Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
But when I had read the other letter, brother, which you appended to your first, I was greatly astonished to find that you had been somewhat shaken by the menace and dread of those newcomers — since, as you wrote, they came at you in a fit of desperation, threatening that, should you refuse the letter they carried, they would proclaim it publicly and spill out much that was shameful and base, fitting only their own mouths. But if things truly stand this way, dearest brother — that we must fear the audacity of the most worthless men, and that wickedness may achieve through rashness and despair what it could never gain by right and fairness — then the strength of the episcopate and the Church's lofty, God-given power to govern have both come to nothing, and Christians we can no longer remain nor even continue to exist, once we have reached a point where the schemes and threats of ruined men make us tremble. Pagans issue their threats, so do Jews; heretics too, and all those whose hearts and minds the devil has claimed, spew their venomous fury daily with raving voices. Even so, threats alone give us no cause to yield, nor does the enemy and adversary outrank Christ merely because he arrogates and grabs so much for himself in this age. What must endure among us, dearest brother, is faith's unbending strength and a firmness so steady and unshaken that, set against every charge and surge of the howling waves, it stands the way a rock lodged in their path stands, by its own bulk and solidity. It makes no difference to a bishop from what direction terror or peril approaches him — one who lives constantly exposed to dangers and terrors, and is in fact made glorious precisely through those dangers and terrors. Nor should we reckon and weigh only the menace coming from pagans or from Jews, seeing that the Lord himself was seized by his own brothers, betrayed by a man he himself had numbered among his apostles; that righteous Abel, at the very dawn of the world, fell at no hand but his brother's; that Jacob, fleeing, was hunted by a brother turned hostile; that the boy Joseph was sold off by the very brothers who sold him; and we find it written too in the gospel that enemies were foretold to arise from within one's own household, and that men once joined by a single bond of accord would turn traitor to one another. Whoever does the betraying, whatever rage drives it, none of that matters once God allows the betrayal to happen and grants the crown for enduring it. Suffering at a brother's hand what Christ himself suffered brings us no shame; nor does doing what Judas did bring glory to those who do it. Yet what emptiness is this, what swollen, puffed-up, hollow bluster from men who threaten — hurling their menace at someone far off, when right here they hold me, present and within their reach! We take no fright at the abuse of men who daily rend themselves and their own lives apart with such talk; the clubs, stones, and swords they brandish in their murderous language do not frighten us. So far as lies within their power, such men stand before God already as murderers. And yet kill us they cannot, unless the Lord allows them to kill. We, though we must die but once, watch them destroy themselves daily — through their hatred, their words, and their own transgressions.
But it is not on this account, dearest brother, that we should abandon ecclesiastical discipline or loosen priestly authority — merely because insults assail us or threats make us tremble — for divine Scripture meets us here and gives its warning: the man who grows presumptuous and defiant, who boasts of himself, shall accomplish nothing whatever, this man who has stretched his soul wide as the grave. And again: fear not the speech of a sinful man, for his splendor shall become dung and worms. Today he is raised on high; tomorrow he is nowhere found, for he has gone back to his own dust, and his very thoughts shall come to nothing. And once more: I beheld the wicked man raised up, towering above the cedars of Lebanon; I passed by, and behold, he was gone; I searched for him, and no trace of his place remained. Such swelling, such pride and arrogant, haughty display, springs not from the teaching of Christ, whose lesson is humility, but instead from the spirit that belongs to antichrist — the very spirit the Lord condemns through his prophet, saying: yet you said within your own heart, I shall climb to heaven, I shall place my throne higher than the stars of God, I shall sit atop the towering mountain, above the high peaks toward the north, I shall rise above the clouds, I shall be equal to the Most High. And he goes on: but you shall be brought down instead to the underworld, to the depths of the earth, and those who look upon you shall be struck with wonder. That is why, elsewhere too, divine Scripture holds out a like penalty against such men, declaring: for the day belonging to the Lord of Hosts falls upon every man who deals unjustly and is proud, upon everyone raised high and puffed up. In this way each man betrays himself at once, by his own mouth and his own speech, and whether antichrist or Christ occupies his heart becomes plain simply from how he talks — just as the Lord himself teaches in his gospel: brood of vipers, how could evil men like you ever speak what is good? For the mouth gives voice to whatever fills the heart in abundance. A good man draws good things from his good storehouse, while a wicked man draws wicked things from his wicked one. This too explains why that rich sinner, watching Lazarus find rest and refreshment in Abraham's embrace, begs for relief even as flames scorch and torment him — paying his penalty above all through his mouth and tongue, of all the parts of his body, precisely because it was with tongue and mouth that he had sinned the most.
Since it stands written that the abusive shall not inherit God's kingdom, and since the Lord likewise says in his gospel that whoever calls his brother a fool, or calls him raca, shall answer for it in the fire of hell — how then can men avoid the Lord's avenging judgment when they hurl such abuse not merely at fellow believers but at priests themselves, men granted so great an honor by God's own favor that anyone in earlier days who defied his priest or judge was put to death without delay? For thus speaks the Lord God in Deuteronomy: whatever man acts arrogantly, refusing to obey the priest or the judge, whoever that man may be in those days — he shall die, and the whole people, upon hearing of it, shall be afraid and shall no longer act wickedly. In the same way, when Samuel was rejected by the Jews, God tells him: it is not you they have rejected, but me. So too the Lord in the gospel: whoever listens to you listens to me and to him who sent me, and whoever spurns you spurns me and him who sent me. And after cleansing the leper, he told him: go, show yourself to the priest. Later still, during his passion, struck by a blow from the high priest's servant and asked whether that was any way to answer the chief priest, the Lord flung back no insult at him, took nothing away from the honor owed the priesthood, but rather, defending and revealing his own innocence, replied: if I have spoken amiss, testify to the wrong; but if rightly, why do you strike me? A further episode comes later, in Acts: there the blessed apostle Paul was rebuked with the words: do you assault God's priest with such abuse? By that time, those men, having already crucified the Lord, had turned sacrilegious, godless, and bloodstained, and no longer held any genuine claim to priestly honor or authority. Yet Paul, mindful even of that empty title and mere shadow of the priesthood, answered: brothers, I was not aware that this man was the chief priest — since scripture says: a ruler of your people you shall not revile.
Given how many such weighty examples precede us, examples through which priestly authority and power stand confirmed by God's own favor, what should we make of men who count as enemies of priests, rebels against the catholic Church, unmoved either by the Lord's own warning or by dread of the judgment still to come? Heresies have sprung up, schisms have been born, from no other source than this: that God's priest goes unheeded, and men forget that the Church has, for a season, a single priest and a single judge standing in Christ's place. Had the whole body of believers obeyed him according to the divine teaching, nobody would ever have raised a hand against the priestly college as a whole; nobody, after the divine verdict, after the people's vote, after fellow bishops had reached agreement, would set himself up as judge — not merely over other bishops now, but over God himself; nobody would tear apart the unity of Christ's Church through schism; nobody, swollen with self-satisfaction, would go off on his own to found some fresh heresy — unless a man's rashness is so sacrilegious, his mind so ruined, that he imagines a bishop can come into being apart from God's judgment, even though the Lord says in his gospel: are two sparrows not sold for a single coin, yet not one falls to earth without the Father's will? If, as he says, not even the least thing occurs apart from God's will, can anyone imagine that the greatest and highest matters take place within God's Church either unknown to him or without his consent — that priests, who are his stewards, are appointed apart from his own decree? To think this is to have no faith at all, the very faith that gives us life; it is to deny honor to God, by whose will and judgment, as we know and believe, everything is ruled and directed. Bishops plainly are not made by God's will when they are made outside the Church, made in defiance of the gospel's own order and tradition — just as the Lord himself declares among the twelve prophets: they have appointed a king for themselves, but not through me. And again: their offerings are like the bread of mourners; all who eat them shall be defiled. And through Isaiah the Holy Spirit likewise cries out: woe to you, rebellious children! So says the Lord: you have taken counsel, but not from me; you have struck an agreement, but not by my spirit — piling sin upon sin.
For the rest — I say it provoked, I say it grieving, I say it compelled — when a bishop is put in the place of one who has died, when he is chosen by the vote of the whole people in peace, when he is protected by God's help in persecution, faithfully joined to all his fellow bishops, already for four years proved to his people in the episcopate, serving discipline in quiet, proscribed in the storm, his very name bound up and joined with his office of bishop, so often demanded for the lion, honored in the circus and the amphitheater by the testimony of the Lord's own favor, and even in these very days in which I wrote this letter to you, sought again for the lion in the circus by the shouting of the crowd on account of the sacrifices which the people were ordered by published edict to celebrate — when such a man, dearest brother, is seen to be attacked by certain desperate and ruined men set outside the Church, it is plain who is doing the attacking: not Christ, surely, who either appoints or protects priests, but he who, as adversary of Christ and enemy of his Church, pursues with his own hostility the man set over the Church for this very purpose — that once the pilot has been removed, he may rage more savagely and violently amid the Church's shipwrecks.
None of this ought to trouble any believer, dearest brother, who keeps the gospel in mind and holds to the apostle's own warning: that in the last days certain proud, defiant men, enemies of God's priests, would either desert the Church or turn against it — for both the Lord and his apostles announced long before that such men would come. Nor should it surprise anyone that a servant finds himself abandoned by some, when even the Lord himself, while performing his greatest wonders and confirming the deeds of God the Father through the witness of his own works, was left by his own disciples. And yet he neither rebuked those who left nor threatened them harshly, but instead turned to the apostles who remained and asked: do you also wish to leave? — thereby honoring the law by which every man, left free and given his own choice, reaches for either death or salvation on his own account. Peter, though — the very rock on which the Lord had built his Church — spoke for everyone as one voice, answering in the voice of the Church itself: Lord, where else should we go? you hold the words of everlasting life, and we have come to believe and to know: you are God's living Son, the Christ — showing thereby that those who abandon Christ perish through their own fault, yet the Church, which believes in Christ and clings once for all to what it has come to know, never truly departs from him at all, and that the Church consists of those who remain within God's house; while whatever planting God the Father did not himself plant shows itself among those we see, not made solid and firm like grain but scattered like chaff before the spirit of the enemy who winnows it — of whom John likewise writes in his letter: they departed from among us, yet they never truly belonged with us, for had they belonged with us, they would have stayed. In the same way Paul warns that we ought not be troubled when the wicked fall away from the Church, nor should the desertion of the unfaithful weaken our own faith. For, he asks, if some among them have lost their faith, does their faithlessness cancel God's faithfulness? Never — for God remains true, though every man may lie.
As far as it concerns us, brother, our own conscience requires us to take care that no one is lost from the Church through any fault of ours; but should anyone perish by his own choice and through his own wrongdoing, refusing to repent and come back to the Church, we shall stand blameless before the judgment, having offered him the remedy — while only those who refused the healing our counsel provided shall remain among the punished. Nor should the abuse hurled by ruined men push us from the straight road and the settled rule, since the apostle himself teaches: if I still sought to please men, I would not be Christ's servant. It makes all the difference whether one seeks to win over men or God. Please men, and you offend the Lord; but strive instead to please God, and both human insult and human curses become things we ought to disregard.
As for why I did not write to you at once, dearest brother, about this Fortunatus — set up as a pseudo-bishop by a handful of long-standing heretics — the matter did not seem urgent enough to rush before you as though it were something of great weight or alarm, especially since Fortunatus's name was already quite familiar to you: one of the five presbyters long ago fled from the Church, only recently removed by the ruling of our numerous and most weighty fellow bishops, who had already written to you about this the year before. Likewise you would recognize Felicissimus, the ringleader of the sedition, who appears in that very same letter our fellow bishops sent you earlier — a man removed here by them, and then only recently driven out from the Church there by you yourself. Since I trusted you already knew all this, and felt sure it remained firmly fixed in your memory and in your own governance, I saw no need to rush word to you urgently about the foolishness of these heretics. Nothing the heretics and schismatics scheme up among themselves ought to touch the majesty and standing of the catholic Church. As it happens, word has reached us that the Novatianist faction has now set up its own pseudo-bishop, one Maximus, a presbyter recently sent to us as Novatian's envoy and turned away from our fellowship. Yet even of this I had not written to you, since we hold all such matters in contempt, and I had lately sent you the names of the bishops established there — sound and whole men, presiding over the brethren within the catholic Church. This much I judged right to put in writing to you, by the counsel of all of us, so that there might be a quick means of clearing up error and telling truth from falsehood, and so that both you and our fellow bishops might know with whom correspondence should properly be exchanged: should anyone outside those named in our letter presume to write to us, you would recognize him at once as either stained by sacrifice or by a certificate, or else simply one of the heretics — a corrupt and godless man, in short. When the chance arose, through Felicianus the acolyte — a man closely trusted, a cleric you had sent along with our colleague Perseus — I included, among the other things that needed to reach you from here, word about this Fortunatus as well. But our brother Felicianus, delayed there either by the winds or held back to gather further letters from us, was overtaken along the way by Felicissimus rushing to reach you first. Crime always moves this way — hoping that speed alone will let it outrun innocence.
Through Felicianus as well, brother, I let you know that Privatus had arrived in Carthage — that old heretic from the colony of Lambaesis, condemned some ninety years past by the judgment of ninety bishops for many grave offenses, and, as your own knowledge surely recalls, most severely censured in the letters of our predecessors Fabian and Donatus. When he sought to argue his case before us at the assembly we convened on the Ides of May just past, and was refused admission, he made this same Fortunatus his pseudo-bishop, a fellow well suited to his company. Along with him had also come a certain Felix, whom Privatus himself had long before set up outside the Church as a pseudo-bishop in heresy. Present too, standing beside the heretic Privatus, were his companions Jovinus and Maximus — men condemned by the verdict of nine of our fellow bishops for unspeakable sacrifices and other proven crimes, and removed again the previous year by the judgment of a great many of us gathered in assembly. Joined to these four was Repostus of Saltus, a man who both collapsed himself during the persecution and, through his sacrilegious urging, dragged down the greater part of his own people as well. These five, together with a handful of men either fallen to sacrifice or burdened by guilty consciences, chose Fortunatus as their pseudo-bishop — and since their crimes matched each other so well, such indeed was the ruler as those he ruled.