Texts & Studies: Cyril of Alexandria’s Assertions II-IV on the Trinity

Greystone Texts & Studies publishes a wide variety of theological, biblical, historical, ethical, and ecclesiastical texts and brief studies, including translations of never before translated works. This is a resource created exclusively for Greystone Members to encourage the confessional and catholic endeavor of reading widely and well in the Church throughout history.

Greystone’s third Text & Studies release is Assertions II-IV of Cyril of Alexandria’s Thesaurus of the Holy & Consubstantial Trinity (Thesaurus de sancta et consubstantiali trinitate), published c. 412.

Cyril of Alexandria (376–444) has often been considered a forgotten father of the early church, but his legacy is quite enduring. Norman Russell has rightly pointed out that “Cyril's christological teaching, even if not always well understood, has never ceased to be regarded as normative for most Christians.”¹ It is impossible to confess a creedal Christology without his influence,² impossible to retrieve a figural reading of time and the Word without addressing him,³ impossible to understand the nuances of patristic soteriology that account for much of the Reformation’s focus on justification and union with Christ, apart from reading him.⁴ While the bulk of Cyril’s work takes up exegetical and biblical theological concerns, and the most enduring of his work is the Christological writings around the Nestorian controversy, Cyril was also a dogmatic theologian who wrote multiple works on the Trinity, one of which was his Thesaurus of the Holy & Consubstantial Trinity, translated here in English for the very first time.

Cyril’s influence throughout the Medieval Church has been noted by scholars such as Marie-Odile Boulnois who has called the Thesaurus "a junction point between patristics and scholasticism.”⁵ But that influence carried beyond the Medieval Church and into the Reformation. As early as 1528, Johannes Oecolampadius published translations of Cyril’s trinitarian works, including the Thesaurus,⁶ and According to Anthony Lane, Calvin cited Cyril on the doctrine of the Trinity, in particular, “for most of his writing career.”⁷ Far from being a mere re-presenting of Athanasius' Orations against the Arians,⁸ the Reformers utilized the Thesaurus in their endeavor to confess a catholic and trinitarian faith that called the Church back to the sources and the holiness of a then by-gone age; a holiness necessary for the task of trinitarian dogmatics.

Cyril opens the Thesaurus with a call to such holiness, reminiscent in a proleptic fashion of John Webster's repeated call for holiness in the theological endeavor. Yet, as Boulnois has written elsewhere, beginning the Thesaurus this way is also polemical: “In contrast with the Eunomians, who claim to know God as perfectly as he knows Himself, Cyril underlines the deficiencies not only of language, but of human thought itself.”⁹ Here in the introduction, Cyril shows us the heart of the matter: in light of Eunomian and Arian positions, how will the Church confess the holy and consubstantial Trinity? With what posture, with what language, under what authority and influence? And while Cyril utilizes, in systematic and exegetical fashion, the creedal tradition and Aristotelian logic, his primary and final authority to counter the prevailing Arian and Eonomian theses remains the Word of God. The Thesaurus is a masterpiece of trinitarian dogmatics, and here Cyril shows that any trinitarian work must begin and end with the Scriptures. Whether addressing the subsistence of the Father and the Son, the eternal generation of the Son, the consubstantiality and unity of the persons, the submission of the Son in the assumption of human nature, or the divinity of the Holy Spirit, Cyril is passionate, with a pastor’s heart for the Church, to put before the reader what the Church has always confessed by the Spirit, under the authority of the Word, as lived before the Father and our fellow man. It is, as the 9th century Byzantine Patriarch of Constantinople, Photius, once wrote, Cyril's clearest theological work, "especially for those able to grasp the meaning of his logical arguments;"¹⁰ truly a Summa contra Gentiles of fourth-century trinitarian theology written for the Church’s edification and growth in godliness.¹¹

“The aim of our speech,” writes Cyril, “is to say that Jesus is Lord.” We hope with this, the first English translation of Cyril’s Thesaurus, that you too will be able to say with greater clarity and devotion that Jesus is Lord.

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Notes:

1. Norman Russell, “‘Apostolic Man’ and ‘Luminary of the Church’: The Enduring Influence of Cyril of Alexandria” in The Theology of St Cyril of Alexandria: A Critical Appreciation, ed. Thomas G. Weinandy and Daniel A. Keating (New York: T&T Clark, 2003), 237.

2. John McGuckin, St Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy: Its History, Theology and Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 227.

3. Gregory K. Hillis, “Introduction” in Glaphyra on the Pentateuch, Vol. 1, trans. Nicholas Lunn, FOTC 137 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2018), 15.

4. Donald Fairbairn, “Patristic Soteriology: Three Trajectories,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 50, no. 2 (2007); Donald Fairbairn, “Justification in St. Cyril of Alexandria,” Participatio: The Journal of the T.F. Torance Theological Fellowship 4, no. 8 (2013); Daniel A. Keating, The Appropriation of Divine Life in Cyril of Alexandria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 324. See also the interesting letters between Peter Martyr Vermigli and John Calvin in which Vermigli asks Calvin about Cyril’s position concerning union with Christ: Gleanings of a Few Scattered Ears (London: Bell and Daldy, 1857), 340-352.

5. Marie-Odile Boulnois, Le paradoxe trinitaire chez Cyrille d'Alexandrie (Paris: Institut des Etudes Augustiniennes, 1994), 16.

6. Diane Poythress, Reformer of Basel: The Life, Thought, and Influence of Johannes Oecolampadius (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2011), 155.

7. Anthony N.S. Lane, “Calvin’s Use of Cyril of Alexandria” in Calvinus Pastor Ecclesiae: Papers of the Eleventh International Congress on Calvin Research, ed. Herman J. Selderhuis and Arnold Huijgen (Göttingen, DE: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016), 186.

8. John McGuckin, St Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy: Its History, Theology and Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 15-16.

9. Marie-Odile Boulnois, “The Mystery of the Trinity according to Cyril of Alexandria: The Deployment of the Triad and Its Recapitulation into the Unity of Divinity” in The Theology of St Cyril of Alexandria: A Critical Appreciation, ed. Thomas G. Weinandy and Daniel A. Keating (New York: T&T Clark, 2003), 79.

10. Photius, The Bibliotheca, trans. N.G. Wilson (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1994), cod. 136.

11. Quoted in Otto Bardenhewer, Geschichte der altkirchlichen Literatur, Vol 4 (Freiberg: Herder, 1924; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 44-45.