Three Christological Treatises
Digital Verbum Edition
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Overview
Cyril, bishop of Alexandria from 412 to 444, is renowned both as one of the most authoritative of all the fathers of the church, and at the same time as one of the most controversial of all church politicians. He oversaw the final extinguishing of pagan religion from Alexandria, and also spent the height of his career as a statesman and an author fighting the doctrines of Nestorius, whose excommunication he brought about at the Council of Ephesus (431). Having spent the first fifteen years of his episcopate writing extensive commentaries on Scripture, from 429 onwards Cyril turned his enormous learning and talent for penning and distributing polemic tracts to the development of doctrinal orthodoxy after he sensed that the new ideas coming out of Constantinople threatened the very core of the Christian doctrines of Incarnation and salvation. The three treatises here translated into English for the first time all belong to the period around the ecumenical council. On Orthodoxy to Theodosius was written for the emperor, a year before the council met, with the aim of persuading him that Nestorius’s sermons were heretical and that his task as leader of both church and state was to ensure right religious observance. The Defense against the Bishops of Oriens and the Defense against Theodoret were written in the months leading up to the council when Cyril found himself required to defend his notorious “Twelve Chapters (or Anathemas),” which many bishops in other parts of the empire felt had gone too far in an anti-Nestorian direction. All three works were key parts of Cyril’s battle for orthodoxy and mark key moments in the church’s progress towards the definition of Christological orthodoxy that was made at Chalcedon.
Top Highlights
“‘I am the living bread who comes down from heaven; anyone who eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread which I give is my flesh, for the life of the world. The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the Father who sent me lives, so I also live because of the Father, and the one who eats me will live because of me.’153 And yet, surely his flesh did not actually come down from heaven as such, but came from the Virgin just as the Scriptures say it did? There are all sorts of ways of proving conclusively that it is not the Word as such that is eaten, but rather it is insofar as he has brought the properties of the two natures together into a single individual, a conjunction that was designed to bring salvation.” (Page 75)
“After all, is it not totally obvious to absolutely everyone that the Only-Begotten came among us as a complete man in order to set our earthly bodies free from the decay that is foreign to it, and that the saving union was the means by which he injected himself into our own way of life? And also so that by making the human soul his very own he might demonstrate that it was superior to sin, as if he had dyed it like a piece of wool with his own nature’s unshakeable immutability?” (Page 55)
“If they so argue, they will be exposed as ignorant of the overall purpose72 of the Incarnation and wholly failing to understand ‘the great mystery of religion.’73 If the Incarnation of the Only-Begotten (that is, his ‘being-made-man’) had no occasion besides making himself visible to those on earth, then nothing at all was added to human nature, and it would make far more sense for us to adhere to the opinions of the Docetists!” (Page 54)
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