Ecumenical Commemoration
Bishop & Doctor of the Church
June 27 · d. 444
also known as Cyril of Alexandria, Cyril the Great
Cyril of Alexandria was the bishop who fought, and won, the battle to call Mary the Mother of God, Theotokos, the God-bearer, because the child she carried was God himself made flesh, one person and not two. At the Council of Ephesus in 431 his theology of the unity of Christ became the church's confession, and it has remained so ever since. He was also a hard and at times ruthless man, and the church has always honored his doctrine while being honest about his methods.
Cyril of Alexandria was born around the year 376 and became, in 412, the bishop of Alexandria in Egypt, one of the most powerful churchmen in the world. He was a formidable theologian and a formidable politician, and he is remembered for guarding a truth at the very center of the Christian faith, the truth of who exactly was born of Mary.
The fight came over a single word. The bishop of Constantinople, Nestorius, taught that Mary should be called the mother of Christ but not the Mother of God, since, he said, she had given birth only to the man Jesus, and God cannot be born. It sounded careful and reverent. Cyril saw that it pulled the savior in two. If the one born of Mary was only a man joined to God, then it was only a man who hung on the cross and only a man who rose, and the whole hope of the gospel, that God himself had entered our flesh to save it, came undone. So Cyril insisted that the child in the manger and the man on the cross were one single person, the eternal Word of God made flesh, and that Mary, having borne that one person in the flesh, was rightly called Theotokos, the one who bore God. He wrote it down as a line in the sand: if any one confess not that Emmanuel is in truth God, and that the holy Virgin is therefore Mother of God, for she bare after the flesh the Word of God made flesh, be he anathema.
At the Council of Ephesus in 431 the church agreed with Cyril, and Nestorius was condemned. It is a measure of the man that even his great victory was won partly by hardball, opening the council before his opponents could arrive and pressing his advantage without mercy, and that side of him should not be hidden. But the doctrine he defended was not his invention or his property; it was the faith of the church, that the one who was laid in the manger was God with us, Emmanuel. Cyril died in 444. The man's faults the church has never denied. The truth he guarded, that in Jesus God himself drew near enough to be carried in a young woman's arms, the church has never let go, and at every Christmas, when believers call Mary the Mother of God, they are confessing what Cyril fought to keep.
How we know Cyril is from his own large body of writing, the biblical commentaries, the dogmatic treatises such as On the Unity of Christ, and a substantial correspondence including the letters to Nestorius that the church received as standards of orthodoxy, together with the acts of the Council of Ephesus. For the political and personal story, including the parts that count against him, the chief source is the church historian Socrates Scholasticus, who wrote within a generation of the events and was no admirer of Cyril. Two shadows fall across his reputation, and an honest account names both. The first is his conduct at Ephesus, where he opened the council without waiting for the bishops of Antioch who were on their way, over the protest of dozens of bishops, and where he was accused of swaying the outcome with money and pressure. The second is the murder of the philosopher Hypatia, a pagan Neoplatonist much loved in Alexandria, who was seized and killed by a Christian mob in 415, during a bitter feud between Cyril and the city's imperial governor. Whether Cyril bore personal responsibility is genuinely disputed: the earliest source, Socrates, names a church reader as the mob's leader and does not charge Cyril directly, while later and hostile witnesses blame him, and modern historians divide over how far his rhetoric and his methods created the conditions for the killing. The achievement and the shadow belong to the same man, and the church has learned to hold them together rather than choose between them.
Cyril is honored as a Doctor of the Church in the West and as a great teacher among the fathers in the East, and his feast is kept on June 27. His enduring monument is the title Theotokos, Mother of God, which the Council of Ephesus affirmed and which remains a touchstone of orthodox Christology, confessed wherever the Incarnation is preached. His treatise On the Unity of Christ is still read as one of the clearest patristic defenses of the single person of the incarnate Word. The tradition about Cyril is appropriately divided, celebrating the doctrine while acknowledging the man, and that very division is instructive: it is a reminder that God has always guarded his truth through flawed and sometimes failing servants, and that the soundness of a doctrine does not depend on the saintliness of the one who defended it.
Further reading. Cyril's mature statement of his Christology is On the Unity of Christ, in John McGuckin's translation. The standard modern study of Cyril and the whole controversy is John A. McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy (1994); a shorter introduction with source extracts is Norman Russell, Cyril of Alexandria (2000).
Online resources. Cyril's Third Letter to Nestorius, with the Twelve Anathemas, is in the public domain in the Pusey translation online and in the acts of Ephesus in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, volume 14.
Almighty God, you gave your servant Cyril of Alexandria special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Nestorius /nɛˈstɔːriəs/; Theotokos /ˌθiːəˈtoʊkɒs/
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52