Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Otherwise the whole discipline of religion and of truth is overturned unless what is spiritually commanded is faithfully kept, unless someone is careful about this very point at the morning sacrifices — that through the taste of wine he not give off the smell of the blood of Christ. Thus, then, the brotherhood begins to be held back from the passion of Christ in times of persecution, once in the offerings it grows accustomed to being embarrassed by his blood and his gore. Yet the Lord himself says in the gospel: whoever has been ashamed of me, of him the Son of Man will be ashamed. And the apostle likewise says: if I were pleasing men, I would not be a servant of Christ. How, then, could we ever spill our own blood in Christ's name, when swallowing his own blood makes us feel shame?
Or does someone comfort himself with the thought that, though only water appears to be offered in the morning, we present the mixed cup once evening dinner arrives? Yet at dinner we have no way of gathering the entire congregation to our table, in order that the whole brotherhood together might witness the sacrament performed as it truly should be. It is nonetheless true that the Lord gave the mixed cup after supper, not in the morning. Must we, then, hold the Lord's Supper after our evening meal, offering the mixed cup that way at our regular Sunday gatherings? Christ's offering was fittingly timed near evening, so that the hour of sacrifice itself would signal the world's decline toward its close, just as Exodus records: the whole gathered assembly of Israel's sons shall slaughter it near evening. And the Psalms likewise say: my upraised hands stand as an evening offering. We, however, mark the Lord's resurrection in the morning.
Since his passion is invoked in every sacrifice we offer — for what we present is nothing less than the Lord's own passion — our task is simply to reenact what he himself did, no more and no less. Scripture tells us that whenever we lift the cup to recall the Lord and his suffering, we are to repeat that same act which he is known to have performed. Let it be considered, dearest brother, whether any predecessor of ours, through ignorance or plain simplicity, neglected to keep and follow what the Lord's own example and teaching directed; such simple failure might perhaps find pardon through the Lord's own mercy. But no excuse remains open to us, now that the Lord himself has warned and taught us to mix wine into his cup exactly as he once did, and to write to our fellow bishops on this very point, so that the law of the gospel and the tradition handed down by the Lord might be preserved everywhere, with nothing of what Christ taught or practiced left abandoned.
To go on scorning these things and to remain fixed in old error is nothing else than to fall headlong into the Lord's own rebuke, as he charges [in the Psalm]: why do you recite my statutes and take my covenant upon your lips? But you have hated discipline and cast my words behind you. If you saw a thief, you ran with him, and you cast your lot among adulterers. To recite the Lord's statutes and covenant, yet fail to act as the Lord himself acted — what is this except throwing away his words and scorning the discipline that comes from him, committing theft and adultery, not of earthly goods but of spiritual ones? — for someone robs the gospel truth of our Lord's own words and deeds whenever he corrupts and falsifies the divine commands. As Jeremiah has it: what, he asks, does straw have in common with wheat? Therefore, behold, I stand against the prophets, says the Lord, who steal my words each one from his neighbor, misleading my people through their lies and their errors. And elsewhere in the same prophet: she committed adultery, he says, with wood and stone, and through all of this she has not turned back to me. This same theft and adultery — lest it fall upon us as well — we must resist with vigilance, with reverent fear, and with careful watchfulness. For if we serve as priests of God and of Christ, I can find no one more deserving of our imitation than God and Christ themselves, since he plainly declares in the gospel that he himself is the light of the world. The one who has followed me will never walk in the dark, but will possess the light of life. So that we might avoid walking in darkness, then, we must follow Christ and keep his commandments, since elsewhere, sending forth the apostles, he himself said: all authority in heaven and on earth has been granted to me. So go out and make disciples of every nation, plunging them into the name shared by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while instructing them to observe every command I have given you. For this reason, if it is Christ's light we mean to walk by, we must not turn away from his commands and counsel, giving thanks that even as he teaches us what to do from now on, he forgives whatever we did wrong in simple ignorance before. And because his second coming draws nearer to us with each day, his generous and gracious favor floods our hearts ever more with the light of truth.
It is fitting, therefore, dearest brother, both to our religion and to our fear of God, and to the very office and duty of our priesthood, in mixing and offering the Lord's cup, to safeguard what the Lord's own tradition truly hands down, correcting, on the Lord's own admonition, what has previously seemed to be done wrongly by certain persons, so that when he begins to come in his own brightness and heavenly majesty, he may find us holding what he warned, observing what he taught, doing what he did. I wish you, dearest brother, always to fare well.
Letter 64. From Cyprian, together with his sixty-six fellow colleagues gathered in council, to their brother Fidus, greeting. Your letter has reached us, dearest brother, and from it we learned that our colleague Therapius rashly extended peace, acting too soon and in undue haste, to a former presbyter named Victor, before Victor had completed his full penance or made his peace with the Lord God whom he had offended. This news disturbed us a good deal, since it meant straying from what our decree required — namely that no one receive peace before the lawful and complete period of satisfaction has passed, and without the people's own request and awareness, unless some illness or pressing need forced the matter. Yet once we had weighed the matter carefully among ourselves over time, we thought it sufficient to reprimand our colleague Therapius for acting so rashly, warning him against repeating such conduct; still, we did not believe that peace, however it had been granted by one of God's priests, should afterward be revoked, and so we permitted Victor to retain the fellowship that had already been extended to him. Concerning the question about infants — you had said that a child should not be baptized within its second or third day of life, that the ancient law of circumcision deserved consideration, and that therefore a newborn ought not to receive baptism and sanctification before the eighth day — our council reached quite a different conclusion. Not a single member agreed with your proposed course; instead we all judged together that no one, once born, should be refused God's mercy and grace. Since the Lord states in his gospel that the Son of Man came not to destroy human souls but to rescue them, so, as much as depends on us, no soul ought to be lost if this can possibly be avoided. What, after all, is missing in someone already shaped by God's own hands within the womb? To our eyes, measuring by the ordinary passage of earthly days, newborns appear to grow gradually; yet anything God has made is already brought to completeness through the majesty and craft of its maker. Further, sacred Scripture assures us that God's gift is bestowed with one same equality upon everyone, whether infant or elder, for we read how Elisha, calling on God over the widow's dead son, laid himself across the boy so that head touched head, face touched face, and his own limbs, stretched over the child, matched each of the little one's limbs, foot against foot. Judged merely by our own manner of birth and bodily proportions, an infant could never be matched to a full-grown man, nor could such small limbs stretch to cover larger ones. But here a spiritual, God-given parity is being shown — that all human beings stand equal and alike, having been made once by God, and that while our bodies may differ in growth measured by worldly years, no such difference exists before God, unless the grace granted at baptism itself varies in measure according to the recipient's age, though the Holy Spirit is in fact given to everyone equally, not by measure but through the Father's own tenderness and generosity. God pays no more attention to a person's age than he does to a person's rank, offering himself to all alike, in perfect balance, for reaching heavenly grace. You also mentioned that the trace of birth still on an infant in its first days is unclean, such that each of us hesitates even to kiss it — but we do not consider this any barrier to bestowing heavenly grace. Scripture tells us that to the clean, everything is clean. None of us should recoil from what God himself chose to fashion. Though the child is only newly come from the womb, that is no reason for anyone to shrink from kissing him while granting grace and making peace, for in kissing an infant each of us, according to his own devotion, ought to picture God's hands still fresh upon that child — hands which we in a sense touch with our lips whenever we embrace someone just formed and just born, since it is God's own handiwork we are embracing. As for the Jews' fleshly circumcision, performed on the eighth day, that practice was itself a foreshadowing mystery — a shadow and figure dispatched ahead of time — which reached its fulfillment only once Christ had come. Since it was on the eighth day — the first day following the sabbath — that the Lord was destined to rise, restore us to life, and grant us a circumcision of the spirit, that eighth day, the first after the sabbath and now the Lord's own day, had already come beforehand as a figure; and once the reality arrived and spiritual circumcision was granted to us, that figure came to an end. For this reason we do not believe anyone ought to be kept from grace under a law now firmly established, nor spiritual circumcision blocked by the carnal kind, but rather that everyone, with no exception, ought to be welcomed into Christ's grace, just as Peter states in the Acts of the Apostles: God has shown me that no person is to be called profane or unclean. And if anything at all were capable of blocking someone from grace, it would surely be the graver sins more likely found among grown and seasoned adults. Yet if even the worst offenders — those who had sinned greatly against God for a long time — receive forgiveness once they come to belief, with none excluded from baptism or grace, how much less should a newborn be excluded, since the only sin such a child carries is the contagion of ancient death inherited at his first birth through descent from Adam's flesh, having done no wrong himself — indeed such a child comes to receive forgiveness even more readily, since what is forgiven him is not his own sin but someone else's. For this reason, then, dearest brother, our council reached this judgment: that we ought never to bar anyone from baptism and from the grace of a God who shows mercy, kindness, and generosity toward all; and though this principle applies to every person, we believe it applies with still greater force to infants and the newly born, who deserve our assistance and divine compassion all the more precisely because, from the very first moment of life, their weeping and crying amount to nothing but a plea for help. We wish you, dearest brother, to fare well always.
Letter 65. From Cyprian, to his brother Epictetus and to the people living at Assuras, greeting. I was struck with deep grief and distress, dearest brothers, upon hearing that Fortunatianus — once your bishop — having suffered a serious collapse, now intends to behave as if unharmed and whole, and has set about claiming the bishopric for himself. This news troubled me for several reasons: first because of the man himself, poor wretch, whether utterly darkened by the devil's shadow or led astray by someone's sacrilegious deception — for while he should instead be making amends and besieging the Lord day and night with weeping, prayer, and pleading, he still ventures to reclaim the very priesthood he betrayed, as if approaching God's altar were permissible after bowing at the devil's, or as if he were not thereby stirring up still fiercer wrath and judgment from the Lord on the last day. Unable to serve as a model of faith and courage for the brothers, he has instead become an instructor in faithlessness, arrogance, and recklessness; and having failed to teach the brothers to hold their ground in the fight, he now teaches those already defeated and fallen not even to ask for mercy — even though the Lord himself declares: to them you poured drink offerings and to them you presented sacrifices; over such things shall I not show my anger? says the Lord; and elsewhere: whoever sacrifices to other gods, apart from the Lord alone, shall be uprooted; and again the Lord speaks, saying: they bowed down to what their own fingers had fashioned, and so man was brought low and humbled, and I will grant them no pardon; and in the Apocalypse too we find the Lord's anger foretold: if anyone worships the beast and its image, and takes its mark upon forehead or hand, that one will likewise drink the wine of God's fury, poured undiluted into the cup of his wrath, and will be tormented with fire and brimstone in full view of the holy angels and of the Lamb; the smoke of their torment rises age after age without end, and neither day nor night will those who worship the beast and its image find any rest. Given, then, that the Lord threatens exactly these punishments and torments on judgment day against all who submit to the devil and offer sacrifice to idols, how could anyone imagine himself fit to serve as God's priest after submitting to and serving the devil's own priests? How could he suppose his hand fit to be raised for God's sacrifice, or his prayer fit for the Lord, once both hand and prayer have become prisoners to sacrilege and crime — especially since divine Scripture bars even priests guilty of lesser faults from approaching the sacrifice, stating in Leviticus: no man bearing a defect or blemish shall come near to present offerings to God; and likewise in Exodus: let the priests who draw near the Lord God make themselves holy, lest the Lord perhaps abandon them; and again: those who come near to serve at the holy altar must not bring guilt upon themselves, lest they die. Those, then, who have burdened themselves with grave wrongs — namely, those whose idol-sacrifices amount to sacrilege — have no claim to God's priesthood, nor can they offer any prayer for the brothers in his presence, given what the gospel states: God pays no heed to a sinner, but listens to the one who reveres him and carries out his will. Granted, the thick gloom of advancing shadows has so darkened certain men's hearts that they let in no ray of light from these healthy teachings, but, having once strayed from the straight course of the true path, are carried off suddenly and steeply into the darkness and delusion born of their own crimes. Small wonder, then, that men who have already denied the Lord likewise spurn our counsel and the Lord's commandments. What they crave are the contributions, offerings, and profits on which they once fed insatiably, and they still lust after feasts and banquets, whose lingering drunkenness they used to belch up daily in their excess — now demonstrating beyond doubt that, before any religion, it was really their stomachs and their shameless appetite for gain that they served. From this we recognize and believe that this scrutiny itself has arisen from God's own testing, so that such men might no longer keep standing at the altar and touching it — men bringing to it the disgrace of the unchaste, the loyalty of traitors, the piety of the impious, treating divine matters as merely earthly, holy things through sacrilegious hands. Accordingly, to prevent such men returning to defile the altar again or make contact with the brothers, we must stand guard with every ounce of strength and press forward with all our energy, driving back so far as possible the shameless boldness behind their crime, so they no longer attempt to act as priests — men who, thrust down to the very edge of death, have collapsed under a heavier ruin than even the lapsed laity. But should this madness prove incurable and persist among these deranged men, with the Holy Spirit withdrawn and the darkness that took hold remaining locked in its own night, then our plan will be this: to pull individual brothers free of their deceit, and to cut them off from any contact, so that no one stumbles into the snares of their error — for no offering can be made holy where the Holy Spirit is absent, nor can the Lord grant benefit to anyone through the prayers of a man who has himself trampled upon the Lord. So if Fortunatianus, either forgetting his own crime through the devil's blinding, or having turned into the devil's own agent and servant for deceiving the brotherhood, continues in this madness, then you, to the extent you can, must labor, and amid this darkness of a raging devil, draw the brothers' minds back from error, so they do not readily fall in with another's madness, nor become partners in the wrongdoing of desperate men, but instead hold firm to the unbroken path of their own salvation and the lasting strength of an integrity they themselves preserve and guard. As for the lapsed, once they recognize the size of their offense, they should not stop pleading with the Lord, nor forsake the one catholic Church that the Lord alone established; rather, remaining steadfast in acts of penance and begging for the Lord's mercy, they should keep knocking at the Church's door, so that they might be taken back into the place they once held, and return to the Christ they had abandoned. Nor should they give ear to those who deceive themselves through a false and fatal enticement, for it is written: let no one lead you astray with empty talk, since it is on account of these very things that God's wrath falls upon the disobedient; do not, then, share company with them. Let no one, therefore, keep company with those who remain stubborn, unafraid of God, and wholly withdrawn from the Church. But should anyone grow impatient with pleading before the offended Lord, and refuse to heed us, choosing instead to follow the desperate and the lost, he alone will bear the blame once judgment day arrives; for how could such a man plead with the Lord on that day, having already denied Christ once and now denying Christ's Church as well, and, refusing obedience to bishops who are sound, whole, and living, having made himself the companion and comrade of the dying? I wish you, dearest brothers, to fare well always.