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| Chapter XIII.
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Chapter
XIII.
For state reasons, the various orders of the
citizens also are crowned with laurel crowns; but the magistrates
besides with golden ones, as at Athens, and at Rome. Even to those are
preferred the Etruscan. This appellation is given to the crowns which,
distinguished by their gems and oak leaves of gold, they put on, with
mantles having an embroidery of palm branches, to conduct the chariots
containing the images of the gods to the circus. There are also
provincial crowns of gold, needing now the larger heads of images
instead of those of men. But your orders, and your magistracies, and
your very place of meeting, the church, are Christ’s. You belong
to Him, for you have been enrolled in the books of life.428
There the blood of the Lord serves for your
purple robe, and your broad stripe is His own cross; there the axe is
already laid to the trunk of the tree;429
there
is the branch out of the root of Jesse.430
Never
mind the state horses with their crown. Your Lord, when, according to
the Scripture, He would enter Jerusalem in triumph, had not even an ass
of His own. These (put their trust) in chariots, and these in horses;
but we will seek our help in the name of the Lord our God.431
From so much as a dwelling in that Babylon of
John’s Revelation432
we are called away;
much more then from its pomp. The rabble, too, are crowned, at one time
because of some great rejoicing for the success of the emperors; at
another, on account of some custom belonging to municipal festivals.
For luxury strives to make her own every occasion of public gladness.
But as for you, you are a foreigner in this world, a citizen of
Jerusalem, the city above. Our citizenship, the apostle says, is in
heaven.433
You have your own registers, your own
calendar; you have nothing to do with the joys of the world; nay, you
are called to the very opposite, for “the world shall rejoice,
but ye shall mourn.”434
And I think the Lord
affirms, that those who mourn are happy, not those who are
crowned. Marriage, too, decks the bridegroom with its crown; and
therefore we will not have heathen brides, lest they seduce us even to
the idolatry with which among them marriage is initiated. You
have the law from the patriarchs indeed; you have the apostle enjoining
people to marry in the Lord.435
You have a crowning
also on the making of a freeman; but you have been already
ransomed by Christ, and that at a great price. How shall the
world manumit the servant of another? Though it seems to be liberty,
yet it will come to be found bondage. In the world everything is
nominal, and nothing real. For even then, as ransomed by Christ,
you were under no bondage to man; and now, though man has given you
liberty, you are the servant of Christ. If you think freedom of the
world to be real, so that you even seal it with a crown, you have
returned to the
slavery of man, imagining it to be freedom; you have lost the freedom
of Christ, fancying it is slavery. Will there be any dispute as to the
cause of crown-wearing, which contests in the games in their turn
supply, and which, both as sacred to the gods and in honour of the
dead, their own reason at once condemns? It only remains, that the
Olympian Jupiter, and the Nemean Hercules, and the wretched little
Archemorus, and the hapless Antinous, should be crowned in a Christian,
that he himself may become a spectacle disgusting to behold. We have
recounted, as I think, all the various causes of the wearing of the
crown, and there is not one which has any place with us: all are
foreign to us, unholy, unlawful, having been abjured already once for
all in the solemn declaration of the sacrament. For they were of the
pomp of the devil and his angels, offices of the world,436
| 436 [A suggestive
interpretation of the baptismal vow, of which see Bunsen,
Hippol., Vol. III., p. 20.] | honours, festivals, popularity huntings,
false vows, exhibitions of human servility, empty praises, base
glories, and in them all idolatry, even in respect of the origin of the
crowns alone, with which they are all wreathed. Claudius will tell us
in his preface, indeed, that in the poems of Homer the heaven also is
crowned with constellations, and that no doubt by God, no doubt for
man; therefore man himself, too, should be crowned by God. But
the world crowns brothels, and baths, and bakehouses, and prisons, and
schools, and the very amphitheatres, and the chambers where the clothes
are stripped from dead gladiators, and the very biers of the dead. How
sacred and holy, how venerable and pure is this article of dress,
determine not from the heaven of poetry alone, but from the
traffickings of the whole world. But indeed a Christian will not
even dishonour his own gate with laurel crowns, if so be he knows how
many gods the devil has attached to doors; Janus so-called from gate,
Limentinus from threshold, Forcus and Carna from leaves and hinges;
among the Greeks, too, the Thyræan Apollo, and the evil spirits,
the Antelii.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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