Celsus declares but does not teach

In the passage of Celsus that I set out, which paraphrases certain things from the Timaeus (Plato, Timaeus 41a–d), it is written that God made nothing mortal, but only immortal things, while mortal things are the works of others; that “the soul is the work of God, but the body is of another nature”; and that a man’s body will differ in nothing from the body of a bat or a maggot or a frog, “for the matter is the same, and what is perishable in them is alike.” Come, then, let us discuss these points too for a little while. We shall be refuting a man who either does not acknowledge his own Epicurean opinion, or, as someone might say, later changed over to better views, or even, as another might say, is a namesake of the Epicurean.

For in declaring such things, having set out to speak against not only us but also the far from contemptible school of philosophers who follow Zeno of Citium, he ought to have proved that the bodies of living creatures are not works of God, and that the great skill shown in them did not come from the first Mind. So too with the countless plants of every kind, which are governed by an indwelling nature that has no sense-impressions, and which came into being to serve a use of no small account in the universe, for men and for the animals that serve men, whatever else may be true of them: he ought not only to have declared but also to have taught that it was not some perfect mind that implanted so many qualities in the matter of plants.

And if once he made gods the craftsmen of all bodies, on the ground that the soul alone is God’s work, how would it not have been consistent for one who divides up so many works of craft and assigns them to many to establish, with some argument of real weight, differences among the gods: some fashioning the bodies of men, others, let us say, those of cattle, and others those of wild beasts? Seeing gods as the craftsmen of serpents and asps and basilisks, some of them makers of each particular species of these, and others makers of the species of each plant and each herb, he ought to have stated the reasons for these divisions. For perhaps, had he given himself to examining the questions of this topic with precision, he would either have held to one God, the Maker of all, who made each thing for some end and for the sake of something; or, if he did not hold to this, he would have seen what defence he must make about the perishable, a thing indifferent in its own nature, and that there is nothing absurd in a world composed of unlike things having come into being from one Craftsman, who fashions the differences of species for the good of the whole.

Or at the very least he ought not to have pronounced on so great a doctrine at all, if he was not going to prove what he professed to teach. Unless, perhaps, the man who blames those who profess bare faith wanted us ourselves to believe what he declared, even though what he professed was not to declare but to teach.