Today’s saint, Cyril of Alexandria, is both a Father and a Doctor of the Church. The titles are a grace, of course, but he worked hard to correspond to them.

He was the nephew of his predecessor as Patriarch of Alexandria in Egypt. He likely spent his youth in a monastery before his uncle drafted him as an assistant and secretary. In 402 he accompanied Theophilus to the notorious Synod of the Oak that deposed St. John Chrysostom, sending the saint to his exile and death. Theophilus was among John’s accusers and persecutors, and it seems likely that Cyril, alas, shared his opinions (though he would, later in life, show signs of a change of heart).

Theophilus died in 412, and Cyril succeeded him, but only after a riot between his supporters and those of his rival. From the start, it seems, Cyril treated heretics and schismatics rather severely, and this won him the enduring opposition of “Can’t we all just get along” Christians, from his day down to our own. Those who despise him have tried to blame him for the lynching of the pagan philosopher Hypatia by an Alexandrian mob. Cyril also had the ill fortune to live in a time when relations between Christians and Jews in Egypt had escalated to open street violence. The Christians received little support from the governor, so Cyril assembled a rough and undisciplined guard of his own, with some truly awful results.

No one disputes that Cyril was an irascible character and something of a political operator. (I recall that even Cardinal Newman was scandalized by Cyril’s severity.) But he’s certainly not the villain that his ancient and modern detractors make him out to be. He was, like Jerome, one of the odd uncles among the Church Fathers. It is impossible to imagine Church history without them, but that doesn’t mean they were (or are) easy to live with.

Cyril was a man of crystalline intellect and tremendous courage, speaking up for the truth, no matter the cost. He was unwilling to compromise doctrine, even if it placed him in opposition to the Christian emperor. And Cyril was always willing to suffer the consequences: he was imprisoned for defending the true doctrine of Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Cyril was, moreover, one of the most brilliant dogmatic theologians ever to walk God’s earth.

He is best known for opposing the teaching of the Nestorius, a monk from Antioch who became Patriarch of Constantinople. Nestorius opposed the use of the term Theotokos (“God-bearer” or “Mother of God”) to describe Mary. He preferred Christotokos, or Christ-bearer, arguing that Mary could not be God’s mother, as she was not His origin; she was rather, he argued, the mother of Jesus’ human nature. Cyril argued, to the contrary, that a mother does not give birth to a nature, but to a person. To deny the title to Mary, then, was to divide Jesus Christ into two subjects, two persons, two “I’s.”

Matters came to a head at the Council of Ephesus in 431, where Cyril’s arguments won the day. Despite the oppressive summer heat — which killed off several of the bishops at council — an enormous crowd of ordinary Christians had assembled at Ephesus. And when, at night, they heard the news of the bishops’ decision, they let out a raucous shout, and they carried the council fathers through the streets of the city in a torchlight procession, singing Marian hymns with great gusto.

Still, once the bishops got back home, many were reluctant to enforce the decrees of the Council. Nestorius tried to summon counter-councils. And Cyril was even, for a brief time, deposed from the patriarchate. Once the dust settled on the controversies, he resumed his voluminous correspondence and Scripture commentary. He died, probably on the 27th of June, 444, after an episcopate of nearly thirty-two years.

An excellent recent biography of Cyril is J.A. McGuckin’s Saint Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy, which I reviewed recently for Touchstone magazine.

In the archives of this blog, you’ll find more on Cyril here and here.

Roger Pearse of The Tertullian Project has posted an excellent article on the state of Cyril’s works in English translation, and especially those on the Web. Roger has himself posted some wonderful rarities (scroll down the page till you find Cyril of Alexandria). God bless Roger for the website he’s labored to give us. May St. Cyril intercede for him (and us) today!

UPDATE: Jeff Ziegler of the Ziegler A-List points us to other online resources, such as Pope Pius XII’s encyclical letter on St. Cyril of Alexandria (Orientalis Ecclesiae, 1944).

Phil states his case — and ours, too.

Father Z is, with reverence, examining one of the contenders for the title of Holy Grail. He tracks it through the era of the Fathers, right down to our own day. The post comes complete with photos of Pope John Paul II kissing the chalice, and Pope Benedict pondering his upcoming pilgrimage to its home. (Yes, I can read his mind, but only this once.) Visit Father Z today!

And, if you’re a true Grail-seeker, I hope you’re familiar with my blog’s sibling site, The Grail Code, which is manned by His Honor and Eminence, Christopher John Bailey. Chris is an old friend and co-author of my latest book, The Grail Code: Quest for the Real Presence. The book is available in Canadian French as Graal Code: Enquête sur le mystère du Graal. Today Chris and I got word that the book will soon be published in German, from Gütersloher Velaghaus. Quest on!

On this day in 363, the Emperor Julian — known to Christians as “Julian the Apostate” — died in battle, having failed utterly in trying to re-establish paganism in the Roman Empire. Once the classmate of St. Gregory Nazianzen, Julian was one of Christianity’s three most articulate opponents in antiquity. Readers of this blog know him well from a post last month.

Julian was creepy, of course, but I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for the guy. Christian historians too often downplay the scandal of his early childhood, when Julian saw his father, his siblings, and other family members butchered by the ostentatiously Christian emperor, who was also Julian’s kinsman. I don’t mean to play therapist, but that sort of thing can leave one with a bad — perhaps invincibly bad — attitude about Christianity.

So I’m actually ambivalent about celebrating this one with chocolate — though I’ll likely mark the day’s main memorial (see below) with abundant confection. Maybe it’s better to pray, in hope, for deliverance of the emperor’s soul. Devout optimists may find reasons for such hope in Julian’s last recorded words.

Hat tip on the anniversary: Rogue Classicism, the keeper of the ancient calendars.

Today, June 26, is the memorial of St. Josemaria Escriva, the 20th-century priest who founded Opus Dei, a path to holiness through ordinary work, family life, friendship, and such — the stuff of everyday life. His is a decidedly modern spirit, but he conceived it as a retrieval of the way of the “early Christians” (his preferred term). Opus Dei was, he said, “as old as the Gospel and, like the Gospel, ever new.” He often cited the authority of the Church Fathers. A quick scan of his books online at EscrivaWorks yields many passages from Clement of Alexandria, Ignatius of Antioch, Tertullian, Ambrose, Justin Martyr, Origen, Cyril of Jerusalem, Cyril of Alexandria, Leo the Great, Jerome, lots and lots from John Chrysostom and Gregory the Great, and dozens from Augustine.

These early Christians were not mere ornaments on his pet project. His vocation was itself a return to the sources — the pre-Nicene sources of the life and labor of ordinary, faithful Christians. The journalist John L. Allen, in his book-length study of Opus Dei, described just how radical St. Josemaria’s vision was: “The idea of priests and laity, men and women, all part of one organic whole, sharing the same vocation and carrying out the same apostolic tasks, has not been part of the Catholic tradition, at least since the early centuries.”

Back in the 1990s (before St. Josemaria’s canonization), the theologian Domingo Ramos-Lissón wrote an excellent study of the man’s patristic influences. It’s titled “The Example of the Early Christians in Blessed Josemaria’s Teachings,” and it’s available free online at the website of the magazine Romana.

Scott Hahn has written what I consider the finest appreciation of St. Josemaria’s reliance on the Fathers. It’s in his soon-to-be-released book, Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei. The whole book is great. You really should own it!

In your kindness, please pray for Father Rene Schatteman, a priest of Opus Dei and a dear friend of mine, as he undergoes surgery today. He injured both knees at the end of Mass on Saturday. It was an unfamiliar church, and there were two more steps down from the altar than Father Rene had anticipated.

Amy Welborn gives us Augustine on the Birth of St. John the Baptist — today’s solemn feast. There’s even an ancient audio track. Always a reason to celebrate with chocolate, unless you prefer honey-dipt locusts.

Biblicalia has posted another fresh installment of St. Victorinus’s third-century commentary on the Book of Revelation. You won’t find this anywhere else in English. Get it while it’s hot!

In early May I had the great pleasure of appearing on Greg and Lisa Popcak’s radio show, Heart, Mind and Strength. The topic of our discussion was the Church Fathers’ use of breastfeeding imagery. The Popcaks kindly gave me permission to post the audio of my short segment, which I’ve done right here (choose “Download the MP3”).

My wife, Terri, is a nursing mother of six, and she leads a breastfeeding support group. It was she who first alerted me to the patristic possibilities, back in 1993, when she wrote about the saints and nursing motherhood. Some years later, in New Covenant magazine, Terri published “Milk and Mystery,” an article about breastfeeding and Christian life. More recently, she and I have co-authored a couple of studies of nursing imagery in the Fathers, and I hope both will be available in print by year’s end.

Breastfeeding was a favorite metaphor of many Church Fathers, but especially Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, and Ephrem. They spoke of mother’s milk as a symbol of God’s grace, of His providence, of the sacraments, and even of the Holy Spirit. It’s a metaphor rarely used in modern preaching, at least in the United States, because breastfeeding, once a necessity, is now a rarity — and the female breast is treated almost exclusively as a sex object.

It was not so, of course, in the time of the Fathers. I was thrilled this week to find, posted on a Russian Christian website, a most fascinating study of the subject, “God’s Milk: An Orthodox Confession of the Eucharist.” The article — by Edward Engelbrecht, a Lutheran pastor and senior editor with Concordia Publishing House — first appeared in the Journal of Early Christian Studies in 1999. Here’s the summary:

The Odes of Solomon and early orthodox Christianity compared a believer’s reception of the body and blood of Christ in the eucharist to a child suckling at its mother’s breast. This appears to have been connected with the widespread use of a cup of milk and honey in the baptismal eucharist, a visual aid to explain the Lord’s nurturing presence in the sacrament. The milk analogy did not stem from symbolic uses of milk in pre-Christian religions or Gnosticism but from general beliefs about physiology coupled with Christian sacramental theology. The feminine characteristics of the milk analogy had no significant effect on orthodox beliefs about the Godhead nor did they cause the analogy to fall out of favor at a later date. Instead, as liturgical use of the cup of milk began to disappear, so did the milk analogy.

It’s a profound, well-written, and accessible study, well worth your time. It’ll nourish your prayer ever afterward.

Father Z is putting the Latin Fathers to work explaining the new revisions to the translation of the Mass. Today we get St. Augustine’s take on the words we’ll say before we receive Holy Communion: “I am not worthy that You should enter under my roof.”

Today is the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. Devotion to the Sacred Heart has got to be on anyone’s short list of the most identifiably Roman Catholic customs — right up there with the Rosary and the use of holy water. It’s the likely origin of that staple of American sarcasm, “My heart bleeds for you,” and, of course, “bleeding-heart liberal.”

Historians trace the devotion to the twelfth century, but Pope Pius XII, in his encyclical on the Sacred Heart, Haurietis Aquas, followed its prehistory to the Fathers:

The holy Fathers, true witnesses of the divinely revealed doctrine, wonderfully understood what St. Paul the Apostle had quite clearly declared; namely; that the mystery of love was, as it were, both the foundation and the culmination of the Incarnation and Redemption. For frequently and clearly we can read in their writings that Jesus Christ took a perfect human nature and our weak and perishable human body with the object of providing for our eternal salvation, and of revealing to us in the clearest possible manner that His infinite love for us could express itself in human terms.

Those are, of course, recurring themes in the Fathers, especially as they worked through the christological controversies of the fourth through sixth centuries.

To mark the feast day, I asked my favorite expert on the subject, Sister Cora Lombardo, which patristic texts I should put forth for my visitors’ prayer and meditation on her favorite feast day. (Sister Cora is an Apostle of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and popular speaker on the Sacred Heart.) She sent the following to me, and I, in obedience, relay them to you.

Here’s St. Gregory of Nyssa:

He had laid wood against wood, and hands against hands: His generously extended hands against those that reach out with greed; His nail-pierced hands against those that are fallen in discouragement; His hands that embrace the whole world against the hand the brought about Adam’s bandishment from Paradise.

Yesterday I hung on the Cross with Christ; today I am glorified with Him; yesterday I was dying with Him, today I am brought to life with Him; yesterday I was buried with Him, today I rise with Him.

Let us become like Christ, since Christ also became like us. Let us become gods for Him, since He became man for us.

And here’s St. Augustine:

“Sing to the Lord a new song; his praise is in the assembly of the saints.” We are urged to sing a new song to the Lord, as new men who have learned a new song. A song is a thing of joy; more profoundly, it is a thing of love. Anyone, therefore, who has learned to love the new life has learned to sing a new song, and the new song reminds us of our new life. The new man, the new song, the new covenant, all belong to the one kingdom of God, and so the new man will sing a new song and will belong to the new covenant.

There is not one who does not love something, but the question is, what to love. The psalms do not tell us not to love, but to choose the object of our love. But how can we choose unless we are first chosen? We cannot love unless someone has loved us first. Listen to the apostle John: We love Him, because He first loved us. The source of man’s love for God can only be found in the fact that God loved him first. He has given us Himself as the object of our love, and He has also given us its source. What this source is you may learn more clearly from the apostle Paul who tell us: The love of God has been poured into our hearts. This love is not something we generate ourselves; it come to us through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Since we have such an assurance, then, let us love God with the love He has given us. As John tells us more fully: God is love, and whoever dwells in love dwells in God, and God in him. It is not enough to say: Love is from God. Which of us would dare to pronounce the words of Scripture: God is love? He alone could say it who knew what it was to have God dwelling within Him.

God offers us a short route to the possession of Himself. He cries out: Love Me and you will have Me for you would be unable to love Me if you did not possess Me already.

Thanks, Sister Cora!

And please make sure to ponder the Scripture readings for the day.

At GrailCode.com, Chris Bailey shows us our first glimpse of Merlin as a wizard. If you’re wondering what this has to do with the era of the Church Fathers, then you haven’t been following this blog very closely — and you haven’t read the book I co-authored with Mr. Bailey, The Grail Code: Quest for the Real Presence.

By the way, History News Network just paid a nice tribute to Chris and GrailCode.com.

Kevin has moved from Hebrew to Latin, from the Book of the Prophet Malachi to St. Victorinus’s Commentary on the Apocalypse. Victorinus, the bishop of Pettau in today’s Austria, was martyred under Diocletian around 303 A.D. No less a scholar than Jerome admired his commentary on Revelation. Jerome produced his own, amended version of the work.