Guiltier in His Feet

Cyprian to his brother Cornelius: greetings.

You have acted with care and with love, dearest brother, in sending Nicephorus the acolyte to us in such haste. He brought us the glad and glorious news of the confessors’ return, and he gave us a full account of the new and damaging schemes that Novatian and Novatus have devised for attacking the church of Christ. The day before, that harmful faction of heretical wickedness had reached us here — already lost itself, and ready to ruin anyone who joined it. The day after, Nicephorus arrived with your letter. [d]

From that letter we learned, and have begun to teach and explain to others, that Evaristus, once an overseer, has not remained even a layman. Banished from his chair and from his people, an exile from the church of Christ, he roams far and wide through other provinces; and having wrecked truth and faith in himself, he is now getting ready wrecks just as frightful for others who are like him. We learned about Nicostratus as well. He has lost his place as a deacon of the holy service, because he siphoned off the church’s money by a sacrilegious fraud and denied holding the deposits of widows and orphans. He did not so much want to come to Africa as to get away here from the city, driven by what he knew of his own robberies and his appalling crimes. And now, a deserter and a runaway from the church, as though changing your climate changed the man, he goes on boasting and announcing himself a confessor — when a man who has denied the church of Christ can no longer either be a confessor of Christ or be called one.

For the apostle Paul says: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and will be joined to his wife, and the two will be one flesh. This is a great mystery; but I am speaking about Christ and the church.” When the blessed apostle says this, and with his sacred voice bears witness to the union of Christ with the church — the two holding to each other by links that cannot be cut — how can a man be with Christ who is not with the bride of Christ and in his church? Or how does he take up the charge of leading and governing the church, when he has plundered and wronged the church of Christ?

About Novatus you need not have told us anything, since it is we who should rather have been describing Novatus to you. He was always greedy for something new, always raging with the rapacity of a greed that cannot be filled, always swollen with the arrogance and the stupidity of his own pride. The overseers there always knew him, and knew him badly. The voice of every priest had always condemned him as a heretic and a man who breaks faith. He is forever prying, so that he can betray. He flatters in order to deceive; he is never loyal in order to love. He is a torch and a fire for fanning the flames of faction, a whirlwind and a storm for wrecking the faith, the foe of quiet, the adversary of calm, the enemy of peace. In the end, when Novatus withdrew from among you — that is, when the storm and the whirlwind moved off — a measure of calm came back there, and the good and glorious confessors who had left the church at his prompting returned to the church once he had gone from the city. [i]

This is the same Novatus who first sowed the flames of discord and division among us; who cut some of the brothers here off from their overseer; who, in the middle of the persecution itself, was a second persecution to our people, overturning the minds of the brothers. He is the man who, without my leave and without my knowledge, out of his own factiousness and ambition, made his henchman Felicissimus a deacon — and then sailed to Rome with his own storm to overturn the church there, and tried to do things of the same kind and the same size, tearing part of the people away from the clergy by force and splitting the harmony of a brotherhood that had been tightly knit and loving toward one another. Since Rome, from her greatness, plainly ought to take precedence over Carthage, the crimes he committed there were greater and heavier still. The man who in the one place had made a deacon against the church, in the other made an overseer.

No one should be surprised at this in men like him. The wicked are always carried away in madness by their own furious passions, and once they have committed their crimes they are driven on by the very awareness of a corrupted mind. Nor can men stay in God’s church who have not kept its divine and churchly discipline, either in the way they live or in the peace of their character. Orphans he has stripped, widows he has cheated, church funds he has held back — and these are what exact from him the penalties we now watch falling on him in his madness. His own father starved to death in the street, and afterwards, even in death, Novatus would not bury him. He struck his wife in the womb with his heel; the miscarriage followed at once, and the child was delivered, the fruit of a murder committed by its own father. And does he now dare to condemn the hands of people who sacrificed, when he is guiltier in his own feet, which killed the son who was about to be born?

He has long been afraid of what he knew he had done. That is why he counted it certain that he would be not only thrown out of the body of elders but cut off from communion as well. The brothers were pressing for it, and the day of the hearing was coming on, when his case was to be dealt with in front of us — and it would have been, if the persecution had not stopped it. He welcomed that. With a kind of longing to slip away and evade being condemned, he committed all these crimes and stirred up all this trouble, so that a man who was going to be thrown out and shut off from the church got ahead of the judgment of the priests by leaving of his own accord — as though getting ahead of the sentence were the same thing as escaping the punishment. [l]

But as for the other brothers, whom we grieve to see taken in by him, we are working to get them away from the dangerous neighborhood of this crafty fraud, to get them clear of the deadly nets of his coaxing, and to bring them back to look for the church that he, by God’s own authority, earned his expulsion from. With the Lord’s help we trust that such men may return by his mercy, for a man cannot be lost unless it is plain that he had to be lost. As the Lord says in his Gospel: “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots.” Only the man who has not been planted in the commands and warnings of God the Father can walk away from the church. Only he can abandon the overseers and stay on in his madness with schismatics and heretics. But the mercy of God the Father, the pardon of Christ our Lord, and our own patience will bring the rest back into one with us. I wish you always well, dearest brother, from my heart. Farewell. [m]