iv.), and excommunication is announced against any who should allow communion except on the agreed terms.
About Nov. 250, persecution relaxed (possibly owing to the Gothic advance in Thrace), and though it was still unsafe for Cyprian to return, he endeavoured to deal with the distress of sufferers who had lost their all, and to recruit the ranks of the clergy and allay the excitement among the lapsed, by a commission (vicarii) of three bishops, Caldonius, Herculanus, Victor, and two presbyters, Numidicus and Rogatian (Epp. 41, 26).
Declaration of Parties.—The excitement on the question of the lapsed is evinced by two classes of stories then afloat as to judgments following on unreconciled offences and on presumptuous communion (de Lapsis, 24, 25, 26). Cyprian employed both to urge delay, but they do not emanate from his party of moderation. At Carthage the party of laxity became prominent; at Rome, that of exclusiveness.
(1) The party of laxity was composed of confessors, spoiled by flattery (de Laps. 20), fashionable lapsi, who declined all penance (Laps. 30), influential ones, who had forced certain clergy to receive them, but also some clergy who united against Cyprian's policy with the five presbyters who had from the first resisted him. Of these, three were undoubtedly Donatus, Gordius, Fortunatus (Maran. Vit. Cyp. § xvii.; Rettberg, pp. 97‒112). That the fourth was Gaius of Didda, or Augendus, is but a guess. The principal in position and ability was the presbyter Novatus (Pearson's Jovinus and Maximus, and Pamelius's Repostus and Felix are impossible). That Cyprian's five original opponents still acted against him is shewn by "olim secundum vestra suffragia" (Ep. 43, v.), though in 43, ii. he seems only to conjecture their complicity with Felicissimus, whom Novatus had associated with himself as deacon in managing a district called Mons (possibly the Bozra itself) (Epp. 52, 59, 36). Cyprian complains of not having been consulted in this appointment, which, owing to the then position of the deacons, gave the party control of considerable funds. All the arrangements hitherto agreed on were disregarded by them, Cyprian's missives unanswered, and his commission of relief treated as an invasion of the diaconal office of Felicissimus, who announced, while other lapsi were at once received into communion, that whoever held communications with or accepted aid from the commission would be excluded from communion or relief from the Mons (Ep. 43, ii.; Ep. 41, where the conjecture in morte, or references to Monte in Numidia, or to the Montenses at Rome, who were Donatists, and were never (anciently) confused with the Novatianists or called Montanistae, are absurd; though Hefele, Novatianischer Schisms, ap. Wetzer and Welte, K. Lexik. and Conciles, t. ii. p. 232, countenances these confusions). It is with the name of Felicissimus that the lax party is generally connected (Ep. 43, iii. v. vii.), and he, with a fellow-deacon Augendus, a renegade bishop Repostus, and certain others, the five presbyters not among them, was presently excommunicated. There is no evidence, nor any contemporary instance, to warrant the belief that Novatus ordained Felicissimus deacon (see the MSS. reading Ep. 52, "satellitem suum diaconum constituit," which Hartel has unwarrantably departed from), nor is there any such appearance of presbyterian principles in this party, as divines of anti-episcopal churches, Neander, Rettberg, d’Aubigne, Keyser, have freely assumed. The party were in episcopal communion, took part in the episcopal election at Carthage, presently elected a new bishop for themselves, and procured episcopal consecration for him. When Novatus visited Rome, he threw himself into the election then proceeding, and, after opposing the candidate who was chosen, procured episcopal consecration for his nominee there also. Felicissimus too must have been a deacon already, or he could not have involved himself and Novatus in the charge of defrauding the church (Epp. 52, i.; 50, i.).
(2) The Puritan Party.—The strength of the Puritans, on the other hand, was in Rome. A group of confessors there, of whom the presbyters Moyses and Maximus were the chief, united with Novatian and the clergy in approving Cyprian's proposals. The modification of discipline by martyrs' merits was never countenanced here (Ep. 28, ii.); nevertheless, Moyses, before his death (which probably happened on the last day of 250), had condemned the extreme tendencies of Novatian towards the non-reconcilement of penitents (see Valesius's correct interpretation of Eus. vi. 43, and Routh, R. S. iii. p. 81). While Cornelius at Rome and Cyprian were moving towards greater leniency than their resolutions had embodied, Novatian, without questioning the hope of salvation for the lapsed, was now for making their exclusion perpetual, and teaching that the purity of the church could not otherwise be maintained.
The earthly conditions of the invisible and visible church had not yet been discussed as the Donatists compelled them to be, and Novatian's growing error, though in the present application it completely severed him from Cyprian and the church, was not in principle different from that which Cyprian (though without producing a schism) held in relation to Baptism. Early in A.D. 251 the Roman confessors were liberated; they lost whatever influence Moyses had exercised on them; they had been drawn towards Novatian, and when Novatus, arriving from Carthage, attached himself to this party, because, though its puritanism was alien to his own practices at home, it was the only opposition existing in the capital which threatened to overthrow the Cyprianic side, they were at once organized into a party to secure the election of a bp. of Rome who would break with Cyprian. The moment for election was given by the absence of Decius and his leading officers on the frontier or in Illyria on account of the base alliance of Priscus with Cniva, and the revolt of Valens. The party of moderation, however, prevailed and secured the election of Cornelius, and consecrated him in spite of himself by 16 bishops[1] ("vim" Ep. 55, vii.).
- ↑ Lipsius has shewn conclusively that the consecration of Cornelius was about Mar. 5 (Chronol. d. römischen Bischöfe, p. 18); the usual statement that it was in June introduces endless contradictions into the common account, and has obliged even Pearson to resort to unmanageable hypotheses of long recesses in the first council of Carthage and of several journeys of Novatus to Rome.
