The life of St Cyril of Jerusalem
His long rivalry with Acacius, the Arian-leaning bishop of Caesarea, first came to a head when Acacius accused him of selling church treasures and a valuable robe to feed the poor during a famine; a synod under Acacius's influence deposed him in 357. The Council of Seleucia restored him in 359 and deposed Acacius in turn, but the emperor Constantius reversed that judgment, and Cyril was exiled again from 360 until Julian's accession let him return in 361. A third exile, his longest at some eleven years, came under the openly pro-Arian emperor Valens, beginning in 367; only after Valens died in 378 was Cyril able to return for good to the see he had already spent so many years away from.
In 381 he took part in the Second Ecumenical Council at Constantinople, where his authority over the church of Jerusalem was formally confirmed and where he voted, after some hesitation, to accept the term homoousios on which the Nicene faith rested.
What he left behind endures apart from these hardships: a set of twenty-three catechetical lectures delivered to candidates preparing for baptism, the first eighteen given through the season of Lent on the articles of the Jerusalem creed, and a concluding five instructing the newly baptized in the week after Easter on the meaning of the sacraments they had just received. Among the earliest and most detailed surviving accounts of how the fourth-century Church actually formed and initiated new Christians, these lectures have shaped catechetical instruction far beyond Cyril's own city and century.
He died in 386, remembered as a bishop whose steadiness through repeated exile and controversy did not overshadow, but was matched by, the lasting instruction he left the whole Church.
