Cyril's earlier proceedings; and his character deservedly suffered in consequence." The turbulent and furious "parabolani" and others, who shed Hypatia's blood at the foot of the altar, were but "bettering the instruction" which had let them loose upon the synagogues. Cyril's name has paid dearly for the error, and the great doctrinal cause which he upheld so stoutly in after-years has suffered for the faults of his earlier life.
It was but natural that the government should the next year restrain the clergy from political action, especially by restrictions on the number and conduct of the parabolani.
Cyril had inherited his uncle's animosity against John Chrysostom, who, in his opinion, had been canonically deposed; he rejected with bitterness the advice of Atticus of Constantinople to place "John's" name on his church diptychs (Ep. p. 204); and it was not until after the memory of that persecuted saint had been rehabilitated at Constantinople as well as at Antioch that the archbp. of Alexandria, urged by Isidore of Pelusium (Isid. i. 370), consented in 417 to follow these precedents. (See Tillemont, xiv. 281.)
We pass over several uneventful years, during which Cyril doubtless occupied himself in ordinary church affairs and in theological literature, and come to the great controversy with which his name is pre-eminently associated. In the end of 428 he became aware of the excitement caused in Constantinople by the preaching of archbp. Nestorius. The line of thought which Nestorius had entered upon (under the influence, as it seems, of Theodore of Mopsuestia) led him to explain away the mystery of the Incarnation by reducing it to a mere association between the Eternal Word and a human Christ. The Alexandrian see had agents at Constantinople, and the denial, by Nestorius and his supporters, of the strict personal oneness between "God the Word" and the Son of Mary—expressed by the formula, "Let no one call Mary Theotokos"—was an event which was certain to excite the vigilant zeal of a prelate like Cyril, opposed, alike by temperament and antecedents, to whatever undermined the mysterious majesty of the Christian faith. Very early in Jan. 429 Cyril dealt with the subject in his Paschal letter or homily, the 17th of the series; in which, while affirming with great vividness and emphasis the reality and permanence of Christ's manhood, he enforced the singleness of his Divine Personality, and applied to His human mother, in two distinct passages, a phrase even stronger than "Theotokos"—μήτηρ Θεοῦ. About the end of Apr. 429, when the controversial sermons of Nestorius—exhibiting no little confusion of thought, but clearly indicating a disbelief in what is theologically termed the Personal Union—had reached Egyptian monks, Cyril wrote to all who within his jurisdiction were "practising the solitary life," a long letter, upholding the term "Theotokos" in its true sense, as not meaning "mother of the Godhead," but mother, as regarded the manhood, of Him Who, being in the form of God, assumed the form of a servant, and, being the Lord of Glory, condescended to suffer the death of the cross. If it was true, Cyril argued, that Jesus Christ was God, it was by consequence not less true that His mother was "Theotokos." If she was not rightly so called, her Son was a human individual external to the divine nature, and not in a true sense Emmanuel. This letter cites at length the Nicene Creed in its original form, ignoring the alterations made by the council of Constantinople, and insisting that the creed identified Jesus Christ with the Divine Co-essential Son. Nestorius was much displeased at the reception given to this letter by some official persons at Constantinople. He ordered one Photius to answer it, and encouraged some Alexandrians residing at the imperial city, who had been rebuked by Cyril for gross offences, to prefer complaints against him (Mansi, iv. 1003, 887). On the other hand, Cyril, having also been interrogated by Celestine of Rome as to the genuineness of Nestorius's sermons, wrote his first letter to Nestorius (Cyr. Ep. p. 19; Mansi, iv. 883), the point of which was that the prevailing excitement had been caused, not by the letter to the monks of Egypt, but by Nestorius's own refusal to allow to Christ's mother a title which was the symbol of her Son's real Divinity. Cyril also referred to a work On the Holy and Co-essential Trinity, which he himself had written in the lifetime of Nestorius's predecessor Atticus, and in which he had used language on the Incarnation which harmonized with his letter to the monks. Nestorius replied very briefly, and in a courteous tone; although he intimated dislike of what he deemed harsh in Cyril's letter (Cyr. Ep. p. 21; Mansi, iv. 885). He evidently did not wish to quarrel with the see of Alexandria, although he practised considerable severities on monks of his own city who withstood him to the face. Cyril, too, was not forward to press the controversy to extremes. During the latter part of 429 he was even blamed by some for inactivity. But he may have written at this period, as Gamier thinks, his "Scholia," or "Notes," on the Incarnation of the Only-begotten (Mar. Merc. ii. 216), and in Feb. 430 (probably after hearing how Nestorius had upheld a bishop named Dorotheus in his anathema against the word "Theotokos") he wrote, in synod, a second Ep. to Nestorius—the letter which became a symbolic treatise sanctioned by general councils. (See it in Cyr. Ep. p. 22; Mansi, iv. 887; cf. Tillemont, xiv. 338). Nothing can be more definite and luminous than his disclaimer of all Apollinarian notions, which had been imputed by Nestorius to those who confessed the "Theotokos"; his explanation of the idea intended by that phrase; his peremptory exclusion of the theory of a mere association as distinct from a hypostatic or personal union, and his not less emphatic assertion of the distinctness of the natures thus brought together in the one Christ. "Not that the difference of the natures was annulled by the union, but rather that one Godhead and Manhood constituted the one Lord Jesus Christ, by their ineffable concurrence into unity. . . . Thus we confess one Christ and Lord." The answer of Nestorius was characterized by ignoratio elenchi, and could not be regarded as a satisfactory statement of belief (Cyr. Ep. p. 25;
