A Life, for his feast on the twenty-seventh day of January — III classis
In medio Ecclesiæ aperuit os eius: et implevit eum Dominus spiritu sapientiæ et intellectus. “In the midst of the Church he opened his mouth: and the Lord filled him with the spirit of wisdom and understanding.” — Introit of the Mass, from Ecclesiasticus 15:5
I. Antioch, and a widow of twenty
He was born at Antioch on the Orontes about the year 347 — the older manuals give 344 or 354, and the question is not settled; the substance of the life is untouched by it. Antioch was then the third city of the Empire, Greek in speech, Syrian in blood, opulent, theatre-loving, half-Christian and wholly worldly, and the city in which the disciples had first been called Christians (Acts 11:26). He would spend fifty years there and be formed entirely by it, including in the things he later spent his breath attacking.
His father Secundus was an officer of rank in the imperial army of Syria and died shortly after the boy’s birth. His mother Anthusa was left a widow at twenty, with a son and an estate to defend, and she refused to marry again. What we know of her we know chiefly because her son, writing long afterwards on the priesthood, set down her words to him when he proposed to leave her: that she asked only that he not make her a widow a second time.
She gave him the best education money could purchase in that city, which meant she gave him to a pagan.
II. The rhetorician’s heir
His master was Libanius, the most celebrated rhetorician of the age and an unreconciled devotee of the old gods, who taught the sons of Antioch to speak as the ancients had spoken. The training took. Whatever else is true of Chrysostom, no Greek Father is so completely a trained orator: the periods, the apostrophes, the sudden turns upon the audience, the refusal to let a congregation sit comfortably — all of it is Antiochene rhetoric, baptized and set to work.
Two anecdotes survive, both from the ancients, both probably polished in the telling and both worth keeping. The first is that Libanius, asked on his deathbed who should succeed him in his chair, answered: John, had the Christians not stolen him. The second Chrysostom reports himself: that his master, hearing of Anthusa’s widowhood and her refusal to remarry, exclaimed in astonishment at what women the Christians had among them.
The law courts had him briefly and lost him. Under the influence of Bishop Meletius of Antioch he was baptized about the year 368 and made a lector, and he came under the discipline of Diodore of Tarsus, whose school taught him the habit that marks every page he wrote: to read the sacred text for what it says, in its literal and historical sense, before reaching for allegory. He never lost it. It is the reason his homilies are still usable, and the reason a man may read him on St. Paul today and find him strangely practical.
III. The mountain, and the ruin of a body
He wished to be a monk from the beginning, and his mother’s tears held him in the city while she lived. When she died — the date is uncertain, about 375 — he went out to the mountains south of Antioch.
He spent four years under an old Syrian ascetic and then two more entirely alone in a cave. He is said to have committed the whole of the New Testament to memory in that time. He scarcely lay down, he scarcely ate, and he stood in the cold. At the end of the six years his stomach and kidneys were permanently destroyed, and he was carried back to Antioch a ruined man of about thirty-two, never afterwards free of pain and never afterwards able to eat like other men.
Two things follow from this and should be held together, because the Church holds them together. The first is that he never repented of the desire, and remained to his death the most vehement praiser of the ascetic life among the Fathers. The second is that he knew he had done it badly. His own later counsel is consistently against excess, against the mortification that destroys the instrument God gave for His service; and it is a counsel purchased at the price of his own health. The saints are not always safe to imitate in their particulars. They are safe to imitate in their object.
That ruined stomach, forty years later, would become one of the charges against him: a bishop who could not dine with the great, and was therefore called proud.
IV. Deacon, priest, and the golden mouth
Meletius ordained him deacon in 381. Flavian, Meletius’ successor, ordained him priest in 386 and gave him the charge of preaching in the principal church of Antioch. He held it for twelve years, and those twelve years produced the greater part of the largest body of writing any Greek Father has left us: the homilies on Genesis, on the Psalms, on St. Matthew, on St. John, on the Acts, and above all on the whole Pauline corpus, of which he was the lifelong and unembarrassed lover.
He had an audience that applauded sermons as it applauded actors, and he told it to stop. He preached against the theatre, the hippodrome, the swearing of oaths, the usurer, the slave-owner who beat his household, the woman weighed down with ornament, and the Christian who left the Liturgy to attend the games. He preached on the Blessed Sacrament with a realism that has never been surpassed and seldom equalled: that the priest’s hands hold what the angels tremble to look upon; that the same Body lies on the altar and lies in the street. Homily 50 on St. Matthew puts the matter in a sentence that has been quoted against comfortable Christians ever since — that it is no honour to drape the Lord’s table in silk while He goes naked and shivering outside the door.
Then, in the February of 387, the city gave him his occasion. A new tax provoked a riot; the mob threw down and dragged through the streets the statues of the Emperor Theodosius and of his late Empress; and Antioch, sobering the next morning, understood that it had earned destruction. The aged Bishop Flavian set out for Constantinople in Lent to plead for the city, and Chrysostom stayed and preached — the twenty-one Homilies on the Statues, delivered to a terrified population under sentence, on penance, on the fear of God, on the swearing of oaths that had begun the whole business, and on the mercy of the Emperor and the far greater mercy of God. The pardon came by Easter. The city never forgot who had held it together.
The surname was not yet his. Chrysostomos — golden-mouthed — is not found in his lifetime; it appears first in the sixth century and then displaces every other title he had.
V. A hard word that must not be passed over
In the same period, 386 and 387, he preached eight homilies commonly titled Adversus Judæos, and honesty requires that they be named here rather than left for the reader to discover from an enemy.
The immediate occasion was pastoral and local: numbers of his own Christians were keeping the Jewish festivals and fasts, taking oaths in the synagogue because they believed those oaths more binding, and resorting to Jewish physicians and amulets. His object was to stop them, and the sermons are formally addressed to those Christians, not to the synagogue. The form he chose was psogos, the invective of the rhetorical schools, in which one was trained to demolish an opponent without measure; Libanius had taught him to do it, and he did it with all the force he had.
The result is language of a ferocity that cannot be defended and ought not to be softened. It exceeded the charity it was meant to serve, and later centuries — which did not share his local occasion and did not need his pastoral object — quarried those sermons for purposes he never intended, and used them as warrant for injuries the Church herself repeatedly condemned, from the Sicut Judæis of Gregory the Great onward.
Two things are to be said, and neither cancels the other. The Church canonized him and made him a Doctor, which means that his teaching taken as a whole is a trustworthy possession of the faithful — and his own commentary on Romans 9–11, where St. Paul speaks of Israel according to the flesh, is not written in that key at all. But sanctity is not impeccability, and a doctor of the Church is not preserved from the vices of his own rhetorical training. He was a great preacher who, on this matter, preached a bad sermon eight times. Read him on St. Paul, on the priesthood, on the Eucharist, on the poor. Do not quarry him for weapons; he was wrong to forge them.
VI. Taken by stealth
Nectarius, Bishop of Constantinople, died in 397. The eunuch Eutropius, chamberlain and effective master of the government of the young Emperor Arcadius, had heard Chrysostom preach and wanted him for the capital. He also knew that Antioch would riot rather than surrender him. So John was invited outside the walls on a pretext, taken up by an imperial officer, and conveyed to Constantinople under escort.
He was consecrated on the twenty-sixth of February, 398, by Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria — who had come intending to install his own candidate, was compelled to consecrate another man’s, and went home with a grievance he kept for five years.
VII. The reform, and the enemies it made
What he did in Constantinople he did quickly, thoroughly, and without the slightest political calculation.
He cut the expenses of the episcopal household to almost nothing, sold the furnishings and the marbles his predecessor had accumulated, and put the proceeds into hospitals and the relief of the poor. He forbade the clergy the custom of the subintroductæ — the “spiritual sisters” who kept house for celibate priests — and deposed those who would not comply. He recalled wandering monks to their monasteries. He deposed bishops in Asia Minor for simony. He preached at court society exactly as he had preached at Antioch, on wealth, on dress, on amusements, and on the accountability of the great, and he was heard by an Empress, Eudoxia, who was not accustomed to it.
He also did what only a great bishop does: he looked outward. He gave the Goths of the city a church and the Liturgy in their own tongue, and preached there himself through an interpreter; he sent missionaries to the Goths beyond the Danube, to Phœnicia, to the Scythians, and toward Persia.
In 399 Eutropius, who had brought him to the city, fell. The man who had lately tried to abolish the right of sanctuary at the altar fled to that altar and clung to it, and the bishop stood over him and preached to a packed and vengeful church on the vanity of vanities, and saved his life for the moment. It is one of the great sermons in Christian literature and it made him no friends among those who had wanted blood.
The pretext for the attack, when it came, was Origenism. Theophilus of Alexandria had driven out the monks of Nitria known as the Tall Brothers on that charge; they came to Constantinople; Chrysostom received them with charity, gave them shelter, withheld communion until their case should be judged, and wrote to Theophilus on their behalf. Theophilus was summoned to Constantinople to answer for his conduct. He came, with Egyptian bishops and Egyptian money, and turned the tribunal around.
VIII. The Oak
In the September of 403 Theophilus convened a synod at a suburb of Chalcedon called The Oak, across the water from the city: some thirty-six bishops, of whom twenty-nine were his own Egyptians. Twenty-nine charges were laid, and the list is instructive in its pettiness — that he ate alone, that he gave no dinners, that he had called someone a name, that he sold church goods, that he was a glutton in private, that he was violent and proud. Beneath them lay the one real charge, which was that he had offended the powerful. He was four times summoned; he answered that he would come before a lawful council but not before a court of his own accusers. He was deposed in absence and, on the further charge of treason for an alleged word against the Empress, sent into exile.
The city rose. Within a day or two a calamity in the imperial bedchamber — the sources speak of an earthquake — terrified Eudoxia, and messengers were sent to bring him back. He returned to acclamation and was, briefly, stronger than ever.
It lasted a few months. A silver statue of the Empress was set up near the great church, and its dedication was celebrated with games and public noise that interrupted the Liturgy; the bishop protested from the pulpit in terms that were reported to the palace in the worst possible light. The old sentence was revived. On Holy Saturday of 404, while he was baptizing the catechumens, soldiers broke into the church and the baptisteries and scattered the vigil; Palladius, who was there, says the water ran red. On the twentieth of June he was taken away for good, and that night fire destroyed the cathedral and the senate house, for which his followers were blamed and hunted.
Rome did not abandon him. Pope St. Innocent I refused to recognize the deposition, broke off communion with Alexandria, Antioch and Constantinople, and sent a legation to demand a true council; the legates were arrested at the frontier and turned back. It is worth noticing what the Apostolic See did here, and against whom, and how little it availed in the short term, and how completely it was vindicated in the long.
IX. Cucusus, and the letters
They sent him to Cucusus, a wretched village in the mountains of Armenia, by a long forced march in summer heat under escort. He arrived broken and lived there three years, harried by Isaurian raiders, snowbound in winter, ill continuously.
From that place he governed more than most bishops govern from their thrones. Two hundred and thirty-six of his letters survive from the exile — seventeen of them to the deaconess St. Olympias, who had given her fortune to the Church and was being persecuted at Constantinople for her loyalty to him. He directed the Phœnician mission from Cucusus and sent money for it. He consoled everyone and asked consolation of no one. The letters are not stoical; they are full of his pains and his cold. They are simply free of resentment, which is a rarer thing.
There he wrote the treatise whose title is his whole doctrine of the matter: Quod nemo læditur nisi a seipso — that no one is harmed except by himself. An emperor may take a see; only I can take my soul. It was not a theory. He had just been given the material.
X. Comana: Gloria Deo pro omnibus
The court concluded that Cucusus was too comfortable and too accessible, and in 407 ordered him removed to Pityus, at the far eastern end of the Black Sea, effectively the end of the world. The guards were instructed to hurry, and they hurried him on foot through heat and rain for three months.
At Comana in Pontus he could go no further. He was brought into the chapel of the martyr St. Basiliscus, where, it is related, the martyr had appeared to him the night before and told him that on the morrow they would be together. He asked for white garments, put off the clothes he had travelled in, received the Sacred Mysteries, made his last prayer, and ended it with the doxology that had been his habit all his life:
Δόξα τῷ Θεῷ πάντων ἕνεκεν. — “Glory be to God for all things.”
And he said Amen, and died. It was the fourteenth of September, 407, in his sixtieth year or thereabouts.
XI. The vindication
Thirty-one years later the Empire that had killed him came to fetch him home. On the twenty-seventh of January, 438, the relics were brought back to Constantinople and laid in the Church of the Holy Apostles, and the Emperor Theodosius II — the son of Arcadius and Eudoxia — laid his face against the coffin and begged pardon for his father and his mother. The persecuted “Johannites” were reconciled and his name restored to the diptychs. That twenty-seventh of January, the day of the translation and not the day of his death, is the day the Roman Church keeps his feast, since the fourteenth of September belongs to the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. The reformed calendar moved him to the thirteenth of September, the eve of his dies natalis.
The rest is the Church’s long ratification. He is one of the four great Doctors of the East, with Athanasius, Basil and Gregory Nazianzen; St. Pius V named that company Doctors of the universal Church in 1568. The ordinary Eucharistic Liturgy of the entire Byzantine rite bears his name — the received text is later than he is, and the attribution is traditional rather than documentary, but the Antiochene anaphora he knew and prayed stands behind it, and the Church’s instinct in giving it his name was sound. In 1908 St. Pius X declared him the heavenly patron of Christian preachers. His relics, carried to Rome after the sack of Constantinople in 1204 and kept for eight centuries at St. Peter’s, were returned to Constantinople in 2004.
He had been condemned by two councils, deposed by an emperor, exiled twice, and marched to death by soldiers. He is now read in every seminary in the world, and the men who broke him are footnotes in his biography.
XII. What the life teaches
That the word is a work, and preaching is not decoration. He was the most gifted speaker of his century and he spent the gift on catechizing the baptized, verse by verse, book by book, for twenty-five years. He did not invent a system; he explained the text and applied it to the people in front of him, which is harder and lasts longer. Every priest who preaches on the Sunday Gospel is doing what Chrysostom made respectable.
That the altar and the poor are one Sacrament in two places. No Father speaks more terribly of the Real Presence and none speaks more insistently of the beggar at the door, and in him the two are a single doctrine. A Eucharistic piety that leaves the poor untouched, and a social charity that leaves the altar untouched, are each, by his measure, half a religion.
That no one is harmed except by himself. He lost his see, his health, his freedom, and his reputation, and he was in part undone by his own rigidity and his own failure to conciliate anybody — he was not a diplomat and did not try to be one. He did not conclude that he had been destroyed. He concluded, and wrote a book to prove it, that the only injury that reaches a man is the one he consents to; and his last sentence on earth was thanksgiving for all things — not in spite of the exile but including it.
Practice
Examine. On the tongue, which is his patronage and his warning. Where does my speech serve the truth, and where does it serve my need to win? He is the proof that a man may be right, and eloquent, and still have preached uncharitably; ask whether the force of your last argument was drawn from charity or from the pleasure of demolishing someone.
Do. Take up one book of Scripture and read it with him — his homilies on St. Matthew or on Romans are in English and freely available — a homily a week, with the chapter beside it. He is the best practical guide to the Epistles the Church possesses, and he is not difficult.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Ecclésiam tuam, quǽsumus, Dómine, grátia cœléstis amplíficet: quam beáti Ioánnis Chrysóstomi Confessóris tui atque Pontíficis illustráre voluísti gloriósis méritis et doctrínis.
“May heavenly grace, we beseech Thee, O Lord, increase Thy Church, which Thou wast pleased to make illustrious by the glorious merits and teaching of blessed John Chrysostom, Thy Confessor and Bishop.”
Or, for any day on which something is taken from you, his own last words, said slowly and meant: Gloria Deo pro omnibus. Glory be to God for all things.
Devote. A visit to the Blessed Sacrament made in his company — recalling his word that the angels surround the altar in fear — followed by an alms given the same day to someone who will not know your name. He would not accept the first without the second.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path continues with the Greek Fathers — Athanasius, Basil, Gregory Nazianzen — and with the bishops broken by the Christian empire they served. The Sacred Liturgy path takes up the Eucharistic realism of the Fathers and the ancient anaphoras, including the one that carries his name. The Theology and Doctrine path treats the Antiochene school of exegesis, its literal method, and what the Church has kept from it.
Sancte Ioannes Chrysostome, patrone prædicatorum, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: Palladius of Helenopolis, Dialogus de vita S. Ioannis Chrysostomi; Socrates Scholasticus and Sozomen, Historia Ecclesiastica; St. John Chrysostom’s own De Sacerdotio, Ad viduam iuniorem, Quod nemo læditur nisi a seipso, and the letters from exile; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), s.v. “St. John Chrysostom”; the New Catholic Encyclopedia; Butler’s Lives of the Saints. The year of birth, the date of Anthusa’s death, and the authenticity of particular sermons reported at second hand are disputed among historians; where they are, it is said so above.