Plainly, if a later-coming faith finds any who were already forestalled by military service, their case is different — like that of those whom John admitted to the laver, like that of the most faithful centurions, one whom Christ approves and one whom Peter catechizes — provided, however, that, once the faith has been received and sealed, either the service must be forsaken at once, as has been done by many, or else one must in every way quibble, lest anything be committed against God which is not permitted even outside military service, or finally one must suffer for God, which the faith of the layman equally has stipulated. For military service promises neither impunity for offenses nor immunity from martyrdoms. Nowhere is the Christian a different thing: there is one Gospel, and the same:
namely Jesus, who will deny every denier and confess every confessor, and will make safe the soul lost for his name, but on the contrary will lose the one gained for profit against his name. In his sight the faithful layman is as much a soldier as the faithful soldier is a layman. The state of faith admits no necessities. There is no necessity of offending, for those whose one necessity is not to offend. For one is pressed by the necessity of tortures or punishments both to sacrifice and to deny outright. Yet not even to that necessity does discipline connive, because greater is the necessity of fearing denial and of undergoing martyrdom than of escaping suffering and of fulfilling one's duty.
Otherwise, a plea of this kind subverts the whole substance of the oath, so as to loosen the clasp even for voluntary offenses. For the will too could be contended to be a necessity, having, forsooth, something whereby even it is compelled. Let me have laid this groundwork with a view also to the other cases of official crowns, to which the plea of necessity is most familiar, since for this reason either offices must be shunned lest we fall into offenses, or martyrdoms must be endured so as to break off from the offices. On the first kind of question — even that of the unlawfulness of military service itself — I shall make no more, so that the second may be dealt with, lest, if I should expel military service with all my might, I should now have raised the question of the military crown in vain. Suppose, finally, that military service is lawful up to the matter of the crown. 12. But let us speak first of the crown as well.
That laurel is sacred to Apollo or to Liber — to the one as god of missiles, to the other as god of triumphs. So Claudius teaches, when he says that soldiers are wont to be wreathed with myrtle also: for the myrtle is Venus's, the mother of the Aeneadae, and also the mistress of Mars, made Roman through Ilia and the line of Romulus. But I do not believe Venus to be Roman with Mars on that side on which she is the pain of a rival mistress. When the soldiery is crowned with olive also, that is idolatry toward Minerva, likewise the goddess of arms, but also crowned from this tree when peace was made with Neptune. In these things there will be the superstition of the military garland, everywhere polluted and polluting all things. Let them now be polluted by their causes as well. Behold the yearly pronouncing of vows: what does it seem to be? The first is at the headquarters, the second at the Capitols. Take, after the places, the words also:
'Then to thee, O Jupiter, we vow that there shall be a bull with horns gilded in gold.' What is the meaning of this utterance? Assuredly it is a denial. Even if the Christian is there silent with his mouth, he answers by the crown upon his head. The same laurel is proclaimed at the distribution of the largess. Plainly this is no gratuitous idolatry, for it sells Christ for a few pieces of gold, as Judas sold him for silver. Will this be, 'You cannot serve God and mammon,' to hand your hand over to mammon and to withdraw from God? Will this be, 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's,' and yet not render man to God while you carry off the coin to Caesar? Is the laurel of triumph woven of leaves or of corpses? Is it adorned with ribbons or with graves? Is it anointed with unguents or with the tears of wives and mothers? Perhaps also of certain Christians;
for even among the barbarians Christ is present. He who has borne this cause upon his head—has not he too done battle? There is yet another kind of service, that of the royal households. For these too are called camp-followers, themselves lavish in the solemnities of the Caesars. But you likewise are the soldier and servant of another; and if of two, of God and of Caesar, then surely not of Caesar's when you owe yourself to God—even in matters common to both, I believe, to the more worthy. The public orders too are crowned with laurels for a public cause, and the magistrates moreover with golden crowns, as at Athens and at Rome. Upon these there are laid besides the Etruscan crowns. This is the name of the crowns which, distinguished by gems and gold oak-leaves from Jupiter, they take up together with the palm-embroidered togas for the leading of the sacred chariots.
There are also provincial golden crowns, requiring larger heads in proportion to the number of images. But your orders and your magistrates, and the very name of curia, is the Church of Christ. In his books of life you are enrolled. There the purple of your robe is the blood of the Lord, and the broad stripe is upon his own cross; there the axes are laid at the very stock of the tree; there the rods spring from the root of Jesse. Let the public horses see to it with their crowns. Your Lord, when according to the Scripture he willed to enter Jerusalem, had not even a private ass. 'These trust in chariots and these in horses, but we will call upon the name of the Lord our God.' From the very dwelling of that Babylon in the Apocalypse of John we are removed, much more from its tribunal.
The common people too are crowned, now out of exultation at the prosperities of their princes, now out of the peculiar character of their municipal solemnities. For all extravagance is a fisher after public rejoicing. But you, a stranger to this world and a citizen of the city above, Jerusalem—'Our citizenship,' he says, 'is in heaven'—you have your own census, your own calendars; you have nothing to do with the joys of the age, nay, you owe the very opposite. 'For the world shall rejoice, but you shall mourn.' And, I think, he says the mourners are blessed, not the crowned. Weddings too crown the bridegrooms. And therefore we shall not marry pagans, lest they lead us on even to idolatry, with which among them marriages begin. You have a law indeed from the patriarchs; you have the apostle commanding us to marry in the Lord.
Worldly manumission too crowns its recipients. But you have already been redeemed by Christ, and that at a great price. How shall the world set free another's slave? Even though it seem to be liberty, yet it will also appear to be slavery: all things in the world are imaginary and nothing is true. For even then you were a free man of a man, having been redeemed by Christ; and now you are Christ's slave, though you have been manumitted by a man. If you think worldly liberty to be true, so that you should seal it even with a crown, you have returned into the slavery of man, which you think liberty, and you have lost the liberty of Christ, which you thought slavery. And shall the athletic contests too be pleaded in defence—contests which their very titles at once condemn as sacred and funereal?
For this is what remains: that Olympian Jupiter, and Nemean Hercules, and the wretched little Archemorus, and the ill-starred Antinous should be crowned in a Christian, so that he himself becomes the very spectacle which he ought not to watch. We have enumerated, I believe, all the occasions, and none of them belongs to us: all are alien, profane, unlawful, once for all forsworn in the attestation of our sacrament. For these were the pomps of the devil and of his angels: the offices of the age, its honours, its solemnities, its popularity-seekings, its false vows, its human servitudes, its empty praises, its base glories; and in all these is idolatry, even in the very reckoning of the crowns with which all these things are wreathed.
Claudius will indeed prelude by declaring that heaven too is crowned with constellations in the verses of Homer—crowned by God, certainly, for man's sake; therefore man himself also ought to be crowned by God. But moreover, brothels too are crowned by the world, and latrines and bakehouses, and the prison and the gladiators' school, and the very amphitheatres, and the stripping-rooms, and the very undertakers' shops. How sacred and holy, how honourable and pure this custom is, judge not from one poetic heaven, but from the traffickings of the whole world. But indeed the Christian will not even disgrace his own doorway with laurels, if he knows how many gods the devil has attached even to doors: Janus from the door, Limentinus from the threshold, Forculus and Carna from the doorpanels and hinges, and even among the Greeks Apollo of the gate and the Antelian demons.
So far is he from bringing to his head the gift of idolatry—nay, I would rather say, to Christ, since Christ is the head of the man—being as free as Christ himself, subject not even to a veil, much less to a binding. But further, that which is subject to a veil, namely the head of the woman, being by this very fact already occupied, has no room also for a binding. She has the burden of her humility. If she ought not to be seen with head uncovered because of the angels, much more with head crowned. Perhaps then she would give offence to those very angels by being crowned. For what is a crown upon a woman's head but a procuress of beauty, but a mark of the utmost wantonness, the extreme denial of modesty, the kindling of allurement? For which reason the woman, in the apostle's foresight, shall not adorn herself too elaborately, so that she may not be crowned even by the artifice of her hair.
Yet he who is both the head of the man and the face of the woman, the Man of the Church, Christ Jesus—what garland, I ask you, did he submit to on behalf of either sex? Of thorns, I suppose, and briars, as a figure of the sins which the earth of our flesh brought forth for us, but which the power of the cross took away, blunting every sting of death in the endurance of the Lord's head—certainly beyond the figure: for the insult is evident, and the disgracing, and the shame, and the cruelty interwoven with these. These things then both defiled and mangled the Lord's temples, that you might now be crowned with laurel and myrtle and olive and with whatever more illustrious foliage there is, and—what is more in vogue—with the hundred-petalled roses too, gathered from the garden of Midas, and with lilies of both kinds and with all the violets, perhaps even with gems and gold?
So that you might rival even that crown of Christ which afterwards came to him? And yet he too tasted honeycombs after gall, nor was he saluted as King of glory by the heavenly ones before he was proscribed as King of the Jews upon the cross, having first been made by the Father a little lower than the angels, and thus crowned with glory and honour. If for these things you owe him your head, repay him such a head, if perchance you can, as he offered his own for yours; or else be not crowned with flowers, if you cannot with thorns—because you cannot with flowers. Keep for God his own thing undefiled. He will crown it, if he wills. Nay, he does will it; indeed he invites: 'To him that overcomes,' he says, 'I will give a crown of life.' Be you too faithful unto death; do you too fight the good fight, whose crown the apostle also deservedly trusts is laid up for him.
The angel too receives the crown of victory, going forth upon a white horse that he might conquer; while another is adorned with the compass of a rainbow, of a heavenly emerald hue. The elders too sit crowned, and by that same gold the Son of Man himself shines above the cloud. If such are the images in the vision, of what sort are the realities in their true representation? Look upon those, adore those. Why do you condemn to the diadem a head that is destined for a fillet or a headband? For Christ Jesus has made us kings to God and to his own Father. What have you to do with a flower that must die? You have the flower from the rod of Jesse, upon which the whole grace of the divine Spirit has rested—the flower incorrupt, unfading, everlasting. This flower the good soldier too, by choosing it, has advanced to in the heavenly ordination.
Blush, you his fellow-soldiers, henceforth to be judged not by him, but by some soldier of Mithras. When he is initiated in the cave, in the camp truly of darkness, a crown is offered to him with a sword interposed, as though a mimicry of martyrdom, and then set upon his head; and he is admonished to strike it off with an opposing hand from his head and to transfer it, if perchance, to his shoulder, saying that Mithras is his crown. And thereafter he is never crowned, and he holds this as a sign for his own testing, whenever he is tempted concerning his sacrament; and at once he is believed to be a soldier of Mithras if he has cast off the crown, if he has said that it is in his god. Let us recognize the devices of the devil, who counterfeits certain things of the divine, that by the faith of his own votaries he may confound and judge us.