In stating that the ‘sufferings of Christ’ are represented (typifi ed) in baptism, along with the remission of sins and impartation of the divine life of the Spirit (see again Mystagogic 2.6), Cyril has framed his discussion on personal communion with the Son in the specifi c context of coming to be co-sufferer with the incarnate Christ. Here we have a development in articulation that has little explicit prece- dent in earlier authors, at least as concerns exegesis of the working of the Spirit in divine-human communion. Since Paul’s own writings (cf. Romans 8.17) – on which Cyril is in this context refl ecting – the idea of being joined to the sufferings of Christ was current in Christian consciousness; but Cyril is not merely repeating the comments of earlier writers. His consideration of personal co-suffering with Christ is framed specifi cally through his elaboration of the role of the Spirit, and once again in the sacramental context of baptism (Mystagogic 2, from which this principal quotation is drawn, is Cyril’s most succinct extrapolation of the baptis- mal rite and its signifi cance, delivered to the newly illumined shortly after their reception). It is not merely that one is to embrace and emulate Christ’s longsuffer- ing sacrifi ce, and so be joined to him in commonality of will, that excites Cyril’s catechetical enthusiasm; but that in the Spirit the human person is, in soul and body, united to him who suffered. The life of the Suffering One becomes, by the indwelling in soul and body of the Holy Spirit, the life of the one joined to his suffering. So writes Cyril:
Christ was really crucifi ed and really buried and literally rose again, and all of this he did for our sake, so that by sharing his sufferings in imitation, we might gain salvation in truth. What unmeasured love this showed for humankind! Christ received the nails in his pure hands and experienced pain, and grants me salvation through sharing his experience without the pain and the toil.103
101 Ibid. The phrase occurs in the Byzantine Liturgy at the conclusion of the Anaphora. 102 See M. Cat. 3.1.
It is clear that Cyril here speaks of emulation – one shares in Christ’s sufferings ‘in imitation’, much in the manner of speaking of previous writers. The same is repeated only a few lines later.104 Yet we must carefully defi ne what Cyril means
by ‘imitation’ (mimesis), for it is not simple re-enactment or emulation.105 The one
who ‘imitates’ Christ ‘shares the experience’ of the one of whom he ‘contains a share by imitation’. There is in Cyril’s utilization of the term a kind of mirror to the older theological language of ‘likeness’, taken as relating to the actual iconic representation or manifestation of the image bound up in the human ‘image and likeness’ of God. Cyril’s reading of human ‘likeness’ to God is not simply a similarity by external emulation, but a reality of anthropological relation to the ‘glorious body’ of the incarnate Son by the power of the Spirit.106 Cyril’s defi nition
of ‘imitation’ follows this understanding, connecting it explicitly to the language of ‘likeness’ later in Mystagogic 2. That passage warrants reproduction in full:
It was to teach us that what Christ suffered ‘for us and our salvation’107 truly
and not in make-believe, and that we have become sharers in his sufferings – it was for this reason that Paul declared with such clarity, ‘for if we have been planted with him in the likeness of his death, we shall be planted with him also in the likeness of his resurrection’ (Romans 6.5). The expression ‘planted with him’ is well chosen, for it is here [i.e. in Gethsemane, on Golgotha at the site of the crucifi xion] that the true vine was planted, and we have been planted with him through sharing in the baptism of his death. Concentrate all your attention on the apostle’s words. He did not say ‘if we are planted with him in his death’, but ‘in the likeness of his death’. It was a real death that Christ really experienced, for his soul was separated from his body; and his burial was real, for his holy body was wrapped in a clean winding-sheet, and every- thing was done for him in reality. For us, however, there is the likeness of his death and his sufferings, but of salvation not the likeness but the reality.108
One does not participate or have a share in ‘the reality’ of Christ’s passion, for neither are a given catechumen’s hands pierced with nails, nor is he buried in the tomb. But the baptized person has, through the communion with the Son effected in that baptism by the Spirit, the likeness of those sufferings – a ‘share’ in them by the imitation of personal communion, which joins him to the ‘reality of salvation’.109
104 Cf. ibid. 2.6.
105 For a good, if brief, treatment of the general concepts of imitation and reality in Cyril, see Mazza, Mystagogy 154–58.
106 See Cat. 4.18; M. Cat. 3.1; etc.
107 This a curious quotation: the phrase ‘for us and our salvation’ is found in the creed of Nicaea, but it is clear from a synthesis of quotations that Cyril is not employing the Nicene creed in his cate- chesis. The phrase’s presence here is something of a mystery.
108 M. Cat. 2.7.
This language of ‘the real’ resonates throughout Cyril’s teaching on the incarnate Son, and specifi cally as relates to his sufferings and resurrection. ‘His passion was real, for he was really crucifi ed’.110 The reality of Christ’s passion is
given such weight in Cyril’s catechesis because, in his own words, ‘I know the resurrection – for if he had remained crucifi ed, perhaps I would not have affi rmed the cross; perhaps I would have concealed it, and my master too. But since the cross was followed by the resurrection, I am not ashamed to affi rm it’.111 The
passion is known from the reality of the resurrection, the cross is seen from the reality of the empty tomb. The death of the incarnate Son is known from the vantage point of the ‘resurrection’ of baptismal re-birth; and even as that latter resurrection to new life is of no effect if there has not antecedently been a death to the false ‘life’ of sin, so the resurrection of Christ cannot be seen, says Cyril, as the inauguration of human salvation unless there is a death to human death, real- ized by the one later raised. Death must be overcome in Christ in order for ‘the mystery [to be] fulfi lled, scripture [to be] fulfi lled, and sins redeemed’.112 Cyril
offers a lengthy quotation of Hebrews 9.11-14 (‘he entered once for all into the holy place through his greater and more perfect tent not made with hands, that is, not of this creation [. . .], through his own blood to obtain eternal redemption’113),
precisely to show that it is the Son’s divinity, as eternal and natural Son of the Father, that makes his death salvifi c, ‘for it was not a common man who suffered, but God made man, competing in the contest of endurance’.114 Cyril’s insistence
on the Son’s divine status, explored already in this chapter, here has direct soterio- logical bearing. Moreover, that bearing is described in incarnational terms:
He stretched out his hands on the cross to encompass the ends of the world. [. . .] He who set the sky in place with his spiritual hands stretched out human hands. They were fastened with nails for this purpose: that when the humanity which bore the sins of humankind had been fastened to the wood and died, sin might die with it, and we might rise again in righteousness. For since death came through one man, life too comes through one man (cf. Romans 5.12–18), the one man who as Saviour voluntarily accepts death. Remember what he said: ‘I have power to lay down my life, and I have power to take it up again’. (cf. John 10.18)115
It is in his humanity that the divine Son of the Father offers up the fallen life of human sinfulness: through the death of his human body, and thus his human life
110 Cat. 13.4. 111 Ibid. 112 Cat. 13.32.
113 Quoted fully in Cat. 13.32. 114 Cat. 13.6.
(Cyril extrapolates, as we have seen, that on the cross Christ’s soul departed his body unto death) the false-life of death is itself put to death. In his humanity he rises from the dead, restoring that humanity to life.
It is precisely here that Cyril’s language of participation, likeness and imitation discovers its full force, summarized in his language of ‘partnership’ with God in Christ:
Just as Christ was truly crucifi ed and buried and rose again, while you are privileged in baptism to be crucifi ed, to be buried and to rise again in him with likeness, so it is with the anointing with chrism. [. . .] You were anointed with
myron and became partners with Christ, and began to share with him.116
The human person, receiving the Holy Spirit in baptism and chrismation as a sacramental realization of the anointing received by Christ in the Jordan, becomes thereby partner with him and shares with him in the life of incarnate union with the Father. By being anointed in Spirit via the body with oil, the person becomes a ‘sharer in Jesus Christ’, the true olive tree into which one is thereby grafted.117