Tertullian, On the Crown 13

They crown public officials with laurel for public service, and magistrates get gold crowns on top of that. Etruscan crowns are added, too—this is the technical term for crowns studded with gems and golden oak leaves, marked for Jupiter, worn when leading the sacred processions in palm-embroidered togas. There are also provincial gold crowns, now hunting bigger heads for statues, not for living men. But your ranks, your magistrates, the very name of your senate—all of it is the Church of Christ. You are enrolled in the books of life. There your purple is the blood of the Lord and the spear wound in his side on the cross; there the axe lies at the root of the tree, there the rods spring from Jesse (Isaiah 11:1). Let them look at the public horses wearing their crowns. Your Lord, when he chose to enter Jerusalem according to Scripture (Zechariah 9:9; Matthew 21:5), didn't even own a private donkey. They ride in chariots and on horseback; we invoke the name of the Lord our God (Psalm 20:7). We have been removed from the very dwelling of that Babylon in the Apocalypse of John (Revelation 17–18), let alone from the speaker's platform. The mob gets crowned now for the thrill of high-office victories, now for the privilege of municipal festivals—and every luxury of public joy is a trap. But you are a stranger to this world, a citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem. "Our citizenship is in heaven," he says (Philippians 3:20). You have your own senses, your own calendar: you have nothing to do with the joys of the age; on the contrary, you must do the opposite. The age will rejoice, but you will mourn (Luke 6:25). And I think: "Blessed are those who mourn," he says, "not those who are crowned" (Matthew 5:4). Weddings crown the bridegroom, too—which is why we don't marry pagans, lest they drag us into idolatry, since their weddings begin with it. You have the law from the Patriarchs (Genesis 24:3), and you have the apostle commanding you to marry only in the Lord (1 Corinthians 7:39). Secular freedom crowns as well. But you have already been redeemed by Christ, and at a tremendous price (1 Corinthians 6:20; 7:23). How can the world free a slave who belongs to another? Even if freedom appears real, slavery also once appeared real. Everything in the age is imaginary; nothing is true. Even then you were a free man, redeemed by Christ; and now you are Christ's slave, even if freed by a human master. If you think the world's freedom is true—so true you ratify it with a crown—you have gone back into the slavery of man, which you mistake for freedom; you have lost the freedom of Christ, which you mistake for slavery. Will the athletic contests be debated, too—contests whose very titles condemn them? Both sacred and funereal games, I mean; all that's left is for Olympian Jupiter, Nemean Hercules, wretched Archemorus, and unhappy Antinous to be crowned on a Christian, so that he becomes the spectacle he ought to be watching. I think we have listed every possible occasion. None of them belongs to us: all are alien, profane, illicit, already rejected once for all in the testimony of the sacrament. These were the pomps of the devil and the offices of his angels—honors of the age, solemnities, popularities, false vows, human slaveries, vain praises, shameful glories—and idolatry in all of them, down to the very meaning of the crowns that adorn them all. Claudius even claims heaven is crowned with stars in Homer's songs; granted, by God—granted, by man—therefore man himself must also be crowned by God. Meanwhile, the age crowns brothels, latrines, bakeries, prisons, the games, the amphitheaters themselves, the very spoliaria, the very funeral processions. Judge how sacred, how holy and clean this habit is—not from one poetic heaven, but from the commerce of the whole world. But a Christian will not defile his doorway with laurels, if he knows how many gods the devil has nailed to doors: Janus on the door, Limentinus on the threshold, Forculus and Cardus on the leaves and hinges, and among the Greeks, Thyreus Apollo and the Antelios demons.