Justified True Belief

(●) The African bishop who taught the Latin church to think of itself as one body, and who was beheaded for saying so out loud. + Cyprian came late to the faith and did not have long in it. He was a wealthy teacher of rhetoric in Carthage, the second city of the Latin west, when he was baptized in middle age, in his late thirties or his forties depending on which reckoning of an unrecorded birth year is right. Within two or three years the people of the city had made him their bishop. Twelve years after his baptism the proconsul, the Roman governor of the province, had him beheaded in a field outside town. Into that short span went two empire-wide persecutions, a plague that emptied the streets, two schisms (each of them a congregation splitting into two rival churches with two rival bishops), a string of church councils, and a public quarrel with the bishop of Rome that neither man ever settled. He is on a Christian apologetics site for two reasons. The first is that almost every later argument about the church as a visible thing, a body you could walk up to and name, runs back through him. What happens to a Christian who leaves it? What may one bishop tell another bishop to do, and what may he not? Does a baptism performed outside it count for anything at all? Those were not seminar questions in Carthage. They were the week’s business, and he answered all three in writing. He is the man who wrote that you cannot have God for your Father if you will not have the church for your mother, and the man who told a council full of bishops that none of them was a bishop over bishops, and both sentences have been quoted at Christians ever since, sometimes by people who do not realize they are quoting the same author. The second reason is more ordinary. Eighty-odd letters came down in his collection, about sixty-five of them written by him, and they are the best window anyone has into the daily life of a third-century church: who paid for the widows, what to do about a deacon who stole, how much money Carthage sent to ransom Christians kidnapped by raiders (one hundred thousand sesterces, as it happens, and he names the donors). Most of what is known about his life comes from his own correspondence, from a short memoir by his deacon Pontius, and from the official court transcript of his two trials. That last document is why his death has an exact date, 14 September 258, while his birth has none at all. The "c. 210" in the title is a modern reckoning worked backwards from his career, not a record of any kind.

(●) c. 210 to 246 AD: He made his money in the first half of his life teaching young men to argue, and after his baptism in middle age he gave it away. + Thascius Cyprianus was born in Roman Africa, most likely in Carthage itself, to a family with land and standing. No source records the year. Historians work it out from the shape of his career, which is why every book about him prints the birth date with a "c." in front of it and why some of them say 200 instead of 210. His profession was rhetoric, which in the third century meant something closer to running a top law school than to teaching composition. A rhetor trained the sons of the wealthy to speak in court, in the town council, and before a governor, and the good ones were famous the way a celebrated trial lawyer is famous now. Jerome, writing a catalog of Christian authors some hundred and thirty years later, opens his entry on him with exactly that: Cyprian "at first was famous as a teacher of rhetoric" (Jerome, On Illustrious Men 67). Then, at some point around 246, an elderly presbyter of the Carthaginian church named Caecilius talked him into Christianity. A presbyter is an elder. The word is simply the Greek for an older man, and it had come to mean one of the senior clergy of a congregation, the men who taught and baptized and served at the table under the bishop; the English word priest is that same Greek word worn down by centuries of use. Carthage had a bench of them, men who had served the congregation for years and knew everyone in it, and one of the old ones spent enough time on a wealthy teacher of rhetoric to change his mind. Cyprian took the man’s name as part of his own, which is how he comes down in the records as Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus, and he sold his estates and gave the proceeds to the poor. He kept his gardens, or rather he got them back after selling them, which Pontius puts down to the kindness of God and later writers to the kindness of friends, and he would be arrested in them twelve years later. His first book, a letter to a friend called To Donatus, is his own account of what happened, and it is worth noticing what he thought the hard part had been. Not believing the doctrine. Changing. He had assumed a man of his habits and appetites simply could not be remade, and he writes about his own baptism as someone genuinely surprised to have been proved wrong about himself.

(●) 248 or 249 AD: The people of Carthage made him their bishop over the objection of five of his own presbyters. + A bishop in the third century was not appointed from above. He was chosen by the congregation he would serve, and the bishops of the neighbouring towns came in to approve the choice and to lay hands on him, which is what consecrating a bishop meant: the men already holding the office putting their hands on the head of the man about to hold it. A bishop’s place is called his see, from sedes, the Latin for a seat, and the word does duty for the office and for the city together. When the see of Carthage fell vacant, the crowd wanted Cyprian. Pontius says he tried to avoid it and that the people surrounded his house to prevent his slipping away. The objection to him was not frivolous. He had been a Christian for two or three years. Paul had told Timothy that an overseer must not be a recent convert (1 Timothy 3:6), and there were presbyters in Carthage who had been ordained for decades and passed over for a rich newcomer. Five of them refused to accept the election, and one of those five, a presbyter named Novatus, turns up behind almost every disaster of the next ten years. Cyprian never pretended the opposition away. Years later, writing to Cornelius at Rome, he set his own case down as that of a bishop "chosen in time of peace by the suffrage of an entire people" and approved by four years in the office (Epistle 54.6 in the Ante-Nicene Fathers numbering, Letter 59 in the modern). The occasion for writing it was that one of those same five presbyters, Fortunatus, had just been set up as a rival bishop of Carthage. It is worth holding on to that picture, because the treatise he is famous for, the one about the unity of the church, was not written by a man with a quiet diocese theorizing about harmony. It was written by a man whose own presbytery had been split since the day he was consecrated.

(●) 250 AD: The emperor Decius ordered every subject to sacrifice, and Cyprian went into hiding and governed his church by letter. + Earlier persecutions had been local and occasional. What Decius ordered at the beginning of 250 was new: every inhabitant of the empire was to sacrifice to the gods before a commission, taste the meat, and receive a signed certificate saying it had been done. A few dozen of these certificates have been dug up in Egypt, ordinary paperwork on papyrus, and they are chilling precisely because they are so bureaucratic. Nobody was asked to renounce Christ. They were asked to produce a receipt. Carthage folded. Cyprian writes that his people queued at the forum, that some ran to sacrifice before they were even summoned, that whole families went together. The mob in the circus called for the bishop by name to be thrown to the lions, and he did not present himself. He withdrew to a hiding place outside the city and stayed there roughly fifteen months, writing letters the whole time: to his clergy about who was to be fed, to the confessors in prison, to Rome. The confessors are worth pausing on, because they are in the middle of everything that happened next. A confessor was a Christian who had been arrested and questioned and had refused to sacrifice, and who was now sitting in a cell waiting to learn whether the refusal was going to cost him his life. He had confessed the name of Christ in front of a magistrate, which is where the word comes from, and if he died for it he would be a martyr. The churches honoured such men and women enormously, and with reason. Not everyone thought this was courage. A letter arrived from some of the Roman clergy, unsigned and written in rough Latin, addressed past Cyprian to the clergy of Carthage, and the implication about a shepherd who had left his flock was not subtle. He answered it (Epistle 14 in the Ante-Nicene Fathers numbering, Letter 20 in the modern), explaining that his presence would have inflamed the crowd and cost other people their lives, and he sent copies of thirteen letters written from hiding to prove he had never stopped governing. It is a reasonable defense and it may well be the right one. It is also the charge his enemies threw at him for the rest of his life, and he knew it.

(●) 251 AD: He came home to a church quarrelling over the Christians who had sacrificed, and called a council instead of settling it himself. + The persecution eased when Decius went off to fight on the Danube, and the question that had been waiting all year could no longer be deferred. What was to be done with the lapsed, the Christians who had complied? They were not a handful of cowards. They were most of the congregation, and they wanted back in. Two parties had already formed, and they were pulling hard in opposite directions. On one side stood the confessors, the Christians who had been jailed or tortured and had not given way, and they were handing out letters of peace by the sheaf. A letter of peace was a note from a confessor asking that a fallen Christian be received back on the strength of what the writer himself had suffered, and the fact that some of them named nobody at all, but asked peace for a man and his friends, so that twenty or thirty people could present themselves on a single note, tells you how carefully they were being weighed. Cyprian’s own hostile presbyters were readmitting anyone who produced one. On the other side, at Rome, a brilliant presbyter named Novatian was arguing that the church had no power to readmit such people at all, and would shortly be consecrated as a rival bishop of Rome on that platform. The two positions have names, and the names are worth having, because the same fight keeps recurring in Christian history under different circumstances. The strict party, Novatian’s, is the rigorist one, from rigour, meaning severity: a church that lets in a man who denied Christ has stopped being the thing it claims to be. The party that would take him back on production of a letter is the lax one. Almost nobody in either camp thought of himself as cruel or as careless. Each was holding on to something true and letting go of something else. Cyprian steered between them and made enemies on both sides for it. His position had three parts. There would be no general amnesty, because a wound that is covered over is not healed. There would be no permanent exclusion either, because forgiveness is not the church’s to withhold. And the sorting would be done case by case, in a council, with the bishop restoring the penitent at the end of a real penance, which in the third century meant a stretch of time spent outside the communion and in public repentance rather than a private apology and a handshake. The length was to be matched to what the man had done: sooner for those who had only bought a certificate, longer for those who had actually sacrificed. A council of African bishops met after Easter 251 and ratified it. He wrote On the Lapsed and On the Unity of the Church for that gathering, and read them aloud to it. Both schisms came anyway. Felicissimus and the five presbyters set up a rival bishop in Carthage on the lax side; Novatian set up a rival church across the empire on the rigorist side. Cyprian spent the rest of his life dealing with the consequences.

(●) c. 252 AD: Plague reached Carthage, and he put his church to work burying the dead of the people who were calling for his execution. + The epidemic that swept the empire from about 249 into the 260s is called the Plague of Cyprian by historians, for no better reason than that his description of it is the vivid one that survived. Pontius, who watched it with him, describes a city where the disease went house by house, where people threw their own relatives into the street while they were still alive, and where the bodies were left lying because carrying them was dangerous and nobody was paying. Cyprian called the congregation together and preached on a single text: love your enemies, pray for your persecutors, because God sends sun and rain on the just and the unjust alike (Matthew 5:44–45). Anyone can look after his own people, he told them; that is what a tax collector does. Then he organized the city block by block. Those with money paid; those without gave their hands and their backs, and Pontius says the poor gave what was worth more than the money. They nursed and buried pagans and Christians without distinction. Here is the detail that makes the story land. In those very months the populace of Carthage was again demanding in the circus that Cyprian be given to the lions, because a new edict had ordered public sacrifices to turn the plague aside, and Christians were the obvious people to blame for angering the gods. He mentions the shouting himself in a letter to Rome, quite calmly, in a list of the things his episcopate had involved so far. The men whose relatives his deacons were burying were the men chanting for his death, and the arrangement struck him as normal.

(●) 255 to 256 AD: He and Stephen of Rome fell out over whether a baptism performed outside the church counted, and neither man gave way. + Converts kept arriving from the Novatianist body, the rigorist church Novatian had set up, and from other splinter groups besides, and they had all been baptized there. Was that baptism real? Nothing about the question was theoretical. A man is standing in front of a bishop asking to be received, and the bishop either puts him in the water or he does not, and whichever he does he is saying something about the years that man has already spent calling himself a Christian. Two customs had grown up. Africa and much of Asia Minor said no, and baptized such people on reception, which from their point of view was not rebaptism at all, since they held nothing had happened the first time. Rome said yes, and received them by the laying on of hands, on the ground that this was what had always been done. Cyprian’s reasoning followed straight from what he taught about the church, and it comes in three steps. Baptism washes away sin because the Holy Spirit is at work in it. The Spirit is given in the church. A group that has cut itself off from the church therefore has nothing to give, and the water poured in such a company is water and nothing else. Stephen, who became bishop of Rome in 254, did not meet that reasoning with reasoning of the same kind. He appealed to the tradition and ruled that nothing was to be innovated beyond what had been handed down, apparently on pain of excommunication, which is exactly what the word sounds like: being shut out of the communion, barred from the Lord’s Table and from the fellowship of the congregation until the matter is put right. He did put one argument beside the rule, and it survives only at second hand, in Cyprian’s report and in Firmilian’s, since Stephen’s own letters are lost: a man baptized anywhere in the name of Christ receives the grace of Christ, and the name does not draw its power from the company. Underneath the two customs lay a real theological question, and it was Stephen’s instinct rather than Cyprian’s that the later church would follow. A sacrament is an act the church performs at Christ’s command, in which something you can see, water or bread or wine, is joined to something you cannot see. (Christians have long differed over how many acts belong on that list, but baptism is on everybody’s.) What the two bishops were really disagreeing about is what makes one of them work: does the validity of a sacrament depend on the standing of the man administering it, or does it depend on Christ? Three African councils backed Cyprian. The largest met at Carthage on 1 September 256, eighty-seven bishops, and instead of taking a show of hands he had each one state his opinion aloud, and had the minutes written down. Those minutes survive, one of the very few verbatim records of an ancient council anyone has. Stephen refused to receive the envoys the council sent and would not let them lodge in Rome. Firmilian, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, wrote to Cyprian backing him in language even angrier than his own. Then Stephen died in 257, persecution fell on both churches, and the quarrel simply stopped without a verdict. The two men, it should be said, never excommunicated each other.

(●) 257 to 258 AD: Valerian exiled him to the coast, then brought him back to Carthage and had him beheaded. + On 30 August 257 Cyprian was brought before the proconsul Aspasius Paternus. The transcript of that hearing survives as the first half of the Acts of the Proconsul, and it is short and very dry, which is a good deal of what makes it worth reading. Nobody in the room is performing. He says he is a Christian and a bishop, that he knows one God and prays to him day and night for all men and for the emperor’s safety. Asked whether he will persist, he answers that a good will which knows God cannot be altered. Asked whether he can go into exile at Curubis, he answers: I go. Asked for the names of his presbyters, he declines, pointing out that informing is against Roman law, and adds that they can be found easily enough in their own cities. Curubis was a small seaside town about fifty miles away. Pontius went with him and remembered it as sunny, with a stream of visitors and kind neighbours. Cyprian kept working, writing to nine bishops sentenced to the Numidian mines with half their hair shaved off, and sending money down to them by a subdeacon and three acolytes, junior clergy who carried the messages and assisted at worship, whose names the bishops put in their reply. In 258 a second edict changed the terms: bishops, presbyters and deacons were to be executed on identification. Sixtus, bishop of Rome, was killed in the catacombs on 6 August with four of his deacons. The new proconsul, Galerius Maximus, recalled Cyprian to Carthage, and Cyprian went back to his own gardens and waited. Friends urged him to run. He refused, and when the summons came to appear at Utica he hid rather than obey it, on the ground that a bishop ought to die among his own people. He was arrested on 13 September, spent the night under guard in an officer’s house with his friends around him while the congregation kept watch in the street outside, and was tried on the morning of the 14th at a villa called Sexti. The sentence was read from a tablet: that Thascius Cyprianus be executed by the sword. He answered, "Thanks be to God." The crowd shouted that they wanted to be beheaded with him. He was taken to a hollow ringed with trees, and people climbed into the branches to see, which reminded Pontius of Zacchaeus. He knelt and prayed, handed his outer garments to his deacons, ordered twenty-five gold pieces paid to the executioner, and stood in his linen tunic while the brethren spread cloths on the ground to catch his blood. He covered his own eyes with his hands, and when he could not knot the band a presbyter and a subdeacon tied it for him, both of them named Julianus. Pontius says the executioner’s hand shook so badly that he could barely hold the sword. That night the Christians carried the body by candlelight to a cemetery in the suburbs, with prayers and, Pontius says, triumph. He was the first bishop of Carthage to be martyred.

What He Taught

(T1) The church is one thing and not many, and a Christian who breaks away is a branch cut off from the tree. + Cyprian reaches for three household pictures, and they are the heart of everything he wrote about the church. Sunlight comes into a room through several windows, but it is one light. A tree puts out branches in every direction, but one root feeds them. A spring runs off into several streams, and the water is the same water. Then he turns each picture around. Separate the ray from the sun and there is no more light in it. Break the branch off and it will never bud again. Cut the stream from its source and the bed dries out. The word for what worried him is schism, and it needs teaching because it is easy to confuse with heresy. Heresy is a division over what is believed; a group teaches that Christ was not really God, and separates over the doctrine. Schism is a division over who is in charge; the doctrine is the same on both sides, and the split is about authority, or about a disputed election, or about how strict the discipline ought to be. Carthage in 251 had two rival bishops who agreed about the creed, and Rome had two who agreed about the creed, and Cyprian’s point is that this is not a smaller problem than heresy but the same catastrophe arriving by a different road. The branch that comes off a healthy tree dies exactly as fast as the branch that comes off a diseased one. He argues it from Scripture rather than from sentiment. The soldiers at the cross tore up the clothes of Jesus among them but would not tear the tunic, because it was woven in one piece from the top (John 19:23–24), and Cyprian reads that seamless garment as a sign of a church that comes down whole from heaven and cannot be divided into shares. He notices that the prayer the Lord taught is plural from the first word: not my Father, not give me my bread, but ours, all the way through, so that even alone in a room a Christian prays as part of a people. And he leans hard on Paul, who begs the Corinthians to agree and let there be no divisions among them (1 Corinthians 1:10), and on the prayer of Jesus that his people may be one so that the world may believe (John 17:20–21). Christians since have agreed with him about the goal and argued about the map. He is describing a visible communion, the one you can locate by asking which bishop a congregation is in fellowship with, and the hard case is the one his own life produced: what happens when the bishops themselves divide, as he and Stephen did. Cyprian never answered that, and it is a fair question to press him on.

(Q) "He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother." + Source: Cyprian, On the Unity of the Church 6 (Wallis translation). His single most quoted sentence, and it helps to know the room it was written for. Carthaginian Christians in 251 were being courted by a rival church that looked purer than their own, and Cyprian is telling them what it would cost to go. The line directly before it calls the church one mother, from whose womb we are born and by whose milk we are fed, so the image is family rather than institution: a man cannot pick one parent and disown the other (T1).

(T2) No bishop is a bishop over bishops. + Two brothers inherit a farm together, and not in halves. Neither of them owns the north field while the other owns the south. Each owns the whole farm, every acre of it, and it is precisely because each owns all of it that neither can sell so much as a hedgerow without the other. Lawyers still have a name for holding property that way, whole and jointly rather than in slices, and Cyprian applies something very like it to the office of bishop. The office is the episcopate, from the Greek episkopos, an overseer, the word the New Testament uses for the men who had charge of a local congregation. Cyprian’s formula is that the episcopate is one, and each bishop holds the whole of it rather than a slice. A bishop of a small African town holds the same undivided office that the bishop of Rome holds. It follows that he answers for it to Christ and not to his colleagues, and it equally follows that he cannot go off and act as though the others did not exist, since what he holds is theirs too. This is not a theory he invented to win an argument, though it certainly served him in one. He had already written it into On the Unity of the Church in 251, years before Stephen ever ruled against him. What the quarrel of 256 did was show him taking his own medicine. He believed Stephen was gravely wrong, he said so in letters that are among the rudest things he ever wrote, and he still did not break communion with him, and he still told his own council that any bishop there was free to vote the other way and would not be judged for it. Two warnings, because the sentence gets quoted in a hurry by people on both sides. Cyprian is not saying that bishops may believe whatever they like; he thought the truth of the matter was plain and that Stephen had missed it. And he is not describing the later papacy in order to reject it, because the later papacy did not yet exist to be described. He is saying something narrower and harder: that in a genuine dispute between churches, no one on earth gets to end the argument by force of office.

(Q) "For neither does any of us set himself up as a bishop of bishops, nor by tyrannical terror does any compel his colleague to the necessity of obedience; since every bishop, according to the allowance of his liberty and power, has his own proper right of judgment, and can no more be judged by another than he himself can judge another." + Source: The Seventh Council of Carthage under Cyprian, opening address (Wallis translation). Cyprian opening the council of 1 September 256, with eighty-seven bishops in the room and Stephen’s ruling on the table. Having just told them that he thinks heretical baptism is worthless, he tells them in the next breath that each of them is to say what he actually thinks, and that a man who disagrees is not to be cut off for it (T2). Every one of the eighty-seven then spoke, and the clerk took it all down.

(T3) A Christian who denied Christ under threat can be healed, but not by pretending the wound is not there. + Anyone who has had a deep cut treated knows the difference between a doctor who is kind and a doctor who is gentle. The kind one cleans the wound out, and it hurts, and it heals. The gentle one dabs at the edges, and you thank him, and three days later the infection is in your blood. Cyprian turns that into the governing image of his whole policy toward the lapsed, and he is blunt about which kind of physician he thinks the confessors handing out blanket pardons were being. The lapsed, lapsi in his Latin, means the Christians who complied with the edict of Decius, and they fell into two grades that mattered enormously to them. The sacrificati had actually gone to the altar, burned the incense, eaten the meat. The libellatici had paid a bribe or used a friendly official to obtain the certificate without doing any of it, and could tell themselves they had never worshipped anything. Penance, in the third-century sense, was the public process of getting back: a period outside the communion rail, fasting, giving to the poor, and at the end the bishop laying hands on the penitent before the congregation that had watched him fail. It was not a fine paid in private. The hard part of Cyprian’s position is that he agreed with both of the parties he was fighting about something real. The rigorists were right that denying Christ is not nothing; Jesus said plainly that whoever denies him before men will be denied before the Father (Matthew 10:32–33), and a church that waved that away would be lying to its own people. The laxists were right that the same Lord ran to meet the son who had spent everything and come home. What Cyprian would not do is let either truth cancel the other. So: the door is open, and there is a road to walk to reach it, and the length of the road is measured to the injury. He put the dying at the front of the queue, on the sensible ground that a man with days to live cannot complete a penance measured in years.

(Q) "He is an unskilful physician who handles the swelling edges of wounds with a tender hand, and, by retaining the poison shut up in the deep recesses of the body, increases it." + Source: Cyprian, On the Lapsed 14 (Wallis translation). Written for the council of 251 and read aloud to it. The sentences on either side of this one are addressed to bishops rather than to the fallen: it is the pastor with the soothing word, not the sinner, who is being called an incompetent doctor here (T3). Cyprian goes on to admit that the patient will cry out when the wound is opened, and to say that he will thank you later.

(T4) Baptism given outside the church is not a baptism at all. + A man walks into your kitchen, signs a cheque and hands it to you. Whether you have been given anything depends entirely on whether there is an account behind the signature. The paper is identical either way. That is how Cyprian thought about a baptism performed by a group that had broken from the church: the water is water and the words are the right words, but the thing that makes a baptism a baptism is the Holy Spirit, and he did not believe the Spirit was operating in a schism. So there was nothing to recognize, and a convert coming over had not been baptized twice; he was being baptized once, late. Stephen of Rome answered from custom rather than from theory, and his instinct turned out to be the one the church kept. A baptism belongs to Christ, not to the man holding the jug. If its worth depended on the state of the minister, then no Christian could ever be sure of his own, since he cannot see into the heart of the priest who baptized him, and the whole thing would rest on a fact nobody can check. Put that way, the Roman position is not laxity about schism at all. It is a refusal to let a schismatic take the sacrament hostage on his way out the door. It is in this argument, and not in a general theory about who goes to heaven, that Cyprian writes the words he is most often quoted for outside his own pages: that there is no salvation out of the church. He is pressing the case to its limit, saying that even a man martyred for the name of Christ while standing outside the communion has gained nothing by it. The line has had a long and complicated career since, and it is worth knowing what question it was answering when he wrote it down.

(Q) "But we who hold the head and root of the one Church know, and trust for certain, that nothing is lawful there outside the Church, and that the baptism which is one is among us." + Source: Cyprian, Epistle 72.2, to Jubaianus (Wallis translation; Letter 73 in modern numbering). Jubaianus, an African bishop, had written asking what to do with converts from the Novatianists, and this long reply became the document the council of 256 debated. The harder sentence, "because there is no salvation out of the Church," comes nineteen sections later in the same letter (T4).

(T5) Money is for giving away, and the list of people to spend it on includes the ones who want you dead. + Start with a receipt. In about 253 raiders in Numidia carried off a number of Christians and held them for ransom, and the bishops there wrote to Carthage for help. Cyprian sent one hundred thousand sesterces, raised from his clergy and congregation, and enclosed the list of everyone who had given so that the Numidians could pray for them by name. What a legionary was paid in those years is argued over, since one emperor after another raised the rate while the silver in the coins kept thinning, but on any of the figures scholars propose the collection came to decades of a soldier’s wages, gathered in a city that had just been through a plague. His reasoning about property is simple and uncomfortable. The things God gives are held in common by the human race, and the proof is in front of everyone: the daylight falls on every roof, the rain waters every field, nobody has worked out how to own the moon. A Christian who shares what his land produces is not being generous in the way a benefactor is generous. He is imitating a Father who does exactly that all day long, for everybody, including the people who curse him. Which is why, when the plague came, the argument was already made. Cyprian did not have to persuade his congregation to bury pagan corpses from first principles; he had been telling them for years that a Christian who looks after his own people only has done nothing that a tax collector does not do. He wrote a whole treatise on what a plague ought to teach, and one line from it sits oddly with our instincts about a bishop: a pestilence, he says, searches out the righteousness of each one, and one of the things it asks is whether the healthy tend the sick and whether physicians stay with their patients. He thought epidemics were examinations, and he thought his church was being marked.

(Q) "For whatever is of God is common in our use; nor is any one excluded from His benefits and His gifts, so as to prevent the whole human race from enjoying equally the divine goodness and liberality." + Source: Cyprian, On Works and Alms 25 (Wallis translation). He has just been describing the first believers in Jerusalem selling their fields and holding everything in common (Acts 4:32), and he goes on from this sentence to the daylight, the sun, the rain, the wind and the stars, all of which arrive without asking who deserves them. The man who shares his harvest, he concludes, is imitating God the Father (T5).

(Q) "For God does not ask for our blood, but for our faith." + Source: Cyprian, On the Mortality 17 (Wallis translation). Written to Christians who had braced themselves for martyrdom and were dying of plague instead, and who felt cheated of the crown. Cyprian tells them that martyrdom is God’s to give rather than theirs to take, that he sees a readiness he has not had occasion to use, and that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were never killed and lost nothing by it. Five years later the man who wrote that sentence knelt in a field outside Carthage and covered his own eyes.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) Carthage buried him by torchlight, and the Latin church never stopped reading his letters. + He was the first African bishop to be killed for the office, and Africa kept the anniversary. The date of his death, 14 September, became his feast, later moved in the Roman calendar to the sixteenth so that the fourteenth could keep the Exaltation of the Cross. His name went into the roll of martyrs named in the canon of the Roman Mass, the fixed central prayer of the Latin liturgy, between Cornelius of Rome and Laurence, and it is still there. His books travelled further and faster than his feast day did. Lactantius, writing about fifty years later, rated him the best writer the Latin church had yet produced, ready and copious and (the thing Lactantius praised highest) plain and open, and in the same chapter faulted him for answering the pagan Demetrianus out of Scripture, which was the one book his opponent did not accept (Lactantius, Divine Institutes V.1). Jerome, compiling a catalogue of Christian authors around 392, declined to list Cyprian’s books on the grounds that they were "more conspicuous than the sun" (Jerome, On Illustrious Men 67), which is the sort of compliment Jerome paid to almost nobody. A book list drawn up about 354, the one modern scholars call the Cheltenham list, catalogues his works alongside the books of the Bible with the number of lines in each, which is a plain sign of what a working Christian library in the west was expected to contain. What the letters gave the church was less a doctrine than a template. Here was a bishop deciding, in writing and with reasons, how to feed a congregation during a persecution, what to do about a presbyter who defrauded orphans, how much of a penance a frightened man owed, when to call a council instead of ruling alone. Later centuries did not always answer as he did. They learned from him that those were the questions, and that a bishop was supposed to put his answers on paper where his colleagues could see them.

(†) Augustine honoured him and refused to follow him, and that combination became the settled way of reading him. + About fifty years after the beheading, the African church tore itself in half over a question Cyprian had answered, and it stayed torn for a century. The Donatists held that sacraments administered by unworthy or compromised clergy were empty, and they claimed Cyprian, with some textual justification, as their authority. Augustine of Hippo answered them in seven books, On Baptism, against the Donatists, and the way he did it shaped how Christians have handled the whole subject of a revered teacher who got something wrong. He did not pretend Cyprian had meant something else. He said Cyprian was mistaken, that a plenary council had since settled the matter the other way, a plenary council being one that speaks for the whole church rather than for a single province the way Cyprian’s African gatherings did, and that the settlement was right: a baptism in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit belongs to Christ, whoever holds the jug, and cannot be repeated. A council at Arles in 314 had already put that in writing for the west. Then he said the thing his opponents could not use. What was admirable in Cyprian, he argued, was not the opinion but the charity: the man who held that view held it while remaining in peace with those who rejected it, refused to break communion over it, and told his own council that a bishop who voted against him would not be judged. Augustine’s verdict, in his own images, is that the error was made good by staying inside catholic unity and by the abundance of Cyprian’s love, and cut away at the last by the pruning hook of martyrdom (On Baptism I.18). Anyone claiming Cyprian’s position while tearing the church apart had taken the half he would have minded losing least. Augustine preached on his feast day for years, and quoted him warmly to the end.

(†) Catholics and Protestants have both claimed him, and the honest reason is that he wrote both of the sentences they quote. + Open On the Unity of the Church at chapter four and you find Cyprian arguing that the Lord built on Peter and gave him the keys first, not because the other apostles were lesser, but so that the origin of unity would visibly begin from one man. Open it at chapter five, a paragraph later, and you find the episcopate held whole by every bishop alike. Turn to the council of 256 and you find him telling a hall of bishops that no one among them is a bishop of bishops. All of it is his. There is a genuine textual puzzle folded into this. Two versions of chapter four come down in the manuscripts, one of them considerably stronger about the chair of Peter than the other. The Jesuit scholar Maurice Bévenot argued from the late 1930s onward that Cyprian himself wrote both, the fuller one first and the shorter one as a revision once the Roman see began using his words in a way he had not intended, and his case is widely though not universally accepted. Older polemics on both sides assumed forgery by the other lot; the evidence does not support that, and it is worth knowing before anyone quotes chapter four at speed. What can be said without taking a side is that Cyprian held two convictions at once which later Christians have found it hard to hold together: that the unity of the church is visible and has a single point of origin, and that no bishop on earth can command another. Readers who prize the first have always had texts in him, and so have readers who prize the second. He was not being evasive. He simply never faced the case that would have forced him to choose, and he died before anyone made him.

(†) Where his own record does not hold up: the rebaptisms, the hardest sentence, and what he said alms could do. + Three things in Cyprian’s own writing, not in what later people made of it, are worth setting down plainly. He is a martyr and one of the great pastors, and none of that is in question here. - The rebaptisms. On the question he fought hardest, the whole later church, east and west, Catholic and Protestant alike, went the other way. Worse, his own treatise had already given the answer: he quotes Paul on one body, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism (Ephesians 4:4–6) as proof that the church is one, without noticing that the same clause was about to be used against him. And he fought dirtier than he argued. His letter to Pompeius speaks of blindness of soul, names the bitter obstinacy of our brother Stephen, and offers the flat sarcasm that an excellent and lawful tradition has been set before them by Stephen’s teaching, which is not the tone of the man who had just told a council that colleagues may differ without being judged. - The hardest sentence, applied hardest. "There is no salvation out of the Church" was aimed at a specific question, but Cyprian pushed it further than the question needed. He held that a man killed for confessing Christ, if he died outside the communion, gained nothing whatever by his death. That is a heavier saying than the New Testament makes anywhere, and Christians across Christendom have since qualified it, differing about how to qualify it but not about the need. - What alms can do. In On Works and Alms he writes that God has given a way to wash away, by almsgiving, the foulness a Christian contracts after baptism. He is careful, and the care should be reported: the sins committed before baptism, he says in the very next breath, are purged by the blood and sanctification of Christ and by nothing else. Some of what is going on here is a Bible problem rather than a doctrine problem, and it takes a moment to lay out. Cyprian read his Old Testament in Latin, and the Latin he had was not made from the Hebrew. It was made from the ancient Greek version, the Septuagint, which Greek-speaking Jews produced before the birth of Christ and which served most early Christians as their Old Testament. At Proverbs 16:6 the Greek and the Hebrew do not say the same thing. In the Greek, and so in Cyprian’s Latin, the line runs that sins are purged by almsgiving and faith. The Hebrew behind modern translations gives "By steadfast love and faithfulness iniquity is atoned for, and by the fear of the Lord one turns away from evil." (Proverbs 16:6). He was quoting his own Bible accurately. It was not quite the same verse. Still, the language has divided Christians ever since. Protestant readers hear it as blurring what only the blood of Jesus does (1 John 1:7) and as edging toward a salvation earned rather than received (Ephesians 2:8–9). Catholic teaching distinguishes the forgiveness of guilt, which is God’s free act, from the works of satisfaction that follow it, meaning the prayer and fasting and giving by which a man already forgiven makes amends for the damage he has done, and reads Cyprian in that frame. Both sides are reading a real sentence, and it is his. There is a fourth charge that is usually brought and is worth answering rather than listing. He hid during the persecution of 250 while other men went to the arena. He defended the decision at the time, his enemies never let it go, and the reader can weigh it. It is fair to note that he refused the same escape in 258, when he had a proconsul’s summons in hand and friends begging him to run.