Bring the Trophies Home

Cyprian to Maximus the elder, and to Urbanus, Sidonius, and Macarius, his brothers: greetings.

Dearest brothers, when I read your letters — the ones you wrote me about your return, about the peace of the church, and about the mending of our brotherhood — I say it openly: the joy they gave me was as great as the joy I felt before, when I learned of the glory of your confession and heard with thanks the news of the heavenly and spiritual renown you had won in that fight. [e]

For this too is a confession of your faith, and it earns praise of its own: to confess that the church is one; to refuse a share in other men’s error — or rather in their wickedness; and to go looking again for the same camp you marched out of, the camp you sprang from with all your strength to fight the battle and beat down the enemy. The trophies won on the field ought to be carried back to the place the weapons came from, so that the church of Christ does not lose the very soldiers, covered in glory, whom Christ himself equipped for glory.

As it is, in the peace of the Lord you have kept the right course of your faith and the rule of an undivided love and harmony, and by the way you have walked you have given the rest an example of love and peace. So now the truth of the church, and the unity of the sacred bond of the good news that we hold, are tied together by your agreement and your pledge as well; and men who had confessed Christ do not end as leaders of error, after standing out as the praised beginners of courage and honor.

Let others weigh how much they may congratulate you, or how much each of them may take pride in it for himself. For my part I say it openly: my congratulations are greater, and I boast of you to others more, for this peaceable return of yours and for your love. [f]

For you ought to hear plainly what was in my heart. I grieved hard, and I was in great distress, that I could not share the common life with men I had once begun to love. Once the error of the split — the heresy — took hold of you on your way out of prison, it looked as though your glory had been left behind in the cell. The honor of your name seemed to have stayed down there, when soldiers of Christ did not come back from prison to the church, though it was with the church’s praise and congratulations that they had gone into it.

There may seem to be weeds in the church; still, neither our faith nor our love should be hindered by it, so that seeing weeds in the church we walk out of the church ourselves. Our one task is to work at being wheat, so that when the wheat begins to be gathered into the Lord’s barns we may receive the fruit of our labor and our work. [g]

The apostle says in his letter, “In a great house there are not only vessels of gold and silver, but also of wood and of clay — some for honor and some for dishonor.” Let us press on, dearest brothers, and work as hard as we possibly can, so that we may be vessels of gold or silver. But breaking the vessels of clay is granted to the Lord alone, and it is to him that the rod of iron has been given. A servant cannot be greater than his master, and no one may claim for himself what the Father has given to the Son alone — as though he could take up the winnowing fork to clear and clean the threshing floor, or could sort every weed out of the wheat by human judgment.

That is proud stubbornness, and a sacrilegious presumption, which a twisted madness takes upon itself. And while some are forever grabbing more authority for themselves than gentle justice asks for, they are lost out of the church; and while they lift themselves up insolently, blinded by their own swelling, they lose the light of the truth. That is why we too have kept to a measure. Thinking of the Lord’s scales, and thinking of the love and mercy of God the Father, we have turned the matter over with ourselves long and carefully, and have weighed with the restraint it deserves what ought to be done.

You can look into all of this thoroughly if you will read the books I recently read out here, and which, for the love we share, I have sent on to you to read as well. In them the lapsed lack neither the blame that rebukes them nor the medicine that heals them. And my small ability has set out, as well as it could, the unity of the universal church. [l]

I trust more and more that this book will please you, since you now read it in such a way as both to approve it and to love it — for what we wrote in words you are carrying out in deeds, when you come back to the church in the unity of love and peace. I wish you always well, dearest brothers, and greatly longed for, from my heart. Farewell.