Note 101 — Chapter VII · ANCIENT CHRISTIANITY AND ITS OPPONENTS

Of a deeper interest are the sections in which Celsus (himself a believer in a Supreme Deity and a future state, and in a multitude of lower Powers, open to invocation) rests his case on grounds of general reason, arguing that the true Son of God must needs have brought home his mission to all mankind;101 and sweeps aside as foolish the whole dispute between Jews and Christians,102 of which he had given a sample. Most interesting of all are the chapters103 in which the Christian cites the pagan’s argument against the homo-centric theory of things. Celsus insists on the large impartiality of Nature, and repudiates the fantasy that the whole scheme is adjusted to the well-being and the salvation of man. Here the Christian, standing for his faith, may be said to carry on, though in the spirit of a new fanaticism, the anti-scientific humanism first set up by Sokrates; while the pagan, though touched by religious apriorism, and prone to lapse from logic to mysticism in his turn, approaches the scientific standpoint of the elder thinkers who had set religion aside.104 Not for thirteen hundred years was his standpoint to be regained among men. His protest against the Christian cultivation of blind faith,105 which Origen tries to meet on rationalistic lines, would in a later age be regarded as conveying no imputation. Even the simple defensive subtleties of Origen are too rationalistic for the succeeding generations of the orthodox. The least embittered of the Fathers, he is in his way the most reasonable; and in his unhesitating resort to the principle of allegory, wherever his documents are too hard for belief, we see the last traces of the spirit of reason as it had been in Plato, not yet paralysed by faith. Henceforth, till a new intellectual life is set up from without, Christian thought is more and more a mere disputation over the unintelligible, in terms of documents open always to opposing constructions.