Where the Crown Came From

So let these dealers in crowns acknowledge, for the moment, the authority of nature — which they share with everyone else simply as human beings — and also the evidence of their own religion, since, as the last chapter showed, they worship the God of nature. Then, over and above what is strictly required, let them weigh the other reasons as well that forbid us to wear crowns: on the head above all, and crowns of every kind. For we are obliged to move on from the rule of nature, which we hold in common with the whole human race, so that we may hold the whole of our own Christian discipline as well — and hold it against those other sorts of crown too, the ones that seem to have been provided for different uses because they are made of different materials. Otherwise, since they are not made of flowers, whose use nature itself points out (as it does in the case of this military laurel), people may think they fall outside our rule, on the grounds that nature has no objection to raise against them. [a]

I see, then, that the matter has to be gone into more thoroughly and at greater length, from its beginnings, on through its stages of growth, out to its wilder developments. For that we have to turn to pagan literature: what belongs to the pagans has to be proved out of their own records. The little of it I have picked up will be enough, I think. If there really was a Pandora, whom Hesiod names as the first woman, hers was the first head the Graces crowned; she received gifts from all the gods, and that is how she got her name, Pandora. But Moses — a prophet, not a poet-shepherd — shows us the first woman, Eve, with her waist girded with leaves, which is a good deal more natural than her temples wreathed with flowers. So Pandora is a myth. Which means we have to blush for the origin of the crown on the score of the lie attached to it; and, as will appear shortly, no less on the score of the facts.

For it is beyond dispute that certain persons either invented the thing or gave it its lustre. Pherecydes reports that Saturn was the first to wear a crown; Diodorus, that Jupiter, after conquering the Titans, was honored with this gift by the rest of the gods. The same author assigns fillets to Priapus, and to Ariadne a garland of gold and Indian gems — the gift of Vulcan, and afterwards of Bacchus, and later turned into a constellation. Callimachus has put a vine crown on Juno; and at Argos her statue, wreathed with vine and with a lion’s skin laid under her feet, shows the stepmother gloating over the spoils of her two stepsons. Hercules wears on his head sometimes poplar, sometimes wild olive, sometimes parsley. You have the tragedy Cerberus; you have Pindar; and you have Callimachus besides, who mentions that Apollo too, after he killed the serpent at Delphi, put on a laurel garland as a suppliant — for in old times suppliants were regularly crowned. Harpocration argues that Bacchus, who is the same as Osiris among the Egyptians, was crowned with ivy on purpose, because it is the nature of ivy to protect the brain against drowsiness. But that Bacchus began the laurel crown in another way as well — the crown in which he celebrated his triumph over the Indians — even the common people admit, when they call the days dedicated to him “the great crown.” Open the writings of Leo the Egyptian, again, and you learn that Isis was the first to discover ears of grain and wear them on her head, a thing better suited to the stomach. Anyone who wants more will find the subject fully laid out in Claudius Saturninus, a writer of real ability who handles this question too. He has a book on crowns, and he explains their beginnings, their causes, their kinds and their rites so thoroughly that you find every charming flower, every beautiful leafy branch, every sod and every vine-shoot has been dedicated to somebody’s head — which makes it abundantly clear how foreign we ought to judge the custom of the crowned head, brought in as it was, and ever since managed, for the honor of those whom the world has believed to be gods.

If the devil, a liar from the beginning, is at work in this matter too for his false godhead, then he had certainly made provision himself for carrying his god-lie through. What sort of thing, then, must it be counted among the people of the true God — a thing brought in by the nations to honor the devil’s candidates, set apart from the start for nobody but them, and given its consecration to idolatry even then, by idols and in idols that were still alive? Not that an idol is anything; but the things other people offer up to idols belong to demons. And if what others offer to them belongs to demons, how much more what the idols offered to themselves while they were living! No doubt the demons had made provision for themselves by means of the men they possessed, out of desire and craving, before the provision had actually been made.

Hold on to that conviction meanwhile, while I look into a question that stands in our way. I already hear it said that plenty of other things besides crowns were invented by those whom the world believes to be gods, and that all the same you meet them in our own present usage, and among the saints of earlier days, and in the service of God, and in Christ himself, who did his work as a man by no other means than these ordinary instruments of human life. [j]

Very well, let it be so; and I will not inquire any further back into where these things came from. Let Mercury have been the first to teach the use of letters: I will grant that letters are needed both for the business and trade of life and for doing our duty to God. If he was also the first to string a chord and draw a tune out of it, then, listening to David, I will not deny that this invention has been in use among the saints and has served God. Let Aesculapius have been the first to look for cures and find them: Isaiah mentions that he prescribed medicine for Hezekiah when he was ill. Paul, too, knows that a little wine does the stomach good. Let Minerva have been the first to build a ship: I shall watch Jonah and the apostles sailing. And there is more than that. Even Christ, we shall find, wears ordinary clothes; Paul has his cloak. If for every article of furniture and every household vessel you name some god of the world as the inventor, then I have to recognize Christ as he reclines at table, and when he holds out a basin for his disciples’ feet, and pours water into it from a jug, and is girded with a linen towel — a garment particularly sacred to Osiris.

That, in general, is my answer on the point. I admit that we use these things along with everybody else, but I insist that the matter be judged in the light of the distinction between what agrees with reason and what is opposed to it. Using them all indiscriminately is deceptive: it hides the corruption of the creation, by which it has been made subject to futility. For we hold that the only things fit to be used — by us or by those who lived before us, the only ones that suit the service of God and of Christ himself — are the things which, to meet the needs of human life, supply what is simply useful and give real help and honest comfort, so that we may well believe they came from God’s own prompting; for it was God, no doubt, who first provided and taught and supplied whatever was for the enjoyment of the man who was his own. As for the things outside that class, they are not fit for use among us — especially the ones which for that very reason are to be found neither with the world nor with Christ.

In short: what patriarch, what prophet, what Levite, or priest, or ruler, or, at a later period, what apostle, or preacher of the good news, or overseer, do you ever find wearing a crown? I do not think even the temple of God itself was crowned — nor the ark of the covenant, nor the tent of witness, nor the altar, nor the lampstand. And yet at that first solemn dedication, and at that second rejoicing over the restoration, crowning would have been the obvious thing, if it were worthy of God. But if all those things were figures of us — for we are God’s temples, and altars, and lights, and sacred vessels — then this too they set out in figure: that the people of God ought not to be crowned. The reality must always answer to the image. [n]

Suppose you object that Christ himself was crowned. You will get this short answer: be crowned yourself, as he was; you have full permission. And even that crown of arrogant ungodliness was not decreed by the Jewish people. It was the Roman soldiers’ device, taken from the practice of the world — a practice the people of God never allowed themselves, either on an occasion of public rejoicing or to gratify the luxury that is bred in us. So they came back from the captivity in Babylon with tambourines and flutes and harps, which suited them better than crowns; and after eating and drinking they got up to play — uncrowned. Neither the account of the rejoicing nor the exposure of the luxury would have kept silent about the crown, whether it was an honor or a disgrace. And Isaiah too, when he says, “With tambourines and harps and flutes they drink their wine,” would have added “and with crowns,” if this practice had ever had a place in the things of God.

So when you allege that the ornaments of the pagan gods are found with God just as much, meaning to claim the head-crown among them for general use, you have already laid the rule down for yourself: we must not have among us, as a thing whose use we share with everyone else, anything that is not to be found in the service of God. [r]

Well, what is so unworthy of God as what is worthy of an idol? And what is so worthy of an idol as what is worthy of a dead man as well? For being crowned is the dead man’s privilege too, since the dead also become idols on the spot, both by their dress and by the rites of deification — which with us is a second idolatry. They have lost their senses, then, and the use they will make of the thing is a use for which the senses are gone, exactly as if, in full possession of their senses, they had set out to misuse it. When there ceases to be any reality in the use, there is no difference between using and misusing. Who can misuse a thing when the perceiving nature with which he means to carry out his purpose is not his to use? The apostle, what is more, forbids us to misuse, where you would expect him rather to have taught us not to use at all — unless it is because where there is no sense for a thing there is no wrong use of it. But the whole business is meaningless, and, so far as the idols are concerned, a dead work, though without doubt a living one so far as the demons are concerned, since the rite belongs to them.

David says of them: “The idols of the nations are silver and gold. They have eyes and do not see; a nose, and do not smell; hands, and they will not handle.” Those are exactly the organs by which we are meant to enjoy flowers. And if he declares that the men who make idols will be like them, then men who use anything after the style of idol finery are like them already. “To the pure all things are pure; and to the impure, in the same way, all things are impure” — and nothing is more impure than idols.

The substances themselves, being creatures of God, have no impurity in them, and in that natural state they are free for anyone to use. What makes all the difference is the service they are put to in the using. I too kill a cock for myself, just as Socrates did for Aesculapius; and if the smell of some place or other offends me, I burn the Arabian product myself — but not with the same ceremony, nor in the same dress, nor with the same procession with which it is done for idols.

If a created thing is defiled by a mere word, as the apostle teaches — “But if anyone says, ‘This has been offered in sacrifice to idols,’ you must not touch it” — how much more when it is polluted by the dress and the rites and the procession of what is offered to the gods. That is how the crown too turns out to be an offering to idols: with this ceremony, this dress, this procession, it is presented in sacrifice to the idols who invented it, to whom its use is specially made over — and chiefly for this reason, that what has no place among the things of God should not be taken into use among us as it is among others.

That is why the apostle cries out, “Flee idolatry” — and he certainly means idolatry whole and entire. Think what a thicket it is, and how many thorns lie hidden in it. Nothing must be given to an idol, and so nothing must be taken from one. If it is inconsistent with faith to recline at table in an idol’s temple, what is it to appear in an idol’s dress? What do Christ and Belial have in common? So run from it; for he tells us to keep our distance from idolatry, to have no close dealings with it of any kind. Even an ordinary earthly snake draws men in with its breath from some way off.

Going further still, John says, “My little children, keep yourselves from idols” — not now from idolatry, as though from the service of it, but from idols themselves, that is, from any resemblance to them. It is an unworthy thing that you, the image of the living God, should turn into the likeness of an idol and a dead man.

So far we assert that this attire belongs to idols, both from the story of where it came from and from its use in false religion — and on this ground besides, that while it is never mentioned in connection with the worship of God, it is handed over more and more to those in whose antiquities, and festivals, and services it is found. In a word, the very doors are crowned, the very victims and altars, the very attendants and priests. In Claudius you have the crowns of all the various colleges of priests. We have added, as well, that distinction between things altogether different from one another — things that agree with reason, that is, and things that are contrary to it — in answer to people who, because some things happen to be used in common, claim the right to share in everything. With reference to this part of the subject, therefore, it now remains for the particular grounds for wearing crowns to be examined, so that by showing them to be foreign to our Christian discipline — opposed to it, in fact — we may demonstrate that not one of them has any plea of reason behind it on which this article of dress might be defended as one whose use we may share, as we may share the use of certain other things that are thrown up at us.