Introductory Notice to Cyprian.
————————————
[
200–258.] If Hippolytus reflects the spirit of Irenæus
in all his writings, it is not remarkable. He was the spiritual
son of the great Bishop of Lyons, and deeply imbued with the family
character imparted to his disciples by the blessed presbyter of Patmos
and Ephesus. But while Cyprian is the spiritual son and pupil of
Tertullian, we must seek his characteristics and the key to his whole
ministry in the far-off See and city where the disciples were first
called Christians. Cyprian is the Ignatius of the West. We
see in his works how truly historical are the writings of Ignatius, and
how diffused was his simple and elementary system of organic
unity. It embodies no hierarchical assumption, no “lordship
over God’s heritage,” but is conceived in the spirit of St. Peter when he disclaimed all this, and said, “The presbyters who are among you I exhort, who am also a presbyter.” Cyprian was indeed a strenuous asserter of the responsibilities of his office; but he built upon that system universally recognised by the Great Councils, which the popes and their adherents have ever laboured to destroy. Nothing can be more delusive than the idea that the mediæval system derives any support from Cyprian’s theory of the episcopate or of Church organization. His was the system of the universal parity and community of bishops. In his scheme the apostolate was perpetuated in the episcopate, and the presbyterate was an apostolic institution, by which others were associated with bishops in all their functions as co-presbyters, but not in those reserved to the presidency of the churches. Feudal ideas imposed a very different system upon the simple framework of original Catholicity. But a careful study of that primitive framework, and of the history of papal development, makes evident the following propositions:—
1. That Cyprian’s maxim, Ecclesia in Episcopo, whatever else he may have meant by it, is an aphoristic statement of the Nicene Constitutions. These were embedded in the Ignatian theory of an episcopate without a trace of a papacy; and Cyprian’s maxims had to be practically destroyed in the West before it was possible to raise the portentous figure of a supreme pontiff, and to subject the Latin churches to the entirely novel principle of Ecclesia in Papa. To this novelty Cyprian’s system is essentially antagonistic.
2. It will be seen that Cyprian, far from
being the patron of ecclesiastical despotism, is the expounder of early
canons and constitutions, in the spirit of order and discipline, indeed, but with the largest exemplification of that “liberty” which is manifested wherever “the Spirit of the Lord” is operative. Cyprian is the patron and defender of the presbytery and of lay co-operation, as well as of the regimen of the episcopate. His letters illustrate the Catholic system as it was known to the Nicene Fathers; but, of all the Christian Fathers, he is the most clear and comprehensive in his conception of the body of Christ as an organic whole, in which every member has an honourable function. Popular government and representative government, the legitimate power and place of the laity, the organization of the Christian plebs into their faculty as the ἀντιλήψεις of St. Paul, the development of synods, omni plebe adstante,—all this is embodied in the Catholic system as Cyprian understood it.
3. The
Orientals in large
degree, even under their yoke of bondage and the superstitions
engendered by their decay, have ever adhered to this Ignatian theory, of which Cyprian was the great expounder in the West; while the terrible schism of the ninth century, which removed the West from the Nicene basis, and placed the Latin churches upon the foundation of the forged Decretals, was effected by ignoring the Cyprianic maxims, and then by a practical pulverizing of their fundamental principle of unity. This change involved a subversion of the primitive episcopate, an annihilation of the rights of the presbytery, and a total abasement of the laity; in a word, the destruction of synodical constitutions and of constitutional freedom.
