About St. Cyril of Alexandria

About
St. Cyril of Alexandria

St. Cyril lived in the Egyptian city of Alexandria from 378 to 444. According Lionel R. Wickham:

The patristic understanding of the Incarnation owes more to Cyril of Alexandria than to any other individual theologian. The classic picture of Christ the God-man, as it is delineated in the formulae of the Church from the Council of Chalcedon onwards, and as it has been presented to the heart in liturgies and hymns, is the picture Cyril persuaded Christians was the true, the only credible, Christ. All subsequent Christology has proceeded, and must proceed, by way of interpretation or criticism of this picture; it is the standard by which interpretations of Christ as God's eternal Son and Word made man and incarnate are judged, the reference-point for differing pictures... Only Augustine (if the Reformation may be allowed to count as a consequence of following to their conclusions his leading thoughts about divine grace and human freedom) has had a comparable significance...
(Cyril of Alexandria: Select Letters, p. xi)

But Cyril himself believed that he was merely articulating what the Fathers of the Church had passed on to him regarding the significance of Christ's incarnation. Or as Cyril puts it:

The view we take of our Saviour's dispensation is the view of the holy fathers who preceded us. By reading their works we equip our own mind to follow them and to introduce no innovation into orthodoxy.
(First Letter to Succensus, 1, quoted in Cyril of Alexandria: Select Letters, p. 71)

Wickham summarizes Cyril's Christology below:

{In the person of Chirst} a man has not become God; God has become man.
(Cyril of Alexandria: Select Letters, p. xxxiv)
For if man's creation, his present condition, and future hope are all bound up with the divine grace which is Christ, it will not do to think of Christ as a good man or a very good man, an inspired man or a very inspired man, an important or a very important example of divine grace. It will not do to explain the Incarnation as a union of wills dependent upon the essentially transitory and fragile responsiveness of the human subject in Christ. Grace cannot depend upon anything, least of all upon the waverings of the best even of human wills. Grace must be unconditional and the Incarnation a binding of the Son of God with man in a union stronger than, because more basic than, any human act or choice.
(Cyril of Alexandria: Select Letters, p. xxxv)
{The Incarnation} is the descent of the eternal Word of God into human conditions and limitations in order radically to alter and restore them, without annihilating them. God remains God and his manhood is manhood still, but now charged with divine power and capable of restoring to fullness of life the believer who shares in it sacramentally.
(Cyril of Alexandria: Select Letters, p. xxxiii)