Augustine was an African Christian who lived from 354-430. So, of course, he never owned a television or watched a movie. However, in his book, Confessions, he says that around the age of sixteen, “I developed a passion for stage plays” (likely Greek tragedies). His observations about the pull of the plays upon his own heart have a strong parallel to the entertainment today and our own reaction to it. Take a look at some quotations from Augustine and the impact the plays had on him.
“The more a man feels such sufferings for himself, the more he is moved by the sight of them on the stage.”
Augustine believed that the plays held up a “mirror to my own miseries” and that he was attracted to the content in the play because it was what was already in his heart.
“The unreal sufferings of the stage…the spectator is not moved to aid the sufferer, but merely to be sorry for him.”
Augustine realized that the tragedies he was witnessing on the stage were not calling him to help the person in need (true caring and love) but instead the fictional depictions of tragedy, pain, and sorry led him to experience a detached pity. He said, “There is real pleasure in pitying others – and we love their sorrows.” His argument was that the plays he went to see were driving his heart to enjoy the sorrows of others rather than to find compassionate solutions for those sorrows.
“Beware of uncleanness… In those days when I went to the theatres, I was glad with lovers when they sinfully enjoyed each other – although the whole thing was merely fictitious and a part of a stage play.”
Augustine saw the tacit approval of wrongdoing in the fictional sphere to be something that was harmful and would leak out into his perception of reality and his view of sin in his day-to-day world.
“I loved to be made sad…and in the misery of others (on the stage) my emotions were stirred. The more my tears were set to flowing, the more pleasure did I get from the drama and the more powerfully did it hold me.”
Augustine’s experience is one that is common to us all. We are gripped by, we remember and are even changed by stories we see portrayed on stage and screen. When the stories cater to our desire to feed our lowest impulses, the hold those stories have upon us is as strong as the impact of stories that inspire what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”
“I loved those sorrows – not that I wanted them to bite too deep (for I had no wish to suffer the sorrows I loved to look upon), but simply to scratch the surface of my heart as I saw them on the stage. If they had been real fingernails, their scratching would have been followed by swelling, inflammation, sores, and flowing pus.”
If we are not careful, we – like Augustine – can be drawn in by entertainment on the screen as a “scratch” to an “itch” that we have for attitudes, perspectives, inclinations, and emotions that are evil and perverse within ourselves. Whether we inwardly revel in an angry monologue delivered by an actor, a scene of sexual lewdness, or a display of rampant materialistic greed portrayed on the screen, scratching that itch in the make-believe world of entertainment does not make that itch go away in real life. Instead, it normalizes the sin in our minds as we go on in search of the next opportunity to scratch that itch.
Was Augustine arguing against all forms of on-stage/on-screen entertainment? I don’t think he was. However, he was noting the detrimental effect (mental, emotional, spiritual) the wrong programming can have upon the human heart.