The Origins of the Games

On the Games

You servants of God, who are about to come near to God and consecrate yourselves to him: take care to understand what the faith requires, the reasoning behind the truth, and the rules of Christian discipline — which forbid, among the other sins of the world, the pleasures of the public games. And you who have already borne witness and made that confession, go back over the subject, so that no one sins either through real ignorance or through an ignorance he has chosen. For earthly pleasure has this kind of power: to keep the chance of enjoying it a while longer, it works to prolong a willing ignorance, and it bribes knowledge into playing a dishonest part. [b]

Perhaps some of you are drawn toward both of those things by the arguments the pagans like to press on us here. First, they say, the fine enjoyments our ears and eyes take in from things outside us are in no way opposed to religion in the mind and the conscience. And second, surely no offense is given to God by any human enjoyment which is not sinful in itself, taken at its proper time and place, with all due honor and reverence kept for him. But this is exactly what we are ready to prove: that these things do not go together with true religion and true obedience to the true God.

There are some who imagine that Christians — a sort of people always ready to die, as they see it — are trained into the self-denial they practice for no other reason than to make it easier to think little of life once its cords have been cut. They take it for an art of quenching all desire for what, so far as Christians are concerned, has already been emptied of everything desirable. So it is reckoned a thing of human planning and foresight rather than something plainly laid down by God’s command. It would be a hard business, they suppose, for Christians to go on enjoying pleasures as great as these and still die for God! It is not as they say. And even if it were, Christian stubbornness might well give itself entirely to a plan so suitable, a rule so excellent.

Then again, everyone is ready with this argument: that all things, as we ourselves teach, were created by God and given to man for his use, and that they must be good, since they all come from so good a source — and that among them are the very things the public games are made of, such as the horse, the lion, bodily strength, a musical voice. So what exists by God’s own creative will cannot be thought foreign to him or hostile to him; and if it is not opposed to him, it cannot be counted harmful to those who worship him, since it is certainly not foreign to them. Beyond any doubt, too, the buildings that go with the places of public amusement are made of rock, stone, marble and columns — things of God, who gave them for the adorning of the earth. And the shows themselves are staged under God’s own sky. [e]

What a skillful advocate human wisdom seems to herself, especially when she is afraid of losing any of her delights, any of the sweet enjoyments of life in this world! In fact you will find quite a few people whom the danger to their pleasures, rather than the danger to their lives, holds back from joining us. Even a weak man has no great dread of death, knowing it is a debt he owes; while a wise man does not look down on pleasure, but treats it as a precious gift — in fact the one blessing of life, whether he is a philosopher or a fool.

Now nobody denies what nobody is ignorant of, since nature herself teaches it: that God is the maker of the universe, that the universe is good, and that it is man’s by the free gift of its Maker. But men have no close acquaintance with the Most High. They know him only from nature, not as his “friends” — at a distance, not as people who have been brought near. So they cannot help being ignorant of what he commands and of what he forbids in the running of his own world. They must be ignorant, too, of the hostile power that works against him and twists the things his hand has made to wrong uses. You cannot know either the will or the enemy of a God you do not know.

So we must not consider only who made all things, but who has corrupted them. We will find out what they were made for once we find out what they were not made for. There is an enormous difference between a corrupted state and the purity a thing had at first, precisely because there is an enormous difference between the Creator and the corrupter. Consider: every sort of evil that even the pagans recognize as evil, and forbid, and guard themselves against, comes out of the works of God. Take murder, whether it is done with iron, with poison, or with magic spells. Iron and herbs and demons are all alike creatures of God. Did the Creator, then, provide these things for the destruction of man? No — he puts his ban on every kind of man-killing by that one summary command, “You shall not kill.” And who but God, the maker of the world, put into it the gold, bronze, silver, ivory, wood and every other material that idols are manufactured from? Did he do it so that men might set up a worship in opposition to himself? On the contrary — in his eyes idolatry is the crowning sin.

What is there that offends God which is not God’s own? But in offending him it stops being his, and once it has stopped being his it is, in his eyes, a thing that offends. Man himself, guilty as he is of every kind of wrong, is not only a work of God — he is God’s image; and yet in soul and body alike he has cut himself off from his Maker. We did not get eyes to serve lust, or a tongue to speak evil with, or ears to be a catch-basin for evil talk, or a throat to serve the vice of gluttony, or a belly to be gluttony’s partner, or the genitals for unchaste excess, or hands for acts of violence, or feet for a wandering life. Was the soul put into the body to become a workshop for traps and fraud and injustice? I think not. For if God, the righteous collector of innocence, hates everything like malice — if he utterly hates such plotting of evil — then it is beyond doubt that of all the things that came from his hand he made none to lead to works he condemns, even though those same works can be carried out with things of his making. This, in fact, is the one ground of condemnation: that the creature misuses the creation.

So we, who along with our knowledge of the Lord have gained some knowledge of his enemy as well — who, in discovering the Creator, have at the same moment laid hands on the great corrupter — should neither wonder at what happened nor doubt it. That corrupting, God-opposing angel overthrew at the beginning the goodness of man, God’s work and image, the owner of the world. In the same way he has entirely changed man’s nature — created, like his own, for perfect sinlessness — into his own condition of wicked hostility toward his Maker. He did it so that in the very thing whose gift to man, and not to him, had grieved him, he might make man guilty in God’s eyes and set up his own supremacy.

Armed with this knowledge against pagan views, let us turn instead to the poor reasoning of our own people. The faith of some, either too simple or too anxious, demands direct authority from Scripture for giving up the games, and holds the matter to be doubtful because such abstinence is not laid on God’s servants clearly and in so many words. Well, we never find it put with the same precision as this — “You shall not enter the circus or the theater; you shall not look on a combat or a show” — the way it is plainly laid down, “You shall not kill; you shall not worship an idol; you shall not commit adultery or fraud.” But we do find that David’s very first word bears on exactly this sort of thing: “Blessed is the man who has not gone into the gathering of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the seat of scoffers.” [g]

He seems to have been foretelling of that righteous man that he took no part in the meetings and deliberations of the Jews when they were taking counsel about killing our Lord. Even so, divine Scripture always reaches further than its first sense: once the immediate meaning has been used up, it goes on in every direction strengthening the practice of a religious life. So here too you have a saying that is not far from a plain prohibition of the games. If he called that handful of Jews a gathering of the wicked, how much more will he give that name to so vast a crowd of pagans! Are pagans less ungodly, less sinners, less enemies of Christ, than the Jews were then?

And see how the other details agree as well. At the games men do literally stand in the way: the spaces between the rows of seats that run around the amphitheater, and the aisles that divide the crowd running down through it, are called ways. And the place in the curve where the married women sit is called a seat. So the reverse of the psalm holds: unblessed is the man who has gone into any council of wicked men, and has stood in any way of sinners, and has sat in any seat of scoffers.

We may take a thing as spoken generally even when it also calls for a particular interpretation. Some things spoken with a particular reference carry a general truth inside them. When God warns the Israelites of their duty, or sharply rebukes them, he certainly has all men in view; when he threatens ruin to Egypt and Ethiopia, he certainly condemns in advance every sinning nation, whichever it is. If, reasoning from the species to the genus, every nation that sins against them is an Egypt and an Ethiopia, then, reasoning from the genus to the species, in the matter of the origin of the games, every show is a gathering of the wicked.

In case anyone thinks we are dealing in mere argumentative subtleties, I will turn to that highest authority of ours, our “seal” itself. When we go down into the water, we profess the Christian faith in the words of its rule, and we testify publicly that we have renounced the devil, his pomp and his angels. Now, is it not in connection with idolatry above all that you find the devil with his pomp and his angels? And from idolatry, to put it briefly — for I do not want to spread the point out — comes every unclean and wicked spirit. So if it is made plain that the whole apparatus of the games rests on idolatry, then beyond any doubt it follows that the renunciation we testified to in the water of baptism covers the games, which by their idolatry have been handed over to the devil and his pomp and his angels. [k]

So we will set out their several origins, and the nurseries in which they grew up; then the titles of some of them, and the names they go by; then their equipment, and the superstitions with which it is observed; then their locations, and the patron gods they are dedicated to; then the arts that serve them, and the authors they are traced back to. If any of these turns out to have had no connection with an idol-god, it will count at once as free of the taint of idolatry, and as falling outside what we renounced at baptism.

As for their origins: since these are somewhat obscure and not much known among us, our inquiry has to go back a long way, and our authorities can be nothing but books of pagan literature. A number of writers survive who have published works on the subject, and the origin of the games as they give it is this. Timaeus tells us that immigrants from Asia, under the leadership of Tyrrhenus — who had lost a contest with his brother over their native kingdom — settled in Etruria. There, among other superstitious observances that went under the name of religion, they set up public games in their new home. The Romans, at their own request, got trained performers from them, and the proper seasons, and the name as well: for they say Ludi comes from Lydi, the Lydians. Varro, it is true, derives the name Ludi from ludus, that is, from play, since they called the Luperci Ludii too, because they ran about making sport; but even in his view that sporting of young men belongs to festival days and temples and objects of religious veneration. It matters little where the name came from, when it is certain that the thing itself springs from idolatry. [m]

The Liberalia, counted under the general title of Ludi, plainly proclaimed the glory of Father Bacchus; these festivities were first consecrated to Bacchus by grateful farmers, in return for the gift he gave them, as they say, in making the pleasures of wine known. Then the Consualia were called Ludi, and at first were held in honor of Neptune, since Neptune goes by the name Consus as well. After that Romulus dedicated the Equiria to Mars — though they claim the Consualia for Romulus too, on the grounds that he consecrated them to Consus, the god (as they will have it) of counsel: the counsel, of course, in which he planned the seizing of the Sabine women as wives for his soldiers. An excellent piece of counsel, no doubt; and still reckoned just and righteous, I suppose, by the Romans themselves, though I may not say by God.

This taints the origin as well. You surely cannot hold a thing to be good that has sprung from crime, from shamelessness, from violence, from hatred, from a founder who murdered his brother, from a son of Mars. Even now, at the first turning-post in the circus, there is an underground altar to this same Consus, with an inscription to this effect: “Consus great in counsel, Mars mighty in battle — tutelary gods.” The state priests sacrifice at it on the seventh of July; the priest of Romulus and the Vestal Virgins on the twenty-first of August.

On top of this, Romulus established games in honor of Jupiter Feretrius on the Tarpeian Hill, according to the account Piso has handed down to us; they were called both Tarpeian and Capitoline. After him Numa Pompilius established games to Mars and to Robigo — for they have invented a goddess of wheat rust as well. Then Tullus Hostilius, then Ancus Marcius, and one after another various others did the same. As for the idols in whose honor these games were founded, there is ample information in the pages of Suetonius Tranquillus. But we need say no more to prove the charge that their origin is idolatrous.

To the evidence of antiquity is added the evidence of the later games, set up in their turn and betraying their origin by the titles they carry to this day — titles in which it is stamped, as if on their very face, for what idol and for what religious object games of the one kind or the other were designed. You have festivals bearing the name of the Great Mother, and of Apollo, and of Ceres too, and of Neptune, and of Jupiter Latiaris, and of Flora, all of them held for a common end. The rest take their religious origin from the birthdays and celebrations of kings, from public victories, from the holidays of towns. [t]

There are also games given by will, in which funeral honors are paid to the memory of private persons; and this too follows an institution of ancient times. For from the first the Ludi were reckoned to be of two kinds, sacred and funeral — that is, in honor of the pagan gods and in honor of the dead. But where idolatry is concerned it makes no difference to us under what name or title it is practiced, so long as it has to do with the wicked spirits we have renounced. If it is lawful to pay homage to the dead, it will be just as lawful to pay it to their gods. The origin is the same in both cases; the idolatry is the same; and on our side the solemn renunciation of all idolatry is the same.

The two kinds of public games, then, have one origin, and they have names in common, since they own the same parentage. And since they are equally tainted with the sin of idolatry, the mother that bore them, they must be alike in their pomp as well. But the more ambitious opening display of the circus games — the one to which the name procession properly belongs — is by itself the proof of whose the whole thing is: the many images, the long line of statues, the chariots of every sort, the thrones, the crowns, the robes. Think, too, what high religious rites there are besides, what sacrifices come before, in between and after. How many guilds, how many priesthoods, how many offices are set in motion is well known to the inhabitants of the great city where the demons hold their convention. [v]

If these things are done in humbler style in the provinces, in keeping with their smaller means, all circus games must still be counted as belonging to the thing they are derived from; the fountain they spring from defiles them. The tiny stream carries the essential nature of its origin from its very spring-head, and the little twig from its very budding. Grand or shabby, it makes no difference: any circus procession whatever is offensive to God. There may be few images to grace it — there is idolatry in one. There may be no more than a single sacred car — it is a chariot of Jupiter. Idolatry of any kind, whether poorly got up or modestly rich and splendid, taints the thing at its origin.