St. Cyprian of Carthage

RhetorFeast August 31

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A wealthy teacher of rhetoric at Carthage who was baptized in middle life, sold his gardens for the poor, and was made bishop by the acclamation of the people two years later. He governed the African church through the Decian persecution, the schisms over the lapsed, and a plague in which he set the Christians of Carthage to nurse the pagans who had called for their deaths. He wrote On the Unity of the Church, quarreled hard with Rome and stayed in communion with it, and was beheaded under Valerian.

Born: c. 210 (Carthage, Roman Africa)
Reposed: September 14, 258 (beheaded at Carthage)
See: Carthage
Feast: August 31

Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus was born at Carthage around the year 210, of a wealthy family, and taught rhetoric publicly in a city where that made a man's voice count. He was converted in middle life through an old presbyter named Caecilianus, was baptized around 246, sold his gardens and gave the price to the poor, and put away the pagan authors for the Scriptures and for Tertullian, whom he read every day.

Around 248 the people of Carthage acclaimed him bishop against his own resistance and against the objection of five presbyters, who opposed him for the rest of his life. In 250 the Emperor Decius ordered every subject of the empire to sacrifice, and the lapse in Carthage was immediate and enormous. Cyprian withdrew into hiding and governed the church by letter for over a year, a decision attacked at the time and defended by him in writing, which is why so much of his correspondence survives.

The question of the lapsed then split the Latin churches twice, once toward laxity under Novatus and Felicissimus at Carthage, and once toward rigor under Novatian at Rome. Against both, Cyprian wrote On the Lapsed and On the Unity of the Catholic Church, read at the Council of Carthage in 251: the sun with many rays and one light, the tree with many branches and one root, the spring with many streams and one source.

When plague came into Carthage in 252 and the dead were left in the streets, he divided the city by districts and set the church to bury the dead and nurse the sick without asking whose they were, including the households that had been demanding their blood. He wrote On the Mortality in the middle of it, for Christians frightened of dying in a bed rather than gloriously under a sword.

He and Stephen of Rome quarreled hard between 255 and 257 over whether a baptism given by heretics is a baptism, and neither yielded, and communion held. At the great council of eighty seven African bishops in 256 he said at the opening that no one among them set himself up as a bishop of bishops. The Church afterward followed neither man simply, and honors as a saint the man whose position it did not adopt whole.

Valerian's edict against the clergy reached him in 257 and he was exiled to Curubis. From there he wrote to the African bishops that Sixtus of Rome had been taken in a cemetery on the sixth of August, 258, and beheaded, and that the persecution would come for him next. It did. He was tried by the proconsul Galerius Maximus at Carthage and beheaded on the fourteenth of September, 258, having ordered that twenty five gold pieces be given to the executioner. The Church keeps his memory on the thirty first of August.