Who Moves the Birds

Out of a great many things that could be said in answer to all this, we have a few to say, refuting the ungrateful falsehood he holds about the one who made him. For Celsus too is a man, and “a man in honor who did not understand”; and so he was not even “counted alongside” the birds and the other animals without reason, the ones he takes to be prophetic. Instead he handed those the first place, going beyond even the Egyptians, who bow down to animals without reason as gods, and put himself underneath them — and, as far as it lay with him, the whole human race with him, as though we thought worse and less about the divine than they do. [a]

But let the first question be this: whether divination by birds and the other living things believed to have that power really exists, or does not. The case can be pressed either way, and neither side deserves contempt. On one side we are shamed out of admitting any such thing, so that a reasoning creature may not drop the divine oracles and use birds instead. On the other side stands the plain evidence, attested by many, that great numbers of people have been brought safely through the worst dangers by trusting divination by birds. For the present, then, let it be granted that augury exists, so that even on those terms I may show those who have already made up their minds that, even with this granted, the superiority of a human being over the animals without reason — including the very ones that divine — is great, and admits of no comparison at all. So this must be said. If there were some divine nature in them able to foreknow what is coming, and rich enough to show what will be, out of its surplus, to any human being who wanted to know, then plainly they would know their own affairs long before. And knowing their own affairs, they would have taken care not to fly toward the place where men had set traps and nets against them, or where archers used them as a target and let arrows fly at them. Certainly, if eagles knew in advance about the plot against their young — whether from serpents climbing up to them and destroying them, or from men who take them for sport or for some other use and service — they would not have nested where the attack was going to come. And in short, not one of these animals would ever have been catchable by men, if it were more divine and wiser than men are.

But further. If birds fight with birds, and if — as Celsus says — the prophetic birds and the other animals without reason have a divine nature and notions of the divine and foreknowledge of what is coming, and told such things beforehand to others, then Homer’s sparrow would not have nested where a serpent was going to make an end of her and her young; nor would the serpent in the same poet have failed to guard himself against being taken by the eagle. For Homer, that marvel of a poet, says this about the first of them: [d]

And about the second one — the bird — the poet says:

So then — was the eagle prophetic, and the serpent not, since the augurs use that animal as well? And since taking one and not the other is easily refuted, could not the claim that both of them were prophetic be refuted just as easily? For if the serpent was prophetic, would he not have guarded himself against suffering what he suffered from the eagle? Countless other examples of the kind could be found, all of them showing that it is not the animals that have a prophetic soul in themselves. According to the poet, and according to most people, it is “the Olympian himself” who “sent him into the light”; and it is by way of some sign that Apollo too uses a hawk for his messenger, since the hawk is called “the swift messenger of Apollo.”

Our own account is this. There are certain wicked demons — Titan-like or Giant-like, if I may put it that way — who turned irreverent toward what is truly divine and toward the angels in heaven, and who fell out of heaven, and who now wallow about the grosser sorts of body and the unclean places on earth. They have some power of seeing into what is coming, since they happen to be stripped of earthy bodies, and they occupy themselves with work of just this kind. Wanting to lead the human race away from the true God, they slip into the more grasping and savage animals, and into others that are craftier, and stir them to whatever the demons want, whenever they want; or else they turn these animals’ imaginations toward flights and movements of one sort or another. The aim is that people, caught by the divining that goes on in animals without reason, should not look for the God who holds all things together, nor examine what the pure worship of God is, but should fall in their reasoning down to the earth, to the birds and the serpents, and to foxes and wolves as well. And in fact men who are skilled in these matters have observed that the clearest foreknowledge comes through animals of that kind, since the demons cannot do as much in the tamer animals as they can in these, where the likeness in wickedness lets them work — though it is not wickedness in these animals, but something like wickedness. [g]

So then, if I have admired anything else about Moses, I will declare this too worth admiring: that Moses observed the differing natures of animals, and — whether he learned from God about them and about the demons that are akin to each animal, or found it out for himself by climbing high in wisdom — in laying out his classification of animals he pronounced unclean every animal that the Egyptians and the rest of mankind think prophetic, and pronounced clean, as a general rule, the ones that are not. Among the unclean animals in Moses are the wolf, the fox, the serpent, the eagle, the hawk, and their like. And on the whole you will find these animals used as examples of the worst things not only in the law but in the prophets too, and a wolf or a fox never named for anything good. [i]

So it seems that each kind of demon has a certain fellowship with a particular kind of animal. And just as among men some men are stronger than others, and not at all on account of their character, in the same way some demons will be more powerful than other demons in the matters that are neither good nor bad. One set of them uses one sort of animal to deceive people, in line with the will of the one our writings call “the ruler of this age,” while another set signals what is coming through another sort. And see how filthy the demons are: weasels are even used by some people to disclose what is coming. Now judge for yourself which is the better thing to accept — that the God who is over all, and his Son, stir up the birds and the rest of the living creatures to divination; or that the ones stirring up animals of this kind, and not human beings, though human beings are standing right there, are wicked demons, and, as our sacred writings name them, “unclean.”

But if the soul of birds is divine because what is coming is foretold through them, why should we not say all the more, where chance words are taken as omens from human beings, that the soul of the people through whom the omens are heard is divine? By that reckoning the woman at the mill in Homer was divine, when she said about the suitors: [m]

So she was divine; but the great Odysseus, the friend of Homer’s Athena, was not divine — he only understood the omen spoken by this “divine” grinder of grain, and was glad, as the poet says:

And now look. If the birds have a divine soul and perceive God — or the gods, as Celsus names them — then plainly, when we human beings sneeze, we sneeze from some divinity within us that gives our soul a prophetic power. Many witnesses testify to this, which is why the poet says:

And Penelope too says:

But what is truly divine does not use animals without reason for the knowledge of what is coming, nor any people who happen to be at hand, but the holiest and purest human souls, which it carries along and makes prophets. So if anything else in the law of Moses is spoken with wonder, sayings like these belong among such things: “You shall not practice augury or read birds.” And in another place: “For these nations, whom the Lord your God will destroy from before your face, will listen to omens and diviners; but the Lord your God has not given you so.” And then next he says: “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet from among your brothers.” And once, when God wanted to turn his people away from augury by means of an augur, he made the spirit in the augur say: “For there is no augury in Jacob, and no divination in Israel. In due time it will be told to Jacob and to Israel what God will accomplish.” Knowing these things and others like them, we want to keep, in its hidden sense, the command that says: “Guard your heart with all watchfulness” — so that nothing belonging to the demons may set foot on the part of us that rules, and no spirit of the powers ranged against us may turn our imagination wherever it likes. We pray instead that “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God” may shine “in our hearts,” with the Spirit of God taking up residence in our imagination and setting the things of God before it; since “all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.” [n]

We ought to know, however, that foreknowing what is coming is not necessarily divine. Taken by itself it is a middle thing, and it falls to bad men and decent men alike. Doctors, at any rate, foreknow certain things by their art, even if their character happens to be bad; and so do ship’s pilots. However poor in character they may be, they foreknow the weather signs and the force of the winds and the turns of the air around us, from a certain amount of trial and observation — and surely nobody is going to call them divine on that account, if their character happens to be poor. So what Celsus says is false: “What could anyone call more divine than foreknowing and foretelling what is coming?” And this is false too, that “many of the animals lay claim to notions of the divine,” for none of the animals without reason has any notion of God. And wholly false is the claim that “the animals without reason are nearer to God’s company” — when even the men who are still bad, however far they may have come in making progress, are far from God’s company. So the only ones nearer to God’s company are those who are truly wise and unfeignedly reverent, such as our own prophets, and Moses, to whom the word bore witness on account of his great purity when it said: “Moses alone shall come near to God; the rest shall not come near.” [q]

And what an irreverent thing this is, said by the very man who charges us with irreverence — that the animals without reason are not only wiser than the nature of human beings but dearer to God as well! Who would not be put off from paying attention to a man who says that a serpent and a fox and a wolf and an eagle and a hawk are dearer to God than the nature of human beings is? For it follows from what he says that if these animals are dearer to God than men are, then plainly they are dearer to God than Socrates and Plato and Pythagoras and Pherecydes, and than the theologians whose praises he had been singing a moment before. One might even pray for him in these words: if these animals are dearer to God than men, may you become dear to God along with them, and be made like the ones you take to be dearer to God than human beings are! And let no one suppose that such a thing is a curse. For who would not pray to become like, in every respect, the ones he is persuaded are dearer to God, so that he too might be dear to God as they are? [s]

And since Celsus wants the gatherings of the animals without reason to be holier than ours, he credits this account not to ordinary people but to intelligent ones — though the truly intelligent are the good, since no bad man is intelligent. He puts it this way: “Intelligent men say that these creatures hold gatherings of their own — holier, clearly, than ours — and that men themselves somehow recognize what is said at them, and prove by the event that they are not ignorant of it: they say beforehand that the birds have announced they are going off somewhere and will do this or that, and then show them gone to that place and doing what was foretold.” Now in truth no intelligent person ever recorded such things, and no wise man ever said that the gatherings of animals without reason are holier than those of human beings. But if, in order to examine what Celsus says, we look at what follows from it, then plainly, on his view, the gatherings of animals without reason are holier than the gatherings of the venerable Pherecydes and Pythagoras and Socrates and Plato and of philosophers in general — which, on the face of it, is not only out of keeping but utterly absurd. And even if we grant that certain people do learn from the meaningless sound of the birds that the birds are going off somewhere and will do this or that, and do announce it beforehand, we will say this too is signaled to men by the demons, in symbols, with the aim of having a man deceived by the demons and his mind dragged down from heaven and from God to the earth, and to the places lower still.

I do not know where Celsus heard of the oaths of elephants, or that they are more faithful toward the divine than we are and have knowledge of God. I know that many wonderful things are recorded about this animal’s nature and its gentleness; but I am not aware that anyone has spoken of an elephant’s oaths — unless perhaps he gave the name of oath-keeping to their gentleness and to their agreement, so to speak, with human beings, once they have come under human control. And even that is false. Rarely, but it has been recorded, elephants have turned savage against people after their apparent tameness and have killed, and for that were condemned to be put down as being of no further use. [u]

Then, to establish — as he supposes — that storks are more reverent than any human being, he brings in what is recorded about that creature: that it repays the care it was given and carries food to the parents that bore it. Our answer is that the storks do this not from any principle about what is fitting, and not from reasoning, but from nature — the nature that framed them wanting to set out, among animals without reason, an example that could shame human beings on the matter of paying back gratitude to the parents who bore them. If Celsus had known how great the difference is between doing such things by reason and doing them without reason, by natural impulse, he would not have said that storks are more reverent than human beings.

Further, still standing up for the reverence of the animals without reason, Celsus brings in the Arabian creature, the phoenix, which after many years comes to Egypt carrying its father, dead and buried in a ball of myrrh, and lays him down where the precinct of the Sun is. This too is recorded; and if it is true, it may itself be a matter of nature — divine providence being generous in setting before human beings, through the differences among living things, the sheer variety of the world’s construction, a variety that reaches even to the birds. And it brought into being one creature that is the only one of its kind, so that this too might make people marvel, not at the creature, but at the one who made it.