Empty hopes and the philosophers

Celsus also says that those who become Christians are led on by empty hopes. Since he thus finds fault with the doctrine of the blessed life and of fellowship with the divine, we shall say to him: By your reasoning, sir, those also who have accepted the teaching of Pythagoras and Plato about the soul are led on by empty hopes, the teaching that the soul is by nature able to rise to the vault of heaven and, in the place above the heavens, to behold the sights that the blessed spectators see (Plato, Phaedrus 247b–c). By your account, Celsus, those too who have accepted that the soul survives, and who live so as to become heroes and to spend their days with the gods, are led on by empty hopes. And perhaps those persuaded that the mind which comes “from outside” (Aristotle, Generation of Animals 736b) is immortal, and will continue its life as mind, might also be said by Celsus to be led on by empty hopes.

Let him, then, no longer hide his own school, but confess that he is an Epicurean, and do battle against what Greeks and barbarians have said, in terms far from contemptible, about the immortality of the soul, or its survival, or the immortality of the mind. Let him show that these are arguments that deceive with empty hopes those who assent to them, while the arguments of his own philosophy are free of empty hopes, and either lead to good hopes or, what better fits his position, instil no hope at all, since the soul is at once utterly destroyed. Unless, indeed, Celsus and the Epicureans will deny that their own hope is empty, the hope about their end, pleasure, which on their view is the good: “the stable condition of the flesh,” and the expectation of it which Epicurus holds sure (Epicurus, fragment 68 Usener).