Ecumenical Commemoration
Bishop of Carthage & Martyr
September 15 · d. 258
also known as Cyprian of Carthage, Thascius Cyprian, St. Cyprian
Bishop of Carthage and the first Latin bishop-martyr to leave us his own library. A wealthy pagan orator converted in middle age, Cyprian led the African church through persecution and plague, fought bitterly over how to forgive Christians who had cracked under torture, and withstood the bishop of Rome over baptism without breaking the church's unity. He met his own death with two words (in Latin). When the proconsul read his sentence, the bishop answered, "Thanks be to God," and walked out to the sword.
Cyprian was born about the year 200 into a rich pagan family of Carthage, the Roman metropolis of North Africa (today a suburb of Tunis in Tunisia). He made his living as a teacher of rhetoric, a man of property and reputation, and he came to Christ late and all at once. In a letter to his friend Donatus he described the change as a true second birth in his baptism: he had thought the gospel's demands impossible until the water of baptism washed the old self away and a new strength flowed in. He gave much of his fortune to the poor, and within two years the church of Carthage made him its bishop.
He had barely settled into the office when the emperor Decius ordered every citizen to sacrifice to the gods or die. The persecution became intense across the empire, and many Christians, terrified, burned the incense or bought certificates saying they had obeyed the idolatrous decree. Cyprian went into hiding and governed his flock by a stream of letters, a course his critics never forgave, but ended up preserving his writing for posterity more than many other third-century leaders. Cyprian judged it his duty to keep the church's shepherd alive in order to care for his sheep. When the storm passed, the hardest question remained: what to do with the lapsed, the brethren who had failed and renounced their Lord? Cyprian steered a middle road, neither slamming the door on the fallen nor flinging it open, and wrote his great little book On the Unity of the Church to hold the church together. "He can no longer have God for his Father," he warned, "who has not the Church for his mother." He worked to create a path for those who had renounced to spend a period of time in penance and then be restored to their church. He did not wink at sin; nor did he doubt the power of the Gospel to redeem even a traitor.
Then plague came to Carthage, a great epidemic that bears his name due to his documentation and leadership. While pagans threw the dying into the streets, Cyprian organized the Christians to nurse the sick, friend and enemy alike, and wrote On Mortality to steady the frightened in the hope of the Resurrection. To serve Jesus faithfully unto death is a faithful gateway into immortality.
After the plague, a harder quarrel followed, and this time it was not with an external persecution or plague, but within the church and the bishop of Rome. Men and women who had been baptized in heterodox sects in the mid-third century were asking to join or rejoin the church. Cyprian and the bishops of Africa held that a washing outside the one Church was no baptism at all, so such converts must be truly baptized. To Cyprian they had only gotten wet. Stephen, the bishop of Rome at the time, held that the old custom was only to lay hands on them for repentance. "Let nothing be innovated," he wrote, "nothing maintained, except what has been handed down." He would not even speak with the bishops Cyprian sent to him, and he went so far as to call Cyprian a false Christ. Cyprian did not give way, and he did not walk away. "Custom without truth," he answered, "is the antiquity of error." In September of 256 he gathered eighty-seven bishops at Carthage and opened their council by refusing to rule over them: "no one of us sets himself up as a bishop of bishops." Each would give his own judgment, "judging no one, nor depriving any one of the right of communion if he differ from us." Stephen died the next summer, and his successor Sixtus, "the good and peace-making priest," restored communion with Cyprian without a formal resolution.
Some sixty years later, in the early fourth century, the councils of Arles and then the great Nicaea ended up defining the difference as a middle path. Rather than the binary positions of Stephen and Cyprian, the councils carved a tertium quid; not a simple unilateral penance and reception or automatic exclusion, but an evaluation of the baptism of whether it was done rightly and in the name of the Trinity. As Augustine would famously argue, baptism belongs to Christ, not to the minister. Consequently, a minister’s heresy, schism, or personal wickedness does not by itself invalidate the sacrament for the baptized.
Persecution returned under the emperor Valerian. Cyprian was first exiled, then recalled to Carthage for trial. He obeyed, and the proconsul Galerius Maximus pronounced the sentence: death by the sword. "Thanks be to God," said the bishop. If anyone had doubted his courage in the Decian persecution, in this one on the fourteenth of September, 258, he was led out peaceably, knelt, bound his eyes himself, and was beheaded among his weeping people.
Cyprian is one of the most thoroughly documented Christians of the third century, because three different kinds of evidence converge. First, his own writings survive in quantity: some eighty letters and a dozen treatises, including On the Unity of the Church and On the Lapsed, which let us hear him think through the crises as they broke. Second, his deacon Pontius wrote a Life of Cyprian shortly after the martyrdom, the first formal Christian biography composed after the Gospels.
Third, and most remarkably, the Acta Proconsularia, the official court record of his trial, preserves the exchange between the bishop and the governor almost word for word. Few ancient saints can be checked against a government transcript. Cyprian can, which is why his death is among the most securely attested martyrdoms of the ancient world.
The quarrel with Stephen of Rome over the baptism of heretics, in 255 and 256, is documented from both sides. Cyprian's own letters on the question survive, including his letter to Pompey, which quotes Stephen's reply in order to answer it. So does a letter to Cyprian from Firmilian, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, whose churches kept the same practice and had also been rebuked by Stephen; its tone is sharper still, and it is Firmilian who reports, in Wallis's translation in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, that Stephen refused the African envoys and called Cyprian "a false Christ and a false apostle, and a deceitful worker." The judgments of the eighty-seven bishops who met at Carthage on 1 September 256 also survive, each bishop's opinion recorded in turn. Eusebius, writing some seventy years later in the Greek East, gives the dispute in two sentences. In McGiffert's translation, Cyprian "maintained that they should not be received except they had been purified from their error by baptism," while Stephen, "considering it unnecessary to add any innovation contrary to the tradition which had been held from the beginning, was very indignant at this."
Stephen died on 27 August 257, and his successor Sixtus II restored communion with Cyprian without any formal resolution of the question. The councils of the next century settled it by neither man's rule alone. The Council of Arles in 314 directed that a convert from heresy be asked the creed of his baptism: if he had been baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, he was to receive only the laying on of hands; if he could not confess that Trinity, he was to be baptized. The Council of Nicaea in 325, in Percival's translation, decreed that the Paulianists, followers of Paul of Samosata, "must by all means be rebaptized." Rather than Stephen's reception of all or Cyprian's refusal of all, the church came to ask whether a baptism had been given rightly, in the name of the Trinity. When the Donatists of Augustine's day claimed Cyprian's letters for their own rebaptizing, Augustine answered them one by one in , disagreeing with Cyprian's conclusion while holding up his conduct. Quoting the opening of the council of 256, he asks, in King's translation in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: "What could be more kind? What more humble?"
Cyprian is commemorated on September 15 in this calendar; the Roman calendar joins him with Pope Cornelius on September 16, and he was in fact beheaded on September 14, 258. He is honored as a model of the pastor who does not abandon his people in spirit even when he must hide his body, and as the theologian who taught the Western church to think about the unity of the visible Church.
His warning that no one can claim God as Father who refuses the Church as mother has echoed through every later argument over schism. The "Plague of Cyprian," during which he turned his people into nurses for a city that hated them, is remembered as one of the early church's great works of mercy, and a reason the faith spread when the old gods offered nothing in the face of death.
Anglicans have long claimed both halves of him. The Cyprian of On the Unity of the Church is a witness to a high doctrine of the visible Church: one Church, one episcopate, and, as he wrote in the baptismal controversy, "no salvation out of the Church." The Cyprian of the council of 256 is a bishop among his peers, who disclaimed any bishop of bishops, and who had resolved from the start of his episcopate "to do nothing on my own private opinion, without your advice and without the consent of the people." Held together, they describe a church order at once episcopal and conciliar: bishops bound to one another as colleagues, and each bishop bound to his own clergy and people.
On the Unity of the Catholic Church (De Ecclesiae Catholicae Unitate)(Latin, c. 251)
His most influential treatise, the source of his famous teaching on the Church as mother.
Public domain: CCEL, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 5
The Epistles of Cyprian(Latin, c. 250-258)
Eighty surviving letters, the running record of a bishop governing through persecution.
Public domain: CCEL, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 5
The Life and Passion of Cyprian, with the Acta Proconsularia(Latin, c. 259)
The earliest life and the verbatim trial record, bound together.
Public domain: CCEL, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 5
Cyprian the Bishop(English, 2002)
A modern reconstruction of Cyprian and the third-century African church.
Primary sources. Cyprian's letters are quoted in Robert Ernest Wallis's translation in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, volume five, which numbers them differently from modern critical editions. The dispute with Stephen is followed in the letter to Jubaianus, Epistle 72 (section 21, "no salvation out of the Church"); the letter to Pompey, Epistle 73 (section 2 for Stephen's "let nothing be innovated," section 9 for "custom without truth is the antiquity of error"); and Firmilian's letter to Cyprian, Epistle 74 (sections 25 and 26, on the refused envoys and the charge of a false Christ). His resolve to act with the counsel of his clergy and the consent of the people is in Epistle 5, section 4. On the Unity of the Church is quoted from sections 5 and 6. The acts of the council of 1 September 256 are printed in the same volume as the Seventh Council of Carthage; Cyprian's opening words ("no one of us sets himself up as a bishop of bishops") are quoted here as Augustine gives them in On Baptism, book 2, chapter 2, section 3, and Augustine's "What could be more kind? What more humble?" is at book 3, chapter 3, section 5, both in J. R. King's translation revised by Chester D. Hartranft in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, volume four. Pontius's description of Sixtus as "the good and peace-making priest" is in his Life and Passion of Cyprian, section 14, in Wallis's translation in the same volume. Eusebius's account is Ecclesiastical History 7.3, in Arthur Cushman McGiffert's translation in the , second series, volume one. The ruling of the Council of Arles (314) on rebaptism is its canon 9 (numbered 8 in some collections), in the ; the Nicene ruling on the Paulianists is , in Henry Percival's translation in the , second series, volume fourteen.
The two sides of Cyprian have been claimed by different parties ever since. On the Unity of the Church survives in two forms of its fourth chapter, one of which speaks more fully of Peter's chair; a conflated text of the two, printed in many editions, "played a large part in controversy with Protestants," as the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1908 put it, and that article judged the fuller form to be Cyprian's own revision and the "old contention that it is a Roman forgery" to be "quite out of the question." The letters on baptism show the same man addressing the bishop of Rome as brother and colleague while refusing him the final word. The church historian Philip Schaff summed up the result: "the authority of his name has been therefore as often employed against the papacy as in its favor." The Church of England's scholars took up his works with particular care; the Oxford edition of 1682 was prepared by John Fell, Bishop of Oxford, with a chronology of the letters by John Pearson, Bishop of Chester.
Reception. Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, volume two, section 199, gives the judgment on Cyprian's name and the papacy quoted above, and lists the Oxford edition of John Fell (1682) with John Pearson's Annales Cyprianici. The Catholic Encyclopedia article "St. Cyprian of Carthage" (1908) sets out the Roman view of the baptismal controversy and of the two texts of On the Unity of the Church.
Further reading. Cyprian's On the Unity of the Church, On the Lapsed, and his letters are gathered in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, volume five, alongside Pontius's Life and the Acta Proconsularia. For a modern account, J. Patout Burns, Cyprian the Bishop (Routledge, 2002), reconstructs the African church in his time.
Online resources. The Ante-Nicene Fathers volume containing Cyprian is free at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
Almighty God, you gave your servant Cyprian boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Donatus /ˈdɒnətəs/; Pontius /ˈpɒnʃəs/; Acta Proconsularia /ˈæktə ˌproʊkɒnsjʊˈlɛəriə/; Proconsularia /ˌproʊkɒnsjʊˈlɛəriə/
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12