Both Will Be Read

Cyprian, who is also called Thascius, to his brother Florentius, who is also called Pupianus: greetings.

I had thought, brother, that by now you had at last come to repentance for rashly listening to, or believing, things said about me in time past that were so wicked, so shameful, so detestable even among pagans. But now, from your own letter, I see you are still exactly what you were. You believe the same things about me, and you hold on to what you believed. And so that the dignity of your eminence and of your martyrdom may not be stained by being in communion with me, you are looking carefully into my character; and after God the Judge, who makes priests, you want to sit in judgment — I will not say on me, for what am I? — but on the judgment of God and of Christ. [d]

That is not believing in God. That is standing up as a rebel against Christ and his gospel. For he says, “Are not two sparrows sold for an assarion? And neither of them falls to the ground apart from my Father’s will.” His majesty and his truth prove that not even trifles happen without God’s knowledge and permission — and yet you think God’s priests are ordained in the church without his knowing it. For to believe that the men who are ordained are unworthy and unchaste: what is that but to believe that his priests are not appointed in the church by God and through God?

Do you suppose that my own testimony about myself is better than God’s? The Lord himself teaches that testimony is not true when a man stands up as a witness about himself, and for this plain reason: everyone will certainly favor himself, and no one will bring damaging things forward against himself. There can be a straightforward confidence in the truth only when someone else is the one who reports and testifies to what is said of us. [g]

“If I testify about myself,” he says, “my testimony is not true; there is another who testifies about me.”

But if the Lord himself, who is going to judge everything before long, was unwilling to be believed on his own testimony, and preferred to be approved by the judgment and testimony of God the Father, how much more ought his servants to keep to this — servants who are not only approved by the judgment and testimony of God, but boast in it!

With you, though, the invention of hostile and spiteful men has won out against God’s own decree, and against a conscience of ours that rests on the strength of its faith. As if, among lapsed and profane men placed outside the church, men from whose hearts the Holy Spirit has gone, there could be anything but a warped mind, a lying tongue, poisonous hatred, and sacrilegious falsehood. Whoever believes them will inevitably be found standing with them when the day of judgment comes.

As for what you said — that priests ought to be lowly, since the Lord and his apostles were lowly — all the brothers, and the pagans as well, know my humility and love it; and you knew it and loved it yourself, while you were still in the church and in communion with me. But which of the two of us is far from humility? I, who serve the brothers every day and welcome everyone who comes to the church with goodwill and gladness? Or you, who make yourself an overseer over an overseer and a judge over a judge, when it is God who has given him for this time? [i]

And yet the Lord God says in Deuteronomy: “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 presumptuously no more.” And again he speaks to Samuel and says: “They have not rejected you; they have rejected me.”

And the Lord, in the gospel, when it was said to him, “Is that how you answer the high priest?” guarded the dignity of the priesthood and taught that it must be kept up. He would say nothing against the high priest. He only cleared his own innocence, and answered: “If I have spoken wrongly, give evidence of the wrong; but if rightly, why do you strike me?”

The blessed apostle did the same. When it was said to him, “Is this how you insult God’s high priest?” he said nothing abusive against the priest — though he could have raised himself boldly against men who had crucified the Lord, men who by then had sacrificed away God and Christ, and the temple and the priesthood with them. Even in false and degraded priests he still had regard for the bare empty shadow of the priestly name, and he 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.”

Unless, perhaps, I was a priest to you before the persecution, while you were in communion with me, and stopped being a priest after it! For when the persecution came it lifted you to the highest height of martyrdom — while it pressed me down under the weight of an outlawry, since the public notice ran: “If anyone holds or possesses any property of Caecilius Cyprian, overseer of the Christians—” So men who did not believe that God appoints an overseer could still believe that the devil outlaws one. [l]

I do not boast of this. I bring it up with grief, since you set yourself up as a judge of God and of Christ, who says to the apostles, and so to all the leaders who succeed the apostles by ordination in their place: “Whoever listens to you listens to me; and whoever listens to me listens to the one who sent me. And whoever rejects you rejects me, and rejects the one who sent me.”

This is where schisms and heresies have come from, and still come from: that the overseer, who is one, and who governs the church, is treated with contempt by the proud presumption of certain people; and the man whom God has thought fit to honor is judged unfit by men. [n]

What swollen pride this is, what arrogance of soul, what puffed-up mind — to summon the men set over the church, and its priests, to a hearing of your own! And unless I am declared clean in your sight and acquitted by your judgment, then look: for six years now the brotherhood has had no overseer, the people no leader, the flock no shepherd, the church no helmsman, Christ no one to stand before him, God no priest. Pupianus must come to the rescue, and give sentence, and declare the decision of God and of Christ accepted — so that all those great numbers of the faithful who have been called away while I led them may not turn out to have gone with no hope of salvation and peace; so that the new crowd of believers may not be reckoned to have got no grace of baptism and of the Holy Spirit through my ministry; so that the peace granted to so many lapsed and repentant people, and the communion given after I had examined them, may not be cancelled by the authority of your verdict. Be so good, then, for once. Condescend to pronounce upon us, and to confirm our office of overseer by the authority of your approval, so that God and his Christ may thank you — since through you both the altar and the people have got back the man who stands before them and steers them.

Bees have a king, and cattle a leader, and they keep faith with him. Robbers obey their chief, and obey him with a full humility. How much simpler and better than you are the brute cattle and the dumb animals — and robbers too, bloody as they are, raging among swords and weapons! The chief among them is acknowledged and feared, and no divine judgment appointed him; a lost faction and a guilty gang agreed on him.

You say the scruple you have fallen into ought to be taken out of your mind. You did fall into it — but by your irreligious credulity. You fell into it by your own sacrilegious disposition and will: by listening so readily to unchaste, impious, unspeakable things against your brother, against a priest; by willingly believing them; by defending other men’s lies as though they were yours, your own property; and by not remembering what is written, “Fence your ears about with thorns, and do not listen to a wicked tongue.” And again: “An evildoer pays attention to the tongue of the unjust; but a righteous man does not listen to lying lips.” [q]

Why, then, have the martyrs not fallen into this scruple — men full of the Holy Spirit, brought close already by their suffering to the presence of God and of his Christ; martyrs who sent letters out of their prison to Cyprian the overseer, acknowledging him as God’s priest and bearing witness to him? Why have so many overseers, my colleagues, not fallen into it — men who were outlawed when they left from among us, or seized and thrown into prison and put in chains, or sent off into exile and gone to the Lord by a glorious road, or in some places condemned to death and given crowns in heaven by the Lord’s own glorifying of them?

Why have they not fallen into it, out of that people of ours which is with us and has been committed to us by God’s favor — so many confessors who were interrogated under torture, and are glorious for the memory of their splendid wounds and scars; so many chaste virgins; so many widows worth praising; and, in the end, all the churches through the whole world that are joined to us in the bond of unity? Unless, of course, all of these who are in communion with me are, as you have written, defiled by the defilement of my lips, and have lost the hope of eternal life by the infection of my communion. Pupianus alone — sound, untouched, holy, modest, the man who would not associate himself with us — will live alone in paradise and in the kingdom of heaven.

You have written as well that because of me the church now has a part of herself scattered abroad — though the whole people of the church is gathered, and united, and joined to itself in an unbroken harmony. The only ones who have stayed outside are the men who would have had to be thrown out even if they had been inside. The Lord, who protects his people and guards them, does not let the wheat be snatched off his threshing floor; only the chaff can be separated from the church. As the apostle says: “For what if some of them have fallen away from the faith? Will their unbelief cancel the faithfulness of God? Certainly not. God is truthful, and every man a liar.” [t]

And the Lord too, in the gospel, when disciples left him as he was speaking, turned to the Twelve and said, “Do you want to go away as well?” Then Peter answered him: “Lord, who shall we go to? You have the words of eternal life; and we believe and are sure that you are the Son of the living God.”

It is Peter who speaks there, the man on whom the church was to be built, and he teaches and shows, in the name of the church, that although a rebellious and arrogant crowd who will not hear and obey may go away, the church does not go away from Christ. And the church is the people united to its priest, the flock that sticks to its shepherd. From this you ought to know that the overseer is in the church and the church in the overseer, and that anyone who is not with the overseer is not in the church; and that they flatter themselves for nothing, those men who creep about at odds with God’s priests and think they are in communion in secret with somebody or other, while the church, which is catholic and one, is not cut apart or divided, but is held together and bound by the cement of priests who stick fast to one another.

So, brother: if you would consider the majesty of God, who ordains priests; if you would for once have regard for Christ, who by his decree and his word and his presence rules the men set over the church, and rules the church through them; if you would trust, about the innocence of overseers, not human hatred but the judgment of God; if you would begin, even this late, to repent of your rashness and pride and insolence; if you would make full amends to God and to his Christ, whom I serve, and to whom I offer sacrifices without ceasing with pure and unstained lips, not only in peace but under persecution — then we may have some ground for communion with you. Even then there would still be respect and fear among us for God’s censure, so that I should first ask my Lord whether he permits peace to be granted to you, and you to be received into the communion of his church, by his own showing and warning. [w]

For I remember what has already been shown to me — what was laid down, rather, by the authority of our Lord and God for a servant who obeys and fears him. Among the other things he thought fit to show and reveal, he added this: “So whoever does not believe Christ, who makes the priest, will begin later on to believe the one who avenges the priest.” [x]

I know that to some men dreams look ridiculous and visions foolish — but only to the sort of men who would rather believe against the priest than believe the priest. It is no wonder. Joseph’s brothers said of him, “Look, here comes the dreamer. Come on, then — let us kill him.” And afterward the dreamer reached what he had dreamed, and the men who meant to kill him and did sell him were put to shame: those who at first would not believe the words believed the deeds later on.

But as for the things you have done, whether in persecution or in peace, it would be foolish of me to pretend to pass judgment on you, since it is you who set yourself up as a judge over us. I have written all this at length out of the pure conscience of my mind and out of my confidence in my Lord and my God. You have my letter, and I have yours. On the day of judgment, before the tribunal of Christ, both will be read.