Against Celsus 4.98

I do not know how Celsus heard of an oath of elephants, and that they are more faithful than we are toward the divine and have knowledge of God. For I know many wonderful things reported about the nature of this animal and its tameness, but I am not aware that anything about the oaths of an elephant has been said by anyone; unless perhaps he called their tameness, and their keeping of a kind of compact with human beings once they have come under them, faithfulness to an oath; and this itself is false. For even if rarely, it has nonetheless been reported that after apparent tameness elephants have turned savage against human beings and committed murders, and for this reason were condemned to be killed as no longer useful. And since after this he takes up, to establish, as he thinks, that storks are more pious than human beings, what is reported about this animal, that it repays its parents' care and brings food to those who begot it, it must be said that storks do this too not from a principle of duty nor from reasoning, but from nature, the nature that formed them having wished to set forth, among irrational animals, an example able to shame human beings into repaying gratitude to their parents. If Celsus had known how different it is to do these things by reason from doing them irrationally and naturally, he would not have called storks more pious than human beings. Further, as though standing up for the piety of irrational animals, Celsus takes up the Arabian animal, the phoenix, which after many years visits Egypt, carrying its dead father buried in a ball of myrrh, and places it where the precinct of the sun is. This too is reported; but, if it is true, it may also be natural, divine providence having been generous in setting before human beings, in the differences among animals, the variety of the structure of things in the world, reaching even to birds; and it made a certain "only-begotten" animal, so as to make people admire in this too not the animal but the one who made it.