The illustrious[490] Celsus, taking occasion I know not from what, next
raises an additional objection against us, as if we asserted that “God
Himself will come down to men.” He imagines also that it follows from
this, that “He has left His own abode;” for he does not know the power
of God, and that “the Spirit of the Lord filleth the world, and that
which upholdeth all things hath knowledge of the voice.”[491] Nor is he
able to understand the words, “Do I not fill heaven and earth? saith the
Lord.”[492] Nor does he see that, according to the doctrine of
Christianity, we all “in Him live, and move, and have our being,”[493]
as Paul also taught in his address to the Athenians; and therefore,
although the God of the universe should through His own power descend
with Jesus into the life of men, and although the Word which was in the
beginning with God, which is also God Himself, should come to us, He
does not give His place or vacate His own seat, so that one place should
be empty of Him, and another which did not formerly contain Him be
filled. But the power and divinity of God comes through him whom God
chooses, and resides in him in whom it finds a place, not changing its
situation, nor leaving its own place empty and filling another: for, in
speaking of His quitting one place and occupying another, we do not mean
such expressions to be taken _topically_; but we say that the soul of
the bad man, and of him who is overwhelmed in wickedness, is abandoned
by God, while we mean that the soul of him who wishes to live
virtuously, or of him who is making progress [in a virtuous life], or
who is already living conformably thereto, is filled with or becomes a
partaker of the Divine Spirit. It is not necessary, then, for the
descent of Christ, or for the coming of God to men, that He should
abandon a greater seat, and that things on earth should be changed, as
Celsus imagines when he says, “If you were to change a single one, even
the least, of things on earth, all things would be overturned and
disappear.” And if we must speak of a change in any one by the appearing
of the power of God, and by the entrance of the word among men, we shall
not be reluctant to speak of changing from a wicked to a virtuous, from
a dissolute to a temperate, and from a superstitious to a religious
life, the person who has allowed the word of God to find entrance into
his soul.
Footnote 490:
γενναιότατος.
Footnote 491:
Wisd. Solom. i. 7, καὶ τὸ συνέχον τὰ πάντα γνῶσιν ἔχει φωνῆς.
Footnote 492:
Cf. Jer. xxiii. 24.
Footnote 493:
Cf. Acts xvii. 28.