On the Shows 17

Likewise we are commanded to put away all unchastity. In this way, then, we are also separated from the theatre, which is the private council-house of unchastity, where nothing wins approval but what wins none elsewhere. So its chief charm is mostly contrived from filth: filth which the Atellan actor gestures; which the mime even represents by playing women, banishing the sense of sex and of shame, so that they blush more easily at home than on the stage; filth, finally, which the pantomime suffers in his body from boyhood, so that he may become an artist. Even the prostitutes themselves, the victims of public lust, are brought out on the stage, more wretched in the presence of women, from whom alone they used to be hidden, and are paraded before the faces of every age and rank; their address, their price, and their record are proclaimed, even to those who have no need of it, even (I say nothing of the rest) things that ought to lie hidden in darkness and in their own dens, lest they defile the day. Let the senate blush, let all the orders blush! Let even those women, the murderers of their own modesty, blush once a year, in terror of their own gestures before the light and the people. But if all unchastity is to be abhorred by us, why should it be lawful to hear what it is not lawful to speak, since we know that even buffoonery and every idle word is judged by God? Why, likewise, should it be lawful to see what it is a disgrace to do? Why should the things that defile a man when they come out of the mouth not seem to defile a man when admitted through the ears and eyes, since ears and eyes are the attendants of the spirit, and he cannot be kept clean whose attendants are defiled? You have, then, the prohibition of the theatre from the prohibition of unchastity. If we also despise the teaching of secular literature as reckoned foolishness with God, we are sufficiently instructed about those kinds of shows too which, drawing on secular literature, set out the stage for play or for contest. And if tragedies and comedies are bloody and wanton, impious and prodigal performers of crimes and lusts, the recollection of anything atrocious or vile is no better than the thing itself: what is rejected in deed is not to be received in word either.