Cyril of Alexandria's Renunciation of Religious Violence

Abstract

AbstractScholarly 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.