The Procatechesis and the Eighteen Catecheses

The Catechetical Lectures of St. Cyril of Jerusalem (Greek Katecheseis) are the single most important surviving witness to how the early Church made Christians. Delivered in Jerusalem about the year 350 to the photizomenoi — “those being enlightened,” the candidates registered for baptism at the coming Pascha — they comprise an introductory address, the Procatechesis, followed by eighteen lectures that walk the candidate from repentance through the whole Jerusalem baptismal creed. Taken down by a stenographer as Cyril spoke, governed throughout by the disciplina arcani that veiled the deepest mysteries until after baptism, they open a window onto the catechumenate, the liturgy, and the holy places of fourth-century Jerusalem that exists nowhere else in such fullness.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Audience: The Photizomenoi

Cyril did not preach the Catecheses to the general congregation but to a defined and enrolled body: the photizomenoi, “those being illuminated” (φωτιζόμενοι), the Latin equivalent of whom is the competentes, “those who seek together.” These were catechumens who, having given in their names at the opening of Lent, had passed from the long, open-ended hearing-stage of the catechumenate into the intensive final preparation for baptism at Pascha (Procatechesis 1). The opening words of the Procatechesis address them directly as those “already on the threshold,” whose “soul’s eye” is being prepared for the illumination of the font (Procatechesis 1; trans. McCauley & Stephenson, FOTC 61). The whole tone of the corpus presupposes a captive, committed, examined audience rather than a casual crowd: Cyril knows their fasting, their exorcisms, and their daily attendance, and he speaks to people whose names are written in the Church’s register and who expect to be baptized within weeks.

The Lenten Setting and the Martyrium

The Catecheses are a Lenten course. They were delivered across the forty days of the Lenten fast, day by day, as the climactic instruction of candidates moving toward the paschal vigil (Procatechesis 4). Their physical setting was the great Constantinian basilica on Golgotha — the Martyrium, the principal church of the Holy Sepulchre complex that Constantine had raised over the sites of Christ’s death and resurrection. Cyril repeatedly gestures to the sacred topography around him as standing proof of the gospel: the rock of Golgotha, the wood of the Cross discovered in his city, the tomb itself are summoned as witnesses (Catechetical Lecture 13.4; 13.39; 14.22). This setting is not incidental. Cyril’s catechesis is the first great instance of a place-anchored theology, in which the candidate is taught the faith on the very ground where the events of salvation occurred, and the holy places themselves do evangelical work.

Date and a Disputed Question

The traditional and most widely held dating places the delivery of the Catecheses around 350. Beyond that, the precise year and Cyril’s status when he delivered them are genuinely contested. [Disputed: that Cyril delivered the lectures as a young presbyter, c. 348, before his episcopal consecration (a position argued from internal modesty-formulae and defended in older scholarship such as that summarised by W. Telfer); versus that he delivered them as bishop, c. 350–351, shortly after succeeding Maximus (the view favoured by E. Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, and by A. Doval, Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogue).] The question turns on how one reads Cyril’s self-references and on the chronology of his accession to the see. What is secure is the rough date and the Lenten, pre-paschal occasion; the dispute concerns only whether the voice is that of a presbyter assisting his bishop or of the bishop himself.

The Shape of the Corpus: A Procatechesis and Eighteen

The corpus has a deliberate architecture. It opens with the Procatechesis (the “fore-catechesis” or introductory address), which is not numbered among the eighteen but stands before them as a sermon on the seriousness of the step the candidate is taking — on sincerity of motive, on the danger of approaching the font as Simon Magus did “to see, not to be illumined,” and on the obligation of secrecy (Procatechesis 4–16).

The eighteen Catecheses then fall into two movements. Lectures 1–5 are preparatory and broadly doctrinal: on repentance and the remission of sins (1), on sin and its conquest (2), on baptism (3), on the elements of the faith — a compact summary of doctrine (4), and on faith itself, with the first formal presentation of the creed (5). Lectures 6–18 form a single sustained commentary on the articles of the Jerusalem baptismal creed, taken clause by clause: the one God and Father (6–7), his omnipotence and the created order (8–9), the one Lord Jesus Christ (10), his eternal Sonship (11), the Incarnation and virgin birth (12), the Crucifixion and burial (13), the Resurrection, Ascension, and session at the right hand (14), the Second Coming and judgement (15), and then the Holy Spirit (16–17), the holy catholic Church, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting (18). Lecture 18 closes the series by looking forward, with explicit instructions for the mystagogy — the post-baptismal instruction on the mysteries that the candidates would receive only in Easter week (Catechetical Lecture 18.32–33).

The Creed-Commentary Spine

The thirteen lectures from 6 to 18 are best understood as a running exposition of a single text: the local creed of the Jerusalem Church, recited to the candidates orally and committed by them to memory rather than to paper. Cyril makes the structural principle explicit, instructing the photizomenoi to hold fast “the Faith” delivered to them and to “receive and guard” it as their lifelong possession (Catechetical Lecture 5.12). Because the creed was never written down for the candidates — a point of the disciplina arcani discussed below — the Catecheses themselves become our principal means of reconstructing the Jerusalem symbol, recovered by collating the clauses Cyril expounds in sequence. This makes the corpus a document of the first importance not only for catechesis but for the history of the creeds, standing alongside the Niceno-Constantinopolitan settlement of 381 as a witness to fourth-century Eastern confession.

Stenographic Transmission

The Catecheses present themselves as a live transcript. The text repeatedly bears the marks of oral delivery — direct address, asides to the listening candidates, responses to the room — and a note preserved in some manuscripts states that the lectures were spoken extempore and taken down in shorthand by a stenographer as Cyril preached (so the manuscript tradition; cf. Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, 22–32). This stenographic origin gives the corpus an unusual immediacy: we appear to overhear the actual words of a fourth-century bishop instructing actual candidates, not a polished literary treatise composed after the fact. It also bears on the vexed question of the Mystagogical Catecheses, whose authorship is separately disputed; the eighteen pre-baptismal lectures, by contrast, are securely Cyril’s, and their transcriptional character is part of the evidence (see The Authorship Question).

The Disciplina Arcani as a Structuring Principle

The single most important key to the architecture of the corpus is the discipline of the secret (disciplina arcani). The deepest mysteries of the faith — the rite and meaning of the Eucharist, the exact wording of the creed, and the text of the Lord’s Prayer — were deliberately withheld from the unbaptized. Cyril warns his hearers repeatedly not to repeat what they learn to catechumens still in the outer ranks, nor to outsiders: “When the catechesis is delivered, if a catechumen ask you what the teachers have said, tell nothing to one who is without” (Procatechesis 12; cf. Catechetical Lecture 6.29). This is why the mystagogy comes after baptism, not before: the freshly baptized are led, in Easter week, into the meaning of the rites they have just undergone, precisely because those mysteries could not be expounded to the still-uninitiated. The whole corpus is thus shaped by a graduated unveiling — the Procatechesis and eighteen lectures bring the candidate to the threshold of the font; the Mystagogical Catecheses, delivered to the newly illumined, complete the disclosure (see The Five Mystagogies).

Why the Catecheses Matter

No other source from the patristic age lets us watch the making of a Christian so closely. For the history of Christian initiation, the Catecheses document the enrolment, the scrutinies, the exorcisms, the fasting, and the handing-over and giving-back of the creed (see The Catechumenate). For the history of the liturgy, read with the Mystagogies and with the contemporary pilgrim diary of Egeria, they let us reconstruct the rites of the Jerusalem Church with a precision available nowhere else (Day, The Baptismal Liturgy of Jerusalem, 1–30). For the history of doctrine, they preserve a local creed and a pre-Constantinopolitan Eastern confession of the faith. And for the history of the holy places, they show a city in which the geography of redemption had become the syllabus of catechesis. As a body of evidence the Catecheses are, simply, foundational — the indispensable text for anyone studying how the fourth-century Church received its converts.

References

Cyril of Jerusalem, Procatechesis and Catecheses 1–18 (Katecheseis), PG 33:331–1181 (the Procatechesis opening the corpus); 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).
Leo P. McCauley and Anthony A. Stephenson, trans., The Works of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, vol. 2 (Catecheses 13–18 and Mystagogical Catecheses), Fathers of the Church 64 (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1970).
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).