Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Letter 53. Maximus, Urbanus, Sidonius, and Macaeius, priests, greet their brother Cyprian. Dearest brother, we feel sure you rejoice with us just as eagerly, since we, taking counsel together and putting the church's welfare and peace first, set aside every other consideration, kept God's judgment intact, and made peace with our bishop Cornelius and the whole clergy alike. Know for certain from this letter that the entire church shared in the gladness of what took place, and that everyone's affection toward it was wholehearted. We pray, dearest brother, for your good health across many years.
Letter 54. Cyprian to Maximus the presbyter, and likewise to his brothers Urbanus, Sidonius, and Macaeius, greeting. Having read your letter, dearest brothers, which you sent me concerning your return and the peace of the church and the restoration of brotherhood, I confess I was made glad to the same degree that I had already rejoiced before, when I learned the glory of your confession and joyfully received the heavenly and spiritual praise of your struggle. This too is proof of your faith and your honor: acknowledging that there is only a single church, refusing to share in someone else's error, or rather his depravity, and instead going back to the very camp you had left — the camp from which, with the strongest resolve, you once set out to fight and overcome the enemy. For it was there, to the place from which arms had been taken up for the battle-line, that the trophies won in that battle-line had to be brought back, lest those whom Christ had prepared for glory should not be held glorious by Christ's church. But now that you have held fast, in the Lord's peace, to a course matching your faith and to the law of undivided love and harmony, and have shown others by your own journey an example of love and peace, our teaching about the church's reality and about the oneness of gospel and sacrament — which we already held — is confirmed as well by your consent and your pledge, so that Christ's confessors, who had stood out as praiseworthy champions of virtue and honor, should not turn into guides toward error. Let others see how much they congratulate you, or how much each glories within himself; as for me, I confess that I both congratulate you enough and glory more than the rest in this peaceable return and love of yours. For you ought to hear plainly what has been in my heart. I grieved deeply and was gravely troubled that I could not share communion with those whom I had once begun to love. Once you had left prison, a schismatic and heretical error seized you, so it seemed as if your glory had stayed shut inside those walls. Your reputation's honor appeared, in fact, to have lodged itself there, since Christ's soldiers failed to come back from prison into the very church they had once entered amid its praise and celebration. For even though there seem to be weeds within the church, our faith or our love ought not to be hindered by this, so that because we perceive there are weeds in the church we should ourselves withdraw from the church. We need only labor to be wheat ourselves, so that when the wheat begins to be stored in the Lord's granaries, we may receive fruit for our work and labor. The apostle writes in his epistle that within a large household the vessels are not merely gold and silver, but wood and earthenware too — some kept for honorable use, others for the opposite. Let us take pains and labor as much as we can to be a vessel of gold or silver. But to break the vessels of clay has been granted to the Lord alone, to whom also the iron rod has been given. A servant cannot be greater than his master, nor may anyone claim for himself what the Father has granted to the Son alone, so as to suppose he can already openly carry the winnowing-fan to the threshing floor to cleanse it, or separate all the weeds from the wheat by human judgment. Such is the arrogant defiance and irreverent overreach that a twisted madness claims for itself. And while some are forever claiming for themselves more than gentle justice demands, they perish out of the church, and while they insolently exalt themselves, blinded by their own swelling pride they lose the light of truth. Because of this we, holding to moderation and looking to the Lord's balance, and considering the Father's devotion and mercy, weighed out, after long and much deliberation among ourselves, what should be done with just moderation. All of this you can examine thoroughly by reading the little book which I had lately read here and which I sent for you also to read, out of our common affection, in which for the lapsed there is neither lacking a censure to rebuke nor a remedy to heal. There our limited effort set forth, to whatever degree it managed, what oneness within the catholic church means; and I am confident this booklet wins your favor increasingly now, for you read it in a spirit of approval and affection, fulfilling in your actions what we had only put into words, as you come back to the church within a bond of love and peace. I wish you, dearest brothers, always good health.
Cyprian to his brother Antonianus, greeting. Dearest brother, I received your earlier letter, one firmly grounded in harmony with our priestly body and firmly attached to the catholic church; in it you declared that you did not share communion with Novatian, but rather followed the counsel of myself and our colleague Cornelius. I sent a copy of that letter on to our colleague Cornelius, so he could set aside every worry, knowing you stood in communion with him — with the catholic church, in other words.
But then a second letter of yours came, carried by our fellow presbyter Quintus, and in it I could tell that your resolve had started to waver, unsettled by Novatian's correspondence. Even though you had earlier settled your judgment and agreement firmly, this letter asked me to explain in writing which heresy Novatian had started, and on what basis Cornelius stays in communion with Trofimus and with those who burned incense to idols. If you raise this question carefully out of genuine concern for the faith, seeking the truth of an uncertain matter in earnest worry, then such hesitant anxiety, in a soul aflame with reverence toward God, deserves no reproach.
Yet since I see that after the first part of your letter you were afterward disturbed by Novatian's letters, I set this down first, dearest brother: that serious men, once founded solidly upon the rock, are not shaken, I will not say by a light breeze, but not even by wind or storm, lest a wavering and uncertain mind be repeatedly tossed by various opinions as if by the gusts of assailing winds, and be turned aside from its purpose with the reproach of a certain fickleness. So that Novatian's letters may not do this to you, brother, or to anyone else, as you have wished, I will briefly set out the reasoning of the matter for you. And indeed, first, since you seem to have been disturbed also concerning my own conduct, I must clear both my person and my cause before you, lest anyone suppose that I have lightly departed from my purpose, and that, having defended the gospel's rigor at first and in the beginning, I later seem to have turned my mind away from that earlier discipline and censure, as though I had thought peace should be granted freely to those who stained their conscience with certificates or who committed the abominable sacrifices. Both of these things I did only after long and carefully weighed deliberation.
While the battle-line still held and the glorious struggle raged on amid the persecution, the soldiers' courage — and above all the resolve of the lapsed — needed rousing with our full exhortation's force and energy, stirred as if by a trumpet-blast of our voice, so that they would pursue repentance not through prayer and mourning alone; rather, once a chance arose to resume the contest and win back salvation, our stern words would drive them toward eagerness for confession and the glory of martyrdom. In the end, when certain presbyters and deacons wrote to me that some were being unrestrained and pressing hastily for admission to communion, I wrote back to them in a letter of mine which still survives, adding also this: if they are in too great a hurry, they have it in their own power to obtain, in the very time itself, more than what they ask, granted to them generously. The battle is still being fought, and the contest is celebrated daily. If a man truly and firmly repents of what he has done, and the warmth of faith prevails, what cannot be deferred can be crowned. But as to what should be decided regarding the case of the lapsed, I put that off, so that when quiet and calm had been given, and divine indulgence allowed the bishops to gather together, we might then, after common deliberation and weighing the counsel drawn from everyone's contribution, decide what ought to be done; but if anyone, before our council and before the decision determined by the counsel of all, wished rashly to grant communion to the lapsed, he himself should be kept from communion.
I set out this very same view at full length to the Roman clergy — who at that time still lacked a bishop — and to the confessor Maximus the presbyter together with the others then in custody, now reunited with Cornelius within the church; their own reply lets you confirm that this is what I wrote. Their letter states it this way: although in so weighty a matter it seems best to us — as you too have urged — that the church's peace be secured first, and only afterward, once bishops, presbyters, deacons, confessors, and laypeople of good standing had deliberated jointly, should the question of the lapsed be handled. It further noted that Novatian, writing at the time and reading out loud what he had composed, along with the presbyter Moses — then still a confessor, now a martyr — signed his name, agreeing that peace be granted to lapsed persons who were weak and near death. That letter traveled across the entire world, reaching every church and all the brethren.
Nevertheless, following what had been determined earlier, once the persecution had quieted down, when the opportunity was given to gather together, a large body of bishops — kept sound and unharmed by their own faith and the Lord's guarding hand — assembled as one, and once passages of Scripture had been cited at length from each side, we struck a balanced middle course through sound moderation: the lapsed were not to lose every prospect of rejoining communion and receiving peace outright, or else, despairing further, they might find the church shut against them and turn to live as pagans following the world; yet neither should the gospel's strictness be loosened so they might dash headlong into communion; but rather that repentance should be drawn out at length, and fatherly mercy be sought with sorrow, and the cases, the intentions, and the necessities of each be examined, according to what is contained in the little book which I trust has reached you, where the several points of our decisions are set down. And in case the number of bishops in Africa seemed insufficient, we also wrote to Rome about this matter to our colleague Cornelius, who himself, after holding a council with very many fellow bishops, agreed with us on the same judgment, with equal gravity and wholesome moderation.
It was necessary now for me to write you about this, so that you might know I have done nothing lightly, but, in accordance with what I had already committed myself to in my letters, referred everything to the common counsel of our council, and had granted communion to none of the lapsed beforehand, while there was still opportunity for the lapsed to receive not merely indulgence but even a crown; yet afterward, as the harmony of the college and the good of gathering the brotherhood together and healing the wound required, I judged it right to yield to the necessity of the times and to provide for the salvation of many, and now not to depart from what was once agreed in our council after common deliberation, however much many things are stirred up by the voices of many, and lies brought forth from the devil's mouth against the priests of God are scattered everywhere to break the harmony of catholic unity. Yet you, being a decent brother and a like-minded fellow bishop in the priesthood, ought not to take at face value whatever the malicious and the apostate claim, but rather weigh, through careful inquiry into our life and conduct, what your modest and serious brother-bishops actually do.
Now, dearest brother, I turn to our colleague Cornelius himself, so you can know the real Cornelius as we do — not through the falsehoods of spiteful detractors, but through the verdict of God, who made him bishop, and through the witness of our fellow bishops, whose entire number across the world has reached agreement in unanimous harmony. As for what recommends our dear Cornelius to God, to Christ, to Christ's church, and equally to every fellow priest, by praiseworthy report: he did not arrive at the episcopate all at once; instead, having risen through every ecclesiastical office and repeatedly earned the Lord's approval in sacred service, he ascended to the priesthood's highest summit by passing through each degree of religious duty in turn. Nor, further, did he seek or desire the episcopate for himself, nor did he grab at it the way others do whom their own swollen arrogance and pride puff up; rather, being calm and unassuming in other respects — as those chosen for this office by God's will tend to be — out of the modesty of his lifelong chastity and the humility of a reserve bred and guarded within him, he was not one who forced his way to becoming bishop, as some do, but instead endured force himself, compelled into accepting the office. He was made bishop through a great many of our fellow bishops who happened to be present in the city of Rome at the time, who sent us honorable, commendable letters, rendered illustrious by their own testimony, about his ordination. Cornelius became bishop through the verdict of God and his Christ, through the witness of nearly the whole clergy, through the vote of the people present on that occasion, through the gathering of the priesthood's elders and good men, at a moment when no one else had been made bishop before him — while Fabian's seat, that is, Peter's seat and the rank of the priestly chair, still stood empty. Once that seat is filled, established by God's will and confirmed by all our agreement, anyone who then wishes to become bishop must become one outside the church, and holds no valid ordination, since he does not hold to the church's unity. Whoever that man may be, however much he boasts of himself and claims for himself, he remains profane, a stranger, an outsider. And because a second cannot exist after the first, whoever is set up following the one who alone should exist is not really a second at all, but nothing whatsoever.
Now consider, after an episcopate neither pursued through ambition nor extorted by force but accepted at the will of God, who appoints priests, just how much virtue appeared in him once he had taken up that office, how much strength of soul, what firmness of faith — a thing we ought, with plain and honest hearts, to recognize fully and commend — in that he sat fearless upon the priestly chair at Rome during the very period when a tyrant hostile to God's priests threatened things utterable and unutterable, and heard news of a rival emperor rising against himself with far greater patience and endurance than news of a priest of God being installed at Rome. Should this man not be hailed, dearest brother, as possessing virtue and faith of the highest order? Should he not be numbered among the illustrious confessors and martyrs, given how long he sat awaiting his own executioners and the agents of a raging tyrant's vengeance, ready to run him through with a sword, crucify him, burn him alive, or tear his flesh and limbs apart by some unprecedented torment, while he stood unmoved against savage decrees, trampling threats, agonies, and torture beneath the strength of his faith? Granted that the Lord's greatness and kindness, having watched over the priest he willed into being, kept him safe once made — still, so far as his own devotion and reverence go, Cornelius endured all that could be endured, and through his priesthood alone he had already defeated the tyrant before that tyrant was later defeated by war and weapons.
As to the fact that certain dishonorable and grave things are being bandied about concerning him, do not be surprised, since you know this has always been the devil's work: to savage God's servants through falsehood and to smear an honorable reputation with fabricated gossip, so that men who shine bright by their own clear conscience end up tarnished by other people's talk. But know that our colleagues have looked into the matter and discovered most truly that he was stained by no defilement of a certificate, as some falsely claim, nor did he mingle sacrilegious communion with the bishops who had sacrificed, but rather he joined to us only those whose cases had been heard and whose innocence had been established.
As for Trofimus, about whom you wished me to write to you, the matter is not as rumor and the lies of the malicious have reported to you. For, just as our predecessors have often done, our dearest brother yielded to necessity for the sake of gathering our brothers together. And since the greater part of the people had gone off with Trofimus, now that Trofimus is returning to the church, making satisfaction and confessing his former error with the repentance of a supplicant, and calling back with full humility and satisfaction the brotherhood he had lately drawn away, his prayers were heard, and there was admitted into the Lord's church not so much Trofimus himself as the very great number of brothers who had been with Trofimus — none of whom would have been willing to return to the church unless they had come along with Trofimus. So, once the matter had been weighed together with a great many colleagues, Trofimus was taken back in, and amends for him came through the brothers' return and the recovered salvation of many. Yet Trofimus was admitted in such a way that he communicates as a layman, not, as the letters of the malicious reported to you, as though he were usurping the office of the priesthood.
As for the report brought to you that Cornelius indiscriminately communicates with those who sacrificed, this too arises from the fabricated rumors of the apostates. Those who defect are hardly in a position to speak well of us, and we should not hope to satisfy people who, unhappy with us and in open revolt against the church, keep forcing their way toward luring the brothers away from it. Wherefore, whatever is said against Cornelius and against us, do not readily listen to it or believe it, dearest brother.
If any are overtaken by illness, they are helped in their danger, as has been our decision. But once help has been given and peace granted to those in peril, they cannot then be choked or crushed by us, or driven by our own hand and force toward the end of death, as though, because peace is given to the dying, those who have received peace must necessarily die — when it appears rather as a sign of divine mercy and fatherly gentleness, that those who receive the pledge of life in the peace given are also kept alive here, having once received that peace. And therefore, if once peace is given, a further span of life is granted by God, no one ought to make this a charge against the priests, since it was once agreed that the brethren should be helped in their danger. Nor should you suppose, dearest brother, as some think, that those who obtained certificates ought to be treated as equal to those who actually sacrificed, since even among those who sacrificed the circumstance and the case are often quite different. For they cannot be treated as equals: the man who rushed at once and willingly to the abominable sacrifice, and the man who resisted and struggled long before he came, under necessity, to that deadly deed; the man who betrayed both himself and all his own household, and the man who, going himself into danger on behalf of everyone, protected his wife and children and whole household by a bargain struck at his own risk; the man who forced his tenants or friends into the crime, and the man who spared his tenants and farmers, and even took in under his own roof and hospitality very many brothers who were being driven out as exiles and fugitives, offering and presenting to the Lord many living and unharmed souls to intercede for the one that was wounded.