On the Crown

​The reasoning for Christian observations becomes greater when nature also defends them, which is the first discipline of all. And therefore this nature first prescribes that a crown does not fit the head. Now, I think that the God of nature is our God, who fashioned man and, for the purpose of desiring, judging, and obtaining the fruits of things, ordained certain senses in him through what may be called the proper organs of his limbs. He dug hearing in the ears, lit sight in the eyes, enclosed taste in the mouth, ventilated smell in the nostrils, and evaluated touch in the hands. Through these services of the outer man administering to the inner man, the fruits of the divine gifts are led to the soul from the senses. What fruit, then, is there from flowers? For the proper substance, or certainly the chief substance, of crowns is the flowers of the field. “Either smell,” you say, “or color, or both alike.” What will be the senses of color and smell? Sight, I think, and smell. Which limbs have obtained these senses? The eyes, if I mistake not, and the nostrils. Use flowers, therefore, with sight and smell, of which senses they are the fruit; use them through the eyes and nostrils, of which senses they are the limbs. The substance was handed down to you by God, the fashion by the world. Although even an extraordinary fashion does not conflict with ordinary use. Let flowers, whether inserted or interwoven, on a thread or on a rush, be to you what they are when free and loose, namely, things for sight and breath. If perchance you deem a crown to be a bundle of flowers grasped in a row, so that you may carry many at once, so that you may use all alike. Now indeed, both hide them in your bosom, if there is such neatness, and scatter them on your couch, if there is such softness, and commit them to your cup, if there is such innocence. Enjoy them in as many ways as you also sense them. But on the head, what taste of a flower is there, what sense of a crown, except only that of a bond, by which neither color is seen, nor smell drawn in, nor tenderness commended? It is as much against nature to seek after a flower with the head, as food with the ear, or sound with the nostril. But everything that is against nature deserves the mark of a monster among all, but among us indeed even the charge of sacrilege against God, the Lord and author of nature.

​Seeking, therefore, the law of God, you have that common one in the public of the world, on the natural tablets, to which the Apostle also is accustomed to appeal; as when, in the matter of the veil of a woman, he says, “Does not even nature teach you?” as when, to the Romans, saying that the Gentiles do by nature the things of the law, he suggests both a natural law and a legal nature. But also in the first part of the epistle, affirming that males and females changed among themselves the natural use of the creation into that which is against nature, in return for the recompense of their error as a punishment, he certainly patronizes natural things. We know God Himself first according to nature, namely, calling Him God of gods, presuming Him to be good, and invoking Him as judge. Do you ask whether nature ought to go before us in enjoying His creation, lest we be carried away by that path by which the rival of God corrupted the entire creation, made subject to man for certain uses, along with man himself, whence also the apostle says that it was made subject to vanity unwillingly, subverted first to vain uses, then to base, unjust, and impious ones? Thus, then, also concerning the pleasures of the spectacles, the creation is defamed by those who indeed by nature perceive all the things of God from which spectacles are prepared, but in knowledge fail to understand this also, that all things have been changed by the devil. But on this subject also, for the sake of our play-lovers, we have given satisfaction also in the Greek style.