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| To the Clergy and People, About the Ordination of Celerinus as Reader.
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Epistle XXXIII.2360
| 2360
Oxford ed.: Ep. xxxix. a.d.
250. |
To the Clergy and People, About the
Ordination of Celerinus as Reader.
Argument.—This Letter is About the Same in Purport with the
Preceding, Except that He Largely Commends the Constancy of Celerinus
in His Confession of the Faith. Moreover, that Both of These
Letters Were Written During His Retreat, is Sufficiently Indicated by
the Circumstances of the Context.
1. Cyprian to the presbyters and deacons,
and to the whole people, his brethren in the Lord, greeting. The
divine benefits, beloved brethren, should be acknowledged and embraced,
wherewith the Lord has condescended to embellish and illustrate His
Church in our times by granting a respite to His good confessors and
His glorious martyrs, that they who had grandly confessed Christ should
afterwards adorn Christ’s clergy in ecclesiastical
ministries. Exult, therefore, and rejoice with me on receiving my
letter, wherein I and my colleagues who were then present mention to
you Celerinus, our brother, glorious alike for his courage and his
character, as added to our clergy, not by human recommendation, but by
divine condescension; who, when he hesitated to yield to the Church,
was constrained by her own admonition and exhortation, in a vision by
night, not to refuse our persuasions; and she had more power, and
constrained him, because it was not right, nor was it becoming, that he
should be without ecclesiastical honour, whom the Lord honoured with
the dignity of heavenly glory.2361
2. This man was the first in the struggle of our
days; he was the leader among Christ’s soldiers; he, in the midst
of the burning beginnings of the persecution, engaged with the very
chief and author of the disturbance, in conquering with invincible firmness the
adversary of his own conflict.2362
| 2362 [He
produced some momentary impression on Decius himself.] | He made a way for others to
conquer; a victor with no small amount of wounds, but triumphant by a
miracle, with the long-abiding and permanent penalties of a tedious
conflict. For nineteen days, shut up in the close guard of a
dungeon, he was racked and in irons; but although his body was laid in
chains, his spirit remained free and at liberty. His flesh wasted
away by the long endurance of hunger and thirst; but God fed his soul,
that lived in faith and virtue, with spiritual nourishments. He
lay in punishments, the stronger for his punishments; imprisoned,
greater than those that imprisoned him; lying prostrate, but loftier
than those who stood; as bound, and firmer than the links which bound
him; judged, and more sublime than those who judged him; and although
his feet were bound on the rack, yet the serpent was trodden on and
ground down and vanquished. In his glorious body shine the bright
evidences of his wounds; their manifest traces show forth, and appear
on the man’s sinews and limbs, worn out with tedious wasting
away.2363
Great
things are they—marvellous things are they—which the
brotherhood may hear of his virtues and of his praises. And
should any one appear like Thomas, who has little faith in what he
hears, the faith of the eyes is not wanting, so that what one hears he
may also see. In the servant of God, the glory of the wounds made
the victory; the memory of the scars preserves that glory.
3. Nor is that kind of title to glories in
the case of Celerinus, our beloved, an unfamiliar and novel
thing. He is advancing in the footsteps of his kindred; he rivals
his parents and relations in equal honours of divine
condescension. His grandmother, Celerina, was some time since
crowned with martyrdom. Moreover, his paternal and maternal
uncles, Laurentius and Egnatius, who themselves also were once warring
in the camps of the world, but were true and spiritual soldiers of God,
casting down the devil by the confession of Christ, merited palms and
crowns from the Lord by their illustrious passion. We always
offer sacrifices for them,2364
| 2364
[Memorial thanksgivings. Ussher argues hereby the absence of all
purgatorial ideas, because martyrs were allowed by all to go at once to
bliss. Compare Tertull., vol. iv. p. 67.] | as you remember, as often as we
celebrate the passions and days of the martyrs in the annual
commemoration. Nor could he, therefore, be degenerate and
inferior whom this family dignity and a generous nobility provoked, by
domestic examples of virtue and faith. But if in a worldly family
it is a matter of heraldry and of praise to be a patrician, of how much
greater praise and honour is it to become of noble rank in the
celestial heraldry! I cannot tell whom I should call more
blessed,—whether those ancestors, for a posterity so illustrious,
or him, for an origin so glorious. So equally between them does
the divine condescension flow, and pass to and fro, that, just as the
dignity of their offspring brightens their crown, so the sublimity of
his ancestry illuminates his glory.
4. When this man, beloved brethren, came to
us with such condescension of the Lord, illustrious by the testimony
and wonder of the very man who had persecuted him, what else behoved to
be done except that he should be placed on the pulpit,2365
that is, on the
tribunal of the Church; that, resting on the loftiness of a higher
station, and conspicuous to the whole people for the brightness of his
honour, he should read the precepts and Gospel of the Lord, which he so
bravely and faithfully follows? Let the voice that has confessed
the Lord daily be heard in those things which the Lord spoke. Let
it be seen whether there is any further degree to which he can be
advanced in the Church. There is nothing in which a confessor can
do more good to the brethren than that, while the reading of the Gospel
is heard from his lips, every one who hears should imitate the faith of
the reader. He should have been associated with Aurelius in
reading; with whom, moreover, he was associated in the alliance of
divine honour; with whom, in all the insignia of virtue and praise, he
had been united. Equal both, and each like to the other, in
proportion as they were sublime in glory, in that proportion they were
humble in modesty. As they were lifted up by divine
condescension, so they were lowly in their own peacefulness and
tranquillity, and equally affording examples to every one of virtues
and character, and fitted both for conflict and for peace; praiseworthy
in the former for strength, in the latter for modesty.
5. In such servants the Lord rejoices; in
confessors of this kind He glories,—whose way and conversation is
so advantageous to the announcement of their glory, that it affords to
others a teaching of discipline. For this purpose Christ has
willed them to remain long here in the Church; for this purpose He has
kept them safe, snatched from the midst of death,—a kind of
resurrection, so to speak, being wrought on their behalf; so that,
while nothing is seen by the brethren loftier in honour, nothing more
lowly in humility, the way of life of the brotherhood2366
| 2366
“The brotherhood may follow and imitate these same
persons;” v. l. | may accompany these same persons.
Know, then, that these for the present are appointed readers, because
it was fitting that the candle should be placed in a candlestick, whence
it may give light to all, and that their glorious countenance should be
established in a higher place, where, beheld by all the surrounding
brotherhood, they may give an incitement of glory to the
beholders. But know that I have already purposed the honour of
the presbytery for them, that so they may be honoured with the same
presents as the presbyters, and may share the monthly
divisions2367
| 2367
See Bingham, Book v. cap. 6, sec. 3.] | in equalled
quantities, to sit with us hereafter in their advanced and strengthened
years; although in nothing can he seem to be inferior in the qualities
of age who has consummated his age by the dignity of his glory. I
bid you, brethren, beloved and earnestly longed-for, ever heartily
farewell.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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