Tertullian, On the Crown 13

Public orders are crowned with laurels for public causes, magistrates with gold; Etruscan insignia are laid on top of them. The word means crowns set with gems and gold oak leaves, marked for Jupiter, worn when officials in palm-embroidered togas lead out the sacred processions. Provincial gold crowns also exist, now seeking larger heads for statues rather than men. But your orders, your magistrates, and the very name of the senate is the Church of Christ. You are enrolled in the books of his life. There your purple is the Lord's blood and the spear-wound in his cross; there the axe lies at the tree's trunk, there the rods from Jesse. Let them look at the public horses wearing their own crowns. When your Lord wished to enter Jerusalem according to Scripture, he did not even have a donkey of his own (Matthew 21:5). Those men ride in chariots and on horses, but we will call on the name of the Lord our God. We have been removed from the very dwelling of that Babylon in the Apocalypse of John, let alone the tribunal (Revelation 18:4). The crowd is crowned now from the exultation of imperial victories, now from the splendor of municipal festivals — every luxury of public joy is a trap. But you are a stranger in this world, a citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem. "Our municipality," he says, "is in the heavens." You have your own senses, your own calendar; you have nothing to do with the age's joys — indeed you owe the opposite: the age will rejoice, but you will mourn. And I think he calls blessed those who mourn, not those who are crowned. Weddings crown the betrothed, which is why we do not marry pagans, lest they drag us into idolatry — since their weddings begin with it. You have the law from the Patriarchs, you have the apostle commanding marriage in the Lord. Secular freedom also crowns. But you have already been redeemed by Christ, and at a great price. How can the world free a slave who belongs to another? Even if freedom appears, slavery also once appeared. Everything in the age is imaginary, nothing true. For even then you were a free man redeemed by Christ; now you are Christ's slave, though freed by a man. If you think the world's freedom is true, so that you also ratify the crown, you have returned to the slavery of man, which you mistake for freedom; you have lost the freedom of Christ, which you mistake for slavery. Will agonistic causes also be debated — causes their own titles condemn at once? Sacred and funeral ones too, of course, since all that remains 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 enumerated every cause. None belongs to us; all are foreign, profane, illicit, rejected once for all in the testimony of the sacrament. These were the pomp of the devil and the offices of his angels: the age's honors, solemnities, popularities, false vows, human services, empty praises, shameful glories — and in all of them idolatry, in the very sense of the crowns with which all these things are adorned. Claudius indeed crowns heaven with stars in Homer's songs; certainly by God, certainly by man — therefore man himself is also to be crowned by God. Meanwhile the age crowns brothels, latrines, bakeries, prison, the game, the amphitheaters, the spoliariums, and funeral processions. How sacred, how holy and clean this habit is — do not judge it from one poetic heaven, but from the commerce of the whole world. But a Christian will not defile his door with laurels, if he knows how many gods the devil has fixed on doorways: Janus on the door, Limentinus on the threshold, Forculus and Cardus on the doors and hinges, and among the Greeks, Thyreus Apollo and Antelios demons.