Festal Letters 1-12

Festal Letter Ten

175 FESTAL LETTER TEn A.D. 422 EHOLD, ONCE again we take it to be our duty to obey the voices of the saints, and in our eagerness to follow as it were in the footsteps of the custom they practiced, to extend a hand of mutual affection to those who are as brothers and at the same time all but children, addressing them in the following sacred words: “Grace and peace to you from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”1 He it is who once again has proclaimed to us this time of the holy feast, so deeply longed for and ardently desired, which the great and illustrious chorus of the holy prophets itself announced previously, instructed as it was in the divine mysteries through the illumination of the Holy Spirit, and taught in advance about what was to happen to us through Christ. Thus the divinely inspired David struck up a divine melody for us as though from a spiritual lyre; the song goes as follows: “Let the heavens be glad, and the earth exult; let the plains rejoice, and all who are in them, before the face of the Lord, for he comes, he comes to judge the earth, to judge the world in justice, and the peoples in his truth.”2 But he of whom it was foretold of old that he would come and would render a just and faultless decision in our regard has made gladness known to us no longer in its expectation but in its reality. For he has sojourned [among us] in the last days of this age, as is evidenced by the sacred and divine Scriptures: “He has judged the world in justice,”3 as the Psalmist says. How has he judged it? By condemning those in error or punishing those who have long disregarded the divine laws. But then, how is it 1. Rom 1.7. 2. Ps 96.11–13. 3. Cf. Ps 96.13. 176 ST. CYRiL OF ALEXAnDRiA that he can still be speaking truthfully when he cries out concerning himself, “For God did not send the Son into the world that he might judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”4 And indeed, anyone of good sense would, i think, agree that to pass a severe judgment on those who have sinned, and to condemn them to punishment, is not the act of someone who is a savior, but of one who wants to cause affliction , someone who without any mercy demands an account of sins already committed. How is it, then, that he has not come to judge the world but to save the world,5 if the sentence he has passed on it is so severe? But i do not suppose that anyone would be so foolish as to think that the Truth could lie about anything. How, then, has he judged the earth? For that is what the Psalmist has cried out to us. A fearsome tyrant had risen up against us, and Satan, driven by greed,6 had seized power, he who had been thrust from the throng of the holy angels like lightning, and been shown to be quite deprived of the glory which was in him, and of the preeminence of his honors, for he had dared to say, “i will be like the Most High.”7 But since he could not go against the decrees from on high, and could not otherwise grieve the holy chastiser , he undertook to wage war on us. He immediately took man out of the straight way, turning him away toward what he himself wanted, and that alone, and, having removed him from the true knowledge of God, made of him who was fashioned in the image of God his own worshiper and adorer. This he did in the grip of an unjust jealousy of us, crowning himself with a glory equal to God’s, for he was under the control of his old passion: more deeply infected by that for which he was being punished, he now aimed openly at achieving universal rule. And as though he had taken over the whole earth, and as though God were completely unconcerned about his own creatures and no longer deigned to take any account of our life, the barbarian became scornful, despising human weakness as he spoke: “i will seize in my hand all the earth like a nest, and i will take it like eggs...