John Chrysostom

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John Chrysostom was a Greek-speaking churchman of the late fourth century, priest at Antioch and then archbishop of Constantinople, remembered above all as a preacher of extraordinary force. The name was not his own: Chrysostomos, “golden-mouthed,” was fixed to him by later generations, and it stuck because nothing else captured what he had been. He was born at Antioch around 347, trained in rhetoric under the pagan orator Libanius, and turned from a public career to a severe ascetic life before ordination drew him back into the city.

The rhetorician and the cave

Antioch in the mid-fourth century was a Greek city of the first rank, a place of theaters and law courts and a working synagogue alongside its churches, and the boy who would be called golden-mouthed was given the education proper to a son of its curial class. Libanius, the most renowned pagan sophist of the age, took him as a pupil and is reported to have named him the man he would have wished to succeed him in the schools, had the Christians not carried him off. The training never left him. The cadence of the classical period, the deployed example, the sudden turn upon the audience — the whole apparatus of Greek oratory passed intact into his preaching, and it is precisely the survival of the rhetorician’s craft inside the bishop’s pulpit that gives his sermons their characteristic pressure.

But the schools did not hold him. Baptized in his late teens or early twenties under bishop Meletius, he withdrew toward the ascetic life that was then remaking the religious imagination of Syria and Egypt — the discipline of fasting, vigil, and renunciation pursued as a training of the whole person, the movement treated under asceticism. For some years he lived among the monks in the mountains above Antioch, and for a final stretch alone in a cave, where, by the standard account, he stood so long at prayer and ate so little that his stomach and kidneys were permanently damaged. The ruined health drove him back down into the city. He was ordained deacon around 381 and presbyter in 386, and the body broken in the cave became the instrument of the most public voice in the Eastern church.

The Antiochene reading

His reputation rests on the homilies, which survive in vast number. Where much patristic exegesis worked allegorically — the method whose great patron was Origen of Alexandria, forever reaching past the letter of the text toward a hidden spiritual sense — Chrysostom belonged to the Antiochene school, which read scripture for its plain and historical sense. The school’s discipline came down to him through Diodore of Tarsus, under whom he studied alongside Theodore of Mopsuestia; it asked first what the words said and what the writer meant, and trusted that the moral and spiritual freight of a passage rode on its literal sense rather than beneath it. In Chrysostom’s hands this was never a dry philology. The plain meaning was a lever, and what he moved with it was the conduct of ordinary life.

He applied it relentlessly — to wealth and poverty, the theater, almsgiving, the treatment of slaves and the poor. He preached running commentaries on whole books, Genesis and the Psalms, Matthew and the letters of Paul, and the transcripts taken down by stenographers in the church are the bulk of what remains. He read Paul above all others, returning again and again to the Letter to the Romans and the rest of the corpus until later ages could speak of him as the apostle’s truest interpreter; the homilies on the Pauline epistles are among the densest he left. The texts show a man impatient with display and unsparing toward his own congregation, including the rich among them. He told a wealthy church that the gold on its walls was the bread it had withheld from the hungry, that the altar of Christ was the body of the poor man in the street, and that a faith which left the beggar outside the door had not understood the gospel it recited inside. He was contemptuous of the chariot races and the stage that emptied his church on feast days, and he said so to the people who had been there.

The single most famous episode of his Antiochene years bound this preaching to a civic crisis. In 387 a tax increase touched off a riot in which the mob threw down the statues of the imperial family, an act of treason that left the city in terror of the emperor’s vengeance. While bishop Flavian rode to plead for Antioch at the court of Theodosius, Chrysostom preached, day after day through Lent, the cycle later called the Homilies on the Statues — turning the city’s fear into a sustained meditation on repentance, providence, and the fear of God rather than of emperors. The reprieve, when it came, fixed his standing. He was the voice Antioch had listened to in its worst hour.

Capital, court, and the Oak

In 397 he was taken, against his wishes, from Antioch to the imperial capital, and consecrated archbishop the following year — the consecration performed, with a heavy irony the future would supply, by Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, who would within five years engineer his ruin. There his austerity and his attacks on extravagance made enemies at court and among the clergy he tried to discipline. He cut the episcopal household’s budget and turned the savings to hospitals and the poor; he refused the lavish dinners by which a metropolitan bought goodwill; he deposed bishops in Asia for simony; and from the pulpit he denounced the dress and display of the wealthy women of the court in terms that the empress Eudoxia took, or was encouraged to take, as aimed at her.

The alliance that destroyed him drew together everyone he had offended. Theophilus of Alexandria came to Constantinople nominally to answer charges of his own, regarding his treatment of a group of Egyptian monks Chrysostom had sheltered; he turned the visit into a prosecution of his host. With Eudoxia’s backing he convened a synod of his own partisans in 403 at a suburban estate across the water near Chalcedon, the gathering known ever after as the Synod of the Oak. It heard a long list of charges — maladministration, harshness, treason against the empress, even, absurdly, eating alone — and condemned him. He was sent briefly into exile; a popular tumult, and by some accounts an earthquake that frightened the palace, brought him back within days. The reconciliation did not hold. A fresh quarrel, ignited when a silver statue of the empress was dedicated with games beside his cathedral and he preached against the noise, led to a second deposition in 404. This time the sentence stood. He was removed to Cucusus, a remote town in the Armenian highlands, and when even that exile left him too well-connected and too well-loved — his letters from Cucusus poured back into the capital and kept his cause alive — the order came to march him farther still, to Pityus on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. He never arrived. Worn out and ill, driven on foot in bad weather by guards who would not let him rest, he died at Comana in Pontus on 14 September 407. His last recorded words gave thanks for everything.

The sermons against the Judaizers

Among his surviving works is a series of eight sermons against Judaizing Christians, the Adversus Judaeos, delivered at Antioch in 386 and 387, whose vehemence has weighed heavily on his later reputation. Historians read them as occasional polemics aimed at members of his own congregation who were keeping Jewish fasts and feasts, swearing oaths in the synagogue, and seeking out Jewish courts and healers — not as systematic doctrine, and not as a program against the Jews of Antioch as such. The genre is the psogos, the formal invective of the Greek rhetorical schools, whose conventions licensed a brutality of language that the modern ear hears as something else entirely. The target was the open boundary between two living communities in a city where the synagogue was attractive and the church’s hold was far from secure; the violence of the rhetoric is the measure of how attractive.

None of which softens what the language did afterward. Wrenched from their setting and read in later centuries when the proportions of power had reversed and Judaism was a tolerated minority under a triumphant Christendom, the sermons furnished a vocabulary of contempt that was put to uses Chrysostom neither foresaw nor would have authorized, and that vocabulary has a documented afterlife reaching into the worst chapters of European history. The careful historical reading and the honest reckoning with the damage are not rival positions. Both are owed.

Scholarship and texts {#research}

The standard modern life is J. N. D. Kelly, Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom — Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press / London: Duckworth, 1995), the first full-length English biography in over a century and still the point of departure for the ascetic years, the Antiochene preaching, and the political catastrophe at the capital. For an annotated entry into the homilies themselves, Wendy Mayer and Pauline Allen, John Chrysostom (Early Church Fathers; London: Routledge, 2000), gathers representative sermons in translation with introduction; Mayer’s later work has reshaped the dating and provenance of much of the corpus. On the most difficult body of texts, Robert L. Wilken’s John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) set the Adversus Judaeos back into the pluralism of fourth-century Antioch and the conventions of ancient invective, and remains the indispensable study.

The Greek text is gathered in J.-P. Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, volumes 47–64, the nineteenth-century collection whose numbering still anchors citation; modern critical editions with French translation appear in the Sources Chrétiennes series, including A.-M. Malingrey’s edition of On the Incomprehensible Nature of God and the Huit homélies contre les Juifs. A broad English translation survives in the Victorian Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, edited by Philip Schaff, which devotes six full volumes to him: the homilies on Matthew, on John and Hebrews, on the Acts and the Epistle to the Romans, on the remaining Pauline letters, together with On the Priesthood, the ascetic treatises, and the Homilies on the Statues. It is dated, but it is the reason so much of Chrysostom has been continuously read in English.

The afterlife of the golden mouth

What the Eastern churches made of him outran his lifetime. Within a generation the verdict of the Oak was reversed: his name was restored to the diptychs, and in 438 the emperor Theodosius II had his bones brought back in state to Constantinople and laid among the emperors, a public penance for a public crime. The Divine Liturgy that bears his name became, and remains, the ordinary eucharistic rite of Orthodox Christianity, though scholars hold that it reached its present form well after him and carries his name by tradition rather than by direct authorship. Orthodoxy numbers him among the Three Holy Hierarchs, beside Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus — the two great Cappadocian theologians whose dogmatic precision complemented his pastoral fire, the wider movement treated under the Cappadocian Fathers — the three of them joined in a single feast established in the eleventh century to end a dispute over which ranked highest. The Western church counts him a Doctor of the Church, set beside his Latin contemporaries Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine of Hippo in the company of those whose teaching the church holds up as a measure. The judgment that fixed his name was, in the end, the simplest one: that of all the early Greek fathers, he was the one people most wanted to hear.

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