Question Number 710:
Can you please explain how the writing by St. Cyprian of Carthage, On the Unity of the Catholic Church, works with the Orthodox idea of how the church is structured? Particularly, part #4: http://www.romancatholicism.org/jansenism/cyprian-church.htm
ANSWER:
This text of St Cyprian and Cyprian's entire corpus and even life are indeed very important.
Sadly, this particular treatise "De unitate (On the unity of the catholic church)" is often misunderstood.
The "catholic church" is obviously (in context, but not so obviously to the modern reader) the local church (diocese). The unity of the catholic church is anchored in the office of the bishop who holds the chair of Peter and who is "Peter's successor" in the church.
The language of certainty (If a man does not hold fast to this oneness of Peter, does he imagine that he still holds the faith? If he deserts the Chair of Peter upon whom the Church was built, has he confidence that he is in the Church?) is the same as the one found in St Ignatius who writes "only consider it assured the Eucharist that is celebrated by the bishop or one whom has been entrusted by the bishop" (paraphrase).
This treatise does not deal with the unity of the "Catholic Church" in the modern sense (a worldwide organism) but of the catholic church as then understood, the local church. For Cyprian, the churches are held together in communion by the unity of their bishops (calledsacerdos or priests in context) who each hold in fullness the Chair of Peter.
If Cyprian had written a treatise on the mechanism to hold the Churches together (entitled perhaps "On the unity of the common union of churches") he may have mentioned a role for the bishop of Rome, but his life and writings show that it would have been along the Orthodox understanding of a very relative primacy, not an absolute ontological supremacy. The great Roman Catholic patristic scholar Quasten concludes on Cyprian:
If he refuses to the bishop of Rome any higher power to maintain by legislation the solidarity of which he is the centre, it must be because he regards the primacy as one of honor and the bishop of Rome as primus inter pares" (Quasten, J n.d., Patrology: Vol.2, Christian Classics, Allen, pp. 375-378)
(see also the book His Broken Body for a detailed discussion of this text and of ecclesiology)
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