De Spectaculis

What is the state of faith, what the rationale of truth, what the prescript of discipline that takes away, among other errors of the world, the pleasures of the spectacles also—servants of God, learn, you who are even now drawing near to God; recognize it, you who have already testified and confessed that you have drawn near—lest anyone sin either through ignorance or through dissembling. For so great is the force of pleasures that it prolongs ignorance for its own opportunity and corrupts conscience into dissembling. To both, perhaps, the opinions of the heathen may yet flatter someone, who in this cause have been wont to argue against us thus: that such great solaces of the eyes and ears from without raise no clamour against religion in mind and conscience; and that the true God is not offended by a man's recreation, which, with fear and honour toward God preserved, it is no crime to enjoy in its own time and in its own place. But this is the very thing we are now preparing to demonstrate: how these things do not befit true religion and true obedience toward the true God. There are those who think that Christians, a race ready for death, are trained to this obstinacy by the renunciation of pleasures, so that they may the more easily despise life, its restraints being as it were cut away, and not long for that which they have already made superfluous to themselves—so that this should be thought defined rather by counsel and human foresight, not by divine prescript. Forsooth, it was irksome that they should persevere and die for the Lord's sake even amid such great pleasures. Yet, even if it were so, so apt a counsel would owe so great obedience to the obstinacy of discipline.

But now there is no one who does not also put forward this: that all things were instituted by God and assigned to man, as we proclaim, and surely good, as being all of a good Author; and that among these are to be reckoned all those things from which the spectacles are furnished—the horse, for example, and the lion, and bodily strength and the sweetness of the voice; and therefore that what is established to be of his own creation cannot seem either foreign or hostile to God, nor is to be reckoned to the worshippers of God as forbidden, since it is not hostile to him, because it is not foreign. Plainly, the very buildings of the places too—since the stones, the cement, the marbles, the columns are God's things, who gave them for the equipment of the earth; but the very acts also are transacted under God's sky. How wise an arguer human ignorance seems to itself, especially when it fears to lose anything of the joys and fruits of the world! Indeed you will find more men whom the peril of pleasure rather than of life calls away from this sect. For even the fool does not dread death as a debt, but even the wise man does not despise pleasure as a thing desired, since there is no other charm of life, both to the fool and to the wise, except pleasure. No one denies, because no one is ignorant—since nature itself spontaneously suggests it—that God is the Founder of the universe, and that this universe is as good as it is made over to man. But because they do not know God thoroughly, save by natural right, and not also by familiar; from afar, not from close at hand; they must needs be ignorant in what manner he either commands or forbids the administration of the things he instituted; and likewise what rival power there is from the opposite side for adulterating the uses of the divine creation, since you will know neither the will nor the adversary of him whom you know too little. Therefore not only this is to be regarded—by whom all things were instituted—but by whom they were perverted. For thus it will appear to what use they were instituted, if it appears to what use they were not. There is much difference between corruption and integrity, because there is much between the Institutor and the Interpolator. For the rest, all the kinds of evils, which even the heathen, as things undoubted, both forbid and guard against, consist of the works of God. You see murder accomplished by sword, by poison, by magical bindings: the sword is God's thing as much as herbs are, as much as angels are. Did its Author, however, provide these things for the slaying of man? Nay, by one and principal precept he takes away every kind of murder: "You shall not kill." Likewise, gold, bronze, silver, ivory, wood, and whatever material is sought for fabricating idols—who set it in the world but God the Author of the world? Was it, however, that these things should be adored against himself? Nay, the highest offence with him is idolatry. What is not God's, which offends God? But when it offends, it has ceased to be God's, and when it has ceased, it offends. Man himself, the author of all crimes, is not only a work of God but also his image; and yet both in body and in spirit he has revolted from his Maker. For we did not receive our eyes for concupiscence, and our tongue for evil-speaking, and our ears for the receptacle of evil-speaking, and our gullet for the crime of gluttony, and our belly for the fellowship of gluttony, and our genitals for the excesses of unchastity, and our hands for violence, and our steps for a wandering life; nor was the spirit implanted in the body for this, that it should become a workshop of snares, of frauds, of iniquities. I think not. For if God, the exactor of innocence, hates every malignity, even malice merely devised, undoubtedly whatever he created, he is established to have created not for the issue of those works which he condemns, although the same works are administered through the things which he created—since this is the whole rationale of condemnation: the perverse administration of the creation by the created. We therefore, who, the Lord being known, have inspected also his rival; who, the Institutor being ascertained, have together detected the Interpolator—ought neither to marvel nor to doubt. Since that power of the interpolating and rivalling angel cast down from integrity, from the beginning, man himself, the work and image of God, the possessor of the whole universe, he likewise changed the whole substance of him, instituted together with him for integrity, together with him into perversity against the Institutor; so that, in that very thing which he had grieved was granted to man, not to himself, he might both make man guilty before God and establish his own dominion.

Furnished with this awareness, let us turn rather, against the opinion of the heathen, to the cavils of our own people. For the faith of some, either too simple or too scrupulous, demands authority from the Scriptures for this renunciation of the spectacles, and sets itself in uncertainty, because such an abstinence is not announced to the servants of God significantly and by name. Plainly we nowhere find—in the manner in which it is openly set down, "You shall not kill, you shall not worship an idol, you shall not commit adultery or fraud"—so expressly defined: "You shall not go into the circus, you shall not view the theatre, the contest, the gladiatorial show." But we do find that to this species also belongs that first utterance of David: "Blessed is the man," he says, "who has not gone into the council of the impious, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the chair of the pestilent." For although he seems to have praised that just man, because he took no part with the council and the assembly of the Jews in deliberating about slaying the Lord, yet the divine Scripture always extends itself broadly, wherever, according to the sense of the present matter, discipline too is fortified; so that here also that voice is not foreign from the interdiction of the spectacles. For if he then called those few Jews the council of the impious, how much more so great a gathering of the heathen people? Are the heathen less impious, less sinners, less enemies of Christ, than the Jews were then? And consider that the rest agrees too. For at the spectacles one both sits in a chair and stands in a way; for "ways" and "cardines" they call the gangways of the tiers all round and the separations of the people down the slope; the "chair" too is the name of the seat itself situated in the curve for the assembly. So, on the contrary, "Unhappy is he who has gone into any council whatever of the impious, and has stood in any way of sinners, and has sat in any chair of the pestilent." Let us understand that which is said generally, when it can be interpreted also specially. For some things pronounced specially savour generally too. When God admonishes the Israelites to discipline, or rebukes them, surely he regards all men; when he threatens destruction to Egypt and Ethiopia, surely he prejudges against every sinful nation. So every sinful nation is Egypt and Ethiopia, from the species to the genus; just as also every spectacle is a council of the impious, from the genus to the species.

Lest anyone think we are quibbling, let me turn to the principal authority of our very seal. When, having entered the water, we profess the Christian faith in the words of its law, we testify with our own mouth that we have renounced the devil and his pomp and his angels. What will be the chief and principal thing in which the devil and his pomp and his angels are reckoned, but idolatry? From which comes every unclean and wicked spirit—so to speak, since I will not dwell longer on this. Therefore, if it shall be established that the whole apparatus of the spectacles consists of idolatry, it will undoubtedly be prejudged that the testimony of our renunciation in the laver pertains to the spectacles also, which are made over to the devil and his pomp and his angels, namely, through idolatry. We will recall the origins of each—in what cradles they grew up in the world; then the titles of certain ones, by what names they are called; then the apparatus, with what superstitions they are furnished; then the places, to what presiding deities they are dedicated; then the arts, to what authors they are reckoned. If anything of these shall not have pertained to an idol, it will pertain neither to idolatry nor to our renunciation.

As to the origins indeed—being more secret and unknown among most of our people—they were not to be investigated more deeply or more abundantly than from the documents of heathen literature. There are extant many authors who have published commentaries on this subject. By these the origin of the games is thus handed down: Timaeus relates that the Lydians, immigrants from Asia, settled in Etruria under the leadership of Tyrrhenus, who had yielded to his brother in a contest for the kingdom. In Etruria, therefore, among the other rites of their superstitions, they instituted spectacles also under the name of religion. Thence the Romans, having sent for craftsmen, borrow them, and the time and the appellation, so that the players should be called "ludii" from the Lydians. But although Varro interprets "ludii" from "ludus," that is, from sport—just as they called the Luperci also "ludii," because they run about in sport—yet he reckons that sport of the youths to belong both to festal days and to temples and to religions. No more now of the cause of the word, since the cause of the thing is idolatry. For when the games were promiscuously called Liberalia, they plainly sounded the honour of Father Liber. For to Liber they were first made by the rustics, on account of the benefit which they ascribe to him, namely the showing of the grace of wine. Thereafter the games called Consualia, which in the beginning honoured Neptune. For they call the same one Consus too. Then Romulus named the Ecurria, from the horses, to Mars; although they vindicate the Consualia too for Romulus, because he dedicated them to Consus, the god, as they will have it, of counsel—that counsel, namely, by which he then devised the rape of the Sabine virgins for marriages for his soldiers. An honest counsel, plainly, and even now among the Romans themselves just and lawful—not to say with God. For this too makes for the stain of its origin: lest you think that good which received its beginning from evil, from shamelessness, from violence, from hatred, from a fratricidal founder, from a son of Mars. And now an altar to Consus is sunk in the circus, at the first turning-posts, under the earth, with an inscription of this kind: "Consus mighty in counsel, Mars in war, the Lares . . ." The public priests sacrifice at it on the Nones of July, and on the twelfth day before the Kalends of September the Quirinal flamen and the virgins. Then the same Romulus instituted games to Jupiter Feretrius on the Tarpeian rock, which Piso records were called Tarpeian and Capitoline. After him Numa Pompilius made games to Mars and to Robigo (for they fashioned a goddess of mildew too); then Tullus Hostilius, then Ancus Marcius and the rest. Who instituted games, to whom, and in what order, and to what idols, is set down in Suetonius Tranquillus, or in those from whom Tranquillus received it. But these things will suffice for the charge of idolatry against their origin.

To the testimony of antiquity is added the posterity that followed, presenting the form of the origin from the titles of this time also, by which it is marked to what idol and to what superstition the games of each kind were noted. For the Megalensian and the Apollinarian, likewise the Cerealian and the Neptunalian and the Latiarian and the Floralian, are celebrated in common; the rest of the games have the causes of their superstition from the birthdays and solemnities of kings, and from public prosperities, and from municipal festivals. Among which the legatary exhibitions too make funeral offerings to the memories of private persons, this too according to the antiquity of the institution. For from the beginning the games were reckoned twofold, sacred and funereal, that is, to the gods of the nations and to the dead. But as to idolatry, it makes no difference to us under what name and title, so long as it reaches to those same spirits whom we renounce. Let them make to the dead, let them make to their own gods—they make to their dead in like manner as to gods; the condition of either part is one, the idolatry is one, our renunciation against idolatry is one.

The origin of both kinds of games, then, is common; common too the titles, as from common causes. Accordingly the apparatus too must of necessity be common, by reason of the general charge of idolatry, their foundress. But the display of the circus games is somewhat more pompous—to which this name properly belongs: the procession going before, proving of itself whose it is, from the row of images, from the train of likenesses, from the cars, from the sacred chariots, from the high carriages, from the seats, from the crowns, from the spoils. How many sacred rites besides, how many sacrifices, go before, intervene, follow; how many colleges, how many priesthoods, how many functions are set in motion—the men of that city know, in which the assembly of the demons has settled. If these things are administered with less care through the provinces, in proportion to their lesser resources, yet all circus games everywhere are to be reckoned to that place whence they are also sought; let them be inquired into from the source whence they are taken. For both a slender rivulet from its own fountain and a modest shoot from its own foliage retains the quality of its origin: let the ambition or the frugality of it look to which it may be. A procession of the circus, of whatever kind, offends God: even if it carries round few images, in one there is idolatry; even if it draws one chariot, it is yet the wagon of Jupiter; any idolatry whatever, meanly furnished or moderately rich, is splendid in the census of its own crime.

That I may also treat of the places according to my purpose: the circus is principally consecrated to the Sun. His temple is in the middle space, and his effigy gleams forth from the summit of the temple, because they did not think that he should be consecrated under a roof whom they have in the open. Those who hold that the spectacle was first exhibited by Circe to the Sun, her father, as they will have it, argue from her also the appellation of the circus. Plainly that sorceress conducted business in this name for those whose priestess she was, namely, for the demons and angels. How many idolatries, then, do you recognize in the fashion of that place! The several ornaments of the circus are several temples. The eggs they ascribe to the honour of the Castors, who do not blush to believe them brought forth from an egg, by Jupiter the swan. The dolphins vomit for Neptune; the columns sustain the Sessiae, from the sowings, the Messiae, from the harvests, the Tutulinae, from the protection of the fruits; before them three altars appear to three gods, the Great, the Mighty, the Strong. The same they think to be the Samothracians. The enormity of the obelisk, as Hermateles affirms, is prostituted to the Sun. Its inscription, whence too its census: it is a superstition out of Egypt. The council of demons was chilly without their Great Mother; she therefore presides there over the channel. Consus, as we have said, lurks in hiding under the earth at the Murcian turning-posts. These too an idol has made: for they will have Murcia to be the goddess of love, to whom in that part they vowed a temple. Observe, O Christian, how many unclean names have possessed the circus. Foreign to you is the religion which so many spirits of the devil have occupied. As to the places, there is room for treating, to forestall the question of certain persons. "For what," you say, "if at another time I shall approach the circus, shall I be imperilled with defilement?" There is no prescription about places. For not only these meeting-places of the spectacles, but even the temples themselves, a servant of God may approach without peril of discipline, if there be a pressing cause—a simple one only, that is, which does not pertain to the proper business or office of that place. For the streets too, and the forum, and the baths, and the inns, and our very houses, are not altogether without idols: the whole world Satan and his angels have filled. Yet it is not because we are in the world that we fall away from God, but if we touch anything of the world's crimes. Accordingly, if I enter the Capitol, if the Serapeum, as a sacrificer or an adorer, I shall fall from God, just as a spectator in the circus or the theatre. The places do not contaminate us of themselves, but the things that are done in the places, by which we have argued that the places themselves too are contaminated: by the contaminated we are contaminated. For this reason, then, we recall to whom such places are dedicated, that we may show those things to be theirs which are done in those places to whom the very places are dedicated.

Now of the craft by which the circus games are exhibited. The business of horsemanship was simple of old; it was conducted from the back, and surely common use was not guilty. But when it was forced into the games, it passed from a gift of God to the offices of the demons. Therefore this kind is reckoned to Castor and Pollux, to whom Stesichorus teaches that horses were distributed by Mercury. But Neptune too is a horseman, whom the Greeks call Hippios. As for the chariots, they consecrated the six-horse to Jupiter, the four-horse to the Sun, the two-horse to the Moon. But also: "Erichthonius first dared to yoke a chariot and four horses, and to stand, swift and victorious, upon the wheels." Erichthonius, the son of Minerva and Vulcan—and indeed of lust spilled to the earth—is a demonic portent, nay, the devil himself, not a serpent. But if Trochilus the Argive is the author of the chariot, he dedicated that work of his first to Juno. If at Rome Romulus first displayed the four-horse chariot, I think that he too was enrolled among the idols, if he is the same as Quirinus. By such authors the four-horse chariots were brought forth, and they deservedly clothed the charioteers too in the colours of idolatry. For in the beginning there were only two, the white and the red. The white was vowed to winter, on account of the white snows; the red to summer, on account of the redness of the sun. But afterwards, pleasure as well as superstition having advanced, some consecrated the red to Mars, others the white to the Zephyrs; the green to Mother Earth, or to spring; the blue to the Sky and the Sea, or to autumn. But since every species of idolatry has been condemned by God, surely that too is condemned which is profaned by the elements of the world.

Let us pass to the scenic matters, of which we have already shown both the common origin and the equal titles, according to the very appellation of the games from the beginning, and the administration joined with the business of horsemanship. The apparatus too is shared in that part, by which one goes to the stage from the temples and altars, and that wretched business of incense and blood, amid pipes and trumpets, with two most defiled masters of funerals and sacred rites, the undertaker and the soothsayer. So, as we passed from the origins of the games to the circus, thence we will now direct ourselves to the scenic games, from the vice of the place. The theatre is properly the shrine of Venus. For in this manner this kind of work escaped destruction in the world. For often the censors used to destroy theatres just as they were rising, taking thought for morals, whose enormous peril from wantonness they of course foresaw—so that already here the very sentence of the heathen yields as a testimony, making with us, and human prerogative serves us for the heightening of discipline. And so Pompey the Great—less only than his own theatre—when he had built that citadel of all turpitudes, fearing some day the censorian animadversion upon his memory, set a temple of Venus on top, and, calling the people by an edict to the dedication, named it not a theatre but a temple of Venus, "under which," he said, "we have placed tiers of seats for the spectacles." So he overlaid a condemned and condemnable work with the title of a temple, and eluded discipline by superstition. But to Venus and Liber it is fitting. These two demons of drunkenness and lust are leagued and conspired between themselves. And so the theatre of Venus is the house of Liber too. For other scenic games too they properly called Liberalia—besides those devoted to Liber, which are the Dionysia among the Greeks—instituted also by Liber. And there is plainly, in the scenic arts too, the patronage of Liber and Venus. The things that are private and proper to the stage—out of the gesture and bending of the body—immolate softness to Venus and Liber, the one dissolved by sex, the other by luxury. But the things that are transacted by voice and measures and instruments and writings have for their proprietors the Apollos and Muses and Minervas and Mercurys. You will hate, O Christian, the things whose authors you cannot but hate. And now we wish to suggest something concerning the arts, and concerning those whose authors we execrate in their names. We know that the names of the dead are nothing, just as their very images are nothing; but we are not ignorant who they are that, under these names and the images set up, work and rejoice and feign divinity—namely, wicked spirits, demons. We see, therefore, that their arts too are dedicated to the honours of those who inhabit the names of their authors, and are not free from idolatry, whose founders are even for that reason held gods. Nay, as concerns the arts, we ought to have prescribed more deeply: that the demons, foreseeing for themselves from the beginning, among the other defilements of idolatry, those also of the spectacles, by which they might call man away from the Lord and bind him to their own honour, inspired also the talents of arts of this kind. For neither would that have been procured by others which was to come to them, nor would they then have produced it through other men than through those in whose names and images and histories they established for themselves the business of conducting the deceit of consecration. That the order may be carried through, let us enter also upon the review of the contests.

The origin of these is from the kinship of the games. Hence these too, being instituted as sacred or funereal, are made either to the gods of the nations or to the dead. Likewise the titles: the Olympia to Jupiter, which at Rome are the Capitoline; likewise the Nemea to Hercules, the Isthmia to Neptune; the rest are various contests of the dead. What wonder, then, if idolatry befouls even the apparatus of the contests—with profane crowns, with priestly presidents, with collegiate ministers, with the very blood of oxen at last? That I may supply something from the place, and from a common topic: on behalf of the college of the Musical and Minervalian and Apollinarian arts, and the Martial too, by combat, by trumpet in the stadium, they rival the circus, which is surely itself the temple of that idol whose solemnities it celebrates. But the gymnastic arts too the disciplines of the Castors and the Herculeses and the Mercurys put forth.

There remains the review of that most notable and most accepted spectacle. It is called "munus" from "officium" (duty), since duty too is a name for "munus" (gift). The ancients thought that they performed a duty to the dead by this spectacle, after they had tempered it with a more humane atrocity. For of old, since it was believed that the souls of the dead were propitiated by human blood, they used to immolate at funerals captives, or slaves of bad condition, whom they had bought. Afterwards it pleased them to overshadow their impiety with pleasure. And so those whom they had prepared, trained in such arms as they then could and in such a manner—only that they might learn to be slain—they then, on the appointed day of the funeral rites, paid out at the tombs. Thus they consoled death by homicides. This is the origin of the gladiatorial show. But by little and little they advanced to as great a refinement as cruelty, because satisfaction was not done to the pleasure of the festivals unless human bodies too were torn apart by wild beasts. What therefore was offered to the dead was surely reckoned to a funeral offering; which species is accordingly idolatry, since idolatry too is a species of funeral offering: both this and that minister to the dead. But in the idols of the dead demons reside. That I may consider the titles too: although this kind of exhibition has passed from the honours of the dead to the honours of the living—I mean quaestorships and magistracies and flaminates and priesthoods—yet, since the dignity of the name is held under the charge of idolatry, it is necessary that whatever is administered in the name of dignity should share also the stains of that from which it has its causes. The same we will interpret of the apparatus, to be reckoned in the display of those very honours—since the purple, the fasces, the fillets, the crowns, the assemblies in short, and the edicts and the previous-day's banquets, are not without the pomp of the devil, without the imitation of the demons. Why should I plead at length about the dreadful place, which not even perjuries can sustain? For the amphitheatre is consecrated by more and harsher names than the Capitol: it is the temple of all the demons. As many unclean spirits settle there as it holds men. That I may conclude about the arts too: we know Mars and Diana to be the presidents of both kinds of show.

We have, I think, sufficiently fulfilled the order—how many ways and by what means the spectacles commit idolatry, from origins, from titles, from apparatus, from places, from crafts—that we may be certain that they in no part befit us, who twice renounce idols. "Not that an idol is anything," as the apostle says, "but because what they do, they do to demons," settled, namely, in the consecrations of idols, whether of the dead or, as they think, of gods. For this reason, therefore, since both species of idols are of one condition—the dead and the gods being one—we abstain from both idolatries. We spit upon temples no less than upon monuments; we acknowledge neither altar, we adore neither effigy, we do not sacrifice, we do not make funeral offerings. But neither do we eat of what is sacrificed or offered to the dead, because we cannot eat the supper of God and the supper of demons. If, then, we free our gullet and belly from defilements, how much more do we keep our nobler parts, both ears and eyes, from idol-offered and corpse-offered pleasures, which are not transacted through the intestines but are digested in the very spirit and soul, whose purity belongs to God more than that of the intestines.

Now, the name of idolatry being interposed—which alone, as a subject, ought to suffice for the renunciation of the spectacles—let us treat the matter by another rationale from abundance, chiefly for the sake of those who flatter themselves because this abstinence is not prescribed by name; as if too little were pronounced even about the spectacles, when the concupiscences of the world are condemned. For as there is a concupiscence of money, or of dignity, or of gluttony, or of lust, or of glory, so too of pleasure; and a species of pleasure is the spectacles also. I think that the concupiscences named generally contain in themselves the pleasures too; equally, the pleasures, understood generally, are dispersed specially into the spectacles as well.

For the rest, we have related above concerning the condition of places, that they do not defile us through themselves, but through those things which are there transacted; through which, when they have together drunk in the defilement, they then spit it out upon others too. Let the principal title, then, idolatry, look to it, as we have said; the remaining qualities of the things themselves let us all bear as God's. God enjoined that the Holy Spirit, being, by reason of the goodness of his nature, tender and delicate, should be treated with tranquillity and gentleness and quiet and peace—not disquieted by fury, by gall, by anger, by grief. How will this be able to agree with the spectacles? For every spectacle is not without a concussion of the spirit. For where there is pleasure, there is also eagerness, by which, namely, pleasure has its savour; where eagerness, there is also rivalry, by which eagerness has its savour. Further, where there is rivalry, there too are fury and gall and anger and grief, and the rest which spring from these, which agree not with discipline. For even if anyone enjoys the spectacles modestly and rightly, according to the condition of his dignity or age or even nature, yet he is not of an immovable mind and without a silent passion of the spirit. No one comes to pleasure without emotion, no one suffers emotion without its mischances. The mischances themselves are the incitements of emotion. But if emotion ceases, there is no pleasure, and that man is now guilty of vanity, betaking himself to where he attains nothing. But, I think, even vanity is foreign to us. And what of the fact that he judges himself, set among those whom, however unwilling, he confesses himself to be a detester of? For us it is not enough if we ourselves do nothing of the kind, unless we be also not associated with those who do such things. "If you saw a thief," he says, "you ran with him." Would that we did not even tarry together with them in the world! But yet in worldly things we are separated, because the world is God's, but worldly things are the devil's.

Since, therefore, fury is interdicted to us, we are taken away from every spectacle, even from the circus, where fury properly presides. Behold the people coming to that spectacle already with fury, already tumultuous, already blind, already roused by their wagers. The praetor is slow for them; their eyes are always rolling in his urn with the lots. Then they hang anxious for the signal; there is one voice of one madness. Know their madness from its vanity: "He has thrown!" they say, and announce to one another what has at the same instant been seen by all. I hold the testimony of their blindness: they do not see what was thrown; they think it is a napkin, but it is the figure of the devil cast down from on high. And so from this one goes into furies and passions and discords, and whatever is not lawful for the priests of peace. Thence curses, revilings, without the justice of hatred; favourings too, without the merit of love. What of their own shall they attain who act there, who are not their own? Unless perhaps this alone, by which they are not their own: they are saddened by another's misfortune, they are gladdened by another's good fortune. Whatever they desire, whatever they detest, is foreign to them; so among them both love is idle and hatred unjust. Or is it perhaps lawful to love without cause more than to hate without cause? God certainly forbids to hate even with cause, who bids enemies be loved; God allows not to curse even with cause, who enjoins that those who curse be blessed. But what is bitterer 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 is anywhere fitting for the saints, it will be lawful in the circus too; but if nowhere, then neither in the circus.

Likewise we are bidden to put away all unchastity. By this rule, then, we are separated also from the theatre, which is the private consistory of unchastity, where nothing is approved but that which is not approved elsewhere. Thus its highest charm is for the most part dressed up out of filth, which the Atellan player acts with gestures, which the mime represents even through womanly matters, exterminating the sense of sex and shame, so that men more easily blush at home than on the stage; which, in fine, the pantomime suffers in his body from boyhood, that he may be able to be an artist. The very harlots too, the victims of public lust, are produced on the stage—more wretched in the presence of women, from whom alone they had lain hid—and are led across the faces of every age, every dignity; the place, the fee, the public notice are proclaimed, even to those who have no need; I say nothing of the rest, which it were fitting should lie hidden in darkness and in their caverns, lest they contaminate the day. Let the senate blush, let all the orders blush; those very destroyers of their own shame, dreading their own gestures brought to the light and the people, blush once a year. But if all unchastity is to be execrated by us, why is it lawful to hear what it is not lawful to speak, since we know that even scurrility and every idle word is judged by God? Why likewise is it lawful to see what it is a disgrace to do? Why do not those things which, brought forth from the mouth, defile a man, seem, admitted through the ears and eyes, to defile a man—since the ears and eyes are servants of the spirit, nor can he be rendered clean whose attendants are defiled? You have, therefore, the interdiction of the theatre too, from the interdiction of unchastity. If we also spurn the doctrine of secular literature as reckoned foolishness with God, we are sufficiently instructed concerning those species of spectacles too which, by secular literature, discharge the sportive or the agonistic stage. But if tragedies and comedies are the bloody and wanton, impious and prodigal, authoresses of crimes and lusts, the commemoration of no thing, whether atrocious or vile, is the better for it: what is rejected in the deed is not to be received even in the word.

But if you should contend that the stadium too is named in the Scriptures, granted, you will hold your point. But you will not deny that the things which are done in the stadium are unworthy of your sight: blows and kicks and buffets, and every petulance of the hand, and whatever disfigurement of the human face, that is, of the divine image. You will nowhere approve the vain races, and the throwings, and the still vainer leaps; nowhere will the violences please you, whether injurious or vain; nor the care of a factitious body, that it may overstep the modelling of God; and on account of the idleness of Greece you will hate the men fattened up. And the wrestling-school is the devil's business: the devil crushed the first men in a wrestling match. The very boxing-glove is a serpentine force, tenacious to seize, tortuous to entangle, fluid to slip away. You have no use of crowns; why do you snatch at pleasures out of crowns?

Shall we now wait to seek the repudiation of the amphitheatre also from the Scriptures? If we can contend that savagery, that impiety, that ferocity, is 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 good when the guilty are punished." Who, save the guilty himself, will deny this? And yet it does not befit the innocent to rejoice at another's punishment, when it rather befits the innocent to grieve that a man, his equal, has been made so guilty that he is so cruelly expended. But who is surety to me that the guilty are always condemned, either to the beasts or to whatever punishment, so that it is not inflicted upon innocence too—either by the vengeance of the judge, or by the weakness of the defence, or by the rigour of the torture? How much better, then, it is not to know when the wicked are punished, lest I know also when the good perish—if indeed they savour of good. Certainly innocent gladiators are sold into the school, that they may become victims of the public pleasure. Even those who are condemned to the school—what kind of thing is it, that from a lighter offence they should make progress to homicide, as a means of amendment? But these things I have answered to the heathen. For the rest, far be it that a Christian should learn at greater length about the aversion from this spectacle. Although no one can express all these things more fully than he who still views them. I had rather not fulfil the account than remember it.

How vain, then—nay, how desperate—is the argumentation of those who, doubtless out of an evasion of losing their pleasure, hold out that no mention of this abstinence is determined specially or locally in the Scriptures, such as directly forbids a servant of God to be inserted into meetings of this kind! Lately I heard a new defence from a certain devotee of the games. "The sun," said he, "nay, God himself, looks down from heaven, and is not contaminated." True, the sun pours its rays even into a sewer, and is not defiled. Would, however, that God beheld no crimes of men, that we might all escape judgment! But he beholds both robberies, and beholds falsehoods and adulteries and frauds and idolatries, and the very spectacles. And therefore we shall not behold them, lest we be beheld by him who beholds all things. You compare, O man, the guilty and the judge—the guilty, who, because he is seen, is guilty; the judge, who, because he sees, is judge. Do we then, outside the limits of the circus, study fury? and outside the cardines of the theatre, intend unchastity? and insolence outside the stadium? and unmercifulness outside the amphitheatre?—because God has eyes even outside the vaults and tiers and galleries. We err: nowhere and never is that excused which God condemns; nowhere and never is that lawful which is never and nowhere lawful. This is the integrity of truth, and, which is owed to it, the fulness of discipline, and the equality of fear, and the faith of obedience—not to change the sentence nor to vary the judgment. That cannot be another thing which truly indeed is good or evil. All things, in regard of the truth of God, are fixed.

The heathen, with whom there is no fulness of truth, because God, the teacher of truth, is not their teacher either, interpret evil and good at their own choice and pleasure: in one place good which in another is evil, and in one place evil which in another is good. So, then, it comes about that the same man who in public scarcely lifts his tunic at the necessity of the bladder, that same man in the circus strips himself in no other way than by displaying his whole shame to the face of all; and that he who guards the ears of his virgin daughter from every foul word, himself leads her into the theatre to those voices and gesticulations; and that he who in the streets either restrains or detests one waging a quarrel with his hand, that same man in the stadium gives his suffrage to heavier blows; and that he who shudders at the corpse of a man dead by the common law, that same man in the amphitheatre looks down with most patient eyes upon bodies gnawed and torn apart and squalid in their own blood; nay, that he who comes to the spectacle for the sake of approving the punishment of a homicide, that same man drives the gladiator, unwilling, to homicide with whips and rods; and that he who demands a lion for every more notable homicide, that same man asks the rod of discharge for a savage gladiator, and confers on him the cap of freedom as a reward; while the slain one he claims back even for the spectacle of his face, more gladly recognizing from close at hand him whom he wished to be killed from afar—so much the harder if he did not wish it.

What wonder? These are the inconsistent doings of men mixing and interchanging the state of good and evil, through the inconstancy of their sense and the variety of their judgment. For the very authors and administrators of the spectacles—those charioteers, players, athletes, gladiators, those most beloved, to whom men submit their souls, and women even their bodies, for whose sake they commit themselves to those things which they reprehend—out of the same art by which they magnify them, they cast down and diminish, nay, manifestly condemn them with ignominy and loss of civil standing, debarring them from the senate-house, the rostra, the senate, the knighthood, and all other honours at once, and certain dignities besides. What great perversity! They love whom they punish, they depreciate whom they approve; magnifying the art, they brand the artist. What kind of judgment is it, that a man should be blackened for those very things by which he earns favour? Nay, how great a confession is it of an evil thing, that its authors, even when they are most accepted, are not without a brand!

Since, therefore, human memory itself—even with the favour of pleasure clamouring against it—judges that they are to be condemned, the goods of dignities being taken away, to a certain rock of infamy, how much more does divine justice animadvert upon artists of this kind? Will that charioteer please God, the disquieter of so many souls, the minister of so many furies, of so many fortunes, crowned as a priest or coloured like a pander, whom the devil has decked out to be snatched along in a chariot against Elijah? Will that one too please who changes his countenance with a razor, faithless toward his own face, which, not content to make next door to that of Saturn and Isis and Liber, he moreover exposes to the insults of slaps, as though he made sport of the Lord's precept? For of course the devil teaches to offer the cheek patiently to be struck. So too he has raised up the tragedians on buskins, because "no one can add one cubit to his stature": he wishes to make Christ a liar. And now I ask whether the very work of masks pleases God, who forbids every likeness to be made—how much more of his own image? The Author of truth loves not the false; with him everything is adultery that is feigned. Accordingly he will not approve the voice that belies sex, ages, that asseverates loves, angers, groans, tears: for he condemns all hypocrisy. For the rest, since in the law he prescribes that a man who shall be clothed in women's garments is accursed, what will he judge of the pantomime, who is bent even to womanly figures? Surely that artist of the boxing too will not go unpunished? For such scars of the boxing-gloves, and the calluses of the fists, and the fungous growths of the ears, he received from God when he was being moulded; for that purpose God lent him eyes, that they should fail him from being beaten! I say nothing of him who sets a man before himself in the lion's place, lest he be too little a homicide who afterwards cuts that same man's throat.

In how many ways have we yet proved that none of those things which are reckoned to the spectacles is pleasing to God! But how is that suited to a servant of God which is not pleasing to God? If we have shown that all things were instituted for the devil's sake, and furnished out of the devil's resources—for there is nothing not the devil's whatever is not God's or displeases God—this will be the pomp of the devil, against whom in the seal of faith we abjure. But what we abjure we ought to share neither in deed nor in word nor in look nor in sight. And so we abjure and rescind our seal, by rescinding its attestation. Does it then remain that we demand a response from the heathen themselves? Let them now announce to us whether it is lawful for Christians to use the spectacle. Nay, hence above all do they understand that a man is made a Christian, from the repudiation of the spectacles. So he plainly denies who takes away that by which he is recognized. But what hope remains in a man of this kind? No one passes over into the camp of the enemy save by throwing away his own arms, save by deserting the standards and the oaths of his own commander, save by covenanting to perish along with him.

Will he, set there where there is nothing of God, at that time think of God? He will have peace, I suppose, in his mind, contending for a charioteer; he will learn chastity, astounded at the mimes. Nay, in every spectacle no scandal will occur to him more than that very over-careful adornment of the women and the men. The very agreement, the very conspiracy or dissension in their favourings, fan the sparks of lusts among themselves by their commerce. In short, no one, in entering a spectacle, thinks first of anything but to be seen and to see. But while the tragedian declaims, will he review the exclamations of some prophet? and amid the measures of an effeminate flute-player will he ponder a psalm with himself? and when the athletes are at work, will he be going to say that the blow must not be returned? And he will be able to be admonished of mercy too, fixed upon the bites of bears and the sponges of the net-fighters! May God avert from his own so great a desire of pernicious pleasure! For what kind of thing is it to go from the church of God into the church of the devil—from heaven, as they say, into the mire? Those hands which you have raised to God, afterwards to weary in applauding an actor? From the mouth with which you have uttered Amen over the Holy Thing, to give testimony to a gladiator? to say "for ever and ever" to anyone at all save God and Christ?

Why then should men of this kind not become penetrable even to demons? For an example occurred, the Lord being 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 burdened because he had dared to assail one of the faithful, he constantly said, "And most justly indeed I did it: I found her on my own ground." It is established too that to another a linen cloth was shown in her sleep on the night of that day on which she had heard a tragedian, with reproach, the tragedian being named—and not beyond the fifth day was that woman in the world. How many other proofs too, surely, have come to pass concerning those who, by communicating with the devil at the spectacles, have fallen from the Lord! "For no one can serve two masters." "What has light to do with darkness? What life and death?"

We ought to hate these gatherings and assemblies of the heathen—if for no other reason, because there the name of God is blasphemed, there lions are daily demanded against us, thence persecutions are decreed, thence temptations are sent out. What will you do, caught in that surging tide of impious suffrages? Not as though you could suffer anything there at the hands of men—no one recognizes you a Christian—but consider what becomes of you in heaven. Do you doubt that in that very moment in which the devil rages in the assembly, all the angels look down from heaven and mark each man—who has spoken blasphemy, who has heard it, who has lent his tongue, who his ears, to the devil against God? Will you not, then, flee from the seats of the enemies of Christ, that chair of pestilences, and the very air which broods over it, befouled with wicked voices? Sweet, granted, they may be, and pleasing, and simple—even some of them honourable. No one tempers poison with gall and hellebore, but with seasoned dishes and well-savoured, and for the most part sweet, he infuses that evil. So too the devil steeps the deadly thing which he compounds in the most pleasing and most accepted of God's things. All things there, whether strong or honourable or sonorous or tuneful or subtle, hold to be as drops of honey from a poisoned little cake; and make not your gullet's account of the pleasure so great as of the peril through its sweetness.

Let the guests of such delicacies be fattened with them: both the places and the times and the inviter are their own. Our suppers, our nuptials, are not yet. We cannot recline at table with them, because neither can they with us: the matter is arranged by turns. Now they rejoice, we are afflicted. "The world," he says, "shall rejoice, but you shall be sorrowful." Let us therefore mourn while the heathen rejoice, that, when they have begun to mourn, we may rejoice—lest, rejoicing equally now, we should then also mourn equally. You are dainty, O Christian, if you long for pleasure even in the world; nay, exceedingly foolish, if you reckon this to be pleasure. Certain philosophers gave this name to quiet and tranquillity; in it they rejoice, in it they take their recreation, in it they even glory. You sigh to me for the turning-posts and the stage and the dust and the arena. I would have you say: cannot we live without pleasure, who ought to die with pleasure? For what other vow is ours than that which was the apostle's too—to depart out of the world and to be received with the Lord? There is the pleasure, where also is the vow.

But now, if you think to pass this span of time in delights, why are you so ungrateful as not to have enough of, nor to recognize, so many and such great pleasures contributed to you by God? For what is more delightful than the reconciliation of God the Father and Lord, than the revelation of truth, than the recognition of errors, than the pardon of so many past crimes? What greater pleasure than the loathing of pleasure itself, than the contempt of the whole world, than true liberty, than an unspotted conscience, than a sufficient life, than no fear of death? That you tread under foot the gods of the nations, that you cast out demons, that you work cures, that you seek revelations, that you live to God? These are the pleasures, these the spectacles of the Christians—holy, perpetual, free. In these reckon to yourself the circus games: look upon the courses of the world, count the gliding times, await the turning-posts of the consummation, defend the fellowships of the churches, start up at the signal of God, rouse yourself at the trumpet of the angel, glory in the palms of the martyrs. If the scenic doctrines delight, we have literature enough, verses enough, sentences enough, songs too enough, voices enough—not fables, but truths; not artifices, but plain simplicities. Do you want boxings and wrestlings too? They are at hand, not small and many. Behold unchastity cast down by chastity, perfidy slain by faith, savagery crushed by mercy, petulance overshadowed by modesty; and such are the contests among us, in which we ourselves are crowned. But 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 undoubted, now exalted, now triumphant! What that exultation of the angels, what the glory of the rising saints! What the kingdom thereafter of the just! What the city, the new Jerusalem! But there remain yet other spectacles—that last and perpetual day of judgment, that day unlooked-for by the nations, that day derided, when so great an antiquity of the world, and so many of its generations, shall be devoured in one fire. How vast the spectacle then! At what shall I wonder? At what shall I laugh? Where shall I rejoice, where exult—beholding so many kings, who were announced to have been received into heaven, groaning together in the lowest darkness with Jupiter himself and their own witnesses? Likewise the governors, the persecutors of the Lord's name, melting in flames fiercer than those with which they raged insultingly against the Christians? Whom besides? Those wise philosophers, blushing before their own disciples burning together with them, to whom they used to persuade that nothing pertains to God, to whom they affirmed that souls were either nothing 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 are the tragedians more to be heard, more vocal, that is, in their own proper calamity; then the players are to be recognized, far more nimble through the fire; then the charioteer is to be beheld, all red on his flaming wheel; then the athletes are to be contemplated, hurled not in the gymnasia but in the fire—save that not even then would I wish them seen, as one who would rather turn 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 destroyer of the sabbath, the Samaritan, and one having a demon; this is he whom you bought from Judas; this is he, beaten with reed and buffets, dishonoured with spittle, given gall and vinegar to drink; this is he whom his disciples secretly stole away, that he might be said to have risen, or whom the gardener dragged off, lest his lettuces should be injured by the throng of those coming and going." That you may behold such things, that you may exult in such, what praetor or consul or quaestor or priest will, of his own liberality, bestow it upon you? And yet these things we already in a manner have, presented through faith by the imagining spirit. But what are those things which neither eye has seen nor ear has heard, nor have they ascended into the heart of man? I believe, more pleasing than the circus, and both enclosures, and every stadium.