Chapter V — On the obligation of the baptismal profession

I. I should have need of Tully's eloquence, that I might be able to lay open according to its worth the incredible sluggishness and drowsiness of certain parish priests in setting forth to adults and young men the most grave burdens and obligations which the baptismal profession carries with it. Very few among Christians will you meet who hold the force and signification of the Christian profession which by a solemn rite they uttered to God in baptism. Before we enter the Church of Christ, or are received into the society of Christ's faithful, first of all we renounce the devil, his pomps, works, and spectacles. What does this renunciation betoken? What are these pomps, what these works, what these spectacles upon which you have declared war, O Christian? Answer. Are you dumb, because you have not been instructed? Hear, and fix it in your heart. The profession made in baptism is that which separates Christians from the world, which is contrary to flesh, blood, pomps, and carnal delights, which distinguishes Christians from the pagans. The pagans observed justice, chastity, equity, and all those things which are necessary for fostering a tranquil society. What therefore do Christians renounce in the baptismal profession, that they may be distinguished from the pagans? Declare it. All the Fathers answer with one mouth, none excepted — especially Tertullian, Cyprian, Nazianzen, Cyril of Alexandria, Basil, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Salvian, and, to omit the rest, St. Charles Borromeo — that Christians renounced theatres, comedies, tragedies, dances, and the other spectacles of a raving world, vain, opposed to modesty and shame, such as are the naked display of the breasts in women, paint, curls, and other prestiges of this kind. The testimonies of the Fathers I have given in the Book On Theatrical Spectacles. One or another for brevity's sake I shall now transcribe.

II. In the Book On the Catechizing of the Uninstructed, chapter 6, St. Augustine instructs an uninstructed man to abstain from theatres if he wishes to be a Christian. But when those are instructed against whom a perverse crowd bodily fill the churches, at the same time also the precepts of Christian and honourable conversation are briefly and becomingly commemorated; lest by drunkards, the avaricious, defrauders, gamesters … lovers of spectacles … and others of this kind he be seduced, and reckon it perhaps unpunished for himself. Because he sees many who are called Christians to love these things, and to do them, and to defend them, and to persuade and prevail upon others.

III. Do you see? Even then carnal Christians dared to persuade and prevail that the frequenting of theatres was lawful — Christians who bodily, as now, filled the churches — from whose lies Augustine endeavours to preserve the uninstructed Christian. Again in chapter 25 he instructs the same uninstructed man against the frequenting of theatres, adding: You will also observe that those crowds fill the churches on the feast days of Christians who fill the theatres on the solemn days of the pagans, and you will be tempted to imitate them. At last, toward the end of the Book, he thus addresses his uninstructed man: Do thou therefore, believing these things, beware of temptations; for the devil seeks companions to perish with him, so that not only through those who are outside the Church — whether pagans, or Jews, or heretics — does that enemy seduce, but also through those whom you shall see within the Catholic Church itself living ill, or immoderate in the pleasures of the belly and the throat, or given to unchaste or vain curiosities, or to unlawful things, whether of spectacles … or in the pomp of pride and avarice. Do not imitate them, but rather be joined with the good, whom you will easily find, if you yourself shall be such.

IV. Unless dances, which are performed even in the theatre, and unless comedies and tragedies be pomps and spectacles of the devil, what will they be? Opportune are the things which Salvian writes, Book 6: In spectacles there is a certain apostasy of the faith, and a deadly prevarication of its very symbols and heavenly sacraments. For what is the first confession of Christians in baptism? What, namely, but that they protest that they renounce the devil and his pomps and spectacles and works? Therefore spectacles and pomps are, even according to our profession, works of the devil.

V. But let us hear a Father of the last age, St. Charles Borromeo, who in his homily on the seventh Sunday after Pentecost writes these things, treating of spiritual blindness: And what — woe is me! — do I hear? That in this city there lies open so savage a workshop of lusts and unchastities, that frequent comedies are recited, and on the stages actors, most unworthy men, masked, lead innumerable incautious young men of this city into the nets of the devil. … I confess indeed, my sons, that while I perhaps slept an enemy man oversowed these tares, and that without my knowing this plague crept in. But we shall certainly endeavour hereafter, God granting, to repress it. … The mime and the actor have invited you by bills fixed to the wall to a satanic invention, which they call a comedy; but hear me: a tragedy it is, and always will be. … Christ calls you through us … and yet his calls are contemned. … The time will come, most beloved, when you will desire to approach and will not be able … but to the mimes and actors of the fathers … prepared for unchaste women … and to the transit of men you will be sent. Read, I pray, the whole.

VI. What say they here who assert that the theatres of that age were different and more obscene, which the Fathers disapproved, from those which flourish in our age? The Fathers condemn that men come forth on the stage clothed in womanly garb, whom they call bufalloi, femellae. They condemn that women with shame cast off act as mimes. They condemn dances, they condemn the music which they call meretricious, they condemn the song which they call stimulating. The truth is inescapable, to which even the patrons of the theatres themselves subscribe: namely, that the music of our age is softer and the song more effeminate. Therefore on this side the theatres of our age are baser than the ancient ones. What of this, that in the ancient ones Christian women (and rarely pagan ones) did not come forth upon the stage? Therefore wrongly are all the theatres of our age traduced as honourable.

VII. Having therefore renounced pomps, spectacles, comedies, tragedies, dances, and all those things which cannot be referred to the glory of Jesus Christ, those to be baptized are admitted into the Church to profess the Christian religion: because a rebel, before he be reconciled to his prince, must first turn his back upon the enemy. In the Church they profess the symbol of faith and the Christian life. What is the Christian life? It is the imitation of the life of Jesus Christ; it is a perpetual war against the devil, the world, the concupiscence of the flesh and of the eyes, the pride of life, ambition, feigned luxury, pomps; it is a perpetual contest against the flesh, an interminable struggle against human appetites; it is a life of penitence, of humility, and of patience; it is the bond of charity, by which all Christians are joined both to God and to one another in an intimate union; it is a profession of singing praises to God, of praying, beseeching, and asking the divine grace; it is the toleration of injuries, persecutions, and calumnies. Not all these things suffice here: one must pray for persecutors and calumniators. Nor is all this enough: not in secret ought a Christian to serve God with an undaunted breast, but openly and publicly to confess — what? The Unity and Trinity of God, the Incarnation of Christ, the symbol, the sacraments. He ought to hold all these things, and it does not suffice. He ought moreover to profess Christian moral integrity and sanctity, which in this our age, no otherwise than formerly the articles of the symbol, suffers no light persecution. Nor ought the hatred and persecution of worldly men to deter a Christian from a profession of this kind: for unless he undergo such a danger, he cannot be Christ's servant. Christ's disciples complained that the world hated them; to whom Christ himself replied: Know ye that it hath hated me before you. If you had been of the world, the world would love its own: but because you are not of the world, therefore the world hateth you. The servant is not greater than his lord. He who shall have blushed at me, my words, my precepts, my examples, my patience and humility, my fastings and persecutions — I too will blush at him before my Father. He that shall confess me before men, I will also confess him before my Father. You shall be hated by all the followers of the world for my name's sake. By these few things the image of the Christian profession has been delineated. If here there be lacking little devotions, frequenting of churches, and pious booklets, they profit nothing. The promise made in Baptism, the baptismal vow, is first of all to be observed. And that this observance may be carried through, there are to be added devotions, spiritual exercises, and the reading of pious books. But the Gospels — again I say the Gospels — are to be read with a profound humility and lowliness of mind, and continuously. Concerning this Christian profession read more in Vol. VIII, dissertation 2, chapter 17.