On Idolatry 18

Now we must deal with the mere trappings and apparatus of office. Each person has his proper dress, both for daily use and for honor and rank. So that purple and the gold ornament of the neck were insignia of rank among the Egyptians and Babylonians in the same way as the bordered, striped, or palm-embroidered togas and the golden crowns of the provincial priests are now, but not on the same terms. For they were conferred only as a title of honor on those who had earned the intimacy of kings; hence they were called the kings' “purpled ones,” from the purple, as with us candidates are named from the white toga; but not so that that apparel was also bound up with priesthoods or with any offices of idols. For if it had been so, surely men of such holiness and constancy would at once have refused the defiled garments, and it would have been evident at once that Daniel was not devoted to idols and did not worship Bel or the dragon, which became evident only much later. That simple purple, then, was among the barbarians a mark not yet of rank but of free birth. For just as Joseph, who had been a slave, and Daniel, who had changed his status through captivity, obtained the citizenship of Egypt and Babylon through the dress of barbarian free birth, so among us believers too, if it should be necessary, the bordered toga may be allowed to boys and the stola to girls, as marks of birth, not of power; of family, not of honor; of rank, not of superstition. But the purple and the other insignia of ranks and powers, dedicated from the beginning to the idolatry bound up with those ranks and powers, bear the stain of their profanation, since, moreover, bordered and striped togas and broad stripes are put on the idols themselves, and fasces and rods are carried before them; and rightly. For the demons are the magistrates of this world; they bear the fasces and the purple as the insignia of one college. What will you gain, then, if you use the apparel but do not carry out its functions? No one can appear clean in unclean things. If you put on a tunic defiled in itself, perhaps it may not be defiled by you, but you cannot be clean because of it. And now you who argue from Joseph and Daniel, know that old and new, rude and polished, begun and completed, servile and free things are not always to be compared. For they were slaves even by condition; but you, the slave of no one, in so far as you belong to Christ alone, who has freed you even from the captivity of the world, ought to act after the Lord's pattern. That Lord walked in humility and obscurity, with no certain home: for “the Son of Man,” he says, “has nowhere to lay his head”; plain in dress, for otherwise he would not have said, “See, those who wear soft clothing are in kings' houses”; finally, without glory in face and appearance, as Isaiah too had foretold. If he exercised no right of power even over his own, for whom he performed a menial service; if, finally, conscious of his kingdom, he fled from being made king, he gave the fullest pattern to his own by directing them away from every eminence and trapping, both of rank and of power. For who would have used them more than the Son of God? What fasces, and how many, would have escorted him; what purple would have bloomed on his shoulders; what gold would have shone on his head, had he not judged the glory of the world alien both to himself and to his own? So what he did not want, he rejected; what he rejected, he condemned; what he condemned, he counted as the pomp of the devil. For he would not have condemned it, had it been his own; and things that are not God's can belong to no one but the devil. If you have renounced the devil's pomp, know that whatever of it you touch is idolatry. Let this at least remind you that all the powers and ranks of this world are not only alien but hostile to God: that through them punishments have been decreed against the servants of God, and through them too the penalties prepared for the impious go unheeded. “But both my birth and my wealth are an obstacle to me against idolatry.” Remedies for avoiding it cannot be lacking; since, even if they were, there remains that one remedy by which you will be made a happier magistrate, not on earth but in heaven.