Against Celsus 6.58

Next we must answer: How does he repent when they become ungrateful and wicked, and find fault with his own art, and hate and threaten and destroy his own offspring? Here he slanders and misrepresents what is written in Genesis, which runs thus: “And the Lord God, seeing that the wickednesses of those on the earth were multiplied, and that each one was intently thinking evil in his heart all the days, considered that he had made man on the earth; and he pondered in his heart, and God said: I will wipe out man whom I made from the face of the earth, from man to beast, and from creeping things to the birds of heaven; for I was angry that I made them.” He sets out things that are not written as though they were indicated by what is written. For in these words neither repentance of God is named nor that he finds fault with his own art and hates it. And if God seems to threaten the flood and to destroy his own offspring in it, it must be said that, since the human soul is immortal, the supposed threat is meant to convert the hearers, and the destruction of men in the flood is a purification of the earth, as those of the Greeks who philosophized in no contemptible way also said in the words: “When the gods purify the earth.” About expressions that attribute human feelings, as it were, to God, we have said not a little above as well.