PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND

There are perhaps few works of the early Christian Church which compare in interest or in importance with that which is here translated. The contra Celsum stands out as the culmination of the whole apologetic movement of the second and third centuries. The apostolic church had not included among its members many wise or many mighty, and as Christianity spread it was natural enough that some attempts should be made to make this Oriental faith, which had not the merit of great antiquity behind it, into a creed which could be found acceptable by thinking minds. The Apologists have in view two closely related objects. They hope to assure the Roman authorities that Christians are not a pernicious and unpatriotic minority group with seditious tendencies and immoral rites; and they want to present Christianity to the educated classes as something intellectually respectable. In the work of Origen it is primarily the latter desire which is uppermost. What he gives us in the contra Celsum is not merely a refutation point by point of a remarkably well-informed opponent. The apology also helps us to see both the arguments which Origen would have used when engaged in disputation with learned pagans at Alexandria or Caesarea, and the way in which he himself in his own mind could be satisfied that Christianity was not an irrational credulity but a profound philosophy.