Liturgical and Historical Importance

Saint Cyril of Jerusalem holds a place in the history of Christian worship out of all proportion to the slender body of his surviving works. His Catechetical Lectures and the five Mystagogical Catecheses are the single richest fourth-century witness to the making of a Christian — the catechumenate, the rites of baptism, the chrismation that follows it, and the Eucharist with its invocation of the Holy Spirit — and through them the rite of Jerusalem can be reconstructed with a fullness possible for no other early see. This file weighs that liturgical importance, the reconstruction of the Jerusalem rite and its influence on the East, and Cyril’s standing as a venerated Father and (in the West) a Doctor of the Church.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

A Cornerstone of Liturgical History

For the historian of liturgy, the corpus that bears Cyril’s name is a document of the first importance. Most of what survives from the early centuries about initiation and the Eucharist is fragmentary, allusive, or prescriptive — church orders that legislate without describing, apologies that gesture at the mysteries without unveiling them. Cyril’s catecheses do something almost unique: they walk a real congregation, in a known city, through the rites they were undergoing, and explain each gesture from within. The eighteen Catechetical Lectures were delivered to the photizomenoi (those “being enlightened”) through the Lent that prepared them for baptism at Pascha; the five Mystagogical Catecheses were given to the same people, now newly baptized, in the bright week that followed, unfolding the meaning of rites they had only just received (see The Procatechesis and the Eighteen). The result is the most circumstantial running account of Christian initiation to survive from the fourth century (Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, Routledge 2000).

Several features make the corpus a cornerstone rather than merely one witness among many. It describes the catechumenate as a graded institution — enrollment, scrutiny, exorcism, the daily Lenten instruction — giving body to a structure elsewhere known only in outline (Procatechesis 1–17). It preserves the baptismal rite in sequence: the renunciation of Satan facing west (apotaxis) and the act of allegiance to Christ facing east (syntaxis), the stripping and anointing with exorcized oil, the triple immersion in the font, all expounded as a real dying and rising with Christ (Mystagogical Catechesis 1–2; hereafter MC; see Baptism and Renunciation). It is the earliest source to treat post-baptismal chrismation as a distinct mystery in its own right — an anointing with myron that confers the Holy Spirit and is set theologically apart from the baptismal washing (MC 3). And in its fifth lecture it gives the earliest detailed running description of an Eastern eucharistic anaphora, complete with the Sursum corda dialogue, the Sanctus joined to the angelic hymn, and a consecratory invocation of the Holy Spirit upon the gifts (MC 5; see The Jerusalem Anaphora). No other fourth-century author supplies all four; Cyril supplies them together, for one community, in sequence.

Reconstructing the Jerusalem Rite

Because the catecheses are mystagogy and not a rubric book, they assume the rite is already known and explain it from the inside — which means their order may be read, with due caution, as the order actually followed in fourth-century Jerusalem. This makes Cyril the foundation stone for any reconstruction of the local rite, and he does not stand alone. The pilgrim Egeria, writing of her travels to the holy places around 381–384, describes the same liturgical world from the worshipper’s vantage: the daily services at the Anastasis, the stational processions through the sites of the Passion, the catechesis of Lent and the mystagogia of Easter week (Egeria, Itinerarium; see The Jerusalem Liturgy). Cyril supplies the words and meaning of the rites; Egeria supplies their setting in the sacred topography and the calendar. Between them, the Jerusalem of the later fourth century is the best-documented liturgical city of the early Church (Day, The Baptismal Liturgy of Jerusalem, Ashgate 2007).

That this rite was celebrated at the holy places themselves gave it a peculiar authority. Baptism and Eucharist were performed where the events they re-presented had occurred — death and resurrection enacted hard by the tomb of Christ — and Cyril repeatedly appeals to the surrounding witnesses of the Gospel, “this holy Golgotha,” “the most holy sepulchre,” the wood of the Cross “dispersed piecemeal from this spot over all the world” (Catechetical Lecture 13.4, 13.39; 10.19; see The True Cross and Relics). The pilgrimage piety that streamed toward Jerusalem in his lifetime carried this liturgical experience outward; pilgrims who had kept Holy Week in the holy city took home both its observances and its imaginative power.

Influence on the Eastern and Byzantine Tradition

The Jerusalem rite was not a backwater but a fountainhead. The developed eucharistic liturgy of the holy city, the Liturgy of Saint James, belongs to Jerusalem and Antioch and is read by liturgists as the mature descendant of the anaphora Cyril describes: the sequence he expounds — peace, Sursum corda, preface, Sanctus, epiclesis, intercessions for the living and the dead, the Lord’s Prayer, the Sancta sanctis, and communion — is in its bones the structure of Saint James (Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, Routledge 2000; Day, The Baptismal Liturgy of Jerusalem, Ashgate 2007). Through the family of Antiochene-Palestinian anaphoras to which Saint James belongs, the shape Cyril attests stands in the prehistory of the Byzantine norm — the Liturgies of Saint Basil and Saint John Chrysostom that became the standard of the Eastern Orthodox Church (see Divine Liturgy).

The most consequential single inheritance is theological as much as ceremonial: the epiclesis. Cyril’s plain statement that the Church calls upon God “to send forth His Holy Spirit upon the gifts lying before Him, that He may make the bread the Body of Christ, and the wine the Blood of Christ” (MC 5.7) is among the earliest and clearest patristic anchors for the Eastern conviction that the Holy Spirit consummates the consecration. That conviction would become a defining mark of Orthodox eucharistic theology, distinguishing the Eastern understanding of the moment and means of consecration from later Western emphases on the words of institution (see The Jerusalem Anaphora). So too the Jerusalem stational liturgy — its processions, its keeping of the days of Holy Week at the sites of the Passion — fed the developing Byzantine calendar and the very idea of a liturgical year mapped onto sacred history. In all these ways Cyril is not merely a witness to a vanished local use but a source of the living tradition.

Veneration as a Father and Teacher

Cyril is honored as a saint in the Orthodox Church, his feast kept on 18 March, and in the Roman Catholic Church on the same day. His standing rests not on a dramatic martyrdom or an ascetic legend but on his labor as bishop and teacher of the mother church of Christendom, and on the orthodoxy of his doctrine. Though his episcopate was broken by three exiles amid the Arian controversies (see Exile and Rehabilitation), he ended it in communion and esteem: he attended the Second Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 381, where his teaching was vindicated, and a synodal letter of the following year commended him to the West as one who had “in various places fought a good fight against the Arians” (see Cyril and the Arian Crisis). In Orthodox reckoning he is numbered among the Fathers and Teachers of the Church, a model catechist whose lectures remain a touchstone for the instruction of converts and for the theology of the mysteries (see Church Fathers).

“Doctor of the Church” — A Western Designation

In 1882 Pope Leo XIII declared Cyril a Doctor of the Church, a designation formally promulgated in 1883, ranking him among the relatively few teachers whose writings the Roman Catholic Church holds up as of eminent and enduring authority. It is important to be precise about the meaning and the limits of this honor. “Doctor of the Church” is a Roman Catholic designation, conferred by papal or conciliar act and carrying a specific juridical sense in Western canon law; it has no exact equivalent in the Orthodox Church, which has no parallel mechanism for elevating particular Fathers to a formally defined doctoral rank. In the Orthodox tradition Cyril is venerated as a holy Father and Teacher of the Church — a title of honor and reverence rather than a canonical category — and his authority is felt through the reception of his works in the consensus of the Fathers, not through a conferred grade. The two churches thus honor the same man for the same reason, the soundness and richness of his teaching, but they express that honor in different idioms, and the Western title should not be read back into the Orthodox vocabulary as though it were native to it (see Methodology on the careful handling of cross-confessional categories).

A Same-Era Caution: The Two Cyrils

A persistent confusion deserves a word. Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 313–386), the fourth-century catechist of this collection, is a wholly distinct figure from Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376–444), the fifth-century patriarch and Christological controversialist who presided at Ephesus (431) and championed the title Theotokos (see Cyril of Alexandria). They share a name but their importance lies in different domains — the one in initiation and liturgy, the other in the doctrine of the Person of Christ — and conflating them, as older popular literature sometimes did, obscures the contribution of each. Cyril of Jerusalem’s distinctive legacy is liturgical and catechetical, carried forward and systematized by later teachers such as Saint John of Damascus, who gathered the patristic inheritance into ordered theology (see John of Damascus).

References

Cyril of Jerusalem. Catechetical Lectures (Catecheses ad illuminandos) and Procatechesis. PG 33.
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. Fathers of the Church 61 and 64. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1969–1970.
Yarnold, Edward. Cyril of Jerusalem. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2000.
Day, Juliette. The Baptismal Liturgy of Jerusalem: Fourth- and Fifth-Century Evidence from Palestine, Syria and Egypt. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.
Egeria. Itinerarium Egeriae (Travels), trans. John Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels. 3rd ed. Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1999.
Leo XIII. Apostolic Letter on the doctors of the Church (declaration of Cyril of Jerusalem as Doctor of the Church, 1882/1883).