Recreation in the Renaissance

The Moral Discourse 61
other honest exercises besides plays and games may prove more appropriate
for Christians. 30
The ethics of the audience
Among the leisure activities which pose different moral problems to the
people taking varying roles in them, the whole world of the performing
arts should be included. It is obvious that performing and watching
(or listening) bear quite different implications. One should add that
performing is a leisure activity only in so far as someone is not professional
(nor, conversely, is drama-, ballet- or concertgoing leisure for
a theatre, dance or music critic – although this would have been an
anachronistic profession in early modern Europe, at least until the
eighteenth-century diffusion of literary magazines). Notwithstanding
such distinctions, a moral consideration of these human activities tends
to consider them as a whole and, while perhaps commenting on the
nuances implied by the various roles, is also likely to offer a coherent
overall judgement.
The specific moral perspective from which medieval and early modern
writers could consider this field varied; therefore the framework and
occasion of discussions is per se worth registering and analysing. At the
dawn of the Christian Middle Ages, in Augustine’s Confessions (VI, 8),
we find the story of Alypius, who hated gladiatorial contests. Dragged
to the arena by some friends, he kept his eyes closed, but opened them
when attracted by the sound of the excited crowd. Naturally, from then
on he became addicted to this bloody entertainment. Curiosity compelled
him to open his eyes. Both Augustine and (three hundred years
later) Bede regarded the curiosity that lures people to the theatre as an
effect of the ‘lust of the eyes’ (concupiscentia oculorum). 31 In the thirteenth
century, reference to those passages of Augustine and Bede provided
the grounds for Aquinas’s treatment of the moral implications of
theatregoing. The relevant question of his Summa theologica (II/II, 167)
discusses curiositas, the vice opposite to studiositas. In the tradition
of Christian doctrine, the latter is one of the forms of the virtue of
modesty. We are therefore, here, in the religious world of binary oppositions
(where one path needs to be followed, the other avoided), rather
than in the ternary system of Aristotelian ethics (where virtue stands in
the golden mean between two opposite vices).
Aquinas divides the topic into two articles, one concerning curiosity
in the field of intellectual knowledge, the other in that of sensory