Cyprian and Justina

The legend and its sources

What the Church received about Cyprian and Justina comes from a Greek passio composed in the fourth century in three originally distinct parts — the Conversion, the Confession (a first-person account placed in Cyprian's own mouth), and the Martyrdom. The legend was already famous by 379, when Gregory the Theologian preached on Cyprian at Constantinople, and in the fifth century the empress Eudocia, wife of Theodosius II, turned it into Greek hexameter verse in three books, substantial parts of which survive and which Photius still read and summarised in the ninth century. The account below follows the traditional narrative as the synaxaria transmit it; the serious problems it raises are set out under Disputed questions.

Cyprian the sorcerer

Cyprian was born of pagan parents at Antioch — which Antioch is itself a question — and was dedicated by them to the service of the gods from childhood. The Confession has him recite an extraordinary curriculum of late-antique paganism: consecrated as a boy, he was initiated in the mysteries on Mount Olympus, served Hera at Argos and Artemis at Tauropolis, studied the lore of the dead at Memphis in Egypt and astrology among the Chaldeans of Babylon, and returned to Antioch a master of every occult art — able, the narrative says, to summon the demons by name, and admitted at last to the presence of the prince of darkness himself, who gave him a company of spirits for his service. The pagans of Antioch revered him as a great priest and magician; the passio charges him with love-spells, poisonings, conjuring of the dead, and the ruin of many souls.

Justina and the defeat of the demons

In the same city lived Justina, a young woman who had come to faith in Christ by hearing the Gospel — the tradition says from a deacon named Praylius — and had then won her pagan parents, Aedesius and Cledonia, to the faith; Aedesius, formerly a priest of the idols, is said to have been ordained presbyter before his death. Justina consecrated her virginity to Christ and gave herself to prayer and fasting.

A wealthy young pagan, Aglaïdas, sought her in marriage and was refused. When force failed him he turned to Cyprian, who undertook to inflame the virgin with desire by his art. The sorcerer sent against her a demon, then a stronger, and at last — in the tradition's telling — the prince of the demons himself; each assault of impure thoughts and apparitions Justina broke by prayer, fasting, and the sign of the precious Cross, and the spirits fled, confessing themselves scorched by a power they could not face. Enraged, Cyprian struck her family and the whole city with plagues and pestilence, until public opinion demanded she marry to end the affliction; Justina answered by prayer, and the plague ceased.

Then Cyprian put to the demon the question on which the whole legend turns: if you tremble at the mere shadow of the Cross and the name of Christ, what will you do when Christ Himself comes? Understanding that the devil to whom he had given his life was a defeated slave, he renounced him; the spurned demon turned on him to destroy him, and Cyprian — still unbaptised — saved himself by making the sign of the Cross. He went to Anthimus, bishop of Antioch, carried his books of magic into the assembly of the Christians and burned them publicly (the gesture of Acts 19:19), was baptised, and never looked back.

Conversion and episcopate

The passio relates that the convert advanced through the degrees of the Church with astonishing speed: reader, then deacon, then priest, and on the death of Anthimus bishop of Antioch. As bishop he brought many pagans to the faith, and set Justina over a community of consecrated virgins as deaconess and mother. The one-time sorcerer became, in the hymnography's favourite paradox, "a most wise physician," healing by grace those he had once harmed by art.

Martyrdom

When Diocletian's persecution broke out, Cyprian and Justina were denounced and arrested, and brought before Eutolmius, count of the East, at Damascus. Cyprian's body was raked with iron claws and Justina was scourged; cast into a cauldron of boiling pitch, fat and wax, they remained — the passio says — unharmed, singing. The count, out of his depth, sent them to the emperor Diocletian himself at Nicomedia, who without further examination sentenced them to the sword. They were beheaded on the banks of the river Gallus, about the year 304. A Christian standing by, Theoctistus, seeing their endurance, embraced Cyprian, confessed Christ, and was beheaded with them — the third figure of the commemoration, who has no separate cultus.

The synaxarion's verses for October 2 keep the scene: Satan grieves, beholding his friend of old willing to die by the sword with Justina.

Relics and translations

The bodies lay unburied six days by the emperor's order; Christian sailors then carried them by night to their ship and brought them to Rome, where a noblewoman named Rufina, of the house of Claudius, buried them with honour on her estate. A later Roman tradition placed relics of Cyprian and Justina in the Lateran — by the baptistery of the Constantinian basilica — and their names entered the Western calendars as well as the Eastern.

Veneration and later cultus

The joint cultus of the sorcerer-bishop and the virgin is ancient: sermons of the late fourth century, the verse passio of Eudocia in the fifth, an entry in the Synaxarion of Constantinople, a miniature in the Menologion of Basil II (c. 1000), and a full proper service in the Menaion for October 2. From the shape of his story Cyprian became the saint invoked above all others against sorcery, spells, and the fear of the demonic; the "prayers of Saint Cyprian" against enchantment, in many recensions, circulate throughout the Greek, Slavic, Romanian and Arabic Orthodox worlds (their popular use has often drifted into the very superstition the saint's legend renounces, a point Orthodox pastoral writers regularly make). In the West the pair were kept on September 26 until 1969, when the Roman calendar reform removed them — precisely on the ground that their story could not be verified as history.

Hymnographic and literary legacy

The legend's literary afterlife is remarkable. Eudocia's hexameter Martyrdom of Cyprian survives in large part (Photius, Bibliotheca cod. 184, summarises all three books). The Confession — in which Cyprian recounts his formation in the occult, his dealings with the devil, and the collapse of that service before the Cross — is the earliest full narrative of a Christian magician bound to the demonic powers and delivered from them, and literary historians have long treated it as a principal ancient precursor of the Faust legend. Calderón de la Barca dramatised the story in El mágico prodigioso (1637), where Cyprian signs his blood-pact for the sake of Justina and is undone by grace — a play often set beside Goethe's Faust in the scholarship. In the Menaion the pair have a full proper service, including the vespers doxastikon "Thou didst put off the teaching of error" quoted below.