On the Public Shows

It is shameful, shameful, I say, for faithful persons who claim for themselves the authority of the Christian name to vindicate from the heavenly Scriptures the vain superstitions of the gentiles mixed with spectacles, and to confer divine authority upon idolatry. For how is it that what is done by pagans in honour of some idol is frequented by faithful Christians as a spectacle, and gentile idolatry is asserted, and the true and divine religion is trampled in contempt of God? Shame holds me back from recounting their objections and defences in this cause. Where, they say, are these things written, where are they forbidden? Otherwise, Elijah is also the charioteer of Israel, and David himself danced before the ark. We read of psalteries, harps, cymbals, timbrels, pipes, citharas, and choirs. The Apostle also, in speaking of combat, sets forth the contest of the cestus and of our wrestling against the spiritual forces of wickedness. Again, when he draws examples from the stadium, he also sets crowns as prizes.

Why therefore may a faithful Christian man not watch what it was lawful for the divine Scriptures to write? In this place I might not undeservedly say that it would have been far better for these persons to have known no Scriptures at all than to read the Scriptures in such a manner. For the words and examples which were set down for the exhortation of evangelical virtue are transferred to the patronage of vices; since these things were not written that they might be watched, but that a greater urgency might be stirred in our souls toward profitable things, inasmuch as so great an urgency exists among the pagans in things that are not profitable.

It is therefore an argument for stirring up virtue, not a permission or liberty to watch gentile error, so that through this the mind may be the more inflamed toward evangelical virtue on account of divine rewards, since it is granted to arrive at eternal gains through the calamity of all labours and pains. For the fact that Elijah is the charioteer of Israel does not lend support to watching the circus games: for he ran in no circus. And the fact that David led dances in the sight of God gives no help to faithful Christians sitting in the theatre: for he did not dance out a tale of Greek licentiousness, twisting his limbs with obscene movements. Psalteries, harps, pipes, timbrels, citharas served the Lord, not idols. Let it not therefore be pleaded as a precedent that unlawful things be watched; they have been changed by the devil as artificer from holy things into unlawful ones. Let shame therefore prescribe to these persons, even if the holy Scriptures cannot. For Scripture provides more wisely in certain matters by commanding.

Having suffered modesty, it forbade the more, because it was silent. Truth, had it descended even to these things, would have thought most ill of its own faithful. For indeed in precepts certain things are more usefully left unspoken: they often admonish while they are forbidden. So also they are left unspoken while they are written in the Scriptures, and severity speaks in place of precepts, and reason teaches what Scripture kept silent. Let each one deliberate with himself alone, and speak with the character of his own profession, and he will never do anything unseemly. For conscience will carry more weight when it owes itself to no other but itself.

What has Scripture forbidden? For it has forbidden to watch what it forbids to do. All these kinds of spectacles, I say, it has condemned when it abolished idolatry, the mother of all games, from which these monsters of vanity and frivolity have come. For what spectacle is there without an idol? What game without sacrifice? What contest not consecrated to a dead man? What does a faithful Christian do among these things? If he flees idolatry, why does one who is already holy take pleasure in criminal matters? Why does he approve against God the superstitions which he loves while he watches? Let him know, moreover, that all these things are inventions of demons, not of God. He shamelessly exorcises demons in the Church whose pleasures he praises in spectacles; and since, having once renounced them, the whole matter was rescinded in Baptism, while after Christ he goes to the devil's spectacle, he renounces Christ as though renouncing the devil.

Idolatry, as I have already said, is the mother of all games; which, in order to draw faithful Christians to itself, flatters them through the pleasure of eyes and ears. Romulus first consecrated the circus games to Consus, as though the god of counsel, on account of the rape of the Sabine women. The rest, moreover, while famine had seized the City, were acquired as scenic games for the diversion of the people, dedicated afterwards to Ceres and Liber and the remaining idols and dead men. Those Greek contests, whether in songs, or in strings, or in voices, or in bodily strength, have their presiding demons of various kinds; and whatever else there is that moves or soothes the eyes or ears of spectators, if it be examined together with its origin and institution, presents as its cause either an idol or a demon or a dead man. Thus the devil as artificer, knowing that idolatry naked by itself was abhorred, mingled it with spectacles, so 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 becomes a victim by the robbery of the priest, while blood caught warm from the throat in a foaming bowl, while it still seethes, is cruelly offered as a drink and flung into the face of a seemingly thirsty idol, and amid the pleasures of certain spectators the death of some is dispensed, so that through a bloody spectacle one may learn to be savage, as though a man's private rage were not enough unless he also learns it publicly. For the punishment of man a rabid beast is nurtured in luxury, so that it may rage more cruelly under the eyes of spectators. The trainer instructs the beast, which would perhaps have been more gentle had not a more cruel master taught it to be savage.

Therefore, to say nothing of whatever idolatry more broadly approves, how vain are the contests themselves: quarrels over colours, contentions over races, favouritisms over honours, rejoicing that a horse has been swifter, grieving that it has been slower, computing the years of a beast, knowing the consuls, learning the ages, designating the lineage, recalling the grandsires and great-grandsires themselves! How utterly idle this whole business, or rather how base and ignominious, that this man, I say, who reckons from memory the entire offspring of the equine race and recounts it without offence to the spectacle with great speed—if you were to ask him about the parents of Christ, he does not know, so that it is more unhappy for him to know. But if again I were to ask by what road he arrived at some spectacle, he will confess it was through brothels, through the naked bodies of prostitutes, through public lust, through public disgrace, through common wantonness, through the common insult of all.

To whom, that I may not charge what he perhaps committed, he yet saw what ought not to have been committed, and led his eyes to the spectacle of idolatry through lust, having dared to lead the Holy One with him into a brothel, if he could; who, hastening to the spectacle, dismissed from the Lord's house and still carrying with him, as is customary, the Eucharist, this faithless man carried the holy body of Christ amid the obscene bodies of harlots, meriting more damnation from the journey than from the pleasure of the spectacle.

But, to pass now from this shameless defilement of the stage, it is shameful to recount what is said, shameful also to accuse what is done: the tricks of plots, the deceits of adulterers, the immodesty of women, the buffoonish jests, the sordid parasites, even the patresfamilias themselves in togas, now stupid, now obscene, foolish in all things, shameless in all things. And although by the speech of these wicked men neither rank nor profession of any man is spared, yet from all sides people gather to the spectacle. The common disgrace gives delight: to see or to recognise or to learn idleness. People rush there to the public shame of the brothel, to the school of obscenity, lest anything be done in secret less than what is learned in public; and amid the very laws, whatever is forbidden by the laws is taught. What does a faithful Christian do among these things, to whom it is not lawful even to think of vices?

Why is he delighted by images of lust, so that, with modesty laid aside in those very images, he may become bolder for crimes? He learns to do while he grows accustomed to see. Those women, however, whom their unhappy lot has thrust into servitude and prostrated, conceal their public lusts, and console their disgrace from their hiding-places. They blush to be seen, even those who have sold their modesty. But this public monstrosity is enacted before the eyes of all, and the obscenity of prostitutes is surpassed. It has been sought out how adultery might be admitted through the eyes. Upon this disgrace a fitting disgrace is heaped. A man broken in all his limbs, and dissolved beyond womanish softness, whose art it is to express words with his hands; and on account of one person who is neither man nor woman, the whole city is stirred, so that the fabulous lusts of antiquity may be danced out.

Thus whatever is unlawful is loved, so that what even age had hidden away is brought back under the memory of eyes.

Lust is not satisfied to use its present evils, unless it makes its own from the spectacle in which even a former age had gone astray. It is not lawful, I say, for faithful Christians to be present, not lawful at all, not even for those whom Greece, equipped with her vain arts, sends everywhere to the enticements of ears. One imitates the hoarse martial blasts of the trumpet, another moderates mournful sounds by blowing breath into a pipe, another, contending with choirs and with the melodious voice of a man, by his own breath which he had drawn from his vitals straining upward into the higher parts of the body, modulates through the holes of the pipes; now with breath released, now shut within and emitted into the air through the fixed passages of the holes, now breaking the sound at a joint, he labours to speak with his fingers, ungrateful to the Artificer who gave him a tongue. Why should I speak of comic and useless cares? Why of those great ravings of the tragic voice?

Why of strings joined with shouting? These things, even if they were not dedicated to idols, ought nevertheless not to be attended or watched by faithful Christians; since, even if they had no criminal character, they have in themselves the greatest vanity, little befitting the faithful.

For that other madness of the rest is a manifest trafficking for idle men; and the first victory is that a belly has been able to hunger beyond human measure, under the title of a crowned gluttony—a shameful fair; the unhappy face is hired out for blows of wounds, so that the more unhappy belly may be fattened. How foul moreover are those wrestling matches, a man lying beneath a man entangled in dishonourable embraces and bonds! In such a contest let him see or even conquer—modesty is nonetheless conquered. Behold, one leaps naked, another hurls a bronze disc with strength strained into the air. This is not glory, but madness. In short, remove the spectator, and you will have restored the vanity. These things must be fled by faithful Christians, as we have already said frequently: spectacles so vain, so pernicious, so sacrilegious, from which both our eyes and our ears ought to be guarded. We quickly grow accustomed to what we hear, what we see.

For when the mind of man is led to the vices themselves, what will it do if it has had examples of the slippery nature of the body which falls of its own accord? What will it do if it has been pushed? The mind must therefore be called away from these things.

The Christian has better spectacles, if he will; he has true and profitable pleasures, if he recognizes himself.

And, to pass over those things which cannot yet be contemplated, he has this beauty of the world to behold and admire: let him look upon the rising of the sun, and again its setting, calling back by mutual alternations days and nights; the orb of the moon marking the courses of the seasons by its waxings and wanings; the choirs of glittering stars and their brightness gleaming with ceaseless motion from on high; the whole year's great members divided in succession from the highest point, and the very days together with the nights arranged through the spaces of the hours; the mass of the earth balanced with its mountains, and the flowing rivers with their springs, the wide seas with their waves and shores; meanwhile the middle air, spread out in constant harmony and bonds of concord alike, quickening all things by its own thinness, now pouring down rains from gathered clouds, now calling back fair weather as the rarity is restored; and in all these things their proper inhabitants: in the air, birds; in the waters, fish; in the earth, man.

These, I say, and other divine works, let these be the spectacles for faithful Christians. What theatre built by human hands can be compared to these works? Though it be built with great masses of stone, the crests of mountains are higher; and though its panelled ceilings gleam with gold, they shall be surpassed by the splendour of the stars. No one who recognizes himself as a son of God will ever marvel at human works. He casts himself down from the height of his own nobility who is able to admire anything apart from the Lord.

Let the faithful Christian, I say, apply himself to the holy Scriptures; and there he will find spectacles worthy of his faith. He will see God establishing His own world, and making that wondrous and superior fabric of man along with the other creatures. He will behold the world in its delights, just shipwrecks, the rewards of the righteous, and the punishments of the wicked, seas dried up for a people, and again seas drawn forth from a rock for the people. He will behold harvests descending from heaven, not pressed out by the plough, rivers offering dry crossings with their columns of water held back. He will see in certain ones faith wrestling with fire, wild beasts overcome by religion and turned to gentleness. He will look upon souls called back even from death itself. He will consider also bodies of those already consumed brought back to life from their tombs, and in all these things he will now see a greater spectacle: that devil, who had triumphed over the whole world, lying beneath the feet of Christ.

How seemly is this spectacle, brethren, how joyful, how needful, to behold always one's own hope, and to open one's eyes to one's own salvation! This is the spectacle which is seen even with eyes taken away. This is the spectacle which no praetor or consul presents, but He who alone is before all things and above all things, yea rather from whom are all things, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be praise and honour for ever and ever. I pray, brethren, that you may always fare well. Amen.