False Positive for Schism: Cyprian, Church Unity, and the Imperial Metamorphosis of Ecclesiology

Cyprian’s treatise, On the Unity of the Church, is a fascinating window into mid-3rd Century Church dynamics. Written in 251, it immediately followed upon the heels of the recently enthroned Roman emperor Decius’ persecution of Christians. The persecution lasted for over a year, ending with the fortuitous death of Decius himself. Briefly, and without putting too fine a point on it, what caused the Christians to be persecuted was that they, along with all other Roman citizens (Jews being exempted), were to give ritual, sacrificial tribute to Decius, one which included the acknowledging of the validity of the pagan gods. Many faithful Christians died for refusal to comply, a good number went into hiding, and another number lapsed in their faith by participating in the sacrificial tribute. 

Among those who lapsed in their faith, many sought readmittance into the Church. This created no small controversy, with a famous presbyter and theologian named Novatian famously speaking out against any too liberal reception of such as lapsed. Considered the lead bishop of Rome by some, Novatian took the more rigorist position against an excessive leniency, but was himself resisted by Cornelius, who was also said to be the chief bishop of Rome, who for his part took the more lenient position towards the lapsed. Novatian was then excommunicated in a synod convened by Cornelius, but the line of bishops and churches who followed Novatian continued on for centuries.

Cyprian, siding with Cornelius, wrote his treatise On The Unity of the Church to publicly declare of Novatian and his followers that they could in no way be considered any kind of Church as long as they stood apart from those churches in communion with himself and Cornelius. The treatise thereafter entered into the annals of Church history as one of the most significant early statements regarding the ontological and “visible” unity of the Church (although that particular term, “visible unity,” does not appear there). Moreover, this early statement of ecclesiology has been affirmed in some sense by Romanists, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Confessional Evangelicals. Not simply asking who reads him best, the prior question that arises is: How can we understand the content of Cyprian’s ecclesiology in light of his historical circumstances, and in what way might that speak to the understanding of ecclesiology as held by those who would claim to receive his text most authentically?

A first observation that must be raised is the extreme context of persecution which surrounded the immediate atmosphere of Cyprian’s treatise. Unlike the Jews, the Christians were not recognized by Rome as a legitimate religion. Thus, by refusing to sacrifice to the emperor, they were seen as a kind of rebellious sect, perhaps even appearing as some kind of subversive politico-religious anarchist group. This would make Christians appear to be not only a nuisance, but probable enemies of the State, and so the persecutions could not be considered the result of merely whimsical political irritation. Therefore, as Decius’ persecution ended, it was likely experienced by Christians as an opportunity to catch their breath and to look around so as to take stock of the damage caused to their communities. As observed above, many died, many went into hiding, and many sacrificed to the pagan gods. Some apostatized only to never return, but some returned with a penitential spirit. 

In this light, it seems quite clear that, sociologically, the Church was in an extremely strained, vulnerable, and fragile state. In a certain sense it was as if the Church had been fractured, whether through the loss of loved ones in the community, through death, through loved ones absent because they went into hiding, through the death of teachers, through the loss of property (whether houses and/or books of sacred Scripture), through the tragedy of apostasy, and through the shame-faced lapsed ones, the lapsi, whose return in some measure smacked of a betrayal of the faithful who died, or a betrayal of those who endured the threat (whether scathed or not) bravely. Perhaps those who went into hiding and returned unscathed even felt a certain stain of guilt in the presence of those brave martyrs and confessors who refused to flee. And it was precisely into this situation that one who had gone into hiding, Cyprian, spoke of Church unity.

As the Church had been enduring political persecution and religious marginalization for over two hundred years, it is fair to say that the Church was in some measure fighting for its very survival, and so schism had a very specific connotation in this context in terms of the immediate practical impact it would have on already strained and wounded communities. Not only spiritually and interpersonally, but also politically it was vital for the Christian community to in some measure be recognized as having a legitimate right to exist, let alone worship, and so it needed to demonstrate unity in multiple very pressing ways. In contrast, the “unity” claimed today in Orthodox and Catholic churches is mainly formalistic and rhetorical. But in Cyprian’s day, the Novatian Schism represented a very decisive and precarious moment in Church history. Thus Cyprian’s idea of Church unity cannot be ahistorically wrenched from its context and pasted onto all other questions of tangible unity, especially as during the Theodosian dynasty the State was fused with the Church. Why was Cyprian's view so different? Because, at the time of the Novatian schism, the Church was not only materially splintering under the weight of persecution and striving to maintain its very existence, its ability to fine-tune and canonically necessitate a precision of doctrine at the level of the philosophical theology as represented, for example, at Chalcedon, would have been inconceivable.

It is also necessary to recall that during the era when Cyprian wrote his treatise on Church unity that he did not mean, and could not have meant, visible churches in the sense of buildings with crosses on the top or with neon signs on the property announcing the presence of a local church community. Being under two centuries of threat, and never having truly known freedom of worship, his conception of unity was constrained in some measure historically and immediately by his political and sociological reality. It was in some ways therefore a very covertly “visible” Church that he was talking about. It is perhaps impossible to know how formally “united” the churches in the remote places of the far East of the Roman empire were with those in the remote places of the far West, or with those in the far north and south, but it does not seem likely that the vision of unity Cyprian was advocating was anything like the progressively complex imperial unity of the post-Constantinian and post-Theodosian Byzantine churches. Their proliferations of canons, multiplied by any number of local and general councils, inversely narrowed the allowable tolerance for any divergence. This was only further magnified by the geographically and culturally diverse communities of Christians as could be found, say, in what is today Spain in the West and what is today Iran in the East. Thus, as each local and regional group of affiliated churches was constantly responding to their own unique complex, local, and regional situations, and so building their own local histories together with their increasingly sacred collection of canons, the filioque being a ready example in the West, this further strained the possibility of a broader sense of “institutional” unity under the ever increasing weight of institutional inflation. Certainly such a Byzantine conception of ecclesiological unity as manifest across these territories was impossible in Cyprian's time.

The foregoing is not to reduce the Church to a merely human institution, for although it is true to say that the Church is certainly more than merely human, it is also true to say that it is not less than human. This kind of ecclesiological development - not failing to mention the added dynamics of State-Church political intrigue - only magnified the risk of schism, and rather guaranteed the inevitability of it. Oskar Skarsaune, in his work, In the Shadow of the Temple, put it this way, that prior to Constantine:

Christians had been used to considering themselves a small elect group, surrounded by a hostile majority, "the world." They had been the "called ones," the few elected from the masses of a lost world" (p. 431)

This is why the kind of schism Cyprian wrote against does not seem to bear a meaningful relation with the arguably distinct kinds of separations that arose after the Church-State ecclesiological metamorphosis. As Skarsaune continues:

Now, all of a sudden, "the world" was supposed to belong to the church. Ideally all Roman citizens were supposed to be or become Christians; under Emperor Theodosius, A.D. 380, orthodox Christianity was by law made the only legal religion in the empire. The repercussions, of course, were many and long-lasting. (p. 431)

Thus it seems that the legal imposition of Christianity did effect profound changes in the self-conception of the Church. From the time of the Acts of the Apostles, being a Christian was not a matter of citizenship in the world, but citizenship was conceived as coming from and being in and towards the heavenly kingdom, and so all the worldliness was in principle outside the Church. Following Constantine, and especially Theodosius, the worldliness that had always been excluded from Christian identity was suddenly intrinsic to Christian identity. Now a united citizenship was necessarily in and towards the Christian Empire in the world. Even the idea of having an Ecumenical Council was bound up with the Emperor as a Christian ruler who could convene such things. This general move, then, towards the mixed marriage of the two kingdoms, created a spiritual, pastoral problem, and:

The answer was found in a literal exodus from the wealthy, affluent society in the city into the desert. (In the Shadow of the Temple, p. 431)

In other words, monasticism was a phenomenon that emerged out of the transformation of the Church as it was wedded to the world empire. The Scriptural intuition of the incompatibility between the world and the Church lay behind these "two types of Christian life" (ibid, p. 431). But, following Theodosius, to be a citizen one must "be" a Christian. Canonical law took the force of secular law, and what is more:

Substantive changes took place in the worship and community life of the church. Soon after 320, Constantine began constructing several large church buildings, then and later known as basilicas, that could hold large crowds of people. But since all the world was now supposed to attend service in the church, the barrier between the crowd in the church and the holiness of the service at the altar had to be emphasized in a new way. Thus the service became something done by the consecrated priests, "the chosen ones" (Greek, kleros), with the crowd, "the people," watching from a distance. (In the Shadow of the Temple, p. 431)

Thus clericalism was born, and worship itself transformed. For, lex orandi, lex credendi, it is absurd to hold the position that the shape of worship doesn't impact the shape of the faith and, moreover, the identity and self-understanding of the worshiping Church. What a people do as a people in terms of worship tells them, lex vivendi, who they are in relation to God and to each other. As Richard Spielmann observes:

From the fourth century, however, and onward into the Middle Ages, vast - even radical - development characterized the worship of the Church. ... Far-reaching developments took place in the theology of worship as well as in liturgical ceremonial. The three chief causes of these radical developments in the Church's worship were the peace of the Church beginning in the fourth century, the theological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries, and the breakup of the Roman Empire. (History of Christian Worship, pp. 38-39)

And during the Constantinian ecclesiological revolution, in the midst of "the new public image and atmosphere of Christianity" (History of Christian Worship, p. 39):

Ceremonies from the imperial court were introduced into worship, such as carrying candles and censers in front of the bishop (or priests). The fact that these paralleled ceremonies described in the Bible for the tabernacle or temple was not by accident: the ceremonies of the temple to a great extent had the same background in ceremonies of the Oriental royal court. Accordingly, the net result of this development as regards liturgy was that Christian worship, from being modeled mainly on the simple pattern of the synagogue worship - the worship of the priestly people - became more like the Old Testament temple worship with the high priest (bishop), priests (presbyters) and Levites (deacons) conducting the service, with the laypeople attending. (In the Shadow of the Temple, p. 432, cf. Jungmann, The Early Liturgy, pp. 122-52)

It is clear that the changes introduced through the imperial metamorphosis of the Church were profound and long-lasting, even "radical." As Spielmann states, especially of the East (keeping in mind that Cyprian was in the more Latin West):

All the Eastern liturgies wen through extensive and radical development in the fourth and fifth centuries. However, they became quite stabilized in the sixth century, and by the eighth century they were so rigidly fixed that they have not changed even today. (History of Christian Worship, p. 49)

Thus, if someone were to assert that if Cyprian in the third century were to get into a time machine that he would implicitly "recognize," say, the worship in the Orthodox, Catholic, or Coptic churches of the eighth century, much less today, is completely false. Nor would he recognize their canons, their World (Ecumenical) Councils, their emperors, their monks, or their hymns. He would not and could not in any obvious way recognize unity with them, but would have to engage in protracted and incredibly complex acts of discernment. Whether he would side with the Romanist, the Eastern Orthodox, the Oriental Orthodox, or the Assyrian Church of the East, is an entirely open question, and considering that they all absorbed the post-Constantinian and Theodosian metamorphosis of ecclesiology, it is entirely possible, if not likely, that he would not recognize them even after protracted study. In fact, he may conclude that they are all factious sects.

As is said of the Eucharistic elements, the Body of Christ is broken but not divided. In other words, breakage does not necessarily imply division. But with the Byzantine imperial ecclesiology, a broken Body gets confused with division in the Body.

To illustrate this, when one is, say, stranded on a desert island, then the need to maintain unity differs in marked ways from the need to maintain unity in a gated suburb. In an analogous way, the idea of Church unity in Christian Byzantium is different at key points from the idea of Church unity in Cyprian’s necessarily covert Church, again recalling that it was a Church that had never known freedom of worship and was striving to survive faithfully while being viciously attacked outwardly. It was essentially mission field unity that Cyprian was talking about, a kind of unity which can be observed among many missionaries when they encounter each other in foreign, hostile territories. They support each other in an implicit Christian generosity. They share needed resources lest the whole mission fail. This may be analogous in some ways also to the situation which motivated the early American saying, “We Must All Hang Together, or Most Assuredly, We Will All Hang Separately.” In other words, Cyprian’s idea of Church unity is not cast in terms of the grand imperial unity of the victorious Byzantine State Church on full display with all of its Ecumenical Councils, swelling collections of canons, and powerful Patriarchates of great Sees, but of a humble band of faithful brothers and sisters meeting and worshiping furtively in houses and catacombs. As Skarsaune argues:

In the pre-Constantinian period the worship had been oriented toward the future coming of the kingdom. ... This orientation toward the future and Christ's second coming was deeply modified and weakened during the Constantinian period. Instead of looking forward to being released from the world, Christians began to think that they were to stay in the world and Christianize it, conquer it. (In the Shadow of the Temple, p. 432)

It therefore seems disingenuous for the imperialist, Byzantine ecclesiology to try to claim Cyprian as its ecclesiological ancestor simpliciter. The ecclesiastical transformation that occurred during and after Constantine, Theodosios, and Justinian resulted in a metamorphosis of identity, still ostensibly "Christian," but one which clearly reflects a far more profound change than a citation of Cyprianic ecclesiology can meaningfully absorb. The joining of Church and State, with its great Councils called by its great Emperors, together with all the intrigue of the Patriarchates and their Sees, not to forget the unsustainable territorial claims of the Empire that resulted in a clear demographic distinction and divide between East and West, and the rise of Islam and its conquering of Roman territories, render no parallel with Cyprianic ecclesiology, and make claims of continuity with Cyprian all but empty rhetoric. Cyprian just did not have in mind a converted Byantine empire, much less a world with two billion Christians spread across six continents and nearly two hundred countries. He had in mind a surviving remnant Church standing on the promise of God to not fail. This kind of “visible” unity is clearly distinct from what Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Romanists would assert, all three being ossified inheritors of the later Byzantine ecclesiological metamorphosis. Cyprianic unity cannot be reduced or expanded to such outward political affiliation between State Church Patriarchates. This is not to say that Byzantine ecclesiology did not necessitate faith, or that the faith played no role in their determinations, but that it was inextricably linked with a transformed vision of the Church as a massive Church State unity.

Byzantine ecclesiology uses the same names and the same words as the Ante-Nicene Fathers, but the meaning is subtly modified in their application to new contexts. This modification of meaning occurs by a process of assuming continuity, which is to say an assumption that there is an agreement persisting unmodified across these two stages of the Church’s existence, an assumption that the shape of Cyprian’s ecclesiology is the same in Decian’s reign as it is in Theodosios’ or Justinian’s. But such an assumption is like saying that what is true of the caterpillar is in all respects true of the butterfly merely due to the fact that they are the selfsame creature. (Note: This analogy does not assume that Byzantine ecclesiology is a necessary or legitimate transformation.) The reality is that the drastic metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly means that what was true of the caterpillar is not in all ways true of the butterfly. Similarly, the nature of a general’s demands for unity among his soldiers and allies during wartime is not the same as a president’s demands for unity in the government or among his constituents during peacetime. In other words, his demand for unity among his beleaguered soldiers does not echo in the same way as his demand for unity in Congress, nor in the same way unity is demanded, say, of Union workers during a strike, teammates in a competition, or hostages in a crisis. 

Certainly unity is needed, but this can and must manifest in different ways in various given contexts. Unity demanded in one setting would not make sense as unity demanded in the other, or perhaps as would even be possible. For each expression of unity among a people, even the people of God, the Church, has a balance and a breaking point within their respective contexts or stages of development. In this way the Cyprianic demand for unity during the age of persecution is quite distinct from the Byzantine demand for unity during the age of prosperity. Unity is needed, certainly, but the imperialist model of unity is not that of the persecuted Church, and couldn't be, and yet the Byzantine ecclesiology assumes, falsely I would argue, that unity as expressed by Cyprian in persecution is of the same nature as its own demand for unity in pomp. In this way, to declare that unity within the Ante-Nicene Church would or must manifest in the same way as unity within the politico-religious State Church of Byzantium is to tear Cyprian out of his native meaning, and make him speak to a situation unknown to him and radically different from his own.

From what was argued above, it is arguably clear that at Nicea (325) and in the Nicene Creed the Church was in the nascent stage of ecclesiastical transformation, one whose full Theodosian and Justinian State-Church future was not yet known. Thus the Nicene Creedal idea of being “one” Church was still more Cyprianic, and not yet deeply bound up with the soon-to-blossom Byzantine State Church identity. Emerging from persecution and still developing organically through the stage of a more inward, interpersonal unity of believers, they had not yet fully transformed their idea of the “one” Church into one necessarily including the framework of the outward bureaucratic Church unity of the State-Church. In other words, as the conception of the Church changed following Constantine and Theodosius to absorb and accommodate the conception of the State, and vice versa, its idea of “one Church” was modified to include a different, corresponding conception of unity. This conception of unity was more formal and political, and as such confused the inward and more interpersonal Cyprianic bond of existential Church unity with extrinsic forms that served to represent and formally guarantee unity.

It is hard for us today to sense how deeply identified Church and State were in the hearts and minds of the Christians following the late fourth century as the Church progressed towards Chalcedon, where inward and visible unity could be said to have been buried in a fleshly confusion of triumphalistic imperial ecclesiology. For none of what has been argued here has been a critique of the need for outward form or for unity. But it is being asserted that the visible body (soma) of the Church was confused with the flesh (sarx) of its administration, thus stifling its ability to express unity of spirit across a diversity of administrative expressions. And so a break in the flesh of the imperial Church institution was treated tragically as if it were a break in the true body of the Church, i.e. a schism. In this way, paradoxically, the schism is not created by the one who “left” the administrative flesh, but by the one who confused its flesh with the Body. Imperial ecclesiology tends towards denying that there is anything accidental to the Church, anything that could be “error,” or merely contingent. This is the sin of a kind of pre-sectarianism that generates schism by making its outward administrative flesh a sine qua non of the Body of Christ, the Church. Post-Nicea, the hierarchy finally became so politicized that an inevitable worldliness crept into their conception of Church unity, a worldliness that couldn’t finally help but exclude others who could not unite in their ecclesiological confusion of flesh and Body. Looking back, and being mistaken about their ecclesiology being truly Cyprianic, they falsely accuse those who separate from their administrative collective as having separated from the Church itself. This is a false positive for schism.

The reality is that Cyprian’s condemnation of Novatian is of a fundamentally different flavor and caliber than, say, the Great Schism between Rome and Constantinople, or even that of the Romanists and the Reformers. It is precisely an imperialized ecclesiology that ends up producing the very schism they claim to be innocent of. Mere administrative diversification, however, was not what happened with Novatian. His problem was more that of rigorism and perfectionism, of denying repentance and reentry into the Church to those who had sinned and lapsed. Denying repentance is contrary to the Gospel, and so Cyprian was right to condemn him. This is a far cry from the ecclesiastical chess played by Rome and Constantinople that produced the Great Schism. In short, the Novatian Schism is not truly analogous to the Great Schism. In this way the Orthodox and Romanist claims to be uniquely in continuity with Cyprian is untenable. 

It seems Cyprian’s idea of unity was not that of outward bureaucratic unity, for that would be an anachronistic projection of the later Byzantine age onto the earlier one. It was a practical, inward, and spiritual unity among brethren living in relationship with each other. Leadership among the priesthood of believers was organic and hierarchical in terms of laity, deacon, and presbyter/bishop, and so was formal in that sense, but not imperial, bureaucratic, and political. The addition of the political State Church element to the idea of Church and therefore Church unity is thus not a trivial addition to the concept of Church, but a deep transformation, a veritable metamorphosis. This conceptualization was not available to Cyprian, and so his idea of unity cannot transfer as such to the later imperialist ecclesiologies. They form in some sense an organic, lineal descent from Cyprian, but, in transitioning to an imperial ecclesiology, his word is not preserved without twist, and in that twist the imperial ecclesiologies falsely manufacture the impression that Cyprian consents to their modified view, when in reality the Cyprianic conception of unity cannot be confused with Byzantine ecclesiology.

-The Reformed Ninja