Cyril’s address of the soul is nowhere near the length or intricacy of that found in Tertullian. Discovered in shorter segments in other orations (e.g. Pro. 9;
Cat. 10; Hom. Par. 17; M. Cat. 1), the brunt of Cyril’s address is located in the
fourth baptismal lecture, under its own heading as one of the ‘ten doctrines’ of Christian belief. While his basic ascription of the soul/body dichotomy is located in the material/immaterial means of effect discovered in baptism, these lectures present a more refi ned address of the soul, its nature and its function. Importantly, it is in the soul that Cyril identifi es the locus of the divine image. The soul is ‘God’s fairest work, formed in the image of its maker’49 – a claim Cyril never directly
makes of the body alone. This is not, however, to suggest that it is the soul’s imma- teriality which allows it, rather than the body, to establish the image; Cyril’s refl ec- tions on the body’s inherent dignity stand against such a reading. It is not the immateriality of the soul that impresses Cyril as imaging the divine, but its charac- ter as life and life-giving within the bi-partite human creature. It is the soul that is ‘a living, rational, incorruptible being, because of him who gave it these gifts’.50
46 See Cat. 4.23.
47 Hom. Par. 18. 48 Cat. 4.23. 49 Cat. 4.18. 50 Ibid.
This assertion lies behind Cyril’s claim that the body is the soul’s instrument (mentioned above), similar to Tertullian’s language of the body as ‘house’. Yet in making such statements, Cyril is not defaming the body as inconsequential or ‘lower’ than the soul (the second-century anti-‘Gnostic’ project had sunk in by the fourth, even if the issue was still very much in the air); rather, his comments are essentially a simple admission that the material body is not itself animative. Echoing biblical imagery, in which the body itself is lifeless dust until infused with God’s breath, Cyril wishes to reinforce the essentially lifeless characteristic of body qua body. It is the soul that brings the body to life, constituting the living person. In a comment on the soul’s share in sin, to which we will turn again later, Cyril draws attention to this animating quality unique to the soul:
If sin is due to the body, why doesn’t a corpse sin? Place a sword in the right hand of a man who has just died; no murder will take place. Whatever forms of beauty are displayed before a young man who has just died, no desire of fornication will be felt.51
The question of sin for the moment set to one side, Cyril’s dichotomization of soul and body as animator and animated, refl ects the ancient testimony of the scriptures on which he is refl ecting. The relationship of the soul to the body echoes that of the ‘breath of life’ to the fashioned dust of Genesis 2.7. The soul gives life to the body, and without it the latter cannot be seen as the true image of its creator. The soul brings the body into the image of God, and it is this that causes Cyril to see the soul as the locus of the divine image. But it is only the locus because it is life-giving, and this life-giving aspect connects it intimately and intrinsically to the body it animates. The body is not of diminished importance on account of the soul’s animating precedence: as Cyril stresses, human nature is to be not of soul, but body and soul together. The one who will stand before God at the judgement will be one of soul and body alike.52 Cyril maintains this balance, grounded
always in the notion that the soul indeed has precedence, but a precedence that only has meaning in the context of the body. Precedence does not equal extent. Cyril makes this observation direct in reminding his catechumens that, ultimately, it is not simply the soul that is God’s image, but ‘man’ – that reality defi ned by neither element apart, but by the dual-presence of them both.53
Cyril’s grounding of his anthropological discussion in a refl ection on the baptismal mystery has here shaped his discourse. Baptism must be both bodily and spiritual, not like that of Simon Magus, whom Cyril claims ‘was baptised but not enlightened; he dipped his body into the water, but did not enlighten his heart
51 Cat. 4.23. 52 See Cat. 4.30.
with the Spirit’.54 Further, if baptism is administered ‘for the forgiveness of sins’
(cf. Mark 1.4, Luke 3.3),55 then its anthropological witness is not merely to the
nature of the person who is cleansed, but also to the sin of which baptism is the laver. Here Cyril discovers further clarity on the nature of the soul, for it is, as we have already seen him proclaim, the soul that is spattered with the ‘mud’ of sin, which is ‘dressed in avarice’.56 To claim that sin resides in the body is to go
not only against the teachings of the scriptures as Cyril reads them (hence his quotations of the Old Testament on the value of the material), but also against the witness of every-day observation. Here the direct focus of the passage cited above on the body’s inanimacy: put a sword in the corpse of a man who has died (i.e. whose soul has departed) and no murder takes place; put a beautiful woman before the corpse of a dead man and there arises no lust or desire. So Cyril: ‘Do not tell me that the body shares the blame for sin [. . .] the body itself does not sin; the soul sins through the body’.57
It is in the soul that the human person’s self-determination and rational freedom reside, and so Cyril’s insistence on its priority in the divine image which nonethe- less is only manifest in the soul-body composite that is the full person. It is the soul that makes deliberative choices, which by those choices both soils and is soiled by the evil of its own determination.58 The body has its own ‘corruptible
and defective side’ – it is as Abraham said but ‘dust and ashes’59 – but this is iden-
tifi ed by Cyril as the inherent weakness and limitation of the material, not as an objectifi able sinfulness in the human corpus. The body is itself pure and must be kept pure, though it is engaged in sin as the instrument of the sinning soul. It is not the immediate actor in the free-determination of wrong; yet, as united to the soul, it is not foreign to those acts it engenders. The soul sins through the body, and so the body, like the soul, becomes unclean and must have a share in the re-birth of baptism.60
Cyril makes a point of emphasizing the freedom inherent in the human soul as created after the image of God, and the presence of sin in humanity as rooted in that freedom. All souls, from Adam’s to the eschaton, are alike. Whether male or female, sinner or saint, the nature of the soul is one. Its structure is uniform and similar in all, not classifi ed by nature as just or unjust.61 Here Cyril takes as his own a point
that has been fundamental to our previous authors: the nature underlying human reality is singular, common and unchanging in its fundamental properties. For Irenaeus, this was imaged in the language of ‘one race’ in Adam; for Tertullian in
54 Pro. 2. 55 See M. Cat. 2.6.
56 Pro. 4. 57 Cat 4.23. 58 See Cat. 4.18.
59 See Cat. 6.3; cf. Gen 18.27.
60 See Cat. 4.23 and Cat. 3.4.
humanity’s ‘one blood’; and for Cyril in ‘one nature’ common to just and unjust alike. If this be so, then unless God himself be the fashioner of sin, the soul qua soul cannot, of its natural character, be held responsible for sin. Cyril is direct on the matter:
For you are not a sinner by birth nor a fornicator by chance; nor, as some in their madness dare to say, do the conjunctions of the stars compel you to devote yourself to wantonness. Why do you avoid acknowledging your own evil deeds and cast the blame on the innocent stars?62
I would have you know this, too, that before the soul enters the world is has committed no sin; but though we arrive sinless, now we sin by choice.63
Sin is, for Cyril as much as for both Irenaeus and Tertullian, an act and not a natu- ral reality. It is economic, not ontological. It may corrupt and wound, but the wound is economic as much as the sin is economic.64 The immediate testimony
of baptism is that the soul, together with the body, can be and is purifi ed of sin.65
It may be soiled, but it can yet be made holy for its bridegroom. And when the soul thus responsible for sin is redeemed by a God-initiated departure from sin, bodily healing follows.66 The purifi ed soul purifi es its instrument. As such, the condition
of man reveals the nature of God through the sacrament. Anthropological renewal discloses the nature of the one who renews, in the one who is renewed.