Celsus

The Greek philosopher Celsus of Alexandria was a Middle Platonist, known only for his anti-Christian work The True Account. The work is lost, but we have Origen's reply to it, Against Celsus. In it Celsus defends a version of Platonist theology. Celsus is known only as the author of a polemical work against the Christians entitled Alēthēs logos, which may be translated The True Account, although other connotations of logos are also present in the title (Logos). We know of this work only through the reply (Against Celsus) composed to it in AD 248 by the Church Father Origen, who does not in fact know who Celsus is (Origen §1). We too know nothing about Celsus, but can date his work fairly closely from references in it to a persecution of Christians under a joint rulership which must be that Marcus Aurelius and Commodus (AD 177-80). The title of Celsus' book may also refer to a passage of Plato's Meno (81a), where Socrates speaks of the ancient doctrine he has heard concerning the immortality of the soul as a 'true account' (Plato §11). One of Celsus' polemical points certainly is that Platonic philosophy is in accord with the wisdom of the most ancient authorities, such as Orpheus and Homer - a common enough view among the Neoplatonists. As regards his own philosophical position, it is hard to pin him to any particular tendency within contemporary Platonism. He shows the expected contempt for a notion like the resurrection of the body (Origen, Against Celsus V 14), or the idea that god made man in his own image (VI 63), there being nothing that could resemble god. At VII 42, he gives a basic account of the Platonist view of the supreme god, which is incompatible with the notion of his involving himself too closely with matter. He alludes, indeed, to the notion of the supreme god being 'beyond being' (Plato, Republic 509b), and the title of his work may indicate his adoption of the logos as a secondary god, but we cannot be sure. He mentions three ways of attaining a conception of god - synthesis, analysis and analogy, which correspond approximately to the three ways distinguished by Alcinous in his Didaskalikos, chapter 10, although there is no indication that Celsus knows that work. Contact between man and god is effected, of course, through the agency of daemons, whom the Christians are criticized for disdaining (VIII 28, 33, 35).