Against Celsus 3.75

And since after this he says that the one who teaches Christianity does something like a man who promises to make bodies healthy but turns people away from heeding skilled physicians because his own lack of skill would be exposed by them, to this too we shall say: Which physicians do you mean, from whom we turn away ordinary people? For surely you do not suppose that we bring our exhortation to the word to philosophers, so that you should think them the physicians from whom we turn away those whom we call to the divine word. Either, then, he gives no answer, having no physicians to name, or he must take refuge in ordinary people, who themselves slavishly chatter about many gods and whatever else ordinary people might say. Either way he will be refuted as having brought in to no purpose, in his argument, the one who turns people away from skilled physicians. And if we turn away from the philosophy of Epicurus, and from those thought to be Epicurean physicians after Epicurus, those deceived by them, how shall we not act most reasonably in removing them from a grievous disease which Celsus's physicians have produced, that of abolishing providence and bringing in pleasure as the good? But suppose that we draw those whom we exhort to our teaching away from other physicians who are philosophers, those of the Peripatos, who abolish providence toward us and the relation of the divine to men: how shall we not make pious and heal those who have been won over, persuading them to devote themselves to the God over all, and free those who obey us from great wounds inflicted by the words of those considered philosophers? But let it be granted that we turn others away from Stoic physicians, who introduce a corruptible god and say that his substance is a body changeable throughout, alterable, and mutable, and who at some time destroy all things and leave God alone: how shall we not, in this case too, free those who obey us from evils, and bring them to the pious teaching about devoting oneself to the Creator and admiring the Father of the Christian teaching, who most humanely arranged for lessons that convert souls to be sown throughout the whole human race? And if we heal from physicians those who suffer from the folly of transmigration, who bring the rational nature down sometimes to every irrational nature and sometimes even to one without imagination, how shall we not make better in soul those who obey the word, which does not teach that insensibility or irrationality is given to the wicked as a portion of punishment, but shows that the toils and punishments brought upon the wicked by God are medicines that convert them? For Christians who live wisely, understanding this, deal with the simpler people as fathers deal with young children. We do not, then, take refuge with children and foolish rustics and say to them, “Flee the physicians”; nor do we say, “See that none of you lays hold of knowledge”; nor do we assert that knowledge is an evil; nor are we mad enough to say that knowledge trips men up from health of soul. Nor would we ever say that anyone perishes because of wisdom, we who, even when we teach, do not say, “Attend to me,” but, “Attend to the God of the universe and to Jesus, the teacher of the lessons about him.” And none of us is so boastful as to say to his pupils what Celsus put in the mouth of the teacher: “I alone will save you.” See, then, how many lies he tells about us. Nor do we say that true physicians destroy those whom they promise to heal.