Against Celsus 4.72

We do speak of God's wrath, but we say that it is not a passion of his, but something he uses to educate, by sterner ways, those who have committed so many and such sins. That what is called God's wrath and what is named his anger educates, and that this is the view of Scripture, is clear from what is said in the sixth psalm: "Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger, nor discipline me in your wrath," and in Jeremiah: "Discipline us, Lord, but with judgment and not in anger, lest you make us few." And whoever reads in the second book of Kingdoms of the "wrath" of God that moved David to number the people, and in the first book of Chronicles of "the devil," and compares the texts with one another, will see to whom the wrath is assigned: the wrath of which Paul says all human beings have become "children," saying: "We were by nature children of wrath, like the rest." That wrath is not a passion of God, but each person prepares it for himself by his sins, Paul will show in the words: "Or do you despise the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness leads you to repentance? But by your hardness and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath and of the revelation of God's righteous judgment." How then can each person "store up wrath for himself on the day of wrath," if "wrath" is understood as a passion? And how can a passion of wrath educate? Moreover, the Word that teaches us never to be angry, and says in the thirty-sixth psalm, "Cease from wrath and forsake anger," and in Paul, "Put away all these things yourselves: wrath, anger, malice, slander, foul talk," would not attach to God himself the passion from which it wishes to free us altogether. It is clear that what is said about God's wrath is figurative from the fact that sleep too is recorded of him, from which the prophet, as though waking him, says: "Arise; why do you sleep, Lord?" And again he says: "And the Lord awoke as one asleep, like a mighty man who has been drunk with wine." If, then, sleep means something else, and not what the obvious understanding of the word shows, why should not wrath also be understood in a similar way? And threats are announcements of what will happen to the wicked, as if someone called threats the words of a doctor telling his patients: "I will cut you and apply cauteries to you, unless you obey my rules and follow this diet and conduct yourself in this way." We therefore do not attach human passions to God, nor do we hold impious opinions about him, nor do we go astray when we set out the accounts about him from the writings themselves compared with one another. Nor is the purpose of those among us who wisely represent the Word anything other than to free the hearers from simple-mindedness as far as possible and to make them wise.