Modern Scholarship

The modern study of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem has been shaped by a handful of major works that have made his catecheses among the best-served of patristic texts: critical editions, scholarly translations, a standard historical monograph on his episcopate, and a sustained debate over the authorship and dating of the Mystagogical Catecheses. This file surveys that literature — who edited and translated Cyril, who argued what about the disputed questions, and where the live debates now stand — and points to the flagship files in this collection that treat each controversy at length.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Editions and the Textual Foundation

All modern work on Cyril rests on the textual labors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The standard collected text remains that printed in J.-P. Migne’s Patrologia Graeca 33, and it is to PG 33 that scholarship still refers for the bulk of the corpus. For the Mystagogical Catecheses the critical text of reference is Auguste Piédagnel’s edition in the Sources Chrétiennes series — Catéchèses mystagogiques, SC 126 (Cerf, 1966) — which established the manuscript basis on which the modern authorship debate is conducted. An influential earlier edition, F. L. Cross’s St Cyril of Jerusalem’s Lectures on the Christian Sacraments (SPCK, 1951), gave the Greek of the Procatechesis and the Mystagogical Catecheses with an introduction and long served as the standard student text in the Anglophone world; its introduction shaped assumptions that later scholarship would reopen.

The principal scholarly translations form the working library. In English the Fathers of the Church volumes of Leo P. McCauley and Anthony A. Stephenson — The Works of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, FOTC 61 and 64 (CUA Press, 1969–1970) — supply annotated renderings of all the works with introductions that weigh the authorship problem. The older translation in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Series 2, Vol. 7), by Edwin Hamilton Gifford, remains in wide use and is the version most often quoted in this collection.

Edward Yarnold

The Jesuit liturgist Edward Yarnold produced the volume that introduces most readers to Cyril today: Cyril of Jerusalem, in Routledge’s Early Church Fathers series (2000), which combines a substantial study with fresh translations of the principal works. Yarnold’s positions have been broadly influential. On the vexed question of the Mystagogical Catecheses, he defended Cyrilline authorship, and offered the well-known “lecture-notes” explanation of why the Mystagogy reads differently from the eighteen Lenten lectures: the difference of style and finish, he argued, reflects the difference of genre and occasion — polished prebaptismal instruction on the one hand, and on the other the briefer, more allusive mystagogia of Easter week, possibly transmitted in a less worked-up form — rather than a difference of author (Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, Routledge 2000). Yarnold’s earlier and complementary contribution was to the study of initiation more broadly: The Awakening of the West: The Initiation of Christian Faith in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries (T&T Clark, 1994), which set Cyril’s rites beside those of Ambrose, Chrysostom, and Theodore of Mopsuestia and made the comparative case for reading the fourth-century mystagogies together.

Alexis James Doval

The single most concentrated treatment of the authorship question is Alexis James Doval’s Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogue: The Authorship of the Mystagogic Catecheses (CUA Press, Patristic Monograph Series 17, 2001). Doval reviewed the whole history of the dispute — the manuscript ascriptions, the liturgical arguments, the stylistic objections — and brought to bear a computer-assisted stylometric analysis, comparing measurable features of the Greek of the Mystagogical Catecheses against the secure Cyrilline corpus of the Catechetical Lectures. On the strength of that quantitative comparison, together with the documentary evidence, Doval argued for Cyrilline authorship (allowing that the texts may have been edited or transmitted by Cyril’s successor John II without ceasing to be substantially Cyril’s). His monograph is now the standard reference on the question, and the methodological turn it represents — testing impressionistic claims about style against statistics — set the terms of subsequent discussion. The full anatomy of the manuscript families and the competing arguments is treated separately in this collection (see The Authorship Question).

Jan Willem Drijvers

For the history rather than the liturgy, the standard modern study is Jan Willem Drijvers’ Cyril of Jerusalem: Bishop and City (Brill, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, 2004). Drijvers set Cyril within the politics of the see he held: the rise of Jerusalem from a suffragan bishopric under the metropolitan of Caesarea toward the prominence its holy places demanded, the rivalry with Acacius of Caesarea that underlay Cyril’s expulsions, the three exiles, and the building of Jerusalem’s liturgical and pilgrimage identity. The book is indispensable for the episcopate as distinct from the writings, and advances a measured reading of Cyril’s churchmanship and doctrinal trajectory. Drijvers had earlier written the standard study of the legend that shadows Cyril’s see — Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of Her Finding of the True Cross (Brill, 1992) — which dissects the development of the Cross-discovery tradition that grew up around the Jerusalem holy places in and after Cyril’s century (see The Procatechesis and the Eighteen for Cyril’s own references to the Cross relic).

Juliette Day

A more sceptical voice in the liturgical reconstruction is Juliette Day, whose The Baptismal Liturgy of Jerusalem: Fourth- and Fifth-Century Evidence from Palestine, Syria and Egypt (Ashgate, 2007) offers a critical reassessment of exactly what the sources permit us to say about the Jerusalem rite. Day is cautious about reading the Mystagogical Catecheses back into Cyril’s own mid-century episcopate: where an older scholarship treated the Mystagogy as straightforward evidence for the rite as Cyril knew it, she tends to date several features later, closer to the time of John II at the century’s end, and to weigh the Jerusalem evidence against the comparative material from Syria and Egypt before granting it. Her work tempers confident reconstructions of “the rite of Cyril” and feeds directly into the dating debate (see below). It is a salutary corrective even for those who, on the authorship question, side with Yarnold and Doval, for the two questions — who wrote the Mystagogy and when its rites took the shape it describes — are logically separable.

Mazza, Kelly, and the Wider Literature

Several further works complete the modern shelf. Enrico Mazza’s Mystagogy: A Theology of Liturgy in the Patristic Age (Pueblo, 1989) studies the method of mystagogy as a genre, reading Cyril alongside Ambrose, Chrysostom, and Theodore — essential context for understanding what kind of text the Mystagogical Catecheses are. On the creed, the classic study remains J. N. D. Kelly’s Early Christian Creeds (3rd ed., Longman, 1972), which analyzes the baptismal creed of Jerusalem that Cyril expounds and locates it within the family of fourth-century Eastern symbols. To these may be added the broad liturgical surveys — above all Paul Bradshaw’s The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship (2nd ed., 2002) — within which Cyril’s anaphora is read as a key witness (see The Jerusalem Liturgy).

The Live Debates

Three debates remain genuinely open, and each has a dedicated flagship file in this collection; only their outlines are sketched here.

The first is the authorship of the Mystagogical Catecheses. The pro-Cyrilline case (Yarnold’s lecture-notes argument, Doval’s stylometry) is now in the ascendant, but a real tradition reads the Mystagogy as the work of John II of Jerusalem or as a later, developed text only loosely Cyrilline — a reading that draws on the divergent manuscript ascriptions and on liturgical features thought to be late. The repository lays out both sides without asserting a certainty the evidence does not allow (see The Authorship Question).

The second is the dating of the Jerusalem rite’s features. Day’s caution about projecting the Mystagogy onto the mid-century rite means that even granting Cyrilline authorship of the text, the practices it describes — the developed chrismation, certain elements of the anaphora — may belong to the rite’s later, not its earlier, form. This is the question of when the Jerusalem liturgy became what the Mystagogy depicts (see The Jerusalem Anaphora).

The third is the “semi-Arian” reassessment of Cyril’s doctrine. An older verdict, taking Cyril’s avoidance of the term homoousios and his early association with the anti-Nicene party around Acacius and the Homoiousians at face value, classed him as a “semi-Arian.” Modern scholarship — R. P. C. Hanson in his magisterial The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (1988), and Drijvers — has substantially rehabilitated him, reading his reticence about a contested philosophical term as the caution of a pastor and biblical theologian whose substantive teaching was Nicene, and whose orthodoxy was vindicated at Constantinople in 381. This collection treats the reassessment in full (see Cyril and the Arian Crisis).

References

Cyril of Jerusalem. Catechetical Lectures, Procatechesis, and (attrib.) Mystagogical Catecheses. PG 33.
Piédagnel, Auguste, ed. Cyrille de Jérusalem: Catéchèses mystagogiques. Sources Chrétiennes 126. Paris: Cerf, 1966.
Cross, F. L., ed. St Cyril of Jerusalem’s Lectures on the Christian Sacraments: The Procatechesis and the Five Mystagogical Catecheses. London: SPCK, 1951.
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.
The Catechetical Lectures of S. Cyril, trans. Edwin Hamilton Gifford. NPNF Series 2, Vol. 7 (NPNF II/7).
Yarnold, Edward. Cyril of Jerusalem. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2000.
Yarnold, Edward. The Awakening of the West: The Initiation of Christian Faith in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994.
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.
Drijvers, Jan Willem. Cyril of Jerusalem: Bishop and City. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 72. Leiden: Brill, 2004.
Drijvers, Jan Willem. Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of Her Finding of the True Cross. Leiden: Brill, 1992.
Day, Juliette. The Baptismal Liturgy of Jerusalem: Fourth- and Fifth-Century Evidence from Palestine, Syria and Egypt. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.
Mazza, Enrico. Mystagogy: A Theology of Liturgy in the Patristic Age. New York: Pueblo, 1989.
Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Creeds. 3rd ed. London: Longman, 1972.
Hanson, R. P. C. The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318–381. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988.
Bradshaw, Paul F. The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship. 2nd ed. London/New York: SPCK/Oxford University Press, 2002.