Cyril of Alexandria's Renunciation of Religious Violence

Abstract

Scholarly accounts of the violent events that occurred early in Cyril of Alexandria's episcopal tenure rely most of all upon Socrates's Ecclesiastical History, Damascius's Philosophical History, and John of Nikiu's Chronicle. In contrast, Cyril's own corpus is almost never consulted or engaged by scholars working on these topics, which has resulted in the complete neglect of certain passages that are directly relevant to these well-known events. Surprisingly, on at least three occasions Cyril explicitly rejects religiously motivated violence, while, in contrast, in two other passages he theorizes about it in positive terms as a means of protecting the integrity of communal boundaries. The analysis of these passages reveals that, in certain works, Cyril employed a violent rhetoric that plausibly contributed to creating the environment that resulted in Hypatia's murder. In contrast, however, he seemingly shifted his rhetoric at a certain point in his career, going out of his way to disavow precisely the kind of actions with which he is usually associated, perhaps doing so as a response to Hypatia's horrific death. With these complementary insights, this study contributes to the growing scholarly interest in how violent rhetoric can lead to actual violence. Moreover, Cyril's disavowal of religious violence complicates the simplistic image of him that holds sway as the dominant interpretation of his legacy among scholars of late antiquity.

Among historians of late antiquity, Cyril of Alexandria, who served as bishop of Egypt's capital from 412 until his death in 444, is known above all for his ruthless power politics and willingness to use violence to accomplish his goals. Indeed, he has one of the worst reputations among late antique bishops, being paradigmatic for the use of violent means to enforce an uncompromising vision of an orthodox empire. Representing the consensus view, Michael Gaddis refers to him as “violent and power-hungry,” Thomas Sizgorich calls him “violent and powerful,” and Edward J. Watts says he was “a tough, resolute leader who had neither the inclination or the temperament to forgive people who dared to challenge him . . . [but] respond[ed] to any challenges he faced with threats of violence.”¹ Most recently Silvia Ronchey has referred to him as “the terrible patriarch of Alexandria” who used “squadrons of violent men” to effect the “violent religious colonization” begun by Theophilus.² Although there are reports of violence carried out by his supporters at the Council of Ephesus in 431,³ the most notorious episodes occurred in Alexandria itself early in his episcopacy, specifically the expulsion of Jews from the city and the lynching of the philosopher Hypatia, which occurred in 415.

Scholarly accounts of these events rely most of all upon book seven of Socrates's Ecclesiastical History, supplemented by a handful of other sources, most prominently Damascius's Philosophical History and John of Nikiu's Chronicle.⁴ Cyril's own corpus is, in contrast, almost never consulted or engaged by those working on these topics,⁵ presumably because it consists overwhelmingly of dogmatic and exegetical treatises, which would appear to be the domain of the historical theologian rather than the historian of late antiquity. This approach has, however, resulted in the complete neglect of certain passages that are directly relevant to these well-known events. The aim of this article is, therefore, to collect and examine his statements on religious violence, so that his own voice can be taken into account in future scholarly reconstructions.⁶ Of course, the very notion of “religious violence” has been undergoing revision of late.⁷ For the present study I focus solely on violence in the sense of bodily harm inflicted upon other human persons since this is the form described in the passages I will examine. With respect to the term “religious,” I mean no more than that the physical harm being considered is a result of one's devotion to God and to the community defined by the worship of that deity, since, once again, this is the theme that emerges in the passages that follow.

Surprisingly, on three occasions Cyril explicitly denounces religiously motivated violence with respect to three distinct scenarios (apostasy, self-defense, and conversion), while, in contrast, in two other passages he theorizes about it in positive terms, though he stops short of explicitly calling on Christians to engage in such acts.⁸ This article will summarize and contextualize each of these five passages, considering them in roughly chronological order, and will then finally consider how we might understand them in relation to one another as well as to the aforementioned events described in other sources. This analysis reveals that in certain works Cyril employed a violent rhetoric that likely contributed to creating the environment that resulted in Hypatia's murder. In contrast, however, he seemingly shifted his rhetoric at a certain point in his career, going out of his way to disavow precisely the kind of actions with which he is usually associated, perhaps doing so as a response to Hypatia's horrific murder. With these complementary insights, this study contributes to the growing scholarly interest in how violent rhetoric can lead to actual violence.⁹ Moreover, his renunciation of religious violence complicates the one-sided image of Cyril as a power-hungry and violent tyrant that holds sway as the dominant interpretation of his legacy among scholars of late antiquity.

Three of the five passages that will be discussed in what follows focus specifically upon apostasy and the appropriateness of violence against would-be apostates and those deceivers who lead them astray. We should recall that, according to two of the three aforementioned historical sources, this is exactly the issue at stake in the Hypatia affair. What began as a dispute between Cyril and the imperial prefect Orestes, himself a baptized Christian, extended to include the philosopher when Orestes was seen in her company. Given that, according to Socrates, the Nitrian monks who had flooded the city to support their bishop had already accused the prefect of being a “sacrificer and a Hellene,”¹⁰ Orestes's professed faith was clearly doubted by some Christians. His frequent meetings with Hypatia would only have strengthened the impression that she was leading him to abandon his Christianity or that his supposed faith was merely a cover for his real allegiance to Hellenism.¹¹ In fact, John of Nikiu's later account makes this point explicit, claiming that Hypatia had beguiled Orestes with her magic and convinced him to stop attending church.¹² Therefore, despite the other factors that were undoubtedly in play in this tragic episode—such as the power struggle between church and state, gender dynamics,¹³ tensions between the monks of the desert and an urban Christian elite,¹⁴ divisions among the Christians within Alexandria itself¹⁵ and even within the town council,¹⁶ and a rivalry between the the city's renown educational tradition and the growing dominance of the church¹⁷—at the heart of the matter was a perceived apostasy from the Christian community. This background should be kept in mind as we consider the passages.

I. “And that prophet or that diviner by dream shall die.” (Deut. 13:1–5; 17:2–7)

Four of the five passages I will treat in this study come from Cyril's voluminous exegetical works, which seem to have been his main literary focus for the first half of his episcopal career.¹⁸ I begin with a passage from his treatise De adoratione, which is a seventeen-book dialogue consisting of exegesis of the Pentateuch focused on ethical guidance for his Christian community and may have been his first work, perhaps written even before he became bishop.¹⁹ The topic of religious violence occurs in book six of the treatise, which bears the title “That we must be devoted to the one who alone is God by nature and must love him from our whole soul and heart.”²⁰ The topic of the book is thus the need to reject the worship of false deities, which leads Cyril into a discussion of apostasy. He first quotes Deuteronomy 12:1–3 in which God commands Israel to destroy the sites where foreign deities are worshipped. In so doing, Cyril explains, God was “establishing fear of being punished as a kind of instructor or noble guardian for us” in order that he might “bring us in every respect around to what pleases him.”²¹ Immediately following the quotation of Deuteronomy 12:1–3, he refers to the “wise men of the Greeks and their elite ranks, and especially the poets,”²² suggesting that Israel's temptation to worship foreign gods is identical to the attraction of pagan sacrifice in his own day. This elision of the world of the Pentateuch with the religious landscape of fifth-century Alexandria is a persistent motif in De adoratione, which frequently makes it difficult for the modern reader to determine when he is simply describing events in the past and when he is prescribing practices for his contemporary audience.

This ambiguity becomes acute as Cyril next quotes Deuteronomy 13:1–5 in which God orders the Israelites to execute a false prophet or diviner who seeks to lead them astray to other gods. His immediate reaction after quoting the passage is not just approval but praise:

Oh how holy the law is and how God-befitting! For if those who murdered bodies must without exception certainly be met with the legal penalty of execution, is it not reasonable that the one who conveys a destructive error to the soul and plunges the soul, which is superior to the body, into the pit of destruction should also be placing himself in danger?²³

Moreover, Cyril does not stop here but goes on to speak approvingly of the execution of the apostate as well as the deceiver, quoting Deuteronomy 17:2–7, which commands that an Israelite man or woman found worshipping other gods must be stoned by the community. He seemingly senses no compassion for such a person, stating that they could “easily have escaped” the deceptive error but chose to do wrong “voluntarily.”²⁴ As before, the severity of the penalty is due to the high stakes of the crime: “For when God is wronged with respect to the worship proper to him, there is no certainty that he will have compassion.”²⁵ Quoting Jesus's command that his disciples love him more than father or mother, Cyril says that, when it comes to potential apostasy, “everything pertaining to love of humanity . . . must depart” and Christians should instead “serve God with a pious severity” (δι’ ɛὐσɛβοῦς σκληρότητος).²⁶

In this passage of De adoratione, Cyril therefore endorses the execution of both the person who would lead a Christian into apostasy as well as a potential apostate him- or herself. Given that De adoratione is a treatise that aims to provide ethical guidance, it is tempting to see this exegesis as a prescription for contemporary practice, though we should note that Cyril stops short of making this point explicit. Moreover, he focuses on God as judge, rather than the human agent, and seems to be attempting to use fear as a pedagogical tool for his own community rather than trying to intimidate non-Christians with threats of violence. As he says just a little further on, sometimes “one of those enrolled amongst us” is “not yet firmly established” and may “practice a love towards Christ that is artificial and counterfeit.”²⁷ Such insufficiently devoted Christians are the likely target of the warning he issues in this passage, whom he is intending to frighten by the threat of divine punishment. Despite this fact, Cyril does not clearly demarcate the boundaries of the “pious severity” Christians should use when serving God and, therefore, leaves open the possibility that some might understand this to mean they should literally implement the Mosaic regulations in the contemporary Roman imperium.

II. “Phinehas . . . has put a stop to my wrath.” (Numbers 25:1–13)

The next passage to be considered is found in Cyril's Against Julian, a lengthy apologetic treatise written in response to the Emperor Julian's Against the Galileans. Once thought to come from the last years of Cyril's career, Against Julian has recently been redated to the period 416–428.²⁸ As an illustration of the morally debased depiction of God found in the Hebrew scriptures, Julian had adduced the story from Numbers 25:1–13 in which Phinehas is said to have restrained God's anger against Israel by taking a spear and driving it through an Israelite man and a foreign woman as they were having sex.²⁹ Cyril, in response, points out that the biblical passage says the foreign women were leading Israel astray by initiating them into the worship of other deities. Consequently, this episode is actually about religious apostasy, and Phinehas's execution of the couple was intended to prevent others from following their example.³⁰ As in the passage from De adoratione, so here again Cyril stops short of explicitly advocating that Christians use Phinehas as a model for their own behavior, though neither does he exclude the possibility that they might do so. In addition, once more in his interpretation of the Phinehas story he consistently presents God as the main actor who dispenses capital punishment. It is an act of God's providence, so Cyril argues, that the Craftsman “reins in [his wayward creatures] with terrifying warnings (τοῖς δɛίμασιν), even adding the required beating (τό γɛ δὴ δɛῖν καταπαίɛσθαι) as the best means of aiding them.”³¹ Or, again, one should “permit [God], like a judge, to use legal regulations to rein in his subjects by the removal of bad people.”³² Cyril never specifies what these legal regulations might consist of, or whether they are enacted solely by God himself or might be carried out by the intermediary of imperial or ecclesiastical officials. The closest he comes to any further concrete specificity is when he points out that Julian himself was an apostate and so naturally finds it disagreeable that God would punish such persons.³³ It therefore at least remains possible that in this passage he is solely envisioning divine retribution, perhaps to be doled out in the afterlife, and is not advocating for any earthly enactment of it by human agents. Even if so, the biblical episode upon which he is commenting presents eerie parallels to the accounts of the relationship between Orestes and Hypatia, with the supposed female seductress leading the pious male away from his community of faith to embrace other deities, requiring a violent act to safeguard the community's integrity.

III. “You have made me hateful.” (Genesis 34:1–31)

The passages in which Cyril rejects religious violence are found in three of his exegetical works: his treatise devoted to the Pentateuch known as the Glaphyra, his Commentary on the Gospel of John, and his Commentary on 2 Corinthians. These passages are united in that they all set forth a prohibition against religious violence, though three distinct scenarios are envisioned in which such violence might be likely to occur. Cyril's Glaphyra probably postdates De adoratione, since he refers to the latter in its preface, and is usually thought to have been written between 412 and 423.³⁴ Rather than take a lemma-by-lemma approach as his other commentaries do, it instead focuses only on select passages from the Pentateuch, showing how they all point to what he calls “the mystery of Christ.”³⁵ The topic of religious violence arises in Cyril's interpretation of Genesis 34:1–31. In the biblical text, Dinah, a daughter of the patriarch Jacob, leaves her father's tent to mingle with other local girls and is seized and raped by Shechem, the son of the ruler of the area. In response, two of Dinah's brothers, Levi and Simeon, exact revenge by convincing the men of the city to be circumcised and then murdering, not just Shechem, but every male in the city. The passage closes with Jacob rebuking his two sons for their violent act.

Cyril first recounts the basic narrative, concluding with a condemnation of the actions of the two brothers who, he says, were “killers” who failed to “moderate their anger-driven deeds (τὰ ἐξ ὀργῆς),” but instead “fixed their mind on something that should be avoided at all costs,” namely the murder of people who had agreed to join their religious faith.³⁶ Cyril therefore begins by highlighting the biblical passage's negative verdict on violence, specifically violence against potential converts. He then takes up each of these plot points and turns them into a sort of allegory for communal life in his own day, broadening the scope of the prohibition to exclude the bodily harm, not of potential converts as in the biblical text, but instead of those who would lead Christians into apostasy. Dinah, represents the “soul” that has been “reborn through baptism” and is thus “ranked among the children of God.” Such a soul “. . . might be corrupted by those accustomed to do such or be led astray into choosing to set their minds on fleshly realities or be misled into ideas about God that are twisted out of place (for the paltry opinions of the unholy heretics are truly of such a nature).”³⁷ Cyril speaks first in rather generic terms about anyone who is accustomed to corrupting a Christian soul or leading it astray. It is unclear if he has a specific group in mind, but the fact that the people of Shechem in the passage are foreigners to Jacob and his family would suggest that he is referring to people external to the Christian community, presumably adherents of traditional Greco-Roman or Egyptian religions. The reference to a specific group becomes clearer in the next clause when he refers explicitly to the “heretics” who hold twisted ideas about God, though even here the use of the pronoun τοιαῦτα might indicate that Christians with deviant theology are but one example of a larger category in view. Cyril's exegesis of the biblical passage seems, therefore, to be designed to be as broad a reference as possible to potential corrupting influences, whether they be non-Christians or Christians who think differently.

The Alexandrian bishop next turns to the vengeful actions of the two brothers in response to their sister's violation:

If this happens, then those who in light of their faith are brothers to the injured soul, whether they have a clerical position—as of course Levi himself did—of if they are perhaps understood as Simeon, that is, those who have the position of being subordinate [to the priests] (for Simeon is translated as “obedience”)—they ought, on the one hand, to be indignant, since one of those belonging to their household of faith has been taken advantage of. They should not, however, proceed still further and demand blood, nor should they demand a savage penalty from those who have caused the corruption, lest they should hear Christ saying to them, “You have made me hateful, so that I am evil to the inhabitants of the land.”³⁸

Here Cyril speaks clearly of two different groups of people.³⁹ Each of the brothers represents a different part of the Christian community. Levi, being a priest, obviously stands for those who hold a “clerical position,” a vague enough reference that it might refer to anyone from a bishop down to a reader in the church.⁴⁰ Simeon, since his name in Hebrew means “obedience” (ὑπακοὴ), depicts those who are “subordinate” (τῶν ὑπηκόων), probably an allusion to the rest of the Christian community that is subordinate to the clerical hierarchy. In other words, Cyril uses these two brothers to represent the entire Christian community, whether ordained or laity.

In terms of the actions the Christian community should undertake when one of their own is corrupted by either insiders or outsiders, Cyril concedes that it is appropriate “to be indignant” at those exerting the nefarious influence but draws a clear line by insisting that Christians must never engage in vengeful bloodshed against the wrongdoers.⁴¹ In a striking move, he then places Jacob's words from the biblical episode in the mouth of Christ himself, implying that, if Christians use violence in defence of their community, they will cause outsiders to despise Christ and his church. He strengthens his prohibition against violence by adducing several supporting arguments, pointing to Christ's rebuke of Peter's use of a sword on the Mount of Olives (quoting Matt. 26:52) and calling on Christians to entrust their cause to God who “judges justly” rather than seeking to take matters into their own hands.⁴² The ethical ideal he valorizes is thus to be “longsuffering” (τληπαθής), which seems basically synonymous with the “forbearance” (ἀνɛξικακία) he will mention twice in the passage from Johannine commentary, which is considered in the next section.⁴³

Cyril's exegesis of the Genesis passage under analysis here is creative, demonstrating an eagerness to find nonviolent application in texts that could easily have been historicized or allegorized in very different directions. The analogy he sketches might seem designed to incite the Christian community to anger, since he compares the corruption of a Christian soul to the rape of one's sister and exhorts his followers to be indignant at such a violation. Nevertheless, while this could be an attempt to rouse people to anger, it might just as likely be a recognition of the community's own likely response to such a violation, even without any prompting from their bishop. Whatever the case, the negative verdict upon the brothers’ actions in the biblical account affords him with a means of restraining the community's reaction by allowing for them to express outrage but demanding that they not seek bodily harm. The fact that he creatively finds warrant in the story to extend this prohibition to all members of the Christian community, both ordained clergy and the laity, further emphasizes the significance of this issue in his mind.

If resonances with our surviving accounts of the Hypatia affair, especially John of Nikiu's, were evident in Cyril's comments in De adoratione and Against Julian, the same is true here as well in the Glaphyra, with Orestes being the Christian soul corrupted by the Platonist philosopher. This similarity throws into sharper relief the tension between the first two passages and the latter one, insofar as the execution of a would-be apostate and the one deceiving him is entertained as a positive notion in both De adoratione and Against Julian, while it is explicitly proscribed in the Glaphyra. Further consideration of how to resolve this tension will be given below. For now it is sufficient to note that, while the possibility of religious violence remained merely notional in De adoratione and Against Julian, here in Glaphyra Cyril is explicitly commenting upon acts of bodily harm carried out by his contemporary followers to safeguard their communal integrity, and he unambiguously denounces such endeavors.

IV. “Put your sword back into its sheath.” (John 18:10–11)

At nearly 393,000 words despite the loss of two of its original twelve books, Cyril's Commentary on the Gospel of John is one of the longest works in all of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and consists of a lemma-by-lemma exegesis of each passage of the fourth gospel.⁴⁴ The date of its composition is hard to pin down, but it certainly precedes the outbreak of the Nestorian controversy in 429 and most likely comes after 424 when a concern for Arianism appears in Cyril's annual festal letters.⁴⁵ The discussion of religious violence is occasioned by his treatment of two verses in succession, John 18:10 and 18:11 (3.22–27 Pusey).⁴⁶ The setting of these verses is the Mount of Olives on the night before Jesus's crucifixion, when Roman soldiers arrive to arrest him. John 18:10 reports that Simon Peter drew his sword to defend his master and struck the slave of the Jewish high priest, succeeding in merely slicing off his right ear. In the subsequent verse, Jesus commands Peter to put his sword away since he must “drink the cup” that his Father has given him.

Despite Peter's status as the chief of the apostles, Cyril does not, for the most part, attempt to defend his actions but states at the outset that he was “stirred up more intensely and harshly than was fitting.”⁴⁷ Why, then, would the evangelist record such a misstep? Cyril asserts that he did so to provide a “model” (ὑπογραμμόν) for readers, so that they “may learn how far the zeal of our devotion to Christ may proceed without blame and what we may choose to do in conflicts like this without stumbling on something displeasing to God.”⁴⁸ In short, Peter is a negative exemplar, representing someone who has gone too far in their devotion to Christ by using violence and force to accomplish what he took to be a righteous goal. As is clear from the mention of “devotion to Christ” above, Cyril is specifically referring to religiously motivated violence, a point that he reasserts slightly later by stating that this principle applies when “we are contending for our devotion to Christ.” Moreover, he broadens the applicability of the episode. Although Peter used a sword, the passage “prohibits” one from using any weapon against opponents, whether a sword or stones or a club.⁴⁹ Rather, the proper response is “to exhibit gentleness (ἠπιότητι) even to our murderers.”⁵⁰

Not content with a bare prohibition on violence, the Alexandrian bishop then offers two rationales for it. First, it is “better” for Christians to allow God “who judges justly” to “correct” people for their wrongs instead of “making their devotion an excuse (πρόφασιν)” for engaging in bloodshed.⁵¹ Cyril here uses law court language, and it is probable that he has in mind the legal consequences for illicit violence, namely being called to account by the imperial prefect or even the emperor himself. Second, given that Christ himself “cheerfully suffered death,” it would be “utterly bizarre” for Christians to attempt “to honor” him with the death of their persecutors. In other words, Christians “must follow Christ himself in this respect.”⁵² Cyril then elaborates on this point by deriving an ethical principle from his Christology. Christ, being God, could of course have completely overcome his opponents without any difficulty, as evidenced by the fact that the group sent to apprehend him fell to the ground when he merely spoke a word (cf. John 18:4–6). This demonstrates that he “was not summoned to death by necessity and compulsion.” Had he been unable to defend himself, suffering harm “against his will,” Peter and the others who “love him” would have been right to “rescue” him by force. But since Christ had the power to defend himself and refused to do so, his followers likewise should not “proceed to lengths that he did not go” by indulging “in unbridled and uncontrolled wrath” (ὀργαῖς).⁵³

In short, Christ's purpose in coming was “to teach us the fullest extent of forbearance and to set forth an example of a complete freedom from anger.”⁵⁴ This is an ethical ideal that, Cyril argues, “surpasses the [Mosaic] law.” Peter's attempt to defend Christ did not in fact violate the lex talionis prescribed in the Pentateuch, since it permitted people to act upon certain “impulses” that “failed to attain the perfect accomplishment of what is truly good,” which consists of showing “meekness” (ἡμɛρότητα) and “the highest forbearance” (ἀνɛξικακίαις . . . ταῖς ἀνωτάτω) exhibited by Christ himself.⁵⁵ In his brief comment on the subsequent verse in which Christ tells Peter to put away his sword, Cyril claims that this is no mere occasional instruction but instead “an ordinance of the gospel way of life with the force of a commandment,” which “forbids” Christ's followers not only from using swords, but from “offering any resistance” to those who would harm them, just as Christ commanded that one turn the other cheek (cf. Matt. 5:39).⁵⁶

The specific scenario envisioned in Cyril's treatment of these verses is a Christian being attacked for his or her faith, with those in his community being identified as Christ and his disciples and with their fifth-century persecutors being identified as the Jews who have come to arrest Jesus. The emphatic prohibition upon violent retaliation or even self-defence stands at odds with the standard depiction of Cyril in historical scholarship, as noted above. One might be tempted to explain this discrepancy by offloading the moral imperative from Cyril's own mindset onto the text itself, since this episode in the Garden of Gethsemane is, after all, a classic scene used to argue for nonviolence.⁵⁷ Perhaps, then, Cyril had no choice but to interpret the passage in this manner in light of the way the text runs, in which case he is here merely begrudgingly or duplicitously denouncing violence. In response to such a hypothetical objection, we should note that the potentiality of the text could have been actualized in other ways to decidedly different ends. To take just one example, Cyril's contemporary Egyptian Isidore of Pelusium adduces Peter's wielding of a sword in a list of similarly violent acts found in Christian sacred texts, all taken to demonstrate that “scripture turns the gentle person into a fighter.”⁵⁸ The case of Isidore reveals that the text does not require a nonviolent reading and in fact can be put to diametrically opposed purposes, with Peter being viewed not as a negative exemplar but as someone whose aggression should be emulated. Isidore's contrasting approach suggests that Cyril's reading of the text in line with what seems to be its plain sense was an interpretive choice. Moreover, he goes beyond highlighting the mere historical sense of the passage by turning Christ's command to Peter into a universally binding gospel ordinance, broadening the scope of the prohibition, and giving it a robust theological rationale.

Finally, we should note that in his exegesis of John 18:10–11, Cyril has recourse to similar language that we saw above in his treatment of the Phinehas episode in Against Julian. Whereas he earlier praised Phinehas's “zeal for God” (τὸν ὑπέρ γɛ τοῦ θɛοῦ ζῆλον), which motivated his violent act,⁵⁹ he here clarifies that one's “zeal” (ὁ ζῆλος) can proceed so far as to become blameworthy,⁶⁰ and whereas he earlier denounced an “excessive forbearance” (τῷ λίαν ἀνɛξικάκῳ) that would “widen the path to apostasy,”⁶¹ he here says Christ came “to teach us the fullest extent of forbearance” (τῆς ɛἰς ἄκρον ἡμῖν ἀνɛξικακίας).⁶² These sets of claims stand in some tension with one another, but this tension is somewhat lessened if we recall that in the earlier passages Cyril emphasized God as the judge who does not show “excessive forbearance” and that his praise of human-enacted violence on God's behalf remained a reference to Israel's distant past rather than his own contemporary moment.

V. “The gentleness that is fitting for the saints.” (2 Corinthians 10:1)

The final passage advocating for nonviolence derives from Cyril's Commentary on 2 Corinthians, which survives only in fragments in the catena tradition.⁶³ As with his other works, a precise date cannot be given for this exegetical treatise, though it certainly postdates the outbreak of the Nestorian controversy in 429.⁶⁴ The specific passage that occasioned Cyril's remarks is 2 Corinthians 10:1: “I myself, Paul, appeal to you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ.”⁶⁵ His exegesis of the verse is brief and begins by historically contextualizing it. Paul, Cyril explains, faced opposition in Corinth both from “Athenian wise men,” who regarded the cross as “foolishness,” as well as from Jews who thought he “was impiously making war against the ancient oracles.”⁶⁶ As a result, “Those in Corinth who were zealous for the faith were quite understandably stirred up against these people, and they wanted to lay hands on them as enemies of the divine proclamation. But ... to do so was exceedingly unbecoming and far removed from the gentleness that is fitting for the saints.”⁶⁷ Cyril's description of these individuals as those who are zealous (οἱ ζηλωταὶ) recalls his use of the term ζῆλος to describe Phinehas and Peter in the passages discussed above. Moreover, his remark that their arousal at Paul's opponents was “quite understandable” (μάλα ɛἰκότως) performs the same rhetorical function as his exhortation in the Glaphyra that Christians should “be indignant” when one of their own is violated, insofar as it grants some degree of legitimacy to their reaction. Yet, like Dinah's brothers and Peter, the Corinthian zealots went too far by wishing to enact bodily harm upon their opponents and failing to exhibit the “meekness and gentleness” of Christ mentioned by Paul in the passage. Cyril strengthens this moral point by citing 2 Timothy 2:24–25, Philippians 1:21, 1 Peter 2:23, 2 Corinthians 10:2, and 1 Corinthians 3:3. Furthermore, as he did in his exegesis of the Dinah episode, he calls on his Christian readers to consider how they might appear from the perspective of those who are outside the community of faith—“those who want to follow the Savior's gentleness ought to be beyond the suspicion of those people,” that is, they should do nothing to make outsiders suspect them of wrongdoing.

Up to this point one might think that Cyril's point in this passage is about nonretaliation against hostile opposition, as it was in his Commentary on the Gospel of John, but in the concluding sentence of the fragment his interpretation takes a surprising turn: “After all, if some do not believe, we should not force them by striking them with clubs, but should instead wait for their voluntary conversion to God.”⁶⁸ Perhaps inspired by the setting of this passage in the context of Paul's missionary journeys, Cyril applies the passage to the topic of proselytism and claims that physical coercion is an inappropriate means of securing the conversion of nonbelievers. Christians should instead wait patiently for them to convert voluntarily, in the meantime doing nothing to cause themselves to be brought into disrepute in the eyes of such would-be converts.⁶⁹ In taking this approach, they are but following the example of Christ, who, as Cyril explains elsewhere, did not become incarnate as a human ruler “ordering those on earth to believe in him” but as an ordinary man with “a restrained and submissive mindset” so that people would “choose a better way,” “not with compulsion hanging over them but rather by persuasion.”⁷⁰

VI. Reassessing Cyril and Violence

Now that I have surveyed five key passages from Cyril's corpus relevant to this topic and highlighted their resonances with Hypatia's murder, a reassessment of Cyril's relation to late antique religious violence is in order. I will briefly address four topics: (1) what these texts imply about Cyril's responsibility for Hypatia's death; (2) the degree to which they evince a shift or development in his thinking and/or rhetoric; (3) their relation to the competing perspectives on the acceptability of violence evident in the other ancient sources that recount this event; and (4) the way in which they complicate the image of Cyril commonly found in scholarship on late antiquity.

Interpretations of Hypatia's murder both ancient and modern are divided on the degree to which Cyril is directly to blame for the event. As argued by Edward Watts in a 2006 study, while the ancient authors “describe the actual murder in broadly similar terms,” each of them nevertheless “comes from a distinct tradition with its own ideas about the murder, its larger significance, and, ultimately, its acceptability.”⁷¹ For Socrates, the episode provides a concrete instance of the principle that disorder in the church is entangled in disorder in society more broadly.⁷² Moreover, although he stops short of saying the Alexandrian bishop directly ordered the murder, he does suggest Cyril was at least responsible for fomenting the conditions that led to it, and he condemns the actions of the perpetrators as “altogether foreign to those who set their minds on Christ's affairs” (ἀλλότριον γὰρ παντɛλῶς τῶν φρονούντων τὰ Χριστοῦ).⁷³ For the Neoplatonist Damascius, Hypatia's death is an instance of a larger pattern of violence against philosophers who bravely resisted arbitrary and oppressive Christian power. His Hypatia was the entirely innocent victim of the envy-driven plot concocted by Cyril himself.⁷⁴ Finally, John of Nikiu, somewhat akin to Damascius, implies that the bishop was directly responsible for the murder, though he views her grisly death as not only acceptable but necessary for the common good. Though he makes no mention of Cyril hatching a plot and directing the perpetrators, his account concludes with the bishop receiving praise from the people for having purged the city of a corrupting influence as had Theophilus before him.

The passages from Cyril's own corpus considered above do not tell us whether Cyril himself plotted Hypatia's murder, as Damascius claims, but they do show that on occasion he was willing to use violent rhetoric and imagery, and it is plausible that such language contributed to creating a climate in which executing someone who appeared, to some at least, as a tempting seductress seemed not only thinkable but obligatory. This would be true whether or not Cyril himself intended for his followers to take such actions. The passages in Against Julian and De adoratione in which he engages in positive theorizing about religious violence as a means of protecting communal integrity are open-ended and vague about real-world violence enacted by one person against another. This might be because Cyril was in fact seeking to incite such acts and was politically savvy enough to recognize that he had to be guarded in his speech. Alternatively, it might be because he was an inexperienced bishop who was naïve about the prospect of actual physical violence, not realizing he was playing with rhetorical fire. Deciding between these options depends upon the more general profile of Cyril's character that one arrives at via other lines of evidence. Whatever the case, emphasizing that God will one day judge the sinner does not necessarily oblige his earthly followers to enforce that punishment in the present day, but to some minds the latter will always seem like a logical inference from the former. It is, therefore, possible, perhaps even probable, that, thanks to the violent rhetoric he employed in these passages, those Christians who conspired to murder Hypatia imagined themselves to be obeying their bishop by executing the outsider corrupting their community, regardless of what Cyril's own perspective on such violent acts may have been.

This raises the second issue, since the vagueness of the two passages that positively theorize religious violence form a striking contrast with the passages in the Glaphyra, the Johannine commentary, and the Commentary on 2 Corinthians, which are more explicit and direct in addressing real-world religious violence. How might we account for the fact that in three works Cyril senses a need to issue an emphatic prohibition upon religiously motivated violence while in two other works he is at best oblivious to its possibility and at worst implicitly encouraging of such deeds? Although certainty is impossible here, it may be that this contrast reveals a shift in his use of violent rhetoric over the course of his career. Dating Cyril's works is difficult to do with precision, as indicated by the wide chronological ranges given for most of these works in the preceding discussion. Nevertheless, if Villani is correct that De adoratione was his earliest work, it may not be coincidental that we find in that treatise his closest dalliance with Christians using violence against would-be apostates and those who would lead them astray. Conversely, in the works that we can most securely date later than De adoratione, namely the Glaphyra, the Johannine commentary, and Commentary on 2 Corinthians, we find explicit renunciation of religious violence.

If there is a discernable shift here, it is important to characterize its nature and its cause with care and nuance. These passages do not necessarily tell us that Cyril's own thinking on religious violence changed, as if he approved of it initially and then later changed his mind. Such a development in his view on the acceptability of violence is possible but difficult to confirm, both because the earlier passages do not speak clearly to his own view on real-world violence and because one might be tempted to read his later disavowal of such actions as disingenuous. Rather, what we observe is, at a minimum, a development in his rhetoric away from using vague language that might incite violence to using direct and explicit language to denounce it. With respect to the cause of this shift, again, we must recognize how little we know and should exercise caution in filling in the gaps in our evidence. Cyril may have changed his tone only reluctantly and in response to imperial displeasure over Hypatia's murder. Alternatively, he may himself have been shocked by the outburst of violence among his followers and realized in its aftermath that he had a responsibility to restrain their worst impulses.

A willingness to shift tactics to achieve one's goal is also apparent in the version of Cyril's actions leading up to Hypatia's murder found in the history of Socrates, who was himself no supporter of the Egyptian bishop. After the Jewish riot and their expulsion from Alexandria, with tensions running high between the bishop and Orestes, Cyril sent his representatives to the prefect to mediate a reconciliation, “doing so,” Socrates tells us, because “the people of Alexandria forced him to” (τοῦτο γὰρ ὁ λαὸς τῶν Ἀλɛξανδρέων αὐτὸν ποιɛῖν προσηνάγκαζɛν).⁷⁵ Orestes rebuffed the attempted reconciliation and tensions continued mounting, leading to an attack on Orestes's life by a Nitrian monk named Ammonius who was duly arrested and died under torture. Cyril initially declared his fallen supporter a martyr, but then backtracked when “sensible” (οἱ ɛὖ φρονοῦντɛς) Christians refused to accept this escalation.⁷⁶ He instead quietly let the matter drop.⁷⁷ In both these instances, the Alexandrian bishop appears to be responsive to his community, correcting his initial missteps in light of communal pressure as he learned what avenues of action were available to him in a moment of crisis to protect his community's interests and also reestablish the harmony of the polis.⁷⁸ Although Socrates says nothing of Cyril's response to Hypatia's murder itself, a prohibition upon religious violence would be in keeping with this pattern of changing his tack in response to a growing awareness of the volatile situation and the constraints under which he had to operate.

As noted at the outset, the historiography on Hypatia's murder has completely overlooked the above passages, focusing instead on the narratives of Socrates, Damascius, and John of Nikiu. In contrast, the voice closest of all to the events in question, Cyril's own voice, has yet to be heard in modern scholarship on this topic. Of course, he hardly gives us an unbiased perspective. Moreover, he does not explicitly address Hypatia's murder in the manner the other three authors do. He does, nonetheless, in Glaphyra comment directly on whether violence is appropriate in cases of apostasy, which is precisely the issue at stake in Hypatia's murder according to two of our other sources. Moreover, he provides us with a further perspective we can use to correct the biases of our other sources. Socrates disliked Cyril because of his actions against the Novatians, and Damascius obviously had no sympathy for him, while, in contrast, John of Nikiu was engaged in a hagiographical attempt to magnify his reputation for a later audience.⁷⁹ In other words, the agendas of each of these other authors would have led them to suppress or at least ignore Cyril's own perspective on the topic at hand and to amplify his responsibility for Hypatia's death, whatever the facts may have been. Yet the unqualified rejection of religiously motivated bodily harm in three later works actually places him starkly at odds with the approval of Hypatia's murder expressed by John of Nikiu, who is usually thought to be passing along the view on the event among Cyril's local supporters,⁸⁰ and aligns him instead with Socrates's judgment that such actions are unfitting for Christians. These passages, therefore, complicate Cyril's endorsement of violence presented by our other ancient sources, since, whatever his perspective on religious violence may have been at the time of Hypatia's death, by the time he composed his later works he was issuing injunctions against such actions. Furthermore, it is perhaps significant that, in all three of the passages rejecting religious violence, Cyril does not simply state an abstract moral principle but highlights negative exemplars who relied upon violent methods to achieve their pious ends—Dinah's brothers, the Apostle Peter, and the Corinthian Christians. At a minimum, this suggests an awareness that some within his Christian community were prone to conform to the pattern of the negative exemplars and it is possible that these figures are even meant to recall the very attackers of Hypatia, since her murder was the most well-known act of public violence to have occurred in Alexandria since the riots surrounding the destruction of the Serapeum in 391.

We should of course be careful not to make these three renunciations of religious violence say more than they do. Cyril does not provide a blanket rejection of all violence in human society carried out by followers of Christ, nor does he necessarily rule out all kinds of violence against apostates. It is possible, for example, that he would have endorsed the use of coercive means by the state to enforce correct religious views, since state-inflicted violence is not his focus in these passages.⁸¹ Or, again, his rejection of “savage penalties” for apostates leaves open the possibility that lesser penalties not involving physical injury are, in his eyes, permissible. Moreover, his elevation of Ammonius as a martyr for dying under torture after throwing a stone at Orestes is unambiguously an act of condoning such violence, though we must here entertain the possibility of a change of position following this incident, perhaps implied by Socrates's own account. In addition, he elsewhere approvingly mentions violence against non-Christian buildings and other objects,⁸² and the rules he lays down in the above passages could even be compatible with Cyril's famous expulsion of the Jewish population from Alexandria since Socrates mentions no bodily harm that occurred during that event,⁸³ though it is hard to imagine how it could have completely been avoided under such circumstances. All we can say with clarity is that in three instances he attempted to prevent the members of his own community from using their faith as a pretext for harming the bodies of others, whether in cases of potential apostasy of believers, attack by outsiders, or when seeking the conversion of unbelievers.

If so, then there is need for some degree of revision in the common scholarly perception of Cyril, which has at times grown into a grotesque caricature. Not only does one look in vain in his corpus for explicit exhortations that his followers use physical violence, such as can easily be found in his contemporaries (for example, Chrysostom: “Slap them in the face, strike them around the mouth”⁸⁴); he instead went out of his way to denounce such behavior and provided an elaborate rationale explaining why it was impermissible for followers of Christ, applying this principle to three specific scenarios. Cyril did, of course, fight vociferously and vehemently in other ways to defend his understanding of the unchanging orthodox faith passed down by the apostles,⁸⁵ and Averil Cameron has argued that the concept of orthodoxy “is itself inherently violent.”⁸⁶ Whether or not orthodoxy is inherently violent, it seems undeniable that it, at a minimum, has the potential of being put to violent ends. Yet, given that, as Cameron also observes, late antique bishops like Cyril were deeply committed to the truth of their orthodox beliefs,⁸⁷ it would be absurd to expect to find them embracing a tolerance born of either political liberalism or postmodern relativism. This does not, however, necessarily imply that they did not recognize violence as problematic, and we might optimistically hope to find in our sources moments when late antique bishops and theologians realized that a commitment to orthodoxy could go in this direction. I suggest that such recognition and pre-emptive actions are precisely what we observe in three of the passages examined above, and, given the power wielded by the Alexandrian bishop in late antiquity, it is hard to believe it would have had no influence upon the community he governed. Hence, although his prohibition upon religious violence tragically came too late to save Hypatia's life, it may have helped prevent other similar events from taking place during the remaining twenty-nine years of his episcopacy.⁸⁸