Origen of Alexandria, Against Celsus 23

Celsus goes on to claim that those who followed Moses as their leader were merely shepherds and goatherds, deceived by rustic tricks into believing there is only one God. He ought to demonstrate how, in his view, such herdsmen could irrationally abandon the worship of the many gods. He himself claims to be able to set forth the whole crowd of Greek deities or those of other peoples, so let him produce the very substance and reality of Mnemosyne giving birth to the Muses from Zeus, or of Themis bearing the Hours, or of the ever-naked Graces existing as genuine beings. He will not succeed, for the Greek inventions that appear to be embodied from natural phenomena cannot be shown to be true gods. After all, why should Greek myths about the gods be considered truer than, say, those of the Egyptians, who in their own language know nothing of Mnemosyne as mother of the nine Muses, or of Themis as mother of the Hours, or of Eurynome as one of the Graces, or of the rest of their names? How much more effective and superior to all such fabrications is it to be persuaded by the visible order of the world to worship its Creator, who is one and the same, who breathes together with the whole cosmos, and who therefore could not have been fashioned by many creators, just as the entire heaven is not held together by many souls moving it. One soul suffices to carry the whole fixed heaven from east to west and to encompass within itself all that the world requires, all that is not self-sufficient. For every part of the world is dependent, and no part is the whole God, since God must not be incomplete, as a part is. Indeed, a deeper line of reasoning may show that, properly speaking, God is neither a part nor a whole, because a whole is composed of parts, and reason refuses to accept that the God over all could be constituted from parts, each of which cannot do what the others do.