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.[525] 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”[526] 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.[527] We
show, accordingly, that the Holy Scriptures represent God as
unchangeable, both by such words as “Thou art the same,”[528] and “I
change not;”[529] 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 principle[530] when
the conflagration [of the world] takes place; and at another, when a
rearrangement of things occurs, he again becomes partly material.[531]
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.
Footnote 525:
Ὁ Θεὸς ἀγαθός ἐστι, καὶ καλὸς, καὶ εὐδαίμων, καὶ ἐν τῷ καλλίστῳ καὶ
ἀρίστῳ.
Footnote 526:
κατάβασιν.
Footnote 527:
τῇ προνοίᾳ καὶ τῇ οἰκονομίᾳ.
Footnote 528:
Ps. cii. 27.
Footnote 529:
Mal. iii. 6.
Footnote 530:
ἡγεμονικὸν.
Footnote 531:
The reading in the text is, ἐπὶ μέρους γίνεται αὐτῆς, which is thus
corrected by Guietus: ἐπιμερὴς γίνεται αὐτὸς.