Against Celsus 5.21

And the followers of Pythagoras and Plato, even if they seem to keep the world indestructible, fall into similar absurdities. For since the stars, at certain appointed periods, take up the same configurations and relations to one another, they say that everything on earth is in the same state as when the world contained the same configuration of the stars' relation. By this reasoning, then, when the stars, after a long period, come to the same relation to one another that they had in the time of Socrates, Socrates must be born again of the same parents and suffer the same things, accused by Anytus and Meletus and condemned by the council of the Areopagus. And the learned among the Egyptians, who hand down such things, are held in honour and not mocked by Celsus and those like him; while we, who say that the universe is administered by God in proportion to the free will of each person, and is always being led, as far as possible, toward what is better, and who know the nature of our free will, which admits of what it admits (for it cannot hold the complete unchangeableness of God), are not thought to say anything worthy of testing and examination.