On the Shows 3

Equipped with this knowledge against the opinion of the heathen, let us rather turn to the objections of our own people. For the faith of some, either too simple or too scrupulous, demands authority from the Scriptures for this renunciation of the shows, and makes itself doubtful because such abstinence is not expressly or by name enjoined on the servants of God. Plainly we nowhere find, in the way that it is openly laid down, “You shall not kill, you shall not worship an idol, you shall not commit adultery or fraud,” a similarly explicit rule: “You shall not go to the circus, nor to the theatre; you shall not watch a contest or a gladiatorial show.” But we find that to this class too belongs that first utterance of David: “Blessed is the man,” he says, “who has not gone into the council of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the chair of pestilences.” For although he seems to have proclaimed that righteous man blessed because he took no part in the council and assembly of the Jews deliberating about killing the Lord, yet divine Scripture always reaches broadly, wherever, according to the sense of the matter at hand, discipline too is fortified; so that here too the utterance is not foreign to the prohibition of the shows. For if it then called a few Jews a council of the ungodly, how much more so great a gathering of a heathen people? Are the heathen less ungodly, less sinners, less enemies of Christ than the Jews were then? And what of the fact that the rest fits too? For at the shows one both sits in a chair and stands in the way: they call “ways” the passages round the girdling walls and the gangways dividing the people down the slope; and the “chair” too is so named, the seat itself, placed in the curve for the audience. So, conversely, let us understand it as said generally: unhappy is he who has gone into any council of the ungodly, and stood in any way of sinners, and sat in any chair of pestilences. When a thing is said generally, it can also be taken specially. For some things spoken specially also carry a general sense. When God admonishes the Israelites about discipline or rebukes them, he surely addresses all; when he threatens Egypt and Ethiopia with destruction, he surely passes judgment in advance on every sinful nation. So every sinful nation is Egypt and Ethiopia, reasoning from species to genus, just as every show is a council of the ungodly, reasoning from genus to species.