On the Crown 13–15

They also crown the public orders with laurels on public occasions, and magistrates besides with golden crowns, as at Athens, as at Rome. Even above these are set the Etruscan crowns: this is the name of the crowns, distinguished with gems and golden oak leaves, from Jupiter, which they take with embroidered togas for escorting the chariots of the gods. There are also the provincial golden crowns, which now seek the larger heads of statues rather than of men. But your orders, your magistrates, and the very name of your senate is the church of Christ. You are his, enrolled in the books of life. There your purple is the blood of the Lord, and your broad stripe is his cross; there the axe is already laid at the root of the tree; there is the rod from the root of Jesse. Let the public horses too see to themselves with their crowns. Your Lord, when he chose to enter Jerusalem according to the Scripture, did not even have a donkey of his own. “Some in chariots and some in horses, but we will call on the name of the Lord our God.” From the very dwelling in that Babylon in the Apocalypse of John we are removed, much less from its seat of honour.

The populace too is crowned, now in exultation at the successes of the emperors, now for the particular solemnities of the towns. For luxury tries to catch every public rejoicing. But you are a stranger in this world, a citizen of the city above, Jerusalem. “Our citizenship,” he says, “is in heaven.” You have your own registers, your own calendars; you have nothing to do with the joys of the world; indeed you owe the opposite. “For the world will rejoice, but you will mourn.” And, I think, he calls those who mourn blessed, not those who are crowned. Weddings too crown the bride and groom; and therefore we will not marry heathens, lest they lead us as far as idolatry, with which marriage begins among them. You have the law, indeed from the patriarchs; you have the apostle commanding to marry in the Lord. Secular freedom too crowns. But you have already been redeemed by Christ, and at a great price. How will the world set free another's slave? Even if it seems to be freedom, it will also seem to be slavery. Everything in the world is imaginary, and nothing true. For even then you were free with respect to man, redeemed by Christ; and now you are Christ's slave, though set free by a man. If you think the world's freedom true, so as even to seal it with a crown, you have gone back into slavery to man, which you think freedom, and you have lost the freedom of Christ, which you think slavery.

Shall the occasions of the games also be discussed, which their very titles condemn at once, being of course sacred and funereal? For only this remains, that Olympian Jupiter, Nemean Hercules, poor little Archemorus, and unhappy Antinous should be crowned in a Christian, so that he himself becomes a spectacle that it is tiresome to watch. We have enumerated, I think, all the occasions, and none of them is ours: all are foreign, profane, unlawful, already once renounced in the solemn declaration of the sacrament. For these were the pomps of the devil and his angels: offices of the world, honours, solemnities, popular favours, false vows, human servitudes, empty praises, shameful glories, and in all these idolatries, even in the mere reckoning of the crowns with which all these things are wreathed. Claudius, to be sure, will begin by saying that in Homer's poems even the sky is crowned with stars: certainly by God, certainly for man; therefore man himself also should be crowned by God. But by the world are crowned brothels and latrines and bakehouses, the prison and the gladiatorial school, the very amphitheatres, the very stripping-rooms for the slain, and the very biers of the undertakers. How sacred and holy, how honourable and clean this dress is, judge not from one poetic sky, but from the dealings of the whole world. But a Christian will not even dishonour his own door with laurels, if he knows how many gods the devil has attached even to doors: Janus from ianua, Limentinus from limen, Forculus and Carna from fores and cardines, and among the Greeks too Thyraean Apollo and the Antelian demons.

So far is he from bringing an offering of idolatry to his own head, or rather, I might now say, to Christ, since Christ is the head of the man: a head as free as Christ himself, not liable even to a veil, much less to a binding. Further, the head that is liable to a veil, the woman's, being already occupied by this very thing, has no room for a binding as well. It has the burden of its own humility. If it ought not to be seen bare because of the angels, much more not crowned; perhaps it would then give offence to those crowned angels. For what is a crown on a woman's head but a procuress of beauty, a mark of utmost wantonness, the final denial of modesty, a fanning of allurement? Therefore, by the apostle's foresight, a woman will not adorn herself too elaborately either, so as not to be crowned even by the art of her hair. Yet he who is both the head of the man and the face of the woman, the husband of the church, Christ Jesus: what kind of wreath, I ask you, did he undergo for both sexes? One of thorns, I think, and thistles, as a figure of the sins which the earth of the flesh brought forth for us, but which the power of the cross took away, blunting every sting of death by the endurance of the Lord's head. Certainly, besides the figure, there is ready at hand the insult, the disgrace, the shame, and the cruelty interwoven with them, which then defiled and lacerated the Lord's temples, so that you now may be crowned with laurel and myrtle and olive and some famous leaf, and, what is more in use, with hundred-petalled roses picked from the garden of Midas, with both kinds of lilies and all the violets, perhaps even with gems and gold, as if to rival that crown of Christ which came to him afterwards. For he tasted honeycomb after gall, and he was not greeted as King of glory in heaven before he had been proscribed on the cross as King of the Jews, made at first by the Father a little lower than the angels, and so crowned with glory and honour. If you owe him your head for these things, repay him, if you can, with such a head as he offered his own for yours; or else be not crowned even with flowers, if you cannot be with thorns, because with flowers you may not.

Keep God's property undefiled for him. He will crown it, if he wills. Indeed he does will it; in fact he invites us: “To him who conquers,” he says, “I will give the crown of life.” Be faithful unto death, you too, and you too fight the good fight, whose crown the apostle rightly trusts is laid up for him. The angel of victory also receives a crown as he goes forth on a white horse to conquer; and another is adorned with the circle of a rainbow, a heavenly meadow. The presbyters sit crowned, and with the same gold the Son of Man himself shines above the cloud. If such are the images in a vision, what will the realities be when they are presented? Look at those; smell those. Why do you condemn to a garland or a serpent-band a head destined for a diadem? For Christ Jesus has made us kings to God and his Father. What have you to do with a flower that will die? You have the flower from the rod of Jesse, on which the whole grace of the divine Spirit rested, a flower incorruptible, unfading, everlasting; by choosing it the good soldier too has advanced in the heavenly ranks. Blush, you his fellow soldiers, to be judged now not by him but by some soldier of Mithras, who, when he is initiated in the cave, in the true camp of darkness, when a crown is offered him on the point of a sword, as if in mimicry of martyrdom, and then fitted on his head, is instructed to push it off his head with his hand and transfer it, perhaps, to his shoulder, saying that Mithras is his crown. And from then on he is never crowned, and he holds this as a sign by which to prove himself, should he ever be tested concerning his oath; and he is at once believed to be a soldier of Mithras if he throws down the crown, if he says that his crown is in his god. Let us recognize the devices of the devil, who imitates some of the things of God for this very purpose, to confound and judge us by the faithfulness of his own followers.