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| Chapter XXVIII
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Chapter
XXVIII.
After thus misrepresenting our views of the nature of
God, Celsus goes on to ask of us “where we hope to go after
death;” and he makes our answer to be, “to another land
better than this.” On this he comments as follows:
“The divine men of a
former age have spoken of a happy life reserved for the souls of the
blessed. Some designated it ‘the isles of the blest,’
and others ‘the Elysian plain,’ so called because they were
there to be delivered from their present evils. Thus Homer
says: ‘But the gods shall send thee to the Elysian plain,
on the borders of the earth, where they lead a most quiet
life.’4737
Plato also,
who believed in the immortality of the soul, distinctly gives the name
‘land’ to the place where it is sent. ‘The
extent of it,’4738
| 4738 Phædo,
lviii. p. 109. | says he, ‘is
immense, and we only occupy a small portion of it, from the Phasis to
the Pillars of Hercules, where we dwell along the shores of the sea, as
grasshoppers and frogs beside a marsh. But there are many other
places inhabited in like manner by other men. For there are in
different parts of the earth cavities, varying in form and in
magnitude, into which run water, and clouds, and air. But that
land which is pure lies in the pure region of
heaven.’” Celsus therefore supposes that what we say
of a land which is much better and more excellent than this, has been
borrowed from certain ancient writers whom he styles
“divine,” and chiefly from Plato, who in his
Phædon discourses on the pure land lying in a pure
heaven. But he does not see that Moses, who is much older than
the Greek literature, introduces God as promising to those who lived
according to His law the holy land, which is “a good land and a
large, a land flowing with milk and honey;”4739
which promise is not to be understood to
refer, as some suppose, to that part of the earth which we call Judea;
for it, however good it may be, still forms part of the earth, which
was originally cursed for the transgression of Adam. For these
words, “Cursed shall the ground be for what thou hast done; with
grief, that is, with labour, shalt thou eat of the fruit of it all the
days of thy life,”4740
were spoken of the
whole earth, the fruit of which every man who died in Adam eats with
sorrow or labour all the days of his life. And as all the earth
has been cursed, it brings forth thorns and briers all the days of the
life of those who in Adam were driven out of paradise; and in the sweat
of his face every man eats bread until he returns to the ground from
which he was taken. For the full exposition of all that is
contained in this passage much might be said; but we have confined
ourselves to these few words at present, which are intended to remove
the idea, that what is said of the good land promised by God to the
righteous, refers to the land of Judea.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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