The plague hits the church
Christians care for the dying during the Plague of Cyprian
The plague that historians call the Plague of Cyprian begins in Ethiopia around 249 AD and spreads with the legions and the trade routes across the entire Roman Empire. At its peak it kills five thousand people a day in Rome alone. It lasts for fifteen years. Estimates of the total death toll vary widely — some scholars suggest it killed between a quarter and a third of the population in the hardest-hit regions, though the full empire-wide figure was certainly lower.
The symptoms are described by Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, in a document written partly to comfort his congregation and partly to explain why Christians should not be afraid to die: eyes on fire, vomiting, feet and hands blackening with gangrene, the body consumed from the inside.
When the plague arrives in a city, the wealthy flee. The physicians flee. The families of the dying, in many cases, flee — throwing the sick into the streets to avoid contagion, abandoning the bodies of the dead.
The Christians stay.
The bishop Dionysius of Alexandria writes a paschal letter during the plague that describes what his community is doing: visiting the sick, carrying the infected on their backs, washing their bodies, cooking their food, burying their dead — often dying of the contagion themselves shortly after.
He names them. He calls them martyrs too — not martyrs of the sword but martyrs of love, who chose exposure to death rather than abandonment of the dying.
The pagans noticed. The emperor Julian, writing a century later while trying to revive Roman paganism, complains bitterly that the Christians have won the loyalty of the population through their charity — their care for not only their own sick but for strangers.
They took care of our people too, he writes, with something close to despair.
“Many of our brethren, in their exceeding love and brotherly kindness, did not spare themselves, but kept by each other, and visited the sick without thought of their own peril.”
— Dionysius of Alexandria, Easter Letter, c. 260 AD
“Greater love has no one than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
The church did not grow primarily through arguments or apologetics in the second and third centuries. It grew, in significant part, because when the plague came, Christians stayed.
Not because they had a death wish. Because they had a theology of the body — a belief that the physical care of the dying neighbor was a form of worship, a way of touching Christ in the most miserable of human forms.
When everything else runs, love stays. That is the sentence that converted more people in the Roman empire than any sermon.
Where is the plague in your world right now? Who has been abandoned that you are positioned to stay with?