The Three Exiles

Across an episcopate of roughly thirty-five years, St. Cyril of Jerusalem was driven from his see three times, banished by a combination of jurisdictional rivalry and Arianizing imperial pressure that tracked the shifting fortunes of the fourth-century controversies. His antagonist throughout was Acacius of Caesarea, his own metropolitan, who opposed Cyril on two fronts at once — over the standing of the see of Jerusalem and over the doctrine of the Son. The three banishments (beginning c. 357, c. 360, and c. 367) cost Cyril something on the order of sixteen years away from his city, a tally the sources permit us to estimate rather than fix, before his final restoration in 378.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Quarrel with Acacius: Two Axes

The whole story of Cyril’s banishments grows out of his conflict with Acacius, bishop of Caesarea Maritima and metropolitan of Palestine, the very prelate who had consecrated him (see Jerusalem and the See). That conflict ran along two intertwined axes, jurisdictional and doctrinal, and it is the combination of the two that makes Cyril’s case so characteristic of the age.

The first axis was jurisdiction. Caesarea was the civil and ecclesiastical metropolis of the province, and as metropolitan Acacius claimed canonical authority over the bishops of Palestine, including the bishop of Jerusalem. Cyril, however, presided over the holy city itself, whose prestige was rising rapidly in the Constantinian age as pilgrims thronged to the sites of the passion and resurrection. The tension was not merely personal but constitutional, rooted in the famous ambiguity of the seventh canon of Nicaea (325), which had granted the bishop of Aelia (Jerusalem) a precedence of honor while expressly reserving to the metropolitan see its proper dignity — leaving wholly unsettled how that honor and that metropolitan right were to be reconciled in practice (Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004). Cyril, backed by the growing weight of his city, resisted Acacius’s pretensions; Acacius, for his part, had every motive to bring the upstart bishop to heel.

The second axis was doctrine. Acacius was a leading figure of the Homoian party, the court-favored Arianizing faction that held the Son to be “like” (homoios) the Father while refusing the Nicene homoousios and even the more conservative homoiousios (“of like substance”). Cyril stood on the conservative, broadly anti-Arian wing, drifting steadily toward the Homoiousian position and, ultimately, toward Nicaea (Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, 1988; see Cyril and the Arian Crisis). Because the doctrinal alignments of the 350s and 360s were also imperial alignments, a metropolitan with court connections could turn a jurisdictional grievance into a charge of insubordination and a doctrinal suspicion into a synodal deposition. That is precisely what Acacius did.

The First Exile (c. 357) and the Famine Charge

The first deposition fell around 357, when Acacius and his allies convened against Cyril and drove him from Jerusalem (Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 4.25, NPNF II/2; Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 2.26, NPNF II/3). The pretext was revealing. Among the charges brought against him was that he had sold church property — vestments and sacred ornaments belonging to the Jerusalem church — and so squandered or alienated what had been consecrated. The substance behind the accusation, as the sympathetic tradition preserves it, was that during a severe famine Cyril had disposed of church goods in order to feed the starving poor, a work of mercy that his enemies recast as the dilapidation of ecclesiastical treasures (Sozomen, HE 4.25, NPNF II/2; Theodoret, HE 2.27, NPNF II/3; Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004). [Disputed: the precise date of the first deposition. The sources do not fix the year; scholars place it c. 357, with some reconstructions allowing 357–358 (Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004).]

Cyril’s response was itself notable. Rather than submitting to the sentence of his metropolitan and a local synod, he appealed to a higher synod — an unusual and assertive move that effectively claimed a right of episcopal appeal against the judgment of his immediate superior (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 2.40, NPNF II/2; Sozomen, HE 4.25, NPNF II/2). In the interval he withdrew from Palestine and took refuge with Silvanus, bishop of Tarsus, a sympathetic Homoiousian who sheltered him and where his appeal could be pursued (Sozomen, HE 4.25, NPNF II/2; Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004).

Restoration at Seleucia (359)

The opportunity Cyril had appealed for came with the Council of Seleucia in Isauria, convened in 359 as the eastern half of the twin synods (Seleucia and Ariminum) that the emperor Constantius had summoned to settle the faith of the empire. At Seleucia the Homoiousian bishops held the majority, and they turned the proceedings against the Acacian party: Acacius and his allies were censured, and the depositions they had engineered — Cyril’s among them — were overturned. Cyril was thereby reinstated in his see (Socrates, HE 2.40, NPNF II/2; Sozomen, HE 4.22, NPNF II/2). The victory, however, was fragile. The Homoiousian ascendancy at Seleucia did not survive the maneuvering at court, where the Acacian and Homoian party soon regained the emperor’s ear, and the pendulum that had swung toward Cyril began at once to swing back.

The Second Exile (c. 360)

In the Council of Constantinople of 360, the triumphant Acacian party imposed its Homoian formula and proceeded to depose its opponents wholesale. Cyril was among those once more cast down and driven from Jerusalem, this second banishment following hard upon his brief restoration (Socrates, HE 2.42, NPNF II/2; Sozomen, HE 4.25, NPNF II/2; Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004). [Disputed: the dating of the second exile. It is generally set c. 360 in the wake of the Acacian synod of Constantinople, though the sources leave the exact span of this banishment imprecise (Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004).]

The second exile, like the first, was a creature of imperial politics as much as of theology: so long as Constantius lived and the Homoian settlement enjoyed his backing, Cyril and bishops of his stamp had no secure footing in their sees.

Return under Julian (361/362)

Relief came from an unexpected quarter. On the death of Constantius in 361, the new emperor Julian — “the Apostate,” bent on restoring paganism — issued a general amnesty recalling the bishops whom Constantius had exiled, a measure calculated less from sympathy than from the cynical hope that the returning factions would tear the Church apart in their quarrels (Socrates, HE 3.1, NPNF II/2; Sozomen, HE 5.5, NPNF II/2). Under this amnesty Cyril returned to Jerusalem, probably in 361 or 362 (Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004). It was during Julian’s reign, by a well-known tradition, that Cyril witnessed the failure of the emperor’s attempt to rebuild the Jewish Temple — an episode the Christian historians read as a vindication of the Lord’s prophecy of its desolation, and which Cyril is said to have foretold would come to nothing (Socrates, HE 3.20, NPNF II/2; Sozomen, HE 5.22, NPNF II/2).

The Third Exile (c. 367–378) under Valens

Julian’s death in 363 and the brief reign of Jovian gave way in the East to the long rule of Valens (364–378), a committed adherent of the Homoian cause who renewed the persecution of the Nicene and non-Homoian bishops. Under Valens, Cyril was banished a third time, around 367 — the longest of his exiles, and one that endured until the emperor’s death (Sozomen, HE 6.12, NPNF II/2; Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004). [Disputed: the date of the third exile is variously given, most often c. 367, though the sparse evidence permits a range in the later 360s (Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004).] Through these years Jerusalem was without its lawful bishop, and Cyril shared the lot of the great Nicene confessors of the era — most conspicuously Athanasius of Alexandria, whose own repeated banishments under successive emperors made him the archetype of the exiled defender of the faith (see St. Athanasius the Great).

The Final Restoration (378)

The turn came with the catastrophe of Adrianople. In August 378 Valens fell in battle against the Goths, and his death broke the Homoian hegemony in the East. The western emperor Gratian thereupon issued an edict of toleration recalling the bishops whom Valens had exiled, and under its terms Cyril returned to Jerusalem for the last time, in 378, to hold his see in peace for the rest of his life (Socrates, HE 5.2, NPNF II/2; Sozomen, HE 7.1, NPNF II/2; Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004).

Taking the three banishments together, Cyril had spent something on the order of sixteen of his roughly thirty-five episcopal years away from his city — a figure that must be offered as an approximation, since the imprecision of the sources makes any exact tally impossible (Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004). Exile was not an interruption of his career but, in a real sense, the shape of it: three times deposed, three times he outlasted his persecutors, holding without retraction the moderate and increasingly Nicene course that would at length be vindicated before the whole Church (see Vindication at Constantinople 381).

References

Socrates Scholasticus. Ecclesiastical History. Trans. NPNF Series 2, Vol. 2 (NPNF II/2).
Sozomen. Ecclesiastical History. Trans. NPNF Series 2, Vol. 2 (NPNF II/2).
Theodoret of Cyrus. Ecclesiastical History. Trans. NPNF Series 2, Vol. 3 (NPNF II/3).
Drijvers, Jan Willem. Cyril of Jerusalem: Bishop and City. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 72. Leiden: Brill, 2004.
Hanson, R. P. C. The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy, 318–381. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988.
Doval, Alexis James. Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogue: The Authorship of the Mystagogic Catecheses. Patristic Monograph Series 17. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001.
Yarnold, Edward. Cyril of Jerusalem. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2000.