The Letter We Would Not Read

Cyprian to Cornelius his brother: greetings.

It was the right thing for God’s servants to do, and above all for priests who are upright and want peace: a little while ago, dearest brother, we sent our colleagues Caldonius and Fortunatus to you. They were to strain every nerve — not only by whatever our letters could do to persuade, but in person, and with the advice of all of you there — to bring the parts of a divided body back into the unity of the whole church, and to tie them into the bond of Christian love. The other side would not bend. Their stubbornness was set and would not give way. They not only turned down the arms and the embrace of the root and mother they came from; the quarrel spread, and revived itself worse and worse, until they appointed an overseer of their own and set up outside the church a rival head — an adulterous one — against the pledge handed down once for all, the pledge of God’s own arrangement and of the oneness of the whole church. [c]

So now we have sent our letters to you. Your letters had reached us, and our colleagues’ as well, and then our colleagues Pompeius and Stephanus arrived — good men, and very dear to us — and by them the whole of this was set out and proved to us beyond any doubt, to everyone’s gladness. The holiness and the truth of what God handed down, and of what the church has settled, both required it of us. Beyond that, we have brought the same matters to the notice of our colleagues one by one throughout the province, and we have told them to send our brothers to you carrying letters of their own.

We have done this, although our mind and our intention had already been stated plainly to the brothers and to all the people here. When letters came recently from both sides, we read yours out and announced your appointment as overseer in everyone’s hearing. And remembering the honor we all share, out of regard for the weight and the holiness of the priestly office, we refused the material the other side had heaped up with bitter venom into a document and forwarded to us. We considered it and weighed it, and judged that in so large and so holy a gathering of brothers, with God’s priests seated together and his altar standing there, such things ought neither to be read nor to be heard. [i]

Things like that should not be brought out lightly, or published carelessly and crudely — things that a quarrelsome pen can turn into a stumbling block in the minds of those who hear them, and that can unsettle brothers who live far off, across the sea, with uncertain reports. Let them look to themselves, the men who serve their own rage or their own craving, forget God’s law and God’s holiness, and enjoy flinging about in the meantime charges they cannot prove. Even when they do not manage to destroy and ruin an innocent man, they are satisfied to have spattered him with lying reports and false rumors. We ought certainly to make the effort, as men set over the church and as priests should, that when anyone writes such things they get no hearing from us. Otherwise, what becomes of what we learn, and say is laid down in Scripture: “Keep your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking deceit.” And elsewhere: “Your mouth overflowed with malice, and your tongue wove deceit together. You sat and spoke against your brother, and slandered your own mother’s son.” And what the apostle says: “Let no rotten talk come out of your mouth, but what is good for building up faith, so that it may give grace to those who hear.” Beyond that, we show what ought to be done: when things like this are written out of somebody’s slanderous recklessness, we do not let them be read among us. And so, dearest brother, when letters came to me against you — even though they were the letters of the fellow elder who sits with you — since they breathed a tone of religious plainness and did not bark out any curses or abuse, I ordered them to be read to the clergy and to the people.

In wanting letters from our colleagues who were present at your appointment there, we were not forgetting the old custom, and we were not looking for anything new. It would have been enough for you to announce by letter that you had been made overseer — except that there was a faction on the other side taking the opposite line, and their slanders and made-up charges were disturbing the minds and perplexing the hearts of our colleagues, and of a good many of the brothers as well. To put the matter to rest, we judged it necessary to get from there the firm and settled word of our colleagues, and they wrote to us. They declared that the testimony their letters gave was fully earned by your character, your life and your teaching, and in doing so they took away from your rivals too — and from the men who delight either in novelty or in evil — every last scruple of doubt or disagreement. And following the advice we had weighed out with sound reason, the minds of the brothers, tossing about on this sea, have honestly and firmly approved your priesthood. [p]

For this, my brother, is what we work at above all, and what we ought to work at: to be careful to keep, as far as we can, the unity handed down by the Lord and, through his apostles, to us who came after them; and, as far as it lies with us, to gather into the church the scattered and straying sheep that the deliberate faction and the heretical testing of certain men is cutting off from their mother. Only those are left outside who have kept up their stubbornness and their madness and have refused to come back to us. They will have to give the Lord their own account of the split and the separation they made, and of the church they walked out on.

Now as to the case of certain elders here, and of Felicissimus: so that you may know what has been done here, our colleagues have sent you letters signed in their own hand. When you have heard the parties, you will learn from those letters what they judged and what sentence they gave. But you will do better, brother, if you also give orders that copies of the letters I sent to you lately by our colleagues Caldonius and Fortunatus be read out, so that everyone may be satisfied: what I wrote about this same Felicissimus and his elders to the clergy there, and to the people as well, to be read to the brothers there — announcing your appointment as overseer, and the course the whole business took, so that there as much as here the brotherhood may have all of it from us. I have sent copies of the same letters from here as well, by Mettius the sub-deacon, whom I have sent, and by Nicephorus the acolyte. I wish you always well, dearest brother, from my heart. [s]