Life in Christ

St. Cyril of Alexandria is remembered first as the controversialist of Ephesus, but he is also a profound theologian of the spiritual life. His soteriology is participatory through and through: divine life is appropriated by the believer through the two great sacraments — Baptism, which gives the indwelling Spirit, and the Eucharist, which gives the life-giving body — so that the Christian is made a son of God by adoption, his very flesh sown with a seed of incorruption that ripens in the resurrection, and his whole person drawn toward deification. This file sets out Cyril’s doctrine of the appropriation of divine life, its sacramental structure, its goal in theosis, and the practical register of the Festal Letters, presenting Cyril as a Father of the spiritual life and not only of dogma.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

A Participatory Soteriology

The governing category of Cyril’s account of salvation is participation. To be saved is not, for Cyril, merely to be forgiven or acquitted; it is to be made a partaker of the divine life, to have the life that God is by nature communicated to the creature by grace. This is the framework within which the modern study of his thought has been recast — above all by Daniel A. Keating, The Appropriation of Divine Life in Cyril of Alexandria (Oxford: OUP, 2004), whose very title names Cyril’s central concern: how the divine life, which belongs to God alone, comes to be appropriated by human beings.

The structure of that appropriation is determined by the Incarnation. Because the Word became flesh, taking a complete humanity into the unity of his own person, human nature has been opened to God in Christ as in a first-fruits; what happened in Christ’s humanity is to be communicated to the humanity of all who are joined to him. The believer is saved by being incorporated into Christ — made one body and one Spirit with him — so that the life-giving power that filled his assumed humanity may flow into the members of his Body. Salvation is thus less a transaction than a real, ontological sharing in the life of the risen and deified humanity of the Word.

The Two Hands of Sanctification: Spirit and Body

Cyril gives this incorporation a precise sacramental form. The divine life reaches the believer along two converging channels, corresponding to the two natures of the means by which we are saved.

The first is the Holy Spirit, given in Baptism. The Spirit who rested on Christ’s humanity and filled it is poured out on the baptized, taking up his dwelling within them and refashioning them after the image of the Son. For Cyril the indwelling Spirit is the principle of the new birth and of sanctification: by the Spirit the believer is made a temple of God, his soul renewed and stamped anew with the divine likeness lost in Adam. The Spirit is, as it were, the inward and personal mode in which God comes to dwell in the saved.

The second is the body of Christ, given in the Eucharist. Where the Spirit sanctifies from within, the life-giving flesh received in communion sanctifies the believer’s body, planting in his perishable members the incorruptible flesh of the Word as a seed of immortality (see Eucharistic Theology). Cyril is emphatic that both are needed: the Spirit and the eucharistic body together effect the transformation of the whole person, soul and flesh alike. To be sanctified by the Spirit without the body would leave the flesh outside salvation; to receive the body without the Spirit would be unintelligible, since it is by the Spirit that the gift is made alive in us. The two sacramental gifts are the two hands by which Christ lays hold of the whole human being and draws it into his own life.

Sonship by Adoption

The first fruit of this participation is sonship. Christ is the Son of God by nature; those who are joined to him become sons of God by adoption and grace (huiothesia). The logic is again participatory: because we are made partakers of the Son’s own Spirit, we are made to share — really, though by grace — in his own relation to the Father, so that we can cry “Abba, Father” not as strangers but as those who have been given a true, if derived, filiation. Adoption for Cyril is no legal fiction but an ontological elevation: the adopted son genuinely possesses, by grace, what the natural Son possesses by nature, namely a share in the divine life and a real kinship with God. This is the proper Cyrilline form of the patristic axiom that the Son of God became man so that men might become sons of God.

The Body as Seed of Incorruption and the Resurrection

Because salvation reaches the body, it culminates in the resurrection of the body. This is one of the most characteristic and most physical strands of Cyril’s thought. The life-giving flesh received in the Eucharist is, he insists, a seed of incorruption — sperma of immortality sown in the mortal members of the communicant, a leaven of resurrection working secretly in the flesh until it transforms the whole. The promise of John 6:54, “I will raise him up at the last day,” is for Cyril the natural issue of eucharistic communion: the flesh that has conquered death, taken into our dying flesh, communicates its victory.

This grounds the resurrection of the body not in a bare divine decree imposed from without but in a real eucharistic union already begun in this life. The Christian’s risen and incorruptible body is the flowering of a seed already planted; the Liturgy is the daily sowing of immortality into mortal nature. Salvation, in Cyril, is therefore as wide as human nature itself — it does not leave the body behind but redeems it, and the resurrection is the public manifestation of a transformation long at work in the sacraments.

Deification through Sacramental Participation

The horizon of the whole is deification — theosis. Cyril is one of the major patristic witnesses to the doctrine that the goal of the Christian life is to be made, by grace, what God is by nature: to become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4) through real participation in the life of the Word. What is distinctive in his account, as Keating has shown, is that this deification is mediated sacramentally and Christologically: it is not a flight of the unaided mind toward an abstract divinity but the appropriation of the divine life that has been made available in the flesh of the incarnate Word and is communicated through the Spirit of Baptism and the body of the Eucharist.

Cyril’s theosis is thus held firmly within the bounds that the later tradition would guard: the creature is deified by grace and participation, never by becoming divine by nature; the distinction between the uncreated God and the deified creature is never collapsed. In this Cyril stands within the broad Orthodox doctrine of theosis that runs through St. Athanasius before him and reaches its mature articulation in St. Maximus the Confessor and, later, in the essence–energies distinction of St. Gregory Palamas. His particular contribution is to have rooted deification so concretely in the sacraments — to have shown that the deifying life of God comes to the believer not in the abstract but in the water and the Spirit, the bread and the cup.

The Spiritual Register of the Festal Letters

That Cyril is a Father of the spiritual life and not merely a dogmatician is clearest in his Festal (or Paschal) Letters — the thirty annual letters by which, as bishop of Alexandria, he announced to the churches the date of Pascha and the discipline of the preceding fast (Epistulae paschales, PG 77:401–981; CPG 5240; trans. FC 118 for letters 1–12 and FC 127 [P. R. Amidon] for 13–30). Here the controversialist gives way to the pastor. The letters dwell on the meaning of Pascha and the Resurrection as the centre of the Christian year; on the shape of the Christian life as a continual passover from death to life, from vice to virtue; and on the concrete disciplines that order that life — fasting as the training of the body and the freeing of the soul, almsgiving and care for the poor as the necessary fruit of repentance, prayer and watchfulness as the soul’s labour.

The Festal Letters show that Cyril’s high doctrine of participation was never meant to remain theoretical. The same flesh that is sown as a seed of incorruption in the Eucharist is to be disciplined by fasting; the same Spirit who indwells the baptized is to be obeyed in the works of mercy; the same divine life that is appropriated sacramentally is to be lived out in the ascetical and charitable practices of the Church’s year. In them the practical and the dogmatic registers meet: theosis is not only confessed but enjoined, and the deification of human nature is shown to be inseparable from the ordinary, costly disciplines of the Christian life.

Cyril, Father of the Spiritual Life

Read whole, Cyril is therefore far more than the man of Ephesus and the Twelve Anathemas. Beneath and beyond the polemic stands a coherent and deeply Orthodox vision of the spiritual life: human nature, fallen and corrupted in Adam, is renewed in Christ and drawn — body and soul, by Spirit and by sacrament — into the very life of God, until it is made a son by adoption, raised incorruptible, and deified by grace. The controversialist and the pastor are one man, and the urgency of his dogmatic battles is finally explained by what he believed was at stake in them: the real participation of human beings in the life of God.

See Also

• Eucharistic Theology — the life-giving flesh that sows the seed of incorruption in the believer
• Mia Physis and the Hypostatic Union — the union of God and man in Christ that grounds the deification of the believer
• The Twelve Anathemas — the dogmatic frame within which Cyril’s soteriology was forged
• The Biblical Commentaries — the exegetical works in which much of this soteriology is developed
• Theosis — the Orthodox doctrine of deification to which Cyril is a major patristic witness
• The Divine Liturgy — the eucharistic worship through which divine life is appropriated

References

• Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of John (In Joannem), PG 73:9–1056; PG 74:9–756; CPG 5208; trans. P. E. Pusey, Library of Fathers 43, and T. Randell, Library of Fathers 48.
• Cyril of Alexandria, Festal (Paschal) Letters (Epistulae paschales, 30 letters), PG 77:401–981; CPG 5240; trans. Fathers of the Church 118 (letters 1–12) and Fathers of the Church 127 (letters 13–30), trans. Philip R. Amidon.
• Cyril of Alexandria, Third Letter to Nestorius (Ep. 17), with the Twelve Anathemas, PG 77:105–121.
• Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ (Quod unus sit Christus), PG 75:1253–1361; trans. John A. McGuckin, On the Unity of Christ, Popular Patristics 13 (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1995).
• Daniel A. Keating, The Appropriation of Divine Life in Cyril of Alexandria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
• Lawrence J. Welch, Christology and Eucharist in the Early Thought of Cyril of Alexandria (San Francisco: International Scholars, 1994).
• Henry Chadwick, “Eucharist and Christology in the Nestorian Controversy,” Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 2 (1951): 145–164.
• John A. McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2004).
• Norman Russell, Cyril of Alexandria (London: Routledge, 2000).