St. John Chrysostom.
Lat. Sanctus Johannes Chrysostom. Ital. San Giovanni Crisostomo, San Giovanni Bocca d’ Oro. Fr. St. Jean Chrysostome. Died Sept. 14, A.D. 407. His festival is celebrated by the Greeks on the 13th of November, and by the Latin Church on the 27th of January.
St. John, called Chrysostom, or of the Golden Mouth, because of his extraordinary eloquence, was born at Antioch in 344. His parents were illustrious, and the career opened to him was of arts and arms; but from his infancy the bent of his mind was peculiar. He lost his father when young; his mother Arthusia, still in the prime of her life, remained a widow for his sake, and superintended his education with care and intelligence. The remark of Sir James Mackintosh that ‘all distinguished men have had able mothers,’ appears especially true of the great churchmen and poets. The mother of St. John Chrysostom ranks with the Monicas and Sylvias, already described.
John, at the age of twenty, was already a renowned pleader at the bar. At the age of twenty-six, the disposition to self-abnegation and the passion for solitude, which had distinguished him from boyhood, became so strong, that he wished to retire altogether from the world; his legal studies, his legal honours, had become hateful to him: he would turn hermit. For a time his mother’s tears and prayers restrained him. He has himself recorded the pathetic remonstrance in which she reminded him of all she had done and suffered in her state of widowhood for his sake, and besought him not to leave her. For the present he yielded: but two years later he fled from society, and passed five or six years in the wilderness near Antioch, devoting himself solely to the study of the Scriptures, to penance and prayer; feeding on the wild vegetables, and leading a life of such rigorous abstinence that his health sank under it, and he was obliged to return to Antioch.
All this time he was not even an ordained priest; but shortly after he had emerged from the desert, Flavian, bishop of Antioch, ordained him, and appointed him preacher. At the moment of his consecration, according to the tradition, a white dove descended on his head, which was regarded as the sign of immediate inspiration. He then entered on his true vocation as a Christian orator, the greatest next to Paul. On one occasion, when the people of Antioch had offended the Emperor Theodosius, and were threatened with a punishment like that which had fallen on Thessalonica, the eloquence of St. John Chrysostom saved them: he was so adored by the people, that when he was appointed patriarch of Constantinople, it was necessary to kidnap him, and carry him off from Antioch by a force of armed soldiers, before the citizens had time to interfere.
From the moment he entered on his high office at Constantinople, he became the model of a Christian bishop. Humble, self-denying, sleeping on a bare plank, content with a little bread and pulse, he entertained with hospitality the poor and strangers: indefatigable as a preacher, he used his great gift of eloquence to convert his hearers to what he believed to be the truth: he united the enthusiasm and the imagination of the poet, the elegant taste of the scholar, the logic of the pleader, with the inspired earnestness of one who had authority from above. He was, like St. Jerome, remarkable for his influence over women; and his correspondence with one of his female converts and friends, Olympias, is considered one of the finest of his works remaining to us: but, inexorable in his denunciations of vice, without regard to sex or station, he thundered against the irregularities of the monks, the luxury and profligacy of the Empress Eudosia, and the servility of her flatterers, and brought down upon himself the vengeance of that haughty woman, with whom the rest of his life was one long contest. He was banished: the voice of the people obliged the emperor to recall him. Persisting in the resolute defence of his church privileges, and his animadversions on the court and the clergy, he was again banished; and, on his way to his distant place of exile, sank under fatigue and the cruel treatment of his guards, who exposed him, bareheaded and bare-footed, to the burning sun of noon: and thus he perished, in the tenth year of his bishopric, and the sixty-third of his age. Gibbon adds, that, at the pious solicitation of the clergy and people of Constantinople, his relics, thirty years after his death, were transported from their obscure sepulchre to the royal city. The Emperor Theodosius advanced to receive them as far as Chalcedon, and, falling prostrate on the coffin, implored, in the name of his guilty parents, Arcadius and Eudosia, the forgiveness of the injured saint.‘
It is owing, I suppose, to the intercourse of Venice with the East, that one of her beautiful churches is dedicated to San Gian Grisostomo, as they call him there, in accents as soft and sonorous as his own Greek. Over the high altar is the grandest devotional picture in which I have seen this saint figure as a chief personage. It is the masterpiece of Sebastian del Piombo,[291] and represents St. John Chrysostom throned and in the act of writing in a great book; behind him, St. Paul. In front, to the right, stands St. John the Baptist, and behind him St. George as patron of Venice; to the left Mary Magdalene, with a beautiful Venetian face; behind her, St. Catherine, patroness of Venice: close to St. J. Chrysostom stands St. Lucia holding her lamp; she is here the type of celestial light or wisdom.[292] This picture was for a long time attributed to Giorgione. There was also a very fine majestic figure of this saint by Rubens, in the collection of M. Schamp: he is in the habit of a Greek bishop; in one hand he holds the sacramental cup, and the left hand rests on the Gospel: the celestial dove hovers near him, and two angels are in attendance.
I cannot quit the history of St. John Chrysostom without alluding to a subject well known to collectors and amateurs, and popularly called ‘La Pénitence de St. Jean Chrysostome.’ It represents a woman undraped, seated in a cave, or wilderness, with an infant in her arms; or lying on the ground with a new-born infant beside her; in the distance is seen a man with a glory round his head, meagre, naked, bearded, crawling on his hands and knees in the most abject attitude; beneath, or at the top, is inscribed S. Johannes Crisostomus.
For a long time this subject perplexed me exceedingly, as I was quite unable to trace it in any of the biographies of Chrysostom, ancient or modern: the kindness of a friend, learned in all the byways as well as the highways of Italian literature, at length assisted me to an explanation.
90 The Penance of St. Chrysostom (Albert Dürer)
The bitter enmity excited against St. John Chrysostom in his lifetime, and the furious vituperations of his adversary, Theophilus of Alexandria, who denounced him as one stained by every vice, ‘hostem humanitatis, sacrilegorum principem, immundum dæmonem,’ as a wretch who had absolutely delivered up his soul to Satan, were apparently disseminated by the monks. Jerome translated the abusive attack of Theophilus into Latin; and long after the slanders against Chrysostom had been silenced in the East, they survived in the West. To this may be added the slaughter of the Egyptian monks by the friends of Chrysostom in the streets of Constantinople; which, I suppose, was also retained in the traditions, and mixed up with the monkish fictions. It seems to have been forgotten who John Chrysostom really was; his name only survived in the popular ballads and legends as an epitome of every horrible crime; and to account for his being, notwithstanding all this, a saint, was a difficulty which in the old legend is surmounted after a very original, and, I must needs add, a very audacious fashion. ‘I have,’ writes my friend, ‘three editions of this legend in Italian, with the title La Historia di San Giovanni Boccadoro. It is in ottava rima, thirty-six stanzas in all, occupying two leaves of letter-press. It was originally composed in the fifteenth century, and reprinted again and again, like the ballads and tales hawked by itinerant ballad-mongers, from that day to this, and as well known to the lower orders as “Jack the Giant-killer” here. I will give you the story as succinctly and as properly as I can. A gentleman of the high roads, named Schitano, confesses his robberies and murders to a certain Frate, who absolves him, upon a solemn promise not to do three things—
Che tu non facci falso sacramento,
Nè homicidio, nè adulterare.
Schitano thereupon takes possession of a cave, and turns Romito (Hermit) in the wilderness. A neighbouring king takes his daughter out hunting with him; a white deer starts across their path; the king dashes away in pursuit ten miles or more, forgetting his daughter; night comes on; the princess, left alone in the forest, wanders till she sees a light, and knocks for admittance at the cave of Schitano. He fancies at first that it must be the “Demonio,” but at length he admits her after long hesitation, and turns her horse out to graze. Her beauty tempts him to break one of his vows; the fear of discovery induces him to violate another by murdering her, and throwing her body into a cistern. The horse, however, is seen by one of the cavaliers of the court, who knocks and inquires if he has seen a certain “donzella” that way? The hermit swears that he has not beheld a Christian face for three years, thus breaking his third vow; but, reflecting on this three-fold sin with horror, he imposes on himself a most severe penance (“un’ aspra penitenza”), to wit—
Di stare sette anni nell’ aspro diserto.
Pane non mangerò nè berò vino,
Nè mai risguarderò il ciel scoperto,
Non parlerò Hebraico nè Latino,
Per fin che quel ch’ io dico non è certo,
Che un fantin di sei di porga favella,
“Perdonato t’ ha Dio; va alla tua cella.”
That is, he swears that for seven years he will neither eat bread nor drink wine, nor look up in the face of heaven, nor speak either Hebrew or Latin, until it shall come to pass that an infant of seven days old shall open its mouth and say, “Heaven hath pardoned thee—go in peace.” So, stripping off his clothes, he crawls on hands and knees like the beasts of the field, eating grass and drinking water.
‘Nor did his resolution fail him—he persists in this “aspra penitenza” for seven years—
Sette anni e sette giorni nel diserto;
Come le bestie andava lui carpone,
E mai non risguardò il ciel scoperto,
Peloso egli era a modo d’ un montone;
Spine e fango il suo letto era per certo,
Del suo peccato havea contrizione;
E ogni cosa facea con gran fervore,
Per purgar il suo fallo e grand’ errore.
In the meantime it came into the king’s head to draw the covers where the hermit was leading this life. The dogs of course found, but neither they nor the king could make anything of this new species of animal, “che pareva un orso.” So they took him home in a chain and deposited him in their zoological collection, where he refused meat and bread, and persisted in grazing. On new year’s day the queen gives birth to a son, who, on the seventh day after he is born, says distinctly to the hermit,—
Torna alla tua cella,
Che Dio t’ ha perdonato il tuo peccato,
Levati su, Romito! ova favella!
But the hermit does not speak as commanded; he makes signs that he will write. The king orders the inkstand to be brought, but there is no ink in it: so Schitano at once earns his surname of Boccadoro (Chrysostom) by a simple expedient: he puts the pen to his mouth, wets it with his saliva, and writes in letters of gold—
Onde la penna in bocca si metteva,
E a scrivere cominciò senza dimoro,
Col sputo, lettere che parevan d’ oro!
‘After seven years and seven days, he opens his golden mouth in speech, and confesses his foul crimes to the king; cavaliers are despatched in search of the body of the princess; as they approach the cavern they hear celestial music, and in the end they bring the donzella out of the cistern alive and well, and very sorry to leave the blessed Virgin and the angels, with whom she had been passing her time most agreeably: she is restored to her parents with universal festa e allegrezza, and she announces to the hermit that he is pardoned and may return to his cell, which he does forthwith, and ends in leading the life of a saint, and being beatified. The “discreti auditori” are invited to take example—
Da questo Santo pien di leggiadria
Che Iddio sempre perdona a’ peccatori,
and are finally informed that they may purchase this edifying history on easy terms, to wit, a halfpenny—
Due quattrini dia senza far più parole.
The price, however, rose; for in the next century the line is altered thus:—
Pero ciascun che comperarne vuole,
Tre quattrini mi dia senza più parole.’
The woodcuts prefixed to the ballad represent this saintly Nebuchadnezzar on all fours, surprised by the king with his huntsmen and dogs; but no female figure, as in the German prints, in which the German version of the legend has evidently been in the mind of the artists. It differs in some respects from the Italian ballad. I shall therefore give as much of it here as will explain the artistic treatment of the story.
‘When John Chrysostom was baptized, the Pope[293] stood godfather. At seven years old he went to school, but he was so dull and backward, that he became the laughing-stock of his schoolfellows. Unable to endure their mockery, he took refuge in a neighbouring church, and prayed to the Virgin; and a voice whispered, “Kiss me on the mouth, and thou shalt be endowed with all learning.” He did so, and, returning to the school, he surpassed all his companions, so that they remained in astonishment: as they looked, they saw a golden ring or streak round his mouth, and asked him how it came there? and when he told them, they wondered yet more. Thence he obtained the name of Chrysostom. John was much beloved by his godfather the Pope, who ordained him priest at a very early age; but the first time he offered the sacrifice of the mass, he was struck to the heart by his unworthiness, and resolved to seek his salvation in solitude; therefore, throwing off his priestly garments, he fled from the city, and made his dwelling in a cavern of the rock, and lived there a long while in prayer and meditation.
‘Now not far from the wilderness in which Chrysostom dwelt, was the capital of a great king; and it happened that one day, as the princess his daughter, who was young and very fair, was walking with her companions, there came a sudden and violent gust of wind, which lifted her up and carried her away, and set her down in the forest, far off; and she wandered about till she came to the cave of Chrysostom, and knocked at the door. He, fearing some temptation of the devil, would not let her in; but she entreated, and said, “I am no demon, but a Christian woman; and if thou leavest me here, the wild beasts will devour me!” So he yielded perforce, and arose and let her in. And he drew a line down the middle of his cell, and said, “That is your part, this is mine; and neither shall pass this line.” But this precaution was in vain, for passion and temptation overpowered his virtue; he over-stepped the line, and sinned. Both repented sorely; and Chrysostom, thinking that if the damsel remained longer in his cave it would only occasion further sin, carried her to a neighbouring precipice, and flung her down. When he had done this deed, he was seized with horror and remorse; and he departed and went to Rome to his godfather the Pope, and confessed all, and entreated absolution. But his godfather knew him not; and, being seized with horror, he drove him forth, and refused to absolve him. So the unhappy sinner fled to the wilderness, and made a solemn vow that he would never rise from the earth nor look up, but crawl on his hands and knees, until he had expiated his great sin and was absolved by Heaven.
‘When he had thus crawled on the earth for fifteen years, the queen brought forth a son; and when the Pope came to baptize the child, the infant opened its mouth and said, “I will not be baptized by thee, but by St. John;” and he repeated this three times: and none could understand this miracle; but the Pope was afraid to proceed. In the meantime, the king’s huntsmen had gone to the forest to bring home game for the christening feast: there, as they rode, they beheld a strange beast creeping on the ground; and not knowing what it might be, they threw a mantle over it and bound it in a chain and brought it to the palace. Many came to look on this strange beast, and with them came the nurse with the king’s son in her arms; and immediately the child opened its mouth and spake, “John, come thou and baptize me!” He answered, “If it be God’s will, speak again!” And the child spoke the same words a second and a third time. Then John stood up; and the hair and the moss fell from his body, and they brought him garments; and he took the child, and baptized him with great devotion.
‘When the king heard his confession, he thought, “Perhaps this was my daughter, who was lost and never found;” and he sent messengers into the forest to seek for the remains of his daughter, that her bones at least might rest in consecrated ground. When they came to the foot of the precipice, there they found a beautiful woman seated, naked, and holding a child in her arms; and John said to her, “Why sittest thou here alone in the wilderness?” And she said, “Dost thou not know me? I am the woman who came to thy cave by night, and whom thou didst hurl down this rock!” Then they brought her home with great joy to her parents.‘[294]
This extravagant legend becomes interesting for two reasons: it shows the existence of the popular feeling and belief with regard to Chrysostom, long subsequent to those events which aroused the hatred of the early monks; and it has been, from its popular notoriety, embodied in some rare and valuable works of art, which all go under the name of ‘the Penance or Penitence of Johannes Chrysostom or Crisostomos.’
1. A rare print by Lucas Cranach, composed and engraved by himself. In the centre is an undraped woman reclining on the ground against a rock, and contemplating her sleeping infant, which is lying on her lap; a stag, a hind crouching, a pheasant feeding near her, express the solitude of her life; in the background is ‘the savage man’ on all fours, and browsing: here, he has no glory round his head. The whole composition is exceedingly picturesque.
2. A rare and beautiful print by B. Beham, and repeated by Hans Sebald Beham, represents a woman lying on the ground with her back turned to the spectator; a child is near her; Chrysostom is seen crawling in the background, with the glory round his head.
3. A small print by Albert Dürer, also exquisitely engraved (from which I give a sketch). Here the woman is sitting at the entrance of a rocky cave, feeding her child from her bosom: in the background the ‘savage man’ crawling on all fours, and a glory round his head. This subject has been called St. Geneviève of Brabant; but it is evidently the same as in the two last-named compositions.
All these prints, being nearly contemporaneous, show that the legend must have been particularly popular about this time (1509-1520). There is also an old French version of the story which I have not seen.