The keenly intellectual thinkers whom we call the Fathers of the Church saw that the majority of the ideas then agitating men’s minds might find a quietus in Christian dogma which suited them a great deal better than the vague and often grotesque shape they had worn hitherto. But there was a residuum of which they felt an instinctive fear, and peculiar notions about animals had the ill-luck of being placed at the head of these. It could not have been a fortunate coincidence that two of the most prominent men who held them in the early centuries were declared foes of the new faith—Celsus and Porphyry.
When the Church triumphed, the treatise written by Celsus would have been no doubt entirely destroyed like other works of the same sort, had not Origen made a great number of quotations from it for the purpose of confutation. Celsus was no borné disputant after the fashion of the Octavius of Minucius, but a man of almost encyclopædic learning; if he was a less fair critic than he held himself to be, it was less from want of information than from want of that sympathy which is needful for true comprehension. The inner feeling of such a man towards the Christian Sectaries was not near so much that of a Torquemada in regard to heretics as that of an old-fashioned Tory upholder of throne and altar towards dissent fifty years ago. It was a feeling of social aloofness.
Yet Celsus wished to be fair, and he had studied religions to enough purpose not to condemn as delusion or untruth everything that a superficial adversary would have rejected at once; for instance, he was ready to allow that the appearances of Christ to His disciples after the Crucifixion might be explained as psychical phenomena. Possibly he believed that truth, not falsehood, was the ultimate basis of all religions as was the belief of Apollonius before him. In some respects Celsus was more unprejudiced than Apollonius; this can be observed in his remarks on Egyptian zoomorphism; it causes surprise, he says, when you go inside one of the splendid Egyptian temples to find for divinity a cat, a monkey or a crocodile, but to the initiated they are symbols which under an allegorical veil turn people to honour imperishable ideas, not perishable animals as the vulgar suppose.
It may have been his recondite researches which led Celsus to take up the question of the intelligence of animals and the conclusions to be drawn from it. He only touches lightly on the subject of their origin; he seems to lean towards the theory that the soul, life, mind, only, is made by God, the corruptible and passing body being a natural growth or perhaps the handiwork of inferior spirits. He denied that reason belonged to man alone, and still more strongly that God created the universe for man rather than for the other animals. Only absurd pride, he says, can engender such a thought. He knew very well that this, far from being a new idea, was the normal view of the ancient world from Aristotle to Cicero; the distinguished men who disagreed with it had never won more than a small minority over to their opinion. Celsus takes Euripides to task for saying—
“The sun and moon are made to serve mankind.”
Why mankind? he asks; why not ants and flies? Night serves them also for rest and day for seeing and working. If it be said that we are the king of animals because we hunt and catch them or because we eat them, why not say that we are made for them because they hunt and catch us? Indeed, they are better provided than we, for while we need arms and nets to take them and the help of several men and dogs, Nature furnishes them with the arms they require, and we are, as it were, made dependent on them. You want to make out that God gave you the power to take and kill wild animals, but at the time when there were no towns or civilisation or society or arms or nets, animals probably caught and devoured men while men never caught animals. In this way, it looks more as if God subjected man to animals than vice versâ. If men seem different from animals because they build cities, make laws, obey magistrates and rulers, you ought to note that this amounts to nothing at all, since ants and bees do just the same. Bees have their “kings”; some command, others obey; they make war, win battles, take prisoner the vanquished; they have their towns and quarters; their work is regulated by fixed periods, they punish the lazy and cowardly—at least they expel the drones. As to ants, they practise the science of social economy just as well as we do; they have granaries which they fill with provisions for the winter; they help their comrades if they see them bending under the weight of a burden; they carry their dead to places which become family tombs; they address each other when they meet: whence it follows that they never lose their way. We must conclude, therefore, that they have complete reasoning powers and common notions of certain general truths, and that they have a language and know how to express fortuitous events. If some one, then, looked down from the height of heaven on to the earth, what difference would he see between our actions and those of ants and bees? If man is proud of knowing magical secrets, serpents and eagles know a great deal more, for they use many preservatives against poisons and diseases, and are acquainted with the virtues of certain stones with which they cure the ailments of their young ones, while if men find out such a cure they think they have hit on the greatest wonder in the world. Finally, if man imagines that he is superior to animals because he possesses notion of God, let him know that it is the same with many of them; what is there more divine, in fact, than to foresee and to foretell the future? Now for that purpose men have recourse to animals, especially to birds, and all our soothsayers do is to understand the indications given by these. If, therefore, birds and other prophetic animals show us by signs the future as it is revealed to them by God, it proves that they have closer relations with the deity than we; that they are wiser and more loved by God. Very enlightened men have thought that they understood the language of certain animals, and in proof of this they have been known to predict that birds would do something or go somewhere, and this was observed to come true. No one keeps an oath more religiously or is more faithful to God than the elephant, which shows that he knows Him.
Hence, concludes Celsus, the universe has not been made for man any more than for the eagle or the dolphin. Everything was created not in the interest of something else, but to contribute to the harmony of the whole in order that the world might be absolutely perfect. God takes care of the universe; it is that which His providence never forsakes, that which never falls into disorder. God no more gets angry with men than with rats or monkeys: everything keeps its appointed place.
In this passage Celsus rises to a higher level than in any other of the excerpts preserved for us by Origen. The tone of irony which usually characterises him disappears in this dignified affirmation of supreme wisdom justified of itself not by the little standards of men—or ants. It must be recognised as a lofty conception, commanding the respect of those who differ from it, and reconciling all apparent difficulties and contradictions forced upon us by the contemplation of men and Nature. But it brings no water from the cool spring to souls dying of thirst; it expounds in the clearest way and even in the noblest way the very thought which drove men into the Christian fold far more surely than the learned apologies of controversialists like Origen; the thought of the crushing unimportance of the individual.
The least attentive reader must be struck by the real knowledge of natural history shown by Celsus: his ants are nearly as conscientiously observed as Lord Avebury’s. Yet a certain suspicion of conscious exaggeration detracts from the seriousness of his arguments; he strikes one as more sincere in disbelieving than in believing. A modern writer has remarked that Celsus in the second half of the second century forestalled Darwin in the second half of the nineteenth by denying human ascendancy and contending that man may be a little lower than the brute. But it scarcely seems certain whether he was convinced by his own reasoning or was not rather replying by paradoxes to what he considered the still greater paradoxes of Christian theology.
The shadow of no such doubt falls on the pages of the neoplatonists Plotinus and Porphyry. To them the destiny of animals was not an academic problem but an obsession. The questions which Heine’s young man asked of the waves: “What signifies man? Whence does he come? Whither does he go?” were asked by them with passionate earnestness in their application to all sentient things. Plotinus reasoned, with great force, that intelligent beast-souls must be like the soul of man since in itself the essence of the soul could not be different. Porphyry (born at Tyre, A.D. 233), accepting this postulate that animals possess an intelligent soul like ours, went on to declare that it was therefore unlawful to kill or feed on them under any circumstances. If justice is due to rational beings, how is it possible to evade the conclusion that we are also bound to act justly towards the races below us? He who loves all animated nature will not single out one tribe of innocent beings for hatred; if he loves the whole he will love every part, and, above all, that part which is most closely allied to ourselves. Porphyry was quite ready to admit that animals in their own way made use of words, and he mentions Melampus and Apollonius as among the philosophers who understood their language. He quoted with approval the laws supposed to have been framed by Triptolemus in the reign of Pandion, fifth king of Athens: “Honour your parents; make oblations of your fruits to the gods; hurt not any living creature.”