Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume IV/Origen/Origen Against Celsus/Book IV/Chapter XXXVII

Chapter XXXVII.

He charges us, moreover, with introducing &#8220;a man formed by the hands of God,&#8221; although the book of Genesis has made no mention of the &#8220;hands&#8221; of God, either when relating the creation or the &#8220;fashioning&#8221; of the man; while it is Job and David who have used the expression, &#8220;Thy hands have made me and fashioned me;&#8221; with reference to which it would need a lengthened discourse to point out the sense in which these words were understood by those who used them, both as regards the difference between &#8220;making&#8221; and &#8220;fashioning,&#8221; and also the &#8220;hands&#8221; of God.&#160; For those who do not understand these and similar expressions in the sacred Scriptures, imagine that we attribute to the God who is over all things a form such as that of man; and according to their conceptions, it follows that we consider the body of God to be furnished with wings, since the Scriptures, literally understood, attribute such appendages to God.&#160; The subject before us, however, does not require us to interpret these expressions; for, in our explanatory remarks upon the book of Genesis, these matters have been made, to the best of our ability, a special subject of investigation.&#160; Observe next the malignity of Celsus in what follows.&#160; For the Scripture, speaking of the &#8220;fashioning&#8221; of the man, says, &#8220;And breathed into his face the breath of life, and the man became a living soul.&#8221; &#160; Whereon Celsus, wishing maliciously to ridicule the &#8220;inbreathing into his face of the breath of life,&#8221; and not understanding the sense in which the expression was employed, states that &#8220;they composed a story that a man was fashioned by the hands of God, and was inflated by breath blown into him,&#8221; in order that, taking the word &#8220;inflated&#8221; to be used in a similar way to the inflation of skins, he might ridicule the statement, &#8220;He breathed into his face the breath of life,&#8221;&#8212;terms which are used figuratively, and require to be explained in order to show that God communicated to man of His incorruptible Spirit; as it is said, &#8220;For Thine incorruptible Spirit is in all things.&#8221;