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The Creed and Constantinople

31 Wednesday May 2017

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The idea of an Ecumenical Council is a retrospective recognition of something which when it happened was not viewed in that way. Local churches often called councils, and Nicaea in 325 was in many sense just another such. It derived its importance from the fact that it was called by the Emperor. But although it promulgated the first version of that Creed whose name we repeat every Sunday, many did not accept it. The continuing popularity of Arianism, plus the teachings of Apollinaris, required attention, as did the arguments about the precise relationship of the Holy Spirit to the Father and the Son.

It is unclear whether Pope Damasus I even knew that the Empror Theodosius summoned bishops to a meeting in Constantinople in May 381; it is clear that he was not asked to send, and therefore did not send, a representative, and it appears likely that he did not even know the results of it. Although it is common to say that it was the Council which modifed the Creed of Nicaea, it would be truer to say that it ratified a variation that was already in use.

The Nicæno-Constantinopolitan Creed, besides some minor changes in the first two articles, added all the clauses after ‘Holy Ghost,’ but omits the anathemata present in the original version of 325. It gives the text as now received in the Eastern Church. There is no authentic evidence of an ecumenical recognition of this enlarged Creed till the Council at Chalcedon, 451, where it was read by Aëtius (a deacon of Constantinople) as the ‘Creed of the 150 fathers,’ and accepted as orthodox, together with the old Nicene Creed, or the ‘Creed of the 318 fathers.’ But the additional clauses existed in 374, seven years before the Constantinopolitan Council, in the two creeds of Epiphanius, a native of Palestine, and most of them as early as 350, in the creed of Cyril of Jerusalem.

The Creed omitted the explicit denunciations of Arianism and preferred, instead to assert the identity of Jesus with the Father, and to say more about the role of the Holy Spirit, who proceeded from the Father (no ‘and the Son’, note). It also reaffirmed the humanity of Christ by bringing into the Creed the Virgin Mary. This, as we saw in the series of posts about St Cyril of Alexandria and the Council of Ephesus, was a necessary part of explaining Christ’s genuine humanity.

Thus, by 381, the Church had effectively thought its collective way to the notion of the Trinity as enunciated by the Cappadocian Fathers.  Jesus was definitively defined as being of one substance with the Father, as preexisting with Him from the beginning, and the Holy Spirit had been defined as an equal member of the Trinity. So much for those who suppose that the nature of Christ and of Christian belief proceeds naturally from one’s own unaided understanding.

Theodore of Mopsuestia and Arius and Appolinarus were not bad men, they were learned men well-versed in Scripture, but they insisted on their view, and when pushed, the majority of bishops in council could not find them to be correct.  But the question of the nature of the Incarnation was not settled. Yes, Christ was fully God and fully human. It would take another Council at Ephesus, and a further one at Chalcedon in 451, to tease out these matters further, but with this post, we come to the end of this series tracing the development of Christological thought from the Apostles to Ephesus. There is one more historical post to come, on the Holy Spirit, before I move on to sum up.

Theosis, Theotokos and St Cyril

10 Wednesday May 2017

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As this short series draws to an end, I hope it is clear that although Ephesus was technically about the use of the word ‘Theotokos’ it was about much more than that; it was about the whole question of the Incarnation and the nature of Jesus. The Docetists and Adoptionists had argued that Jesus was just a man upon whom the Spirit had descended and in whom the Spirit dwelt until the crucifixion; some of this eway of thinking can be traced in Islam’s ideas about Jesus.

Cyril, like his great predecessor, believed in theosis. Though now often misunderstood (there is information here on this blog) it was at the heart of Cyril’s theology, inherited from St. Athanasius. In principle, the Incarnation transformed human nature as a whole, the Word refashioning it in His own flesh. Cyril was following Athansius in holding that ‘The Word was made man so that we might be made God” (De Inc 54.3).

Participation in the Divine Life is the purpose of the sacraments; without the deifying power of the Word they are emptied of their power and we are lost in sin. ‘If you detach the life-giving Word of God from the mystical and true union with the body and separate them entirely, how can you prove that it is still life giving?‘ If the Word had not deified our flesh through the Incarnation by the Virgin Mary, then Christians could not become sons of God by adoption and thus participate in the Divine Life. In his Commentary on John [i:9] he wrote:

Those who have attained adoption as sons of God through faith in Christ are
baptized not into anything belonging to the created order but into the Holy Trinity
itself, through the mediation of the Word, who on the one hand joined what is
human to himself by means of the flesh that was united to him, and on the other
was joined by nature to him who had begotten him, since he was by nature God.
Thus what is servile [i.e. our humanity] rises up to the level of sonship through
participation in him who is Son in reality, called and, as it were, promoted to the
rank which the Son posses by nature. That is why we are called offspring of God
and are such, for we have experienced a rebirth by faith through the Spirit.

What was at stake in confessing Our Blessed Lady the Theotokos, was nothing less than the reality of our salvation:

Is it not wicked and shocking to try to take away from God the Word his birth
from a woman according to the flesh? For how could his body possibly give life to
us if it were not the very own body of him who is Life? And how could it be that
the “blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin” (1 Jn 1:7) if it was in reality only that
of an ordinary man subject to sin? And how has “God the Father sent his Son born
of a woman, born subject to the law” (Gal 4:4)? Or how has “he condemned sin in
the flesh” (Rom 8:3)?

As always, devotion to Our Lady led towards her Son and our salvation. The sad thing about those Protestants who attack the Church for ‘bigging up’ Mary and think is somehow lessens the role of Christ, is that they get it precisely wrong. Our Lady may be the most blessed of human beings, but she simply facilitates the birth of the Saviour; her soul magnifies God. Of course, if you start with the odd idea that Catholics ‘worship’ Our Lady, you will end up in an odd place; and it is sad that some, however often they are shown it is not so, continue to repeat their own legend.

St. Cyril saw the truth with a clear eye; we have much to thank him for.

It is fitting to finish with this prayer of St. Cyril’s:

“O most holy Lady, Theotokos, light of my poor soul, my hope, my protection, my refuge, my comfort, and my joy! I thank you for having enabled me to be a partaker of the most pure Body and most precious Blood of your Son. 

Enlighten the eyes of my heart, O Blessed One who carried the Source of Immortality. 

O most tender and loving Mother of the merciful God; have mercy on me and grant me a repentant and contrite heart with humility of mind. Keep my thoughts from wandering into all kinds of distractions, and make me worthy always, even to my last breath, to receive the most pure Mysteries of Christ for the healing of my soul and body. 

Give me tears of repentance and thanksgiving that I may sing of you and praise you all the days of my life, for you are ever-blessed and praised. Amen.”

It may well be that we have so far lost sight of the sense of the sacred that was with Cyril, that we can no longer enter into the world which he inhabited, but if we cannot, we shall not understand what motivated him, or why it mattered so much to him and his contemporaries. What was at stake was nothing less than the issue of our eternal salvation.

My gratitude to those of you who have expressed your appreciation of this series. There will be a hiatus as we approach the centenary of Fatima, and thereafter I shall return to this topic with an examination of the Christological controversy which led to the split at Chalcedon in 451.

Ephesus: the triumph of the Theotokos

08 Monday May 2017

Posted by in Faith, st cyril of alexandria

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To return to the Council. We left it with St Cyril in the ascendant and the definition of Our Lady as ‘Theotokos’ as agreed. But things were far from over. The Antiochene delegation, led by Bishop John, turned up on 26 June, convoked another synod and announced that Cyril was deposed. That created a deadlock: two Councils, two decisions. The emperor originally agreed with both groups – so all the leading bishops were deposed. Here is where the charge comes that Cyril bribed his way to victory.

It must be said up front that Cyril did indeed send a considerable number of very expensive gifts to Constantinople, but to attribute his victory to this is to ignore two things; that the partisans of Nestorius did likewise, as this was how these things were done; it is also to ignore the theological dimension.

The people of Constantinople were behind the Cyrilline council and there were demonstrations and riots when it became known that Theodosius had deposed him. Theodosius was in even more trouble when, on 10 July, the Roman delegation turned up and supported Cyril. Rome and the population of Constantinople were united with Cyril in defence of the Theotokos, as were the people of Ephesus, who  refused to abandon him even when he was placed under house arrest. The ‘gifts’ were part of Cyril’s tactics to secure allies in Constantinople where the partisans of Nestorius still had influence. As McGuckin puts it:

‘Cyril’s payments to court officials undoubtedly smoothed the way for his cause … Nonetheless the key factor which swayed Theodosius was without question the solid determination of the Cyrilline party not to abandon their president whom they identified as synonymous with their cause.’ (p. 106).

Cyril and Memnon were restored, Nestorius deposed; what remained to be done was to reconcile Christendom. Here it helped that the majority of the Antiochenes had accepted the orthodoxy of the declaration that St. Mary was, indeed Theotokos.

It took two more years before Cyril and the church at Antioch could be reconciled, but the former knew how to be magnanimous in victory. John, bishop of Antioch, had no wish to continue to quarrel with the powerful Patriarch. In 433 Cyril marked their reunion with his famous epistle which began “Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad”. It contained the credal statement about Our Lady we hold to this day:

Concerning the Virgin Mother of God, we thus think and speak; and of the manner of the Incarnation of the Only Begotten Son of God, necessarily, not by way of addition but for the sake of certainty, as we have received from the beginning from the divine Scriptures and from the tradition of the holy fathers, we will speak briefly, adding nothing whatever to the Faith set forth by the holy Fathers in Nice.  For, as we said before, it suffices for all knowledge of piety and the refutation of all false doctrine of heretics.  But we speak, not presuming on the impossible; but with the confession of our own weakness, excluding those who wish us to cling to those things which transcend human consideration.

We confess, therefore, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, perfect God, and perfect Man of a reasonable soul and flesh consisting; begotten before the ages of the Father according to his Divinity, and in the last days, for us and for our salvation, of Mary the Virgin according to his humanity, of the same substance with his Father according to his Divinity, and of the same substance with us according to his humanity; for there became a union of two natures.  Wherefore we confess one Christ, one Son, one Lord.

According to this understanding of this unmixed union, we confess the holy Virgin to be Mother of God; because God the Word was incarnate and became Man, and from this conception he united the temple taken from her with himself.

Peace was restored. Some of the more partisan Alexandrians criticised Cyril for giving way to some of the phraseology of the Antiochenes, but he had won his point – and the harshness of the Twelve Anathema was to be buried in the love of brothers reunited; some sacrifice is always necessary. The unwisdom of his critics would be shown six years after his death in 444. But what had Cyril won?

St Cyril praises Our Lady at Ephesus

07 Sunday May 2017

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Faith, st cyril of alexandria

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One of the tragedies of the Reformation as it progressed was that narrow and literal minded men not only lost contact with the age-old devotion of Christians to Our Lady, but, in their ignorance, sought to suggest that her place in Christian devotion was, in some unspecified way, a version of the worship of Diana which had taken place in Ephesus. Quite how it was that a Church which canonised St Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, which mentions this tradition at Ephesus, but makes clear Paul made converts there, came to adopt ‘Diana worship’, is never explained by such people. Being both rather ignorant and literal minded, and perhaps with a trace or three of misogyny, they see veneration of the Mother of God, they vaguely know there was a cult of Diana at Ephesus, so they put 1 and 1 together and come up with 11, never stopping to explain two things: why Christians would worship Diana in another guise; and why none of their bishops would have noticed?

Ephesus was, as Cyril knew, the place where the Blessed Virgin had come to live with St John, the pair of them fulfilling Jesus’ charge to them. Our friend Bosco poured scorn on the idea, it is not, after all, in the Bible. Well, of course, the charge from Jesus is there, and unless we suppose the pair of them disobeyed that command, we believe they were faithful to Him. But why Ephesus? It was certainly traditional by the time of Cyril, but where did the tradition originate?

One of the Churches to whom St John addressed a letter in the Book of the Apocalypse, was that at Smyrna. Now known as Izmir and the third largest city in Turkey, it is located just north of the old capital of Roman Ephesus. St Polycarp, who was martyred in 156, lived there, and was a disciple of St John, whom he had known as a young man, and by whom he had been brought to Christ. St Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyons who died in 200, was a disciple of Polycarp’s, and carried forward the traditions he was taught by the disciple of St John. Among those traditions was that the two saints, John and Our Lady, lived in Ephesus; that house has been uncovered by archaeologists. Naturally, those who prefer their own unaided interpretation of Scripture to the traditions handed on by the Church will do what some of St John’s own disciples did, which is to deny his testimony. The rest of us will respect that a faithful disciple of a faithful disciple of St John knew what he was talking about.

All of that is by way of prelude to an examination of St Cyril’s speech at the opening of the Council at Ephesus, a city steeped in stories of the life of Our Lady and St John. The first of the Church Fathers to have a developed Mariology was Irenaeus. He made no claim to originality in what he wrote, and was recording systematically what the generation before him had taken for granted – it was, after all, a time when first-hand testimony of those who had known the Apostles was beginning to fade – hence the need to note it down. He saw Our Lady as the New Eve, through whose obedience the disobedience of the first Eve was redeemed. Where Eve’s disobedience had condemned mankind, Mary’s obedience brought into the world Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. In emphasising the reality of Jesus as a man incarnate of the Virgin, Irenaeus fought the heresy of docestism, which taught that Jesus was just a man filled with the Spirit (a statement recently made here by our friend Bosco, who was unaware he was repeating the earliest heresy). All of these themes we find in St Cyril’s address to the Fathers at the opening of the Council.

I see here a joyful company of Christian men met together in ready response to the call of Mary, the holy and ever-virgin Mother of God. The great grief that weighed upon me is changed into joy by your presence, venerable Fathers. Now the beautiful saying of David the psalmist: How good and pleasant it is for brothers to live together in unity (Psalm 133) has come true for us.

Therefore, holy and incomprehensible Trinity, we salute you at whose summons we have come together to this church of Mary, the Mother of God.

Mary, Mother of God, we salute you. Precious vessel, worthy of the whole world’s reverence, you are an ever-shining light, the crown of virginity, the symbol of orthodoxy, an indestructible temple, the place that held him whom no place can contain, mother and virgin. Because of you the holy gospels could say: Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

We salute you, for in your holy womb was confined him who is beyond all limitation. Because of you the holy Trinity is glorified and adored; the cross is called precious and is venerated throughout the world; the heavens exult; the angels and archangels make merry; demons are put to flight; the devil, that tempter, is thrust down from heaven; the fallen race of man is taken up on high; all creatures possessed by the madness of idolatry have attained knowledge of the truth; believers receive holy baptism; the oil of gladness is poured out; the Church is established throughout the world; pagans are brought to repentance.

And there, of course, we come to the heart of the matter. For Cyril, as for all Christians, the fact of the Incarnation is a cause of overwhelming joy, and that leads him to praise Our Lady extensively. This, of course, is the sort of thing which dour Protestants tend not to get, which makes one wonder what they do when they are taken up with the sheer joy of Christ? St Cyril, however, has only just begun:

What more is there to say? Because of you the light of the only-begotten Son of God has shone upon those who sat in darkness and in the shadow of death; prophets pronounced the word of God; the apostles preached salvation to the Gentiles; the dead are raised to life, and kings rule by the power of the holy Trinity.

Who can put Mary’s high honor into words? She is both mother and virgin. I am overwhelmed by the wonder of this miracle. Of course no one could be prevented from living in the house he had built for himself, yet who would invite mockery by asking his own servant to become his mother?

Behold then the joy of the whole universe. Let the union of God and man in the Son of the Virgin Mary fill us with awe and adoration. Let us fear and worship the undivided Trinity as we sing the praise of the ever-virgin Mary, the holy temple of God, and of God himself, her Son and spotless Bridegroom. To him be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

Formulaic language? No, there is a depth of devotion there which, as events were to show, was shared by so many others. This was no expression of a new doctrine. It was the eloquent restatement of one always held by Christians. Reading it gives one some idea of the depth of Cyril’s devotion – and an insight into why he fought this fight as fiercely as he did.

Fighting the beasts at Ephesus

06 Saturday May 2017

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Faith, Marian devotion, st cyril of alexandria

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Three main charges are commonly levelled against St. Cyril by his denigrators:
– that he turned up at Ephesus with what amounted to his own private army and stirred up opposition to Nestorius
– that he intemperately started the Council early
– that he bribed the emperor into accepting his version of events

There is a level at which each of these criticisms is extracted from the truth, but done so in a manner which leaves it an empty shell. An understanding of this requires a resort to narrative history for a while.

Nestorius was the first bishop to arrive (he only had to cross the Bosphorus). He turned up with his ecclesiastical supporters, his own armed guard, and that of the prefect, Count Candidian, who was the emperor’s representative. In these circumstances it was wise of Cyril to turn up with his ecclesiastical supporters and their ‘attendants’. McGuckin (p. 56) quotes a letter extant now only in Coptic in which St. Cyril denies the charge of bringing an army, and he says there ‘is no hard evidence’ to suggest Cyril did so. The ease with which Count Irenaeus and Candidian were able to cut off Cyril’s supply lines later supports such a conclusion. Cyril turned up, as Nestorius did, with supporters; what he lacked was the armed support enjoyed by the latter. So yes, it is true to say he turned with with a large entourage; to represent that as an attempt to overawe the Imperial Power is too simplistic.

There  was a good deal of anti-Nestorian sentiment in Ephesus. Memnon, its archbishop, barred Nestorius from communion, and aligned himself with Cyril. To blame Cyril for the unpopularity of Nestorius is to misunderstand the context of the Council. Ephesus was the city where Our Blessed Lady had lived with St. John, and had long been the centre of Marian devotion; that its people would have been hostile to Nestorius was natural – Cyril needed to do nothing save proclaim orthodox belief to receive support.

The Council was due to convene on 7 June 431. Cyril delayed it for two weeks as many delegates, including those from Rome and Antioch, had failed to meet that deadline. The hot weather and the strain on the food resources of Ephesus took its toll on those delegates who had arrived. When Cyril received information that the Antiochenes would be delayed a while longer, he summoned the Council together. He suspected, and not without cause, that John of Antioch did not want to be there when Nestorius was deposed; the evidence is sifted at McGuckin pp. 66-68.

Should Cyril have waited longer? Perhaps, but since he had no idea when, if ever, the other delegates might arrive, he decided a fortnight was sufficient.

The First Session began on Monday morning, June 22nd, at Saint Mary’s Cathedral, with Cyril presiding; Peter, an Alexandrian priest, was appointed as the chief legal notary. There were 155 bishops present, of whom 68, led by Theodoret of Cyrus, came to protest against the decision to open the Council. Count Candidian came with them and declared the meeting illegal. St. Cyril asked him to read the letter of the Emperor. This had a double purpose. It revealed a clear instruction to the Count from the Emperor to refrain from interfering in theological discussion. By reading the letter, the Count had, in Cyril’s opinion, opened the Council in a formal sense. After hearing the letter, the bishops asked the Count to leave the meeting and not to interfere in the work of the Council. Count Candidian then left, followed by Theodoret and 26 of the 68 dissident bishops. The remaining 42 bishops stayed.  The meeting went on to summon Nestorius, something repeated the following day, and when he refused to attend, he was deposed.

St. Cyril’s description of the reaction of the great crowd outside to this event is worth repeating:

“When they heard that the wretched men were deposed, they all began with one voice to cry out in praise of the Holy Council, glorifying God because the enemy of the Faith had fallen.”

The people had spoken; the bishops had spoken; but would that be enough for orthodoxy to prevail?

Before turning to that, I want to take a moment to look at how Cyril opened the Council, as it will help us understand how he saw Our Lady in the economy of salvation.

St Cyril: how to write about God

05 Friday May 2017

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One of the main shortcomings of Gibbon’s approach, is that in failing to understand what Cyril thought was at stake, he misses the real criticism which might be, and was, levelled at Cyril, and it is one which nearly wrecked the Council – and the unity of Christendom.

Cyril’s Third letter was a sound statement of orthodoxy. If he had left things there he would have saved himself much trouble; but he did not. The Twelve Chapters which accompanied them could be read as an uncompromising attack on the whole Antiochene school. One rule of thumb always works; when something can be read as an attack, it will be. Nestorius sent the Chapters to John, bishop of Antioch, who, prompted his two leading theologians, Andrew of Samosata and Theodoret of Cyrrhus to fire counter-blasts at Cyril. (McGuckin, pp. 44-4)

Some good would come from the subsequent epistolary warfare, although not in time for the Council. Andrew and Theodore both accused Cyril of Appolinarianism, that is of believing that Christ did not have a human soul but was a man with a divine soul, and therefore not man at all. This could certainly be one reading of the theopaschite language used by Cyril ‘God died in the flesh’; but it was a misunderstanding of the paradoxical language which Cyril loved to use. Both Theodore and Andrew hammered out an expression of the Antiochene position which made it less liable to be taken as adoptionist; that is that Our Lord was a man whose form was infused by divinity, but not, itself, divine.

But if the controversy forced the Antiochenes to clarify their position, the same was true for Cyril. His language had left him open to the charges laid against him, and his answers in treatises Response to the Orientals, and To Euoptus, while they dealt with the charge of Appolinarianism, did not quite provide an answer to the key question at issue. Should Jesus be ‘properly and distinctly viewed as a human individual (a Jewish man) or whether he was the divine Son in person (God).’ (McGuckin, p. 49). The Theopascite language had been meant as a paradox to show the mystery of the mode of union between the divine and the human – that is it was as such that ‘God died’. But Cyril would have to do better than that.

Cyril knew that God had become man and died for us, and on that point he would not yield; it was that which he took Nestorius to be challenging by denying to Mary the title of God bearer. But he also came to realise that he would need to do more work to explaining the way in which the humanity of Jesus was not simply a cypher.

However, the calling of the Council at Ephesus would both cut across this work, and make the urgency of it the more acute. At Ephesus Cyril, like St. Paul before him, would be fighting with the beasts.

St Cyril contra Nestorius

04 Thursday May 2017

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At the heart of the dispute was not the power struggle depicted by Gibbon and others, but the very nature of our salvation. Nestorius’ position was clear:

That God passed through the Virgin Christokos I am taught by the divine Scriptures, but that God was born from her I have not been taught anywhere

Nostorius argued that those who taught that Mary was Theotokos were ‘heretics’. (Russell, p. 34) This he proclaimed from the cathedra in Constantinople; this it was which so concerned Cyril. As neither of his first two letters secured any concessions from Nestorius, and with the latter clearly marshalling the forces of the Empire against him, Cyril needed to gather his own resources. His attempts to garner support from the sister of Theodosius back-fired; but he fared better elsewhere.

In the summer of 430 Cyril sent Pope Celestine a dossier on Nestorius’ teaching, along with a commentary and patristic testimony. The Pope, no theologian, handed the dossier to his archdeacon, Leo (later Pope Leo the Great) and John Cassian, the two most formidable theologians in the West; they advised him that Cyril was correct.   On 11 August 430 a local synod was held in Rome. It condemned the teachings of Nestorius as heretical. Celestine told Cyril of this and appointed him his representative at the synod which it had been announced would take place at Ephesus. Nestorius’ own appeals to Celestine went unanswered. For those who care about such matters, it ought to be noted that both patriarchs appealed to Rome for support.

In November 430 a local synod at Alexandria found Nestorius guilty of heresy. St. Cyril send a third letter to Nestorius containing 12 anathemata which he was required to accept as the price of entering back into communion:

1. If anyone does not confess the Emmanuel to be truly God, and hence the holy virgin to be Mother of God (for she gave birth in the flesh to the Word of God made flesh), let him be anathema.

2. If anyone does not confess that the Word of God the Father was hypostatically united to the flesh so as to be One Christ with his own flesh, that is the same one at once God and man, let him be anathema.

3. If anyone divides the hypostases of the One Christ after the union, connecting them only by a conjunction in terms of honour or dignity or sovereignty, and not rather by a combination in terms of natural union, let him be anathema.

4. If anyone interprets the sayings in the Gospels and apostolic writings, or the things said about Christ by the saints, or the things he says about himself, as referring to two prosopa or hypostases, attributing some of them to a man conceived of as separate from the Word of God, and attributing others (as divine) exclusively to the Word of God the Father, let him be anathema.

5. If anyone should dare to say that Christ was a God-bearing man and not rather that he is truly God as the one natural Son, since the Word became flesh and ‘shared in flesh and blood just like us’ (Heb.2.14), let him be anathema.

6. If anyone says that the Word of God the Father is the God or Lord of Christ, and does not rather confess the same one is at once God and man, since according to the scriptures the Word has become flesh, let him be anathema.

7. If anyone says that Jesus as a man was activated by the Word of God and invested with the glory of the Only Begotten, as being someone different to him, let him be anathema.

8. If anyone should dare to say that the assumed man ought to be worshipped along with God the Word and co-glorified and called ‘God’ as if he were one alongside another (for the continual addition of the phrase ‘along with’ demands this interpretation) and does not rather worship the Emmanuel with a single veneration and render him a single doxology since the Word became flesh, let him be anathema.

9. If anyone says that the One Lord Jesus Christ was glorified by the Spirit, using the power that came through him as if it were foreign to himself, and receiving from him the power to work against unclean spirits and to accomplish divine signs for men, and does not rather say that the Spirit is his very own, through whom he also worked the divine signs, let him be anathema.

10. The divine scripture says that Christ became ‘the high priest and apostle of our confession’ (Heb.3.1) and ‘offered himself for our sake as a fragrant sacrifice to God the Father’ (Eph.5.2). So if anyone says that it was not the very Word of God who became our high priest and apostle when he became flesh and man as we are, but it was someone different to him, a separate man born of a woman; or if anyone says that he made the offering also for himself and not rather for us alone (for he who knew no sin had no need of offerings), let him be anathema.

11. If anyone does not confess that the Lord’s flesh is life-giving and the very-own flesh of the Word of God the Father, but says that it is the flesh of someone else, different to him, and joined to him in terms of dignity, or indeed only having a divine indwelling, rather than being life-giving, as we have said, because it has become the personal flesh of the Word who has the power to bring all things to life, let him be anathema.

12. If anyone does not confess that the Word of God suffered in the flesh, was crucified in the flesh, and tasted death in the flesh, becoming the first-born from the dead, although as God he is life and life-giving, let him be anathema.

This, along with the decision of the Roman synod, was conveyed to Nestorius on 30 November. Only two weeks earlier, on 19 November 430, Theodosius II had invited the bishops to a synod to be held at Pentecost (7 June 431). The scene was set for one of the most controversial of all ecumenical councils, and an occasion which would provide Cyril’s opponents with much ammunition.

St Cyril’s contribution and a new hope

29 Saturday Apr 2017

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Faith, Marian devotion, Reading the BIble, st cyril of alexandria

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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.’ [1] The whole point of the Incarnation is that through it, our fallen nature is raised to new heights. 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. [ 2] 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.’ [3]

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’s part in the death of the Pagan philosopher, Hypatia, which I have dealt with elsewhere on this blog has tended to overshadow his reputation in a world which prizes a feminist Whig theory of history over theology, but it is worth recovering his theology, and going beyond the controversies which have defined him in the history books. Like his own hero, Athanasius, Cyril is strong meat to a generation whose faith in relativism fails only when it comes to the foundation of its own faith, but the traditional Coptic reading seems to me the most persuasive. Cyril was a man steeped in Scripture (you can hardly read three lines of his writing without coming across a Biblical reference) and in the Fathers. He saw himself as the inheritor of the great Alexandrian tradition of theology, and his job was to defend what he had inherited. He had a keen ear for novelty and a keen nose for unorthodoxy, and he brought the full weight of his intellect to bear on both when he thought that there were wolves in the sheepfold.

St Cyril’s patriarchate was the high-water mark of the See of St Mark at Alexandria. Like his uncle Theophilius, whom he had succeeded, Cyril was a skilled ecclesiastical politician. Both men had been careful to build and maintain an alliance with Rome, which appreciated both the intellectual fire-power of Alexandria, and its place as a counter-balance to the ambitions of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Theophilius had been able to depose the golden-mouthed John Chrysostom after the Synod of the Oak, and Cyril was able to depose the heretical Nestorius. In both cases, their enemies alleged that this was the result of Alexandrian bribery, but whilst, as was always the case in that era, ‘gifts’ were given, in Cyril’s case at least, it was the weight of his argumentation which counted most. But when his successor, Disocoros, tried to repeat the success of his predecessors at the second Council of Ephesus in 449, the manner of his initial success led to a Council being convened at Chalcedon in 451, where he was reprimanded for his high-handedness. Lacking Cyril’s intellectual weight, he was out-marshalled, and, failing to get the Bishop of Rome on side, was deposed, with his enemies alleging he taught heresy. This led, across the next 150 years to what became a permanent schism, which opened the way to the triumph of Islam. If Alexandria lost its place in the Christian Pentarchy, then Jerusalem, Antioch and, fianlly, Constantinople, would fare no better. After 1453 Rome was the only one of the ancient Sees of the early Church not to have been swamped by the Muslim tide; a position it retains to this day.

But let us not finish this short series on a pessimistic note. As I write, Pope Tawadoros II and Pope Francis have issued a joint statement on Coptic/Catholic relations

We, Francis, Bishop of Rome and Pope of the Catholic Church, and Tawadros II, Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of the See of Saint Mark, give thanks to God in the Holy Spirit for granting us the joyful opportunity to meet once more, to exchange a fraternal embrace and to join again in common prayer. We glorify the Almighty for the bonds of fraternity and friendship existing between the See of Saint Peter and the See of Saint Mark. The privilege of being together here in Egypt is a sign that the solidity of our relationship is increasing year by year, and that we are growing in closeness, faith and love of Christ our Lord. We give thanks to God for this beloved Egypt, the “homeland that lives inside us,” as His Holiness Pope Shenouda III used to say, the “people blessed by God” (cf. Is 19:25) with its ancient Pharaonic civilization, the Greek and Roman heritage, the Coptic tradition and the Islamic presence. Egypt is the place where the Holy Family found refuge, a land of martyrs and saints.

2. Our deep bond of friendship and fraternity has its origin in the full communion that existed between our Churches in the first centuries and was expressed in many different ways through the early Ecumenical Councils, dating back to the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the contribution of the courageous Church Father Saint Athanasius, who earned the title “Protector of the Faith”. Our communion was expressed through prayer and similar liturgical practices, the veneration of the same martyrs and saints, and in the development and spread of monasticism, following the example of the great Saint Anthony, known as the Father of all monks. This common experience of communion before the time of separation has a special significance in our efforts to restore full communion today. Most of the relations which existed in the early centuries between the Catholic Church and the Coptic Orthodox Church have continued to the present day in spite of divisions, and have recently been revitalized. They challenge us to intensify our common efforts to persevere in the search for visible unity in diversity, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

St Mark was, we are told, the interpreter of St Peter, and the See of St Mark has a special place in the heart of the See of St Peter. What a joy, then, to see their successors speak of the goal of unity. Let us pray that Cyril’s successor may one day write, as the great Saint did upon the reconciliation with Antioch in A.D. 433 – ‘Let the heavens rejoice’ – Amen.

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[1] McGuckin, p. 186.

[2] Farag, p. 111.

[3] Keating, Divine Life, p. 205.

St Cyril and the Theotokos

28 Friday Apr 2017

Posted by in Bible, Catholic Tradition, Faith, st cyril of alexandria

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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.’ [1]  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. [2]

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

St. Cyril has 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 the scope of this paper, [3]  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. [4] 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. [5] But this is to misread things. St. Cyril’s soteriology was a dynamic one, in which, as we have seen, enfleshment and the Logos were both essential parts of the Cyrilline vision.

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[1] L. Wickham, Cyril of Alexandria: Selected Letters, (Oxford, 1983), p. 73
[2] Wickham, p. 73
[3] McGuckin, St. Cyril, Chapter 3, for a full discussion.
[4] Wickham, p. 63
[5] Susan Wessel, Cyril of Alexandra and the Nestorian Controversy (Oxford, 2004).p.2

St Cyril and Salvation

27 Thursday Apr 2017

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

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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