Cyril of Alexandria’s political machinations are well known within scholarship on late antiquity. Early in his tenure as bishop he had a protracted quarrel with the imperial prefect Orestes, which culminated in the murder of Hypatia and likely resulted in imperial displeasure. Despite these events, Cyril managed to maintain his hold on the throne of St Mark, though fifteen years later his management of church affairs would once again draw the attention of Theodosius II and his court, this time thanks to an intractable debate with Nestorius, the newly enthroned bishop of the eastern capitol. Cyril’s skillful management of this complex theological controversy involving the entire Christian oikumene and competing factions of the imperial household has been well rehearsed in scholarship. However, few scholars working on these events have asked how his own views on the Empire and its ruler relate to his various interactions with the state. To rectify this gap, this paper will examine three key passages in his corpus. First, Cyril dedicated his apologetic treatise Against Julian to the Emperor and used the prologue to sketch an image of Theodosius II as a pious earthly ruler imitating Christ, ‘the great emperor’ in contrast to Julian whose opposition to Christianity required a response from those committed to defending God’s glory. Later, in book six of Against Julian, he drew a sharp contrast between heavenly and earthly rule, arguing that the legitimacy of human rulers rests not upon an ontological superiority to their fellow humans but upon contingent qualities, most preeminently the piety already mentioned in the preface to the work. Finally, in his On Orthodoxy to Theodosius, sent to the Emperor in the early stages of the Nestorian controversy, Cyril once more directly addressed his sovereign and operationalized the themes in Against Julian by calling on Theodosius to take action against the newly installed patriarch of Constantinople whose Christological musings he regarded as defamatory of the divine glory. The tacit implication of this exhortation in light of the statements in Against Julian was that failure to deal appropriately with Nestorius risked invalidating Theodosius’ very rule. The Emperor may not have been pleased by this bold move from the Alexandrian patriarch, but the central role played by the piety of the imperial household in Theodosius’ public propaganda had created the opening for such an appeal.
Matthew R. Crawford is Professor at Australian Catholic University where he serves as Director of the Program in Biblical and Early Christian Studies in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry. He came to ACU in 2015 after completing his doctorate and an AHRC-funded postdoc at Durham University. In 2018 he was awarded a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award from the ARC for research on religious belief and social cohesion in late antiquity. The major output of that project will be a jointly authored English translation of Cyril of Alexandria’s apologetic treatise Against Julian which should appear in early 2025 with CUP. In addition, he is the author of a 2019 monograph on the Eusebian Canon Tables published by OUP and the co-editor of a 900-page collection titled The Intellectual World of Late Antique Christianity, which was published last year by CUP, as well as the forthcoming Cambridge History of Early Christian Theology.
Classical Association of Victoria 