§ 1. Tertullian divides spectacles into four kinds: the madness of the circus, the unchastity of the theater, the atrocity of the arena, and the vanity of the xystus. The Greeks celebrated the Nemean, Pythian, Isthmian, and Olympic games; they contended in racing, singing, wrestling, boxing, and the speed of horses. Various games were combined with these principal ones. Today some of these remain; of certain others only traces survive.
Tertullian deservedly calls the circus a madness on account of the expense and the frenzy of those favoring different colors, and the tumults arising from it. I shall treat the atrocity of the arena and the vanity of the xystus when the discussion has reached fortitude. Now it is necessary to discuss the unchastity of theaters, which is opposed to temperance. Chastity was attacked in all the contests, not in the theater alone. For Tertullian says in On Spectacles, Chapter XXI: “Thus it happens that the man who scarcely lifts his tunic in public from necessity of the bladder exults in the circus only by casting all shame in the face of everyone.” In the xystus also they exhibited the unchaste wrestling contests of prostitutes and effeminate men; in the arena they cast naked human beings before beasts; and, lest any evil be lacking,
the one cause of everything was the flame of impiety and impurity. Nor was chastity to be sought in cruelty, because every luxurious man is cruel and all cruelty is luxurious. For those to whom the torments and deaths of innocent persons are a delight, and who bend over bodies squalid with their own blood with the most patient eyes—it is not marvelous that they are enslaved to other pleasures.
Gladiatorial spectacles were abolished early by Christian emperors. Circensian, theatrical, and xystic spectacles remained longer. Arcadius and Honorius abolished the foul games of Maiuma: the final law, π., On Maiuma, in the Theodosian Code. Chariot races and the running of horses could otherwise be tolerated by their own nature. But the contests of factions stirred up tumults. Nevertheless the bishops opposed themselves to them all. See Arnobius, Book II, On the Amphitheater; and, before everyone, Tertullian, On Spectacles, and the booklet on the same matter attributed to Saint Cyprian; Lactantius, Book VI, Chapter XX; Augustine; Jerome; and others in various books. Constantine abolished the gladiatorial games—Eusebius, Book IV of his life, Chapter XXVIII, and Sozomen, Book I of his History—but they revived. Attend to the things said in Book II of the Code, On Gladiators. Indeed, when Augustine treats of Alypius, he recalls the combat and the conspicuous wound.
As the authority of the bishops increased, theaters and stages were abolished on Sundays and on the feasts of the Nativity, Epiphany, Easter, and Pentecost. Thus the law Dominico, On Spectacles, in the Theodosian Code. See also Canon 66 of the synod celebrated in Trullo.
§ 2. The wise men of old will indicate to us how great a stain and plague spectacles brought upon morals. “Nothing,” says Seneca, “is so harmful to good morals as to sit idly at some spectacle.” Saint Cyprian sets forth the causes in the first epistle To Donatus: “Turn your gaze from here to the no less lamentable contagions of another spectacle. In the theaters too you will behold what is both a grief and a shame to you. The tragic buskin is a verse recital of ancient crimes: the ancient horror concerning parricides and incests is repeated by an action expressed after the likeness of truth, lest that which was once committed grow obsolete as the ages pass. Every age is admonished by hearing that what has been done can be done. Crimes never die through the old age of time; offense is never buried by the times; wickedness is never interred by oblivion. Those things become examples which had ceased to be crimes.
“Then it delights a man, in mimes, through instruction in shameful deeds, either to recognize what he has done at home or to hear what he can do. Adultery is learned while it is seen; and with the evil of public authority acting as procurer for vices, the matron who had perhaps proceeded chaste to the spectacle returns unchaste from the spectacle. Beyond this, how great a stain upon morals, what kindling of disgraceful deeds, what nourishment of vices, to be polluted by actors’ gestures! To see, contrary to the covenant and law of birth, an elaborate performance of men enduring incestuous obscenity! Men are unmanned; every honor and vigor of their sex is softened by the dishonor of an enervated body. The more anyone has broken a man into a woman, the more he gives pleasure there. He grows in praise from his crime, and the fouler he is, the more skillful he is judged. He is watched—O abomination!—and watched willingly.
“What could one who is such not persuade men to do? He moves the senses, soothes the affections, and storms the stronger conscience of a good breast. Nor is the authority of an enticing disgrace absent, so that destruction may creep upon human beings through the softer hearing. They represent an unchaste Venus, an adulterous Mars, and that Jupiter of theirs, a prince no more in kingship than in vices, burning toward earthly loves with his very thunderbolts—now growing white in the feathers of a swan, now flowing down in a golden shower, now springing onto the stage toward the puberty of boys, carried off with birds as his servants. Ask now whether one who watches can be uncorrupted or chaste. They imitate the gods whom they venerate; for the wretched, offenses become religious acts.
“O, if only, stationed in that lofty watchtower, you could introduce your eyes into secret places, unclose the covered doors of bedchambers, and open hidden inner rooms to the consciousness of the eyes. You would see things done by the unchaste which a chaste brow could not even behold. You would see what it is itself a crime to see. You would see what men maddened by the fury of vices deny that they have done and hasten to do. Men rush upon men with insane lusts. Things are done which cannot please even the very men who do them. I lie if one who is such does not rebuke others; a shameful man defames shameful men and believes that he has escaped the one who knows, as though it were not sufficient that he cannot escape his own conscience. The same men are accusers in public and defendants in secret, at once censors of and guilty before themselves. They condemn outside what they perform within; they willingly admit what, when they have admitted it, they accuse—an audacity agreeing altogether with vices, and a shamelessness corresponding to the unchaste. I do not wish you to marvel at what men of this kind speak with that polluted mouth: whatever sin is now committed by the voice is less.”
He exaggerates nothing. He keeps silent about those things which modesty prohibited him from saying. Heliogabalus ordered to be exhibited in reality the things which the mimes imitated. No one can be excused on the ground that the Athenians did those things long ago. Aristophanes, the most wicked of all, reproaches the wickedness of the whole city because by a public decree they removed from his place an aged poet who abstained from obscene taunts. Believe steadfastly that minds so fit for prostitutes deserved whatever evils they afterward suffered.
§ 3. “The theater,” says Tertullian in Chapter X of On Spectacles, “is properly the shrine of Venus. In this manner, finally, that kind of work arose in the world. For the censors often destroyed theaters just when they were springing up again, consulting for morals, whose immense danger from wantonness they plainly foresaw. Thus already from this point the heathens’ own judgment, which makes with us, may yield as testimony against them, and the prerogative even of human discipline may serve us for an amplification of the charge. And so Pompey the Great, lesser only than his own theater, when he had built that citadel of every shameful deed, sometimes fearing a censorial censure of his memory, placed a temple of Venus above it. Summoning the people to its dedication by edict, he called it not a theater but a temple of Venus, ‘beneath which,’ he said, ‘we have placed the tiers of spectacles.’ Thus he covered a condemned and condemnable work with the title of a temple and mocked discipline by superstition.
“But Venus and Liber agree with one another. Those two demons of drunkenness and lust have conspired and sworn together among themselves. Therefore the theater of Venus is also the house of Liber. For they also called other theatrical games Liberalia in their proper designation, not only because they were devoted to Liber—as the Dionysia are among the Greeks—but also because they were instituted by Liber. And plainly the patronage of Liber and Venus exists even in the theatrical arts, in those things which are private and proper to the stage, concerning gesture and looseness of body. For, dissolute, they sacrifice softness to Venus and Liber—to the one through sex, to the other through looseness.”
And in Chapter XVII: “In like manner, we are ordered to remove all unchastity. Therefore in this way we are also separated from the theater, which is the private consistory of unchastity, where nothing is approved except what is disapproved elsewhere. Thus the whole of its favor is in the greatest degree fashioned from filthiness, which the Atellan gesticulator and which the mime also represent through women, banishing the shame of their sex so that they blush more easily at home than on the stage; which, finally, the pantomime suffers in his body from boyhood so that he can be an artist. Even the prostitutes themselves, victims of public lust, are brought forward on the stage, more wretched in the presence of women, from whom alone they were hidden; and they are paraded before the faces of every age and every dignity. Their place, their fee, and their encomium are proclaimed, even to those who have no need of it. I keep silent about the rest, which ought to lie hidden in darkness and in its own caves, lest it contaminate the day. Let
the Senate blush; let all the orders blush. Those very destroyers of their own shame, growing afraid to bring their gestures into the light and before the people, blush once a year. But if unchastity must be execrated by us, why should it be lawful to hear what it is not lawful to speak? Since we also know that scurrilities and every idle word are judged by God, why should it equally be lawful to hear things which it is a crime to do? Why should those things which, uttered by the mouth, defile a man not be thought to defile a man when admitted through eyes and ears, since ears and eyes are attendants of the spirit, and he whose attendants are polluted cannot be presented as clean?” Therefore the prohibition of unchastity also contains the prohibition of the theater. Cyprian agrees in his book On Spectacles; Lactantius, Book VI, Chapter XX; Augustine, Book XX of The City of God, Chapters IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, X, and XIII.
You will perhaps say that lascivious comedies are prohibited, not grave ones, not tragedies. But tragedy too represents ancient crimes, so that it may be established that what has been done can be done; and tragedies should be exhibited only with great discrimination. This, therefore, is the sum, and the rule which must be observed in these games.
§ 4. First, neither the commonwealth nor the prince is permitted to introduce such spectacles; neither can permit them. An actor is infamous and is not admitted to the communion of the Church. There is an example in Saint Cyprian, Epistle 61: “Because of your affection and our mutual modesty you judged that I should be consulted, most illustrious brother, concerning what I think of a certain actor who, established among you, still perseveres in the dishonor of that same art of his; and, as a master and teacher not of boys who are to be educated but of boys who are to be destroyed, also instills into others what he learned wickedly—whether such a man ought to communicate with you.
“I think it agrees neither with the divine Majesty nor with evangelical discipline that the modesty and honor of the Church should be defiled by so shameful and infamous a contagion. For since men are prohibited in the Law from putting on a woman’s garment and those of this kind are judged accursed, how much greater a crime is it not only to receive women’s clothing, but also to represent shameful, soft, and womanly gestures through instruction in an unchaste art? Nor should anyone excuse himself if he himself has ceased from the theater while he nevertheless teaches this to others. For he cannot be seen to have ceased who appoints substitutes and supplies many successors in place of himself alone—educating and teaching, contrary to God’s institution, how a male may be broken into a woman and sex altered by art, and how the Devil, who stains the divine creation, may be pleased through the offenses of a corrupted and enervated body.
“But if such a man pleads his want and the necessity of poverty, his necessity too can be assisted among the others who are sustained by the Church’s provisions, provided that he is content with more frugal but innocent food. Nor let him think that he must be bought off with a salary so that he ceases from sins, since he renders this not to you but to himself. For the rest, let him seek as much as he wishes from that source.”
§ 5. By the example of the Roman Empire, they say that they are able to permit—indeed, to seek—pleasures for the people. But among the Romans there was at first a moderation of stage players; then stages and theaters were often abolished and actors driven into exile. For they were becoming accustomed to idleness and vices, since, as Varro reproaches them in Book II of On Agriculture, “They preferred to move their hands in the theater and circus rather than among crops and vineyards.” They learned by experience that virtue could not stand in the kingdom of pleasure, and that innocence could not remain among so many incitements to vices. Therefore they often condemned these things, and most wickedly resumed what they had rightly renounced. The matter departed into such great madness that performers received the pay of generals and armies. At so great a price were purchased the kindling of disgraceful acts and the stain of morals. So great was the reward for violators of morals. Thus Tertullian speaks: “Theaters arose for violating morals. So many unclean spirits sit there as there are human beings whom the theater holds.”
§ 6. So great, so pernicious an evil can be abolished by the prince with one word, with one sheet of paper; and because he can oppose it so easily, if he does not do so, he himself cannot be saved. For what Christian will stir up a tumult? Then too, very many subjects, and indeed soldiers, are offended by these delights of princes and cities. Now the defenders of the fatherland in garrisons and camps are in want, while those who render service of no worth, pernicious service, live in gold and purple and insult those who pursue honorable things. But how can a commonwealth stand in which actors are equated with generals? We read with wonder of the wealth of Roscius and others, and from them we learn the madness of public vanity.
The Spartans did better in removing actors altogether than those who resolved to regulate them by laws. For although actors were sometimes compelled by the commands of princes to abstain in public, many seditious things were nevertheless attempted by them in public and many foul things within houses. Augustus was indeed just and severe toward Stephanio and lenient toward Pylades, but at last steadfastly brave; yet in the rest of his life he was indulgent and a corrupter of morals, for he himself lived most shamefully, and his wife and daughters were a public disgrace. Therefore stage players and performers must altogether be removed from our midst—much more foreign ones, such as Britons and others who wander everywhere through Germany; for they are infamous on account of their theatrical art and introduce great corruptions.
I would not, however, abolish every apparatus of the theater and every study of comedies; but I would readily concede it when bound by definite laws.
§ 7. First, let it excite to virtue both those who declaim and those who see and hear either a fable or a true history. We possess one play of Plautus more modest than the others, the Captivi:
Certainly, he says, it will be expedient to give attention to this play.
Its subject has not been handled before, nor is it like the others;
Nor are there filthy and unmentionable verses in it.
Here there is neither a perjured procurer nor an evil prostitute,
Nor a vainglorious soldier.
Therefore let the plays be holy and implant virtue. Let them teach civil prudence. Let nothing be spoken in a theater of Christians which could not also be spoken in a church. For your hearer is a temple of the Holy Spirit, to whom it is impious to commend trifles, much less obscenities. For the chief of all political writers and instructor of a great king rightly says in Book VII, Chapter XVII:
Οἷον, αἰσχρολογίαν ἐκ τῆς πόλεως, ὥσπερ ἄλλο τι τῶν φαύλων, ἐξορίζειν.
Foul speech, like other evils, must be utterly banished from the city.
Second, let there be such moderation of gestures as not only pleases, by its gravity, men who are civilly and elegantly mannered, but which the actor can retain through the whole remainder of his life, so that the stage may contribute to living courteously and agreeably in human society, and so that even the roughness and sluggishness of rustic young men may be formed.
Third, when the affections of vicious men—for example, of the proud, avaricious, and angry—are represented by voice and gesture, let the character of the verse and action be such that hatred and detestation of the vices is produced. And let the cause of evil never be acted so skillfully that the cause of good appears to have fallen. Thus there will not occur what sometimes happens: that actors carry into private conversation the gait, expression, and tossings
of the arms which they displayed properly in theaters; and those who seemed to simulate pride in the theater exhibit it as reality in life.
Fourth, let them never represent the affection of a lover by words or gestures—not even for the purpose of showing the disastrous end of unchastity. Therefore the actor will not bring forward Hemor, son of Sichem, wounded by love, in order that, through the destruction of all the citizens and the sexual outrage avenged, he may strike greater fear. Nor will he present Delilah’s flatteries in order that Samson’s fates may be sung. There is a great difference among these matters. To think and speak about pride, avarice, or drunkenness, and to simulate its affections, does not lead the mind away from virtue. But the disease of lust is contagious; it is transmitted by the slightest breeze. This vice, too, when rebuked somewhat inconsiderately or immodestly, often rages more vehemently. Men behold the angry and the drunken without anger or drunkenness of their own, and by the very sight have learned to condemn those vices. Improvident minds do not safely hear the lusts of others, except incidentally and in passing. If you dwell upon representing loves, the mind is infected with vice before it hears the catastrophe to the end.
Fifth, I do not condemn charms and witticisms, provided they are pointed, honorable, and pertain to contempt for vices. For nothing can be said wittily except against a vice. If you jest against an innocent person, it is an insult. In the very jest, let something of a good disposition shine forth; let foulness never insinuate itself. Nazianzen says excellently:
Εἰπεῖν, ἀκοῦσαι, ἢ δρᾶσαι, μικρὸν μέσον.
Speaking, hearing, and doing stand at a short interval. Therefore let the jest be noble, not malevolent, not foul, because one ought not even to hear such a jest.
What Antonius of Siena relates in the history of the Dominican Fathers is marvelous. A young man had disclosed his love to Lucia, a chaste and holy virgin, and among his flatteries had written that he was wounded and captivated by the beauty of her eyes. But she, unaccustomed to a procurer’s flattery and at the same time concerned for the lover’s salvation, sent her eyes, torn out, to the young man, with an inscription added: that he now possessed the very cheap thing which she had valued less than her God. How chaste was that spirit, which tore out eyes violated by an impure letter because they had pleased her lover! How would that virgin have detested theatrical obscenities when she avenged a letter in this manner?
Sixth, let no woman enter the stage, nor any man in a woman’s costume. Let even the clothing of that sex, whom modesty and laws confine at home, be absent from the theater. I have never approved a young man, in feminine dress, simulating a woman—even one holy, modest, and chaste—or having his hair arranged and being adorned by women, so that he may be seen in public as though a woman. I rejoiced that this judgment of mine was approved by our Society; for it prohibited our pupils from coming forth upon the stage in women’s clothing in the future. And in general I dislike the cause of chastity being pleaded in the theater. Chastity is modest and tender, safer by fleeing and hiding; it does not desire to appear in public even for its own praise. Let faith, fortitude, prudence, and sobriety have their parts. Let chastity enjoy its own conscience alone at home. If it is praised in public, let this be done sparingly and modestly.
Seventh, let no one proceed onto the stage for the sake of gain—no one who does not sustain his life by another art or support himself and his family from domestic resources. Therefore I have already utterly proscribed from my commonwealth stage players and mountebanks who prepare a living by jesting, speaking obscenely, and deceiving; whose praise grows from crime; and who are considered more skillful the fouler they are. Men of this kind are generally most wicked. For since they are oppressed by poverty, they labor to gather crowds and please the people; hence they say and do those things by which every most foolish man is delighted. Hence they do not care what they say, provided they extort money. Therefore it was badly provided for the commonwealth when that dregs was supported at public expense, and laughter and instruction in foulness were purchased with so great a concern. Roscius received a daily wage of one thousand denarii, as Macrobius testifies in Book III of the Saturnalia. But surely, is it lawful, contrary to right, that those things which the provinces contributed be spent on the amusements of the worst men? It also disturbs the peace of the commonwealth.
Eighth, just as obscene license ought not wander about the prince’s table, but instead a benign invitation, nobility of jest, and love of studies, so let sacred, honorable, political, and learned comedy—an indication of a liberal disposition and a pledge of future hope—delight the eyes of the Christian people with grave courtesy and easy dignity. And let it be brought about that every most honorable and most noble person comes to practice in this matter. Rule 13 of the prescribed plan of studies for the rectors of the Society has encompassed all these things in brief words:
“13. The subject of tragedies and comedies—which ought to be only in Latin and very rare—shall be sacred and pious. Nothing shall be inserted between the acts which is not Latin and decorous; nor shall any female character or clothing be introduced.
“14. But let him take great care to prevent the pupils, while preparing themselves for things of this kind, from suffering a loss of morals or studies.”