From Convert to Overseer

The Life and Passion of Cyprian, Overseer and Martyr. By Pontius the Deacon.

Cyprian — God’s devoted priest and his glorious witness — left many writings, and the memory of his good name survives in them. His eloquence and God’s grace poured out of him so richly and so abundantly that he will very likely never stop speaking, right up to the end of the world. Even so, what he did and what he earned make it only right that his example should be set down in writing, and so I have decided to put together this short and compact account. Not that the life of so great a man could be unknown even to the pagan nations, but so that this unmatched and towering pattern may be carried on to those who come after us, in a memory that does not die. [c]

It would certainly be a hard thing to let it pass. Our predecessors gave such honor even to laymen and catechumens who won martyrdom that, out of reverence for the martyrdom itself, they wrote down many — I almost said nearly all — of the details of what those people suffered, so that they might come to the knowledge of us who had not yet been born. It would be hard, then, if the passion of such a priest and such a martyr as Cyprian were passed over, a man who quite apart from his martyrdom had a great deal to teach, and if what he did while he lived stayed hidden from the world.

And what he did was so remarkable, so great, so admirable, that thinking about how great it is frightens me off. I admit I am not competent to speak in a way worthy of the honor he earned, or to tell such noble deeds in a way that makes them look as great as they actually are. My one comfort is that the sheer number of his glories is enough by itself and needs no herald. What makes it harder is that you are anxious to hear a great deal about him — everything, if that were possible — burning with eagerness to become acquainted at least with his deeds, now that his living words have fallen silent. And on that score, to say that my powers of speech fail me would be saying too little: eloquence itself lacks the power to satisfy what you want. So I am hard pressed on both sides. He weighs me down with his virtues, and you push me hard with your requests.

Where, then, shall I begin? From what direction should I approach a description of his goodness, if not from the beginning of his faith and from his heavenly birth? What a man of God does should not be counted from any point except the time he was born of God. He had his occupations before that, and the liberal arts had soaked into his mind while he was busy with them; but I pass those over, since up to then they had to do with nothing but his worldly advantage. Once he had learned sacred knowledge, though, and had broken through the clouds of this world into the light of spiritual wisdom — wherever I was with him in what he did, wherever I noticed any of his more remarkable labors, I will speak of them. I ask only this allowance: that whatever I say too meagerly, and too little is what I am bound to say, be charged to my ignorance rather than subtracted from his glory. [e]

While his faith was still in its first rudiments, he believed that in God’s sight nothing counted for as much as keeping himself continent. He thought the heart could become what it ought to be, and the mind could take in the full measure of truth, if he trampled the craving of the flesh underfoot with the sturdy, healthy strength of holiness. Who has ever recorded such a marvel? His second birth had not yet lit up the new man with the full splendor of the divine light, and already he was beating the old original darkness with nothing more than the light’s first dawning. Then — and this is greater still — when he had learned certain things from reading the Scriptures, things measured not by the standing of a beginner but by how early it still was in his faith, he laid hold at once of what he had found, and used it to his own advantage in deserving well of God.

He handed out his means to relieve the poor in their need. He sold whole estates and paid out the price of them. In one stroke he gained two things: contempt for this world’s ambition, than which nothing is more destructive, and the practice of that mercy which God has preferred even to his sacrifices — the mercy that even the man failed to keep who said he had kept every command of the law. So, with a devotion that ran ahead of itself, he had nearly begun to be perfect before he had learned how to be perfect. Which of the men of old, I ask, ever did this? Which of the most celebrated veterans of the faith, men whose hearts and ears have beaten to the divine words for years, ever attempted anything like it — anything like what this man accomplished by his glorious and admirable labors, while his faith was still unskilled and perhaps nobody trusted him yet, outdoing the whole age of the ancients?

No one reaps the moment he has sown. No one presses out a vintage from a trench just dug. No one has ever yet looked for ripe fruit on cuttings just planted. But in him every unbelievable thing came together at once. In him the threshing came first — if it can even be said, for the thing is past believing — the threshing before the sowing, the vintage before the shoots, the fruit before the root.

The apostle’s letter says that beginners are to be passed over, in case the dullness of paganism still clinging to their unsettled minds should let their untaught inexperience sin in some way against God. Cyprian was the first, and I think the only one, to furnish an illustration that faith makes greater progress than time does. In the Acts of the Apostles the eunuch is described as baptized by Philip on the spot, because he believed with his whole heart; but that is not a fair comparison. He was a Jew. He was coming away from the Lord’s temple, he was reading the prophet Isaiah, and his hope was in Christ, though as yet he did not believe that Christ had come. Cyprian came out of ignorant paganism, and began with a faith as mature as the faith few people perhaps have when they have finished the course. In short, where God’s grace was concerned there was no delay and no putting off — and that is saying too little: he received the eldership and the priesthood at once. For who would not entrust every rank of honor to a man who believed with a heart like that? [i]

There is a great deal he did while he was still a layman, and a great deal he did once he was an elder — much of it patterned on the righteous men of old, whom he followed by close imitation, and carried out with the obedience of a man wholly given over — and all of it deserved well of the Lord. His usual way of talking about this was that whenever he had read of someone held up with God’s praise, he would urge us to ask what that person had done to please God. Job, made glorious by God’s own testimony, was called a true worshiper of God, a man with no one on earth to compare with him; so Cyprian taught that we should do whatever Job had done before us, and that by doing the same things we might call out the same testimony from God about ourselves.

Job thought nothing of losing his estate, and gained so much from having his virtue tested this way that he did not even feel the temporary losses that touched his affections. Neither poverty nor pain broke him down. His wife’s urging did not move him. The dreadful suffering of his own body did not shake his firmness. His virtue stayed settled in its own house, and his devotion, planted on deep roots, gave way under no assault of the devil tempting him to stop blessing his God with a grateful faith even in his troubles. His house stood open to anyone who came. No widow went away from him with an empty fold in her dress. No blind man went without him for a guide. No one faltering on his feet went without him for a staff. No one stripped of help by the hand of the powerful went without him for a defender. This, Cyprian used to say, is what people ought to do who want to please God. And so, running through the examples of all the good men, by always imitating those who were better than the rest he made himself worth imitating too.

Among us he was closely bound to a righteous man of praiseworthy memory named Caecilius, an elder in years as well as in rank, who had turned him from his worldly errors to the acknowledgment of the true God. He loved this man with complete honor and every attention, looking up to him with an obedient reverence, not only as the friend and companion of his soul but as the father of his new life. In the end Caecilius, won over by all this attention, was stirred — as well he might be — to such a pitch of love beyond measure that when he was leaving this world and his summons was at hand, he entrusted his wife and children to Cyprian. The man he had made a partner in the fellowship of his way of life he went on to make the heir of his affection. [l]

It would be tiresome to go through the circumstances one by one, and hard work to list everything he did. As proof of his good works I think this one thing is enough: that by God’s own verdict and the people’s favor he was chosen for the office of priest and the rank of overseer while he was still newly baptized and, as people reckoned it, a beginner. He was still in the early days of his faith, in the untaught season of his spiritual life, and yet a generous character shone out of him so plainly that, though he had no glitter of office about him yet but only of hope, he already gave every assurance that he could be trusted with the priesthood that was coming to him. [m]

And I will not leave out this remarkable thing. When the whole people, moved by God, sprang forward in love and honor for him, he humbly drew back. He gave way to men of longer standing, thinking himself unworthy of a claim to so great an honor — and by that he became more worthy. A man is made more worthy by giving up what he deserves. The eager people were on fire with this excitement, wanting with a spiritual longing, as the outcome proved, not only an overseer. In the man they were demanding then, with some hidden foreboding from God, they were looking for more than a priest: they were looking for a future martyr. The brotherhood crowded in and laid siege to the doors of the house, and an anxious love was moving along every approach to it. That apostolic experience might well have happened to him then, as he wanted — being let down through a window — if he had also matched the apostle in the honor of ordination.

Anyone could see that all the rest were waiting for him to come out, anxious and in suspense, and that when he came they received him with overflowing joy. I say this unwillingly, but I have to say it. Some opposed him — even so that he might win them over. And with what gentleness, what patience, what kindness he let it go! How mercifully he forgave them, and afterwards counted them, to the astonishment of many, among his closest and most intimate friends! Who would not be amazed at such forgetfulness in a mind that forgot nothing?

From this point on, who is equal to describing how he carried himself? What compassion he had. What energy. How great his mercy, how great his strictness. So much holiness and grace shone out of his face that it threw the minds of those who looked at him into confusion. His expression was serious and glad at once. His severity was never gloomy and his friendliness never excessive; the two were mixed and tempered together, so that you could not decide whether he deserved more to be revered or to be loved — except that he deserved both to be revered and to be loved. His clothing did not clash with his face either; it too was kept to a fitting middle. The pride of the world never fired him up, and an overdone show of poverty never made him squalid, since that second kind of dress comes just as much from bragging as an ambitious frugality comes from showing off. [n]

And what did he do as overseer about the poor, whom he had already loved as a catechumen? Let devoted priests weigh it up, or men whose very rank has trained them to the duty of good works, or men whom the pledge we all share has bound to the duty of showing love. The overseer’s chair received Cyprian as he already was; it did not make him so.

And so, for merits like these, he was at once given the glory of being proscribed as well. Nothing else would have been fitting. A man rich in the full honor of religion and faith in the hidden recesses of his conscience ought also to be renowned in the report the pagans spread abroad. With the speed at which he always reached everything, he might well have hurried then to the crown of martyrdom appointed for him — the crowd kept calling for him, over and over, to be given to the lions — except that he had to pass through every grade of glory before arriving at the highest, and except that the ruin that was coming needed the help of so fertile a mind. [p]

Imagine him carried off at that time by the dignity of martyrdom. Who would have shown what grace does as faith advances? Who would have held virgins to the discipline of modesty that suits them, and to a dress worthy of holiness, bridled as it were by the Lord’s own lessons? Who would have taught repentance to the lapsed, truth to heretics, unity to those who had broken away, peaceableness and the rule of gospel prayer to the sons of God? Who would have beaten back the blaspheming pagans by turning back on them the accusations they heap on us? Who would have comforted Christians whose affection was too tender, or — what matters more — whose faith was too weak when they lost the people they loved, comforting them with the hope of what is to come? Where else would we have learned mercy like that? Where patience? Who would have checked the bad blood that rises from the poisoned spite of envy, with the sweetness of a healing remedy? Who would have raised up such great martyrs by the urging of his God-given words? Who, in short, would have breathed courage into so many confessors — men sealed with a second inscription on their distinguished foreheads and kept alive as an example of martyrdom — kindling their ardor with a trumpet out of heaven?

It was a good thing, a very good thing, and truly the Spirit’s own doing, that a man needed for so many excellent purposes was held back from completing his martyrdom. Do you want to be sure that the reason he withdrew was not fear? To bring nothing else forward: he did suffer later on, and he would certainly have escaped that suffering in the same way, if escaping was what he had done the first time. It was fear, yes, and rightly so — the fear that dreads offending the Lord, the fear that would rather obey God’s commands than be crowned while disobeying them. A mind given over to God in everything, and enslaved in that way to God’s warnings, believed that it would be sinning even in the act of suffering, if it had not obeyed the Lord, who at that time was telling him to look for a hiding place.

There is something more to say here about what the delay was good for, though I have already touched on the matter lightly. From what plainly happened afterwards it follows that we can prove that the withdrawal was not thought up out of human cowardice but was, as it truly was, God’s own doing. An unheard-of and violent fury of cruel persecution had laid God’s people waste. Since the cunning enemy could not deceive everyone by a single fraud, wherever a careless soldier left his side exposed, there the enemy struck, showing his rage in different forms and destroying men one at a time, each with a different kind of downfall. Someone was needed who, when men had been wounded and hurt by the attacking enemy’s various devices, could apply the remedy of heaven’s medicine to fit the wound — cutting in one case, soothing in another. [s]

So a man was kept safe whose mind, on top of his other excellences, had been spiritually trained — a man who could hold the Church steady on a middle course between the crashing waves of the opposing splits. Are these not God’s own plans, I ask? Could it have been done without God? Let those consider it who think that things like this can happen by chance. The Church answers them in a clear voice, saying, “I do not allow it and I do not believe it, that men so badly needed are kept safe apart from God’s own arrangement.”

Still, if it seems good, let me glance at the rest. Afterwards a dreadful plague broke out. The overwhelming destruction of a hateful disease went into house after house of a trembling population, and day after day it carried off countless people with a sudden stroke, each from his own home. Everyone was shuddering, running, keeping clear of the contagion, shamefully putting their own friends out of doors — as though by shutting out the person who was certain to die of the plague you could shut out death itself as well. Meanwhile, all over the city, there lay about no longer bodies but the carcasses of a great many people; and by making the passers-by look at a lot that would be theirs in turn, they begged for pity. No one paid attention to anything but his own cruel profit. No one trembled at the memory of something like it before. No one did for another what he wanted done for himself. [u]

In circumstances like these it would be a wrong to pass over what Christ’s pontiff did, a man who surpassed the pontiffs of the world as much in kindly affection as he did in the truth of his religion. He gathered the people together in one place and pressed on them first of all the benefits of mercy, teaching from examples out of the divine lessons how much the duties of kindness count toward deserving well of God. Then he added that there is nothing remarkable in caring for our own people with the attentions love requires; the man who becomes perfect is the one who does something more than the tax collector or the pagan does — who overcomes evil with good, and shows a forbearance like God’s own forbearance, and loves even his enemies, and prays for the salvation of the people who persecute him, as the Lord urges and commands. God keeps making his sun rise, and from time to time gives rain to feed the seed, showing all these kindnesses not only to his own people but to outsiders as well. And if a man professes to be a son of God, why does he not copy his Father’s example?

“It is fitting for us,” he said, “to live up to our birth. It is not right that people plainly born of God should turn out degenerate. A good Father’s stock should rather be proved in his offspring by their competing to match his goodness.”