Cyril of Antioch
Saint Cyril the Confessor, Bishop of Antioch
Bishop · Confessor · d. c. 303 (some notices give 298)
Commemorated 22 July — Commemoration of the Confessor-Bishop of Antioch
Cyril was bishop of Antioch the Great at the turn of the fourth century — the immediate predecessor of the persecution, whose episcopate ended just as Diocletian's edicts fell upon the churches. Eusebius of Caesarea, who was his contemporary and says so, names him in the Antiochene succession between Timaeus and Tyrannus, and notes pointedly that it was in Tyrannus's time that "the destruction of the churches" occurred. Nothing of his teaching or writing survives. The later hagiographic tradition remembers him as a confessor, condemned under Diocletian to labour in the mines and dying of his sufferings; the Latin martyrologies go further and call him a martyr. He is honoured on July 22, and holds his place in the Antiochian memory as the last bishop of the peace before the Great Persecution.
The see of Antioch at the end of the third century
Antioch in the 280s and 290s was the third city of the Roman world and the mother-church of the Gentile mission — the place where the disciples were first called Christians (Acts 11:26), the see of Peter, of Ignatius the God-bearer, of Babylas. It was also a church still recovering from a grave internal wound. A generation before Cyril, Paul of Samosata had held the see and had been deposed by the great synod of about 268 for his teaching on the person of Christ; his refusal to give up the church building was settled only by an appeal to the emperor Aurelian. Domnus, then Timaeus, then Cyril followed in the restored succession.
Cyril received the episcopate from Timaeus about 279 or 280 and held it until about 303 — a long tenure of roughly two decades, falling almost entirely within the "long peace" that ran from Gallienus to the last years of Diocletian. It was the period in which the Church in Syria grew openly, built large buildings, and acquired the visibility that would make it a target.
The witness of Eusebius
The primary and nearly the only contemporary notice is a single sentence of Eusebius, in the seventh book of the Ecclesiastical History: "About the same time Timaeus received the episcopate of Antioch after Domnus, and Cyril, who lived in our day, succeeded him." Eusebius resumes the succession a little later: "After Cyril, Tyrannus received the episcopate of the parish of Antioch. In his time occurred the destruction of the churches."
That is all — but it is worth weighing what it establishes and what it does not. It establishes that Cyril was a real bishop of Antioch, contemporary with the historian, in a succession Eusebius was concerned to record accurately; and it fixes the end of his episcopate against the outbreak of the persecution of 303. It does not tell us how he died. Eusebius, who is not shy of recording confessors and martyrs by name, does not here call Cyril either.
The confessor of the mines
The later tradition supplies what Eusebius omits. The Greek and Latin notices for July 22 remember Cyril as a confessor of the faith under Diocletian, condemned with many others to the mines — the standard sentence, damnatio ad metalla, for clergy who would not sacrifice, which sent men to the copper and porphyry workings of Cilicia, Palestine and Egypt under conditions calculated to kill slowly. On this account he endured the labour for a long space, was released or died in it, and reposed of the hardships he had suffered. The Latin martyrologies, compressing, style him bishop and martyr of Antioch.
The two strands are not irreconcilable. If Cyril's episcopate ended in the very year the edicts began, then a sentence to the mines is exactly what the record of 303 would predict for the bishop of a great Eastern see, and a death in or shortly after that captivity would explain both his disappearance from the succession and Tyrannus's accession before the worst of the destruction. But it must be said plainly that the mines and the martyr's title are later attributions, not contemporary testimony.
Feast and commemoration
July 22 (church date; New Calendar civil July 22, Old Calendar civil August 4). His day falls under the great feast of Mary Magdalene and is not liturgically prominent; he has no proper service in the printed Menaion, and where he is commemorated it is by the common of a hierarch. He belongs nonetheless to the diptychs of Antioch, and in a corpus attentive to the Antiochian tradition he is worth naming for what he marks: the last bishop of the great peace, standing at the threshold of the persecution that would produce the Antiochene martyrs of the fourth century.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)
O God of our fathers, who dealest with us ever according to Thy gentleness: take not away Thy mercy from us, but by the intercessions of Thy hierarch Cyril, guide our life in peace.
Iconography
No distinct iconographic type of this Cyril has developed, and images identified as his are not to be relied upon: the name is borne by far more celebrated hierarchs whose types dominate the tradition. Where he is written, it is by the general type of a hierarch of the early centuries — a bearded bishop of middle years in the phelonion and the crossed polystaurion omophorion, blessing with the right hand and holding the closed Gospel in the left, and, since he is honoured as a confessor, sometimes bearing the cross as well. No pre-1900 image identifiable as Cyril of Antioch has been located for this collection.
Disputed questions
- The date of his repose. Modern lists of the bishops of Antioch generally give his episcopate as c. 279/280–303, on the strength of Eusebius's ordering. Several liturgical notices, however, print 298 — a date which, if correct, would put his death before the persecution and make the tradition of the mines untenable. The chronology of the Antiochene succession in this period is acknowledged to be uncertain at every point, and neither figure can be defended as secure. This entry follows c. 303, with 298 recorded as a variant.
- Confessor or martyr? Eusebius calls him neither. Greek usage tends to confessor; the Roman martyrology says bishop and martyr. This corpus classifies him confessor, as the claim that can be made without going beyond what the tradition actually transmits.
- The number of his name. He is sometimes styled "Cyril I of Antioch" in lists that also count a Cyril among the later Syriac Orthodox patriarchs of the same see. He is not to be confused with any of them, nor with Cyril of Jerusalem, Cyril of Alexandria, or Cyril of Gortyna.
- The silence of the record. No writing, no synodal act, and no letter of Cyril survives, and no Life was composed. Any fuller account of him in circulation is reconstruction.