5. ST. CYPRIAN AND ROME

St. Cyprian, whose co-operation with Rome in the affair of the repentant apostates has been recounted, was at that time, only recently consecrated (248), and his consecration as bishop had followed closely on his conversion. He came apparently of a family socially distinguished, and his own education was of the best. A scholarly distinction and the courtesy of the great gentleman are apparent in all his writings, and in all that we know of his eventful career as Bishop of Carthage. St. Cyprian was of that class of men who are born to rule. The habit of decision, the instinct for responsibility, the courage to lead, all this was St. Cyprian's by nature.

He had hardly been consecrated when the persecution of Decius came to wreck the peace of the Church, and with the persecution the crisis of the confessors and the repentant apostates. He had thought it his duty not to expose himself to arrest, and it was from a secret hiding place that he ruled his flock, encouraging those whom the persecution tried and, to the best of his powers, restraining the excesses of the innovators. With the peace there came the end of the long vacancy in the Roman See, the election of Cornelius, and the schism of Novatian. Towards that schism some of St. Cyprian's own disloyal clergy had worked, and it was but fitting that he should himself be prominent in the work for peace. He checked the schemes of Novatian's envoys at Carthage, and he wrote a memorable appeal to the confessors at Rome who sided with the anti-pope. But his great contribution to the restoration of unity was his treatise On the Unity of the Church published at this moment. The subject of this important work is better indicated by an older title it sometimes bore, De Simplicitate Praelatorum, i.e. on there being but one bishop in each church-for the Church with whose unity St. Cyprian is concerned, in this work, is not the Catholic Church as a whole, but the local church, and more precisely the local church of Rome.

It has been well said of St. Cyprian that "He was a practical man without any philosophy or theology." He repeats the tradition; he borrows very largely from Tertullian; he writes a highly cultivated Latin; but there is nowhere evidence that he possessed any power of seeing general principles in the learning he had, nor of deducing thence, in his day to day application of it, further general truths. The one subject which he ventures to explore is this question of the Church and its nature. He explores it simply because exploration of it is forced on him by controversies he cannot escape. And it is in the spirit of a practical controversialist, eager to find arguments and confirmation of his policy, that he explores it. The pitfalls to which such a character is exposed, in such a work, are very easy to imagine. St. Cyprian was to experience them in very full measure.

In the De Unitate Ecclesiae he pleads for unity in each local church, and, well in the tradition, he finds the only hope of such unity in the obedience of all to the local bishop. Our Lord founded the first Church on one individual, Peter, as a pattern for all time. In each church there should be but one bishop as there was but one Peter. Schism is the sin of sins. To leave the bishop is to leave the Church, and to leave the Church is to leave Christ. Outside the Church there are no sacraments nor any bishops. St. Cyprian's theory, and the arguments by which he supports it, serve his restricted purpose admirably. But beyond the local church there is the whole body, of which the local church is but a part. It is possible, in arguing for the authority of the local bishop, to leave less room than will be needed if the theory is ever to be completed and take in the unity of the Church Universal. It was St. Cyprian's misfortune that he based his pleas for unity on arguments only true in part. The next five years were to make this painfully, almost tragically, clear. St. Cyprian was next to find himself in disagreement with Rome.

The first trouble was with that pope, Cornelius, to assist whom the De Unitate Ecclesiae had been written. The priest Felicissimus whom St. Cyprian had excommunicated for his share in the disturbances of the repentant apostates, and who, gone to Rome to appeal, had then become the ally of Novatian, now put in his appeal to Cornelius. St. Cyprian's complaint is that the pope should even listen to so discredited an intriguer. An incidental phrase of his letter witnesses to the important fact that he shared the belief, so far uncontroverted, that in the Church Universal the local Church of Rome had a special place. For St. Cyprian it is ecclesia principalis (a phrase which recalls immediately the potentior principalitas of St. Irenaeus) and the " source from which the unity arises."

Pope Cornelius died in 253. His successor was Stephen I, and with the new pope St. Cyprian had a series of disagreements.

In 254 the bishops of Merida and Leon in Spain were deposed, why we do not know. The affair had apparently caused a certain commotion, for their successors thought it well to seek support in a general confirmation of their rights. So it was that they appealed for recognition to Africa and, at their Autumn meeting, the African bishops confirmed the Spanish sentences and the new elections. But the deposed bishops appealed to Rome, and Rome re-established them ! Of the rights and wrongs of the affair it is not possible to judge, for the documents have long ago perished. We can, however, note the affair as a cause of discord between St. Cyprian and Rome at the very beginning of St. Stephen's pontificate, and we can also note, m connection with it, the appearance of some disturbing new theories in St. Cyprian's theology of Church government. One such theory is that it is for the people to depose bishops who are sinners. They are the judges. Another equally mischievous novelty is the idea that only men of innocent life should be made bishops, because bishops who sin lose the Holy Spirit and all power of order; their prayers are not heard; God no longer ratifies what they do; their sacrifices contaminate those for whom they are offered.

The next stage in St. Cyprian's development is the affair of the bishop of Arles, Marcian. He was a rigorist of the Novatian type and he refused to give his people the benefit of the new milder discipline in the matter of apostasy. Thereupon he was denounced to Rome, and at Carthage too, as a bishop who had cut himself off from the unity of the Church. It was a suitable occasion for the application of St. Cyprian's theory of deposition. He did not, however, make use of it. Nor did he leave the matter to the bishops of the accused prelate's own province. Instead he wrote to Rome, a most urgent letter. The pope, he urged, should write authoritatively to the bishops of Gaul. It is his duty to maintain the established discipline, the decision of Cornelius. He must depose Marcian and appoint another in his place. And would the pope be good enough to say whom he had appointed as Marcian's successor so that the bishops would know with whom, in future, they must communicate as Bishop of Arles.

St. Cyprian, in his indignation, has forgotten his own theory of the year before. He contradicts it. He is appealing, once more, in the traditional manner to the potentior principalitas of the ecclesia principalis. A year later and, in conflict with Rome on a question of policy, he once more involves himself in novelties and contradiction.

The subject of the new dispute was the question whether, when persons already baptized by heretics or schismatics were received into the Church, they should be re-baptized. A layman of note raised the question -- a very practical one no doubt in the time of religious revival which followed the Decian persecution-and St. Cyprian replied in an elaborate letter. The baptism administered by heretics cannot be of value, he teaches, because the Holy Spirit does not operate outside the one only Church. Later in the year (255) the question was raised at the African bishops' meeting, and the same decision was given in a joint letter to the bishops of Numidia. Despite the authority that inspired the letter the discussion continued. An opposition party revealed itself, quoting against St. Cyprian and his council an older practice. To settle the matter finally a joint meeting of all the bishops of Africa and Numidia was held in the Lent of 256, and the declaration of 255 re-affirmed. St. Cyprian wrote to Rome the news of the council’s decision.

Now at Rome, as at Alexandria, the teaching had always been that the baptism of heretics was valid, as it had been the teaching in Africa until about thirty years before St. Cyprian's time. There is reason to believe that the Africans knew the Roman tradition, and it is possible that during the interval between the two African Councils (Autumn 255 and Spring of 256) Rome had declared its mind. St. Cyprian, in that case, would be repeating the procedure of acting independently of Rome, as in the matter of the Spanish bishops, and his letter after the Council of 256 be, not merely an announcement of African policy, but a reply to Pope Stephen's definite declaration that if the rite be duly administered the person of the minister does not affect its validity.

Be that as it may, two facts are certain. First of all, when the African envoys arrived in Rome they found themselves treated as heretics. They were refused communion, refused even hospitality, and the pope refused them a hearing. Cyprian was regarded as the false prophet of a false Christ. The second fact is St. Cyprian's letter. For all his recognition of the ecclesia principalis, he writes as though, in this matter, he considered all bishops were equals; as though the administration of baptism was a detail of the local church's domestic life -- and if the detail differed from church to church, that was the business of the local church and of the local church alone. To God alone is the local bishop responsible. This is hardly in keeping with the theory of 254 that bishops are to be judged by the people who elected them and, if bad, deposed. St. Cyprian is once again weaving a theory to justify his policy, and weaving it from one day to the next. Another contradiction of his own theory is the declaration, in the letter to Rome, that this question of the validity of baptism is one on which Catholic bishops can differ. In 255 he had explained to Marcian that it is an article of faith !

The letter to Rome is, in its tone, an appeal to an ally. For answer the pope notifies the Bishop of Carthage of the Law and the Tradition and, without any diplomacy, simply bids him observe it. " If therefore anyone shall come to you from any heresy whatsoever, let there be no innovation contrary to what has been handed down, namely that hands be imposed upon them in [sign of] penance." The reply is in the curt legal tone of a power too conscious of its own authority and of the obedience due to it, and too accustomed to receive obedience, to feel any need of argument. To the decision the pope simply added the reference-the already traditional reference -- to the first of his predecessors in the Roman See, and to the authority thence deriving to himself. In all this there is nothing new. The one element of novelty, so far, is in St. Cyprian's theories. His action on receipt of the Roman decree adds yet another. He took fire at what he called the pope's "haughtiness, self-contradictions, wandering from the point at issue, his clumsiness and lack of foresight," and at the next meeting of the African bishops (September 1, 256) a joint reply was sent to the pope. " None of us," said St. Cyprian in his opening speech and alluding to the pope, "poses as bishop of bishops. . . each bishop has the right to think for himself and as he is not accountable to any other, so is no bishop accountable to him." The Council unanimously supported St. Cyprian.

Rome proceeded to make known its decision to all the churches. It was no longer a question merely of the correction of the Bishop of Carthage. Rome was hinting at the possible excommunication of dissidents. St. Cyprian began to look round for allies. He found a most devoted one in the Bishop of Cesarea in Cappadocia, Firmilian. Firmilian replied in a letter filled with so violent an invective against the pope that the pious pens of the copyists not infrequently refuse to transcribe it. The unity and the peace of the Church, "unity of faith, unity of truth" are assured facts. They stand in no need of any protection from a supreme judge of controversies. Almost, in the midst of this philippic, Firmilian denies the possibility of differences. The pope is worse than all the heretics, for he deliberately darkens the minds of the repentant heretics who seek light from him. As for the pope's reminder that he is the successor of Peter and therefore the final judge of the tradition, that, for Firmilian, is the crowning mark of St. Stephen's folly and pride.

Rome waited, her relations with the churches of Asia Minor as strained as her relations with Africa. Then, before any action had been taken, on August 2, 257, the pope St. Stephen died. Whether the new pope, Sixtus II, was of a gentler disposition, or whether he thought it wiser not to press the matter to a decision at a moment when the persecution was reviving, the question was left alone. Sixtus and St. Cyprian were friends and the Roman Church in the next year came to the help of Firmilian, whose diocese had suffered much in the Persian invasion. The controversy of the three sees had speedily travelled beyond its first issue of the worth of heretical baptism. It had raised the question of the relation between the pope and the episcopate, a thorny question which was to cause trouble again and again in the ensuing centuries, and which was not to be finally solved until the Council of 1870. Little wonder that its appearance in the days of St. Cyprian provoked such a turmoil. Of more importance to Church History than the evidence which that turmoil affords as to the real humanity of the great saints, is its witness to the Roman See's habit of ruling; and to the fact that, upon all the questions which the ever- widening discussion involved, it is that decisive Roman interpretation of the tradition, which had occasioned the turmoil, that secures universal acceptance and is taken as the Church's belief. "For with this Church every other Church throughout the world must bring itself to agree."

St. Cyprian, it is not hard to understand why, has been the chosen patron of those in our own times whose ideal is a Catholicism without the Roman Primacy. But so to esteem him is to do him serious injustice. 'The theological impasse into which, at the end of his career, his untheological mentality led him must be judged in the light of his whole life, the mood which found expression when storms provoked his gallant soul be set side by side with those calmer hours when, free from the necessity to justify a policy, "he recognised in the Roman See an altogether special importance because it is the See of that Apostle upon whom Christ conferred the primacy of apostolic authority."

Eleven months after the pope whom he had opposed, St. Cyprian, too, laid down his life in testimony of his faith, September 14, 258. The Acta which relate his trial and martyrdom are well known as among the most moving of all that marvellous literature: his arrest and trial, and exile, his recall and re-arrest, the second trial, its sentence of death and the serene confident beauty of his death. Galerius Maximus proconsul Cypriano episcopo dixit: Tu es Thascius Cyprianus? Cyprianus episcopus respondit: Ego sum. . . . Iusserunt te sacratissimi imperatores caerimoniari. Cyprianus episcopus dixit: Non facio. Galerius Maximus ait: Consule tibi. Cyprianus episcopus respondit: Fac quod tibi praeceptum est: in re tam iusta nulla est consultatio. Then the proconsul most reluctantly, vix et aegre, lectured him as is the custom for judges with the man they must condemn. Et his dictis decretum ex tabella recitavit: Thascium Cyprianum gladio animadverti placet. Cyprianus episcopus dixit: Deo Gratias. He was led to the place of execution. He set off his outer garment, bade his servants give the executioner his alms, five and twenty pieces of gold. He bound himself his eyes, and his deacons bound his hands. "Ita beatus Cyprianus passus est. . . the eighteenth day before the Kalends of October, under the Emperors Valerian and Gallienus but in the reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ, to Whom honour and glory for ever and ever Amen."

The Roman Church, embodying the memory of her greatest names in the very heart of her active life, has written them into the consecration prayer of the Mass, and along with the names of these ancient popes, that of the great Bishop of Carthage who, on earth, sometimes opposed them.