CYPRIAN. - A presbyter to whom St. Jerome sent epistle 140. They had previously already been in epistolary correspondence and afterwards had made each other's personal acquaintance, forming a friendship between them. Jerome praises him as most studious of the law of God. Thus C. asked him for a simple and plain explanation of Ps. 89. The aforementioned letter is the reply to that request (PL 22, 1166-79; and I. Hilberg: CSEL, LVI, 269-89).
The exegesis constantly keeps in view the Hebrew, the Septuagint and the other versions. There are clear affirmations of the necessity of Grace for performing any good work: «He can do nothing good without Him who granted free will with the pledge not to deny His Grace for individual works, so that freedom of will might not become an occasion of insult to the Creator and of arrogance for him who was created free, yet in such a way as to have to acknowledge that he is nothing without God» (ch. 5). And again, toward the end: «Where are those who, boasting of the power of free will, make the Grace of God, which they believe they have obtained, consist in having the power to do or not to do either good or evil?». Such vigorous affirmations recall the Pelagian controversy, in which St. Jerome took a most active part in defense of orthodoxy. According to Vallarsi the epistle was written ca. 418, when the struggle against Pelagianism was still raging, which in that very year was condemned, after the Council of Carthage, by Pope Zosimus in the Epistola tractoria.
Michele Pellegrino