The Camp of Light and Darkness

To begin at the real root of the military crown, I think we have to ask first whether military service is proper for a Christian at all. What is the point of arguing about the incidentals when the thing they rest on deserves to be condemned? Do we believe it lawful for a human oath to be added on top of the divine one — for a man to come under promise to another master after Christ, and to renounce father and mother and all his nearest relations, the very people the law has told us to honor and love next after God himself, and to whom the good news too has given honor, only ranking them below Christ? [a]

Is it to be held lawful to make a trade of the sword, when the Lord announces that the man who uses the sword will die by the sword? Will a son of peace take part in a battle, when it is not even fitting for him to go to law? Will he apply the chain and the prison and the torture and the death sentence, when he does not avenge even his own wrongs? Will he keep watch duty for other people rather than for Christ — or keep it on the Lord’s day, when he does not keep it for Christ himself? Will he stand guard in front of the temples he has renounced? Will he take a meal where the apostle has forbidden him to? Will he carefully protect at night the demons he put to flight by day with his exorcisms, leaning and resting all the while on the spear that pierced Christ’s side? Will he carry a flag that is hostile to Christ? Will he ask the emperor for a watchword, when he has already received one from God? Will he be disturbed in death by the trumpeter’s trumpet, when he expects to be woken by the angel’s? And will a Christian be burned according to camp rule, when he was not permitted to burn incense to an idol, and Christ let him off the punishment of fire?

As for how many other offenses are wrapped up in the duties of camp life — offenses we must count as breaking God’s law — a quick survey will show you. The very carrying of the name across from the camp of light to the camp of darkness breaks it.

Of course, if faith comes later and finds a man already in the army, his case is different — as with the men John used to accept for baptism, and with those two most faithful centurions, the one Christ approves and the one Peter instructs. All the same, once a man has become a believer and his faith has been sealed, either he must leave the service at once, which is what many have done; or he will have to resort to every kind of quibbling to avoid offending God, and that is not allowed even outside military service; or, last of all, he must endure for God the fate that a civilian’s faith has been just as ready to accept. Military service does not hold out any escape from punishment for sin, or any exemption from martyrdom. Nowhere does the Christian become a different man. There is one good news and the same Jesus, who will one day deny everyone who denies him and acknowledge everyone who acknowledges God — who will save the life that has been lost for his sake, and destroy the life that has been saved for gain, to his dishonor. With him a faithful civilian is a soldier, just as a faithful soldier is a civilian.

A state of faith admits no plea of necessity. Men are under no necessity to sin whose one necessity is not to sin. For if a man is pressed into offering sacrifice and flatly denying Christ by the necessity of torture or of punishment, even then discipline does not wink at the necessity — because there is a higher necessity: to dread denying and to undergo martyrdom, rather than to escape suffering and pay the homage demanded. In fact an excuse of that kind overturns the whole substance of our oath, since it removes even the barrier against deliberate sins; for on the same reasoning it will be possible to argue that a man’s own inclination is a necessity, as carrying a sort of compulsion in it.

I have in fact already disposed of this very plea of necessity in dealing with the arguments used to defend the crowns that go with public office, where it is the standard defense — since for that very reason offices must either be refused, so that we do not fall into acts of sin, or martyrdoms endured so that we may be quit of the offices. On this first aspect of the question, the unlawfulness even of a military life in itself, I will add no more, so that the second question may be restored to its place. Indeed, if I put my strength to the question and banish the military life from us altogether, there is no point now in my issuing a challenge about the military crown. So suppose that military service is lawful, as far as the argument for the crown is concerned.

But let me first say a word about the crown itself as well. This laurel one is sacred to Apollo or to Bacchus — to Apollo as the god of archery, to Bacchus as the god of triumphs. Claudius teaches the same thing when he tells us that soldiers are in the habit of being wreathed with myrtle too. For myrtle belongs to Venus, the mother of the line of Aeneas and the mistress of the god of war, who is Roman by way of Ilia and the Romuli. But I do not believe that Venus is Roman in the way Mars is, because of the vexation the concubine caused her. And when military service is crowned with olive instead, the idolatry has respect to Minerva, who is just as much a goddess of arms, but who got a crown of that tree because of the peace she made with Neptune. In these respects the superstition of the military garland will be everywhere defiled and everywhere defiling. [i]

And it is further defiled, I should think, in its grounds as well. Look at the yearly public pronouncing of vows: what does that show itself to be on its face? It happens first in the part of the camp where the general’s tent stands, and then in the temples. Along with the places, notice the words: “We vow that you, Jupiter, will then have an ox with gold-decorated horns.” What does that utterance mean? Beyond any doubt, the denial of Christ. Even though the Christian says nothing in those places with his mouth, he makes his response by having the crown on his head.

The laurel is likewise ordered at the handing out of the emperor’s bounty. So you see that idolatry is not without its profit: it sells Christ for pieces of gold, as Judas sold him for pieces of silver. Will it be “You cannot serve God and mammon” to spend your energies on mammon and depart from God? Will it be “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” not only not to render the man himself to God, but even to take the denarius from Caesar?

Is the laurel of a triumph made of leaves, or of corpses? Is it decorated with ribbons, or with tombs? Is it wet with ointment, or with the tears of wives and mothers? And some of them may be Christian tears, for Christ is among the barbarians too. Has not the man who has carried a crown on his head for that reason fought even against himself?

Another kind of service belongs to the royal guards. Crowns are in fact called camp crowns, as belonging to the camp, and bounty crowns as well, from the imperial functions they perform. But even then you are still someone else’s soldier and someone else’s servant; and if of two masters, of God and Caesar — but assuredly not of Caesar’s then, when you owe yourself to God, who has the higher claim, I should think, even in matters where both have an interest.

For reasons of state the various orders of citizens are crowned with laurel crowns too, and the magistrates besides with golden ones, as at Athens and at Rome. Even those are outranked by the Etruscan. That is the name given to the crowns which, distinguished by their gems and their golden oak leaves, they put on — along with mantles embroidered with palm branches — to escort the chariots carrying the images of the gods to the circus. There are provincial crowns of gold as well, which by now need the larger heads of statues instead of the heads of men. [o]

But your orders and your magistracies, and the very place where you meet, the church, are Christ’s. You belong to him, for you have been enrolled in the books of life. There the blood of the Lord serves as your purple robe, and your broad stripe is his own cross. There the axe is already laid to the trunk of the tree; there is the branch out of the root of Jesse. Never mind the state horses with their crown. Your Lord, when he meant to enter Jerusalem in triumph as the Scripture says, did not even have an ass of his own. “These trust in chariots and these in horses, but we will seek our help in the name of the Lord our God.”

From so much as living in that Babylon of John’s Revelation we are called away; how much more, then, from its parade. The common people are crowned as well — sometimes because of some great rejoicing over the emperors’ success, sometimes on account of a custom belonging to the town festivals. For extravagance works to make her own every occasion of public gladness. But as for you, you are a foreigner in this world and a citizen of Jerusalem, the city above. Our citizenship, the apostle says, is in heaven. You have your own registers and your own calendar; you have nothing to do with the joys of the world. In fact you are called to the very opposite, for “the world will rejoice, but you will mourn.” And I think the Lord declares that the people who mourn are the happy ones, not the people who are crowned.

Marriage decks the bridegroom with a crown too, and that is why we will not have pagan brides, in case they seduce us into the idolatry with which marriage among them begins. You have the law from the patriarchs, and you have the apostle telling people to marry in the Lord. You have a crowning also at the making of a free man; but you have already been ransomed by Christ, and at a great price. How is the world to set free another man’s slave? It seems to be liberty, but it will turn out to be bondage. In the world everything is a name and nothing is real. Even then, as one ransomed by Christ, you were under no bondage to any man; and now, though a man has given you your liberty, you are Christ’s slave. If you think the world’s freedom is real, so real that you even seal it with a crown, you have gone back into slavery to man while imagining it is freedom, and you have lost the freedom of Christ while fancying it is slavery.

Will there be any dispute about the cause of crown-wearing that the contests at the games supply in their turn — contests which, being both sacred to the gods and held in honor of the dead, their own reason condemns at once? All that is left is for Olympian Jupiter and Nemean Hercules, and the wretched little Archemorus and the unhappy Antinous, to be crowned in a Christian, so that he himself becomes a spectacle disgusting to look at.

We have gone through, I think, all the various causes of the wearing of the crown, and there is not one of them that has any place with us: they are all foreign to us, unholy, unlawful, renounced already once for all in the solemn words of our oath. For they belonged to the parade of the devil and his angels — offices of the world, honors, festivals, canvassing for popularity, false vows, exhibitions of human servility, empty praises, degrading glories, and in all of them idolatry, even in the mere origin of the crowns they are all wreathed with.

Claudius will tell us in his preface, of course, that in Homer’s poems the sky is crowned with constellations too, and that by God, no doubt, and for man; and so man himself should be crowned by God as well. But the world crowns brothels and baths and bakehouses and prisons and schools, and the amphitheatres themselves, and the rooms where the clothes are stripped from dead gladiators, and the very biers of the dead. Judge how sacred and holy, how venerable and pure this article of dress is — not from the heaven of the poets alone, but from the trafficking of the whole world. But a Christian will not even dishonor his own gate with laurel crowns, if he knows how many gods the devil has attached to doors: Janus, so called from the gate; Limentinus, from the threshold; Forculus and Carna, from the door leaves and the hinges; and among the Greeks, Apollo of the Doorway, and the evil spirits called the Antelii.

Much less may a Christian put the service of idolatry on his own head — or rather, I might have said, upon Christ, since Christ is the head of the Christian man. His head is as free as Christ’s own is, under no obligation to wear a covering, let alone a band. But even the head that is bound to have the veil, a woman’s, I mean, has no room for a band either, being already taken up by that very thing. She has the burden of her own humility to carry. If she ought not to appear with her head uncovered on account of the angels, much more will she offend, with a crown on it, those who are perhaps wearing crowns above. For what is a crown on a woman’s head but beauty made seductive, a mark of sheer wantonness, a notable throwing away of modesty, a setting of temptation on fire? So a woman, taking counsel from the apostles’ foresight, will not adorn herself too elaborately, so that she may not be crowned either with some exquisite arrangement of her hair. [w]

But what sort of garland, I ask you, did the one who is the head of the man and the glory of the woman, Christ Jesus, the husband of the church, submit to on behalf of both sexes? Thorns, I think, and thistles — a figure of the sins that the soil of the flesh brought forth for us, but which the power of the cross removed, blunting, as our Lord’s head endured it, every sting of death.

Yes, and beyond the figure there was insult with a ready lip, and dishonor, and infamy, and the ferocity of the cruel things that then disfigured and tore the Lord’s temples — so that you might now be crowned with laurel and myrtle and olive and any famous branch, and, what is of more use, with hundred-petalled roses as well, gathered from the garden of Midas, and with both kinds of lily, and with violets of every sort, and perhaps with gems and gold too, so as even to rival that crown of Christ which he obtained afterwards. For it was after the gall that he tasted the honeycomb, and he was not greeted as King of Glory in the heavenly places until he had been condemned to the cross as King of the Jews, having first been made by the Father for a time a little lower than the angels, and so crowned with glory and honor. If you owe him your own head for all this, pay it back if you can, in the state in which he presented his for yours; or else do not be crowned with flowers at all, if you cannot be crowned with thorns, because you may not be crowned with flowers.

Keep God’s own property untainted for him; he will crown it if he chooses. In fact he does choose. He calls us to it. To the one who conquers he says, “I will give a crown of life.” You too, be faithful to the point of death; you too, fight the good fight, whose crown the apostle feels so justly confident has been laid up for him. The angel as well, going out on a white horse conquering and to conquer, receives a crown of victory; and another is adorned with a rainbow around him, as it were in its fair colors — a meadow in the sky. In the same way the elders sit crowned around, crowned too with a crown of gold, and the Son of Man himself flashes out above the clouds. If such are the appearances in the seer’s vision, what sort of thing will the realities be when they are actually shown? [ac]

Look at those crowns. Breathe in those scents. Why do you condemn to a little chaplet, or a twisted headband, a brow that has been destined for a diadem? For Christ Jesus has made us kings as well, to God and his Father. What have you in common with a flower that is going to die? You have a flower in the Branch of Jesse, on which the grace of the divine Spirit rested in all its fullness — a flower undefiled, unfading, everlasting; and by choosing it the good soldier too has won promotion in the ranks of heaven.

Blush, you fellow soldiers of his, at being condemned from now on not even by him, but by some soldier of Mithras. At his initiation, in the gloomy cavern — in the camp of darkness, it may well be said — a crown is presented to him at the sword’s point, as though in mimicry of martyrdom, and is then put on his head; and he is instructed to push it back and cast it off, and to shift it, if you like, to his shoulder, saying that Mithras is his crown. And from then on he is never crowned; and he keeps that as a mark to show who he is, if he is ever put to the test anywhere about his religion; and he is believed at once to be a soldier of Mithras if he throws the crown away, if he says that he has his crown in his god. Let us take note of the devices of the devil, who is in the habit of aping some of God’s own things with no other design than to shame us by the faithfulness of his servants, and so to condemn us.