On the Public Shows

1It saddens me deeply and weighs heavily on my heart whenever no opportunity to write to you presents itself, for it is my loss not to speak with you. So too, nothing restores such joy and cheer to me as when the opportunity comes again. I consider myself with you when I speak to you through letters. Although I know you are certain that what I say is true and do not doubt the truth of my words at all, still the very fact of my writing proves the sincerity of the matter: for no opportunity is ever passed over, and so my affection is demonstrated. Though I am sure you are no less serious in the conduct of your lives than you are faithful in the sacrament, still, since there is no lack of bland and indulgent patrons who lend authority to vices and, what is worse, turn the censure of the heavenly Scriptures into a defense of crimes—as if the pleasure of public shows were sought without fault or guilt for relaxation of the mind. For the vigor of church discipline has been so weakened and is so cast down headlong by every languor of vice, worse and worse, that vices are no longer given an excuse but an authority. So it has pleased a few not to instruct you now, but to admonish you who are already instructed, lest wounds that have been badly bound burst through the scar of healing. For no evil is more difficult to extinguish than one that has easy returns, while it is both asserted by the consensus of the crowd and flattered by excuse.

2I say it again: it is not shameful—indeed, it is not shameful—for faithful people, for those who claim for themselves the authority of the Christian name, to defend the empty superstitions of the Gentiles mixed up with public shows by appealing to the heavenly Scriptures, and to hand over divine authority to idolatry. For when what the pagans do in honor of some idol is attended by faithful Christians as a public show, then Gentile idolatry is affirmed, and true and divine religion is trampled in contempt of God. Shame holds me back from repeating their objections and defenses in this matter. “Where,” they say, “are these things written? Where are they forbidden? After all, Elijah is the charioteer of Israel, and David himself danced before the arena. We read of harps, lyres, bronze cymbals, drums, flutes, and dances. The apostle too, fighting with the cestus, sets before us the contest of our wrestling against spiritual forces of wickedness. Again, when he takes examples from the stadium, he also sets out the prizes of the crown. Why then should a faithful Christian not be allowed to watch what the divine writings were allowed to write?” At this point I would rightly say that it would have been far better for these people to know no writings at all than to read the writings in this way. For the words and examples that were set down to stir us toward evangelical virtue are twisted into defenses of vices—since these things were not written so that they might be watched, but so that a greater urgency might be stirred in our minds toward things that profit us, seeing how great an urgency the pagans show in things that do not profit.

3The argument, then, is for stirring up virtue, not a permission or freedom to watch pagan error. Its purpose is that the mind may be kindled more toward evangelical virtue for the sake of divine rewards, when through the calamity of all labors and pains one strives to arrive at earthly gains. For the fact that Elijah is the charioteer of Israel does not plead the case for watching circus games: he ran in no circus. And the fact that David danced in the sight of God does nothing to help faithful Christians sitting in the theater: he did not distort his limbs with obscene movements and dance out a story of Greek lust. Harps, lyres, flutes, tambourines, and citharas sang to God, not to an idol. So it will not be commanded that the forbidden be watched. By the devil's artifice, holy things have been changed into forbidden things. Let modesty, then, command these matters, even if the holy Scriptures cannot. For Scripture provides more for certain things by commanding. Having suffered shame, it forbade more because it was silent, lest the truth, if it should descend even to these things, would have thought very badly about its faithful ones. For often in precepts certain things are more usefully passed over in silence. They often warn while they are forbidden. So also they are passed over in silence while they are written in the divine writings, and in place of precepts severity speaks, and reason teaches what Scripture has kept silent about. Let each person only deliberate with himself and speak with the character of his own profession, and he will never do anything indecorous. For conscience will have more weight, which will owe itself to no one else but itself.

4What has Scripture forbidden? It has forbidden watching what it forbids doing. I say it condemned all these kinds of public shows when it took away idolatry, the mother of all games, from which these monsters of vanity and frivolity came. For what public show is without an idol, what game is without a sacrifice, what contest is not consecrated to a dead man? What is a faithful Christian doing among these things? If he flees idolatry, what place is there for him? Why does someone who is now holy take pleasure from criminal things? Why does he approve superstitions against God by loving them while he watches? Let him know, moreover, that all these things are inventions of demons, not of God. He shamelessly exorcizes demons in the church whose pleasures he praises in the public shows: and although he renounced the devil once and every tie was cut in baptism, when he goes to the devil's public show after Christ, he renounces Christ as if he were the devil. Idolatry, as I have already said, is the mother of all games, and to make faithful Christians come to her she flatters them through the pleasure of eyes and ears. Romulus first consecrated circus games to Consus, supposedly the god of counsel, in order to seize the Sabine women; others consecrated the rest. When famine had seized the city, stage plays were introduced to summon the people, dedicated to Ceres and Liber, and afterward to the remaining idols and the dead. Those Greek contests, whether in singing or in stringed instruments or in voices or in strength, have various demons as their presiding powers: and whatever else moves the eyes of the spectators or soothes their ears, if you ask about its origin and institution, it presents as its cause either an idol or a demon or a dead man. So the devil, the artificer, because he knew that idolatry by itself, naked, was shuddered at, mixed it with public shows so that it could be loved through pleasure.

5Why should I go on at length describing the monstrous kinds of sacrifices that take place in the games? Sometimes a human being even becomes the sacrificial victim through the brigandage of a priest, when blood still warm from the throat is caught in a foaming dish and, while it still steams, is thrown as if into the face of a thirsty idol and cruelly offered as a drink. And amid the pleasures of the spectators, someone's death is dispensed, so that through a bloody spectacle people learn to be savage—as if a person's private rage were not enough unless he also learns it in public. For the punishment of a human being, a raging wild beast is fed as a luxury, so that under the spectators' eyes it may rage more cruelly. The trainer schools the beast, which perhaps would have been less mad if a crueler master had not taught it to be savage.

So, to say nothing of all that idolatry proves, how vain these things are in themselves. Contests, quarrels over colors, rivalries over chariots, partisanship over honors—rejoicing that one horse was faster, grieving that another was slower, counting the years of the animal, knowing the consuls under which it raced, learning the ages, designating the lineage, recalling the grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers themselves. How utterly idle is this business—no, how shamefully disgraceful! Ask this man, I say, who from memory counts the whole offspring of the horse family and recites this lineage at great speed without stumbling, ask him about the parents of Christ, and he does not know—or he is more unfortunate if he does know. And if I ask him again by what route he arrived at that public show, he will confess: through the brothel, past the naked bodies of prostitutes, through slippery lust, through public disgrace, through common wantonness, through the shared insult of everyone. I will not charge him with what he perhaps did, but he certainly saw what should not have been done, and he led his eyes to the spectacle of idolatry through lust. He dared to lead the holy thing with him into the brothel—if he could have, this unfaithful man, hurrying to the public show after being dismissed from the Lord's house and still carrying with him, as is customary, the Eucharist, carried around the holy body of Christ among the obscene bodies of prostitutes, deserving more condemnation from the journey than from the pleasure of the show.

6But now let me turn to the immodest jests of the stage. I am ashamed to repeat what is said there, ashamed even to accuse what is done: the tricks of arguments, the deceits of adulterers, the shamelessness of women, the buffoonish jokes, the filthy parasites, and even the fathers of families in their togas—now stupid, now obscene, in everything dull-witted, and shameless in their very names. And although no person, no class, no profession is spared by this wicked talk, everyone still gathers for the show. The common disgrace pleases them, of course—either to recognize their own idleness or to learn it. They rush together into that brothel of public modesty, into a school of obscenity, so that nothing is done in private less than what is learned in public. And in the very presence of the laws, whatever the laws forbid is taught. What is a faithful Christian doing in the midst of this—a person who is not permitted even to think about vices? Why does he take pleasure in images of lust, so that with his modesty laid aside in them he becomes bolder for crimes? He learns to do while he grows accustomed to watch. Yet those women whom their misfortune has prostituted into the slavery of public lust are hidden by their place, and they console their disgrace in concealment: even those who have sold their modesty blush to be seen. But this public monstrosity is carried on before all who watch, and the obscenity of prostitutes is surpassed. The question is how adultery might be admitted through the eyes. To this disgrace a disgrace worthy of it is added: a man broken in all his limbs and dissolved beyond womanly softness into effeminacy, whose art is to express words with his hands. And for the sake of one person—I know not whether man or woman—the whole city is stirred up so that the fabled lusts of antiquity are danced out. Thus whatever is not permitted is loved so much that what even age had hidden, memory brings back before the eyes.

7Lust is not satisfied with using its present evils; it must also make the public show its own, in which even an earlier age went astray. I say it is not permitted for faithful Christians to attend—not permitted at all, even for those whom Greece, trained in empty arts, sends everywhere to soothe the ears. One imitates the hoarse blasts of the war trumpet; another shapes mournful sounds by breathing into the pipe; another contends with choirs and with the human voice in song, and with the breath he has drawn from deep within his chest modulates the holes of the pipes—now releasing it, now holding it back and pressing it in, now sending it out through certain holes and pouring it into the air, then breaking the sound into notes, laboring to speak with his fingers, ungrateful to the Maker who gave him a tongue. Why should I speak of the useless follies of comedy, of those great frenzies of the tragic voice, of strings joined with shouting? Even if these things were not dedicated to idols, they still should not be attended or watched by faithful Christians, because even if they held no crime, they hold in themselves the greatest vanity, and one hardly fitting for the faithful.

8The other madness of the rest is plain to see: it is a business for idle men. A body grows fat on stuffing to its own injury, so that it may strike harder or be beaten harder, and the first victory is to have been able to hunger beyond the measure of a human belly—all for the title of a crown in a shameful market of gluttons. An unhappy face is hired out for blows, so that a still more unhappy belly may be stuffed. How foul, moreover, are the wrestlings themselves: a man lies under a man, tangled in dishonorable embraces and bindings. In such a contest, let whoever wins be seen—modesty has been defeated. Look, one man leaps naked; another hurls a bronze hoop into the air with all his strength. This is the glory of madness. Take away the spectator, and you have returned it to vanity. Faithful Christians must flee these things, as we have said often already—public shows so vain, so pernicious, so sacrilegious. Both our eyes and our ears must be guarded. We quickly grow accustomed to what we hear, and swiftly to what we see. For when the human mind is led to vices themselves, what will it do to itself if it has examples? The body's nature is slippery and falls of its own accord—what will it do if it is pushed? The soul must be called away from these things.

9A Christian has better public shows, if he wants them. He has true and profitable pleasures, if he recollects himself. And to pass over those things he cannot yet contemplate, he has this beauty of the world to see and admire. Let him watch the sunrise, and again the sunset, as day and night return in turn. Let him watch the moon's orb marking the seasons' course by its waxing and waning, the glittering choirs of the stars shining constantly from their swift motion, the parts of the whole year divided in turn, the days themselves and nights arranged by the spaces of hours, the mass of the earth poised with its mountains, the rivers pouring forth with their springs, the seas stretched out with their waves and shores, and the air spread between, constant in its perfect harmony and bonds of concord, quickening all things by its fineness—now pouring down rain from gathered clouds, now bringing back clear weather with restored openness. And in all these things, their own inhabitants: the bird in the air, the fish in the water, the human being on the earth. These, I say, and other works of God, are the public shows for faithful Christians. What theater built by human hands can compare with these works? However great the masses of stone with which it is built, the crests of the mountains are higher. However much its gilded ceilings gleam, they will be surpassed by the brightness of the stars. No one will ever admire human works who recognizes himself as a son of God. He casts himself down from the height of his nobility who can admire anything after God.

10Let the faithful Christian devote himself to the Scriptures, I say. There he will find public shows worthy of his faith. He will see God establishing His world, and along with the other creatures He makes human beings—that admirable workmanship, and something better still. He will watch the world in its sins: righteous shipwrecks, rewards for the godly and punishments for the ungodly, seas dried up for a people to cross, and then seas brought forth for them again from a rock (Exodus 14:21-22; Exodus 17:6). He will watch harvests come down from heaven, not pressed out of threshing floors by the plow (Exodus 16:4). He will look upon rivers that offer dry crossings while the ranks of their waters are held back (Joshua 3:17). He will see faith wrestling with fire in certain men (Daniel 3:25), wild beasts overcome by reverence and turned gentle (Daniel 6:22). He will gaze upon souls called back from death itself, and he will consider the admirable lives of the perfected, their bodies brought back from the tombs. And in all these things he will see a greater public show still: that devil who had triumphed over the whole world, now lying under the feet of Christ. How fitting is this public show, brothers—how pleasant, how necessary! To look always upon one's hope, and to open one's eyes to one's salvation. This is a public show that is seen even when one's eyes are lost. This is a public show that no praetor or consul puts on, but He who alone is before all things and above all things—indeed, from whom all things come—the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be praise and honor forever and ever. I wish you well, brothers.