The Clash with Stephen

Between 255 and 257 Cyprian and Pope Stephen I of Rome fell into open conflict over whether those baptized by heretics and schismatics must be (re)baptized on entering the Church. Cyprian and the African and Eastern bishops held that there is no baptism outside the Church and so such persons receive true baptism for the first time; Stephen, invoking ancient Roman custom, held the prior baptism valid and received converts by the laying-on of hands alone — and threatened to break communion with the Africans and Easterners who disagreed. The dispute, in which Cyprian denied that any bishop is a “bishop of bishops” and Stephen claimed the authority of the chair of Peter, was left unresolved when both men died as martyrs within little more than a year.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

The Question

The theological substance of the dispute — whether the sacraments can exist outside the Church — is treated in the companion file Baptism and the Boundaries of the Church. This file concerns the clash itself: the collision between two bishops and two understandings of authority that the baptism question forced into the open. The occasion was practical. Converts were coming into the Catholic Church from the Novatianist and other heretical or schismatic communities (see Novatian and the Rigorists). How were they to be received? The African church, following a ruling of an earlier Council of Carthage under Bishop Agrippinus (c. 220s), held that since baptism belongs to the Church alone, the washing they had received outside her was no baptism, and they must be baptized — for the first time, in African eyes — on entering (Cyprian, Epistula 71.4; 73.3 [CSEL 3.2]; trans. ANF 5, Epp. 70, 72). Rome, by contrast, received such converts by the imposition of hands in penance, treating their baptism as valid. For a generation the two customs had coexisted without rupture. Cyprian’s vigorous reassertion of the African practice in three councils of Carthage (255, 256) brought it to a head.

Stephen’s Intervention

When Cyprian, on behalf of the African bishops, wrote to inform Rome of the councils’ decisions, Pope Stephen reacted not with discussion but with a peremptory demand for conformity and a threat of rupture. Cyprian’s own letters and the letter of Firmilian of Caesarea preserve Stephen’s position, since Stephen’s own letters survive only as quoted by his opponents. Stephen rested his case on custom and tradition: “Let there be no innovation beyond what has been handed down” — nihil innovetur nisi quod traditum est (Stephen, quoted in Cyprian, Epistula 74.1 [CSEL 3.2:799]; trans. ANF 5, Ep. 73). He held the baptism of heretics valid provided it was given in the name of the Trinity, and received converts “by the laying-on of hands unto repentance” (manus illi imponatur in paenitentiam). And — most provocatively to Cyprian — he is reported to have grounded his demand in the authority of his see, claiming to “hold the succession of Peter” (Firmilian, in Cyprian, Epistula 75.17 [CSEL 3.2:821]; trans. ANF 5, Ep. 74). According to Cyprian and Firmilian, Stephen broke off communion with the African and Cappadocian delegations, and even refused to receive the bishops Cyprian sent, ordering the Roman faithful to deny them hospitality (Firmilian, in Epistula 75.25).

Cyprian’s Reply: Truth over Custom

Cyprian answered Stephen’s appeal to custom with the maxim that became the slogan of the whole controversy: “custom without truth is the antiquity of error” — consuetudo sine veritate vetustas erroris est (Cyprian, Epistula 74.9 [CSEL 3.2:806]; trans. ANF 5, Ep. 73.9). Antiquity, he argued, is no warrant if the custom is wrong; what matters is not how long a practice has been followed but whether it is true. “Nor ought custom, which had crept in among some, to prevent the truth from prevailing and conquering; for custom without truth is the antiquity of error. On which account, let us forsake the error and follow the truth” (Cyprian, Epistula 74.9; trans. ANF 5). He charged Stephen with defending the cause of heretics against the Church — “thou who hast betrayed the cause of the Church” — and with inconsistency, in granting to those baptized by heretics a baptism he would not grant comes from the Holy Spirit (Cyprian, Epistula 74.1–2; 73.13–15; trans. ANF 5).

“No Bishop of Bishops”

The most quoted Cyprianic statement of the controversy is not from a letter to Stephen but from the preface Cyprian delivered to the eighty-seven African bishops gathered at the Seventh Council of Carthage on 1 September 256, where each bishop in turn gave his sentence in favour of (re)baptism. Cyprian opened: “It remains that we severally declare our opinion on this same subject, judging no one, nor depriving any one of the right of communion if he differ from us. For neither does any of us set himself up as a bishop of bishops, nor by tyrannical terror does any compel his colleague to the necessity of obedience; since every bishop, in the free use of his liberty and power, has the right of forming his own judgment, and can no more be judged by another than he himself can judge another. But let us all wait for the judgment of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the one and only one that has the power both of preferring us in the government of His Church, and of judging us in our conduct there” (Cyprian, Sententiae Episcoporum (Seventh Council of Carthage, 256), preface [CSEL 3.1:435–436; PL 3:1053–1054]; trans. ANF 5). The Latin of the key clause — neque enim quisquam nostrum episcopum se episcoporum constituit aut tyrannico terrore ad obsequendi necessitatem collegas suos adigit — is the sharpest patristic denial that any bishop, the bishop of Rome included, may rule the episcopate as a monarch. Whether or not the preface names Stephen, it was delivered in the heat of his threat, and the bishops it addresses are precisely those Stephen had ordered to conform (Bévenot, OECT introduction; Brent, Cyprian and Roman Carthage; Burns, Cyprian the Bishop, ch. 6).

Firmilian and the East

Cyprian was not isolated. Firmilian of Caesarea in Cappadocia — a leading bishop of the East and a disciple of Origen’s circle — wrote Cyprian a long and indignant letter (preserved in Latin translation as Epistula 75 in Cyprian’s corpus) wholly supporting the African position and denouncing Stephen in still harsher terms than Cyprian had used. Firmilian was scandalized that Stephen “who so boasts of the place of his episcopate, and contends that he holds the succession from Peter, on whom the foundations of the Church were laid,” should by his error of communion with heretics “cut himself off” and become a worse schismatic than those he defended (Firmilian, in Cyprian, Epistula 75.17 [CSEL 3.2:821]; trans. ANF 5, Ep. 74). The Eastern churches of Asia Minor had themselves long practised the (re)baptism of heretics, and Firmilian’s letter shows that on the eve of the schism much of the East stood with Carthage and against Rome on this question (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 7.5; Sage, Cyprian; see Baptism and the Boundaries of the Church).

Left Unresolved

The dispute never reached a settlement. Stephen died — by tradition a martyr — on 2 August 257, his threat against the Africans and Easterners unexecuted; there is no evidence that he ever formally excommunicated Cyprian, Firmilian, or their colleagues, or that communion was in fact severed in any lasting way (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 7.5; the Liber Pontificalis; Sage, Cyprian). Within a year the Valerianic persecution fell on both churches: Stephen’s successor Sixtus II was killed in August 258, and Cyprian himself was beheaded on 14 September 258 (see The Acta and the Passion). Cyprian thus died holding a position that the later Western Church would not adopt: Rome’s practice, not Carthage’s, eventually prevailed in the West, and the Council of Arles (314) and ultimately Augustine, against the Donatists, ruled that heretical baptism in the name of the Trinity is valid (see Baptism and the Boundaries of the Church; The Contested Ecclesiology). That a sainted bishop and martyr died in open, unhealed disagreement with the bishop of Rome — and that the Church reckons both men saints — is one of the central data of the East–West argument over the papacy.

The Two Readings of the Clash

[Disputed: The Roman reading holds that Cyprian was sincerely but gravely mistaken on the baptismal question, that Stephen taught what the Church would later define as true, and that the episode shows Rome already exercising — through Stephen’s appeal to the Petrine succession and his power to require conformity — a primacy the rest only resisted to their own correction. On this view Stephen’s nihil innovetur was vindicated and Cyprian’s consuetudo sine veritate was, on this point, wrong; the Catholic Encyclopedia and Roman scholarship grant Cyprian’s error frankly while reading Stephen’s intervention as an early act of papal authority (the Catholic Encyclopedia, “Pope St. Stephen I”; cf. Chapman, Studies on the Early Papacy). The Orthodox reading holds that the clash is the decisive demonstration of how Cyprian understood his own Petrine language: the same bishop who wrote primatus Petro datur (see The Primacy Text) flatly refused to let Rome impose its custom on Africa, denied that any bishop is a “bishop of bishops,” and died unreconciled — proving that for Cyprian, and for the East that stood with him, Rome held a primacy of honour and origin but no jurisdiction over the colleges of bishops. On this reading Stephen’s appeal to the successio Petri is the first clear claim of a Roman jurisdictional primacy and Cyprian’s and Firmilian’s resistance is the first clear conciliarist rejection of it (Afanasiev and Meyendorff, The Primacy of Peter; L’Huillier; Bévenot, JTS 1954, on the limits of Cyprian’s “primacy”). Both traditions grant the facts — Stephen demanded conformity, Cyprian refused, neither yielded, both are saints — and divide only on whose theology and whose authority the episode vindicates.]

References

Cyprian of Carthage. Epistulae 71 (to Quintus), 73 (to Jubaianus), 74 (to Pompey, reporting Stephen’s rescript), 75 (Firmilian of Caesarea to Cyprian). CSEL 3.2 (Hartel); PL 3–4. Trans. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 5 (numbered there as Epp. 70, 72, 73, 74). Online: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/050674.htm (Ep. 74) and https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/050675.htm (Firmilian).
Cyprian of Carthage. Sententiae Episcoporum Numero LXXXVII de Haereticis Baptizandis (Seventh Council of Carthage, 1 Sept. 256), preface (neque enim quisquam nostrum episcopum se episcoporum constituit). CSEL 3.1:435–461; PL 3:1051–1116. Trans. ANF 5. Online: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0508.htm
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History 7.2–5. On the baptismal dispute, Stephen, and the Eastern practice. Trans. NPNF II/1.
Bévenot, Maurice. Cyprian: De Lapsis and De Ecclesiae Catholicae Unitate. Oxford Early Christian Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971; and “Primatus Petro datur: St Cyprian on the Papacy.” JTS n.s. 5 (1954): 19–35.
Brent, Allen. Cyprian and Roman Carthage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. On the rebaptism councils and Cyprian’s relations with Rome.
Burns, J. Patout. Cyprian the Bishop. London: Routledge, 2002, ch. 6, on the Stephen controversy.
Sage, Michael M. Cyprian. Patristic Monograph Series 1. Cambridge, MA: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1975. On the chronology and the unresolved outcome.
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 the clash.