A Catechesis Delivered on the Site
Most catechesis, in any era, is necessarily a teaching about events at a distance – geographical, temporal, or both. A candidate for baptism in fourth-century Antioch, or in any century in almost any place, learns the story of Christ's death and resurrection as something that happened elsewhere, some time ago, attested by texts and tradition rather than by the immediate evidence of the senses. Cyril's candidates in Jerusalem were not in this position. They received instruction on the articles of the creed – including the article concerning Christ's crucifixion, burial, and resurrection – in buildings constructed over the place where, according to the tradition Cyril represents, those events occurred, and they would be baptized, within days, in a font near that same site.
Cyril is explicit that this proximity matters to his teaching. He repeatedly draws his hearers' attention to where they are standing, what they can see, what previous generations of pilgrims have come to see. The catechesis is not merely verbal instruction that happens to take place in a particular location; the location is part of the instruction.
What See and Touch Adds to Hear
Cyril's phrase – “others merely hear, but we both see and touch” – draws a distinction TLA's framework depends on throughout: the distinction between a moral or theological claim received at a distance, mediated by report, and the same claim encountered at its source. Most of the authors TLA examines stand, with respect to the Christian moral inheritance their fiction draws on, in something like the position of those who “merely hear” – the inheritance reaches them culturally, often unrecognized as an inheritance at all, detached from the source that originally grounded it.
Cyril's catechumens occupy the opposite position, and Cyril's teaching is constructed to make the most of it. The creed they are learning is not, for them, a set of propositions about a distant past; it is a description of the ground they are standing on. This does not make their faith automatic or guaranteed – Cyril's lectures spend considerable effort on exactly the kind of moral and doctrinal instruction that any catechumen, anywhere, would need. But it removes one kind of distance entirely. The source of the claims and the claims themselves occupy the same place.
Genesis 3 and the Promise Made Good on the Ground
Genesis 3:15 is a promise made at the scene of the rupture it addresses – spoken to the serpent, in the presence of the man and the woman, in the same conversation that has just disclosed the rupture's reality. The promise is not delivered later, from elsewhere, as a report about something that will eventually be arranged. It is spoken into the actual situation it concerns, at the place where the situation exists.
What Cyril's catechumens stand on, in Cyril's account, is the place where that promise was kept – where, in the language of the creed they are learning, the one crushed the serpent's head even while being struck in the heel. TLA's broader argument is that secular fiction often carries moral weight whose source lies in this promise and its fulfillment, without the fiction's own framework being able to locate or account for that source. Cyril represents the case where the source is not merely acknowledged but stood upon, literally, by people being instructed in exactly what TLA argues other texts borrow without knowing it. “Others merely hear,” Cyril tells his catechumens, “but we both see and touch” – and what TLA adds, reading centuries of literature after Cyril, is that even those who have lost the ability to see and touch the source have not thereby lost everything the source gave. They have lost only the knowledge of where it came from.