Cyril and the Arian Crisis

St. Cyril of Jerusalem lived his whole episcopate inside the long convulsion that followed Nicaea, when the word homoousios divided the Eastern Church and the language of orthodoxy was still being forged. Ordained by an Arianizing bishop, associated with the moderate “homoiousian” party, and conspicuous for never using the Nicene watchword, Cyril was labeled a “semi-Arian” by hostile ancient writers and by some later scholars. Yet his Catechetical Lectures teach a Son who is “true God of true God,” begotten before all ages and eternally with the Father. The fair adjudication of the charge — substantively Nicene, cautious only about a contested term, and finally vindicated at Constantinople in 381 — is one of the more instructive cases in the historiography of the fourth century.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Theological Setting

Cyril (c. 313–386) came to maturity in the decades when the Council of Nicaea’s definition of 325 was contested, eclipsed, and only slowly received across the Greek East. The conflict was not a simple duel between “Arians” and “the orthodox” but a spectrum of parties divided as much by the acceptability of technical vocabulary as by underlying belief. At the radical end stood the Anomoeans (Aetius, Eunomius), who held the Son to be “unlike” (anomoios) the Father. In the middle lay the Homoians, who confessed the Son simply “like” (homoios) the Father and refused all substance-language, and the Homoiousians, who taught that the Son is “of like substance” (homoiousios) with the Father — a position close to Nicaea in intent but wary of the Nicene term. At the other end stood the defenders of the Nicene homoousios (“of one substance”), pre-eminently St. Athanasius. Cyril’s career must be read against this map, for his alignments shifted across it as the controversy matured (Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, 348–380, on the parties).

Ordained by Acacius

Cyril’s ecclesiastical beginnings placed him squarely within the anti-Nicene establishment. He was ordained — most probably consecrated bishop of Jerusalem about 350 — by Acacius of Caesarea, the leading Homoian (Arianizing) metropolitan of Palestine and the eventual head of the court party under Constantius II (Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, 32–40). Acacius was Cyril’s metropolitan and, at first, his patron. This connection is the root historical fact behind every later suspicion of Cyril’s orthodoxy: a man raised to his see by the chief Homoian of the region looked, on its face, like a member of the Arianizing camp.

The relationship did not last. Within a few years Cyril and Acacius were locked in conflict — partly over the rank of the Jerusalem see against Caesarea, partly over doctrine — and Acacius engineered the first of Cyril’s depositions and exiles. That bitter quarrel belongs to the story of the exiles (treated fully in section 07; see The Three Exiles). What matters here is that Cyril’s origin under Acacian patronage, and his subsequent movement away from it, frame the doctrinal question.

The Avoidance of Homoousios

The fact most often cited against Cyril is that his Catechetical Lectures never use the Nicene homoousios. This is true, and it is deliberate. Throughout the Lectures Cyril confesses the Son’s full divinity in scriptural and traditional language while declining the controverted technical term. He teaches that the Son is “true God of true God,” “begotten of the Father before all ages,” “by whom all things were made,” and “in all things like (homoios) to Him that begat Him,” eternally co-existing with the Father (Catechetical Lecture 4.7; 11.4–14). He explicitly rejects the Arian formula that “there was a time when the Son was not,” insisting on the Son’s eternal generation (Catechetical Lecture 11.17). What he will not do is deploy homoousios itself.

This reticence must be understood in its mid-century context. The word homoousios was, for many conservative Easterners of unimpeachable orthodoxy, a problematic term: it was non-scriptural; it had been used and rejected in earlier disputes; and it carried, for them, an association with the modalist Sabellianism and with Paul of Samosata, whom an earlier Antiochene synod had reportedly condemned partly for misusing the word. Caution about the term was therefore shared by many figures who were in no sense Arian, and whose orthodoxy is beyond question. Cyril’s silence about homoousios is thus evidence of conservatism and prudence, not of heterodoxy; his doctrine of the Son is, in substance, what Nicaea defended, expressed without Nicaea’s contested shibboleth (Hanson, 398–401; cf. Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, 22–32).

The Homoiousian Associations and Seleucia (359)

As the controversy developed, Cyril aligned not with the radicals but with the moderate Homoiousian party led by Basil of Ancyra and George of Laodicea — the “of like substance” group that opposed the Anomoean extremists and that, over the 350s and 360s, gradually converged toward the Nicene position. In 359 Cyril attended the Council of Seleucia with this group, which there resisted the imperial Homoian pressure to reduce the faith to a bare “like” (homoios) (Hanson, 371–380; Drijvers, 41–55). The Homoiousians have often been called, loosely and somewhat misleadingly, the “semi-Arians”; but their actual concern was to affirm the Son’s likeness to the Father in substance against those who denied any substantial likeness. Modern scholarship recognizes this party as the bridge by which a large body of the Eastern episcopate came home to Nicaea — and Cyril’s place within it marks him as a member of the converging center, not of the Arian wing.

The “Semi-Arian” Charge and Its Fair Adjudication

The charge that Cyril was a “semi-Arian” has a real basis and a real answer, and fairness requires both. Its basis: hostile ancient sources — notably Jerome and Rufinus — cast suspicion on Cyril’s orthodoxy, drawing on his Acacian ordination, his avoidance of homoousios, and his Homoiousian associations; some later historians repeated the label largely on their authority. Jerome in particular was no neutral witness, writing amid the partisan memory of the conflict.

The answer, which is the verdict of modern critical scholarship, is that the charge mistakes vocabulary for doctrine. R.P.C. Hanson and Jan Willem Drijvers concur that Cyril was a conservative moderate who was substantively orthodox: his teaching on the Son in the Lectures is materially that of Nicaea; his hesitation was confined to a single contested word; and he ended firmly Nicene, his orthodoxy ratified by the universal Church at the Council of Constantinople in 381, which received him in communion and confirmed his see (see Vindication at Constantinople 381). To call such a man “semi-Arian” is to read a terminological caution, shared by many saints, as a doctrinal defect.

The honest historical statement, therefore, holds both poles in view. [Disputed: older labeling of Cyril as “semi-Arian”/homoiousian (drawing on Jerome, Rufinus, and his Acacian ordination and Homoiousian associations); vs the modern scholarly verdict (Hanson, Drijvers) that he was substantively Nicene in doctrine, cautious only about the term homoousios, and fully vindicated as orthodox at Constantinople 381.] The collection’s own judgment follows the modern verdict, while recording the older charge and the facts that gave it its plausibility.

The Anti-Arian Substance of the Lectures

Read on their own terms, the Catechetical Lectures are an anti-Arian document. Cyril repeatedly closes the doors through which Arianism entered. He affirms the Son’s eternity against “there was when he was not”; he confesses the Son as “Only-begotten,” begotten not made, “true God,” through whom all things came to be; he guards the unity of the Father and the Son against any subordination that would make the Son a creature; and he warns the candidates explicitly against heresies that diminish the Son (Catechetical Lecture 4.7; 11.4–18; cf. 6.12–13 on heresies). The Lectures’ creed-commentary expounds a confession (see The Jerusalem Creed) in which the Son is “begotten of the Father true God before all ages” — a phrase that excludes Arianism as firmly as any homoousion clause, while keeping to the scriptural register Cyril preferred. The substance of Nicaea is present; only its watchword is absent.

Vindication and Verdict

When Cyril took his seat among the one hundred and fifty fathers at Constantinople in 381, the matter was effectively settled in his favor. The council, the second ecumenical, both confirmed the Nicene faith with its expanded confession of the Spirit and received Cyril as a bishop of recognized orthodoxy — a vindication made explicit in the synodal letter of the Eastern bishops of 382, which commended Cyril’s standing (the relevant testimony preserved in Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 5.9). The trajectory of his life thus runs from an ambiguous beginning under Acacian patronage, through the long caution of the homoousios-shy Eastern center, to a firmly Nicene end honored by the universal Church. The “semi-Arian” of hostile memory is, on the evidence of his own teaching and of the council’s reception, a conservative bishop who held the faith of Nicaea in substance and was vindicated as orthodox in the end.

References

Cyril of Jerusalem, Catecheses 4, 6, 11 (Katecheseis), within 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, 2 vols., Fathers of the Church 61 and 64 (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1969–1970).
Edward Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, The Early Church Fathers (London: Routledge, 2000).
R.P.C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318–381 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988).
Jan Willem Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem: Bishop and City (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
Alexis James Doval, Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogue (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2001).
Theodoret of Cyrus, Ecclesiastical History 5.9 (the synodal letter of 382), NPNF, 2nd ser., vol. 3.