“He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother.”
He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother.
Cyprian · The Treatises · ANF V, On the Unity of the Church, Treatise I, 6
The most quoted line in Latin Christianity after scripture, and it is a sentence about schism rather than about unbelief: the man Cyprian means has left, not never arrived. The paragraph before it calls the Church one mother from whose womb we are born and by whose milk we are nourished.
How this is known
These words were matched, word for word, against this project’s own copy of the volume cited.
Quoted from the Ante-Nicene Fathers translation this project holds in full, and checked against those bytes at every rebuild — the words, the work and the place in it.
Read in Wallis, ANF vol. 5 (1886) · Ernest Wallis
Also by
- Cyprian every saying recorded of this person, and their page