05 — The Unity of the Church

On the Unity of the Catholic Church and the great formulae of Latin ecclesiology, with the flagship problem of the two recensions of the Primacy Text of De Unitate 4.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

Part of the St. Cyprian of Carthage Reference Guide. This section contains two content files:

File	Summary
de-unitate.md	On the Unity of the Catholic Church (De Unitate) — De Ecclesiae Catholicae Unitate, written around 251 in the heat of the Novatianist and Felicissiman schisms, is Cyprian’s masterwork and the foundational treatise of Latin ecclesiology: the work that gave the Church the maxims “he cannot have God for his Father who has not the Church for his Mother” and “there is no salvation outside the Church,” and that grounded the Church’s unity in the one episcopate held by every bishop “for the whole” (in solidum). This file sets out the treatise’s argument, its central images, and its great formulae; the contested Chapter 4 and its two recensions are treated separately in The Primacy Text.
the-primacy-text.md	The Primacy Text (De Unitate 4) — Chapter 4 of De Unitate — the passage on Peter and the unity of the Church — survives in two distinct recensions: a longer one (the Textus Receptus or “Primacy Text”) that stresses the primatus given to Peter and the one cathedra Petri, and a shorter one that speaks of Peter only as the figure of the one episcopate shared equally by all. This file presents both recensions in parallel with their sources, reports the modern scholarly conclusion (associated above all with Maurice Bévenot) that both are genuinely Cyprian’s own, and sets out as a structured dispute the Roman-primacy reading and the Orthodox reading of the passage.

File

Summary

de-unitate.md

On the Unity of the Catholic Church (De Unitate) — De Ecclesiae Catholicae Unitate, written around 251 in the heat of the Novatianist and Felicissiman schisms, is Cyprian’s masterwork and the foundational treatise of Latin ecclesiology: the work that gave the Church the maxims “he cannot have God for his Father who has not the Church for his Mother” and “there is no salvation outside the Church,” and that grounded the Church’s unity in the one episcopate held by every bishop “for the whole” (in solidum). This file sets out the treatise’s argument, its central images, and its great formulae; the contested Chapter 4 and its two recensions are treated separately in The Primacy Text.

the-primacy-text.md

The Primacy Text (De Unitate 4) — Chapter 4 of De Unitate — the passage on Peter and the unity of the Church — survives in two distinct recensions: a longer one (the Textus Receptus or “Primacy Text”) that stresses the primatus given to Peter and the one cathedra Petri, and a shorter one that speaks of Peter only as the figure of the one episcopate shared equally by all. This file presents both recensions in parallel with their sources, reports the modern scholarly conclusion (associated above all with Maurice Bévenot) that both are genuinely Cyprian’s own, and sets out as a structured dispute the Roman-primacy reading and the Orthodox reading of the passage.

05 — The Unity of the Church

See Also