On the Shows 17–30

Likewise we are commanded to put away all unchastity. In this way, then, we are also separated from the theatre, which is the private council-house of unchastity, where nothing wins approval but what wins none elsewhere. So its chief charm is mostly contrived from filth: filth which the Atellan actor gestures; which the mime even represents by playing women, banishing the sense of sex and of shame, so that they blush more easily at home than on the stage; filth, finally, which the pantomime suffers in his body from boyhood, so that he may become an artist. Even the prostitutes themselves, the victims of public lust, are brought out on the stage, more wretched in the presence of women, from whom alone they used to be hidden, and are paraded before the faces of every age and rank; their address, their price, and their record are proclaimed, even to those who have no need of it, even (I say nothing of the rest) things that ought to lie hidden in darkness and in their own dens, lest they defile the day. Let the senate blush, let all the orders blush! Let even those women, the murderers of their own modesty, blush once a year, in terror of their own gestures before the light and the people. But if all unchastity is to be abhorred by us, why should it be lawful to hear what it is not lawful to speak, since we know that even buffoonery and every idle word is judged by God? Why, likewise, should it be lawful to see what it is a disgrace to do? Why should the things that defile a man when they come out of the mouth not seem to defile a man when admitted through the ears and eyes, since ears and eyes are the attendants of the spirit, and he cannot be kept clean whose attendants are defiled? You have, then, the prohibition of the theatre from the prohibition of unchastity. If we also despise the teaching of secular literature as reckoned foolishness with God, we are sufficiently instructed about those kinds of shows too which, drawing on secular literature, set out the stage for play or for contest. And if tragedies and comedies are bloody and wanton, impious and prodigal performers of crimes and lusts, the recollection of anything atrocious or vile is no better than the thing itself: what is rejected in deed is not to be received in word either.

If you argue that the stadium is named in the Scriptures, you will certainly win your point. But you will not deny that what is done in the stadium is unworthy of your sight: punches, kicks, cuffs, every wantonness of the hand, and every disfigurement of the human face, that is, of the image of God. You will nowhere approve the vain running and throwing, and the vainer leaping; nowhere will strength please you, whether it does harm or is merely vain; nor will care for an artificial body, as though it surpassed God's modelling; and you will hate men fattened for the idleness of Greece. Wrestling too is the devil's business: the devil first threw the first human beings. The very grip is the power of a serpent: tenacious in seizing, twisting in binding, slippery in escaping. You have no use for crowns; why do you hunt pleasures from crowns?

Shall we now wait to seek from the Scriptures a repudiation of the amphitheatre too? If we can claim that cruelty, impiety, and savagery are permitted us, let us go to the amphitheatre. If we are such as we are said to be, let us delight in human blood. It is good when the guilty are punished. Who but a guilty man will deny this? And yet the innocent ought not to rejoice at another's punishment, since it rather befits the innocent to grieve that a man, his equal, has become so guilty as to be spent so cruelly. But who guarantees to me that it is always the guilty who are sentenced to the beasts or to any other punishment, so that it is not inflicted on innocence too, through the vengefulness of the judge, or the weakness of the defense, or the pressure of torture? How much better, then, not to know when the wicked are punished, lest I also know when the good perish, if indeed they have any taste of good. Certainly innocent gladiators are sold into the training school to become victims of public pleasure. Even as for those condemned to the school, what kind of thing is it that for a lighter offense they should be improved into murderers? But these answers I have given to the heathen. For the rest, God forbid that a Christian should need any further teaching about his aversion to this show. Though no one can describe all these things more fully than one who still watches. I would rather leave it incomplete than remember.

How vain, then, nay how desperate, is the argument of those who, doubtless from reluctance to lose a pleasure, plead that no mention of this abstinence is set down specifically or by place in the Scriptures, directly forbidding the servant of God to mingle in such gatherings! I recently heard a new defense from a certain lover of shows. “The sun,” he said, “nay God himself, watches from heaven and is not defiled.” Certainly; and the sun sends its rays into the sewer too and is not polluted. Would that God watched none of the crimes of men, so that we might all escape judgment! But he watches robberies too; he watches falsehoods and adulteries and frauds and idolatries and the shows themselves. And for that very reason we will not watch, lest we be seen by him who watches all things. You are comparing, man, the accused and the judge: the accused, who is accused because he is seen, and the judge, who is judge because he sees. Do we then pursue frenzy outside the bounds of the circus, and aim at unchastity outside the doorways of the theatre, and at insolence outside the stadium, and at mercilessness outside the amphitheatre, because God has eyes outside the vaults and tiers and … too? We err: nowhere and never is that excused which God condemns; nowhere and never is that lawful which is not lawful always and everywhere. This is the integrity of truth, and, owed to it, the fullness of discipline, the constancy of fear, and the faithfulness of obedience: not to change one's sentence nor vary one's judgment. What is truly good or evil cannot be otherwise.

But all things are fixed with the truth of God. The heathen, who have no fullness of truth, because God is not their teacher of truth, interpret evil and good by their own discretion and whim: good in one place what is evil in another, and evil in one place what is good in another. So it happens that the man who in public will scarcely lift his tunic for the needs of the bladder will in the circus strip it off only in such a way as to thrust all his shame before the faces of everyone; that the man who guards his virgin daughter's ears from every filthy word himself takes her to the theatre to hear those words and see those gestures; that the man who in the streets either restrains or deplores a quarrel carried on with fists will in the stadium applaud heavier blows; that the man who shudders at the corpse of one who died by the common law of nature will in the amphitheatre lean over, with most patient eyes, bodies gnawed, torn apart, and fouled in their own blood; nay, that the one who comes to the show to approve the punishment of a murderer will drive an unwilling gladiator to murder with lashes and rods; and that the one who demands the lion for every more notorious murderer will ask the wooden sword of discharge for a savage gladiator and grant him the cap of freedom as a reward, while he calls back the one who has been dispatched in order to view his face, inspecting more gladly close at hand the man he wanted killed at a distance, and all the more hardened if he did not want it.

What wonder? These are the inconsistencies of men who confuse and exchange the standing of good and evil through fickleness of feeling and variety of judgment. For the very sponsors and managers of the shows take those most beloved charioteers, actors, athletes, and gladiators, to whom men surrender their souls and women even their bodies, for whose sake they commit what they censure, and for the very art for which they make much of them they degrade and demean them; indeed they openly condemn them with disgrace and loss of civil rights, keeping them from the senate house, the rostra, the senate, the equestrian order, and all other offices, as well as from certain distinctions. What perversity! They love those whom they penalize; they cheapen those whom they approve; they magnify the art and brand the artist. What kind of judgment is it that a man should be disgraced for the very things by which he wins favor? Nay, what a confession of an evil thing! Its performers, though they are the most welcome of all, are not free of the mark of infamy.

Since, then, human reflection, even with the charm of pleasure clamoring against it, judges that they should be condemned, stripped of the benefits of rank, and cast onto a kind of rock of infamy, how much more does divine justice punish such performers? Will that charioteer please God, the disturber of so many souls, the minister of so many frenzies, of so many …, crowned like a priest or dressed in colors like a pimp, whom the devil has decked out to be carried off in a chariot in rivalry with Elijah? Will that one please him who changes his features with a razor, unfaithful to his own face, which, not content to make it resemble Saturn and Isis and Liber, he moreover exposes to the insults of slaps, as if making sport of the Lord's command? The devil too, of course, teaches us to offer the cheek patiently to be struck! So too he has raised the tragic actors on buskins, because “no one can add one cubit to his stature”: he wants to make Christ a liar. And now I ask whether the very business of masks pleases God, who forbids any likeness to be made, how much more a likeness of his own image? The author of truth does not love what is false; with him everything counterfeited is adultery. So he will not approve a voice that belies sex and age, that feigns loves, angers, groans, and tears; for he condemns all hypocrisy. Moreover, since in the law he pronounces cursed whoever is dressed in women's clothing, what will he judge of the pantomime, who is even bent into women's postures? The artist of the fists, no doubt, will go unpunished! For he received such scars from the cestus, such calluses of the fists, such swollen ears from God when he was fashioned; God lent him eyes for this, that they might be put out by blows! I say nothing of the man who pushes another before him to face the lion, lest he be less a murderer than the one who afterwards cuts the same man's throat.

In how many ways, then, have we now proved that nothing of what belongs to the shows is pleasing to God! Or is what is not pleasing to God fitting for the servant of God? If we have shown that all of them were instituted for the devil's sake and furnished from the devil's things (for whatever is not God's, or displeases God, is the devil's), this will be the pomp of the devil, which we renounced in the seal of faith. But what we have renounced, we ought not to share in by deed or word, by sight or glance. Otherwise we renounce in such a way that we break the seal by breaking its testimony. Does it remain, then, for us to demand an answer from the heathen themselves? Let them tell us now whether it is lawful for Christians to attend the shows. Indeed, it is chiefly from this that they know a man has become a Christian: from his rejection of the shows. So he plainly denies the faith who takes away the thing by which he is recognized. What hope is left in such a man? No one passes over into the camp of the enemy without throwing away his arms, deserting the standards and the oath of his commander, and agreeing to perish with the enemy.

Will a man think about God at such a time, when he is placed where there is nothing of God? He will have peace in his mind, I suppose, while he is shouting for a charioteer; he will learn chastity while he gapes at the mimes! Indeed, at every show nothing will cause him to stumble more than that very over-careful dress of women and men. The very sharing of feeling, the very agreement or disagreement among them in their cheering, fans the sparks of lust through their dealings with one another. In short, no one going to a show thinks of anything first but to see and be seen. But while the tragic actor bawls, he will be recalling the exclamations of some prophet; and amid the measures of an effeminate flute-player he will be composing a psalm for himself; and when the athletes are at work, he will say that one must not strike back! He will also be able to be moved to mercy, with his eyes fixed on the bites of bears and the sponges of the net-fighters! May God turn away from his own people so great a craving for deadly pleasure! For what sort of thing is it to go from the church of God to the church of the devil, from heaven, as they say, into the mud? To weary those hands, which you have lifted up to God, afterwards in applauding an actor? From the mouth with which you have spoken the Amen over what is holy, to bear witness to a gladiator? To say “for ever and ever” to anyone else at all but God and Christ?

Why, then, should such people not also become open to demons? For there has been an example, the Lord being witness, of the woman who went to the theatre and came back from there with a demon. So in the exorcism, when the unclean spirit was rebuked for having dared to attack a believer, it answered firmly: “And I did it quite rightly, for I found her on my own ground.” It is well known too that to another woman a linen shroud was shown in her sleep on the night of the day on which she had heard a tragic actor, and the actor was named in rebuke; and that woman was not in this world beyond the fifth day. Surely other proofs too have come about concerning those who, by keeping company with the devil at the shows, have fallen away from the Lord. For no one can serve two masters. What has light to do with darkness? What has life to do with death?

We ought to hate those gatherings and assemblies of the heathen, if only because there the name of God is blasphemed, there the lions are demanded against us every day, from there persecutions are decreed and temptations sent out. What will you do if you are caught in that surging tide of impious voting? Not that you can suffer anything there from men (no one recognizes you as a Christian); but consider what becomes of you in heaven. Do you doubt that at the very moment when the devil is raging against the church, all the angels look out from heaven and mark down each one: who spoke blasphemy, who listened to it, who lent his tongue and who his ears to the devil against God? Will you not, then, flee the seats of the enemies of Christ, that chair of pestilences, and the very air that broods above it, befouled with wicked cries? Granted that some things there are sweet, pleasant, simple, even decent. No one mixes poison with gall and hellebore; he puts that evil into seasoned dishes, well flavored and mostly sweet. So too the devil steeps the deadly draught he prepares in the things of God that are most pleasing and acceptable. Everything there, whether brave or honorable, sonorous or melodious or subtle, regard as drops of honey from a poisoned cake; and do not value your appetite for the pleasure more than the danger that comes through its sweetness.

Let such sweets fatten their own guests: they have their places and their times and their host. Our banquets, our wedding feasts, are not yet. We cannot recline at table with them, because they cannot recline with us either; the matter is arranged by turns. Now they rejoice, and we are afflicted. “The world,” he says, “will rejoice; you will be sorrowful.” Let us mourn, then, while the heathen rejoice, so that when they begin to mourn, we may rejoice; lest, if we rejoice with them now, we should then mourn with them too. You are too fastidious, Christian, if you want pleasure in this world as well; nay, you are too foolish, if you think this is pleasure. Some philosophers gave this name to rest and tranquillity; in it they rejoice, in it they find their diversion, in it they even glory. You sigh for the turning-posts, and the stage, and the dust, and the sand! I would have you say: “We cannot live without pleasure”; we who ought to die with pleasure! For what other wish have we than the apostle's, to depart from the world and be received by the Lord? Here is our pleasure, where our wish is.

Do you think, then, that this span of life is to be spent in delights? Why are you so ungrateful as not to find enough, nor to recognize, the many great pleasures God has given you? For what is more delightful than reconciliation with God, our Father and Lord, than the revelation of truth, than the recognition of errors, than pardon for so many past crimes? What greater pleasure is there than disdain for pleasure itself, than contempt for the whole world, than true freedom, than a clean conscience, than a life content with enough, than freedom from all fear of death? Than that you trample on the gods of the nations, drive out demons, perform cures, seek revelations, and live to God? These are the pleasures, these are the shows of Christians: holy, everlasting, free of charge. In these interpret for yourself the games of the circus: watch the course of the world, count the seasons gliding by and the laps completed, await the goal of the consummation, defend the fellowships of the churches, rouse yourself at God's signal, rise up at the angel's trumpet, glory in the palms of the martyrs. If the teachings of the stage delight you, we have literature enough, verses enough, maxims enough, songs enough, and voices enough; not fables, but truths; not tricks, but simplicity. Do you want boxing and wrestling? They are at hand, not small matches but many. See unchastity thrown down by chastity, faithlessness slain by faith, cruelty crushed by mercy, wantonness overshadowed by modesty: such are the contests among us, in which we ourselves are crowned. Do you want some blood too? You have Christ's.

But what a show is near at hand: the coming of the Lord, now no longer doubted, now exalted, now triumphant! What exultation of the angels, what glory of the rising saints! What a kingdom of the righteous thereafter! What a city, the new Jerusalem! Yet there remain other shows: that last and everlasting day of judgment, unexpected by the nations and mocked by them, when so great an age of the world and all its generations will be consumed in one fire. What a spectacle that will be, how vast! What shall I admire? What shall I laugh at? Where shall I rejoice, where exult, as I see so many kings, who were proclaimed as received into heaven, groaning together in the lowest darkness with Jupiter himself and with the very witnesses of their ascent? Likewise the governors, persecutors of the Lord's name, melting in flames fiercer than those with which they raged in their insolence against the Christians? Whom besides? Those wise philosophers, blushing before their disciples as they burn together with them, whom they persuaded that nothing concerned God, to whom they affirmed that souls either do not exist or will not return to their former bodies? The poets too, trembling before the tribunal not of Rhadamanthus or Minos, but of the unexpected Christ? Then the tragic actors will be more worth hearing, being more vocal, no doubt, in their own calamity; then the actors will be worth knowing, much looser-limbed through the fire; then the charioteer will be worth watching, red all over on his fiery wheel; then the athletes will be worth contemplating, thrown … not in the gymnasiums but in the fire; except that not even then would I wish to see them, as I would rather turn an insatiable gaze on those who raged against the Lord. “This,” I shall say, “is he, the son of the carpenter or of the harlot, the sabbath-breaker, the Samaritan who has a demon; this is he whom you bought from Judas; this is he who was beaten with the reed and with fists, dishonored with spittle, given gall and vinegar to drink; this is he whom his disciples stole away secretly, so that it might be said he had risen, or whom the gardener removed, so that his lettuces might not be trampled by the crowds of visitors.” That you may see such things, that you may exult in such things, what praetor or consul or quaestor or priest will provide them for you from his own bounty? And yet we already have these things in a way through faith, set before us by the imagining spirit. But what are those things which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have they entered into the heart of man? More pleasing, I believe, than the circus and both theatres and every stadium.