Ecumenical Commemoration
Bishop & Doctor of the Church
March 18 · d. 386
also known as Cyril of Jerusalem, Cyril of the Holy City
Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, taught the candidates for baptism in the city where the Church began. His Catechetical Lectures, delivered around the year 350 and preserved entire, walk the Creed article by article and remain the fullest surviving account of how a fourth-century church made Christians. He was deposed three times in the quarrel with Acacius of Caesarea, exiled for roughly eleven of his thirty-five years as bishop, and vindicated by a council in 382. He died in 386.
Cyril of Jerusalem stood in the great round church built over the tomb of Christ, and in front of him stood people who had given in their names for baptism. He was a priest then, not yet a bishop, and the work he had been given was to teach them. He did not hand them a book. He talked to them, day after day through Lent, and someone wrote it down, and that is how we still have his voice.
Listen to how he began. "Already there is an odour of blessedness upon you, O you who are soon to be enlightened: already you are gathering the spiritual flowers, to weave heavenly crowns." That is Edwin Hamilton Gifford's rendering of the Greek. Cyril was speaking to people who had not yet been washed, and he told them they already smelled of heaven.
He also told them the truth about the road. "But there is a serpent by the wayside watching those who pass by: beware lest he bite you with unbelief." He meant it plainly: between them and the water stood something that did not want them to reach it. Fifteen centuries later the American novelist Flannery O'Connor took up that dragon by the road as the figure for her own vocation, in a wording not quite Gifford's, and it has been quoted ever since by people who have forgotten it was ever about baptism.
Then he said the hardest thing a teacher can say. "Even to me, who tell you these things, give not absolute credence, unless thou receive the proof of the things which I announce from the Divine Scriptures." He was the man in the chair, and he told the people in front of him not to take his word for it.
He became bishop of that city around 350 or 351, and the trouble started at once. Caesarea, up the coast, held the administrative rank over all the bishops of Palestine, and Jerusalem held something older: it was the see of James, the first bishop of all. Acacius, the bishop of Caesarea, meant to keep the rank he had. When famine came to the city, Cyril sold the church's goods to buy food for the hungry, and Sozomen, writing a century later, says what he sold: the veil and the sacred ornaments of the church. Acacius made that the charge. Cyril was deposed in 357 and took shelter with Silvanus of Tarsus. He was deposed again around 360. He was banished again around 367, under the Emperor Valens, and that exile lasted until Valens died in 378. Something near a third of his episcopate was spent outside the city he was bishop of.
In 380, while the dust of all that was still settling, a synod at Antioch sent Gregory of Nyssa to Jerusalem to see what state the church there was in. Gregory found the faith itself sound and the city a prey to parties, troubled by the morals of clergy and people alike. That was the honest verdict of a friend.
The next year Cyril went to the Council of Constantinople and there accepted the word homoousios, which he had gone thirty years without saying. Socrates and Sozomen both call that an act of repentance. In 382 a council wrote of him: "Of the Church in Jerusalem, the Mother of all the Churches, we make known that Cyril the most reverend and most beloved of God is Bishop; and that he was canonically ordained long ago by the Bishops of the province, and that he has very often fought a good fight in various places against the Arians." The men who had said otherwise had been saying it for thirty years, and the Church's answer came in his lifetime.
He died in his own see, on 18 March, in the year 386. What he left is the thing he did first: a room full of people about to be baptised, told to prepare their hearts, told to pray day and night, told that the serpent was real and could be passed. "Have faith in-dwelling, stedfast hope, a strong sandal, that you may pass the enemy, and enter the presence of your Lord."
Cyril stood in front of people who had every reason to take his word for things, and told them not to: give not absolute credence even to me, unless you receive the proof from the Scriptures. He was not being modest. He was handing them something they could keep after he was gone, and he was gone often, three times deposed and years at a time out of the city. Consider who in your life you have been believing because of who they are rather than because of what they have shown you, and consider, too, what you are asking of the people who listen to you. Would you be willing to give them the means to check you?
The unusual thing about Cyril is that we have a great deal of what he said and very little of what happened to him. The Procatechesis, the eighteen Lenten Catechetical Lectures, and the five Mystagogic Catecheses survive complete, along with a letter to the Emperor Constantius, a homily on the paralytic at Bethesda, and three small fragments. None of it is autobiography. For his life we depend on the fifth-century church historians Socrates (writing about 439 to 443) and Sozomen (about 443 to 450), on Theodoret (about 449 to 450), and on Jerome, a younger contemporary who is the earliest witness and also the most hostile one. The connected chronology most often followed in English is that of E. H. Gifford, who wrote the Prolegomena to the 1893 Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers volume and translated the lectures there.
No ancient source gives his birth year. He was born probably in the early 310s; the figure is a modern back-calculation from Cyril's own remarks about what Jerusalem looked like before Constantine's builders arrived, on the reasoning that a man needs to be ten or twelve to carry such memories. He was ordained deacon by Bishop Macarius around 334 or 335, priest by Bishop Maximus around 343, and given charge of the catechumens around 347 to 350, the date resting on Cyril's own reckoning that he was speaking fully seventy years after the Emperor Probus.
His accession to the see, in 350 or 351, is genuinely contested. Jerome charges that Maximus had named the priest Heraclius as his successor, and that Cyril obtained the see only by repudiating his ordination by Maximus and accepting reordination from Acacius and other Arian-leaning bishops. Socrates and Sozomen tell it without any charge against Cyril: Acacius and Patrophilus expelled Maximus and gave the church to Cyril. Gifford judged Jerome's account incredible and strongly marked by personal prejudice, which is Gifford's verdict and not the Catholic Encyclopedia's, though it is often quoted as though it were. Two further things weigh against Jerome. The synodical letter of 382 states that Cyril was canonically ordained long ago by the bishops of the province, which is the nearest thing to a contemporary institutional judgement. And Sozomen places Heraclius after Cyril rather than before him, among the bishops who held Jerusalem while Cyril was out, which is not the sequence Jerome describes.
The exiles are better attested than their causes. The 357 deposition turned on the sale of church goods in famine; Sozomen names the veil and the sacred ornaments, and a further detail sometimes attached to the story, that a jewelled robe had been a gift of Constantine, comes from Theodoret rather than Sozomen and is not carried here. The Council of Seleucia in September 359 heard Cyril's case, Acacius withdrew rather than face him, and Cyril was briefly vindicated; a synod at Constantinople deposed him again around 360, on the charge of communing with the Homoiousian bishops Eustathius of Sebaste, Basil of Ancyra, and George of Laodicea. The third exile is usually dated to 367 by inference from the general dating of Valens's measures, and ended with Valens's death in 378.
The East keeps two days for Cyril. The first is 18 March, the day of his death, which the West keeps as well. The second is 7 May, and it commemorates not the man but something he reported: the cross of light seen over Jerusalem in 351, stretching from Golgotha to the Mount of Olives, which he described in his letter to the Emperor Constantius. The Coptic Church commemorates him on Paremhat 22.
What is missing from the record is worth saying plainly. There is no documented account of his burial, no tradition of his relics, no translation of them anywhere, no shrine. Search for "Saint Cyril" and relics together and you will be shown the tomb at San Clemente in Rome, but those are the relics of a different Cyril, the ninth-century apostle to the Slavs. There was no canonization process, because Cyril died twelve centuries before anything of the kind existed; the observance simply continued, and the Church later added the title of Doctor to it.
He is kept today as an optional memorial on 18 March in the Roman calendar, as "Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, Teacher of the Faith" on the same day in the Church of England's Common Worship, and on 18 March in the calendar of the ACNA Book of Common Prayer of 2019, which is this app's own liturgical inheritance. In iconography he wears the vestments of a bishop, as any bishop-saint does; the one image belonging to him alone is the cross of light.
Cyril's catechetical works are quoted here in the translation of Edwin Hamilton Gifford, revised from the Oxford Library of the Fathers version of 1838 (edited by John Henry Newman, with the translation largely by R. W. Church) and published in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 7, in 1893. It is freely available: the full set of lectures and Gifford's "Life of S. Cyril", which supplies the chronology, the statement that his parents' names are quite unknown, and the 382 synodical letter (transmitted by Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History V.9).
The passages quoted above are: the opening ("Already there is an odour of blessedness"), Procatechesis §1; the serpent by the wayside and "Have faith in-dwelling," Procatechesis §16, on the same page; "Even to me, who tell you these things," Catechetical Lecture 4 §17.
For the exiles and the famine sale, Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History IV, chapters 25 (the veil and sacred ornaments) and 30 (the intervening bishops). For Cyril's party affiliation, the death-date dissent, Gregory of Nyssa's visit of 380, and the description of the cross of light, the Catholic Encyclopedia, "St. Cyril of Jerusalem". For the manuscripts and the printed editions, NPNF2-07 Prolegomena §III, "Manuscripts and Editions".
Modern English translations: F. L. Cross, St. Cyril of Jerusalem's Lectures on the Christian Sacraments (London, 1951); William Telfer, Cyril of Jerusalem and Nemesius of Emesa, Library of Christian Classics (London, 1955); Leo P. McCauley and Anthony A. Stephenson, Fathers of the Church 61 (1969) and 64 (1970), the standard complete scholarly English version; Edward Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, Routledge Early Church Fathers (2000). On the disputed authorship of the Mystagogic Catecheses, W. J. Swaans in Le Muséon 55 (1942) and Alexis J. Doval, Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogue (Catholic University of America Press, 2001).
Whether he came home in 361 is disputed and should not be presented as settled. The Catholic Encyclopedia has Cyril returning when Julian recalled the bishops Constantius had exiled. Sozomen says the opposite: that Erennius held Jerusalem, then Heraclius, then Hilarius, until the reign of Theodosius, when Cyril was restored. That is three intervening bishops and no return under Julian at all.
His doctrinal position is the point on which candour costs least and helps most. The Catholic Encyclopedia says of him, in its own voice, that he belonged to the Semi-Arian, or Homoean party, and is content to declare that the Son is in all things like the Father. He avoided the Nicene homoousios for three decades and accepted it at Constantinople in 381, in what Socrates and Sozomen call an act of repentance. That is a change of position, not a return to one long held, and a summary that makes him a lifelong outspoken Nicene is a summary the sources do not support.
He died on 18 March 386, following Jerome's reckoning that he held the see eight years under Theodosius. Socrates gives 385. Leo XIII named him a Doctor of the Church in the 1880s or 1890s; the reachable sources give 1882, 1883, and 1893, the Vatican's own page gives no year at all, and no papal act was located, so no year is stated here.
The Mystagogic Catecheses, the five Easter-week lectures on baptism, chrismation, and the Eucharist, carry a live question of their own. Some manuscripts name Cyril's successor John II. W. J. Swaans argued for John on manuscript grounds in 1942; Alexis Doval argued for Cyril on stylometric grounds in 2001. Majority opinion favours Cyril, not unanimously, and the attribution is defended rather than simply given.
The text itself reaches us through roughly fifteen manuscript authorities. The oldest and most important is Codex Monacensis I. 394 at Munich, a parchment folio written in small uncials in the East around the tenth century, some six centuries after the lectures were spoken. Anton Augustin Touttée's Benedictine edition of 1720 stood for about a hundred and thirty years; Reischl and Rupp produced the modern critical edition at Munich in 1848 and 1860, altering the Benedictine text only where the evidence was very weighty.
Almighty God, you gave your servant Cyril of Jerusalem 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.
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52