Against Celsus 4.97

How impiously has the one who charges us with impiety said that irrational animals are not only wiser than human nature but also dearer to God! And who would not be turned away, if he paid attention to a man who says that the serpent, the fox, the wolf, the eagle, and the hawk are dearer to God than human nature? It follows for him to say that, if these animals are dearer to God than human beings, clearly these animals are dearer to God than Socrates and Plato and Pythagoras and Pherecydes and the theologians he praised a little earlier. And one might pray for him, saying: "If these animals are dearer to God than human beings, may you become dear to God with them, and be made like those who, in your view, are dearer to God than human beings." And let him not suppose such a thing to be a curse; for who would not pray to become wholly like those he is convinced are dearer to God, so that he himself may become dear to God as they are? Celsus, wishing the conversations of irrational animals to be holier than ours, does not attribute this report to ordinary people but to the intelligent. But the intelligent in truth are the good, for no wicked person is intelligent. He speaks, then, in this way: "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 are not ignorant, 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 already foretold." In truth no intelligent person has reported such things, and no wise person has said that the conversations of irrational animals are holier than those of human beings. But if, to examine Celsus's views, we look at what follows from them, it is clear that on his view the conversations of irrational animals are holier than the venerable conversations of Pherecydes, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and the philosophers; which is plainly not only incongruous but most absurd. But even if we should believe that some people, learning from the inarticulate cry of birds that the birds will go somewhere and do this or that, foretell it, we will say that this too has been shown to human beings symbolically by the demons, with the aim that man should be deceived by the demons and his mind dragged down from heaven and God to earth and to things still lower.