Matthew 25 · Story · Mercy
Mercy in the Plague Years
Clergy at two cities of the third century wrote of the faithful who stayed with the dying through an epidemic, in letters, a sermon and a life of a bishop that still survive.
Cyprian taught his people to show mercy to their enemies as well as to their own, his deacon Pontius says.
I was naked and you clothed Me, I was sick and you looked after Me, I was in prison and you visited Me.’
- Where
- Alexandria, Carthage
- When
- 250 to 262 AD (probable)
Summary
Plague came on Alexandria and Carthage in the years after a persecution of the church. At Alexandria, Bishop Dionysius wrote that many Christians died nursing the sick, presbyters and deacons among them. At Carthage, Bishop Cyprian wrote that believers who died in the plague were sent ahead and should not be mourned, and he answered a pagan who laid the plague on the Christians.
- The emperor Decius published an edict against the Christians in January 250, and both bishops spent the persecution in hiding.
- Eusebius kept the plague letters of Dionysius in his Church History, book 7, chapters 21 and 22.
- By the Catholic Encyclopedia's date the plague reached Carthage in 252, and Cyprian wrote On the Mortality for his church while it raged.
- Pontius, Cyprian's deacon, records that the church at Carthage shared out the work by each member's means, and that the poor gave their labour.
Two Churches in the Plague
Dionysius was bishop of Alexandria and Cyprian bishop of Carthage when the plague came.
In the years after the emperor Decius persecuted the church, a plague came on Alexandria in Egypt and on Carthage in Africa. It belongs to mercy because the believers of both cities nursed the sick when others fled, and some caught the sickness and died.
The record of the plague rests on the letters of Dionysius that Eusebius kept, on the treatises of Cyprian, and on the Life of Cyprian by his deacon Pontius. The story See How They Love One Another gives these plague accounts in brief, beside Tertullian's saying and Basil's house for the sick.
The Plague Years in Order
The Catholic Encyclopedia fixes the years of the persecution, and Eusebius gives the order of events at Alexandria.
Persecution came first, then war and famine at Alexandria, then the plague that reached Carthage by 252.
To scale: 7 of 10 stops dated; a bar is a span; a mark that would lie on another stands in a lane under the axis.
- Decius becomes emperorOctober 249 ADCatholic Encyclopedia
- Decius publishes an edict against the ChristiansJanuary 250 ADCatholic Encyclopedia
- Dionysius stays in a desert place in Libya250 to 251 ADCatholic Encyclopedia, one source
- The persecution wanesearly 251 ADCatholic Encyclopedia
- War and famine at Alexandria, then the plagueNot datedEusebius 7.22, the order alone
- The festal letter of the plague yearNot datedEusebius 7.22, no year
- The plague reaches Carthage, and On the Mortality is written252 ADCatholic Encyclopedia, one source
- To Demetrianus is writtenNot datedNo year in the treatise
- Cyprian's martyrdom258 ADCatholic Encyclopedia
- Tumult, famine and pestilence at Alexandria, the troubles of the letter to Hierax261 to 262 ADCatholic Encyclopedia
A timeline of ten events from 249 to 262 AD, each naming the record that fixes its date. Seven stand on the axis, two of them as ranges, and the three the sources leave undated stand in their order with no mark.
The plague reaches Carthage, and On the Mortality is written, To Demetrianus is written, Cyprian's martyrdom, Tumult, famine and pestilence at Alexandria, the troubles of the letter to Hierax
The Plague at Alexandria and Carthage
Dionysius wrote from Alexandria and Cyprian from Carthage, and their letters and sermons give the plague in their own words.
The Catholic Encyclopedia calls the persecution under Decius "the severest trial to which the Church up to that time had been subjected". At Alexandria, Eusebius writes in his Church History, a work of the fourth century, that "a pestilential disease followed the war" (7.22.1). Dionysius said that after "a very brief season of rest this pestilence assailed us", and that it "did not keep aloof even from us, but the heathen it assailed more severely" (7.22.6).
Most of the brethren, he wrote, nursed the sick without sparing themselves. Many who nursed others "died themselves having transferred to themselves their death", and they made a popular saying real in action, "taking their departure as the others' 'offscouring'" (7.22.7).
Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.The nurses Dionysius describes gave their lives for the sick they tended.
"Truly the best of our brethren departed from life in this manner," he wrote, "including some presbyters and deacons" (7.22.8). Of the pagans he wrote that they fled from their sick and "left the dead like refuse, unburied" (7.22.10).
At Carthage, Pontius, whose Life of Cyprian tells of Cyprian's death in 258 and so was written after it, writes that his bishop was proscribed and "frequently demanded for the lions" (Life of Cyprian 7). When the plague came, Cyprian wrote On the Mortality for believers whom it disturbed "that the power of this Disease attacks our people equally with the heathens" (section 8).
He answered that "many of our people are liberated from this world" (section 15). The dead, he said, "are not to be lamented, since we know that they are not lost, but sent before" (section 20).
For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.Cyprian cites Paul's words in section 7 of On the Mortality to teach that a believer who died in the plague lost nothing.
Pontius says that Cyprian gathered the people and "first of all urged the benefits of mercy", teaching them to love even their enemies (Life of Cyprian 9). Then "the ministrations are constantly distributed according to the quality of the men and their degrees" (section 10).
Pontius claims that the good was done "to all men, not to those only who are of the household of faith" (section 10). He ranks it above Tobias in the Book of Tobit, who buried the slain "of his own race only".
Dionysius set the plague after persecution, war and famineEusebius, Church History 7.22.3 to 5
Dionysius began with the persecution: "First, they drove us out" (7.22.4). War and famine followed, "which we endured in common with the heathen" (7.22.5). He likened the city in the plague to Egypt on the night its firstborn died (7.22.3, citing Exodus 12:30).
Dionysius wrote to Hierax of a city that had lost its peopleEusebius, Church History 7.21.9
In a festal letter to Hierax, a bishop in Egypt, Dionysius wrote of "these continuous pestilences". He wrote that "the men from forty to seventy years of age were then so much more numerous" than those now enrolled from fourteen to eighty "for the public allowance of food" (7.21.9). He compares age groups on the food roll and gives no number of the dead.
Cyprian answered the charge that the Christians brought the plagueCyprian, To Demetrianus 2 and 10
Demetrianus, a pagan, reported that "to us it is ascribed that wars arise more frequently, that plague, that famines rage" (section 2). The Catholic Encyclopedia calls the reply the one writing of Cyprian "couched in a pungent strain". Cyprian answered that in the plague "mercy is not manifested to the weak, and avarice and rapine are waiting open-mouthed for the dead" (section 10).
The fund of money is the Catholic Encyclopedia's summaryCatholic Encyclopedia, Cyprian of Carthage (1908)
The Encyclopedia says that Cyprian "raised a staff of workers and a great fund of money for the nursing of the sick and the burial of the dead". Pontius, his deacon, names the sharing of the work and says nothing of a fund.
What the Sources Leave Unsaid
The writers give no year for the plague's beginning or its end.
Eusebius places the letter to Hierax in the chapter before the festal letter of the plague, while the Catholic Encyclopedia sets its troubles years later, when "Famine and pestilence raged anew".
For Carthage, neither Pontius nor the heading of On the Mortality in the Ante-Nicene Fathers gives a year.
The Mercy of the Father
Cyprian grounded the work of mercy in the Father's kindness to the evil and the good.
In Life of Cyprian 9, Pontius records Cyprian's question: "if a man professes to be a son of God, why does not he imitate the example of his Father?"
But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.Cyprian's question to his church in the plague rests on these verses.
Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.Jesus names the Father's mercy as the measure of His disciples' mercy.
Did the Church's Care Change Its Growth?
Cyprian and a modern sociologist both tie the plague years to conversions.
Rodney Stark, a sociologist, argues in The Rise of Christianity (1996) that Christian mutual aid in the epidemics gave believers a far higher survival rate than pagans, as the publisher describes the book. Its fourth chapter treats epidemics, networks and conversion.
Cyprian wrote that by the dread of the mortality "the heathens are constrained to believe" (On the Mortality 15), and he gives no number.
Every account of the care in this plague was written by a Christian to Christians. Dionysius wrote to his own flock, whose sick are "our brethren". Pontius wrote of his own bishop, and Cyprian wrote to his own church. The picture Dionysius gives of pagans who fled comes from one side only, and the care of outsiders rests on Pontius's report of Carthage. No record from outside the church in the 250s confirms the care. The nearest pagan witness is the emperor Julian, who wrote to Arsacius in 362 that the "impious Galilaeans" fed the pagan poor as well as their own. The effect of the care on the church's growth is not known from these sources.
After the Plague
Cyprian did not live to see the peace for the church of which Dionysius later wrote.
Eusebius records a letter of Dionysius "to Hermammon and the brethren in Egypt", written after the plague, "mentioning the peace under Gallienus" (7.22.12).
In the plague years the believers of Alexandria and Carthage showed the Father's mercy in deeds, at the cost of their health and of some of their lives.
And the King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did for Me.’The King counts care given to the least of His brothers as given to Him, and the nursing in these cities was care of that kind.
Sources
Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.
- Eusebius, Church History, book 7, chapters 21 and 22, translated by Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, volume 1 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1890)
- Cyprian, On the Mortality (Treatise 7), sections 7, 8, 15 and 20, translated by Robert Ernest Wallis, Ante-Nicene Fathers, volume 5 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1886)
- Cyprian, To Demetrianus (Treatise 5), sections 2 and 10, in the same Wallis translation and volume.
- Pontius the Deacon, The Life and Passion of Cyprian, sections 7, 9 and 10, in Wallis's English in the Ante-Nicene volume named above.
- John Chapman, St. Cyprian of Carthage, The Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 4 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908)
- John Chapman, Dionysius of Alexandria, The Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909)
- Patrick Healy, Decius, in the 1908 volume that holds Chapman's Cyprian.
- Julian, Letter 22, to Arsacius, in The Works of the Emperor Julian, volume 3, translated by W. C. Wright (Loeb Classical Library, 1923)
- Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton University Press, 1996), the publisher's description and the table of contents in the Library of Congress catalogue.
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