Category Archives: St John

St Cyril and Salvation

27 Thursday Apr 2017

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In what sense, then, does the fact that Jesus is truly God and truly man, relate to our salvation? Unlike his admired predecessor, St Athanasius, St. Cyril does not use the word ‘theosis’ very often, but, nonetheless, the concept of our divinisation is central to his thought; indeed, set in the Alexandrian tradition, and soaked in the writings of St. Athanasius the Apostolic, it would have been amazing had that not been the case. St. Cyril expands our understanding of the famous Athanasian saying that: ‘He was made man so that we might be made god.’[1]

As relevant now, as then, was St. Cyril’s statement that someone who claimed to believe in God as a Christian must believe in God the Father, the Son who became Incarnate, and the Holy Spirit. [2]  The Holy Spirit is fully part of the Godhead, since ‘all things are by the Father, through the Son in the Spirit’; this characteristically Cyrilline formula is one he refers to again and again.

If we look at St. John 17.23: ‘I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one’, we see his conception of the ‘economy’ that has taken place for our salvation. The Word leaves His equality with God the Father, emptying Himself, as in Philippians 2, and taking upon Himself an earthly temple from the Virgin’s womb, He became one with us also, but He was still what He had always been: Christ is one and the Son is one. Even though the flesh is not of the nature of the Father and does not enjoy union with Him, it is still one with the Word and is thus in union with God. In no other way can man have union with God except through the Incarnate Word. The union with the Spirit, was a union without confusion with God the Word and in an inexpressible way, sanctified the flesh; only this way can St. Athanasius’ saying be properly understood. Only through The Word’s own flesh can we come into contact with the Trinity; only through Eucharist, through the flesh of Christ, can we participate in His divinity.

For St. Cyril, John 1.14 is especially relevant here: ‘he says not that the Word came into flesh, but that It was made Flesh, that you might not suppose that He came into it as in the case of the prophets or any other of the Saints by participation, but did Himself become actual Flesh, that is man’.  [In Jo. 1:14.]

This anti-docetic emphasis points us to the crux of his future disagreement with Nestorius, for it develops St. Athanasius’ soteriology; only through the Incarnate Word is God is able to lead humanity to deification. Both Saints are following the Pauline theme, developed in Philippians, of divine kenosis. The union of the divine and the human allows the sanctification and deification of humanity; through that we are united with the Father. Long before Nestorius preached, St, Cyril was teaching the truth expressed in St. Gregory of Nazianzus’ phrase: ‘what is not assumed cannot be healed.’ There are, as he shows us in his commentary on John 6:22, two stages in our sonship: the first, through the Incarnation, which is a sonship in general; the second comes in our personal participation in the divine nature through the Holy Spirit and the Eucharist.

For St. Cyril the renewal of mankind is not simply a return of man to his original state; like St. Irenaeus before him, he maintained that Christ ‘did not simply return man to his original state, but offers him gifts from God which were not in the possession of Adam.’ [3]  Adam did not partake of the divine nature; only in Christ did man receive divine sonship. Through the ‘second Adam’ mankind gains far than it had lost in the Fall: ‘we became diseased through the disobedience of the first Adam and his curse, but we have become rich through the obedience of the second and his blessings.’ [4]

Mankind cannot grasp this blessing by its own efforts; only through the mediation of the Spirit, in the sacraments, can we become sons of God. It is in St. Cyril that the concept of divinisation as taught by the earlier Fathers reaches full maturity. [5] :

‘God the Father therefore gives life to all things through the Son in the Holy Spirit’, [6] and the Son, by putting on our nature, refashions it to his own life. And he himself is also in us, for we have all become partakers of him, and have him in ourselves through the Spirit. For this reason, we have become ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Peter 1:4), and are reckoned as sons, and so too have in ourselves the Father himself through the Son.’ [In Jo. 14.20]

Salvation is the work of the whole Trinity, not of one part of it.

[1] St. Athanasius, De Incarnatione 54.

[2] Farag, 78 for full references.

[3] R.L. Wilken, Judaism and the Christian Mind (NY, 1971)

[4] Koen, p. 41, citing In Jo. 1:14.

[5] Keating, Theology of St. Cyril, p. 149.

[6] St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of St. Luke, part 1 (Oriental Orthodox Library, 2006, In Luc. 22:17-22 p. 569

 

 

St Cyril and the Incarnation

26 Wednesday Apr 2017

Posted by in Bible, Catholic Tradition, Early Church, Faith, st cyril of alexandria, St John

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Like most of the early Fathers, Cyril made no claims to originality, indeed it was of the essence of his method and belief that he brought nothing new to theology. As he pointed out in a letter to Acacius of Beroea: ‘I have been nurtured at the hands of holy and orthodox fathers;’ [1] and we see, in his use of Origen, St. Athanasius, St. Basil and St. Gregory Nazianzus, that far from possessing the arrogance attributed to him by his detractors, St. Cyril lies firmly in the best patristic tradition of adapting the insights of the past and adding, where appropriate, glosses of his own It was this enormous knowledge of Scripture, and of the exegetical tradition of the Church, which would make him such a formidable defender of orthodoxy in the controversy with Nestorius. So where does Cyril’s importance lie? If he simply wrote long allegorical commentaries of a sort which were once fashionable, but no longer serve any useful purpose, was Gibbon not right about him?

Orthodoxy proceeds by a process which might be described as dialectical in so far as a basic position which has been assumed to be so is challenged, and a debate follows. Yes, the ‘faith’ was ‘once delivered’, but despite the assumptions of some, aspects of doctrine turned out not to be clear. As early as the writing of St John’s Epistle, converts were arguing about whether Jesus was God, and if so, what that meant for the idea of monotheism; how could Jesus be God and God be one? If Jesus was God, was his mother then the mother of God? What did that mean? But what did it mean is Mary was not in some sense the Mother of God. This is where St Cyril made an enormous contribution to our understanding. Instead of simply saying that Jesus was God, but it was all a mystery, and Mary might or might not have been the Mother of God in some sense, Cyril; brought his huge learning and Scriptural knowledge to his job as a Pastor of Souls. His theological writing was designed with one purpose in mind – the salvation of souls. How was man saved? He is saved, Cyril argued, by Christ becoming man. But if He had just become a man, then how would that save us? He must also have been God? But what did that mean? The Incarnation is at the heart of his doctrine of salvation, and for him, any message that detracted from the full humanity and full divinity of the Incarnate Word threatened the salvation of his flock.

An examination of St. Cyril’s comments on St. John’s Gospel give us an insight into the formation of his thought on this important issue.

To our way of thinking, St. Cyril’s Commentary on the Gospel of St. John is an odd one. We are used to commentaries which deal equally with all verses, but this is not the Patristic model. The first book, which when printed covers 168 pages, deals only with St. John 1:1:1-28; the second, which covers 293 printed pages, deals with St. John 1:29-5:34; John 5:35-6:37 are covered in the 116 pages of book 3, whilst book 4 takes 159 pages to comment on John 6:38-7:24; book 5 requires 171 pages to deal with John 7:25-8.43, and it takes him 12 books in all to cover the whole Gospel. So it can be seen that like many of the early exegetes, it is the earlier part of the Gospel which commands most of his attention; he takes three chapters to examine John 1:1 alone, and then another hundred pages to get to verse 28. The Incarnation as described by St. John is at the centre of his thought. Although the modern Western practice is to separate Christology from Soteriology, such a distinction was not only unknown to St. Cyril, it would have run counter to his mode of thinking. The Holy Trinity is at the heart of our salvation, as it is of St. Cyril’s theology. 

A key Cyrilline text is St. John 16:15: ‘All that the Father has is mine, therefore I said that He will take what is mine and share it with you.’ In his writings on the Trinity, St. Gregory Nazianzus had used this verse to emphasise that there was nothing which was ‘peculiar’ to any one of the Persons of the Trinity: ‘For their being itself is common and equal, even though the Son receives it from the Father.’ [2] This anti-Sebellian line is also emphasised by St. Cyril using the same verse, when he argues that it shows that the Spirit does not possess His wisdom by participation in the Son. If ‘He will take what is mine’, St. Cyril writes, it is because the Spirit ‘is consubstantial with the Son and proceeds through Him as befits God, who possesses in its perfection all the virtue and all the power of the Son.’ The Holy Spirit is like ‘a living and active fragrance from the substance of God, a fragrance which transmits to the creature that which comes from God and ensures participation in the substance which is above all substances.’ It is interesting that St. Cyril, as so often, uses an analogy which is not connected with the thought processes; by such means he emphasises that through the Spirit  we not only receive knowledge of the divine nature, we actually participate in it:

 If in effect the fragrance of aromatic plants impregnates clothing with its own virtue and in some way transforms into itself that in which it finds itself, how does the Spirit not have the power, since it issues from God by nature, to give, by itself to those in which it finds itself the communication of the divine nature? [In Jo 11:1-2, dealing with St. John 16:14-16.]

St Cyril eschews mechanistic analogies, and even though he cannot, at times, avoid philosophical and technical terms, he always tries to write about the Trinity in terms which appeal to the empathy of his readers.

[1] Russell, St Cyril p. 4, note 18, which I have preferred to Fr. McGuckin’s version at p. 339 of his book.

[2] P. Schaff and H. Wace, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series 2, volume VII (Grand Rapids, 1996 edn.), St. Gregory Nazianzen, ‘The Fourth Theological Oration, XI, p. 313.

John’s Gospel

13 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by in Bible, Early Church, Faith, Reading the BIble, St John

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When I was a young man at University my tutors had a firm line on St John’s Gospel. They were agreed that it was a second century document; that it was a product of Hellenistic thinking; that it had in it Gnostic elements; and that whoever had written it, it could not have been the ‘Beloved disciple’ who stood at the foot of the cross. One of the pleasures of growing older has been to see nearly every element in this exploded.

The conclusion that it was second century came from the belief among scholars back then that its theology was far too complex for the early Church. The fragment of St John’s Gospel now at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, known as P52, is thought to date from around 120 AD. It was found in Egypt. No one believes it was written there, so it is a copy. We cannot know where it originated or how many copies there were in circulation at the same time. We do know it takes time for copies to be made and to circulate, and it is not unreasonable to suppose it might have taken a decade between the composition of the Gospel and its arrival in Egypt. Modern scholarship suggests, in other words, that c.100 A.D. is probably the latest date for its composition.

Bishop John Robinson was a controversial figure for the views he expressed in his book Honest to God, but for me, his best book remains Redating the New Testament which was published in 1976. His views, as ever, did not command universal support, but in terms of the dating of the Scriptures, there are strong arguments in his favour. For him there was one fact as of fundamental importance – the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70. A datable fact, and one which rocked the Jewish world on its foundations, it is never once mentioned in any of the NT books; this, Robinson pointed out, is exceedingly odd. It is like someone writing a history of modern Britain and not mentioning world war II; you would do that only if you were writing before that war had taken place.

By the 1950s the conventional consensus was something like this:

50-1 I and II Thessalonians
53-6 Galatians, Philippians, I and II Corinthians, Romans
56-8 Colossians, Philemon
c.70 Mark
70-90 Luke
80-90 Acts, Hebrews
80-100 Matthew, Ephesians
90-5 I Peter, Revelation
90-100 John
90-110 I-III John
-100 James
c.100 Jude
100+ I and II Timothy, Titus
125-50 II Peter

Much of this, Robinson pointed out, was based on theories of what theological developments it was supposed were relevant to what date; anything ‘advanced’ had to be late, and as John’s Gospel was, theologically speaking, very sophisticated, that meant it must be the latest. That rather presupposes the conclusion you want to reach, and seems an unreliable method.

The early church was very cautious about claims of texts to be apostolic, there needed to be a real tradition about the provenance of a Gospel, and John’s was accepted from the beginning. It is impossible to read the text without coming to the conclusion that the person is claiming to be the Beloved Disciple. Much paper and ink have been spent on the notion of a Johannine comunity, the existence of which (outside those pages) has never been shown to exist, and yet, on the basis of an academic construct, scholars have argued that the text is not by John but by others in his name. The evidence for this is the supposed existence of the ‘community’. The circular element in this argument is all to apparent, but if we read the text without the presuppositions scholars brought to it, then we have no need to assume other authorship.

Scholars have extrapolated from the tradition that John lived to a grand old age, and assumed that the Gospel must have been written towards the end of his life; for this there is no hard evidence. The end of the Gospel is clearly written by another hand after John’s death, but that is no reason to assume that the rest of it was also written in the late first century. The similarities between some of the ideas in the Dead Sea Scrolls and John’s Gospel kicks the props away from the old theory that it had to be late because of Hellenistic influence; there was much more interpenetration between Hebrew and Greek thought than scholars once recognised. As Robinson puts it: ‘The gospel shows the marks of being both Palestinian and Greek – in contrast with the Qumran literature which is Palestinian and Hebrew. I am not convinced that this simple difference has been given sufficient weight.’

Kilpatrick’s conclusion about St John is worth quoting:

What have we learned about him? A poor man from a poor province he does not seem to have been a bookish person. In Greek terms he was uneducated with no contact with the Greek religious and philosophical literature of his day. This creates a problem: how does a man without these contacts have so many apparent similarities to a writer like Philo in his thought? As his material conditions as far as we can elicit them indicate a man of Palestinian origin it seems reasonable to look for the background of his presentation of the Gospel there. Our sources of information will be the LXX and related works, the literature of the Qumran and the Rabbinic texts especially the traditions of the Tannaim. On other counts we arc being forced to recognize that notions we have associated with Hellenistic Judaism were not unknown and not without influence in Palestinian Judaism in the first century AD.

Robinson’s conclusion on the date is as follows:

30-50 Formation of the Johannine tradition and proto-gospel in Jerusalem
50-55 First edition of our present gospel in Asia Minor
60-65 II, III and I John
65 + The final form of the gospel, with prologue and epilogue.

If we take on board the witness of the early Fathers, then there is no evidence of any ‘community’ at work in the writing of the Gospel. Possibly our earliest independent witness is Papias of Hieropolis, writing in the early second century, and acquainted with those who had talked with the Apostles and other eyewitnesses. What survives of his prodigious output are small fragments embedded in Eusebius. Using this material, and analysing the text, scholars such as Martin Hengel and Richard Bauckham have challenged the views of more liberal scholars, that the book was a compilation, and even the view of Raymond Brown that it was the product of a ‘Johannine community’; Bauckham attributes it to the ‘John the elder’, who is mentioned by Eusebius as the author of ‘Revelation’.

Their arguments are ingenious, but unnecessary, and they do what is all too common in modern scholarship, fail to take into account the authorial voice. It would be very hard to read John’s Gospel and not assume he was the one who had leant on the Lord’s breast at the last supper. If (and Hengel and Bauckham suggest) this John ‘the elder’ was prominent enough in the church to have produced 4 or 5 books of the New Testament Canon, surely more steps would have been taken to distinguish him from John the son of Zebedee. The early church went to great lengths to distinguish between James the brother of Jesus and James the son of Zebedee, and between the numerous men named “Judas.” It seems strange that ‘John the elder’, the author of five conical books, would have falenl off of the historical radar. (Note also the distinction in the Synoptics between John the Baptist and John the son of Zebedee. If it weren’t for the latter John, perhaps John the Baptist would just be known as “John.”)

I can see no reason to suppose that in place of the eye-witness of the Last Supper we need another chap called ‘John’. It reminds me of the old joke that the Illiad wasn’t written by Homer, but by another fellow of the same name.

Raising Lazarus: the view from the Church Fathers

02 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by in Bible, Commentaries, Early Church, Faith, St John

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What follow is a collection of the reflections of the Fathers on today’s Gospel reading.

 

John 11:1-45

St Augustine reminds us that Lazarus is raised from the dead by the one who created all things and brings new life to all mankind. St Cyril of Alexandria tells us that in mentioning the names of Martha and Mary, the Evangelist is showing us why the Lord loved them for their piety and devotion to Him. He mentions the tale of Mary and the ointment to show that she had such a thirst for Him that she wiped His feet with her hair, seeking to fasten to herself the spiritual blessing that comes from the Holy flesh. She often sits close to Him and is clearly devoted to her Lord. All the more reason then to stress, as Chrysostom does, that this Mary is not the harlot mentioned in Matthew 26:7.

Gregory of Nyssa’s account describes how Christ’s absence gives death the chance to do its work. Chrysostom is not slow to point out that even those closest to Jesus are not spared suffering, sorrow and death. Those, he tells us, who are offended by such things ‘do not know that those who are especially dear to God have it as their lot to endure such things.’

Peter Chrysologus describes the way in which the miracle of Lazarus is quite different from those where Jesus raised the daughter of Jairus, or the widow’s only son. Here death has already exerted its full power. Jesus lets death do its worst, and then he does His best – and we see here the power of the Son of God writ large in all its glory.

St Augustine comments on the terms in which the sisters wrote to Jesus. They said that the one whom he loved was ill. They did not ask for healing, but expressed their faith that love does not abandon the object of itself; they knew he would not abandon them. But rather, as St Cyril reminds us, Jesus saw that this would be turned to glory of God, when men saw His power; and He and God are one, for here Jesus says that ‘the Son of God’ might be glorified.

Yet the disciples were, as Augustine comments, fearful, so Jesus reproves them. Christ is the day, His Apostles the twelve hours, and it is not the time to withdraw whilst the Light is with them; the day is followed by the hours; the Apostles follow Jesus. St Athanasius reminds us that everyone who walks in the Light will be saved, but those who turn aside and walk in the darkness will be lost. The upright need fear no ill.

Augustine tells us that in saying that Lazarus is only sleeping, Jesus foreshadow what is to come, since all those who die in faith will be raised again, and so they are, indeed, only sleeping. Jesus did not need to go to Lazarus to raise him, but chose to do so in order that all men should know by whose power this miracle was wrought – including in this number his own disciples. Jesus uses this episode to instruct his own disciples who do not see clearly yet. Thomas the twin grasps the notion that one must die with Jesus to be raised with him, and yet he does not know the fullness of what he says; when the moment comes, he, like the others, will not be there. Of all the Apostles, only St John is at the foot of the Cross.

Origen sees in Mary’s absence the fact that she was quietly and prayerfully hopeful, trusting in the Lord, whilst the more active Martha wanted to rush to Jesus and seek his help. She, too, believes unconditionally. Augustine points out that she does not ask Jesus to raise her brother, she leaves to him the decision on what to do; our faith should imitate that; it is His will, not our will that must be done. Jesus is not the God of the dead but of the living, for those who believe on Him shall not die. As Paul tells us in 1 Thess 4:13-14, those who are asleep in Christ will rise with Him. He is the Life and the Resurrection.

Peter Chrysologus tells us that Christ, and Mary and the Jews all weep. That Mary should have wept was natural since she was the sister and had until that point no comforter. The Jews wept because they were in the presence of that death which is the lots of sons of Adam; as he was then, so would they be soon.. Jesus weeps because he is calling to mind the joy which the resurrection will give to those whom he loves. Chrysostom thinks that Jesus weeps here to show how human he is and to show he shares our sorrow. He asks where they have laid him so that the Jews will come with him to see the miracle.

Jesus is moved because he loves his friend, and his heart goes with those who sorrow. Martha, ever the practical one, intervenes to warn Jesus about what will happen if the stone is removed, but He reproaches her for her unbelief. She believes, and it is her belief and that of Mary which. St Cyril tells us, raises their brother to life. Jesus is the source of life and of hope, and if we will trust him then it will end as he wishes. Jesus thanks His Father, as we should, and like him, we should lift our eyes in prayer. This, Athanasius reminds us, is the voice that spoke the world into creation, and the one that will call us from the tomb at the last day. The unbinding of Lazarus is the type of our being freed from the bonds of sin; many of us are like Lazarus, trapped in the tomb until released by the word of Jesus. That word removes from death its sting, and we can look forward to the resurrection and death has to let us go. But the Jews were confused: some believed, some did not. How hard are the hearts of those who are blind.

The feast day of St John the Divine

27 Tuesday Dec 2016

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Today, by long tradition, the Church celebrates the feast of St John, the disciple whom Jesus ‘loved best’. He it was who, again according to tradition, rested upon the Saviour’s breast at the Last Supper, and it was to him that Jesus entrusted His mother in his final agonies on the Cross. The same tradition which tells us these things, tells us he is the author of the Gospel and the three epistles which bear his name; it also tells us he is the author of the vision captured in the ‘Apocalypse’ or ‘Revelation of St John the Divine’. That same tradition tells us that he lived to a great old age.

As the last surviving Apostle, St John provided a direct link back to the earthly ministry of Jesus. Tradition has it that he was much revered by the local community, and that in old age he would be asked often to sum up the message of the Lord Jesus. His answer sometimes disappointed those who expected some profound statement of doctrinal truth. He would say: “My little children, love one another.” After hearing this advice over and over again, several members of the congregation asked St. John: “Master, why do you always say this?” He replied with a gentle smile: “It is the Lord’s command. And if this alone be done, it is enough!”

The image of the last of the Apostles haunted the imagination of the Victorian poet, Robert Browning, who wrote a now all but forgotten poem about his death, called ‘A Death in the Desert’:

If I live yet, it is for good, more love

Through me to men: be nought but ashes here

That keep awhile my semblance, who was John,—

Still, when they scatter, there is left on earth

No one alive who knew (consider this!)

—Saw with his eyes and handled with his hands

That which was from the first, the Word of Life.

How will it be when none more saith ‘I saw’?”

At that point in history, the Apostolic tradition became wholly from memory. But St John had already committed to paper his own account of Jesus, as well as letters to his church and, again if we can credit tradition, written the Revelation whilst in exile on Patmos.

Despite the modern fashion for doubting whether St. John wrote the letters, Gospel and Apocalypse which bear his name, the early church was in no doubt: these books were included in the canon because they were his work; it may be that, as in so much else, we imagine ourselves as so much wiser than the ancients; but it may be, as so often, that we are not so. After all, Polycarp, who was ordained by St John, taught St Irenaeus, and neither of them seemed in any doubt.

The wonderful prologue to the Gospel gives us a true poetic insight into the Divine origin of Jesus, and poses for us the question with which all Christology grapples – how God can have been human and divine – as well as answering it. His understanding that Christ was fully human and fully divine clearly failed to appeal to those who wished to reduce Him to something their imaginations could grasp. St. John was far from meek and mild towards those who denied the truth. This we see in his epistles, but also in the tradition which St. Irenaeus had from Polycarp of his encounter with a notorious heretic Cerinthus in a bath-house. Hearing that the latter was within, John started back, and said “Let us, my brethren, make haste and be gone, lest the bath, wherein is Cerinthus the enemy of the Truth, should fall upon our heads.”

We see the same concern for truth in his epistles, which suggest that not even the witness of the last of the Apostles was enough for some men who claimed to be led by the Spirit. John bore witness to the Truth – a person, not a concept. Like so many of the followers of Jesus, John had seen through a glass darkly, but thereafter he saw in the bright light of the Resurrection. We cannot know precisely why he wrote his Gospel, but we can see clearly enough what drives it – indeed he states as much himself (John 20:31):

these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.

It is not like the other Gospels. It tells us but little about the life of Jesus, perhaps assuming that those interested in such things already had access to the accounts of Matthew, Mark and Luke. But what it does tell us unambiguously is what heretics doubted from reading the other texts – which is that Jesus was Divine. He was the Word who, from the beginning, spoke creation into existence. It is not accidental that he concentrates heavily on Christ’s controversies with His opponents; John faced the same doubters throughout his ministry. He stresses his credentials as an eye-witness, and those who take it upon themselves to doubt his testimony, strike at the heart of what he is about – which is the distinction between truth and falsehood. John is, above all, a witness to the Truth and calls us to believe that Jesus is indeed the Christ.

 

St John the Evangelist, pray for us!

 

Images of God

02 Sunday Oct 2016

Posted by in Bible, Faith, Reading the BIble, Salvation, St John

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paraklet_com

God is Infinite; we are not. That being so, it is natural that two things follow: we do not fully comprehend Him; and we tend to emphasise the parts of Him that seem most relevant to us. To these limitations, we can add our own sinful natures. Little wonder that we need Christ to save us and to show us more clearly who God is. But even there we have to be careful of our own limitations. Christ spoke in hyperbole at times. For example, if my right eye happened to catch a rather fetching young lady and my thoughts turned in a direction they should not have as a result, then should I actually do what the Lord says in Matthew 5:29? As I look round, I see no one with gouged out right eyes, so I assume either that everyone is utterly immune from the temptations which sight can bring, or that we are, and we all understand that what Jesus is really saying is not ‘rip your eye out’ but that we should exercise caution and be aware of occasions of sin. But if anyone wants to be a literalist here, let me know and I can recommend help.

If we are not literalists here, why are we about, say, Matthew 25:31-33 or Luke 13:24? Well, few of us would feel that we wanted to rip out our right eye, but many would feel more comfortable with the idea that whilst they, following the narrow way, were going to be saved, many others – those sinners over there, who I am not like – were going to get the just desserts for their sinful ways; that is a part of our fallen human nature. It is less clear, or so it seems to me, that Jesus thought this way. His strictures towards those who did, indeed, think of themselves as being better than that sinner over there are clear from Luke 18:9-14. The Law of Moses was absolutely literal about the penalty for being caught in adultery (Lev 20:10; Deut. 22:20) and it was precisely for that reason that the Pharisees thought they would catch Jesus out by bringing the woman caught in adultery to Him. Tired of his preaching of mercy and love, they presented him with a case which they thought would oblige him either to abandon that teaching, or to clearly break the Law; either way, they would have been able to discredit him. We know the result, the Lord of Creation confronted those judgmental men with their own sins, and so touched their hearts that not one of them could play the hypocrite by throwing the first stone.

That interesting word Paraclete might detain us for longer than it usually does. The Church teaches is He is the Holy Spirit, but that Greek word covers a variety of meanings, including ‘advocate’ – He is our advocate, as Jesus is our mediator. If you want to think of it in terms of courts, when we get to the final judgment we have a powerful advocate and a mediator. Let us take Saul of Tarsus, a nasty, judgmental sort of fellow if ever there was one. A well-educated Pharisee, he has no time for those backsliding  followers of the crucified prophet Jesus, and was happy to persecute them. We are not shown any sign that he repented of his sins before that scene on the Damascus Road. How could he move from non-repentance to repentance in the twinkling of an eye? St John gives us the answer in 1 John 4:19 – he loved us first. If we will but repent, then we can receive that love. It is there already, only our false pride and our blindness prevent us from seeing it and receiving it.

Even on the Cross in agony, one of the last things Jesus did before surrendering his Spirit was to ask for forgiveness for those who, moments earlier, had hammered nails into his hands. So, yes, sheep and goats will be separated, but to assume, as some do, that we have to take Jesus literally when he says ‘many’ will not be saved, but not when he tells us to pluck our eye out, raises interesting questions about how we, as individuals, emphasise those parts of Scripture which seem most relevant to us. Jesus is warning us about ourselves, he is telling us not that we should literally tear our eye out, he is warning us of the effects of sin; so, too, is he doing when he talks to us about sheep and goats. If we will but receive him, he will redeem us. He knows, alas, that many of us will reject him, but he still loves us, and he wants us all to be saved. That we shall not all be is down not to a vengeful God, but to a foolish and prideful humanity which in its folly rejects the offered love because it has not the humility to receive it.

St Cyril and the theology of the Incarnation

01 Friday Jul 2016

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As we can see from this brief survey of St. Cyril’s theology, the Incarnation was at the heart of all his thinking. The Incarnate Word unites our nature with that of God as a salvific act; the power of the one heals and transforms the marred nature of the other. It was essential to this scheme that the Word suffered, albeit ‘impassibly’. There is only one personal reality in the Incarnate Lord, and that subject is the divine Word who has made a human nature His own; the Word has not simply adopted a body, He has taken on a whole human life; He is ‘the Word enfleshed.’ [McGuckin, p. 186.] The whole point of the Incarnation is that through it, our fallen nature is redeemed and restored and we become, once again, what God meant us to be, recreated in His divine image. Christ’s flesh is, indeed, ‘life-giving’. If His flesh were not divine flesh it could not heal us, but if it were not also flesh, we could not receive its healing at the Eucharistic Feast. What Christ deifies in his own flesh, he deifies through Grace in mankind.

This was the position St. Cyril enunciated against the heresies from Constantinople and Antioch, and he had found it years before in his commentary on St. John 1:11-13, where he realised that the Incarnation had three aims: to condemn sin in the flesh; to overcome death by his death; and to make us children of God by which we receive a regeneration in the Spirit. [ Farag, p. 111.] As Professor Keating so aptly remarks: ‘There is something of grandeur, and even beauty, in Cyril’s conception of our share in the life of the triune God.’ Keating, Divine Life, p. 205.]

It has long been held in parts of the Protestant tradition that patristic exegesis is, in fact, eisegesis – that is a misreading of the Bible. Despite the fact that the Fathers helped establish what was, and was not, the canon of Holy Scripture, we are asked to believe that their inspiration failed them when they came to examine the same texts. This is not the Orthodox understanding, for it separates text, meaning and action. St. Cyril was not just a theologian; he was a bishop and pastor, a great teacher who held responsibility before God for his flock. He wrote not for the academic journal, but for the salvation of souls. Everything he confessed he derived from Scripture and from the Alexandrian Holy Tradition of which it is such an important part, and in setting his own mark upon that tradition he is, indeed, ‘the Seal of the Fathers.’

St. Cyril wrote not for himself, nor for posterity, but as a pastor. He was the servant of that shepherd who had died for His sheep; he was willing to do the same. Every word he wrote was for the salvation of souls. We should remember that this is the true purpose of theology.

St Cyril, St John and salvation

30 Thursday Jun 2016

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No brief survey can do justice to St. Cyril’s multiple contributions to our understanding of the Faith ‘once received’: his Trinitarianism and his Christology are the very summit of the achievement of the Eastern Fathers. His debt to Origen, St. Athanasius and to the Cappadocians, as well as to St. Irenaeus is obvious, but he brought their work to a new perfection. If the Western traditions have not always given him the credit that is his due – and his absence from the standard edition of the Church Fathers is much to its detriment – then he has remained a powerful influence on the Oriental Orthodox tradition, not least in his own Coptic Church. A true Christology has to be related to a true soteriology, one that really transforms mankind and raises us to life in God.

This was why, when St. Cyril heard that Nestorius was speaking of the ‘two natures’ of Christ, he became concerned. He told bishop Succenus that because Nestorius ‘isolates the individual man born of the holy Virgin and likewise the individual Son, the Word from God the Father’; he ‘declares the holy Virgin is not the mother of God but mother of the man.’ [L. Wickham, Cyril of Alexandria: Selected Letters, (Oxford, 1983), p. 73]  The correct doctrine is that Christ is the pre-eternal Word born of the Virgin. St. Cyril knew that some were accusing him of an Appolinarian understanding of the Incarnation, and thought he was teaching a merger or a mingling of the two natures. This he dismissed as a ‘slander’, asserting what his own Church has ever held:

We affirm that the Word from God the Father united to himself in some inscrutable and ineffable manner, a body endowed with mental life and that he came forth, man from woman, become what we are, not by change of nature but in gracious fulfilment of God’s plan. In willing to become man he did not abandon his being God by nature; though he descended to our limited level and worse the form of a slave, even in that state he remained in the transcendent realms of Godhead and in the Lordship belonging to his nature.

So we unite the Word from God the Father without merger, alteration or change to holy flesh owning mental life in a manner inexpressible and surpassing understanding, and confess one Son, Christ and Lord, the self-same God and man, not a diverse pair but one and the same, being and being seen to be both things. [Wickham, p. 73]

There is ‘one incarnate nature of the Word’, and after union, there should be no speaking of two natures.

St. Cyril has, of course, been criticised for his use of the phrase ‘the one incarnate nature of God the Word’, and some hold that he was ‘taken in’ by an Appolinarian forgery which he thought Athansian in origin. A full discussion of this topic lies beyond what can be discussed here, [McGuckin, St. Cyril, Chapter 3, for a full discussion.]  but this does him a serious injustice. As he wrote to his agent in Constantinople. Eulogius: ‘there is no obligation to reject everything heretics say – they affirm many of the points we too affirm. [Wickham, p. 63] Apollinarius had come to the wrong conclusion, but he had identified the need for the Church to confess a single subject in the Incarnate Word. This had been at the heart of Alexandrian theology from Origen’s day, and has led even recent scholars to assert that ‘a single subject Christ, with an emphasis on Christ’s divinity’ was part of the Alexandrian tradition. [Susan Wessel, Cyril of Alexandra and the Nestorian Controversy (Oxford, 2004).p.2.] But this is to misread things. St. Cyril’s soteriology was a dynamic one, in which, as we have seen, it enfleshment and the Logos were both essential parts of the Cyrilline vision.

St Cyril and the Incarnate Word

28 Tuesday Jun 2016

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Although it is often observed that St. Cyril does not use the word ‘theosis’ very often, the concept of our divinisation is central to his thought; indeed, set in the Alexandrian tradition, and soaked in the writings of St. Athanasius the Apostolic, it would have been amazing had that not been the case. St. Cyril expands our understanding of the famous Athansian saying that: ‘He was made man so that we might be made god.’ St. Athanasius, De Incarnatione 54.]

As relevant now, as then, was St. Cyril’s statement that someone who claimed to believe in God as a Christian must believe in God the Father, the Son who became Incarnate, and the Holy Spirit. [Farag, 78 for full references.]  The Holy Spirit is fully part of the Godhead, since ‘all things are by the Father, through the Son in the Spirit’; this characteristically Cyrilline formula is one he refers to again and again.

If we look at St. John 17.23: ‘I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one’, we see his conception of the ‘economy’ that has taken place for our salvation. The Word leaves His equality with God the Father, emptying Himself, as in Philippians 2, and taking upon Himself an earthly temple from the Virgin’s womb, He became one with us also, but He was still what He had always been: Christ is one and the Son is one. Even though the flesh is not of the nature of the Father and does not enjoy union with Him, it is still one with the Word and is thus in union with God. In no other way can man have union with God except through the Incarnate Word. The union with the Spirit, which was a union without confusion with God the Word and in an inexpressible way, sanctified the flesh; only this way can St. Athanasius’ saying be properly understood. Only through The Word’s own flesh can we come into contact with the Trinity; only through Eucharist, through the flesh of Christ, can we participate in His divinity. [Koen, p. 20.]

For St. Cyril, John 1.14 is especially relevant here: ‘he says not that the Word came into flesh, but that It was made Flesh, that you might not suppose that He came into it as in the case of the prophets or any other of the Saints by participation, but did Himself become actual Flesh, that is man’.  [In Jo. 1:14.]

This anti-docetic emphasis points us to the crux of his future disagreement with Nestorius, for it develops St. Athanasius’ soteriology; only through the Incarnate Word is God is able to lead humanity to deification. Both Saints are following the Pauline theme, developed in Philippians, of divine kenosis. Through the union of the divine and the human, He allows the sanctification and deification of humanity; through that we are united with the Father. Long before Nestorius preached, St, Cyril was teaching the truth expressed in St. Gregory of Nazianzus’ phrase: ‘what is not assumed cannot be healed.’ There are, as he shows us in his commentary on John 6:22, two stages in our sonship: the first, through the Incarnation, which is a sonship in general; the second comes in our personal participation in the divine nature through the Holy Spirit and the Eucharist.

For St. Cyril the renewal of mankind is not simply a return of man to his original state; like St. Irenaeus before him, he maintained that Christ ‘did not simply return man to his original state, but offers him gifts from God which were not in the possession of Adam.’  R.L. Wilken, Judaism and the Christian Mind (NY, 1971)]  Adam did not partake of the divine nature; only in Christ did man receive divine sonship. Through the ‘second Adam’ mankind gains far than it had lost in the Fall: ‘we became diseased through the disobedience of the first Adam and his curse, but we have become rich through the obedience of the second and his blessings.’  [Koen, p. 41, citing In Jo. 1:14.]  Mankind cannot grasp this blessing by its own efforts; only through the mediation of the Spirit, in the sacraments, can we become sons of God. It is in St. Cyril that concept of divinisation as taught by the earlier Fathers reaches full maturity.[Keating, Theology of St. Cyril, p. 149.[Keating, Theology of St. Cyril, p. 149.]  ‘God the Father therefore gives life to all things through the Son in the Holy Spirit’, [St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of St. Luke, part 1 (Oriental Orthodox Library, 2006),In Luc. 22:17-22 p. 569] .and the Son, by putting on our nature, refashions it to his own life. And he himself is also in us, for we have all become partakers of him, and have him in ourselves through the Spirit. For this reason, we have become ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Peter 1:4), and are reckoned as sons, and so too have in ourselves the Father himself through the Son. [In Jo. 14.20]

Salvation is the work of the Trinity, not of one part of it.

The feast of St Cyril of Alexandria: reflections on St John

27 Monday Jun 2016

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Until fairly recently, St Cyril of Alexandria, whose feast day it is today, was a neglected figure in Patristics. Thanks to the works of the Rev Prof John McGuckin, and Norman Tanner (SJ) and others, this is changing.  This is all to the good, for he was one of the acutest theologians of the Patristic era, but he wrote not simply as a scholar, but as a bishop and also as an historian and the theologian.  As St. Cyril pointed out in a letter to Acacius of Beroea: ‘I have been nurtured at the hands of holy and orthodox fathers;’ [Russell, p. 4, note 18, which I have preferred to Fr. McGuckin’s version at p. 339 of his book.] and we see, in his use of Origen, St. Athanasius, St. Basil and St. Gregory Nazianzus, that far from possessing the arrogance attributed to him by his detractors, St. Cyril lies firmly in the best patristic tradition of adapting the insights of the past and adding, where appropriate, glosses of his own. He was steeped in the Holy Scriptures and in the writings of the Fathers; and it was the possession of this armoury which made him such a formidable opponent in the great Christological controversy with Nestorius.

Indeed, St. Cyril became involved in that dispute not because he was, by nature, a controversialist (although he was certainly of a combative turn of mind), but because it touched upon his main concerns as a pastor – and that was soteriology: how is man saved? Only if God truly became man, can man truly become one with God; any message that detracted from the full humanity and full divinity of the Incarnate Word threatened the salvation of his flock; what shepherd would hesitate to deal with such a threat?

This is hardly the place to do more than scratch the surface of this deep mystery, but some of St. Cyril’s comments on St. John’s Gospel give us an insight into the formation of his thought on this important issue.

To our way of thinking, St. Cyril’s Commentary on the Gospel of St. John is an odd one. We are used to commentaries which deal equally with all verses, but this is not the Patristic model. The first book, which when printed covers 168 pages, deals only with St. John 1:1:1-28; the second, which covers 293 printed pages, deal with St. John 1:29-5:34; John 5:35-6:37 are covered in the 116 pages of book 3, whilst book 4 takes 159 pages to comment on John 6:38-7:24; book 5 requires 171 pages to deal with John 7:25-8.43, and it takes him 12 books in all to cover the whole Gospel. So it can be seen that like many of the early exegete, it is the earlier part of the Gospel which commands most of his attention; he takes three chapters to examine John 1:1 alone, and then another hundred pages to get to verse 28. The Incarnation as described by St. John is at the centre of his thought. Although the modern Western practice is to separate Christology from Soteriology, such a distinction was not only unknown to St. Cyril, it would have run counter to his mode of thinking. The Holy Trinity is at the heart of our salvation, as it is of St. Cyril’s theology. [Farag]

A key Cyrilline text is St. John 16:15: ‘All that the Father has is mine, therefore I said that He will take what is mine and share it with you.’ In his writings on the Trinity, St. Gregory Nazianzus had used this verse to emphasise that there was nothing which was ‘peculiar’ to any one of the Persons of the Trinity: ‘For their being itself is common and equal, even though the Son receives it from the Father.’ [P. Schaff and H. Wace, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series 2, volume VII (Grand Rapids, 1996 edn.), St. Gregory Nazianzen, ‘The Fourth Theological Oration, XI, p. 313.]

This anti-Sebellian line is also emphasised by St. Cyril using the same verse, when he argues that it shows that the Spirit does not possess His wisdom by participation in the Son. If ‘He will take what is mine’, St. Cyril writes, it is because the Spirit ‘is consubstantial with the Son and proceeds through Him as befits God, who possesses in its perfection all the virtue and all the power of the Son.’ The Holy Spirit is like ‘a living and active fragrance from the substance of God, a fragrance which transmits to the creature that which comes from God and ensures participation in the substance which is above all substances.’ It is interesting that St. Cyril, as so often, uses an analogy which is not connected with the thought processes; by such means he emphasises that through the Spirit  we not only receive knowledge of the divine nature, we actually participate in it:

 If in effect the fragrance of aromatic plants impregnates clothing with its own virtue and in some way transforms into itself that in which it finds itself, how does the Spirit not have the power, since it issues from God by nature, to give, by itself to those in which it finds itself the communication of the divine nature? [In Jo 11:1-2, dealing with St. John 16:14-16.]

St Cyril ora pro nobis