Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus was born at Carthage, in Roman Africa, around the year two hundred and ten, into wealth and standing. He was educated in rhetoric and taught it publicly, which in that city and that century meant he was one of the men whose voice shaped what the educated classes thought. He owned gardens, he kept a household, and he was, by his own later account, comfortable, admired, and unfree.

In middle life he came to know an old presbyter named Caecilianus, who taught him the Scriptures. What broke in him he described afterward in the letter to Donatus: that he had thought the new birth impossible, that a man so long formed by his habits could not be remade, and that he had been wrong. He was baptized around the year two hundred and forty six.

The change was not private. He sold his gardens and gave the price to the poor of Carthage, took a vow of continence, and put the pagan authors away for the Scriptures and for Tertullian, whom he read daily and called, so the tradition holds, the master. Within two years he was ordained presbyter. Within three, the people of Carthage would have him for their bishop.

The see fell vacant around the year two hundred and forty eight, and the people acclaimed Cyprian. He was a new Christian, and the canons of the Church discouraged the rapid promotion of the newly baptized. He himself resisted and hid in his house, and the crowd surrounded it until he consented. Five of the presbyters of Carthage never forgave the election, and every trouble of the next ten years found them waiting.

He had been bishop barely a year when the Emperor Decius, in the year two hundred and fifty, ordered every subject of the empire to sacrifice and to obtain a certificate proving it. It was the first persecution designed not to kill Christians but to dissolve them, and it worked. In Carthage the lapse was mass and it was immediate. Some sacrificed; some bought the certificate without sacrificing; some sent a slave to do it for them.

Cyprian did not present himself for martyrdom. He withdrew to a place of hiding and governed the church of Carthage by letter for more than a year, which is why so many of his letters survive. The choice was attacked at the time, at Carthage and at Rome, and he defended it in writing: that the shepherd who is hunted first leaves the flock leaderless, and that his own name at the head of the proscription would have drawn the search onto everyone sheltering him. History has mostly accepted the defense, not least because he did not hide the second time.

When the persecution slackened, the question that split the African church was what to do with those who had fallen. Confessors who had suffered and survived began issuing letters of peace, readmitting the lapsed on their own authority and in numbers. Cyprian held that the fall was real, that restoration was possible, and that it belonged to the bishop and a council to grant, after penance measured to the fault. The presbyter Novatus and the deacon Felicissimus took the lax side and made a schism of it. At Rome, Novatian took the opposite side, held that the lapsed could never be received at all, and made a second schism out of the rigor.

Against both, Cyprian wrote the two works read at the Council of Carthage in the spring of two hundred and fifty one: On the Lapsed, and On the Unity of the Catholic Church. The second is the reason his name is spoken in every later argument about what the Church is. Its images have outlived its occasion: the sun with many rays and one light, the tree with many branches and one root, the spring with many streams and one source, the seamless garment that the soldiers would not tear.

The council settled it in the middle: the lapsed would be received after penance, graded by what they had actually done, and those in danger of death would not be kept waiting. It is the answer of a pastor rather than a party, and it held.

In the year two hundred and fifty two a pestilence came into Carthage and stayed for years. The dead lay in the streets, the sick were put out of doors by their own households, and the pagan population blamed the Christians for the anger of the gods. Cyprian gathered the church, divided the city by districts, and set the Christians of Carthage to bury the dead and nurse the sick without asking whose they were, the wealthy paying and the poor working, and the ones they nursed included the people who had been calling for their blood.

He wrote On the Mortality in the middle of it, for Christians who were frightened of dying of a disease rather than gloriously under a sword. It is not a consoling book in the modern sense. Its argument is that a Christian who has spent his life saying he wants to be with Christ has no honest ground for terror when the door opens, and that the plague sorts the ones who meant it from the ones who did not.

Between the years two hundred and fifty five and two hundred and fifty seven, Cyprian and Stephen, bishop of Rome, quarreled hard over whether a baptism administered by heretics or schismatics is a baptism at all. The African councils, following the long African custom, said that it is not, and that a convert from schism must be baptized in the Church. Stephen said that the form is what matters and that such a convert is received by the laying on of hands, not rebaptized. The letters grew sharp. Stephen threatened to break communion.

Cyprian did not yield and Rome did not yield, and the two churches remained in communion anyway, which is the part of the story that matters. He convened the great council of eighty seven African bishops in September of two hundred and fifty six, later called the Seventh Council of Carthage, where each bishop gave his sentence in turn and Cyprian, presiding, said at the opening that no one among them set himself up as a bishop of bishops.

The Church's settled practice on this question afterward followed neither man simply. The Orthodox Church receives converts by different means according to the case, sometimes by baptism, sometimes by chrismation, sometimes by confession alone, and its canons and its practice have room in them for both the African rigor and the Roman economy. Cyprian is honored as a saint and a martyr by the same Church that did not adopt his position whole.

In the year two hundred and fifty seven the Emperor Valerian went after the clergy directly. Cyprian was summoned before the proconsul Aspasius Paternus, refused to name his presbyters, confessed himself a Christian and a bishop, and was exiled to Curubis on the coast. He stayed there about a year, and it was there that he received the news that Sixtus, bishop of Rome, had been taken in a cemetery on the sixth of August, two hundred and fifty eight, and beheaded on the spot with four of his deacons. Cyprian wrote it to the African bishops in the letter numbered eightieth in his collection, and added that the persecution had now reached the point where it would come for him.

He came back to his own gardens outside Carthage and waited. When the officers came for him he was tried by the proconsul Galerius Maximus, who read the sentence: that Thascius Cyprianus should be executed by the sword. The record of the trial preserves what he answered, and the crowd of Christians who had followed him out to the field of Sextus called out that they would die with him.

He was beheaded on the fourteenth of September, two hundred and fifty eight, having first taken off his outer garments himself, knelt, prayed, bound his own eyes with the help of a presbyter and a deacon, and ordered that twenty five gold pieces be given to the executioner. The Christians spread cloths and napkins in front of him to catch the blood. They buried him that night by torchlight in the cemetery of the procurator Macrobius Candidianus, and the Church of Africa never let his memory go.

The Orthodox Church keeps his memory on the thirty first of August. The West keeps it on the sixteenth of September with Cornelius of Rome. He is the earliest Latin Father whose complete correspondence survives, and after Tertullian he is the writer who taught the Latin Church how to say what it believed.