Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Letter 66. From Cyprian, also called Thascius, to his brother Florentius, known too as Pupianus, greeting. Brother, I had supposed that you had finally come round to repentance, and that whatever unspeakable, shameful things — things loathsome even to pagans — you had once rashly heard or believed of us belonged now to the past. Yet your letter shows me otherwise: you remain exactly the man you were, holding the same opinions of us and clinging stubbornly to what you have chosen to believe; and, worried that our fellowship might somehow tarnish the glory of your reputation and your martyrdom, you go probing into our behavior, and, setting aside God the judge who appoints priests, you would rather — not, I dare say, pass sentence on me, for who am I? — overturn the very verdict rendered by God and by Christ. That is disbelief in God himself; that is open revolt against Christ and his gospel, for he has said: are two sparrows not sold for a mere penny, yet not a single one drops to earth apart from the Father's consent — and by this his majesty and truth show that nothing, however trivial, occurs without God's own awareness and permission. Yet you imagine priests are ordained in the church behind his back. To believe the men ordained are unworthy and corrupt is simply to claim that God plays no part, directly or otherwise, in establishing his own priests within the church. Or do you rate my personal testimony above God's own, when the Lord himself instructs us that no one's witness about himself can be trusted, since every man naturally favors his own cause and will not volunteer evidence against himself — whereas genuine truth demands, when we make our proclamations, a witness separate from the one proclaiming? "If I testify concerning myself," he says, "my testimony is not true; there is another who testifies of me." And if the Lord — who will one day judge everything — refused to have his own self-testimony simply taken on faith, choosing instead to be vindicated through the Father's own judgment and witness, how much more ought his servants hold to that principle, servants who are not only vindicated by God's judgment and witness but who take pride in it. Yet a fabrication spun by hostile, malicious men has overpowered you, set against the divine verdict and against the confidence we place in our own faith — as though, among the lapsed, the defiled, and those thrust outside the church, hearts the Holy Spirit has abandoned could hold anything but a corrupted mind, a lying tongue, poisoned grudges, and blasphemous falsehoods; and whoever puts faith in such people is bound to be counted among them once the day of reckoning arrives. Now, regarding your claim that priests should be humble because the Lord and his apostles were humble: my own humility is well known to, and cherished by, all our brothers and even by pagans; you too once recognized it and valued it, back when you were still within the church and still in fellowship with me. But ask which of us truly stands far from humility — I, who wait on the brothers day after day and receive each newcomer to the church kindly, willingly and with joy, or you, who have made yourself a bishop over your bishop and a judge over the judge whom God appointed for his own season — recall that the Lord God says in Deuteronomy: whoever acts with such arrogance that he will not obey the priest or the judge holding office in those days — that person shall be put to death, and the whole nation, hearing of it, will be afraid and will no longer act wickedly; and again he tells Samuel: it is not you they have spurned, it is me. And once more, when someone said to the Lord in the gospel, "Do you answer the high priest so?" — he, careful to uphold and teach that the priesthood's honor must be respected, said nothing against the high priest himself, but merely defended his own innocence, replying: "If I have spoken wrongly, point out the wrong; but if rightly, why strike me?" So too the blessed apostle, on being told, "Do you dare abuse the high priest this way?", uttered no insult against the priest — even though he might rightly have spoken out boldly against men who had crucified God and had already thrown away the Lord, the Christ, the temple, and the priesthood; yet, though that priesthood was counterfeit and stripped of honor, he still respected the mere hollow shadow of its title, and said: "Brothers, I did not realize he was the high priest, for scripture says, you shall not speak evil of a ruler of your people." Unless, that is, I was only a priest to you before the persecution, while you still shared communion with me, and stopped being a priest once the persecution came — since that same persecution lifted you to the very peak of a martyr's glory while it bore down on me with the weight of proscription, when this was read out publicly: "Whoever holds or keeps any property belonging to Caecilius Cyprianus, bishop of the Christians..." — so that people who would not believe God when he set up a bishop might at least believe the devil when he outlawed one. I do not boast of this; I mention it with sorrow, since you have made yourself judge over God and over Christ, who tells the apostles — and, through them, everyone set over the church who succeeds them by delegated ordination — "Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever listens to me listens to the one who sent me; and whoever rejects you rejects me, and the one who sent me." For where, after all, have schisms and heresies come from, and where do they keep arising, if not from this: the bishop, who alone presides over the church, gets treated with contempt through the arrogant presumption of certain men, while a man God himself has honored is judged unworthy in men's eyes? What is this swelling of pride, this haughtiness of spirit, this puffed-up mind, that summons those set over you — your priests — before your own private tribunal, as though, unless we've been cleared in your court and acquitted by your verdict, then, behold, for six years now the brotherhood has had no bishop, the people no leader, the flock no shepherd, the church no governor, Christ no chief priest, God no priest at all! Let Pupianus step forward and render his verdict; let him claim credit for the judgment belonging to God and to Christ, so that this vast number of the faithful gathered under our charge won't appear to have died without hope of salvation or peace; so that this new body of believers won't be judged to have gained through us no grace of baptism or of the Holy Spirit; so that the peace granted to so many of the lapsed and repentant, and the communion conceded after our own examination, won't be nullified by the weight of your judgment. Give your consent at last; condescend to render a verdict about us and to confirm our episcopate by the strength of your own judgment, so that God and his Christ can thank you for having, through your agency, restored to their altar and to their people a chief priest and a governor. Bees have their king, cattle their leader, and both remain loyal; even bandits submit to their chief with complete and humble obedience. How much simpler, how much better, are dumb beasts and speechless animals — even brigands, savage and bloodstained among their swords and weapons — than you! Among them their leader is acknowledged and feared, though he was chosen not by divine appointment but merely agreed upon by a band of lost, guilty criminals. You said, too, that you needed to shake off a scruple lodged in your mind. You fell into it, yes, but through your own irreverent credulity; you fell into it through your own sacrilegious will and thinking — since you eagerly listen to, and happily credit, unchaste, impious, unspeakable charges brought against a brother, against a priest, and defend other people's lies as if they were your own possession, forgetting the scripture: "Fence your ears about with thorns, and refuse to listen to a wicked tongue," and again: "A wicked man gives heed to an unjust tongue, but a righteous man pays no attention to lying lips." Why did such a scruple never trouble the martyrs, brimming with the Holy Spirit and, through their suffering, already standing near the presence of God and his Christ — men who sent letters from prison to Cyprian the bishop, recognizing him as God's priest and testifying on his behalf? Why did this scruple never trouble so many of my fellow bishops and colleagues, who either were themselves proscribed as they left our ranks, or were arrested and kept in prison and chains, or were driven into exile and made their way to the Lord along a glorious road, or, executed in various places, received their heavenly crowns straight from the Lord's own glory? Why did this scruple never trouble, among our own people who stand with us, entrusted to us by God's favor, so many confessors tested under torture, celebrated for the memory of their notable scars and wounds, so many virgins preserved intact, so many admirable widows, and, in the end, every church throughout the entire world bound to us in the tie of unity? Unless, as you have written, all of these — being in communion with me — have been contaminated by my defiled mouth and have thereby lost, through contact with my fellowship, all hope of everlasting life. Pupianus alone remains sound, untouched, holy and pure, having refused association with us, and to him alone will belong a dwelling in paradise, within heaven's kingdom. You have also written that the church, on my account, now keeps a portion of itself scattered abroad — when in truth the entire body of the church stands gathered, united, bound together in undivided harmony, and only those men remain outside who, even were they inside, would deserve expulsion; nor does the Lord, guardian and protector of his people, permit the wheat to be torn from his threshing floor — only chaff can be winnowed away from the church — for the apostle himself says: "What, then, if some among them have broken faith? Does their faithlessness cancel God's faithfulness? Certainly not; let God be true, though every man be a liar." And the Lord too, in the gospel, when the disciples were deserting him as he spoke, turned to the Twelve and asked, "Do you also want to leave?" Peter answered him: "Lord, to whom would we go? You hold the words of everlasting life, and we have come to believe and know that you are the Son of the living God." It is Peter who speaks there — the very man on whom the church was built — teaching and demonstrating, on the church's behalf, that although a stubborn, arrogant crowd of the disobedient may break away, the church itself never breaks away from Christ; and the church consists of those who are the people united to their priest, the flock clinging fast to its shepherd. From this you should grasp a single truth: the bishop resides within the church, just as the church resides within its bishop, so anyone standing apart from the bishop stands outside the church too; and it is pointless for those to flatter themselves who, lacking peace with God's priests, slip in and imagine they hold some secret communion here or there with certain individuals — for the church, one and catholic, is never split or torn apart, but everywhere stands joined together, bound fast by the mutual bond of its priests. So then, brother: if you will weigh the majesty of God, who ordains Christ's priests; if you will at some point turn your gaze to Christ, who by his will, his command, and his presence governs both those set over the church and the church alongside them; if you will trust in the innocence of priests on the strength of divine judgment rather than human malice; if you will finally begin, even now, however late, to regret your rashness, your pride, your insolence; if you will offer full satisfaction to the Lord and to his Christ — the one I serve, offering him, with lips kept undefiled, unending sacrifice through both persecution and peace alike — then we shall be able to weigh the question of restoring you to communion, though still holding fast to our reverence and fear of the divine censure; and I will first put the matter before my Lord, to see whether he will, by his own sign and warning, permit peace to be granted you and allow you to be received into the communion of his church.