No Better Than the Ants

For in the first place he thinks that thunder and lightning and rain are not works of God — by now playing the Epicurean more openly than before. And in the second place he says: “Even if someone were to grant that these are works of God, they do not come about to feed us human beings any more than to feed the plants and the trees and the grasses and the thorns.” So he grants, like a true Epicurean, that these things happen by chance and not by providence. For if they are of no more use to us than to plants and trees and grasses and thorns, then plainly either they do not come from providence at all, or they come from a providence that takes no more care of us than of trees and grass and a thorn bush. Either way the thing is irreverent on the face of it. And it is silly to stand and argue against such statements with a man who is charging us with irreverence, since anyone can see from what has been said which of us is the irreverent one. [a]

Then he says that even if you claim these things grow for human beings — he plainly means the plants and the trees and the grasses and the thorns — “why will you say they grow for human beings rather than for the wildest of the irrational animals?” Let Celsus say plainly, then, that so great a variety among the things that grow on the earth is not the work of providence; that some chance meeting of atoms produced qualities so many and so different; that it is by chance that so many kinds of plants and trees and grasses resemble one another; that no craftsman’s reason gave them their standing; and that they do not take their beginning from a mind that surpasses all wonder.

But we Christians, who are given over to the one God who created these things, are grateful for them too to the Maker who made them, because he has laid out for us so great a hearth — and, on our account, for the animals that serve us. He “makes grass grow for the cattle, and green growth for the service of human beings, to bring bread out of the earth; and wine to gladden a man’s heart, and oil to make his face cheerful, and bread to strengthen a man’s heart.” And that he has prepared food even for the wildest of the animals is no surprise. Others who have practiced philosophy have said that these very animals came into being to give the rational animal its exercise. And one of the wise men among us says somewhere: “Do not say, ‘What is this? What is this for?’ For everything has been created for its own use.” And again: “Do not say, ‘What is this? What is this for?’ For everything will be looked for in its own time.”

After this, Celsus wants it to be true that providence has made the things that grow on the earth no more for us than for the wildest of the animals, and he says: “We at least are fed barely and painfully, working hard and suffering for it; while for them ‘all things grow unsown and unplowed.’” He does not see that God, wanting human understanding to be exercised everywhere, so that it would not sit idle and never think its way to the arts, made the human being needy — so that by his very neediness he would be forced to find out arts, some for food and others for shelter. For people who were never going to search out divine things or take up philosophy, it was better to be short of what they needed, and so to use their understanding to invent the arts, than to have plenty and neglect their understanding altogether. [f]

Being short of what life requires is what produced farming, and vine-growing, and the arts of the garden; and carpentry and metalwork, which make the tools for the arts that supply our food. Being short of shelter brought in weaving, which comes after carding and spinning, and house-building; and so understanding climbed as far as architecture. And the lack of what people need is what made the produce of other places be carried by seamanship and steering to those who did not have it. So on this ground too one might admire providence, which for our own good made the rational creature needier than the irrational animals. The irrational animals have their food ready to hand, since they have not even a starting point toward the arts, and they have their covering by nature: they are haired, or feathered, or scaled, or shelled. Let this stand as our answer to the words that appear in Celsus: “We are fed barely and painfully, working hard and suffering for it; while for them ‘all things grow unsown and unplowed.’”

Next, forgetting that what he set out to do is to accuse Jews and Christians, he brings up against himself an iambic line of Euripides that goes against his own opinion; and then, closing with what the line says, he charges it with being badly said. Celsus’ words run this way: “And if you also bring up the line of Euripides, that [h]

why more to us than to the ants and the flies? For night comes to them as well, so that they may rest, and day, so that they may see and get to work.” It is plain enough, then, that it is not only certain Jews and Christians who have said that the sun and the things in the sky serve us. So did the man whom some call the philosopher of the stage, who had been a hearer of Anaxagoras’ lectures on nature. He takes the human being, one rational creature, to stand for all rational beings, and says that the things set in order in the universe serve them all — and those ordered things are themselves indicated in the same figure by the words “the sun and the night.”

Or perhaps the tragic poet named the day from the sun that makes the day, teaching that the things which most need day and night are the things below the moon, and that other things need them less than the things on earth do. So day and night “are slaves to mortals,” having come into being for the sake of rational beings. And if ants and flies get some benefit on the side from the things that came into being for human beings — working by day and taking their rest by night — we must not on that account say that day and night came about for the sake of ants and flies; nor may we suppose they came about for nothing. We must reckon that they came to be by providence, for the sake of human beings.

After this he brings up against himself what is said on behalf of human beings — that the irrational animals were made for their sake. He says: “If someone were to call us the rulers of the animals, on the ground that we hunt the other animals and feast on them, we will say: why have we not rather come into being for their sake, since they hunt us and eat us? Besides, we need nets and weapons, and a good many men to help, and dogs, to use against what we hunt; while nature has given them weapons at once and out of themselves, and easily puts us in their power.” [l]

Here too you can see how understanding has been given us as a great help, and one better than any weapon the wild beasts appear to have. We are far weaker in body than the animals, and far shorter than some of them; yet by our understanding we get the better of the wild beasts, and we hunt elephants, huge as they are. Those whose nature it is to be tamed we bring under our own gentle handling. Against those whose nature it is not, or which do not look as though they would be of any use to us tamed, we take a stand that keeps us safe: when we want to, we keep such great beasts shut up, and when we need food from their bodies, we kill them just as we kill the animals that are not wild. So the Maker has made all things slaves of the rational animal and of its natural understanding. For some purposes we need dogs — to guard sheepfolds, say, or cattle yards or goat pens or houses; for others we need oxen, as in farming; for others we use draft animals to carry loads. And in the same way it is said that the whole tribe of lions and bears and leopards and wild boars and the like has been given us to exercise the seeds of courage that are in us.

Then, answering the human race, who are aware of their own superiority — the superiority they have over the irrational animals — he says: “As to what you say, that God gave us the power to catch wild beasts and to put them to our own use, we will answer that in all likelihood, before there were cities and arts and dealings of this kind, and weapons and nets, human beings were seized and eaten by wild beasts, and wild beasts were hardly ever caught by human beings.” Notice, against this, that even if human beings do catch wild beasts and wild beasts do seize human beings, there is a great difference between those who prevail by understanding and the creatures that get the better, by wildness and cruelty, of people who do not use their understanding to keep themselves from being harmed by beasts. [n]

As for “before there were cities and arts and dealings of this kind,” I think he has forgotten what he said earlier: that the world is ungenerated and imperishable; that only the things on earth undergo floods and burnings; and that they do not all meet with them at the same time. Just as men who hold that the world had no beginning cannot name a beginning for it, so neither can they name a time when there were no cities at all and the arts had not yet been found out. But let these statements of his stand as well. We can grant them without contradicting ourselves; he can no longer grant them without contradicting what he said above. And even so, what does any of it do toward proving that at the start human beings were always seized and eaten by wild beasts, and that wild beasts were not caught by human beings at all?

For if the world came to be by providence, and God is set over the whole of things, it was necessary that the first live sparks of the human race should from the beginning have come under some guard from beings higher than themselves — so that at the start there were dealings between the divine nature and human beings. The poet of Ascra saw this too, and sang:

And the divine account according to Moses brings in the first human beings as hearing a more-than-human voice, and oracles, and at times as seeing visits that God’s angels made to them. For it was likely that at the beginning of the world human nature would be helped to a greater degree, until progress had been made toward understanding and the rest of the virtues and the finding out of the arts, and people were able to live on their own as well — no longer always needing those who serve the will of God to be their guardians and stewards, appearing to them in ways beyond expectation. It follows from this that it is false that “at the start human beings were seized and eaten by wild beasts, while wild beasts were hardly ever caught by human beings.” [r]

And from these things it is clear that what Celsus says here is false as well: “So that in this way God has rather made human beings subject to the wild beasts.” For God did not make human beings subject to the wild beasts. He gave the wild beasts to be catchable by human understanding, and by the arts that stand upon understanding and are directed against them. It was not without God that human beings contrived their own safety from the wild beasts, and their mastery over them.

Our fine fellow does not see how many philosophers there are who bring in providence and say that it does everything for the sake of rational beings; and so, as far as it lies with him, he does away with teachings that are useful for the agreement of Christians with philosophy in these matters. Nor does he see how much harm is done, and how reverence for God is blocked, by accepting that in God’s sight a human being differs in nothing from ants or bees. He says: “If human beings seem to differ from the irrational animals on this ground, that they have settled cities and make use of a constitution and offices and governments, that is nothing to the purpose; for so do the ants and the bees. The bees at any rate have a leader, and there is a following and a court, and wars and victories, and takings of the defeated, and cities and outskirts, and a succession of tasks, and judgments passed on the idle and the wicked — the drones, for instance, they drive out and punish.” [t]

In these things too he has not seen how what is carried through by reason and rational skill differs from what comes about from an irrational nature and a bare structure. No reason present in the creatures that do these things takes on the cause of them, for they have no reason at all. It is the most ancient one — who is also the Son of God, and king of all that is set under him — who has made an irrational nature, and it is as irrational that it comes to the help of those who were not counted worthy of reason.

So cities came to stand among human beings, along with many arts and an ordering of laws; and among human beings constitutions and offices and governments are either the ones properly so called — certain excellent settled dispositions and activities — or the ones so named in a looser sense, made in imitation of the first ones as far as that could be done. For it was by looking at those that the lawgivers who succeeded set up the best constitutions and offices and governments. Not one of these is to be found among the irrational animals, even if Celsus carries over words that belong to reason, and arrangements drawn up for rational beings — city and constitutions and offices and governments — and applies them to ants and bees as well. For all this the ants and the bees deserve no credit at all, since they do not act with reasoning. What deserves admiration is the divine nature, which stretched out even as far as the irrational creatures something like an imitation of rational beings — perhaps to put rational beings to shame, so that by looking at ants they might become harder workers and better keepers of what is useful to them, and by studying bees they might obey their governments and divide up among themselves the useful work of a commonwealth, for the safety of the cities.

Perhaps too there is a lesson lying in what pass for the wars of the bees: that wars among human beings, if ever there has to be one, should be just and orderly. And it is not cities and outskirts that the bees have. Their hives and their hexagons and their works, and the succession they keep among themselves, are for the sake of human beings, who need honey for many things — both for the treatment of bodies that are ailing, and as a clean food. Nor should what the bees do to the drones be set beside the judgments passed on the idle and the wicked in cities, and the punishments inflicted on them. But, as I said before, in these things it is nature that is to be admired; while the human being is to be approved, since he can reason his way through everything and set everything in order, working together with providence, and carrying through works that belong not to God’s providence alone but to his own forethought as well. [y]