Two Saints for Times of Duplicity
We badly need mental and spiritual rest in the midst of times of duplicity such as ours! On January 17th, the feast of Saint Antony the Great helps us in our times of madness and disorientation. Madness, disorientation, duplicity – is there any end to the evils that surround us? Today, January 18th, is the double feast of Saints Athanasius the Great and Cyril of Alexandria. Both were bishops in that great cosmopolitan center of Mediterranean culture. They encountered the flip side of what Antony encountered. Antony fought demons in the desert and lived a life of gospel simplicity and poverty. Athanasius and Cyril, by contrast, were at the forefront of big intellectual and theological controversies. They lived and interacted at the seats of political land ecclesiastical power. They were ‘popes’ in the Eastern Empire! To this day, the Archbishop, or Patriarch, of Alexandria is called Pope, though the meaning of the title is different than it is in Rome.
The decades after the First Ecumenical Council (which was held in the year 325 AD) were tumultuous. The Church had made the fatal mistake of aligning itself with the Empire. And that is a fatal mistake that the Church and churches continue to make, even in the United States which doesn’t even have a state church (not in theory, anyway). The minute the Church becomes part of the state apparatus, it falls captive to the whims of government. Jefferson and the Founding Fathers were profoundly insightful because they knew history very well. And history is not something that today’s Christian and pseudo-Christian provocateurs study, especially if it’s history older than yesterday’s headlines.
Athanasius paid the price for the Church-State concordat that had become rooted in the Empire. Between the years 335 and 364 he was deposed and exiled five times (!) by emperors who sided with the Arian heresy. Athanasius stood firm against the heresy that denied the divinity of Christ. He indeed was seen during those years as standing alone against the world! He defended the incarnation of Christ in the fullness of its meaning and consequences. He was a true fighter for the truth, and a warning to today’s churches that accommodate themselves too easily to political power on the one hand, or to the shifting sands of political correctness on the other hand.
Cyril of Alexandria carried the fight of Athanasius in a different arena. By his time the threat of Arianism had been resolved. The divinity of Christ was established in the minds and faith of the Church. The challenge now was to understand the humanity of Christ, and that became just as controversial and tumultuous in the fifth century as the fight with Arianism had been in the fourth century. Cyril’s ‘personalist’ theology was very advanced for his time, but it prevailed against ideas that in many and different ways undermined the humanity of Christ.
But enough about Cyril and Athanasius. There’s plenty about them on the Internet. But please don’t fall for the lie that Cyril was responsible for the Christian mob that killed the pagan astronomer and philosopher Hypatia. Her killing did take place – one of those horrible acts that religion very often gives rise to – but the lie that Cyril provoked the mob is anti-Christian propaganda that has also been taken up by feminist historians of religion.
Athanasius and Cyril lived more than a millennium and a half ago. But their stories have much relevance to today’s mixing of politics and social agendas with Christianity. Cyril’s lofty intellectual theology even influenced the thought of Pope John Paul II. We lose so much when we ignore history!
Father Constantine Sarantidis