A reflection for Wednesday within the Sixteenth Week after Pentecost — Ss. Cornelii Papæ et Cypriani Episcopi, Martyrum, III classis (16 September)
Commemoratio ad Laudes tantum: Ss. Euphemiæ, Luciæ et Geminiani Martyrum
The Introit of today’s Mass is not a song of triumph but a groan: Intret in conspectu tuo, Domine, gemitus compeditorum — “Let the sighing of the prisoners come in before Thee, O Lord” (Ps. 78:11). The Church keeps the feast of a Pope who died in exile and a Bishop who died under the sword, and she begins not with their crowns but with their chains. Before we are shown the souls of the just in the hand of God, we are made to hear the sound that rose from the prison.
These two men belong together, and the Church has never separated them. Their names stand side by side in the Canon of the Mass — Cornelii, Cypriani — spoken by every priest of the Roman Rite at every Mass for seventeen centuries. One governed the Church of Rome; the other governed the Church of Carthage and defended the Roman Pontiff against a schism. Together they show us the two halves of today’s readings: the peace of the just, and the patience by which that peace is possessed.
I. The souls of the just are in the hand of God
The Epistle (Wis. 3:1-8) is among the most consoling passages in the Old Testament, and the Church reads it again and again over her martyrs:
“But the souls of the just are in the hand of God, and the torment of death shall not touch them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die: and their departure was taken for misery: and their going away from us, for utter destruction: but they are in peace.”
Notice the sharp division the sacred writer draws between two ways of seeing. In the sight of the unwise — visi sunt oculis insipientium mori — death looks like annihilation, exile like defeat, the executioner’s stroke like the last word. But the unwise are looking at the wrong thing. They see the hand of the persecutor; they do not see the hand of God beneath it.
No one understood this passage better than St. Cyprian, and no one had more occasion to preach it. In the years 252 and following, a plague swept through the Roman world and emptied the houses of Carthage. The pagans said the Christians had brought it; some of the Christians themselves were shaken to find that faith did not exempt them from dying. Cyprian answered them in his treatise De mortalitate, and his answer is the Book of Wisdom translated into pastoral counsel. Our brethren who have been called away from the world, he writes, are not to be lamented as lost, for they are not lost but sent on ahead of us — non amitti sed praemitti. We may long for them as travellers long for companions who have set out first; we may not mourn them as the pagans mourn, who have no hope. To grieve as though death were destruction, he says, is to give the lie by our tears to the faith we profess with our lips.
“And though in the sight of men they suffered torments, their hope is full of immortality.” Spes illorum immortalitate plena est. The Communion antiphon of today’s Mass takes up the next verses, so that the Church places them on our lips at the very moment we receive the Body of the Lord: Et si coram hominibus tormenta passi sunt, Deus tentavit eos: tamquam aurum in fornace probavit eos, et quasi holocausta accepit eos — “As gold in the furnace He hath proved them, and as a victim of a holocaust He hath received them.” Cyprian himself, in his exhortation to martyrdom addressed to Fortunatus, gathered these sentences of Wisdom among the Scriptures by which he armed his people for the coming persecution.
The image of the furnace is exact. Gold is not destroyed by the fire; only what is not gold is destroyed. The martyr is not unmade by suffering but assayed by it — and the fire reveals what was already there. Tertullian, Cyprian’s master (Cyprian used to ask for his books with the words “Give me the master”), had written the Church’s most famous sentence on the matter: semen est sanguis Christianorum — the blood of Christians is seed (Apologeticum 50). What the unwise take for the end of the harvest is its sowing.
II. Be not terrified
The Gospel (Luke 21:9-19) is our Lord’s own prophecy of the Church’s sufferings, spoken in the Temple in the last days before His Passion: “And when you shall hear of wars and seditions, be not terrified… they will lay their hands upon you, and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and into prisons, dragging you before kings and governors, for my name’s sake.”
Every clause of it was fulfilled in the lives of today’s saints.
St. Cornelius was elected Bishop of Rome in 251, after the see had stood vacant for more than a year because the Emperor Decius had made the election of a Pope practically a death sentence. Decius, it was reported, said he would sooner tolerate a rival emperor than a bishop in Rome. Cornelius accepted the office knowing this. Almost at once he faced not only the Emperor but a schism: the Roman priest Novatian, a learned and severe man, had himself consecrated as a rival bishop, teaching that those who had lapsed under persecution — the Christians who had offered incense to the idols or bought certificates saying they had — could never be restored to communion by the Church. Cornelius held the traditional and merciful doctrine: that the lapsed who did true penance could be reconciled. A council at Rome in 251 upheld him and condemned Novatian. Two years later, under the Emperor Gallus, Cornelius was banished to Centumcellae, the port now called Civitavecchia, and there he died in June of 253, worn out by the hardships of his exile. The Church has always counted him among her martyrs: he was “delivered up” and “brought before governors” for the name of Christ, and the chain was no less a chain for being slow.
St. Cyprian, a wealthy rhetorician of Carthage converted in middle age, was made bishop within two or three years of his baptism, over the objections of some of his clergy. When Decius’s persecution broke out he withdrew into hiding, judging that the flock needed its shepherd alive, and he governed Carthage by letters — a decision for which he was reproached, and which he defended by the Lord’s own counsel: “when they shall persecute you in this city, flee into another” (Matt. 10:23). He was not avoiding martyrdom, only refusing to seize it before God offered it. When the persecution passed he confronted the same crisis Cornelius faced in Rome, holding the middle way between the laxists who would readmit the lapsed without penance and the rigorists who would never readmit them. Against the Novatianist schism he wrote the treatise that every Catholic ought to know, On the Unity of the Catholic Church, containing the sentence that has been repeated ever since: habere non potest Deum patrem qui Ecclesiam non habet matrem — “he cannot have God for his Father who has not the Church for his Mother” (De unitate, 6). And when the Roman clergy were uncertain which of the rival claimants was the true Pope, Cyprian’s recognition of Cornelius carried the whole African Church with it.
Here the words of the Gospel apply with painful literalness: “You shall be betrayed by your parents and brethren, and kinsmen and friends.” Both men suffered more from brethren than from pagans. The wound of schism came from priests. And, as the honest telling of Cyprian’s life requires, one of the sharpest trials of his later years came not from an enemy at all but from his own zeal: in the controversy over the baptism of heretics he held, with the African councils, that such baptism was invalid and must be repeated, and he resisted Pope St. Stephen, who upheld the Roman tradition that it was not to be repeated. The Church judged for Rome. Cyprian was wrong on the point.
St. Augustine, who revered Cyprian above almost any other Latin writer and preached several sermons on his feast, did not hide the error — the Donatists of his own day were appealing to it — but he explained why it did not stain the saint. Cyprian, Augustine says, erred while holding fast to unity; he never broke communion over his opinion, and he expressly left other bishops free to judge otherwise. The charity which covers a multitude of sins covered this. And if anything in so fruitful a branch still needed pruning, Augustine continues, alluding to the Lord’s words about the vine (John 15:2), it was cut away by the pruning-knife of martyrdom (De baptismo I, 18). The martyr’s blood did not canonize the error; it purged the man.
III. I will give you a mouth and wisdom
“Lay it up therefore in your hearts, not to meditate before how you shall answer: for I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which all your adversaries shall not be able to resist and gainsay.”
We possess, almost word for word, the record of how this promise was kept. The Acta Proconsularia of St. Cyprian preserve his two interrogations before the Roman proconsuls. In 257, under the Emperor Valerian, he was ordered to acknowledge the Roman gods; he answered that he was a Christian and a bishop, that he knew no other gods but the one true God who made heaven and earth, and that he would not give up the names of his priests, since the laws themselves forbade informers. He was exiled to Curubis. A year later he was brought back and tried again before the proconsul Galerius Maximus. The exchange is almost bare of rhetoric, which is itself the sign that the mouth and wisdom were not his own. When commanded to sacrifice, he said: “I will not.” When told to consider his own welfare, he replied that in so just a matter there was nothing to consider. And when the sentence was read — that Thascius Cyprian should die by the sword — the whole of his answer was two words: Deo gratias.
On the fourteenth of September, 258, in a field outside Carthage, before a crowd of his people who had climbed the trees to see, he took off his cloak, knelt, and prayed. He bound his own eyes. He directed that twenty-five gold pieces be given to the executioner. The Christians spread cloths about him to catch his blood. He was the first bishop of Africa to receive the crown of martyrdom.
“Thanks be to God” — that is the voice of Wisdom’s just man, whom “the torment of death shall not touch.” The executioner touched the body. He could not reach the soul, which was in another hand.
IV. In your patience you shall possess your souls
The Gospel ends with two verses that seem at first to contradict each other: “Some of you they will put to death… But a hair of your head shall not perish.” The Fathers resolve it by lifting our eyes to the resurrection. St. Augustine teaches that the promise concerns not the preservation of the body from harm but its restoration in glory: nothing that belongs to the integrity of the risen body will be lost, and God, who numbers the very hairs of our heads, will not forget one of them (cf. De civitate Dei XXII, 19). The persecutor may take everything; he takes it only on loan.
And then comes the sentence which is the key to the whole feast: In patientia vestra possidebitis animas vestras — “In your patience you shall possess your souls.”
St. Gregory the Great preached on this very Gospel in his thirty-fifth homily on the Gospels, and his commentary is read in the Breviary on the feasts of martyrs. Patience, he says, is the root and guardian of all the virtues — radix omnium custosque virtutum. We possess our souls through patience because, in learning to govern ourselves, we begin to possess the very thing that we are. The impatient man does not possess his soul; his soul is possessed by whoever angers him. And Gregory defines the virtue with great precision: true patience consists in bearing with equanimity the evils others inflict on us, and in harbouring no resentment toward the one who inflicts them. He who bears injury outwardly but nurses a grudge within has not the virtue of patience but only its appearance.
Then Gregory says something that brings this feast down from the arena to every Christian home. We cannot all die by the sword, he says; but we can be martyrs without the sword, if we truly keep patience in our souls. Sine ferro et flammis martyres esse possumus, si patientiam in animo veraciter custodimus. To love the one who harms us, to bear the hidden cross of daily contradiction without bitterness, to persevere in the duties of our state when they are thankless — this, Gregory says, is martyrdom in the time of peace.
This is precisely what we see in Cornelius and Cyprian long before their deaths. Cornelius’s patience with the lapsed; Cyprian’s patience with a flock scattered by fear and a clergy divided by faction; the patience of both with the slander of schismatics; the patience of an exile who did not know whether he would return. Their final confession was not a sudden heroism but the harvest of a patience long practised. The soul that has been possessed through patience in small things is ready to be surrendered to God in the great one.
St. Thomas gives the reason. Patience, he teaches, is that virtue by which a man is not broken by sorrow into abandoning the good, and because it removes the obstacle to all the other virtues, it is said to have a perfect work (James 1:4); yet it is itself caused by charity, according to the Apostle, “Charity is patient” (1 Cor. 13:4; cf. Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 136). Martyrdom is thus the supreme act of patience because it is the supreme act of love: “Greater love than this no man hath” (John 15:13).
V. The commemoration: three more witnesses
At Lauds today the Church also commemorates St. Euphemia, the virgin of Chalcedon, in whose basilica the Fourth Ecumenical Council gathered in 451 to define that Christ is one Person in two natures; St. Lucy, a Roman matron venerated with her; and St. Geminianus, who suffered with her. Euphemia’s place in the history of doctrine is itself a lesson in today’s theme: the Fathers of Chalcedon, defending the true faith against error, met at the tomb of a young woman who had defended it with her blood. Doctrine and martyrdom are not two different vocations. The same fidelity that keeps the faith pure in councils keeps it alive in prisons.
VI. A word for practice
Few of us will be summoned before a proconsul. But the Gospel promises all of us “wars and seditions,” the betrayal of friends, and the hatred of the world “for my name’s sake,” and none of us is excused from possessing our souls in patience.
First, examine yourself on Gregory’s definition. Is there someone whose injury to you you bear outwardly but resent inwardly? Name the person before God. Patience that stops at the surface is not yet the virtue; ask for the grace to wish that person well from the heart.
Second, keep unity. Cyprian’s great teaching is that there is no salvation in separating from the Church, even for a cause one believes righteous, and even when one is sorely tried by her ministers. In an age of confusion, the temptation to schism of heart — to a private Church of the likeminded — is real. Hold fast to the Mother, and you will have the Father.
Third, learn to say Deo gratias over the small sentences that are passed on you: the disappointment, the humiliation, the illness, the loss. Say it aloud if you can. The words that ended Cyprian’s life can sanctify ours.
Suggested prayer: the Collect of the day —
Beatorum Martyrum pariterque Pontificum Cornelii et Cypriani nos, quaesumus, Domine, festa tueantur: et eorum commendet oratio veneranda.
“May the feast of Thy blessed Martyrs and Pontiffs, Cornelius and Cyprian, protect us, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and may their venerable prayer commend us unto Thee.”
Or, more simply, the words of Job which the martyrs made their own: Dominus dedit, Dominus abstulit; sit nomen Domini benedictum.
Suggested devotion: the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, dwelling on the Carrying of the Cross, where the Lord Himself possessed His soul in patience on the way to the place of execution; or the reading, slowly, of Wisdom 3:1-8 as a prayer for the faithful departed.
If you wish to go deeper, today’s feast opens onto two of our paths. The Church History path treats the persecutions of Decius and Valerian, the controversy over the lapsed, and the Novatianist schism — the first great crisis in which the question of the Church’s power to forgive was fought out. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up Cyprian’s De unitate and the Church’s doctrine that there is no salvation outside her, and treats patience and fortitude in the Thomistic order of the virtues.
Sancti Corneli et Cypriane, ora pro nobis.