A Life, for the feast of SS. Cornelius and Cyprian on the sixteenth day of September — III classis
Iustorum animae in manu Dei sunt, et non tanget illos tormentum mortis. “The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and the torment of death shall not touch them.” — Epistle of the Mass, Wisdom 3:1
I. A rhetor of Carthage
He was born Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus at Carthage, or very near it, in the first years of the third century — the date is nowhere recorded, and the historians place it somewhere between 200 and 210. His family was pagan, wealthy, and of standing in the second city of the Latin West. He received the education that such a family bought for its sons, and he became what that education was designed to produce: a rhetor, a teacher of eloquence, a man admired in the forum and at ease among the powerful, with a house, gardens, and the manners of his class.
We know almost nothing of these years from his own pen, and what he tells us is only what he thought of them afterward. In the little treatise Ad Donatum, written soon after his conversion, he describes a man who could not imagine being otherwise than he was: bound by long custom to his dinners, his dress, his retinue, his ambitions, and privately convinced that the new birth the Christians spoke of was impossible for a grown man. “How,” he asks of his former self, “can one who has been clothed in gold and purple put on plain and common garments?”
II. The new birth
The instrument of his conversion was an old priest of Carthage named Caecilianus (or Caecilius), whose friendship he sought and whose name, in gratitude, he afterwards took for his own. Around the year 245 or 246, being then a man of middle age, he was instructed and baptized.
What he had thought impossible happened, and the Ad Donatum records it with the astonishment of a man who has watched a law of nature suspended in his own person: “After the stain of former years had been washed away by the water of regeneration, a light from above poured itself into my cleansed heart… what before had seemed difficult began to offer a means of accomplishment; what had been thought impossible, to be capable of being done.”
He did not treat the grace as an ornament. According to his deacon and first biographer, Pontius, he sold the greater part of his estate for the relief of the poor, bound himself to perpetual continence, and gave himself to the study of the Scriptures. He read the Christian writers who had gone before him, and above all his countryman Tertullian. St. Jerome records a story he had from an old man who had it from Cyprian’s own secretary: that the bishop let no day pass without reading Tertullian, and would ask for the book with the words Da magistrum — “Hand me the master.” He took from Tertullian his vigour and his Latin; he did not take his rigorism, and he died in the communion that Tertullian had left.
III. Bishop by acclamation
His progress was irregular by any later standard. He was ordained priest within a short time of his baptism, and in 248 or 249, on the death of Bishop Donatus, the clergy and people of Carthage demanded him for their bishop. He tried to withdraw; the crowd surrounded his house and would not disperse. A party of five presbyters opposed the election of a neophyte over their heads, and he did not forget it, nor they him. But the choice stood, and the confirmation of the neighbouring bishops followed. He was perhaps not three years a Christian.
He governed his church for about ten years. Almost the whole of that decade was spent under persecution, plague, schism, or controversy, and it is the measure of the man that out of it came the most important body of writing on the nature of the Church between the Apostles and Augustine.
IV. The persecution of Decius
In the last weeks of 249 the Emperor Decius issued the edict that made the persecution of Christians, for the first time, a universal and systematic undertaking of the Roman state. Every inhabitant of the Empire was to sacrifice to the gods in the presence of commissioners and receive a certificate — a libellus — attesting it. Pope St. Fabian was put to death at Rome in January of 250, and the Roman see stood vacant for fourteen months because no election could safely be held.
At Carthage the crowd in the amphitheatre cried for the bishop: Cyprianum ad leonem! — “Cyprian to the lion!” Cyprian withdrew into hiding, and from his retreat he governed his church by letters for more than a year.
His enemies called it flight, and some of the Roman clergy, writing in the vacancy of their own see, were at first inclined to agree. He answered them without heat. He had not fled to save his life, he said, but to spare his people the tumult that his presence provoked, and to keep the Church from being left without a head at the moment she most needed one; he had been warned, he believed, by God. He sent money to the confessors in prison, directed his clergy, and wrote to those under threat. What settled the question was the end of his life: the man who had withdrawn in 250 walked to his death in 258 when withdrawal was again possible and he declined it. Nobody who stood in the crowd at the Villa Sexti ever again called him a coward.
V. The lapsed and the peace of the martyrs
The persecution broke the Church at Carthage in a way the arena had never broken it. Great numbers had yielded. Some had offered sacrifice (sacrificati), some had burned incense (thurificati), and a larger number had bribed the officials for a certificate without sacrificing at all (libellatici). When the storm passed they came back in crowds, asking to be readmitted to communion.
Here the first great crisis of his episcopate arose, and it came from the side of the heroes. The confessors — those who had suffered for Christ in prison and torture and survived — enjoyed an immense prestige, and some of them, led by a confessor named Lucianus, began issuing letters of peace (libelli pacis) by the hundred, restoring the lapsed on their own authority and sometimes, in the name of a martyr already dead, to whole families at once. A party of presbyters, among them Cyprian’s old opponents, seized on this to readmit the lapsed without penance and to set up against the bishop; the deacon Felicissimus became the head of the schism.
Cyprian honoured the confessors and would not be governed by them. He held that the merits of the martyrs were real and could be pleaded before God, but that reconciliation belonged to the bishop in communion with his fellow bishops, after due penance and examination, and not to any private authority however glorious. When he returned to Carthage after Easter of 251, he wrote De Lapsis, one of the most searching treatises on sin and repentance the early Church possesses — merciless toward the easy readmission that “gives peace without peace,” and tender toward the fallen who truly grieve. A council of African bishops that spring adopted his course: the libellatici to be restored after a proportionate penance, the sacrificati to do lifelong penance and be reconciled at death; and, when a new persecution threatened under Gallus, peace to be given to all the penitent, so that they should not go unarmed into the combat.
VI. The unity of the Church
At the same time Rome was torn. In March of 251 the clergy of the Roman Church elected Cornelius to the see of Peter; a brilliant and austere Roman priest, Novatian, refused the election, had himself consecrated by three bishops, and set himself up as a rival pope, teaching that the lapsed could never be readmitted to the Church at all. Envoys from both claimants arrived at Carthage.
Cyprian did not act in haste. He sent two bishops to Rome to learn the facts, and when they reported that Cornelius had been lawfully chosen by the clergy, the people, and the bishops, he recognized him and never wavered afterward. The communion of the African churches, and with it that of much of the West, went with Cornelius. The friendship of the two men, formed across the sea by letter, is the reason the Church has joined them in a single feast and names them side by side in the Canon of the Mass.
Out of the double schism — Felicissimus at Carthage, Novatian at Rome — came the treatise De Catholicae Ecclesiae Unitate, which is the foundation stone of Catholic ecclesiology in the Latin tongue. The Church, he writes, is one, as the sun is one though its rays are many, as the tree is one though its branches are many, as the spring is one though its streams are many. Cut a ray from the sun and it gives no light; break a branch from the tree and it bears no fruit; cut a stream from its source and it dries up. And then the sentence that has been repeated in every Catholic century since: Habere iam non potest Deum patrem qui ecclesiam non habet matrem — “He can no longer have God for his Father who has not the Church for his Mother.”
The Lord, he teaches, built the Church upon Peter, and gave to one man the keys, that unity might be shown to have its origin in one. In his letters he speaks of Rome as the chair of Peter and the principal Church, whence priestly unity took its rise (Ep. 59). He calls the bishop the bond of the local church: the Church is in the bishop, and the bishop in the Church, and whoever is not with the bishop is not in the Church (Ep. 66). And he fixed in Latin the axiom Salus extra ecclesiam non est — “Outside the Church there is no salvation” (Ep. 73).
(A note for the careful reader: the fourth chapter of De Unitate survives in two versions, one of which speaks more emphatically of the primacy given to Peter. Scholars long disputed which was genuine; the view now most widely held, following the Jesuit Maurice Bévenot, is that both are Cyprian’s own, the second a revision he made himself. The substance of his teaching on Peter as the origin of unity stands in either.)
VII. The plague
In 252 a pestilence came out of the East and fell upon Carthage, and it lasted, with remissions, for years. The pagans abandoned their sick in the streets and robbed the dead, and some blamed the Christians for the gods’ anger.
Cyprian assembled his people and told them that it was not enough to care for their own. Pontius records the substance of his exhortation: there was nothing remarkable in cherishing those of the household of faith; the perfection of charity was to do more than the publicans and heathen, to overcome evil with good, and to love their enemies as Christ commanded. He divided the city among the faithful according to their means — money from the rich, labour from the poor — and the Church of Carthage nursed and buried pagan and Christian without distinction.
To the frightened he wrote De Mortalitate, which is a Christian’s answer to death en masse. He does not pretend that the plague spares the just. He says that the servant of God has already renounced the world and ought not to fear leaving it; that the pestilence searches out the hearts of men, showing who will tend the sick and who will flee, who will release his slaves and who will seize the dead man’s goods; and that we should not mourn the brethren who have been called away, since they are not lost but sent before. In the same years he wrote De Opere et Eleemosynis, on almsgiving, and De Dominica Oratione, a commentary on the Our Father that the Church read for centuries.
Cornelius, meanwhile, was arrested under Gallus and exiled to Centumcellae, where he died in June of 253. Cyprian wrote him a letter of congratulation on his confession before he died, and received the news of his death as the news of a martyrdom.
VIII. The error and the charity: the baptismal controversy
Honesty requires this chapter as it required the account of Cherubini in the life of Calasanctius, and for the same reason: the Church does not canonize men who never erred.
The question was what to do with those who had been baptized in heretical or schismatic sects — by the Novatianists, for instance — and who now sought entry into the Catholic Church. The African churches, following a council held under Bishop Agrippinus decades before, rebaptized them, holding that there is no baptism outside the Church and that one cannot give what one does not have. The Roman Church, and most of the East, held the older and wider tradition: that baptism rightly given in the name of the Trinity is Christ’s baptism whoever pours the water, and that such converts were to be received by the imposition of hands in penance, not baptized again.
Cyprian defended the African practice with all his force, in letters and in councils at Carthage in 255 and 256, the last attended by eighty-seven bishops. Pope St. Stephen I answered with equal force, commanding nihil innovetur nisi quod traditum est — “let there be no innovation beyond what has been handed down” — refusing to receive the African envoys, and threatening to break communion with those who rebaptized. Firmilian of Caesarea in Cappadocia took Cyprian’s part in language far harsher than Cyprian’s own. For a moment the unity which Cyprian had defended better than any man alive stood in danger at his own hand.
It did not break. Stephen died in August of 257; his successor, St. Sixtus II, restored peace without either side retracting; within a year both Sixtus and Cyprian were martyrs. And the Church, in time, judged between them. The Council of Arles in 314 adopted the Roman practice, the Council of Nicaea confirmed its principle, and the Council of Trent defined it: whoever says that baptism given by heretics in the name of the Trinity, with the intention of doing what the Church does, is not true baptism, let him be anathema (Sess. VII, De Baptismo, can. 4). Stephen was right, and Cyprian was wrong.
It fell to St. Augustine, a century and a half later, to explain why this does not diminish him. The Donatists had made Cyprian their patron and rebaptism their banner, and Augustine wrote seven books De Baptismo against them largely in order to rescue Cyprian from his admirers. His argument is the proper Catholic reading of the matter. Cyprian erred on a question not yet settled by the Church; he erred holding fast to communion with those who thought otherwise; he declared expressly that no bishop should be cut off for differing on it; and therefore the thing which the Donatists had destroyed — unity and charity — he had preserved, even while mistaken. And if, Augustine says, anything in so fruitful a branch still needed cutting away, the pruning-hook of martyrdom removed it.
IX. Exile and the second summons
In August of 257 the Emperor Valerian renewed the persecution, directing it this time at the clergy. On the thirtieth of that month Cyprian was brought before the proconsul Aspasius Paternus. The record of the interrogation survives in the Acta Proconsularia, and it is almost wholly in dialogue:
The proconsul told him that the emperors had commanded all who did not follow the Roman religion to acknowledge the Roman rites. Cyprian answered: “I am a Christian and a bishop. I know no other gods but the one true God, who made heaven and earth.” Asked for the names of his priests, he said that the laws themselves forbade informers, and that his priests would be found in their own cities. He was sent into exile at Curubis, a small town on the coast some fifty miles away, where he remained a year and continued to govern his church by letter. Pontius tells us that on the first night there he saw in a dream a young man of great stature who led him before the proconsul; the judge wrote on a tablet, and the young man, standing behind the judge, made with his hand the sign of a sword stroke, and then held up his fingers to show a delay of one day. Cyprian took it for a promise of a year, and it was a year to the day.
In 258 a second rescript of Valerian commanded that bishops, priests, and deacons be put to death forthwith. Cyprian learned that Pope Sixtus had been beheaded in the cemetery of Callixtus on the sixth of August with four of his deacons, and he wrote to his clergy to tell them to prepare. A new proconsul, Galerius Maximus, had recalled him to his own gardens near Carthage. When officers came to take him to Utica, where the proconsul then was, Cyprian withdrew for a time, and he said plainly why: a bishop ought to confess Christ in the city of his own church, so that his people might be strengthened by the confession of their own shepherd. When the proconsul returned to Carthage, Cyprian came back to his gardens and waited.
X. Deo gratias
On the thirteenth of September two officers came for him and took him in a carriage to the proconsul’s residence at the Villa Sexti, a few miles outside the city. The hearing was put off to the next day. He passed the night in the house of one of the officers, and the people of Carthage, hearing of it, gathered in the street outside and kept vigil until morning, lest anything be done to their bishop without them. Cyprian gave orders that the young girls in the crowd were to be looked after.
On the morning of the fourteenth of September, 258, he was brought before Galerius Maximus, who was ill and near his own death. The Acta preserve the exchange, and nothing added to it would improve it.
“Are you Thascius Cyprian?” “I am.” “Are you the one whom the Christians regard as their bishop (papa)?” “I am.” “The most sacred emperors have commanded you to perform the rites.” “I will not.” “Consider your position.” “Do what you are commanded. In so just a matter there is no need of consideration.”
The proconsul conferred with his council and pronounced him an enemy of the Roman gods and a ringleader of wicked men, and read the sentence from his tablet: Thascium Cyprianum gladio animadverti placet — “It is decreed that Thascius Cyprian be executed by the sword.”
Cyprian said: Deo gratias.
And the crowd of the brethren cried out: “Let us be beheaded with him!”
He was led to a level place among the trees, and a great multitude followed him; people climbed the trees to see. He took off his cloak and knelt on it and prayed; then he took off his dalmatic and gave it to his deacons, and stood in his linen tunic, and waited for the executioner. When the man came, the bishop commanded that twenty-five pieces of gold be given him. The brethren spread linen cloths and napkins on the ground before him to receive his blood. He bound his eyes with his own hands; and because he could not tie the ends of the cloth, a priest and a subdeacon, Julian and Julian, tied them for him. And so the blessed Cyprian suffered.
His body was laid for a time nearby, out of sight of the pagans; at nightfall the Christians came with tapers and torches and carried it in triumph, with prayers, to the burial ground of the procurator Macrobius Candidianus on the Mappalian Way, near the fish-ponds. He was the first bishop of Carthage to receive the crown of martyrdom.
XI. His honour in the Church
The Church of Africa venerated him at once, and two basilicas rose over the places of his death and burial. St. Augustine preached on his feast year after year to the people of Hippo and Carthage, and a number of those sermons survive. His name entered the Canon of the Roman Mass beside that of Cornelius, where the priest still pronounces it daily in the Communicantes: Cornelii, Cypriani, Laurentii, Chrysogoni…
He died on the fourteenth of September, but that day belongs to the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, and so the traditional Roman calendar keeps his feast jointly with St. Cornelius on the sixteenth, with the Mass Intret in conspectu tuo and a commemoration of St. Euphemia and her companions. The Epistle is the reading from Wisdom on the souls of the just in the hand of God; the Gospel is Our Lord’s prophecy of persecution in St. Luke: In patientia vestra possidebitis animas vestras — “In your patience you shall possess your souls.”
XII. What the life teaches
That the Church is our Mother, and there is no Father without her. Cyprian lived at the moment when the Church might easily have dissolved into the parties of the rigorists and the laxists, the confessors and the bishops, the rival claimants to Peter’s chair. He saw that the question beneath all of them was one question: whether the Church is a visible unity, built on Peter, held together by the bishops in communion, or a loose company of the like-minded. He answered it once for the Latin Church, and the answer was confirmed with his blood. Our age, which inclines to make religion a private arrangement with God, needs that answer at least as badly as his.
That mercy and discipline are not rivals. Against the laxists he defended penance; against Novatian he defended pardon. He refused both the cheap peace that costs the sinner nothing and the pitiless purity that leaves the sinner nowhere to go. That balance is the traditional Catholic practice of the confessional, and he was among the first to articulate it.
That a great man may be wrong, and a saint still. He erred on baptism, forcefully and publicly, against the successor of Peter whose see he had himself called the source of unity. What saved him was not being right; it was that he would not break charity to win. Every Catholic who has ever held a strong opinion in a disputed matter has need of this example, and of Augustine’s gloss upon it.
That the martyr’s courage is formed long before the sword. “Do what you are commanded” was not the speech of a moment. It was the fruit of thirteen years of daily conversion, of property given away, of a flock tended through plague and schism, of a man who had learned in De Mortalitate to count death as a departure home. Deo gratias is what a whole life of thanksgiving sounds like at its end.
Practice
Examine. Where do I treat the Church as an option rather than a Mother — receiving what I approve of in her teaching, discipline, or authority, and quietly declining the rest? And in any dispute I hold strongly, have I kept charity with those who differ, as Cyprian did even when he was mistaken?
Do. Perform one work of mercy this week for someone who is not “of the household” — a person outside your parish, your circle, or your sympathies. Cyprian commanded his people to nurse the pagans who had cried for his death.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Beatorum Martyrum pariter et Pontificum Cornelii et Cypriani nos, quaesumus, Domine, festa tueantur: et eorum commendet oratio gloriosa.
“May the feast of Thy blessed Martyrs and Bishops Cornelius and Cyprian protect us, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and may their glorious prayer commend us unto Thee.”
Or pray the Our Father slowly, once, with his commentary in mind: that we call God our Father only as members of His one family, and ask for our bread only as those who share it.
Devote. The Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, with particular attention to the Carrying of the Cross; and, at the words Deo gratias at the end of Mass, a deliberate act of thanksgiving for whatever God has sent this week, including what was hard.
If you wish to go deeper: the Church History path treats the persecutions of Decius and Valerian, the Novatianist schism, and the long road from the African councils to the definition of Trent on heretical baptism. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up Cyprian’s ecclesiology — the Petrine origin of unity, the bishop as bond of the local church, and the true sense of extra ecclesiam nulla salus as the Church has taught it. The Lives of the Saints path continues with the martyr-bishops of the early centuries: Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp, Fabian, Sixtus II, and Cornelius himself.
Sancte Cypriane, episcope et martyr, defensor unitatis Ecclesiae, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: St. Cyprian, Ad Donatum, De Lapsis, De Catholicae Ecclesiae Unitate, De Mortalitate, De Dominica Oratione, and the Epistles; Pontius the Deacon, Vita Cypriani; the Acta Proconsularia Sancti Cypriani; St. Jerome, De Viris Illustribus 53 and 67; St. Augustine, De Baptismo contra Donatistas and the Sermones in natali Cypriani; the Council of Trent, Sess. VII; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1908), s.v. “St. Cyprian of Carthage”; and M. Bévenot, S.J., on the text of De Unitate. Dates of his birth, conversion, and election are approximate, following the scholarly consensus.