Torches Under Our Faith

To Caecilius Cyprian, overseer of the church of the Carthaginians: from Moyses and Maximus, elders, and Nicostratus and Rufinus, deacons, and the other confessors who are holding fast in the faith of the truth — in God the Father, and in His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, and in the Holy Spirit: greetings.

Brother, we are set down in the middle of many different sorrows, because of the ruin that has come in our own time on so many brothers, almost everywhere in the world. Into that, one great comfort has reached us: your letter arrived and lifted us up, and we gathered some relief for the grief of our downcast spirits. From it we can already see why God’s kind care wanted us kept shut up in prison chains so long. Perhaps there was no other reason than this — that taught by your letter, and roused by it more strongly, we might come to the crown appointed for us with a more determined will. [c]

Your letter shone on us like calm in the middle of a storm; like the quiet we had been longing for in the middle of a rough sea; like rest in the middle of hard labor; like health in the middle of danger and pain; like a bright, burning light in the thickest dark. So we drank it down with a thirsty spirit and took it in with a hungry appetite, and we are glad to find ourselves fed by it and made strong enough to meet the enemy. The Lord will repay you for that love of yours, and will give you back the fruit this good work has earned. The man who urges others on deserves the crown’s reward no less than the man who suffers. The man who has taught deserves praise no less than the man who has also acted. The man who has given the warning is to be honored no less than the man who has fought. Except that sometimes the heavier weight of glory falls on the trainer rather than on the learner who proved teachable — because the learner would probably have had nothing to practice if the trainer had not first taught him.

So we say it again, brother Cyprian: we have received great joy, great comfort, great refreshment — above all because you described, with the glorious praise they deserved, the glorious — we will not say deaths — the immortalities of the martyrs. Departures like theirs had to be announced in words like yours, so that what was reported would be told the way it was done. So out of your letter we saw those glorious triumphs of the martyrs, and in a way our own eyes followed them as they went up to heaven, and we watched them take their seats among the angels and among the powers and dominions of heaven. And in a way our ears caught the Lord bearing them the witness He promised, in the Father’s presence. That is what lifts our spirits day after day, and sets us on fire to follow the track of such honor. [e]

For what more glorious or more blessed thing can happen to anyone, by God’s stooping to us, than to confess the Lord God in death itself, in front of his own executioners? Than, among the raging and varied and exquisite tortures of worldly power, with the body racked and torn and cut to pieces, to confess Christ the Son of God with a spirit still free, even as it goes out? Than to have climbed to heaven with the world left behind? Than to have left men and to stand among the angels? Than, with every obstacle of this world broken through, to stand already free in the sight of God? Than to enjoy the kingdom of heaven with no delay at all? Than to have become a partner in Christ’s suffering, in Christ’s name? Than to have become, by God’s stooping to us, the judge of one’s own judge? Than to have carried away an unstained conscience from confessing His name? Than to have refused to obey the sacrilegious human laws set against the faith? Than to have borne witness to the truth in public? Than, by dying, to have beaten death itself, which everyone dreads? Than, by that same death, to have reached immortality? Than, torn apart and tortured with every instrument of cruelty, to have beaten the torture by means of the tortures themselves? Than by strength of mind to have wrestled down every agony of a mangled body? Than not to have flinched at the flow of one’s own blood? Than to have begun to love one’s own punishments, once faith made them bearable? Than to count it an injury to one’s life not to have laid it down? [f]

For our Lord calls us out to this battle as with the trumpet of His good news, when He says: “Anyone who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and anyone who loves his own soul more than me is not worthy of me. And anyone who does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me.” And again: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs. Blessed will you be when people persecute you and hate you. Rejoice, and be glad beyond measure, because that is how their fathers persecuted the prophets who came before you.” And again: “Because you will stand in front of kings and rulers; and brother will hand over brother to death, and a father his son; and the one who endures to the end will be saved.” And: “To the one who conquers I will grant to sit on my throne, just as I also conquered and sat down on my Father’s throne.” And the apostle says: “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Trouble, or hardship, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or the sword? (As it is written: For your sake we are being put to death all day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter.) No — in all these things we are more than conquerors because of Him who has loved us.” [h]

When we read these things and others like them, collected in the Gospel, and feel the Lord’s words set under us like torches to light our faith on fire, then we do not merely stop dreading the enemies of the truth — we call them out. We have already beaten God’s opponents by the plain fact that we do not give in to them, and we have put down their wicked laws against the truth. And although we have not yet shed our blood, we are ready to shed it. Let no one think that this delay in our going is any kindness. It gets in our way. It holds up our glory. It postpones heaven. It keeps back the glorious sight of God. In a contest of this kind — the kind where faith is fighting hand to hand — putting martyrs off with delay is not real kindness. [n]

So ask, dear Cyprian, that in His mercy the Lord will arm and equip every one of us more fully and more readily, day after day, and will steady us and strengthen us with the strength of His power; and that, like a good commander, He will at last bring His soldiers out — the men He has been training and testing in the camp of our prison — onto the battlefield set in front of them. May He hold out to us the arms of God, the weapons that do not know how to be beaten: the breastplate of righteousness, which is never broken; the shield of faith, which cannot be pierced; the helmet of salvation, which cannot be split; and the sword of the Spirit, which has never yet been damaged. For to whom would we rather entrust these requests, to be asked on our behalf, than to our own honored overseer — victims already marked out, asking help from the priest?

Here is another joy of ours. In the work of your office as overseer — even though the state of the times has kept you apart from your brothers meanwhile — you have again and again steadied the confessors by your letters. You have always supplied what they needed out of your own honestly gotten property. In everything you have somehow shown yourself present. In no part of your duty have you hung back like a deserter. But there is something that stirred us to a still greater joy, and we cannot keep quiet about it; we have to say it out loud with every witness our voice can give. We see that you rebuked, with the right and deserved severity, both the people who forgot their sin and in a rush of eagerness squeezed peace out of the elders while you were away, and the men who, with no regard for the Gospel, handed out the Lord’s holy thing to dogs and pearls to pigs with unholy ease. [r]

A crime this great — one that has spread with unbelievable ruin over nearly the whole earth — ought, as you write yourself, to be handled carefully and with restraint, on the advice of all the overseers, elders, deacons, confessors, and even the laymen who are still standing firm; you say as much in your own letters. Otherwise, wanting to repair the ruins before the time is right, we may turn out to be causing a second and larger collapse. For what is left of God’s word if pardon is handed to sinners as easily as that? Certainly their spirits should be encouraged and fed until they are ripe for it, and they should be taught out of the holy Scriptures how great and how far-reaching the sin is that they have committed.

They should not take heart from the fact that they are many; they should be sobered by the fact that they are not few. A crowd with no blush in it has never yet counted for anything toward excusing a crime. What proves repentance is shame, self-restraint, patience, discipline, humility, and submission — waiting for other people’s judgment on itself, and accepting other people’s sentence on its own opinion. That is what puts skin over a deep wound. That is what lifts the ruins of a fallen spirit and rebuilds them, and puts out and holds down the burning fumes of their raging sins. A doctor does not give a sick man the food healthy bodies eat: feeding him at the wrong moment would not hold the raging illness down but drive it harder. That is to say, what fasting could have reduced sooner would be dragged out longer by impatience and a growing load he cannot digest.

So hands fouled by godless sacrifices have to be cleaned by good works; wretched mouths defiled by accursed food have to be washed out by words of real repentance; and the spirit has to be made new and made holy in the inner rooms of a faithful heart. Let the repeated groaning of the penitents be heard. Let faithful tears run from their eyes, not once but again and again, so that the very eyes that wickedly looked at idols may wash away, with tears that satisfy God, the forbidden things they did. Illness needs nothing but patience. The tired and the weak wrestle with their pain, and they can hope for health at last only if by bearing it they can outlast their suffering. A scar the doctor has raised too quickly is not to be trusted, and the least mishap undoes the cure if the remedies were not used faithfully and slowly enough. A flame comes roaring back into a blaze unless the whole fire’s fuel is put out down to the last spark. So men in this condition ought to see plainly that they themselves are the better for the very delay, and that more reliable remedies are being applied through the postponement they need. [v]

Besides — what would it mean to say that men who confess Christ are shut up in the keeping of a filthy prison, if the men who denied Him run no risk at all about their faith? What would it mean that we are bound in a belt of chains for God’s name, if the men who did not keep their confession of God are not cut off from communion? What would it mean that martyrs in prison lay down their glorious lives, if the men who abandoned the faith never feel how great their danger and their sin were? But if they show too much impatience and demand communion with unbearable eagerness, then all those complaining, spiteful reproaches they throw out with peevish, unbridled tongues are wasted; they do nothing against the truth. They could have kept by their own right what they are now forced to beg for, under a compulsion they went looking for themselves. The faith that was able to confess Christ could also have been kept by Christ inside the communion. Blessed and most glorious father, we wish you well in the Lord always and with all our heart. Keep us in mind.