On the Shows 23

Since, then, human reflection, even with the charm of pleasure clamoring against it, judges that they should be condemned, stripped of the benefits of rank, and cast onto a kind of rock of infamy, how much more does divine justice punish such performers? Will that charioteer please God, the disturber of so many souls, the minister of so many frenzies, of so many …, crowned like a priest or dressed in colors like a pimp, whom the devil has decked out to be carried off in a chariot in rivalry with Elijah? Will that one please him who changes his features with a razor, unfaithful to his own face, which, not content to make it resemble Saturn and Isis and Liber, he moreover exposes to the insults of slaps, as if making sport of the Lord's command? The devil too, of course, teaches us to offer the cheek patiently to be struck! So too he has raised the tragic actors on buskins, because “no one can add one cubit to his stature”: he wants to make Christ a liar. And now I ask whether the very business of masks pleases God, who forbids any likeness to be made, how much more a likeness of his own image? The author of truth does not love what is false; with him everything counterfeited is adultery. So he will not approve a voice that belies sex and age, that feigns loves, angers, groans, and tears; for he condemns all hypocrisy. Moreover, since in the law he pronounces cursed whoever is dressed in women's clothing, what will he judge of the pantomime, who is even bent into women's postures? The artist of the fists, no doubt, will go unpunished! For he received such scars from the cestus, such calluses of the fists, such swollen ears from God when he was fashioned; God lent him eyes for this, that they might be put out by blows! I say nothing of the man who pushes another before him to face the lion, lest he be less a murderer than the one who afterwards cuts the same man's throat.