XIV. Now, having interposed the name of idolatry—which alone, as a subject, ought to suffice for the renunciation of the spectacles—let us treat the matter on another principle, over and above, chiefly on account of those who flatter themselves that this abstinence has not been expressly prescribed by name; as though too little were pronounced concerning the spectacles when the concupiscences of the world are condemned. For just as there is a concupiscence of money, or of dignity, or of the gullet, or of lust, or of glory, so also there is a concupiscence of pleasure; and spectacles are a species of pleasure. I suppose that the concupiscences named generally contain in themselves the pleasures also, and the pleasures likewise understood generally are expounded specifically also into the spectacles.
XV. For the rest, we have related above concerning the condition of places, that they do not defile us through themselves, but through the things which are done there, through which, when they have drunk in the defilement, they then spit it back upon others also. Let the principal title, then, as we have said, be seen to—idolatry; the remaining qualities of the things themselves, all contrary to God, let us bring forward. God has commanded that the Holy Spirit—being, according to the goodness of His nature, tender and delicate—be treated with tranquillity and gentleness and quiet and peace, not disturbed by frenzy, by bile, by anger, by grief. How, then, will He be able to agree with the spectacles? For no spectacle is without a shaking of the spirit. For where there is pleasure, there also is eagerness, through which, of course, pleasure has its savour;
where there is eagerness, there also is rivalry, through which eagerness has its savour. Further, where there is rivalry, there also are frenzy and bile and anger and grief and the other things that follow from these, which do not accord with discipline. For even if someone enjoys the spectacles modestly and properly, according to the condition of his dignity or age or even his nature, still he is not of unmoved mind and without a silent passion of the spirit. No one comes to pleasure without emotion, no one suffers emotion without its own reverses. The very reverses are the incitements of emotion. Otherwise, if emotion ceases, there is no pleasure, and that man is already guilty of vanity, coming there where he attains nothing. But I think that even vanity is foreign to us.
And what of this, that he even judges himself, placed among those to whom, unwilling to be counted like, he certainly confesses himself an abhorrer? For us it is not enough if we ourselves do nothing of such a kind, unless we also do not associate with those who habitually do such things. 'If you saw a thief,' he says, 'you ran along with him.' Would that we might not so much as tarry in the world at the same time together with them! But nevertheless, in worldly matters we are separated, because the world is God's, but worldly things are the devil's. XVI. Since, then, frenzy is forbidden to us, we are taken away from every spectacle, and even from the circus, where frenzy properly presides. Behold the people coming to that spectacle already with frenzy, already tumultuous, already blind, already excited over their wagers. The praetor is too slow for them; their eyes are ever rolling, together with the lots, in his urn.
Then in anxiety they hang upon the signal; there is one voice of one madness. Recognize the madness from its vanity: 'He has thrown!' they say, and announce to one another what has been seen by all at the same moment. I hold their testimony of 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. And so from this they go off into furies and passions and discords, and whatever is not lawful for the priests of peace. Thence come curses, revilings without the justice of hatred, and even applause without the merit of love. What of their own are they going to obtain, who act there, who are not their own? Unless perhaps this alone, through which they are not their own: they are saddened at another's misfortune, they rejoice at another's good fortune. Whatever they desire, whatever they abominate, is foreign to them;
thus among them love too is idle and hatred unjust. Or is it perhaps permissible to love without cause more than to hate without cause? God assuredly forbids us to hate even with cause, He who commands that enemies be loved; God does not permit us to curse even with cause, He who charges that those who curse be blessed. But what is more bitter than the circus, where they do not spare even their own princes or fellow-citizens? If any of these things by which the circus rages agrees anywhere with the saints, it will be permitted even in the circus; but if nowhere, then not even in the circus. XVII. Similarly, we are bidden to put away all unchastity. In this manner, therefore, we are also separated from the theatre, which is the private consistory of unchastity, where nothing is approved but what is not approved elsewhere.
Thus its highest charm is contrived mostly out of filth, which the Atellan player mimics with gestures, which the mime represents even through women, banishing the sense of sex and shame, so that they blush more easily at home than on the stage; which, finally, the pantomime endures in his body from boyhood, that he may be able to be an artist. The very harlots too, the victims of public lust, are brought forth upon the stage, more wretched in the presence of women, from whom alone they used to hide; and they are paraded before faces of every age, of every rank; their place, their fee, their record is proclaimed—even to those who have no need of it—even (I am silent about the rest) such women as it were fitting should lurk in the darkness and in their own caverns, lest they should contaminate the day.
Let the senate blush, let all the orders blush! Those very destroyers of their own modesty, dreading their own gestures in the light and before the people, blush once a year. But if all unchastity is to be execrated by us, why should it be lawful to hear what it is not lawful to speak, since we know that even scurrility and every idle word is condemned by God? Why should it be equally lawful to see what it is a disgrace to do? Why should the things which, uttered by the mouth, defile a man, not seem to defile the man when admitted through the ears and eyes—since ears and eyes are servants of the spirit, and the spirit cannot be kept clean whose attendants are defiled? You have, then, the prohibition of the theatre too, from the prohibition of unchastity.
If we also spurn the teaching of secular literature as accounted foolishness in the sight of God, sufficient prescription is laid down for us concerning those kinds of spectacles too which, by means of secular literature, mark out the playful or the athletic stage. But if tragedies and comedies are the bloody and wanton, the impious and prodigal instigators of crimes and lusts, no commemoration of anything either atrocious or vile is the better for it: what is rejected in the deed is not to be received even in the telling. XVIII. But if you should contend that the stadium is named in the Scriptures, granted, you shall carry your point.
But you will not deny that the things done in the stadium are unworthy of your gaze—fists and heels and cuffs and every insolence of the hand, and every mangling of the human face, that is, of the divine image. You will nowhere approve the vain races and casts of the javelin and the yet vainer leaps; nowhere will violence, whether injurious or vain, please you; nor even the care of a fabricated body, so as to surpass the plastic art of God; and on account of the idleness of Greece you will hate men fattened up. And the wrestling-school too is the devil's business: the devil dashed the first men to the ground. The very gesture is a serpentine force, tenacious to seize hold, tortuous to bind, fluid to slip away. There is no use of crowns for you; why do you go hunting for pleasures out of crowns?
XIX. Shall we now expect that we should seek from the Scriptures a repudiation of the amphitheatre also? If we can contend that savagery, that impiety, that ferocity has been permitted to us, let us go into the amphitheatre. If we are such as we are said to be, let us delight in human blood. 'It is a good thing when the guilty are punished.' Who but a guilty man will deny this? And yet it does not befit the innocent to rejoice at the punishment of another, since it rather becomes the innocent to grieve that a man, his own peer, has been made so guilty as to be so cruelly expended. But who is my surety that it is always the guilty who are condemned to the beasts, or to whatever punishment, and that it is not inflicted also upon innocence, whether by the vengeance of the judge, or the weakness of the defence, or the pressure of the torture?
How much better, then, is it not to know when the wicked are punished, lest I know also when the good perish—if indeed they have a taste of good! Certainly, indeed, innocent gladiators go on sale into the training-school, that they may become the victims of the public pleasure. Even those who are condemned into the training-school—what a thing it is that from a lighter offence they should make progress into homicides by way of amendment! But these things I have answered to the heathen. For the rest, far be it that a Christian should have to learn any longer about the aversion from this kind of spectacle! Although no one can fully express all these things except one who still looks on. I would rather not complete the account than remember it.
How vain, indeed how desperate, is the argument of those who, out of an unmistakable reluctance to give up their pleasure, pretend that no mention of such abstinence is anywhere specified in the Scriptures, either by subject or by place, so as directly to forbid the servant of God to take part in gatherings of this kind. Lately I heard a novel defence of some pretty little sport. 'The sun,' says the man, 'nay, God himself, looks down from heaven and is not defiled.' To be sure: the sun casts its rays even into a sewer and is not befouled. But would to God that he looked upon none of men's outrages, so that we might all escape judgement! But he looks upon robberies too, he looks upon lies and adulteries and frauds and idolatries, and upon the very shows themselves.
And therefore, then, shall we not look on, lest we be seen by him who looks on all things? You compare, O man, the accused and the judge: the accused, who is accused because he is seen; the judge, who is judge because he sees. Do we then give ourselves to frenzy only beyond the bounds of the circus, and aim at lewdness only beyond the doors of the theatre, and to insolence only beyond the racecourse, and to mercilessness only beyond the amphitheatre, seeing that God has eyes even beyond the vaults and tiers and awnings? We are mistaken: nowhere and never is that excused which God condemns; nowhere and never is that lawful which is always and everywhere unlawful. This is the integrity of the truth, and the fullness of discipline that is owed to it, and the constancy of fear, and the fidelity of obedience: not to change one's verdict nor to vary one's judgement.
That cannot be one thing here and another there which is truly good or evil. All things are fixed and settled with the truth of God. The heathen, who have no fullness of the truth in their keeping—since neither is God their teacher of truth—interpret evil and good according to their own caprice and lust: what is good in one place is elsewhere evil, and what is evil in one place is elsewhere good.
Thus, then, it comes about that a man who in public would scarcely lift his tunic even under the pressing need of his bladder, that same man in the circus will bare himself no otherwise than by flinging all his shame into the face of everyone; and that a man who guards his virgin daughter's ears from every filthy word, that same man will himself lead her into the theatre to those cries and gesticulations; and that a man who in the streets either checks or curses a brawl carried on by fist, that same man in the stadium will cast his vote for still fiercer blows; and that a man who shudders at the corpse of one dead by the common law of nature, that same man in the amphitheatre will bend down from above with most patient eyes upon bodies gnawed and torn and befouled in their own blood; nay, a man who comes to the show to attest his approval of the punishment of a murderer, that same man will drive the reluctant gladiator to murder with lashes and rods; and a man who demands the lion for every notorious murderer, that same man will beg the wooden sword for a savage gladiator and confer on him the cap of freedom as a reward, while the slain one he will demand back again even for a spectacle of his face, gazing more gladly close at hand upon one he wished to kill from afar—so much the harder if he did not wish it.
What wonder? These are the inconsistencies of men who confuse and interchange the state of good and evil through inconstancy of feeling and variety of judgement. For the very authors and managers of the shows set those charioteers, actors, athletes, and gladiators—their best beloved, to whom men subject their souls and women even their bodies, for whose sake they commit themselves to the very things they blame—they set them, by the same art through which they magnify them, down low, and degrade them; nay, they openly condemn them with disgrace and loss of civil standing, barring them from the senate-house, the rostrum, the senate, the equestrian order, and all other honours together with certain marks of distinction. What great perversity! They love those whom they penalize, they debase those whom they approve; they magnify the art, they brand the artist.
What kind of judgement is it, that a man should be disgraced for the very things by which he earns favour? Nay, how great a confession it is of an evil business, when its authors, even while they are most welcomed, are not without a brand of infamy! Since, then, human recollection—even against the clamour of the pleasure's charm—decrees that such men be condemned, stripping them of the goods of rank and casting them upon a certain rock of ill-fame, how much more does divine justice take note of such craftsmen? Or will that charioteer please God, the disquieter of so many souls, the minister of so many furies, of so many states of mind, crowned like a priest or painted like a pander, whom the devil has decked out to be swept along in his chariot against Elijah?
And will that man please God who changes his own countenance with a razor, unfaithful to his own face, which, not content to make it resemble Saturn and Isis and Liber, he further exposes to the insults of blows, as though he were making sport of the Lord's precept? For indeed the devil too teaches men to offer the smitten cheek patiently. So too he has raised the tragedians high on their buskins, because 'no one can add one cubit to his stature': he wants to make Christ a liar. And now indeed I ask whether the very use of masks can please God, who forbids every likeness to be made—how much more the likeness of his own image? The author of truth does not love the false; with him everything that is feigned is adultery.
Accordingly, a voice that counterfeits sex and ages, that asserts loves, angers, groans, and tears, he will not approve: for he condemns all hypocrisy. And besides, when in the Law he prescribes that a man who is clothed in women's garments is accursed, what will he judge of the pantomime, who is even trained up in womanly ways? Surely too shall that craftsman of fisticuffs go unpunished? For such scars from the gauntlets, and such callouses of the fists, and such fungus-swollen ears he received from God when he was fashioned; for this end God furnished him with eyes—that they might fail him under the beating! I say nothing of him who sets a man before a lion, that he may be no less a murderer than the one who afterwards cuts that same man's throat.
In how many ways still shall we plead our case, that none of the things reckoned to the shows is pleasing to God, or fitting for the servant of God, seeing it is not pleasing to God? If we have shown that all things were established for the devil's sake and furnished out of the devil's stores—for whatever is not God's, or displeases God, is nothing other than the devil's—this will be the pomp of the devil, against which we renounce in the seal of faith. And what we renounce, we ought not to share in, neither by deed nor by word nor by sight nor by expectation. But do we not renounce and rescind our seal, by rescinding our testimony of it? Does it then remain that we should demand the answer from the very heathen? Let them now declare to us whether it be lawful for Christians to attend a show.
And indeed it is from this above all that they recognize a man to have become a Christian—from his repudiation of the shows. So a man plainly denies his profession when he does away with that by which he is recognized. And what hope is left in such a man? No one deserts to the enemy's camp except by throwing away his own arms, except by forsaking the standards and oaths of his own commander, except by covenanting to perish along with them. Or will he at that time give any thought to God, set there where there is nothing of God? Peace of mind, I suppose, he will have, while he strives on behalf of a charioteer; he will learn chastity, spellbound at the mimes! Nay, in every show no scandal will meet him more than that very over-careful adornment of the women and of the men.
That very agreement of taste, that conspiring or dissension among themselves in their favouritism, fans into flame the sparks of lust by the traffic between them. In short, no one goes to enter a show without first thinking of nothing but to see and to be seen. But while the tragedian is declaiming, that man will be turning over in his mind the exclamations of some prophet; and amid the strains of the effeminate flute-player he will inwardly compose a psalm to himself; and while the athletes are contending, he is the man to say that one must not strike back! He may then also be admonished about mercy, while fixed intent 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 pernicious pleasure! For what is it but to pass from the Church of God to the church of the devil, from heaven, as they say, into the mire?
Shall you weary those very hands, which you have lifted up to God, afterwards in applauding an actor? Out of that mouth by which you have uttered Amen upon the Holy Thing, shall you bear witness to a gladiator, and say 'unto the ages, from age to age' to any one at all except to God and Christ? Why then should men not become penetrable even to demons of this kind? For an example did indeed occur, with the Lord as witness of that woman who went to the theatre and returned thence with a demon. And so in the exorcism, when the unclean spirit was pressed, because he had dared to assail a believer, he said steadfastly: 'And most justly indeed have I done it:
for I found her on my own ground.' It is well attested too that to another woman a linen cloth was shown in a dream on the night of that same day on which she had listened to a tragic actor, the tragedian being named with reproach, and that this woman was not in the world beyond the fifth day. How many other proofs assuredly have come forth concerning those who by fellowshipping 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 with death?' We ought to hate these gatherings and assemblies of the heathen, if only because there the name of God is blasphemed, there the daily lions are demanded against us, thence persecutions are decreed, thence temptations are sent forth. What will you do, caught in that seething tide of impious clamours?
Not as though you could suffer anything there at the hands of men—no one recognizes you as a Christian—but reflect on what becomes of you in heaven. Do you doubt that, in that very moment when the devil rages in the assembly, all the angels look forth from heaven and mark each one: who has uttered blasphemy, who has listened to it, whose tongue, whose ears he has lent to the devil against God? Will you not then flee the seats of Christ's enemies, that chair of pestilences, and the very air that hangs over them, befouled with wicked cries? Grant that they be sweet and pleasing and simple, even that some of them be honourable: no one tempers poison with gall and hellebore, but with well-seasoned and tasty morsels, and mostly with sweet ones, he introduces that bane.
So too the devil steeps the deadly draught he brews in the things of God that are most pleasing and most acceptable. Whatever there is strong or honourable or sonorous or tuneful or subtle, regard it all just like drops of honey from a poisoned cake, and do not value your gullet's pleasure so highly as the peril that comes through the sweetness. Let his own guests be fattened on such sweets: to them belong the places and the times and the host himself. Our banquets, our nuptials, are not yet come. We cannot recline at table with them, because neither will they with us: the matter is arranged by turns. Now they rejoice, we are in conflict.
'The world,' he says, 'shall rejoice, but you shall be sorrowful.' Let us then mourn while the heathen rejoice, so that, when they begin to mourn, we may rejoice; lest, rejoicing now alongside them, we should then also mourn alongside them. You are pampered, O Christian, if you crave pleasure even in this world—nay, exceedingly foolish, if you count this to be pleasure. Certain philosophers gave this name to quietude and tranquillity; in that they rejoice, in that they find their occupation, in that they even glory. Do you sigh to me for the turning-posts and the stage and the dust and the arena? Tell me, I pray: cannot we live without pleasure, we who must die with pleasure? For what else is our vow than that of the apostle also—to depart from the world and to be received with the Lord? Here is our pleasure, where also is our vow.
And now, if you think to pass this present span of time amid delights, why are you so ungrateful, that you neither have enough of, nor acknowledge, so many and such great pleasures bestowed on you by God? For what is more delightful than reconciliation with God the Father and Lord, than the revelation of the truth, than the recognition of one's errors, than the pardon of so many past crimes? What greater pleasure than disdain for pleasure itself, than contempt for the whole world, than true freedom, than an unstained conscience, than a life that suffices for itself, than no fear of death—that you tread underfoot the gods of the nations, that you drive out demons, that you work cures, that you seek revelations, that you live unto God? These are the pleasures, these the shows, of Christians—holy, perpetual, free of charge.
In these interpret to yourself the games of the circus: gaze upon the racecourse of the world, count up the seasons gliding by, the spaces already run through, look for the goal-posts of the consummation, defend the fellowships of the churches, rouse yourself at God's signal, stand erect at the angel's trumpet, glory in the palms of martyrdom. If the teachings of the stage delight you, we have literature enough, verses enough, maxims enough, songs too enough, and voices enough—no fables, but truths; no artful twists, but plain sincerities. Do you want boxing-matches and wrestling too? They are at hand, and not small nor few.
Behold lewdness cast down by chastity, perfidy cut down by faith, cruelty crushed by mercy, wantonness thrown into shade by modesty—such are the contests among us, in which we ourselves are crowned. Do you want something of blood too? You have Christ's. But what a spectacle is already at hand—the coming of the Lord, now beyond all doubt, now exalted, now triumphant! What exultation that of the angels, what glory that of the saints rising again! What a kingdom thereafter of the righteous! What a city, the new Jerusalem! But indeed there remain yet other spectacles: that last and everlasting Day of Judgement, that day unlooked-for by the nations, that day derided, when so great an antiquity of the world, and all its births, shall be swallowed up in one fire. How vast then the sweep of the spectacle!
What shall I admire? At what shall I laugh? Where shall I rejoice, where exult—as I behold so many kings, who were announced to have been received into heaven, groaning together in the lowest darkness with Jove himself and with those their very witnesses? 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? And whom besides? Those wise philosophers, blushing before their disciples who blaze together with them—the disciples whom they used to persuade that nothing pertained to God, to whom they affirmed that souls were either nothing at all, or would not return into their former bodies? The poets too, trembling not before the tribunal of Rhadamanthus nor of Minos, but of the unexpected Christ?
Then the tragedians are more worth hearing, more vocal, no doubt, in their own proper calamity; then the actors are to be marked, far more supple through the fire; then the charioteer is to be gazed upon, all red on his flaming wheel; then the athletes are to be contemplated, hurled not in the gymnasia but into the fire—save that not even then would I wish them seen, as one who would rather turn upon those others an insatiable gaze: upon those who raged against the Lord. 'This is he,' I shall say, 'the son of a carpenter or a harlot, the Sabbath-breaker, the Samaritan who has a demon; this is he whom you bought from Judas; this is he, beaten with reed and fists, defiled with spittings, given gall and vinegar to drink;
this is he whom the disciples secretly stole away, that he might be said to have risen again—or whom the gardener dragged off, lest his lettuces should be trampled by the throng of comers.' To behold such things, to exult in such things—what praetor or consul or quaestor or priest will out of his own liberality furnish it to you? And yet these things we already in a manner possess through faith, presented to us by the imagining spirit. But of what sort are those things which neither eye has seen nor ear has heard nor have entered into the heart of man? I believe more delightful than the circus and both amphitheatres and every stadium.