On the Shows 30

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.