Cyril of Alexandria

Cyril of Alexandria was among the most influential bishops and theologians of the late antique Christian world. He headed the Church of Alexandria as its patriarch from 412 until his death in 444 and is counted in the Coptic succession as Pope Cyril I. He was born in Egypt in the later fourth century, customarily dated by historians to about 376, into a family closely tied to the Alexandrian hierarchy; his uncle Theophilus was patriarch from 385 to 412. Cyril received a classical and scriptural education in the Alexandrian tradition and spent a formative period with the monks of Nitria before entering the clergy of the capital. In 403 he accompanied Theophilus to the Synod of the Oak near Chalcedon, which deposed John Chrysostom of Constantinople, an act that later required explanation when Cyril sought full communion with churches that venerated Chrysostom.

He succeeded Theophilus in 412 after a contested election in which a faction preferred the archdeacon Timothy. As patriarch he asserted the power of the Alexandrian see in a city that remained religiously mixed. He suppressed the Novatian community, closing their churches. Relations with Alexandria's Jews deteriorated into civic violence; the church historian Socrates Scholasticus, writing in the following decades, describes Cyril as leading or authorizing the expulsion of Jews from the city and the occupation of synagogues. In 415 a Christian crowd murdered the pagan philosopher and mathematician Hypatia. Ancient accounts, especially Socrates and later the pagan writer Damascius, place the crime in an atmosphere of conflict among the imperial prefect Orestes, the patriarch, and popular Christian groups including the parabalani. Modern historians continue to dispute how far Cyril instigated or condoned the murder; no surviving contemporary legal record convicts him, but the episode has permanently colored assessments of his rule in Alexandria.

Cyril's principal theological battle began when Nestorius, a monk of Antiochene training, became bishop of Constantinople in 428 and preached against calling Mary Theotokos (God-bearer), on the ground that she bore the man Christ rather than God the Word. Cyril judged this preaching to divide the one Christ into two subjects. He wrote to the Egyptian monks, then conducted a correspondence with Nestorius that included a second letter later received as a standard of orthodoxy and a third letter accompanied by twelve anathemas that Antiochene bishops found extreme. Pope Celestine I of Rome authorized Cyril to act against Nestorius. At the Council of Ephesus in 431, Cyril opened the council before John of Antioch and the Syrian bishops had arrived; the assembly deposed Nestorius and affirmed the title Theotokos. The delayed Oriental bishops held a rival synod deposing Cyril. The emperor Theodosius II briefly constrained both men. Nestorius was removed from Constantinople and later died in exile; Cyril returned to Alexandria. In 433 he and John of Antioch agreed to a Formula of Reunion that spoke of a union of two natures while preserving the unity of the incarnate Word and the Marian title.

Cyril was a prolific exegete and polemicist. His surviving works include the Glaphyra and the treatise On Worship in Spirit and Truth on the Pentateuch, commentaries on Isaiah and the minor prophets, a substantial commentary on the Gospel of John, homilies on Luke, an apology against the anti-Christian books of the emperor Julian, and numerous festal letters and dogmatic epistles. His preferred Christological phrase, one incarnate nature of God the Word, was later read in opposite ways: the churches that rejected the Council of Chalcedon in 451 appealed to Cyril as the measure of orthodoxy, while Chalcedonian Catholics and Eastern Orthodox also claimed him, interpreting that language as compatible with two natures after the union. He died at Alexandria in 444 and was succeeded by Dioscorus. The fifth-century churches already honored him as a father and saint. The Roman Catholic Church keeps his feast on 27 June and, in 1882, Pope Leo XIII declared him a Doctor of the Church. The Eastern Orthodox commemorate him on 18 January and in some calendars on 9 June; the Coptic Orthodox Church venerates him among the great popes of Alexandria. He was never Bishop of Rome, but he held the patriarchate and the traditional Alexandrian papal title of that ancient see.