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Translated by P. E. Pusey
St Cyril of Alexandria Resources Online and in Print
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This Part: 115 Pages
Page 11
"In my treatise to the holy Virgins [i. e. the Princesses Marina and Arcadia who had embraced the virgin estate] I made a very large provision of more obvious sayings which had nothing hard to understand; but in this I have made mention of the obscurer. For your Pious Authority ought both to know these and not to be ignorant of the other, in order that by means of both, perfection in knowledge, like a light, may dwell in your most pure understanding [42]"
Bishop Hefele [43] thinks that there are indications that the two Princesses had, in contrast with the Emperor, spoken for Cyril and against Nestorius.
Of the five sermons of Nestorius on the Incarnation which Marius Mercator translated into Latin, S. Cyril has cited copiously from the second: the fourth and fifth of Mercator's collection belong to the close of A.D. 430; for the fourth is dated the eighth of the Ides of December (Dec. 6), the Saturday after Nestorius had received S. Cyril's four Bishops with S. Celestine's Letter and S. Cyril's with the 12 Chapters. In it Nestorius recapitulates some of the teaching which S. Cyril had quoted from an earlier sermon, i.e. on God sending forth His Son. Of that earlier sermon we have only fragments, but it was preached against S. Cyril's letter to the Monks [44]. Nestorius speaks of S. Cyril as the " wrangler [45], " the heretic [46]," and he apostrophises S. Cyril or S. Proclus, "O heretic in clerical form [47]."
The last of that series in Mercator's collection was preached on Sunday Dec. 7.
Count Irenaeus has also preserved it; the compiler of the Synodicon gives it in another translation [48].
* * * *
One of the interests and employments of the Bishops during their first days at Ephesus will have been the becoming acquainted with some whom they had never before seen. This time was probably the beginning of a lasting friendship between S. Cyril and Acacius the metropolitan of Melitene, on the borders of Armenia towards Cappadocia: the long letter which he wrote to Valerian Bishop of Iconium points at S. Cyril's having readied some degree of intimacy with him; he wrote too to Donatus, Bishop of Nicopolis, on the west of Greece, and no doubt there were other friendships too as the fruit of the long sojourn at Ephesus. Some of S. Cyril's letters shew how warm-hearted and sensitive he was, notwithstanding his mighty will and unswerving purpose.
But there were other sadder things belonging to that summer at Ephesus, sickness and death, the sickness probably the fever so prevalent now along all that poisonous coast, and passing in many cases into dysentery. "We do not know what Bishops the Council lost; for our knowledge of those who composed it is derived from the lists of names at the opening of the first and sixth session and the signatures to those two sessions. But the fact is mentioned several times: S. Cyril in the first session of the Council says,
42. [t] Opp. v. P. ii. 2. 131 a.
43. [u] Hist. Conc. § 129 near the end.
44. [x] See S. Cyril's books against Nestorius, pp. 20, 51, 141, 164.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/cyril-alexandria/against-nestorius.asp?pg=11
