Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
If, then, ordinary human judgment—even with the seductive whisper of pleasure working against it—condemns such men, stripping them of every mark of standing and dashing them onto some reef of infamy, how much more will divine justice take note of such performers? Will God be pleased with that charioteer, disturber of so many souls, minister of so many furies, of so many... statues—crowned or painted like some priest, like a pimp, whom the devil has decked out to be swept off in his chariot against Elijah's own sun-god rivals? Will he be pleased, too, with the man who alters his own face with a razor, unfaithful to his own features—not content to make his face the next thing to Saturn's and Isis's and Bacchus's, he further exposes it to the insult of slaps, as though he were playing by the Lord's own command? So the devil, it seems, also teaches a man to patiently offer his cheek to be struck! So too he has hoisted tragic actors up on their buskins, because "no one can add a single cubit to his own height"—he wants to make Christ a liar. And now I ask further whether the very business of masks pleases the God who forbids every image to be made—how much more the image of himself? The author of truth does not love the false; in his eyes, everything that is feigned is adultery. He will therefore never approve a voice that fakes sex and age, that counterfeits love, anger, groans, and tears—for he condemns all hypocrisy without exception. And since in his law he pronounces a curse on the man who dresses himself in women's clothing, what will he judge of the pantomime dancer, who is even made up like a woman? And will that boxer, too, go unpunished? For those scars from the boxing-strap, those calluses from the fists, those cauliflower ears—he received his ears from God when he was formed precisely so that they might be ruined by being beaten. I say nothing of the man who sets a human being in front of a lion, lest it seem too little a murder compared to the man who cuts that same man's throat afterward.