1: Cyril'S Life
1: CYRIL'S LIFE
We know virtually nothing about Cyril's early life. He was born shortly before that second spring in the history of the Church, when Constantine's vision of the Cross heralded his victory over his rival Maxentius in 312 and led him to embrace Christianity, granting the Church first a tolerated, and then an increasingly favoured position in the Roman Empire. Cyril would have been a schoolboy at the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325, and was ordained priest by Maximus who had become Bishop of Jerusalem shortly before the dedication of Constantine's great basilica there in 335. Though W.Telfer suggested a Caesarean origin, Cyril seems to have been a native of Jerusalem, for he was ordained to serve that church, and knew the appearance of the site before Constantine's basilica was built.
For it was in a garden that he was crucified. For although it has been largely decorated with royal gifts, it was once a garden, and the signs and remains of it still survive. (Cat. 14.5)
The phrase ‘shelter of the rock’ (Cant 2.14 (LXX)) refers to the shelter which at that time stood in front of the door to the Saviour's tomb, and had been hollowed from the very rock in the way that was customary here in front of tombs. It is no longer visible because some time ago the front chamber was chiselled away when the tomb was given the decoration it has today. For before the Emperor had set this magnificent structure over the tomb, there was a shelter in front of the rock. (Cat. 14.9)
Although the year in which Cyril became bishop cannot be established precisely, there are certain pointers to a date of about 350. His remark in the Catecheses that the Emperor Probus (276–282) reigned ‘a full seventy years ago’ suggests that he had succeeded to the see of Jerusalem by the middle of the century; for although it was not unknown for a presbyter to deliver catechetical instructions (John Chrysostom's baptismal homilies at Antioch are an example) Cyril gives no hint that the ‘bishop’ in the Catecheses is any other than himself—in contrast to Homily 20, where the reference to ‘our father's teaching’ (patrikes didaskalias) seems to imply that he had not yet become bishop. His accession was still recent when he wrote his Letter to Constantius in 351, which he calls his ‘firstfruits’, describing the apparition of a shining cross in the sky over Jerusalem (ad Const. 1).
Much uncertainty surrounds Cyril's succession to the see. According to one tradition two militantly Arian bishops of nearby cities, namely Acacius of Caesarea (the metropolitan see) and Patrophilus of Scythopolis, conspired to oust Maximus of Jerusalem because of his staunch defence of the orthodox faith, and appointed Cyril in his place (Socrates, HE 2.38; Sozomen, HE 2.20; 4.20). This version of the events evidently implies that Cyril himself had Arian sympathies, for, having succeeded in getting rid of Maximus, Acacius and Patrophilus would hardly have replaced him with one who was not kindly disposed to their own cause. St Jerome, who should have known what he was talking about as he was a resident in the Holy Land from the last months of Cyril's episcopate, gives a still more discreditable account of Cyril's succession, according to which Cyril, as an out and out Arian, was offered the see on Maximus’ death on condition that he would repudiate his ordination at the hands of that bishop (Jerome, Chron.: PL 27.683). However, since Jerome's judgments of individuals were sometimes more emotional than judicious, he may have allowed his hostility to Cyril's successor John to colour his assessment of Cyril himself. Theodoret of Cyrrhus however gives a quite different account: he represents Cyril as ‘an earnest champion of the apostolic decrees’ of Nicaea, and says nothing about any Arian conspiracy to make him Maximus’ successor (Theodoret, HE 2.22).
Nevertheless the circumstances of Cyril's succession cannot have been unquestionable. According to Theodoret the right-thinking Maximus had someone else in mind as his successor; one would not expect him to approve of a candidate who was acceptable to the Arian Acacius. Indeed, the bishops in their letter after the Council of Constantinople of 381 felt it necessary to vindicate both Cyril's orthodoxy and the validity of his consecration:
Of the church at Jerusalem, mother of all the churches, we make known that the right reverend and most religious Cyril is bishop, who was some time ago correctly ordained by the bishops of the province, and has in several places fought a good fight against the Arians. (Theodoret, HE 5.9)
It would be no surprise or disgrace if Cyril had been a little slow to wake up to the dangerous implications of Arius’ views. The Council of Nicaea was, after all, the first ecumenical council, and the Church at large did not at once recognize the decisive authority of its novel definition that the Son was ‘of the same substance (homoousios)’ as the Father. Even such a defender of orthodoxy as Hilary of Poitiers claimed to have had no knowledge of Nicaea or the homoousion until the eve of his exile in 357 (Hilary, de Syn. 91); while St Athanasius himself, for all the persecution he endured at the hands of the Arians, was slow to take the term homoousios into his own writings. Eusebius, Acacius’ predecessor at Caesarea, seems to have regarded the Arianizing Council of Jerusalem, which reinstated Arius in 335, as at least equal in authority to the Council of Nicaea, which had condemned him (and arraigned Eusebius himself) ten years earlier. We shall have more to say about Cyril's orthodoxy below in section 5.
However much Cyril owed his appointment to sympathy with Acacius’ Arian convictions, his relationship with his metropolitan soon changed, as he entered into a dispute with Acacius ‘concerning his [Acacius’] rights as a metropolitan, which he claimed on the ground of his bishopric being an apostolic see’ (Sozomen, HE 4.25). The seventh canon of Nicaea had done little to clarify the issue when it decreed that, in view of ancient custom, the bishop of Aelia (Jerusalem) should have ‘the succession of honour’, while at the same time the metropolis was to retain its proper rank. This dispute influenced the protagonists’ attitude to the religious significance of the places chosen by providence as the theatre on which the drama of salvation-history was enacted: whereas Cyril sought to exploit the significance of Jerusalem as the Holy City, Acacius’ predecessor Eusebius had focused more widely on the Holy Land, which included Caesarea as well as Jerusalem. Cyril's letter to Constantius on the appearance of the Cross in the sky over Jerusalem should perhaps be read against this background as an opportunistic attempt to enlist the Emperor's support on the side of the Holy City.
According to Sozomen the scope of this dispute widened, so that the two bishops exchanged accusations of heresy, with Cyril charging Acacius of Arianism, and being charged in return of holding that the Son is ‘of like substance with the Father’. We shall see in the fifth section of this Introduction that even in the Catecheses, which should be dated no later than the early 350s, Cyril already saw the need to refute some of the key Arian theses, though he never included Arius or his followers in lists of heretics. Acacius strengthened his case against Cyril with allegations that he had restored communion to several deposed bishops and illegally sold church property to raise funds during a famine (Sozomen, HE 4.25); and when for two years Cyril persisted in his refusal to appear before his metropolitan, Acacius deposed him in 357. Thereupon Cyril appealed to the secular authorities, a step which the historian Socrates regarded as unusual, though Touttée shows that such an appeal was not unparalleled. He spent this first exile at Tarsus, but he was allowed to make his appeal at the Council of Seleucia (359), where according to Sozomen he joined the moderate anti-Arian party of Basil of Ancyra and Eustathius of Sebaste, who, while avoiding the Nicene homoousios, preferred to say that the Son was ‘of similar substance (homoiousios)’ with the Father—the very view which, as we have seen, Acacius had detected in Cyril. The Council deposed Acacius, allowing Cyril to return to his see, only to become an exile again the following year once Acacius had persuaded Constantius, an Arian sympathizer, that Cyril had sold to a dancer a vestment presented by the Emperor's father Constantine to Bishop Macarius, so that it became a stage prop. However, when Constantius died in November 361, Julian the Apostate, becoming sole emperor, showed his superiority to the Christians he despised by recalling all the bishops who had been banished in the previous reign. The place of Cyril's second exile is not known, though when he was again restored, his journey home took him through Antioch, where he rescued a young Christian who had been imprisoned and tortured by his pagan father, and smuggled him back to Jerusalem in his carriage. The imperial clemency did not however deter him from resisting Julian's attempts to restore the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem; he received providential assistance from a storm which damaged the rising building, and was regarded as a portent (Socrates, HE 3.20).
On the death of Acacius of Caesarea (c. 365), Cyril carried the war into the rival camp and sent two candidates for the vacant see, the successful one being his own brother Gelasius. However, the success of this attempt to reverse the domination of Caesarea over Jerusalem was short-lived, for Gelasius was soon deposed and replaced by the Arian Euzoius. Worse was to follow. In 367 Valens, another Arian sympathizer, succeeded as Emperor of the Eastern provinces and reactivated the sentences of banishment imposed by Constantius. Thus Cyril went into exile for the third time. However, when Valens’ reign ended in 378, his successor Gratian soon recalled the exiled bishops.
At the end of this third exile—he had been in banishment for some fifteen out of the preceding twenty-two years—Cyril returned to find the church in Jerusalem rent by schism. Gregory of Nyssa, who visited the city in 379, described the religious strife and moral decay which he found there, apparently shortly before Cyril's arrival.
There is no form of immorality that they do not venture to commit—to say nothing of prostitution, adultery, theft, idolatry, poisoning, envious disputes, murder…nowhere is murder taken so lightly as it is in those parts…I had promised to confer with the heads of the holy churches in Jerusalem, because their affairs were in confusion and a negotiator was needed.
The Mystagogic Catecheses, which Cyril delivered in his last years in Jerusalem, give no hint of this stormy background.
At the Council of Constantinople in 381 Cyril emerged as one of the leaders of the homoousians; though Sozomen and Socrates, in keeping with their unfavourable accounts of Cyril's original succession to the see of Jerusalem, maintained that he first needed to renounce his earlier ‘Macedonian’ position. The charge is plausible, in so far as Cyril, like Macedonius, preferred to speak of the Son as ‘like’ the Father rather than as ‘consubstantial’ with him; there is no parallel in Cyril's works to Macedonius’ denial of the divinity of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless the bishops who met in the same city in the following year included in their synodical letter an expression of confidence that Cyril had been ‘canonically ordained [or appointed] by the bishops of the province’, and praised ‘the good fight he had fought in several places against Arianism’ (Theodoret, HE 5.9); but, as has been suggested above, the fact that such a declaration was necessary implies that some doubt had been expressed. The year of Cyril's death was traditionally given as 386, but P.Nautin has shown that the text of Jerome, De Viris Illustribus 112, on which the date was based, suggests rather a date of 387.