Baptism and Renunciation

On the night of Pascha the candidates of fourth-century Jerusalem passed, in a single continuous action, from the catechumenate into the Church: they renounced Satan facing the West, pledged allegiance to Christ facing the East, stripped naked, were anointed over the whole body with exorcised oil, and went down three times into the font. St. Cyril’s Mystagogical Catecheses expound this rite gesture by gesture, reading the water as at once a tomb and a womb and the descent as a real sharing in the death, burial, and rising of Christ. This file follows the rite as Cyril describes it, from the threshold of the baptistery to the third immersion.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Two Chambers of the Baptistery

Cyril’s account of baptism unfolds across two spaces, and the architecture carries the meaning. The candidates first entered an outer chamber (the vestibule of the baptistery), where the preliminary rites of renunciation and adherence were performed while still clothed; only then did they pass into the inner chamber where the font stood, to be stripped, anointed, and immersed (Mystagogical Catechesis 1.1–2; 2.1–2; trans. McCauley & Stephenson, FOTC 64). From this point the work is cited as MC. The movement from outer to inner room is itself the first act of the drama: the candidate crosses a threshold out of the kingdom of darkness into the place of regeneration. Because the MC belong to the disciplina arcani and were expounded only after the rite (see The Five Mystagogies), Cyril appeals throughout to a shared and very recent experience: “When you entered,” he reminds them, you stood and did thus and so (MC 1.2; trans. NPNF II/7).

A note of attribution is owed at the outset. The Cyrilline authorship of the MC is debated, some manuscripts naming Cyril, others his successor John II, and some both; the repository treats the question fully and without adjudication in The Authorship Question. For the present purpose the rites are read as the Jerusalem rite to which Cyril and his see are the witnesses, whether the lectures are his own composition or his substance edited under John.

Facing West: The Apotaxis, the Renunciation of Satan

The rite opened with the candidate turned to face the West, “the region of sensible darkness,” the quarter where the light fails (MC 1.4; trans. NPNF II/7). Standing thus, with hand outstretched as toward a present adversary, the candidate addressed Satan directly and broke with him in a formula of renunciation, the apotaxis: “I renounce thee, Satan, and all thy works, and all thy pomp, and all thy worship” (MC 1.4–8; trans. NPNF II/7). Cyril dwells on each clause. The “works” of Satan are sin in all its forms; the “pomp” he glosses as the seductions of the theatre, the racecourse, and the spectacles of pagan civic life, with the whole apparatus of idolatry and the meats offered to idols; his “worship” is every cult and superstition that draws the soul from God (MC 1.5–8). The renunciation is therefore no private inward act but a public, audible, legally framed repudiation, spoken as one would address a former master from whom one is now freed.

The westward orientation gives the words their force. To renounce Satan “as though he were present” (MC 1.4) is to confront the power one is leaving in the very quarter associated with him. Cyril even reaches behind the rite to its first type, recalling the Exodus: as Israel turned from Pharaoh and passed through the sea, so the candidate turns from the tyrant who once held him (MC 1.2–3). The break with the past must be total and named before the new allegiance can be made.

Facing East: The Syntaxis, the Act of Allegiance

Having renounced the West, the candidate then turned to the East, the quarter of light and of Paradise, and made the syntaxis, the act of adherence or covenant with Christ: “And I believe in the Father, and in the Son, and in the Holy Ghost, and in one baptism of repentance” (MC 1.9; trans. NPNF II/7). The bodily turn is the hinge of the whole preliminary rite. Cyril reads the East as the direction of the lost Paradise planted “eastward in Eden” (Gen. 2:8), so that the turn signifies the return of the exile toward his true homeland (MC 1.9). Where the apotaxis severs, the syntaxis binds; the two together stage baptism as a transfer of lordship, a change of the one to whom the soul belongs. The clause is at once trinitarian and creedal, recapitulating in compressed form the faith the candidate had received in the traditio symboli during Lent (see The Catechumenate, and The Jerusalem Creed). With this confession the preliminary rites in the outer chamber were complete, and the candidate was led through into the inner baptistery.

The Stripping: Putting Off the Old Man

Within the inner chamber the candidates removed their garments and stood naked. Cyril gives the gesture a double interpretation. First, it is an imitation of Christ: stripped of clothing, the candidate is conformed to the naked Christ upon the cross, who “stripped Himself, and by His nakedness put off from Himself the principalities and powers, and openly triumphed over them” (MC 2.2; trans. NPNF II/7, citing Col. 2:15). Second, and inseparably, the stripping enacts the Pauline “putting off of the old man with his deeds” (Col. 3:9), the casting away of the garment of mortality and sin worn since Eden (MC 2.2). Cyril reaches even for a figure of recovered innocence: now unclothed and unashamed, the candidate bears “the likeness of Adam, who was naked in the garden and was not ashamed” (MC 2.2). The nakedness is thus no incidental detail but a deliberate sign of the death of the old self that the font is about to accomplish.

The Pre-Baptismal Anointing with Exorcised Oil

Before the immersion came an anointing of the whole body with exorcised oil (MC 2.3). This is the pre-baptismal unction, to be distinguished sharply from the chrismation that follows the font (treated in Chrismation and the Seal). Cyril’s imagery here is athletic and exorcistic rather than pneumatic. The oil has been exorcised — “by invocation of God and prayer it received power not only to burn away the traces of sin, but also to put to flight all the invisible powers of the evil one” (MC 2.3; trans. NPNF II/7) — and the candidate, anointed from head to foot, is made a wrestler against the devil, oiled like an athlete entering the contest, so that the adversary can find no hold upon him (MC 2.3). The same oil that drives out the demonic also grafts the candidate onto Christ: the anointing makes him a “partaker of the true olive tree” of Jesus, into which the wild olive of his nature is now ingrafted (MC 2.3, citing Rom. 11:24). The rite thus prepares the body it has just stripped, arming it for the descent into the saving water.

The Threefold Immersion: Tomb and Womb

The candidate was then led to the font and immersed three times, rising each time, while confessing his faith in the three Persons of the Trinity (MC 2.4). Cyril packs the heart of his baptismal theology into this moment. The triple descent figures the three days of Christ’s burial: as the Lord lay three days in the heart of the earth, so the threefold submersion configures the candidate to that burial (MC 2.4). And the whole action is read through Romans 6: descending into the water, the candidate is buried with Christ; rising, he rises with Him, so that “in one and the same action you died and were born, and that saving water was at once your grave and your mother” (MC 2.4; trans. NPNF II/7). The font is therefore at once a tomb that receives the dead old man and a womb that brings forth the new — the single most concentrated image in the corpus.

Cyril guards this typology with a qualification that recurs through the MC. The rite is a genuine imitation (mimēsis) of Christ’s death and burial, figurative in its mode yet entirely real in its effect. “Christ truly died… but to us the imitation conferred salvation in reality” — we did not literally die and rise, “but while the imitation was in figure, the salvation was in reality” (MC 2.5; trans. NPNF II/7). The baptized has not himself been crucified; yet through the likeness he is made a true partaker of Christ’s sufferings, and the grace is no mere likeness but the thing itself. This pairing — sign and reality held together, the figure conferring what it signifies — is the same logic that governs Cyril’s account of the chrism and of the Eucharist (see Eucharistic Realism). It is the signature of the Jerusalem mystagogy: a sacramental realism that neither collapses the sign into bare symbol nor dissolves the uniqueness of the Cross.

The Shape of the Whole

Read in sequence — westward renunciation, eastward adherence, stripping, anointing, triple immersion — the rite is a single dramatic passage from death to life, from the dominion of Satan to incorporation into Christ. Each gesture has its scriptural type: the Exodus from Egypt, the stripping of the old man, the wrestler’s oil, the three days in the tomb, the new birth from the maternal water. What rises from the font is a newly enlightened Christian, ready to be sealed with the Spirit and led to the altar. For the anointing that follows and completes the initiation, see Chrismation and the Seal.

References

Cyril of Jerusalem (attrib.). Mystagogical Catecheses (Catecheses mystagogicae), esp. MC 1–2. PG 33; critical edition Auguste Piédagnel, ed., Catéchèses mystagogiques, Sources Chrétiennes 126. Paris: Cerf, 1966.
The Catechetical Lectures of S. Cyril of Jerusalem, trans. Edwin Hamilton Gifford. NPNF, 2nd ser., vol. 7 (NPNF II/7).
McCauley, Leo P., and Anthony A. Stephenson, trans. 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.
Doval, Alexis James. Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogue: The Authorship of the Mystagogic Catecheses. Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2001.
Day, Juliette. The Baptismal Liturgy of Jerusalem: Fourth- and Fifth-Century Evidence from Palestine, Syria and Egypt. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.
Yarnold, Edward. The Awakening of the West: The Origins of Christian Initiation and the Reform of Baptism. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994.