A Peace That Is No Peace

Cyprian to all the people: greetings.

Dearly loved brothers, Virtius, a most faithful and upright elder, and Rogatianus and Numidicus — elders and confessors both, men made famous by the glory of God’s own stooping favor — and the deacons as well, good men given to every duty in the running of the church, and the other ministers with them, are there in person and give you their whole attention. They never stop steadying you one by one with unwearied encouragement, and steering and reshaping the minds of the lapsed with sound advice. Still, as much as I can, I warn you, and as I can, I come to you in my letters. [c]

In my letters, I say, dearly loved brothers — because the spite and the treachery of certain elders has brought it about that I am not allowed to come to you before Easter Day. They have not forgotten what they swore together, and they still keep their old poison against my office as overseer, which is to say against your vote and against God’s verdict. So they take up their old attack on me again, and with their usual cunning they begin their sacrilegious scheming all over.

And by God’s providence — not because we wished it or wanted it, but while we were forgiving them and keeping quiet — they have taken the punishment they had earned. We did not throw them out. They threw themselves out. In front of their own conscience they have passed sentence on themselves, and the sentence agrees with your votes and with God’s. These plotters, these evil men, have driven themselves out of the church of their own accord.

Now it is out in the open where the faction of Felicissimus came from — what root it grew on and what strength held it up. These are the men who in earlier days kept encouraging certain confessors and urging them on: not to agree with their overseer, not to keep the church’s discipline faithfully and quietly as the Lord commanded, not to guard the glory of what they had confessed by an unspoiled and unstained way of life. [g]

And in case it were too little to have corrupted the minds of some of the confessors, and to have wanted to arm one broken-off piece of our brotherhood against God’s priesthood, they have now turned their poisoned trickery toward the ruin of the lapsed. They mean to turn the sick and the wounded away from the healing of their wound — men whom the disaster of their fall has left less fit and less sturdy to take stronger counsel. They invite them, with the lie of a peace that is no peace, into a recklessness that will kill them: to leave off the prayers and the pleading by which, with long and unbroken amends, the Lord is to be won over.

So I beg you, brothers: watch out for the devil’s traps. Look after your own salvation, and keep a careful guard against this deadly lie. This is one more persecution and one more trial. Those five elders are nobody but the five leading men who lately joined the magistrates in an edict, to overturn our faith and to drive the weaker hearts among the brothers into their deadly nets by twisting the truth. [j]

Now the same plan and the same overturning is being worked again by those five elders, linked with Felicissimus, and it wrecks salvation. God is not to be begged. The man who has denied Christ is not to plead for mercy from the very Christ he denied. After the guilt of the crime, repentance is to be taken away as well. The Lord is not to be won over through overseers and priests; instead the Lord’s priests are to be abandoned, and a new practice is to spring up out of a sacrilegious appointment, against the discipline the good news lays down.

It had already been settled once — by us, by the confessors, by the clergy of the city, and beyond that by all the overseers appointed either in our own province or across the sea — that nothing new was to be brought in about the case of the lapsed until we had all gathered in one place, compared what we thought, and decided on a measured sentence, balanced alike by discipline and by mercy. Against that decision of ours they have rebelled, and all the authority and power of the priesthood is being torn down by conspiring factions.

What I go through now, dearly loved brothers — that at a moment like this I cannot come to you myself, that I cannot go to each one of you myself, that I cannot myself encourage you out of the teaching of the Lord and of his good news! Two years of exile now, and it was not enough. A separation from you that is nothing but mourning — from your faces, from the sight of you. Grief and lamenting that never stop, which in my loneliness without you break me to pieces with my unending mourning. Tears running day and night. And still it is not enough: there is not so much as a chance for the priest you yourselves made, with so much love and so much eagerness, to greet you or to be held in your arms. [n]

And a heavier grief than that is laid on my worn-out spirit: that in the middle of so much anxiety and so much need I cannot hurry to you myself. Treacherous men are making threats and setting traps, and we are afraid that my arrival would raise a still greater uproar there — that an overseer, whose business is to look after peace and quiet in everything, would look as though he had himself handed over the makings of a riot and had made the persecution bitter all over again.

So from where I am, dearly loved brothers, I not only warn you, I advise you. Do not put rash trust in words that mean you harm. Do not give easy agreement to lying talk. Do not take darkness for light, night for day, hunger for food, thirst for drink, poison for medicine, death for safety. And do not let the age or the standing of these men fool you. They answer to the old wickedness of the two elders, who tried to corrupt and force the chaste Susanna; and they are trying the same thing — to corrupt the chastity of the church and force the truth of the good news, with teaching that is adultery.

The Lord cries out and says: [q]

“Do not listen to the words of the false prophets, for the visions of their own hearts are deceiving them. They speak, but not out of the mouth of the Lord. To the men who despise the word of the Lord they say: You will have peace.”

The men offering peace now have no peace themselves. The men promising to bring the lapsed back and call them home into the church have walked out of the church themselves. There is one God, and Christ is one, and there is one church, and one chair, founded on the rock by the word of the Lord. No second altar can be set up and no new priesthood made; there is the one altar and the one priesthood. Whoever gathers somewhere else is scattering. Whatever is set up by human madness, so that what God arranged is broken into, is adultery, is godless, is sacrilege.

Keep well away from the infection men like this carry, and run from their words. Avoid them as you would an eating sore and a plague, since the Lord warns you and says:

“They are blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into the ditch.”

They cut off your prayers, the prayers you pour out with us to God day and night to win him over by making amends as you should. They cut off the tears you use to wash away the guilt of the sin you committed. They cut off the peace you are truly and faithfully asking for from the Lord’s mercy. And they do not know what is written: “That prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, who has spoken to turn you away from the Lord your God, is to be put to death.” Dearly loved brothers, let nobody make you wander off the Lord’s roads. Let nobody snatch you, Christians, away from the good news of Christ. Let nobody take the church’s own sons away from the church. Let the men who wanted to be lost be lost by themselves. Let the men who left the church stay outside the church by themselves. Let the men who rebelled against overseers be without overseers by themselves. Let the men who have earned it — first by your votes and now by God’s verdict — take by themselves the penalty of their own plotting and spite.

The Lord warns us in his Gospel and says: [v]

“You set aside the command of God so that you may set up your own tradition.”

So let the men who set aside the command of God and work hard to keep their own tradition be set aside by you, bravely and firmly. Let one fall be enough for the lapsed. Let nobody’s fraud knock down men who want to get up. Let nobody push those already down still deeper and hold them there — men we are praying for, that God’s hand and arm may lift them. Let nobody turn men who are half alive, and begging to get their old health back, away from every hope of rescue. Let nobody put out the last light on the road of salvation for men wavering in the darkness of their fall.

The apostle teaches us and says:

“If anyone teaches otherwise, and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and with his teaching, he is puffed up with foolishness. Keep away from men like that.”

And again he says:

“Let nobody fool you with empty words, for it is because of these things that the anger of God comes on the sons of disobedience. So do not take a share with them.”

There is no reason for you to be fooled by empty words and to start taking a share in their rottenness. Get away from men like that, I beg you, and settle down with our advice — ours, who pour out unbroken prayers for you to the Lord every day, who want you called back into the church by the Lord’s kindness, who ask God for the fullest peace, first for the mother and then for her children. Add your own pleading and your prayers to our prayers and pleading. Mix your tears with our wailing.

Keep clear of the wolves that cut the sheep off from the shepherd. Keep clear of the poisoned tongue of the devil, who from the beginning of the world has always been a deceiver and a liar: he lies in order to deceive, he flatters in order to injure, he promises good in order to hand over evil, he promises life in order to put to death. Now too his words are out in the open and his poisons are plain. He promises peace, so that peace can never be reached. He promises salvation, so that the man who has sinned will never come to salvation. He promises a church, while arranging it so that whoever believes him is lost altogether, outside the church.

Now is the moment, dearly loved brothers. Those of you who stood firm: hold out bravely, and keep the glorious steadiness you kept all through the persecution with unbroken firmness. And if any of you were outmaneuvered by the enemy and fell, then in this second trial take faithful counsel for your hope and for your peace. So that the Lord may pardon you, do not walk away from the priests of the Lord, since it is written: “The man who acts presumptuously, and will not listen to the priest or to the judge who is there in those days, that man is to die.” [y]

Of this persecution, this is the latest and the final trial, and it too, under the Lord’s protection, will soon be over. Then I shall stand before you again after Easter Day, with my colleagues; and with them present we shall be able both to arrange and to finish the business that has to be done, according to your own judgment and to the shared advice of all of us, as it was decided before. But if anyone refuses to repent and to make amends to God, and gives in instead to the party of Felicissimus and his strong-arm men, and joins himself to the faction of the heretics, let him know that afterwards he cannot come back into the church and share the common life with the overseers and the people of Christ.

Dearly loved brothers, I wish you always well, from my heart, and I ask that you plead alongside me in unbroken prayer, so that the mercy of God may be won.