Cyril Of Alexandria Quotes

If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink

S.Cyril elsewhere says, "As one therefore of the forsaken, in that He too like us partook of blood and flesh, He says, Why forsookest Thou Me? which was [the utterance] of one who was undoing the forsaking that had come upon us and as it were winning the Father to Himself and calling Him to good favour to us as to Himself first.

Supporters of apokatastasis in roughly chronological order: - [c. 30-105] Apostle Paul and various NT authors - [c. 80-150] Scattered likely references among Apostolic Fathers o Ignatius o Justin Martyr o Tatian o Theophilus of Antioch (explicit references) - [130-202] Irenaeus - [c. 150-200] Pantaenus of Alexandria - [150-215] Clement of Alexandria - [154-222] Bardaisan of Edessa - [c. 184-253] Origen (including The Dialogue of Adamantius) - [♱ 265] Dionysius of Alexandria - [265-280] Theognustus - [c. 250-300] Hieracas - [♱ c. 309] Pierius - [♱ c. 309] St Pamphilus Martyr - [♱ c. 311] Methodius of Olympus - [251-306] St. Anthony - [c. 260-340] Eusebius - [c. 270-340] St. Macrina the Elder - [conv. 355] Gaius Marius Victorinus (converted at very old age) - [300-368] Hilary of Poitiers - [c. 296-373] Athanasius of Alexandria - [♱ c. 374] Marcellus of Ancrya - [♱378] Titus of Basra/Bostra - [c. 329-379] Basil the Cappadocian - [327-379] St. Macrina the Younger - [♱387] Cyril of Jerusalem (possibly) - [c. 300-388] Paulinus, bishop of Tyre and then Antioch - [c. 329-390] Gregory Nazianzen - [♱ c. 390] Apollinaris of Laodicaea - [♱ c. 390] Diodore of Tarsus - [330-390] Gregory of Nyssa - [c. 310/13-395/8] Didymus the Blind of Alexandria - [333-397] Ambrose of Milan - [345-399] Evagrius Ponticus - [♱407] Theotimus of Scythia - [350-428] Theodore of Mopsuestia - [c. 360-400] Rufinus - [350-410] Asterius of Amaseia - [347-420] St. Jerome - [354-430] St. Augustine (early, anti-Manichean phase) - [363-430] Palladius - [360-435] John Cassian - [373-414] Synesius of Cyrene - [376-444] Cyril of Alexandria - [500s] John of Caesarea - [♱520] Aeneas of Gaza - [♱523] Philoxenus of Mabbug - [475-525] Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite - [♱543] Stephen Bar Sudhaili - [580-662] St. Maximus the Confessor - [♱ c. 700] St. Isaac of Nineveh - [c. 620-705] Anastasius of Sinai - [c. 690-780] St. John of Dalyatha - [710/13-c. 780] Joseph Hazzaya - [813-903] Moses Bar Kepha - [815-877] Johannes Scotus Eriugena

Some early Christians saw Christ’s humble beginnings as a foreshadowing of how he continues to meet us in the Eucharist. For example, St. Cyril of Alexandria said that when we sin, we fail to live out our dignity as humans made in the image of God, and we instead become like animals, living a life of self-gratification. Yet while animals feed from an ordinary manger, we as sinners approach Christ in a feeding trough that is much more substantial. Jesus feeds us not with hay but with his own Body and Blood in the Eucharist.6

Cyril, upon learning of this, got hold of the body and placed it in a position of honor and veneration in one of his churches. He conducted over it a ceremony of canonization, bestowing on the would-be assassin the title of Saint Ammonius Thaumasius (Saint Ammonius the Admirable) and publicly declaring him to be a martyr for the Christian faith.

Another factor: Christianity offered opportunities for advancement in the church to intelligent young men, some of whom might otherwise have become mathematicians or scientists. Bishops and presbyters were generally exempt from the jurisdiction of the ordinary civil courts, and from taxation. A bishop such as Cyril of Alexandria or Ambrose of Milan could exercise considerable political power, much more than a scholar at the Museum in Alexandria or the Academy in Athens. This was something new. Under paganism religious offices had gone to men of wealth or political power, rather than wealth and power going to men of religion. For instance, Julius Caesar and his successors won the office of supreme pontiff, not as a recognition of piety or learning, but as a consequence of their political power.

Hypatia, the daughter of Theon, the mathematician, endeavored to continue the old-time instructions. Each day before her academy stood a long train of chariots; her lecture-room was crowded with the wealth and fashion of Alexandria. They came to listen to her discourses on those questions which man in all ages has asked, but which have never yet been answered: "What am I? Where am I? What can I know?" Hypatia and Cyril; philosophy and bigotry; they cannot exist together. As Hypatia repaired to her academy, she was assaulted by (Saint) Cyril's mob—a mob of many monks. Stripped naked in the street, she was dragged into a church, and there killed by the club of

Cyril of Alexandria, even more than St. Epiphanius, can present difficulties for the polemicists with the Catholics and lend support to the Filioque partisans, for it is his wont not only to call the Holy Spirit proper, idios, to the Son, in all the ambiguity of this expression, but also to speak of the origination (proeisi) of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son, or even from 'Both'.

The Spirit is assuredly in no way changeable; or even if some think Him to be so infirm as to change, the disgrace will be traced back to the divine nature itself, if in fact the Spirit is from God the Father and, for that matter, from the Son, being poured forth substantially from both, that is to say, from the Father through the Son.

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Since the Holy Spirit when he is in us effects our being conformed to God, and he actually proceeds from the Father and Son, it is abundantly clear that he is of the divine essence, in it in essence and proceeding from it.

Teaching about Christ begins in silence. 'Be still, for that is the absolute', writes Kierkegaard. That has nothing to do with the silence of the mystics, who in their dumbness chatter away secretly in their soul by themselves. The silence of the Church is the silence before the Word. In so far as the Church proclaims the Word, it falls down silently in truth before the inexpressible: 'In silence I worship the unutterable' (Cyril of Alexandria). The spoken Word is the inexpressible; this unutterable is the Word. 'It must become spoken, it is the great battle cry' (Luther). Although it is cried out by the Church in the world, it remains the inexpressible. To speak of Christ means to keep silent; to keep silent about Christ means to speak. When the Church speaks rightly out of a proper silence, then Christ is proclaimed.

the heaven and the earth and all things which were made were made “in the beginning”, that is, in the Saviour’.27 Likewise Cyril of Alexandria: ‘No beginning that is the least bit temporal can be applied to the Only-Begotten because he is before all time and has his existence before the ages’.28

In the spring of the year 415, relations between Christians and non-Christians in Alexandria were tense. The sky above the city might have been darkened by only a few scudding white clouds but in its streets the atmosphere—always quarrelsome—was more precarious than ever. To make matters worse the city had a new bishop, Cyril. After the zealot Theophilus, many Alexandrians must have hoped that their next cleric would be more conciliatory. He was not.

Allegorically (St. Cyril of Alexandria, Catena of the Greek Fathers): the setting of Christ's birth points us to the Eucharist. Since through sin man becomes like the beasts, Christ lies in the trough where animals feed, offering them, not hay, but his own body as life-giving bread.

The shocking death of Hypatia ought to have merited a good deal of attention in the histories of the period. Instead it is treated lightly and obliquely, if at all. In history, as in life, no one in Alexandria was punished for her murder. There was a cover-up. Some writers were highly critical – even to fervent Christian eyes this was an appalling act. But not all: as one Christian bishop later recorded with admiration, once the satanic woman had been destroyed, then all the people surrounded Cyril in acclamation for he had ‘destroyed the last remains of idolatry in the city’. The affected myopia of Christian historians could be magnificent: as the historian Ramsay MacMullen has put it, ‘Hostile writings and discarded views were not recopied or passed on, or they were actively suppressed.’ The Church acted as a great and, at times, fierce filter on all written material, the centuries of its control as ‘a differentially permeable membrane’ that ‘allowed the writings of Christianity to pass through but not of Christianity’s enemies’.

The shocking death of Hypatia ought to have merited a good deal of attention in the histories of the period. Instead it is treated lightly and obliquely, if at all. In history, as in life, no one in Alexandria was punished for her murder. There was a cover-up.61 Some writers were highly critical—even to fervent Christian eyes this was an appalling act. But not all: as one Christian bishop later recorded with admiration, once the satanic woman had been destroyed, then all the people surrounded Cyril in acclamation for he had “destroyed the last remains of idolatry in the city.

It was Hypatia’s fault, said the Christians, that the governor was being so stubborn. It was she, they murmured, who was standing between Orestes and Cyril, preventing them from reconciling. Fanned by the parabalani, the rumours started to catch, and flame. Hypatia was not merely a difficult woman, they said. Hadn’t everyone seen her use symbols in her work, and astrolabes? The illiterate parabalani (‘bestial men – truly abominable’ as one philosopher would later call them) knew what these instruments were. They were not the tools of mathematics and philosophy, no: they were the work of the Devil. Hypatia was not a philosopher: she was a creature of Hell. It was she who was turning the entire city against God with her trickery and her spells. She was ‘atheizing’ Alexandria. Naturally, she seemed appealing enough – but that was how the Evil One worked. Hypatia, they said, had ‘beguiled many people through satanic wiles’. Worst of all, she had even beguiled Orestes. Hadn’t he stopped going to church? It was clear: she had ‘beguiled him through her magic’. This could not be allowed to continue. One day in March AD 415, Hypatia set out from her home to go for her daily ride through the city. Suddenly, she found her way blocked by a ‘multitude of believers in God’. They ordered her to get down from her chariot. Knowing what had recently happened to her friend Orestes, she must have realized as she climbed down that her situation was a serious one. She cannot possibly have realized quite how serious. As soon as she stood on the street, the parabalani, under the guidance of a Church magistrate called Peter – ‘a perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ’ – surged round and seized ‘the pagan woman’. They then dragged Alexandria’s greatest living mathematician through the streets to a church. Once inside, they ripped the clothes from her body then, using broken pieces of pottery as blades, flayed her skin from her flesh. Some say that, while she still gasped for breath, they gouged out her eyes. Once she was dead, they tore her body into pieces and threw what was left of the ‘luminous child of reason’ onto a pyre and burned her.

Theologian Michael Vlach has done an admirable job chronicling the appearances of penal substitution in the writings of the fathers,9 citing Clement of Rome, Ignatius, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Epistle to Diognetus, Justin Martyr, Eusebius of Caesarea, Eusebius of Emesa, Hilary of Poitiers, Athanasius, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, Ambrose of Milan, John Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria, Gregory the Great, Severus of Antioch, Oecumenius, and of course Augustine of Hippo. Vlach’s significant documentation spans the first ten centuries of the orthodox church.

Cyril of Alexandria says, as we saw earlier, ‘One is the Son, one Lord, Jesus Christ, both before the incarnation and after the incarnation’,

This is true of every age. For every Cyril of Alexandria (the bishop when Hypatia was murdered) there was a Basil of Caesarea (who established the first hospital). For every Christian warlord hacking his way through pagan Europe there was a humble preacher standing in his way preferring to die than to kill. We will meet both of these, and more, in the next few chapters.