On the Shows 1–16

Servants of God, you who are just now drawing near to God, learn, and you who have already testified and confessed that you have drawn near, recall, what the state of faith, the reason of truth, and the rule of discipline is which, among the other errors of the world, takes away also the pleasures of the shows, lest anyone sin either through ignorance or through pretence. For such is the power of pleasures that it draws out ignorance into an opportunity and corrupts knowledge into pretence. Toward both, perhaps, the opinions of the heathen may still flatter someone, since in this matter they are accustomed to argue against us thus: that such delights of the eyes or ears, coming from outside, are no hindrance to religion in the mind and conscience; and that God is not offended by the enjoyment of man, which it is no crime to enjoy in its own time and place, so long as fear and honor toward God remain intact. But this is precisely what we are preparing to show: how these things are not compatible with true religion and true obedience toward the true God. There are some who think that Christians, a race ready for death, are trained to this obstinacy by the renunciation of pleasures, so that they may more easily despise life when its moorings, as it were, have been cut, and may not long for what they have already made superfluous to themselves; so that this would be thought to have been laid down by design and human foresight rather than by divine precept. As if, forsooth, those who continued in such pleasures would be loath to die for the Lord! And yet, even if it were so, the steadfastness of our discipline would owe full obedience to so fitting a design.

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.

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.

Lest anyone think we are quibbling, I will turn to the chief authority of our seal itself. When, entering the water, we profess the Christian faith in the words of its law, we testify with our own mouth that we have renounced the devil and his pomp and his angels. What will be the chief and principal thing in which the devil and his pomp and his angels are reckoned, if not idolatry? From it comes every unclean and wicked spirit, so to speak; I will not dwell on this any longer. So if it is established that the whole apparatus of the shows consists of idolatry, it will be settled beyond doubt that the testimony of our renunciation in the bath applies also to the shows, which are made over to the devil and his pomp and his angels, that is, through idolatry. We will recount the origins of each, in what cradles they grew up in the world; then the titles of some, by what names they are called; then their equipment, with what superstitions they are furnished; then the places, to what patrons they are dedicated; then the arts, to what authors they are ascribed. If any of these proves not to have been connected with an idol, it will concern neither idolatry nor our renunciation.

As for the origins, since they are rather obscure and unknown to many of our people, they had to be investigated from no other source than the works of heathen literature. There are many authors who have published treatises on this subject. By them the origin of the games is handed down thus. Timaeus reports that Lydians, migrating from Asia, settled in Etruria under the leadership of Tyrrhenus, who had yielded to his brother in a contest for the kingdom. So in Etruria, among the other rites of their superstitions, they also instituted shows in the name of religion. From there the Romans sent for performers and borrowed from them the season and the name, so that players (ludii) were called after the Lydians. But although Varro derives ludii from ludus, that is, from play, just as they also called the Luperci ludii because they run about playing, still he assigns that play of the young men to festival days, temples, and religious rites. No more, then, about the reason for the name, since the reason for the thing is idolatry. For when games in general were called Liberalia, they plainly proclaimed the honor of Father Liber. For they were first held by country people for Liber, on account of the benefit they ascribe to him for having shown them the gift of wine. Next, the games called Consualia, which at first honored Neptune; for they also call him Consus. Then Romulus named the Equirria, from horses, for Mars; though they also assign the Consualia to Romulus, on the ground that he dedicated them to Consus, the god, as they would have it, of counsel: the counsel, namely, by which he then devised the rape of the Sabine maidens as wives for his soldiers. An upright counsel indeed, and even now just and lawful among the Romans themselves, not to say before God! For this too adds to the stain of the origin, so that you should not think good what took its beginning from evil: from shamelessness, violence, and hatred, from a fratricide founder, a son of Mars. And even now an altar to that Consus is sunk underground in the circus at the first turning-posts, with an inscription of this kind: “Consus mighty in counsel, Mars in war, the Lares in …” The public priests sacrifice at it on the Nones of July, and the flamen of Quirinus and the virgins on the twelfth day before the Kalends of September. Next the same Romulus instituted games to Jupiter Feretrius on the Tarpeian hill, which Piso reports were called the Tarpeian and Capitoline games; after him Numa Pompilius held games for Mars and for Robigo (for they have even invented a goddess of rust); then Tullus Hostilius, then Ancus Martius, and the rest. Which of them instituted which games, in what order, and to what idols, is set down in Suetonius Tranquillus, or in those from whom Tranquillus took it. But this will be enough to establish the guilt of their origin in idolatry.

To the testimony of antiquity is added the posterity that followed, which displays the form of the origin in the titles of the present time as well, by which it is marked to what idol and what superstition games of both kinds were assigned. For the Megalensian and Apollinarian games, likewise the Cerealian, Neptunalian, Latiar, and Floral games, are celebrated in common; the rest of the games have their reasons in superstition from the birthdays and anniversaries of kings, from public successes, and from municipal festivals. Among these are also the shows given by bequest, which make offerings to the memory of private persons; this too follows the ancient institution. For from the beginning games were reckoned in two kinds, sacred and funeral, that is, for the gods of the nations and for the dead. But with us it makes no difference, as regards idolatry, under what name and title it goes, so long as it comes to the same spirits whom we renounce. Whether they do it for the dead or for their gods, they do it for their dead just as for their gods; there is one condition on both sides, one idolatry, and one renunciation of ours against idolatry.

The origin of both kinds of games, then, is common, and their titles are common too, as coming from common causes. Likewise they must have their equipment in common, from the general guilt of idolatry, their foundress. But the display of the circus games is somewhat more pompous, and to them this name properly belongs: the procession (pompa) that goes before, proving in itself whose it is by the train of images, the column of statues, the chariots, the sacred wagons, the carriages, the thrones, the crowns, the robes. What rites besides, what sacrifices come before, between, and after, how many guilds, how many priesthoods, how many offices are set in motion, the people of that city know in which the assembly of demons has taken its seat. If these things are managed with less care in the provinces, in proportion to lesser means, still all circus games everywhere are to be referred to the place from which they are sought, and judged by the source from which they are taken. For even a thin stream from its spring and a small shoot from its bough keeps the quality of its origin. Let its ambition or its frugality see to it …: any procession of the circus whatever offends God. Even if it carries few images about, idolatry is present in one; even if it draws only one sacred wagon, it is still Jupiter's cart; any idolatry, whether meanly furnished or moderately rich, is splendid in the wealth of its crime.

To follow my plan in the matter of places too: the circus is chiefly consecrated to the Sun. His temple stands in the middle of the course, and his image shines from the top of the temple, because they did not think it fitting to consecrate under a roof one whom they have in the open. Those who maintain that the first show was given by Circe to the Sun, her father, as they would have it, argue that the name circus comes from her. Plainly the sorceress did this business under this name for those whose priestess she was, namely demons and angels. How many idolatries, then, do you recognize in the furnishing of that place? Each ornament of the circus is a temple. The eggs they ascribe to the honor of the Castors, not blushing to believe them hatched from the egg of Jupiter the swan. The dolphins spout for Neptune; the columns bear Seia, named from sowing, Messia, from harvest, and Tutulina, from the protection of the crops; in front of them three altars serve three gods, the Great, the Mighty, and the Strong; they think these are the Samothracian gods. The huge obelisk, as Hermateles affirms, is prostituted to the Sun; its inscription, like its origin, is Egyptian superstition. The council of demons would have been cold without their Great Mother; so she presides there over the channel. Consus, as we said, lies hidden underground at the turning-posts. The Murciae too an idol has claimed: for they hold Murcia to be a goddess of love, to whom they vowed a temple in that part. Take note, Christian, how many unclean names have taken possession of the circus. That religion is foreign to you which so many spirits of the devil have seized. As to places, this is the point at which to forestall a question some people raise. “What,” you say, “if I go to the circus at another time: shall I be in danger of defilement?” There is no rule about places as such. For not only these meeting places of the shows, but even the temples themselves the servant of God may enter without danger to his discipline, if some plain reason compels him, one that has nothing to do with the proper business or function of that place. Besides, the streets, the forum, the baths, the inns, and our very houses are not altogether without idols: Satan and his angels have filled the whole world. Yet it is not because we are in the world that we fall away from God, but if we touch any of the world's crimes. So if I enter the Capitol or the Serapeum as a sacrificer or worshipper, I shall fall away from God, just as I would by entering the circus or the theatre as a spectator. Places do not defile us of themselves, but what is done in the places, by which, as we have argued, even the places themselves are defiled: we are defiled by what is defiled. We mention to whom such places are dedicated precisely in order to show that what is done in them belongs to those to whom the places themselves are dedicated.

Now about the art by which the circus games are exhibited. Horsemanship was formerly a simple thing: one rode on horseback, and it was certainly a matter of common use; it was not guilty. But when it was pressed into the games, it passed from being a gift of God to the service of demons. So this kind is assigned to Castor and Pollux, to whom, Stesichorus tells us, horses were allotted by Mercury. Neptune too is equestrian, whom the Greeks call Hippios. They have consecrated the six-horse team to Jupiter, the four-horse to the Sun, the two-horse to the Moon. And again: “Erichthonius first dared to yoke chariots and four horses, and to stand victorious on the swift wheels.” Erichthonius, son of Minerva and Vulcan, born indeed of lust spilled on the earth, is a demonic portent, nay the devil himself, not a snake. If Trochilus of Argos was the inventor of the chariot, he dedicated that work of his first to Juno. If at Rome Romulus first displayed the four-horse chariot, I think he too has been enrolled among the idols, if he is the same as Quirinus. Since the four-horse chariots were brought forward by such authors, it is fitting that they also clothed the charioteers in the colors of idolatry. For at first there were only two, white and red. White was dedicated to winter for the gleaming snows, red to summer for the redness of the sun. But afterwards, as both pleasure and superstition advanced, some consecrated the red to Mars, others the white to the Zephyrs, the green to Mother Earth or to spring, and the blue to Heaven and Sea or to autumn. But since every kind of idolatry is condemned by God, surely that kind too is condemned which is profaned by the elements of the world.

Let us pass on to the theatrical shows, whose origin, we have already shown, is shared with the circus, and whose titles are alike, in keeping with the name of games from the beginning and their management joined with horse-racing. Their equipment? Their equipment too is shared in this respect, that people go to the stage from temples and altars and that miserable business of incense and blood, amid flutes and trumpets, under those two most polluted masters of ceremonies at funerals and sacrifices, the undertaker and the soothsayer. So, as we passed from the origins of the games to the circus games, we shall now direct our course from there to the stage games. From the fault of its place, the theatre is properly the shrine of Venus. It was, in fact, in this way that this kind of building came into the world. For the censors often pulled down theatres just as they were rising, taking thought for morals, since they foresaw, no doubt, a great danger from their lewdness; so that here their own judgment, agreeing with us, already serves as a testimony against the heathen, and for us, as a human precedent that heightens our discipline. So Pompey the Great, a man smaller only than his theatre, when he had built that citadel of all shameful things, fearing at some time a censor's rebuke upon his memory, built a temple of Venus on top of it; and calling the people by edict to its dedication, he named it not a theatre but a temple of Venus, “under which,” he said, “we have placed tiers of seats for shows.” So he screened with the title of a temple a work condemned and deserving condemnation, and mocked discipline with superstition. But Venus and Liber get on well together. Those two demons, of drunkenness and of lust, have conspired and sworn together. So the theatre of Venus is also the house of Liber. For they properly called other stage games too Liberalia, besides those devoted to Liber, which among the Greeks are the Dionysia, and which Liber himself instituted. And plainly the stage arts too are under the patronage of Liber and Venus. What is private and peculiar to the stage, the effeminacy of gesture and of bodily movement, they offer to Venus and Liber, both dissolute gods, the one through sex, the other through excess. But what is carried out by voice and measures and instruments and letters has Apollos and Muses and Minervas and Mercuries as its owners. You will hate, Christian, the things whose authors you cannot but hate. Now we wish to add something about the arts, and about those whose authors we curse in their names. We know that the names of the dead are nothing, as are their images too; but we are not ignorant of who works under those names when images have been set up, and takes delight and counterfeits divinity: wicked spirits, that is, demons. We see, then, that the arts too are dedicated to the honor of those who dwell in the names of their authors, and are not free of idolatry, since their founders are for that very reason held to be gods. Indeed, as far as the arts are concerned, we ought to have perceived more deeply that the demons, providing for themselves from the beginning, among the other defilements of idolatry, the defilements of the shows too, by which they might call man away from the Lord and bind him to their own honor, also inspired the talents for such arts. For what was to come to them would not have been procured by others, nor would they then have produced it through any men but those in whose names and images and stories they had determined to carry on for themselves the business of the fraud of consecration. That the order may be completed, let us now take up the discussion of the athletic contests.

Their origin comes from their kinship with the games. Hence they too are instituted as sacred or as funeral, and are held for the gods of the nations or for the dead. Their titles likewise: the Olympian games for Jupiter, which at Rome are the Capitoline; likewise the Nemean for Hercules, the Isthmian for Neptune; the rest are various contests for the dead. What wonder, then, if idolatry befouls the equipment of the contests too, with profane crowns, priestly presidents, attendants from the guilds, and finally the very blood of bulls? To add a word on the place, which they share … for the college of the arts of the Muses, of Minerva, and of Apollo, and of Mars too, they imitate the circus in the stadium with combat and trumpet; and the stadium is surely itself a temple, of the idol whose festivals it celebrates. The gymnastic arts too were brought forth by the disciplines of the Castors, of Hercules, and of Mercury.

There remains the review of that most notable and most popular show. It is called munus from “duty” (officium), since officium is also one of the meanings of munus. The ancients thought that by this show they were performing a duty to the dead, after they had tempered it with a more humane cruelty. For formerly, since it was believed that the souls of the departed were propitiated by human blood, they used to buy captives or slaves of poor quality and sacrifice them at funerals. Afterwards it pleased them to cloak the impiety with pleasure. So those whom they had procured, trained in such arms and as well as they then could, only so that they might learn to be killed, they soon spent at the tombs on the day appointed for the funeral offerings. So they consoled death with murders. This is the origin of the munus. But gradually they advanced to as great refinement as they did to cruelty, because the pleasure of the holiday was not satisfied unless human bodies were also torn apart by wild beasts. What was offered to the dead, then, was surely counted as a funeral rite; and that kind is idolatry, since idolatry too is a kind of funeral rite: the one as much as the other serves the dead. And in the idols of the dead demons dwell. To consider the titles too: although this kind of exhibition has passed from honors paid to the dead to the honors of the living, I mean quaestorships and magistracies and flaminates and priesthoods, yet since the dignity of the name is bound by the crime of idolatry, whatever is administered in the name of that dignity must also share the stains of the source from which it has its occasions. We shall interpret the equipment in the same way, counted among the trappings of those very honors: the purple, the fasces, the fillets, the crowns, and finally the proclamations, the edicts, and the banquets of the day before are not without the pomp of the devil, not without the invitation of demons. What should I say of that dreadful place, which not even perjuries can bear? For the amphitheatre is consecrated with more names, and harsher ones, than the Capitol: it is the temple of all the demons. As many unclean spirits sit there as it holds men. To conclude with the arts too: we know that Mars and Diana are the patrons of both kinds of games.

We have, I think, filled out the plan sufficiently, showing in how many ways and by what means the shows commit idolatry: by their origins, titles, equipment, places, and arts; so that we may be certain that in no respect do they befit us, who twice over renounce idols. Not that an idol is anything, as the apostle says, but because what they do, they do to demons, who dwell, that is, in the consecrations of idols, whether of the dead or, as they think, of gods. For this reason, then, since both kinds of idols are of one condition, the dead and the gods being one, we abstain from both idolatries. We spit on temples no less than on tombs; we know neither kind of altar, we adore neither kind of image; we do not sacrifice, we do not make offerings to the dead. Nor do we eat of what is sacrificed or offered to the dead, because we cannot eat the supper of God and the supper of demons. If, then, we keep our throat and belly free from defilements, how much more do we keep our nobler parts, our ears and eyes, from the pleasures offered to idols and to the dead, which are not digested by the intestines but in the spirit and soul itself, whose cleanness matters more to God than that of the intestines.

Now, having set forth the name of idolatry, which alone ought to be ground enough for renouncing the shows, let us treat the matter by another line of reasoning, over and above, chiefly for the sake of those who flatter themselves that this abstinence is not prescribed by name. As if too little were said about the shows when the lusts of the world are condemned! For just as there is lust for money, or rank, or gluttony, or sex, or glory, so there is also lust for pleasure; and the shows are a kind of pleasure. Lusts named in general, I think, include pleasures within them; likewise pleasures, understood in general, are also specifically divided out into the shows.

Moreover, we noted above, concerning the condition of places, that they do not defile us by themselves but by what is done there, and that, once they have drunk in the defilement, they then spew it out on others too. Let the chief heading, then, idolatry, as we said, stand on its own; let us set all the other qualities of the things themselves against them, as things contrary to God. God has commanded that the Holy Spirit, as being tender and delicate by the goodness of his nature, be treated with tranquillity, gentleness, quiet, and peace, not disturbed with frenzy, bile, anger, or grief. How can he agree with the shows? For no show is without agitation of the spirit. For where there is pleasure, there is also eagerness, which gives pleasure its savor; where there is eagerness, there is also rivalry, which gives eagerness its savor. And where there is rivalry, there too are frenzy, bile, anger, and grief, and the rest that follow from them, which, like them, are incompatible with discipline. For even if someone enjoys the shows modestly and decently, as befits his rank, his age, or even his nature, still he is not unmoved in mind nor without a silent passion of the spirit. No one comes to pleasure without feeling; no one experiences feeling without its ups and downs. Those very ups and downs are incitements to feeling. On the other hand, if feeling ceases, there is no pleasure, and then he is already guilty of vanity, going where he gains nothing. But I think vanity too is foreign to us. What of the fact that he condemns himself by taking his place among those whom he confesses he detests by not wishing to be one of them? It is not enough for us not to do such things ourselves, unless we also keep from the company of those who do them. “If you saw a thief,” it says, “you ran along with him.” Would that we did not even live in the world together with them! Yet in the things of the world we are separated from them, because the world is God's, but worldly things are the devil's.

Since, then, frenzy is forbidden us, we are removed from every show, and from the circus too, where frenzy properly presides. Look at the people coming to that show already in a frenzy, already in an uproar, already blind, already excited over their bets. The praetor is too slow for them; their eyes are forever rolling in his urn along with the lots. Then they hang anxiously on the signal; one madness has one voice. Recognize the madness from its folly: “He has thrown it!” they say, and they announce to one another what all have seen at once. I hold the evidence of their blindness: they do not see what has been thrown. They think it a napkin; but it is the figure of the devil cast down from on high. From that, then, they go on into rages, passions, and quarrels, and whatever is unlawful for priests of peace. Then come curses and abuse without the justice of hatred, and cheers without the merit of love. For what will those gain of their own who act there, when they are not their own? Unless perhaps this alone, through which they are not their own: they are saddened by another's misfortune and glad at another's good fortune. Whatever they desire, whatever they loathe, is foreign to them; so their love is idle and their hatred unjust. Or is it perhaps more lawful to love without cause than to hate without cause? God certainly forbids us to hate even with cause, for he commands us to love our enemies; God does not allow us to curse even with cause, for he commands us to bless those who curse. But what is more bitter than the circus, where they do not spare even their rulers or their fellow citizens? If any of the things at which the circus rages befits the saints anywhere, it will be allowed in the circus too; but if nowhere, then not in the circus either.