Against Celsus 7.44

Celsus, then, thinks that God is known either by synthesis applied to other things, like what geometers call synthesis, or by analysis from other things, or by analogy like the analogy among the same geometers, if indeed anyone can come in this way to the forecourts of the good. But the Word of God, saying, “No one has known the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son reveals him,” declares that God is known by a certain divine grace, which comes into the soul not without God but with a kind of inspiration. And indeed it is likely that the knowledge of God is greater than human nature can attain (which is why there are so many errors about God among men), but that by the goodness and love of God for humankind, and by a wonderful and more divine grace, the knowledge of God reaches those whom God's foreknowledge has marked out beforehand as those who will live worthily of him whom they have come to know, never debasing their piety toward him, not even if they are led away to death by those who do not know what piety is and who imagine anything whatever to be piety rather than what piety really is, nor if they are thought to be most ridiculous. And God, I think, seeing the arrogance or the contempt for others of those who pride themselves on knowing God and on having learned divine things from philosophy, and yet, just like the most uneducated, go off to the images and their temples and the much-talked-of mysteries, “chose” “the foolish things of the world,” the simplest among Christians, who live more moderately and more purely than many philosophers, “to shame the wise,” who are not ashamed to converse with lifeless things as gods or images of gods. For what person of sense will not laugh at one who, after such great and numerous discourses in philosophy about God or gods, gazes at images and either sends up his prayer to them, or, by seeing them, imagines that he must ascend from what is seen and is a symbol to what is understood? But the Christian, even the simple one, is persuaded that every place in the world is a part of the whole, since the whole world is God's temple; and praying “in every place,” closing the eyes of sense and awakening those of the soul, he rises above the whole world. And he does not stop even at the vault of heaven, but, coming in thought into the place above the heavens, guided by the divine Spirit, and as it were outside the world, he sends up his prayer to God, not for ordinary things; for he has learned from Jesus to seek nothing small, that is, sensible, but only the great and truly divine things, which, given by God, help one to travel to the blessedness that is with him through his Son, who is the Word, God.