Cyprian of Carthage

200 – 258

Cyprian of Carthage was born around 200 AD into a wealthy pagan family in Carthage — the great North African city that had once been Rome's most formidable rival. He was educated in rhetoric, practiced law, and was by any measure a man of the world. He converted to Christianity around 246 AD, in his mid-forties. Two years later, the congregation at Carthage elected him their bishop. He had been a Christian for less than three years. He held that office for a decade of extraordinary crisis. In 249, the Emperor Decius issued an edict requiring every citizen of the Roman empire to sacrifice to the traditional gods and obtain a certificate proving they had done so. The persecution that followed was the first empire-wide attempt to suppress Christianity, and it divided the church in ways that were harder to heal than the persecutions themselves. Many Christians complied. Many bought forged certificates. Many died rather than comply. When the persecution passed, the question of what to do with the lapsed — those who had renounced their faith under threat — tore churches apart. Cyprian charted a careful middle course, requiring genuine penance before restoration, and defended it in On the Lapsed. His other great work from the same period is On the Unity of the Church, written during the schism of Novatian, a Roman priest who set himself up as a rival bishop. Cyprian's argument is ecclesiological rather than personal: the Church is one because Christ is one, and to break communion with the bishop is to break communion with the Body of Christ. His formulation — "He cannot have God as his Father who does not have the Church as his Mother" — has been quoted ever since, most famously by Augustine, and has remained central to Catholic and Orthodox ecclesiology. The other side of the same coin: "Outside the Church there is no salvation." Cyprian wrote it first. Cyprian himself fled Carthage during the Decian persecution — a decision his enemies never let him forget — and governed his church through letters from exile. His correspondence survives in remarkable completeness and is among the most valuable documentary evidence for mid-third-century Christianity. He returned to Carthage after the persecution ended and governed for nearly a decade more, until the Emperor Valerian renewed persecution in 257. Cyprian refused to exile himself a second time. On September 14, 258, he was beheaded outside Carthage. His last words, according to the eyewitness account preserved in the Proconsular Acts, were: "Thanks be to God." He is honored as a saint in Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican traditions. His debate with Pope Stephen over the rebaptism of heretics — in which Cyprian held that heretics must be rebaptized, while Stephen held that their original baptism remained valid — is cited by Protestants as evidence that the early church did not regard Rome as having definitive jurisdictional authority. He is simultaneously a hero of Roman Catholic ecclesiology and a useful footnote for Protestant critics of it. He is, in that sense, genuinely catholic.