Against Celsus 4.74–4.88

Next he accuses us at length of saying that God made all things for man. And he wishes to show from natural history about animals, and from the sagacity that appears in them, that all things came into being no more for human beings than for the irrational animals. He seems to me to say something like those who, out of hatred for people they detest, accuse them of the very things for which their dearest friends are praised. For just as in their case hatred blinds them so that they do not see that they are also accusing their dearest friends by what they think are slanders against their enemies, in the same way Celsus too, his reasoning confused, has not seen that he is also accusing the Stoic philosophers, who rightly put man, and in a word rational nature, ahead of all irrational beings, and say that providence made all things principally for its sake. And rational beings have the place of the principal things, like children being born; while irrational and inanimate things have the place of the afterbirth created together with the child. And I think that, just as in cities those who oversee the goods for sale and the market oversee them for no other reason than for human beings, yet dogs and other irrational animals also share incidentally in the abundance, so providence cares principally for rational beings, and it has followed that irrational beings too enjoy what comes about for human beings. And just as a person errs who says that the market overseers care no more for human beings than for dogs, since dogs too share incidentally in the abundance of the goods for sale, so much more are Celsus and those who think as he does impious toward God, who cares for rational beings, when they say: "Why are these things produced as food for human beings rather than for plants, trees, grass, and thorns?"

For he thinks, first, that thunders and lightnings and rains are not works of God, being by now more openly an Epicurean; and second he says that, even if one were to grant that these are works of God, they are produced as food no more for us human beings than for plants, trees, grass, and thorns, granting, like a true Epicurean, that these things happen by chance and not by providence. For if they are no more useful to us than to plants, trees, grass, and thorns, it is clear that they do not come from providence either, or else from a providence that cares no more for us than for trees, grass, and thorns. Each of these views is plainly impious; and to stand up and contradict such things against one who accuses us of impiety is simple-minded, for it is clear to everyone from what has been said who is the impious one. Then he says: "Even if you say that these grow for human beings" (clearly meaning plants, trees, grass, and thorns), "why will you say that they grow for human beings rather than for the wildest irrational animals?" Let Celsus say plainly, then, that the great variety of things growing on earth is not the work of providence, but some chance concourse of atoms has made so many qualities, and that by chance so many species of plants and trees and grass resemble one another; and that no craftsmanlike reason brought them into being, nor do they have their origin from a mind that surpasses all wonder. But we Christians, devoted to the only God who created these things, give thanks for these too to their maker, because he prepared so great a home for us, and, for our sake, for the animals that serve us: "He who makes grass spring up for the cattle, and green plants for the service of human beings, to bring forth bread from the earth, and that wine may gladden the heart of man, and his face be made cheerful with oil, and bread strengthen the heart of man." And if he has also prepared food for the wildest animals, there is nothing surprising in that; for other philosophers too have said that these animals came into being to exercise the rational animal. And one of the wise men among us says somewhere: "Do not say, 'What is this? Why is this?' For all things were created for their use," and "Do not say, 'What is this? Why is this?' For all things will be sought out in their time."

Next, Celsus, wishing to show that providence made the things that grow on earth no more for us than for the wildest animals, says: "We, toiling and labouring hard, are fed with difficulty and pain; but for them 'all things grow unsown and unploughed.'" He does not see that God, wishing human understanding to be exercised everywhere, so that it would not remain idle and without invention of the arts, made man needy, so that by his very neediness he would be compelled to discover arts, some for food and others for shelter. For it was better for those who would not seek divine things and pursue philosophy to be in want, so as to use their understanding to discover arts, than, having everything in abundance, to neglect understanding altogether. At any rate, want of the necessities of life established agriculture, vine-dressing, the arts of gardening, carpentry and smithing, which make tools for the arts that serve the production of food; and want of shelter introduced weaving, after carding and spinning, and building; and so understanding has risen even to architecture. And lack of necessities has caused the products of other places to be carried by seamanship and navigation to those who do not have them; so that for these reasons too one might admire providence, which, to our benefit, made the rational being needier than the irrational animals. For the irrational animals have their food ready to hand, since they do not have the capacity for arts; and they have natural covering too, for they are covered with hair, or feathers, or scales, or shells. Let this be said in our defence against the passage in Celsus that says: "We, toiling and labouring hard, are fed with difficulty; but for them 'all things grow unsown and unploughed.'"

Next, forgetting that his purpose is to accuse Jews and Christians, he raises against himself an iambic line of Euripides that opposes his view, and, closing with what was said, accuses it of being wrongly said. Celsus's passage runs thus: "And if you quote the line of Euripides, that 'sun and night are servants to mortals,' why to us rather than to ants and flies? For to them too 'night' comes for rest, and day for seeing and working." It is clear, then, that not only some Jews and Christians have said that the sun and the things in heaven serve us, but also the one some call the philosopher of the stage, who had been a hearer of Anaxagoras's natural philosophy; he says, by synecdoche from the one rational being, man, that the things ordered in the universe serve all rational beings, which again are indicated by synecdoche in "sun and night." Or perhaps the tragedian also named the day from the sun, which makes the day, teaching that the things that most need day and night are those beneath the moon, and others not so much as those on earth. Day, then, and "night serve mortals," having come into being for the sake of rational beings. And if ants and flies, working by day and resting by night, share incidentally in what came into being for human beings, it must not be said that day and night come into being for ants and flies too, nor for no reason at all; rather one must believe that these things came into being by providence for the sake of human beings.

Next he raises against himself what is said on behalf of human beings, that the irrational animals were made for them. And he says: "If someone should call us rulers of the animals, since we hunt the other animals and feast on them, we will say: why were we not rather made for them, since they hunt us and eat us? Moreover, we need nets and weapons and many men to help us, and dogs, against the animals we hunt; but to them nature has given weapons at once and of themselves, easily subjecting us to them." Here too you see in what way understanding has been given to us as a great help, better than any weapon the wild beasts seem to have. At any rate, we who are far weaker in body than the animals, and than some of them exceedingly smaller, master the wild beasts through understanding, and hunt even such enormous elephants. Those that are by nature capable of being tamed we subject to our tameness; against those that are not, or that do not seem to us to provide any use from taming, we take our stand with such security that when we wish we keep such great beasts shut up, and when we need food from their bodies we kill them just as we do the animals that are not wild. The Creator, then, made all things servants of the rational animal and of its natural understanding. For some purposes we need dogs, for example to guard flocks of sheep, herds of cattle, flocks of goats, or houses; for others oxen, for example for farming; for others we use yoke-animals or beasts of burden. So too the race of lions and bears, leopards and boars, and the like is said to have been given to us to exercise the seeds of courage in us.

Then he says to the race of human beings, who are aware of their superiority over the irrational animals: "To what you say, that God has given us the power to catch wild beasts and use them, we will say that probably, before there were cities and arts and such associations, and weapons and nets, human beings were seized and eaten by wild beasts, while wild beasts were very rarely caught by human beings." See, in reply to this, that even if human beings catch wild beasts and wild beasts seize human beings, there is a great difference between those who prevail by understanding and those who get the upper hand by savagery and cruelty over people who do not use understanding to avoid suffering from wild beasts. As for "before there were cities and arts and such associations," I think he has forgotten what he said above, that the world is uncreated and indestructible, and that only things on earth suffer floods and conflagrations, and not all of them fall into these at once. So, just as those who hold the world uncreated cannot speak of its beginning, neither can they speak of a time when there were no cities at all and arts had not yet been discovered. But suppose we grant him this, consistently with our view though no longer with what he himself said above: what has this to do with the claim that at the beginning human beings were in every case seized and eaten by wild beasts, while wild beasts were no longer caught by human beings? For if the world came into being by providence, and God presides over the universe, the first sparks of the human race must, at their beginning, have come under some protection from higher beings, so that at the beginning there was an association of the divine nature with human beings. The poet of Ascra had this in mind when he said: "For then feasts were shared, and seats were shared, between the immortal gods and mortal human beings."

And the divine word according to Moses also presented the first human beings as hearing a more divine voice and oracles, and sometimes seeing visits of God's angels made to them. For it is likely that at the beginning of the world human nature was helped to a greater degree, until, having made progress in understanding and the other virtues and in the discovery of the arts, they were able to live on their own as well, not always needing those who serve God's will to guide and manage them with a wondrous appearance. It follows from this that it is false that at the beginning human beings were seized and eaten by wild beasts, while wild beasts were very rarely caught by human beings. From this it is plain that what Celsus says in these words is false too: "So that in this way at least God subjected human beings rather to the wild beasts." For God did not subject human beings to the wild beasts, but gave the wild beasts to be caught by human understanding and by the arts that understanding produces against them. For it was not without God that human beings contrived for themselves safety from wild beasts and mastery over them.

The noble fellow does not see how many philosophers, who introduce providence and say it does all things for the sake of rational beings, he does away with, as far as in him lies, together with useful doctrines in which Christians agree with philosophy; nor how much harm, hindering piety, comes from accepting that man differs in no way before God from ants or bees. He says: "If human beings seem to differ from the irrational animals because they have built cities and use a constitution and offices and positions of command, this is nothing to the point; for ants and bees do too. Bees, at any rate, have a leader, and there is following and service, wars and victories, and the capture of the defeated, and cities and suburbs too, and succession of work, and punishments against the idle and wicked; at any rate they drive out the drones and punish them." Here too he has not seen the difference between things accomplished by reason and reasoning and things that come about from an irrational nature and mere constitution. For these no reason present in those who do them accounts (for they do not have it); but the most ancient one, the Son of God and King of all subject things, made an irrational nature that helps, as irrational, those not counted worthy of reason. Among human beings, then, cities came into being with many arts and an ordering of laws; and constitutions and offices and positions of command among human beings are either those properly so called, certain earnest dispositions and activities, or those so named by a looser use of words, in imitation of those as far as possible. For those who have made laws successfully looked to those and established the best constitutions, offices, and positions of command. None of these can be found among irrational beings, even if Celsus applies to ants and bees the rational names that are assigned to rational beings: city, constitutions, offices, and positions of command. In these matters we must in no way praise the ants or the bees (for they do not act with reasoning), but we must admire the divine nature, which extended even to irrational beings a kind of imitation, as it were, of rational beings, perhaps to shame rational beings, so that looking at ants they may become more industrious and more careful to store up what is useful to them, and considering bees they may obey those in command and divide among themselves the useful works of the state for the preservation of cities.

And perhaps the so-called wars of the bees are set there as a lesson that wars among human beings, if ever they must happen, should be just and orderly. And bees do not have cities and suburbs; rather, the hives and the hexagonal cells and the works of the bees and the succession among them exist for the sake of human beings, who need honey for many purposes, for the treatment of bodies that are ailing and as pure food. Nor should what the bees do against the drones be compared with the punishments in cities against the idle and wicked and the penalties inflicted on them. But, as I said before, in these things nature is to be admired; while man, who is able to reason about all things and to set all things in order, is to be approved as a fellow worker with providence, accomplishing the works not of God's providence alone but also of his own.

Having spoken about bees, so as to belittle, as far as in him lies, the cities, constitutions, offices, positions of command, and wars for native lands, not of us Christians only but of all human beings, Celsus next adds a detailed eulogy of ants, so that by his eulogy of them he may bring down, in his argument about the ants, human management in the matter of food, and cast aside human foresight for winter quarters as having nothing more than what he supposes is the irrational foresight of the ants. Which of the simpler people, who do not know how to look into the nature of all things, would Celsus not turn away, as far as in him lies, from helping those weighed down by burdens and sharing their toil, when he says of ants that they take over one another's burdens whenever they see one tired? For someone who needs education through reason and has no understanding of it will say: "Since, then, we differ in no way from ants, even when we help those who are tired from carrying very heavy burdens, why do we do such a thing in vain?" The ants, being irrational animals, would not be puffed up to think great things of themselves because their works are compared to those of human beings; but human beings, who can hear through reason how their fellowship is being belittled, might be harmed, as far as Celsus and his words can do it. He does not see that in wishing to turn his readers away from Christianity he turns away even non-Christians from compassion toward those who carry the heaviest burdens. He ought, if he were even a philosopher aware of human fellowship, not only not to do away, along with Christianity, with what is useful among human beings, but also to cooperate, if possible, with the goods that Christianity shares with other human beings. And if ants cut off the sprouts of the grain they store away, so that it does not swell but remains as food for them through the year, one must not suppose that reasoning in ants is the cause of this, but nature, mother of all, which has ordered even irrational beings so as not to leave even the least thing without some trace of the reason that comes from nature. Unless, of course, by this Celsus covertly wants (for in many things he likes to play the Platonist) every soul to be of the same kind, and a man's to differ in no way from that of ants and bees; which is the view of one who brings the soul down from the vault of heaven not to the human body only but to the other bodies as well. Christians will not be persuaded by this, since they have already grasped that the human soul was made "in the image" of God, and see that it is impossible for a nature created "in the image" of God to wipe out its features altogether and take on others, made in the images of I know not what, among the irrational animals.

And since he says that the living ants set apart a special place for those that die, and that this is their ancestral burial ground, it must be said that the more praises he utters of the irrational animals, the more, even against his will, he magnifies the work of the Word who ordered all things, and shows the skill in human beings that is able by reason to set in order even the advantages of the nature of irrational beings. (But why do I say irrational, since Celsus thinks that the beings called irrational according to the common notions of all people are not irrational at all?) At any rate, the man who promised to speak about the whole of nature, and boasted of the truth in the title of his book, does not think even ants are irrational. For he says of ants, as though they converse with one another, something like this: "Indeed, when they meet one another they converse, and so they do not lose their way; so there is among them a fulness of reason, and common notions of certain universals, and speech, and objects and meanings." For conversing with another takes place in speech that shows some meaning, and often reports about what are called objects; and to say that these exist in ants too, how would it not be the most ridiculous thing of all?

And he is not ashamed to add to these things, so as to display to those who come after him the unseemliness of his own doctrines, saying: "Come then, if someone were to look down from heaven upon the earth, how would what we do seem to differ from what ants and bees do?" Does the one who, on his hypothesis, looks down from heaven upon the earth at what human beings do and what ants do look at the bodies of human beings and ants, but not perceive the rational ruling faculty moved by reasoning, and on the other hand the irrational ruling faculty moved irrationally by impulse and impression, with a certain natural constitution underneath? It would be absurd for one looking from heaven at things on earth to want to look at the bodies of human beings and ants from so great a distance, and not much rather to see the natures of their ruling faculties and the source of their impulses, rational or irrational. And if he once sees the source of all impulses, it is clear that he would also see the difference and the superiority of man, not only over ants but also over elephants. For one looking from heaven will see in the irrational beings, even if their bodies are large, no other principle than, if I may so call it, irrationality; but in rational beings reason, which human beings share with divine and heavenly beings, and perhaps with the God over all himself; which is why man is said to have been made "in the image" of God; for the "image" of the God over all is his Word.

Next, as though striving to bring the human race down still further and make it like the irrational animals, and wishing to leave out nothing of what is reported of irrational animals that shows something greater, he says that the arts of sorcery too exist in some irrational animals, so that human beings may not pride themselves especially on this either, or wish to have superiority over the irrational animals. He says this: "And if human beings think something of themselves for sorcery, here too snakes and eagles are wiser; at any rate they know many antidotes and charms against harm, and indeed the powers of certain stones for the protection of their young; and when human beings chance upon these, they think they have a wonderful possession." First, I do not know how he called sorcery the animals' experience, or some natural apprehension, of natural antidotes; for the name sorcery is customarily applied to something else. Unless perhaps, as an Epicurean, he covertly wants to disparage all use of such things as belonging to the professions of sorcerers. But let it be granted to him that human beings pride themselves on knowing these things, whether they are sorcerers or not: how does it follow that snakes are wiser than human beings in this, because they use fennel for sharpness of sight and quickness of movement, grasping only this natural thing not by reasoning but by their constitution? Human beings do not come to such a thing from bare nature like snakes, but partly from experience and partly from reason, and sometimes by reasoning and according to science. So too, if eagles find the so-called eagle-stone and carry it to their nest for the protection of their young, how does it follow that eagles are wise, and wiser than human beings, who found by experience the natural help given to eagles and used it by reasoning and with understanding?

Let it be granted that other antidotes too are known by animals. What has this to do with showing that it is not nature but reason that discovers these things in animals? For if it were reason that discovered them, not just this one thing alone would be found, fixed, in snakes (let there be a second and a third), and something else in the eagle, and so with the other animals; rather, as many things as in human beings. But as it is, it is plain from the fact that each animal's nature has been inclined, in a fixed way, toward certain helps, that there is no wisdom or reason in them, but a certain natural constitution toward such things for the preservation of the animals, brought about by the Word. And yet, if I wished to close with Celsus on these matters, I would have used the saying of Solomon from Proverbs, which runs thus: "There are four things that are least on the earth, but these are wiser than the wise: the ants, which have no strength, but prepare their food in summer; and the rock-badgers, a people not strong, who made their houses in the rocks; the locust has no king, yet marches in good order at one command; and the gecko, which supports itself on its hands and is easily caught, lives in the strongholds of the king." But I do not use these sayings as though their sense were plain; rather, in keeping with the title (for the book is titled Proverbs), I examine them as riddles. For it is the custom of these men to divide things that show one thing on the surface but convey another in a hidden sense into many kinds, one of which is proverbs. That is why in our Gospels too our Saviour is written to have said: "I have spoken these things to you in proverbs; the hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in proverbs." It is not, then, the perceptible ants that are wiser even "than the wise," but those indicated as in the form of proverbs. And the same must be said of the other animals. But Celsus thinks the books of the Jews and Christians are altogether very simple and unlearned, and supposes that those who interpret them allegorically do so by forcing the intent of the writers. Let Celsus, then, be refuted by this too as slandering us in vain; and let his argument about snakes and eagles, which declared them wiser than human beings, be refuted as well.

Wishing further to show at length that not even notions about the divine are exclusive to the human race among all mortal beings, but that some of the irrational animals too have notions about God (about whom such disagreements have arisen even among the sharper-witted of human beings everywhere, Greeks and barbarians), he says: "If man is thought superior to the other animals because he has grasped notions of the divine, let those who say this know that many of the other animals will lay claim to this too; and with good reason. For what could one call more divine than to foreknow and foretell the future? Human beings learn this from the other animals, and especially from birds; and those who understand their indications are the diviners. If, then, birds, and whatever other prophetic animals there are, foreknowing from God, teach us by signs, it seems that they are by nature so much nearer to divine converse, and wiser and dearer to God. And the intelligent among human beings say that they have conversations too, evidently holier than ours, and that they themselves somehow understand what is said and show by the deed that they understand, when, having said beforehand that the birds said they would go somewhere and do this or that, they show them going there and doing what they had foretold. And nothing seems to keep oaths better than elephants, or to be more faithful to divine things, surely because they have knowledge of him." See in this how many questions debated among philosophers, not only of the Greeks but also of those among barbarians, who either discovered or learned from certain demons the facts about omens from birds and other animals, from which certain divinations are said to come to human beings, he seizes upon and sets out as agreed. For first it has been debated whether there is an art of augury, and in general divination through animals, or not. Second, among those who have accepted that there is divination through birds, the cause of the manner of divination has not been agreed upon; for some say that the movements of the animals come from certain demons or prophetic gods, to birds for different flights and different cries, and to the others for such and such movements; while others say that their souls are more divine and suited to this, which is most unconvincing.