The Arena Is a Temple

To carry on with the argument from places: the circus is dedicated above all to the Sun. His temple stands in the middle of it, and his image blazes out from the temple roof, since they did not think it right to pay sacred honors under a roof to a thing they have out in the open sky. Those who say the first show was put on by Circe, in honor of the Sun her father — as they will have it — also claim that the circus takes its name from her. Plainly, then, the sorceress did this in the name of the powers whose priestess she was: I mean the demons and the evil spirits. So look at the pile of idolatries you have in the decoration of the place. Every ornament in the circus is a temple in itself. The eggs are held sacred to the Castors, by men who are not ashamed to profess that the twins were hatched out of the egg of a swan, and that the swan was Jupiter himself. The Dolphins spout in honor of Neptune. Statues of Sessia, named as the goddess of sowing, of Messia, named as the goddess of reaping, and of Tutulina, named as the deity who guards the crop, weigh down the columns. In front of them stand three altars to three gods — Great, Mighty, Victorious — reckoned to belong to Samothrace. The huge obelisk, as Hermeteles says, is set up in the open to the Sun; its inscription, like its origin, belongs to Egyptian superstition. The gathering of demons would be a dreary thing without their Great Mother, and so she presides there over the water channel. Consus, as we have already mentioned, lies buried underground at the Murcian turning posts. Both of these came from an idol, for they will have it that Murcia is the goddess of love, and they have consecrated a temple to her on that spot. Look, Christian, at how many filthy names have taken possession of the circus! You have no business in a sacred place occupied by such crowds of devilish spirits. And since we are speaking of places, this is the right moment to deal in advance with a point some will raise. What, you say — am I in danger of being defiled if I go into the circus when the games are not being held? There is no law that forbids us the mere places. Not only the buildings where shows are put on, but even the temples, can be entered by a servant of God without any danger to his religion, provided he has some honest reason for it that has nothing to do with what they are properly for or with any official duty. Why, the streets and the market, the baths, the taverns, and our own houses are not entirely free of idols either. Satan and his angels have filled the whole world. It is not by merely being in the world that we fall away from God, but by touching and staining ourselves with the world’s sins. I break with my Maker by going to the Capitol or the temple of Serapis to sacrifice or to worship — and I break with him just as much by going as a spectator to the circus or the theatre. The places do not contaminate us in themselves; what is done in them does, and it is from that, we maintain, that the places themselves become defiled. What is polluted pollutes us. That is why we have set out for you whom places of this kind are dedicated to: so that we can prove that what is done in them belongs to the idol-patrons the very places are sacred to. [a]

Now for the kinds of performance that belong to the circus in particular. In the old days riding was a plain matter of sitting on a horse, and there was certainly nothing sinful in its ordinary use; but once it was dragged into the games it passed out of the service of God and into the employment of demons. So this kind of circus performance is treated as sacred to Castor and Pollux, to whom, Stesichorus tells us, Mercury gave horses. Neptune too is a god of horsemen, and the Greeks call him Hippius. As for the teams, they have dedicated the four-horse chariot to the sun and the two-horse chariot to the moon. But, as the poet has it: [i]

Erichthonius, the son of Vulcan and Minerva, the fruit of a disgraceful passion spilled on the earth, is a monstrous demon — the devil himself, in fact, and no mere snake. But if Trochilus the Argive made the first chariot, he dedicated that work of his to Juno. And if Romulus was the first to put on a four-horse race at Rome, he too, I think, has a place among the idols — at least if he and Quirinus are one and the same. And since the chariots had inventors like these, the drivers were naturally dressed in the colors of idolatry as well. At first there were only two, white and red: white sacred to winter with its glittering snow, red to summer with its ruddy sun. Later, as luxury grew along with superstition, some dedicated red to Mars and others white to the west winds, while green was given to Mother Earth, or to spring, and blue to sky and sea, or to autumn. But since God condemns idolatry of every kind, that form of it certainly shares the condemnation, offered as it is to the elements of nature.

Let us move on now to the shows of the stage. We have already shown that they have the same origin as the circus and carry the same idolatrous names — from the first they too were called Ludi, and they serve idols just as much. They are alike in their parade as well, having the same procession from temples and altars to the place of performance, with that dismal extravagance of incense and blood, and music of pipes and trumpets, all managed by the soothsayer and the undertaker, those two foul masters of funerals and sacrifices. So, having gone from the origin of the Ludi to the games of the circus, we will now turn from there to the games of the theatre, beginning with the building. The theatre was properly a temple of Venus to begin with, and, to put it briefly, that is how stage performances slipped past censure and got a foothold in the world. Time and again the censors, in the interest of public morals, put down the theatres just as they were going up, foreseeing what a danger there was of their leading to general debauchery. So even here, in this agreement of their own people with us, the heathen have a witness against themselves, and human knowledge, judging in advance, confirms our position. Accordingly Pompey the Great — smaller than nothing except his own theatre — when he had put up that stronghold of every filthy thing, was afraid that one day the censors would condemn his memory, so he set a temple of Venus on top of it. Summoning the people by public notice to its dedication, he called it not a theatre but a temple. “Under it,” he said, “we have set tiers of seats for watching the shows.” In this way he threw a veil over a building that had been condemned over and over, and is always to be condemned, by pretending it was a sacred place; and by means of superstition he blinded the eyes of a decent discipline. But Venus and Bacchus are close allies. These two evil spirits are sworn partners, the patrons of drunkenness and lust. So the theatre of Venus is Bacchus’ house as well. The other stage entertainments were properly named Liberalia — they were consecrated to Bacchus, like the Dionysia of the Greeks, and it was he who set them up. There is no doubt that the performances of the theatre are under the joint patronage of these two gods. The indecency of gesture and dress that is the special and peculiar mark of the stage is consecrated to them: the one deity wanton by her sex, the other by his robes. And the stage’s use of voice and song and lute and pipe belongs to Apollos and Muses and Minervas and Mercuries. You will hate, Christian, the things whose inventors you must utterly detest. So let us say a word here about the arts of the theatre as well — the things whose inventors we curse in cursing their names. We know that the names of the dead are nothing, and so are their images. But we know well enough who it is that goes to work under those names when the images are set up, and delights in the honor paid them, and pretends to be divine: none other than accursed spirits, demons. We see, then, that the arts too are consecrated to the service of the beings who live in the names of their founders, and that things whose inventors won a place among the gods for their discoveries cannot be held free of the taint of idolatry. In fact, on the subject of the arts we ought to have gone further back and cut off all further argument by taking this position: that the demons, deciding beforehand in their own interest — among the other evils of idolatry — that the public shows should be part of the world’s defilement, meaning to draw man away from his Lord and bind him to their own service, carried the plan out by handing him the artistic gifts the shows require. Nobody but they would have made provision and preparation for the ends they had in view; and they would not have given the arts to the world through anyone except the men in whose names and images and stories they set up, for their own purposes, the whole contrivance of consecration. [l]

To carry our plan through, let us now look at the contests. Their origin is close kin to that of the games, the Ludi. So they are held either as sacred or as funeral events, according to whether they were founded in honor of the nations’ idol-gods or of the dead. That is how they come to be called Olympian in honor of Jupiter — known at Rome as the Capitoline — Nemean in honor of Hercules, Isthmian in honor of Neptune, and the rest mortuarii, as belonging to the dead. Is it any wonder, then, if idolatry defiles the procession of the contest with its unholy crowns, its priestly presidents, its attendants from the various colleges, and, last of all, with the blood of its sacrifices? And to finish the point about the place: in the one arena that serves the college of arts sacred to the Muses and Apollo and Minerva, and the college of arts dedicated to Mars, men rival the circus with contest and the sound of the trumpet — and that arena is a real temple, the temple of the god whose festivals it celebrates. The gymnastic arts, too, began with their Castors and Herculeses and Mercuries. [o]

It remains for us to examine the most famous show of all, and the one held in the highest favor. It is called a munus, a dutiful service, because it is an office; it goes by the name officium as well as munus. The ancients thought that in this ceremony they were paying their duties to the dead. Later on they modified its character somewhat, with a more refined kind of cruelty. In earlier times, believing that the souls of the departed were appeased by human blood, they used to buy captives or slaves of bad character and sacrifice them at their funeral rites. Afterwards they thought it better to throw the covering of pleasure over the wickedness. So the men they had provided for the fight, and trained in arms as well as they could — trained only so that they might learn how to die — they killed on the day of the funeral at the burial places. They comforted a death with murders. That is the origin of the Munus. But their refinement gradually caught up with their cruelty, for these human wild beasts could find no pleasure exquisite enough except in the sight of men torn apart by animals. Offerings made to appease the dead were then counted among funeral sacrifices, and these are idolatry — since idolatry is in fact a kind of homage paid to the departed, and the one is as much a service done to dead men as the other. What is more, demons have taken up residence in the images of the dead. To come to the matter of names as well: this kind of exhibition has passed over from honors of the dead to honors of the living — I mean to quaestorships and magistracies, and to priesthoods of various kinds. But since idolatry still clings to the name of the dignity, whatever is done in that name shares its filth. The same holds for the procession of the Munus, if we look at it in the pomp attached to these honors themselves; for the purple robes, the rods of office, the headbands, the crowns, the proclamations too, and the edicts, and the sacred banquet the day before are not without the pomp of the devil and the summoning of demons. And what need is there to dwell on the place of horrors, which is too much even for the tongue of a perjurer? The amphitheatre is consecrated to names more numerous and more terrible than the Capitol itself, temple of all demons though it is. There are as many unclean spirits there as it holds men. To finish with a single remark about the arts that have a place in it: we know that its two kinds of entertainment have Mars and Diana for their patrons. [q]

I think we have carried out our plan faithfully, showing in how many different ways the sin of idolatry clings to the shows — in their origins, their titles, their equipment, the places they are held in, and their arts. And we may take it as beyond all doubt that for us, who have renounced all idols twice over, they are utterly unsuitable. “Not that an idol is anything,” as the apostle says; but the homage paid there is paid to demons, who are the real occupants of these consecrated images, whether the images are of dead men or of what they take to be gods. For this reason, then — because the two have a common source, their dead and their gods being one and the same — we keep clear of both idolatries. We dislike the temples no less than the tombs. We have nothing to do with either altar; we worship neither image; we offer no sacrifices to the gods and no funeral offerings to the departed; and we do not eat what has been offered in either case, because we cannot share God’s feast and the feast of demons. If, then, we keep throat and belly free of such defilements, how much more do we hold back our nobler parts, our ears and eyes, from idolatrous and funeral pleasures — pleasures that do not pass through the body but are digested in the very spirit and soul, whose purity God has far more right to claim from us than that of our bodily organs. [v]

Having sufficiently made out the charge of idolatry, which by itself ought to be reason enough for us to give up the shows, let us now look at the subject another way, over and above what the case needs — for the sake of those in particular who keep themselves comfortable in the thought that the abstinence we are urging is not laid down in so many words. As if the condemnation of the world’s lusts did not carry a sufficient declaration against all these amusements. For just as there is a lust of money, or of rank, or of eating, or of impure enjoyment, or of glory, so there is also a lust of pleasure. And a show is simply a kind of pleasure. So I think that pleasures come under the general heading of lusts, and that in the same way the shows are a particular class under the general idea of pleasures. But we have already said how it stands with the buildings where shows are held: they are not polluting in themselves, but take in their filth from what is done in them, and then squirt it out again onto other people. [x]

Having done enough, then, as we have said, with that main argument — that the taint of idolatry is in all of them — let us now set the other features of the show against the things of God. God has commanded us to deal calmly, gently, quietly and peacefully with the Holy Spirit, since these are the only things that suit the goodness of his nature, his tenderness and his sensitiveness; and not to vex him with rage, ill-nature, anger or grief. Well, how is that to be squared with the shows? For a show always stirs the spirit up. Where there is pleasure there is eagerness, which gives the pleasure its edge; and where there is eagerness there is rivalry, which in turn gives the eagerness its edge. Then, where you have rivalry, you have rage, bitterness, wrath and grief, and all the bad things that flow out of them — the whole thing entirely out of keeping with the religion of Christ. Even suppose a man enjoys the shows in a moderate way, as suits his rank or his age or his temperament: he is still not undisturbed in mind, still not without some unspoken stirrings of the inner man. Nobody takes pleasures like these without their violent excitements; nobody comes under those excitements without the lapses that naturally follow. And those lapses in turn breed passionate desire. If there is no desire there is no pleasure, and a man who goes where nothing is to be gotten is guilty of frivolity — and frivolity, to my mind, is foreign to us as well. What is more, a man pronounces sentence on himself in the very act of taking his seat among people he confesses he has nothing in common with, since he has no wish to be like them. It is not enough that we do no such things ourselves, unless we also break off all connection with those who do. “If you saw a thief,” Scripture says, “you went along with him.” I wish we did not even live in the same world as these wicked men! But though that wish cannot be granted, even now we are separate from them in what belongs to the world — for the world is God’s, but worldliness is the devil’s. [y]