Talk:Celsus

http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/Ap0301/CELSUS/

Celsus, the First Nietzsche: Resentment and the Case Against Christianity

Thomas F. Bertonneau Department of English Central Michigan University Mount Pleasant MI 48859 3e4kkhr@cmuvm.csv.cmich.edu

• Christianity shares with Judaism the ability to provoke resentment against its own persistent undermining of resentment. Nothing infuriates the critics of Judaism and Christianity – but especially of Christianity – more than the gentle admonition to turn the other cheek. Like the swellfoot outsider, Biblical religion becomes a magnet for every imaginable accusation, inspiring a voluminous Schimpflexicon of calumny and abuse.

Thus, while my main theme is resentment as a response to Judaism and Christianity, with the emphasis on Christianity, I nevertheless wish to begin by addressing a specific form taken by resentment: Verbal mud-slinging, or vilification, which, although primitive, yet bears a relation both to philosophy and poetics.

Celsus:

• "The cult of Christ is a secret society whose members huddle together in corners for fear of being brought to trial and punishment. Their persistence is the persistence of a group threatened by a common danger, and danger is a more powerful incentive to fraternal feeling than is any oath… They also practice their rites in secret in order to avoid the sentence of death that looms over them." (53)

Celsus,

• There is a sort of arrogance in the assumption of the Christians that evil is on the rise. Even if something seems evil to you it is far from clear whether it is really evil; one person with his limited perspective on the whole state of creation is unequipped to know whether what is good for you is good for someone else in the universe, and vice versa. (82)

While some of the Christians proclaim [that] they have the same god as do the Jews, others insist that there is another god higher than the creator-god and opposed to him. And some Christians teach that the Son came from this higher god. Still others admit of a third god – those, that is to say, who call themselves gnostics – and still others, though calling themselves Christians, want to live according to the laws of the Jews. I could also mention those who call themselves Simonians after Simon, and those naming themselves Helenians after Helen, his consort. There are Christian sects named after Marcellina, Harpocratian Christians who trace themselves to Salome, and some who follow Mariamne and others who follow Martha, and still others who call themselves Marcionites after their leader, Marcion. (90-91)

God is that which is beautiful and happy and exists within himself in the most perfect of all conceivable states. This means that God is changeless. A God who comes down to men undergoes change – a change from good to bad; from beautiful to shameful; from happiness to misfortune; from what is perfect to what is wicked. Now what sort of a god would choose a change like that? (77-78)

If they persist in refusing to worship the various gods who preside over the day-to-day activities of life, then they should not be permitted to live until marriageable age; they should not be permitted to marry, to have children, nor to do anything else over which a god presides. If they are going to marry, have children, and have a good time of it, taking the bad with the good as all men must, then they ought to pray to the beings who have made life possible for them. They should offer the appropriate sacrifices and say the proper prayers until such time as they are free of their earthly entanglements, and ingratiate themselves to the beings who control all spheres of human activity. It is at best ungrateful to use someone’s flat and pay [him] no rent (as Christians do the earth). (123)

The Christian conception of God – God as the God of the sick, God as spider, God as spirit – is one of the most corrupt conceptions of God arrived at on earth: Perhaps it even represents the low-water mark in the descending development of the God type. God degenerated into the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! In God a declaration of hostility towards life, nature, the will to life! God the formula for every calumny of “this world,” for every lie about “the next world!” In God nothingness deified, the will to nothingness sanctified!… (128)

Thomas F. Bertonneau imagines that Celsus may view Christianity as "a conspicuous and obnoxious species of internal flight from the order and reality of the great civic world" but he like Celsus are a part of that blood thirsty species that prefers to oppress his neighbor for his personal gain at the expense justifying his coveting wantonness with a pseudo philosophy of social justice rather than fin for himself in a Republic where he would have to hope for the charity of others. He would rather bite his neighbor than go hungry and grind his fellow man into loaves of bread rather than fast.