Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Public orders are crowned with laurel for public occasions, magistrates too, but with gold ones besides — so at Athens, so at Rome. Etruscan crowns rank higher still: that is the name for crowns of gold set with gems and oak leaves, marked with Jupiter's own emblem, which men wear when they lead out the sacred chariots, together with the palm-embroidered toga. There are also provincial gold crowns, competing for the greater number of imperial busts they can carry. But your orders, your magistracies, the very name of your senate-house, is the church of Christ. It is there you are enrolled, in the books of life. [2] There your purple is the Lord's blood, and the nail driven wide, into his cross; there are the axes, already laid to the root of the tree; there the rods sprung from the root of Jesse. Let others keep their public horses and their crowns. Your Lord, when he chose to enter Jerusalem according to the scripture, did not even own a donkey of his own. — 'Some in chariots and some on horses, but we will call on the name of the Lord our God.' — [3] From that very dwelling of Babylon in John's Apocalypse we are called away — let alone from the speaker's platform. The common crowd too gets crowned, now over the triumphs of the great, now for the special festivals of the towns. All public rejoicing, after all, is a kind of predatory extravagance. [4] But you — stranger to this world, citizen of the Jerusalem above — 'our citizenship,' it is said, 'is in heaven' — you have your own census-rolls, your own reckoning of days; this age's revelries are simply no concern of yours, and indeed you owe it quite the reverse. 'For the world will rejoice, but you will mourn.' And I think he calls the mourners blessed, not the crowned. Marriages, too, crown their bridegrooms. And that is exactly why we do not marry pagans, lest they lead us all the way to idolatry, which is where their marriages begin. [5] You have a law for this from the patriarchs themselves, you have the apostle commanding marriage 'in the Lord.' Worldly freedom crowns a man too. But you have already been redeemed by Christ, and at a great price. How will the world manumit a slave that belongs to someone else? Even if it looks like freedom, it will turn out to be slavery all the same: everything in this age is illusion, nothing is real. For at the time you were still a free man, you were a slave already redeemed by Christ; and now, though a man has set you free, you are Christ's slave. [6] If you take the world's freedom for the real thing, so far as to seal it with a crown, you have gone back into slavery to a man — thinking it freedom — and thrown away the freedom of Christ, thinking it slavery. Are we even going to argue the case of the athletic games, which their very titles already condemn — 'sacred' games, and 'funeral' games? For this much remains: that Olympian Jupiter, and Nemean Hercules, and poor little Archemorus, and unlucky Antinous, should be crowned on a Christian head, so that he himself becomes the spectacle he has no business watching. [7] We have, I think, run through every case, and not one belongs to us: all are foreign, profane, forbidden, all forsworn already, once for all, in the pledge of our sacrament. For these all belonged to that procession got up by the devil and his angels: the offices of this age, its honors, its festivals, its popularity contests, its false vows, its servilities to men, its empty praises, its shabby glories; and idolatry runs through all of it, present even in the mere matter of crowns, since it is with crowns that all these things are garlanded. [8] Claudius will no doubt bring up the fact that in Homer's poems heaven itself is crowned with stars — by God, certainly, or at least by a man; therefore man himself, he will say, deserves to be crowned by God. But then again, this age crowns brothels too, and latrines, and mills, and prisons, and gladiatorial schools, and amphitheaters themselves, and the very rooms where corpses are stripped, and the undertakers' shops. How sacred and holy, how honorable and clean this custom is — don't judge it by one poet's heaven, judge it by the traffic of the whole world. [9] But surely, a Christian will say, I will not disgrace my own doorway with laurel — if only he knew how many gods the devil has grafted onto doorposts too: Janus from the door (ianua), Limentinus from the threshold (limen), Forculus and Carna from the doorleaves and hinges, and among the Greeks Apollo of the Door and the spirits called Averters-of-Evil.