文集 第 11 章

CYPRIAN TO THE PEOPLE STANDING FAST IN THE GOSPEL, GREETING. As it greatly saddens me and heavily afflicts my soul whenever no occasion is offered me of writing to you—for it is a loss to me not to converse with you—so nothing restores to me such joy and cheerfulness as when the occasion again presents itself. I reckon that I am with you when I speak to you by letter. Although, therefore, I know that you are sure these things which I say are so, and that you doubt nothing of the truth of my words, yet the very argument confirms the sincerity of the matter; for when no occasion at all is let pass, affection is proved. Although, then, I am certain that you are no less serious in the conduct of life than faithful in the sacrament:

yet, since there is no lack of smooth defenders of vices and indulgent patrons who lend authority to vices, and—what is worse—turn the censure of the heavenly Scriptures into an advocacy of crimes, as if the pleasure of the shows were sought as a harmless relaxation of the mind, free from fault—for the vigour of ecclesiastical discipline has been so unnerved, and men are so hurled headlong into every languor of vices, that now not merely excuse but authority is given to vices—it has seemed good to instruct you in a few words, or rather, being already instructed, to admonish you, lest, because wounds have been ill bound up, the scar covering over the healing should burst open again.

For no evil is more difficult to extinguish than that which has easy returns, being both asserted by the consent of the multitude and coaxed on by excuse. Are they not ashamed, I say, are they not ashamed—faithful men, and men claiming for themselves the authority of the Christian name—to justify from the heavenly Scriptures the empty superstitions of the Gentiles mingled with the shows, and to confer divine authority upon idolatry? For when that which is performed by the heathen in honour of some idol is frequented by faithful Christians at the spectacle, both Gentile idolatry is upheld and true and divine religion is trodden underfoot to the reproach of God. Shame holds me back from reporting their pretexts and defences in this cause.

'Where,' they say, 'are these things written, where are they forbidden? Besides, Elijah too is a charioteer of Israel, and David himself danced before the ark. We read of harps, cithers, cymbals, timbrels, flutes, lyres, and choirs. The Apostle too, contending, sets before us the boxing-gloves and the contest of our wrestling against the spiritual forces of wickedness. Again, when he takes examples from the stadium, he sets down prizes of a crown as well. Why then is it not lawful for a faithful Christian man to behold what it was lawful for divine writings to record?' In this place I might not undeservedly say that it had been far better for such men to know no letters at all than to read letters in this way. For the words and examples set down for the exhortation of evangelical virtue are transferred to the patronage of vices:

since these things were written not that such spectacles might be watched, but that a greater urgency might be aroused in our souls concerning things that shall profit us, seeing that among the heathen so great an urgency exists concerning things that shall not profit. It is therefore an argument for kindling virtue, not a permission or licence for beholding Gentile error, so that thereby the soul may be the more inflamed toward evangelical virtue for the sake of divine rewards, since through the calamity of all labours and sorrows men strive to attain to earthly gains. For the fact that Elijah is a charioteer of Israel gives no sanction to watching the circus games: for he ran in no circus. And that David led choirs in the sight of God is no help to faithful Christians sitting in the theatre:

for he twisted no limbs with obscene motions in dancing out some fable of Greek lust. The harps, cithers, flutes, timbrels, and lyres sang to God, not to an idol. Therefore it will not be prescribed by precedent that unlawful things be watched. By the craft of the devil holy things have been changed into unlawful ones. Let shame, then, prescribe to such men, even if the holy Scriptures cannot. For in a certain sense Scripture provides better by its very silence in commanding: suffering a modest reserve, it forbade the more by keeping silence, lest, if truth had stooped even to such matters, it should have thought too basely of its own faithful; for indeed very often in its precepts certain things are more usefully passed over in silence. They often admonish while they are being forbidden.

So also things are passed over in silence though they are written in the divine letters, and in the place of precepts severity speaks, and reason teaches what Scripture has kept silent. Let each man deliberate with himself alone, and let him speak with the character of his own profession, and he will never do anything unseemly: for conscience will carry the greater weight, since it will owe itself to no other but to itself. What has Scripture forbidden? It has forbidden the watching of what it forbids to be done. It condemned all these kinds of spectacles, I say, when it abolished idolatry, the mother of all games, from which these monsters of vanity and levity have come. For what spectacle is there without an idol, what game without a sacrifice, what contest that is not consecrated to a dead man? What does a faithful Christian do amid these things?

If he flees idolatry, what place has he there? Why does one who is now holy take pleasure in criminal things? Why does he approve against God the superstitions which he loves while he watches? For the rest, let him know that all these things are the inventions of demons, not of God. Shamelessly does he exorcise demons in the church whose pleasures he praises at the spectacles; and though once, in renouncing him at baptism, the whole matter was cut off, yet when after Christ he goes to the spectacle of the devil, he renounces Christ as though he were the devil. Idolatry, as I have already said, is the mother of all games, which, that faithful Christians may come to her, allures them through the pleasure of the eyes and ears.

Romulus was the first to consecrate the circus games to Consus, as though the god of counsel, on account of the seizing of the Sabine women; the rest consecrated the remaining games. When famine had seized the city, the scenic games were devised as a summons for the people thus acquired, and were dedicated to Ceres and Liber, and afterwards to the other idols and to the dead. Those Greek contests too, whether in songs, or on strings, or in voices, or in feats of strength, have their various demons as presidents; and whatever else there is that either moves the eyes or soothes the ears of the spectators, if it be traced back to its origin and institution, presents as its cause either an idol, or a demon, or a dead man. Thus the devil, that craftsman, because he knew that idolatry naked and by itself was abhorred, mingled it with the shows, that through pleasure it might be loved.

What need is there to pursue more, or to describe the monstrous kinds of sacrifices in the games, among which sometimes even a man is made a victim by the brigandage of the priest, while the blood, caught still warm from the very throat in a foaming bowl and while it yet seethes, is cruelly offered up, hurled as though into the face of a thirsting idol, and amid the pleasures of the spectators the death of certain men is paid out, that through a bloody spectacle men may learn to rage—as though a man's private fury were too little, unless he learned it also in public? For the punishment of a man a raging beast is nourished amid delicacies, that under the eyes of the spectators it may rage the more cruelly. The craftsman trains the beast, which perhaps would have been more mad still, had not a crueller master taught it to rage.

Therefore, to say nothing of whatever idolatry more broadly countenances, how empty are the contests themselves—the quarrels over colours, the disputes over chariots, the applause over honours—to rejoice that a horse has been swifter, to grieve that it has been slower, to reckon up the years of a beast, to know its owners, to learn its ages, to designate its pedigree, to recite its very grandsires and great-grandsires! How wholly idle a business is all this—nay, how basely and shamefully disgraceful? This man, I say, who reckons up by heart the whole progeny of the equine race and repeats that passage without a stumble at great speed—if you should ask him for the parents of Christ, he does not know them, or, more unhappy still, if he does know them.

And if I should ask him again by what route he came to that spectacle, he will confess: through the brothels, past the naked bodies of harlots, through slippery lust, through public disgrace, through vulgar wantonness, through the common insult offered to all. Even if I do not charge him with what he perhaps committed, yet he saw what ought not to have been committed, and through lust he led his eyes to the spectacle of idolatry—daring to lead the holy thing with him into the brothel, had he been able; for one who, hastening to the spectacle, was dismissed from the Lord's assembly and still carried with him, as is the custom, the Eucharist, that faithless man bore the holy Body of Christ about among the obscene bodies of prostitutes, deserving more condemnation from his route than from the pleasure of the spectacle.

But to pass on now to the shameless jests of the stage, it is a shame to report what is said, a shame even to accuse what is done—the tricks of plots, the deceits of adulterers, the immodesties of women, the buffoonish jokes, the sordid parasites, and even the very heads of households in their togas, now made stupid, now obscene, in all things dull-witted, shameless in specific characters. And though by these scurrilous performances no man is spared, of whatever kind or profession, yet all gather to the spectacle. Their common disgrace delights them, forsooth, whether to recall or to learn its idle deeds. There is a rushing together into that brothel of public modesty, to the school of obscenity, lest anything be done less in secret than what is learned in public:

and amid the very laws themselves, whatever the laws forbid is taught. What does a faithful Christian do amid these things, for whom it is not lawful even to think upon vices? Why is he delighted with the images of lust, so that, laying aside his modesty among them, he may grow bolder toward crimes? He learns even to do it while he grows accustomed to see it. Yet those women whom their own misfortune has prostituted to public lust, a hidden place conceals, and they console their disgrace from their lurking-holes: they blush to be seen, even they who have sold their modesty. But this public monster is enacted while all look on, and the obscenity of prostitutes is paraded: a way has been sought whereby adultery might be admitted through the eyes.

Upon this disgrace a disgrace fully worthy of it is heaped: a man broken in all his limbs, and a man dissolved beyond the softness of a woman, whose art it is to make words with his hands; and on account of one whom I know not—neither man nor woman—the whole city is stirred, that the fabulous lusts of antiquity may be danced out. So is whatever is unlawful beloved, that memory may bring back before the eyes even what age itself had hidden. It is not enough for lust to make use of its own present evils, unless it makes its own out of the spectacle that in which even a former age had gone astray. It is not lawful, I say, for faithful Christians to be present—nor is it at all lawful even for those whom Greece, equipped with her empty arts, sends everywhere to all men for the enticement of the ears.

One imitates the hoarse warlike blasts of the trumpet; another, breathing into the flute, modulates its mournful sounds; another, contending with choirs and with the melodious voice of a man, breathing out that breath which, straining, he had drawn up from his innermost depths, tunes the holes of the flutes—now with the breath poured forth, now shut in and held back within, now sent out through fixed holes and poured abroad into the air; likewise, breaking the sound into joints, he labours to speak with his fingers, ungrateful to the Craftsman who gave him a tongue. Why should I speak of the useless cares of comedy, of those great madnesses of the tragic voice, of the strings struck up amid clamour? These things, even if they were not dedicated to idols, still ought not to be attended or watched by faithful Christians:

for even though they have no crime in them, they have in themselves the greatest vanity, and one little befitting the faithful. For that other madness of the rest is manifest: a trafficking for idle men. To its own injury the body grows fat in fattening, that it may the more sturdily either strike or be struck; and the first victory is to have been able to go hungry beyond measure, over the title of an eating crown, at the shameful market. The wretched face is hired out to blows, that the more wretched belly may be fattened. How foul, moreover, are the wrestling-bouts themselves: a man lying beneath a man is entangled in dishonourable embraces and holds. To stand firm in such a contest—let him see who conquers: modesty is conquered. Behold, one leaps up naked before you, another hurls the bronze disc into the air with straining might.

Let this be the glory of madness. In short, remove the spectator, and you will have rendered it mere vanity. These things are to be fled by faithful Christians, as we have now often said—spectacles so empty, so pernicious, so sacrilegious; and both our eyes and our ears are to be guarded. Quickly we grow accustomed to what we hear, swiftly to what we see. For when the mind of man is drawn to the vices themselves, what will it do to itself if it has examples? The slippery nature of the body, which of its own accord falls to ruin, what will it do if it be given a push? The soul must be called away from these things. The Christian has better spectacles, if he will; he has true and profitable pleasures, if he will collect himself:

and, to pass over those things which he cannot yet contemplate, he has this beauty of the world which he may behold and admire. Let him gaze upon the rising of the sun, and again its setting, as by alternating turns they call back the days and the nights; the orb of the moon marking the courses of the seasons by its waxings and wanings; the glittering choirs of the stars, ever shining from the height with their great mobility; the members of the whole year divided by their turns; the very days set in order with the nights through the spaces of the hours; the mass of the earth balanced with its mountains, and the rivers pouring forth with their springs; the outspread seas with their waves and shores; meanwhile the middle air, held constant with the highest harmony and with the bonds of concord outstretched, quickening all things by its very thinness—now pouring down showers from contracted clouds, now recalling fair weather by restored rarity; and in all these, their proper inhabitants: in the air the bird, in the waters the fish, on the earth man.

These, I say, and other divine works likewise, should be the spectacles for faithful Christians. What theatre built by human hands could be compared with these works? Though it be built up with great masses of stones, the crests of the mountains are higher; and though its panelled ceilings gleam with gold, they will be surpassed by the brightness of the stars: never will he marvel at human works who has recognized himself to be a son of God. He casts himself down from the summit of his own high nobility who can admire anything after God. Let the faithful Christian, I say, lean upon the sacred Scriptures: there he will find spectacles worthy of his faith. He will see God establishing His world, and, with the rest of the animals, making man and that admirable and better fabric.

He will behold the world in its transgressions—the just shipwrecks, the rewards of the godly and the punishments of the ungodly, seas dried up for the people, and again from the rock seas poured forth for the people. He will behold harvests descending from heaven, not pressed out from the threshing-floors by the plough; he will look upon rivers exhibiting dry crossings, the columns of their waters held back; he will see in certain men faith wrestling with fire, wild beasts overcome by religion and turned to gentleness; he will gaze upon souls even now called back from death itself; he will consider also, from the tombs, the admirable lives of the very bodies already consummated, brought back again. And in all these he will now behold a greater spectacle: that devil who had triumphed over the whole world, lying beneath the feet of Christ.

How seemly this spectacle, brethren, how joyful, how necessary—ever to gaze upon one's own hope, and to open one's eyes to one's own salvation! This is the spectacle that is seen even when the eyes of sight are lost. This is the spectacle that no praetor or consul sets forth, but He who is alone and before all things and above all things—nay, from whom are all things—the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be praise and honour unto the ages of ages. I desire, brethren, that you fare well.