Jerusalem and the See

The episcopate of St. Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 313–386) unfolded against the dramatic transformation of his city from the provincial Roman colony of Aelia Capitolina into the foremost center of Christian pilgrimage in the empire. This file traces the rising prestige of the Jerusalem see after Constantine, the monumental Holy Sepulchre complex that gave Cyril his liturgical and catechetical stage, the canonical subordination of Jerusalem to the metropolitan of Caesarea fixed at Nicaea, and the contested ordination by Acacius that bound Cyril’s early career to the very man who would become his chief antagonist.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

From Aelia Capitolina to the Holy City

The Jerusalem over which Cyril presided had, for nearly two centuries, not even officially borne its ancient name. After the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt, the emperor Hadrian refounded the city in 135 as the Roman colony Aelia Capitolina, planting a pagan settlement on the ruins and barring Jews from the site (Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004). Through the second and third centuries the Christian community there remained modest, its bishop an ordinary provincial figure subordinate to the metropolitan of the province of Palestine, whose seat was the great coastal city of Caesarea Maritima. The Jerusalem see possessed an unrivalled symbolic claim — it was the mother church of Pentecost, the city of the Lord’s passion and resurrection — yet that claim carried little institutional weight so long as the holy places themselves lay buried beneath Hadrian’s pagan platform.

The decisive change came with Constantine. Following the Council of Nicaea (325), the emperor and his mother Helena turned their attention and resources to the sacred topography of Palestine, and Bishop Macarius of Jerusalem secured imperial backing to clear the site of Golgotha and the tomb (Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004). What followed reshaped both the city and the standing of its bishop. The recovery of the holy places, the building program that monumentalized them, and the flood of pilgrims that resulted gave the Jerusalem see a new kind of prestige — not the jurisdictional authority of a metropolitan, but the magnetic authority of place.

The Holy Sepulchre Complex

At the heart of Constantine’s program stood the great complex on Golgotha. Excavation beneath the pagan temple uncovered what was identified as the tomb of Christ, and over and around it the emperor commissioned an architectural ensemble of unprecedented ambition. The complex comprised several connected elements: the Rotunda known as the Anastasis (“Resurrection”), built to enshrine the rock-cut tomb itself; the great basilica called the Martyrium, raised on Golgotha as the main congregational church; an open colonnaded courtyard between them containing the Rock of Calvary; and an entrance atrium opening onto the city’s main street (Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004). The Martyrium basilica and the wider complex were solemnly dedicated in 335, during a great gathering of bishops, marking the formal inauguration of Christian Jerusalem as a built reality.

The scale and richness of the buildings impressed contemporaries: the historian Eusebius, who attended the dedication of 335 and delivered an address there, devoted lavish description to Constantine’s foundation, dwelling on the colonnades, the gilded coffered ceiling of the basilica, and the marble of the courtyard (Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004). What the emperor had built was at once a memorial of the resurrection and a public proclamation of the empire’s new faith, anchored to the precise ground on which the Christian story claimed to have happened.

This ensemble was not merely a backdrop to Cyril’s ministry; it was its stage. The catechetical instruction he delivered to baptismal candidates was given within the Martyrium, and his celebrated mystagogical teaching presupposed the Anastasis rotunda and the actual sites of the passion as the setting for initiation (see The Jerusalem Liturgy). Cyril himself could appeal to the very wood of Golgotha and the relic of the Cross as standing before his hearers’ eyes, lending his preaching an evidential immediacy unavailable to any other bishop in the Christian world (Catechetical Lecture 13.4; trans. NPNF II/7). Repeatedly he turns to the topography around him as witness — “this Golgotha,” “this all-holy Sepulchre” — making the very stones of the city corroborate the events he expounds (Catechetical Lecture 13.39; trans. NPNF II/7). The architecture of the holy places and the liturgy that animated them were inseparable from his catechetical project (see The True Cross and Relics). It was this fusion of sacred place, relic, and rite that drew the pilgrims whose presence, in turn, magnified the standing of the bishop who presided over them.

Nicaea Canon 7 and the Caesarean Question

The rising glory of the holy city created an immediate canonical tension, because honor and jurisdiction did not coincide. The Council of Nicaea had already addressed the matter in its seventh canon, which decreed that, since custom and ancient tradition required that the bishop of Aelia (Jerusalem) be held in honor, he should have the “succession of honor,” while the metropolitan see — Caesarea — retained its proper dignity and rights intact (Nicaea 325, Canon 7; in NPNF II/14; see Ecumenical Councils). The canon thus granted Jerusalem a precedence of honor without disturbing the structural subordination of its bishop to the metropolitan of Palestine. Jerusalem held the prestige of the holy places; Caesarea held the metropolitan authority — the power to convene synods, to confirm episcopal elections, and to discipline the bishops of the province.

This unstable arrangement framed the central institutional struggle of Cyril’s career. The prestige that pilgrimage and the holy places conferred upon his see made the canonical subordination to Caesarea increasingly anomalous, and Cyril pressed, implicitly and at times explicitly, for a standing commensurate with his city’s sanctity. That campaign would not reach its goal in his lifetime: only at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, two generations after his death, was Jerusalem finally raised to patriarchal rank with jurisdiction over the three Palestinian provinces (Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004; see Ecumenical Councils). Cyril’s friction with Caesarea is best read as an early and formative chapter in that longer ascent.

Ordination by Acacius

The personal dimension of this jurisdictional rivalry is sharpened by the circumstances of Cyril’s own ordination. He was consecrated bishop of Jerusalem around 350 or 351, succeeding Maximus, and his consecrating metropolitan was none other than Acacius of Caesarea, the powerful and theologically Arianizing bishop who held the metropolitan rights over Palestine (Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004). Acacius would, within a few years, become Cyril’s bitter adversary, deposing him on disciplinary and doctrinal pretexts and driving him into the first of his exiles (see The Three Exiles). That the same man both ordained and persecuted Cyril gave their conflict a peculiarly intimate and canonical edge: it was, in part, a contest over whether the bishop of the holy city would remain the metropolitan’s subordinate.

The hostility of the relationship generated a corresponding hostility in the sources. Certain ancient writers unfriendly to Cyril — notably Jerome, and the church historian Rufinus — alleged that his ordination had been tainted, charging that he had received it at Arian hands or that it was in some way canonically irregular (Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004). These charges should be reported as what they are: accusations advanced by hostile witnesses in the heat of the fourth-century controversies, not established facts. Jerome in particular wrote with manifest animus, and the polemical context — in which a bishop’s orthodoxy and the validity of his orders were standard weapons — counsels caution.

[Disputed: the doctrinal coloring of Cyril’s ordination and early career. Hostile fourth-century sources (Jerome, Chronicle; Rufinus) present his consecration by Acacius as Arian-tainted or irregular; modern scholarship (Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004) treats these allegations as polemically motivated and regards Cyril himself as a moderate of broadly Nicene sympathy whose conflict with Acacius was as much jurisdictional as doctrinal. The repository follows the cautious reading: the allegations are recorded, but attributed, not affirmed.]

See Also

• Life and Times — the connected biography against this institutional backdrop
• The Three Exiles — the conflict with Acacius that the ordination foreshadowed
• The True Cross and Relics — the holy places as the source of the see’s prestige
• The Jerusalem Liturgy — the worship enacted within the Sepulchre complex
• Ecumenical Councils — Nicaea Canon 7 and Chalcedon 451 in conciliar context
• Pre-Schism Church — the fourth-century Church in which Jerusalem rose

References

• Cyril of Jerusalem. Catechetical Lectures (Catecheses). PG 33.331–1181; trans. NPNF Series 2, Vol. 7 (NPNF II/7); and McCauley, Leo P., and Anthony A. Stephenson, The Works of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, FOTC 61 & 64. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1969–1970.
• Drijvers, Jan Willem. Cyril of Jerusalem: Bishop and City. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 72. Leiden: Brill, 2004.
• Yarnold, Edward. Cyril of Jerusalem. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2000.
• The First Council of Nicaea (325), Canon 7. In The Seven Ecumenical Councils, NPNF II/14.
• The Council of Chalcedon (451). In The Seven Ecumenical Councils, NPNF II/14.