Cyril of Alexandria

Overview

Cyril of Alexandria (c. 375-444) was bishop of Alexandria from AD 412 until his death, and the central figure on the Alexandrian side of the fifth-century controversy over how the divine and human natures are united in the one person of Christ.¹ He is remembered above all as the chief opponent of Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, in the dispute over calling Mary Theotokos (“Bearer of God”) that produced the Council of Ephesus in 431 and, two decades later, shaped the Chalcedonian settlement of the question.¹

Life and Ministry

Cyril became bishop of Alexandria in 412 and held the office until his death in 444.¹ In 428, Nestorius, a monk from Antioch newly appointed bishop of Constantinople, objected to calling Mary Theotokos, preferring Christotokos (“Bearer of Christ”) on the ground that the eternal, unbeginning God could not have spent nine months in a womb and been born.¹ Cyril judged that Nestorius’s language reduced the incarnation to no more than an outward joining of the divine Word to an ordinary man, and that this emptied the work of redemption of its power, since only God could save from sin and death.¹ The two bishops exchanged formal anathemas, and Cyril pressed the case against Nestorius at the Council of Ephesus in 431.² Charles Hodge records that Cyril “secured [Nestorius’s] condemnation by violent means” at that council, an “irregular decision” that the Greek and Syrian bishops resisted for a time before Nestorius was finally deposed and banished, dying in exile around 440.³

Theological Contribution

On Mary as Theotokos, Cyril argued directly from the deity of the child she bore:

I am amazed that there are some who are extremely doubtful whether the holy Virgin should be called Mother of God or not. For if our Lord Jesus Christ is God, then surely the holy Virgin who gave him birth must be God’s mother… . Although those mothers [of ordinary people] are only the mothers of bodies belonging to this world, still they are said to give birth, not to a part of a person but to the whole person, consisting of soul and body… . If anyone maintained that anyone’s mother was “mother of flesh” and not “mother of soul,” he would be talking nonsense. For what she has produced is one living being, a composite of two dissimilar elements, but a single human being, with each element retaining its own nature.⁴

Denying Mary the title, on Cyril’s reasoning, implied that the Logos was only superficially associated with the man born of her, rather than truly and personally united to a complete human nature from the moment of conception.¹

On the union of the two natures, Cyril taught what later theology would call the hypostatic union: the divine Logos and the human nature were joined so intimately in the one person of Christ that it became proper to speak of what belongs to one nature as belonging to the other, a principle called the communicatio idiomatum.¹ Applied to Christ, this meant the divine Logos could be spoken of as suffering in the flesh, and the flesh of the Logos could be spoken of as becoming “the firstborn from the dead,” even though the properties of each nature remained distinct in themselves.¹ Cyril pressed the same logic against Nestorius in the letter read at the Council of Ephesus, arguing that refusing this personal union left only the error of positing “two Sons”:

We, therefore, confess one Christ and Lord, not as worshipping a man with the Word (lest this expression “with the Word” should suggest to the mind the idea of division), but worshipping him as one and the same, forasmuch as the body of the Word, with which he sits with the Father, is not separated from the Word himself, not as if two sons were sitting with him, but one by the union with the flesh. If, however, we reject the personal union as impossible or unbecoming, we fall into the error of speaking of two sons … We must not, therefore, divide the one Lord Jesus Christ into two Sons.⁵

Cyril also wrote a substantial apologetic work, For the Holy Religion of the Christians against the Books of the Impious Julian, answering the emperor Julian the Apostate’s anti-Christian polemic Against the Galileans; Julian’s work is now known only through the quotations preserved in Cyril’s reply.⁶

Historical Significance

The Council of Chalcedon in 451 canonized letters by both Cyril and Leo the Great, bishop of Rome, as authoritative statements of Christology alongside its own Definition, and the Definition’s insistence on Mary as Theotokos and on one person in two natures, “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation,” reflects the settlement of the very controversy Cyril and Nestorius had fought over two decades earlier.¹⁷ A.A. Hodge frames the underlying Alexandrian-Antiochene divide as a difference in theological temperament as much as doctrine: an Alexandrian school inclined to “an intuitive mode of thought inclining to the mystical,” against an Antiochene school marked by “a logical reflective bent of the understanding,” with Cyril representing the former and Nestorius’s teacher Theodore of Mopsuestia the latter.⁸

Cyril’s own formula, that the incarnation, or hypostatical union, resulted in “one nature in Christ” because the human was “changed into the divine,” was pressed further than Cyril intended by those who came after him.³ Charles Hodge traces the Eutychian, or Monophysite, heresy that Chalcedon condemned back to this language: Eutyches was “one of the most strenuous advocates of the views of Cyril,” and it was Dioscurus, Cyril’s own successor as bishop of Alexandria, who championed the “one nature” position all the way to the “Robber Council” of Ephesus in 449, which Chalcedon overturned two years later.⁹¹⁰

Samuel Parkison traces the extra Calvinisticum, the claim that the Son’s divine nature is not exhausted or confined by the incarnate humanity, to a concept that functioned for both Cyril and Thomas Aquinas to protect, respectively, the divinity and the humanity of the Son.¹¹ John Calvin, for his part, cites the Council of Ephesus and Cyril’s role there as a delegate of Celestine, bishop of Rome, in his own polemic against later Roman claims to papal primacy, arguing that the episode shows no bishop, including the bishop of Rome, then held authority over the others.¹²

Related Doctrines

References

Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), chap. 8, “Truly God and Truly Man,” 78-89. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 386-387. ↩
Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Person of Christ,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 376-453, at 400. ↩ ↩²
Cyril of Alexandria, Letter 1 to the Monks of Egypt, in The Later Christian Fathers, ed. and trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 252, quoted in Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 81. ↩
Cyril of Alexandria’s letter at the Council of Ephesus, in Henry R. Percival, Philip Schaff, and Henry Wace, eds., The Seven Ecumenical Councils of the Undivided Church, quoted in Darron Thomas Chapman, “Formulations of the Concept of Person Prior to Boethius,” in “The Concept of Person in Christian Theology: An Exposition and Defense of a Classical Boethian/Thomistic Definition of Person” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2026), 45-77, at 71. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology,” editorial note 5. ↩
Chapman, “Formulations of the Concept of Person Prior to Boethius,” 71-72. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 386. ↩
Hodge, “Chapter III. Person of Christ,” 401. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 387. ↩
Samuel G. Parkison, “Irresistible Beauty: Beholding Triune Glory in the Face of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2021), chap. 20, “Incarnation of the Immutable Son.” ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 7. ↩