On the Shows 2

Now there is no one who does not also allege this: that all things were instituted by God and assigned to man, as we preach, and are certainly good, as all things are from a good author; that among these are counted all the things from which the shows are furnished, the horse, for instance, and the lion, and strength of body, and sweetness of voice; that therefore what consists of his own creation can seem neither foreign nor hostile to God, and what is not hostile to him, because not foreign, is not to be counted against his worshippers. Plainly even the very buildings of the places, the stones, the cement, the marble, the columns, are God's things, who gave them to furnish the earth; and the performances themselves take place under God's heaven. How wise an arguer human ignorance thinks itself, especially when it fears to lose any such thing among the joys and fruits of the world! In fact you will find more people whom the danger to their pleasure, rather than to their life, keeps away from this sect. For even a fool does not fear death, as something owed; even a wise man does not despise pleasure, as something desired, since for fool and wise man alike life has no charm but pleasure. No one denies, because no one is unaware of what nature itself suggests, that God is the founder of the universe, and that this universe is good and made over to man. But because they know God not thoroughly, but only by natural right and not as members of his household, from afar and not close at hand, they must be ignorant of how he commands or forbids the things he instituted to be used, and also of what rival power there is on the opposite side to adulterate the uses of the divine creation; for you cannot know either the will or the adversary of one whom you know too little. So we must consider not only by whom all things were instituted, but by whom they were perverted. For so it will appear for what use they were instituted, if it appears for what use they were not. There is a great difference between corruption and integrity, because there is a great difference between the founder and the falsifier. Moreover, all kinds of evils, which even the heathen forbid and punish as beyond doubt, consist of God's works. You see murder accomplished by iron, by poison, by magical bindings: iron is as much God's thing as herbs, as angels. Yet did the Author provide these for the killing of man? On the contrary, he destroys every kind of murder by one chief precept: “You shall not kill.” Likewise gold, bronze, silver, ivory, wood, and whatever material is seized for making idols: who put them in the world but God, the author of the world? Yet was it so that they might be adored against himself? On the contrary, idolatry is the supreme offense in his eyes. What is there that offends God that is not God's? But when it offends, it has ceased to be God's; and when it has ceased to be his, it offends. Man himself, the author of all crimes, is not only the work of God but also his image; and yet both in body and in spirit he has fallen away from his maker. For we did not receive eyes for lust, and the tongue for evil-speaking, and ears for taking in evil-speaking, and the throat for the crime of gluttony, and the belly as gluttony's partner, and the genitals for excesses of unchastity, and hands for violence, and feet for a vagrant life; nor was the spirit implanted in the body to become a workshop of plots, frauds, and iniquities. I think not. For if God, who requires innocence, hates all malignity, even malice merely devised, it is beyond doubt that whatever he created, he did not create for the outcome of works that he condemns, even though those same works are carried out by means of the things he created; since this is the whole ground of condemnation, the perverse use of creation by the creatures. We, then, who, having come to know the Lord, have also looked into his rival, and who, having discovered the founder, have at the same time detected the falsifier, ought neither to wonder nor to doubt. Since from the beginning that power of the falsifying and rival angel cast down from his integrity man himself, the work and image of God, the possessor of the whole universe, it changed his whole substance, established together with him for integrity, together with him into perversity against the founder, so that, in the very things which it grieved to see granted to man and not to itself, it might both make man guilty before God and set up its own dominion.