Against Celsus 3.47

But it is likely that what Paul wrote in the first letter to the Corinthians, as to Greeks greatly puffed up with Greek wisdom, has moved some to think that the teaching does not want wise men. But let whoever thinks such things hear this: just as the teaching, when it censures bad men, says that they are wise not about intelligible, invisible, and eternal things, but, occupied only with things of sense and placing everything in them, are wise men of the world; so also, since there are many doctrines, those which speak for matter and bodies and say that all things that primarily subsist are bodies and that there is nothing else besides them, whether called invisible or named incorporeal, it calls “wisdom of the world,” which is being brought to nothing and made foolish, and wisdom of this age; but those which transfer the soul from the affairs of this world to the blessedness with God and to what is called his kingdom, and which teach to despise all things of sense and sight as temporary and to hasten to the invisible things and to look at the things that are not seen, these it calls the “wisdom of God.” And Paul, as a lover of truth, says of certain wise men among the Greeks, in the things in which they speak truly, “that, knowing God, they did not glorify him as God or give thanks.” And he bears them witness that they knew God; and he says too that this did not come to them without God, where he writes, “For God has shown it to them,” hinting, I think, at those who ascend from visible things to intelligible ones when he writes that “the invisible things of God from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made, both his eternal power and divinity, so that they are without excuse; because, knowing God, they did not glorify him as God or give thanks.”