Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Chapter XVII.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter
XVII.
Are we not, in like manner, enjoined to put away from us
all immodesty? On this ground, again, we are excluded from the
theatre, which is immodesty’s own peculiar abode, where nothing
is in repute but what elsewhere is disreputable. So the best path to
the highest favour of its god is the vileness which the Atellan364
| 364 [The ludi
Atellani were so called from Atella, in Campania, where a vast
amphitheatre delighted the inhabitants. Juvenal, Sat. vi. 71. The like
disgrace our times.] |
gesticulates, which the buffoon in woman’s clothes exhibits,
destroying all natural modesty, so that they blush more readily at home
than at the play, which finally is done from his childhood on the
person of the pantomime, that he may become an actor. The very harlots,
too, victims of the public lust, are brought upon the stage, their
misery increased as being there in the presence of their own sex, from
whom alone they are wont to hide themselves: they are paraded
publicly before every age and every rank—their abode, their
gains, their praises, are set forth, and that even in the hearing of
those who should not hear such things. I say nothing about other
matters, which it were good to hide away in their own darkness and
their own gloomy caves, lest they should stain the light of day. Let
the Senate, let all ranks, blush for very shame! Why, even these
miserable women, who by their own gestures destroy their modesty,
dreading the light of day, and the people’s gaze, know something
of shame at least once a year. But if we ought to abominate all that is
immodest, on what ground is it right to hear what we must not speak?
For all licentiousness of speech, nay, every idle word, is condemned by
God. Why, in the same way, is it right to look on what it is
disgraceful to do? How is it that the things which defile a man in
going out of his mouth, are not regarded as doing so when they go in at
his eyes and ears—when eyes and ears are the immediate attendants
on the spirit—and that can never be pure whose
servants-in-waiting are impure? You have the theatre forbidden, then,
in the forbidding of immodesty. If, again, we despise the
teaching of secular literature as being foolishness in God’s
eyes, our duty is plain enough in regard to those spectacles, which
from this source derive the tragic or comic play. If tragedies and
comedies are the bloody and wanton, the impious and licentious
inventors of crimes and lusts, it is not good even that there should be
any calling to remembrance the atrocious or the vile. What you reject
in deed, you are not to bid welcome to in word.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
