The Catechumenate

Behind St. Cyril of Jerusalem’s Catechetical Lectures lies a whole institution: the catechumenate, the graded process by which the fourth-century Church received, examined, and prepared its converts for baptism. Cyril’s corpus is among our richest sources for how that process actually worked — the enrolment of names at the opening of Lent, the passage from the long outer catechumenate into the intensive final stage of the photizomenoi, the daily exorcisms and scrutinies, the fasting and moral self-examination, and the solemn handing-over and giving-back of the creed. Over the whole stood the disciplina arcani, the discipline of the secret, which governed what could be said, to whom, and when.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Enrolment: The Giving-in of Names

The process began with an act of registration. At the opening of the Lenten fast a catechumen who judged himself ready presented his name to be enrolled among the candidates for the coming paschal baptism (Procatechesis 1, 4). Cyril addresses his hearers as those who have just taken this decisive step — who have “given in” their names and so passed from indefinite inquiry into a fixed, bounded preparation with a date attached. He is careful at once to test the motive of those enrolling: some, he warns, come for the wrong reasons — to please a spouse, to court a patron, or out of mere curiosity, as Simon Magus once “came to the font” to watch rather than to be washed (Procatechesis 2–4; trans. McCauley & Stephenson, FOTC 61). The enrolment was thus not a formality but the opening of a scrutiny of the heart, and Cyril makes clear that the Church inspected the candidate’s manner of life as well as his confession.

Two Stages: Catechumens and Photizomenoi

The catechumenate was not a single state but two. The broader and longer stage was the catechumenate proper — the standing of those who had embraced the faith, attended the instructional preaching, and were counted among the faithful-in-formation, but who might remain in that condition for an extended and open-ended time. From this body, each Lent, a cohort moved into the second and final stage: the photizomenoi, “those being enlightened” (φωτιζόμενοι), the immediate candidates for the next Pascha, whom the Latin West called the competentes. It is to this inner, committed group that the Catecheses are addressed. Cyril marks the distinction sharply and enforces it: the photizomenoi now receive teaching that the ordinary catechumen may not hear, and Cyril insists they not relay it to those still in the outer rank (Procatechesis 12). The catechumenate, in other words, was a graded ascent, and the Catecheses catch the candidate at the moment of its final and most intensive climb.

The Scrutinies and Daily Exorcisms

The Lenten preparation was rigorous and ritually structured. Cyril urges his candidates to submit daily to exorcism, describing the rite in concrete terms: the candidate stands while the exorcism is breathed and prayed over him, the prayers being “gathered from the divine Scriptures” so that the soul, “smelted” as in a furnace, is purged of the alien spirit and made fit for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit (Procatechesis 9). These exorcisms were not occasional but a sustained daily discipline across the fast, paired with scrutinies — the Church’s ongoing examination of the candidates’ sincerity and progress. Cyril attaches moral weight to the exorcism: the candidate is to attend devoutly, the women apart spinning or reading in silence while they wait, the men in prayer, the whole assembly gathered in fervent and ordered expectation (Procatechesis 14). The scene he sketches is of a community visibly at work on its converts.

Fasting and Moral Preparation

Alongside the rites ran an ascetic and ethical preparation. The candidates fasted with the Lenten fast and were summoned to a thoroughgoing reform of life: to forgive injuries, to abandon avarice and impurity, to cleanse the “vessel” of the soul before it receives the grace of the font (Procatechesis 4–7). Cyril’s governing image is horticultural and metallurgical at once — the soul is a field to be weeded and a metal to be refined before the seed and the Spirit can take. The point is insistent: baptism does not work mechanically upon an unwilling or unreformed heart. “If your body be here but not your mind, it profits nothing,” he warns (Procatechesis 4). The catechumenate is therefore as much a moral as a doctrinal novitiate, and the weeks of the fast are given over to the candidate’s active cooperation with the grace he is about to receive.

The Traditio and Redditio Symboli

The doctrinal heart of the final stage was the creed. In a solemn act — the traditio symboli, the “handing-over of the creed” — the local baptismal symbol of the Jerusalem Church was delivered orally to the photizomenoi, who were charged to commit it to memory. Cyril expounds it to them clause by clause across Lectures 6–18 and exhorts them to “receive and guard” the Faith thus delivered as their possession for life (Catechetical Lecture 5.12–13). The creed was emphatically not written down: Cyril directs the candidate to “get it by heart” and not to “write it on paper, but to engrave it by memory upon the heart,” lest a catechumen or an outsider should chance upon the text (Catechetical Lecture 5.12). At the end of the preparation came the reciprocal rite, the redditio symboli, the “giving-back of the creed,” in which the candidate recited the symbol he had memorized, returning to the Church the faith she had entrusted to him. The pairing — handing over and giving back — made the creed a personal deposit, received and confessed by name.

The Disciplina Arcani over the Whole

Governing every stage was the discipline of the secret (disciplina arcani). What the photizomenoi learned in their final Lent — above all the wording of the creed, and later the rite and meaning of the Eucharist and the text of the Lord’s Prayer — was guarded from the unbaptized. Cyril is explicit and repeated: “See thou tell nothing” to a catechumen who asks what was taught; “we speak, in a hidden way, of things not hidden” (Procatechesis 12; cf. Catechetical Lecture 6.29). The discipline was not mere caution but a theology of graduated disclosure: the mysteries were to be entered, not merely informed about, and so the fullest unveiling — the mystagogy — was deferred until after baptism, when the newly illumined could be led into the meaning of rites they had already undergone (see The Five Mystagogies). The secret, in short, was a pedagogy: it built reverence into the very order of catechesis.

A Process Recovered

Read together, these elements let us reconstruct the catechumenate of fourth-century Jerusalem with rare precision — and, cross-checked against the pilgrim Egeria’s eyewitness diary of the same city a generation later, the reconstruction is unusually secure (Day, The Baptismal Liturgy of Jerusalem, 1–30; Doval, Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogue, 13–40). Cyril does not describe the system from outside; he is its operator, and the Catecheses are its working transcript. For the structure of the corpus that carries this process — the Procatechesis and the eighteen, and the creed-commentary that runs through them — see The Procatechesis and the Eighteen Catecheses. What the catechumenate finally aimed at was the font itself and the renunciation that immediately preceded it (see Baptism and Renunciation).

References

Cyril of Jerusalem, Procatechesis and Catecheses 1–18 (Katecheseis), PG 33:331–1181; CPG 3585.
The Catechetical Lectures of S. Cyril, Archbishop of Jerusalem, trans. Edwin Hamilton Gifford, NPNF, 2nd ser., vol. 7 (1894).
Leo P. McCauley and Anthony A. Stephenson, trans., The Works of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, vol. 1 (Procatechesis and Catecheses 1–12), Fathers of the Church 61 (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1969).
Edward Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, The Early Church Fathers (London: Routledge, 2000).
Alexis James Doval, Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogue: The Authorship of the Mystagogic Catecheses (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2001).
Juliette Day, The Baptismal Liturgy of Jerusalem: Fourth- and Fifth-Century Evidence from Palestine, Syria and Egypt (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
Jan Willem Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem: Bishop and City (Leiden: Brill, 2004).