But will not those narratives, especially when they are understood in
their proper sense, appear far more worthy of respect than the story
that Dionysus was deceived by the Titans, and expelled from the throne
of Jupiter, and torn in pieces by them, and his remains being afterwards
put together again, he returned as it were once more to life, and
ascended to heaven? Or are the Greeks at liberty to refer such stories
to the doctrine of the soul, and to interpret them figuratively, while
the door of a consistent explanation, and one everywhere in accord and
harmony with the writings of the Divine Spirit, who had His abode in
pure souls, is closed against _us_? Celsus, then, is altogether ignorant
of the purpose of our writings, and it is therefore upon his own
acceptation of them that he casts discredit, and not upon their real
meaning; whereas, if he had reflected on what is appropriate[538] to a
soul which is to enjoy an everlasting life, and on the opinion which we
are to form of its essence and principles, he would not so have
ridiculed the entrance of the immortal into a mortal body, which took
place not according to the metempsychosis of Plato, but agreeably to
another and higher view of things. And he would have observed one
“descent,” distinguished by its great benevolence, undertaken to convert
(as the Scripture mystically terms them) the “lost sheep of the house of
Israel,” which had strayed down from the mountains, and to which the
Shepherd is said in certain parables to have gone down, leaving on the
mountains those “which had not strayed.”
Footnote 538:
τί ἀκολουθεῖ.