The Immorality of the Theatre: Echoes of the Criticism of Early Christian Literature in Rousseau’s Letter to D’Alembert

Abstract

If the debate about the moral limits of artistic expression represents a constant in Western cultural history, criticism of drama is an outstanding example of this controversy by virtue of its vividness and persistence. Both these characteristics are more than evident in the interesting argumentative confluence between the Letter to M. D’Alembert by Jean Jacques Rousseau and early Christian literature. The link is explained by means of the famous Querelle du théâtre, which pitted reformers against rigorists during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France. This article is intended to demonstrate some of the points of contact between Rousseau’s critique and that of Tertullian and Augustine, showing how arguments put forth originally in a religious context are present in the secular field.