Cyprian of Carthage Biography and Books

Cyprian of Carthage was a middle-aged celebrity lawyer when he became a Christian, and he had almost exactly twelve years left to live. Into them he packed a conversion, a fortune given away, a bishopric he did not want, two persecutions, a plague, three furious controversies, some of the warmest devotional prose in Latin, and his own execution. He is the first great pastor of the Western church whose letters we can still read, and the first African bishop to die under the sword.

He was born Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus, probably around AD 200 to 210, into wealth in Carthage, the second city of the Latin West. He was trained as a rhetorician and taught rhetoric publicly, which in that world meant he was a public figure: fashionable, sought after, dining well, moving among men who ran the province. He was somewhere past forty when an elderly presbyter named Caecilianus began talking to him about Christ, and it undid him. Cyprian took the old man's name as his own and never stopped acknowledging the debt; when Caecilianus died he took his widow and family into his household.

Born again in middle age

What conversion felt like from the inside, Cyprian wrote down almost immediately afterwards, in a letter to his friend Donatus. It remains the best thing he ever wrote, and one of the few first-person accounts of Christian conversion to survive from the ancient world:

While I was still lying in darkness and gloomy night, wavering hither and thither, tossed about on the foam of this boastful age, and uncertain of my wandering steps, knowing nothing of my real life, and remote from truth and light, I used to regard it as a difficult matter that a man should be capable of being born again.

— Cyprian, to Donatus

He is honest about why he thought it impossible. He lists his own chains one by one: the banquets, the gold and purple, the crowds of clients, the horror of being an ordinary private citizen with nobody in attendance. He had assumed his vices were simply parts of himself, indigenous to him, and had given up expecting anything better. Then came baptism, and the thing he had thought could not happen happened:

After that, by the agency of the Spirit breathed from heaven, a second birth had restored me to a new man, then, in a wondrous manner, doubtful things at once began to assure themselves to me, hidden things to be revealed, dark things to be enlightened, what before had seemed difficult began to suggest a means of accomplishment, what had been thought impossible, to be capable of being achieved.

— Cyprian, to Donatus

He acted on it at once. He sold estates and gave the proceeds to the poor, and adopted a strict simplicity of life that seems to have astonished a city that had watched him dine for twenty years. Within two years, and against his own protest, the Christians of Carthage acclaimed him their bishop. Five senior presbyters never forgave him for it, and their resentment shadowed the rest of his ministry.

The persecution, and the charge of cowardice

He had been bishop barely a year when the emperor Decius, in January 250, ordered every citizen of the empire to sacrifice to the gods and obtain a certificate proving it. It was the first systematic, empire-wide attempt to destroy the church, and it worked far better than anyone expected. In Carthage, Christians queued at the altars. Some sacrificed outright; many more bought certificates without sacrificing. The bishop of Rome was executed. Cyprian went into hiding.

He was attacked for it then and has been attacked for it since, and he did not pretend otherwise. His defence, argued through a stream of letters from his hiding place, was that the mob had been shouting his name in the amphitheatre and that his death at that moment would have finished the church in Carthage rather than strengthened it. So he governed by correspondence for over a year: comforting the imprisoned, restraining the confessors who had begun handing out pardons to the lapsed on their own authority, holding a shattered congregation together at a distance. Whether he was right is still argued. What is not in doubt is that eight years later, when the choice came again, he did not run.

The persecution ended and left him a harder problem: what to do with the thousands who had failed. The rigorists said the lapsed could never be received back. Cyprian refused both easy answers. Those who had sacrificed must do genuine penance and could then be restored; those who had merely bought certificates were treated more leniently; and no one, he insisted, could be restored by the say-so of an individual confessor outside the church's discipline. The controversy pushed him into writing his treatise on the unity of the church, with its famous and much-quarrelled-over sentence:

He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother.

— Cyprian, On the Unity of the Church

The plague

Then, in 252, an epidemic hit Carthage that would rage across the empire for years and take an emperor with it. Historians still call it the Plague of Cyprian, because his deacon Pontius left the fullest description of what it did to a city. People fled their own houses. The dying were put out in the street. Bodies lay about, Pontius wrote, and nobody regarded anything besides his cruel gains.

Cyprian called the congregation together. He argued from the Sermon on the Mount that loving those who love you is what the tax collectors do, that God sends rain on aliens as well as on his own people, and that a son of God ought to imitate his Father. Then he organised the city's relief: money from those who had it, labour from those who had not, the sick nursed and the dead buried without asking whether the household was Christian or pagan. The population that had been screaming for his blood two years earlier was nursed through the plague by the people it had wanted to kill.

Out of those months came his treatise on the mortality, written for Christians frightened that they were dying of the same disease as everyone else. His answer is bracing rather than consoling: the plague is not a punishment aimed at believers but a proving, and a Christian who cannot face dying has not yet grasped what he claims to believe.

Teaching a church to pray

Somewhere in these years Cyprian wrote the little book on the Lord's Prayer that is still the readiest way into his mind. It is the first Latin commentary on the prayer, and its premise is disarming: we would not know how to address God at all if God had not told us.

He works through the prayer clause by clause, and keeps noticing that it is plural. We do not say my Father, he observes, but our; our prayer is public and common, and when we pray we pray not for one but for the whole people, because we are all one. For a bishop trying to reassemble a church that had betrayed itself under pressure, that was not a grammatical observation. It was the whole programme.

Curubis and the sword

In 257 the emperor Valerian moved against the church's leadership directly. Cyprian was summoned, refused to sacrifice, and was exiled to Curubis, a small coastal town, where he continued writing to his people. A year later the policy hardened: bishops were to be executed. He was brought back to Carthage and kept under a form of house arrest, and he used the time to write to the churches.

On 14 September 258 he was tried by the proconsul Galerius Maximus, condemned, and taken out to a level place surrounded by trees, into which people climbed to see. Pontius describes it with the eye of a man who was there. The crowd was so large that people climbed the trees to see, which reminded him of Zacchaeus. Cyprian bound his own eyes with his own hands rather than wait to be blindfolded, and tried to hurry the executioner, whose right hand was shaking so badly that he could barely hold the blade.

He was the first bishop of Carthage to die a martyr. His people gathered the body by torchlight. What he left behind is unusually complete for a third-century figure: over eighty letters, a dozen short treatises, and a body of pastoral practice that the Latin church would draw on for a thousand years. But the sentence that keeps drawing readers back is still the one he wrote in the first flush of grace, before any of it happened, when he was simply a middle-aged man astonished that God had changed him: what had been thought impossible, to be capable of being achieved.