On the Crown

​They also crown public orders with laurel for public reasons, and magistrates moreover with golden ones, as at Athens, as at Rome. Etruscan crowns are also placed upon them. This is the name of the crowns which they, distinguished by Jupiter with gems and leaves of gold from the oak, assume to escort the ceremonial chariots with embroidered togas. There are also provincial golden crowns, now of images, not of men, requiring larger heads. But your orders and your magistrates, and the very name of the senate-house, 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 upon His cross; there, the axe is already laid at the root of the tree; there, is the rod from the root of Jesse. Let public horses also look to themselves with their crowns. Your Lord, when according to scripture He wished to enter Jerusalem, did not even have a private ass. “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses, but we will call upon the name of the Lord our God.” By the very habitation of that Babylon in the Apocalypse of John we are removed, much more from the dais. The populace is also crowned, now from exultation in imperial prosperities, now from the peculiarity of municipal solemnities. For the luxury of all public joy is a captivating thing. But you are a stranger to this world, a citizen of the city above, Jerusalem. “Our citizenship,” it says, “is in heaven.” You have your own census, your own calendars, you have nothing to do with the joys of the world; rather, you owe the contrary. “For the world shall rejoice, but you shall lament.” And, I think, He pronounces blessed those who read, not those who are crowned. Marriage also crowns spouses, and for this reason we do not marry pagans, lest they lead us even into idolatry, from which among them marriage begins. You have a law from the patriarchs indeed, and you have the apostle commanding to marry in the Lord. Secular freedom also crowns. But you have already been redeemed by Christ, and indeed at a great price. How shall the world manumit another’s servant? Even if it seems to be freedom, yet it will also be seen as servitude. Everything is imaginary in the world, and nothing is true. For even then you were a free man of man, redeemed by Christ, and now you are a servant of Christ, although manumitted by man. If you think the freedom of the world is true, so that you seal it with a crown, you have returned into the servitude of man, which you think is freedom, and you have lost the freedom of Christ, which you think is servitude. Shall athletic contests also be discussed, which their very titles condemn immediately, being indeed both sacred and funeral? For this is what remains: that Olympian Jupiter, and Nemean Hercules, and poor little Archemorus, and unhappy Antinous should be crowned in a Christian, so that he himself becomes a spectacle which it is tedious to behold. We have enumerated, as I think, all the occasions, and none is with us; all are foreign, profane, illicit, already once abjured in the witness of our oath. For these were the pageants of the devil and his angels: the offices of the world, honors, solemnities, popularities, false vows, human services, empty praises, disgraceful glories, and in all these, idolatry exists even in the mere census of the crowns with which all these things are wreathed. Claudius indeed prefaces that even the heaven is crowned with stars in Homer’s poems, certainly by God, certainly for man; therefore, man himself must also be crowned by God. But by the world are crowned brothels, latrines, mills, prison, school, the amphitheaters themselves, the stripping-rooms, and the undertakers themselves. How sacred and holy, how honorable and clean this habit is, do not judge from one poetic heaven, but from the traffics of the whole world. But indeed, the Christian will not defile even his door with laurels, if he knows how many gods the devil has attached even to entrances: Janus from the door, Limentinus from the threshold, Forculus and Carna from the folding-doors and hinges, and even among the Greeks, Apollo of the Gateway and the demons facing the sun.