CYPRIAN OF CARTHAGE

The celebration in honor of Saint Cyprian of Carthage (200-258) in the Orthodox Church falls on the last day of summer according to the Julian calendar, on the very eve of the church new year, the ancient Orthodox “Year of the Lord”. Such a providential coincidence makes it easier to remember the day of remembrance of this great ancient Father of the Church, whose theological heritage is extremely important. On this day, August 31, 258, in Carthage he was sentenced to death. Saint Cyprian was the bishop of Carthage; he suffered for his faith in Christ during the cruel persecution of the Roman emperor Valerian (253-260).

Saint Cyprian is one of the very few ancient Orthodox Western saints whose legacy is certainly revered in the Orthodox Church. It was to Cyprian that the great axiom of Christian antiquity belongs: “Outside the Church there is no salvation.” In the 20th century, in his polemic against the ecumenical movement, this motto of Cyprian was the Orthodox theologian Hilarion (Troitsky) (1886-1929), who subsequently ended his life as a bishop and new martyr of the Russian Church.

At one time, Cyprian was faced with the phenomenon of schism, which was dangerous for church unity in what was still a deeply pagan time. Hilarion was alarmed by the denial of the weight of historical Christianity, which, in his opinion, was conveyed by enthusiasts of ecumenical unity at the birth of this movement. In our postmodern times, we have to admit that many, even formally considering themselves Christians, in fact proclaim not the truth about the Church, but a “new pseudo-axiom”: “there is no salvation outside the market”!

The confession of faith of Saint Cyprian, which he pronounced in the face of the proconsul who judged him, has been preserved: “I am a Christian and a bishop. I know no other gods except the one and true God, who created heaven and earth, the sea and everything in it. We Christians serve this God, we pray to him day and night, for ourselves and for all people, including for the well-being of rulers.”

This is a real short Creed. He can serve as an example of reliable Orthodox behavior: to be faithful to our calling in faith and in ministry or profession; reject all idolatry, material and spiritual; believe, honor and serve the One God; and, finally, always, day and night, offer prayers to the Heavenly Father, first for yourself, and then for all people; thereby, according to the commandment, “to love God and neighbor” (cf. Matt. 22:39).

Information about Saint Cyprian has come to us thanks to the “Life” written by his contemporary, the Carthaginian deacon Pontius; in the surviving proconsular acts of the trial of Cyprian; and also, very importantly, in his numerous works. At one time, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus (329-390) pronounced a sermon about St Cyprian of Carthage. In this work, he mistakenly identified the Carthaginian saint with another Cyprian—a former magician who converted to faith in Christ and suffered for his confession along with the Virgin Justina, in the Church of Antioch.

Thus, thanks to this humble, mysterious “brotherly love of the saints” in their heavenly and earthly Communion, the Father of the Church, martyr and theologian from Carthage saved from oblivion the saints Cyprian and Justina, who are now highly revered by Orthodox Christians in popular piety. It turns out that just as almost seventeen centuries after the martyrdom in Carthage, Hilarion of the Trinity “revived” the great “dogmatic axiom of Cyprian” that had been forgotten, “our Cyprian,” through the mouth of Gregory the Theologian, “sheltered” Cyprian and Justina in his biography. Such an amazing example of “hagiographical hospitality”!