Vindication at Constantinople 381

After three exiles and decades under the shadow of an Arianizing charge, St. Cyril of Jerusalem lived to see his orthodoxy formally vouched for by the assembled Church. He attended the Second Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 381 as the recognized bishop of Jerusalem, by then having embraced the Nicene homoousios; and a synodal letter preserved in Theodoret’s Ecclesiastical History (5.9) testifies that Cyril was the lawful bishop of his see and had “fought against the Arians.” That testimony stands as the formal seal on his orthodoxy, closing in his favor the long-standing question of his “semi-Arian” associations. He died about five years later, c. 386, in peace and in possession of his see.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Cyril at the Second Ecumenical Council

When Theodosius I, a convinced Nicene, summoned the council that met at Constantinople in 381, Cyril came to it as the restored and recognized bishop of Jerusalem (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 5.8, NPNF II/2; Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 7.7, NPNF II/2; see The Ecumenical Councils). The council of 381 stands in the Church’s reckoning as the Second Ecumenical Council, the assembly that reaffirmed and completed the work of Nicaea: it confirmed the consubstantiality of the Son and, against the Pneumatomachi who denied it, articulated the full divinity of the Holy Spirit, the fruit of which is the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed confessed in the liturgy to this day (see The Ecumenical Councils). The council was a gathering of the eastern episcopate under imperial Nicene patronage, and among the great figures associated with it was Gregory the Theologian, who for a time presided over its deliberations (Socrates, HE 5.8, NPNF II/2; see St. Gregory the Theologian).

That Cyril sat in such a company, unchallenged as to his see and unimpeached as to his faith, was itself the measure of how far the wheel had turned. The bishop whom Acacius and the Homoian party had three times deposed now took his place among the architects of the Nicene settlement, his presence a quiet refutation of the charges that had dogged his career (Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004).

Cyril’s Acceptance of the Nicene Faith

The vindication was not merely political but theological, and it rested on a real development in Cyril’s own confession. He had begun his episcopate within the conservative, anti-Arian camp that hesitated over the Nicene term homoousios — a hesitation that arose less from sympathy with Arianism than from a fear that “of one substance” might be read in a Sabellian or materially confused sense — and that for a season favored the homoiousion, the Son as “of like substance” with the Father (Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, 1988; see Cyril and the Arian Crisis). Over the decades of controversy and exile, Cyril — like a great part of the Homoiousian center — came to see that the substance of his own faith and the substance of the Nicene confession were one, and that the term he had once held at arm’s length safeguarded precisely what he had always meant to defend.

By the time of the council of 381 Cyril had accepted homoousios and stood squarely within the Nicene communion (Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004; Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, Routledge 2000). His own catechetical teaching, for all its earlier reticence about the contested word, had never wavered on the realities the word protected: the true and eternal Sonship of Christ, begotten of the Father before all ages, of the same divine being and not a creature (see The Jerusalem Creed). His arrival at the Nicene formula was therefore less a conversion than a homecoming, the convergence of a lifelong substance with its proper name.

The Synodal Testimony in Theodoret, HE 5.9

The decisive documentary vindication is preserved by Theodoret, who transcribes a synodal letter of the bishops gathered at Constantinople and addressed to the Western bishops. The letter, surveying the orthodox occupants of the great eastern sees, expressly names Cyril as the lawful and canonical bishop of the church of Jerusalem and records that he “had in time past combated the Arians” — a formal certification, on the authority of the assembled fathers, both of the legitimacy of his see and of the soundness of his faith (Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 5.9, NPNF II/3). For a bishop whose enemies had spent thirty years branding him an irregular intruder and a crypto-Arian, this notice in the Church’s own conciliar correspondence was the most complete refutation imaginable: the very generation that had watched the controversy unfold pronounced him orthodox and his tenure valid.

It is worth weighing the precise force of the phrase. To say that Cyril had “fought against the Arians” was not faint praise but a deliberate placing of him on the right side of the defining conflict of the age, alongside the confessors of Nicaea rather than the partisans of Acacius — and it did so in a document framed to reassure the Latin West of the orthodoxy of the eastern episcopate (Theodoret, HE 5.9, NPNF II/3; Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004).

The Question of 381 versus 382

A point of scholarly precision attaches to the dating of this testimonial, and it should be stated plainly. The synodal letter that Theodoret preserves in HE 5.9, and which contains the words about Cyril, belongs by the most common reckoning not to the council of 381 itself but to a follow-up synod that gathered at Constantinople the next year, in 382, and wrote to the Western bishops in connection with their council at Rome. On that reading the vindicating phrase is strictly the voice of the synod of 382, though it concerns and confirms the same body of eastern bishops who had assembled in 381 (Theodoret, HE 5.9, NPNF II/3; Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004).

[Disputed: whether the testimonial that Cyril “had in time past combated the Arians” belongs to the Second Ecumenical Council of 381 itself or to the follow-up Constantinopolitan synod of 382. The text is in any case preserved in Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 5.9 (NPNF II/3); the more common scholarly attribution assigns the synodal letter to the synod of 382 addressing the Westerns, while the substance of the vindication — Cyril’s recognition as lawful bishop and his anti-Arian record — pertains equally to the council of 381 at which he was present (Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004). Both possibilities are reported here.]

Either way, the historical conclusion is unaffected: at the turn of the 380s the conciliar Church of the East, with the assent of the West, set its formal seal on Cyril’s orthodoxy and the legitimacy of his see.

The Closing of the “Semi-Arian” Question

The deepest significance of the events of 381–382 is that they closed, in Cyril’s favor, the question that had hung over his whole career. Because he had once stood with the Homoiousians and had been the protégé and then the adversary of the Homoian Acacius, hostile and careless reporters alike had been able to file him under the loose heading of “semi-Arian,” as though his early reserve toward homoousios convicted him of heterodoxy (Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, 1988). The conciliar testimony cut through that charge at its root. By certifying him as a lawful bishop who had contended against the Arians, the Church declared that his place was among the defenders of the faith, not its opponents, and that the journey from Homoiousian caution to Nicene confession was a path of orthodoxy rather than a record of error (Theodoret, HE 5.9, NPNF II/3; Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004).

Cyril did not long survive his vindication. He returned to govern his see in peace and died about 386, in his own city and his own church, after an episcopate that had begun in controversy and ended in conciliar honor (Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem, Brill 2004). The Church that received him as a saint and Father did so with the formal assurance of an ecumenical generation that his faith had been sound — the final and authoritative answer to the men who had three times driven him from Jerusalem (see The Three Exiles).

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). [Synodal letter at HE 5.9.]
The Second Ecumenical Council (Constantinople) (381). In The Seven Ecumenical Councils, NPNF Series 2, Vol. 14 (NPNF II/14).
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.