Fatur irenaeus dum cyprianus tacet: A Censure of Cyprian of Carthage at the Time of the Reformation

For centuries, Saint Irenaeus of Lyon did not have a collective prayer, while the fate of Saint Cyprian of Carthage was different from the dawn of Christianity. The relationship between them goes beyond the literary and doctrinal aspects of their works because we find something else in common besides from their desire for unity: silence. We have baptized this term to the absence or interruption of a eucologycal tradition associated to the Fathers of the Church. This peculiarity of the Doctor unitatis, which I have called Irenaeus’ silence, will end with the Council of Trent when a collect prayer is assigned to him in the missal. On the other hand, Cyprian’s prayer disappears in the same Council that placed Irenaeus in the introductory rites, and it will not return to the missals until after four hundred years of Cyprian silence, in the Second Vatican Council. The purpose of this research is to make a comparison of the collect prayers of the fathers in question, observing the linguistic and semantic structure that composes them to understand the causes of these silences and their relationship with their historical period. For this reason, we have consulted codices of sacramentary books from the IV century, making use of eucology, paleography, and philological analysis to conclude with a clear censorship of Saint Cyprian within the Church, due to his controversial book De unitate Ecclesiae. This article aims to open a door for the study of the fathers from a philological perspective based on eucology.