Not Every Fall Is Alike

Cyprian to his brother Antonianus: greetings.

I received your first letters, dearest brother — letters that held firmly to the harmony of the college of priests and stayed with the universal church. In them you let me know that you were not in fellowship with Novatian, but were following my advice and holding one common agreement with Cornelius, our fellow overseer. You asked me, besides, to pass a copy of those same letters on to our colleague Cornelius, so that he could lay aside every worry and know at once that you were in communion with him — that is, with the universal church. [d]

But afterwards other letters of yours arrived, sent by Quintus, our fellow elder. In these I saw that your mind had begun to waver, worked on by letters from Novatian. Earlier you had settled your opinion and your agreement firmly; now in these letters you wanted me to write to you all over again — what heresy Novatian has brought in, and on what grounds Cornelius is in fellowship with Trophimus and with the men who sacrificed. If in all this you are anxious out of care for the faith, and are working hard to find out the truth of a doubtful business, then the hesitating anxiety of a mind not yet made up, in the fear of God, is nothing to be blamed for. [i]

Still, since I see that after the first opinion you set down in your letter you have been shaken since by letters from Novatian, let me say this first of all, dearest brother. Serious men, men once set on the strong rock with solid firmness, are not moved — I will not say by a light breath of air, but not even by a wind or a storm. Otherwise their minds go changeable and unsure, driven back and forth again and again by one opinion after another, as gusts of wind rush at them, and they are turned away from their purpose with some disgrace of fickleness. So that Novatian’s letters may not do this to you, or to anyone else, I will set out the whole business for you in a few words, as you asked me to, my brother. [j]

And first of all, since you seem troubled about what I myself have done, I have to clear my own person and my own case in your eyes. I do not want anyone thinking I gave up my purpose lightly — that at the outset, at the very beginning, I kept up the vigor of the gospel, and then later turned my mind away from discipline and from its old severity of judgment, so as to think that peace should be made easy for men who have stained their conscience with certificates, or who have offered abominable sacrifices. I have done both those things, and not without long weighing and balancing of reasons.

While the battle was still going on, and the struggle of a glorious contest was raging in the persecution, the courage of the soldiers had to be fired up with every kind of urging and with all the pressure I had. The minds of the lapsed above all had to be roused by my voice, as if by a trumpet call, so that they would take the road of repentance — and not only with prayers and weeping. Since a chance was being offered them to take up the struggle again and win back their salvation, they had to be reproved by my voice and stirred instead to the eagerness of confession and the glory of martyrdom. [k]

So when the elders and deacons wrote to me about certain people, saying that they had no restraint and were pressing hard to be received into communion, I answered them in a letter that still exists, and I added this: “If they are as anxious as all that, what they are asking for is already in their own hands. The time itself is offering them more than they ask. The battle is still being fought. The struggle is put on daily. If they truly and steadily repent of what they have done, and the heat of their faith wins out, then a man who cannot be made to wait can be crowned.” But I put off deciding what should be arranged in the case of the lapsed, so that when quiet and calm had been granted, and God’s kindness allowed the overseers to gather in one place, we could then share and weigh the advice collected from comparing everyone’s opinion, and settle what needed to be done. And if anyone, ahead of our council and ahead of the decision reached by everyone’s advice, should rashly want to be in communion with the lapsed, he himself was to be held back from communion.

I wrote all this very fully to Rome as well — to the clergy there, who at that time were still acting without an overseer, and to the confessors: Maximus the elder and the rest, who were then shut up in prison and are now in the church, joined with Cornelius. You can tell that I wrote it from their reply, for in their letter they wrote this: “Still, what you yourself have said in so weighty a matter satisfies us: that the peace of the church must first be kept, and then that a gathering for counsel should be brought together — with an overseer, elders, deacons and confessors, along with the laypeople who have stood firm — and that we should deal there with the case of the lapsed.” Something else was added — Novatian writing it at the time, and reading out in his own voice what he had written, and Moyses the elder, then still a confessor and now a martyr, signing it — namely that peace ought to be granted to any of the lapsed who were sick and at the point of leaving this life. That letter was sent through the whole world, and was brought to the notice of all the churches and all the brothers. [n]

Then, following what had been decided beforehand: when the persecution had quieted and there was an opportunity to meet, a large number of overseers came together — men whom their faith and God’s protection had kept sound and safe. The divine Scriptures were brought forward on both sides, and we balanced the decision with healthy moderation. The hope of communion and peace was not to be refused the lapsed altogether, or they would fail worse still out of despair and, with the church shut against them, would live as the pagan world lives. But neither was the gospel’s censure to be loosened, so that they might rush headlong into communion. Instead their repentance was to be drawn out a long while, the Father’s mercy begged with grief, and each person’s case and wish and need looked into one by one — all of it as it stands in a little book which I trust has reached you, where the several headings of our decisions are collected. And in case the number of overseers in Africa should seem too small, we wrote about this to Rome as well, to Cornelius our colleague. He too held a council, with a great many overseers, and came to the same view we had held, with the same seriousness and the same healthy moderation. [q]

It has become necessary to write to you about this now, so that you may know I have done nothing lightly. As I had set out beforehand in my letters, I had put everything off to the common decision of our council, and up to that point I had not been in communion with a single one of the lapsed — not while there was still an opening by which the lapsed might receive not only pardon but even a crown. Afterwards, though, the agreement of our college required it, and so did the good of gathering the brotherhood together and healing its wound. So I gave in to the necessity of the times, and judged that the safety of the many had to be seen to. And I do not now back away from what was once settled in our council by common agreement — even though a great many things are being aired by a great many voices, and lies against God’s priests, uttered out of the devil’s mouth, are thrown about everywhere to tear apart the harmony of universal unity. It is fitting for you, though, as a good brother and a fellow priest of one mind with me, not to take in easily what spiteful men and deserters may say. Weigh carefully instead what your colleagues — modest and serious men — actually do, judging it from an examination of our life and our teaching. [r]

I come now, dearest brother, to the character of Cornelius our colleague, so that along with us you may know Cornelius more justly — not from the lies of spiteful men and slanderers, but from the judgment of the Lord God, who made him an overseer, and from the testimony of his fellow overseers, whose whole number has agreed about him with complete unanimity throughout the whole world. [s]

Here is the thing that commends our dearest Cornelius, with a report worth praising, to God and to Christ, and to his church, and to all his fellow priests as well: he was not a man who came to the office of overseer all at once. He was promoted through every one of the church’s offices, and he had often served the Lord well in the work of God, and so he climbed by all the grades of religious service to the high summit of the priesthood. What is more, he neither asked for the office of overseer nor wanted it. He did not seize it the way others do, when the swelling of arrogance and pride puffs them up. He was quiet instead, and mild, the sort of man those are who are chosen by God for this office. Keeping to the modesty of his virgin self-restraint, and to the humility of a reverence born in him and guarded, he did not use force to be made an overseer, as some men do. He was the one forced: he had to be compelled to take the office of overseer at all.

He was made overseer by a great many of our colleagues who were in the city of Rome at the time, and they sent us letters about his ordination — honorable letters, full of praise, and remarkable for the testimony they announced about him. Cornelius, moreover, was made overseer by the judgment of God and of his Christ, by the testimony of nearly all the clergy, by the vote of the people who were present at the time, and by the assembly of priests old in the office and of good men — and this at a time when no one had been made overseer before him, when the place of Fabian, which is to say the place of Peter, and the rank of the priestly chair stood empty. That place has now been filled by the will of God and settled by the consent of all of us. So whoever wants to be made an overseer now has to be made one from outside; and he cannot have the ordination of the church who does not hold the unity of the church. Whoever he may be, however much he boasts about himself and claims for himself, he is unholy, he is a stranger, he is outside. And since there cannot be a second after the first, whoever is made after the man who ought to stand alone is not second to him — he is in fact nothing at all.

Then afterwards, once he had taken up the office of overseer — not got by begging for it, and not wrung out of anyone, but given by the will of God, who makes priests — consider what strength there was in the very taking up of it: what firmness of mind, what solidity of faith. This is a thing we ought to look into thoroughly and praise with a plain heart. He sat down without fear in the priestly chair at Rome at the very time when a tyrant hateful to God’s priests was threatening things that can be spoken and things that cannot. That man would have listened far more patiently and calmly to the news that a rival prince had been raised up against him than to the news that a priest of God had been installed at Rome. [u]

Is this man not to be commended, dearest brother, with the highest testimony to his courage and his faith? Is he not to be counted among the glorious confessors and martyrs — a man who for so long sat waiting for those who would mangle his body, the avengers of a savage tyrant, men who, when Cornelius stood against their murderous edicts and trampled on their threats and their sufferings and their tortures by the vigor of his faith, would either rush at him with the sword, or crucify him, or scorch him with fire, or tear open his belly and his limbs with some unheard-of kind of punishment? The majesty and goodness of the Lord who protects us did guard the priest, once made, whom he had willed to be made. Even so, as far as his own devotion and fear were concerned, Cornelius went through everything he could go through; and he conquered the tyrant first, by his priestly office, before that tyrant was conquered later in arms and in war.

As for certain shameful and spiteful things that are being bandied about concerning him, I would not have you wonder at it, since you know that this is always the devil’s work: to wound God’s servants with lies, and to blacken a glorious name with false reports, so that men who are bright in the light of their own conscience may be tarnished by what other people say. You should know, besides, that our colleagues have looked into the matter, and have certainly found that he is marked with the stain of no certificate, as some hint that he is. Neither has he mixed himself into unholy fellowship with the overseers who sacrificed. He has only taken into fellowship with us those men whose case had been heard and whose innocence was proved.

As for Trophimus too, about whom you wanted news written to you, the case is not what the report and the lie of spiteful people carried to you. Our dearest brother did what our predecessors have often done: in bringing the brothers back together, he gave way to necessity. A very large part of the people had gone off with Trophimus. So when Trophimus came back to the church, and made amends, and confessed his earlier mistake with the repentance of prayer, and with complete humility and satisfaction called back the brotherhood he had lately taken away, his prayers were heard. Not Trophimus only, but a very great number of the brothers who had been with Trophimus, were let into the Lord’s church — and they would not all have come back to the church if they had not come in Trophimus’ company. So the matter was weighed there with a number of colleagues, and Trophimus was received; and the return of the brothers, and salvation restored to many, made his amends for him. Even so, Trophimus was received on these terms only: that he is in communion as a layman, and not — as the letters of spiteful men informed you — in such a way as to take the place of a priest.

Then as to what you were told, that Cornelius is in communion everywhere with men who have sacrificed — that news too has come out of the false reports of the deserters. People who leave us cannot praise us, and we ought not to expect to please men who, while they are displeasing us and revolting against the church, keep pressing hard to lure brothers away from the church. So, dearest brothers, do not lightly listen to, or believe, whatever is being rumored at the moment against Cornelius and about me. [v]

If any of them are seized by illness, help is given them in their danger, as has been decided. But after they have been helped, and peace has been granted them in their danger, we cannot then smother them or destroy them, or drive them by our own force or with our own hands to the outcome of death — as though, because peace is granted to the dying, the people who received peace had to die. In fact the mark of God’s love and a father’s gentleness shows more clearly this way: those who in the peace given them receive the pledge of life are, by that very peace they received, bound to life here as well. And so, if a reprieve is given by God once peace has been received, no one ought to complain about the priests over it, since it has been settled once for all that brothers in peril are to be helped. [w]

And you must not think, dearest brother, as some do, that the men who took certificates are to be put on a level with those who sacrificed. Even among those who sacrificed, the situation and the case are often different. We must not put on the same level a man who leapt forward at once and willingly to the abominable sacrifice and a man who reached that deadly end under compulsion, after a long fight and a long resistance; a man who betrayed both himself and everyone connected with him, and a man who went up to the trial himself on behalf of them all and so shielded his wife and his children and his whole household by taking the danger on himself; a man who drove his own household or his friends into the crime, and a man who spared his household and his slaves, and even took many brothers who were leaving for exile and flight into his house and his hospitality — a man showing and offering to the Lord many souls alive and safe, to plead for the one soul that was wounded.

Since, then, there is so much difference among those who sacrificed, what a want of mercy it is, and how bitter a hardship, to lump the men who took certificates in with the men who sacrificed — when the one who took the certificate may say: “I had read it beforehand, and I had been made aware of it by the overseer’s teaching, that we must not sacrifice to idols, that God’s servant ought not to worship images. And so, to keep myself from doing what was not lawful, when the chance of taking a certificate was offered me — and I would not have taken even that, if the chance had not been put in front of me — I either went myself, or charged someone else who was going, to tell the magistrate that I am a Christian, that I am not allowed to sacrifice, that I cannot come to the devil’s altars, and that I am paying a price for this very purpose: so that I may not do what is not lawful for me to do.” But now even the man who is stained with having taken a certificate — once he has learned from our warnings that he ought not to have done even that, and that although his hand is clean and no touch of the deadly food has polluted his lips, his conscience is polluted all the same — weeps when he hears us, and laments, and is now warned of the thing in which he sinned. Deceived not so much by guilt as by mistake, he bears witness that for another time he is taught and ready. [x]