Against Celsus 4.54

Since in the passage of Celsus I set out, which paraphrases certain things from the Timaeus, it is written that God made nothing mortal, but only immortal things, while mortal things are the works of others; and that the soul is the work of God, but the nature of the body is different; and that the body of a man will not differ from the body of a bat, or a worm, or a frog, for the matter is the same and their corruptibility is alike: come, let us discuss these things too for a little, refuting a man who either does not profess his own Epicurean opinion, or, as one might say, later changed to better views, or, as another might say, is a namesake of the Epicurean. For when he declared such things, he ought to have undertaken to contradict not only us but also the not ignoble school of philosophers descended from Zeno of Citium, and to establish that the bodies of animals are not works of God, and that the great skill shown in them did not come from the first Mind. He should also, about the many plants of every kind, governed by an indwelling nature without imagination and made for no contemptible use in the universe for men and for the animals that serve men, however else they may exist, not merely have declared but also have taught that it was not some perfect Mind that implanted such great qualities in the matter of plants. And if he once made gods the creators of all bodies, the soul alone being the work of God, how was it not consistent for one who divided up so many created things and gave them to many creators to establish, with some not contemptible argument, the differences among the gods, some making human bodies, others, say, the bodies of cattle, and others those of wild beasts? And seeing gods as creators of serpents, asps, and basilisks, and some as creators according to each individual species of them, and others according to the species of each plant and each herb, he should have stated the reasons for the divisions. For perhaps, if he had given himself to a precise examination of this subject, he would either have kept one God as creator of all things, who made each thing for some purpose and reason, or, not keeping to this, he would have seen what defense he had to make about corruptibility, a thing indifferent by its own nature, and that there is nothing absurd in a world composed of unlike things having been made by one craftsman, who formed the differences of species for the benefit of the whole. Or at the very least he should not have declared anything at all about so great a doctrine, if he was not going to establish what he professed to teach; unless, perhaps, he who accuses those who profess bare faith himself wanted us to believe what he declared, although he professed not to declare but to teach.