the Jewish
religion, and put into his mouth, like a second Philo, ideas which at all
events sound more Platonic than Epicurean. Origen was entirely justified
in showing that in this process Celsus frequently forgot his part; and
this he did with much skill.

But whatever Celsus may have been,--an Epicurean, or, as has occasionally
been maintained, a Neo-platonist,--he was at all events no mean adversary
and certainly not unworthy of Origen's steel. If not, why should Origen
have felt the need of such an earnest refutation? He says, certainly, that
he did it only at the request of his old friend and protector, Ambrosius.
But that is what many writers under similar circumstances have said and
still say. We have, at all events, lost much through the loss (or
destruction?) of all manuscripts of Celsus. Not only was he acquainted
with the principal philosophical schools of antiquity, he appears also to
have studied zealously the religions of the ancient world as they were
known at that time to the learned, especially in Alexandria, of which we
have but scant knowledge. Origen expressly states (I, 14) that Celsus
described the various peoples who possessed religious and philosophical
systems, because he supposed that all these views bore a certain
relationship to one another. Without a doubt much has been here lost to
us, not only for the history of Greek philosophy, but also for the history
of Oriental religions and philosophies, whose representatives at that time
sojourned in Alexandria, yet as to whose personal influence we are almost
entirely in the dark. Celsus is presumed to have written of the doctrines
of the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Jews, Persians, Odrysians,
Samothracians, Eleusinians, even of the Samaneans, _i.e._ the Buddhists
(I, 24), and to have represented these as better accredited than those of
the Jews. We see anew what treasures were stored up in Alexandria, and we
feel all the more deeply their irrevocable loss. The desire and the hope
of recovering the work of Celsus were therefore quite natural for any who
wished to penetrate more deeply into the spiritual atmosphere of the
second and third centuries, and especially for such as strove to
understand clearly how men of this age, versed in philosophy, such as
Clement and Origen himself, could confess Christianity, or become
converted to it, or could defend it against other philosophers without in
the least becoming untrue to their philosophical convicti