Celsus borrows Plato’s sun

Let us see also what he says he will teach us, if indeed we shall be able to follow it. Here he says that we are bound fast to the flesh altogether, we who, if we live rightly and in keeping with the word of Jesus, hear the saying: “You are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you” (Romans 8:9). He says too that we see nothing pure, we who try to keep even our thoughts from being defiled by the promptings of wickedness, and who say in prayer, “Create a pure heart in me, O God, and renew a right spirit in my inmost parts” (Psalm 51:10), so that with the “pure heart” (Matthew 5:8), which alone is by nature able to see God, we may behold him.

What he says is this: “Being and becoming: the intelligible, the visible. With being goes truth; with becoming, error. Knowledge, then, is concerned with truth, and opinion with the other (compare Plato, Republic 534a; Timaeus 29c). Of the intelligible there is thought, of the visible, sight; mind knows the intelligible, and the eye the visible. What the sun is, then, among visible things, being neither eye nor sight, but the cause to the eye of its seeing, to sight of its existing through the sun, to visible things of their being seen, to all things perceived by sense of their coming into being, and indeed to itself of its being beheld, that is what he is among intelligible things, he who is neither mind nor thought nor knowledge, but is the cause to mind of its thinking, to thought of its existing through him, to knowledge of its knowing through him, and to all intelligible things, to truth itself and to being itself, of their being; he is beyond all things, and is known by the mind through a certain unspeakable power (Plato, Republic 508b-509b). These things have been said for men who have intelligence; and if you too understand any of them, it is well with you. And if you think that some spirit comes down from God to foretell divine things, this would be the spirit that proclaims these things, the spirit with which men of old were filled when they announced many good things. If you cannot grasp them, keep silent and cover up your own ignorance, and do not say that those who see are blind and that those who run are lame, when you yourselves are lamed and maimed in your souls in every way, and live by the body, that is, by what is dead.”