Letter 237

Isidore of PelusiumUnknown|isidore pelusium
From: Isidore of Pelusium, monk at Pelusium
To: Alupius
Date: ~410 AD
Context: Isidore warns against the theater as a school of vice — cataloguing the specific kinds of damage it does to those who attend.

The theater — that furnace of irrational love — captures the best of men and drags them into the worst of themselves. It does not do this subtly. It does it systematically: it trains the audience to find virtue boring and vice entertaining; to admire what the gospel condemns; to weep at the sorrows of fictional people while remaining indifferent to the real sorrows of neighbors they walk past every day.

This is not mere entertainment. It is formation — but formation in the wrong direction. Avoid it.

Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.