Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 1, Vol. 7 (Augustine: Gospel and Epistle of John)

followed by the recall of all the exiled bishops, both orthodox and heretical, and the restoration of their confiscated estates. Julian’s object, according to Socrates, was “to brand the memory of Constantius by making him appear to have been cruel towards his subjects.” An equally amiable motive imputed to him is mentioned by Sozomen: “It is said that he issued this order in their behalf not out of mercy, but so that, through contention among themselves, the Church might be involved in fraternal strife.” Cyril, returning with the other bishops, seems to have passed through Antioch on his way home and to have been well received by the excellent Bishop Meletius.

It happened that the son of a heathen priest attached to the Emperor’s court, having been instructed in his youth by a deaconess whom he visited with his mother, had secretly become a Christian. Upon discovering this, his father had cruelly scourged him and burnt his hands, feet, and back with hot spits. He managed to escape and took refuge with his friend the deaconess. “She dressed me in women’s garments and took me in her covered carriage to the divine Meletius. He handed me over to the Bishop of Jerusalem, at that time Cyril, and we started by night for Palestine. After the death of Julian, this young man led his father also into the way of truth. This act he told me with the rest.”

The next incident recorded in the life of S. Cyril is his alleged prediction of the failure of Julian’s attempt to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem. “The vain and ambitious mind of Julian,” says Gibbon, “might aspire to restore the ancient glory of the Temple of Jerusalem. As the Christians were firmly persuaded that a sentence of everlasting destruction had been pronounced against the whole fabric of the Mosaic law, the Imperial sophist would have converted the success of his undertaking into a specious argument against the faith of prophecy and the truth of revelation.” Again he writes: “The Christians entertained a natural and pious expectation that in this memorable contest, the honor of religion would be vindicated by some signal miracle.” That such an expectation may have been shared by Cyril is not impossible, but there is no satisfactory evidence that he ventured to foretell any miraculous interposition. According to the account of Rufinus, “lime and cement had been brought, and all was ready for destroying the old foundations and laying new ones the next day. But Cyril remained undismayed, and after careful consideration—either of what he had read in Daniel’s prophecy concerning the ‘times,’ or of our Lord’s predictions in the Gospels—persisted that it was impossible that one stone should ever there be laid upon another by the Jews.” This account of Cyril’s expectation, though probable enough in itself, seems to be little more than a conjecture founded on his statement (Catechesis 15.15), that “Antichrist will come at the time when there shall not be left one stone upon another in the Temple of the Jews.” That doom was not completed in Cyril’s time, nor did he expect it to be fulfilled until the coming of the Jewish Antichrist, who was to restore the Temple shortly before the end of the world. It was impossible for Cyril to see in Julian such an Antichrist as he has described; and therefore, without any gift or pretense of prophecy, he might very well express a firm conviction that the attempted restoration at that time must fail. Though Gibbon is even more cynical and contemptuous than usual in his examination of the alleged miracles, he does not attempt to deny the main facts of the story: with their miraculous character we are not here concerned, but only with Cyril’s conduct on so remarkable an occasion.

In the same year, A.D. 363, Julian was killed in his Persian campaign on the 26th of June and was succeeded by Jovian, whose universal tolerance and personal profession of the Nicene faith—though discredited by the looseness of his morals—gave an interval of comparative rest to the Church.