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| Chapter XIV
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Chapter XIV.
But let us look at what Celsus next with great
ostentation announces in the following fashion: “And
again,” he says, “let us resume the subject from the
beginning, with a larger array of proofs. And I make no new
statement, but say what has been long settled. God is good, and
beautiful, and blessed, and that in the best and most beautiful
degree.3736
| 3736 ῾Ο
Θεὸς ἀγαθός
ἐστι, καὶ
καλὸς, καὶ
εὐδαίμων, καὶ
ἐν τῷ
καλλίστῳ καὶ
ἀρίστῳ. | But if he
come down among men, he must undergo a change, and a change from good
to evil, from virtue to vice, from happiness to misery, and from best
to worst. Who, then, would make choice of such a change? It
is the nature of a mortal, indeed, to undergo change and remoulding,
but of an immortal to remain the same and unaltered. God, then,
could not admit of such a change.” Now it appears to me
that the fitting answer has been returned to these objections, when I
have related what is called in Scripture the
“condescension”3737
of God to human
affairs; for which purpose He did not need to undergo a transformation,
as Celsus thinks we assert, nor a change from good to evil, nor from
virtue to vice, nor from happiness to misery, nor from best to
worst. For, continuing unchangeable in His essence, He
condescends to human affairs by the economy of His providence.3738
| 3738 τῆ προνοίᾳ
καὶ τῇ
οἰκονομίᾳ. | We show, accordingly, that the holy
Scriptures represent God as unchangeable, both by such words as
“Thou art the same,”3739
and” I
change not;”3740
whereas the gods of
Epicurus, being composed of atoms, and, so far as their structure is
concerned, capable of dissolution, endeavour to throw off the atoms
which contain the elements of destruction. Nay, even the god of
the Stoics, as being corporeal, at one time has his whole essence
composed of the guiding principle3741
when the
conflagration (of the world) takes place; and at another, when
a rearrangement of things occurs, he again becomes partly
material.3742
| 3742 The reading in the
text is, ἐπὶ μέρους
γίνεται
αὐτῆς, which is thus corrected by
Guietus: ἐπιμερὴς
γίνεται
αὐτὸς. | For even the
Stoics were unable distinctly to comprehend the natural idea of God, as
of a being altogether incorruptible and simple, and uncompounded and
indivisible.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
