EASTERTIDE · 2 MAY & TRINITY · 16 SEPTEMBER Bishops & Martyrs · The African Fathers
Cyprian of Carthage & Athanasius of Alexandria
Bishops & Martyrs · The African Fathers · d. 258 & 373
Cyprian — SIP-ree-an · Carthage — KAR-thij · Athanasius — ath-an-AY-zee-us · Nicaea — ny-SEE-a · homoousios — hom-oh-OO-see-os · Arius — AIR-ee-us · lapsi — LAP-see · Decius — DEE-shus · Valerian — val-EER-ee-an
O God, who didst raise up thy servants Cyprian and Athanasius to be pillars of thy Church in the fire of persecution and the storm of heresy; Grant that we may hold fast, as they did, both to the unity of the Body and to the truth of the Faith, knowing that the Church which gathers us and the Christ who saves us are one and the same gift; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Africa gave the Latin Church two of its greatest minds before Augustine was born. Tertullian of Carthage (ter-TUL-ee-an) had already forged the Latin theological vocabulary that would shape every subsequent Western Doctor. Cyprian (SIP-ree-an) of Carthage, who came to faith in middle age by reading Tertullian, inherited that vocabulary and applied it to the most urgent pastoral question of the third-century Church: what to do about the lapsi (LAP-see) — those who had apostatised under the Decian (DEE-shun) persecution of 250 and now wished to return. The question sounds administrative. Its implications were total. For in answering it, Cyprian was compelled to articulate what the Church actually is, what the bishop’s authority actually means, and on what terms the fractured body of Christ can be healed and made whole. Athanasius (ath-an-AY-zee-us) of Alexandria, born a generation later into the Egyptian Church, faced a different but equally total question: whether the Word who became flesh at Bethlehem is truly and fully God, or whether — as Arius (AIR-ee-us) and his vast following maintained — he is a supreme but created being, the highest of God’s works but not God himself. Both Cyprian and Athanasius answered their questions with their lives. Cyprian was beheaded outside Carthage (KAR-thij) in 258 under the Emperor Valerian (val-EER-ee-an). Athanasius spent seventeen of his forty-five years as bishop in exile, driven out five times by five different emperors. Together they are the African tradition’s supreme gift to the universal Church: the bishop who defined ecclesial unity, and the bishop who defined Christological orthodoxy.
Cyprian had been a wealthy rhetorician and a pagan when he converted in his forties, gave his wealth to the poor, and was elected bishop of Carthage almost immediately. Within two years the Decian persecution descended on the Church and the lapsi — those who had sacrificed to the imperial gods or obtained certificates claiming they had done so — presented the most agonising pastoral problem the young Church had yet faced. Some of his clergy, under pressure from the confessors languishing in prison, were readmitting the lapsed without penance or episcopal authorisation. The rigorist faction in Rome under Novatian (noh-VAY-shun) refused to readmit them at all, claiming the Church had no power to forgive apostasy. Between these two errors, Cyprian carved the via media that would define Catholic discipline thereafter: the lapsed could be restored, but only through a proper process of penance, only under the authority of the bishop, and only in the unity of the whole Church. He cannot have God for his Father who has not the Church for his mother. The sentence has sometimes been read as harsh. Read in its context it is an act of pastoral mercy: it insists that the lapsed belong to the Church, that the Church has the authority to receive them back, and that no private arrangement — however well-intentioned — can substitute for the corporate healing of the body that their apostasy has wounded. Cyprian was martyred before he could see the full fruit of this teaching, but the tree he planted bore the ecclesiology of the whole subsequent Latin West.
Athanasius attended the Council of Nicaea (ny-SEE-a) in 325 as a young deacon, not yet bishop, in the entourage of his predecessor Alexander of Alexandria. He watched the Council define the Son as homoousios (hom-oh-OO-see-os) — of the same substance as the Father — against the Arian position that the Son was homoiousios (hom-oy-OO-see-os) — of similar but not identical substance. The difference is a single iota, the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet, and the theological stakes were absolute: if the Son is not fully God, then the Incarnation does not bring God to us but only a very exalted creature, and our salvation is the work of something less than God, which is to say no salvation at all. Athanasius became bishop of Alexandria the following year and spent the rest of his life defending the Nicene formula against emperors, councils, and majorities who repeatedly decided that the iota did not matter. Athanasius contra mundum — Athanasius against the world — is not a boast but a simple description: at several points in the 340s and 350s he was literally the only bishop of any consequence in the East still holding the Nicene position. He held it through five exiles totalling seventeen years. He outlived every emperor who exiled him. And the Nicene faith, which at the Council of Constantinople in 381 was finally confirmed as the faith of the universal Church, was the faith he had refused to abandon in the years when everyone around him had. The Easter season in which his feast falls is the right season for him: Athanasius’s entire theological argument rests on the Resurrection. If the Word who rose is not fully God, the Resurrection changes nothing. It is because he is fully God that death could not hold him, and it is because death could not hold him that it cannot hold us.
Cyprian and Athanasius face each other across the theological tradition like the two sides of a single arch. Cyprian builds from the bottom up: the local community, the bishop, the synod, the unity of the episcopate — the Church as the body that holds salvation because it holds the Body. Athanasius builds from the top down: the eternal Word, the Incarnation, the homoousios — the doctrine that holds salvation because it holds the truth about who Christ is. Neither arch stands without the other. A Church that has Cyprian’s ecclesiology without Athanasius’s Christology is a perfectly organised body worshipping something less than God. A Church that has Athanasius’s Christology without Cyprian’s ecclesiology is a correct theology with no community to inhabit and transmit it. The two African bishops, separated in their feast days by the width of the liturgical year, are the two halves of a single answer to the question the whole Patristic tradition was asking: what is the Church, and who is the Christ at its centre? They answered it with their scholarship, their exile, their blood, and their lives.
O Almighty God, who by the labours of thy servants Cyprian and Athanasius didst preserve thy Church in unity and in truth; Grant that we may never separate what they held together: the Body that gathers us, and the Word who saves us; that, built up in charity and grounded in right faith, we may at last come to the fullness of him in whom the whole creation is recapitulated; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.