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Cyprian the Bishop CYPRIAN THE BISHOP This is the first up-to-date, accessible study dedicated to the rule of Cyprian as the Bishop of Carthage in the 250s AD. Using the tools of cultural anthropology, Cyprian the Bishop examines the interplay between the shift in the social structures of Christian churches in third-century Roman Africa, the development of their ritual practices, and the efficacy assigned to them in changing a person’s standing—not only within a community—but before God. During the Decian persecution, Bishop Cyprian attempted to steer the middle ground between compromise and traditionalism; he redefined the performance of the sacraments—particularly penance and reconciliation—and showed that their efficacy depended upon the unity of the church. Cyprian succeeded where his rivals failed by defining the boundary between the empire and the church. By concentrating on social structures, J.Patout Burns Jr. reveals the logic of Cyprian’s plan, the basis for its success in his time, and the reason why it failed in later centuries when the church was integrated into imperial society. This book will be of great interest to classicists, ancient historians and sociologists as well as theologians. J.Patout Burns Jr. is Edward A.Malloy Professor of Catholic Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School. He is the author of The Development of Augustine’s Doctrine of Operative Grace, and the editor of Theological Anthropology. CYPRIAN THE BISHOP J.Patout Burns Jr. London and New York First published 2002 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. © 2002 J.Patout Burns Jr. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Burns, J.Patout. Cyprian the Bishop/J.Patout Burns, Jr. (Routledge early church monographs) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Cyprian, Saint, Bishop of Carthage. 2. Church—Unity—History of doctrines—Early church, ca. 30–600. I. Title. II. Series BRI720 c8 B87 2002 270.1'092–dc21 [B] 2001049229 ISBN 0-203-46987-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-77811-1 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–23849–8 (hbk) ISBN 0–415–23850–1 (pbk) CONTENTS Preface vii List of abbreviations xi 1 History of Cyprian’s controversies 1 2 Christians of Carthage under persecution 12 3 Necessity of repentance 25 4 Efficacy of the reconciliation ritual 51 5 Indivisibility of the church 78 6 Initiation into unity 100 7 Purity of the church 132 8 Unity of the episcopate 151 9 Cyprian’s African heritage 166 Notes 177 Bibliography 233 Index 235 PREFACE This study began in a faculty seminar in the Department of Religion at the University of Florida in which Dennis Owen and Sheldon Isenberg explained the value of Mary Douglas’ scheme for correlating the social structure of a community and its assumptions about its position in the cosmos and the efficacy of its practices. The foundational essay, “Cultural Bias,”1 and the book, Natural Symbols,2 suddenly appeared to offer tools for understanding the theological positions which Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage in the middle of the third century, had developed to help his community cope with the defections they experienced during the persecution of Decius and the divisions within the church which followed it. Cyprian presented a scripturally based and tightly argued theory of sacramental efficacy which was rejected by the Roman church, championed by the African Donatists, and then so reinterpreted by Augustine that it had little further influence. How could such a coherent and cogent system have been simply abandoned in favor of one whose sole supports were custom and political influence? Cyprian’s system was not so much refuted as shoved aside and ignored. The answer to understanding its success and then its failure might lie, then, in the social rather than the intellectual context. It might have failed because the social structures supporting it changed with the toleration and support of Christianity by the Roman Empire. Fortunately, the collection of Cyprian’s letters provide significant information about his church community and its members, as well as his dealings with both his fellow bishops and opponents. These documents provide clues for understanding what his people and his colleagues, as well as their opponents, were doing and thinking. Douglas’ schema for comparing communities was first applied to the opposing positions taken by the African and the Roman bishops in the baptismal controversy. When the results proved satisfactory, the present broader study of the understanding vii PREFACE of the unity of the church and the efficacy of its rituals of purification was undertaken. The objective of this study is not to provide a biography of Cyprian or historical study of his church. Even within the limits of the English language, the supply of such studies is not seriously lacking. Archbishop Benson’s 1897 book is dated but still useful in many ways.3 Michael Sage’s study presents the advances during the three-quarters of a century separating his own work from that of Benson.4 The introductions to each of the four volumes of G.W. Clarke’s translation of Cyprian’s letters supply an excellent summary of the bishop’s life and ministry; the commentary on the individual letters provides an exhaustive review of the current state of knowledge and a judicious advance on many points.5 The present study will attempt to revise Graeme Clarke’s historical work on the letters and Maurice Bévenot’s editorial advances on the versions of Cyprian’s On the Unity of the Catholic Church6 in very limited ways, such as arguing for a different dating of one of the letters in the baptismal controversy and proposing a double rather than a single rewriting of On Unity by Cyprian himself. Michael Fahey’s study of Cyprian’s use of scripture, amended by Clarke, proved particularly helpful in developing the patterns of citation which are the basis for the present proposals for this new chronology.7 Otherwise, this study is unashamedly dependent upon and derivative from the excellent historical work done on Cyprian during the last century. The goal of this study is to elucidate the correlation between Cyprian’s theology and his practice as a bishop. The foundational contributions of the North African theologians—Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine—to the development of Latin Christian thought were nearly all immediately related to problems of Christian life in the church. Such theology can best be interpreted, appreciated and even appropriated by understanding it within the context of its original development. For the problems with which Cyprian dealt—the unity and rituals of the church—the social context was more important than the intellectual: the structures by which his church community was organized and its ways of distinguishing itself from the imperial society. Thus chapters 3 and 4, for example, will argue that the positions which Cyprian took on the reconciliation of the lapsed can best be understood as means of reor-ganizing the community in the face of the crisis of the Decian persecution which nearly destroyed it. Chapters 5 and 8 will show that the process of selecting, installing and removing bishops was foundational to the theory of the unity of the local and universall church. Chapter 6 viii PREFACE explores what Cyprian took to be the practical consequences of accepting schismatic baptism and chapter 7 investi-gates the limits of enforceable standards of purity for the church and its clergy in particular. By understanding a theology within its developmental cultural context, the adjustments necessary to adapt and appropriate it in a different social world might be specified. Though each had to appeal to Cyprian, neither the Donatists nor the Catholics in Africa could adopt his theory of the purity or holiness of the church exactly as he presented it to his people and colleagues. The church’s relationship to imperial society had been changed radically by the Constantinian toleration and the Theodosian establishment of Christianity. In parallel, the conception of the purity of the church and the rituals which protected its boundary with the empire had to be reworked. The Donatists made assertions about the transmission of contagion within the unity of the church and episcopate which Cyprian neither made nor acted upon. Augustine, in contrast, appealed to a significance of intention within the functioning of the earthly church which Cyprian explicitly rejected in his focus on performance. By specifying the connection between Cyprian’s thought and his social context, the study signals modifications which could be anticipated when the social circumstances changed. The study will begin with a review of the events and an analysis of the social structure of the Christian church in Carthage on the eve of the Decian persecution. Subsequent chapters will focus on the rituals of penance and baptism, the purity of the church, and the unity of the local and universal church. The influence of Mary Douglas is ubiquitous but not explicitly noted. An earlier version of the study of the rebaptism controversy here covered in chapters 1 and 5 was published in the first volume of Journal of Early Christian Studies.8 A study derived from chapter 3 is published in the proceedings of the 1999 International Conference on Patristic Studies.9 The research which is here reported was supported by Washington University in St Louis and Vanderbilt Divinity School.
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