Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
From this, dearest brother, you can already tell the rest of the lies that those desperate and ruined men have been scattering there — for even though the whole company of sacrificers and heretics produced only five bogus bishops willing to make the crossing to Carthage and take Fortunatus as their partner in madness, those same men, sons of the devil and steeped in falsehood, have still dared to boast, as you write, that twenty-five bishops were present. This very lie they had already been circulating here among our brothers beforehand, claiming that twenty-five bishops were coming from Numidia to install a bishop of their own. Once that lie was exposed and they were left confounded — since only five shipwrecked men actually showed up, and we kept even those at a distance — off they sailed to Rome bearing the freight of their falsehoods, as if the truth were too slow a vessel to overtake them and expose their lying tongues with proof drawn from plain fact. And here, brother, lies the true madness: failing to grasp that falsehood cannot deceive for long, that night endures only until daybreak, and that once the day brightens and the sun climbs, the dark and the gloom yield to light, and whatever thieving went on under cover of night comes to a stop. Indeed, ask them for names and they would have none, even false ones, to give. Wickedness is so scarce among them that not twenty-five altogether can be scraped up from both the sacrificers and the heretics. Yet to fool the ears of simple folk and those at a distance, they inflate the count with lies, as though — even if the number were genuine — the Church could be defeated by heretics, or justice by the unjust.
It does not suit me, dearest brother, to descend to their own level now and rehearse in my own words everything they have done and go on doing, since what priests of God ought to say and set down in writing needs careful thought, and shame, more than anger, should guide what we speak, lest I appear, under provocation, to be piling up insults instead of laying out crimes and sins. So the frauds worked against the Church I pass over in silence; their plots, their adulteries, their offenses of every stripe I leave untouched. But there is one matter — and here the concern is not mine, nor any man's, but God's own — that I do not think should go unmentioned about their crime: even from the very first day the persecution began, when the wrongdoers crimes were still fresh and burning, and when it was not only shrines of the devil that reeked from those forbidden offerings but the lapsed themselves whose hands and mouths still gave off smoke, these men refused to stop admitting the lapsed to communion and obstructing the penance that ought to have been carried out — this even though God cries out, whoever sacrifices to other gods shall be uprooted, except to the Lord alone; and the Lord declares in the gospel, whoever denies me, him will I deny; and elsewhere the divine wrath and indignation speaks out plainly: to them you poured drink offerings, to them you brought sacrifices — shall this not stir my indignation? says the Lord. Yet these men work to keep God, who himself swears he is provoked to anger, from being petitioned at all; they work to keep Christ, who proclaims he will deny whoever denies him, from being won over by prayer and amends.
As for us, right during the persecution itself we sent letters on this exact question and were ignored. After holding council on several occasions, we set it down as a decree — backed not merely by our agreement but by the threat of censure — that the brothers must do penance, and that peace was not to be handed out carelessly to any who refused to do it. But these men, sacrilegious toward God, reckless in impious fury against God's priests, have broken from the Church and raised murderous weapons against her, laboring to see the devil's malice carried through to completion — so that divine mercy might find no wounded soul left to tend within its own Church; they poison, with the deceit of their falsehoods, whatever penitence the wretched might feel, so that God's anger goes unappeased, so that none will seek out Christ the Lord — whom he once shrank from confessing as a Christian and afterward feared to renounce — so that whoever had left the Church stays gone. Effort goes into making sure offenses cannot be paid for by rightful amends and mourning, that tears cannot wash the wounds clean. A lying counterfeit peace strips away the genuine one; the healing lap of the mother is barred shut, with a stepmother stepping in between, so that the weeping and sighing of the lapsed goes unheard from lip and breast. Beyond that, the lapsed are pressed to turn the same tongues and mouths that once sinned on the Capitol into weapons of abuse against the priests; confessors, virgins, and all those made glorious within the Church by the renown of their faith, these men chase down with insult and slander. Through this it is not so much our people's modesty, humility, and sense of shame that takes the blow as it is the offenders' own hope and life that get torn to shreds. For the one who is wretched is not the one who endures abuse but the one who deals it; and under the law, the sinner is not the man struck by his brother but the man who strikes him; when guilty men wrong the innocent, it is in fact the guilty, imagining themselves the doers, who suffer the wrong. This, in the end, is why their minds have gone numb and their perception dull and foreign to them: it is God's anger at work, withholding from them any grasp of their offenses, so that no penitence can follow — just as scripture has it: God gave them a spirit of stupor, meaning that they would not turn back, be healed, and after their sins be cured through entreaty and rightful amends. And the apostle Paul writes in his letter: they refused to love the truth in a way that would bring them salvation, and on that account God will send upon them a delusion at work, so that they believe a falsehood, so that judgment falls on all who refused to believe the truth and instead took delight in wrongdoing. The first rung of blessedness is never sinning; the second is owning up to one's sins. In the first, innocence runs its course whole and untouched, guarding itself; in the second, a cure steps in to heal what is broken. Both of these these men have thrown away by offending God, so that the grace won through the sanctifying of baptism has slipped from them, and beneath there remains no penitence to cure the guilt. Or do you suppose, brother, that these count as trivial wrongs against God, minor and modest failings — that because of these men the majesty of an angry God goes unpetitioned, that his wrath, his fire, his coming day go unfeared, that with antichrist already at the door the faith of God's soldiers is stripped of its weapons, while the vigor and dread owed to Christ are cast aside? Let laymen answer for how they will handle this. On priests falls the heavier duty of upholding and guarding God's majesty, so that we not appear to be careless in any part of it, since the Lord gives this warning: and now, priests, this charge is laid upon you — if you refuse to listen, and refuse to take it to heart to render honor to my name, says the Lord, I will loose a curse against you, and I will turn even your blessing into a curse. Honor, then, is paid to God precisely when his majesty and judgment are held in such contempt that, even as he himself declares his anger and indignation at those who sacrifice, and threatens eternal punishment and unending torment, sacrilegious men come forward proclaiming that God's wrath need not be weighed, that the Lord's judgment need not be dreaded, that no one need knock at Christ's Church — but instead, with penance done away and no confession of the crime ever made, bishops scorned and trodden down, presbyters should announce peace in words full of deceit, and — so that the lapsed never rise and the excommunicated never return to the Church — communion should be handed to those holding none.
Nor did it satisfy them merely to have broken from the gospel, stripping from the lapsed any hope of amends or penitence, and to have stripped men caught up in fraud, or fouled by adultery, or contaminated by the deadly touch of sacrifice, of every sense and fruit of penitence, so that they would neither seek God nor own up to their wrongs before the Church — beyond even this, they built for themselves, outside the Church and in opposition to it, a meeting-place for a ruined faction, a spot where a crowd of the guilty-conscienced, unwilling to seek God's pardon or make amends, could pour together. And after all that, on top of everything, once they had propped up a false bishop of their own manufacture through heretics, they now have the nerve to set sail, carrying letters as schismatics and profane men, toward Peter's seat and toward the principal church, the very source from which priestly unity first sprang — giving no thought at all to the fact that these are Romans, a people whose faith the apostle's own preaching once praised, a people faithlessness cannot reach. So what reason could there be for them to come, announcing a false bishop raised up against the true ones? Either they stand by what was done and mean to keep at their crime, or, if it displeases them and they are backing away, they already know where they belong. For we have all agreed together, and it is only fair and right, that each man's case be tried in the place where the offense occurred, and since every shepherd has been given his own share of the flock to rule and tend, answerable to the Lord for how he manages it, surely those under our charge ought not to go roaming about, nor to smash, through treacherous and reckless behavior, the unity binding the bishops together, but rather to argue their case in the place where their accusers and the witnesses to their crime can be found — unless, perhaps, to a handful of desperate, ruined men the authority carried by the bishops of Africa now looks trivial, those very bishops who have already judged them and, weighing the many snares of guilt binding their conscience, condemned them lately by their own verdict. Their case has already been heard, sentence has already fallen, and it does not befit the dignity of priests for that to be dragged open again by the shifting whims of an unsteady, changeable mind, since the Lord's own teaching runs: let your speech be yes, yes; no, no.
If the number of those who passed judgment on them last year were reckoned together with the presbyters and deacons, more were present then at the judgment and inquiry than are these same men who now appear joined with Fortunatus. For you should know, dearest brother, that ever since he was made a false bishop by heretics he has been all but abandoned by nearly everyone. For those to whom deceptions were held out in the past and to whom false words were given, on the assurance that they would shortly rejoin the Church together, once they saw a false bishop actually installed there, discovered they had been fooled and led on, and now day after day they keep returning and knocking at the Church's door — while we, who must answer to the Lord, weigh each case with anxious care, scrutinizing closely who deserves to be taken back in and welcomed to the Church. For with some, either their own wrongdoing works against them, or the brothers object so stubbornly and firmly that letting them in at all would risk scandal and danger to many. Rotten scraps should never be gathered up in a way that wounds what is whole and sound alongside it, nor is any shepherd wise or fit for his task who blends diseased, infected sheep into the flock so freely that the whole flock catches the spreading sickness. [Pay their numbers no mind; a single man who stands in awe of God outweighs a thousand godless sons, just as the Lord spoke through the prophet: son, take no delight in godless sons, however many they multiply to you, since the fear of God has no place in them.] If only, dearest brother, you could stand here beside us when these twisted, perverse men come back from their schism! You would see the sheer effort it takes me to talk our brothers into patience, so that, setting aside their grief, they might agree to take back and heal the guilty. Just as they celebrate and rejoice when the milder offenders with lighter guilt return, so, conversely, they balk and push back whenever men beyond correction and beyond shame — fouled by adultery or by sacrifice, and on top of it all still arrogant — come crawling back to the Church in a way that spoils the good character already inside it. I can scarcely persuade the people — indeed I must all but wrest their consent — to let such men be admitted at all. And the grief of the brotherhood has been proved all the more just from this, that one or another, received through my own too-ready leniency against the resistance and protest of the people, turned out worse than they had been before and could not keep faith with their penitence, because they had not come with true penitence in the first place.
And these other men, who have now sailed off to join you together with Felicissimus, guilty of every crime, dispatched as envoys by the false bishop Fortunatus — what am I even to say about them? They bring you letters as false as the man himself whose words they carry, men whose sins weigh as heavy on the conscience, whose lives are as vile, whose reputation as disgraceful, that they should have been thrown out of the Church even had they still belonged to it. Indeed, knowing full well what their own conscience holds against them, they dare not come near, dare not so much as approach the Church's threshold, but roam the province instead, hunting for brothers to trap and plunder, and now, already notorious everywhere and driven out on every side for their crimes, off they sail to you as well. For they can have no face to approach us or to take their stand among us, since there are the bitterest and gravest charges brought against them by the brothers. If they wish to put our judgment to the test, let them come. In short, if they can offer any excuse or defense, let us see what sense of satisfaction they have, what fruit of penitence they bring. Here the Church is closed to no one, nor is a bishop refused to anyone. Our patience, our leniency, our humanity stand ready for those who come. I wish for all to return to the Church; I wish all our fellow soldiers to be gathered together within the camp of Christ and the household of God the Father. I forgive everything, I overlook much, out of zeal and desire to gather the brotherhood together. Even offenses committed against God I do not examine with the full rigor of religious judgment. In pardoning offenses more than is proper, I very nearly sin myself. I embrace, with ready and full affection, those who return with penitence, confessing their sin with humble and simple satisfaction.
But if there are any who think they can return to the Church not by prayers but by threats, or who imagine they can make an entrance for themselves not by lamentations and satisfactions but by intimidation, let them be sure of this: that against such men the Church of the Lord stands shut, and that the camp of Christ, unconquered and strong and fortified under the Lord's protection, does not yield to threats. A priest of God, holding fast the gospel, keeping the commandments of Christ, can be killed, but cannot be conquered. Zechariah, God's high priest, furnishes and supplies us an example of courage and faith: neither threats nor stoning could break him, and he was slain within God's own temple while crying aloud, repeating the very words that we ourselves now hurl at the heretics: thus speaks the Lord: you have abandoned my paths, and I in turn abandon you. It does not follow that, merely because a handful of reckless and wicked men have turned their backs on the Lord's heavenly, life-giving paths and, holy in nothing they do, find themselves left behind by the Holy Spirit, we ourselves should then grow careless of what tradition hands down from God, weighing the crimes of frenzied men as heavier than the rulings of priests, or imagining that human aggression carries more force than divine protection carries to shield us.
Is this, then, dearest brother, the point we have come to — that the catholic Church's own dignity, the loyal and unblemished grandeur of the people gathered within her, and the very authority and power of the priesthood, must all be set aside, so that men who have positioned themselves outside the Church can claim the right to sit in judgment over the one placed over her: wounded men judging the sound, the damaged judging the whole, the fallen judging the one still standing, the guilty judging the judge, the sacrilegious judging the priest? What is left, then, except for the Church to yield ground to the Capitol, for the priests to step back and the Lord's altar to be cleared away, and for images and idols, altars and all, to be marched into the holy and honored gathering of our own clergy — handing Novatian richer, fuller ammunition to declaim against us — should those who sacrificed and openly denied Christ not merely be pleaded with and let back in absent any act of penance, but on top of it begin lording over us through sheer intimidation? Let them lay down their weapons if peace is what they want; if they mean to make amends, why the threats? And if threats are what they bring, let them understand that God's priests hold no fear of them. Even antichrist himself, when his coming begins, will not force his way into the Church simply by threatening, nor will anyone bow to his violence just because he vows to destroy whoever resists him. Heretics only arm us further while imagining their threats terrify us; rather than beat us down, they lift us up and set us ablaze, even as they turn what should be peace into something worse for the brothers than persecution itself. Still, we hope the fury in their words never hardens into deed, that men who sin already through faithless, cruel speech will not go on to sin in action too. We ask and implore of God — a God they never tire of provoking and angering — that their hearts might soften, that laying down their rage their minds might come back to health, that their hearts, shrouded now in the darkness of their offenses, might glimpse the light of penitence, and that they would rather want the bishop's prayers offered up on their behalf than spill a priest's blood themselves. But should they persist in their rage and carry on cruelly with these plots and their murderous threats, there exists no priest of God so feeble, so crushed and downcast, so undone by the weakness common to men, that divine strength cannot raise him up against these enemies who assail God, nor whose frailty and humility cannot draw courage from the vigor of the Lord who shields him. Whose hand ends us, or when, means nothing to us, since death and bloodshed will bring us our reward from the Lord himself. It is instead their own fate that calls for tears and mourning, so thoroughly has the devil blinded them that, sparing no thought for hell's unending torments, they try to play the part of an antichrist already close at hand.
And although I know, dearest brother, that out of the mutual love which we owe and show to one another, you always read our letters to the most flourishing clergy who preside with you there and to the most holy and honored people, yet now I both press and request that this thing you normally do unprompted, as an act of honor, you do this time because I have asked it — namely, that once this letter of mine has been read, if any contagion of poisoned speech and pestilent sowing has crept in among you there, it may all be stripped away from the ears and hearts of the brothers, and that the whole and sincere love of good men may be purged clean, on the part of all, from every stain of heretical detraction.