Against Celsus 6.14

Yet Celsus says that others are the most uneducated, slaves, and most ignorant, meaning those who do not know his precepts and have not been trained in the learning of the Greeks. But we say that the most uneducated are those who are not ashamed to talk to lifeless things, who call on what is weak for health, ask what is dead for life, and beg what is utterly helpless for help. And even if some say that these are not the gods but imitations of the true gods and symbols of them, these too are no less uneducated, slaves, and ignorant, since they imagine that imitations of the divinity can be in the hands of craftsmen. So we say that the lowest among us have been set free from this lack of education and ignorance, and that the divine hope is understood and grasped by the most intelligent. We also say that it is not possible for one who has not been trained in human wisdom to receive the more divine; and we acknowledge that all human wisdom is foolishness compared with the divine. Then, when he ought to argue about the doctrine, Celsus calls us sorcerers and says that we flee headlong from the more cultivated, because they are not ready to be deceived, and lure the more boorish. For he did not see that from the very beginning our wise men were educated in outside learning too: Moses “in all the wisdom of the Egyptians,” and Daniel, Ananias, Azarias, and Misael in all the letters of the Assyrians, so that they were found ten times better than all the wise men there. And now too the churches have, in proportion to their numbers, a few wise men who have come even from what we call wisdom “according to the flesh,” and they also have those who have passed from that to the divine wisdom.