The Turbulent Early Years

The first years of St. Cyril of Alexandria’s episcopate (from 412) were marked by violent communal conflict — a rupture with the Jewish community of Alexandria that ended in their expulsion, and a feud with the imperial prefect Orestes that culminated in the death of the monk Ammonius and Cyril’s contested attempt to enroll him as a martyr. This file reconstructs that period strictly from its lone narrative source, Socrates Scholasticus, whose hostility to Cyril makes his testimony weighty but whose framing must be handled with care; it closes by setting up, without resolving, the Hypatia question of 415.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Problem of the Sources

Almost the entire narrative of Cyril’s first years rests on a single witness: Socrates of Constantinople, called Scholasticus, whose Ecclesiastical History (covering 305–439, completed c. 439) supplies the only connected account (Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History VII.13–15; trans. NPNF II/2). This source-critical fact must govern everything that follows. Socrates was a Constantinopolitan layman, writing at a distance from Egypt, broadly sympathetic to the Novatians, and openly critical of Cyril. His hostility is not a reason to discount him — on the contrary, it is what gives his testimony its evidentiary force, since the unfavorable details he records cannot be the inventions of a partisan burnishing a saint’s legend (Norman Russell, Cyril of Alexandria, London: Routledge, 2000; Susan Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy: The Making of a Saint and of a Heretic, Oxford: OUP, 2004). But the same fact imposes discipline: where Socrates supplies figures and motives, they should be reported as his and not inflated, and his interpretive judgments should be distinguished from the bare events he transmits. There is no independent Alexandrian narrative against which to check him, and the responsible course is to relay what he says, attribute it to him, and resist the temptation to make the story more certain than the evidence allows.

The Conflict with the Jewish Community

The Jewish community of Alexandria was large and long-established, and the friction that destroyed its standing in the city began, on Socrates’s account, over a matter of public entertainment. The Jews were devoted to the spectacles of dancing staged in the theatre, and these performances, held on the Sabbath, drew disorderly crowds. The prefect Orestes published regulations governing the spectacles, and at the announcement of these rules a faction of the Jewish populace, present in the theatre, came into conflict with the partisans of Cyril who were also there (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History VII.13; trans. NPNF II/2).

In the disturbance a teacher named Hierax, a man Socrates describes as a zealous partisan of Cyril and an enthusiastic applauder of the bishop’s preaching, was singled out. The Jews accused him of having come into the theatre only to incite sedition. Orestes — already resentful of the bishop’s encroachment on civil affairs, and seizing the occasion — had Hierax seized and publicly tortured in the theatre (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History VII.13; trans. NPNF II/2). Cyril responded by summoning the leaders of the Jews and threatening them with severe consequences if the hostility continued.

The threat, on Socrates’s telling, hardened rather than cooled the conflict, and led to a night-time plot. The Jews agreed on a signal by which they might recognize one another in the dark — rings made of palm-bark worn on the finger — and then raised a false cry through the city by night that “the church of Alexander was on fire.” Christians who ran out at the alarm to save their church were set upon and slain by the waiting conspirators (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History VII.13; trans. NPNF II/2). The next day Cyril, with an “immense crowd” at his back, went to the synagogues, seized them, drove the Jews out of the city, and permitted the populace to plunder their goods (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History VII.13; trans. NPNF II/2). The expulsion of a community that had lived in Alexandria, by Socrates’s own remark, since the city’s foundation was thus accomplished by the patriarch acting in the place of the civil power.

Two cautions are essential. First, this is Socrates alone; no other narrative source records the episode, and the figures and motives are entirely his. The account should not be inflated beyond what he reports, nor should casualty numbers be supplied that he does not give. Second, the conventional dating is approximate. The episode is usually placed around 414 [Disputed: Socrates gives no year for the sequence; some reference works place it in 415, immediately before the murder of Hypatia, while others set it in 414 — the date is not fixed by the source]. What is securely Socrates’s is the structure of the event: a partisan provocation, a prefect willing to discipline Cyril’s man, a reprisal cycle, and a patriarch who answered communal violence by seizing the civil prerogative of expelling a population. Orestes was filled with indignation at this usurpation of his jurisdiction and reported it to the emperor (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History VII.13; trans. NPNF II/2).

The Feud with Orestes and the Death of Ammonius

The breach between bishop and prefect now widened into open enmity. Socrates is careful to note that Orestes was no pagan: he was a baptized Christian, “baptized by Atticus the bishop at Constantinople,” and his quarrel with Cyril was not religious but jurisdictional — he resented the bishops’ encroachment on the authority that belonged to the emperor’s officers (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History VII.14; trans. NPNF II/2). Cyril, for his part, attempted a reconciliation. According to the well-known form of the gesture, he held out to Orestes the Book of the Gospels, proposing that reverence for Scripture should compose their quarrel; Orestes rebuffed the overture, unwilling to be reconciled on the bishop’s terms (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History VII.14; trans. NPNF II/2).

It was at this point that the monks intervened, and the situation turned deadly. About five hundred monks came down from the desert of Nitria — the same militant monastic constituency that had served Theophilus a generation earlier — and, gathering around Orestes, abused him as a pagan and a Greek (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History VII.14; trans. NPNF II/2). One of them, a monk named Ammonius, threw a stone that struck Orestes on the head and drew blood. The prefect’s guards fled, but the city populace ran up, rescued Orestes, and seized Ammonius. Orestes had Ammonius publicly tortured, and the monk died under the torture (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History VII.14; trans. NPNF II/2).

Cyril’s response to Ammonius’s death is the episode’s revealing climax — and the point at which Socrates records a dissent that came from within Cyril’s own communion. Cyril took up the body, had it carried into a church, renamed the dead monk “Thaumasius” — “the Wonderful” — proclaimed him a martyr, and delivered a eulogy in his honor, praising his courage as that of one who had contended for piety (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History VII.14; trans. NPNF II/2). But Socrates is emphatic that this estimate did not carry. He reports that “the more sober-minded, although Christians, did not accept Cyril’s prejudiced estimate of the matter,” because they knew that Ammonius “had suffered the punishment due to his rashness,” and that he had died not for refusing to deny Christ but for an act of violence (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History VII.14; trans. NPNF II/2). Socrates adds, tellingly, that Cyril himself came to recognize this, and so “by his silence” gradually let the matter “sink into oblivion” — quietly dropping the cult he had tried to inaugurate (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History VII.14; trans. NPNF II/2). McGuckin and Russell both treat the episode as instructive precisely for this reversal: it shows the limits of even the Alexandrian patriarch’s power to define holiness by decree, checked by the moral judgment of his own community (John A. McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy, Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004; Russell, Cyril of Alexandria).

What the Period Reveals

Read with the discipline the sources demand, these years disclose less about Cyril’s private character than about the office he held and the civic climate in which he held it. The patriarchate Cyril inherited from Theophilus was an instrument of mobilized force — capable of putting an immense crowd or five hundred desert monks into the streets — and the boundary between its sacral and its civil functions had been blurred to the point of structural conflict with the imperial prefect (Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997). The expulsion of the Jews and the Ammonius affair are best understood not as isolated outrages but as the predictable friction of that arrangement: a bishop wielding popular and monastic power against a prefect defending imperial jurisdiction, in a city long primed for communal violence. Wessel stresses that the later “making of a saint” out of Cyril had to be accomplished in spite of, and partly by suppression of, exactly this record (Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy).

Two questions of historical judgment must be held open. The first is how far personal responsibility for the violence can be assigned to Cyril himself, as distinct from the partisans, crowds, and monks who acted in his name and to his evident benefit — a question on which Socrates’s hostile framing and his silence about Cyril’s direct orders both cut in complicated ways. The second is the event that this entire climate sets up but that this file does not attempt to resolve: the murder of the philosopher Hypatia in 415, which followed immediately upon the feud with Orestes and into which Cyril’s partisans were drawn. The character of his early patriarchate — partisan, mobilized, and violent at the seams between church and state — is the necessary context for that question, which is taken up in its own section.

See Also

• Alexandria and the Accession (412) — the inheritance and the contested election that produced the office described here
• The Murder of 415 — the death of Hypatia, which followed directly from the Orestes feud
• Cyril’s Responsibility Debated — the historiographical argument over Cyril’s culpability for the violence of these years
• Theotokos and the Dispute — the doctrinal controversy that would define Cyril’s later, more constructive career
• St. John Chrysostom — the precedent of Nitrian monks deployed in ecclesiastical politics under Theophilus
• Pre-Schism Church — the wider late-antique ecclesial world in which these events unfolded

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. VII.13–15).
• 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.