Providence cares first for rational beings

Next, at great length, he charges us with saying that God made all things for man. And he wants to show, from the natural history of animals and the shrewdness that shows itself in them, that all things have come into being no more for the sake of human beings than for the sake of the irrational animals. He seems to me to say something like those who, out of enmity toward those they hate, accuse them of the very things for which their own dearest friends are praised. For just as with these, hatred blinds them so that they do not see that they are accusing even their dearest friends by the very things through which they think they are speaking ill of their enemies, so in the same way Celsus too, his reasoning thrown into confusion, has not seen that he is also accusing the philosophers of the Stoa. They rightly set man, and in a word the rational nature, above all irrational things, and they say that providence made all things primarily for its sake. And the rational beings, which come first, stand in the place of children being born, while the irrational and the lifeless stand in the place of the afterbirth that is formed along with the child.

And I think that, just as in cities those who look after the goods for sale and the market look after them for no other reason than for the sake of human beings, yet dogs too and others of the irrational animals have a share in the plenty, so providence takes thought primarily for rational beings, and it has followed that the irrational animals also enjoy what is made for human beings. And just as a man is wrong who says that the market officers look after human beings no more than dogs, since the dogs too share in the plenty of the goods for sale, so much more do Celsus and those who think as he does commit impiety against God, who takes thought for rational beings, when they say: “Why are these things produced as food for human beings rather than for plants, for trees and grasses and thorns?”