Do Not Fear Their Threats

Cyprian to Cornelius his brother: greetings.

I have read your letter, dearest brother, the one you sent by our brother Saturus the acolyte. It is full to overflowing of brotherly love, of the church’s discipline, and of a priest’s plain rebuke. In it you let me know that Felicissimus has been rejected by you there — no new enemy of Christ, this man, but one cut off from the church long ago for a great many serious crimes, and condemned not by my judgment alone but by the judgment of a great many of my fellow overseers. You tell me that when he arrived with a gang and a faction of desperate men behind him, he was driven out of the church with all the firmness an overseer is bound to use. He was driven from that church long ago, he and others like him, by the majesty of God and by the severity of Christ our Lord and Judge. He is the author of schism and division. He handled money entrusted to him and used it falsely. He violated virgins. He has broken up and corrupted many marriages. A man like that was not to go on defiling the bride of Christ — until now uncorrupted, holy, and chaste — by the dishonor of his presence and by his shameless and incestuous touch. [d]

But then I read your other letter, brother, the one you attached to the first, and I was considerably surprised to see that you had been shaken to some degree by the threats and the terrors of the men who had come. By your own account they attacked you and threatened you with the utmost desperation: if you would not receive the letters they had brought, they would read them out in public, and would say a great many low and disgraceful things — the sort of thing that fits their mouths. But if that is how matters stand, dearest brother — if the nerve of the worst men is a thing to be dreaded, and what wicked men cannot get by right and fairness they can get by daring and desperation — then there is an end of the strength of an overseer’s office, and an end of the high and God-given power of governing the church. We cannot go on any longer; in fact we can no longer be Christians at all, if it has come to this, that we are to be afraid of the threats and the traps of men who have been cast out. For the Gentiles threaten too, and the Jews, and the heretics, and all those whose hearts and minds the devil has taken over; every day they give proof of their poisonous madness with raging voices. We are not to give way, then, because they threaten. The adversary and enemy is no greater than Christ for claiming so much for himself and taking so much upon himself in this world. An unshakable strength of faith ought to stay with us, dearest brother; and against every breaking and beating of the waves that roar at us, a steady and unshaken courage should set itself like a rock that stands by its own hardness and its own mass. It makes no difference where the terror or the danger comes from when it comes to an overseer, whose life is lived under terrors and dangers, and who is made glorious by those very terrors and dangers. [h]

For we should not think much of bare threats from Gentiles or from Jews, when we see that the Lord himself was deserted by his own brothers, and was betrayed by a man he had himself chosen among his apostles; and that at the beginning of the world it was a brother and no one else who killed righteous Abel, and an angry brother who chased Jacob as he fled, and young Joseph who was sold by an act of his brothers. In the Gospel too we read the warning that our enemies would rather be of our own household, and that those who have first shared in the sacred bond of unity will be the ones who hand one another over. It makes no difference who does the handing over or who does the raging, since God allows those to be handed over whom he means to crown. It is no disgrace to us to suffer from our brothers what Christ suffered, and it is no glory to them to do what Judas did. But what insolence there is in them, what swollen, puffed-up, empty boasting on the part of these threateners — to threaten me over there while I am not present, when here they have me present and within their reach! I am not afraid of the abuse with which they wound themselves and their own lives every day. I do not tremble at their clubs and their stones and their swords, which they wave about with the words of men who murder their own kin. As far as it lies in them, such men are murderers before God. Yet they cannot kill unless the Lord has allowed them to kill; and though I have only one death to die, they kill me daily by their hatred, their words, and their villainies.

But that is no reason, dearest brother, to abandon the church’s discipline or to slacken a priest’s censure — not because we are shaken by abuse or rattled by terrors. Holy Scripture comes to meet us and warns us, saying: “But the man who presumes and is arrogant, the man who boasts of himself, who has made his appetite as wide as the world of the dead, will accomplish nothing.” And again: “Do not fear the words of a sinful man, for his glory will be dung and worms. Today he is lifted up, and tomorrow he will not be found, because he has gone back into his own earth, and his scheming has perished.” And again: “I have seen the wicked lifted high and raised above the cedars of Lebanon; and I passed by, and there he was not; I looked for him, and his place was not found.” [l]

Being lifted up, being swollen, arrogant and lofty boasting — these do not come from the teaching of Christ, who teaches humility. They come from the spirit of Antichrist, whom the Lord rebukes through his prophet, saying: “For you have said in your heart, I will climb into heaven, I will set my throne above the stars of God; I will sit on a high mountain, above the high mountains to the north; I will climb above the clouds; I will be like the Most High.” And he added: “Yet you will go down to the world of the dead, to the foundations of the earth; and those who see you will stare at you.” That is why Scripture threatens the same punishment on such men in another place as well, and says: “For the day of the Lord of hosts will be upon everyone who does injury and is proud, and upon everyone who is lifted up and lofty.”

So every man is given away at once by his own mouth and his own words, and whether he has Christ in his heart or Antichrist is told by his speaking, as the Lord says in his Gospel: “Brood of vipers, how can you speak good things when you are evil? For out of what fills the heart the mouth speaks. A good man out of his good store brings out good things, and an evil man out of his evil store brings out evil things.” And that is why the rich sinner who begs help from Lazarus — Lazarus by then laid in Abraham’s arms and settled in a place of comfort, while he writhes in torment and is eaten by the heat of the burning flame — suffers more punishment in his mouth and his tongue than in any other part of his body: because it was surely in his mouth and his tongue that he had sinned most.

For it is written: “Nor will slanderers inherit the kingdom of God.” And again the Lord says in his Gospel: “Whoever says to his brother, You fool, and whoever says, Raca, will be liable to the Gehenna of fire.” How, then, are they to escape the rebuke of the Lord who avenges — men who pile up talk like this not only on their brothers but on the priests as well? God has stooped to grant the priests such honor that whoever would not obey his priest, and the man judging there for the time, was to be put to death at once. [p]

In Deuteronomy the Lord God says: “And the man who acts presumptuously and will not listen to the priest or to the judge, whoever he may be in those days — that man will die; and all the people, when they hear of it, will be afraid, and will act wickedly no more.” And when Samuel was despised by the Jews, God says to him: “They have not despised you; they have despised me.” And the Lord also says in the Gospel: “Whoever hears you hears me, and him who sent me; and whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects him who sent me.”

And when he had cleansed the man with leprosy, he said: “Go, show yourself to the priest.” And afterwards, in the time of his suffering, when he had taken a blow on the face from a servant of the high priest, the servant said to him: “Is that how you answer the high priest?” The Lord said nothing insulting against the high priest and took nothing away from a priest’s honor. Instead, stating his own innocence and showing it, he says: “If I have spoken wrongly, give evidence of the wrong; but if rightly, why do you strike me?” And later still, in the Acts of the Apostles, it was said to the blessed apostle Paul: “Are you insulting God’s priest?” Those men had by then begun to be sacrilegious and godless and bloodstained, the Lord having already been crucified, and they no longer kept anything of a priest’s honor and authority. Even so Paul, out of regard for the name itself, empty as it was, and for what was by then only the shadow of a priest, said: “I did not know, brothers, that he was the high priest; for it is written, You shall not speak evil of the ruler of your people.”

So when there are examples like these, and so many of them, and others besides — precedents by which a priest’s authority and power stand established by God’s own stooping favor — what sort of people do you suppose these are, who are enemies of the priests and rebels against the universal church, and who are frightened neither by the threat of a Lord who warns them beforehand nor by the punishment of the judgment that is coming? For heresies have arisen and schisms have begun from no other source than this: that God’s priest is not obeyed, and that men do not consider that in a church there is one man who is priest for the time, and judge for the time in Christ’s place. If the whole brotherhood obeyed him, as the teaching of God requires, no one would stir up anything against the body of priests. No one, after God’s verdict, after the people’s vote, after the agreement of his fellow overseers, would make himself a judge — not of the overseer now, but of God. No one would tear the church apart by splitting the unity of Christ. No one, pleasing himself and swelling with arrogance, would found a new heresy of his own, separate and outside. [t]

Unless a man is so daringly sacrilegious and so far gone in mind as to think that a priest is made without God’s verdict, when the Lord says in his Gospel: “Are not two sparrows sold for an assarion? And one of them does not fall to the ground without your Father’s will.” When he says that not even the smallest things happen without God’s will, does anyone suppose that the highest and greatest things happen in God’s church either without God’s knowledge or without his permission, and that priests — his stewards, that is — are not appointed by his decision? This is not to have the faith we live by. This is not to give God the honor due to him, when it is by his direction and his decision that we know and believe all things are ruled and governed.

There are, beyond question, overseers made not by the will of God — the ones made outside the church, the ones made against the arrangement and the tradition of the Gospel, as the Lord himself says in the twelve prophets: “They have set up a king for themselves, and not by me.” And again: “Their sacrifices are like the bread of mourners; everyone who eats of them will be defiled.” And the Holy Spirit cries out through Isaiah too, and says: “Woe to you, children who are deserters. This is what the Lord says: You have taken counsel, but not from me, and you have made a covenant, but not by my Spirit, so as to add sin to sin.”

But — and I speak to you as a man provoked, I speak as a man grieving, I speak because I am forced to — take the case of a man appointed overseer in the place of one who has died; chosen in a time of peace by the vote of a whole people; protected by God’s help through a persecution; faithfully bound to all his colleagues; proved to his own people by four years’ experience now in the office; keeping discipline in the time of peace, and in the time of trouble put on the proscription lists with the name of his office applied and attached to him; asked for so often in the circus “for the lions”; honored in the amphitheater by the witness of God’s stooping favor; and now, in these very days on which I am writing this letter to you, demanded in the circus “for the lions” all over again by the shouting of the crowd, because of the sacrifices the people were ordered by published edict to perform. When a man like that, dearest brother, is seen to be attacked by desperate and reckless men, by men whose place is outside the church, it is plain who is attacking him. Not Christ, surely, who both appoints his priests and protects them; but the one who is Christ’s adversary and his church’s enemy, and who hounds the man who governs the church with all his spite for this very purpose: that with the helmsman taken away he may rage more savagely and more violently, and scatter the church. [y]

And it ought not to disturb anyone, my dearest brother, who is faithful and keeps the Gospel in mind and holds on to the commands of the apostle who warned us beforehand, if in the last days certain men — proud, defiant, enemies of God’s priests — either leave the church or act against the church, since both the Lord and his apostles foretold that there would be such men. And let no one be surprised that the servant set over them should be deserted by some, when the Lord himself was deserted by his own disciples — he who did such great and wonderful works, and who made plain what God the Father is by the evidence of the things he did. [ac]

And yet he did not scold them when they went away, or even threaten them harshly. Instead he turned to his apostles and said: “Do you want to go away too?” He was plainly keeping to the law by which a man, left to his own liberty and set in his own choice, chooses for himself either death or salvation. All the same, Peter, on whom the church had been built by that same Lord, speaking as one for all and answering with the voice of the church, says: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we believe and are sure that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

He was showing, beyond question, that those who departed from Christ perished by their own fault, and that the church which believes in Christ and holds on to what it once learned never departs from him at all; and that those are the church who stay in the house of God. But on the other hand, those men are not the planting planted by God the Father, whom we see not standing firm with the solidity of wheat but blown about like chaff by the breath of the enemy scattering them. John says of them in his letter: “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would certainly have stayed with us.” Paul too warns us, when evil men perish out of the church, not to be disturbed, and not to let our faith be lessened by the departure of the faithless. He says: “For what of it, if some of them have fallen away from the faith? Has their unbelief made God’s faithfulness of no effect? Certainly not. For God is true, and every man a liar.”

For our own part, dearest brother, our conscience requires us to work at this: that no one should perish out of the church through any fault of ours. But if anyone perishes of his own accord and by his own sin, and is unwilling to repent and come back to the church, then we who have been anxious for their well-being will be blameless on the day of judgment, and they alone will be left in punishment who refused to be healed by the wholesomeness of our advice. [af]

Nor ought the abuse of the lost to move us in the least to leave the straight road and the settled rule, since the apostle instructs us as well, saying: “If I were pleasing men, I would not be the servant of Christ.” There is a great difference between wanting to deserve well of men and wanting to deserve well of God. If we look to please men, the Lord is offended. But if we strive and labor to please God, we ought to think nothing of human abuse and insult.