Cyprian

Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus was a wealthy man in Carthage, a teacher of rhetoric, a public figure, a landowner, until an old presbyter named Caecilianus led him to Christ around 246. He was baptized, sold estates to feed the poor, and within about two years the people of Carthage acclaimed him their bishop, over the objection of several senior presbyters who never forgave it.

He had barely a year of quiet. In 250 the emperor Decius ordered every inhabitant of the empire to sacrifice and obtain a certificate proving it. Carthage broke. Christians queued at the temples in numbers that shocked their own clergy.

Cyprian withdrew into hiding and governed the church by letter for over a year. He was attacked for it then and has been since. His own answer was that a hunted bishop in the open would have brought the mob down on the whole congregation, and that his letters, dozens of them survive, kept the church working.

When the persecution eased, the hardest question in the third-century church landed on his desk: what to do with the lapsed. Confessors who had suffered were handing out letters of peace restoring the fallen wholesale. Rigorists said the fallen could never be restored at all. Cyprian took the middle and made it stick, restoration, but after penance, graded by what each person had actually done, and decided by the bishop in council, not by individuals. He wrote it up in On the Lapsed, and then wrote On the Unity of the Catholic Church to argue that a church that fragments over the question has already lost.

In 252 plague swept North Africa. Bodies lay in the streets and pagan Carthage blamed the Christians. Cyprian gathered his congregation and organized them to nurse and bury the sick of the whole city, including the people who had been demanding their deaths. His biographer Pontius, who watched it, recorded it.

He fought Stephen of Rome to a standstill over whether converts baptized by heretics needed rebaptism, holding his ground without breaking communion.

Valerian's persecution took him in 257. Exiled first to Curubis, he was recalled, tried by the proconsul Galerius Maximus, and sentenced. The court record survives. On 14 September 258 he walked to the place of execution, took off his outer garment, knelt and prayed, bound his own eyes, and ordered twenty-five gold pieces given to the man who was about to behead him.

Sources: Pontius, Life of Cyprian; the Acta Proconsularia of Cyprian; Cyprian, Letters, On the Lapsed, On the Unity of the Church (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2.