The Kiss of a Newborn

Cyprian, and with him the colleagues who sat with him in council, sixty-six in all, to Fidus their brother: greetings.

We have read your letter, dearest brother, in which you told us about Victor, who used to be an elder. You wrote that our colleague Therapius acted rashly, far too early and in over-eager haste, and granted him peace before he had fully repented and made amends to the Lord God, against whom he had sinned. That troubled us, because it was a departure from the authority of our own decree: peace granted before the lawful and complete time of making amends, and without the people asking for it or even knowing of it, when no illness made it urgent and no necessity forced it. [d]

The matter was weighed among us a long while. In the end we judged it enough to rebuke our colleague Therapius for having done this rashly, and to instruct him not to do the same for anyone else. But we did not think that peace, once granted in any way at all by a priest of God, was to be taken back. And so we have let Victor keep the communion that was granted to him.

But as for the case of the infants: you say they ought not to be baptized within the second or third day after they are born, and that the law of the ancient circumcision should be kept in view, so that in your judgment a child just born should not be baptized and made holy before the eighth day. In our council we all thought very differently. Not one man agreed with the course you proposed. We all judged, rather, that the mercy and grace of God is to be refused to no one born of man. [i]

For as the Lord says in his Gospel, “The Son of Man has not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them,” so, as far as we are able, we must work to see that no soul is lost, if that is possible. What is lacking to a person who has once been formed in the womb by the hand of God? To us, and to our eyes, those who are born appear to gain something as the days of the world go by. But whatever things are made by God are finished by the majesty and the working of God who made them.

What is more, faith in the divine Scriptures declares to us that among all alike, infants and those who are older, the divine gift is equal and the same. Elisha prayed to God and laid himself out over the widow’s infant son, who was lying dead: his head set on the child’s head, his face on the child’s face, the limbs of Elisha spread over and joined to each of the child’s limbs, his feet to the child’s feet. If this is weighed as a matter of the inequality of our birth and our bodies, an infant could not be made equal to a grown and full-sized man; its small limbs could not fit and match the larger limbs of an adult. But what is expressed there is the divine and spiritual equality: that all people are alike and equal, since they have once been made by God. [k]

Our age may differ in how far our bodies have grown, according to the world, but not according to God. Otherwise the very grace given to the baptized would be given less or more according to the age of those who receive it, when in fact the Holy Spirit is not given by measure, but by the love and mercy of the Father alike to all. For God shows no favoritism to a person, and so he shows none to an age either. He shows himself Father to all, with a carefully weighed equality, so that heavenly grace may be reached.

As for what you say, that in the first days after its birth an infant is not clean to look at, so that any of us would still shudder to kiss it: we do not think this ought to be brought forward as anything that stands in the way of heavenly grace. For it is written, “To the pure all things are pure.” None of us ought to shudder at what God has seen fit to make. The infant is still fresh from its birth, and yet it is not such a thing that anyone should shudder to kiss it when grace is being given and peace made. For in the kiss of an infant, every one of us ought, for the sake of his own religion, to think of the hands of God themselves, still new, which in a manner of speaking we are kissing, in a man lately formed and freshly born, when we embrace what God has made. [m]

As for the keeping of the eighth day in the Jewish circumcision of the flesh, a sign was given there beforehand, in shadow and in practice; but when Christ came it was fulfilled in truth. For because the eighth day, that is, the first day after the sabbath, was to be the day on which the Lord would rise again, and make us alive, and give us the circumcision of the spirit, that eighth day, the first day after the sabbath, the Lord’s day, went ahead of it as a picture. And the picture ceased when the truth came in its own time and spiritual circumcision was given to us.

For this reason we think that no one is to be hindered from obtaining grace by the law that was laid down long ago, and that spiritual circumcision ought not to be hindered by circumcision of the flesh. Every human being without exception is to be admitted to the grace of Christ, since Peter too speaks in the Acts of the Apostles and says, “The Lord has told me that I should call no man common or unclean.” [p]

But if anything could hinder people from obtaining grace, it would be their more serious sins that hindered the mature, the grown, and the old. And if even the greatest sinners, who had sinned much against God, are granted the forgiveness of sins when they afterward come to believe, and nobody is hindered from baptism and from grace, how much more ought we to shrink from hindering an infant! Lately born, he has not sinned. He has only caught, in being born after the flesh according to Adam, the infection of the ancient death at his very first birth. And for that very reason he comes the more easily to receive the forgiveness of sins, since what is forgiven him is not his own sins, but another’s.

And so, dearest brother, this was our judgment in council: that no one at all ought to be hindered by us from baptism and from the grace of God, who is merciful and kind and loving toward everyone. And since this is to be observed and held to in the case of all, we think it is to be observed all the more in the case of infants and the newly born, who on this very account have the greater claim on our help and on the mercy of God: because at the very beginning of their birth, crying and weeping, they do nothing else but plead. We pray, dearest brother, that you may always be well. [r]