Cyprian of Carthage

The persecution under Decius in 250 required everyone in the empire to sacrifice and to obtain a certificate, a libellus, proving it. It was designed to catch a whole population rather than to identify a few, and it worked. In Carthage very large numbers complied, some by sacrificing and some by buying a certificate without sacrificing. Cyprian himself withdrew from the city and governed by letter, which his critics used against him afterwards.

When the pressure lifted the question was what to do with them. Confessors, those who had been imprisoned and had not given way, began issuing letters of peace readmitting the lapsed on their own authority, which Cyprian regarded as a collapse of order. At the other extreme a party at Rome around Novatian held that the church had no power to readmit them at all.

His answer, worked out in De Lapsis and in a series of African councils, distinguished degrees. Those who had sacrificed were treated more severely than those who had merely bought a certificate, penance was graduated by what had been done, and readmission was a decision of the bishop with his clergy and people rather than of an individual confessor. The principle underneath is the one he is remembered for, that the unity of the church is not an optional good but the condition of everything else it does.

The second controversy of his episcopate was about baptism performed outside the church. In Africa the settled view, which Cyprian defended, was that such a baptism was simply not a baptism, because the one who administers it has nothing to give; a convert coming from a schismatic group was therefore baptised, not received. Stephen, bishop of Rome, held the opposite, that the rite was valid whoever performed it and that the convert should be received by the laying on of hands. The exchange became sharp, and Stephen is reported to have refused to receive the African envoys.

Neither man lived to settle it. Stephen died in 257 and Cyprian was beheaded in 258 under Valerian, after a first sentence of exile. The proconsular record of his trial, terse and procedural, survives, and it is one of the better documents of a Roman magistrate handling a Christian bishop.

The quarrel then outlived them both in a way neither would have wanted. A century later the Donatists cited Cyprian, correctly, for the position that sacraments administered by the unworthy are void, and Augustine had to argue against the most revered figure in African Christianity by distinguishing the validity of a rite from its fruitfulness. That distinction became standard Western doctrine, and it was reached under pressure from a schism.