The Wreath and the Sword

By now most Christians have talked themselves into believing that it is excusable, every so often, to do what the pagans do — for fear that “the Name be blasphemed.” But the blasphemy we must avoid at all costs is, I take it, this: when one of us gives a pagan real cause to blaspheme, by cheating him, or injuring him, or insulting him, or anything else he has an honest complaint about, so that the Name is attacked deservedly and the Lord is deservedly angry. Otherwise, if “through you my name is blasphemed” covers every kind of blasphemy, we are all lost at once — since the whole circus assails the Name with its foul shouting, and we have done nothing to deserve it. Let us stop being Christians, then, and it will not be blasphemed! On the contrary: as long as we are Christians, let it be blasphemed — blasphemed while we are keeping the discipline, not while we are overstepping it; while we are being approved, not while we are being condemned. Blasphemy on the very edge of martyrdom, which testifies that I am a Christian at the moment it detests me for being one! To curse a discipline well kept is to bless the Name. [a]

“If I still wanted to please men,” Paul says, “I would not be Christ’s slave.” But the same apostle tells us elsewhere to take care to please everyone: “as I please all men in all things.” No doubt he pleased them by keeping the Saturnalia and New Year’s Day! Or was it by restraint and patience — by seriousness, kindness, and honesty? In the same way, when he says, “I have become all things to all, so that I may gain all,” does he mean an idolater to idolaters, a pagan to pagans, worldly to the worldly? He does not forbid us to keep company with idolaters and adulterers and other criminals: “otherwise you would have to leave the world.” But he does not slacken the reins of company so far that, since we have to live and mix with sinners, we may sin along with them as well. Where there is the sharing of life, which the apostle allows, there is also the sinning, which nobody allows. To live with pagans is lawful. To die with them is not.

So let us live with them all; let us be glad with them, on the ground of a nature we share, not of a superstition we share. We are their equals in soul, not in discipline; joint owners of the world, not of its error. But if we have no right to share in things like these even with outsiders, how much worse is it to celebrate them among brothers! Who can maintain that, or defend it? The Holy Spirit reproaches the Jews for their holy days: “Your sabbaths and new moons and ceremonies — my soul hates them.” And here are we, to whom sabbaths are foreign, and new moons, and the festivals God himself once loved — and we keep the Saturnalia, and the first of January, and Midwinter, and the Matronalia! Presents come and go, New Year’s gifts change hands, the games add their noise and the dinner parties their din. The nations keep better faith with their own sect than we do: they claim no Christian festival for themselves. Not the Lord’s day, not Pentecost — even if they had heard of them, they would not have shared them with us, for fear of looking like Christians. And we are not afraid of looking like pagans!

If any allowance is to be made to the flesh, you have it. I will not even say your own days — you have more than that. A pagan gets each festival once a year; you get a festival every eighth day. Call out the separate holy days of all the nations, set them in a row, and they still cannot make up a Pentecost.

“Let your works shine,” he says. But these days it is our shops and our front doors that shine! You will find more pagan doorways now without lamps and laurel wreaths than Christian ones. What are we to make of this sort of ceremony? If it is an honor paid to an idol, then plainly an idol’s honor is idolatry. If it is done for a man’s sake — well, consider again that all idolatry is done for man’s sake; consider again that all idolatry is worship paid to men, since even their own worshippers generally agree that the gods of the nations were once men themselves. So it makes no difference whether that superstitious homage goes to men of an earlier age or of this one. Idolatry stands condemned not because of the persons set up to be worshipped, but because of its observances, which belong to demons. [i]

“The things that are Caesar’s are to be rendered to Caesar.” It is enough that he set the other half beside it: “and the things that are God’s to God.” What, then, is Caesar’s? Exactly what they were consulting him about: whether the poll tax should be paid to Caesar or not. That is why the Lord asked for the coin to be shown him and asked whose likeness was on it; and when he had heard it was Caesar’s, he said, “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and what is God’s to God” — that is, the image of Caesar, which is on the coin, to Caesar, and the image of God, which is on man, to God. You render money to Caesar and yourself to God. Otherwise, what will be left for God, if everything is Caesar’s? To which you say: “Then the lamps at my door and the laurels on my doorposts are an honor to God?” They are there, of course, not because they honor God, but because they honor the one who stands in God’s place in ceremonies of this kind. That much is on the surface; the act of worship itself, which is done in secret, belongs to demons. For anyone whose ignorance of pagan literature has kept this from him should be sure of it: the Romans have gods of entrances — Cardea, named for the hinge; Forculus, for the door; Limentinus, for the threshold; and Janus himself, for the gate. Of course we know that names like these are empty and made up. But once they are dragged down into superstition, demons and every unclean spirit seize them for their own by the bond of consecration. Demons have no personal names of their own; they find a name in the place where they also find a token. Among the Greeks in the same way we read of Apollo Thyraeus — Apollo of the Door — and of the Antelian demons, who preside over entrances.

The Holy Spirit foresaw all this from the beginning and sang of it beforehand through Enoch, that most ancient of prophets: even doorways would be turned to superstitious use. And we can see that other kinds of mouth are worshipped as well, at the baths. So if there are beings worshipped at entrances, the lamps and the laurels belong to them. Whatever you do to a doorway, you will have done to an idol.

Here I call in a witness on God’s authority as well, since it is not safe to keep quiet about something shown to one man — shown, obviously, for everyone’s sake. I know of a brother who was severely punished in a vision that same night because, when public celebrations were suddenly announced, his slaves had put wreaths on his gates. He had not put them up himself and had not ordered it; he had left the house beforehand, and when he came back he told them off for what they had done. That is how strictly we are assessed with God in matters of this kind — even for the discipline of our own household.

As for the honors due to kings or emperors, we have a rule that covers it: we are to be obedient in everything, as the apostle directs — “subject to magistrates and rulers and powers” — but within the limits of discipline, and only so long as we keep ourselves clear of idolatry. That is why the example of the three brothers ran ahead of us. They were obedient to King Nebuchadnezzar in everything else, and yet they refused with complete steadiness to honor his statue. They proved that whatever is exalted past the measure of honor due to a man, into the likeness of divine loftiness, is idolatry. Daniel too submitted to Darius on every other point, and stayed at his post as long as it put his religion in no danger; and rather than run that danger he was no more afraid of the king’s lions than the three had been of the king’s fires.

So let people who have no light light their lamps every day; let people with the fires of hell hanging over them fasten laurels to their doorposts — laurels that will shortly burn. The tokens of darkness and the omens of their punishment suit them. But you are a light of the world, and a tree that never loses its leaves. If you have renounced temples, do not make a temple out of your own front door. That is putting it too mildly. If you have renounced brothels, do not dress your own house up to look like a new one.

When it comes to the ceremonies of private and family occasions — the white toga, betrothals, weddings, the naming of a child — I do not think there is any danger to guard against from the whiff of idolatry mixed in with them. We have to look at the reasons the ceremony exists at all. The ones I have named I take to be clean in themselves, since neither a man’s clothing nor the wedding ring nor the marriage itself comes down to us from honors paid to any idol. In fact I find no clothing cursed by God except a woman’s clothing on a man: “cursed,” he says, “is every man who dresses himself in a woman’s clothes.” And the toga is a garment that is manly in name as well as in use. God no more forbids a wedding to be held than a name to be given. “But there are sacrifices that go with these occasions.” Let me be invited, then, and let the ceremony not be billed as “attendance at a sacrifice,” and my good offices are at my friends’ disposal. I only wish they were at their disposal in fact, and that we could get out of watching what we are not allowed to do. But since the evil one has hemmed the world about with idolatry so completely, it will be lawful for us to attend some ceremonies where what we are seen doing is a service to a man, not to an idol. Obviously, if I am invited to take a priest’s part and to sacrifice, I will not go: that is a service belonging to an idol alone. And I will not supply advice, or money, or any other good turn in a matter of that kind either. If it is on account of the sacrifice that I am invited and stand there, I will be a sharer in idolatry. If some other reason puts me next to the man sacrificing, I will be no more than a spectator of the sacrifice. [p]

But what are believing slaves or children to do? Or officials, when they attend on their masters or patrons or superiors while these are sacrificing? Well — if a man has handed the wine to someone sacrificing, or helped him with so much as one word that the sacrifice requires or that belongs to it, he will be counted a servant of idolatry. Keeping that rule in mind, we can still render service even “to magistrates and powers,” following the example of the patriarchs and the other forefathers, who obeyed idolatrous kings right up to the border of idolatry. [r]

Out of this a dispute arose quite recently: whether a servant of God should take on the administration of any rank or power, supposing he is able — whether by some special favor or by his own adroitness — to keep himself untouched by every kind of idolatry, on the model of Joseph and Daniel, who were clean of idolatry and yet administered rank and power alike, in the livery and the purple of a governorship over the whole of Egypt or of Babylonia. So let us grant that a man might manage to move about in any office you like under nothing but the name of it: not sacrificing, and not lending his authority to sacrifices; not contracting out the supply of victims; not handing over the care of temples to others; not overseeing their revenues; not putting on public shows at his own expense or the public’s, and not presiding over them; making no proclamation and issuing no edict for any festival; not even taking oaths — and then, on the side of power, not sitting in judgment on anyone’s life or good name, though you might put up with his judging about money; not condemning and not condemning in advance; binding no one, imprisoning no one, torturing no one. If it is believable that all of this is possible.

Now we must deal with the dress and equipment of office by itself. Every man has a dress of his own, for daily use as well as for office and rank. That famous purple, then, and the gold worn as an ornament round the neck, were badges of rank among the Egyptians and the Babylonians in the same way that bordered togas and striped ones and palm-embroidered ones, and the gold wreaths of provincial priests, are badges of rank now — but not on the same terms. In those days they were only conferred, under the name of honor, on men who had earned a king’s personal friendship. That is why such men were called a king’s “purple men,” much as some among us are called “candidates” from their white toga. They were not conferred on the understanding that the dress was tied to priesthoods as well, or to any idol ceremony. If it had been, men of that holiness and steadiness would have refused the polluted robes on the spot, and it would have been clear then and there that Daniel was no eager slave of idols and did not worship Bel or the dragon — which in fact only came out long afterward. [t]

That purple, then, was plain purple. At the time it was not a mark of official standing among the barbarians, but of noble birth. Joseph had been a slave, and Daniel had had his condition changed by captivity, and both of them reached the standing of free men in the states of Babylon and Egypt by way of the dress of barbarian nobility. In the same way, among us believers, if it comes to it, the bordered toga may properly be allowed to boys and the stole to girls — as badges of birth, not of power; of family, not of office; of rank, not of superstition. But the purple, and the other badges of dignities and powers, were dedicated from the very beginning to the idolatry grafted into that dignity and those powers, and they carry the stain of their own profanation. Bordered togas and striped ones and broad-barred ones are put on the idols themselves, after all, and the fasces and the rods are carried in front of them too. And rightly so, for demons are the magistrates of this world: they carry the fasces and the purple, the badges of one and the same college. What will you gain, then, if you wear the dress but do not perform its duties? Where things are unclean, nobody can appear clean. If you put on a tunic that is defiled in itself, perhaps it will not be defiled by you; but you, by it, will be unable to stay clean.

By now, you who keep arguing about “Joseph” and “Daniel,” you should know that old and new, rough and polished, the thing begun and the thing grown up, slave and free, are not always comparable. They were slaves by their very circumstances. But you belong to nobody — you are the slave of Christ alone, who freed you from the world’s captivity as well — so the duty falls to you to act on your Lord’s pattern. That Lord walked in humility and obscurity, with no settled home: “the Son of Man,” he said, “has nowhere to lay his head.” His dress was plain, or he would not have said, “Look, the people who wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses.” He had, in short, no glory in his face or his bearing, exactly as Isaiah had announced beforehand. He exercised no right of power even over his own followers; he did a servant’s work for them. And though he knew perfectly well that a kingdom was his, he pulled back from being made a king. He could not have given his own people a fuller example of turning cold toward all the pride and all the trappings of dignity and of power alike. For if they were meant to be used, who would have used them sooner than the Son of God? What sort of fasces would have escorted him, and how many? What sort of purple would have flowered from his shoulders? What sort of gold would have blazed from his head — if he had not judged the glory of the world to be foreign both to himself and to his own?

So what he refused to accept, he rejected; what he rejected, he condemned; what he condemned, he counted as part of the devil’s parade. He would not have condemned anything except what was not his own — and what is not God’s can belong to nobody but the devil. If you have renounced “the devil’s parade,” then know that whatever you touch there is idolatry. And let this help remind you as well: all the powers and dignities of this world are not merely foreign to God, they are enemies of God. Through them punishments have been decreed against God’s servants; through them, too, the penalties owed to the godless are ignored. “But my birth and my money make it hard for me to hold out against idolatry.” There is no shortage of remedies for avoiding it. And even if the remedies do run out, one is still left, and by it you will be made a happier magistrate — not on earth, but in heaven.

In that last section a decision may seem to have been given about military service too, which sits between rank and power. But the question is now being asked directly: whether a believer may turn to military service, and whether a soldier may be admitted to the faith — even the rank and file, or any of the lower grades, who are under no necessity of taking part in sacrifices or in executions. There is no agreement between the divine oath and the human one, between the standard of Christ and the standard of the devil, between the camp of light and the camp of darkness. One soul cannot be owed to two masters, God and Caesar. [aa]

And yet, you say, Moses carried a rod, and Aaron wore a buckle, and John is belted with leather, and Joshua son of Nun leads a line of march, and the People went to war — if you care to trifle with the subject. But how will a Christian go to war? How will he even serve in peacetime, without the sword the Lord has taken away? Soldiers had come to John, it is true, and had been given the rule they were to follow; a centurion had believed, it is true. But afterward the Lord, in disarming Peter, unbelted every soldier. No dress is lawful among us if it is assigned to an unlawful action.