Against Celsus 4.79

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."