Justified True Belief

(●) The bishop of Alexandria who made the church say out loud that the baby in the manger was God. + Set out a nativity scene on a mantelpiece and you have in your hands a claim so large that most people who handle it every December have stopped noticing it. There is a woman, and there is an infant, and Christians say that the infant is the maker of the woman. In the fifth century a preacher in the capital of the empire said, in effect, that this was going too far, and that a more careful way of speaking was needed. The man who would not let him get away with it was the bishop of Alexandria. Cyril ran the church in Egypt for nearly thirty-two years, and for the last sixteen of them he was fighting about one sentence: whether Mary may be called Theotokos, which is Greek for God-bearer, the one who gave birth to God. He thought the whole gospel was standing on that word. If the one born of Mary was not God himself but a man very closely joined to God, then the one who died on the cross was also a man very closely joined to God, and God has not actually come to us or actually died for us. He won the argument at the Council of Ephesus in 431, and the church has spoken his way ever since. He also fought dirty, and the record says so. His name is attached to a council he opened before his opponents could reach the city, to a mountain of gold sent to courtiers, and to three years of street violence in Alexandria that ended with a famous philosopher lynched in a church. One signature fact holds both halves of him together: the fullest surviving text of the emperor Julian’s attack on Christianity comes down to us inside Cyril’s refutation of it, because he quoted his enemy at length before answering him.

(●) c. 376 AD: Born in Egypt and raised for the church by the most powerful bishop in the East. + Nobody wrote down the year Cyril was born. Scholars work backwards from his career and land somewhere around 376 AD, and the figure carries a "c." for a reason. What is certain is the family. He was the nephew of Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria, which is as much as the ancient writers say; whether the tie ran through his mother or his father they do not tell us, and later accounts guess in both directions. In the Egypt of that century there was no better family to be born into if you meant to matter. A bishop’s see is his official seat and the whole stretch of country that comes with it, the way a county comes with its courthouse, and the see of Alexandria was not a parish. Egypt fed the empire, and the grain fleets that sailed north to Constantinople sailed from Alexandrian docks; the bishop who controlled the city’s churches, its charities, its hospital brotherhoods and its enormous crowds was, in practice, the strongest man in the province. Cyril was educated for it: grammar and rhetoric first, then Scripture, and by his own later habits a great deal of Athanasius, the Alexandrian bishop of the previous century who had spent his life insisting that the Son is fully God. One ancient letter suggests Cyril spent a stretch of his youth among the monks of the desert, and later writers made it five years in the mountains of Nitria; the detail is plausible and not certain. In 403 he went north with his uncle’s party to a synod, which is simply a meeting of bishops called to settle a piece of church business, held at an estate called the Oak, in the suburbs of Chalcedon across the water from Constantinople. That synod deposed John Chrysostom, the greatest preacher of the age, on charges that most of the church came to regard as a stitch-up. Cyril was young, he was in his uncle’s train, and he believed the charges. Long after Chrysostom was dead and vindicated, Cyril still refused to read his name in the diptychs, the list of honoured bishops recited aloud during the liturgy. It took years of pressure from Atticus of Constantinople and from Isidore of Pelusium, the monk who had been his own spiritual adviser and who never stopped telling him unwelcome things, before the name went back on the list.

(●) 412 AD: Three days after his uncle died, he took the patriarch’s chair over a rival and a riot. + Theophilus died on 15 October 412, and the city split. One party wanted the archdeacon Timothy; the other wanted the dead man’s nephew. Abundantius, who commanded the troops in Egypt, backed Timothy. The crowds backed Cyril, and the crowds won. On the third day after his uncle’s death he was enthroned. Socrates Scholasticus, a lawyer in Constantinople who wrote a history of the church within Cyril’s own lifetime and had no affection for him, adds a sour line at that point: from then on the bishopric of Alexandria went beyond its priestly business and took up the running of secular affairs. He is not making it up. Cyril moved immediately against the Novatians, a rigorist group that had broken away in the third century because it would not readmit Christians who had crumbled under persecution. He shut their churches in Alexandria, took their sacred vessels, and stripped their bishop. So the shape of him was fixed inside a week: enormously able, theologically serious, and entirely willing to reach for the leverage of a great city. The gifts and the temper travel together in him, and neither one can be quietly set down while the other is admired.

(●) 415 AD: His feud with the imperial governor ended in a lynching, and the reproach fell on him. + The trouble began, as trouble in Alexandria often did, at the theatre. Socrates tells it in detail. The governor Orestes was reading out regulations for the dancing shows when the crowd spotted one of Cyril’s known supporters, a schoolmaster named Hierax, in the seats. The Jewish part of the audience shouted that he had come to stir up a riot; Orestes, who already resented the bishop’s habit of watching him, had Hierax seized and tortured in the theatre on the spot. From there it went the way these things go. Cyril summoned the leaders of the Jewish community and threatened them, and threats made it worse rather than better. According to Socrates a night attack followed, with a false cry that a church was on fire and Christians cut down in the streets as they ran to save it. In the morning Cyril went to the synagogues with a great crowd behind him, took them, drove the Jewish community out of Alexandria, and let the mob have their goods. A community that had lived in the city since Alexander founded it was driven from its homes in a morning. Orestes reported all of it to the emperor. Five hundred monks came down from the desert of Nitria to fight for their bishop, surrounded the governor’s chariot in the street and called him a pagan; one of them, Ammonius, threw a stone that opened Orestes’ head. The city crowd rescued the governor and handed Ammonius over, and Orestes had him tortured until he died. Cyril then had the body laid in a church, renamed the man Thaumasius, "the wonderful," enrolled him among the martyrs, and preached his courage. Socrates records that the more sober-minded Christians of Alexandria would not go along with it, since they knew perfectly well that Ammonius had died for throwing a rock and not for refusing to deny Christ, and that Cyril, knowing it too, let the whole business fade into silence. In March 415 the quarrel produced its worst hour. Hypatia was a mathematician and Platonist philosopher of great reputation who lectured publicly in the city, and she was a friend of Orestes; word went round the Christian populace that she was the reason the governor would not be reconciled to the bishop. A mob led by a church reader named Peter, a man from the minor clergy whose whole office was to stand up in the services and read the Scripture lessons aloud, caught her in the street, dragged her into the church called the Caesareum, stripped her, killed her with roof tiles, and burned what was left. Socrates, who is hostile to Cyril throughout, does not say that Cyril ordered it and does not accuse him of it. What he says is that the affair brought no small reproach upon Cyril and upon the whole church of Alexandria, and that nothing is further from the mind of Christianity than massacres of that kind. A pagan writer a century later, Damascius, did blame Cyril directly, and he is late, hostile, and unsupported. The judgment the primary sources will bear is narrower and still heavy: the men who did it were of his party, the mood that produced it came out of a feud he had been stoking for two years, and he never disowned any of it.

(●) 429 AD: A bishop in Constantinople refused Mary the title God-bearer, and Cyril answered from Egypt. + In the winter of 427 to 428 the emperor Theodosius II brought a celebrated preacher from Antioch to be bishop of the capital. Nestorius arrived with a reputation for eloquence and a horror of sloppy language about God. In Constantinople people had long been calling Mary Theotokos, God-bearer. Nestorius and a presbyter of his household, one of the senior clergy on his own staff, thought the word was a trap: taken plainly, they said, it sounds as though the eternal God started existing inside a girl in Nazareth. He proposed Christotokos, Christ-bearer, instead. Sermons travel. Copies reached Egypt, and by Lent of 429 monks in the Egyptian desert were arguing about it, which is what pulled Cyril in. He wrote a Paschal Letter for that Easter, the circular an Alexandrian bishop sent out every year to announce the date and preach on it, and then a long letter to the monks explaining why the word had to stay. That is where the correspondence with Nestorius began, and at first it was a good deal more courteous than either man’s reputation would suggest. In February 430 Cyril sent the letter that has outlived everything else he wrote, a calm and closely argued page and a half now known simply as his Second Letter to Nestorius, which two ecumenical councils, meaning councils gathered from the whole church rather than one province, would later adopt as a standard of the faith. His case never really moves off one point, and the point is a great deal simpler than the machinery of councils that grew up around it. The question is not what honour Mary is owed. The question is who was born. Every mother bears a person, not a nature; no one says a woman is the mother of her son’s humanity. So if the person born of Mary is the eternal Son, then she is the mother of the one who is God, whatever qualifications you then add, and Elizabeth had already said as much when she called her "the mother of my Lord" (Luke 1:43). And if she is not, then the man who walked out of that stable was somebody other than God, and everything he did for us was done by somebody other than God.

(●) 431 AD: At Ephesus he opened the council before his opponents arrived, and won it in a day. + Both sides had appealed to Rome, and Rome answered Cyril. A synod under Pope Celestine condemned Nestorius in August 430 and left it to Cyril to deliver the ultimatum: recant within ten days. Cyril’s own synod in Alexandria attached to that ultimatum a list of twelve propositions for Nestorius to anathematize. To anathematize a statement is to condemn it formally and by name, in front of witnesses, and to declare that whoever holds it stands outside the fellowship of the church. It is not a disagreement. It is a door closing. The twelve, known ever since as the Twelve Anathemas, were written in the hardest language Cyril ever used, and phrased in a way that even sympathetic bishops found alarming. Nestorius refused. Theodosius II summoned a general council to Ephesus for Pentecost 431. Cyril came with about fifty Egyptian bishops. John of Antioch and the Syrian bishops, who would have argued Nestorius’ corner, were late on the road. Sixty-eight bishops already at Ephesus asked for a delay until the Syrians arrived. Cyril refused, took the chair on 22 June in the church of Mary, sent a summons to Nestorius three times and had it refused three times, read the correspondence into the record, had his Second Letter approved by acclamation, and deposed Nestorius. All of it happened in one sitting. That night the people of Ephesus escorted the bishops back to their lodgings with torches. Four days later John of Antioch reached the city, held a rival council of about forty-three bishops, and deposed Cyril in turn. The papal legates, the men Rome had sent to speak in the pope’s name, arrived on 10 July and confirmed Cyril’s session. The emperor, presented with two councils that had each deposed the other, accepted all the depositions at once and put Cyril, Memnon of Ephesus and Nestorius under guard. Cyril got out and was home in Alexandria by the end of October, greeted as a conqueror. Nestorius went back to a monastery in Antioch and eventually into exile in the Egyptian desert. How Cyril got out of custody does him no credit. Among the Latin records of the council there survives a letter from his archdeacon Epiphanius, with an attached inventory of what had been sent to officials of the imperial court to keep the verdict standing. It is itemized by recipient: woollen carpets, tablecloths, hangings and door curtains, stool covers, ivory chairs and ivory stools, large tables, ostriches, and then, at the foot of each list, the gold: fifty pounds of it to one official, two hundred to another, with the whole inventory running to something over two thousand pounds. The word the document uses for the gifts is eulogiae, "blessings." Historians who have added the inventory up reckon it among the largest bribes documented from antiquity, and it survives in his own church’s paperwork rather than in an enemy’s pamphlet.

(●) 433 AD: He signed a statement of faith drafted by the other side, and the East had peace. + His admirers and his critics both tend to skip what happened next, and it may be the best thing he ever did. For two years after Ephesus the Eastern church was split down the middle, Alexandria against Antioch, with two sets of depositions in force and the emperor losing patience. Then John of Antioch sent Paul, bishop of Emesa, to Alexandria carrying a short confession of faith that the Syrian bishops had drawn up. It was not written in Cyril’s vocabulary. It called Christ "of the same substance with us according to his humanity," and it said flatly that in him "there became a union of two natures," which is close to the language Cyril had spent three years attacking. It also called Mary the Mother of God, which was the thing he had gone to war for. He signed it. Then he wrote to John a letter that opens with a line from the Psalms about the heavens rejoicing, and the split closed. What he had refused to grant to an argument he granted to a formula that said what he meant, and he never pretended otherwise afterwards. His own supporters were appalled, and he spent much of the next few years writing to them: to Acacius of Melitene, to Eulogius, to Succensus, patiently explaining that "two natures" in the mouth of an Antiochene did not mean two sons, and that a man may use another man’s words when the words are true. Isidore of Pelusium, who had spent twenty years telling him he was too hot, now worried that he had given away too much. The reunion held for the eleven years Cyril had left.

(●) 444 AD: He died after nearly thirty-two years as patriarch, having written the answer to Julian. + Some time in the 430s Cyril turned aside from the Christological fight to deal with a dead man. Seventy years earlier the emperor Julian, raised a Christian and baptized, had abandoned the faith and written three books against it. Cyril says in his preface to Theodosius II that pagans were still throwing those books at Christians in the street and boasting that no learned man on the Christian side had ever been able to answer them. So he answered them, at enormous length, in a work called Against Julian that ran to twenty books, of which the first ten survive complete in Greek along with substantial fragments of the rest. Because his method was to quote Julian in full and then reply, nearly everything now known of Julian’s Against the Galileans survives only because Cyril copied it out in order to demolish it. The last great pagan attack on Christianity is preserved in the file of the man who refuted it. In the same late years he wrote his warmest and clearest book on Christ, a dialogue called That Christ is One, which says everything the Twelve Anathemas said without the hardness. He died in June 444, on the ninth or the twenty-seventh; the sources give both days and the churches have kept both. He had been bishop for nearly thirty-two years, and he was succeeded by his archdeacon Dioscorus. Rome eventually gave him the rank it reserves for the church’s great teachers: Leo XIII approved his Mass and Office as a Doctor of the Church in 1883.

What He Taught

(T1) The child Mary carried was God himself, and so the church may call her the God-bearer. + Think about how you would fill in a hospital form. Under "mother" you write a name, and the name belongs to a person; you do not write that she is the mother of a body, or of a human nature, or of a set of characteristics. Mothers bear people. Cyril’s whole argument for Theotokos hangs on that ordinary fact about how the word "mother" works. Theotokos is two Greek words stuck together, theos, God, and tokos, one who gives birth. God-bearer. Nestorius’ objection to it was not silly, and Cyril knew that: nobody thinks Mary is the source of the divine nature, or that God began in Nazareth, and if the word implies that, the word is blasphemous. So Cyril spends his energy denying exactly that. The divine nature took nothing from Mary. It has no beginning at all. What she gave was a real human body with a rational soul, and the one who took that body from her was the Word who was with God in the beginning (John 1:1). Put those two things together and the conclusion follows without any further help. The person she bore is the Word. Therefore the person she bore is God. Therefore she is the mother of one who is God, which is all the word ever claimed. Elizabeth, filled with the Spirit, had already reached for the same form of words when she greeted her cousin as "the mother of my Lord" (Luke 1:43), and Paul says the same thing another way when he writes that God sent forth his Son, born of woman (Galatians 4:4). Plenty of Christians hear the word and flinch, and the flinch usually says something like this: "So it is really about Mary after all, and I am being asked to agree to more than I believe." It is not, and Cyril would have been the first to say so. Theotokos is a claim about Christ that happens to be phrased through his mother. The council that adopted the word was not deciding what honours Mary should receive; Christians disagree about that to this day, and the word settles none of it. It was deciding whether the one born at Bethlehem was God, and it decided yes.

(Q) "This was the sentiment of the holy Fathers; therefore they ventured to call the holy Virgin, the Mother of God, not as if the nature of the Word or his divinity had its beginning from the holy Virgin, but because of her was born that holy body with a rational soul, to which the Word being personally united is said to be born according to the flesh." + Source: Cyril of Alexandria, Second Letter to Nestorius (Percival translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 14). Cyril is arguing that the title is not an innovation of his own. The holy Fathers he appeals to are the bishops of the previous century whose faith he claims to be repeating, and the sentence carefully denies the thing Nestorius feared before it affirms the thing Cyril wanted. The council at Ephesus in 431 approved this letter by acclamation, and the Council of Chalcedon read it into its own acts twenty years later.

(T2) The Word did not move into a man. The infant in the manger was the Word. + Here is the picture Cyril was fighting, and it is a picture many sincere Christians carry around without ever having chosen it. God looked for a perfect man; he found one; and he came to live in him more fully than he has ever lived in anyone, so that when you look at Jesus of Nazareth you are looking at a human being with God inside. That is a high view of Christ. It is also, Cyril said, a description of a prophet, and there have been prophets. His alternative has a technical name, the hypostatic union, and the term is worth ten seconds of care because it does real work. A hypostasis in this vocabulary is a particular someone, the individual who does the acting and is pointed at when you say "he." To say the union is hypostatic is to say the joining happened at the level of the person, not at the level of cooperation, agreement, or indwelling. There is one someone in Jesus Christ, and that someone is the eternal Son, now living a human life through a real human body and a real human mind that are genuinely his own. Cyril’s test case is the birth itself: there was never a moment when a baby existed and the Word then arrived. The union was made in the womb. Everything else in his theology follows the same rule. When Jesus is hungry, it is God who is hungry, in the way a human being is hungry. When he weeps at a grave, it is God weeping human tears out of human eyes. This is the doctrine later theologians call the communication of properties: what belongs to either nature may be said of the one person, because there is only one person there to say anything about. The one place his language failed him was a phrase he loved: "one incarnate nature of God the Word." He believed it came from Athanasius, and it did not. It came from a tract that circulated under Athanasius’ name but was written by Apollinaris, a fourth-century bishop whose error was to say that in Christ the divine Word replaced the human mind. Cyril did not hold that, and said so repeatedly. But he built on a sentence he had not checked, and it was left to the Council of Chalcedon, seven years after his death, to supply the precision he had not: one person, in two natures, without confusion and without division.

(Q) "For although visible and a child in swaddling clothes, and even in the bosom of his Virgin Mother, he filled all creation as God, and was a fellow-ruler with him who begat him, for the Godhead is without quantity and dimension, and cannot have limits." + Source: Cyril of Alexandria, Third Letter to Nestorius (Percival translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 14). The letter that carried the Twelve Anathemas is mostly a hard document, and then it stops for a sentence like this one. Cyril is answering the obvious objection, that an infant is small and God is not, by pointing out that the objection assumes God takes up room. He does not. Nothing about the manger fenced the Word in, because there is no size at which the Word could be contained in the first place.

(T3) God cannot suffer, and at Calvary God suffered, because the body on the cross was his own. + A man burns his hand on a hot pan. Nobody says his hand was burned and he was not; you say he burned himself, because the hand is his. That is roughly the shape of the answer Cyril gives to the hardest question in his theology, and he would not thank anyone for pressing the comparison further than it goes. The question is unavoidable once you have said what he said in (T1) and (T2). Christians inherited from Scripture and from Greek thought alike the conviction that God is impassible, which means he cannot be acted upon from outside, worn down, damaged, or made to suffer against his will. A God who could be injured by his creatures would be one more item in the world rather than its maker. Fine. Now put that God on a Roman cross. Cyril’s answer is to refuse both easy exits. He will not say that only the human part suffered while the divine part looked on, because that puts two subjects back in Christ and undoes everything. He will not say that the divine nature was hurt, because a wounded God is not God. What he says instead is that the Word suffered in the flesh: the nature that suffered was the human one, and the person who suffered was the Son, because that flesh was not somebody else’s. Nails go into a body; the body belongs to him; therefore he is the one crucified. Paul had said it in one phrase already when he wrote that the rulers of this age crucified the Lord of glory (1 Corinthians 2:8). Both halves of that have to be held or the cross empties out. Drop the impassibility and God is a fellow sufferer who cannot save anybody. Drop the suffering and the cross is a fine man’s death that God arranged and watched. Hold both and you have the thing the New Testament actually says: the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood (Acts 20:28).

(Q) "Not as if God the Word suffered in his own nature stripes, or the piercing of the nails, or any other wounds, for the Divine nature is incapable of suffering, inasmuch as it is incorporeal, but since that which had become his own body suffered in this way, he is also said to suffer for us; for he who is in himself incapable of suffering was in a suffering body." + Source: Cyril of Alexandria, Second Letter to Nestorius (Percival translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 14). The same letter the council approved, a few lines after the passage on the birth. Cyril goes straight on from suffering to death and applies the identical rule: the Word is life and cannot die, and yet it is right to say that he died for us, because the body that tasted death was his own body and not a borrowed one.

(T4) If the flesh Christians receive is not God’s own flesh, it cannot give life. + Cyril was an exegete long before he was a controversialist, which is to say that he spent his working life going through the biblical text a line at a time and explaining what it says. He had already written twelve books on the Gospel of John by the time Nestorius opened his mouth, and it is there, commenting on the sixth chapter, that his Christology stops being a matter of definitions and starts being a matter of dinner. Jesus tells the crowd at Capernaum that unless they eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood they have no life in them (John 6:53). Cyril takes the promise attached to it seriously: whoever feeds on that flesh has eternal life and will be raised on the last day (John 6:54). Then he asks the obvious question. Flesh is flesh. Bodies rot. How can eating anything make a person immortal? His answer is that it cannot, unless the flesh in question belongs to the Word. Life does not sit in a body as a quality; life is what the Word is. So a body that is genuinely the Word’s own body is charged with what he is, the way (Cyril says) water in a kettle over a fire all but forgets that it is cold by nature. What the believer receives is not a relic of a holy man. It is life-giving flesh, and it works. Christians have disagreed for centuries about what exactly happens at the Lord’s Table, and the argument Cyril is making does not settle that dispute. What it does is show why he would not compromise on the person of Christ. If Jesus is a man united to God rather than God made man, then the flesh given for the life of the world (John 6:51) is a creature’s flesh, and a creature has no life to hand out. The sacrament, the cross, and the resurrection all stand or fall on the same sentence.

(Q) "For as if one took a spark and buried it amid much stubble, in order that the seed of fire preserved might lay hold on it, so in us too our Lord Jesus Christ hideth life through His Own Flesh, and inserts it as a seed of immortality, abolishing the whole corruption that is in us." + Source: Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of John, book four, on John 6:54 (Pusey translation, Library of the Fathers, 1874). Cyril is explaining why Jesus says "I will raise him up" rather than "my body will raise him up." The spark in the stubble is his picture of what has happened to a mortal body that has received the flesh of the Word: something has been put in it that will not stay quiet, and decay has lost the argument in advance.

(Q) "Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad, for the middle wall of partition has been taken away, and grief has been silenced, and all kind of difference of opinion has been removed." + Source: Cyril of Alexandria, Letter to John of Antioch (Percival translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 14). The opening of the letter of 433 in which Cyril accepted the Antiochene confession and ended the schism. The Latin church knew it for centuries by its first two words, Laetentur caeli. Twenty years later the Council of Chalcedon read this letter and the Second Letter to Nestorius into its acts together, and treated the pair of them as the measure of what the church believed about Christ.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) Ephesus gave the church the word, and Chalcedon built its definition out of his letters. + Two things came out of 431 that have never been undone. The first is the word itself. Theotokos went into the liturgies of the East and, as Dei Genitrix and then "Mother of God," into the West, and it is still recited every week by Christians who could not tell you which council produced it. The second is a habit of mind: after Ephesus, the church would not let anyone talk about Jesus as though there were two people in him being described alternately. Twenty years later, at Chalcedon in 451, the bishops sat down to fix the language for good, and they did it with Cyril’s correspondence open on the table. His Second Letter to Nestorius was read out (T1, T3). So was his letter to John of Antioch accepting the reunion formula. The definition they produced holds his emphasis and adds the precision he had lacked: one and the same Christ, made known in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, the difference of the natures not taken away by the union. That last clause repeats, almost word for word in the Greek, a line from the Second Letter. A century later the Second Council of Constantinople in 553 went back over the whole controversy and reaffirmed him again. The result is that Cyril’s question, not Cyril’s temper, set the terms for every later Christian statement about Christ. The Reformers inherited Chalcedon and argued from it without needing to reopen it. When a modern Christian says that God died on the cross, or sings that the infinite has become an infant, the grammar being used is his.

(†) Churches that broke with one another after his death both kept him as their chief teacher. + Chalcedon divided the Eastern church, and the division has lasted sixteen hundred years. The Coptic, Syriac, Armenian and Ethiopian churches did not receive the council’s formula of "in two natures," holding that it conceded too much to the Antiochene side; the Greek and Latin churches did receive it. Both sides then went on quoting Cyril, and neither has ever stopped. That is a strange thing to be true of a controversialist, and it is not an accident. The Oriental Orthodox churches read him as the man who refused to divide Christ and who never surrendered the word Theotokos. The Chalcedonian churches read him as the man whose letters the council enacted. Both readings can point at real sentences, because Cyril in fact insisted on both things: one Christ who is the subject of everything said about him, and a full humanity in him that is not swallowed up. In the modern conversations between the Eastern Orthodox and the Oriental Orthodox churches, that shared inheritance has been the ground on which each side has come to recognize the other’s faith in its own vocabulary. For a Christian reader the practical use of Cyril is simpler than any of this. He is the father who will not let the incarnation be softened into a partnership. Whenever the doctrine starts to drift back toward a God who inspired a man, he is the voice on the other side of the table saying that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14), and that "became" is the whole of it.

(†) His own record holds an expulsion, a lynching by men of his own church, a council opened early, and a court paid in gold. + The other column of the ledger is long, and it is written in the sources his own church preserved, not in the propaganda of his enemies. - Alexandria. He expelled an entire Jewish community from the city and let a mob strip their property, on the account of a historian writing in his own lifetime. He then took a monk who had thrown a stone at the imperial governor, a man tortured to death for assault, and enrolled him among the martyrs, until his own congregation’s better sense made him drop it quietly. Whatever provocation there had been, an overseer is to be "not arrogant or quick-tempered or a drunkard or violent" (Titus 1:7), and the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God (James 1:20). - Hypatia. The primary sources do not put the murder in his hands, and honesty means saying so. They do put the feud in his hands. Socrates, no friend of his, writes that the affair brought no small reproach on Cyril and on the whole church of Alexandria, and Cyril never repudiated the men who did it or the atmosphere he had spent two years building. - Ephesus. Sixty-eight bishops asked him to wait for the Syrians; he opened without them and sat as accuser and judge in the same chair, and the whole case was settled in a single sitting. His own later conduct is the sharpest argument against him here: in 433 he accepted a confession from the very men he had refused to wait for, which suggests the delay would have cost him nothing and might have spared the church a schism. - The gold. The inventory of gifts sent from Alexandria to the imperial court to secure the outcome survives among the council’s own records. Calling them "blessings" did not make them blessings. - The unchecked formula. He made "one incarnate nature of God the Word" central to his teaching on the strength of an attribution he never verified, and it came from a forgery (T2). A theologian who demanded exactness from everyone else owed the same care to his own sources. "Then why should I take my doctrine from a man like this?" is the fair question, and the answer is not that the charges have been overdrawn. None of this is a reason to set his theology aside, and Christians have generally not tried to. The doctrine was tested on its merits by councils that included men he had wronged, and it held. An argument does not inherit the character of the person making it; a liar can still be right about arithmetic, and a bishop with a mob at his back can still be right about the incarnation. But the church has never been well served by pretending its best minds were also its best men. Cyril saw further into the mystery of the incarnation than almost anyone before or since, and he would have served it better with a slower hand.