the grounds that it’s natural. Second, one should ask why it matters
whether something is natural or not. Presumably, by most standards,
antibiotics and life-saving surgery are unnatural; but nobody seems to be
crying to get rid of them. As so often, the appeal to nature is a thin veil
for whatever bigotry the author happens to have inherited or taken on. In
Rousseau’s letter, this becomes particularly clear when he comes to discuss
women. In defending his claims that a married woman should keep away
from all men other than her husband, that women belong at home with
children, that‘there are no good morals for women outside of a withdrawn
and domestic life’, Rousseau simply appeals to nature:‘Nature wanted it
so, and it would be a crime to stifle its voice’.^15
The school of morals
D’Alembert was neither thefirst nor the last to take the view that the
theatre could be not merely entertaining, but also a school of morals.
Unsurprisingly, this claim was often made by playwrights–among them
Lessing, Schiller, Racine and Voltaire.^16 (That said, it was by no means a
universal view among playwrights–towards the end of his career, Goethe,
for example, denies that theatre has a beneficial moral effect on the audi-
ence.^17 ) When we assess moral defences of theatre, it’s helpful to bear in
mind that they are often directed towards Christian criticisms. The con-
flict between the theatre and the church has a long history–about as
long as the history of the church itself. And it has only really ceased as
both have ceased to be taken seriously as venues forpublic moral learning.
This was not so in the past. For the early Christian church, Greek theatre was
objectionable because pagan; but, even worse, it was part of a festival for
Dionysus, a particularly unchristian deity, who symbolised, amongst
other things, intoxication, subversion and orgy. There were also other
standard church criticisms of theatre, besides its pagan origins: its alleg-
edly inherent use of illusion and deception, which were seen to contradict
Jesus’demands for truth; its effect on the emotions of the audience, taking
their minds away from God. In as much as the church was (and is) an
actively political organisation, theatre also represented an inherent poli-
tical threat, for reasons discussed in Chapter 7.
Of course, as with music, painting, sculpture, war, politics and every-
thing else, the Church was happy to make use, for its own purposes, of
those things it openly and vociferously opposed.^18 Hence wefind early
Christian tragedies, Jesuit didactic theatre, medieval pageant plays and so
on. Nonetheless, the Christian message on theatre has for the most part
been overwhelmingly negative and the claims of the playwrights (and phi-
losophers defending them) to be presenting a school of morals should be seen
in that light. Hence Racine, although claiming that Greek theatre was
A school of morals? 105