Modern accounts of Cyprian's career have been dominated by the momentous political and ecclesiastical events of his episcopate: the Decian persecution,Footnote 1 the controversies in Africa and Rome over the restoration of those who had compromised with Decius’ edict and, later, over the rebaptism of heretics,Footnote 2 and the renewed persecution under Valerian in 257–8, during which Cyprian was martyred.Footnote 3 The focus of modern scholarship reflects that of the ancient evidence. The chronological span of Cyprian's oeuvre corresponds closely to his tenure of the episcopate, to which he was elevated between May 248 and May 249.Footnote 4 Most of Cyprian's epistles and treatises were written later, either during Decius’ reign and its aftermath, or in the final years of his life.Footnote 5 Cyprian's episcopate and eventual martyrdom likewise dominate the main contemporary narratives, the Acta of his martyrdom and the panegyrical vita attributed by Jerome to the deacon Pontius.Footnote 6 The Cyprian whom we see in his works, the letters of his contemporaries and the third-century hagiographical material is very much Cyprian the bishop, whose teaching so impressed his contemporaries that, even after his death, he could appear (or be imagined to have appeared) in a vision, to spur men steeped in his writings to martyrdom.Footnote 7
Cyprian's career and personal development before he became bishop remain comparatively obscure. The main ancient source, Pontius’ vita, sketches a narrative of rapid and total conversion. Abandoning his previous career as a rhetorician or advocate through the influence of a presbyter named Caecilianus, Cyprian read the Scriptures, embraced continence and chose to donate his wealth for the support of the poor.Footnote 8 Perhaps because of his use of his property as an instrument of ecclesiastical patronage, he ‘was elected’ through a surge of popular support ‘to the office of the priesthood and the rank of the episcopate while still a neophyte and, as he was reckoned, one new to the faith’.Footnote 9
Pontius’ narrative can be supplemented by brief references in Lactantius’ Divine institutes and the works of Jerome, who used Pontius’ account, but also had independent access to oral traditions on Cyprian through Paul of Concordia, an acquaintance who had known Cyprian's notarius in the latter's old age.Footnote 10 Only one Cyprianic work, however, comments on the author's conversion. This is the scenic monologue Ad Donatum. The most mannered of Cyprian's works, Ad Donatum presents Cyprian sitting in a tranquil garden during the autumn vintage vacation and expounding the benefits of divine gratia to his addressee, who is figured, in keeping with the literary conceit, as the silent interlocutor of Cyprian's monologue. Cyprian recounts his moral and spiritual uncertainty prior to conversion, describes the spiritual transformation worked by the infusion of grace in his baptism, and contrasts the sins of the saeculum to the peaceful life of the spiritalia castra. He also contrasts the voluble boastfulness of secular oratory to the straightforward, factual exposition of the Christian truth: a rejection, most have assumed, of his own prior rhetorical career.
Ad Donatum is usually dated very close in time to Cyprian's entry into the Church. This has allowed historians to fit the work into a neat narrative of Cyprian's conversion and pre-episcopal career. His baptism is usually placed some two to four years before his ordination, in 245 or 246, probably during the Easter season, the ordinary time, according to Tertullian, for baptisms in the third-century African Church.Footnote 11 Marked by a stylistic ornateness that Cyprian's later works do not display, Ad Donatum was thus a neophyte's first attempt at Christian rhetoric, ‘the work’ (as one scholar has put it) ‘which spontaneously pours forth from the heart of an ardent convert after baptism’.Footnote 12 Though Cyprian was not yet able to write in the simple, truly Christian style that he praises in the work's second section,Footnote 13 he wished to make the depth of his conversion known to his secular peers through his account of his spiritual wanderings and liberation in baptism.Footnote 14 Ad Donatum reflects Cyprian's state of mind immediately after his baptism, not his development into the churchman who can be seen in his later works.
This article proposes an alternative reconstruction of Cyprian's early career and the place of Ad Donatum within it. First, building on modern revisions of Cyprian's pre-episcopal career, it will argue that the standard chronology of Cyprian's baptism is without sound foundation; it depends not on ancient evidence, but on a series of inferences, first laid down in seventeenth-century scholarship on Cyprian's career, that do not stand up to critical scrutiny. Second, the article will be argue that the tendency to see Ad Donatum as the work of a new and inexperienced convert – which is encouraged by the standard dating and has not yet been systematically scrutinised even by those who question that chronology – misjudges Cyprian's self-presentation. Ad Donatum emphasises not its author's newness to the Christian faith, but, as comparison with the roughly contemporary Ad Quirinum shows with particular clarity, the profundity of his conversion and his ability and authority to proclaim his new beliefs. In the concluding section, a new position for Ad Donatum among the few fixed points in Cyprian's early career will be tentatively offered. The work of a man newly baptised, but not of the inexperienced convert imagined by most modern scholars, Ad Donatum may have been written shortly before Cyprian's elevation to the episcopate, in order to answer the concerns of his earliest critics.
The date of Cyprian's baptism and of Ad Donatum
No external evidence survives that would allow us to assign an absolute date to Ad Donatum or to Cyprian's baptism, on which it dwells so pointedly. The standard modern chronology was first laid out by John Pearson, bishop of Chester, in the ‘Annales Cyprianici’ that he wrote for John Fell's Oxford edition of Cyprian's works of 1682. Pearson inferred from Pontius’ account that Cyprian had been a presbyter and probably also a deacon prior to his elevation to the bishopric of Carthage, and so conjectured that at least two years had elapsed between his baptism and his final ordination.Footnote 15 In his chronological account, he placed Ad Donatum in 246, ‘no very long time after [Cyprian's] baptism’ at Easter of that year. The grounds were three-fold: that Cyprian foregrounded his baptism in Ad Donatum; that the work was written in uncharacteristically ornate rhetoric, such as Cyprian would probably have used in his secular profession; and that Augustine, in a brief comment in De doctrina Christiana iv.14.31, implied that Ad Donatum was the first of Cyprian's works.Footnote 16
Pearson's chronology was generally accepted by later editors and church historians,Footnote 17 and a date of 245 or 246 for Cyprian's conversion, and thus for the writing of Ad Donatum, remains widely accepted.Footnote 18 Yet that date rests on slender evidence, as scholars have occasionally recognised. Pearson's insertion of a multi-year gap between Cyprian's baptism and episcopacy is especially open to challenge. In an article on Cyprian's teaching and practice of almsgiving, Geoffrey Dunn suggested, in passing, that Cyprian's baptism ought to be placed ‘much closer to Cyprian's election as bishop than to 246’.Footnote 19 The proposal, which is not entirely unprecedented, rests on a revision of Cyprian's pre-episcopal offices.Footnote 20 Modern biographers of Cyprian, such as Michael Sage, had already abandoned Pearson's inference that Cyprian held a diaconate, on which his ancient admirers are silent.Footnote 21 In his 1988 Yale dissertation, Charles Bobertz proposed that Cyprian's presbyterate should be similarly elided. In his reconstruction, Cyprian was elevated straight from the laity to a single, episcopal office conceived as having a presbyteral aspect; Bobertz emphasised, following Pontius, the rapidity of Cyprian's rise and rejected the idea that he had been a presbyter for many years between his conversion and his ordination, but did not explicitly revisit the date of Cyprian's baptism.Footnote 22 From his argument, Dunn drew the natural chronological inference: if Cyprian had not actually held the intervening offices that most historians have supposed, there is no reason to put his baptism a full two, three or even four years before his ordination as bishop.
Bobertz's argument is not incontrovertible. Pontius mentions the ‘many deeds’ that Cyprian performed while ‘still a layman’ and ‘now a presbyter’, before he recounts Cyprian's ordination as bishop; the reference would thus seem to be to distinct periods of time spent in the laity and in a presbyteral office distinct from the episcopate.Footnote 23 Jerome, likewise, seems to distinguish Cyprian's episcopate from a preceding presbyterate;Footnote 24 though his account may well depend on Pontius’, it shows, at the very least, that this ancient interpreter of the vita did not infer that Cyprian had been made bishop straightaway. Nevertheless, Bobertz's interpretation, and the new chronology that Dunn derives from it, reflect the tenor of the vita more accurately than does the multi-year progress through the ranks of the Church postulated by Pearson. No absolute lower bound can be placed on the length of Cyprian's tenure of his pre-episcopal offices, however many (or few) he may have held. Though nothing licenses us to think that he progressed through all his ranks in a single week, as Ambrose of Milan would more than a century later, the example of the later and similarly influential churchman is still instructive.Footnote 25 With sufficient pressure, a man could rise very swiftly indeed in the Church. Cyprian became a bishop after an exceptionally short time, and even a date as late as Easter 248 (or perhaps Easter 249, by which time G. W. Clarke suggests that he was active as bishop) would fit the ancient evidence better than does the gap of two to four years preferred by most historians.Footnote 26
However, Ad Donatum plays more than just a chronological role in narratives of Cyprian's early career. To scholars from Pearson to Dunn, Ad Donatum has seemed a remnant (perhaps the sole remnant) of what Dunn calls a period of ‘pure religious idealism, if we may use such a term’, prior to and distinct from Cyprian's later experience of ‘the practical realities of life as bishop’.Footnote 27 Pontius’ Cyprian became a bishop while still a neophyte; the Cyprian of most modern historiography was a new convert first and only became a bishop after a process of maturation of unknown length. In this biographical scheme, Ad Donatum plays a key role, since it seems to testify to a period of ‘transition’, as Jacques Fontaine called it, during which Cyprian grappled both with the heady spiritual experience of his conversion and with the worldly stylistics that he had (it is assumed) previously employed as a rhetorician.Footnote 28 Chronology implies, and is implicated in, a particular narrative of Cyprian's personal development.
This biographical narrative rests on no firmer evidence than the chronology with which it is bound up. As E. W. Watson noted more than a century ago, neither the style of Ad Donatum nor its description of Cyprian's baptism shows Cyprian to have been an inexperienced neophyte when he wrote it.Footnote 29 Cyprian's praise for a ‘simple’ style in Ad Donatum 2 is not, as often assumed, a description of a rhetoric to which he has tried, but failed, to conform his own writing. An integral part of the work's argument, it introduces the theme of Christian moral and spiritual superiority to the world that will dominate the central sections of the monologue. In the course of his exhortations, Cyprian actually adopts multiple styles of varying complexity, as Michael Winterbottom has shown.Footnote 30 The work's technical virtuosity is not, therefore, an accidental leftover of a now-abandoned rhetorical career, but a proof of the care with which Cyprian composed his protreptic to serious Christian living.Footnote 31 Cyprian's account of his baptism must, likewise, be read in the context of the work's wider argument. Though Cyprian does highlight the profound change worked in him by the grace of God, he neither says when that event occurred nor portrays himself as a new convert. It is Donatus, and not Cyprian, who is cast as the inexperienced new Christian, and it is from Cyprian, in fact, that he receives his instruction.
It is nevertheless unnecessary to go so far as Watson did and suggest that Ad Donatum could have been written ‘at any point during [Cyprian's] episcopate’.Footnote 32 The external evidence, it is true, gives no definite indication. Augustine contrasted Ad Donatum to Cyprian's consequentes litterae in De doctrina Christiana iv.14.31, but (as Watson pointed out) he may only have meant ‘that Ad Don. stood at the beginning of his copy’, as in most manuscripts and in the ancient lists of Cyprian's works, including that in Pontius’ vita.Footnote 33 The codicological priority of Ad Donatum might suggest that it was the first of Cyprian's works, but it can hardly be used to infer when, exactly, it was written, let alone in what mood. Nevertheless, the evidence internal to the work itself implies a particularly early date. Cyprian sets his monologue in a tranquil garden and consistently portrays the Christian life as a peaceful refuge from a storm-tossed world.Footnote 34 A similar metaphor appears in De bono patientiae (written in the mid-250s), but Cyprian gives no hint here, as he would there, that the Church is threatened by ‘the persecutions of Jews or gentiles and heretics’.Footnote 35 A date before the Decian edict on sacrifices is therefore likely.
Other indications suggest that Ad Donatum was written even earlier, before Cyprian's ordination. Although Ad Donatum shows Cyprian teaching Donatus, it gives no hint that he has yet become bishop: the only churchly grade that he credits to himself is the first, baptism. Unlike in the more openly polemical epistles, Cyprian seldom appeals to his own episcopal office in his treatises, but he does not hesitate to assert his paternal, pastoral concern where appropriate.Footnote 36 Thus, for example, in the opening section of De habitu uirginum, which is likely of pre-Decian date,Footnote 37 he reminds his readers of his authority as an episcopal sacerdos, saying, ‘brothers also, and priests most of all, do not hate but love those whom they chide in order to correct them’; later, he will bid the virgins ‘listen, as if to a parent; listen, I ask you, to one who is at once afraid and giving you warning’.Footnote 38 Nothing like this can be found in Ad Donatum. The contrast with the post-Decian Ad Fortunatum is even more striking. Here, Cyprian expresses his desire, as the one who baptised the future martyrs in water, to prepare them for their second baptism in blood.Footnote 39 In Ad Donatum, Cyprian refers to Donatus’ baptism without the least hint that he was involved in its performance.Footnote 40 His instruction is spoken with authority, but it is the authority of a Christian who has experienced the transforming power of divine grace. The Cyprian of Ad Donatum is, it would seem, for once Cyprian the layman (or at most Cyprian the junior cleric), not Cyprian the bishop.
Ad Donatum therefore belongs roughly where most scholars have put it, relative to the key points of Cyprian's early career. Written, most likely, before his ordination, it must also date close in time to his baptism. However, the absolute chronology, as established in modern historiography, is sheer speculation. Nothing but the inertia of tradition secures a date for Cyprian's baptism, or the writing of Ad Donatum, as early as 246, and nothing, equally, excludes a date as late as the spring of 248 or even 249. More important, the standard narrative of Cyprian's psychological and spiritual development is largely invention. There is some evidence that Cyprian became a presbyter before becoming bishop, but there is none for the transitional period of post-baptismal maturation implied by Pearson's chronology and elaborated by modern scholars. As Pontius said of Cyprian, ‘he, though coming from among the untutored gentiles, began with a faith so mature as few, perhaps, have finished with’.Footnote 41 The vita is an unabashed panegyric, but its account cannot be dismissed in favour of speculations grounded in a conjectural chronology and reinforced by an inexact reading of Ad Donatum. Ad Donatum may well be the work of a new convert; if so, it must be the work of a new convert whose ‘transition’ to Christian thought and speech was already largely complete.
Baptism and Scripture: Cyprian as teacher in Ad Donatum and Ad Quirinum
If Pearson's reconstruction of Cyprian's early career is to be rejected, in what context was Ad Donatum actually written? Though sparse, the contemporary evidence is not unhelpful. Two other works credited to Cyprian have sometimes been put before his ordination as bishop. One, the brief apologetic tract Quod idola dii non sint (sometimes called De idolorum uanitate), is probably not his, as it appears to depend on Lactantius.Footnote 42 Though the parallels might conceivably reflect borrowing by rather than from Lactantius, the fourth-century apologist cannot have known Quod idola as a Cyprianic work, since he faults Cyprian for failing to use Classical authorities to refute the worship of the gods in Ad Demetrianum; if Quod idola were Cyprianic, its Classical learning would have vitiated his complaints.Footnote 43 The other early Cyprianic work is the three-volume scriptural handbook Ad Quirinum, whose attribution to Cyprian, sometimes questioned on stylistic grounds and because the work is absent from the brief list of Cyprian's treatises in Pontius, Vita 7.3–11, has been vindicated in recent scholarship.Footnote 44
A collection of biblical testimonia grouped under thematic headings, Ad Quirinum was written, as the work's two prefaces, to the first and third books, imply, in two stages. To the first two volumes, which present a tightly organised system of anti-Judaic and Messianic passages, Cyprian later added a third that lays out Christian moral precepts in a looser array.Footnote 45 All three books are typically placed early in Cyprian's career.Footnote 46 As with Ad Donatum, direct evidence is lacking, but the supposition is not improbable. The third book's prescriptions cover topics from women's dress (36) to usury (48). The pressing issues of church politics in the 250s – persecution and martyrdom (3.15–18, 29), schism and heresy (3.78, 86), and the forgiveness, by the Church, of those who ‘sin against God’ (28) – are treated at some length, but play no special role. Ad Quirinum is, it would appear, a general compendium of doctrine and practice aimed at a Church in a state of relative peace; only later, under the threat of persecution, would Cyprian devote another, briefer collection, Ad Fortunatum, specifically to the problem of idolatry and martyrdom.
Cyprian modestly states, in the preface to Ad Quirinum i, that he ‘has not so much written a treatise as supplied material for writers’.Footnote 47 Nevertheless, the authority with which he states the Church's precepts in the headings to book 3 imply that it, at least, was the work of a holder of ecclesiastical office. He addresses Quirinus as filius, adopting a fatherly stance that he employs in only two of the letters, those to Eucratius (himself probably a bishop: ep. ii.2.3) and Magnus (ep. lxix). The word, used in ancient letters to address ‘a much younger friend’, does not unambiguously mark Cyprian out as a bishop, but might seem out of place in the mouth of a layman who was writing a work on Christian teaching.Footnote 48 Ad Quirinum was most likely a product of the early, pre-Decian phase of Cyprian's episcopate, but it is not impossible that it was written even earlier.Footnote 49 Either way, it is probably a little earlier than De habitu uirginum, which draws on a body of scriptural texts that overlaps extensively with the relevant sections of Ad Quirinum iii and takes a similarly paternal approach to its addressees,Footnote 50 and only a little later than Ad Donatum.
Written not long (it seems) after Cyprian's ordination, and thus after his baptism, Ad Quirinum may help to locate Ad Donatum within Cyprian's very early career. Despite their profound formal differences, the two works, each of which seems to have been written in response to a request for instruction from a less-experienced Christian friend, share the same aim: to provide ‘understanding of heart’ (‘intellectus cordis’ in the preface to Ad Quirinum i; ‘conscientia pectoris’ in Ad Donatum 1) to Cyprian's reader by educating him on the divine disciplina. Other indications suggest an even closer link between the two works. Near the end of Ad Donatum, Cyprian bids the newly baptised Donatus make a habit of prayer and Scripture-reading. As he puts it, ‘Pray or read continuously. Now you will speak with God, now he with you. Let him instruct you in his precepts; let him set you in order.’Footnote 51 However, though Cyprian bids Donatus sing a Psalm at the close of his monologue, he neither recommends passages with which to begin his lectio, nor gives instruction on the meaning of Scripture. Ad Quirinum supplies both.
The thematic overlap between Ad Donatum and Ad Quirinum suggests that they were intended as companion-pieces. Ad Quirinum likely had a catechetical purpose,Footnote 52 but Cyprian nowhere indicates that it was aimed solely at the unbaptised. Quirinus has, he says, asked for ‘divine teachings by which the Lord has deigned to educate and instruct us through the holy Scriptures, that, led away from the shadows of error and illuminated by his pure and shining light, we might hold to the way of life through the salutary sacraments’.Footnote 53 The language is strongly reminiscent of the account of Cyprian's baptism in Ad Donatum, where he calls his pre-baptismal self ‘a stranger to truth and light’, who ‘lay in shadows and in sightless night’, refers to the vivification ‘to new life by the washing of the salutary water’, and describes the ‘infusion’ of the ‘light from above’ into his heart upon his baptism.Footnote 54 It also leaves open the possibility that Ad Quirinum was meant for the baptised faithful, as well as for catechumens; as Cyprian makes clear in Ad Donatum, holding fast to the ‘way of innocence, the way of righteousness’, may begin with baptism, but divine grace continues to abound thereafter according to the strength of one's faith.Footnote 55 Ad Quirinum presents a similar picture of increasing faith and sanctity. Cyprian's aim is to provide selections ‘which … will help you, when you read them, to form the first lineaments of faith’, but Quirinus will receive ‘greater vigour … and understanding of the heart more and more’ if he turns to the Scriptures themselves, the ‘springs of divine plenitude’.Footnote 56
Cyprian seems to have meant Ad Quirinum as a primer for precisely the sort of Scripture-based piety that he exhorts Donatus to adopt. The subtle differences in authorial self-presentation between the two works may therefore help to determine in what setting Ad Donatum was composed. Though Ad Quirinum includes nothing like Cyprian's account of his conversion in Ad Donatum 3–4, the preface to the first book does sketch a brief portrait of the author. As in Ad Donatum and some later works, he emphasises the mediocrity of his own abilities.Footnote 57 He also roots his teaching in the same divine illumination that he describes in Ad Donatum. Here, there is a small but important difference. In Ad Quirinum i, the divine illumination, imparted by Scripture and the sacraments, to which Cyprian appeals is a general illumination shared by all Christians. Though Cyprian is shown to be an authority on the Scriptures and is quite possibly already a bishop, he puts no stress on his own office or experience of conversion. In Ad Donatum, by contrast, Cyprian's personal experience of spiritual illumination is central not just to the work's form, as an extended monologue, but also to its content. Cyprian's account of baptism and its effects is emphatically autobiographical, as can be seen from the opening lines onward. ‘I’, Cyprian begins, ‘when I was lying in shadows and in sightless darkness, and when I was tossing, staggering on the sea of the billowing world and doubtful on wandering steps, ignorant of my life, a stranger to truth and light.’Footnote 58 Cyprian's exposition of the effects of the sacrament mixes together singular and plural pronouns, encompassing Donatus within his experiences, but its reference to Cyprian himself is still clear. ‘You certainly know’, he says, ‘and recognise with me what that death of crimes, that life of virtues, has taken from us or what it has bestowed upon us. You yourself know; I am not proclaiming it. Boasting in one's own praise is odious.’Footnote 59 Donatus has experienced the same grace that Cyprian has, but Cyprian is still his own primary example, of the evils of the pre-Christian life as of baptism's transformative power.
Donatus, accordingly, sometimes appears as Cyprian's friend and spiritual equal, into whose mind the same ‘Lord has flowed’ in baptism,Footnote 60 while, at other times, the impartation of the Spirit gives Cyprian an authority that Donatus does not enjoy. This is particularly apparent at the beginning of Cyprian's account of the evils of the world, where he declares to Donatus that ‘I will give you light for your understanding, I, having wiped away the gloom of its evils, will reveal the shadows of an age laid open’.Footnote 61 Here, Cyprian is not pointing out to Donatus truths that both men have perceived in baptism, but instead doing for his friend the same thing that the Spirit did for him then: causing ‘doubtful things to grow firm, hidden things to lie open, dark things to grow bright’.Footnote 62 The validity of Cyprian's exposition of the world's ills depends not on the power of divine grace in general, but very specifically on his own experience of that grace, which has enabled him to perceive with special clarity the hidden shadows of the world and given him the power to speak correctly ‘about the Lord, about God’.Footnote 63
Cyprian's account of his baptismal regeneration thus serves two purposes. It is an example of the Spirit's power, but, at the same time, it demonstrates that Cyprian himself has received from the same Spirit the insight necessary to show Donatus (and any other readers) the evils of the world and to expound God's commandments truthfully.Footnote 64 Accordingly, Cyprian explicitly adopts the pose of a teacher instructing his pupil. ‘But you’, he charges Donatus near the end of his monologue, ‘whom the heavenly soldiery has now marked out for the spiritual camp, keep the discipline uncorrupted, keep it soberly with the religious virtues.’Footnote 65 Donatus appears here as a new recruit receiving instruction in the ‘heavenly soldiery’ in which he has ‘now’ been enlisted. Cyprian, by implication, is either the new soldier's captain or a veteran comrade-in-arms.
Ad Quirinum is, of course, a scriptural handbook, and one might not expect its preface to focus on Cyprian in the way that Ad Donatum does. However, the contrast between the two works shows a peculiar characteristic of Ad Donatum in particular relief. Some of Cyprian's later works, such as De habitu uirginum and Ad Fortunatum (another scriptural compendium, it should be noted), foreground Cyprian's authority and personal concern, as bishop, for his congregants. Ad Donatum conveys a similar concern for Donatus, and, implicitly, for other newly baptised readers, but without any suggestion that Cyprian holds an authoritative office. His claim to teach Donatus is purely charismatic, grounded in the transformation worked in him by divine grace. Though Cyprian disclaims any ability to boast in himself, Ad Donatum is not simply an exposition of the power of baptism and the glories of the Christian life; it is, by the same token, an exposition of Cyprian's new character as a Christian convert. The Cyprian portrayed in Ad Donatum is not just a mature Christian; he is, though probably still a neophyte himself, already prepared to proclaim the precepts and the grace of God to his fellow Christians.
Ad Donatum: an answer to Cyprian's first critics?
Having set Ad Donatum alongside Ad Quirinum, we may begin to sketch a picture of its place within Cyprian's post-baptismal career. An exhortation to new converts, including his old friend Donatus, Ad Donatum may have been intended as a kind of companion-piece to the slightly later Ad Quirinum. Together, the two works provided a fervent protreptic to serious Christianity, a warning against backsliding, and a detailed account of scriptural teachings on Christ, the Church and, once the third book of Ad Quirinum was added, the moral expectations incumbent upon Christians. Ad Donatum may also, as scholars have long recognised, have had other audiences in addition to its primary readership, newly baptised persons of some education and substance. Alongside its exposition of public and private violence and lust (6–9), Ad Donatum rejects worldly rhetoric (2), political ambition and power (3, 11), the cruel jurisprudence of the forum (10) and the glory of personal wealth (12–13), specifically warning Donatus that he will lose interest in the opulence of his house as his piety grows (15). That Cyprian focuses on the concerns of wealthy Romans is evident, and has often been taken as a sign that the work was meant to defend his conversion to his peers in the Carthaginian elite.Footnote 66 This supposition may well hold true. However, when set alongside Cyprian's relentless emphasis on his own transformation and attendant power to teach, his focus on the sins of his own class suggests another audience: Christians, of whatever station, who doubted Cyprian's fitness for the episcopate.
Brief reports from both Pontius and Cyprian himself indicate that his ordination met with immediate opposition. Pontius’ account is rosier, in keeping with his panegyrical tone: some persons, he concedes, resisted Cyprian's elevation, but the charismatic bishop soon won over his rivals to lasting friendship.Footnote 67 A letter that Cyprian wrote to his congregation in 251 darkens the picture: the same five presbyters who were then challenging him over the question of apostasy, had, Cyprian says, also tried to prevent his elevation to the episcopate.Footnote 68 Why, Cyprian does not say, but it is hardly surprising that better-established ecclesiastical officers did not welcome the swift rise of a rival endowed not just with great force of character, but also with considerable social advantages: a sophisticated education and profession, connections with the pagan Carthaginian upper-crust (still in evidence just before his death), and wealth, which he bestowed on local pauperes, among them, most likely, many from the local laity, the chief backers of his ordination.Footnote 69
It seems strange that Cyprian, who was so prolific a writer during later controversies, should have produced nothing in response to the presbyters’ ‘conspiracy’, as he called it years later.Footnote 70 Granted, it is possible that Cyprian did write letters or treatises of which no record survives,Footnote 71 but we should take seriously the possibility that we do have, in the extant Cyprianic corpus, a work intended to quieten the objections of those who opposed his ordination: Ad Donatum. The aspects of Cyprian's self-portrayal that set Ad Donatum apart from other works such as Ad Quirinum are well suited not only for establishing a rapport with neophyte readers, but also for reassuring Christians who doubted Cyprian's suitability for episcopal office. By rejecting the trappings of wealth, education and political power in favour of the life of grace, Cyprian emphasises the sincerity and thoroughness of his own break with the world that he formerly inhabited, from whose polluting temptations he has, he declares, been utterly and permanently freed by the Holy Spirit in baptism. Even as he exhorts Donatus to stand fast in the grace of God, he implicitly demonstrates his own humility, dependence on God and ability to proclaim the Christian message powerfully and eloquently to the wealthy and well-connected of his world: his own former peers.
Anyone reading Ad Donatum would find in it an exhortation to serious Christian living that is inextricably bound up with a vivid and appealing portrait of its author. The Cyprian whom Ad Donatum displays to the reader is a truly new man who depends in everything, even those things on which he might have cause to pride himself, on God alone. Nevertheless, he remains a product of the wealth and profession that he has now laid aside, as Ad Donatum makes very clear. Even the artfully balanced language in which Cyprian proclaims his transformation shows the educational advantages that he has enjoyed. Few churchmen of the day could have matched the stylistic refinement and grace that he displays throughout Ad Donatum, and his Christian readers, friendly or hostile, must have recognised this.Footnote 72
If Cyprian was not already a bishop when he penned his first treatise, Ad Donatum is a powerful, though wholly implicit, defence of his suitability for that position, inasmuch as it makes clear the reality and depth of his conversion, his commitment to the instruction of new Christians and his superior education, which he has now put at the service of God and of the Church. If he had already been ordained, it makes an equally powerful defence of his elevation to the episcopate, to which, Pontius says, he had been reluctant to ascend.Footnote 73 In his monologue on the spiritual life, Cyprian may be glancing from time to time past Donatus not just to other neophytes, but also to unsteady friends in the Church of Carthage, whose confidence he is trying to maintain, and to his opponents, whose favour he wishes to win. Ad Donatum may thus have been truly intended to serve as an ‘apology’ not (or not only), as some have assumed, ‘for Cyprian's conversion and baptism’,Footnote 74 but also for his further advancement in the Church, which followed so swiftly upon it.
This conclusion, and the dating of Ad Donatum to the days immediately before or after Cyprian's ordination as bishop that it implies, must remain tentative, as neither the precise grounds on which the five presbyters opposed Cyprian nor how Ad Donatum was distributed is known.Footnote 75 Nevertheless, the traditional narrative of its composition, with the gap of multiple years between Cyprian's baptism and ordination, must be decisively rejected, along with the reading of Ad Donatum as a (relatively) naïve work. The psychological and chronological gap between Ad Donatum and early, post-ordination works such as De habitu uirginum is a postulate of modern scholarship that runs contrary both to Pontius’ account and the evidence of Ad Donatum itself, which consistently portrays Cyprian as a convinced Christian able to proclaim the faith with understanding and power. Ad Donatum is not the last work of an old rhetor in transition to Christianity; it is the first work of Cyprian, the pre-eminent churchman of his day.
