Epistulae

XVI. EPISTLES. I. DONATUS TO CYPRIAN. I believe you remember, most holy Cyprian, what our loquacity was before the orator: one sense, one thought, undivided reading. Why, then, are we not also strengthened in our minds by divine reading? Or was that thought not always with us, as you used to promise, that we should believe together **** II. EPISTLE OF POPE CORNELIUS TO CYPRIAN. I have received your writings, which are not pleasing to your love and are against the rule of faith, in which I recognized nausea and the poisons of words against the Catholic Church spread throughout the whole world, sown by you with horrible tares, which I did not praise. I ask that you quickly remove and condemn them. Indeed, you ought to have done this before the deadly poison, sprinkled in the world, infected the minds of the simple and innocent. Therefore, it is not fitting to rebaptize. Therefore, uproot and extricate, as we have said, with flowery and worthy words in a later letter, the earlier writings, which the offspring of vipers have decided to sow against the Catholic faith. For it is not fitting for the bishop of so great a city and the most excellent teacher that, while you think the baptism of heresy is to be condemned, you dare to stain true baptism with your words, which you lament, obviously, to be contrary to the Apostle saying: One God, one faith, one baptism.

III. CYPRIAN TO THE People of Carthage Assembled, Eternal Greetings in the Lord. We indeed give thanks to God the Father and to the Lord Jesus Christ, who has reunited you and restored you to your gatherings. For this reason we have recalled and wished to keep the writing of the most blessed martyrs and confessors for our council. The majesty and the Holy Spirit command from above, whose grace in us is a witness of salvation. For when it treats of the traditors, it commands both in the Gospel and in the Apostle, both in the Psalms and in the Prophets and in the other scriptures: "Search." When this was searched by us, it was found by those who handed over the sacred scriptures that they do not deserve to enter our council, that is, the council of salvation. For there is no one who enters this council * * * does not look to the heavenly. And therefore we recalled that those who handled the scriptures in such a way * * to the state of the people and the judgment presented by them * * nor may any action be brought forward by them, nor are they even to be near the state of the sacrifice or of the people: from whom, indeed, the people have long since been abandoned, the altars stripped bare, the sacrifices promoted.

Rightly recalling these things with sadness and grief of spirit, we have made our appeal to the Lord, as we were bound to determine: that all those who had dared to engage in disputes, dissensions, heresies, and scandals, so that they no longer provoke men to themselves—whether they be weak in faith or in the Scriptures, or be readers—we have decreed, and we do not wish to recede from our decree, that if any bishop has handed over, they may deserve a priest ministering at the altar with a whole body for this people. But we have commanded those by whom we order sacrifice to be offered. Rightly, these commands must be obeyed, nor will anything else be done than what the sincere evangelical voice speaks according to John. "I do not wish," it says, "sacrifices from your hands, because you have not come to me with a pure offering." He who certainly does not offer a pure offering, the offering from his hands does not ascend. For again we read: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Those who through the word have contrived a pretense to give uninhabitable things among them—whether true holy scriptures or feigned ones—he who gives voice and who gives proximate desires, he who certainly feigns to hand over will fulfill the tradition. Rightly, we wish that those who deny should for the time being have pardon, confessing the fathers. For he who says he does not have the scriptures was certainly prepared to be tortured, of whom we have examples. They denied a third time, and did not hand over the sacrament. But those who offered even without being interrogated will for the time being communicate as laity until the decision of the council.

Nevertheless, we wish that the state of the council which sacred Scripture has promoted be fulfilled according to the fixed judgment of the saints and friends of God, since the witnesses and those near to us had already long ago determined something through our predecessors. For this reason it is necessary for us to agree with, embrace, and fulfill the witnesses. I wish you always to fare well in the Lord. Amen. Thanks be to God. IV. CYPRIAN TO BENEDICTUS AND HIS Most Beloved Parent Turasius, Eternal Salvation in the Lord. I have received your letter of affection, by which I learned that your mind was disturbed with grief over the death of your daughter. I have admired nothing so much as the fact that the virtue of a Christian breast was so tossed about in you that you bent your mind toward grief. I am astonished that the wall of faith was penetrated by the wounds of bereavement, which the hope of resurrection and the heavenly kingdom ought to have fortified. Hope never agrees with grief, nor does faith ever feel any loss whatsoever. We believe that our loved ones rise again, and we lament. What would we do if God commanded that they only die without resurrection? His will alone suffices for consolation, for we know that no affection is to be placed before it. He who created had given and taken away. Who else contends to lament what he had received for a time? He had lent it to you so that you might have it for whatever time he wished, and when he wished, he might take it back again. He took away nothing of yours, for he deigned to receive back what was his own. It was fitting for the creditor to receive back what was his due, and nothing else befits the borrower than to give thanks to his creditor.

Thus we read in Job, whose most devoted voice we follow. "The Lord," he says, "gave; the Lord took away. As it pleased the Lord, so it was done. Let the name of the Lord be blessed." Therefore, this alone was no small consolation against grief—that no one ought to mourn when something belonging to another has been returned, because it was not lawful for what was necessary to its own master to be retained by another. Another provision of consolation is added, which meets the darts of bereavement. We ought to have rejoiced at those departing from the world, if we felt the world's enmities against us, and we bewail the benefits of the Lord, who knows what He bestows upon our weakness. He who still grieves for someone sleeping wishes to be in danger, and amid the waves of this present life desires to see the wretched one toil. Why do you think a faithful Christian soul should have lingered within the prison of the world, for whom the whole world is a shipwreck? He has escaped so many and such great storms of life, so many assaults of the devil, so many wars of the body, so many disasters of the world [so many calamities]. And you pour forth tears, as if you did not know what you yourself suffer daily. For this reason the Lord thus admonishes his apostles, saying: "If you had loved me, you would rejoice, because I am going to the Father." Plainly, he wept for the dead Lazarus, but not with your tears—he, the promiser of resurrection. He could not teach grief, lest he make faith a betrayal of the faith he was teaching.

He grieved not that Lazarus was sleeping, but rather that he was rising again, and he wept for the one whom he was compelled, for the sake of saving others [and confounding the unbelievers], to recall to the world. The Lord, giving this life, was groaning, which you lament has been taken away. Against his tears your tears fight, and your love contends with his love. His weeping has no equal. He was unwilling to return to hardships the one he had loved, and you believe you love the one for whom you wished the torments of labors still to remain. Moreover, if you thought he grieved that Lazarus was dead, he would not have previously allowed him to go out, he who could repel death, or certainly he would not weep who afterward had the power to raise the dead. Hence it is apparent that he was moved for the sole reason that he was compelled to recall his dearest one again to a hostile life for the sake of some who would believe or for confounding the unbelievers. Finally, he added, saying: "Therefore, Father, so that they may believe that you sent me." Rejoice, therefore, where he was compelled to weep, lest you seem to envy the felicities of the sleeping. He has passed from an alien world to his own, he has passed to the Lord, and from a hostile fatherland he has migrated to his paternal fatherland, he has migrated to heaven, the apostle saying: "We know," he says, "that if our earthly home of this body is dissolved, we have a dwelling not made by hand, eternal in the heavens." Therefore, he has lost the home which he ought never to have known.

He lacked the evil citizens, whose hatreds he endured, lest he still be a sojourner in a hostile land, as the apostle recalls, saying: as long as we are in the world, we are pilgrims from the Lord. Therefore, mourning ought not to weigh upon us, whoever has merited to return from pilgrimage to his own homeland, especially since he is known to return not empty and void, who has purchased the profit of Christianity, for which he came to the commerce of the world. He completed his business, returned, and paid his debt to God. He bought the purchase for which he had descended, and hastened to return to the Lord, to whom he may offer the merchandise, so that he may receive both the security and the honor of the purchased goods. And you will say, I am troubled by no doubt of the heavenly promises, but I am tossed about, burning with the mere separation from the dying, desolate, deprived of the solace of a dear pledge. This is an excuse, blessed one, without doubt of human frailty, which cannot serve as a defense for lack of faith. For if men were unable to bear desolation, they would never have sent their pledges away from themselves at all. They complain that they are abandoned by the dying, and they entrust living sons to foreign regions either for the sake of letters or for honors or for business, and they rejoice to dwell their whole life without affections, provided they obtain what they desire to gain from their pledges.

and they all drive them to go to the palaces, they travel abroad, they sail to acquire studies of rank or to settle some matters of patrimony through labors and dangers, nor do they allow those whom they love to be at leisure with them. And so that they may be able to reach the palaces of heaven, the studies of Christ, the honor of eternal life, the patrimony of everlasting possession with security, no one gladly congratulates his own children on departing from him. On account of uncertainties, through uncertainties, each one compels a son or a brother or a parent to travel abroad, and on account of certainties, through certainties, no one allows any of his own to set forth. For the sake of acquiring sins, parents rejoice to be separated from children, and children from parents, with the devil provoking them; for the sake of receiving indulgence, they are unwilling to be separated from each other when God calls, so that it appears that we do not grieve for whomever we seem to lose according to our reason, but rather show a sign of distrust, since we do not endure the departures of our own to the Lord, whose travels in the world we welcome. Because we believe in worldly gains, we tolerate the divided members of our own body. If we believed in God's promises, after the departure of our own, nothing other than the joys of our heart ought to resound with thanks. Believe me, unbelief always mourns in all things, and just as faith cannot know what to grieve, so distrust alone is held captive by sorrows.

For if we say they are sleeping, we ought certainly to believe them sleeping and not dead, but resting in the meantime, according to the word of the Lord speaking faithfully: "Everyone," he says, "who believes in me, even if he dies, will live." If any physician were to promise you this, you could without doubt deny no joy at all to his promise; but now, because Christ, the maker and restorer, promises, do you not fear to mourn, so that you seem to judge Christ a more faithful and at the same time more powerful physician in his promises? But you say, "I grieve for my abandoned old age, who ought rather to have preceded my children, so that I might not remain in labors." When anything concerning spiritual goods is treated, nothing at all of carnal things is to be placed before the eyes. I profess that a better thing has happened to you, who I consider not carnal but spiritual happiness around you. You say you are worn out in old age by the death of some pledge of yours. I, on the contrary, prove you relieved. The Lord has rather cut off for your old age the anxiety that tormented you about your living daughter, lest she perish. It is better now that you believe her dead to the world but alive with God, than that you would grieve her alive to the world but perhaps dead before the Lord. Rejoice that you will deserve to follow your Christian daughter, whom having followed, you may rejoice to embrace again in heaven. She has not abandoned you, but has gone before; and she hastened to receive her departing father, lest he grieve. You have not lost your nurture.

if you have shuddered at mourning and are able to reckon that an old man has offered your child to the Lord, according to the prayer after Abraham—if you cannot do the first, that you at least appear to rejoice in the one taken away, since he did not tremble to offer. From him the Lord demanded; from you he took. He obeyed a command; you consented to a will. Through the unlawful law of nature, [the Lord] proved that man devoted to himself; you, at least through the lawful condition of mortality, let him mark as religious. For if you are compelled neither by will nor by necessity to offer anything of devotion to the Lord, in what part can you prove yourself a Christian? Let our unbelief blush, nor with the Gentiles **, if it wishes to be subject to God. The outcome of death is common to us with them, and we surpass their griefs with our own griefs. What would we do if something special were demanded from us? What, to our disgrace? Gentiles often despise griefs, though they are snatched not to heavenly promises but to the punishments of Tartarus. And we weep as we go to heaven. Let such a Christian consider what he deserves thereafter, who neither strives to imitate the examples of the saints nor has the contempt of the Gentiles. They, in despair, despise mourning, and we, in hope, do not try to despise it. Finally, they often do not hesitate to sell their children, so that they reject them alive—which is worse. And we do not even relieve the deaths of the departed; we want those taken into captivity and granted freedom **.

they fearlessly hand over their own children to serve mortals, and we, with a sacrilegious mind, hesitate to release our children—both theirs and ours—to be freed by God, as if it were judged safer for a child to be condemned among men than with God. It is a shameful reproach, something Christians endure from pagans, by whom they are undoubtedly judged worse, when it would have been criminal not to call them equals, let alone betters. Christians are unwilling to escort their own to blessings even with rejoicing; pagans do not hesitate to hand them over to evils. Finally, let us be compelled to bend our minds even by the very happiness of our dying, lest our desires begin to oppose theirs. They themselves rejoice, those who depart, coming to rest. Let us also rejoice with them, at least counting the blessedness of our own who depart. Be religious even by the vow of the one who has escaped, if you cannot by your own, and exult because you recognize that a sharer of your blood has pleased Christ, especially since you ought to endure the Lord’s will even by the occasion, to which you cannot object. And since this lot is common to all, vain is the grief that seems neither first nor alone. But you say: no anguish of my desolate mind torments me, but the affection of humanity for the dying little one’s sins impels me. It is not permitted to stir a Christian’s mind even by this, lest it struggle against Christ’s commands. What does it matter when and what kind of children we have sent away, whom we are ordered by the Lord to hate for the sake of devotion?

it is better now that she, dying, has left her soul safe in peace, rather than that she should have been unable to release it in persecution along with her own destruction. He himself helps them in the world whose mother dwells in heaven, and he who comes to the mother's aid certainly succours the children as well. Finally, consider whether anything ought to be granted to grief, where the mind can be wearied without any remedy. The one who grieves ought to grieve wisely, lest he lose without cause what he grieves for. But now arms must be taken up against mourning, so that our hope may be able to gain victory. First of all, let us rejoice that the Lord wished to receive her. Then, because this is common to all in the world, there is added our own private privilege, that we are called to rest. There follows the consummation of all joys, that in the resurrection we shall be restored to each other by the Lord, as the apostle promises: therefore, brothers, we do not wish you to be ignorant concerning those who sleep, that you may not be saddened like the rest who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, so also the Lord will bring those who have slept through Jesus with him. These things, blessed one, I have sent to you out of common charity. For the rest, I know that you console others. Then bereavement will not find itself penetrable, if you do not cease to arm others against it. I wish you, dearest brother, always to be well and to remember me.