09 — Legacy and Reception

How East and the Roman West have read his ecclesiology and the primacy text differently, Augustine’s use of him against the Donatists, and the modern scholarship of Brent, Burns, and Sage.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

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

File	Summary
modern-scholarship.md	Modern Scholarship — The modern critical study of Cyprian is now over a century old and has moved across three distinct phases: a nineteenth-century battle over the authenticity of the Primacy Text, a mid-twentieth-century text-critical and theological settlement associated above all with Maurice Bévenot, and a late-twentieth/early-twenty-first-century turn toward social, rhetorical, and institutional readings pioneered by Allen Brent and J. Patout Burns. This file surveys the principal scholars, editions, and open questions that shape how Cyprian is read today.
the-contested-ecclesiology.md	The Contested Ecclesiology — No ante-Nicene Father has been read more differently by East and West than Cyprian of Carthage: the same bishop who wrote that “a primacy is given to Peter” refused to the end of his life to let the bishop of Rome impose Roman custom on Africa, and died holding a position the later Western Church would not adopt. This file traces how the Roman West and the Orthodox East have each claimed Cyprian’s ecclesiology as their own, why the two recensions of De Unitate 4 become the crux of that argument, how Augustine turned Cyprian’s authority against the Donatists who had claimed his baptismal doctrine, and what the modern critical scholarship concludes — or refuses to conclude — about the dispute.

File

Summary

modern-scholarship.md

Modern Scholarship — The modern critical study of Cyprian is now over a century old and has moved across three distinct phases: a nineteenth-century battle over the authenticity of the Primacy Text, a mid-twentieth-century text-critical and theological settlement associated above all with Maurice Bévenot, and a late-twentieth/early-twenty-first-century turn toward social, rhetorical, and institutional readings pioneered by Allen Brent and J. Patout Burns. This file surveys the principal scholars, editions, and open questions that shape how Cyprian is read today.

the-contested-ecclesiology.md

The Contested Ecclesiology — No ante-Nicene Father has been read more differently by East and West than Cyprian of Carthage: the same bishop who wrote that “a primacy is given to Peter” refused to the end of his life to let the bishop of Rome impose Roman custom on Africa, and died holding a position the later Western Church would not adopt. This file traces how the Roman West and the Orthodox East have each claimed Cyprian’s ecclesiology as their own, why the two recensions of De Unitate 4 become the crux of that argument, how Augustine turned Cyprian’s authority against the Donatists who had claimed his baptismal doctrine, and what the modern critical scholarship concludes — or refuses to conclude — about the dispute.

09 — Legacy and Reception

See Also