Who are truly the uneducated

It is true that Celsus calls one set of people “most uneducated and slaves and most ignorant”: those who do not know his precepts and have not been schooled in the learning of the Greeks. We, however, call most uneducated those who are not ashamed to talk to lifeless things, who call on what is weak for health, ask what is dead for life, and beg what is most helpless for help (Wisdom of Solomon 13:17–18). And even if some say that these things are not the gods but imitations and symbols of the true ones, these too are none the less uneducated and slaves and ignorant, since they imagine that imitations of the divine are in the hands of common craftsmen. So we say that even the least among us have been freed from this lack of education and this ignorance, and that the divine hope is understood and grasped by the most intelligent.

We also say that it is impossible for one who has not been trained in human wisdom to take in the more divine wisdom; and we confess that all human wisdom is foolishness compared with the divine. Then, when he ought to argue the point, he calls us charlatans and says that we flee headlong from the more cultivated, since they are not ready to be deceived, and lure in the more rustic like birds. For he did not see that from the very beginning our wise men were schooled in outside learning as well: Moses “in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (Acts 7:22), and Daniel, Hananiah, Azariah and Mishael in all the learning of the Assyrians, so that they were found ten times better than all the wise men there (Daniel 1:4, 17, 20). Even now the churches have, in proportion to their numbers, few wise men who have come to them from what we call wisdom “according to the flesh” (1 Corinthians 1:26); but they also have those who have passed from that wisdom to the divine wisdom.