Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
The case grows stronger for Christian observances when even nature defends them — nature, which is the first discipline of all. And so it is nature that first lays down that a crown does not suit the head. I hold, moreover, that God, the God of nature — our God — who shaped man and, for the desiring, judging, and obtaining of the fruits of things, ordained in him fixed senses, each with its own organ of the members in a manner of speaking: he dug out hearing in the ears, kindled sight in the eyes, shut taste up in the mouth, set smell astir in the nostrils, and valued touch in the hands. Through these services of the outer man, ministering to the inner man, the fruits of divine gifts are conducted from the senses to the soul. What fruit, then, comes from flowers? Their proper substance, certainly their chief substance as the material of garlands, is the flowers of the field. Their fragrance, you say, or their color, or both together. What senses register color and fragrance? Sight, I take it, and smell. What members have drawn those senses as their lot? The eyes, unless I am mistaken, and the nostrils. Use flowers, then, by sight and by smell — the senses whose fruit they are — use them through the eyes and the nostrils, which are the organs of those senses. The substance was handed you by God; the fashion was handed you by the world. And yet not even an unusual fashion clashes with the ordinary use: let flowers be yours strung and woven, on thread or on rush, yet free, yet unbound — objects, that is, for the eye's delight and the nostril's. Call a crown, if you like, a bundle of flowers gathered in a row, so that you may carry many at once and enjoy them all equally. Go further — tuck them into your bosom, if your fastidiousness runs that far; scatter them on your couch, if your softness runs that far; steep them in your cup, if your innocence runs that far. Enjoy them in as many ways as you have senses for enjoying. But on the head, what taste has a flower, what sensation has a crown, but that of a mere binding, in which neither is color discerned, nor fragrance drawn in, nor tenderness appreciated? To chase after a flower with the head is as much against nature as to hunt for nourishment with the ear, or for noise with the nostril. And everything against nature earns, in everyone's judgment, the mark of a monstrosity — and for us in particular, even the further charge of sacrilege against God, the Lord and author of nature.