Note 175 — Chapter II
Neil Buchanan translation
Footnote 175:
(return)
That is a fundamental idea and in fact the outstanding feature of the treatise "de unitate." The heretics and schismatics lack love, whereas the unity of the Church is the product of love, this being the main Christian virtue. That is the ideal thought on which Cyprian builds his theory (see also epp. 45. 1: 55. 24: 69. 1 and elsewhere), and not quite wrongly, in so far as his purpose was to gather and preserve, and not scatter. The reader may also recall the early Christian notion that Christendom should be a band of brethren ruled by love. But this love ceases to have any application to the case of those who are disobedient to the authority of the bishop and to Christians of the sterner sort. The appeal which Catholicism makes to love, even at the present day, in order to justify its secularised and tyrannical Church, turns in the mouth of hierarchical politicians into hypocrisy, of which one would like to acquit a man of Cyprian's stamp.