Who Was Cyril of Jerusalem?
Cyril was born around 313, probably in or near Jerusalem, and was ordained deacon and then priest in the city of his birth. Around 350 he became Bishop of Jerusalem, a position he held for nearly forty years, though his tenure was repeatedly interrupted: Cyril was exiled from his see three times, in 357, 360, and 367, as the Arian controversy – the great fourth-century dispute over whether the Son was truly equal to the Father or a created being of a lesser order – played out in shifts of imperial and ecclesiastical favor. Cyril was consistently on the side of what would become Nicene orthodoxy, and he attended the Council of Constantinople in 381, which confirmed the Nicene Creed and the doctrine of the Holy Spirit's divinity. He died in 386.
Cyril's major surviving work is his Catechetical Lectures, twenty-three instructions delivered to candidates preparing for baptism. The first eighteen were given during Lent, walking the candidates through the articles of the baptismal creed one by one; the final five, known as the Mystagogical Catecheses, were delivered during Easter week to the newly baptized, explaining the sacraments they had just received. What distinguishes Cyril's lectures is their setting: they were delivered in Jerusalem, in the buildings constructed over the sites of Christ's death and resurrection, to people who would be baptized, within days, in a baptistery near Golgotha itself.
Cyril is significant for TLA because his catechesis represents something close to the opposite of borrowed moral capital: not a fragment of truth detached from its source and operating, often unrecognized, at a distance, but a teaching delivered at the source itself, to people standing where the events the teaching describes are said to have occurred. Where TLA spends much of its attention on texts that carry moral weight their authors cannot fully account for, Cyril represents the limiting case of full accounting – a teacher who could, quite literally, point.
In Their Own Words
“Others merely hear, but we both see and touch.”
– Catechetical Lectures“I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible.”
– Catechetical Lectures, baptismal creed“He was crucified…and buried. He rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures.”
– Catechetical Lectures, baptismal creedSelected Bibliography
- Catechetical Lectures – 18 Lenten lectures on the baptismal creed
- Mystagogical Catecheses – 5 Easter-week lectures on the sacraments
- Letter to the Emperor Constantius