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Cyril of Alexandria

Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376–444), patriarch of Alexandria from 412 and the leading opponent of Nestorius.

History

Roots

Cyril grew up inside the most powerful church in the eastern empire. His uncle Theophilus was patriarch of Alexandria, and the young Cyril went with him to Constantinople in 403 for the “Synod of the Oak,” which deposed John Chrysostom. For years afterwards Cyril refused to restore Chrysostom’s name to the diptychs of his church (Catholic Encyclopedia, “St. Cyril of Alexandria”, secondary). Alexandria had a long rivalry with Constantinople, the upstart imperial see, and a theological tradition running back through Athanasius that read the Gospels as the story of the eternal Word himself coming among us.

When Theophilus died in October 412, the city split over his successor. The historian Socrates reports that troops backed the archdeacon Timothy, but Cyril’s party won, and he took office “with greater power than Theophilus had ever exercised.” He at once closed the churches of the Novatians and seized their property (Socrates, Church History 7.7).

Alexandria, 412–428

Cyril’s early years were violent. Socrates, who disliked him, tells the story in three chapters (Church History 7.13–15). A quarrel over theatre crowds set Cyril against the prefect Orestes and the city’s Jews. After Jews killed a number of Christians in a night ambush, Cyril led a crowd to the synagogues and drove the Jewish community out of the city, letting the crowd plunder their goods. Five hundred monks from Nitria then came into the city and one of them stoned Orestes; when the prefect had the man tortured to death, Cyril honored him as a martyr.

In March 415 a Christian mob led by a church reader named Peter dragged the philosopher Hypatia from her carriage and murdered her, believing she stood between Orestes and the bishop. Socrates says the affair “brought not the least opprobrium” on Cyril and the Alexandrian church. He does not say Cyril ordered it, and historians still argue over how far Cyril is to blame.

The same years produced most of Cyril’s exegesis and his anti-Arian theology: the Thesaurus and the Dialogues on the Trinity, a large Commentary on John (Pusey’s translation, tertullian.org), sermons on Luke (tertullian.org), and an annual series of Festal Letters. Later came Against Julian, a reply to the emperor Julian’s attack on Christianity.

The Nestorian controversy, 428–433

In 428 Nestorius, a monk from Antioch, became bishop of Constantinople. He backed a preacher who objected to calling Mary Theotokos, “God-bearer,” and proposed Christotokos, “Christ-bearer,” instead. To Cyril this meant splitting Christ into two subjects: the eternal Son, and a man born of Mary in whom the Son lived. He wrote to the Egyptian monks in 429, then to Nestorius directly. His second letter set out the doctrine that later councils would treat as the standard (text in the acts of Ephesus).

Cyril also wrote to Pope Celestine, who held a synod in Rome in August 430 and backed him. Cyril then sent Nestorius a third letter ending in twelve anathemas, demanding he sign them (Twelve Anathemas, with Nestorius’ counter-anathemas). The bishops of Antioch, led by John of Antioch and the theologian Theodoret, read the anathemas as Apollinarian: as if Cyril denied Christ a full human mind.

The emperor Theodosius II called a council at Ephesus for 431. Cyril opened the Council of Ephesus on 22 June before John and the Syrian bishops arrived, and the bishops present deposed Nestorius that day. John’s party, arriving days later, held their own council and deposed Cyril and Memnon of Ephesus. The emperor at first confirmed both depositions and had Cyril held under guard. Cyril got back to Alexandria that autumn. Nestorius stayed deposed.

The break took two years of negotiation to heal. In 433 Cyril accepted a creed drafted on the Antiochene side and replied to John with his letter beginning “Let the heavens rejoice.” The Formula of Reunion confessed Christ as “perfect God, and perfect Man,” spoke of “a union of two natures,” and called Mary Theotokos (Cyril to John of Antioch, in the acts of Chalcedon). Some of Cyril’s own supporters thought he had given too much away, and he spent the following years writing letters, including two to Succensus, to explain that he had not.

Influence

Cyril died in 444. His successor Dioscorus pressed the “one nature” side of his language against Flavian of Constantinople and Pope Leo, whose Tome taught that “each form does what is proper to it” (Leo, Letter 28). At the Council of Chalcedon in 451 the bishops cried “Blessed Cyril so taught,” had his second letter to Nestorius and his letter to John read as standards of faith, and then defined Christ as one person “in two natures” (acts and definition).

That definition broke the church apart. The churches that became the Oriental Orthodox held that “in two natures” betrayed Cyril and kept his formula of “one incarnate nature of God the Word”; their Miaphysitism is Cyril’s language taken as the rule. The Chalcedonian churches spent the next century proving that they too were Cyrillian. The Second Council of Constantinople in 553 condemned Theodoret’s writings against Cyril and his anathemas, and ruled that Cyril’s “one nature” phrase is orthodox when read as the Fathers meant it (Constantinople II, anathemas 8 and 13). The Church of the East, which never accepted Ephesus, honors Nestorius and not Cyril.

East and West both count him a saint. The Greek tradition calls him “Pillar of Faith” and “Seal of all the Fathers,” and the Catholic Church has kept a feast for him as a Doctor of the Church since 1882 (Wikipedia, secondary).

Key ideas and contributors

One subject. Cyril’s central claim is that the one who was born, suffered and died is the eternal Word himself, in the flesh he made his own. In his second letter to Nestorius: the Word “having personally united to himself flesh animated by a rational soul, did in an ineffable and inconceivable manner become man,” so that “of both” there is “one Christ and one Son; for the difference of the natures is not taken away by the union” (text). The text he returned to was John 1:14.

Hypostatic union. Against what he saw as Nestorius’ “conjunction” of two persons by honor or authority, Cyril insisted on a union “according to hypostasis.” The second anathema states it: whoever does not confess that the Word “is united hypostatically to flesh” and is “one only Christ both God and man at the same time” is anathema. The phrase became the standard term at Chalcedon and after.

Theotokos. Mary is God-bearer because the child she bore is God the Word in the flesh, not because she is the source of his divinity. The first anathema makes this the test case (Luke 1:43).

God suffered in the flesh. The twelfth anathema requires confessing “that the Word of God suffered in the flesh, that he was crucified in the flesh.” This “theopaschite” language mattered to Cyril because salvation depends on it: only if the one who died is God does his death destroy death.

Life-giving flesh. Cyril tied the incarnation to the Eucharist. The eleventh anathema says the Lord’s flesh “gives life because it is that of the Word who gives life to all,” which is why receiving it heals and divinizes the believer (John 6:53–56). This theme of sharing in the divine life through the Word made flesh fed later Eastern teaching on Theosis and on the Orthodox Eucharistic Mystery.

One incarnate nature. Cyril often used the formula mia physis tou Theou Logou sesarkomene, “one incarnate nature of God the Word.” He believed it came from Athanasius; it in fact came from a treatise by Apollinaris circulating under Athanasius’ name (Catholic Encyclopedia, secondary). Cyril used “nature” here to mean the concrete existing Son, close to what Chalcedon would call “person.”

His late treatise On the Unity of Christ gives the whole position in dialogue form (trans. John McGuckin, SVS Press). His fullest polemic is the five books Against Nestorius (tertullian.org).

Key controversies

Did Cyril read Nestorius fairly? Nestorius said he never taught two Sons, only two complete natures joined in one prosopon, and that “Christ” was the right name for the one who bears both. His counter-anathemas, preserved beside Cyril’s, accuse Cyril of mixing the natures and making the Godhead suffer (text). His late apology, the Bazaar of Heracleides, rediscovered in a Syriac manuscript in the late nineteenth century and translated into English in 1925, made many modern scholars more sympathetic to him. The Church of the East and the Catholic Church signed a Common Christological Declaration in 1994 that set the old labels aside (cited by title; not checked online).

Apollinarianism. The Antiochenes charged that the anathemas, especially the call for a “natural” or hypostatic union, left no room for a real human soul acting in Christ. Theodoret wrote a full refutation of the twelve anathemas (not checked online). Cyril answered that the flesh was “animated by a rational soul” and accepted “two natures” language in 433. Defenders treat the reunion as proof he was never Apollinarian; critics see it as a tactical retreat.

Chalcedon or Miaphysitism? Both sides claim him. Chalcedonians point to the Formula of Reunion and his statement that the natures stay distinct. Miaphysites point to “one incarnate nature,” to his letters to Succensus, and to his refusal to divide Christ’s acts between the natures as Leo’s Tome does. Modern dialogues between the Oriental Orthodox and the Chalcedonian churches have largely concluded that the two sides confessed the same faith in different words, with Cyril as the shared ground: the 1990 Chambésy statement of the Orthodox–Oriental Orthodox Joint Commission says “both families have always loyally maintained the same authentic Orthodox Christological faith” and grounds both terminologies in Cyril (text).

Conduct and power. The Council of Ephesus was managed hard. Cyril opened it before the Syrians arrived, and he is widely reported to have spent large sums on gifts to court officials to secure the outcome; the claim rests on a surviving list of Alexandrian “blessings” sent to Constantinople (Volker Menze, “Blessings, Bribes, and Bishops,” 2022, secondary). Add the expulsion of the Jews, the Nitrian monks, and the death of Hypatia, and many historians, from Edward Gibbon onward, have treated him as a ruthless church politician. His defenders argue that Socrates was hostile, that no source has him ordering Hypatia’s death, and that a theologian’s doctrine stands or falls on its own merits.

What remains unresolved

Almost no one now disputes Cyril’s main claim, that Christ is one subject and the eternal Son is the one who was born and died. What remains open is whether Nestorius ever denied it, and whether Chalcedon’s “in two natures” kept faith with Cyril or broke with him. The answer still divides the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches from the Oriental Orthodox, though less sharply than it once did. The moral question also stays open: how a church should honor a theologian whose doctrine it accepts and whose conduct it cannot defend.