the Athenians and Lacedaemonians; do you not think that your invention of G.o.d's son being sent to the Jews is more laughable still?"[43] The incarnation further carried with it stories of "G.o.d eating"--mutton, vinegar, gall.

This revolted Celsus, and he summed it all up in one horrible word.[44]

[Sidenote: The ignominy of Jesus]

The ignominy of the life of Jesus was evidence to Celsus of the falsity of his claim to be G.o.d's son. He bitterly taunts Christians with following a child of shame--"G.o.d's would not be a body like yours--nor begotten as you were begotten, Jesus!"[45] He reviles Jesus for the Pa.s.sion--"unhelped by his Father and unable to help himself."[46] He goes to the Gospels ("I know the whole story," he says[47]) and he cites incident after incident. He reproaches Jesus with seeking to escape the cross,[48] he brings forward "the men who mocked him and put the purple robe on him, the crown of thorns, and; {250} the reed in his hand";[49] he taunts him with being unable to endure his thirst upon the cross--"which many a common man will endure."[50] As to the resurrection, "if Jesus wished really to display his divine power, he ought to have appeared to the actual men who reviled him, and to him who condemned him and to all, for, of course, he was no longer afraid of any man, seeing he was dead, and, as you say, G.o.d, and was not originally sent to elude observation."[51] Or, better still, to show his G.o.dhead, he might have vanished from the gibbet.[52]

What befel Jesus, befals his followers. "Don't you see, my dear sir?"

Celsus says, "a man may stand and blaspheme your daemon; and not that only, he may forbid him land and sea, and then lay hands on _you_, who are consecrated to him like a statue, bind you, march you off and impale you; and the daemon, or, as you say, the son of G.o.d, does not help you."[53] "You may stand and revile the statues of the G.o.ds and laugh. But if you tried it in the actual presence of Dionysus or Herakles, you might not get off so comfortably. But your G.o.d in his own person they spread out and punished, and those who did it have suffered nothing.... He too who sent his son (according to you) with some message or other, looked on and saw him thus cruelly punished, so that the message perished with him, and though all this time has pa.s.sed he has never heeded. What father was ever so unnatural (_anosios_)?

Ah! but perhaps he wished it, you say, and that was why he endured the insult. And perhaps our G.o.ds _wish_ it too, when you blaspheme them."[54]

Celsus would seem to have heard Christian preaching, for beside deriding "Only believe" and "Thy faith will save thee," he is offended by the language they use about the cross. "Wide as the sects stand apart, and bitter as are their quarrels and mutual abuse, you will hear them all say their 'To me the world is crucified and I to the world.'"[55] In one great pa.s.sage he mixes, as Origen says, the things he has mis-heard, and quotes Christian utterances about "a soul that lives, and a heaven that is slain that it may live, and earth slain with the {251} sword, and ever so many people being slain to live; and death taking a rest in the world when the sin of the world dies; and then a narrow way down, and gates that open of themselves. And everywhere you have the tree of life and the resurrection of the flesh from the tree--I suppose, because their teacher was nailed to a cross and was a carpenter by trade. Exactly as, if he had chanced to be thrown down a precipice, or pushed into a pit, or choked in a noose, or if he had been a cobbler, or a stone-mason, or a blacksmith, there would have been above the heavens a precipice of life, or a pit of resurrection, or a rope of immortality, or a happy stone, or the iron of love, or the holy hide."[56]

[Sidenote: The Cross and the miracles]

The miracles of Jesus Celsus easily explains. "Through poverty he went to Egypt and worked there as a hired labourer; and there he became acquainted with certain powers [or faculties], on which the Egyptians pride themselves, and he came back holding his head high on account of them, and because of them he announced that he was G.o.d."[57] But, granting the miracles of healing and of raising the dead and feeding the mult.i.tudes, he maintains that ordinary quacks will do greater miracles in the streets for an obol or two, "driving devils out of men,[58] and blowing away diseases and calling up the souls of heroes, and displaying sumptuous banquets and tables and sweetmeats and dainties that are not there;"--"must we count _them_ sons of G.o.d?"[59]

There are plenty of prophets too, "and it is quite an easy and ordinary thing for each of them to say 'I am G.o.d--or G.o.d's son--or a divine spirit. And I am come; for already the world perisheth, and ye, oh men, are lost for your sins. But I am willing to {252} save you; and ye shall see me hereafter coming with heavenly power. Blessed is he that has worshipped me now; but upon all the rest I will send eternal fire, and upon their cities and lands. And men who do not recognize their own guilt shall repent in vain with groans; and them that have believed me, I will guard for ever.'"[60] Jesus was, he holds, an obvious quack and impostor. In fact, there is little to choose between worshipping Jesus and Antinous, the favourite of Hadrian, who had actually been deified in Egypt.[61]

The teaching of Jesus, to which Christians pointed, was after all a mere medley of garbled quotations from Greek literature. Thus when Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a rich man to go into the kingdom of G.o.d, he was merely spoiling the Platonic saying that it is impossible for a man to be exceedingly good and exceedingly rich at the same time.[62] The kingdom of heaven itself comes from the "divinely spoken" words of Plato; it is the "supercelestial region" of the _Phaedrus_.[63] Satan is a parody of Herac.l.i.tus' conception of War.[64] The Christian resurrection comes from metempsychosis.[65] The idea that "G.o.d will descend, carrying fire (like a torturer in a law-court)" comes from some confused notion of the teaching of the Greeks upon cycles and periods and the final conflagration.[66] Plato has this advantage that he never boasted and never said that G.o.d had "a son who descended and talked with me."[67] The "son of G.o.d" itself was an expression borrowed in their clumsy way by the Christians from the ancients who conceived of the universe as G.o.d's offspring.[68]

[Sidenote: Resurrection]

Christians lay great stress on the immortality, "but it is silly of them to suppose that when G.o.d--like a cook--brings the fire, the rest of mankind will be roasted and they themselves will alone remain, not merely the living, but even those who died long ago, rising from the earth with the identical flesh they had before. Really it is the hope of worms! For what soul of a man would any longer wish for a body that {253} had rotted?"[69] The loathsomeness of the idea, he says, cannot be expressed, and besides it is impossible. "They have nothing to reply to this, so they fly to the absurdest refuge, and say that all is possible with G.o.d. But G.o.d cannot do what is foul, and what is contrary to nature he will not do. Though you in your vulgarity may wish a loathsome thing, it does not follow that G.o.d can do it, nor that you are right to believe at once that it will come to pa.s.s. For it is not of superfluous desire and wandering disorder, but of true and just nature that G.o.d is prince (_archegetes_). He could grant immortal life of the soul; but 'corpses,' as Herac.l.i.tus says, 'are less useful than dung.' The flesh is full of--what it is not beautiful even to mention--and to make it immortal contrary to all reason (_paralogos_), is what G.o.d neither will nor can do. For he is the reason of all things that are, so that he cannot do anything contrary to reason or contrary to himself."[70] And yet, says Celsus, "you hope you will see G.o.d with the eyes of your body, and hear his voice with your ears, and touch him with the hands of sense."[71] If they threaten the heathen with eternal punishment, the exegetes, hierophants, and mystagogues of the temples hurl back the same threat, and while words are equal, they can show proofs in daemonic activities and oracles.[72] "With those however who speak of the soul or the mind (whether they choose to call it spiritual, or a spirit intelligent, holy and happy, or a living soul, or the supercelestial and incorruptible offspring of a divine and bodyless nature--or whatever they please)--with those who hope to have this eternally with G.o.d, with such I will speak. For they are right in holding that they who have lived well will be happy and the unjust will be held in eternal woes. From this opinion (_dogmatos_) let not them nor any one else depart."[73]

In this way Celsus surveys the main points of Christian history and teaching. They have no real grounds beneath them. The basis of the church is "faction (_stasis_) and the profit it brings, and fear of those without;--those are the things that establish the faith for them."[74] Faction is their keynote, taken from the Jews at first; and faction splits them up into innumerable sects beside the "great church,"[75]--"the {254} one thing they have in common, if indeed they still have it, is the name; and this one thing they are ashamed to abandon."[76] When they all say "'Believe, if you wish to be saved, or else depart'; what are those to do who really wish to be saved? Should they throw the dice to find out to whom to turn?"[77] In short, faction is their breath of life, and "if all mankind were willing to be Christian, then they would not."[78]

[Sidenote: G.o.ds and daemons]

But Celsus is not content merely to refute; he will point out a more excellent way. "Are not all things ruled according to the will of G.o.d?

is not all Providence from him? Whatever there is in the whole scheme of things, whether the work of G.o.d, or of angels, or other daemons, or heroes, all these have their law from the greatest G.o.d; and in power over each thing is set he that has been counted fit."[79] "Probably the various sections are allotted to various rulers (_epoptais_) and distributed in certain provinces, and so governed. Thus among the various nations things would be done rightly if done as those rulers would have them. It is then not holy to break down what has been from the beginning the tradition of one and another place."[80] Again, the body is the prison of the soul; should there not then be warders of it--daemons in fact?[81] Then "will not a man, who worships G.o.d, be justified in serving him who has his power from G.o.d?"[82] To worship them all cannot grieve him to whom they all belong.[83] Over and over Celsus maintains the duty of "living by the ancestral usages," "each people worshipping its own traditional deities."[84] To say with the Christians that there is one Lord, meaning G.o.d, is to break up the kingdom of G.o.d and make factions there (_stasiaxein_), as if there were choices to be made, and one were a rival of another.[85]

Ammon is no worse than the angels of the Jews; though here the Jews are so far right in that they hold by the ways of their ancestors--an advantage which the Jewish proselytes have {255} forfeited.[86] If the Jews pride themselves on superior knowledge and so hold aloof from other men, Herodotus is evidence that their supposed peculiar dogma is shared by the Persians; and "I think it makes no difference whether you call Zeus the Most High, or Zeus, or Adonai, or Sabaoth, or Amun, like the Egyptians, or Papaios like the Scythians."[87]

The evidence for the ancillary daemons and G.o.ds he finds in the familiar places. "Why need I tell at length how many things prophets and prophetesses at the oracles have foretold, and other men and women possessed by a voice of a G.o.d within them? the marvels heard from shrines? revelations from sacrifices and victims, and other miraculous tokens? And some have been face to face with visible phantoms. The whole of life is full of these things." Cities have escaped plague and famine through warnings from oracles, and have suffered for neglecting them. The childless have gained children, and the crippled have been healed, while those who have treated sacred things with contempt have been punished in suicide and incurable diseases.[88] Let a man go to the shrine of Trophonius or Amphiaraus or Mopsus, and there he may see the G.o.ds in the likeness of men, no feigned forms (_pseudomenous_) but clear to see, "not slipping by them once, like him who deceived these people [the Christians], but ever a.s.sociating with those who will."[89]

"A great mult.i.tude of men, Greeks and barbarians, testify that they have often seen and still do see Asklepios, and not merely a phantom of him, but they see himself healing men, and doing them good, and foretelling the future."[90] Is it not likely that these "satraps and ministers of air and earth" could do you harm, if you did them despite?[91] Earthly rulers too deserve worship, since they hold their positions not without daemonic influence.[92] Why should not the Christians worship them, daemons and Emperors? If they worshipped no other but one G.o.d, they might have some clear argument against other men; but, as it is, they more than worship the person who lately appeared, and reckon that G.o.d is not wronged by the service done to his subordinate,[93]--though in truth he is only a corpse.[94] In any case, "if idols are nothing, what harm is there in taking part in the festival? but if there are daemons, it is clear they too {256} are of G.o.d, and in them we must trust, and speak them fair, according to the laws, and pray that they may be propitious."[95]

It is characteristic of the candour of Celsus that he lets slip a caution or two about the service of daemons. Christians are as credulous, he says in one place, as "those who lightly (_alogos_) believe in the roaming priests of Cybele (_metragurtais_) and wonder-seers, Mithras and Sabadios and the like--phantoms of Hecate or some other female daemon or daemons."[96] Again, he has a word of warning as to magic, and the danger and injury into which those fall who busy themselves with it--"One must be on one's guard, that one may not, by being occupied with these matters, become entangled in the service of them [literally; fused with them, _syntake_], and through love of the body and by turning away from better things be overcome by forgetfulness. For perhaps we should not disbelieve wise men, who say (as a matter of fact) that of the daemons who pervade the earth the greater part are entangled in 'becoming' (_genesei syntetekos_)--fused and riveted to it--and being bound to blood and smoke and chantings and other such things can do no more than heal the body and foretell future destiny to man and city; and the limits of their knowledge and power are those of human affairs."[97]

[Sidenote: The rescue of the empire]

At the last comes his great plea. Human authority is of divine ordinance. "To the Emperor all on earth is given; and whatever you receive in life is from him."[98] "We must not disbelieve one of old, who long ago said--

Let one be king, to whom the son of wise Kronos has given it.

If you invalidate this thought (_dogma_), probably the Emperor will punish you. For if all men were to do as you do, nothing will prevent the Emperor being left alone and deserted,[99] and all things on earth falling into the power of the {257} most lawless and barbarous savages, with the result that neither of your religion nor of the true wisdom would there be left among men so much as the name.[100] You will hardly allege that if the Romans were persuaded by you and forsook all their usages as to G.o.ds and men, and called upon your 'Most High' or whatever you like, he would descend and fight for them and they would need no other help. For before now that same G.o.d promised (as you say) this and much more to those who served him, and you see all the good he has done them and you. As for them [the Jews], instead of being masters of all the earth, they have not a clod nor a hearthstone left them; while you--if there is any of you left in hiding, search is being made for him to put him to death."[101] The Christian sentiment that it is desirable for all who inhabit the Empire, Greeks and barbarians, Asia, Europe and Libya, to agree to one law or custom, is foolish and impracticable.[102] So Celsus calls on the Christians "to come to the help of the Emperor with all their might and labour with him as right requires, fight on his behalf, take the field with him, if he call on you, and share the command of the legions with him[103]--yes, and be magistrates, if need be, and to do this for the salvation of laws and religion."[104]

It will be noted that, so far as our fragments serve us, Celsus confines himself essentially to the charges of folly, perversity, and want of national feeling. An excessive opinion of the value of the human soul and an absurd fancy of G.o.d's interest in man are two of the chief faults he sees in Christianity.[105] He sees well, for the love of G.o.d our Father and the infinite significance of the meanest and commonest and most depraved of men were after all the cardinal doctrines of the new faith. There can be no compromise between the Christian conception of the Ecclesia of G.o.d and Celsus' contempt for an "ecclesia of worms in a pool"; nor between the "Abba Father" of Jesus and the aloof and philosophic G.o.d of Celsus "away beyond everything."

These two {258} contrasts bring into clear relief the essentially new features of Christianity, and from the standpoint of ancient philosophy they were foolish and arbitrary fancies. That standpoint was unquestioned by Celsus.

[Sidenote: The failure of Celsus]

Confident in the truth of his premisses and the conclusions that follow from them, Celsus charged the Christians with folly and dogmatism. Yet it would be difficult to maintain that they were more dogmatic than himself; they at least had ventured on the experiment of a new life, that was to bring ancient Philosophy to a new test. They were the researchers in spiritual things, and he the traditionalist. As to the charge of folly, we may at once admit a comparatively lower standard of education among the Christians; yet Lucian's book _Alexander_, with its curious story of the false prophet who cla.s.sed them with the Epicureans as his natural enemies, suggests that, with all their limitations, they had an emanc.i.p.ation of mind not reached by all their contemporaries.

If they did not accept the conclusions of Greek thinkers as final, they were still less prepared to accept sleight-of-hand and hysteria as the ultimate authority in religious truth.[106] Plutarch, we may remember, based belief in immortality on the oracles of Apollo; and Celsus himself appeals to the evidence of shrines and miracles. If we say that pagans and Christians alike believed in the occurrence of these miracles and in daemonic agency as their cause, it remains that the Christians put something much nearer the modern value upon them, while Celsus, who denounced the Christians as fools, tendered this contemptible evidence for the religion he advocated.

His Greek training was in some degree the cause of this. The immeasurable vanity of the Greeks did not escape the Romans. A sense of indebtedness to the race that has given us Homer, Euripides and Plato leads us to treat all Greeks kindly--with more kindness than those critics show them whose acquaintance with them has been less in literature and more in life. The great race still had gifts for mankind, but it was now mainly living upon its past. In Plutarch the pride of race is genial and pleasant; in Celsus it takes another form--that of contempt for the barbarian and the unlettered. {259} The truism may be forgiven that contempt is no pathway to understanding or to truth; and in this case contempt cut Celsus off from any real access to the mind of the people he attacked. He read their books; he heard them talk; but, for all his conscious desire to inform himself, he did not penetrate into the heart of the movement--nor of the men. He missed the real motive force--the power of the life and personality of Jesus, on which depended the two cardinal doctrines which he a.s.sailed.

The extraordinary blunders, to which the very surest critics in literature are liable, may prepare us for anything. But to those who have some intimate realization of the mind of Jesus, the portrait which Celsus drew of him is an amazing caricature--the ignorant Jewish conjuror, who garbles Plato, and makes no impression on his friends, is hardly so much as a parody. It meant that Celsus did not understand the central thing in the new faith. The "G.o.dhead" of Jesus was as absurd as he said, if it was predicated of the Jesus whom he drew; and there he let it rest. How such a dogma could have grown in such a case he did not inquire; nor, finding it grown, did he correct his theory by the fact. Thus upon the real strength of Christianity he had nothing to say. This was not the way to convince opponents, and here the action of the Christians was sounder and braver. For they accepted the inspiration of the great men of Greece, entered into their spirit (as far as in that day it was possible), and fairly did their best to put themselves at a universal point of view.[107] They had the larger sympathies.

Yet for Celsus it may be pleaded that his object was perhaps less the reconversion of Christians to the old faith than to prevent the perversion of pagans to the new. But here too he failed, for he did not understand even the midway people with whom he was dealing. They were a large cla.s.s--men and women open to religious ideas from whatever source they might come--Egypt, Judaea, or Persia, desirous of the knowledge of {260} G.o.d and of communion with G.o.d, and in many cases conscious of sin. In none of these feelings did Celsus share--his interests are all intellectual and practical. Plutarch before him, and the Neo-Platonists after him, understood the religious instincts which they endeavoured to satisfy, and for the cold, hard outlines of Celsus'