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.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

Occasion and Date

De Unitate was composed against schism, not heresy. Cyprian wrote it around 251, after his return from hiding, when the African church was being torn by the schism of Felicissimus at Carthage (see Cyprian’s Middle Path) and the Roman church by the schism of Novatian (see Novatian and the Rigorists); the treatise was almost certainly read out, in some form, to the Carthaginian council of 251 (Cyprian, De Unitate; Bévenot, OECT introduction; Burns, Cyprian the Bishop, ch. 4). Its target is the man who tears the Church by setting up “altar against altar” and “bishop against bishop,” and its purpose is to show that such a man, however orthodox his confession and however heroic his apparent zeal, places himself outside the one Church and so outside salvation (Cyprian, De Unitate 10–12 [CSEL 3.1:218–220; PL 4:506–509]; trans. ANF 5). The schismatic, not the persecutor, is here the deadliest enemy of the Church — for “the more terrible and fierce enemy is he who, hiding himself under the name of Christian, lays waste the Church… an enemy the more to be feared and guarded against because he is the less easily perceived” (Cyprian, De Unitate 3; trans. ANF 5).

The Church as Mother

The treatise’s most famous sentence binds salvation to the Church through the image of motherhood. “He can no longer have God for his Father who has not the Church for his Mother” — habere iam non potest Deum patrem qui ecclesiam non habet matrem (Cyprian, De Unitate 6 [CSEL 3.1:214; PL 4:503]; trans. ANF 5). The image is developed from the figure of the one ark of Noah, outside which all perished: “If anyone could escape who was outside the ark of Noah, then he also may escape who shall be outside of the Church” (Cyprian, De Unitate 6; trans. ANF 5). From the same chapter comes the parallel maxim that the broader tradition compresses into extra ecclesiam nulla salus — “there is no salvation outside the Church” (salus extra ecclesiam non est), a phrase Cyprian states most explicitly not in De Unitate itself but in his correspondence, in Letter 73 to Jubaianus on the baptism of heretics (Cyprian, Epistula 73.21 [CSEL 3.2:795]; trans. ANF 5, Ep. 72; see Baptism and the Boundaries of the Church). For Cyprian the two are one teaching: the Church is the only mother who bears Christians to life, and to leave her communion is to leave the source of life itself.

The Seamless Robe and the Undivided Light

Cyprian heaps up images for the indivisibility of the Church. She is the seamless robe of Christ, “woven from the top throughout,” which the soldiers at the cross would not tear (John 19:23–24): “that coat… received its unity from the part that came from above… He who rends and divides the Church of Christ cannot possess the clothing of Christ” (Cyprian, De Unitate 7 [CSEL 3.1:215; PL 4:504]; trans. ANF 5). She is the one sun with many rays, the one tree with many branches, the one spring with many streams: “Separate a ray of the sun from its body of light, its unity does not allow a division of light; break a branch from a tree — when broken, it will not be able to bud; cut off the stream from its fountain, and that which is cut off dries up. Thus also the Church, shone over with the light of the Lord, sheds forth her rays over the whole world, yet it is one light which is everywhere diffused, nor is the unity of the body separated” (Cyprian, De Unitate 5 [CSEL 3.1:213–214; PL 4:501]; trans. ANF 5). She is the one dove of the Song of Songs, the enclosed garden and sealed fountain (Cyprian, De Unitate 4; Song of Songs 4:12, 6:9). The cumulative force of the images is a single claim: the Church is not an aggregate of congregations that may divide and re-form, but an organic unity that, once severed from, cannot be reconstituted outside.

“Whatever Is Separated from the Source”

From this it follows that the schismatic’s virtues do not save him. Cyprian presses the point with deliberate severity: the man who has left the Church may keep the faith, may give his goods to the poor, may even die in confession of the Name, and yet not be saved, because he is outside the one Church in which alone these things have life. “Such a one may be slain, he cannot be crowned… Though they give their bodies to be burned, or lay down their lives for the brethren, that will be to them no advancement of faith, but the consummation of perfidy… He cannot be a martyr who is not in the Church… They cannot dwell with God who would not be of one mind in the Church of God” (Cyprian, De Unitate 14 [CSEL 3.1:222–223; PL 4:511–512]; trans. ANF 5). This is the most stringent statement in the Fathers of the principle that there is no salvation, and no valid sacramental life, outside the Church’s communion — the principle that would drive Cyprian’s later insistence that even baptism conferred outside the Church is no baptism at all (see The Clash with Stephen).

The Episcopate Held In Solidum

The hinge of the treatise’s positive ecclesiology is the doctrine of the one episcopate. The unity of the Church is realized in the one office of bishop, which every bishop holds whole and entire, not as a fraction but as a share in an undivided possession. Cyprian states it in the lapidary clause of Chapter 5: episcopatus unus est, cuius a singulis in solidum pars tenetur — “the episcopate is one, of which a part is held by each [bishop] for the whole” (Cyprian, De Unitate 5 [CSEL 3.1:214; PL 4:501]; trans. ANF 5 renders it “the episcopate is one, each part of which is held by each one for the whole”). The phrase in solidum is a term of Roman law: in a joint obligation held in solidum, each party is liable for, and possesses, the whole, not merely a divided portion (Brent, Cyprian and Roman Carthage, on Cyprian’s legal vocabulary; Burns, Cyprian the Bishop, ch. 5). Applied to the episcopate, it means that there is one office of bishop in the whole world, and every individual bishop possesses the whole of it within his own church, in solidarity with all the rest — so that the bishops together are a single college, and to break with the college is to forfeit the office. This is the heart of what later scholarship calls Cyprian’s “collegial” or “conciliarist” ecclesiology: a unity not of subordination to a single head but of communion among bishops who each hold the one episcopate entire (see The Bishop within the College; The Contested Ecclesiology).

Peter and the Unity (Chapter 4)

Immediately before the in solidum clause, in Chapter 4, Cyprian grounds the unity of the episcopate in the figure of Peter: the Lord built His Church upon one man, and gave the keys to one, in order to show that the Church is one. This chapter — which exists in two recensions, one of which adds a series of clauses on the “primacy” and “chair” of Peter — is the single most contested passage in Cyprian and the chief battleground of the East–West reading of his ecclesiology. Because the text-critical and interpretive questions there are weighty enough to require their own treatment, Chapter 4 is handled in full, with both recensions presented in parallel, in The Primacy Text. What must be said here is only that, in either recension, Chapter 4’s Peter does the same work as Chapter 5’s in solidum: he is the one on whom the one Church is founded, the visible sign that “the episcopate is one.” Cyprian’s own gloss settles the function — “the other apostles were also the same as was Peter, endowed with an equal partnership both of honour and power, but the beginning proceeds from unity” (Cyprian, De Unitate 4; trans. ANF 5).

The Reach of the Treatise

De Unitate became the charter document of Western thinking about the Church. Augustine quarried it against the Donatists a century and a half later — turning Cyprian’s “no salvation outside the Church” against the very African rigorists who claimed Cyprian’s mantle (see The Contested Ecclesiology); the medieval West read its Petrine chapter as a charter of the papacy; and the modern Orthodox have read its in solidum episcopate as the classic patristic statement of conciliar, communion-ecclesiology over against papal monarchy (Afanasiev and Meyendorff, in The Primacy of Peter; Zizioulas, Being as Communion). That a single short treatise could be claimed by Roman primatial theology and by Orthodox eucharistic ecclesiology alike is the measure of its depth — and of the genuine tension between its two great themes, the one Church founded on one Peter and the one episcopate held by every bishop in solidum, which the rest of this section and Section 09 explore (see The Contested Ecclesiology).

References

Cyprian of Carthage. De Ecclesiae Catholicae Unitate (On the Unity of the Catholic Church). In S. Thasci Caecili Cypriani Opera Omnia, ed. W. Hartel, CSEL 3.1, Vienna 1868; and Sancti Cypriani Episcopi Opera, ed. M. Bévenot, CCSL 3, Turnhout: Brepols, 1972. PL 4:493–520. Trans. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 5, ed. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, Buffalo 1886 (the web-checkable anchor). Online: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/050701.htm
Cyprian of Carthage. Epistula 73.21 (to Jubaianus), salus extra ecclesiam non est. CSEL 3.2:795. Trans. G. W. Clarke, The Letters of St. Cyprian, ACW 47 (= ANF 5, Ep. 72).
Bévenot, Maurice, ed. and trans. St. Cyprian: The Lapsed; The Unity of the Catholic Church. Ancient Christian Writers 25. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1957; and Cyprian: De Lapsis and De Ecclesiae Catholicae Unitate. Oxford Early Christian Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.
Burns, J. Patout. Cyprian the Bishop. London: Routledge, 2002. On the in solidum episcopate and the occasion of De Unitate.
Brent, Allen. Cyprian and Roman Carthage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. On Cyprian’s legal and rhetorical vocabulary, including in solidum.
Meyendorff, John, ed. The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, rev. ed. 1992. The Orthodox reading of Cyprian’s collegial episcopate.