Ants, Eagles, and Birds of Omen

Celsus has finished with the bees. Now, so as to cheapen — so far as it lies with him — not only our cities but the cities of all mankind, and their constitutions and their offices and their rulerships, and the wars men fight for their own countries, he goes straight on into a long eulogy of the ants. By praising them he means to knock down the good management with which men provide their food, setting it beside the ants; and he means to throw out as worthless the forethought that lays in stores for winter, as having nothing in it beyond the unreasoning forethought he credits the ants with. [a]

And which of the simpler sort of people — those who do not know how to look into the nature of things — would Celsus not turn away, so far as it lies with him, from helping men who are weighed down under loads, and from taking a share in their labor, when he says of the ants that they take hold of one another’s burdens whenever they see one of their number struggling? For the man who needs to be trained by the word, and who has no ear for it at all, will say: “Since we are no different from ants, even when we help men who are worn out with carrying the heaviest loads, why do we keep on doing it for nothing?” Now the ants, being animals without reason, could not be lifted up into thinking well of themselves because their works have been set beside the works of men. But men, who by their reason are able to hear how their fellow-feeling is being cheapened, would be injured, so far as Celsus and his arguments can injure them. He does not see that, in wanting to turn the readers of his book away from Christianity, he also turns away the sympathy of those who are not Christians toward the men who carry the heaviest loads of all. If he had been even so much as a philosopher, with a sense of fellow-feeling, he ought not merely to have refrained from sweeping away, along with Christianity, the useful things that exist among men; he ought also to have worked alongside the good things Christianity holds in common with the rest of mankind, if it lay in his power.

And if the ants really do set aside the sprouting part of the grain they have stored, so that it will not swell into bud but will stay through the year as food for them, we are not to suppose that reasoning in ants is the cause of it. The cause is nature, the mother of all, who has put such order into the creatures without reason that not even the least of them is left without some trace of the reason nature planted in it. Unless, of course, Celsus is quietly getting at something else by all this — for in many places he likes to play the Platonist — namely that every soul is of one and the same kind, and that a man’s soul differs in nothing from the souls of ants and bees. That is the position of a man who brings the soul down from the vaults of heaven not only into a human body but into all the rest as well. Christians will not be persuaded by any of it. They have already taken hold of this: that the human soul came to be according to the image of God. And they see that it is impossible for a nature made according to God’s image to rub out its own marks altogether and take on others, stamped — after whose images I do not know — among the creatures that have no reason.

He says, too, that when ants die the living ones set apart a place of their own for them, and that this is their ancestral burying ground. To this we must answer that the more praises he heaps on the animals without reason, the more he magnifies — even against his will — the work of the Word who set all things in order, and the more he shows what resourcefulness there is in men, which is able to take even the advantages nature has given the creatures without reason and set them in order by reason. [f]

But why do I say “without reason”? Celsus holds that the animals which everyone’s common notions call reasonless are nothing of the kind. He does not even think the ants are without reason — he who undertook to speak about the whole of nature, and who boasted of truth in the very title of his book. Here is how he speaks of ants conversing with one another: “And indeed, when they meet one another they fall into conversation, which is why they never mistake their roads. So there is a full complement of reason among them, and common notions of certain universal things, and a voice, and things that happen and things signified.” Now when one person converses with another, it is done by a voice that makes some signified thing clear, and that often reports as well about what are called the objects. To say that this goes on among ants too — how could anything be more laughable?

And he is not ashamed to add the following to all this, so that even the men who come after him may be shown the shamefulness of his opinions. He says: “Come now: if someone were to look down from heaven upon the earth, what difference would there seem to be between the things we do and the things done by ants and bees?” Take his own supposition, then: a man looking from heaven down to earth at what men do and what the ants do. Does he look at the bodies of men and of ants and fail to notice the reasoning ruling part, moved by reckoning — and, on the other side, the unreasoning ruling part, moved unreasoningly by impulse and impression, along with a certain equipment built into it? It is absurd that a man looking at earthly things from heaven should want to look, across so great a distance, at the bodies of men and of ants, and not much rather at the natures of their ruling parts and at the spring their impulses rise from, whether that spring is a reasoning one or an unreasoning one. [j]

And once he does look at the spring from which all impulses come, he will plainly see the difference too, and man’s superiority not only over ants but even over elephants. For the man who looks from heaven will see, in the creatures without reason — however large their bodies may be — no other first principle than, if I may put it so, unreason; but in reasoning beings he will see reason, which men hold in common with beings divine and heavenly, and perhaps with the God who is over all himself. It is on account of reason that man has been said to have come to be according to the image of God; for the image of the God who is over all is his reason.

Next, as though fighting to drag the human race down further still and make it like the animals without reason, and unwilling to leave out a single one of the things on record about them that show how great they are, he says that even sorcery is found in some of the creatures without reason — so that not even in this may men give themselves special airs, or want to keep any superiority over them. These are his words: “And if men think highly of themselves over sorcery as well, then in that too snakes and eagles are already the wiser. At any rate they know many antidotes against poison, and many things that ward off harm, and they know the powers of certain stones for keeping their young alive. If men happen upon these, they think they have got hold of a wonderful possession.” First of all, I do not know how he came to give the name of sorcery to what animals have concerning natural antidotes, whether that is experience or some natural grasp of the thing; for the word sorcery has been worn by use into meaning something else. Unless, perhaps, as an Epicurean he means quietly to attack the whole use of such things, as resting on nothing but the professions of sorcerers. [n]

Still, let it be granted him that men do think a great deal of themselves over knowing these things, whether they are sorcerers or not. How does it follow that snakes are wiser than men in this — snakes, who use fennel to sharpen their sight and quicken their movement, and who take hold of this one natural thing not by reckoning it out but from the way they are built? Men do not come to such a thing out of bare nature, as snakes do. They come to it partly by trial, partly by reason, and sometimes by reckoning and by knowledge. So too with the eagles. If they find the stone called the eagle-stone and carry it to the nest to keep the chicks there alive, how does that show that eagles are wise, and wiser than men — men who found out by trial the natural help that was given to eagles, and who found it out by reckoning and used it with understanding?

Let it be granted, too, that animals know other antidotes besides. What does that do toward showing that it is not nature but reason that finds these things out in them? For if reason were the finder, this one thing — grant a second and a third as well — would not be all that is found among snakes, and some other single thing in the eagle, and so on through the rest of the animals, each by a fixed assignment; there would be as many discoveries among them as there are among men. As it is, the very fact that each animal’s nature inclines toward certain helps and no others makes it plain that there is neither wisdom nor reason in them, but a natural equipment for such things, given for the animals’ preservation and made by the Word. [r]

And yet, if I wanted to come to close quarters with Celsus on this ground, I could use the words of Solomon out of the book of Proverbs, which run like this: “There are four things that are least upon the earth, and these are wiser than the wise: the ants, who have no strength, yet get their food ready in summer; and the rock hyraxes, a nation that is not strong, who have made their houses in the rocks; the locust has no king, yet it marches out in good order at a single command; and the gecko, propping itself on its hands and easily caught, lives in a king’s strongholds.” But I do not use these sayings as though they were plain. Following the title — for the book is headed Proverbs — I look into them as riddles. It is the custom of these men to sort into many kinds the writings that show one thing on the face of it and report another as a hidden sense; and one of those kinds is the proverb. That is why in our Gospels too our Savior is written to have said: “I have spoken these things to you in proverbs; an hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in proverbs.” So it is not the ants we can see that are wiser even than the wise, but the ones pointed to under the form of a proverb. And the same must be said about the rest of the animals. Celsus, however, thinks the books of the Jews and the Christians are utterly simple and the work of amateurs, and supposes that those who read them as allegory do so by forcing the writers’ intention. Let this, then, be enough to convict Celsus of slandering us to no purpose; and let his argument about snakes and eagles stand convicted as well, which declared them wiser than men.

He wants to go further still, and to show that even the notions men have about the divine are nothing special among all the mortal creatures — that some of the animals without reason have notions about God as well, about whom such disagreements have arisen even among the sharpest men everywhere, Greeks and barbarians alike. So he says: “If a man is thought to be superior to the rest of the animals because he has laid hold of the notion of the divine, then let those who say so know that many of the other animals will lay claim to this too — and with very good reason. For what could anyone call more divine than knowing beforehand what is to come, and showing it beforehand? Men, then, learn this from the other animals, and above all from birds; and those who catch the meaning of what the birds indicate are the diviners. And if birds, and whatever other animals have the gift of divination, foreknow from God and teach us by signs, then they must be by nature that much nearer to the company of God, and wiser, and dearer to him. The intelligent among men say, too, that those animals hold meetings of their own — plainly more sacred than ours — and that they themselves somehow recognize what is said at them, and show by the event that they do recognize it: when they have said beforehand that the birds declared they would go off to such and such a place and do this or that, they then point to the birds having gone there and done what was foretold. And nothing seems truer to its oaths than an elephant, or more faithful toward the things of God — surely for no other reason than that they have some knowledge of him.” [x]

Now look at what he does here. Questions that are still under investigation among those who practice philosophy — not only among the Greeks but among the barbarians, whether they found these things out for themselves or learned from certain demons what has to do with birds of omen and the other animals, from which some kinds of divination are said to come to men — he snatches up and sets down as though they were agreed. For in the first place, it has been asked whether there is any art of augury at all, and, in a word, any divination by animals, or none. And in the second place, among those who do accept that there is divination by birds, there is no agreement about the cause of the way it works. Some say the movements come to the animals from certain demons or gods of divination — to birds, for different flights and different cries, and to the rest for movements of this or that kind. Others say that the souls of these animals are themselves more divine, and fitted for such work, which is the least believable thing of all.

So Celsus, since by all this he wanted to prove that the animals without reason are more divine and wiser than men, ought to have gone further and established that such divination exists; then to have set out its defense more clearly; then to have thrown out, by demonstration, the arguments of those who do away with divinations of this sort, and to have overturned, by demonstration, the arguments of those who say that the movements come to animals from demons or from gods for the sake of divining; and after that to have established that the soul of the animals without reason is the more divine. Had he done so, and shown the settled habit of a philosopher in matters of this size, we would have stood against his plausible arguments as best we could — overturning the claim that animals without reason are wiser than men, and showing to be false the claims that they have notions of the divine more sacred than ours, and that they hold certain sacred meetings with one another. [aa]

But as it is, the man who charges us with believing in the God who is over all requires us to believe that the souls of birds have notions of God that are more divine and more distinct than men’s. And if that is true, then the birds have clearer notions about God than Celsus himself has — and it is no wonder if they are clearer than Celsus’, since he cheapens man so far. Indeed, so far as it lies with him, the birds have grander and more divine notions than — I will not even bring in ourselves, the Christians, or the Jews who use the same Scriptures we do — than the theologians among the Greeks; for those were only men. So, according to Celsus, the tribe of birds that supposedly prophesy has grasped the nature of the divine better than Pherecydes and Pythagoras and Socrates and Plato. And we ought to go to school to the birds as our teachers, so that, just as on Celsus’ supposition they teach us by divination the things that are to come, they may also rid men of their doubt about the divine, handing on to them the clear notion of him that they have got hold of.

It follows for Celsus, then, since he holds that the birds surpass men, that he should use birds as his teachers, and none at all of the men who have practiced philosophy among the Greeks.