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HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF DECIUS
The metaphysics of decline and renewal.
Modern, post elightenment historians, with some reservations, have typically
described the age in which Cyprian lived and wrote in the mid third century as
‘an age of anxiety’. Typically their account is of constitutional collapse of a
malfunctioning political machine, precipitated finally by natural disasters and
by military defeat at the hands of the Persians in the East and the Goths in the
West. Such a view of the third-century in terms of ‘crisis’ and ‘anxiety’ has
been contested by MacMullan on the grounds that the ‘real’ situation, not at all
that bad, did not merit such a description.1
My account, however, claims that in any historical event, between the ‘real’
causes and what they produce, the social construction ofstands those causes and
events in the consciousness those who live contemporaneously with them. It is
this construction that I wish to examine as equally deserving of understanding
as a historical cause that produced what it did. Such a construction did not see
causes in terms of a malfunctioning machine, but in terms of a metaphysics in
which nature and society were reflections of the same reality: social
disintegration was but a reflection of the order of nature at variance with itself
(natura discors).
After the death of the last members of the Severan dynasty, Severus
Alexander and his mother Julia Mammaea (AD 235), the emperor was neither a
princeps created with the co-operation of the Senate, the legions, and the
people, as Trajan and his successors had been, nor an hereditary monarch as
Diocletian was to become. During this intervening period the emperor was the
sole creation of the legionary factions.
The process of succession determined by the legions alone commenced
following the death of Commodus (AD 192). Pertinax was duly appointed with
the formal approval of the Senate as the latter’s successor and given the title
princeps and other traditional republican appellations. But these had hardly
prevented, by their apparent legitimacy, the immediate murder of Pertinax.2
Factions within the army had supported rival claimants, including Sulplicianus
and Didius Julianus, who proceeded to buy the support of the military in a
1 R. MacMullen, Roman Government's Response to Crisis, AD 235–337 (New Haven and
London: Yale U.P. 1976), chapter 1, cf. G. Alföldy, ‘Die Krise des Imperium Romanum und die
Religion Roms’, (=Alföldy, Augewählte Beiträge, pp. 349–87); Idem, ‘The Crisis of the Third
Century as seen by Contemporaries’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 15 (1974), 89–111
(=Alföldy, Augewählte Beiträge, pp. 319–42).
2
R. Rémondon, La crise de l’empire romain de Marc Aurèle à Anastase (Nouvelle Clio:
L’histoire et ses problèmes; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 1970), pp. 100–3.
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gruesome auction, without reference to the legitimating function of the Senate.3
Septimius Severus was to emerge as the self-styled avenger of Pertinax, the
legitimately approved candidate for the succession now murdered, but only
after winning in battle against his former collaborators Niger and Albinus with
the aid of a force of troops loyal personally to himself (AD 193).
The death of Severus Alexander that was the end of the Severan dynasty
also saw the re-emergence of similar antagonistic forces upsetting the balance
of power between Senate, princeps and the legions. From the accession of
Maximinus Thrax (AD 235) until Diocletian (284) the factional forces emerged
again following military defeat at the hands of the Goths of the West, or the
Persians in the East, and natural disasters. Political disorder was in evidence in
the fourteen years (AD 235-249) of what was virtually civil war between rival
contestants for the position of emperor.
Maximinus the usurper had claimed the Empire that he was to lose to
Gordian I and his son and co-regent Gordian II, when they marched into
Carthage in 238. Though Maximinus succeeded initially in defeating the two
Gordians, despite their senatorial support, Gordian III, grandson of Gordian I,
was to succeed, and, on the 9th July 238 was proclaimed Augustus by the senate
at the age of thirteen, subsequent to the murder of Maximinus.
Gordian himself was murdered in March AD 244, and replaced as emperor
by Philip the Arab. But, whilst the revolts of Jotapianus and Pacantianus were
to be crushed at the end of Philip’s reign, that of Uranius Antoninus survived
both Philip and Decius. He was only to be defeated by Valerian in 253, then a
general of Trebonius Gallus, but was later to become emperor himself. Such
was the record of this period from Commodus to Diocletian (192-283), with an
estimated twenty-four changes of government and thirty-five emperors.4
In terms of our post-Enlightenment historiography, we may well regard
this record as one of numerous problems needing solution in the functioning of
the machinery of government and the harmonizing of social order. We may see
Diocletian’s Tetrarchy as the solution to a malfunctioning, governmental
machine, with its aim for the peaceful transition of legitimate power from him
to his successors. Diocletian had partitioned an empire that had grown too large
for a single emperor to rule, and delicately ordered the balance of power
between both of its parts.
Regarding the problem of social cohesions, we may see disunity as
endemic in an empire of diverse peoples and cultures: all those in North Africa
who supported Gordian I against Maximinus, and who according suffered the
revenge of Capellianus, may not have been driven by purely prudential
motives: some may have been moved by the desire of an ancient culture to
stand alone. Caracalla’s citizenship law (AD 212) had sought, by granting
universal citizenship throughout the Empire, to encompass the distinct cultures
3
4
Cassius Dio (Epitome), LXXI.11.3–4.
As calculated by F.J. Foakes-Jackson, History of the Christian Church to A.D. 461
(Cambridge: J. Hall and Son 1909), p. 47.
HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF DECIUS
67
of the Empire within a common, imperial whole. His policy was to have its
religious counterpart in the succeeding reign of Elagabalus (AD 218-222), in
the attempted establishment of a universal religion. The quest for such a
religion became therefore inevitable if such disintegration was to be avoided,
whether in the form of Elagabalus’ abortive pagan universal cult of the
Unconquered Sun (Sol Inuictus), or Aurelian’s greater success in that direction,
or indeed of Constantine’s Christianization of the same quest.
We may, then, with Rives, see the failure of the Graeco-Roman pantheon
to assert a religious identity within the Empire against the force of native
divinities not wholly assimilated with their alleged counterparts as a
disintegrative force against the emergence of a common imperial culture.5 We
may in consequence see Cyprian’s rhetoric of Church Unity as the precursor of
the triumph of Christianity under Constantine, with its hope, frequently vain, of
providing in religion a more cohesive and unifying political force. As such we
could see Cyprian as contributing unconsciously to a solution of the problem of
political and social disintegration that began with Commodus, and ended with
the conversion of Constantine. Thus from our post Enlightenment perspective
we claim that the governmental ‘machine’ had gone wrong, and the human
beings ‘repaired’ the machine in the light of their experience of historical crisis
caused by its malfunction.
Sometimes however we may view historical development and change in a
post Darwinian perspective, by analogy with a living organism so that certain
tendencies are seen as endemic but latent in the social organism, only to
develop pathological forms when the right environmental stimuli prevail. Thus
the forces that would tear the empire apart are considered present from
Commodus onwards, but only become active with the disorders that followed
the accession of Maximinus. Such a post Enlightenment exercise in historical
interpretation is not, I am firmly convinced, without merit.
But the mind of Cyprian and his contemporaries is accessible and available
to us only through an examination of the logic of the discourse within which
they interacted with their pagan culture: we need to interpret their language
game in order to explore their social construction of reality. As Weber pointed
out, in any account that claims objectivity the historian must acknowledge his
own subjectivity as part of his account if he wishes to achieve genuine
understanding (Verstehen). I propose then acknowledging the subjectivity of
our post-Enlightment, symbolic universe of meaning so that we can be freed to
explore the different universe of meaning inhabited by people in the third
century.6
Rives, Religion and Carthage, chapter 3.
I have used such concepts as ‘social construction of reality,’ ‘symbolic universe of
meaning’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’ in the sense defined in P. Berger and T. Luckmann,
The Social Construction of Reality (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1967), and P. Berger, The Social
Reality of Religion (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1973).
5
6
68
CHAPTER THREE
Inhabitants of the symbolic universe of meaning of third century Imperial
Carthage did not interpret their world generally in the mechanistic or organic
terms of our post Enlightenment world: for them the universe and its history
was determined by a metaphysical purpose. The steps that human being took to
divine and then submit to such a purpose conditioned their actions, and defined
for them the character of the historical events that they sought to narrate. We
shall have no real understanding (Verstehen) of those actions if we dismiss the
metaphysical social construction of reality whose conception significantly
influences and explains such actions.
In order to explore their ‘mind’, we need in reality to consult their
discourse or their social construction of reality. We need to reconstruct the
view of historical development, decline, and rebirth found in their
contemporary historiography. This was the discourse in which Cyprian and his
fellow religionists shared, and necessarily shared, if they were to interact at all
with their general culture.
That historiography was informed by a cyclic view of history, in which the
age of gold inevitably declined into that of silver, brass and iron only to be
reborn again in a renewed golden age. It involved a metaphysic that would not
separate nature from society so that fact could be separated from value: decline
in morality, natural decline into old age, the wearing out of the natural world,
and the break up of society were all reflections of an identical metaphysical
process. Nature, society, and morality were therefore reflections of a single
process of development irreversable as Fate.
Such a view was sustained by a powerful philosophical argument from the
Stoicism represented in particular by Chrysippus, in which all things arise from
the primal fire and finally return to the primaeval fire in a final conflagration
(e2kpu/rwsij), in never ending cycles. Fate drives the process that is moved by
the fiery breath or lo/goj that permeates all things that it thus controls them by
means of its divine mind that gives things their purpose. That purpose can
reveal itself in the form of miraculous signs in nature that are portents: the
lo/goj, immanent in all things, can express the future to which it compels all
things to proceed. This would happen in particular when things fall apart and
break up as the world reaches ‘old age’, losing its powers, but yet expecting its
future transformation in its rebirth. Nature at variance with itself would produce
falling stars and monstrous births, and the immanent lo/goj, driving all things
towards their destined end, would reveal the pattern of the future in divination
by patterns in the sky made by meteors or the flights of birds, or on the entrails
of a sheep.
It is here that we find the perspective in terms of which Cyprian was to
follow the Octavius of Minucius Felix in understanding the third century crises
through which his own personal history was to move. Whether to Demetrian
outside the Church, or to those Christians whose faith was shattered by the
ravages of plague (AD 252-253), Cyprian will interpret, in De Mortalitate
written at this time, Christ’s Second Coming in terms of the ‘world’s old age
HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF DECIUS
69
(senectus mundi)’. There is a shared perspective in Cyprian’s interaction with
his contemporaries. It is to the detailed task of exploring that third century
social construction of reality that we now turn.
A. STOICISM AS A CYCLIC VIEW OF HISTORY.
As both Dio Cassius (in AD 229) and Herodian (in 238) end their histories
before the time of Cyprian, the latter is often the only contemporary, literary
witness that we have to the events that he describes. If this is true regarding the
history of the pagan empire, it is even more the case with the inner history of
the Church. Later commentaries, whether of the Scriptores Historiae Augustae,
or of Eusebius, are notoriously anachronistic. The former reflects the age of
Julian and its contemporary preoccupations are allowed to shape the description
of earlier emperors before the victory of the Church. The latter reflects a view
of history that allows no concept of the development of institutions or ideas so
that Church Order and doctrine must have been from the beginning what it was
in the fourth century.
We must begin by asking what general view of the character of events and
their change can be derived from third century writers, whether pagan or
Christian? What were the shared assumptions of both groups that lay hidden
behind their differences?
To have even ‘disagreement in opinion’ one must, as Wittgenstein has
shown us, have achieved a prior agreement, an ‘agreement in a form of life’.
The moral rebel arises within the form of life in which he expresses his moral
disagreement against a shared conceptual backcloth. What was the shared
backcloth of assumptions against which Church and Pagan Empire were to
develop in dynamic interaction with one another? It was with that dialogue,
with certain, formal shared assumptions, that Cyprian, as we shall see, was to
engage.
The world of Herodian and Cassius Dio, shortly before the period whose
history they both failed to write, had not experienced what Weber called the
‘disenchantment’ of the world: for them as for their contemporaries there was
no differences between the operation of events in the physical or biological
world and that of the social, political, and moral world. Natural disasters were
reflected in a breakdown of social order, but, as countless accounts of prodigia
show, instablity in social order is reflected in the natural order. Order whether
in nature or in society has a single, ultimate metaphysical foundation. Lucan,
the nephew of Seneca, had seen the civil war that ended the Republic as the
product of ‘nature at variance with herself (natura discors)’. But such a Stoic
conception was found earlier in a Platonist form developed into a
historiography by Polybius.
A.1. Polybius as the founder of Graeco Roman historiography.
Earlier Polybius (208-168 BC) had propounded a cyclic view of history in
which there is taxonomy of good constitutions that decline into their evil or
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imperfect counterparts. Monarchy (monarxi/a) arises as a process by which
human beings pass out of a state of nature into society, through a basic instinct
that they have for self-preservation, to life under a leader who will protect
rather than destroy them. But, from somewhat amoral and prudential origins,
kingship (basilei/a) arises in which the king is a source of rational and moral
order even though he may through age or other reasons lack personal physical
force, or overwhelming physical forces of others supporting him.7 For good
Platonic reasons: ‘This first conception of goodness and justice and their
opposites which men possess by nature is the origin and genesis of true
kingship’.8
Thus on Platonist assumptions,9 basilei/a or ‘kingly rule’ must be the best
form of government from which all others are derived. The a)rxh/ (origin or
first principle) must be superior to that from which it is derived: it must be the
Good that was for Plato the highest order of reality, standing at the head of the
a divided line that marked the gradations of reality and appearance, and
imparting its reality to the rest of the Forms in a hierarchically organized model
of reality.10 But kingly rule turns into its opposite, ‘tyranny (turanni/j)’ when
human passions disturb and destroy the rational moral order: rulers become
corrupt and subjects revolt in anger. Since ethical considerations move the
leaders of the popular revolt, those with whom their ‘first conception of the
good and just’ remains are able to become the leaders recognised by the
populace as ‘the noble’, and, in course of time, ‘aristocracy (a)ristokrati/a)’
replaces turanni/j as a good form of government.11 Aristocracy is transformed
by a similar degenerative process to that in which monarchy had been into
‘oligarchy (o)ligarxi/a)’.12
Once again, the causal explanation of the change is in the moral qualities
of human beings: it is ‘insolence (u3brij)’ and ‘injustice (a)diki/a)’, according to
Polybius, of the children of aristocrats, in consequence of their moral decline,
that produce the transformation of the bad form of government that is oligarchy
into the good form that is ‘democracy’. With experience of all other possible
forms of government and their pathological forms, out of self-preservation ‘the
masses (to\ plh~qoj)’ resort to this last good form of government: ‘Thus their
only hope of still surviving unimpaired is in themselves, and to this they
resort, and make the constitution a democracy instead of any oligarchy’.13 The
final and last, degenerate form of the development of constitutions from a
moral opposite is ‘mob-rule (o)xlokrati/a)’ or ‘ochlocracy’ produced by the
7 Polybius, Historiae, VI.4.2 and 6.12.
8 Ibid. VI.7.1.
9 Plato, Respublicae, 8.562 A; Leges,
3.681 A–B. Cf. F.W. Walbank, A Historical
Commentary on Polybius (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1957), vol. I, pp. 652–54.
10 Plato Respublicae, 6.19 B.
11 Polybius, Historiae, VI.4.3.
12 Polybius, Historiae, VI.4.9.
13 Polybius, Historiae, VI.8.3.
HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF DECIUS
71
democratic form of government being corrupted through insolence and
‘lawlessness (paranomi/a)’.
For Polybius the process of constitutional change and decline was both
natural and cyclic. ‘Ochlocracy’ was destined to reproduce the conditions of a
state of nature which had first called forth the amoral and prudential monarchy
which would once again develop into the moral kingship, seen once more in
‘this first conception of goodness ... which men possess by nature’.
Thus historical change was cyclic. Furthermore, the process of cyclical
change (a)naku/klwsij) that governed society was natural. Societies developed
and declined in accordance with the same kind of natural order as did the stars
or a natural living organism.14 Indeed his use of anakyklosis has become a
technical term derived by Polybius and his predecessors from its general use in
Plato for the movement of the natural order.15 Here Plato maintains that, since
the universe is of a bodily nature, it cannot be uninvolved in change like the
most divine things of all. Thus human societies, like the stars, must in a circular
motion imitate the divine mind whilst falling short of its ulimate, motionless
changelessness.
In Plato’s description the universe, as a living creature, is made to resemble
its ‘model’, the world soul. Being subject to time, the world of becoming
imitates eternity and circles around according to number.16 It would therefore
have been impossible, according to Polybius, for some very Platonic reasons, to
produce the arrested state that had abolished change, which Popper argued to
have been Plato’s real objective.17
A.2. Cassius Dio and Herodian: Stoic Theories of Historical Decline.
I have sought to analyse Polybius’ historiography at some length since both
Cassius Dio and Herodian assume features of a theory of decline drawn albeit
unsystematically from the Polybian project.18 Polybius’ original claim was that
an historian could be mistaken in making future predictions about the precise
timing of a process of one particular constitutional change, but he could only
very seldom be mistaken about ‘each stage of growth or decline’.19 Historians
from the third century onwards believed that they were witnessing the decline
and disintegration of the Roman Empire. They could, indeed, detect the stage
14 Polybius, Historiae, VI.9.10.
15 Plato, Politicus, 269, cf. Walbank, Historical
16 Plato, Timaeus, 37 D: ... xro/nou tau~ta
Commentary, vol. I, p. 568, 10.
ai)w~na/ te mimoume/nou kai\ kat ) a)riqmo\n
kukloume/nou ge/gonen ei1dh. I believe that Polybius’ account of the anakyklosis is more
consitent with his underlying Platonism than suggested by F.W. Walbank, ‘Polybius’, in Sather
Classical Lectures (Berkeley: University of California Press 1972), vol. XLII, 142–4, cf.
Walbank, Historical Commentary, vol. I, pp. 643–8.
17 K. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1952),
vol. I. The Spell of Plato.
18 F. Millar, A Study of Cassius Dio (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1964), pp. 73–7.
19 Polybius, Historiae, VI, 9,11.
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of the process of change in which their society was involved, but not predict the
precise date of its demise.
For Cassius Dio, on the death of Commodus (AD 192), ‘history now
declines from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust’.20 Certainly
Herodian’s view of Maximinus, who seized power after his murder of Severus
Alexander and his mother Julia Mamaea (AD 235), was that kingly rule had
experienced a ‘transformation (metabolh/)’ into tyranny: Maximinus, in taking over the empire, executed the greatest transformation (metabolh/),
adopting the harshest authority and based on fear, and he tried to make a complete
transformation from a mild and gentle kingship to the most savage tyranny
(turanni/j).21
Dionysius of Alexandria also revealed the assumptions of the same
historiographical perspective when he too uses the expression metabolh/ as a
change in historical circumstances from good to evil. Thus he described the
arrival of Decius’ decree as marking a change from the rule of the kindly
Philip, and its eschatological significance in terms of Christ’s apocalyptic
predictions.22
There is, however, one fundamental distinction between the trend of
Polybius’ historiography and that of Dio and Herodian. The movement of
historical change was for Polybius the result of human passions that, by their
nature, upset the rational and therefore ethical order. From the first century BC,
Platonism, in alliance with Stoicism, mythologised the forces of potential chaos
implicit in a Platonic view of the corporeal: no longer human passions but
cosmic forces were responsible for such a chaos.
Thus for Lucan in the first century the collapse of the Republic in the civil
war had been the product of a natura discors: it was a collapse in the
metaphysical order of things to be marked by supernatural signs and prodigies
that witnessed to that fact. Polybius had rejected any such marks, and refused to
mythologise a process that was the product of the way all corporeal things
simply lose their rational order due to a natural instability that is not endowed
with human purpose. He will criticise for example such authors who report that
at Bargylia no snow or rain falls on the statue of Artemis Kindyas. He rejects
the claim of Theopompus that people who enter the holy of holies of the temple
of Zeus in Arcadia become shadowless.23 The divine for him must exist within
the limits of Platonic rationalism.24
20 Dio Cassius, LII.36.4, cf. Alföldy, ‘Crisis’, p.
21 Herodian, VII.1.1. See also G. Alföldy,
322.
‘Zeitgeschichte und Krisenempfindung bei
Herodian’, Hermes, 99 (1971), 429– 449 (= Alföldy, Ausgewählte Beiträge, pp. 273–94).
22 Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, VI.41.9 quoting Mat. 24:24. See also below, chapter 4,
footnote 1 and associated text.
23 Polybius, Historiae, XVI.11, 3–7. See also P. Pédech, La Méthode Historique de Polybe
(Collection d’Études Anciennes de l’Association Guillaume Budé; Paris: Société d’Edition
‘Les Belles Lettres’ 1964), pp. 391–7.
24 Pédech, Méthode, pp. 396–7.
HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF DECIUS
73
It is important to emphasise that Polybius, in contrast to his Stoic
successors, did not regard pro/noia as ‘divine providence’ and as such the
equivalent of ‘fate (tu/xh)’.25 For him the latter concept was equivalent to an
au)to/maton, an event which happened of itself and without an external
agency, and which was therefore capricious and irrational. Polybius uses
pro/noia, not of historical events, but of a sagacious and practical,
psychological quality of some individuals to judge rationally certain
outcomes.26 But pro/noia was to become, as Stoicism developed, a cosmic
principle expressive of divine providence that ordered human destiny.
A.3. History and Divine Providence in Stoic Metaphysics.
Zeno was to influence his followers, Cleanthes and Chrysippus, to produce a
cyclical view of history that, unlike Polybius’ Platonism, integrated historical
with natural change and development. The Stoic monism of Zeno claimed one
ou)si/a or being of existence. But there were two principles that were aspects of
the one, namely ‘the active principle (to\ poiou~n)’ and ‘the passive principle
(to\ pa/sxon)’. The latter was ‘(formless) matter (u3lh) but the former ‘divine
reason (inherent) in it (lo/goj)’ that was ‘eternal (a)i5dion)’ and which created
‘each of the things throughout the whole universe whose form it bore’.27
Indeed, the lo/goj was conceived as sufficiently personal as to be identified
with Zeus. The lo/goj was named Zeus (Di/a) because ‘through (di/a) him all
things came to be)’.28
The universal order, which would only mistakenly be identified with a
creatio e nihilo, comes about by a modification of the refined fire or light that
is Zeus, the divine lo/goj as spiritual body.29 God himself is ‘the fiery mind
(nou~j) of the world’.30 The ‘fire’ is logiko/n.31 The existing order is immanent
in the lo/goj from whom it comes and to whom it returns, and from which a
new order arises. The process by which this comes about is called the
‘conflagration (e)kpu/rwsij)’ in which the universe, in certain predetermined
cycles, returns to the primaeval fire from which it has arisen. The universe
returns to its original condition as primaeval fire just like a natural growth
returns to seed.32
It is possible to give an account of the process of e)kpu/rwsij that is
mechanical and chemical. Stoics saw the original matter of the lo/goj as
25
Pédech, Méthode, p. 333, cf. R. Hirzel, Untersuchungen zu Cicero’s philosophischen
Schriften (Leipzig: Hirzel 1882), II, pp. 862–70; F. Allègre, ‘Étude sur la déesse grecque
Tyché’, Bibliothèque de la Faculté des Lettres de Lyon, XIV (1889), 129–32.
26 Polybius, Historiae, III.47.6–7; 60,7; 81.22; 115.11; VIII.34.10; IX.5.1; X.2.6; 2.13;
33.2; 33.3; XI.19.5; XV.7.1; XVIII.28.6 etc., cf. Pédech, Méthode, p. 333.
27 Zeno, Peri\ Ou)si/aj (apud Diogenes Laertius 7.134= Arnim I, p. 24.6–9).
28 Ioannes Laurentius Lydus, De Mensibus (= Arnim II, p. 312.29–33.
29 Origen, Contra Celsum, 6.7 (= Arnim II, p. 310.24–5).
30 Aëtius I.7.23 (= Arnim I, p. 42.7–8).
31 Galenus, De Qualitatibus Incorporeis, 6 (= Arnim II, p. 116.11–15).
32 Eusebius Praeparatio Evangelica, XV.18,1–3 (= Arnim II, p. 184.12–16).
CHAPTER THREE
74
refined fire, Cleanthes as ‘flame’ and Chrysippus as ‘a ray of light’.33 Order
arose as a kind of distilation from the light as the four elements arise, one of
which is the crasser and unrefined fire of sense perception.34 Empty space was
a necessary feature of the Stoic system in order to enable the expansion and
contraction that formed the cyclic process, whose end and new beginning was
the e)kpu/rwsij.35 But such a mechanistic account would be misleading.
The Stoics were to insist that the movement of world building and world
destruction was the product of the personal lo/goj or divine mind36 exercising
both pro/noia, and determining the destiny of all things as ei(marme/nh.37 As the
lo/goj was personal and identified with Zeus, creation and recreation could not
take place as the result of blind and impersonal forces, but must consist in
pro/noia as well as ei(marme/nh.38 Chrysippus was to claim in the second book
of his De Finibus and throughout his De Fato that: ‘Fate (ei(marme/nh)is the
reasoning (lo/goj) of the world, or the reasoning of the things in the world that
are governed by providence (pronoi/a)’.39
The lo/goj, which still exists after e)kpu/rwsij and before the new
restoration of the world, can be described simply as pro/noia by itself and as
yet without any fulfilment. Zeus-lo/goj, alone of all the gods, is without
corruption or dissolution at the e)kpu/rwsij, and ‘reverts back into providence
(pro/noia)’. God and the world are, like soul and foresight in the individual,
ultimately material and one in the Stoic monism that will admit no final
distinction between matter and spirit. Both God and the world are destined to
revert to the condition of the single fiery substance, whose nature is that of the
lo/goj-pro/noia. In the words of Chrysippus: ‘When the ekpurosis takes place
... then they both turn together into the one common nature of the [fiery] ether
and continue’.40
But if pro/noia is providence as a metaphysical principle that orders both
physical matter and human society, then it follows logically that human beings,
themselves endowed with lo/goj, will be able to discern providence which
they experience as fate. Thus Stocism generally was able to argue logically
from its first principles that divination was possible.41 Through dreams or the
rites of the augures or haruspices it was possible to discern the intentions of the
divine lo/goj that as pro/noia was commanding human destiny. Portents and
prodigies were but expressions of the divine mind that formed the logical
33
34
35
Philo, De Incorruptione Mundi, 254.7 (= Arnim II, p. 186.32–34).
Pseudo Hippolytus, Refutatio, X.6.4.
Achilles, Isagoge 8,131 (= Arnim II, p. 186.29–31), see J.M. Rist, Stoic Philosophy
(Cambridge: U.P. 1977), pp. 175–6.
36 Chrysippus, Peri\ qew~n 1 (apud Philodemus, De Pietate = Arnim II, p. 315.3).
37 Plutarch, De Stoicis repugnandis, 34 (=Arnim II, p. 269.12–13).
38 Plutarch, De Stoicis repugnandis, 47 (= Arnim II, p. 292.11–13).
39 Crysippus De Finibus, 2 and De Fato (apud Stobaius, Eclogae, I.39.1 = Arnim II, p.
264.18). See also Alexander Aphrodias, De Fato, 22 (= Arnim II, p. 273.26).
40 Plutarch, De Communibus Notiis aduersus Stoicos, 36 (= Arnim II, p. 312.36).
41 Poseidonius restored divination and astrology against his master Panaetius.
HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF DECIUS
75
pattern of divine intention for those who had the means (te/xnh) to discern that
pattern.42
A.4. Prodigia, design and eschatology; shared Christian and Pagan concepts.
Jewish and Christian apocalyptic too mirrored such portents as signs, not of a
continuing cyclical and periodic decay to be followed by restoration and
renewal, but of the final end of history. In this respect, Berger was clearly right
to argue that simply because prodigies were not signs of the end in pagan
literature, therefore there is no relation between Christian and Pagan signs.43
We may parallel here the prodigies that we have selected from Cassius Dio and
Herodian, with their early Christian counterparts:
a.
b.
c.
d.
At the outbreak of the struggle between Septimius Severus and Albinus (AD 196), a
great fire was seen in the northern sky at night, and a fine rain resembling silver fell
from the sky on the Forum of Augustus. Dio plated some bronze coins with the
substance that disappeared within three days.44 In the Apocalypse: ‘The fourth angel
pours his bowl over the sun, and it was given him to burn men in fire’. (Apoc. 16:8 cf.
8:7-8).
At the height of Elagabalus’ religious revolution (AD 219), amongst other ‘portents
(te/rata)’ the statue of Isis came alive and turned her face toward the interior of her
temple.45 Similarly, in Apoc. 13:14, the image of the beast comes alive and speaks and
acts to destroy those who do not worship it.46
The moon eclipsed in blood causes consternation in the camp of Vitellius (AD 69), in
the political chaos that preceded the accession of Vespasian.47 The supersession of
Macrinus by Elagabalus (AD 218) was also accompanied by an eclipse of the sun and
a comet.48 In the Apocalypse of John, and in the Markan apocalypse, the moon
becoming blood, the sun eclipsing and stars falling are common features.49
Whilst Severus, Niger, and Albinus were fighting to control the empire in AD 193,
three stars surrounding the sun were seen by a group that included Dio himself as
Julianus was offering the sacrifices in front of the senate house.50 According to
Ignatius, the sun moon and stars formed a chorus around the star at Christ’s birth.51
Ignatius in this passage, by contrast with Mark or the Apocalypse, is dealing
with a ‘sign (shmei~on)’ or a ‘portent (te/raj)’ that is not concerned with a
42
Chrysippus, De Fato, Poseidonius, Zeno (Diogenes Laertius, 7.149 = Arnim I, p. 44.28–
34 = Arnim II, p. 265.27).
43 K. Berger, ‘Hellenistisch-heidnische Prodigien und die Vorzeichen in der jüdischen und
christlichen Apokalyptik’, in ANRW II.23.2, p. 1442.
44 Cassius Dio, LXXVI.4.6–7.
45 Cassius Dio, LXXX.10.1.
46 Apoc. 13:15.
47 Cassius Dio, LXV.11.1.
48 Cassius Dio, LXXIX.30.1.
49 In Apoc. 16:3 the sea ‘becomes blood’, in 16:4 (cf. 8:8) the rivers and fountains of water
become blood. In Apoc. 8:12 a third of the day and night are darkened. Likewise in Mark
13:24–25 (in adaptation of Isaiah 34:4), we read of stars falling.
50 Cassius Dio, LXXIV.14.4.
51
Ignatius, Ad Ephesios, 19.2.
CHAPTER THREE
76
prophecy of the future, but an indication of an eschatological future realised in
the present.52
Luke, too, uses te/rata kai\ shmei~a of the New Age, realised in the present
at Pentecost in Acts 2:19a, where he speaks of blood, fire, vapour of smoke and
a darkened sun and moon that is blood. He specifically recasts Joel’s
prophecy.53 Thus he can introduce shmei~a as the parallel to te/rata, making
the former ‘below’ and the latter ‘above’, thus also making their appearance in
the sky the critical point.
Lukan theology, as I have argued elsewhere, is about seeking the pax dei
(ei)rh/nh) as the self-conscious counterpart to the Augustan pax deorum.54 The
Augustan aureum saeculum, the ultima aetas of Virgil, Eclogae, 4.4, is
mirrored in the new age that Jesus and the apostles bring. Thus the Lukan
material shows that apocalyptic discourse and its assumptions were
comprehensible within a discourse in which historical change was accompanied
by supernatural prodigies, and understood in terms of ‘foreknowledge
(pro/noia)’, read in the context of Stoic eschatology. Recent Lukan studies
have interpreted Luke’s concept of events which happen ‘by the predetermined
counsel (boulh/) and foreknowledge (prognw/sij) of God’ (Acts 2:23) in
terms of Stoic pro/noia.55
We are thus presented by the various writers who testify to ancient views
on society and history with a discourse, the possibilities of which are by no
means exhausted by any one participant in that discourse. There was no logical
disjunction between apocalypticism and Hellenistic philosophy, represented by
Stoicism, within a picture of social and historical development indicated by
supernatural signs for which it gave a sophisticated explanation in terms of its
philosophical theology. The author of the Apocalypse, or of the Markan
apocalypse, may not have made, or chosen to have made, the particular moves
in the language game that realised those other possibilities. But Luke and
Ignatius certainly did: there was thus sufficient common ground in the
discourse in terms of the logic of shmei~a and te/rata, the endowment of nature
and history with divine purpose, etc. to make whole areas of both agreement
and disagreement comprehensible. Indeed, without such ‘agreement in form of
life’, as Wittgenstein says, it would be possible neither to agree nor disagree ‘in
opinion’.
52
Brent, Ignatius, p. 230; pp. 240–2. See also ‘Ignatius and Polycarp: The Transformation
of New Testament Traditions in the context of the Mystery Cults’, in Trajectories through the
New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers, Editors: Andrew Gregory and Christopher Tuckett
(Oxford: University Press 2005), pp. 325–49.
53 Cf. Berger, ‘Prodigien’, p. 1437: ‘Lukas... hat daher das ganze Zitat im Sinne
hellenistischen Prodigienstiles aktualisiert’.
54 A. Brent, ‘Luke-Acts and the Imperial Cult in Asia Minor’, Journal of Theological
Studies, 48.2 (1997), 411–38; Brent, Imperial Cult, Chapter 3.
55 J.T. Squires, The Plan of God in Luke-Acts (Society for New Testament Studies,
mongraph series 76; Cambridge: 1993), pp. 15–17; 38–46; 103–8; Brent, Imperial Cult, pp. 90–
101.
HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF DECIUS
77
Certainly in the case of II Peter we find the logic of Stoic discourse fully
developed. Primitive eschatology is well represented, though the delay of the
signs of Christ’s coming has lead to much scoffing on the part of unbelievers.
The pseudonymous writer interprets the transformation of the old world into
the new, the new heavens and the new earth (3.13), as the ‘conflagration’ of
Stoic eschatology (e)kpu/rwsij). ‘The heavens will be dissolved as they burn up
(3.12: purou/menoi)’. He promises further that the ‘elements will be burned up
and dissolved (3:10: stoixei~a)’, just as Chrysippus had said that ‘the four
elements (stoixei~a) ... would be dissolved into themeselves’.56 Thus the
apocalyptic of ‘day of the Lord’ of which the Hebrew prophets had spoken, ‘in
which the heavens will pass away with a rushing motion’, or ‘the elements will
burn up and melt (3:10)’, is justified metaphysically in terms of Stoic
cosmology, and the new heavens that replace them. Thus also was Augustus’
saeculum aureum interpreted as the setting right of natura discors in Lucan’s
description of the transformation of republic into empire,.
Polybius had originally understood, in his originally cyclic view, the
development of human societies in terms of a demythologised ethic of human
action, as we noted. II Peter has an ethical account, but one set squarely in the
matrix of a cosmological metaphysic. The dynamic of cosmic decay is inherent
lust, which the faithful will escape through participation in the divine nature.
The purposes of God’s promises are: ‘… in order that you may become sharers
in the divine nature (qei~a fu/sij), having escaped the corruption (fqora/) that
is in the cosmos through lust (1:4)’. Thus we find re-echoed in late second
century apocalytic expectation the Stoic dictum that ‘the world is destructable
through ekpurosis (fqarto\n to\n ko/smon kat ) e)kpu/rwsin)’.57
In this respect the author of II Peter was far closer to Dio and Lucan than to
Polybius. The former two writers clearly shared with him a metaphysic of rise
and decline marked by prodigies as the signs of what was to take place, as did
the proconsul of Asia’s inscription where he speaks of Augustus’ birth in a
world that would have welcomed its fqora/. As he says:
If not [the beginning of all things] in nature, at least in the order of the useful, for even if
there is nothing in a fallen condition and changed into an unfortunate condition that he
has not set right, he has given to the whole world a different appearance, which would
[as a world] have gladly welcomed its destruction (fqora/) had not for the common
good fortune Caesar been born.58
Thus such a Stoic metaphysic of decline and renewal was to underly the
political rhetoric of the Principate, as Lucan also showed in De Bello Ciuili.59
56 Chrysippus, De substantia elementorum, (apud Stobaeus, Eclogae, I.129.1 = Arnim II, p.
136.8–11).
57 Aëtius, Placita, II.4.7 (= Arnim II, p. 181.5–6). See also Arius Didymus, Fragmenta, 36
(apud Eusebius Praeparatio Evangelica, XV.18.1–3 = Arnim II, p. 184.10).
58 Ehrenberg and Jones, Documents, no. 98, cf. also OGIS 458; SEG 4.490. Sherk, Greek
East, no. 101.
59 Brent, Imperial Cult, pp. 46–51.
CHAPTER THREE
78
This rhetoric was to be enduring, and is witnessed, as we shall see in Chapter 4,
in the iconography of the coinage of Decius and his contemporaries.
But for the moment let us note how for II Peter Christian virtues are also
Stoic virtues. We meet with ‘self control (1:6: e)gkra/teia)’, as one of the
virtues of those who are ‘sharers in the divine nature (qei~a fu/sij)’.60 We find a
definition of this term in Panaetius as ‘a disposition never to be overcome in
that which concerns right reason (o)rqo\j lo/goj)’.61 We also have an account in
which natural disturbances are also moral disturbances: both Christian and
pagan can expect shmei~a indicative of the unfolding events of history.
Thus for historiographers such as Dio Casius and Herodian, the Polybian
historiography, in terms of cycles produced by the human, psychological
propensity for moral decline, has been transformed. Historical development in
terms of a cycle of rise and decline has been absorbed into a metaphysical
system, in which the universe was infused with the divine power of the lo/goj
spirit permeating both nature, human society, and human individuals. The
lo/goj of the individual psyche was but an extension of the lo/goj in nature
and in society. Unusual natural events could be understood as prodigia and
portenta expressive of a providence whose ways could be discerned.
Furthermore, such a metaphysical system provided philosophical
justification for the imperial ideology. The renewal of the saeculum aureum
was linked with the cult of the divinized emperors, the first of who, Augustus,
as augur, had produced the sign and seal of Fortuna Redux and the return of the
golden age. We have seen how such ideas found transformation, in the growth
of a common discourse, into the miraculous signs of Christ’s coming, and of
the renewal of the world at the end of time in accordance with Judaeo-Christian
expectation. Decius Trajan was to appeal, along with his rivals, to the renewal
of the world, the renouatio mundi, and each successively staked their claim to
be the agent of Fate of realizing such a new birth.
Let us now develop this insight further and in greater detail with reference
to Cyprian and his immediate predecessors.
B. CYPRIAN’S CHRISTIAN STOICISM AND ITS ANTECEDENTS.
It is easy though quite facile to have a view of the psychology of the apologists
of the second century, such as Justin Martyr, that suggests they were merely
suggesting pagan parallels with the intention of making that othodoxy more
credible to pagans: their real faith was in a culturally uncontaminated, Christian
orthodoxy. The construction of that orthodoxy itself required participation in
the form of life of an historical culture of which they themselves were the
products. The ekpurosis, as we have seen, entered the warp and woof of
Christian apocalyptic, particularly in that mid-second century document, II
60 II Peter 1:6.
61 Diogenes Laertius,
7.93 (= Arnim III, p. 65.12). See also Plutarch, De Stoicis repugnandis,
15.1041a (= Arnim III, p. 73.16).
HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF DECIUS
79
Peter. Thus we had exemplified how an apocalyptic discourse is created and
changed by those who share in a common form of life that makes discoursive
dialogue possible, and thus the process of agreement and disageement by which
that discourse is extended and further developed.
Justin may appear at one point to object most strongly to the ekpurosis,
prefering instead Plato’s view: he believes that the personal Demiurge of the
Timaeus ordered the world and can therefore disorder it again.62 But he will,
nevertheless, at another point, affirm, though with qualification, that the
ekpurosis corresponds to the destruction of the world in Christian apocalyptic.
He claims that the story of Noah represents the historical truth behind the
Deucalion myth. He then continues: ‘For we say that there will be an ekpurosis,
but not as the Stoics according to their account of the change of all things into
one another’.63 Thus his qualification should not be interpreted as ruling out
any final denial of an underlying metaphysic that he then requires to make his
case for the incarnation. Christ is the ‘immanent logos (lo/goj e)ndia/qetoj)’, of
which the Stoics only have partial knowledge when they grasp that its seeds are
in good men, but not ‘the knowledge of the Logos of the universal whole which
is Christ’.64
Cyprian’s immediate theological predecessors, Tertullian and Minucius
Felix, will show a far more radical assimilation of Stoic cosmology with
Christian eschatology, as we shall now see.
B.1. Tertullian and the ekpurosis.
Tertullian in an apologetic context is prepared to appeal to Stoicism in order to
explain in what sense Christ is God’s Son, through whom creation took place.
Appealing directly to Zeno, he claims:
Also it is claimed amongst your own philosophers that Logos, which means both ‘word’
and ‘reason’, is clearly the framer of the universe. Zeno defines this principle as the
maker who has fashioned all things in due order. This same principle should be called
Fate and God and the mind of Juppiter and the factor determining all things.65
Tertullian will agree with Cleanthes on the spiritual character of the logos as
the world soul permeating all things as the ultimate cause that controlls all
events. Of Fate, God, mind and logos: ‘Cleanthes includes all these things in
the category of the Spirit that he affirms as that which permeates the
universe’.66
Tertullian’s appeal to Stoicism is not however confined to an apologetic
context. In his work against Hermogenes, who had endevoured to produce a
Scriptural argument for the eternity of matter, Tertullian claims that his
opponent is in error for arguing that God creates the world merely by appearing
62 Justin Martyr, Apologia, 1.20.
63 Justin Martyr Apologia, 2.7 (=
64 Tertullian, Apolgia, 2.8.
65 Tertullian, Apologia, 21.10.
66 Tertullian, Apologia, 21.10.
Arnim II.187.21).
80
CHAPTER THREE
before a pre-existing matter and affecting it by his beauty. In refutation he
asserts: ‘The Stoics regard God as pervading matter just like honey through
honeycombs’.67 At other times, however, he will identify heresy with Stoicism,
and hold himself aloof. Marcion’s more perfect god came from Stoicism:
‘When matter is equated with God, there is the school of Zeno’.68 In what way
Marcion had made matter equal with God he does not say.
Tertullian, therefore, is eclectic in his use of Stoic argument. Clearly, on
the positive side, he has accepted the lo/goj as both ‘immanent (e)ndia/qetoj)’
and ‘transcendent (proforiko/j)’ as illustrative of Christ’s role in creation and
in providence. But we must now ask what he believes about the ekpurosis as an
account of the end of the world to which the logos doctrine had lead in the
Stoicism of Cleanthes and Chrysippus, and that Poseidonius continued (135-51
B.C.), despite the earlier skepticism of Panaetius his teacher.
Undoubtedly Tertullian’s main use of Stoicism is in his treatise on the soul,
where he finds support for his contention that the soul has a corporal nature.69 It
is in this work that we have an incidental reference to the ekpurosis in
connection with the belief in the temporary survival of the soul up until the
reabsorbtion of all things in the primaeval, rational and divine fire. Tertullian
mentions in a list those who believe only in the immortality of the souls of the
wise, such as Pythagoras, Empedokles and Plato: ‘… those who who grant to
the soul some delay from when it leaves the body to the conflagration of the
universe, such as the Stoics, who place only their own souls, those of the wise,
in the mansions above’.70 But he then goes on to show that he sees a connection
between the Stoic ekpurosis and the final Judgement of Christianity, when he
asks of such souls existing in such an interval: ‘What value or benefit will be
theirs from that post-mortem course of instruction when they are so on the point
of perishing in the final conflagration’.71
Furthermore, in his attack on the pagan gladiatorial performances (De
Spectaculis), he looks forward to the Second Advent is such terms as these:
… the performance (spectaculum) that is near involves the Advent of the Lord whose
purpose is already sure … For there remain other performances to be attended, namely
the last and complete Day of Judgement, that day that the nations do not expect, that day
that they have mocked, when all the wearing out of the present age (saeculi uetustas)
and all of its rebirths (natiuitates) will be absorbed into the one fire.72
Clearly the backcloth to Tertullian’s claim is that of a Stoic eschatology in
which history just as nature is cyclic, moved to rise, perish, and to be reborn
again in a never-ending cycle: that is his ‘agreement in a form of life’ as the
67 Tertullian, Adversus Hermogenum, 44, cf. Ad Nationes, 2.4. See also E.F. Osborn,
Tertullian, First Theologian of the West (Cambridge: U.P. 1997), 214–24.
68 Tertullian, De Praescriptione, 7.4, cf. Adversus Marcionem, I.13.3.
69 Tertullian, De Anima 5.2–3; 6.8; 14.2; 25.2 and 9; 43.5.
70 Tertullian, De Anima 54.1(387).
71 Tertullian, De Anima 54.3(387).
72 Tertullian, De Spectaculis 30.2.
HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF DECIUS
81
backloth to which his ‘disagreement in opinion’ becomes intelligible: there is a
conflagration but it is not cyclic but final, and after the uetustas there is only
one, final renouatio.
For Tertullian the Day of Judgment is the final goal of history, and not just
one phase in an ever-renewing cycle: it will be an event that is ‘complete’. Yet
movements in nature and in history are described in terms that retain a shadow
of their origin in such a cyclic perspective: they are uetustas saeculi and
natiuitates. Here we have reflected the themes ‘of the birth (peri\ gene/sewj)
and destruction of the world (kai\ fqora~j)’ of which Diogenes Laertius assures
us that Zeno, Chrysippus and others wrote.73 fqora/, like uetustas can mean
‘deteriorating’ or ‘decaying’.
But though Tertullian drew such positive comparisons, he never moved on
from them to a fully developed use of the perspective of the renewal of the age
(renouatio saeculi) so as to produce a developed interpretation of contemporary
history in such terms. Both Minucius Felix, followed by Cyprian, were to
interpret contemporary events in such terms, and thus enter a dialogue with
their pagan contemporaries with whom they shared in formal terms in such a
perspective, as we shall now see.
B.2. Minucius Felix and cosmic decline and renewal.
Minucius Felix, whose Octavius is set at Ostia but written in North Africa, is
one of Cyprian’s immediate predecessors, and alluded to by him. Octavius, the
Christian respondent to Caecilius, defends Christian eschatology within the
metaphysical framework of Greek philosophy, and employs Cicero’s De
Natura Deorum to give him the arguments that he will refashion for his
defence.
Octavius’ reply to Caecilius in this dialogue claims most of the
philosophers as supporting the Christian view of one God as the first principle
of the universe. As such, he is following the apologetic strategy used by
Tertullian. On Stoicism he says that Zeno, Chrysippus and Cleanthes:
… offer different forms of explanation, but they all fall back upon the united purpose of
providence. Zeno wants… law that is both of nature and divine, identified occasionally
with the aether, and otherwise with reason (ratio), to be the first principle (principium)
of all things … Cleanthes discusses sometimes the mind, and sometimes the soul of
nature and sometimes the aether, but for the most part the divine mind.74
Furthermore, his apology seems to move beyond a mere ad hominem argument
when he claims that in consequence ‘either the Christians of today are
philosophers, or that philosophers of old were already Christians’. (20.1).
Minucius Felix will finally use the Stoic eschatology of the e)kpu/rwsij in
order to rebut Caecilius’ assertion that the Christian doctrine of the destruction
of the world by fire was absurd. But he modifies this doctrine in a far more
sophisticated fashion than Tertullian, and thus demonstrates the seriousness
73 Diogenes
74 Minucius
Laertius,7.142.
Felix, Octavius, 19.10.
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with which he accepts it as a partial account of the truth. Like Justin he will
appeal to a Platonic doctrine against that of the Stoics, namely that: ‘The
universe was created eternal and indissoluble by God ... only God himself, who
created it, can make it dissoluble and mortal’. The cycles of destruction and
recreation do not therefore take place according to Fatum, but are God’s free
act: ‘It is unremarkable, therefore, if it should be destroyed in its entireity by
him who raised it up’.75
The language of his description of the world’s decline, what Tertullian had
called its uetustas or fqora/, foreshadows that which Cyprian will use as a
fully-fledged view of the development of history towards Christ’s Second
Advent. An examination of the physical constituents of nature appear to
support such a view:
As for the destruction of the world by fire, it is a vulgar error to regard a sudden
conflagration, or a failure of moisture, as incredible. What philosopher doubts or does
not know, that all things which arise at birth perish, that created things pass away, that
the sky with all the constellations that are found within the heavens will come to an end
just as they began. So too the universe will disappear in a blaze of fire, if sun, moon and
stars are deprived of the fountains of fresh water, and of the water of the seas in nurture.
It is the established view amongst the Stoics that, once moisture is used up, then all of
this world will be consumed with fire.76
An historical analysis founded conceptually on the individualist perspective of
the post seventeenth century would describe Minucius Felix as far closer to the
pagan philosophy of his time than Cyprian. The former chooses to distinguish,
at first sight barely, the positions of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and the Academy
that are so carefully contrasted in Cicero’s dialogue on which he depends. For
him it is enough that no one doubts the final incendium mundi. But even in such
an example the metaphor of ‘closeness’ between an individual bearer of an idea
and his culture is unhelpful.
Minucius Felix shares a common discourse with the paganism with which
he disagrees and needs to share, even if he is to express only disagreement. He
is still operating with agreement with foundational principles of the discourse
in that he will justify Christian apocalyptic, not merely with a pagan parallel to
which he is not committed, but with a pagan cosmological reason in
justification. It is the failure of moisture due to the omnipotence of evaporating
fire that will mean necessarily the final conflagration.77
We shall now see how Cyprian participates in such a shared discourse, and
how, in the light of such a discourse, he can give a Christian interpretation to
the history of his times that pagans would also find compelling in view of the
logic in which they both shared.
75 Minucius Felix, Octavius, 34.4, cf Plato, Timaeus, 41 a.
76 Minucius Felix, Octavius, 34.1–2.
77 Minucius Felix, Octavius, 34.1–4, cf. Compare Cicero
supply defects in the latter’s manuscript.
De Natura Deorum, 3.37 used to
HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF DECIUS
83
C. CYPRIAN’S DIALOGUE WITH PAGAN CULTURE.
Cyprian does not overtly acknowledge a parallel with the ekpurosis, however
much there may be a literary dependence between the Octavius and some of
Cyprian’s works, as Sage and others have noted.78 Cyprian however injects into
his otherwise biblically based apocalyptic predictions some reflections on the
senectus mundi that show a common perspective with both Dio’s cyclic view of
history, with its Polybian framework remythologised in the forms of Stoicism
with its incorporation of prodigies in the way that I have described. Cyprian
might disavow his pagan culture on which his education, whether as rhetor or
as aduocatus, had been founded, but that culture, providing the fundamental
backcloth to his discourse, remains.
We find his predictions of the closeness of the world’s end in his
description of the decline of natural world, and the correspondences that he
draws with morality in society. He makes his claims about decline reflected in
the appearance of ecclesiastical schisms, as we have observed that he had done
with supernatural signs (prodigia) accompanying appointments to ecclesiastical
positions (Chapter 2, section C.3.2). We shall conclude that his justification of
the last times and apocalyptic expectations shows that fundamentally he is at
home in the world of Gordian, Philip and Decius Trajan, and their own view of
history as the final stage of a cyclic decline before the return of the saeculum
aureum. We shall examine Ad Donatum, Ad Demetrianum, and De Mortalitate
from such a standpoint, as well as some selected Letters, following Alföldy’s
persuasive analysis of many of these texts.79
C.1. Ad Donatum: Spiritual rebirth and peace in a collapsing world.
As we have seen, Cyprian composed this work around AD 246 shortly after his
baptism.80 It was in this work that Cyprian had described his experience of
being ‘reborn anew (renasci denuo)’, and ‘inspired into new life through the
laver of the saving waters’.81 But linked with this experience had been his prior
feeling of decay and deline that the human body shared with a world of nature
in decline:
78 Sage, Cyprian, pp. 51–67. G. Clarke, ‘Minucius Felix: Octavius 4:6’, Classical
Philology, 61 (1966), p. 252; G. Clarke, ‘The Literary Setting of the Octavius of Minucius
Felix’, Journal of Religious History, 3 (1964/5), p. 195; B. Axelson, Das Prioritätsproblem
Tertullian-Minucius Felix (Skrifter utgivna av Vetenskaps-Societeten i Lund 27; Lund: C.W.K.
Gleerup 1941), p. 10.
79 I am indebted here to G. Alföldy, ‘Der heilige Cyprian und die Krise des römischen
Reiches’, Historia, 22 (1973), 479–501 (=Alföldy, Augewählte Beiträge, pp. 295–318).
80 Chapter 1, section A.
81 Cyprian, Ad Donatum, 3 (38–9).
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Suddenly and swiftly would be stripped away that persistent senile decay either innately
fixed in the substance of our nature, or to which, by its long possession of us, we had
become so accustomed.82
The ‘senility (senium)’ or ‘persistent decay (uetustas) … to which, by its long
possession of us’ refers to what we shall see that he will call in Ad
Demetrianum and in the De Mortalitate, the ‘old age of the world (senectus
mundi)’.83 We saw the equivalence of uetustas to fqora/ in Stoic metaphysics,
as the counterpart to ge/nesij in a cyclical view of historical development.
Cyprian thus reflects the Stoic eschatology that nature as well as society has
declined from the golden age to that of iron, and that both the earth and human
bodies reflect this feature of the general decline in what was ‘innately fixed in
the substance of our nature (genuinum situ materiae naturalis)’.
Renewal of the age (renouatio saeculi), the slogan that evoked the hoped
for promise of the return of the golden age and proclaimed on every side by the
spin-doctors of the rival pagan contenders for power from 235 onwards, is
synthesized with the Christian hope of resurrection through the Spirit: ‘Thus
the Spirit that we have received controls at its own pleasure what we have
begun to be. Because we have not yet experienced change in our body and its
members, physical aspects up until now are concealed under the clouds of this
present age. But how great here and now is the empowerment of our human
spirit, how great is its force!’84
The power of the Spirit to raise up the faithful with transformed and
glorified, resurrection bodies, in a transformed nature, is a Pauline theme,
which may itself be the product of the influence of Stoic, natural law.85 But
Cyprian’s emphasis here is on the Christian spiritual rebirth as providing hope
for the renewal of an age that evidences empirically its state of instablility and
collapse, its fqora/ before gene/sij again produces a new cycle under the
influence of the power of the world-spirit that is the lo/goj e)ndia/qetoj: the
physical appearance (carnalis aspectus) of the present age (saeculum) is
concealed under its cloud the power of the regerating lo/goj-Spirit.
We see here, in the Ad Donatum, themes in embryo that were to develop in
Cyprian’s subsequent writings into a more fully formed understanding of
history, comprehensible also to his pagan opponents in such terms. Also in
embryo we find indications of an anxiety of mind that he shared with his
contemporaries that saw upheavals, whether in nature or in society, as
indications of the instability of a cosmos faltering in decline towards its final
end. He speaks of himself when: ‘… at one time tossed on the high sea of this
82 For discussion of Stoic determinism and its implications for nature and society, see Rist,
Stoic Philosophy, pp. 175–85 and A.A. Long, Stoic Studies, (Cambridge: University Press
1996), pp. 40–4.
83 Cyprian, Ad Demetrianum, 3 (62–3); 4 (76–8); De Mortalitate, 25 (422 and 427).
84 Cyprian, Ad Donatum, 5 (100–3).
85 Rom. 8:18–23.
HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF DECIUS
85
vainglorious age, I was wavering in my wandering footsteps’.86 He describes:
‘… roads… now filled with ambushes and ... many kinds of battles widely
scattered abroad over the whole world’.87 Carthage itself had witnessed such
events but a few years before Cyprian was to write thus about his conversion.
In AD 235 the revolt of Gordian I had begun at Carthage with the support
of the entire province of Africa Proconsularis. It was Capellianus, the legtatus
pro praetore of Numidia, that now opposed him on behalf of the emperor
Maximinus. Both Gordian I and his son died at Carthage (AD 238), which,
having supported Gordian, was now subjected to a reign of terror. In
consequence, Gordian III (in AD 243), avenging his grandfather, disbanded a
Legion and thereby provoked a revolt against himself at Carthage.88 Clearly the
age of iron had returned and events were awaiting the renewal of the lost age of
gold, and the historical agent of that cosmic process in the person of Philip,
who was now to become emperor in succession to Gordian.
It is to the reign of Philip I that we owe the speech of the unknown rhetor
who was author of the work Ei)j Basile/a, included pseudepigraphically in the
works of Aelius Aristides. The rhetor describes: ‘... all things agitated
(kekinhme/na) and changed... into a different country, and the empire shaken as
in a great storm or earthquake’.89 ‘Shaken’ and ‘storm-stossed’ were to be
recurrent themes in Cyprian’s volcabularly as descriptive of a global and
cosmic psychology with which he faced the uetustas mundi. It was in the
context of historical events of this character that Cyprian was to proclaim:
There is therefore for Man one sure means to peace and to calm, one genuine and
steadfast place of security. To find it, a man must extricate himself from the storms of
this restless age, and find his anchor in a safe harbour.90
Increasingly his view of the process of transformation of disorder, whether in
nature or in society, into peace and security will be described in terms of a
Stoic metaphysic that justified philosophically such an interpretation of the
present and hope for the future.
C.2. Ad Demetrianum: Christians and the corruption of nature and of society.
Demetrian appears to have been a minor magistrate who had taken great delight
at mocking Christian worship and practice.91 Drought and plague had followed
in AD 252 just after the cessation of the Decian Persecution (AD 249-52). Such
prodigies clearly showed the failure of the pax deorum through the presence
and non-participation of the Christians in the appropriate pagan rites.92 Cyprian
86 Cyprian, Ad Donatum, 3 (33–5).
87 Cyprian, Ad Donatum, 10 (189–90).
88 Herodian, VII.8.9.1–9.9.11. See also Sage, Cyprian, pp. 37–46.
89 B. Keil, Aelii Aristidis Smyrnaei, opera quae supersunt omnia,
1897), 35.14 cf. p. 94.
90 Ad Donatum, 14.282–3.
91 Ad Demetrianum, 1.351; 10 cf Sage p. 276.
92 Ad Demetrianum, 3.37–9.
I–II (Berlin: Weidmann
86
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will insist that, rather than cause such prodigies, Christians will pray for the pax
of nature and of society:
In the midst of the very ruins of a decaying age (inter ipsas saeculi labentis ruinas) ...we
always ask for the repulse of enemies and for obtaining showers ... and, propitiating and
appeasing God, we entreat constantly and urgently, day and night, for your peace and
salvation.93
Yet he shares the same discourse with Demetrian when he ascribes the reason
for the prodigia to the senectus mundi. 94
C.2.1. Cyprian and the senectus mundi.
The Octavius had justified the final conflagration in terms of the evaporation of
water because, according to the Stoic doctrine, the stronger principle was fire
that would prevail at the ekpurosis. Cyprian will now argue that, even without
the prophecies of the Christian Scriptures, the evidence of nature itself will
show the dawning in these events of the Day of Judgment:
On this subject, though you are ignorant of what God knows, and a stranger to the truth,
you ought to have grasped in the first place that the world has at this point of time grown
old. It no longer consists of those vital powers of which it had previously consisted, nor
is it endowed with the superior force and vitality with which it was endowed in the past.
Even if we hold our peace and do not put forward any evidences from the Holy
Scriptures and God’s formal pronouncements, the world even now is telling its own
story and bearing witness by producing the evidence for its decline in the form of its
own universal defects (occasum sui rerum labentium probatione).95
Rainfall is lesser in winter, in summer the heat is diminished, so that the crops
are not as ripe. Trees do not bear autumnal fruit as they once did. The resources
of the hills are exhausted and do not yield the same quantity of mined marble,
silver and gold as before. Farm labourers, sailors at sea, and soldiers are
decreasing in numbers. And since there is no distinction between nature and
society, what is true of the one will be true of the other, and with a similar
cause in cosmic, metaphysical decline.
Thus Nature, in accordance with the Stoic doctrine, is reflected in society.
Husbandman, soldier, and sailor are failing in their responsibilities as is: ‘...
innocence in the market (forum), justice in the tribunal (iudicium), concord in
friendships, skilfulness in the arts, discipline in morals (in moribus
disciplina)’.96 Furthermore this is related to a theory of cosmic decline,
sanctioned by natural and therefore divine law, which Cassius Dio, as well as
Polybius, would have well understood. Cyprian asks:
93 Ad Demetianum, 20.380–1 and 400–4.
94 M. Spanneut, Le stoïcisme des pères
de l’Église de Clément de Rome à Clément
d’Alexandrie (Patristica Sorbonensia I; Paris: Éditions du Seuil 1957), pp. 413– 14.
95 Cyprian, Ad Demetrianum, 3 (39–46). probatio (‘production of evidence’), is thus used of
the formal stage in a judicial process in Quintillian, Declamationes, 269.
96 Cyprian, Ad Demetrianum, 3 (47–64).
HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF DECIUS
87
Do you think that the constitution of a given thing that is growing old can demonstrate
itself to be of the same prevailing strength as it was able previously to be when tenderly
young and lively? Whatever is at the point when its last end drawing near, and sinking
into its final stage (finis) of decay is of necessity growing smaller. So the sun at its
setting sheds forth its rays with less brilliant and fiery radiance, so the moon, with the
horns of its crescent fading, tapers as it wanders from its course. The tree that had been
in time before green and fertile, now, with withered boughs, is in process of being soon
barren, misshapen by old age (senectute deformis). The fountain that used previously to
flow freely and abundantly in overflowing streams, now failing through old age
(senectus), scarcely trickles with scant drops. This is the sentence passed upon the
world, this is the law of God: all things that rise as the sun must also set with it. All that
grows should decline with age. All that are strong should grow weak, and that are great
should grow smaller, and when they have grown weak and are smaller, they should
reach their final stage.97
Clearly we have here an appeal, not only to Stoic natural law, but also to the
sentence laid down by Fate as required by theories of such law.
The more frequent occurrences of famine and drought are not therefore
isolated prodigia showing the anger of the gods towards the Christians. They
are part of a cosmic pattern. The cause of a stream giving insufficient water or
of a tree not yielding fruit is senectus or fqora/, by which the tree has become
deformis or the stream deficiens. Like the shining of the sun or the moon, they
bear witness to the cosmic principle, derived from what nature generally
evidences in individual examples of birth (natiuitas/ ge/nesij) and death, that
whatever has arisen in the process of birth must also decline into old age
(senectus/ fqora/). It is this final end for which nature, history, and human
societies are giving evidence that they have now reached. The Christians cannot
be held responsible for the general decline in human eyesight of hearing, or the
decline in longevity from approaching one-thousand years to approaching
merely one-hundred. Children are growing white hair before they are old or
failing to grow hair at all. Thus:
So, at its very dawn, birth at the present time hastens to its premature end, so whatever
now comes to birth declines due to the old age of the world itself. Consequently, no one
ought to be amazed that individual and particular elements in the world have begun to
run out, when already the world itself as a whole is in eclipse and at its final end.98
Thus Cyprian shares a common backcloth of general assumptions with his
contemporaries, a common form of life in terms of which he can argue his
difference of eschatological opinion as to whether decline is cyclic or part of
the divine judgement out of which will come the believers final end in the
kingdom of God.
Cyprian continues the theme of the insecurity of the present whose basis
we examined in Ad Donatum (above, C.1), but which has become here
increasingly identified with the senectus mundi. Like his pagan contemporaries,
as we shall see in further detail, he was looking for ‘a time of divine promise’
97 Cyprian,
98 Cyprian,
Ad Demetrianum, 3 (56–67).
Ad Demetrianum, 4 (76–80).
88
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as he stood ‘constant against all the whirling currents of this storm tossed
world’.99 He reflects a background in popular Stoicism when he refers to the
human condition (condicio) as social, as ‘dwelling in one house’.
It is important to appreciate an essential interrelationship between the
concept of condicio as meaning on the one hand (i) ‘natural circumstance’ or
‘character’, and on the other (ii) ‘contract’, ‘covenant’, or ‘agreement’.
Cicero uses this term in the latter sense (ii) when he gives as an example of
a theoretical inquiry: ‘Whether law (ius) has its origin in nature or in some
human agreement (condicio hominum) and contract (pactio)’.100 He uses it in
the former sense (i) when he speaks of the ‘human condition (humana
condicio)’ as one of natural endowments and limitiations.101
We shall now see how Cyprian reflects both senses, and their
interrelationship in Roman social theory.
C.2.2. Cicero and Seneca: Cyprian’s contract with nature and society.
In Cicero’s social theory (and that as we shall see of Seneca too) there is a clear
relationship between these two meanings. The social contract by which human
societies were originally inaurgurated was the result of the natural propensity of
the human condition (condicio) to enter a social contract (condicio) that was an
expression of that natural condition. We enter the contract because of the
‘shared principle of rationality (communis ratio)’ that is the fundamental
constituent of our human ‘condition (condicio)’:
We have been endowed and equipped with the gifts of the gods … that there is one
principle by which men may live together and this is the same for all, and possessed
equally by all (paris communisque ratio); and finally that all men are bound together by
a certain compliance and good will and also by a partnership in justice (societas iuris)…
How can we separate Law and Justice from Nature?102
In this regard Stoicism developed a theory of the foundations of human society
in a social contract. Cyprian subscribes to such a principle of natural equality
when he says:
You yourself require subjection from your slave, you as a human being force him as a
human being to obey and be submissive, even though both of you share the same destiny
of having to be born (sors nascendi), a common natural state of having to die (condicio
una moriendi), a shared, similar physical substance (corporum materia consimilis), a
shared principle of rationality in your souls (animarum ratio communis). Through equal
justice (aequali iure) and a common natural law (et pari lege) you both come into the
world and afterwards make your exit from the world.103
Thus Cyprian uses common, Stoic terms such as animarum ratio communis,
sors, and aequali iure et pari lege of human beings in nature, in a passage
99 Cyprian, Ad Demetrianum, 19 (366–7).
100 Cicero, Topica, 21.82.
101 Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes, I.8.15,
102 Cicero, De Legibus, I.13.35.
103 Cyprian, Ad Demetrianum, 8 (140–5).
cf. Seneca, Epistulae Morales Ad Lucilium, L.
HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF DECIUS
89
which shows the influence of the Stoic doctrine of natural law in which the
rational universe was reflected in reason shared by all human beings (communis
ratio).
But Cyprian was to exhibit further the location of his reflection within a
Stoic discourse in that he sees our common human condition as a social
condition to be understood in terms of a social contract. We saw in our
previous quotation the conceptual relationship between condicio and pactio in
Cicero with respect to the social contract.104 We shall now see how the making
of the original contract is part of a Stoic theory of natural law.
Cicero claims that the origins of human society was not due to a negative
fear, but to a positive and rational drive for coherence and unity:
The first cause of them coming together was not so much weakness of the individual than
a certain act of association natural to man (naturalis congregatio) … In a short time a
scattered and wandering crowd by mutual agreement (concordia) had been made a
citizen-body.105
Such a view was to be further developed by Seneca, in which he propounded an
account of social origins in which originally the principle of natural reason
enabled society to be governed without coercive law. The latter became only
necessary when human beings became slaves to their passions:
But the first of mortal men and those who were born from them followed nature without
moral corruption, and considered the law to be the same as their leader, submitting
themselves to the arbitration of someone better than themselves … In nature the weaker
submit to the stronger … But in the case of human beings the best is regarded as the
highest. A ruler was chosen for his rational mind and for that reason those nations
possessed the greatest blessedness amongst whom the ruler would not have been able to
be more powerful unless he was morally better.106
Such a society was characteristic of the golden age of Poseidonius, in which the
wise ruled by reason and without coercive law.
Accordingly that age, which they call ‘the golden age’, Poseidonius considers a
kingdom under the jurisdiction of the wise … They used persuasion or dissuassion and
suggested what was and was not useful. But after that acts of vice crept in and kingdoms
were transformed into tyrannies, then there arose the need for laws.107
The need for coercive laws therefore only arose out of vice, in which passion
surpassed the bounds of reason: vice was unnatural because it was
unreasonable.
We have argued that Cyprian inhabits a social construction of reality
formed in such a Stoic perspective. He has affirmed natural equality in a
context overshadowed by a theory of history of decline from the standards of a
golden age. Cyprian, whilst agreeing regarding the general and formal
104 See footnote 92 and associated text.
105 Cicero, De Republica, I.25.39–40
Republica, III.13.23.
106 Seneca, Epistulae, 90.4.
107 Seneca, Epistulae, 90.5–6.
(= Augustine, Epistulae, 138.10). See also De
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90
principles fundamental to the discourse, nevertheless will at this point make
different substantive moves in the ‘language-game’ that formed the basis of his
dialogue with his pagan contemporaries. As Wittgenstein would have expressed
it, his agreement with them ‘in a form of life’ enables disagreement as well as
agreement ‘in opinion’ as a movement in a language-game.
Cyprian clearly did not believe in a cyclic view of history any more than
had Justin Martyr, Minucius Felix, or Tertullian before him. The return of the
golden age was to be in subsequent Christian writers the final goal of history.
Furthermore, Christians and pagans, despite their common human condition
(condicio), were not destined to live together in a pre-fallen condition without
coercive law. There was to be no abiding contract (condicio) between them.
The sheep were to be separated from the goats at the final Judgement, when the
passing into the fire (ekpurosis) was reserved for unbelievers alone. Thus
Cyprian says:
Do not accordingly allow anyone to be deceived that because we equally possess flesh
and body for now, there can be any shared agreement (condicio communis) between the
unholy and ourselves ... about the nature of the hardships of the present age.108
As he has just previously explained:
For as long as our body continues here with a nature shared with the rest of mankind, it
is necessary that there should be a covenant to keep us together in a common body
(corporalis condicio communis) under which it is not allowed that members of humanity
should split from one another into two opposing parts without first departing hither from
this age. For this period we are confined together, both good and bad, within one house.
We put up with whatever will happen within that house due to a fortune that we share
until that time of this present age has been fulfilled. Then we shall be separated one from
another for the dwellings of either eternal death or those of immortality.109
Here he shares with his contemporaries a common discourse with a common
logic. When he associates prodigies and the lex divina with Scriptural
predictions about a final end, he will clearly part company with his
contemproraries and disagree ‘in opinion’, but on the basis of a common
agreement with them ‘in form of life’. Thus Cyprian continues the common
Stoic theme of the world as ‘within one house’.110
Seneca referred to the soul of the wise man as: ‘the social animal (sociale
animal) and born for living in community (in commune genitus) regards the
world as one universal house’.111 Cicero too will regard the universe as one
house in which the divine and human coexist as part of one natural whole: ‘The
world is as it were the common home of the gods and of men or the city of both
of them. For they alone live by justice and law in their use of reason (ratio)
..’.112 Octavius also had referred generally to what one can see of rational order
108 Cyprian,
109 Cyprian,
Ad Demetrianum, 21 (405–7).
Ad Demetrianum, 19 (368–74).
110 Spanneut, Stoïcisme, p. 255.
111 Seneca, De Beneficiis, VII.1.7.
112 Cicero, De Natura Deorum, II.62.154.
HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF DECIUS
91
‘ ... in this house of the world, when you gaze on, in the heavens and on earth,
foresight (prouidentia), order (ordo), and law …’113
But Cyprian here once again looks at the notion of ‘house’ and ‘world’ in
an eschatological context. The one house of the world shared with the pagans
must come to an end at the Judgment. However, he will explain the
disintegration of the divine order of Church unity into the schisms of Novatian
and Felicissimus as signs of the end, as prophesied in Scripture ‘at the sunset of
the world (in occasu mundi)’.114 The fragmentation of such divine order is seen
in the refusal of the schismatics to have regard to the Church as that of brethren
dwelling in ‘one house’, according to the Psalms, and the eating of the Paschal
Lamb ‘in one house’ according to Exodus.115 We must shortly consider the
nature of schism in such metaphysical terms in greater detail.
But let us first examine Cyprian’s continuation of such Stoic themes in a
document intended to be read within the community for consolation, and not as
an apology to those outside the Church, namely the De Mortalitate.
C.3. De Mortalitate: shared condition with pagans in the present age.
Cyprian did not use such features of a Stoic and pagan perspective on decline
and restoration simply as part of an ad hominem argument to a pagan
magistrate without being firmly convinced himself of its truth. In the same year
(AD 252) Cyprian also composed his work on mortality (De Mortalitate) to the
Christian community, in which he sought to remedy the situation of despair and
doubt that had arisen as an aftermath to a plague. Cyprian had celebrated the
end of persecution (in AD 251) with a rhetoric that spoke of peace following
military victory by the white robed army of martyrs.116
It was on such a community that the plague unexpectedly fell and shattered
all confidence that their faithful endurance had bourn them any fruit. Those
who had confessed Christ and survived were now dying of disease. Those who
desired to depart to the next life in consequence of faithful confession before
the pagan magistrate now felt deprived of martyrdom in an ignominious
death.117 Christians were being wiped out in a plague in similar numbers to
pagans.
Cyprian’s reply relies for the most part on Scriptural paraenesis. But at
significant points of his treatise he nevertheless turns frequently from the theme
of escaping the toils of our individual bodies to the body of the world itself. He
will adopt Stoic themes of decline into senectus, and subsequent rebirth or
restoration. Such themes, moreover, continue to leave their mark on his
understanding of the present in terms of traditional Christian apocalyptic.
113 Minucius Felix, Octavius, 18.4.
114 Cyprian, De Unitate, 16 (395). See also below, C.3.
115 Cyprian, De Unitate, 8 (207–16) and Ps. 67:7 and Ex. 12:46.
116 ‘Adest militum Christi candida’, in Cyprian, De Lapsis, 1–2 (1–22).
117 Cyprian, De Mortalitate, 17 (277–85).
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92
Cyprian argues that renunciation of self, whose final expression is
acceptance of death as a gateway to eternal life, though normal for Christians
throughout the ages, is especially pertinent to Christians of his generation. That
generation was the last generation, as not only Scripture but also human
experience clearly indicates.
Cyprian says of the soldier of God that:
He ought to recognise that we should experience no fear in the face of the storms and
hurricanes of the world ... when the Lord predicted beforehand these things would come
about ... wars and famines and earthquakes and pestilences he anounced previously and
prophesied that they would arise in particular places.118
Although traditionally the apocalypses in the Synoptic Gospels warn that wars,
famines, plagues and the like are not necessarily signs of the end, Cyprian
argues that the increase of all of these at the present time reveal the imminence
of the kingdom of God. Following a citation from the Lukan apocalypse,119 he
adds:
The kingdom of God, most beloved brothers, has begun to be imminent. The reward of
life and the joy of eternal salvation, and everlasting gladness, and the gaining possession
of a paradise once lost are now coming with the passing of the world ... Only someone
who does not believe that he is beginning to reign with Christ will be unwilling to go to
him.120
‘The passing of the world’ Cyprian will view once again, as in Ad
Demetrianum, in terms of Stoic eschatology: it is a truth not only of Scripture
but also human experience in which the world itself testifies to its ‘old age
(senectus)’:
…now with the world falling and oppressed by the storms of attacking evils we who
perceive what grievous things have already begun and know that more grievous things
are imminent should count it greatest gain if we should speedily depart from here …
Behold the world is tottering (nutat) and collapsing (labitur) and bearing witness not
now through age (senectus) but through the end of all …121
Once again he employs the Stoic metaphor of the world as one house, but as
breaking up due to its senectus:
If in your small habitation the walls totter in their old age (uetustate nutarent) the roof
above shakes frightenly, if your home showed signs of fatigue when its structure had
declined with the exhaustion of old age and was threatening to immediately collapse,
would you not with all speed change your residence?122
In such a Stoic context he is thus able to assure the believing community that it
is by no means incomprehensible that they should be suffering in equal
numbers with the pagans: in dwelling in one house that is the world we share
with all humanity in a common physical existence:
118 Cyprian,
119 Cyprian,
120 Cyprian,
121 Cyprian,
122 Cyprian,
De Mortalitate, 2 (15–22).
De Mortalitate, 2 (27–28) = Luke 21.31.
De Mortalitate, 2 (29–37).
De Mortalitate, 25 (416–19; 426–7).
De Mortalitate, 25 (420–23).
HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF DECIUS
93
For it troubles certain of us that the sickness of this plague takes our own people away
with violence along with the pagans. As if a Christian was a believer for the purpose of
glad enjoyment of the world and of the present age, immune from being touched by its
evils, and as if though suffering every adversity here he was not being preserved for a
joy that was future. It troubles some that we have this mortality in common with others
(mortalitas communis). But what in this world do we not have in common with others as
long as this flesh, in accordance with the law of our original birth, still remains common
to us (secundum legem primae natiuitatis manet caro ista communis)? As long as we are
in the world, we are united with the human race in equality of the flesh, we are separated
in spirit ... whatever are the disadvantages of the flesh, we have them in common with
the human race.123
Such disadvantages include attacks from an enemy, drought, shipwrecks, and
physical diseases. Cyprian will now apply the concept of condicio, to which we
saw that his address to Demetrian also testified. In the latter Cyrprian made
reference both to the human natural condition, but also its natural propensity
for making a social contract as the foundation for living in society. He will use
condicio specifically in the sense of ‘shared agreement’ when he says:
This weak condition of our physical members is shared by us with the remainder of
humanity for as long as in the present age that this shared flesh is borne in the present.
Therefore if the Christian recognises and accepts under what contract (condicio), under
what law he will have become a believer, let him grasp how much more he must endure
in the present age in proportion to the struggle in which he must engage with the
devil.124
We thus see that, whether he addresses the pagan Demetrian, or Christians
within his community, the eschatological backcloth, conceived in Stoic terms,
remains the same.
C.2.3. Cyprian and Demetrian: a common backcloth in popular Stoicism.
Cyprian is not simply expressing himself in an ad hominem way to Demetrian:
he is rather appealing to a common form of life in which both Christians and
Pagans agree, and which gives their disagreements in opinion their point and
their meaning. Both Christians and Pagans understand nature and society in
terms of a Stoic hylomorphism in which one’s individual natural condition, the
moral state of one’s society, and the unity and coherence of the cosmos, are all
part of a single process of cosmic change, decline and rebirth. The physical
condition of Christians is one with that of pagans, they are tied to the same
cosmic order and contract in which they live together in one house.
Cyprian’s diagnosis of the human condition in the present stage of world
history, in the present saeculum, is therefore in agreement with his pagan
contemporaries. The future stage will, he believes, be different from that of
pagan, Stoic expectations. Christians and Pagans and their world will not
together experience ekpurosis and rebirth as part of an eternal historical cycle.
To history there is a goal that is Christ’s Second Advent. Christians will escape
123 Cyprian,
124 Cyprian,
De Mortalitate, 8 (107–19).
De Mortalitate, 8 (127–9.132).
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94
from that cycle because they will be changed into the image of Christ in
accordance with New Testament teaching: ‘Then accordingly that incorrupt
body shall clothe itself with incorruption and this mortal shall receive
immortality, and the Spirit lead us to God the Father’.125 It is therefore the
Spirit of God that permeates all things as lo/goj that will not transform
Christians with Pagans by the cyclic process of ekpurosis, but lead the believer
to God.
Nevertheless their nature is transformed and renewed into the image of
Christ from its state of senectus that it shared with the present age: ‘Who would
not pray earnestly to be changed and reformed into the image of Christ and the
dignity of heavenly grace?’126 Yet there remains a cyclic element of sorts in
that the golden age of the past is to restored eternally. Christ ‘releases us from
the snares of the present age and restores us to paradise and to a kingdom’.127
The shadow of Seneca’s description of Panaetius’ account of the kingdom of
the wise in the golden age thus spreads itself over Cyprian’s biblical exegesis.
We shall now see how Cyprian sets the behaviour of Novatian and
Felicissimus in such a context of Stoic historiography. Their acts embody the
metaphysics of the historical process of decline as they break up the unity of
the Church, and Antichrist comes as the sign of the End.
C.3. Divisions within the Christian Community as signs of the End.
Whether he addresses a pagan or a Christian audience, we have seen that
Cyprian regards loss of peace, concord and unity in the order of civil society to
reflect the lost order of nature: such natural and social phenomena were equally
indices of such metaphysical collapse conceived in terms of Stoic philosophy.
The age of iron approaching its final decay whence would occur its
transformation in the return of the age of gold.
Society, in sympathy with nature, will break up in the phase of its final
decline. Thus Cyprian regards the development of schism within the Church as
an index of a declining world and as such indicative of ‘the last hour’ and the
coming of Antichrist. His work De Ecclesiae Catholicae Unitate was addressed
in AD 251 against adherents to the Novatian schism. The schismatics, whom he
will not distinguish from heretics, are clearly for him an index of the world’s
general decline:
This evil, most faithful brothers, began even in past time, but now the same evil grows
in size to threatening proportions of destructiveness. It is a poisonous decay (pernicies)
that begins to rise up and spring forth, wrought by heretical perversity and by schisms,
even as ought to happen at the world’s sunset (in occasu mundi). The Holy Spirit
through the Apostle forewarned with this prediction: ‘In the last days… distressing
times will come’ Whatever words were said beforehand are being fulfilled, and, with the
125 Cyprian,
126 Cyprian,
127 Cyprian,
De Mortalitate, 8 (116–19), cf. 1 Cor. 15:53.
De Mortalitiate, 22 (370–71), cf. Phil. 3:20–21.
De Mortalitate, 26 (433–34).
HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF DECIUS
95
end of the age drawing near, they will come to pass as men are searched and examined
along with the times.128
Heretical activity in dividing ecclesiastical hierarchy is therefore an example of
fqora/ (pernicies) that preceeds the ge/nesij from the ekpurosis. Heresy
appears as an index of the finis saeculi and the occasus mundi.
It was, furthermore, primarily in terms of heresy that Cyprian was now to
see the fulfillment of the apocalyptic predictions regarding the coming of the
Antchrist. His Stoically based metaphysic of social division as a loss of divine
order clearly was encouraging him in this direction, as we shall now see.
C.3.1. Ecclesiastical division a sign of the work of Antichrist.
Cyprian had not earlier identified Decius with the apocalyptic coming of
Antichrist as had those with whom he experienced difficulties amongst the
confessors. Lucianus, the imprisoned confessor, had written to Celerinus (June
250) that, in making his confession, he had caused fear to ‘the very great
serpent himself, camp organizer for the Antichrist (metatorem Antichristi)’.129
Metator means someone who measures or marks out a military camp in
preparation for war,130 so that there appears to be here a reference to Apoc.
20:7-8, where Satan is released from his prison, and marshalls Gog and Magog
for war, and surrounds the camp of the saints. Behind the magistrates
implementing Decius’ Edict there is, therefore, according to Cyprian’s
opponent, the emperor himself. But even here the emperor is simply the serpent
preparing the way for Antichrist and is not Antichrist himself.
Prior to Cyprian, Hippolytus had regarded the Roman empire, for all its
hostitilty, to be ‘the restrainer (o( kate/xwn)’ of II Thess. 2:6: the Antichrist was
not to come until 500 years after the birth of Christ and thus distant from his
own day by some 300 years.131 Tertullian too had insisted:
There is another and greater need for us to pray for emperors, and in so doing for the
whole region covered by the empire and its order, and for the interests of the Romans. It
is we who know of the greatest force that menaces the whole globe and of the close of
the age itself that threatens dreadful things and that they are restrained by the respite
provided by the Roman empire (Romani imperii commeatu retardari). 132
Cyprian appears not to locate Decius himself within any apocalyptic
framework, and the equating of Decius with Antichrist directly is found only in
128
Cyprian, De Unitate, 16 (392–96), in exposition of II Tim 3:1–9.
129 Cyprian, Epistulae, XXII.1.1 (11).
130 Cicero, Orationes Phillipicae in Marcum Antonium, 11.12 and 14.10.
131 Hippolytus, In Danielem 4.22–4; De Antichristo, 29–36, cf. D.G. Dunbar,
‘The Delay of
the Parousia in Hippolytus’, Vigiliae Christianae 37 (1983), 315–16. See also K.J. Neumann,
Hippolyt von Rom in seiner Stellung zu Staat und Welt: Neue Funde und Forschungen zur
Geschichte von Staat und Kirche in der römishen Kaiserzeit (Leipzig: Veit 1902), pp. 46–7;
pp. 74–8.
132 Tertullian, Apologia, 32.1(1–5).
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a later ms., dated AD 719.133 Decius remains for Cyprian simply ‘a tyrant
(tyrannus)’ issuing ‘savage edicts (edicta feralia)’. 134
It is only after Decius, at the time of the writing of Ad Fortunatum, one of
the last of Cyprian’s treatises and written with Valerian in view (AD 257), that
we find mention of the imminence of Antichrist, but, nevertheless, not directly
identified as the reigning Roman Emperor.135 Cyprian writes: ‘The weight of
tribulations and persecutions falls heavy and that, at the close (in fine) and final
conclusion of the world (in consummatione mundi), the troubled time of
Antichrist has begun to approach’.136 But even here Valerian is not identified
himself with Antichrist: his persecution is simply a sign of the approaching
‘troubled time of Antichrist’.
In the same work he will, reflecting as we shall see on the imperial images
of the dead and deified emperors (diui) now associated with the gods of the
Roman state, speak of ‘the image of the beast (imago bestiae)’ as a fulfillment
of the prediction of the Apocalypse:
He says that all live and reign with Christ, not only those who had been slain but
whoever enduring in firmness of faith and the fear of God had not reverenced the image
of the Beast nor had agreed to his deadly and sacrilegious edicts (funesta eius et
sacrilega edicta).137
But Decius, who was in any case dead by this time, and Valerian, being alive,
were as yet not among their number: there is no personal identification of either
with Antichrist. But nevertheless the time of the Antichrist is approaching.
Unlike Hippolytus, he does not believe that the history of the present age has
some two hundred years still to run: ‘The six thousand years are almost
fulfilled from when the devil constantly attacks humanity’.138
Around May in AD 253 Cyprian had written to the laity in Thibaris a letter
in which he sought to warn of a renewal of persecution. His words show us
once again that his Christian eschatology bears the firm impress of a Stoic
world-view.
For you ought to know and hold as a certain belief that the day of tribulation is dawning
overhead, and that the sunset of the world and the time of the Antichrist (et occasum
saeculi atque Antichristi tempus) is approaching. Let no one yearn for anything from an
age that is dying but let him follow Christ.139
133 Codex Treverensis 36, see M.R. James, ‘An apocalyptic fragment in Latin’, in Apocrypha
Anecdota: A collection of thirteen apocryphal books and fragments (Texts and Studies II.3;
Cambridge: University Press 1893), p. 154, cf. Clarke, Letters, I, p. 331, note 5.
134 Cyprian, Epistulae,, LV.9.1(151) and 9.2 (158).
135 Fortunatus is one of the bishops mentioned at the Synod of Carthage in A.D. 256 and
addressed as such (‘frater carissime’) in Ad Fortunatum, Praef. 3.32–3.
136 Cyprian, Ad Fortunatum, Praef., 1 (1–4).
137 Cyprian, Ad Fortunatum, 12 (56–9). See also Chapter 4, section C.2.
138 Cyprian, Ad Fortununatum, praef. 2 (23–4).
139 Cyprian, Epistulae, LVIII.1.2 (13–15).
HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF DECIUS
97
Thus the tempus Antichristi is made part of the phenomenon of a saeculum
moriens.140 But for Cyprian the coming of Antichrist was still future, however
imminent. No one ‘should be frightened by the terror of future persecution or
by the advent of the Antichrist who looms large’.141 But when Cyprian comes
to speak of a real Antichrist, he prefers more to speak of those who cause
divisions within the Church because they embody the marks of the world’s
senectus as it breaks up.
Cyprian was now to link nature and society, as had his pagan
contemporaries. Persecution by the Roman state was a sign of the end, but the
divisions caused by schismatics were, in the metaphysical reality that lay
behind appearances, no different from persecution. Cyprian had already
identified divisions within the Church as a new form of persecution, for which
he claimed that Felicissimus had been responsible.
In the late spring of AD 251, in the De Lapis that probably records his
address to the Council summoned to debate policy in dealing with the lapsed in
persecution, Cyprian had denounced Felicissimus and his followers for
producing a situation that was nothing less than ‘another persecution
(persecutio … alia)’ and ‘another trial (alia temptatio)’.142 Cyprian hailed the
violent demands of the petitioners on this issue as ‘a new kind of disaster’, a
‘deceiving evil and a seductive destruction (pernicies)’ that was in effect
continuing the persecution.143 Thus fqora/ (pernicies), with accompanying
clades, marks also the nature of schism. Not the Roman emperor but
Felicissimus, therefore, is the one who is identifiable with Antichrist. As early
as AD 252 Cyprian had described Felicissimus as flaunting himself as an
‘enemy of Christ’.144 Such ‘flaunting’ is born, not from the teaching of Christ,
but from the spirit of Antichrist’.145 Felicissimus has ‘Antichrist in his heart’.146
For Cyprian, therefore, the time and spirit of the Antichrist was about the
general circumstances of the End, both within and without the Church.
Furthermore, the marks of that time bore the impress of the Stoic eschatology
that he shared with his pagan contemporaries. Cyprian wrote with thirty-seven
African bishops on the apostasy of the deposed bishops Basilides and Martialis
(in AD 254), respectively of Legio-and Asturica and Emerita. Such behaviour
was to be expected:
These events were announced beforehand that they would happen at the end of the age
(in saeculi fine), predicted both by the voice of our Lord and by the solemn declaration
of the apostles, that when the world would wane and Antichrist would draw near,
140 Cyprian,
141 Cyprian,
142 Cyprian,
143 Cyprian,
144 Cyprian,
145 Cyprian,
146 Cyprian,
Epistulae, LVIII.2.1(30–31).
Epistulae, LVIII.7.1 (161–2).
De Lapsis, 16 (330).
De Lapsis 15 (287–90).
Epistulae,, LIX.1.1 (6).
Epistulae,, LIX.3.2 (75–76).
Epistulae,, LIX.3.3 (85–86).
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98
whatever was good would wane also, and their opposite evils instead would make
advances.147
The approach of Antichrist is characteristic of traditional apocalyptic, but the
language of the world’s deficit and decline is an imposition on that tradition of
third century concerns with the metaphysical condition of a world in its
senectus. Thus Cyprian will argue that the occasus mundi and the coming of
Antichrist are indicated, not primarily in the state of the secular power outside
the Church, but rather within.
C.3.2. The unity of the Church and the unity of the present age.
Writing of the validity of baptism in Novatian’s schism (before AD 255),
Cyprian claims with the support of 1 Jn. 2:18-19:
Likewise the apostle John himself did not distinguish between heresy or schism,
nor placed others who separated in some different category, but all who had
departed from the church and who acted against the church he names as
Antichrist … From this it is clear that all are adversaries of Christ and
antichrists, who have decided to depart from the charity and unity (unitas) of the
catholic church.148
Thus the metaphysical collapse of the order of the age of iron, according to the
contemporary pagan perspective, has its Christian counterpart in the nearness
of the second coming. Valerian and Decius are but indications of the coming of
Antichrist in pagan society at the final senectus mundi as are the more so
heretics and schismatics within the Christian community.
The unity (unitas) of the Catholic Church is therefore part and parcel of the
Stoic, hylomorphic unity of the world. That order, as we have seen, was
expressed in terms of the mundus or saeculum as constituting one house. It is
the unity, constituted by mind and fate, that moves both nature and history, as
Alexander Aphrodisias points out:
Still the logos is concerned with first principles and God, and is also the unity of the
universe (tou~ panto\j e3nwsij)and its sympathy (sumpa/qeia) with itself. For the God
who permeates matter is for them the same as all existence.149
Cicero had claimed:
Thus the world is firmly established and so sticks together in order to continue in
existence … bodies so interjoined continue in existence (corpora inter se iuncta
permanent) since they are bound together as if by a certain bond (uinculum) placed
around them. This bond it effects by that nature which is outpoured throughout the
whole world as it establishes all things by mind and logos (ratio).150
147 Cyprian, Epistulae,, LXVII.7 (153–57).
148 Cyprian, Epistulae, LXIX.1.3 (19-29).
See also LXX.3.2 (85-89) (on the rebaptism of
heretics).
149 Alexander Aphrodisias, De Mixtione (= Arnim II. 475.14–16).
150 Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 2.115 (=Arnim II.549.8–13).
HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF DECIUS
99
We can therefore see how, in Stoic terms, the metaphor of the universe as ‘one
house (una domus)’ that we saw in Cicero and Seneca, can be understood both
in terms of Stoic hylomorphism and an eschatology that is related to it.151 Such
a domus stabilis, Cyprian would respond, has become a ‘house that showed
signs of fatigue’ now that we have arrived at the occasus or senectus mundi.152
For Seneca it was the case that before the loss of its unity the world was ‘a
component part of God’ and that: ‘... this universe within which we are
contained is both one and God (et unum est et deus), and we are its associates
(socii) and physical members (membra)’.153 Though Cyprian may disagree with
some of the details of that claim, it is nevertheless within such a perspective
that he understands both the unity of the Church and its schismatical
fragmentation.
Cyprian will link concepts of natural ‘unity (unitas/ e3nwsij)’ with ‘bodies
interjoined (corpora inter se iuncta) … by a bond (uinculo)’ to a concept of
social stability related to a metaphysics both of nature and society as ‘one
house (una domus)’. Thus he claims that the bride of Christ ‘knows one
house’.154 The undivided tunic of Christ is the ‘scriptural pledge of unity
(sacramentum unitatis), the bond of concord that inseparably sticks together
(uinculum concordiae inseparabiliter cohaerentis)’,155 just as we have just seen
that Cicero described parts of the world as ‘sticking together’.
Novatian had acted against such a unity:
Though there is one Church that comes from Christ’s body, divided into many members
throughout the whole world, though for precisely the same reason there is one
episcopate, widely spread in a harmony of concord between many corporations
(concordi numerositate diffusus), despite this, Novatian is attempting to create a Church
of human origin in place of what God has handed down (post dei traditionem), in place
of the unity fastened and universally joined together, of the Catholic Church (post
conexam et ubique coniunctam catholicae ecclesiae unitatem).156
For Cyprian we are members of the Church in a similar sense as for Seneca we
are ‘associates (socii) and physical members (membra)’ of the universe that is
one as God is, as a ‘component part (pars)’ of him. The integrity and unity of
the Church was thus a metaphysical integrity and unity, conceived in terms that
Stoics would have understood as the principle of the unity of the world: the
universe is a component part of God that makes the universe one whole entity.
The true believer would wish to belong ‘more and more to the college and
society of our body (magis ac magis collegii et corporis nostri societate)’. He
would thus be in the: ‘... one Church that has one light which is poured forth
everywhere but whose unity is not separated from its body’.157 For Cicero, as
151 Seneca, De Beneficiis, VII.1.7; Cicero, De Natura Deorum Deorum, II.62.154.
152 Cyprian, De Mortalitate, 25 (420–23), quoted fully in text for footnote 122, above.
153 Seneca, Epistulae, 92.30.
154 Cyprian, De Unitate 6 (144).
155 Cyprian, De Unitate, 7 (163–4).
156 Cyprian, Epistulae, LV.24.2 (427–31).
157 Cyprian, Epistulae, LV.30.1 (550–51).
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we saw, it was nature ‘poured out through the whole world which establishes
all things by mind (mens) and logos (ratio)’.158 For Cyprian it is the Spirit in
the Church that effects, according to St. Paul, this unity.159 But the character of
this unity, as Cyprian conceives it, bears the impress of Alexander Aphrodisias’
‘God who permeates matter’.160
The schismatics or heretics were therefore according to Cyprian not part of
the promise of escape from our common human condition at the world’s sunset
in order to be with God with bodies transformed, as he argued in detail in the
De Mortalitate (above C.3). They were part of the collapse of the house of the
world due to its senectus, and their creation of discord and crisis was part of the
fabric of the occasus saeculi. Contemporary events could be clearly seen as
part of the natura discors of the last age of iron of which Dio had spoken and
of which Stoic philosphy had provided a metaphysical explanation. For
Cyprian they were part of the signs of the end prophesied in Scripture, but
nevertheless susceptible to a rational explanation: Stoic metaphysics, as part of
the general mindset of his age, was also his cultural and intellectual inheritance
We thus see that both Christian and Pagan expectations for the future were
characterised by a common metaphysical focus of the decline of the present age
and its eschatological consequences. The rival discourses were competing
claims to satisfy expectations of the end of the present age and its decline into a
new age of order and happiness: the two discourses expressed their differences
within a general, common perspective. We shall now see how this particularly
applies to the political rhetoric of the pagan imperial power that was to confront
Cyprian and his Church in the Decian Persecution.
158 See below,
159 Eph. 4:2–3
160 See below,
footnote 150 and associated text.
in Cyprian, De Unitate, 8 (200–201).
footnote 149 and associated text.