Augustine Sokolovski
On January 31, the last day of the penultimate winter month, the Church honors the memory of Saints Athanasius and Cyril. The saints were the greatest of the holy bishops of the Alexandrian Church after the end of pagan persecution of Christians.
Over the centuries, the joint celebration in their honor became a common tribute to the memory of the Alexandrian Church. However, before, when Orthodox Christians knew the Holy Fathers by name, remembered their lives, read their works and honored the days of their memory, the Celebration in honor of Athanasius and Cyril was conceived as a genuine Small Triumph of Orthodoxy, by analogy with the Great Triumph of Orthodoxy, which, as is known, is celebrated on the first Sunday of Great Lent.
The days of memory of the saints were not chosen arbitrarily by the Church. By analogy with early Christian times, when the Church celebrated exclusively the Death on the Cross and the Resurrection of the Lord, the days of memory of the saints, in the first centuries of Christianity, were celebrated on the day of their martyrdom, or righteous death. In accordance with the Easter mystery, they were called Birthdays, for they were a true small Easter, in the image of the Great Easter of Jesus.
Subsequently, the belief in the general resurrection became the basis for celebrating the days of the discovery and translation of the relics of the saints. Thus, the joint winter memory of Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria is historically associated with the translation of the relics of Athanasius to Constantinople probably under Patriarch Germanus (715-730) in the first half of the 8th century. Then the relics of the saint were placed next to the relics of St. Cyril in the Church of St. Sophia.
Athanasius the Great (295-373) became one of the first bishops who were not martyrs, who were honored with the universal church veneration as a saint. The day of his birth, that is, his righteous death, is easy to remember: it always falls on May 2 (15). Athanasius was exiled many times, suffered persecution, but he persevered and lived a long life, becoming a confessor.
All his life he defended the truth that the Divine Logos, incarnate in Jesus Christ, was not created, but was, is, and always will be consubstantial with the Father and divine. This teaching was accepted at the First Ecumenical Council in 325 in Nicaea and confirmed at the Second Council in Constantinople in 381. Initially, Nicene Orthodoxy withstood the pressure of heretics and the powers that be, who helped the Arians, largely thanks to Athanasius.
The veneration of Athanasius quickly spread throughout the Christian Universe, in the East and in the West. Thus, in his sermon in memory of Athanasius on his heavenly birthday, May 2, 379, Saint Gregory the Theologian already likened the saint to the patriarchs, prophets and apostles, and called him “the Pillar of the Church” and “the Father of Orthodoxy.”
Cyril of Alexandria (370–444) was the last great representative of the Alexandrian School of Theology and Greek-Christian literature of Egypt. He was a disciple of his paternal uncle, Bishop Theophilus, and another relative, the great elder and spiritual writer Saint Isidore of Pelusium (370–449), who left behind a huge number of letters to various people.
From Theophilus, Cyril inherited a polemical spirit and irreconcilability in confronting heretics and opponents in general, and from Isidore, a love of theology, interpretation of Scripture, and asceticism. From both of his mentors, the saint adopted a special veneration for monastics. It was on their authority that he relied in his numerous confrontations with pagans and heretics. Cyril himself spent years in an ascetic life.
Whether due to the circumstances of the time or his personal temperament, Cyril's pastoral ministry was not as infallible as Athanasius'. Thus, in 403, already a priest, he accompanied Theophilus to the infamous Council "under the Oak", near Constantinople, where John Chrysostom was unjustly deposed. In 412, Cyril became Theophilus' successor in the Alexandrian See, after which, only at the insistence of the Bishop of Rome, in 418 he restored the commemoration of the already deceased Chrysostom in church diptychs.
Cyril was irreconcilable in religious and dogmatic confrontations. He opposed the pagans, the Judaizers, and the church schism of the rigorists of the Novatians. His main service to the Church was the triumph of the Orthodox teaching on the personality of the God-man-Christ at the Third Ecumenical Council in Ephesus in 431. According to this teaching, the Personality of Christ is divine, Christ is the incarnate Logos, the Word of God.
At the Fifth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in 553, Athanasius and Cyril are mentioned among the 12 Fathers of the Church, on whom the dogmatic and moral teaching of the Universal Church is based. Among the Fathers: Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, Hilary of Poitiers, Augustine of Hippo, Leo the Great, and others. The year of Cyril's birth, that is, his personal Easter, is easy to remember: the saint departed to the Lord in 444.
The joint commemoration of Saints Athanasius and Cyril is not only a great triumph, but also a sad holiday. The fact is that in 451 the Fourth Ecumenical Council took place in Chalcedon, at which the dogmatic formulations of the Church's teaching on the God-man Christ were further clarified. But the majority of believers of the Alexandrian Church did not agree with this. In their opposition, they referred to the legacy of St. Cyril.
Therefore, already in 536, the Alexandrian Patriarchate was divided in two: the city of Alexandria, with 300,000 believers, remained in communion with the Universal Church, the Patriarchates of Rome and Constantinople. The rest of Egypt, about 6,000,000, headed by an alternative patriarch and its own hierarchy, began a separate existence.
Thus, contrary to common sense and the will of Cyril himself, if he were still alive, he became not only the Father of the Church, but also, in fact, the Father of two Churches that had been in conflict with each other for a long time: the Greek Patriarchate of Alexandria and the Coptic Church of Egypt. Both Churches accused each other of heresy and considered themselves Orthodox.
The same parallel hierarchy, headed by its Patriarch, existed in the Antiochian Church already since 519, which, unlike Alexandria, was divided approximately in two equal parts.
All this greatly contributed to the rapid capture of all of Egypt by the Arab armies, which occurred only a century after the division of the Alexandrian Church. The Greek Patriarch was forced to flee with the retreating Byzantine armies, and the Coptic welcomed the Arab troops as liberators of his flock from the yoke of Constantinople. But it soon became clear that the Christians of Egypt were not liberated but were facing an apocalyptic disaster.