Chapter 13
THE CHAPLET
Chapter 13 (1) For state reasons, the various orders of the citizens also wear laurel crowns, and there are special crowns of gold for the magistrates, as at Athens and Rome. More elaborate even than these are the Etruscan crowns. This is the name given to those crowns that are adorned with gems and oak leaves of gold, sacred to Jupiter; they wear them with togas embroidered with palm leaves when leading the chariots that carry the images of the gods. Then, there are the golden crowns of the provincials; too large for human heads, they rather fit statues.
However, your orders and your magistracies and the very name of the place in which you meet, the church, all are
Christ's. For you are His, inscribed in the Book of Life.1
(2) There is your purple—the Blood of the Lord, there your broad purple stripes—on His cross. There, the axe is already laid to the root of the tree;2 there is the branch sprung from the root of Jesse.3 And, pay no attention to the state horses with their crowns. Your Lord, when he wished to enter
Jerusalem, as the Scripture tells us, did not even possess an ass of His own.4 'Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we will call upon the name of the Lord our God.'5 (3)
We are cautioned against even dwelling in that Babylon of John's Apocalypse,6 how much more against its pomp! The rabble, too, wear crowns—now because of some great re joicing for the successes of the emperors; now on account of 1 Cf. Phil. 4.3; Apoc. 17.8.
2 Cf. Matt. 3.10; Luke 3.9.
3 Cf. Isa. 11.1.
4 Cf. Zach. 9.9; Matt. 21.1,2.
5 Ps. 19.8.
6 Cf. Apoc. 18.10.
TERTULLIAN
special municipal festivals. Wantonness, indeed, tries to make its own any occasion of public gladness.
(4) But you are a mere pilgrim in this world7 and your city is the heavenly Jerusalem. St. Paul tells us: 'But our citizenship is of heaven.'8 You have your own citizen lists, your own calendar, and you have no part in the joys of this world; in fact, quite the contrary. 'The world will rejoice, but you will be sorrowful.'9 I rather think the Lord is there saying that they will be happy who mourn,10 hot those who are crowned.
The bridegroom is decked with a crown at marriage, too, and that is the reason why we do not marry pagans, lest they drag us down into idolatry with which their marriage cere mony begins. (5) You have the Law, from the patriarchs themselves, and you have the Apostle, too, bidding us to marry in the Lord.* 11 There is a crowning, also, when a slave is freed, but you have been already redeemed by Christ and that at a great price.12 How, then, can the world manumit the slave of another? Though the result might seem to be freedom, it really is not, but rather more like slavery. In all worldly things there is but semblance, and nothing is real. For, even then, as ransomed by Christ, you were under no bondage to man; now, though man has given you freedom, you are the slave of Christ.13 (6) If you really believe the freedom of the world to be real, so much so that you even seal it with a 7 Cf. 1 Peter 2.11; Heb. 11.13.
8 Phil. 3.20; cf. Heb. 12.22.
9 John 16.20.
10 Cf. Matt. 5.4.
11 Cf. Gen. 24.3,4; 28.1,2; 1 Cor. 7.39.
12 Cf. 1 Peter 1.18,19; 1 Cor. 6.20.
13 Cf. 1 Cor. 7.22,23.
THE CHAPLET
crown, then you have returned to the slavery of man, imagining it to be freedom; you have lost the liberty of Christ which you imagine to be slavery rather than freedom.
Will there be any need for discussing the games as occasions of the wearing of crowns, when their very names condemn them, being both sacred to the gods and in honor of the dead?14 All we will need now will be to have Olympian
Jupiter, Nemean Hercules, along with that poor Archemoruslj and the hapless Antinous,16 crowned in the person of a Christian to make the latter a spectacle disgusting to behold.
(7) I imagine that by now we have covered all the cases in which one might wear a crown, and they are all shown to be totally alien to us as Christians. They are foreign to us, unholy, forbidden, once for all forsworn in our baptismal vow. For they surely are 'the pomps of the Devil and his angels.' What are they but worldly positions and honors, festivals, insincere vows by the people, exhibitions of human servility, empty flatteries, and glory that brings bitterness in its train? And, at the base of them all, what is there but idolatry? For this is at the root of every crown that is placed
14 See above, Spectacles 6.3, where Tertullian makes the same distinction between 'games in honor of pagan deities and those in honor of dead persons.'
15 Son of Lycurgus of Nemea, who was killed by a dragon, while his nurse Hypsipyle showed a spring to the Seven against Thebes. The Seven gave the boy a magnificent funeral and, on that occasion, celebrated the Nemean Games for the first time. The boy's name was
Opheltes, but he was afterwards called Archemorus—'Beginner of Death'—because his was the first of the many lives to be lost in the expedition of the Argive heroes against Thebes.
16 A beautiful youth and favorite of Emperor Hadrian. He died by drowning himself in the Nile in 130. In his memory Hadrian founded the city of Antinoopolis, raised him to the rank of the gods, built temples for his worship, and ordered festivals to be celebrated in his honor.