Chapter 19
TERTULLIAN
Greece.5 (3) Also, the art of wrestling belongs to the Devil's trade: it was the Devil who first crushed men. The very movements of the wrestler have a snakelike quality: the grip that takes hold of the opponent, the twist that binds him, the sleekness with which he slips away from him. Crowns are of no use to you; why do you seek pleasure from crowns?6
Chapter 19 (1) Are we now to wait for a scriptural repudiation of the amphitheater, also? If we can claim that cruelty, impiety, and brutality are permitted us, let us by all means go to the amphi theater. If we are what people say we are, let us take delight in human blood.1 (2) It is a good thing when the guilty are punished. Who will deny this but the guilty? Yet it is not becoming for the guiltless to take pleasure in the punishment of another; rather, it befits the guiltless to grieve that a man, like himself, has become so guilty that he is treated with such
5 Conservative Romans objected to the introduction of Greek gymnastics.
Ascribing the fall of Greece chiefly to the idle life in the gymnasia, they feared -a simitar corruption of the Roman youth by these exercises (cf. especially Plutarch, Quaestiones Romanae 40) .
6 Tertullian means the crowns, the prizes of victory in the athletic contests. To him the wearing of crowns is a heathen practice connected with idolatry and should, therefore, not be practised by Christians under any circumstances. He deals with this subject in detail in his treatise De corona.
1 An allusion to one of the false and harmful accusations against the Christians. Their ceremonies while celebrating the Holy Eucharist were distorted by gruesome rumors to the effect that they were akin to cannibalism. Christian phraseology about eating Christ's flesh and drinking His blood led to the notion that the Christians observed cannibalistic rites. Refutation of this accusation in the works of the Christian apologists is quite frequent; see, for instance, Tertullian
Apology 2.5; 7.1; 8.2,7; Minucius Felix, Octavius 9.5.
SPECTACLES
cruelty. (3) And who is my voucher that it is the guilty always who are condemned to the beasts,2 or whatever punish ment, and that it is never inflicted on innocence, too, through the vindictiveness of the judge or the weakness of the defense or the intensity of the torture? How much better it is, then, not to know when the wicked are punished, lest I come to know also when the good are destroyed, provided, of course, that there is savor of good in them. (4) Certain it is that innocent men are sold as gladiators to serve as victims of public pleasure.3 Even in the case of those who are condemned to the games, what a preposterous idea is it that, in atonement for a smaller offense, they should be driven to the extreme of murder!
(5) This reply I have addressed to Gentiles. Heaven forbid that a Christian should need any further instruction about the detestableness of this kind of spectacle. No one, however, is able to describe all the details at full length except one who is still in the habit of going to the spectacles. I myself prefer to leave the picture incomplete rather than to recall it.
2 One of the most cruel kinds of execution provided for in Roman law was to deliver those sentenced to death either defenseless or insufficiently armed to wild beasts in the arena. The frightful executions in the amphitheater were a center of attraction for the Roman public at large, who had no idea of the sanctity of life.
3 Among the gladiators there were, no doubt, a number of condemned criminals, but the greater part of them consisted of innocent people, prisoners of war, slaves sold by their owners to the arena, free-born men who either were coerced to fight or volunteered, finding the very danger of the profession an incentive. Cf. Lactantius, Divinae institutiones 6.20.14: 'Being imbued with this practice [of clamoring for ever-fresh combatants in the amphitheater] they have lost their humanity. Therefore they do not even spare the innocent, but practise upon all what they have learned in the slaughter of the wicked.'
TERTULLIAN
Chapter 20 (1) How foolish, then—rather, how desperate—is the reasoning of those who, obviously as a subterfuge to avoid the loss of pleasure, plead as their excuse that no regulation con cerning such an abstinence is laid down in Scripture, in precise terms or in a definite passage, forbidding the servant of God to enter gatherings of this kind. (2) Only recently I heard a novel defense offered by one of these devotees of the games. 'The sun,' he said, 'nay, even God Himself, looks on from heaven and is not defiled.' Why, the sun also sends his rays into the sewer and is not soiled! (3) Would that God looked on at no sins of men that we might all escape judg ment ! But He looks on at robberies, He looks on at falsehoods and adulteries and frauds and acts of idolatry and at the very spectacles. And it is for that reason that we will not look at them, lest we be seen by Him who looks on at everything.
(4) My man, you are putting the defendant on the same footing as the judge: the defendant who is a defendant because he is seen, and the judge who, because he sees, is judge. (5) Do we, perhaps, indulge in frenzy also outside the confines of the circus, outside the gates of the theater give free play to lewdness, outside the stadium to haughty deportment, outside the amphitheater to cruelty, just because God has eyes also outside the covered seats and the tiers and the stage? We are wrong: nowhere and never is there any exemption from what God condemns; nowhere and never is there any per mission for what is forbidden always and everywhere. (6) It is the freedom from the change of opinion and from the mutability of judgment that constitutes the fullness of truth and—what is due to truth—perfect morality, unvarying
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reverence, and faithful obedience. What is intrinsically good or evil cannot be anything else.
Chapter 21 (1) All things, we maintain, are firmly defined by the truth of God. The heathens who do not possess the fullness of truth, since their teacher of truth is not God, form their judgment of good and evil in accordance with their own opinion and inclination, making what is good in one place evil in another, and what is evil in one place good in another. (2) Thus it happens that the same man who in public will scarcely raise the tunic to ease nature will put it off in the circus in such a way as to expose himself completely to the gaze of all; and the man who protects the ears of his maiden daughter from every foul word will take her himself to the theater to hear such words and see the gestures which accompany them. (3) The same man who tries to break up or denounces a quarrel in the streets which has come to fisticuffs will in the stadium applaud fights far more dangerous; and the same man who shudders at the sight of the body of a man who died in accordance with nature's law common to all will in the amphitheater look down with tolerant eyes upon bodies mangled, rent asunder, and smeared with their own blood. (4) What is more, the same man who allegedly comes to the spectacle to show his approval of the punishment for murder will have a reluctant gladiator driven on with lashes and with rods to commit murder;1 and the same man who wants every more notorious
1 Reluctant gladiators were driven with whips and hot irons into the arena to fight, while the excited spectators shouted: 'Kill him, lash