3. Before the next question let us consider
whether we have not good reason for approving of the saying ‘No man can serve two
masters’, which continues ‘for either he will hate the one and love the other,
or he will cleave to the one and espies the other’, and after that ‘You cannot
serve God and mammon’. The defense leads us to a profound and mysterious
doctrine about gods and the lords. The divine scripture knows that there is a
great Lord above al the gods. In this phrase we do not understand the words ‘gods’
to refer to those worshipped by the heathen, seeing that we have learn that ‘all
the gods of the heath are daemons’. But we understand it of gods who have some sort
of assembly known to the prophetic word. The supreme God judges these and
appoints to each one the work for which he is fitted. For ‘God stood in the
assembly of the gods, and in the midst he judges gods’. Moreover, the Lord is ‘the
God of Gods’, who by His Son ‘called the earth from the rising of the sun to
its setting’. And we are commanded to ‘give thanks to the God of gods’, and
have also learn that ‘God is not the God of the dead but of the living’. The
idea here is set forth not merely in the texts which I have quoted but also in innumerable
others.
4. Such are the ideas which the divine scriptures
teach us to study and think about the Lord and lords. In one place they say ‘Give
thanks to the God of gods, for his mercy endureth for ever’; and in another
place that God is ‘King of kings and Lord of lords’. And the Bibel knows some
so-called gods, and some who are actually are gods, whether so called or not.
Paul teaches the same doctrine about those that really are lords, and those
which are not, when he says, ‘For though there may be some that are called gods
in heaven or on earth, as there are gods many and lords many.’ Then, because through
Jesus the God of gods ‘calls form the east and west’ those whom He wishes to
call to His own portion, and because the Christ of God who is Lord shows that
he is superior to every other lord by the fact that he has gone into the
territory of every lord and calls to himself people from every territory, and
because Paul understood this, he continues after the words which I have quoted:
‘yet to us there is one God, the Father, of whom all things, and one Lord Jesus
Christ, through whom are all things and we through him’. And perceiving that
the doctrine in this matter is a wonderful and mysterious one he adds: ‘But
this knowledge is not in all men.’ Now hen he says, ‘Yet to us there is one
God, the Father of whom are all things, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom
are all things’, by the words ‘to us’ he refers to himself and to all who have
ascended to the supreme God of gods and to the supreme Lord of lords. The man
who has ascended to the supreme God is he who, without any divided loyalty
whatever, worships Him through His Son, the divine Logos and Wisdom seen in
Jesus, who alone leads to Him those who by all mans try to draw near to God,
the Creator of all things, by exceptionally good words and deeds and thoughts.
I think it is for this and for similar reasons that the princes of the world,
who is transformed into an angel of light, caused the words to be written—‘A
host of gods and daemons follows him, arranged in eleven divisions’, where he says
of himself and the philosophers, ‘We are with Zeus, but others are with the
other daemons, some with one, some with another.’
5. Well then, since there are many so called or
actual gods, and similarly also lords, we do all we can to ascend not only
above those worshipped as gods by the nations on earth, but also even above
those whom the scriptures hold to be gods. Nothing is known of the latter by strangers
to the covenants of God given through Moses and Jesus our Saviour, and by those
alien to His promises made plain by them. He who does no action loved by daemons
rises above bondage to all daemons and ascends above the portion of those said
to be gods by Paul if he looks, whether in the way that they do or in some
other way, not at the things which are seen but at the things which are not
seen. If anyone sees how ‘the earnest expectation of the creation waits for the
manifestation of the sons of God, for the creation was made subject to
futility, not willingly but by reason of him who subjected it in hope’, and if
he speaks well of the creation because he perceives how it will all ‘be
delivered from the bondage of corruption’ and come to ‘the liberty of the glory
of the children of God’, he is not dragged away to serving God in conjunction
with some other deity beside Him, nor serving two masters. (Origen, Contra Celsum
8.3-5, in Origen: Contra Celsum [trans. Henry Chadwick; Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1953], 456-57)
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