Lawgivers and the unschooled crowd

After this he again abuses the man who champions Christianity, and pronounces that he recounts laughable things, but he does not prove, or even clearly set out, the things he calls laughable. In his abuse he says that no sensible man is persuaded by the teaching, being misled himself by the great number of those who come to it. In this too he acts like a man who would say, because of the great number of unschooled people who are guided by the laws, that no sensible man obeys, let us say, Solon or Lycurgus or Zaleucus or any of the others, and especially if he takes “sensible” to mean the man whose character is shaped by virtue. For just as with such people the lawgivers, according to what seemed useful to them, put them under such a discipline and such laws, so God, giving laws in Jesus to men everywhere, guides even those who are not sensible, so far as such people can be guided toward the better.

The God who speaks in Moses knew this, as we have also said above, and says: “They moved me to jealousy with what is no god; they provoked me to anger with their idols; and I will move them to jealousy with what is no nation; with a senseless nation I will provoke them to anger” (Deuteronomy 32:21). Knowing it, Paul too said: “God chose the foolish things of the world to put the wise to shame” (1 Corinthians 1:27). By “the wise” he means, in a broad sense, all who seem to have advanced in learning but have fallen away into godless polytheism, since “claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptible man and birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things” (Romans 1:22–23).