For
your part, you [Rogatianus] have shown us honour and acted with your customary humility
in choosing to lay before us your complaint about him, whereas you possessed
the right, by the power of the authority of your episcopal chair, to exact immediate
punishment from him; you could have rested assured that all of us your
colleagues would come whatever action you took by virtue of your episcopal power
against this insolent deacon of yours. In fact, you have injunctions from God
concerning men of this character, since, in Deuteronomy, the Lord our God says:
And whatever man acts with such arrogance that he pays no heed to the priest
or the judge, whoever he may be in those days, that man shall die, and when all
the people heart of it, they will be afraid and will desist, henceforth, from
their wickedness.
There
is another text which demonstrates to us that these words of God were uttered
with all His true and solemn majesty in order to secure honour and vindication
for His priests. When three of the temple servants (tres de ministeriis),
Core, Dathan, and Abiron, had the arrogant presumption to lift up their heads
and act in opposition to Aaron the priest and set themselves on an equal footing
with that priest, their appointed leader, the earth opened up, swallowed and devoured
them and they were punished forthwith for their insolence and sacrilege. And
they were not alone: two hundred and fifty others as well who were their companions
in rebellion were consumed by the fire that burst forth by the power of the
Lord, thereby proving that priests of God are vindicated by Him who makes
priests. (Epistle 3.1-1-2, in The Letters of St. Cyprian, Volume 1 [trans.
G. W. Clarke; Ancient Christian Writers 43; New York: Newman Press, 1984], 54-55)
Commenting on “three of the
temple servants,” Clarke noted the following:
Note
Cyprian’s careful choice of description to make the diaconate fit in with his
Old Testament illustration. Similarly in Ep. 69.8.1 these three are
described as loci sui ministerium transgressi. For Cyprian the
rhetorician, such parallelisms (as with sacerdotes = OT priest/NT bishop)
have more argumentative weight than merely superficial verbal linkages. (Ibid.,
166 n. 6)
