I. What is the state of faith, what the reason of truth, what the prescript of discipline that, among the rest of the world's errors, takes away also the pleasures of the spectacles — servants of God, learn; you who are just now approaching to God, recognize it; you who have already testified and confessed that you have approached, that no one may sin either by ignorance or by dissimulation. For so great is the force of the pleasures that it both protracts ignorance into an occasion and corrupts conscience into dissimulation. Toward both, perhaps, the opinions of the heathen may still flatter someone, who in this cause have been wont thus to argue against us:
that such great solaces from without, of the eyes or ears, in no way clash with religion in the mind and conscience; and that God is not truly offended by man's delight, in which, with fear toward God preserved and His honor kept in its own time and its own place, to take enjoyment is no crime. But precisely this is what we are just now preparing to demonstrate — how such things do not accord with true religion and true obedience toward the true God. There are those who suppose that Christians, a race ready for death, are trained to this obstinacy by the renunciation of pleasures, so that they may the more easily despise life, its retaining-cords being as it were cut away, and may not long for what they have already made superfluous to themselves — so that this may be thought defined rather by such counsel and human foresight, not by divine prescript.
It irked them, forsooth, that even while persevering amid such great pleasures we should die for the Lord. And yet, even if it were so, so fitting a counsel deserved obedience for so great an obstinacy of discipline. II. But now there is no one who does not also put forward this too: that all things were instituted by God and assigned to man, as we proclaim, and certainly all good things, as coming from a good Author; that among these are to be reckoned all those things from which the spectacles are furnished — the horse, for example, and the lion, and bodily strength, and sweetness of voice; therefore that what consists of His own creation can seem neither alien nor hostile to God, nor is to be reckoned to God's worshippers as hostile to Him, since it is not alien.
Plainly even the very buildings of the places — the stones, the cement, the marbles, the columns — are God's things, who gave them for the equipment of the earth; but the very acts too are transacted under God's heaven. How wise an arguer human ignorance seems to itself, especially when it fears to lose something of the sort out of the joys and fruits of the world! In fine, you will find more whom the peril of pleasure than of life calls away from this sect. For even the fool does not dread death as a debt, and even the wise man does not despise pleasure as a thing given, since to fool and wise alike there is no other charm of life but pleasure.
No one denies, because no one is ignorant of what nature itself spontaneously suggests, that God is the Creator of the universe, and that this universe is as good as it is delivered over to man. But because they do not know God thoroughly except by natural right, not also by intimate right — from afar, not from near — it is necessary that they be ignorant how He either commands or forbids the administering of the things He instituted, and likewise what force there is, rival from the opposite side, for adulterating the uses of the divine creation; for you can know neither the will nor the adversary of Him whom you know less. Not only, then, is regard to be had to Him by whom all things have been instituted, but also to him by whom they have been turned aside. For thus it will appear for what use they were instituted, if it appears for what they were not.
There is a great difference between corruption and integrity, because there is a great difference between the institutor and the interpolator. Moreover, all the species of evils, which even the heathen both prohibit and guard against as undoubted, consist of the works of God. You see murder accomplished by iron, by poison, by magical bindings: iron is as much a thing of God as herbs, as angels. Did He, however, provide these things for the slaying of a man? Nay, He does away with every species of murder by one and principal precept: "You shall not kill." Likewise gold, bronze, silver, ivory, wood, and whatever material is caught up for the fabricating of idols — who placed it in the world but God the Author of the world? Was it, however, that these things might be adored against Himself?
And yet the highest offense in His sight is idolatry. What is not God's that offends God? But when it offends, it has ceased to be God's, and when it has ceased, it offends. Man himself, the author of all disgraceful deeds, is not only the work of God but also His image; and yet both in body and in spirit he has revolted from his Institutor. For neither did we take eyes for concupiscence, and the tongue for evil-speaking, and the ears for the reception of evil-speaking, and the gullet for the crime of gluttony, and the belly for fellowship with gluttony, and the genitals for the excesses of unchastity, and the hands for violence, and the steps for a wandering life; nor was the spirit therefore implanted in the body that it should become a workshop of ambushes, of frauds, of iniquities. I think not.
For if the God who exacts innocence hates all malignity, and if only excogitated wickedness, undoubtedly whatever He founded it is certain He did not found unto the outcome of those works which He condemns, although those same works be administered through the things He founded, since this is the whole reason of condemnation: the perverse administration of the creation by the creatures. We, therefore, who, the Lord being known, have also inspected His rival, who, the Institutor being discovered, have detected the interpolator along with Him, ought neither to wonder nor to doubt:
since that force of the interpolating and rivaling angel from the beginning cast down man himself — the work and image of God, the possessor of the whole universe — from his integrity, it likewise, together with him, changed into perversity the whole of his substance, which had been established in integrity along with him, against the Institutor; so that, what it grieved to have been granted to man and not to itself, in that very thing it might both make man guilty before God and set up its own dominion. III. Instructed with this consciousness against the opinion of the heathen, let us rather turn to the cavils of our own people.
For the faith of some, being either too simple or too scrupulous, demands authority from the Scriptures for this renunciation of the spectacles, and sets itself in uncertainty, because such abstinence is not denounced to the servants of God significantly and by name. Plainly nowhere do we find, in the manner in which it is openly laid down: "You shall not kill, you shall not worship an idol, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not admit fraud," so expressly defined: you shall not go into the circus, you shall not behold the theater, the contest, the gladiatorial show. But we do find that first utterance of David pertains to this species as well:
'Blessed is the man,' he says, 'who has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the seat of the pestilent.' For although he seems to have pronounced that man righteous because he took no part in the council and assembly of the Jews who were plotting to put the Lord to death, yet divine Scripture is always distributed in a broad sense, so that wherever, according to the sense of the present matter, discipline too is fortified, this passage also may not be a voice foreign to the prohibition of the spectacles. For if it then called those few Jews a council of the ungodly, how much more so great a gathering of the heathen people? Are the heathen less ungodly, less sinners, less enemies of Christ than the Jews were then? And what of this, that the rest also fits:
For at the spectacles one sits in the seat and stands in the way; for they call the passages and the divisions of the tiers, running around, 'ways,' and the sloping partitions of the seats for the common people 'hinges'; and the place set for sitting in the curve is likewise called a 'seat.' And so, on the contrary, 'unhappy is he who has gone into whatever council of the ungodly, and stood in whatever way of sinners, and sat in whatever seat of the pestilent.' Let us understand a thing said generally, when it also admits of being interpreted specifically in some other way. For certain things pronounced specifically also have a general savour. When God admonishes the Israelites in discipline or rebukes them, he certainly means it for all; when he threatens destruction to Egypt and Ethiopia, he certainly gives judgment beforehand against every sinful nation.
Thus every sinful nation is 'Egypt and Ethiopia' from the particular to the general, just as likewise every spectacle is 'a council of the ungodly' from the general to the particular. IV. Lest anyone think that we are quibbling, I will turn to the paramount authority of our own seal. When, entering the water, we profess the Christian faith in the words of its law, we testify with our own mouth that we have renounced the devil, and his pomp, and his angels. What will be the chief and foremost thing in which the devil, his pomp, and his angels are reckoned, but idolatry? From which every unclean and wicked spirit, so to speak—but I say no more of this.
Therefore, if it be established that the whole apparatus of the spectacles consists of idolatry, it will undoubtedly be prejudged that our testimony of renunciation in the laver pertains also to the spectacles, which are made over to the devil and his pomp and his angels—namely, through idolatry. We shall record the origins of each, in what cradles they grew up in the world; then the titles by which they are named; then the equipment with which they are furnished in their superstitions; then the places, to what patrons they are dedicated; then the arts, to what authors they are ascribed. If any of these should not pertain to an idol, it will pertain neither to idolatry nor to our abjuration.
V. As to origins indeed, since they are rather obscure and unknown to most of our own people, they had to be investigated at deeper level and from no other source than the records of pagan literature. There exist many authors who have published commentaries on this subject. By these the origin of the games is thus handed down: Timaeus relates that the Lydians, immigrants from Asia, settled in Etruria under the leadership of Tyrrhenus, who had yielded to his brother in a contest for the throne. So then in Etruria, among the other rites of their superstitions, they instituted spectacles also under the name of religion. Thence the Romans, having sent for the performers, borrowed them, and likewise the name, so that the players (ludii) were called after the Lydians.
But even though Varro derives 'ludii' from 'ludus,' that is, from 'play,' just as they also called the Luperci 'ludii' because they ran about while playing, yet he reckons that play of the young men as belonging to festal days and temples and religions. No more, now, of the reason for the name, since the reason for the thing itself is idolatry. For also, when the games were indiscriminately called Liberalia, they plainly proclaimed honour to Father Liber. For to Liber they were first made by the country-folk, on account of the benefit which they ascribe to him, the discovery having shown the grace of wine. Thereafter the games were called Consualia, which at the beginning honoured Neptune; for they call him also Consus. Next Romulus named the Ecurria from horses, in honour of Mars;
although they claim the Consualia too for Romulus, on the ground that he dedicated them to Consus, the god, as they will have it, of counsel—that counsel, namely, by which he then devised the rape of the Sabine virgins into marriages for his soldiers. A worthy counsel indeed, and even now among the Romans themselves held just and lawful—not to say in the sight of God! For this too contributes to the stain of its origin, that you should not deem good what took its beginning from evil, from shamelessness, from violence, from hatred, from a founder who was a fratricide, from a son of Mars. And even now the altar to that Consus is sunk in the ground in the circus at the first turning-posts, with an inscription of this kind: CONSUS IN COUNSEL, MARS IN WAR, THE LARES MIGHTY IN... The public priests sacrifice at it on the Nones of July, and on the twelfth day before the Kalends of
the September Kalends, the Quirinal flamen and the Virgins sacrifice there. Next this same Romulus instituted games to Jupiter Feretrius on the Tarpeian Hill, which Piso records were called both Tarpeian and Capitoline. After him Numa Pompilius made games to Mars and Robigo (for they even fashioned a goddess of mildew); next Tullus Hostilius, then Ancus Marcius, and the rest. Who instituted games, and which, in what order, and to what idols, is set down in Suetonius Tranquillus, or in those from whom Tranquillus received it. But these things will suffice as to the charge of idolatry regarding origin. VI. To the testimony of antiquity there is added the posterity that followed, displaying the pattern of the origin in the titles of this later time also, whereby it was marked out to what idol and to what superstition the games of either kind were assigned.
For the Megalensian and Apollinarian games, likewise the Cerealian and Neptunalian and Latiarian and Floralian, are celebrated in common; the rest of the games have their occasions in the birthdays and solemnities of kings, in public prosperities and municipal festivals of superstition. Among these, even the legated exhibitions perform funeral rites for the memory of private persons—that too according to the antiquity of the institution. For from the very beginning the games were reckoned of two kinds, sacred and funereal, that is, to the gods of the nations and to the dead. But as regards idolatry it makes no difference with us under what name and title it comes, so long as it arrives at the same spirits whom we renounce. Let them do it for the dead, let them do it for their own gods—they do it for their dead just as for gods;
one condition belongs to both parties, one idolatry, one renunciation of ours against idolatry. VII. Common, therefore, is the origin of the games of both kinds, common too their titles, as arising from common causes. Accordingly, they must of necessity have their equipment in common, in respect of the general guilt of the idolatry that founded them. But the display of the circus is somewhat more pompous, to which this very name properly belongs: the procession that goes before, proving of itself whose it is by the series of images, by the train of figures, by the chariots, by the sacred cars, by the wagon-thrones, by the litters, by the crowns, by the spoils.
Moreover, how many sacred rites, how many sacrifices go before, come between, follow after; how many colleges, how many priesthoods, how many offices are set in motion—the men of that city know it, in which the assembly of demons has taken its seat. Even if these things are administered with less care throughout the provinces, according to their lesser resources, yet all circus-games everywhere must be reckoned to that source whence they are also sought; from that source they are defiled, from which they are taken. For even a slender rivulet from its own spring, and a modest twig from its own bough, retains the quality of its origin. Let one see to the ostentation or the frugality of it: whatever the pomp of the circus be, it offends God. Even if it carries about few images, in one there is idolatry; even if it draws one sacred car, it is still the wagon of Jupiter;
any idolatry whatsoever, whether meanly furnished or moderately rich and splendid, is guilty by the reckoning of its own crime. VIII. That I may deal also with the places according to my plan: the circus is principally consecrated to the Sun. His temple stands in the middle of the space, and his image shines forth from the summit of the temple, since they did not think that he ought to be consecrated under a roof whom they have in the open sky. They affirm that the spectacle was first exhibited by Circe to the Sun her father, as they will have it, and from her they argue for the very name of the 'circus.' Clearly the sorceress transacted this business for them under this name, whose priestess she was—namely, for demons and angels. How many idolatries, then, do you recognize in the arrangement of that place? Each single ornament of the circus is a single temple.
The eggs they ascribe to the honour of the Castors—those who, believing the twins to have been hatched from an egg by Jupiter in the form of a swan, are not ashamed. The columns spew forth dolphins to Neptune, and support statues of the Sessiae from sowings, of the Messiae from harvests, of the Tutulinae from the guardianship of the crops; before these, three altars serve three gods, the Great, the Mighty, the Strong. These same they reckon to be the Samothracian gods. The huge obelisk, as Hermateles affirms, is prostituted to the Sun; its inscription, whence also its provenance, is a superstition out of Egypt. The council of demons would be chilly without their own Great Mother; she therefore presides there over the channel-basin. Consus, as we have said, lurks underground at the turning-posts of the Murcian goddess. Her too they made an idol: for they will have Murcia to be a goddess of love, to whom they vowed a temple in that quarter.
Take note, Christian, how many unclean names have possessed the circus. Foreign to you is the region which so many spirits of the devil have occupied. As to places, indeed, there is occasion for reconsidering, so as to forestall the question of certain persons. 'What then,' you say, 'if at another time I go to the circus, shall I be in danger of defilement?' There is no prohibition regarding places. For not only these meeting-places of the spectacles, but even the temples themselves, the servant of God may enter without peril to his discipline, if there be an urgent cause—provided only it be a simple one, which does not pertain to the proper business or function of that place. Besides, the streets and the forum and the baths and the inns and even our own houses are not altogether without idols: the whole world Satan and his angels have filled.
Yet not because we are in the world do we fall away from God, but only if we touch something of the world's crimes. Accordingly, if as a sacrificer or worshipper I have entered the Capitol or the Serapeum, I shall fall away from God, just as I shall as a spectator at the circus or the theatre. The places do not contaminate us of themselves, but the things done in them, by which the very places also are contaminated, as we have argued: by contaminated things we are contaminated. And for this reason we recall to what powers such places are dedicated, that we may show them to belong to those whose actions are done in those places, to whom the places themselves are dedicated. IX. Now as to the craft by which the circus-games are exhibited. Horsemanship of old was a simple thing: it was practised on the horse's back, and its common use was certainly not culpable.
But when it was pressed into the service of the games, it passed over from being a gift of God to being the ministry of demons. And so this kind of thing is assigned to Castor and Pollux, to whom Stesichorus teaches that horses were distributed by Mercury. But Neptune too is an equestrian, whom the Greeks call Hippios. The chariot-yoke, moreover, they consecrated to Jupiter, the four-horse team to the Sun, the two-horse team to the Moon. But it was also Erichthonius who first 'dared to yoke a chariot and four horses and, victorious, to stand upon its swift wheels.' Erichthonius, son of Minerva and Vulcan—and that indeed from a lust fallen to the earth—is a demonic monstrosity, nay, the devil himself, not a snake. But if Trochilus of Argos is the inventor of the chariot, he dedicated that work of his to Juno first.
If at Rome Romulus first displayed the four-horse chariot, I suppose that he too has been enrolled among the idols, if he is the same as Quirinus. With such founders, the four-horse teams having been brought forth, they deservedly clothed the charioteers too in the colours of idolatry. For at the beginning there were only two, the white and the red. The white was vowed to winter on account of its white snows, the red to summer on account of the redness of the sun. But afterwards, as pleasure no less than superstition advanced, some consecrated the red to Mars, others the white to the Zephyrs; the green to Mother Earth or to spring, the blue to Sky and Sea or to autumn. Since, however, every kind of idolatry has been condemned by God, that too is certainly condemned which is profaned by reference to the elements of the world.
X. Let us pass on to the matters of the stage, whose origin we have already shown to be common and their titles equal, according to that very naming of the games from the beginning, and their administration conjoined with the equestrian affair. Their equipment too is a partner from that side, in that one goes to the stage from the temples and altars, and from that wretchedness of incense and blood, amid flutes and trumpets, under the direction of two most filthy managers of funerals and sacred rites, the master of ceremonies and the soothsayer. Thus, since from the origins of the games we crossed over to the circus-games, from there we shall now direct our course to the games of the stage, on account of the vice of the place. The theatre is properly the sanctuary of Venus. This, in fact, was the manner in which that kind of work made its way in the world.
For the censors often used to destroy the theatres precisely as they were rising, consulting for morals, foreseeing, that is, the enormous peril from wantonness—so that even from this the very judgment of the heathen may come in for testimony on our side, and a human prerogative too may serve us for the heightening of discipline. And so Pompey the Great, less great only than his own theatre, when he had built that citadel of all vileness, fearing at some time the censorial censure of his memory, superimposed a temple of Venus, and, summoning the people by edict to its dedication, called it not a theatre but a temple of Venus, 'beneath which,' he said, 'we have placed the tiers of the spectacles.' Thus he cloaked a condemned and condemnable work under the title of a temple, and mocked discipline by means of superstition.
But it suits both Venus and Liber. These two demons of drunkenness and lust are in conspiracy and sworn league with each other. And so the theatre of Venus is also the house of Liber. For they used properly to call other stage-games Liberalia too, besides those devoted to Liber, which are the Dionysia among the Greeks, and were instituted by Liber. And plainly, in the stage-arts too, there is the patronage of Liber and of Venus. Those things which are peculiar and proper to the stage—the effeminacy of gesture and bending of the body—they sacrifice to Venus and Liber, the ones dissolute through sex, the others through luxury. But those things which are performed by voice and modulations and instruments and letters have the Apollos and Muses and Minervas and Mercuries as their masters.
You will hate, O Christian, those whose authors you cannot but hate. Now, indeed, we wish to bring in a word about the arts and about those whose authors we execrate in their very names. We know that the names of the dead are nothing, just as their images too are nothing; but we are not ignorant who it is that works under those names and instituted images, and rejoices, and feigns divinity—wicked spirits, namely, demons. We see, therefore, that their arts too are dedicated to the honours of those who inhabit the names of their authors, and are not free from idolatry, whose founders are for that very reason accounted gods.
Nay, as far as concerns the arts, we ought to have laid down at a deeper level that the demons, from the beginning providing for themselves among the other pollutions of idolatry those of the spectacles also—by which they might call man away from the Lord and bind him to their own honour—inspired the very talents of arts of this kind. For neither would that have been procured by others which was to come to them, nor would they then have brought it forth through other men than through those in whose names and images and histories they established the deceit of consecration, meaning to transact their own business thereby. That the sequence may be carried through, let us enter also upon the review of the athletic contests. XI. Their origin is derived from their kinship with the games. Hence these too are instituted as either sacred or funereal, and are performed either to the gods of the nations or to the dead. Their titles are likewise:
the Olympian games to Jupiter, which at Rome are the Capitoline; likewise the Nemean to Hercules, the Isthmian to Neptune; the rest are various contests for the dead. What wonder, then, if idolatry befouls even the equipment of the contests—with its profane crowns, its priestly presidents, its ministers of the colleges, and finally with the very blood of oxen? And that I may supply something from the place too, and from a common consideration, on behalf of the college of the arts of the Muses and of Minerva and of Apollo, and also of Mars, they rival the circus in the stadium through combat, through the trumpet—which is likewise itself the temple of that very idol whose solemnities it performs. But the gymnastic arts too the disciplines of the Castors and the Herculeses and the Mercuries handed down. XII. There remains the review of that most notorious and most popular of spectacles.
It is called a 'munus' (duty/gift) from 'officium' (office), since 'office' is also a name for a 'munus.' Now the ancients thought that they were performing an office to the dead by this spectacle, after they had tempered it with a more humane atrocity. For of old, since it was believed that the souls of the departed were propitiated by human blood, they used to sacrifice at the funeral rites captives, or slaves of poor condition whom they had bought. Afterwards it seemed good to overshadow impiety with pleasure. And so those whom they had prepared, trained in such arms as then and in such manner as they could—but only that they might learn to be slain—they used, on the appointed day of the funeral offerings, to dispatch at the tombs. Thus they consoled death with homicides. This is the origin of the gladiatorial munus.
But little by little they advanced to as great a refinement as their cruelty, since satisfaction was not made to the pleasure of the wild beasts unless human bodies too were torn to pieces by the beasts. What, therefore, was offered as an expiation to the dead was certainly reckoned to the funeral rite; which kind is likewise idolatry, since idolatry too is a kind of funeral offering: both the one and the other minister to the dead. And in the idols of the dead the demons take up their abode.
That I may consider the titles too: although this kind of exhibition has passed from the honours of the dead to the honours of the living—I mean quaestorships and magistracies and flaminates and priesthoods—yet, since the dignity of the name is held by the crime of idolatry, it necessarily follows that whatever is administered in the name of a dignity should share also the stains of that from which it has its origins. The same we shall interpret concerning the equipment to be reckoned in the display of these very honours: that the purple, the fasces, the fillets, the crowns, and finally the assemblies and edicts and the day-before banquets, are not without the pomp of the devil, not without the invitation of demons. What, then, shall I say by way of peroration about that horrid place, which even perjuries cannot endure?
For the amphitheatre is consecrated to more and harsher names than the Capitol: it is the temple of all the demons. As many unclean spirits take their seats there as it holds men. And that I may conclude also concerning the arts, we know Mars and Diana to be the presidents of both kinds of games. XIII. Sufficiently, I think, we have filled out the order—in how many and what ways the spectacles commit idolatry—concerning origins, titles, equipment, places, and crafts, so that we may be certain that in no part do these things suit us, who renounce the idols twice. Not that an idol is anything, as the Apostle says, but because the things they do, they do to demons—who take up their abode, of course, in the consecrations of the idols, whether of the dead or, as they think, of the gods.
Therefore, for this reason—since both kinds of idols are of one condition, seeing that the dead and the gods are one—we abstain from both idolatry. And no less do we spit upon temples than upon tombs; we acknowledge neither altar, we adore neither image, we do not sacrifice, we do not offer to the dead. But neither do we eat of what is sacrificed or offered to the dead, because we cannot eat the supper of God and the supper of demons. If, then, we free our gullet and belly from defilements, how much more do we withhold our more august parts, both ears and eyes, from idol-sacrificed and corpse-sacrificed pleasures—which are not transacted through the intestines but are digested in the very spirit and soul, whose cleanness pertains more to God than that of the intestines.