Weighed Against the Gospel

The elders and deacons living at Rome, to father Cyprian: greetings.

When we read your letter through with care, dearest brother — the one you sent by Fortunatus the sub-deacon — we were struck with a double sorrow and thrown into a twofold grief: that no rest has been given you in straits like these of the persecution, and that the unreasonable insolence of the lapsed brothers has now been carried, so we are told, as far as dangerous talk. Yet although what we have just spoken of hit us and our spirit hard, your firmness and the severity you have used, as proper discipline requires, lighten the heavy weight of our grief. You rightly hold back the wickedness of some, and by urging them to repentance you show them the lawful road to salvation. [d]

That they should have wanted to rush to such an extreme does surprise us a good deal — that with such insistence, at a time so unseasonable and so bitter, in a sin so great and so far past bounds, they should not so much ask peace for themselves as claim it; should say, in fact, that they already have it in heaven. If they have it, why ask for what they possess? But if the very fact of their asking proves that they do not have it, why will they not accept the judgment of the men they saw fit to ask for a peace they plainly do not have? And if they think the right to communion comes to them from some other quarter, let them try holding it up against the Gospel; then at last it may do them real good, if it is not out of tune with the Gospel’s law. But on what principle can a thing grant Gospel communion when it appears to have been set up against Gospel truth? Every privilege of that kind has fellowship in view, and it holds only on the assumption that it is not out of keeping with the will of the one whose fellowship it seeks. Since this claim is foreign to his will, it must lose the favor and the privilege of that fellowship altogether.

So let them look at what it is they are trying to do. If they say that the Gospel laid down one ruling and the martyrs another, then in setting the martyrs at odds with the Gospel they put themselves in danger from both sides. On the one hand the Gospel’s own majesty will already look shattered and thrown down, if some newer ruling can overturn it. On the other, the glorious crown of confession will be lifted off the martyrs’ heads, if they are found not to have won it by keeping the very Gospel that makes a man a martyr. It follows, reasonably enough, that no one should be more careful to settle nothing against the Gospel than the man who is working to receive the name of martyr from the Gospel. There is something else we would like to be told. If martyrs become martyrs for no other reason than this — that by refusing to sacrifice they may keep the church’s peace even to the shedding of their own blood, for fear that if the pain of the torture overcame them they would lose that peace and so lose salvation — on what principle do they suppose that the salvation they believed they would not have if they had sacrificed should be handed to men who are said to have sacrificed, when they ought to hold others to the same law they themselves plainly kept in front of their own eyes? [f]

And in this we notice that they have produced against their own case the very thing they thought was on their side. If the martyrs judged that peace was to be granted to these people, why did they not grant it themselves? Why did they think — as they themselves say — that the matter had to be referred to the overseers? A man who orders a thing to be done can certainly do the thing he orders. But as we understand it — indeed, as the case itself says out loud — the most holy martyrs judged that a proper measure of modesty and of truth had to be kept on both sides. Pressed as they were by many, in sending them on to the overseer they reckoned they were serving their own modesty, so as to be troubled no further; and in not admitting them to communion themselves, they judged that the purity of the Gospel’s law ought to be kept undamaged.

But out of your love, brother, never stop calming the spirits of the lapsed and giving those who have gone wrong the medicine of truth — even though sick men are apt to turn away the kindness of anyone who would cure them. This wound of the lapsed is still fresh; the sore is still swelling. And so we are certain that when a longer stretch of time has worn down that urgency of theirs, they will come to love the very delay that hands them over to a treatment they can trust — provided there are not men arming them for their own ruin, teaching them crookedly, and demanding on their behalf, instead of the healing remedy of delay, the deadly poison of a communion given too soon. For we do not believe that they would all have dared to claim peace for themselves so insolently unless certain people had put them up to it. We know the faith of the church at Carthage, we know her training, we know her humility — which is why we were surprised to see certain things put to you by letter rather rudely, when we have often seen, in many proofs of affection on both sides, the love you have for one another. [g]

It is time, then, that they should repent of their fault, prove their grief over their lapse, show modesty, display humility, give some sign of shame — so that by their submission they may appeal to God for his kindness, and by paying due honor to God’s priest may draw God’s mercy down upon themselves. How much better these men’s own letters would have been if their own humility had backed the prayers of those who stood firm! What is asked for is more easily obtained when the man it is asked for is worthy of obtaining it.

As for Privatus of Lambaesis, you have done what you always do, in wanting to inform us of the business, since it is a cause for anxiety. It falls to all of us to keep watch over the body of the whole church, whose members are scattered through every province. But that crafty man’s dishonesty could not have been hidden from us even before your letters came. Some while ago a man named Futurus came from the company of that same wickedness — a standard-bearer of Privatus — and wanted to get letters out of us by a trick. We were not in the dark about who he was, and he did not get the letters he was after. We bid you a hearty farewell in the Lord. [j]