Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
So then, when you set forth the inventions of the pagan gods as things found even in the service of God, in order to claim among them the crown for the head as common usage too, you are yourself already laying down the rule: nothing is to be admitted to common use among us that is not also found among the things of God. For what is so unworthy of God as what is worthy of an idol? And what fits an idol so well as what fits a corpse just as well? For it is also the custom to crown the dead, since they too at once become idols, in both the trappings and the ritual of consecration — which among us is a second idolatry. Those, then, who lack sense may as well make use of a thing whose sense they lack, as if they wished to abuse it while still having sense; there is no difference in abusing a thing once the reality of using it rightly has ceased — for once nature's power of proper feeling has stopped, who is there to abuse what he no longer has the means to use? But for us it is not permitted even to abuse it, since the apostle teaches the easier course of not using it at all. Except that those who feel nothing do not really "abuse" it either, but are simply absent from the whole business, and the very object itself is dead, so far as concerns idols — though very much alive, so far as concerns the demons to whom the superstition properly belongs. "The nations' idols," declares David, "are gold and silver, works of men's hands: eyes have they, yet they do not see; noses, yet cannot smell; hands, and cannot feel." For this is exactly what enjoying flowers amounts to. But if he pronounces that those who make idols will become just like them, then those who now make use of them in the idols' own style of adornment are already just like them. "All things are pure to the pure"; so too all things are impure to the impure. And nothing is more impure than idols. As for pure substances — being things of God — they remain, by their own condition, common to use; but the manner of that use matters too. I myself, for instance, sacrifice a rooster for my own table no less than Socrates did for Aesculapius, and if some place's smell offends me, I burn a bit of Arabian incense — but not in the same rite, not in the same dress, not with the same apparatus as is done before idols. For if a bare word is enough to pollute a thing's condition — as the apostle teaches: "If anyone says, this has been offered to an idol, do not touch it" — how much more, when you have actually pranced about in the very dress and rite and apparatus of things sacrificed to idols, are you contaminated? So the crown too becomes something "offered to an idol." For by this rite and dress and apparatus it is sacrificed to idols as its own authors, whose property this use most especially is — so that nothing found nowhere among the things of God can be admitted into our fellowship. That is why the apostle cries out: "Flee idolatry!" — the whole of it, entirely. Consider the forest, and how many thorns lie hidden in it. Nothing is to be given to an idol; so neither is anything to be taken from an idol. If it is foreign to the faith to recline at a meal in an idol's temple, what of appearing in an idol's very dress? "What fellowship has Christ with Belial?" And therefore, flee. A long divorce is what is commanded from idolatry. In nothing is one to come close to it: even the earthly dragon draws men in with its breath from a distance. John goes further still: "Little children," he says, "guard yourselves from idols!" — no longer merely from idolatry as a practice, but from idols themselves, that is, from their very image. For it would be a disgrace for you, who bear the likeness of the living God, to turn instead into the likeness of a lifeless idol. Up to this point we have claimed the distinctive character of this particular dress for idols alone, both from the record of its origin and from the practice of superstition — and further, because so long as it is not counted among the things of God, it is counted more and more among the things of those in whose ancient rites and festivals and offices it is used. Even the doorways themselves and the sacrificial victims and altars, and their very ministers and priests, are crowned. You have the crowns of every priestly college recorded under Claudius. But we have also already laid out that distinction between rational and irrational cases, for the benefit of those who defend common practice across the board on the strength of a few examples. For this part, then, it remains to examine the actual grounds given for wearing crowns, so that, by showing them to be foreign to — indeed, contrary to — our discipline, we may prove none of them propped up by any support of reason, by which such a practice could be claimed for our fellowship, as some claim by throwing certain examples at us.