Alexandria and the Accession (412)

St. Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376–444) inherited an episcopal office of exceptional power, shaped by his uncle Theophilus and by the peculiar position of the Alexandrian see in late-antique Egypt. This file traces that inheritance — the “pharaonic” patriarchate, the destruction of the Serapeum, the Origenist controversy and the deposition of John Chrysostom — and then the contested election of 412 that brought Cyril to the throne with, in the words of his unfriendly contemporary Socrates, “greater power than Theophilus had ever exercised.”

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Alexandrian See and Its Power

By the early fifth century the patriarchate of Alexandria was unlike any other bishopric in the Christian world. Christopher Haas has characterized its authority as “pharaonic” — a quasi-monarchical office whose holder commanded not only the clergy of Egypt but the affection and obedience of the urban crowd, the loyalty of the monastic settlements of the desert, and the muscle of quasi-paramilitary corps such as the parabalani, the corporation of hospital attendants who could be mobilized as a bodyguard or a mob as circumstances required (Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997). The bishop of Alexandria presided over a vast grain-exporting metropolis riven by deep communal divisions — between pagans, Jews, and Christians, and within Christianity between competing parties — and the office had grown to fill the vacuum left by the decline of the old civic institutions. Norman Russell observes that the Alexandrian episcopate had effectively become “the most powerful position in Egypt after that of the imperial prefect,” and that its incumbents were tempted, repeatedly, to behave as if it were the most powerful position without qualification (Norman Russell, Cyril of Alexandria, The Early Church Fathers, London: Routledge, 2000).

This is the institutional fact that frames everything in Cyril’s early career. He did not invent the combative, jurisdictionally aggressive style of the Alexandrian throne; he inherited it, fully formed, from the man who raised him.

Theophilus (Patriarch 385–412)

Cyril was the nephew of Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria from 385 to 412 — the son of Theophilus’s sister, and so his sister’s son (Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History VII.7; trans. NPNF II/2). Under his uncle’s patronage Cyril received the standard sequence of a late-antique elite education — grammar and rhetoric, then theology — and he is reported to have spent a period among the monks of Nitria before his accession, though the length of that stay and the identity of any monastic mentor are uncertain and should not be over-specified (Russell, Cyril of Alexandria). What is beyond dispute is that he was formed within Theophilus’s household and learned the exercise of the patriarchal office at first hand, as his uncle’s protégé.

Theophilus’s tenure had been turbulent and is the indispensable backdrop to Cyril’s. Three episodes from it bear directly on the inheritance.

First, the destruction of the Serapeum (391). When the emperor Theodosius I issued his sweeping anti-pagan edicts, Theophilus led the demolition of the great temple of Serapis at Alexandria — the most celebrated shrine of the old religion in the city — converting a campaign against paganism into a demonstration of the patriarch’s capacity to command crowds and reshape the urban landscape by force (Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity). The episode established a template: the Alexandrian bishop as a man who could put a mass of Christians and monks into the streets to a decisive end.

Second, the Origenist controversy. Theophilus had at first been sympathetic to the Origenist monks of the Egyptian desert, but he reversed himself sharply around 399–401, condemning Origenism and turning on the so-called Tall Brothers — leading Nitrian monks of Origenist sympathy. Driven out of Egypt, the Tall Brothers fled to Constantinople and the protection of its bishop, John Chrysostom. This flight set up a collision between the two great eastern sees (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History VI.7–9; Russell, Cyril of Alexandria).

Third, and as the direct consequence, the deposition of John Chrysostom. Summoned to Constantinople ostensibly to answer for his treatment of the refugee monks, Theophilus instead turned the occasion against Chrysostom himself, engineering Chrysostom’s condemnation at the Synod of the Oak in 403 (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History VI.15; trans. NPNF II/2). Cyril, then a young man, accompanied his uncle to Constantinople and was present at the Synod of the Oak — attested as attendance in his uncle’s entourage, as Theophilus’s young companion, not as an independent actor with a role of his own (Russell, Cyril of Alexandria; John A. McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy, Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004; orig. Brill 1994). The experience left a mark: years later, as patriarch, Cyril at first resisted restoring Chrysostom’s name to the diptychs of Alexandria, regarding the condemnation as his uncle’s settled judgment, and was persuaded to relent only under the urging of Atticus of Constantinople and Isidore of Pelusium — a reconciliation that, framed cautiously, indicates how deeply he had absorbed his uncle’s quarrels as his own (Russell, Cyril of Alexandria; McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria).

The Death of Theophilus and the Contested Election (412)

Theophilus died on 15 October 412 (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History VII.7; trans. NPNF II/2). What followed was not the orderly succession that later hagiography might prefer, but a sharp public struggle. Socrates reports a “great contest” over the vacant see, fought between two candidates: the archdeacon Timothy and Cyril. The factions did not confine themselves to the clergy. Socrates records that Abundantius, the military commander of the troops in Egypt, sided with Timothy — and it is worth being precise here: Socrates names Abundantius as the commander of the soldiery, not as the civil prefect of Egypt, and the distinction matters for understanding the alignment of forces (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History VII.7; trans. NPNF II/2).

The contest was decided not in a day but after public disturbance. Socrates states that after three days of conflict Cyril prevailed, coming “into possession of the episcopate” on 18 October 412 — and he attaches to the moment a pointed editorial judgment that has colored the assessment of Cyril ever since: Cyril took up the office “with greater power than Theophilus had ever exercised.” Socrates goes further, observing that from this point the Alexandrian bishopric “went beyond the limits of its sacerdotal functions, and assumed the administration of secular matters” (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History VII.7; trans. NPNF II/2).

A word on this source is necessary, because nearly all of the narrative for Cyril’s early years rests on it. Socrates of Constantinople, called Scholasticus, was a Constantinopolitan layman whose Ecclesiastical History covers the years 305 to 439 and was completed about 439. He wrote from outside Egypt, was broadly sympathetic to the Novatians, and was distinctly critical of Cyril. His hostility is precisely why his testimony carries evidentiary weight: it is not the report of a partisan working to burnish a saint’s memory, and where it records facts unfavorable to Cyril it cannot be dismissed as Cyrilline propaganda (Russell, Cyril of Alexandria; Susan Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy: The Making of a Saint and of a Heretic, Oxford: OUP, 2004). The corollary is that his interpretive framing — his judgment that Cyril overstepped the sacerdotal office — should be read as the assessment of an unfriendly witness, weighed accordingly, and distinguished from the bare facts he transmits.

The Novatian Seizures

Cyril’s first recorded acts as patriarch were not pastoral but coercive, and they confirm Socrates’s framing of an office reaching beyond its sacral bounds. Immediately upon accession Cyril moved against the Novatians, a rigorist schismatic body with churches in Alexandria. According to Socrates he shut up the Novatian churches of the city, took possession of their consecrated vessels and ornaments, and stripped their bishop Theopemptus of everything he had (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History VII.7; trans. NPNF II/2). Socrates, himself sympathetic to the Novatians, plainly regarded this as an abuse; even allowing for his bias, the episode shows the new patriarch deploying the coercive reach of his office against a rival Christian community within days of taking it up. McGuckin reads the act as Cyril asserting, at the outset, an exclusive ecclesiastical monopoly in his city — a statement of intent about how the see would be administered (McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria).

Orestes and the Beginnings of Jurisdictional Tension

The other figure who enters the story at this period is Orestes, the imperial prefect (the Augustal Prefect, the emperor’s chief civil official in Egypt). Orestes was himself a baptized Christian — Socrates specifies that he had been baptized by Atticus, bishop of Constantinople — but he held a clear and conventional view of the boundary between civil and ecclesiastical authority, and he resented the patriarchate’s tendency to encroach on imperial jurisdiction (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History VII.13–14; trans. NPNF II/2). The structural tension between the two offices — the prefect’s lawful authority over the city and the patriarch’s swollen, popularly backed power — was built into the situation Cyril inherited, and it did not take long to ignite. Wessel notes that the conflict between Cyril and Orestes was less a clash of personalities than a contest over the line dividing two jurisdictions that the Alexandrian see had been steadily blurring for a generation (Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy).

That contest, together with the catastrophic collision between Cyril’s partisans and the Jewish community of Alexandria, would define the first years of his episcopate — the turbulent early period taken up in the companion file.

References

Socrates Scholasticus (Socrates of Constantinople). Ecclesiastical History (covering 305–439, completed c. 439). Trans. A. C. Zenos, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 2 (NPNF II/2). Cited by book and chapter (esp. VI.7–15, VII.7, VII.13–14).
Christopher Haas. Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
John A. McGuckin. St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004 (originally Leiden: Brill, 1994).
Norman Russell. Cyril of Alexandria. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2000.
Susan Wessel. Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy: The Making of a Saint and of a Heretic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.