Cyril

The single name Cyril, given here with no Wikidata identifier, no encyclopedia article, and no epithet, see, companion, or century, does not identify one verifiable historical person. The Greek name Kyrillos (Latin Cyrillus), conventionally rendered Cyril in English and meaning roughly lordly or masterful, was borne by many Christian bishops, monks, missionaries, and martyrs across the Greek East, the Latin West, the Slavic churches, and the Oriental Orthodox communions. Because those men lived in different centuries and held different offices, none of the usual biographical fields—year of birth, year of death, places of birth or burial, feast day, religious order, or patronages—can be filled for an unspecified Cyril without silently substituting one famous figure for another. That substitution would be guesswork.

The three figures most often meant when English speakers say Saint Cyril are not interchangeable. Cyril of Jerusalem was a fourth-century bishop of Jerusalem, remembered for the Catechetical Lectures that describe baptism, the Eucharist, and the liturgy of Jerusalem; he is not the same man as the later Alexandrian patriarch. Cyril of Alexandria became patriarch of Alexandria in 412, played a decisive role at the Council of Ephesus in 431 in defending the title Theotokos for Mary, and died in 444; later tradition numbers him among the Doctors of the Church, and in the Coptic Church the bishop of Alexandria is styled pope, so this Cyril is sometimes counted as a pope of Alexandria as well as a patriarch. Constantine, a ninth-century scholar from Thessalonica, took the monastic name Cyril in Rome and, with his brother Methodius, worked in Great Moravia, devising a Slavic script and translating liturgical books; he died in 869 and is honoured with Methodius as an apostle to the Slavs. Their birth years, death years, feast days, and patronages differ, and none of those data may be attached to a bare name.

Hagiographical calendars and national churches preserve still other Cyrils: monastic founders such as Cyril of White Lake in northern Russia, the preacher Cyril of Turov among the East Slavs, early martyrs listed in the martyrologies, and a long series of later patriarchs and Coptic popes named Cyril or Kyrillos. Some of these men were monks and can be documented as unmarried; others were bishops whose family status is simply unrecorded. A few held the office of patriarch or, in the Alexandrian Coptic succession, of pope; most did not. Patronages attached to one Cyril (for example, the Slavic apostles as patrons of Europe, or Cyril of Alexandria in relation to Alexandria and to orthodox Christology) do not belong to the others.

This entry therefore leaves dates, places, offices, marital status, children, canonization or beatification, feast day, and patronages blank. Gender is given as male because the historical name Cyril in this onomastic and hagiographical setting is masculine; every other field would require choosing among unrelated lives. A source-based biography can be written only after the subject is fixed by a distinctive epithet, a see, a companion (such as Methodius), a century, or a catalogue identifier.