The Promised Tomorrow

I am leaving out many other things, important ones, because the space I have will not let me set them out at greater length, and because what has been said about them is enough. But if the pagans could have heard all this as they stood in front of the speakers’ platform, they would probably have believed on the spot. What, then, ought a Christian people to do, whose very name comes from faith? So the work was handed out steadily, according to what each man was and what rank he held. Many who could not show the generosity of the rich, because poverty had them hemmed in, showed more than the rich did: they made up out of their own labor a service worth more than any money. And under a teacher like that, who would not press forward to be found somewhere in that campaign, where he might please God the Father, and Christ the Judge, and — for now — so fine a priest? So the good was done in an overflow of generous work toward everyone, and not only toward those who belong to the household of faith. [a]

Something more was done here than what is recorded of Tobit’s unmatched kindness. He must forgive, and forgive again, and forgive often — or, to put it more truly, one has to grant as a matter of fairness that although a great deal could be done before Christ, something more could be done after Christ, since all fullness is credited to his times. Tobit gathered up the dead whom the king had killed and thrown out — and only those of his own people.

Exile followed acts as good and as generous as these. That is always how contempt for God pays: it returns the worse for the better. What God’s priest answered when the proconsul questioned him, the official Acts record. In the meantime the man was shut out of the city who had done something for the city’s safety — the man who had worked so that the eyes of the living should not have to look at a scene out of hell; the man, I say, who had kept watch over works of kindness and had seen to it (and here is the wickedness of it: his goodness was never acknowledged) that when everyone else was walking away from the ruined face of the city, a stripped town and an emptied countryside should not notice how many of its people had run. [f]

But let the world see to this, the world that counts banishment a penalty. To them their homeland is too dear, and it carries the same name as their fathers; but we turn away even from our own parents if they try to argue us out of God. To them it is a heavy sentence to live outside their own city; to a Christian this whole world is one home. So even if he were banished to some hidden, out-of-the-way place, he is bound up with the affairs of his God and cannot count it exile. Besides, while he honestly serves God he is a stranger even in his own city. The self-control of the Holy Spirit holds him back from the cravings of the flesh, and he lays aside the way of life of the man he used to be; and among his fellow-citizens — I could almost say among the very parents of his earthly life — he is a foreigner. And even supposing this could look like a punishment, still, in cases and sentences of this kind, which we suffer so that our virtue may be put to the proof, it is not a punishment; it is glory. But grant that banishment is no punishment to us: the witness of their own conscience may still charge the last and worst wickedness against men who can lay on the innocent what they themselves think is punishment.

I will not describe a delightful place now, and for the moment I pass over every pleasant thing that might be added to it. Picture instead a place filthy in its setting, squalid to look at, with no clean water, no green to please the eye, no shore nearby — nothing but huge wooded rocks between the inhospitable jaws of an utterly deserted wilderness, far off in the trackless parts of the world. A place like that could have earned the name of exile, if that is where Cyprian, God’s priest, had gone. And even there, if human hands had failed to serve him, either birds would have served him, as they did Elijah, or angels, as they did Daniel. Away with the idea that anything at all could be lacking to the least of us, so long as he stands and confesses the Name. So far was God’s pontiff, who had always pressed on in works of mercy, from needing any of these things.

And now let us come back with thanks to the second thing I mentioned: that for a soul like his God provided a sunny and suitable spot, a lodging as private as he wanted, and everything that has been promised as an addition to those who seek God’s kingdom and righteousness. I will not stop to count the brothers who came to visit him, or the kindness of the townspeople themselves, who supplied him with everything he seemed to have been deprived of. But I will not pass over God’s remarkable visit to him, by which he chose to make his priest in exile so certain of the suffering ahead that, in his full confidence of the martyrdom hanging over him, Curubis held not only an exile but a martyr. For on the first day we spent in the place of banishment — his love was kind enough to choose me out of his household companions for a voluntary exile; I only wish he could have chosen me to share his suffering as well — he told me this: [j]

“Before I had yet sunk into the rest of sleep, a young man appeared to me, of unusual height, who seemed to be leading me to the praetorium, where I found myself brought before the tribunal of the proconsul, who was sitting there. When he looked at me he began at once to write down a sentence on his tablet — one I did not know, since he had asked me nothing in the usual questioning. But the young man standing behind him read very anxiously what had been written down. And because he could not say it out loud, he showed me by a sign I could read what that tablet held: he stretched his hand out flat, like a blade, and copied the stroke of the usual penalty, and made what he wanted understood as plain as speech — I understood the sentence of suffering that was coming.

“I began at once to ask and to beg for a delay of just one day, until I could put my property in some reasonable order. And when I had pressed my request hard, he began writing on his tablet again — I do not know what. But I could see from the calm of his face that the judge’s mind had been moved by my petition, as being a fair one. And that young man, who had already opened the news of my suffering to me by gesture rather than by words, hurried to signal over and over, by a secret sign, that the delay I had asked for was granted until tomorrow: he twisted his fingers one behind the other. And although the sentence had not been read out, and although I was rejoicing at heart with great gladness over the delay I had been given, I still trembled so with fear at not being sure of the meaning that the leftovers of that fear kept my exulting heart beating far too hard.”

What could be plainer than that revelation? What could be more blessed than that kindness? Everything that followed had been told him beforehand. Nothing of God’s words was cut short, nothing of so sacred a promise was mutilated. Go over each detail carefully against what was announced. He asks for a delay until tomorrow, at the point when the sentence of his suffering was still under consideration, asking to settle his affairs on the day he had gained. That one day stood for a year, which he was to spend in the world after his vision. To put it more plainly: when the year had run out he was crowned on the very day on which, at the year’s beginning, the thing had been announced to him. For although we do not read in the sacred Scriptures of the Lord’s day as a year, we still count that stretch of time as owing when a promise is made about things to come. So it makes no difference if here, under the ordinary word “day,” it is only a year that is meant in this place, since the greater ought to be the fuller in meaning. [n]

That it was explained by signs rather than by speech was because the use of speech was being held back for the showing of the time itself. A thing is usually put into words at the point when what is put forward is being carried out. And in fact nobody knew why this had been shown to him until afterwards, when he was crowned on the very day he had seen. In the meantime everyone certainly knew that his suffering was coming, but not one of them spoke of the day of it, exactly as if they did not know. And I find something like it in the Scriptures. Zechariah the priest, because he did not believe the angel’s promise of a son, was struck dumb, so that he asked for a tablet by a sign, meaning to write his son’s name rather than say it. With good reason here too, where God’s messenger announced the coming suffering of his priest by signs rather than by speech, he both warned his faith and strengthened his priest.

Further, the reason for asking a delay grew out of his wish to put his affairs in order and settle his will. And what affairs, or what will, did he have to settle, except the church’s? So that last delay was granted in order that whatever had to be arranged by his final decision about the care and support of the poor could be arranged. And I think it was for no other reason — indeed for this reason only — that the allowance was made even by the very men who had thrown him out and were about to kill him: that being on hand he might relieve the poor who were in front of him too, with the last, or to speak more exactly the entire, outlay of his final stewardship. And so, having ordered things so generously and arranged them as he wanted, the next day drew near.

Now too a messenger came to him from the city, from Xistus — a good and peace-making priest, and for that reason a most blessed martyr. From then on the executioner was looked for at any moment, the man who would strike through the consecrated neck of that most holy victim; and so, in the daily expectation of dying, every day was to him a day on which the crown might be awarded. In the meantime many distinguished people gathered around him, people of the most illustrious rank and family, noble by the world’s standards, who out of old friendship urged him again and again to withdraw. And so that their urging should not look in any way hollow, they even offered him places he could retire to. But he had already set the world aside; his mind was fixed on heaven, and he did not agree to their tempting arguments. Perhaps he would even then have done what so many faithful friends were asking, if it had been ordered him by God’s own command. [p]

But the high glory of so great a man must not go by unannounced: that at that very time, when the world was swelling and breathing out hatred of the Name from its confidence in its emperors, he was teaching God’s servants, as opportunity allowed, out of the Lord’s own exhortations, and stirring them to trample the sufferings of this present time underfoot by looking at the glory that was to come. Indeed, his love of holy speech was such that he wanted his own prayers about his suffering answered this way: that he should be put to death in the very act of speaking about God.

These were the daily acts of a priest marked out to be an offering that would please God — when look: at the proconsul’s order the officer with his soldiers came on him suddenly and unexpectedly, or rather, to speak more truly, thought that he had come on him unexpectedly, at his gardens. At his gardens, I say, which at the beginning of his faith he had sold, and which, restored to him by God’s mercy, he would certainly have sold again for the use of the poor, if he had not wanted to avoid ill-will from the persecutors. But when could a mind that was always ready be caught off guard, as if by an attack it had not foreseen? So he went forward now, sure that what had been so long delayed was about to be settled. He went forward with his head high and his bearing lifted, showing cheerfulness in his face and courage in his heart. [r]

But being put off until the next day, he came back from the praetorium to the officer’s house — when suddenly a rumor ran everywhere through Carthage that Thascius had now been brought forward. There was nobody who did not know him, both for his high standing in the honorable opinion of everyone and for the memory of his most famous work. On every side people came flocking together to a spectacle — glorious to us, because of the devotion of faith, and to be mourned even by the pagans. A gentle custody had charge of him, though, once he had been taken and put for one night in the officer’s house, so that we, his companions and friends, were with him as usual. The whole population, in the meantime, anxious that nothing should be done during the night without their knowing it, kept watch in front of the officer’s door. God’s goodness granted him at that time, when he was so truly worthy of it, that even God’s people should keep vigil on the night of their priest’s suffering.

Yet someone may perhaps ask what the reason was for his coming back from the praetorium to the officer. Some think it came from the fact that the proconsul, for his own part, was unwilling just then. Far be it from me to complain, in matters that God has ordered, of laziness or reluctance in a proconsul. Far be it from me to let such an evil into a religious mind — that a man’s whim should decide the fate of so blessed a martyr. But the tomorrow which God’s kindness had foretold a year before had to be, literally, tomorrow.

At last that other day dawned — the appointed day, the promised day, the day that belonged to God — and if the tyrant himself had wanted to put it off, he would have had no power to do it. It was a day glad in the awareness of the martyr to come; and with the clouds scattered all around the world, the day shone on them with a brilliant sun. He came out of the house of the officer — though he himself was the officer of Christ and God — and was walled in on every side by the ranks of a mixed crowd. Such a countless army hung on his company that they might have been coming with a massed troop to attack death itself. [u]

Now on his way he had to pass the racecourse. And rightly so, as if it had been arranged on purpose: the man who had finished his contest and was running for the crown of righteousness had to pass the place of a matching struggle. But when he had reached the praetorium, since the proconsul had not yet come out, a room was given him to wait in. There he sat, soaked with heavy sweat after the long walk — the seat happened to be covered with linen, so that even in the very moment of his suffering he might have the honor due an overseer — and one of the officers, a tesserarius, who had once been a Christian, offered him his own clothes, as if he might want to change his damp things for dry ones. And the man plainly wanted nothing more out of the kindness he offered than to own the now blood-stained sweat of a martyr on his way to God. Cyprian answered him: “We are applying remedies to discomforts that today will very likely no longer exist.”

Is it any wonder that he thought nothing of pain in the body, when he had thought nothing of death in the soul? Why should we say more? He was suddenly announced to the proconsul; he is brought forward; he is placed before him; he is asked his name. He answers who he is, and nothing more.

And so the judge reads out from his tablet the sentence that lately, in the vision, he had not read — a spiritual sentence, not to be spoken carelessly; a sentence worthy of such an overseer and such a martyr; a glorious sentence, in which he was called a standard-bearer of the sect, and an enemy of the gods, and a man who was to be an example to his people, and one by whose blood discipline would begin to be established. Nothing could be more complete than that sentence, nothing truer. For everything that was said, although a pagan said it, is divine. And it is no wonder, since priests are in the habit of prophesying about the passion. [w]

He had been a standard-bearer, who used to teach people about carrying Christ’s standard; he had been an enemy of the gods, who ordered the idols destroyed. And he did give an example to his friends, since, when many were going to follow in the same way, he was the first in the province to consecrate the firstfruits of martyrdom. And by his blood discipline did begin to be established — but it was the discipline of martyrs, who copied their teacher and imitated a glory like his own, and who themselves also gave discipline its confirmation by the very blood of their own example.