The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Fathers & the Creeds
Cyril of Jerusalem
died c. 386Patristic
Driven out of Jerusalem three times, he left behind the catechism the ancient church actually taught its converts.
Summary
- Lived died c. 386.
- Stood in The Fathers & the Creeds (AD 313–600).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Patristic / Eastern.
The life
Cyril was born about 313 and became bishop of Jerusalem around 350. He held the see, off and on, for thirty-five years, off and on because he was driven out of it three times and spent roughly sixteen of those years in exile.
His trouble was Acacius of Caesarea, the leader of the Arian-leaning party in Palestine and, as metropolitan, Cyril's superior. Cyril resisted him on doctrine and disputed his jurisdiction; Jerusalem was the holier city, Caesarea the higher see. Acacius deposed him in 357, partly on the charge that Cyril had sold church property and vestments to buy food during a famine. Cyril did not deny selling them. He was recalled, exiled again under Constantius, restored under Julian, exiled a third time under Valens, and finally restored under Theodosius in 378. He was at the Council of Constantinople in 381, and the council explicitly recognized him as the lawful bishop of Jerusalem.
What he left the church is a course of instruction. In Lent, probably about 350, in the great basilica Constantine had built over the tomb of Christ, Cyril delivered twenty-four Catechetical Lectures to people preparing for baptism, eighteen before Easter, and five more in the week after, given to the newly baptized and explaining the sacraments they had just received. Someone in the congregation took them down. It is the earliest complete course of Christian instruction that survives.
They are extraordinarily concrete. He teaches the creed clause by clause. He explains what baptism does, what the anointing means, what happens at the Lord's table, and how to receive the bread, making the left hand a throne for the right. He warns against pagan practice and against heretical teachers by name. He teaches from the very ground where the events happened, pointing at the rock of Golgotha and the wood of the cross displayed in the church, and saying: this is not a rumor, it is here.
He also wrote to the emperor Constantius in 351 to report a luminous cross seen in the sky over Jerusalem, stretching from Golgotha to the Mount of Olives, witnessed by the whole city. The letter survives.
He died in 386, having spent almost half his episcopate in banishment. Rome named him a Doctor of the Church in 1883.
Sources: Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 7); Socrates Scholasticus and Sozomen, Ecclesiastical Histories; The Pilgrimage of Egeria; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "St. Cyril of Jerusalem".
What was happening while he lived7 moments · AD 313–600
- 313The Edict of Milan makes Christianity legalConstantine and Licinius agreed that everyone in the empire could worship as they chose, and ordered confiscated church property returned. After nearly three centuries of being an illegal religion, the church woke up protected.
- 325The Council of NicaeaAbout three hundred bishops met in a lakeside town in what is now Turkey to answer Arius, an Alexandrian pastor who taught that the Son was God's first and greatest creature, glorious, but made, so that "there was when He was not." The council answered with one word: the Son is *homoousios* with the Father, of the very same being, begotten, not made.
- 335Athanasius is exiled for the first timeThe bishop of Alexandria, who had been at Nicaea as a young deacon, was banished to Trier in Germany after a rigged synod. Four more exiles followed; he spent roughly seventeen of his forty-five years as bishop away from his city.
- 367Athanasius's Easter letter lists the twenty-sevenHis thirty-ninth Festal Letter names exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament we use today, the earliest surviving list that matches ours. Councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) confirmed the same list in the West.
- 380Nicene Christianity becomes the empire's official religionThe Edict of Thessalonica, issued by Theodosius I, commanded all his subjects to hold the faith of Nicaea. Legal protection had become legal privilege, and pressure on everyone else.
- 381The Council of ConstantinopleAround a hundred and fifty bishops confirmed Nicaea and expanded its article on the Holy Spirit, who "proceeds from the Father" and "together with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified." This 381 text is the creed most churches actually recite as the Nicene Creed.
- 386Augustine converts in a Milan gardenA thirty-one-year-old professor of rhetoric, weeping under a fig tree, heard a child's voice chanting "take up and read," opened Paul's letter to the Romans, and stopped running. His mother Monica had prayed for him for years; Bishop Ambrose's preaching had already broken his objections.
In their own words
“Consider the apt disposition of the sun, or rather of him whose ordering determined its course; how in summer it is higher in the heavens and makes the days longer, thereby giving people good time for their works, while in winter it contracts its course that the cold season might not be too long and that the nights, becoming longer, might serve as the repose of people and for the fruitfulness of the earth's products.”
Catechetical Lecture 9:6 · on Psalms 19:6
“it rises at one end of the heavens and runs its circuit to the other; nothing is deprived of its warmth.”
“The chief priests and the Pharisees, through the agency of Pilate, sealed the tomb; but the women saw him who was risen.… The chief priests lacked understanding, but the women beheld with their own eyes. When the soldiers came into the city and told the chief priests what had happened, they said to the soldiers, "Say, his disciples came by night and stole him while we were sleeping." Well did Isaiah foretell this also, in their persons: "But tell us, and relate another error.”
Catechetical Lecture 14:14 · on Isaiah 30:10
“They say to the seers, “Stop seeing visions!” and to the prophets, “Do not prophesy to us the truth! Speak to us pleasant words; prophesy illusions.”
“It was not the people alone that sinned but also Aaron, the high priest. For Moses says, "And the wrath of the Lord was upon Aaron"; "and I prayed for him," he says, "and God forgave him." Now Moses made supplication on behalf of the high priest who sinned and prevailed upon the Lord by his importunity. If so, will not Jesus, his only-begotten Son, imploring God in our behalf, more so prevail?”
Catechetical Lecture 2.10 · on Deuteronomy 9:20
“The LORD was angry enough with Aaron to destroy him, but at that time I also prayed for Aaron.”
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Cyril of Jerusalem at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Walked new believers through the faith step by step before their baptism, and wrote every lecture down.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Fathers & the Creeds · 130 on this stretch of wall
Exiled five separate times for refusing to say the Son was anything less than God, they called it Athanasius against the world.
Made a Roman emperor stand outside the church door until he repented of a massacre.
Heard 'sell what you have' read aloud in church, walked into the Egyptian desert, and started monasticism.
A brilliant, restless sinner whose mother prayed for him thirty years; his Confessions still read like a man talking straight to God.
Built an entire town for the sick and the poor outside his city, and wrote the rule Eastern monks still live by.
Preached five sermons in a tiny borrowed chapel that settled how the whole church speaks about the Trinity.