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Palestine: Cyril of Jerusalem and Epiphanius

andrew louth
At the Council of Nicaea in 325, the Fathers decreed in their seventh canon that the honour paid to the bishop of Aelia by custom and ancient tradition was to be preserved, without prejudice to the rights of the metropolitan city (of Caesarea). Aelia (in full: Aelia Capitolina) was the name given to the city established on the site of ancient Jerusalem in 135 after that city had been razed to the ground by the Romans. The canon witnesses to the tensions focused on the city of Jerusalem, with its Gentile name erasing its Jewish associations, while custom and ancient tradition honour it as the site of the central events of the Christian faith: the death and resurrection of the Lord. Custom and ancient tradition accomplished a good deal in the years following the cumenical Council, enabling the Emperors mother Helena, on her pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 326 or 327, to identify many of the sacred sites, as well as discovering the relics of the True Cross. Within a decade of the council, these sites had been adorned by splendid new buildings, raised at imperial expense, not least the complex of buildings on the site embracing Golgotha and the tomb whence Christ had risen, including the Church of the Resurrection (the Anastasis), or the Holy Sepulchre, dedicated on 13 September 335. In this way the tension between secular Aelia and religious Jerusalem was resolved in the Christian city of Jerusalem, set to become the Holy City of Christendom, the goal of pilgrimage and guardian of the places where God had lived his incarnate life. Whether or not Jerusalem had earlier been a place of Christian pilgrimage, the Christian city established by imperial bounty witnessed pilgrimage on a hitherto unthinkable scale, and, as the pilgrims returned with their memories, became a potent inuence throughout the whole Christian world. Jerusalem, then, saw itself transformed in the fourth century, but the consolidation of its position only began in the fth century. Jerusalem was raised to patriarchal status, in return for Juvenals compliance with imperial orthodoxy, at the Council of Chalcedon (451), and the real development of Palestinian monasticism belongs to the fth century,
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with the foundations of St Euthymius and St Sabas (the Great Lavra), the heroes of Cyril of Scythopolis Lives of the Monks of Palestine. Later still, after the fall of Palestine and the Eastern provinces to Islam, these monasteries became a beacon of orthodoxy, exercising a powerful inuence, both theological and liturgical, throughout the world of Byzantine Christendom. Of such a future there is little trace in the literature to be surveyed in this chapter: Jerusalem was marginal to the theological currents of the fourth and fth centuries, and though it became a geographical focus for the controversy over Origenism, this was largely because of the presence in the Holy Land of Jerome and other Latins, who can hardly be classed as Palestinian, even though Jerome spent almost half his long life there.

Cyril of Jerusalem
We know nothing about Cyril until, in 348, already a priest of the Church of Jerusalem, he was consecrated bishop by Acacius of Caesarea and Patrophilus of Scythopolis in succession to Maximus. In 357 he was deposed by a council held in Jerusalem, either because he had failed to toe the doctrinal line laid down by his metropolitan Acacius, or perhaps because he had sought to establish the independence of his see from the metropolitan see of Caesarea (developing the spirit, though not the letter, of canon 7 of Nicaea). He was briey reinstated in 359 by the Council of Seleucia, but with the triumph the next year of Acacius and the homoeans again deposed. He returned to his see on the death of the Emperor Constantius (362), but this time fell foul of the Arianizing policy of the Emperor Valens and in 367, or shortly after, was yet again deposed. He took charge of his see again in 378, attended the Second cumenical Council at Constantinople in 381, and died later that decade, probably on 18 March 387. Such a disjointed episcopal career was by no means unusual in the mid-fourth century, but unlike some others affected similarly, Cyril can hardly be claimed as a martyr for orthodoxy: he seems to be a representative of those Eastern bishops (perhaps a majority), initially mistrustful of Nicaea, who came nally to accept the creed of that council, and the doctrine of the homoousion. Cyrils main literary work is a collection of Catechetical Homilies. Prefaced by a procatechesis, there are twenty-three sermons, eighteen of which were given during Lent, and ve, expounding the rites of initiation themselves (baptism, anointing and the eucharist), the so-called mystagogical catecheses, given during Easter week itself (and thus after those who heard them had been initiated). Because of a casual reference to the heresy of Mani as being seventy
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years old (Cat. 6.20), it is generally held that these sermons were delivered early in Cyrils episcopate, perhaps in 350, though it is possible they were delivered in 348, Cyril, then still a priest, deputizing for his bishop, Maximus. In some manuscripts the ve mystagogical catecheses are ascribed, not to Cyril, but to his successor John: there is no scholarly agreement as to which of them they belong to. These form the earliest collection of catechetical homilies to survive: from later in the century there survive such homilies by John Chrysostom (twelve in all, but not all from the same series; none of them mystagogical), by Theodore of Mopsuestia (sixteen in all, six mystagogical), and, in the West, Ambrose (all mystagogical). The rst eighteen of Cyrils sermons, together with the introductory procatechesis, were given in the course of Lent to those who were to be baptized on Easter Eve to those about to be enlightened (fwtizmenoi). The catechumenate normally lasted several years, though it seems that children of Christian parents were generally admitted as catechumens shortly after birth, and their names enrolled, along with those who had completed their catechumenate, at the beginning of the Lent before their baptism. The procatechesis welcomes the candidates, and emphasizes the seriousness of the step they are about to take in baptism, in which sins are forgiven once-for-all: there is no second chance. The note of mystery, which is to resound throughout the mystagogical catecheses, is already sounded: already you stand on the frontier of mystery. I adjure you to smuggle no word out (Procat. 12). The catechetical sermons that follow deal with the importance of forgiveness and Bible reading, penitence and the danger of the devil and temptation; the third deals in general with the meaning of baptism; the fourth contains a summary of Christian doctrine; the fth discusses faith; and the rest expound, article by article, the baptismal creed which the candidates will profess when baptized. In the course of the last sermon the fwtizmenoi recited, one by one, the baptismal creed they had committed to memory. These sermons were given in the Martyrion, the basilica erected by Constantine over the crypt where the True Cross had been discovered, the largest building on the Golgotha site that included the Church of the Anastasis. In the fourth sermon, Cyril, for conrmation of the historicity of the crucixion, appeals to this sacred Golgotha where we have now come together because of him who was crucied here (Cat. 4.10). The mystagogical catecheses were given, whether by Cyril or John, to the newly baptized in the Church of the Anastasis (so the Spanish pilgrim Egeria informs us) in the course of Easter Week. These remarkable sermons convey a powerful sense of the awesome mystery of the eucharistic celebration, that most dread hour (frikwdestth ra), in which Christ
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himself is present through the invocation (pklhsiv) of the Holy Spirit, and given to the faithful in the elements of bread and wine. Apart from another sermon (on the healing of the paralytic), there also survive one (or possibly two) letters from Cyril. One of these letters has long been known: the letter, written in 351 to the Emperor Constantius, informing him of the miraculous cross of light that appeared over Jerusalem on 7 May 351,1 during the Paschal season. In this letter he recalls the discovery of the True Cross, fraught with salvation, though he does not name the Empress Helena, and more surprisingly makes no mention of Constantines vision of the Cross which, according to Eusebius, occasioned his conversion, even though he takes the miracle as a good omen for Constantius, as he set out under the trophy of the cross against the usurper Magnentius, whom he ultimately defeated. The other is a letter preserved in Syriac, attributed to Cyril, about the attempted rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem under Julian the Apostate.2 Although the modern editor of his letter is not inclined to accept its authenticity, it seems to belong to Cyrils circle, and ts closely with his conviction that Jerusalem has now become a Christian city, the city of the Cross.

Epiphanius of Salamis
Epiphanius place in the literary history of Palestine is rather different from Cyrils, not least because he spent the latter half of his life as bishop of Constantia, ancient Salamis, in Cyprus (365403). He was, however, born in about 315 in Palestine, in Eleutheropolis not far from Gaza, where around 335, after making a tour of the monks of Egypt, he founded a monastery, over which he ruled for about thirty years. Even though he spent the latter part of his life in Cyprus, he maintained contact with Palestine, and was instrumental in stirring up the Origenist controversy there in the last decade of the fourth century. He seems to have studied in Alexandria, and acquired knowledge of Greek, Syriac, Hebrew, Coptic and some Latin: Jerome referred to him as vir Epiphanius pentglwttov (Ruf. 3.6). He had no time for the classical ideals of his contemporaries, the Cappadocian Fathers, and his Greek is what Karl Holl called an elevated Koine, apparently readily understood by his contemporaries, learned or not (so Jerome, Vir. Ill. 114), but as it has reached us, tortuous and sometimes barely comprehensible. His main works, which belong to the mid-370s, are the Ancoratus (One rmly anchored) and his compendium of heresy, the Panarion (Medicine Chest, so-called because it provided remedies for those bitten by the serpent of heresy). The Ancoratus is a lengthy defence of the orthodoxy that was to be
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triumphant at the Second cumenical Council in 381, at which Epiphanius himself was not present. It is a long and rambling defence, which often seems to move by association of ideas rather than any logic of argument, and ends with a lengthy creed of Epiphanius own composition, preceded by a creed practically identical with that endorsed at the Second cumenical Council (the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed), to which the anathemas that formed part of the original creed of the Council of Nicaea are appended. There is, however, general scholarly agreement that Epiphanius originally included the genuine creed of Nicaea, for which the liturgically more familiar creed was substituted at a later date. The Panarion is a list of, and refutation of, eighty heresies. It is the most important collection of heresiological material to survive, and formed the basis for later such collections, notably John Damascenes account of 100 heresies, which formed part of his Fountain Head of Knowledge. One is tempted to characterize it as a compendium of largely inaccurate information, but its earlier sections provide access to lost works, notably Justin Martyrs work on heresies, the Greek of Irenaeus Adversus Haereses, and Hippolytus Syntagma. But it is perhaps even more important for what it professes to be: an analysis, or better diagnosis, of heresy. The Greek word aresiv was originally quite neutral in its connotation: it indicated a choice, a way of life or way of thought. It was used of the schools of philosophy, and by extension (by Josephus, for instance) of the different groups within Judaism. In Christian use it came quickly to mean a wilful choice, a chosen departure from the one orthodox tradition. It is perhaps rst used in this sense by Hegesippus, who, according to Eusebius, named seven heresies among the Jews, all hostile to the tribe of Judah and the Christ, which introduced into the virgin Church spawned the heresies of various groups that we would call gnostic (HE 4.22): many of the names of these heresies, as recorded by Eusebius, are preserved in the early parts of Epiphanius Panarion. It is a picture of an original unitary purity that of orthodoxy splitting up into a multiplicity of heresies. Drawing on earlier attempts, Epiphanius seeks to provide a genealogy of this process, but the signicance of Epiphanius effort lies, in part, in its date, and the way in which it provided valuable support to the emerging neo-Nicene orthodoxy that was to receive imperial endorsement from Theodosius I and the Second cumenical Council, called by him in 381. Epiphanius begins with the four mothers of pre-Christian heresy (derived, it seems, from Col. 3:11), and the sixteen heresies that have owed from them. The rst is barbarism, the antediluvian heresy that prevailed from the Fall, proceeding from Adams disobedience, the second, Scythism, which prevailed
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from the Flood until the Tower of Babel (or Terah, the rst potter, who made possible idolatry Epiphanius account is not at all clear), marked by error proceeding from the nature of the individual will, not from what was taught or written (Pan. 2.3). The third mother of heresy is Hellenism, which is identied with idolatry, and the fourth, Judaism, marked by circumcision. None of these was properly a heresy, but rather opposition, in various forms, to the faith, so to speak, which now holds sway in the holy Catholic church of God, so recently founded, a faith which was in the beginning and which later was revealed again (ibid.). From these ow the sixteen pre-Christian heresies: four philosophical schools (Stoics, Platonists, Pythagoreans and Epicureans) and twelve Jewish sects (Hegesippus seven, augmented). There follows an interlude, telling of the incarnation of the Word, after which Epiphanius embarks on his account of the sixty Christian heresies: from assorted gnostics to the various trinitarian heresies of the fourth century, closing with Mariolatrous Collyridians and the Messalians. Epiphanius structure is an elaboration of the apologists claim to the pristine nature of the Catholic faith: it is a kind of sociology of knowledge establishing the authenticity of orthodoxy. One of Epiphanius heresies, already a concern in the Ancoratus, is Origenism. In the 390s Epiphanius was instrumental in fomenting the Origenist controversy in Palestine, and securing the support of Jerome, once an admirer of the great Alexandrian. One of his letters from this period is preserved, in Jeromes translation, as Letter 51 in the collection of Jeromes letters. That letter contains a dramatic example of Epiphanius iconoclasm, further examples of which are to be found in a pamphlet, a letter to the Emperor Theodosius I, and the Testament to the community of which he was bishop, fragments of which were salvaged by Karl Holl from the refutation of Epiphanius composed by the great iconodule patriarch of the ninth century, Nicephorus. Several other works of Epiphanius survive, but most of what came to be attributed to him is spurious.
Notes
1 This is the date normally given, with Cyril referring to Constantius preparations for the battle of Mursa (28 September 351). It has however been argued that the date should be 350 (by H. Gr goire and P. Orgels, Byzantion 24 (1954), 5969) e or 353 ( J. Vogt, Berichte uber Kreuzeserscheinungen aus dem 4. Jahrhunderts n. Chr., Annuaire de linstitut de philologie et dhistoire orientales 9 (1949), 6023). 2 Sebastian Brock, A Letter Attributed to Cyril of Jerusalem on the Rebuilding of the Temple under Julian, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 40 (1977), 26786 (reprinted as item X of Syriac Perspectives on Late Antiquity).

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