Bread Instead of the Stage

Cyprian to Euchratius his brother: greetings. [a]

Out of the love we have for one another, and out of your regard for me, you decided that I ought to be consulted, dearest brother, about what I think of a certain actor. He has settled among you and still keeps up the disgrace of the trade he practices; and as a master and teacher — not for the training of boys but for their ruin — he passes on to others what he himself had the misfortune to learn. You are asking whether a man like that ought to share communion with us. In my judgment it suits neither the majesty of God nor the discipline of the good news that the church’s decency and good name should be fouled by so shameful and disreputable an infection. In the law a man is forbidden to put on a woman’s clothing, and those who offend in this way are judged accursed. How much worse, then, is the offense of not only putting on women’s clothes but also performing base, effeminate and wanton gestures, and doing it by teaching an indecent art.

And no one should excuse himself by saying that he has given up the theater himself while he is still teaching the art to others. A man cannot be counted as having given it up when he puts others in his own place, and supplies many in place of himself alone. Against what God appointed, he instructs and teaches how a man may be broken down into a woman, and his sex altered by art, and how the devil, who defiles the image of God, may be gratified by the sins of a body corrupted and drained of its strength.

But if he pleads poverty and the pressure of small means, his need can be met along with the others who are kept by the church’s support — provided, that is, that he is content with food that is very plain but innocent. And he must not think that he is being bought off, paid an allowance to stop sinning; the gain in that is not ours but his own. Whatever more he wants, he will have to look for it where such things come from — earnings of the kind that carry people away from the banquet of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and lead them down, fattened in this world to their own grief and ruin, to the everlasting torment of hunger and thirst.

So, as far as you can, call him back from this depravity and disgrace to the way of innocence and to the hope of everlasting life, so that he will be content with what the church provides — sparing, certainly, but wholesome. But if the church where you are cannot manage this, and has not enough to support those in need, he may move over to us and receive here whatever he needs for food and clothing; and so stop teaching deadly things to others outside the church, and instead learn wholesome things inside it. I wish you well always, dearest brother, with all my heart.