Certificates in a Dead Man’s Name

Cyprian to the elders and deacons living at Rome, my brothers: greetings.

After the letters I wrote you, dearest brothers — the ones in which I explained what I had done and gave some short account of my discipline and my care — another matter has come up that ought no more than the rest to be kept from you. Our brother Lucian is himself one of the confessors: hot in faith, strong in courage, but not much grounded in the reading of the Lord’s word. He has taken certain things on himself. For a while he set himself up as an authority to people who did not know any better, so that certificates written in his own hand were handed out to a great many people indiscriminately, in the name of Paulus. [c]

Now Mappalicus the martyr was careful and modest, and he kept the law and the discipline in mind. He wrote no letters that went against the good news. Moved by a son’s affection for his mother, who had fallen, he directed only that peace be given to her, and nothing more. Saturninus too, after his torture, stayed on in prison and sent out no letters of that kind.

But Lucian handed out certificates everywhere in Paulus’s name, written in his own hand, while Paulus was still in prison — and then, after Paulus died, went on doing the same thing under his name, saying that Paulus had ordered him to. He did not see that he must obey the Lord rather than his fellow servant. Many certificates were given in the name of Aurelius as well, a young man who had been through the torture; that same Lucian’s hand wrote every one of them, because Aurelius did not know how to write.

To put some sort of stop to this, I wrote letters to them, which I have sent on to you enclosed with my earlier letter. In them I did not fail to ask them, and to press them, to have regard for the law of the Lord and for the good news. [h]

But after I had sent my letters to them, so that the thing might be handled with more moderation and restraint, this same Lucian wrote a letter in the name of all the confessors — a letter in which just about every bond of faith, all fear of God, the Lord’s own command, and the sacredness and purity of the good news were dissolved. He wrote, in the name of them all, that they had granted peace to all, and that he wished this decree to be passed on through me to the other overseers. I am sending you a copy of that letter. It did add the words, “those whose account of what they have done since committing their sin has satisfied you” — and that is the very thing that stirs up the greater ill-will against me, since once I begin to hear each man’s case and look into it, I appear to be refusing to many people what they are all now boasting they have received from the martyrs and confessors.

In fact, this rebellious business has already begun to show itself. In our province, through some of its towns, the crowd has made an attack on those set over them and has forced them to grant on the spot the peace that they all shouted had once been granted them by the martyrs and confessors. Their leaders were frightened and beaten down, and had little strength to hold out against them, either in firmness of mind or in strength of faith. [j]

Here with us, too, there are some turbulent spirits, men I could barely keep in hand before, who were being put off until I came. This letter set them alight like a torch. They began to grow more violent and to extort the peace granted to them.

I have sent you a copy of the letters I wrote to my clergy about all this, and also what my colleague Caldonius wrote, with his usual honesty and faithfulness, and what I wrote back to him; I have sent both for you to read. I have sent copies as well of the letter of Celerinus — that good, sturdy confessor — which he wrote to Lucian, who is a confessor too, and of Lucian’s reply. I want you to see how hard I have worked at every part of this, and how carefully; and I want you to learn the truth for yourselves — how moderate and cautious Celerinus the confessor is, and how respectful, both in his humility and in his fear for our faith, while Lucian, as I said, is the less skilled at understanding the Lord’s word, and by giving in so easily does harm, since he turns people against the reverent way I am handling this.

For the Lord said that the nations were to be baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and that their past sins were to be wiped away in baptism. But this man, knowing nothing of the rule and nothing of the law, orders peace to be granted and sins wiped away in the name of Paulus, and says that Paulus ordered him to do it — as you will see for yourselves in the letter that same Lucian sent to Celerinus. He gave very little thought to this: it is not martyrs who make the good news; it is the good news that makes martyrs. For Paul the apostle too, the man the Lord called a chosen vessel for himself, laid it down in his letter: “I am astonished that you are so quickly turning away from him who called you into the grace of Christ, to a different good news — which is not another; there are only some who are unsettling you and who want to twist the good news of Christ. But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should announce to you any good news other than the one we announced to you, let him be accursed. As I said before, so I say again now: if anyone announces to you any good news other than the one you received, let him be accursed.”

But your letter, the one written to my clergy, reached me at just the right moment, and so did the letters that the blessed confessors Moyses and Maximus, Nicostratus and the rest sent to Saturninus and Aurelius and the others. Those letters hold the full strength of the good news and the sturdy discipline of the Lord’s law. Your words were a great help to me while I was working here and standing up against the onset of ill-will with all the strength of faith. My work was cut short from above: before the letters I sent you last had even reached you, you were already telling me that your own judgment, following the law of the good news, agreed strongly and with one voice with mine. Dearest brothers, whom I long to see, I wish you always well with all my heart. [o]