Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Now many have already come round to thinking that some allowance ought to be made, whenever we do what the pagans do, so that the Name not be blasphemed. But the blasphemy we must at all costs avoid is, as I see it, the following: that any of us give a pagan a just cause for blasphemy, through fraud, or wrong, or insult, or any other matter deserving complaint, in which the Name is struck deservedly — so that the Lord too is deservedly angered. [2] But if it means that on account of you my name is blasphemed regardless of the nature of the blasphemy, then we are all lost together, since the whole circus, with its wicked cheering, assails the Name with no cause whatever. Let us stop, and it will not be blasphemed. No — rather, let it be blasphemed while we hold to discipline and do not stray from it, while we are being tested and approved, not while we are found wanting. [3] O blasphemy, kin to martyrdom, which testifies that I am a Christian at the very moment it curses me for it! The cursing of a discipline kept intact is itself a blessing on the Name. If I still wished to please men, he says, I would not be a servant of Christ. Yet elsewhere the same apostle bids us take care to please everyone. As I, he says, please everyone in everything. [4] Was it, I wonder, by celebrating the Saturnalia and the Kalends of January that he pleased men? Or was it by his moderation, his patience, his gravity, his kindness, his integrity? So when he says, I have become all things to all men, that I might win them all — does that mean an idolater to idolaters? A pagan to pagans? A worldling to worldlings? [5] Even though he does not forbid us to associate with idolaters and adulterers and other such offenders, saying instead, otherwise you would have to go out of the world, still he does not let loose the reins of our conduct to such a degree that, because we are of necessity bound to live together and mix
with sinners, we may therefore also sin along with them. Where there is that shared commerce of life which the apostle allows, there is no allowance for shared sinning, which no one permits. It is lawful to live alongside pagans; it is not lawful to die alongside them. Let us live together with everyone; let us rejoice together in what we share by nature, not in what belongs to superstition. We are equals in soul, not in creed; joint-possessors of the world, not of its error. [6] But if we have no right at all to such fellowship with outsiders, how much more shameful is it to indulge in it among brothers! Who can bear or defend that? The Holy Spirit rebukes the Jews for their own feast days: your sabbaths, he says, and new moons and festivals my soul hates. Yet we, for whom sabbaths are foreign things, and new moons and holidays once loved by God are foreign too, keep the Saturnalia, the Kalends of January, the Feast of Winter, and the Matronalia — gifts and presents circulate, games ring out,
banquets clatter on. [7] O the pagans' better faithfulness to their own sect, which lays claim to none of the Christians' own solemn days! Not our Sunday, not our Pentecost — even had they known of them, they would not have shared in them with us; for they would fear being taken for Christians. We, though, are not afraid of being pronounced pagans. If some indulgence must be granted the flesh, you have — I will not say only your own festival days, but
far more of them. For the pagans each have one feast day a year; you have one every eighth day. Pick out, one by one, all the solemnities of the nations and set them in a row: they will not add up to a single Pentecost.
XV.