The Devil’s Pomp Renounced

Since every kind of passionate excitement is forbidden to us, we are shut out from every kind of show, and above all from the circus, where excitement is at home and rules the place. Look at the people arriving: already worked up, already in an uproar, already blind with passion, already in a fever over their bets. The praetor is too slow for them. Their eyes keep rolling as though they were tumbling in the urn along with the lots. Then they hang on the signal in an agony of suspense, and one shout goes up out of a common madness. You can tell how far “out of themselves” they are by the stupid things they say. “He has thrown it!” they cry, and each one announces to his neighbor what every one of them has just seen. I have the clearest proof of their blindness: they do not see what has really been thrown. They take it for a starting cloth, but it is the likeness of the devil flung headlong from on high. [a]

So the result is that they fall into rages and passions and quarrels — everything that people consecrated to peace ought never to touch. Then come curses and abuse where there is no cause for hatred, and shouts of applause where there is nothing to deserve them. And what do the people who share in all this get out of it for themselves? They are not their own masters. Perhaps that is exactly what they get: the thing that makes them not their own. They are made sad by another man’s grief and glad by another man’s joy. Whatever they long for on the one side, or loathe on the other, has nothing whatever to do with them. So their love is a pointless thing and their hatred is an unjust one. Or is a love without cause somehow more allowable than a hatred without cause? God certainly forbids us to hate even when we have a reason for hating, since he commands us to love our enemies. God forbids us to curse even when there are grounds for it, since he commands us to bless those who curse us. But what is more pitiless than the circus, where people do not spare even their own rulers and fellow citizens? If any of its madnesses are fitting for God’s holy people anywhere else, then they will be fitting in the circus too. But if they are right nowhere, then they are not right there either.

In the same way, are we not told to put all indecency away from us? On that ground again we are shut out from the theatre, which is indecency’s own home, where nothing has any standing except what is disgraceful everywhere else. The surest road to the highest favor of the theatre’s god is the vilest thing there is: what the Atellan player acts out with his gestures; what the clown does dressed as a woman, killing off every sense of shame, so that a man blushes more readily at home than at the play; and finally what the pantomime endures in his own body from boyhood on, so that he can qualify for the stage. The prostitutes too, the victims of the public’s lust, are brought out on the stage. Their misery is made worse by being there in front of their own sex, the only people they usually hide from. They are paraded in public before every age and every rank. Where they live, what they charge, what they are praised for, is announced aloud — and announced in the hearing of people who ought never to hear such things. I say nothing about the rest of it, which had better stay buried in its own darkness and its own black holes rather than stain the daylight. Let the Senate blush; let every rank in the city blush! Even these wretched women, who destroy their own modesty by their own gestures, dread the daylight and the crowd’s stare, and know something of shame at least once a year. [c]

But if we ought to loathe everything indecent, on what ground is it right to listen to what we are not allowed to say? All filthy talk — every careless word, in fact — is condemned by God. On the same reasoning, how is it right to look at what is disgraceful to do? How is it that the things which defile a man when they come out of his mouth are held not to defile him when they go in at his eyes and ears? Eyes and ears are the immediate attendants on the spirit, and a spirit whose attendants are unclean can never be clean itself. So when indecency was forbidden you, the theatre was forbidden along with it. And if we count the teaching of pagan literature as foolishness in God’s sight, our duty is plain enough about the shows that come out of that source — the tragedy and the comedy. If tragedies and comedies are the bloody and the lecherous, the godless and the unbridled, inventors of crimes and lusts, then it is not even good to have the atrocious or the filthy called back to mind. What you refuse to do, you are not to welcome in words.

But if you plead that the racecourse is mentioned in Scripture, I grant it at once. Still, you will not refuse to admit that what actually goes on there is not for you to watch: the punches, the kicks, the slaps, all the recklessness of the fist, and every kind of disfiguring of the human face — which is nothing less than disfiguring the image of God. You will never approve those pointless contests of running and throwing, or the still more pointless jumping. You will never take pleasure in displays of strength that are damaging or useless. You will certainly not look with approval on a body worked up by art to outdo the Creator’s own work. And you will feel the exact opposite of satisfaction with the athletes that Greece fattens up in the idleness of peacetime. The wrestler’s art is a thing of the devil’s. The devil wrestled with the first human beings and crushed them to death. The very posture of it has the power of the serpent in it: a grip that holds, coils that torture, a body that slips away. You have no need of crowns. Why do you struggle to get your pleasures out of crowns? [g]

Now let us see how the Scriptures condemn the amphitheatre. If we can maintain that it is right to take pleasure in cruelty and godlessness and savagery, then let us go there. If we are what people say we are, let us feast ourselves there on human blood. It is a good thing, no doubt, for the guilty to be punished. Who but a criminal would deny it? And yet an innocent man can take no pleasure in another man’s suffering. He would rather grieve that a man like himself has sinned badly enough to need so terrible a punishment. But who guarantees me that it is always the guilty who are sentenced to the beasts, or to some other death, and that the innocent never suffer from a judge’s spite, or a weak defence, or the pressure of the rack? How much better, then, for me to know nothing at all about the punishing of the wicked, in case I have to learn as well about good men coming to a bad end — if there is any goodness to speak of in a case like that. [i]

In any case, gladiators charged with no crime at all are put up for sale for the games, to become the victims of the public’s pleasure. And even where men really have been sentenced to the amphitheatre, what a monstrous thing it is that while serving their punishment for some lesser offence they graduate into the crime of killing men. But I mean all this for pagans. I will not insult Christians by adding another word about how they ought to loathe this kind of show — though nobody could set the whole subject out more fully than I could, unless it were someone still in the habit of going. I would rather leave the account incomplete than set my memory working.

How empty — how hopeless, rather — is the reasoning of people who, simply because they will not give up a pleasure, insist that we cannot point to the exact words or the exact passage where this abstinence is laid down and the servants of God are directly forbidden to have anything to do with such gatherings. I heard a novel defence lately from a certain lover of the shows. “The sun — God himself, in fact — looks down from heaven on the show, and takes no defilement from it.” Yes, and the sun pours his rays into the sewer without being defiled either. As for God, I only wish every crime were hidden from his eye, so that we might all escape judgment. But he looks on robberies too; he looks on lies, adulteries, frauds, idolatries — and on these same shows. And that is precisely why we will not look on them: so that the All-seeing does not see us doing it. [k]

You are putting the criminal and the judge on the same level, man. The criminal is a criminal because he is seen; the Judge is a Judge because he sees. Are we set on playing the madman, then, provided we stay outside the boundary line of the circus? Outside the theatre doors are we free to be lewd, outside the racecourse to be arrogant, outside the amphitheatre to be cruel, because God has eyes outside the colonnades and the tiers and the awnings too? Never and nowhere is a thing free of blame that God condemns always. Never and nowhere is it right to do what you may not do at every time and in every place. It is truth’s freedom from shifting opinions and changing verdicts that makes it complete, and gives it its claim to full authority, to reverence that does not vary, and to obedience that keeps faith. What is genuinely good or genuinely bad cannot be anything else. And in all things God’s truth is unchangeable.

The pagans have no full disclosure of the truth, for they are not taught by God. They hold a thing bad or good as their own will and their own passions suit, making what is good in one place bad in another, and what is bad in one place good in another. So it strangely happens that a man who can barely lift his tunic in public, even when nature is pressing him hard, takes it right off in the circus, as though he meant to expose himself to everybody. The father who carefully guards his unmarried daughter’s ears from every polluting word takes her to the theatre himself and hands her over to all its foul language and foul gestures. The man who in the street pulls apart a brawling boxer, or shouts abuse at him, gives every encouragement in the arena to fighting far more serious. And the man who shudders at the body of someone dead by the ordinary law of nature looks down in the amphitheatre with perfectly patient eyes on bodies mangled and torn and smeared with their own blood. Yes, and the very man who comes to the show because he thinks murderers ought to pay for their crime drives the unwilling gladiator on to the killing with rods and whips. The man who demands the lion for every deep-dyed killer calls for the wooden sword for a savage swordsman and rewards him with the cap of freedom. And he must have the poor victim brought back to him so that he can get a look at his face — inspecting up close, with relish, the man he wanted torn to pieces at a safe distance. And if that was not what he wanted, he is crueller still.

And what is surprising about it? Inconsistencies like these are exactly what you would expect from men who confuse and reverse the nature of good and evil by their unsteady feelings and their fickle judgment. Look at the men who put on the shows and manage them. In the very respect in which they praise the charioteers and the actors and the wrestlers and those darling gladiators to the skies — the men to whom other men prostitute their souls and women their bodies — in that very respect they slight them and trample on them, though it is for their sake that they are guilty of the deeds they condemn. In fact they sentence them to disgrace and the loss of their rights as citizens, shutting them out of the Senate house and the speaker’s platform, out of senatorial and equestrian rank, and out of all other honors and certain distinctions besides. What twisted thinking! They take pleasure in the men they punish. They heap slights on the men they are applauding at the same moment. They exalt the art and brand the artist. What an outrage, to blacken a man for the very things that make him worth something in their eyes! And what a confession that these things are evil, when even the men who are best at them and highest in favor cannot escape a mark of shame.

So then: a man’s own reflections, even with all the sweetness of pleasure working on him, lead him to think that people like these deserve to be sentenced to a wretched life of disgrace, stripped of everything that goes with holding an honorable position. How much more, then, does God’s justice punish those who give themselves to these arts! Will God take any pleasure in the charioteer, who throws so many souls into turmoil, stirs up so many furious passions, and creates so many different moods — crowned like a priest one moment and wearing the colors of a pimp the next, dressed up by the devil so that he can be whirled off in his chariot as though the point were to carry off Elijah? Will God be pleased with the man who puts a razor to himself and completely alters his features; who, having no respect for the face he was given, is not content with making it as much like Saturn and Isis and Bacchus as he can, but hands it over quietly to insulting blows, as if in mockery of our Lord? The devil, you see, makes it part of his own teaching that the cheek is to be meekly offered to the man who strikes it. In the same way he has made tragic actors taller with their high boots, because “no one can add eighteen inches to his own height.” He wants to make Christ out to be a liar. [l]

And as for the wearing of masks, I ask you: is that according to the mind of God, who forbids the making of any likeness at all, and above all the likeness of man, who is his own image? The Author of truth hates everything false. He counts everything unreal as adultery. Condemning hypocrisy of every kind as he does, he will never approve a man putting on another voice, or another sex, or another age; he will never approve pretended loves and rages and groans and tears. Then again, since his law declares that the man is cursed who dresses himself in women’s clothes, what must his verdict be on the pantomime, who is brought up to play the woman? And will the boxer go unpunished? I suppose he was born with these gauntlet scars, and the thick skin on his knuckles, and these lumps on his ears! God gave him eyes, no doubt, for no other purpose than to have them knocked out in a fight. I say nothing of the man who, to save himself, thrusts another into the lion’s way, so that he may not fall short of being a murderer when he kills that very same man on the arena floor.

In how many more ways am I to show that nothing which belongs to the shows has God’s approval, and that nothing without his approval is fitting for God’s servants? If I have managed to make it plain that they were set up entirely for the devil’s sake and got up entirely out of the devil’s own materials — since everything that is not God’s, or is not pleasing in his sight, belongs to his wicked rival — then this simply means that in them you have that “pomp of the devil” which we renounce in the seal of our faith. We ought to have no connection with the things we have renounced, whether in act or in word, whether by looking at them or by looking forward to them. And do we not cancel and revoke that pledge made at baptism when we stop bearing witness to it? Or does it remain for us to appeal to the pagans themselves? Then let them tell us whether it is right for Christians to attend the show. Why, the refusal of these amusements is the chief sign to them that a man has taken up the Christian faith. So anyone who lays aside the faith’s own badge is plainly guilty of denying it. What hope can you possibly keep for a man who does that? When you go over to the enemy’s camp, you throw down your weapons, you desert the standards and the oath you swore to your commander, and you throw in your lot with your new friends for life or death. [r]

Sitting where there is nothing of God, will a man be thinking about his Maker? Will there be peace in his soul when there is fierce partisanship in it over a charioteer? Wound up into a frenzy of excitement, will he be learning modesty? In the whole business he will meet no greater temptation than the fine clothes of the men and the women. The very mingling of feelings, the very agreeing and disagreeing with one another as they hand out their favors, in such close company as that, fan the sparks of passion into flame. And besides, there is hardly any other reason for going to the show than to see and be seen. While a tragic actor is declaiming his lines, will a man be turning over what the prophets said? Among the tunes of some player got up as a woman, will he call a psalm to mind? While the athletes are locked in their struggle, will he be ready to announce that no one is to strike back? And with his eye fixed on the bites of bears and the nets of the net-fighters, can he still be moved to pity? May God keep his people from any such eager appetite for a cruel amusement! For what a monstrous thing it is to go from God’s church to the devil’s — from the sky to the sty, as the saying goes; to lift your hands up to God and then wear them out clapping an actor; out of the mouth with which you said Amen over the holy thing, to shout your support for a gladiator; to cry “For ever!” to anyone but God and Christ! [t]

Why should not people who walk into the temptations of the show become open to evil spirits as well? We have the case of the woman — the Lord himself is witness to it — who went to the theatre and came home with a demon in her. So when the spirit was being driven out and the unclean creature was rebuked for daring to attack a believer, he answered firmly: “And I did it entirely within my rights. I found her on my own ground.” Another case is well known too. A woman had been listening to a tragedian, and on that very night she saw a linen sheet in her sleep, with the actor’s name spoken at the same time and sharply condemned; and five days later that woman was dead. How many more unmistakable proofs we have had, in the case of people who kept company with the devil at the shows and fell away from the Lord! For no one can serve two masters. What partnership has light with darkness, or life with death? [w]