John Chrysostom

← Encyclopedia

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.

His reputation rests on the homilies, which survive in vast number. Where much patristic exegesis worked allegorically, Chrysostom belonged to the Antiochene school, which read scripture for its plain and historical sense, and he applied it relentlessly to the conduct of ordinary life — wealth and poverty, the theatre, 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 in the church are the bulk of what remains. The texts show a man impatient with display and unsparing toward his own congregation, including the rich among them.

In 397 he was taken, against his wishes, from Antioch to the imperial capital, and consecrated archbishop the following year. There his austerity and his attacks on extravagance made enemies at court and among the clergy he tried to discipline. A coalition led by the empress Eudoxia and the bishop Theophilus of Alexandria engineered his condemnation at the Synod of the Oak in 403; recalled, deposed again, he was sent into exile and died in 407 on a forced march in the mountains of Anatolia. Among his surviving works is a series of sermons against Judaizing Christians, the Adversus Judaeos, whose vehemence has weighed heavily on his later reputation; historians read them as occasional polemics aimed at members of his own congregation attending the synagogue, not as systematic doctrine, while acknowledging the long damage their language did.

What the Eastern churches made of him outran his lifetime. 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 and Gregory of Nazianzus; the Western church counts him a Doctor of the Church. 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.

→ Related: Logos · Isaiah · Jeremiah · Anointing Of The Sick