Saint Cyril of Jerusalem

A teacher in the holy city

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Cyril was born around the year 313 — the very year the Emperor Constantine granted peace to the Church — and he lived his whole life in and around Jerusalem, the city where Christ was crucified and rose again. Ordained a deacon and then a priest by the bishop of Jerusalem, he was entrusted early with one of the most important tasks in the Church of that city: the instruction of the catechumens, those preparing for Holy Baptism. Around the year 350 he succeeded to the episcopal throne of Jerusalem itself, and he would shepherd that holy and turbulent see, with several painful interruptions, for some thirty-five years.

Jerusalem in Cyril's day was being transformed. Over the sites of Christ's death and resurrection rose the great basilica of the Holy Sepulchre, built by Constantine, and pilgrims were beginning to stream to the holy places from every corner of the Christian world. It was in this church, on the very ground of the Resurrection, that Cyril delivered the lectures that would make his name immortal.

The Catechetical Lectures

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Cyril's enduring gift to the Church is his series of Catechetical Lectures — the fullest and most precious record we possess of how the early Church prepared converts for Baptism. Delivered during Great Lent to the catechumens who would be baptized at Pascha, the lectures open with an introductory address, the Procatechesis, and continue through eighteen instructions that lead the hearer step by step from repentance and the meaning of Baptism, through the whole of the Creed, article by article: the one God, the Father Almighty; Christ, His only-begotten Son, incarnate, crucified, risen, and ascended; the Holy Spirit; the Church, and the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.

What makes these lectures so remarkable is their immediacy. We are listening in on an actual bishop teaching actual converts in the fourth century — warm, vivid, practical, and pastoral, full of appeals to the Scriptures and to the holy places visible all around them. Cyril warns against heresy, calls for sincere repentance, and prepares his hearers for the awesome night when they will descend into the baptismal waters and rise as new creatures in Christ.

“The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. You are going to the Father of spirits, but you are passing by that dragon.”St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Procatechesis

The Mystagogical Catecheses

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To the Catechetical Lectures are joined five shorter instructions of a different and even more intimate kind: the Mystagogical Catecheses, the “teaching of the mysteries.” These were delivered not before Baptism but after it, during the bright week of Pascha, to those who had just been baptized. Now at last Cyril could explain to them the meaning of what they had experienced — the renunciation of Satan, the threefold immersion, the anointing with holy chrism, and above all the Holy Eucharist.

These five lectures are one of the great treasures of Christian history, for they describe the Baptism, Chrismation, and Divine Liturgy of the fourth-century Church in their own words. Cyril teaches plainly that the bread and wine of the Eucharist truly become the Body and Blood of Christ; he describes the washing of hands, the kiss of peace, the lifting up of hearts, the calling down of the Holy Spirit upon the gifts, and the reception of Communion — a liturgy unmistakably recognizable as the one Orthodox Christians still celebrate today. In Cyril we hear the early Church praying, and find it praying as we do.

A bishop in a time of strife

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Cyril's years as bishop were anything but peaceful. The Church of his day was convulsed by the Arian controversy over the divinity of the Son of God, and Jerusalem was caught in the struggle. Cyril came into bitter conflict with Acacius, the powerful Arian-leaning bishop of nearby Caesarea, over both doctrine and the rights of the Jerusalem see. The result was a long ordeal of persecution: Cyril was deposed and driven from his city no fewer than three times, and spent something like sixteen years of his episcopate in exile, returning only to be banished again as emperors and church parties rose and fell.

Through it all he held to the orthodox faith. Though in his early teaching he had used cautious and scriptural language rather than the technical terms of the council of Nicaea, his doctrine was sound, and in time he stood fully and openly with the defenders of the Son's true divinity. His patience under repeated exile, never repaid with bitterness, is itself part of his witness.

The luminous Cross and the Temple

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Two famous events marked his episcopate. In the year 351 a great cross of light is said to have appeared in the sky over Jerusalem, stretching from Golgotha to the Mount of Olives and shining more brightly than the sun, seen by the whole city; Cyril reported the wonder in a letter to the Emperor. And in 363, when the Emperor Julian the Apostate, hoping to discredit the words of Christ, set out to rebuild the Jewish Temple that the Lord had foretold would be left desolate, the work was halted — by Cyril's account and others — when flames and upheavals burst from the foundations and drove the builders away. Cyril is said to have calmly foretold that the attempt would fail, trusting the word of the Gospel.

Vindicated and honored

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Cyril lived to see his vindication. When the Second Ecumenical Council gathered at Constantinople in 381 to complete the Nicene Creed and seal the Church's faith in the Holy Spirit, Cyril was present among the fathers, and the council formally recognized both the legitimacy of his episcopate and the orthodoxy of his faith — a public answer to the years of accusation he had endured. He reposed in peace around 386, an old man who had outlasted his persecutors.

The Church East and West honors Saint Cyril of Jerusalem as a saint and a great teacher; in the West he was named a Doctor of the Church. But his truest monument is his Catechetical Lectures, which have never stopped doing the work for which they were first spoken: handing on the faith, whole and unaltered, to those coming to Christ. To read them is to sit again among the catechumens in the church of the Resurrection and to hear the ancient faith explained by one who received it close to its source.

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