Chapter 15
TERTULLIAN
lilies, and violets of all sorts, or perhaps you even wish to have jeweled and golden crowns? Of course, only that you might imitate Christ in the crown that He afterwards received!
It was after the gall9 He was given a taste of honey, and He was not hailed as the King of Glory by the angels until he had been proscribed on the cross as 'King of the Jews';10 being first made by the Father a little less than the angels, He was then crowned with glory and honor.11 If, then, you owe your head to Him as a debt for these favors, try as best you can to repay Him in the fashion that He offered His head for yours.
Or, be not crowned with flowers at all if you cannot bear the thorns, because, with flowers, you cannot be crowned.
Chapter 15 (1) Keep untainted, therefore, for God what is His; He will crown it if so He choose. And, He will; in fact, He invites us to be crowned. To him who conquers He says: 'I will give the crown of life.'1 Be you, too, faithful unto death; fight, too, the good fight whose crown the Apostle feels so justly confident has been laid up for him.2 The angel of victory, also, who, riding a white horse, goes forth to conquer, receives a crown, and another is adorned with a rainbow which [in its fair colors] is like a celestial meadow.3 The elders, too, sit crowned with golden crowns and the Son of 9 Cf. Matt. 27.34.
10 Cf. Matt. 27.37; Mark 15.26; Luke 23.38.
11 Cf. Heb. 2.7; Ps. 8.6.
1 Apoc 2.10; cf. James 1.12.
2 Cf. 2 Tim. 4.7,8.
3 Cf. Apoc. 6.2; 10.1.
THE CHAPLET
Man Himself, wearing a golden crown, shines forth above the clouds.4 (2) If such beautiful images are seen in the vision of the seer, what will the realities themselves be? Feast your eyes upon those crowns, savor those odors, and do not demean your brow with a little chaplet or a twisted headband, when your destiny is to wear a diadem. For Christ Jesus has made us to be as kings to God and His Father,5 so why bother with a flower that is destined to die? Yours is a flower from the root of Jesse, upon which the grace of the divine Spirit has rested in all its fullness, a flower untainted, unfading and everlasting.6
(3) Choosing this flower, the good soldier has advanced in rank in the heavenly army. Are you not ashamed, fellow soldiers of Christ, that you will be condemned, not by Christ, but by some soldier of Mithras? At the initiation, deep in a cavern, in the very camp of darkness, a crown is presented to the candidate at the point of a sword, as if in mimicry of martyrdom, and put upon his head; then he is admonished to resist and throw it off and possibly slip it on the shoulder of the god, saying: 'Mithras is my crown.' He is at once acknowledged as a soldier of Mithras if he throws the crown away, saying that in his god he has his crown. (4) And thenceforward he never puts a crown on his head, and he uses that as a sign of identification, if anywhere he be tested as to his oath of initiation. Let us, then, recognize the wiles of the Devil, who imitates some of God's things with no other design than to put us to shame by the faithfulness of his own servants and to condemn us.
4 Cf. Apoc. 4.4; 14.14.
5 Cf. Apoc. 1.6.
6 Cf. Isa. 11.1,2.
• '*
FLIGHT IN TIME
OF PERSECUTION
Translated by
EDWIN A. QUAIN, S.J., Ph.D.
Fordham University
INTRODUCTION
''jKSN AN earlier work. The Chaplet (1.5), Tertullian Egg plf had touched upon a question which, in those uncerIbm tain times, was a matter of grave concern for every fervent Christian: Is the Christian allowed to take refuge in flight under the crucial test of persecution? The promise Ter tullian had given on that occasion, namely, to give a detailed answer to this vexing question, he made good by writing a special treatise, Flight in Time of Persecution.
The Church never did impose on its members the absolute duty of exposing themselves to martyrdom by boldly waiting for arrest, torture, and death. The Martyrdom of Polycarp
(Ch. 4), written in 156, contains the explicit statement: 'We do not commend those who give themselves up, since the Gospel does not teach this.' St. Poly carp himself, yielding to the entreaties of friends, quietly left his episcopal city of Smyrna and withdrew to a farm in the neighborhood. Nor did other Christian leaders of unquestionable courage, as, for instance, St. Cyprian, hesitate to retire to a safe place of hiding, when giving themselves up to their persecutors would only have meant uselessly courting death and probably
TERTULLIAN
causing greater damage to the Christian community as a whole.
In his Catholic days, Tertullian had found no fault with this attitude. 'In time of persecution,' he wrote in Ad uxorem
(1.3.4), 'it is better to use the permission granted and "to flee from town to town," than to be apprehended and to deny the faith under torture.' A similar view is implied in his De patientia (13.6). As a Montanist, however, Tertullian felt himself compelled to change his opinion in the matter.
Did the 'Paraclete' who spoke through the mouth of his Phrygian prophet, Montanus, not make it unmistakably clear that, in persecution, a Christian should never be a coward and seek safety in flight, but be anxious to die a martyr's death (see below, Ch. 9.4)? Hence, consulted by a Catholic Christian, whose name was Fabius, as to whether it was permitted to elude persecution either by going into hiding or by buying off the persecutors, Tertullian categorically condemns both means of escaping danger as equivalent to formal apostasy. Persecution, he argues, is willed by God, the Devil being only the instrument of persecution, not its author.
As coming from God, persecution is something intrinsically good. It tests the faith of Christians, separating the chaff from the wheat, and increases religious zeal anl fervor. For those who object to these conclusions by referring to Matt. 23.10,
'When they begin to persecute you, flee from city to city'
(see below, Ch. 6.1), Tertullian has a ready answer. The Lord's command, he replies, was only intended for the persons of the Apostles, their times, and the peculiar circumstances of their mission, but does not apply to the present. As to buying one's freedom from persecution by bribing informers, soldiers and judges, such a practice is 'flight' in disguised form, unworthy of God, because it tries to redeem with
FLIGHT IN TIME OF PERSECUTION
money a man whom Christ has redeemed with his Blood.
That the treatise belongs to Tertullian's Montanist period is evident from such passages as Ch. 1.1, where the author regrets that the addressee, Fabius, obviously a Catholic
Christian, has not yet accepted the 'Paraclete' of the Montanists; Ch. 9.4, where he bolsters his argumentation by quoting two utterances of the 'Paraclete'; Ch. 11.2, where he states that anyone who harkens to the 'Paraclete' 'will hear Him branding the runaways'; Ch. 14.3, where he insists on the necessity of further revelation by the 'Paraclete.'
The treatise is usually assigned to the year 212.
The text followed in the present translation is that of J. J.
Thierry in Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 2 (Tumholti 1954) 1133-1155.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Texts:
J. J. Thierry, Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 2 (Tumholti 1954) 1133-1155.
J. J. Thierry, Tertullianus. De fuga in persectuione, ed. with [Dutch] introduction, translation, and commentary (Hilversum 1941).
J. Marra, Q. Septimii Tertulliani De spectaculis, De fuga in persecutione, De pallio (Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum Paravianum;
Turin 1954).
Secondary Sources:
E. Jolyon, La Fuite de la persecution. Ce qu'en a pense Tertullien et ce qu'en pense VEglise (Lyon 1903) .
H. Leclercq, 'Fuite de la persecution,' DACL 5.2 (1923) 2660-2684.
A Quacquarelli, 'La persecuzione secondo Tertulliano,' Gregorianum 31 (1950) 562-589.