Saint Cyril of Jerusalem and the poverty of philosophy

St Cyril of Jerusalem

Today, the seventh of May, is one of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem’s two feast days in the Orthodox Church—the other one, the commemoration of his repose, being on the eighteenth of March. This is the day on which the miraculous appearance of the Cross in the skies over Golgotha and the Mount of Olives occurred in the year 351, and Saint Cyril’s is commemorated for his role in witnessing this event.

Not much is known of Saint Cyril’s early life. He was born in 315 and became a priest at the age of 31, in 346, and was elevated to the archbishopric four years later. His archbishopric was marked by a decades-long string of exiles, imprisonments and persecutions: under Emperor Constantius, under Emperor Julian the Apostate, and under Emperor Valens. Yet Saint Cyril somehow managed, in the midst of it all, to retain his humanity and trust in God—over against the princes and sons of men who seemingly always and everywhere opposed him. Saint Cyril spent all of his own wealth providing for the citizens of Jerusalem during a famine, and even pawned off Church utensils in order to buy grain for those who were starving. At another time, Saint Cyril was said to have prophesied that Julian the Apostate’s attempts to rebuild the Jewish Temple would come to naught—and later a series of disasters struck the Temple such that construction couldn’t continue.

If his hagiography is to be believed, then, like the Scriptural God he glorifies, Saint Cyril was emphatically not a fan of sedentary architecture.

Yet Saint Cyril is important, not for his miracles or for his prophecies or even for his works of charity, but instead for the writings and the teachings that he left. I have recently returned to reading his Catechetical Lectures. It is stunning how much I garnered, going back for a reread.

In my own anti-philosophical mood, reinforced by the occurrences in Gaza and a certain well-known continental philosopher’s morally-indefensible stands on this and other current events, I find myself in particular drawn to Saint Cyril’s prophetic invective against the Hellenic philosophers of his own time:

There is need of a wakeful soul, since there are many that make spoil through philosophy and vain deceit. The Greeks on the one hand draw men away by their smooth tongue, for honey droppeth from a harlot’s lips: whereas they of the Circumcision deceive those who come to them by means of the Divine Scriptures, which they miserably misinterpret though studying them from childhood to old age, and growing old in ignorance. (Lecture IV)

In his lecture against heresy, Saint Cyril correctly upbraids the philosophers in the point of his jeremiad against Manichaeism for ‘not… reproving the king in the cause of truth’ and ‘not… destroying the idols’. The promise of Plato’s Socrates, and the promise of Aristotle, that men might be made their own masters through the search for truth along the path of reason—is a deception. Philosophy is a path, not to self-mastery, but to self-idolatry.

If the entire Strauss-Kojève debate shows us anything useful, it is that Saint Cyril is right on the money at that point. The entire Western philosophical project in fact enslaves the human being to a mode of language and its use, that will always and everywhere serve the purposes of would-be Pharaohs, Alexanders, Caesars, Napoleons and Hitlers. Philosophy cannot speak truth to power, but will ultimately always be the slave of power¹. The only way to win the philosophers’ semantic shell game is not to play. Why is this? It’s because Socrates’s entire aim, to start with, is flawed. In his fallen state, man is not his own master, and cannot be.

So then, where can we turn?

The Palestinian Patriarch’s point of reference, as for Saint John Chrysostom and Saint Ephraim the Syrian, is always Scripture. Though we are not made aware in his hagiography of his parentage, Saint Cyril reads Scripture the way a Syriac or a Palestinian—that is to say, as a Semite—does. Saint Cyril speaks as a pedagogue, not as a debater or a polemicist, of Scripture.

The catechumens to whom Saint Cyril delivered these addresses during Great Lent, would have heard Scripture, read aloud to them, in the context of the Divine Liturgy before they would have been called upon to depart. These writings that Saint Cyril has left to us, likewise, were first delivered as lectures to the catechumens. Saint Cyril’s method is as important as the message: he appeals to what is written, and attempts thereupon to interpret all of the catechumens’ questions about the Symbol of Faith.

For Saint Cyril, the rational intellect is something that must be yoked, and brought under the discipline of the text. This is in order to bring the catechumens’ behaviour into accord with Scriptural statutes, and the will of the Scriptural God:

Seek not the things that are too deep for thee, neither search out the things that are above thy strength: what is commanded thee, think thereupon. (Lecture VI)

To give one example, when discussing the Mystery of Baptism, does he go into abstruse theologising over the symbolism of the waters? Not in the least. He says instead:

What then must you do? And what are the fruits of repentance? Let him that hath two coats give to him that hath none… and he that hath meat, let him do likewise. Wouldst thou enjoy the grace of the Holy Spirit, yet judgest the poor not worthy of bodily food? (Lecture III)

Baptism entails upon itself a change, not only in mind, not only in ideas, but in comportment. And the measuring-stick is not any creed, not any mental formula: it is concrete love of neighbour… and that, as understood in the context of the Law of Moses, the Books and the Prophets.

Once more, in discoursing upon God the Father, and the relationship between the Father and the Son, Saint Cyril pointedly does not come to any philosophical conclusion regarding the oneness or the many-ness of the substance or the nature or the will of God the Father:

I have ever wondered at the curiosity of the bold men, who by their imagined reverence fall into impiety. For though they know nothing of Thrones, and Dominions, and Principalities, and Powers, the workmanship of Christ, they attempt to scrutinise their Creator Himself. Tell me first, O most daring man, wherein does Throne differ from Dominion, and then scrutinise what pertains to Christ… Not even the Holy Ghost Himself has spoken in the Scriptures concerning the generation of the Son from the Father. Why then dost thou busy thyself about things which not even the Holy Ghost has written in the Scriptures? Thou that knowest not the things which are written, busiest thou thyself about the things which are not written? (Lecture XI)

Instead, he comes to the conclusion that

the first virtue of godliness in Christians is to honour their parents, to requite the troubles of those who begat them, and with all their might to confer on them what tends to their comfort… (Lecture VII)

What is important to St Cyril is not to dispute over the underlying attributes or inner relations of the Persons (let alone about even whether or not they are ‘persons’, in the language of Greek philosophy!), but instead what is implied from the Scriptural Godhead in how we should behave, from the love of the Father for His Son. In other words, St Cyril places himself and his catechumenate under the didactic hand of Scripture. He does not try to philosophise it; nor does he try to read it as history or as science. His concern is chiefly the manner in which we behave, and finds that Scripture will judge us on not on how we think, but on what we do:

We do nothing without the body. We blaspheme with the mouth, and with the mouth we pray. With the body we commit fornication, and with the body we keep chastity. With the hand we rob, and by the hand we bestow alms; and the rest in like manner. Since then the body has been our minister in all things, it shall also share with us in the future the fruits of the past. (Lecture XVIII)

This saintly Patriarch, the direct apostolic predecessor to the current Patriarch Theophilos III, speaks as much to Christians now, not to sit aside idly and watch as the Holy Land burns once again. Instead, we are to follow the statutes and commandments of the One Scriptural God, and to love our neighbours, today: not just in the idle chatter of the philosophers, but in truth.

What is commanded thee: think thereupon. Amen.

^{1. That’s how someone like Žižek can pretend, and perhaps even delude himself, that he’s doing something liberating… when in fact he’s actively and consciously demonising the Arabs at the same time as they’re being slaughtered en masse by the Israelis, and cravenly serving his NATO paymasters’ interests at the same time.↩}