The Five Mystagogies

The five Mystagogical Catecheses are post-baptismal lectures delivered during Bright Week to the newly baptized of fourth-century Jerusalem, unveiling the inner meaning of the rites of initiation they had received on the Paschal night. Spoken within the Anastasis rotunda over the tomb of Christ, they form the earliest detailed Eastern witness to the integrated sequence of baptism, chrismation, and Eucharist. This file surveys the five addresses, their setting and method, and their unrivalled documentary value; the question of their authorship is treated separately.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Mystagogy and the Bright-Week Setting

In the catechetical economy of fourth-century Jerusalem, the unveiling of the mysteries came after their reception, not before. Through the weeks of Lent the candidates for baptism (photizomenoi, “those being enlightened”) had received the eighteen Catechetical Lectures, instruction in the creed, repentance, and the moral life, delivered in the great basilica of the Martyrium (see The Procatechesis and Eighteen Lectures). What they had not been told, under the discipline of secrecy (disciplina arcani), was the concrete shape and significance of the sacramental rites themselves. Those were withheld until the candidate had passed through them. Only when the newly baptized (neophotistoi) had emerged from the font, been sealed with the holy myron, and communicated at the altar were they ready to have the meaning of what they had undergone disclosed to them.

This disclosure is mystagogy — literally a “leading into the mysteries” — and it occupied the days of Bright Week, the week following Pascha. The preacher could now appeal directly to a shared and recent experience: he and his hearers had stood together in the same waters and at the same table only days before. The opening of the first lecture states the principle plainly, that the time had come to lay out “the spiritual and heavenly mysteries” so that the newly initiated might grasp the significance of what was done to them on “that evening of your baptism” (Mystagogical Catechesis 1.1; trans. NPNF II/7). From this point the work is cited as MC.

The Venue: From Martyrium to Anastasis

The mystagogies are inseparable from their architecture. Where the Lenten Catecheses were delivered in the Martyrium, the congregational basilica on Golgotha, the Mystagogical Catecheses presuppose a different and more intimate space: the Anastasis, the Rotunda of the Resurrection raised by Constantine over the rock-cut tomb of Christ (Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, Routledge 2000; see Jerusalem and the See). The shift of venue is itself part of the catechesis. Standing within the very monument of the Resurrection, the newly baptized could be told that their descent into and ascent out of the font had configured them to the death and rising of Christ enacted on that spot. The setting gave the typology an evidential force unavailable anywhere else in the Christian world: the rites were expounded in the presence of the holy places they signified (Day, The Baptismal Liturgy of Jerusalem, Ashgate 2007).

The Five Lectures in Sequence

The five addresses follow the order of the initiation rite itself, moving the neophyte step by step back through the night just past.

MC 1 — Renunciation and Adherence. The first lecture expounds the preliminary rites performed at the entrance to the baptistery: the candidate’s turning to the West to renounce Satan, his pomp, and his works (the apotaxis), and the turning to the East to enter into covenant with Christ (the syntaxis) (MC 1.2–9; trans. McCauley & Stephenson, FOTC 64). The drama of facing away from and then toward Christ frames baptism as a change of allegiance (see Baptism and Renunciation).

MC 2 — Baptism. The second turns to the font proper: the stripping off of the old garment, the anointing of the whole body with exorcised oil, and the threefold immersion. Cyril reads the rite through Romans 6, as a real participation in the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ — “in one and the same action you died and were born” (MC 2.4; trans. NPNF II/7). The water is at once tomb and womb.

MC 3 — Chrismation. The third lecture expounds the anointing that follows baptism: the sealing with the holy myron (chrism), through which the newly baptized receive the gift of the Holy Spirit and become christoi, “anointed ones,” after the pattern of Christ at the Jordan (MC 3.1–4; trans. FOTC 64; see Chrismation and the Seal). This is among the earliest detailed witnesses to chrismation as a distinct sacramental moment of the Spirit’s seal.

MC 4 — The Body and Blood. The fourth turns to the Eucharist, and states with unguarded directness that the bread and wine are the Body and Blood of Christ, not figures but realities to be received “with full assurance” (MC 4.1–6; trans. NPNF II/7). This eucharistic realism is one of the most cited features of the corpus (see Eucharistic Realism).

MC 5 — The Eucharistic Liturgy. The fifth and longest lecture walks through the shape of the liturgy itself: the washing of the celebrant’s hands (lavabo), the kiss of peace, the dialogue “Lift up your hearts” (Sursum corda), the Sanctus, and crucially the epiclesis — the invocation of the Holy Spirit upon the gifts to make them the Body and Blood of Christ — followed by the intercessions, the Lord’s Prayer, and the reception of communion (MC 5.4–22; trans. FOTC 64; see The Jerusalem Anaphora). It is the earliest connected commentary on a Eucharistic Prayer to survive from the Christian East (Mazza, Mystagogy, Pueblo 1989).

The Mystagogical Method

The method that unifies the five lectures is typological. Cyril does not catalogue rubrics; he reads each gesture as the visible enactment of a scriptural reality, pairing the rite with its biblical type and antitype (Mazza, Mystagogy, Pueblo 1989). The renunciation answers to the Exodus from Egypt; the immersion to the burial of Christ and to the passage through the Red Sea; the chrism to the descent of the Spirit; the bread and wine to the offering of Melchizedek and the institution at the Supper. The aim is not information but participation: to lead the neophyte to recognize that in the rites of the Paschal night he has been incorporated into the very events of salvation. Because the explanation follows the experience, the mystagogue can presuppose the affective shock of the rites — the darkness, the water, the fragrance of the chrism, the taste of the gifts — and interpret it from within. This experience-then-meaning structure is the formal signature of the Jerusalem mystagogy and the model later imitated across the Christian world (Day, The Baptismal Liturgy of Jerusalem, Ashgate 2007).

Documentary Value

Whatever their precise authorship and date, the Mystagogical Catecheses are a document of the first importance. They preserve, in coherent narrative order, an entire fourth-century rite of Christian initiation — renunciation, immersion, chrismation, and first communion — as a single liturgical and theological whole, witnessed from the mother church of the faith at the very holy places (Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, Routledge 2000). For the structure of early baptism, the emergence of chrismation as a distinct sacrament, eucharistic realism, and above all the early shape of the anaphora with its Spirit-epiclesis, the MC are the richest single Eastern source of their century (see Modern Scholarship, and Divine Liturgy).

A Note on Authorship

The MC are transmitted in a manuscript tradition that ascribes them variously to Cyril, to his successor John II of Jerusalem (bishop 387–417), and in some copies to “Cyril and John” together. Whether the lectures are Cyril’s own, John’s, or Cyril’s substance edited under John remains debated, and the stylistic and liturgical arguments cut in more than one direction. The repository treats that question at length, fairly and without adjudication, in the companion file The Authorship Question. For the purposes of the present survey it suffices to say that the MC are a product of the Jerusalem church in the later fourth century, transmitted under Cyril’s name and defended by leading scholarship as substantially his.

References

Cyril of Jerusalem (attrib.). Mystagogical Catecheses (Catecheses mystagogicae). PG 33; critical edition Auguste Piédagnel, ed., Catéchèses mystagogiques, Sources Chrétiennes 126. Paris: Cerf, 1966.
The Catechetical Lectures of S. Cyril, trans. Edwin Hamilton Gifford. NPNF Series 2, Vol. 7 (NPNF II/7).
McCauley, Leo P., and Anthony A. Stephenson. The Works of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, Vol. 2. Fathers of the Church 64. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1970.
Yarnold, Edward. Cyril of Jerusalem. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2000.
Mazza, Enrico. Mystagogy: A Theology of Liturgy in the Patristic Age. New York: Pueblo, 1989.
Day, Juliette. The Baptismal Liturgy of Jerusalem: Fourth- and Fifth-Century Evidence from Palestine, Syria and Egypt. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.