Donatus to Cyprian. I believe that you remember, most holy Cyprian, what chatter we had together in the presence of the orator: one mind, one thought, an undivided reading. Why then in divine reading also are we not likewise strengthened in soul? Or was it not always our thought, as you used to promise, that we might believe together... Letter of Pope Cornelius to Cyprian. I have received the writings of your love, not delightful and written against the rule of faith, in which I recognized nauseous matters, and I did not praise that the poisons of your discourse against the Catholic Church spread throughout the whole world had been sown by you with horrible tares. These I ask you speedily to remove and to condemn beforehand.
This indeed you ought to have done before the deadly venom scattered in the world infected the minds of the simple and innocent. It is therefore not right to rebaptize. Therefore root out and disentangle, as we have said, by a later letter, with flowery and worthy words, your former writings, which the offspring of vipers have decided to sow against the Catholic faith. For it does not befit the bishop of so great a city and the most excellent teacher, that while you think the baptism of heresy is to be condemned beforehand, you should dare with your words to defile true baptism, which you grieve, namely, to oppose the Apostle who says: One God, one faith, one baptism. Cyprian to the people dwelling at Carthage, eternal salvation in the Lord.
We indeed give thanks to God the Father and to the Lord Jesus Christ, who has restored you, gathered together into assemblies. For this reason we have made mention, and we have wished to keep for our council the writing of the most blessed martyrs and confessors. From above the Majesty commands, and the Holy Spirit, whose saving grace among us is our witness. For when it treated of the traitors, it commands, both in the Gospel and in the Apostle, both in the Psalms and in the Prophets and the rest of the Scriptures: Search. When this had been searched out by us, we found from those who betrayed the holy Scriptures that they do not deserve to enter our council, that is, the saving council. For there is no one who enters this council who does not look to the heavenly.
And therefore we have made mention that those who so handled the Scriptures, as to the standing of the people and to the judgment put forth by them... nor is any action to be brought forward by them, nor even to be near to the standing of the sacrifice or of the people: by whom indeed the people had long since been abandoned, the altars stripped bare, the sacrifices carried off. Rightly recalling these things with sorrow and grief of soul, with God as witness, we set forth what we ought to have decreed:
So that all who had dared to raise disputes and dissensions and heresies and scandals may no longer provoke to themselves men who are either weak in faith or shallow in the Scriptures, even readers, this we decree, and by our decree we are unwilling to depart from it: that if any who has betrayed be a leader set over this people, they should deserve a bishop administering at the altar and with body intact. And to these we have commanded that the sacrifice be offered by those whom we command. Rightly ought these precepts to be obeyed, nor shall anything else be done than what at once the sincere evangelical voice according to John speaks. I do not want, he says, sacrifices from your hands, because you have not come to me with a pure victim. Whoever indeed does not offer a pure victim, from his hands the victim does not ascend. For again we read:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Those who by a word feign to give a fabrication offer among them things uninhabitable, whether true holy Scriptures or feigned ones, he who gives the voice and who gives the nearest desires, he indeed who feigns to hand over will supply the tradition. Rightly we wish that those who deny should meanwhile have pardon as fathers who confess. For he who says he does not possess the Scriptures was indeed ready even to be tortured, and of these we have examples. A third time they denied, and did not betray the sacrament. But these who, not even being asked, offered them, shall for the time, until the standing of the council, communicate as laymen.
Nevertheless, in the standing of the council, we wish that what holy Scripture has advanced be supplied according to the fixed judgment for the saints and friends of God, since already the witnesses and those near had long since decided something, our predecessors. For which reason it is necessary for us to consent with the witnesses, to embrace and to supply. I wish that you may always fare well in the Lord. Amen. Thanks be to God. Cyprian to the blessed and most beloved parent Turasius, eternal salvation in the Lord. I have received the writings of your love, by which I have learned that your mind was moved with grief over the falling asleep of your daughter. I marvelled at nothing more chiefly than that the virtue of a Christian heart had been shaken in you, so that you bent your mind to grief.
I am astonished that the wall of faith has been pierced by the wounds of bereavement, which the hope of resurrection and of the heavenly kingdom ought to have hedged about. Never does hope agree with grief, nor does faith ever feel any loss whatsoever. We believe that our own will rise again, and yet we mourn. What would we do if God commanded only to die without resurrection? His will alone suffices for consolation, to which we know no affection is to be preferred. What he had given, he took away, who had created it. Who else strives to mourn what he had received for a time? He had lent it, that you might have it for as long a time as he willed, and take it away again when he willed. He took nothing of yours who deigned to receive back his own.
It was fitting that the creditor should receive back what he had entrusted, and nothing is more becoming than for the borrower to give thanks to his creditor. Thus we read in Job the most devout voice which we should follow. The Lord, he says, gave; the Lord has taken away. As it has pleased the Lord, so it is done. Blessed be the name of the Lord. This consolation alone against mourning was surely no small thing: that no one ought to mourn when he has given back something that belonged to another, for it was not lawful that what was needful to its owner be retained by another. Another provision of consolation is added, which may meet the darts of bereavement. We ought to have rejoiced over those departing from the world, if we felt the world's enmities against us; and yet we mourn the benefits of the Lord, who knows what he grants to our weakness.
He who grieves for one who sleeps wished him to be still endangered, and desired to see the wretched one struggling amid the waves of this present life. To what end do you think that a Christian and faithful soul ought to have lingered within the prison of the world, for whom the whole world is a shipwreck? From so many and such great storms of life, from so many assaults of the devil, from so many wars of the body, from so many disasters of the age [so many calamities] it has escaped. And you pour out tears, as though you did not know what you yourself suffer daily in yourself. For which reason the Lord thus admonishes his apostles, saying: If you loved me, you would rejoice, because I go to the Father. Plainly he wept for the dead Lazarus, but not with tears such as yours, being the promiser of resurrection. He could not teach grief, lest he make the faith which he was teaching into faithlessness.
He grieved for Lazarus, not as sleeping, but rather as rising again, and he wept for one whom he was compelled to recall to the world for the sake of saving others [and confounding the unbelieving]. Giving this life, the Lord groaned, the life which you grieve to have been taken away. Your tears fight against his tears, and your love against his love. His weeping has no equal. He was unwilling to give back to toils the one whom he had loved, and you believe yourself to love the one for whom you wished the torments of toils still to remain. Moreover, if you think that he grieved for the dead Lazarus, he who could have driven back death would not before have permitted him to depart; or surely he who afterward had power to raise the dead would not weep.
From this it appears that he was moved by one cause alone: that he was pressed to recall his dearest one again to the hostile life, for the sake of some who would believe or of confounding the unbelieving. Finally, he thus followed, saying: Therefore, Father, that they may believe that you have sent me. Rejoice, then, over that for which he was compelled to weep, lest you seem to envy the felicities of those who sleep. From an alien world he passed to his own; he passed to the Lord, and from a hostile fatherland he migrated to the fatherland of the Father; he migrated to heaven, as the Apostle says: We know, he says, that if the earthly house of this our body is dissolved, we have a dwelling not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. He therefore was deprived of a house which he ought not even to have known.
He was deprived of evil fellow-citizens, whose hatreds he was enduring, so that he might no longer sojourn in a hostile land, as the Apostle recalls, saying: As long as we are in the world, we are pilgrims away from the Lord. Mourning ought not therefore to weigh upon us for anyone who has deserved to return from his pilgrimage to his own region, especially when he is known to return not empty and void who has trafficked for the gain of Christianity, for the sake of which he came to the world's commerce. He completed his business, returned, and paid his debt to God. He acquired the purchase for which he had come down, and hastened to return to the Lord, to whom he might offer his merchandise, that he might receive both the security and the honour of the merchandise he had acquired.
And I, you will say, am disturbed by no doubt of the heavenly promises, but tossed about, desolate, being scorched by the mere separation of the dying one, bereft of the solace of a dear pledge. This excuse, blessed one, is without doubt of human frailty, which cannot serve as advocate for distrust. For if men were unable to bear desolation, they would never at all have sent their pledges away from themselves. They complain that they are forsaken by the dying, and yet they entrust their living children to foreign regions, whether for the sake of letters or of honours or of business, and they rejoice to dwell their whole life without affections, provided they obtain what they desire to gain from their pledges.
And that they may go to the palaces, they journey abroad; they sail to acquire the pursuits of dignity, or setting out through toils and perils to settle some cases of patrimony, they drive all onward, nor do they suffer those whom they love to be idle with them. But that they may be able to come with security to the palaces of heaven, to the pursuits of Christ, to the honour of everlasting life, to the patrimony of an eternal possession, no one gladly congratulates his children on departing from him. For uncertain things, through uncertain ways, each one compels a son or brother or parent to journey abroad; and for certain things, through certain ways, no one allows any of his own to set out.
To acquire sins, parents rejoice to be separated from children as much as children from parents, at the devil's provoking; but to receive pardon they are unwilling to be parted from one another at God's calling; so that it may appear that we do not grieve for reason's sake over whomever we seem to lose, but rather display a token of distrust, we who cannot endure the departures of our own to the Lord, over whose pilgrimages in the world we rejoice. Because we trust in the world's gains, we tolerate the members of our own body being divided. If we trust in God's promises, after the departure of our own, the joys of our heart ought to resound nothing but thanksgiving.
Believe me, in all things unbelief always mourns, and as faith cannot know what it should grieve over, so distrust alone is held as a handmaid to sorrows. For if we say they are sleeping, we ought surely to believe them sleeping and not dead, but resting for the time, according to the voice of the Lord faithfully speaking: Everyone, he says, who believes in me, though he die, shall live. If some physician were to promise you this, you could without doubt deny his promise no gladness at all: now, because Christ the maker and the raiser promises, you do not fear to mourn, so that you seem to judge a physician more faithful and likewise more powerful than Christ in his promises.
But you say, I grieve for a bereft old age, I who ought rather to have gone before my children, that I might not remain amid toils. When anything about spiritual goods is treated, nothing at all of carnal things is to be set before the eyes. I profess to you that it has turned out better, I who consider concerning you not carnal but spiritual felicity. You say that you are worn out in old age by the death of one of your pledges. I, on the contrary, prove that you have been relieved. The Lord has rather cut away from your old age the anxiety that tormented you over your living daughter, lest she perish. You believe it surely better that she is now dead to the world but alive with God, than that, alive to the world, you would perhaps grieve her to be dead with the Lord.
Rejoice for yourself that you will deserve to follow a Christian daughter, whom, having followed, you may rejoice to embrace again in heaven. She did not desert you, but went before; and lest she should grieve, she hastened to receive her departing father. You have not lost your nurslings. If you shrink from mourning and as an old man can reckon that you have offered your pledge to the Lord, according to your vow after Abraham, if you cannot be first, so that what he did not tremble to offer, you at least may seem to rejoice over what has been taken away. From him the Lord demanded; from you he took. He obeyed the command; do you consent to his will. Him the Lord approved as devoted to himself through the unlawful law of nature; you at least let him note as religious through the lawful condition of mortality.
For if you are compelled neither by will nor by necessity to render something of devotion to the Lord, in what part will you be able to prove yourself a Christian? Let our unbelief blush, nor be outdone even by the heathen, if it wishes to be subject to God. Common to us with them is the departure of death, and their sorrows we surpass with our sorrows. What would we do if something peculiar were demanded of us? What, that turns to our disgrace? The heathen often despise sorrows, though they are snatched not to heavenly promises but to the punishments of Tartarus. And we mourn those going to heaven. Let such a Christian consider what he shall thereafter deserve, who neither strives to imitate the examples of the saints nor holds the contempt of the heathen.
They despise mourning by despairing, and we by hoping do not strive to despise it. Finally, they often do not hesitate to sell their children, so that, what is worse, they may spurn the living. And us the deaths of the departed do not relieve, though we wish those taken away to be granted to captivity and freedom. They fearlessly hand over their sons to serve mortal men, and we with a sacrilegious mind hesitate to dismiss our own and their children alike to God to be set free, as if it were judged safer for one of one's children to be condemned among men rather than with God. Some shameful reproach, I know not what, of Christians among the heathen, by whom without doubt those are judged worse whom it were criminal to hold as equals, not to say as betters.
Christians are unwilling even with congratulation to lead their own to good things; the heathen do not hesitate to hand theirs over to evils. Finally, even by the very felicity of our dying ones let us be compelled to bend our mind, lest our desires begin to oppose their desires. They themselves rejoice who depart, coming to rest. Let us too rejoice with them, at least reckoning the blessedness of our departing ones. Be religious at least by the vow of him who has escaped, if you cannot by your own, and exult because you know that a partaker of your blood has pleased Christ, especially because even from the occasion you ought to bear the Lord's will, which you cannot contradict. And since this lot is common to all, vain is the grief which seems to be neither the first nor the only one. But you say:
No anguish of mind over my desolation gnaws at me, but the affection of humanity urges me on account of the sins of my little one who is dying. Nor is even this permitted to move a Christian mind, lest it struggle against Christ's commands. What difference does it make whenever and of whatever sort we have sent away children, whom we are commanded by the Lord for the cause of devotion to hate? Better now, dying, has he left his soul safe in peace, than that he should be unable to dismiss it in persecution without his own ruin. He himself aids them in the world whose mother dwells in heaven, and he who succours the mother assuredly comes to the aid of the children as well. Finally, see whether anything ought to be conceded to grief, where the mind can be wearied without any remedy.
He ought to grieve wisely who grieves, lest he lose without cause that for which he grieves. Now, however, against mourning arms are to be taken up, that our hope may be able to have victory. First of all, let us congratulate ourselves that the Lord willed to receive him. Next, because this is common to all in the world, there is added our own private and particular good, that we are summoned to rest. There follows the consummation of all joys, that in the resurrection we shall be restored to one another, the Lord reforming us, which the Apostle promises: We do not want you, therefore, to be ignorant, brothers, concerning those who sleep, that you may not be saddened as also the rest who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, so also the Lord will bring with him through Jesus those who have fallen asleep.
These things, blessed one, I have transmitted to you for our common charity. For the rest, I know that you console others. Then bereavement will not find itself penetrable, if you do not cease to arm others against it. I wish you, dearest brother, always to fare well and to remember us.