Bishop of Carthage

Within approximately two years of his baptism at Easter 246, Cyprian was elected bishop of Carthage by popular acclamation — an ascent of remarkable speed, canonically anomalous, and immediately contested by five senior presbyters who would never be reconciled to him. How he came to the chair, how he held it, and what governing principles he brought to the greatest see of Latin Africa are the subjects of this file.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

From the Font to the Chair: The Speed of Advancement

The trajectory from baptism to the episcopate of Carthage in barely two years was, by any ancient or modern standard, extraordinary. The usual pattern of clerical advancement — long formation, gradual movement through the orders of reader, subdeacon, deacon, presbyter, and then the episcopate — implied a span of years, sometimes decades (cf. canon 2 of Nicaea 325, which legislates specifically against such rapid promotion, “against the rule of the Church”). Cyprian moved through all of it at a pace that his contemporaries noticed and that his enemies exploited. He was, by the account of Pontius his deacon, made presbyter “immediately” after baptism (Pontius, Vita Cypriani 3 [PL 3:1540]; trans. ANF 5), and elected to the episcopate within the year or two that followed — at the latest by early 249, perhaps already in 248 (Sage, Cyprian, 108–111; Burns, Cyprian the Bishop, 3–6).

What made the advance possible was not the subversion of order but the pressure of popular demand from the Christian laity of Carthage. Ancient episcopal elections, as governed by the practice Cyprian himself later articulated, were in principle the joint act of clergy, neighboring bishops, and the assembled people (Cyprian, Epistula 67.3–5 [CSEL 3.2:737–739]; trans. Clarke, ACW 46). The people of Carthage, it appears, demanded Cyprian overwhelmingly. Pontius describes the moment in terms that emphasize the undividedness and persistence of the popular will: “all men eagerly desired it, in a wonderful manner called for it… With one accord they not only preferred him before others, but even compelled him” (Pontius, Vita 3; trans. ANF 5). The language of compulsion (coegerunt) is conventional in episcopal-election narratives — it belongs to the rhetoric of episcopal reluctance by which a bishop demonstrates that he sought neither the office nor its authority — but the underlying social reality it reflects, a new convert of extraordinary gifts and conspicuous generosity who had already captured the community’s confidence, is not in doubt (Brent, Cyprian and Roman Carthage, ch. 3; Burns, Cyprian the Bishop, 4–5).

Cyprian’s own account of his reluctance is preserved indirectly in his references to the modesty (modestia) that made him resist the weight of an office he felt unworthy to bear; the theme is a topos of episcopal literature from Gregory Nazianzen back to Moses before the burning bush, but for Cyprian it had an additional and concrete grounding — he was newly baptized, and the bishop of a great church was, by the expectations of the time, a man of long Christian formation (Cyprian, Epistula 55.8 [CSEL 3.2:630]; trans. Clarke, ACW 44; Sage, Cyprian, 110–111). The Nicene canon against rapid promotion post-dates him by seventy-five years, but the sense of the impropriety it codifies was already present in 248, and his enemies would use it against him.

The Five Presbyters: Seeds of Schism

The election was not unopposed. Five presbyters of the Carthaginian church refused to accept Cyprian as their bishop and mounted a formal opposition that — unlike the conventional reluctance of a newly-elected bishop — never dissolved into reconciliation (Pontius, Vita 3 [PL 3:1540]; Sage, Cyprian, 111–113; Burns, Cyprian the Bishop, 5–6). Their names are not given by Pontius, but the correspondence of the following years allows partial identification: Novatus of Carthage was certainly among them, as was the deacon Felicissimus, and the presbyter Gaius perhaps (Cyprian, Epistula 52 [CSEL 3.2:616–624]; Epistula 59.10 [CSEL 3.2:677]; trans. Clarke, ACW 44; Sage, Cyprian, 111–115). This nucleus of disaffected clergy became the core of what developed, during and after the Decian persecution, into the Felicissiman schism — the faction that accused Cyprian of excessive severity towards the lapsi (the lapsed) while simultaneously, in some cases, allying with the rigorist schism at Rome. The apparent contradiction is less paradoxical than it seems: what united the five was not a coherent theological position but a settled personal opposition to the man who had leapt over them to the chair they had served under his predecessors.

Cyprian was aware throughout his episcopate that these men represented an unhealed wound in the body of the Carthaginian church. He refers to them obliquely in the correspondence as “those who never pleased God” and “the fractious” (turbulenti), and his letters to Rome during the Decian exile identify the same group as the source of the unauthorized granting of reconciliation to the lapsi in his absence (Cyprian, Epistula 14.3 [CSEL 3.2:510]; Epistula 43.1–3 [CSEL 3.2:590–594]; trans. Clarke, ACW 43–44). The schism they seeded is treated at length in Cyprian’s Middle Path; what matters here is its origin — in the unresolved bitterness of men who had watched a wealthy pagan rhetor, two years a Christian, take the throne of the Carthaginian church before any of them.

The Nature of the Carthaginian Episcopate

The see Cyprian now headed was, by the mid-third century, the most important in the Latin West outside Rome. Carthage was the metropolitan church for the whole of the proconsular province of Africa and the traditional presidency of the African episcopal college — a body that met in regional councils under the bishop of Carthage’s leadership (Burns, Cyprian the Bishop, ch. 6; Brent, Cyprian and Roman Carthage, 19–25). This meant that the bishop of Carthage was not simply the pastor of a single urban congregation but the presiding figure of perhaps the most numerous episcopal college in the entire Church: Cyprian’s own councils at Carthage could gather eighty-seven bishops at a time (Cyprian, Sententiae Episcoporum [CSEL 3.1:436], the council of 256 on the rebaptism question). His see therefore carried a weight in the whole-Church conversations of the third century — with Rome, with the East — that no other Latin church could match, and his correspondence with Cornelius and Stephen of Rome was conducted bishop to bishop, primus to primus, not as the deference of a subordinate but as the exchange of equals in the episcopate held in solidum (see The Correspondence; Cyprian, De Unitate 5 [CSEL 3.1:214]; Burns, Cyprian the Bishop, ch. 5).

Within Carthage itself the bishop was simultaneously the community’s liturgical head, judicial arbitrator, administrator of charitable funds, and representative before the civil authorities — roles the letters show Cyprian managing simultaneously: adjudicating disputes among confessors in prison, directing relief to the poor, and conducting diplomatic correspondence with Rome, often from hiding (see The Flight of 251).

“Nothing Without Your Counsel”: The Governing Principle

The most distinctive statement of Cyprian’s governing philosophy appears in the letter he sent to his clergy at the outbreak of the Decian persecution, when he had withdrawn to a place of safety and was directing affairs from a distance. He states the principle he had held from the beginning: “I have resolved to do nothing by my own private opinion without your counsel and the consent of the people” (nihil sine consilio vestro et sine consensu plebis meae privato consilio gerere) (Cyprian, Epistula 14.4 [CSEL 3.2:511]; trans. Clarke, ACW 43). The formula — clergy as the deliberative council (consilium), people as the body whose consent validates — was not original to Cyprian; it reflected the actual practice of government in the African church. But in his hands it became a governing principle consistently applied, and the consistency distinguishes him from other ancient bishops who appealed to the same formula in rhetoric while disregarding it in practice.

The correspondence demonstrates the principle at work in detail. Major decisions — the readmission of the lapsi, the response to Novatian’s schism, the rebaptism of heretics — are submitted to council and argued through before resolution (Cyprian, Epistula 17.3 [CSEL 3.2:522]; Epistula 55.6 [CSEL 3.2:628]; trans. Clarke, ACW 43–44). Cyprian does not merely consult; he argues, persuades, and sometimes concedes. The letters to Rome in the early 250s reveal a bishop who was simultaneously firm on matters of principle — the invalidity of schismatic ordinations, the necessity of proper penance — and genuinely flexible on the pastoral question of how fast the penance should be concluded (Cyprian, Epistula 55 [CSEL 3.2:624–642]; trans. Clarke, ACW 44; Burns, Cyprian the Bishop, ch. 3). This combination of theological firmness with collegial process is the signature of his governance, and it helps explain why a man who had been bishop for less than a decade and died as a martyr before he was fifty could generate an eighty-one-letter correspondence that remains the richest documentary window onto any pre-Nicene church.

Rapid Election and Canonical Memory

The speed of Cyprian’s advance lodged itself in the Church’s canonical memory. Cyprian himself appealed to the popular election when asserting to Rome that a bishop’s standing in his own see is secured by the divine judgment expressed through his people (Cyprian, Epistula 59.5–6 [CSEL 3.2:672–674]; trans. Clarke, ACW 44). The principle is not a pragmatic defense of an embarrassing irregularity but the corollary of his in solidum theology: if each bishop holds the whole episcopate within his own church, then the acclamation of the people, under God, is the ordinary instrument by which the Spirit designates the man so appointed (Cyprian, De Unitate 5 [CSEL 3.1:214]; Burns, Cyprian the Bishop, ch. 5). The five hostile presbyters had voted against him; the people had overruled them; and the subsequent decade vindicated the judgment.

The anomaly itself was not forgotten. It almost certainly lies behind Nicaea’s canon 2 (325), which prohibits the rapid elevation of neophytes to the episcopate — the earliest legislative response to a pattern of which Carthage 248/249 was the most celebrated case (see Orthodoxy: Canon Law).

See Also

References

  • Pontius the Deacon. Vita Cypriani (Life of Cyprian). PL 3:1537–1578. Trans. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 5, ed. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, Buffalo 1886. Online: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0505.htm
  • Cyprian of Carthage. Epistulae (Letters). CSEL 3.2, ed. W. Hartel, Vienna 1871. Trans. G. W. Clarke, The Letters of St. Cyprian of Carthage, 4 vols. Ancient Christian Writers 43, 44, 46, 47. New York: Newman Press, 1984–1989. (All letter citations in this file use Clarke’s Hartel/CSEL numbering.)
  • Cyprian of Carthage. De Ecclesiae Catholicae Unitate (On the Unity of the Catholic Church) 5. CSEL 3.1:213–214. Trans. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 5.
  • Cyprian of Carthage. Sententiae Episcoporum (Opinions of Eighty-Seven Bishops, council of 256). CSEL 3.1:435–461. Trans. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 5.
  • Council of Nicaea (325), canon 2 (against the rapid promotion of neophytes). Greek text in Joannou, Discipline Générale Antique, vol. I.1 (Rome: Pontifical Commission, 1962). Trans. in The Seven Ecumenical Councils, NPNF II/14.
  • Sage, Michael M. Cyprian. Patristic Monograph Series 1. Cambridge, MA: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1975. Chs. 4–5 on the election, the five presbyters, and the early episcopate.
  • Brent, Allen. Cyprian and Roman Carthage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Ch. 3 on the social dynamics of the election.
  • Burns, J. Patout. Cyprian the Bishop. London: Routledge, 2002. The sustained study of Cyprian’s governance, especially chs. 1, 3, and 5–6 on episcopal authority, consent, and collegiality.