Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume IV/Origen/Origen Against Celsus/Book V/Chapter VII

by Origen

Chapter VII.

Having, moreover, assumed that the Jews consider the heaven to be God, he adds that this is absurd; finding fault with those who bow down to the heaven, but not also to the sun, and moon, and stars, saying that the Jews do this, as if it were possible that “the whole” should be God, and its several parts not divine.  And he seems to call the heaven “a whole,” and sun, moon, and stars its several parts.  Now, certainly neither Jews nor Christians call the “heaven” God.  Let it be granted, however, that, as he alleges, the heaven is called God by the Jews, and suppose that sun, moon, and stars are parts of “heaven,”—which is by no means true, for neither are the animals and plants upon the earth any portion of it,—how is it true, even according to the opinions of the Greeks, that if God be a whole, His parts also are divine?  Certainly they say that the Cosmos taken as the whole^[1] is God, the Stoics calling it the First God, the followers of Plato the Second, and some of them the Third.  According to these philosophers, then, seeing the whole Cosmos is God, its parts also are divine; so that not only are human beings divine, but the whole of the irrational creation, as being “portions” of the Cosmos; and besides these, the plants also are divine.  And if the rivers, and mountains, and seas are portions of the Cosmos, then, since the whole Cosmos is God, are the rivers and seas also gods?  But even this the Greeks will not assert.  Those, however, who preside over rivers and seas (either demons or gods, as they call them), they would term gods.  Now from this it follows that the general statement of Celsus, even according to the Greeks, who hold the doctrine of Providence, is false, that if any “whole” be a god, its parts necessarily are divine.  But it follows from the doctrine of Celsus, that if the Cosmos be God, all that is in it is divine, being parts of the Cosmos.  Now, according to this view, animals, as flies, and gnats, and worms, and every species of serpent, as well as of birds and fishes, will be divine,—an assertion which would not be made even by those who maintain that the Cosmos is God.  But the Jews, who live according to the law of Moses, although they may not know how to receive the secret meaning of the law, which is conveyed in obscure language, will not maintain that either the heaven or the angels are God.

1. τὸ ὅλον ὁ κόσμος.