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| Chapter XXXVII
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Chapter
XXXVII.
Now if this is a true account of what constitutes
the right and the wrong use of personification, have we not grounds for
holding Celsus up to ridicule for thus ascribing to Christians words
which they never uttered? For if those whom he represents as
speaking are the unlearned, how is it possible that such persons could
distinguish between “sense” and “reason,”
between “objects of sense” and “objects of the
reason?” To argue in this way, they would require to have
studied under the Stoics, who deny all intellectual existences, and
maintain that all that we apprehend is apprehended through the senses,
and that all knowledge comes through the senses. But if, on the
other hand, he puts these words into the mouth of philosophers who
search carefully into the meaning of Christian doctrines, the
statements in question do not agree with their character and
principles. For no one who has learnt that God is invisible, and
that certain of His works are invisible, that is to say, apprehended by
the reason,4765
| 4765 νοητά, falling under the
province of νοῦς, the reason. For
convenience, we translate it elsewhere “intellectual.” | can say, as if to
justify his faith in a resurrection, “How can they know God,
except by the perception of the senses?” or, “How otherwise
than through the senses can they gain any knowledge?” For
it is not in any secret writings, perused only by a few wise men, but
in such as are most widely diffused and most commonly known among the
people, that these words are written: “The invisible things
of God from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being
understood by the things that are made.”4766
From whence it is to be inferred, that
though men who live upon the earth have to begin with the use of the
senses upon sensible objects, in order to go on from them to a
knowledge of the nature of things intellectual, yet their knowledge
must not stop short with the objects of sense.
And thus, while Christians would
not say that it is impossible to have a knowledge of intellectual
objects without the senses, but rather that the senses supply the first
means of obtaining knowledge, they might well ask the question,
“Who can gain any knowledge without the senses?” without
deserving the abuse of Celsus, when he adds, “This is not the
language of a man; it comes not from the soul, but from the
flesh.”E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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