ABSTRACT
Cyprian might seem to have inaugurated a mediating position for preserving the holiness of the church by restricting to the clergy the purity requirement which had extended to the whole assembly: he argued that penitent apostates could be admitted to communion without polluting the entire congregation accepting them; yet he insisted that the sanctifying power of the church depended upon the holiness of the clergy, particularly their freedom from all taint of idolatry, apostasy or schism. The outcome of Cyprian’s actions in response to the ecclesiastical consequences of the Decian persecution might be so summarized but his stance was actually less innovative and more nuanced. Cyprian’s primary concern at the time he considered the admission of the penitent lapsed was not the danger of pollution which would jeopardize the church’s holiness and power to sanctify but a fear of inciting divine wrath by contravening the corrective function of the persecution itself. When he dealt with failed clergy within the unity of the church, he judged that they posed a threat of contamination only to clergy and laity who actually consented to their sins. In neither of these cases was the holiness of the church itself necessarily in jeopardy. When Christian rituals of baptism and eucharist were performed outside and in opposition to the unity of the church, however, they not only failed to sanctify but polluted their participants in the same way as the idolatrous ceremonies of Roman polytheism.
