St. Cyril of Alexandria

In the last issue of this article, I began sharing with my readers the thoughts of St. Cyril of Alexandria about Christ, Who is the Emmanuel. He once proclaimed, paraphrasing Isaiah, that “it is not an elder, nor an angel, but the Lord Himself who saved us, not by an alien death or by the mediation of an ordinary man, but by His very own blood.”

This recognition of God as the agent of salvation is shown also in the repeated use of the title “Emmanuel” (which in translation means “God with us”) for Christ, particularly in Cyril’s famous twelve anathemas contained in his third letter to Nestorius. Like Athanasius before him, Cyril could not conceive of the divine love manifested in the incarnation to be really perfect unless it was an act of self-giving by God. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son”. This implied the personal presence of God in the human reality of Jesus of Nazareth.

The Christological trend that originated in Antioch with Theodore of Mopsuestia and was mot openly preached by Nestorius was based on the fear that the humanity of Jesus would be totally ignored by the proponents of “deification.” This is why the controversy against Nestorius, undertaken by Cyril with such energy and consistency, was centered on the two most human moments in the Gospel story of Jesus: his birth from Mary and his death on the cross. Although Cyril always recognized that both these moments belong to divine economy in the flesh – that is, that the eternal God by nature could neither be born in history nor die – he considered that the salvation of the world would not have occurred unless it was personally the Son of God who was born of the Virgin, and also personally suffered on the cross “according to the flesh”.

Hopefully you, my readers, will sense how the Church has, from the very beginning, struggled to discovered how to correctly understand Who Jesus IS and what He actually did on earth. Many great, dedicated minds spent years finding the exact words to share with us Who Jesus IS. If only modern Christians would put as much energy into coming to a true understanding of who Jesus is, I’m sure that our world would be quite different.

To be a Christian means to ponder on what we believe and Who God and Jesus are. It means trying to make our beliefs real to us. If we don’t ever struggle with our beliefs, we will never come to a real understanding of them.

Think about this.