The text of exposition is his work On the Unity of Christ [2]. The treatise is a dialogue whereby Cyril, with theological and philosophical rigor, develops his hypostatic union doctrine. His main opponent is Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople (c. 345), who entered the spotlight for his rejection of the term theotokos (“God bearer”) for the Virgin Mary. He rejected it because he thought no human woman could bear the eternal God. That debate will not be examined here. But it has relevance for his doctrine of Christ in that as he could not affirm a human being could bear the eternal God, the Incarnation, likewise, could not be a true union of divinity and humanity. Nestorius saw that God and man were radically different. Jesus was truly human, experiencing all that which pertains to humanity. But in the Incarnation, the fully divine Logos was in communion with the human life of Jesus but was not in any way dominated nor subjugated by it [3]. Nestorius thought “the divinity and humanity can only be maintained if the two remain ‘two’”[4].
Cyril thought Nestorian’s doctrine of the Incarnation was abhorrent. For Cyril the redemptive aim was not about God and man merely having a relationship; rather, it was about full reconciliation of God and man in Jesus. As such, the divine act of reconciliation is a work intended to transform humanity from a mortal fallen creature to an immortal, divinized spiritual creature. Therefore, the Incarnation had to be a “seamless union”[5]. This process was the drawing in of humanity into the life of God, termed theosis (deification). Far from a pagan conception of this process, theosis was the ineffable act of grace whereby the Second Person of the Trinity becomes man so that we might become like God. Cyril slogans this redemptive act: “What he was by nature, we become by grace.”
The Incarnation is the unfathomable demonstration of God’s infinite power, making the invisible Lord visible, in that the Eternal God who cannot be contained, contains himself in human flesh, living among his people, and ultimately going to the cross for them. The challenge the church, and Cyril, faced was the manner of articulating a cogent doctrine of the Incarnation that was completely distinguishable from a paganized concept of divinity. As mentioned, this divine act was inexplicable. Nevertheless, it was the event of all events in human history, and Scripture’s revelation of this event presses the human intellect to its limits [6].
The impetus driving Cyril’s investigation was understanding the subjective unity of Christ. If he followed Nestorius, then the incarnational scheme posited two Sons, existing side-by-side. But Cyril could not accept such perversion. And this work is his attempt at solving that dilemma in a logical manner that is faithful to biblical revelation, ensuring to avoid any hint of corrupting the gospel [7]. Cyril’s task is to develop a doctrine that accounts for the humanity and deity of Christ, a true union of humanity and divinity that is in no means mixed, overlapped, co-habited, or of mere association. Rather, as we will see, Cyril terms his doctrine a hypostatic union, whereby, to quote McGuckin’s summation of it,
the person of the Logos is the sole personal subject of all the conditions of his existence divine or human. The Logos is, needless to say, the sole personal subject of all his own acts as eternal Lord (the creation, the inspiration of the ancient prophets, and so on), but after the incarnation the same one is also the personal subject directing all his actions performed within this time and this space, embodied acts which form the context of the human life of Christ in Palestine.[8]
Cyril begins his treatise, in dialogue form, getting familiar with Nestorius’ aberrant views, which stray from orthodoxy. Immediately, he enquires about his rejection of Mary as the theotokos, noting it is because he maintains she has not given birth to God, since the Word was before her, in fact before every age, thus he is coeternal, “ineffably begotten by nature” from God the Father (Unity, 52, 53). Cyril shifts his argumentation toward “they,” which seems to refer to a band of Nestorian followers. In their understanding of the Word becoming flesh (John 1:14), the Word’s becoming human meant he ceased to be what he was before. Taking on flesh signified a change in the Word. But Cyril is put off by their erroneous assumptions, noting scriptural passages that speak of the Lord as our refuge (Ps. 90:1; 94:22) by no means imply he does so by transformation of his nature into something else (Unity, 54). God by nature is immutable, “he remains that which he was and is forever,” regardless of his becoming a refuge for us. Cyril will not budge from his formative doctrine of God. He must provide an account of the Incarnation that “preserves the immutability and inalterability as innate and essential to God” (Unity, 54).
Therefore, the Incarnation was not a change, mixing, or blending of the Only Begotten Word into/with human form; rather, Cyril says it was an act of submission, as Hebrews 12:2 reveals: “For the joy that lay before him, he endured the cross, despising shame.” Therefore, as God, Cyril writes, “he wished to make that flesh which was held in the grip of sin and death evidently superior to sin and death. He made it his very own, and not soulless as some have said, but rather animated with a rational soul, and thus he restored flesh to what it was in the beginning” (Unity, 55). The incomprehensible and ineffable act, Cyril writes, was “for the economy of salvation.” In “one single act of generation,” the Son is begotten from God the Father, which is then revealed to us in the divine economy. Drawing from 2 Corinthians 8:9, Cyril succinctly states: “He took what was ours to be his very own so that we might have all that was his” (Unity, 58, 59). But his opponents “have turned the mystery of the economy in the flesh completely on its head” (Unity, 69).
Cyril addresses his opponents who have strayed from the skopos of Scripture, interpreting passages that seem to indicate Christ is not true God of God as the Father. Masterfully, Cyril interprets Scripture with the theologia/ekonomia lens, which maintains the unity of the God-man, whereby the person of the Lord is sole subject, experiencing and acting in what is proper to his humanity and also his divinity. When he refers to Christ as the sole subject, Cyril is claiming “that (1) Jesus is a real existent being (mia physis); and (2) he is the one Logos existing as incarnate (tou logou sesarkomeneh)”[10]. All that we see in Scripture about Christ, that which speaks of his eternity as God, and that which speaks of his human birth, pertains to one and the same, as befitting for him as God and befitting him as man (Unity, 69). Therefore, Cyril’s interpretation of Christological passages glides along the spectrum of the theologia-ekonomia framework, so that he doesn’t deny key teachings found elsewhere in Scripture.
How does he do this? Let’s see how Cyril handles a few passages. In Matthew 23:9, Jesus says, “Do not call anyone on earth your father, because you have one Father, who is in heaven.” Cyril writes, “And because he came down into our condition solely in order to lead us to his own divine state, he also said: ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (John 20:17). And Cyril writes, “In this case the Heavenly One is his natural Father; in our case he is our God. But insofar as this true and natural Son became as we are, so he speaks of the Father as his God, a language fitting to his self-emptying” (Unity, 69). Cyril avoids the interpretive mistakes his opponents (i.e., the Nestorians) make in that they swerve to the divine “side” of Christ (or the human side), giving it the dominant controlling power in their interpretations. While there is a non-contrastive dichotomy between the natures, there is an undissolvable unity in the one person (i.e., subject) of the Lord Christ. When it comes to these types of “conflicting” passages, Cyril interprets them in a manner befitting of the context.
In Matthew 23:9, Cyril delineates the economic entailments, in that because no one is to call a man “your father,” since there is only one True Father in heaven, “he,” the Son, came down to us to bring us to his own divine state. As the God-man, he is the true form of perfected humanity, who is fully obedient to the Father, as the last Adam. And thus, as the perfect human, he will not call a man on earth his father. But as the God-man, he comes down from heaven, so that he can bring us to the true Father in heaven. Therefore, in referencing John 20:17, in which Jesus tells Mary that he is going to his Father and your Father, Jesus is speaking of the Heavenly One as his Father, befitting of his natural generation as the begotten Son from the Father. But to us, the Father is our God. And in becoming as we are in human weakness, he speaks of the Father as his God, in “self-emptying” language befitting of his humanity (Unity, 63). This last point is crucial. For Christ to fulfill the law and redeem humanity, he must live as man in every way as man—in complete creaturely submission to God. And on the cross, “the fragility of Jesus’ flesh becomes the medium of translucency to the glory of God. . . . The crucified Son simply ‘is’ the glory of God”[11].
Conclusion
When we consider the unity of Christ, we have an ontological unity, which maintains both natures unitedly. Between the two natures is a communicatio idiomatum, the communication of properties in the one person. This entails a threefold axiom: (1) It is truly God the Son who is man. (2) It is truly man that the Son of God is. (3) The Son of God truly is man. In these axioms, the Lord Jesus is truly and fully divine, truly and fully human, and there is ontological unity between the person of the Son and his humanity [12]. In this synergistic union, the human nature of Jesus does not have its own hypostasis apart from the one the Lord. The Son is the “singular ‘existent’ of the human Jesus”[13]. In the hypostatic union, “the human nature acquires existence in the existence of God, in the mode of being of the Word”[14]. Articulation of the doctrine in this manner guarded against the idea of a double existence of Christ as Logos and as man. The Incarnation has no creaturely analogue. Thus, in the hypostatic union what “Christ achieves in the new integrity of human nature, discovered in his theandric energy, is a crucial inversion: divine things are done humanly, and human things are done divinely. . . . ‘If he conquered as God, to us it is nothing; but if he conquered as man we conquered in him’ ”[15].
– Romans 11:36
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[1]. His key writings were preserved in the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, moving the Church’s theology of Christ forward against heretical notions, most acutely in the influential writings of Nestorius, the bishop of Constantinople, who taught that the human person and the divine person were united in a manner making them indistinguishable. However, Cyril’s doctrine needed more precision as it pertains to “person” and “nature,” so the council at Chalcedon (451) modified it, making the distinction that affirmed Christ’s two natures indivisibly united, without confusion, in the single subject of the person of Jesus, with both natures contributing to his enhancement and development
[2] English translation cited: Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, trans. John Anthony McGuckin (St Vladimirs Seminary Pr, 1997).
[3] McGuckin, “Introduction,” in Ibid., 34.
[4] Aaron Riches, Ecce Homo: On the Divine Unity of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), 27.
[5] “Introduction,” in Alexandria and McGuckin, On the Unity of Christ, 35.
[6] Ibid., 36.
[7] Ibid., 39.
[8] Ibid., 40–1.
[9] Riches, Ecce Homo, 39.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid., 100.
[12] Ibid., 44–5. Riches contrasts Cyril’s axiom with the metaphysical errors of Nestorianism and Eutychianism, one is dualist (Nest.) and the other monist (Eut.). In the former, the ‘proximity’ of God does not enhance the integrity of human reality but rather weakens it; in the latter, the ‘proximity’ of the human to God threatens to corrupt his divine passibility” (p.63).
[13] Ibid., 112.
[14] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1936), I/2, 163.
[15] Riches, Ecce Homo, 106; Cyril of Alexandria, In Ioannis Evangelium, 16.33, quoted in Riches, Ecce Homo, 106.
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