Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Great differences existed among those who truly offered sacrifice, so subjecting certificate-holders to that same harsh judgment would be cruel injustice — for the man who obtained a certificate can plead his own case: 'Through my bishop's instruction I had already come to know that idolatry was forbidden and that no one devoted to God should bow before an image. To keep from breaking that rule, I seized on the certificate option only once it was offered — I would never have sought it out myself — and either appeared before the magistrate personally or had someone else declare on my behalf that I was a Christian, that sacrifice was barred to me, that I would not approach the altars of the devil, and that my payment was purely to escape committing what was forbidden.' Even so, this certificate-bearer, once our rebuke taught him that even this conduct had been wrong, carries a stained conscience despite hands untouched by forbidden food and lips free of its contagion. Hearing our words, he weeps, mourns, is now made aware of his failing, and — led astray more by mistake than by wrongdoing — declares himself finally schooled and ready for whatever follows.
If we turn away the repentance of such people — who still hold some confidence in a conscience not wholly ruined — they will immediately be swept, along with wife and the children they managed to keep safe, into heresy or schism through the devil's enticements; and on judgment day it will stand against us that we failed to care for a wounded sheep, and that for one wounded animal we lost a great many sound ones. Yet the Lord left the ninety-nine that were whole to search out the one gone astray and worn down, and once he found it, he bore it home upon his own shoulders. Shall we, then, fail even to search for the weary, and worse, drive off those who come seeking us? And while false prophets go on tearing and scattering Christ's flock even now, shall we hand the wolves and dogs their chance — destroying by our own cruelty and lack of feeling those whom the fiercest persecution failed to destroy? Where, dearest brother, would that leave the apostle's teaching — that in every matter he tries to satisfy everyone, looking not to what serves himself but what serves the many, so that they might be saved; that we should follow his example just as he follows Christ's? Or again, that he made himself weak for the weak, so as to win them over; or that when a single part of the body suffers, every part suffers alongside it, and when one part is glad, all the rest share the gladness.
There exists a different line of thought, dearest brother, belonging to the philosophers and the Stoics, who hold that every sin carries equal weight and that a serious-minded man should not be swayed easily. Yet a vast gulf separates Christians from philosophers. Since the apostle warns us to watch lest anyone plunder us through philosophy and empty deceit, we must steer clear of anything that springs not from God's mercy but flows from the arrogance of a harsher philosophical creed. Of Moses, though, scripture tells us he was a man of surpassing gentleness. And in his gospel the Lord instructs: show mercy, just as your Father has shown mercy toward you. Elsewhere: it is not the well who require a doctor, but those in poor health. What sort of healing can a man offer who declares, 'I treat only the well, who need no physician at all'? Rather, our task is to bring aid and healing to the wounded. Nor should we count as dead those we see struck down by a savage persecution — count them instead as merely half alive, for had they been utterly dead, they could never later have risen among us as confessors and martyrs.
Yet because something remains in them that repentance, if it follows, can restore to fresh strength in faith and courage — for repentance itself supplies the armor — nothing at all can be armed in one who instead surrenders to despair: who, cut off harshly and cruelly from the church, turns aside to pagan customs and worldly business, or, cast out, goes over to heretics and schismatics. There, even should he later be killed on account of the Name, having been placed outside the church and severed from both unity and love, he cannot win the martyr's crown. For this reason, dearest brother, we have decided that, once each case has been weighed individually, the certificate-holders should be received for now, and that the sacrificers should be helped as death draws near — since confession has no place among the dead, and no one can be forced by us into repentance once its fruit has been taken away. Should the trial come first, he will be discovered by us, fortified and equipped for that trial; but if instead frailty overtakes him before the trial arrives, he departs bearing the comfort of peace and fellowship.
Nor do we mean to anticipate the judgment of the Lord, who alone will judge — so that should he find the sinner's repentance complete and genuine, he may confirm what we have here decided. But should anyone deceive us with a false show of repentance, God, whom no one mocks and who sees into the human heart, will pass judgment on what we could only view imperfectly, and the Lord will set right whatever his servants judged wrongly; still, brother, we must keep in mind the words written: a brother who helps his brother will be lifted up, and the apostle's own statement that, watching over yourselves so that you too are not tempted, you should carry one another's loads, and in that way fulfill Christ's law. Likewise, checking pride and crushing arrogance, he writes in his letter: let the one who imagines himself standing take care not to fall; and elsewhere he asks: who are you, to sit in judgment over someone else's servant? Before his own master he stands or falls — and stand he will, for God has power to keep him upright. John, too, shows that we hold Christ our Lord as our advocate and intercessor before God for our sins, writing: my little children, I write these things to you so that you may not sin; yet should anyone sin, we have one who pleads for us with the Father, Christ the righteous, who himself atones for our sins. And Paul the apostle likewise wrote in his letter: if, while we were still sinners, Christ died on our behalf, how much more, now made righteous by his blood, will we be rescued through him from wrath.
Bearing his kindness and mercy in mind, we ought not to treat our brothers with harshness, hardness, or a lack of feeling, but should instead share the grief of the grieving and weep alongside those who weep, lifting them up as best we can through the support and consolation of our affection — neither so unbending and rigid that we crush their attempts at repentance, nor so loose and permissive that we grant communion carelessly. Picture it: a brother lies struck down and wounded on the battlefield by the foe. From one side the devil labors to finish off the one he has already wounded; from the other, Christ presses that the man he ransomed should not be lost entirely. Standing between these two, on which side do we place ourselves? Do we favor the devil's destruction of him, walking past the half-dead brother the way the priest and Levite did in the gospel story? Or, acting as priests of God and Christ, following what Christ both taught and did himself, do we instead pull the wounded man free from the enemy's grip, and, once he is healed, hand him over to God, the true judge?
Do not suppose, dearest brother, that granting the lapsed a path of repentance, or offering the penitent hope of peace, weakens the courage of the faithful or reduces the number of martyrdoms. The resolve of those genuinely steadfast stays unmoved, and among people who hold God in reverence and love with their whole heart, an unshaken and sturdy integrity continues. Even adulterers, after all, receive from us a season for repentance and are granted peace — yet virginity within the church does not therefore diminish, nor does the noble commitment to continence weaken on account of others' sins. The church thrives, adorned by so many virgins, and chastity along with modesty keeps intact the full measure of its honor; the strength of continence is not undone merely because pardon and mercy are extended to the adulterer. To stand in a position of pardon is one thing; to reach glory is another. Being confined in prison until the last coin owed is paid is one thing; receiving straightaway the reward due to faith and courage is another. Being purified through prolonged suffering for one's sins, refined slowly by fire, is one thing; having already washed away every sin through suffering endured is another. Hanging suspended until judgment day awaiting the Lord's verdict is one thing; being crowned by the Lord at once is another entirely.
Indeed, some bishops before our time, here in our own province, took the view that adulterers should not be granted peace, and shut the door on repentance altogether where adultery was concerned. All the same, they did not break away from their fellow bishops' company, nor did their unyielding rigor or strict judgment tear apart the unity of the catholic church — so that, though peace was extended to adulterers elsewhere, a bishop who withheld it was not thereby cut off from the church. So long as the tie of harmony holds and the undivided bond of the catholic church continues on, every bishop manages his own course of action and directs his own policy, ultimately answerable to the Lord for it.
I am astonished, though, that certain people are so fixed in their view that they deny repentance ought to be granted to the lapsed, or think pardon should be withheld from the penitent — given that it is written: recall the place from which you fell, and repent, and return to your earlier deeds. This, of course, addresses someone already recognized as fallen, whom the Lord urges to rise once more through good works, since scripture states that almsgiving rescues from death — not, naturally, from that death Christ's blood extinguished once for all, or from which we were freed by the water of saving baptism and our redeemer's grace, but from the death that afterward creeps in through sin. Elsewhere too a season for repentance is granted, and the Lord issues a warning to the one who fails to repent: I hold much against you, he says, because you let your wife Jezebel, who claims to be a prophetess, teach and mislead my servants into fornication and eating what has been sacrificed; and I gave her a season to repent, yet she refuses to repent of her fornication. See, I am throwing her onto a bed, and those who committed fornication with her into deep affliction, unless they turn from their deeds in repentance. Surely the Lord would not press repentance at all were he not promising mercy to those who repent. And in the gospel he states: I tell you, there will be greater joy in heaven over a single repentant sinner than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance. For since scripture tells us that God did not create death, nor takes delight in the ruin of the living, it follows that he who wishes no one to perish wants sinners to repent and, through repentance, come back to life once more. This is why, through the prophet Joel, he calls out and says: even now, declares the Lord your God, turn back to me with your whole heart, together with fasting and weeping and mourning, and tear open your hearts rather than your garments, and come back once more to your God the Lord, since he is compassionate and kind, slow to anger and abounding in tenderness, one who turns aside from the punishment he had threatened for wrongdoing. In the psalms as well we find both God's severity and his mercy side by side, threatening even as he spares, punishing to bring correction, and once correction is made, holding back further harm: I will punish, he says, their wrongdoing with the rod and their sins with blows, yet I will not withdraw my mercy from them.
The Lord, too, in the gospel, reveals the loving-kindness of God the Father when he asks: which of you, if his son asks him for bread, would hand him a stone instead; or if he asks for a fish, would hand him a snake? If you, then, wicked as you are, know how to give worthwhile gifts to your own children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him? Here the Lord sets an earthly father alongside the boundless and generous kindness of God the Father. For if that flawed father here on earth, though deeply wounded by a son who sinned and did wrong, nevertheless rejoices and is overjoyed — should he later see that same son changed, having set aside the wrongs of his former life and, through the pain of repentance, corrected toward a sober, upright way of living and the discipline of blamelessness — and welcomes back with a father's delighted embrace the one he had once cast away, how much more will that one true Father, good and merciful and kind, who is himself goodness, mercy, and kindness, take joy in his children's repentance, holding out no threat of wrath or punishment to those who repent, or grieve, or mourn, but instead offering mercy and forgiveness? For this reason the Lord in the gospel pronounces those who mourn blessed, since mourning draws mercy toward itself; whoever remains stubborn and proud only piles up wrath and the penalty of the coming judgment upon himself. And so, dearest brother, we have ruled that those who fail to repent, and who do not, with their whole heart and through an open display of grief, bear witness to sorrow over their offenses, should be kept entirely apart from any expectation of fellowship and peace — should they only start pleading for it once weakness and danger have set in; for what drives them to ask is not repentance for their offense but the urgent reminder of approaching death, and someone who never once considered that he might die does not deserve comfort at death's threshold.
Turning now to the matter of Novatian, dearest brother, on whom you asked to have written what heresy he introduced — understand first that we ought not even trouble ourselves over what he teaches, since he teaches from outside the fold. Whoever and whatever he may be, no one who stands apart from Christ's church can be called a Christian. Let him boast all he wants and trumpet his supposed philosophy or eloquence with proud speech: having preserved neither brotherly love nor the church's unity, he has forfeited even what he once possessed — unless perhaps you consider him a bishop, when, with a bishop already duly installed in the church by sixteen fellow bishops, he strains through sheer ambition, set up as an outsider and adulterous bishop by deserters, to seize the office for himself. And though there is, from Christ, a single church spread across the whole world and divided into many members, and likewise a single episcopate spread across a harmonious multitude of bishops, this man, after God's own tradition, after the linked and universally joined unity of the catholic church, tries to fashion a merely human church, dispatching his own new apostles through countless cities to lay certain fresh foundations for his invented institution. And though bishops have long since been appointed throughout every province and every city — men seasoned with age, sound in the faith, proven under strain, outlawed in persecution — he dares to set rival pseudo-bishops over them, as though his fresh and stubborn venture could somehow cover the whole world, or the fabric holding the church's body together could be torn apart by the seeds of his discord. He fails to see that schismatic movements always burn brightest at their beginning but cannot go on growing, and whatever they launched unlawfully cannot increase, but instead collapses at once from its own twisted rivalry. He could not, in any case, retain a bishop's office even had he first been validly made a bishop and only later broken away from his fellow bishops' body and the church's unity, since the apostle instructs us to bear with one another so we do not drift from the unity God has founded, saying: bearing with one another in love, striving to preserve the unity granted by the Spirit through the bond of peace. Whoever, then, keeps neither the unity given by the Spirit nor the bond of peace, cutting himself off from the church's bond and the fellowship of its priests, can hold neither the authority nor the honor of a bishop, since he refused to preserve either the unity or the peace belonging to the episcopate.
Consider, then, just how excessive his arrogance runs, how thoroughly he has forgotten humility and gentleness, how greatly he flaunts his own presumption — that anyone would dare, or trust himself able, to accomplish what the Lord did not even entrust to the apostles: imagining he can tell weeds apart from wheat, or, as if granted sole authority to wield the winnowing-fork and clear the threshing floor, attempting to sift chaff from grain. And though the apostle states that in a large house the vessels are not made only of gold and silver, but of wood and clay as well, he appears to pick out only the golden and silver vessels, scorning, rejecting, and condemning those made of wood and clay — even though it is only on the day of the Lord that the wooden vessels will be consumed by the fire of his burning judgment, and the clay ones shattered by the one who wields the iron rod.
Or if he has appointed himself examiner and judge of the heart and the innermost being, let him judge equally in every case; and since he knows it is written, 'Behold, you have been made whole; sin no more, lest something worse befall you,' let him separate cheats and adulterers too from his own side and company, seeing that the case of the adulterer is far graver and worse than that of the certificate-holder, since the one sinned out of necessity, the other by choice; the one thought it enough for himself, deceived by error, that he had not actually sacrificed; the other, an assailant of another man's marriage, or one who entered a brothel, has defiled with a detestable pollution the sanctified body and temple of God in the sewer and filthy pit of the common crowd — just as the apostle says, 'Every sin that a man commits is outside the body; but the one who commits fornication sins against his own body.' Yet even to these repentance is granted, and hope of lamenting and making amends is left them, according to that same apostle who says: 'I fear that when I come to you I may mourn for many of those who sinned before and did not repent of the uncleanness which they committed, and of the fornication and lust.'